All Your Words Are Belong To Us

To my mind one of the most stunning developments on the web this year have been the almost total unhinging of content ownership. One must wonder what this may mean for the professional content developers, such as journalists and even bloggers, not to mention the content developed by a company for their own website.

I am thinking of two products, from very different companies, but together they paint an early picture of what might be happening to web-based content.

The first is sidewiki from Google. This is a browser add on that allows anyone–anyone–to paste any comments on any webpage. I am quite surprised that there has not been more controversy about this and, perhaps, it is just because it has not been widely used so far (?).

I don’t know how you feel about having anyone in the crowd have the ability to say anything they want about your website on your website, but I find the idea somewhat disturbing. A lot of thought and creativity goes into a website (a good one, anyway) and enabling random people to make random comments (warranted or not) on someone else’s site seems akin to allowing taggers to deface the buildings in the Googleplex.

Is this where we’re going? Is this where we want to be going? Is this leakage of social media into places where, perhaps, it might not belong? Let’s remember, this is the web, where we once could buy pet food and order groceries…but not anymore because the model didn’t hold up. Could we be seeing the same kind of over-the-edge “irrational exuberance” we’ve seen before?

Along with sidewiki I have recently discovered a browser add on that I absolutely love, but I have to wonder if, at some fundamental level, it might smack of the same kind of issue–that of causing one to wonder, who owns the content? Who owns the experience? The overall look and feel? And, yes, even the ads on a site?

The add on is readability, which turns a cluttered, hard-to-read website into a lovely, print-like page. Sans ads, banners, anything but the main copy. After using it for the last day I have to say, I love it, yet it does inspire some guilty pleasure. Certainly, there is an argument to be made that if the marketers, designers, and other web-zoids hadn’t gone crazy with the unimportant, distracting clutter, that a program like this wouldn’t ever be necessary.

Granted. And I agree completely. And, like sidewiki, readability does seem to intrude on the ownership of the overall experience of someone’s property. Certainly, most of us would never put up with this in the “real” world. Our building facades are ours, our signs are ours, and our cars are ours, and they look as we want them to look. When that look is altered without our approval we find that intrusive.

Should we feel any different about our websites?

Android Apps—a Growing Market

Want to know if your Android application customer demographic has changed since Verizon’s launch of the DROID? Just look at your app’s comments on the Marketplace. Over the past few weeks, the language has dramatically changed from a constructive comment like “great app but needs some work” to a more aggressive one like ‘”this app sucks—my phone keeps on crashing” without any diagnostic aid. While this hurts the developer’s sales, it shows that the user market has changed and expanded.

When the first Android phone emerged—the T-Mobile G1—the early adopters jumped on it. These consumers, the first users exposed to the problems common to early-stage product deployment, were tech-savvy. They were compassionate with developers’ struggles in a young market and patient with the crashes, bugs, and error messages. These people mostly had an understanding of the programming behind the apps. They acknowledged that as the new Android phones hit the market, the apps would have to adapt with them.

Unlike other popular smart phones, the Android operating system has been deployed in at least 10 different devices and carried by at least 5 service providers internationally. Each device has different parameters for certain features and, on top of that, the Android OS keeps being updated creating a constant stream of programming demands. Unfortunately, the consumer doesn’t always understand this. They’ve been trained to assume that each app that arrives in the Marketplace has been tested on every device and the latest OS before being made available on the market. That’s not how Android works.

On a positive note, the new wave of consumers suggests that the product is being adopted by the early majority. While early adopters tend to perceive risks in a positive way, early majority undoubtedly perceive risks as negative, hence comments like “don’t even bother downloading the app—it crashes my phone” which, in fact, is a device error.

What we can take away from this is that the Android developers are going through a maturity stage where they have to learn how to manage their consumers. They will need to help educate their users through blogs, increase their customer service by reaching out to the unsatisfied customers, and connect with the trendsetters who often aid in the awareness of the products.

Typekit—Expand Your Website’s Font Library

It has been a long wait, but I finally received my invitation to try out Typekit—a solution to the agony of being restricted by web-safe fonts. Created by Small Batch Inc., Typekit will allow web developers to write their CSS, link it to a font file, and have that font appear on their website. No more using Flash or images to convey a typographic style while sacrificing your SEO.

So, why has it taken this long to get fonts other than Arial, Times, Verdana, and Geneva on our websites? Part is due to browser technology (the ability to link to a font) and the other is due to protecting the copyright of the typeface. Like software, a typeface is purchased with a license, which means it can only be used on a certain number of computers. In the near future, all major browsers will support the ability to link to a font, so the only remaining hurdle was the licensing issue. Here’s Typekit’s explanation of what they did to make it happen:

“We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.” (Source http://blog.typekit.com)

Typekit has prepared 4 packages for their service (currently a yearly pricing discount).

1. Trial
- free
- 5GB
- Trial library (70 fonts to choose from)
- 1 website, 2 fonts
- Typekit badge required (links to a colophon page providing detailed information about the displayed fonts and the foundries and designers who created them)

2. Personal
- $24.99/year
- 10GB
- Personal library (240 fonts to choose from)
- 1 website, 5 fonts

3. Portfolio
- $49.99/year
- 20GB
- Full library (300 fonts to choose from)
- 5 websites, unlimited fonts

4. Performance
- $249.99/year
- 100GB
- Full library
- 40 websites, unlimited fonts

All are W3C standards compliant, allow advanced style control, and are fully refundable for 30 days. The servers hosting the fonts are fast and reliable, and if your site exceeds the bandwidth defined in the package (ie. if your site suddenly gets high-volume traffic) the fonts will continue to appear. If traffic remains high, you may receive a phone call from Typekit to discuss ways to adjust your service package.

The only case where the fonts may not appear and default to standard fonts (CSS Stacks) is when the browser is not compliant. All browsers supporting the CSS @font-face rule will work with Typekit. They include Firefox 3.5 and higher, Safari 3.1 and higher, and Internet Explorer 6 and higher. For those developing a site, Safari 3.1 or higher and Firefox 3.5 or higher will be required to run the Typekit application (they are currently working on including IE).

After clicking on the Trial package option, you’re prompted to provide a domain name with up to 10 URLs, including ‘localhost’ for development. Once that is done, simply copy and paste the javascript code into the head tag of the pages you want to activate then have fun browsing through the type library and choosing your site’s new fonts! Here’s what I chose—don’t forget to click on the Typekit badge!  CLICK HERE to view sample.

Read more about Typekit:
http://blog.typekit.com/2009/05/27/introducing-typekit/

http://www.webdirections.org/blog/ubiquitous-web-font-embedding-just-got-a-step-closer/

Banner’s birthday, social’s future?

Everyone say Happy Birthday to our favorite ad medium, the banner ad! Yes, on October 27th, the banner ad turned 15. It’s hard to believe, but in 1994, when the web was still only just graphical and DSL was unknown and downloads were at 24.4kbs (remember that?) the very first banner ads were launched. On Hotwired magazine, one of the first online magazines.

The advertisers? MCI (who employed Vinton Cerf), Volvo, Club Med, and 1800 collect. The click through rate of those ads? 78 percent (!!!). What would we do now for a 78% CTR?

Is this the future of social media? In 1994 the web was new and fresh and everyone from advertisers to agencies to consumers to publishers were excited at this (latest) new thing that was going to revolutionize the advertising and marketing world.

And people clicked like mad! For a while. Then…not so much. When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad?

Not that a company shouldn’t do online advertising, but in terms of actually creating new sales, banner ads have gone the way of the 30 second spot; something you need to do as part of the mix, but not something that you are going to necessarily be able to tie directly to sales (lots of technology and metrics not withstanding).

So, is this the future of social media? To go from a high-excitement, world-altering, new technology to something that just needs to be part of the mix? Honestly, I don’t have the definitive answer. But (come on, you knew there was a “but” coming, eh?), my experience tells me that it is really hard for anything to live up to the hype that SM is getting these days.

Is it cool? Sure. Exciting? You betcha. A innovative way to have B2C interactions? Yup.

And yes, businesses/brands will have to alter how they reach out to consumers and groups of consumers. Especially, brands will have to significantly change how they manage and accept risk, because as the conversation that is a brand moves more to a bidirectional dialog, the business side of the equation has to accept an increased level of chaos and lack of control.

Ultimately, however, people are still people and how they act is, at a fundamental level, probably not going to change dramatically due to SM. Brands will learn to use SM, just as they did banner ads, and it will become a known part of the landscape–familiar and comfortable as viewing a web page.

And not clicking on the banner ad.

QR Codes and Exchanging Digital Information

Ever wonder what those funky square patterns that show up on an e-ticket are? They’re called QR codes— short for Quick Response—and they come to us from Japan where they are frequently used to transfer digital information.

Usually, we see these codes read by scanners pointed at our e-tickets, but it is becoming more common to use mobile phones as well. Not only is the average consumer able to read the codes with an app, but create them too. One online service that allows you to do this is Kaywa (http://qrcode.kaywa.com/).

After giving it a try, I only found a few disadvantages. The first step is to choose what you want to encode in the QR (URL, text, telephone number, or SMS). Next, enter the content and select what size you would like the code graphic to be. After that, hit ‘generate’. The code will appear in the preview pane and from there you can right-click to download the graphic (a URL for the code will also be available in case you need to download it again). Here are the QR codes I generated using the URL and text option.

QR code with URL

So, what next? How does your mobile phone read the code? Kaywa provides a reader you can download to your phone from their site, but it only supports certain phones (http://reader.kaywa.com/phones). I lucked out on my Android, but thankfully a developer has picked up on the demand and has provided an alternative called Barcode Scanner. I opened the app, held the camera up to the code, and a second later the information appeared on my screen along with options to open the URL, share via email, or send by SMS.

QR codes are gaining in popularity and are becoming a quick and easy way to connect to a consumer. You can find them in magazine advertisements, on websites, and even on t-shirts. For more information on QR codes, visit the Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code or read this article posted on Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/what-is-a-qr-code-and-why-do-you-need-one-27588.

Cloudy with Chance of Symbols

Recently I had the chance to attend the Churchill Club dinner at which Larry Ellison was interviewed by Ed Zander.

Always an interesting interview, Larry was in good form that night and talked on topics ranging from his commitment to win next year’s America’s Cup (if the Swiss don’t cheat) to the future of Oracle to cloud computing.

Larry’s main point on cloud computing seemed to be summed up in the statement, “What the hell do you mean by this? It’s still a computer and software!”

Far be it from me to argue with such an august personality of the tech arena, but Mr. Ellison’s rant and the continued questions about it through the evening did get me started thinking about the etymology of the term, “cloud computing.”

Does anyone now remember where this term started? It started with clip art and PowerPoint; presentations in which the internet was represented by a clip art cloud. Now, how’s THAT for the power of symbology?

A cheesy little piece of clip art (OK, many cheesy little pieces of clip art) took hold of the cultural psyche and so embedded itself there that now you see the term used on the front of widely published journals and used by (technoweeny) pundits everywhere.

I am the only one who finds this amazing? This is where the power of symbols can be seen in action. And this is where, as marketers, we need to be aware of the cultural iconology and utilize these social icons. This is where stories get their power and why stories have such power, because they are a shortcut to the swirling pool of meaning just there below our consciousness.

This is how a little piece of clip art became such an icon that luminaries like Larry Ellison end up on stage in front of a thousand people pontificating about it.

As marketers, as writers, as communicators, as SEOs, as storytellers, we have this awesome power at our disposal. The great marketers know this, know how to employ it, how not to break it’s rules, how to use it with integrity, and how to integrate multi-faceted communications so that they all add to the effect.

Famous advertisers and marketers like David Ogilvy knew this implicitly. And it’s when modern day marketers remember this that things take off. How a tweet circles the world. How a little piece of clip art becomes part of our culture and language. How our messages take on lives of their own.

Naming Process

As we (The Oya Group) are getting more known in social circles, we are getting more and more of these kinds of requests; not so much asking for a service, but asking about what is the algorithm we might use to complete a particular task.

Obviously, sometimes there is some conflict here; after all, if someone wants the benefit of our experience and talent, they should just hire us! But, mostly, we’re happy to help. Especially as sometimes it ends up with a process being articulated that might have been just implicit before, as is this case with this document. A pretty good picture of the process we generally employ to come up with a name, a brand, a company (or product) identity.

This is in response to an email from someone starting a company in Spain. She was asking how we name companies, and here is our response.

Here is the process I would generally follow for a naming project. It’s hard work and you’ll need to ask yourself some tough questions—but they are questions you need to have answered anyway, in order to come up with a good story for your company.

First off, go back to basics. What are the primary attributes of your company? Why are you starting it and what good is it to anyone? For instance, are you saving people money, allowing them to connect (to someone or something) more easily, etc.

Once you have the general most important aspects of your company, you need to work on the positioning. This means how does your company relate to the competition in the field? Are you offering a lower price, better value (e.g. More stuff for the same price as your competition), or something else? What kind of experience is your company going to offer that is better, different, less expensive, etc.?

From here work on your value propositions. See if you can get the primary values you are offering the marketplace into a single sentence or, maybe, a couple of sentences (at most). “We enable people to monetize their Twitter posts,” might be one. Or, “Our service enables housewives to enjoy the luxury of a top-tier spa right in their own home,” is another. Keep it brief and completely free of any technical jargon. Your Mom needs to be able to read and understand it.

Once you have all this, you have defined your brand values; what are the key elements you need your name (in fact, your whole brand, once you have that worked out) to communicate.

Using that as a platform, decide what type of name works best. Is it going to be made up? Is it going to be something constructed from ancient root languages (e.g. Latin)? There are benefits and detriments to all of them. A really good resource for ideas on this is a naming company a client of ours is using, Igor ( http://www.igorinternational.com/). They have a couple of white papers on naming (one wayyyy too long and the other long, but not too bad) that has a great explanation of what names are good and why, and what problems each type of name may have.

From here, just start throwing things out. I use a large (2m) white board for this, because it helps me to see all the names written large in one place. In fact, sometimes I take up all the white boards in my office. Give yourself some time here and don’t just hide in a room and do it (although you may have a couple of sessions like that)–get out into the world with this process in the front of your consciousness—it’ll open you up to seeing things through this looking glass and stuff may pop out at you. It could be anything; a flower, a radio commercial, anything.

Bring those back to the process and add them to the set of possibilities. After a few days (or a week or two or three) some names will start to pop out at you. Take those and live with them for a few days—some fewer of them will still pop out. Choose one of them. For now, this will work. Once you get out to market and can really test the name you may want to review it but, for the moment, this algorithm should yield you a name that, if not perfect, will be something that everyone agrees is a good working title for the company.

And here is the best piece of advice I could give you: don’t over think it. A name needs to appeal as a blink moment (if you haven’t read Blink, you should do so as part of this process). If a name takes more than 2 seconds for you to be attracted to it, then it’s the wrong name. The reason this is such a challenging exercise is that a name is your 3-second elevator pitch. You can’t appeal to anyone’s intellect in that time, so you need to appeal to their emotions.

Naming is one of the most challenging and rewarding part of the marketing process. It’s like hitting a home run; sounds simple (just hit the ball hard, right?) but in practice it’s a lot harder. So, for anyone who is embarking on a naming exercise, good luck and please let us know if we can help!

Purchasing a Latte with my iPod Touch

On the evening of September 23rd, I learned I could finally ditch the Starbucks gift card I carried around in my wallet in exchange for downloading an app. The free app is called Starbucks Card Mobile and works on both the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

After downloading the app, I was prompted to enter the 16-digit code on the original Starbucks card I owned and the 8-digit security code underneath it. It didn’t appear there was an option to simply set up an account. Additional cards can be added as well. Once the card is added, you will need to add your billing information (you can add several credit cards) and then load a dollar amount to the Starbucks card. A limited time bonus of $5 will be credited to your account if you load a minimum of $25 to it.

The only problem I had while setting up my account was loading the $25 (of course I want the $5—that’s a free latte). When I selected the dollar amount and hit apply an error message came up ‘An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or come back later.’ I tried again and it still failed to add the $25. Hoping I hadn’t just added $50 to my card, I clicked the Refresh Balance button. Still $0. It was midnight by this time so I figured work was being done on the system, causing the error messages. I waited until the morning and tried again, this time successfully. I hit refresh and suddenly there was $55 on my card. Looking at the transaction history later on, it turned out one of the midnight transfers did go through. A bit annoyed that I put more on the card than I intended, I was still excited to test it out.

When discussing the future of e-commerce and consumer transactions via mobile device with friends, the topic always went back to credit cards. The consumer is protected when using a credit card service so there is a trust factor, but how can an operation gain the confidence of a consumer and how can they profit from it? The discussion then turned towards debit rather than credit. Starbucks has acknowledge security issues by requesting that the user enter a password before reloading a card, so if your mobile device is stolen, there’s no way someone can get free grande Caramel Macchiatos for the rest of their life. In addition, if you set up an account on Starbucks.com, you can report the card lost or stolen. If you’d like to add even more security to your Starbucks Card app, you can assign a password to it that is required during launch. In terms of profits, I’m sure this will come in the form of marketing data and customer loyalty.

Eager to try out the new app, I had to find out which store would actually accept it. Only 16 Starbucks stores between Seattle, WA and Mountain View, CA are testing it, even though the iTunes stores says they’re accepting them in Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and San Jose too. In the app under Payment Trial, it currently has a zero next to Participating Stores but the demo video shows locations spread across Mountain View. I decided the only up-to-date source would be on their corporate site. http://www.starbucks.com/mobile-apps/StarbucksCardMobile/

There were rumors that a user could order a coffee via the app and then scan a bar code with all the payment info in it to transfer the amount due. The second part was true, but I can’t seem to find a way to order a drink before I even walk into the store. There’s a myStarbucks app I haven’t tried, but it seems to be a social app rather than an app one can use to order from.

The eyes of the Starbucks employee who was taking my order lit up when I asked if I could use the app. He said “you’re my first app customer!”. Being in the center of Silicon Valley, I considered it an honor. He whipped around the bar code scanner, I opened my app, clicked the Touch to Pay button, held it up to the scanner and then heard a ‘beeeeeep’. An error message showed up on my screen. After he pressed a couple of buttons on his register, we tried it again. This time, even though another error message came up, the transaction went through. My app wasn’t refreshing the amount left on the card so he gave me a receipt for proof of payment. By the time that was done, my latte was ready.

I like the app and can see it becoming a pioneer of micro mobile debit cards. Now that I’m in the Starbucks system, I’m predicting I’ll be receiving coupons and offers via email. If I can manage those through my account and even on my mobile device, I can see my trips to Starbucks becoming more frequent. Apple and Starbucks have a good relationship because of iTunes and I trust this will make it even stronger.

Here are some more details about the Starbucks Card app:

• Create your Starbucks Card account using your email and a password. From here you can check your balance, set up auto-reload, and sign up to receive email offers. The app closed once I created the account. Upon relaunch, the card info appeared to be lost and I had to re-enter it. Account will be active on Starbucks.com, but info will have to be re-entered and registered in order to manage your card(s) via the site.
• You can enable auto-reload (off is default) by choosing a dollar amount when balance falls under a defined amount (ie. add $25 when balance falls under $20).
• When you click on the main screen’s balance amount, a menu will appear where you can reload the card, refresh the balance, set up auto-reload, and view recent transactions.
• Under Payment Trial, there’s a short video called How Does it Work, as well as Participating Stores button (currently 0), and an Enable Payments slider (set to On).
• Under Settings you can add cards (new or pull from account), delete cards, change billing info, set a passcode (security code to open the app), get app info, read terms of use, and access the help section (rewards, mobile payment, account, reload/auto, security, lost/new device, other).
• For security purposes, sessions time out.

Why Stories Sell and Why Barak Loves Them

The story of stories is starting to take root in the public consciousness, and more and more science is now showing us why exactly people relate to stories so much. Turns out there are a specific class of neurons that are specifically wired to respond to stories.

In a recent article in FastCompany, Dr. Marco Iacoboni’s work is detailed, showing just how and why humans and their brains are so strongly attracted to stories.

Turns out that the very first way people communicated information with each other was via stories. Then, guess what? The people with more information were the survivors and were, thus, more able to reproduce.

Over time, this means that humanity selected for story sensitivity.

Which is why, today, audiences tend to glaze over during PowerPoint presentations that have no narrative structure–people just aren’t designed to respond well to lists of fact and figures or unstructured information.

No story means much mess interest on the part of your audience. Give people a reason to care, a beginning, middle, and end, and they will not only care but be interested, and actually remember your pitch later.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

By Any Other Name…

Naming. It gets a lot of attention and it has for thousands of years. The Bard tells us, “…that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Indeed, it would. But if the name is flat, inscrutable, or undecipherable, then will we ever get to the lovely bouquet?  Only if something else attracts us.

We recently had a CEO tell us that “there are just no more good names out there…” which makes me wonder; did anyone ever tell Michelangelo that there were just no more good sculptures out there? Not that I would ever directly compare our work to that of the master, but it does cause one to wonder, “is that what people really think?” Or, is it just that naming seems too hard and it just seems easier to not have to go there?

The general rule is the fewer words you use to describe something, the harder it is to do. The famous story about Samuel Clemens telling his publisher that a 30 page story takes 2 days, but a 2 page story take 30 days, makes it clear that the real genius is not in complexity, but in simplicity. And that, I think, is where naming becomes such a challenge and makes executives and entrepreneurs hypertensive–more than just an elevator pitch, it is your TEN SECOND pitch.

And if, in that 10 seconds, you don’t intrigue, fascinate, and, yes, even titillate, then is anyone going to get to your bouquet?

In this time-compressed, fast paced, world we all inhabit, that is, indeed, the question. For, to answer The Bard’s question, “what’s in a name?” The answer is “everything.” And that’s the answer to why naming is such an incredible challenge for so many people/executives/creatives/entrepreneurs; because it is (or should be) a wonderful representation of exactly what makes you so great…in 10 seconds and a handful of characters and phonemes.

But never fear. The greatest names are yet to come.