A brief thought from the train today: content marketing is still somewhat in the “low-hanging fruit” days, but as the information economy becomes more efficient, and the returns on content “arbitrage” begin to diminish, content will have to do more than simply answer questions. Content will have to connect with people.

When you are “working a room,” connecting is an exercise in finding common ground. You live in New York City? I used to live in New York. You have a daughter? I have a son. Etcetera. Common ground in this sense, however, addresses the lowest common denominators; the superficial aspects of life. Those help you open a door, of course, but once someone chooses to read your content, that door already stands open, does it not?

People truly connect not when they share the same what, but when they share the same why. There are some companies out there that are fantastic content marketers–and I’d never give them my custom, because their content is incongruous with other aspects of their brand. When that is the case, I find myself irrationally choosing not to do business with them, despite an overwhelming flood of “rationally” helpful content. They’ve connected with me on the surface, but failed to connect with me on a deeper level.

Every time, for instance, someone sends me an infographic that is based upon lousy data, or is improperly cited, or mixes apples and oranges, a little part of me dies. But you might receive the same infographic, and have that image spark the idea that makes you the next Mark Zuckerberg. Value judgements about content are individual and idiosyncratic, and ultimately it is not for me to judge what content is or is not of value to you. But if you wanted to reach me, you’d understand me. And if you understood me, you wouldn’t send me crap infographics. You’d understand, and empathize with, my values, not my search terms.

The strongest brands in the world leave deeper footprints. Content alone rarely does that. Content can serve as a record of proof, but seldom serve as the proof itself. Indeed, if your brand is proving it, every day, in customer service, quality, operational efficiency or innovation (whatever your customers connect with), the content will create itself. Brands scramble to encourage user-generated content, but the best content is the trailing variable of consumer passion, not the product of a contest.

Content marketing begins with who you are, who you hire, and how you act.

On The Common Ground Of Content Marketing is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

When I need to pull myself out of a thinking rut, or am otherwise in search of a “mental sorbet,” Tom Asacker is one of the people I turn to who can reliably spin my thinking around. I loved his latest release, The Business of Belief, so much, that I invited Tom to answer a few questions about this short, provocative book so I could share some of his thoughts with you.

We hear plenty these days about influence, but The Business of Belief deals with something more primal, and more useful: persuasion. You cannot hope to persuade a customer unless you can connect with their beliefs–and you cannot connect with their beliefs unless you are crystal clear about your beliefs. And if that sounds a little seditious for a marketing book, it is. Hence, my first question:

Tom W: The book starts out as a branding and marketing book, but becomes something…very different. Who is this book for, and what do you hope they do with it?

Tom A: It’s for people who are interested in the modern art of influence and behavior change. Those who want to understand and move others, so that they can make their good intentions a reality. And I believe that it’s needed now more than ever, because growth has stalled and frustration levels are at an all time high and climbing.

We’re living in fast-paced world overwhelmed by complexity and choice. I hope the book causes people to slow down and think, to use it as a springboard to reexamine their beliefs and decisions. And that their questioning brings them renewed passion for possibility, change and growth.

Tom W: I love the metaphor you employ of “crossing a bridge” for behavior change. Which is harder to create–a desire for the outcome on the other side, or the feeling of “safety and comfort” to cross the bridge?

Tom A: It really depends on the strength of the desire, the number of competing options, and the perceived level of risk and uncertainty. For example, I may have a strong desire for a novel experience. If it’s for a new wine, the challenge will be to bring a particular brand to life in my mind, to stimulate my desire. Safety and comfort are pretty much non-issues. However, if the novel experience I desire is an expensive vacation in a foreign country, then creating a feeling of safety and comfort may be the greater challenge.

When it comes to behavior change within organizations, both are equally difficult. Leaders must communicate frequently and passionately to stimulate desire as well as to create an environment that feels safe and comfortable. More importantly, they must work really hard to reduce the number of competing options on people’s time, attention and motivations.

Tom W: You quote Daniel Kahneman, who is near and dear to my heart, about our bias to pick the simpler choice; the easier answer. Under what circumstances might we pick the more complex choice?

Tom A: When a particular choice really matters to us. “Matter” comes from the Sanskrit “maatra” which means “to measure.” If, for example, you’re an engineer developing a breakthrough product, complexity is irrelevant because it is in your DNA to be “measured” in your approach. The same is true of all enthusiasts. Their choices may appear more complex, especially to novices, but it’s not really. Enthusiasts simply derive value in a more exacting process of choosing.

Tom W: In Part Three you talk about breaking the happy trance of our present beliefs and creating new thinking patterns, which reminds me of “This is Water,” by David Foster Wallace. Isn’t this a little cognitive behavioral therapy, disguised as marketing?

Tom A: The essence of marketing, the terminal goal, is to influence someone’s decision. So it’s all about understanding thinking patterns and behavior change. However, unlike CBT, choices in the marketplace are not influenced by changing someone’s thinking, which then leads to a change in their feelings and behavior. Instead, you must appeal to their feelings first. Our thoughts and behavior follow our perceptions and feelings. That’s the happy trance. Look, we may impulsively choose a particular brand, because we like the design of the packaging. And that’s okay. But that trance also guides more significant decisions, like the actions we take at work or with our health, career and community.

I’m aware that it’s impossible to exist in today’s modern marketplace and become completely enlightened, to wake up and be fully conscious of all of our choices and decisions. What I am imploring people to do is to become more conscious, especially regarding decisions that will have consequences on their future well-being, and the well-being of others.

Tom W: I love the Buckminster Fuller quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” So–what message should HR departments take from this?

Tom A: That they should stop trying to fix people, and instead work on fixing the design of the business. Because the design, the model, is what produces the results. The people, all of whom desire to do a good job, are simply working within its, and their, constraints.

The great statistician and quality consultant Dr. W. Edwards Deming wrote, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” I’m finding far too many executives trying to manage the results of the operation by managing their people, especially their activities and reporting. It will never work. Instead, they need to better understand and manage the process, and let the process drive the results.

Tom W: Your final anecdote describes someone named Jake who grows content, and thus stops growing. Are we doomed (confined?) to a choice between contentment and growth?

Tom A: Yes.

What I love about Tom’s writing is that he doesn’t tell you how to do things. He gets you to examine why you do them. Get the right answer to that, and the how works itself out pretty directly. If you’d like to read more of Tom’s provocative thinking, I encourage you to pick up a copy of The Business of Belief (not an affiliate link) follow Tom on Twitter, and start yourself down that challenging, but ultimately rewarding path.

Tom Asacker On The Business Of Belief is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Who needs data, when you have a vision? “Ship it!,” they tell you. Don’t wait for permission–beg for forgiveness! Go with your instincts, and they’ll never fail you.

We see these sorts of platitudes daily. It’s hard to make a populist argument against “go with your gut” or “lead from the heart” or other romantic notions of leadership.

But survivors get to write history, as I’ve often said in this space, and for every bold, swashbuckling CEO who ignores the naysayers and succeeds, there are scores of CEO’s who ignore the naysayers…and don’t.

Stephanie Clifford’s marvelous article on ousted J.C. Penney CEO Ronald Johnson highlights one such example. Johnson was formerly the Senior Vice President of Retail Operations for Apple, and a man who “liked to tell employees that there were two kinds of people: believers and skeptics, and at Apple, there were only believers.”

There is, of course, a BIG difference between a skeptic and a cynic. I’m no cynic. But a little healthy skepticism is good. Skepticism is often what reveals a key piece of data that either prevents an awful decision, or facilitates a better one. According to Clifford’s article, some of that key data was available, but was ignored in favor of Johnson’s instinct:

[Johnson] ignored a study Penney had just completed on customer preferences, and gave merchants a one-sheet grid explaining what prices they could use.

“Ron’s response at the time was, just like at Apple, customers don’t always know what they want,” said an executive who advocated testing. “We’re not going to test it — we’re going to roll it out.”

Now, my intent here is not necessarily to roll my eyes and issue the self-righteous “I told you so” of the professional market researcher. OK, maybe a little. But this attitude–that customers don’t know what they want–is a dangerous one. Henry Ford was famously dismissive of market research, claiming that “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Maybe so, but that’s because Ford was a car man, and not a market researcher. I can assure you that if a competent practitioner in my field asked Ford’s customers what they wanted, the answer would have been “to get places faster.” Just so.

We all love a good story, and the received wisdom we learn from the outliers–those truly visionary CEO’s who make markets–provides fodder for some good ones. But the corollary tale–the tale of the competent CEO who seeks the data, listens to the advice, and changes their mind to make what turned out to be a better decision? These don’t show up on most people’s Kindles. Those CEO’s are every bit as brave, though the best-seller lists rarely celebrate that kind of courage. But there’s nothing more brave than recognizing that your personal instinct is wrong, and changing course to make a better decision for shareholders and stakeholders.

Here’s the one truth I’ve come to after two decades as a professional qualitative and quantitative researcher: if you can’t get a customer to tell you what they want, you asked the wrong question.

Intuition, Instinct, and Bravery is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

…And I have enjoyed talking to those people on my new podcast, The Friday Five. If you haven’t heard the show yet, consider this my first shameless cross-promotional plug to hear the show that critics are calling “…a…show…”

Each week, I talk to some of the leading lights in (and outside of) digital marketing, social media, and more about their Music DNA–told through five songs that they can tell great stories about, and one guilty pleasure that is part of their DNA that, perhaps, they regret.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve had C.C. Chapman, Mark Schaefer, Tim Hayden, Ann Handley, Dave Thomas, Tamsen Webster (my wife!), and Jay Baer on the show, talking about their personal lives, where they came from and what shaped them–all from the point of view of the songs that mattered most to them.

No, we don’t discuss marketing, or media, or research. But if you’ve ever wanted to see another side of some pretty interesting people, I hope you’ll check out the show. You can find it at TheFridayFive.com, or subscribe directly to the podcast from the iTunes music store.

Like Soylent Green, The Internet Is Made Of People is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

I have a confession: I look at my Klout score about once a week. There, I said it.

Here’s what I have noticed over the past six months:

1. It’s pretty stable. The “vacation” problem (declines in short term activity equating to immediate score declines) seems to have been worked out.

2. My score is clearly not overly tied to activity. My Klout score has been stable at 77 for quite a while, and I am a decidedly low-volume tweeter/facebooker/blogger. My audience is also not nearly as large as many of the high-volume, well-read bloggers I’ve seen with lower scores.

3. Given #2, Klout seems to have made dramatic adjustments to bring quality of interactions on an equal footing with quantity. Again, I am neither as prolific or as widely-followed a social personage as some of my friends with similar scores. But, the answer is locked away in the previous sentence–I have a lot of friends with similar scores. I didn’t gravitate to them because they had high Klout scores. Oh, good Lord, no. I gravitated towards them because they were smart and challenged me. And that’s why I choose to believe their Klout scores are high–because they actually have influence.

And because those influencers retweet me, follow me, interact with my Facebook posts and tag me in photos, Klout has brought me along for the ride. The fact that I have comparatively fewer interactions online means that the ones I do have–with other high-scoring influencers, apparently–are given quite a bit of weight.

4. Offline matters. Klout has publicly stated that they look at things like Wikipedia profiles (and perhaps I owe some of my score to Hockey legend Tom Webster), but where I see this really manifest itself is in things like photo tagging. Note this photo I was tagged in from the recent Social Fresh conference in Tampa:

As you can see, this essentially counts as “interactions” in Klout’s scoring system with people who also have high Klout scores. And that record of high Klout-scoring interactions began offline, though it was shared online.

Which means, of course, that in Klout-land, just as in real life, it’s all about who you know–or at least, who you are seen to know.

5. Klout and Chess have something in common. When I was younger, I was a bit of a competitive chess player. Chess rankings, as administered by FIDE (the World Chess Federation), take into account not only your wins and losses, but the relative strengths of the players you beat (and lose to.) If you have fewer victories than a comparably ranked player, but those victories are against highly ranked opponents (and you don’t have lots of losses against lower ranked players) your score will be higher.

Now, in chess, the positive impact of a (potentially lucky?) win against a higher ranked player can be quickly nullified by a couple of losses to lower-ranked players. It is clear from watching my Klout score that I have benefited from encouraging interactions from “higher ranked players.” Would I then be penalized if the lion’s share of my interactions came from much “lower ranked players?” This remains to be seen, though the ramifications are troubling.

The Point

All of which brings me to this central question: Is Klout getting “better?” In the early days, the quantity of your activity was clearly a driving force behind your Klout score–the more active you were on social, the more you could “goose” your numbers.

This may, or may not, continue to be the case. But since I am not incredibly active as a social content creator, clearly there are multiple paths to attaining a higher “score” in online influence measures. I do NOT consider myself to be as influential online as some of my friends–say, Mark Schaefer, Jason Falls, Jay Baer, CC Chapman and other high-scoring individuals–yet, clearly we all interact together online, and in multiple ways.

So have I ridden their coattails? Or, given my score, have they ridden mine? The latter is unlikely; the former–complicated. But I’ll say this: The Klout of 2013 has something the Klout of 2011 did NOT have–more data. And Klout is clearly continuing to iterate, learn, and improve. This, I hope, can also be said of smart marketers.

That said, have YOU noticed any changes with Klout, or other social influence scoring measures? Are they getting better? Worse? Are they becoming more or less relevant? The comments are yours.

Klout, Revisited is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Several months ago, I wrote this on my personal blog, because it didn’t (at the time) seem like it was “BrandSavant” material. In the months that passed, two things happened: one, Posterous–the host of my personal blog–was bought by Twitter, and Twitter made the company-but-not-user-friendly decision to shutter Posterous, so I need to preserve this content by the end of the month or lose it. Lesson learned (and for you, I hope.)

The other thing that happened was that this post–on an unpromoted, bare-bones, personal blog–ended up getting more page views than the average post I write here. So, it resonated. While I figure out what I want to do with my personal musings now that the landlord has kicked me out of the building (and lets face it, that’s what the Twitter/Posterous acquisition has done), I thought I’d repost this here for you.

Finally, I’ll just add that I don’t write to a schedule here at BrandSavant. I respect *the hell* out of the people who can, and do, write frequent content that is worth reading to a schedule. That’s a pretty short list–a non-zero number, but I can count them on two hands. What I am beginning to understand is this: reading “how to excel at frequent content marketing” articles from these talented and gifted individuals might be akin to reading “how to dunk” articles from LeBron James.

Find your own path. And I hope you get something from this.

The Dark Side of Content Marketing

I don’t consider myself a very good content marketer. The number of people I know of that can consistently and frequently produce amazing content on a calendar is pretty small, and I’m not going to risk offense by naming anyone here, so I’ll leave it at this–if you don’t think this applies to you, then it doesn’t. Fair enough?

Content marketing is an enormously powerful tool, and it can be used for good and for evil. The recent fall from grace of noted author Jonah Lehrer is a useful cautionary tale for the latter. Lehrer, author of How We Decide and the pulled-from-the-shelves Imagine: How Creativity Works, has become something of a pariah, but a recent, superb piece in New York Magazine makes the point that all Lehrer did by plagiarizing himself and others, and by making up “evidence” out of whole cloth was, essentially, what was asked of him by “the system.”

I do not excuse this, and “I was just doing what I was expected/told to do” has often been offered as a thin excuse for far greater crimes than Lehrer has committed or is even capable of committing. It is, in fact, a terrible excuse, and the first refuge of those that need to justify reprehensible or questionable behavior. And, let’s be clear–Jonah Lehrer himself has never proffered this excuse, though the writer of this (superb) piece has dangled it as a tantalizing possibility. But this article, too, is content marketing.

So is this blog post.

I’ve given a number of talks over the past year or so disparaging a brand of “research” that we often see in social media–data provided for the purposes of content marketing. Some infographics fall into this category, as do studies that aggregate social media data to give you the “right” way to tweet. They aren’t designed to help you–not really. These things have nearly no applicability to your specific situation or your business. They are designed to get you to click on them. To sign up for a white paper. To register for a webinar. To make you, in other words, a lead.

You know this, surely. But even knowing this, we often fail to close the circle here–that data produced for the purposes of content marketing is inherently incurious. As I’ve often written here and elsewhere, “incurious” is as vulgar a word in my business as I can possibly muster. It’s the professional researcher’s equivalent of the F-Bomb.

But we thirst for content. The social web is, in fact, a vast, insatiable mill for content. Providing content has become a viable career, and I do not disparage this. But the dark side of this is that the content marketer is often mistaken for an expert in the field in which he or she is creating content. In the case of Jonah Lehrer, he was riding on the coattails of absolutely the most influential thinker in my professional life and career, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. My entire post-MBA career has been spent studying Kahneman’s work and his insights into consumer behavior and behavioral economics.

Kanheman’s work has been translated, popularized, and extended by a wide variety of writers, ranging from Dubner and Levitt (Freakonomics), to Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice) to Daniel Ariely (Predictability Irrational.) Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide also built upon Kahneman’s work, but there is a crucial distinction here. Lehrer was a smart guy–I’m not belittling his intellect–but he was at heart a content marketer, not a scientist. Otherwise, he would have been a scientist, no? He popularized the insights of researchers like Kahneman, translating them for laypeople and finding the anecdotes and case studies that would entrance and captivate readers, but he did not extend those findings–he moved on to the next topic, the next book, the inevitable Ted talk and speaking circuit to which that grants one access.

I don’t judge him. I cannot judge him (hell, I’d love to have a Ted talk.) But whether you see Lehrer as a James Frey-esque congenital liar or as a victim caught up in the trope of the writer-as-expert (as opposed to the expert writer), the fact remains that Lehrer became popular. He delivered what we, the buying public, wanted. He was hardly a scientist. But thousands believed he was a scientist, because he wrote like a scientist. He fed the content mill, and he did it very effectively.

The tale of Jonah Lehrer, whose career as a content marketer appears to be effectively over, is a cautionary tale, and it applies to pretty much all of us who do exactly what it is I am trying to do here–market myself as a thought leader/thinker/consultant by dint of a few blog posts. And I take that cautionary tale to heart, both as a creator and as a consumer of information. With that in mind, here are three things I take away from the story of Jonah Lehrer:

1. The content beast, though oft-fed, is insatiable. You are only as good as your next book, your next blog post, or your last talk. I don’t write very often here or at Brandsavant, as this has long been a trap that I have resisted. For every blog post I publish, there are five or six others that never see the light of day, because they just aren’t good enough. I only publish what I am proud of, and for that reason this space sometimes can lie fallow for weeks at a time. I’m ok with that. You, of course, need to find your own way, and you may be eminently capable of producing quality content more frequently than I.

But, if you cannot, the surest way to fall into the Lehrer trap is to write to a schedule, and not in the service of ideas. The tyranny of the content calendar is responsible for a lot of weak content on the web. Keeping up that pace out of deference to some kind of received wisdom about publishing frequency may not by default lead you to the kind of intellectual dishonesty of which Lehrer was guilty, but it does place stress on the system, as it were. My Brandsavant blog became much more important to me when it became a showcase for my best thought, and when it became important to me it became a better blog. At least, that’s my hallucination.

2. There are experts about things, and there are people who can write about things. Those that can do both exceptionally well are exceedingly rare. I have enormous respect for writers like Brian Greene, who can not only translate science for laymen, but also do the science. That’s a gift. A rare gift, as it turns out. We should celebrate those that have it, but also acknowledge that rarity.

Today, we see a lot of very gifted writers blogging about trends in social media and business, and we cannot help but be influenced by that writing and those thinkers. But we also have to acknowledge the fact that the folks doing the work and the folks writing well about the work are rarely the same people. Jonah Lehrer is a gifted writer. But, as a behavioral economist, he’s a gifted writer. Our ability to share our content on the web, especially on social media, is wonderful and has presented me with opportunities that I never dreamed of 5 years ago. But the ability to disseminate content should never be mistaken for skills as a scientist, sociologist, human resources professional, operations manager or any number of disciplines that require actually doing the thing.

To that end, allow me to suggest that the best way to mitigate this phenomenon is to be sure and augment your reading/follow list/Google+ circles with the voices of the not-so-popular, the contrarians and the practitioners of the disciplines we follow. We are bombarded with content marketing that invokes psychology, organizational behavior, leadership principles, change management and corporate culture. Yet, very few of the popular voices who talk about how social media has transformed business have much actual expertise in areas outside of marketing and PR.

I do not denigrate those voices–far from it. I often range far afield of my own educational background and experience in my writing–but do be sure to balance those voices by seeking out HR specialists, psychologists, management consultants and CEO’s who, though they may not have the platforms held by some popular bloggers, have just as much if not more to say about how social has transformed business as anyone.

I do not fault those who produce content in those areas–again, the system almosts demands it–but that very same system requires that we start holding content marketing to a higher standard.

3. Finally, the great crime of writers such as Lehrer (and one of my least favorite popular writers, Malcolm Gladwell) is this: they confuse information and evidence. I still believe that this post, on the difference between the two, is one of the best things I’ve written, and it is certainly the one that best sums up my personal approach to my job.

What writers like Lehrer, Gladwell and any number of currently popular business writers do is this: they start with the insight, and then seek out data to prove it. Lehrer certainly did this: he began with an idea, and then (as the writer of the excellent New York piece linked above noted) sought out the data required to serve as the scaffolding of that idea. There is a saying in my business: the plural of anecdote is not data. And while some popular “data-driven” writers and bloggers often have compelling anecdotes to illustrate their beliefs, those insights were not data-driven.

Anyone can cherry pick anecdotes in the service of an idea–Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to mastery” myth is a prime example–but that doesn’t mean that those insights actually came from data. And when we start with the idea, and then look for the data, then we no longer treat facts as information. We treat them as evidence; discarding that which does not support our idea, and elevating that which does. And this is one of the greatest crimes committed by some of the worst content marketing that I see on the social web.

And if you are using any of this content marketing to support business decisions, then it isn’t a victimless crime.

Still, content marketing runs the gamut from helpful to innocuous to potentially harmful. How can we seek the light, and eschew the dark side? Well, as my lovely wife Tamsen reminds me, there is a simple trick to dealing with the geyser of information being spewed daily by Twitter, Facebook, blog posts and other content outlets: always seek to disconfirm, or, as I mentioned to Jay Baer in his excellent post here, don’t seek to prove yourself right, prove yourself wrong.

That doesn’t mean being a critic, or even a cynic. And it doesn’t necessarily mean taking what we read in content marketing with a grain of salt, as it were. Instead, it means that what we read might be true–in fact, we can even hope that it is true–but our first obligation is not to believe it. Our first obligation is to wonder. When we are confronted with a new piece of data, or some new prescriptive article about the best way to use social media, the enlightened reader wonders if it is actually true and applicable to their situation, and then seeks to disprove it.

This has nothing to do with doubt and everything to do with confirmation bias. If you cannot disprove a thing after putting it to the test for your specific situation, then you have a genuine insight. But if you can readily disprove it, then you know to keep looking. And I don’t know about you, but I keep looking, each and every day.

So, I have a love-hate relationship with content marketing. I acknowledge it. I use it. I embrace it. But I also recognize that that there is a truly dark side indeed to content marketing. What say you?

The Content Marketing Treadmill is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Thomas Jefferson would have been a very good marketer.

When he said, “The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society,” I’m almost positive he was taking about email marketing.

Today, with retargeting and re-re-targeting and delicious cookies, digital marketing has the ability to be directly personalized on a one-to-one basis. But look at the best practices for email marketing software: most major email service providers have some capacity to do what’s called “A/B” testing. You mock up two versions of your email (maybe more), and send both out to a small portion of your database to test which message works better–which one was opened or clicked on by a higher percentage of your test sample.

Then, helpfully, these ESP software packages allow you to “pick the winner,” and send off the highest testing version to the rest of your database. But consider this:

Let’s say you test two versions of your email, Version “A,” and Version “B,” with a sample of your database. You get the results, and Version A “won,” by a margin of 3:1. In other words, 75% of the people who interacted with one of your emails, interacted with Version A. You flip a switch, and everyone gets Version A.

But 25% picked Version B. And, if your test sample was large enough, that’s likely projectable throughout your entire database. Knowing that, why would you then send Version A to a quarter of your customers, when they’d rather get Version B?

Let’s rethink the whole process. What if the goal of A/B “testing” were not to pick the winner, but to learn something? To me, the best way to attack big data is to focus on the small numbers. When you get a report back that says 75% prefer ‘A,’ while 25% prefer ‘B,’ what if you replaced the urge to send everyone “the winner” with a question: I wonder why 25% chose B?

This is not only an answerable question, it’s likely a crucial question. If your database is robust, you likely have a lot of profile data about that 25%, so start by making them a “segment.” What have they got in common? What interests have they shown in the past? What other behaviors link them together? Of course, you might not have the answers in your database, but the questions are still worth asking. So why not ask them? Take that “25%” segment, offer them a discount off their next purchase, and ask them why they clicked on your test mail, and what they found appealing? Pick a smaller sample, and call a few of them.

The most important question, always, is not “what,” as in “what email did you prefer,” but why. Knowing why people do what they do allows you do anticipate their needs and delight them profitably, which is the best “theory of the firm” I know. 

So, the next time you conduct “A/B” testing (or indeed any kind of content testing), flip your thinking. Instead of thinking about the test as an opportunity to learn about your content (an exercise with diminishing returns), think about these exercises as opportunities to learn more about your customers, and why they gravitate (or not) to your brand. Do that, and suddenly “A/B Testing” is a test you’ll always win, no matter which version is better. Your goal is never to understand your data. It’s always to understand people.

Also, President Jefferson, I am sorry I dragged you into this. You’re a good sport.

The Marketing Tyranny of the Majority is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

This is such a great article about the problems facing the “analyst” industry in the age of social media. I’ve worked on both sides of the industry analyst business over the past 15 years or so, and I can confidently say two things:

1) For some firms, the analyst business has turned into a complete *racket.* You pay them to be a client, you get “coverage.” Full stop.

2) The research/methodology standards of some analyst firms have also slipped, which makes these firms more dependent on their “rock stars.” I used to be able to rely upon primary research from analyst firms, but primary research of quality is getting more and more expensive. Some firms continue to do the work; however, others rely upon what is really qualitative research (i.e., interviewing their clients) masquerading as quantitative.  This forces clients to trust the judgement of their “rock star” analyst, when what companies should be doing is paying for quality research and insights, and hiring their own “rock stars” to interpret it.

It’s just not possible for *any* industry analyst to have the best interests of all of their clients at heart. Think about that for a moment.

Pay for the best primary research data, and hire your own stars. Failing that, hire an industry analyst based upon the quality of their data, not their personalities. Those are the only two paths to sustained, knowledge-based competitive advantage.

The Future of the Analyst Business is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Last week, at Social Slam in Knoxville, my wife Tamsen and I gave a brand new presentation called Putting Data to Work (and we’ll both have a lot more to say on this topic in the coming months). In one section of the presentation, we talked a lot about the value of qualitative research as a tool to get to the heart of what your brand stands for in the minds of your customers or audience.

In the subsequent Q&A, we were asked to offer some advice on the types of questions you might ask your customers or audience to unlock some of the elusive “truths” about your brand, product or service. I’ll tell you what I told them: there’s one great question that cuts right to the heart of the essence of your brand, and anyone can ask it (though I’ll offer some advice on how to ask it). Both Tamsen and I have relied on this question for years–she has asked variants of this in her branding work on both the agency and client sides, and I’ve been closing and/or opening qualitative research projects with some form of this question for fifteen years. Here it is:

If [brand/product/service] were to die, what would you miss?

I call this the “Brand Eulogy” question. It works with customers, prospective customers, readers and even channel partners, and it is one of the most direct paths to uncovering consumer expectations that I know of. It easily trumps “how did you find out about us,” which is maybe the second best question you can ask (and should be asking at the point of sale, every time.)

The eulogy question might lead to a customer telling you about a feature or product benefit that they’d miss, or some other rational explanation. Sometimes, though, what you get back from that question is not the product of a rational assessment, but an emotional reaction that reveals a deeper connection (or disconnection) you might not have guessed.

The “eulogy” part is important, because a consumer may or may not have the language to describe to you why your brand is important, or why it exists–but if you take your brand away (and quite permanently) you will get a range of answers that are otherwise difficult to excavate. I might not be able to tell you exactly what it is about your brand that I care about, but if you tell me it’s going away forever, I can speculate on what I might do as a result, and that’s just as valuable a tool to unlock what matters.

By the way, I am very precise about the language I use here. The actual question I ask is “What if I were to tell you that [brand/product] were dead–not ever coming back. What, if anything, would you miss?” Let’s unpack that a bit. First, I do give the option of “…if anything,” because if they wouldn’t miss a thing, that’s a valid answer, and I don’t want them inventing something as a condition of Research Stockholm Syndrome. If customers would miss nothing about you, you at least have a problem and the means to craft a hypothesis, and that’s the start of the scientific method. You might then follow up by asking the same question about your competitors, to see if it’s a category-wide issue, or endemic to your brand.

The first part, “What if I were to tell you…” is also quite deliberate. I would never come out and say “[Brand] is dead. What do you miss the most?” That would be deceptive, and dishonor my profession. But asking “What if [brand] went away” or the even more insipid “Imagine that [brand] went away…” frames the question a little too hypothetically–and roots it in make-believe. Instead, I deliberately choose “What if I were to tell you that…”, because while it allows me not to deceive, it does put the consumer a little closer to an emotional reaction, as they wonder if this could really be true.

By the way, this is a great internal exercise, too. Ask your employees. Ask your customers. See how far apart, or close together, the answers are.

Sometimes the best way to save a brand is to kill it. At least for five minutes.

The Single Best Question You Can Ask Your Customers, Audience Or Partners is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

From Amazon’s Kindle product page:

Ahem.

Maximum Battery Life (in hours):

THERE I FIXED IT.

The Large Print Giveth; The Small Print Taketh Away is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

From a CBC news report on the drinking age in Saskatchewan remaining 19:

Ahem:

“The legal drinking age is 19 across Canada, except in Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec (where the drinking age is 18.)”

THERE I FIXED IT.

(I feel bad for those who are 17.6, or 18.8. SO CLOSE!)

Extreme Data Makeovers, Part Two: Bars Aren’t Just For Drinking is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

The current usage of “Real-Time Marketing” confuses me, to be honest. It has certainly inspired a lot of hashtaggery, and gotten the chattering classes talking about Oreos again. A leading publisher is now sending me a “Real Time Media and Marketing” newsletter. And yes, it has inspired a lot of blog posts, including this one.

I hesitated writing this, because curmudgeonry is not becoming to me. However, two aspects of what we seem to be calling “real time marketing” don’t really jibe:

1. Real Time Marketing was already a thing. Its been a thing since the 90′s. When profile data is used to generate a just-in-time offer for an individual customer on the fly (what CRM systems have been doing for well over a decade,) THAT’S real-time marketing. You know when you search for a product on Amazon, and you get two more products recommended to you for one package price? RTM has been used to describe that process for some time now, so the term’s current usage in reference to “I tweeted that really fast” is a little misleading. The key to RTM is personalization, not tweet speed.

2. …which leads me to my second point: that thing that is currently being referred to as “real time marketing” is not marketing. I suppose you could call it “responsive advertising,” but it kinda isn’t that either. When I lived in New York City, one of the local radio stations used to position their “street team” at the George Washington Bridge, and pay the tolls of incoming drivers. It was a “real time” act that got people to talk about the brand. And that, I always thought, fell under the umbrella of “Promotions,” not Marketing.

I guess I am a stickler about the use of the word “marketing.” To me, it’s the theory of the firm; the name we give to the process of anticipating and creating demand for products with a combination of price, product, people, and–yes–promotion that constitutes the firm’s raison d’être. Getting people to retweet a brand message (no matter how quickly that message is generated or disseminated) plays a promotional role, but there’s nothing personalized or strategic at play here, so there doesn’t seem to be much justification for co-opting a perfectly good term for what seems to be an inaccurate use.

Now get off my lawn!

I Do Not Think Real Time Marketing Means What They Think It Means is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Yes, BrandSavant readers, you have a chance to set my career back by five years–maybe more–by enabling a flood of personally embarrassing content.

On April 15th (tax day!), my beautiful wife Tamsen and I are going to run our very first marathon–and it’s a big one. We have decided to run the Boston Marathon on behalf of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dorchester, an organization dedicated to providing inspiration, resources, and (most importantly) the power of possibility to some kids who could really use a hand here in the Boston area. As parents ourselves, we know that the most important thing you can give a child is the belief in their own potential to realize their dreams. Knowing that there are kids out there who don’t–yet–believe that is a powerful motivator.

We have some ambitious fundraising goals, so if you’ve ever wanted to show your appreciation for the sporadically-posted and occasionally-tolerable content here at BrandSavant, I’d love it if you could support these kids with a donation–whatever you can manage–at our fundraising page here.

My wife has written a very compelling appeal on that page for the many good reasons this worthy organization could use your help. I, however, have chosen to take the low road. To that end, if you look at the various levels of donation to the right of the page, you’ll see the various ways that I will debase myself to inspire your donations. My mullet-festooned high school picture? Check. Re-enacting the entire “Battle Dance” scene from Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” video? Check. My Boz Scaggs impersonation, for YouTube to see? Check check double check.

I’ll stop here, before it gets worse. Please donate if you can, what you can. My video camera stands at the ready. MAKE IT HAPPEN. Donate today!

Help Me Set My Career Back Five Years is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

I came across a couple of things this weekend that *almost* inspired a rant. However, ranting doesn’t agree with me in the long term, so I slept on it, came up with a good link-bait-y title, and wrote this instead.

The first thing I came across was the results of a survey a BrandSavant reader sent me that showed social media platform usage across younger demos. When I saw that their results disagreed *violently* with some of the data put out there by Edison, Pew, Nielsen and other reputable sources, I looked into the methodology. Turns out, it was from a new survey tool that trades survey question responses for access to content across a publishing network–and I’m *not* talking about Google Consumer Surveys, which has a robust and growing network and continues to iterate.

No, this is a different tool, and a different “publishers network” (and, hence, a different sample base) from Google’s. Here’s what I could learn about the sample base for this survey, and for other surveys offered on this platform, expressed in Danish: ∅.

The FAQ offered no guidance on even basic demographics, save for a line that indicated they use “inferred demographics” based on IP addresses, which seems like a lot of work when you could just *ask* me how old I am, considering I am taking your survey in the first place. But I digress.

The tool is not important here, so I’m not linking to it. But the existence of this tool, which does indeed provide “information” quickly and cheaply, is symptomatic of something larger, which I do want to address. But I wasn’t sure about how I would address it until I came across a couple of blog posts this weekend that I nearly left intemperate responses to. I’m glad I didn’t.

I read two posts this weekend from social media marketers that disparaged survey data in favor of real-time social media data. The people who wrote these posts are smart people. So I’m not linking to the posts, because I’m not making it about the posts (or their authors.) Instead, I want to talk about the sentiment behind these posts: that survey data is “artificial,” while social media data is unfiltered and “real.”

The fact is, neither source of data is perfect. Here’s a simple question that no social media monitoring tool alone can answer: what percentage of a brand’s customers or prospects tweet, or read tweets, about that brand? That’s a pretty basic question that a survey can answer that makes all of that social media monitoring data comprehensible.

Pitting survey and server data against each other is a ridiculous false choice. Smart market researchers use *both* to generate insights on behalf of their brand or client. Survey research generates insights in a controlled setting. Social media monitoring generates insights in an uncontrolled setting. As a professional market researcher, I use the latter to generate language and ideas, but I use the former to *test* them scientifically. In short, I use them both. I *need* both and I’m glad to have all of these things in my arsenal.

Put another way, both surveys and social media monitoring are tools in my utility belt. Positing that listening will kill asking is like saying hammers will kill wrenches. What discourages me about these posts, and the data generated by the survey tool I mentioned above, is this: both “tools” generate research data. I do not dispute that. But here is a distinction with a difference:

There is a wide chasm between “research” and “market research.”

Unfiltered social media data that doesn’t address the caveats of social media research gives you: research. Asking questions with a survey tool to a sample you can’t characterize gives you: research.

When a client asks me to find the features and benefits that financial services professionals want to see in an investment portal? I need to give them market research.

Unfiltered DIY questionnaires and raw social media monitoring give you information about the people. Market research researches your target market. It offers actionable insights based upon the data we can gather–both through social media and questionnaires–about a sample of the people you want to reach.

A penultimate thought about what the Internet has done to research: we have never had more access to bulk data than we have today. In a sense, the two items that inspired this post work at opposite ends of the same continuum. While social media monitoring gives us more data about how people react to brands in the wild than we’ve ever had, the spate of DIY research tools gives us more access to directed “answers” than we have ever had. But quantity is not quality. The metric tonnage of data we can mine from Twitter, and the quantity of data thrown off by the DIY “polling” apps of the world, are all the by-products of great tools that can certainly provide research, but need work to make the leap to providing market research.

If you can’t answer within statistically acceptable parameters who tweeted about your brand, or who answered your question, you have research. If you *can,* you have market research. That’s the hard fact.

Finally, a thought to those who continue to believe that surveys have “stopped working” due to the Internet, mobile phones, and other factors: on Election Day in 2012 we fielded over 100,000 surveys in one day across 50 states to provide the sole, lasting record on who voted and why, and to give the major U.S. news networks decision support to project the results of nearly 100 races from the Presidential election on down to various Senate and House races and assorted referenda. No inaccurate projections were made. It wasn’t magic; it was science, which still–refreshingly–works just fine.

The Internet has given my profession an enormously powerful set of tools to work with, including social media monitoring and quick Internet surveys. But the Internet didn’t kill the survey. It made the survey better.

The Survey Is Dead is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Not for the first time today, a piece of research was passed along to me by someone warning that it was social media research, “so the usual caveats apply.”

This phrase is starting to become meaningless to me. Does it have meaning to you? When I look back through various studies I’ve seen that have been derived from social media clickstream data, I often see that they’ve been shared with “the usual caveats.” To me, that phrase has become the new “interesting;” that thing you say about a piece of data when you don’t know what it means.

Here’s the thing about the usual caveats: if you do the work, those caveats are quantifiable. When someone denigrates TV ratings research, for example, because those ratings are based upon a sample of a few hundred viewers who keep diaries/electronic records of what they watch, I’m quick to remind people that this sampling methodology is predictable, operates within known parameters, and is based upon a methodology accredited by the Media Research Council, an independent body established to insure the validity, reliability and effectiveness of those estimates. And by the way, estimates aren’t guesses.

But when people look at social media research and accept it “with the usual caveats,” without knowing what those caveats actually are, they risk great violence to the truth and certainly some damage to their brand, if not their psyche. Accepting this is to accept the fact that *no research* is generally better than *awful research.* After all, doing *no* research means that you have a chance of making a poor decision (or no decision); relying on *crap* research guarantees that bad decision.

So, the next time you review, endorse or pass along a piece of social media research with “the usual caveats,” consider what some of those caveats might actually be. For the most part, they all concern the same thing: how representative of (and therefore projectable to) some known population that data is. And note: social media need not be representative, if it is predictably, quantifiably and/or repeatably non-representative. So, what are my caveats? Here are a few:

1. What specific sources comprise the data, and in what proportions? (BTW, this is where most social media monitoring and research platforms fall flat, and I’m only on #1).

2. Is the data weighted to some known quantity, or did it come straight from the “spigot?”

3. Can we calibrate the data using some known secondary research?

4. Can we calibrate the data with primary research?

5. Can we track the conversational history of the data sources to gauge sample quality?

6. Can I pull a random sample of raw data to manually test against automated descriptive statistics?

7. What do I know about the customers of the brand in question who do not tweet about this product?

Now, do you need to know the answers to all of these things to judge the quality of a piece of social media research? No. There is no such thing as perfect information, whether that data comes from surveys or servers. That’s why these are caveats. These are the things you need to know that you know or don’t know before you know what you know. Or, as one of America’s greatest poets once said,

The Unknown

As we know,

We don’t know.

I pass this “poem” along with the usual caveats.

“The Usual Caveats” of Social Media Research is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

My compadres at Edison and I are very excited to announce that we are now providing podcast measurement ratings and metrics for the Launchpad Digital Media suite of programs. If you are at all involved in podcasting, you know that Edison has been committed to the space since 2006, and has provided credible third party usage statistics for the past six years–and I’ve gladly shared these stats with podcasters since the first Podcast and New Media Expo in Ontario, California, and at various Podcamps and Blogworld sessions ever since.

I love the medium–we love the medium–and we are excited to see what Norm Pattiz and Launchpad are going to do in this space. If you don’t know those names, you know the names they represent: Launchpad’s digital roster includes podcasts from Adam Carolla, CBS News, Dr. Drew, Penn Jillette, Tom Green, Jay Mohr and an ever-growing stable of the industry’s most talented personalities.

We’re big believers in podcasting, and big believers in what Norm is putting together here. Norm’s prior ventures include founding Westwood One–essentially inventing radio syndication–and bringing the likes of the NFL, Casey Kasem and Meet The Press to radios nationwide. We are thrilled to be able to bring the same methodologies we have successfully employed to provide credible third-party measurement to Pandora and other clients for Launchpad’s lineup of top-notch talent.

Our goal is to accurately and credibly report podcast consumption statistics that provide advertisers with audience metrics they can trust. And when advertisers trust the metrics, advertising dollars follow. It’s a charge we take very seriously, and we can’t wait to see where all of this leads.

I’m bullish on podcasting. There have never been more quality programs and more available listeners than there are right now. And I am personally thrilled to be able to contribute to the medium’s continuing usage as a preferred vehicle for advertising. Also, I am a huge Penn and Teller fanboy, so providing metrics for Penn’s podcast? Yeah, sign me up.

We’ll have more on this soon!

Some Big News For Podcasting is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

I’m not the only one who has said this, but the GoDaddy ad during the 2013 Super Bowl was *appallingly* bad. Just so you know exactly what I am talking about, here it is–but please, don’t watch it if you don’t need to.

There have been many armchair quarterbacks chiming in on the depths of the…uhhh…depths of this spot. Many of those reactions have been visceral and emotional, and they are not wrong–GoDaddy’s branding over the past few years has been nothing short of vomit-inducing. I don’t have anything to add to those reactions, and yes: GoDaddy’s branding makes me queasy.

I’ll just add this, more rational reaction: GoDaddy’s continuing journey down this particular path is atrociously poor branding, if you buy into the definition of branding to which I ascribe. The smartest take on branding I know of comes from my friend, the inestimably smart Tom Barnes, who once told me this: “The definition of a branding exercise is any exercise that reduces the risk of purchase.”

I love that definition, and it’s now fully ingrained into my thinking process. In fact, I can think of no situation where that is not, at the root of the problem, the root of the problem.

So here’s a rational take on the spectacular failings of both this spot, and GoDaddy’s entire branding campaign over the years, which seems to be centered on sex: Positioning yourself as the “sexy” domain registrar does not reduce or otherwise mitigate the risk of purchase. Conflating your brand with sex works with beer. Men who drink beer don’t want to be seen drinking a lame beer. A beer that associates itself with scantily-clad women is reducing the risk that men might feel drinking that beer by making that association in a logical way: I am at a bar, I want to be seen as attractive, so I will drink a beer that seems to attract attractive people at bars, so I don’t risk looking like a loser.

There is no scenario in which that makes sense for a hosting company. My hosting company is not something that is part of my “story” as a person. I’ve never been asked what hosting company I use at a bar. I’ve never been asked by someone on a date what hosting company I use. Associating sex with hosting is contextually irrelevant, and does not reduce the risk of purchase. I’ve never made a purchasing decision about hosting based upon what that decision says about me as a person to others.

We buy things, consume media, and associate ourselves with brands based upon what those brands signify, and that is how, to some extent, we tell our own stories. I’ve never seen anyone trumpet a hosting company for any other reason than uptime, value, service, performance or features. I think there are ways to make those features “sexy” in a contextually relevant way. What GoDaddy has done, year after year, is position itself merely as the “sexy” hosting company. And that says diddly about the risks associated with purchasing hosting in any meaningful way.

Finally, there’s a very simple way for brands to evaluate whether or not approaches like this will work for them. All you need to do is study your customers. If what your customers say and do makes the case that how their purchase might be perceived by others is an important attribute in their purchase decision (and yes, the skilled market researcher can indeed uncover this data) then by all means, smooch away. Get yourself some porn stars. Push the boundaries. This narrative works for some brands because people want to tell their own stories by associating themselves with those brands.

But I really doubt that competent market research in the hosting category would reveal “sexy” as even remotely in the top ten attributes worth owning. Who owns cheap? Who owns reliable? Who owns customer service? Who owns performance? I can’t personally answer any of those questions for hosting. If you can’t answer all four of those questions, then the branding stories that need to be told first are clear.

Why We Brand is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

This is, we are told, the era of video. Of images. Of YouTube and Instagram and Vine and .gifs. I don’t disagree with that. But do consider this Super Bowl ad, which was my personal favorite and indisputably one of the most powerful ads to air during the big game:

Please watch it.

Then, press play again and close your eyes.

I don’t think I am going out on a limb here if I suggest that it was every bit as powerful without the images as it was with them. Consider Hal Riney’s voiceover in this spot, which defined Ronald Reagan’s campaign (and again, I encourage you to close your eyes):

If you work with brands day to day as I do, you know that storytelling and content are more crucial than ever. But with all the focus on the tech aspects of storytelling, and the tools we use to distribute those stories, we must never forget that the atomic unit of branding is the story, no matter who tells it, or how it is told.

Audio is an enormously powerful medium. I don’t know how many banner ads you can recall, but I bet you can hum the jingle for Intel, or sing “We Are Flintstones Kids” and “Oh, What A Feeling To Drive…Toyota” or sing the Big Mac jingle without much prompting. Audio tells stories every bit as powerfully as video, and while Chrysler may have co-opted this extraordinary Paul Harvey speech, it should serve as a reminder to the rest of us that great audio storytelling isn’t about platforms or technology or even audio quality–it’s about the storytellers.

Today, we have online music providers that aren’t telling stories–they are just jukeboxes. Wheat truckers. We have some offline radio broadcasters who have responded to passive measurement by offering passive content, and trying to out-commodify today’s online wheat truckers. That’s not going to save radio, either online or offline.

Stories demonstrate the power of audio. Nothing is more powerful in the minds of consumers than stories. If you are one of my regular readers in the radio business, you know this, I hope. You can invest in streaming technology, online music curation algorithms, visual branding and social sharing technology. But never, ever forget that the power of audio branding lies with the story, not how that story is distributed.

To succeed in telling stories, we don’t need to invest in cutting-edge streaming or podcasting platforms or collaborative filtering algorithms.

We need to find today’s Paul Harveys.

I miss you, Paul Harvey. I hope the next Paul Harvey is out there. We need you.

The Forgotten Power of Audio is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Apple is an enormously successful company, and as such has spurred a cottage industry in business writing as we all try to generalize lessons in hindsight from an outlier. I note this because I recently came across this interesting juxtaposition in the almost violently pro-Apple blog, Daring Fireball, about Philips exiting the consumer electronics industry:

What is the “lesson” here, in following this news article with the “bag of hurt” comment? One assumes that it’s yet another example of Apple’s prescience; their ability to recognize and avoid dead-end markets (and, by dint of the juxtaposition, a dig at Philips, as well, for making those hurt-bag-ful Blu-Ray players for so many years.)

It is true that Apple has, in the last decade, successfully “skated to where the puck is going,” as The Great One once said. That, of course, is not the sole component of success (just ask Preston Tucker); let’s also acknowledge that there is also a fair amount of luck involved. But Apple has in recent years had more hits than misses, and there are scores of valid business lessons we can all learn from how they have relentlessly prioritized design and innovation. So stipulated.

Let me say this, however: predicting the future is child’s play. It takes no great skill to predict, as Steve Jobs did, what will be. Here–I’ll do it for you: in the future, we will fly faster than light to interplanetary colonies, eat pills that replicate entire thanksgiving dinners, live to be 200 and, eventually, learn Chinese in minutes with a suppository. You’re welcome.

No, predicting the future is not difficult. Predicting the timing of the future, however, is a singularly difficult skill, and rarely works twice in a row. Of course Blu-Ray was a “bag of hurt;’ eventually we will be able to watch movies on our eyelids by clenching our buttocks. So was Philips stupid for making Blu-Ray players? That’s a more complicated question than Daring Fireball’s simplistic juxtaposition implies.

Let me humbly suggest something Philips and Apple have in common: they are both thriving businesses. Philips has a market cap of around 27 billion, which, while nowhere near that of Apple’s, is not a lemonade stand, either. You might know the Philips name from their consumer electronics business, or maybe their electric toothbrushes, but they also make CAT scanners and radiology equipment. In fact, technology from Philips has demonstrably saved lives, which is more than you can say for the Apple Newton, which merely scheduled me for grunch with my bother-in-law.

There is a clear lesson here in this recent move by Philips, and it’s one that any business can learn from, not just those with $500 billion market caps. Steve Jobs predicted the futility of Blu-Ray in 2008. He wasn’t wrong. Also true: Best Buy sold a crapton of Blu-Ray players from 2008-2012. See, there are two ways to bet on the future: one, the current Apple way, is to formulate one vision of a future and attempt to conjure that vision into reality through superior design, engineering and marketing skills. That worked for them in the latter years of Jobs’ tenure. There is also another way–the portfolio approach.

Transitional technologies like Blu-Ray, Minidiscs and (back in the Dragon’s Lair days) Laserdiscs were all doomed to eventual failure. Duh. But their death throes lasted long enough for some companies to generate a ton of cash flow selling those corpses for years. In effect, Blu-Ray players are like interstate restaurants–they are waystations; brief respites on the journey to where you’d rather be. Sometimes those journeys take longer than you think they will, and you end up eating a taco at Exit 42 even though a 5-star dinner awaits you in Manhattan. You know you’re going to get better food at the end of the journey. But the journey is a long one, and everyone’s gotta eat.

The danger in the kind of thinking that compares Philips with Apple here is the danger of the false choice: simplistic thinking boils these sorts of strategies down to either/or scenarios. Smart thinking deals with both/and. The smart money knows that Blu-Ray is a bag of hurt, AND recognizes that people are still gonna buy a ton of disc players on the way to that eventual but impossible to schedule disc-less future.

Think of it this way: before Henry Ford democratized auto ownership with the modern assembly line, I don’t think smart people thought cars were a passing fad. Cars were inevitable. But there were still a lot of buggy whips sold on the way to that destination. And for the smartest companies, selling those buggy whips financed their bets on what that future would look like.

And that is what, for some companies, the cash flow from those transitional technologies enabled–the financial ability to respond, smartly, to where the puck was going. What Philips announced was not an admission of failure–far from it. It was an acknowledgement that they had milked that particular cash cow as long as they could, and were wisely exiting the industry before it became cash flow negative. Really, is there any better lesson to learn about “market timing” than that?

Philips may not sell another DVD player for all eternity, but the cash flow they generated from this transitional technology was just as much a bet on the future as Apple’s “all-or-nothing” bets are. The difference is that the bet Philips made didn’t depend on any one future occurring. By building waystations–blu-ray players, MP3 players, headphones, etc.–they were just betting differently. If tech is a big game of roulette, Apple pushed in all its chips on one number, while Philips spread its bets, with the anticipation that one or more would pay off in the short term to finance its long term vision.

The only stupid thing Philips could have done here was to keep making Blu-Ray players in the face of dwindling cash flow. They didn’t do that. Instead, they made some cash opportunistically and got out when the market indicators told them to–liquid, and ready to fight another day.

The portfolio approach is a viable and important business strategy for the rest of us. Having “waystation” products or technologies is not a sign of weakness or an inability to predict the future. In the best examples, it’s an acknowledgement that the future may or may not happen when we think it is going to happen–and the most important thing you can to to greet that inevitable future is to still be in business and in a financial position to capitalize on it. The “Apple Way” is to be right about how and when that future arrives. Waystations allow you to stay in business when you guess wrong.

So, I suppose what I am suggesting is this: formulate your vision for the future. Make no small plans. But don’t rule out building a few exit 42 taco stands or Blu-Ray players to profit from the present, so you are ready to cash in on the opportunities of the future. Build your waystations, and find the buggy whips that will enable the jetpacks.

Or you could just “be like Apple.”

Waystations is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

Today I logged into Facebook and was greeted with the ad bar below:

You know it. You’ve seen it. Facebook ads are a junk shop; a seemingly random miscellany of hastily constructed, poorly targeted and (sometimes) vaguely seedy-looking pitches for things I couldn’t even conceive of clicking on, let alone purchasing. I often post a “howler of the day” on my Facebook page (poor Grant has been named before) as a joke, but I think Facebook has a real problem here.

Now, when I point this out, some of you (correctly) rush in to remind me that all of the tools for better targeting are there in Facebook, so yes–it’s not wrong to say that the seething vortex of sin and degradation that is my Facebook ad bar is the fault of crappy marketers, not Facebook.  After all, Facebook knows that I live in downtown Boston (my zip), that I’m married, my age and that I have multiple degrees. So the fact that I continue to get ads for meeting singles, overnight degrees,  American Apparel soft porn and landscaping for my 18th floor “lawn” is surely down to the spray-and-pray tactics of lazy marketers, right?

Well,yes…but allow me to throw two additional spanners into the works, here.

First of all, I do place some responsibility on the shoulders of the advertisers, but not exactly in the way you might think. I’m not sure that lecturing joescrappyonlinedegreefarmandgrill.com is going to have any great impact. But there is one ad in the diorama of failure above, from an advertiser who should know better, that actually does resonate with me–the Sony headphones ad.

I happen to have a headphone “problem” and do, in fact, have a number of Sony ‘phones in my collection. Am I going to click on that ad, though? Of course not. I’m not going to click on it because Facebook’s ad bar is typically such a slough of despond that I have very little sense that my click would go anywhere reputable.

Where you choose to advertise says a lot about your brand, right? If I were launching a new line of vitamins (and let’s face it, why not?) I could advertise in GQ, Men’s Health or “Get RIPPED!” (the latter, hopefully fictional). Now, there are reasons why you might advertise in any of these, but for each you have a sense of not only the content, but also the advertising–your neighbors in the “mall” of that publication. Location, location, location. So the only advertiser I would fault in the ad banner I posted would be Amazon, or perhaps Sony, for choosing to put a booth pitching $300 headphones in the middle of a flea market.

What advertisers like Amazon and Sony should do is hold Facebook’s feet to the fire more on the placement of their advertising. Herein lies the second, and biggest problem–Facebook’s benign neglect of that space. Saying that it’s the responsibility of the advertiser to use that space better is akin to putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.

In the 90′s, I did a ton of research in the radio industry (in fact, if you live in or near a top 50 market, there is a very good chance I consulted at least one station you listened to in that market). We worked very hard on the “pie” of the radio hour–the “clock”, as it’s called. Typically, that clock is about 45 minutes of the stuff you wanted to hear (the music or talk content) and 15 minutes was advertising and promotional messages. ALL of it, however, is “content” to a listener, and all of it was researched and optimized. If you spent thousands of dollars researching the optimal content for a relaxing station, for example, but ran SCREAMING car dealer commercials in between the music, you would essentially be throwing your money away.

Magazines, newspapers, TV networks and radio stations ALL regulate the quality and content of their advertising, and all make choices. If these “heritage” media can do this, I expect the technological sophistication underpinning Facebook to render that a trivial problem. You might (wait for it…) need some humans involved in the process, because to date the machines haven’t proven worthy.

To me, the next step for Facebook is not figuring out how to optimize my friends, or expose me to more branded content. It’s making better use of the space they already have to get me to take action. Facebook has enough information about me to make a pretty good guess about what interests me, and they know me far better than any of the advertisers on my page. If Facebook wants to be the matchmaker for a relationship between me and an advertiser, it seems to me that it’s incumbent upon them, not the advertiser, to make a better introduction.

To me, the opportunity cost of this is a killer. Imagine how powerful Facebook would be if they got this right?

What say you? Am I off base, cranky, or both? The comments are yours.

The Facebook Flea Market is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!