The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Unified Communication

There were a couple of communication related stories today. Hotmail got a reboot, and looks very clean. It is now called Outlook.com and I logged in for the first time in 7+years. Yahoo email and messenger had some outages today, welcome Marissa Mayer. Twitter reinstated Guy Adams Twitter account. What do these three stories have in common? They show us what is good, bad, and ugly in communications.

Hotmail is now Outlook.com

First Outlook.com. Hotmail may have been my 2^nd or third email service and if I recall correctly I created it to log into Microsoft support sites… It was a mess. Typical email client where no thought was given to how the interface would be used by people. I remember how excited I was to get my early invite to Gmail and how clean the page looked. How…usable it was. Now, so is Hotmail umm, ah, Outlook.com. This is the good. Taking something less usable and making it better.

Yahoo Email and Messenger

The bad. Yahoo. One of my friends posted today he didn’t know which was worse, not getting email from Yahoo, or admitting you still use Yahoo for email. It is showing the problem of the company as a whole. Something that doesn’t work that well, even if you wanted to you it. They have a lot of work to do to raise themselves to the level of a bad provider.

Twitter Killing themselves

The ugly. Twitter has again shown ways it can’t be trusted. Due to its business relationship with NBC, tweets were being monitored and when a Twitter user included an email of an NBC executive, the Twitter staff alerted NBC and suggested they file a complaint, which they did, causing the Twitter users account to be suspended. The problem? The email address is on NBC’s website, it is public. Another problem? Monitoring tweets for content. Enough of an issue was raised that Twitter reinstated the account and apologized, but not for why or how they disabled the account. They continue to state the post was a violation. This will be great the next time people start tweeting about the next uprising in the Middle East and Twitter shuts them down for the content of their tweets. Ugly.

We all learn every day and especially in the always on global social media pool. But whatever your platform, it has to be on, it has to be usable, and it has to be open or you might as well open a telegraph office.

Samuel Morse Telegraph

IPO No No

Subtitle, Does social media marketing pay?

I read about GM pulling their paid ads off of Facebook after marketing executives determined the ads had little impact on consumers. Here is a news flash GM, nether do your cars. OK, maybe that is harsh. But, it seems to me that a newly organized company who had a large (but not large enough) IPO would not release this information right before Facebook’s IPO.

GM is a company that needed a government bailout to stay afloat, and then has still not been able to raise their stock price to a point where the tax payers can break even. We need to be able to sell our stock at $43.67 and GM stock is at 21.42 today. So I don’t think I am going to listen too much to them talking down a profitable new media company like Facebook.

What does it mean? Well there are two points. Does the marketing work, and why go public.

Does social media marketing work? Yes and no. Remember Social Media marketing is still marketing, and some marketing is good, and some, not so good. Think Super Bowl ads. Some are catchy, well designed ads that actually talk about the product or service. Some are funny, with no connection to a product or service I can see, and some just suck. So some of these are good marketing decisions and some are not, but you can’t say placing an ad during the Super Bowl is just good, or just bad.

I believe Social Media marketing works when you can generate a buzz about a product or service. Getting spikes and having something go viral is key to social media. It is hard to get enough people to get so excited about a car that this process can happen. How many people that use facebook have an Apple product versus a GM product? I think that is the issue.

The why go public? Attention. Trying to create the viral effect I mentioned above, in and with the media they know, old media. Simple as that.

The real winners will be companies who understand how to add social media into their existing marketing strategy effectively. Not a company that can’t track an increase in sales to click ads in a social media platform.

InstaDamn!

Instagram was bought by Facebook for 1 Billion dollars. A 2 year old company with 12 employees. What is it that Facebook was buying? Users? Market? Technology? Whatever the reason, it cost about $37 dollars a user.

That number seems both a lot and a little at the same time to me.

It is a lot of money per user when Facebook is buying 27 million of them at the same time, especially when many of them are already Facebook users, so the cost per unique or new user may be much higher than the $37 dollar number.

It is a little amount when you look at a customer by customer basis. Would you pay $37 dollars to gain a new client? Most companies’ acquisition cost for a new lead or prospect are much higher than this. Do you know or track your cost to acquire new customers? You really should, but you knew that.

Facebook thinks it can sell more in advertising than the $37 dollars per user. I would say that is a fair bet. In addition, it isn’t like those billion dollars was generating a lot of interest sitting in the bank with this economy. It is an investment. A land grab advertising investment.

Am I shocked a 2 year old company can be worth a billion dollars? Absolutely. Do I think this is the end of the big deals? Absolutely not. But I do understand that the way to make money in this industry has changed and a everyone who wants to stay out front needs to understand this.

Yahoo Dabba Do!

No one likes second place. That means we really don’t like third place, or worse. Welcome to Yahoo. Yahoo’s third CEO, Scott Thompson, has started layoffs to around 2000 people or 14% of their staff. Thompson said in a memo on Wednesday, “"The changes we're announcing today will put our customers first, allow us to move fast, and to get stuff done,". Most, like me, aren’t buying it. More on the layoffs here.

I’m not buying it, because rarely can you do more with less, especially when you have to maintain current operations and reinvent yourself at the same time. I think the biggest issue is lack of vision. Look around, how many internet portal companies do you still see that matter in your daily life? So when we don’t know what we are going to be when we grow up, we don’t. We get lost.

Yahoo has tried to fix that, with new CEOs. Each with a new vision, each with a new dabble. A dabble is not a vision. Multiple dabbles just get ugly. Yahoo Dabba Do! Next stop Bedrock, all the way at rock bottom.

There is a place and a strategy for web portal like companies. Being a good consolidator and aggregator of information with easy links to what I need. Pull feeds from other social sites into my news portal, these things I will use. There are not cuts to the top, so the only reason I see for cuts is to maximize profits, not maximize success.

Media Rush

Rush Limbaugh, love him or hate him you know about him. He has been master of self-promotion and leveraging people and events to further, well, him. He is currently in hot water due to some comments I won’t repeat here, but you can read the story here. Self-promotion. It is a doubled edged sword. How much is too much? Is there too much?

I don’t know about too much, in the words of a friend of mine, “Always be pimpin’…” But this event does point out an important issue about how you promote yourself, and where you promote yourself, and what you do to promote yourself. Rush Limbaugh is a media guy, his job is talking and he screwed it up, how easy can it be for you?

So if we break down the issue, Rush Limbaugh’s problem was not so much what he said, but that Rush made it personal about someone. Most people who are convicted for stock and securities issues are actually convicted for lying. Rush Limbaugh is being convicted in the court of public opinion because he did not rectify the issue immediately and to the injured parties’ satisfaction. How often do we fail to do that, even with non-social media issues?

I’m a firm believer in sharing. I have one public identity on many different platforms.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, I even Blog ;-). I rarely post to a small group of people, I make my comments public. I guess I am who I am.  The world is changing and it will be harder and harder to do business without a social presence.  So my guidelines?

• Post. A lot, about everything you are interested in. People like to do business with people they like. The more they know about you, the more they can like you.
• Believe what you post and be ready to defend it.
• Create most of your own content.
• Treat a social media comment the same as you would deal with a customer face to face. Be respectful, apologize if you have done wrong, and ask what you can do to fix it.

Whether you do or not is a business decision, ask Rush Limbaugh how that is working out for him? 

Miner 49er…

Two really interesting stories that are more connected that you might think.

The first was Google admitting to circumventing the security of the Safari browser when it was set to prohibit websites from using tracking cookies. You can find that story here.

The second was in Forbes talking about how retailer Target was able to identify that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father was able to know. That story is here.

Both stories have one common theme. Data Mining. Whether it is mining the data from store purchases and using that data to generate more sales, or mining the data from internet searches to generate better searches and ad revenue, it is still data mining.

So this data mining doesn’t have to be evil or even a breach of privacy. If you want to see who Google thinks you are, go here. This is some of the data they use to provide suggestions and ads to you. I can tell you I think this is much more helpful that the old way ads used to be put on search portals or in the results.

We all want great customer support. We all want our computers and websites to read our minds. We all want this to happen without sharing any data. We are all dreaming, and Google can tell us about what with about an 80% accuracy…

Super or Bowl Marketing

We all love the Super Bowl ads. I’m not sure when it started, but I know that the ads are often the most talked about Super Bowl happenings. Millions are spent by these companies and their brand managers for 30 seconds during this game. Is it worth it?

As with all marketing, and never forget that that is what those ads are, some work, and some don’t. Which ones do you remember now after 24 hours? Which ones do you remember AND remember the brand it was for? Which ones do you remember AND remember the brand it was for AND thought it was good or positive? That one may have been worth it.

The Dot Com era was the golden era of Super Bowl ads. Also the biggest waste of marketing dollars ever. Great commercials, no idea who they were for or why. Viral video, huge social media numbers wasted. If you want to entertain people, start a movie company, otherwise market your brand.

Great marketing equals Super branding. Poor marketing equals dollars down the Bowl. Whether you are doing 5 cent Google adWords or 5 million dollar Super Bowl ads, wasted message equals wasted dollars.

Marketing Up With The Joneses

We all know about keeping up with the Joneses. I don’t know if you have seen the movie, The Joneses. I linked to it if you haven’t.

It is all about creating demand by selling the dream. That, and staying true to yourself, but we’ll save that part for another blog. How do you market? How do you measure it? Are you tracking all of it?

Even the “ripple” effect? The intangible marketing that your employees do every time they meet with, talk to, or interact with anyone? Believe me, this does more than any radio ad you have ever run.

Sell the dream of whatever you sell, every time, everywhere, everyone.

Iowa Caucuses for Your Sales

What are the Iowa Caucuses anyway? Well if you don’t know, you can check it out here. In short, it is a popularity contest. A small group of people in an insulated area are give an extreme level of decision making power for the rest of the country.

So when you are selling to an account, who needs to vote for you first before you even get started? The CEO, the IT department, end user, management? Whoever it is, it is a personality contest.

It is what you say and how you look, do you pass the smell test, these are the things that get you in the door. By you, I mean your solution too, but generally you can get a meeting without ever showing your product, if they like you.

So go to those picnics, kiss those babies, and don’t be afraid to step in a cow pie or two and you may get “voted” to the next level.

Run It Out

How you ever heard this phrase? It is generally yelled by a coach near the end of a play when it looks like you are too far away from the action to make a difference. What the coach knows is sometimes you are close enough to make a difference.

In sales you may often find yourself running after a deal and falling further behind. This may be a time when you need to run it out. Keep pursuing the deal, don’t quit. It is not unusual for the deal you are chasing to slow down or double back and when that happens you will be right there.

This doesn’t mean you should run blindly after every lost deal. You need to be protective of your most precious resource, your time. You do need to run out every deal till you are sure it is totally out of reach.

Allison Hasn't Stopped...

When should you ever stop? That is a little open ended, so when should you stop growing your career and skills? OK, sounds stupid, everyone one say it together, NEVER! But for real, when is enough, enough?

I started thinking about this when I saw that Microsoft CVP Allison Watson was starting to Blog again. My first thought was cool, she will have great information. My second thought was, WTH! why would she need to write a blog? She is a VP at Microsoft. I have had the honor of watching her speak from the main stage at a Worldwide Partner Conference, what more does she want? Then it hit me, the word is need.

Why do I write my blog? I needed to. I had things to say and blogging let me do that. I haven’t spoken to Allison, but my guess is, she needs to blog as well. When it is all said and done, we keep getting better and taking on more work to challenge ourselves and to grow as people. While I don’t consider my blog work, it is a challenge to write 5-6 a week.

So while I might not reach CVP at Microsoft, I’ll keep climbing and growing, and of course blogging, because I need to.

Apple of Your Customer’s Eye

Amazing buzz today over the the upcoming announcement by Apple. I have seen several posts by people wondering how Apple is able to get everyone all worked up about their announcement. I look at it another way. I always see the excitement around Apple announcements as a grass roots movement. People are just that much in love with Apples products. I bet you wish your customers felt that way about you. So what has Apple done right to create this and how can you take advantage too? Lets look.

1st
They aren’t Microsoft. They were able to draw a line between them and Microsoft and declare that their side of the line was cooler, less evil, hipper, less corporate, and power to the people. Whether you believe this or not, they have been able to sell it to their customers and society at large. How does this help you? It tells you that you should define your business ethics and lead with them. Make sure the entire company believes, or at least behaves with that philosophy. Make sure your customers see you as Luke, not Darth.

2nd
They limited outside innovation for the sake of control and security. It damn near killed them in the beginning, by limiting outside developers and manufacturers early on. But they had a vision of how they wanted tome products and company to be, and were willing to bet the company on it. They also secured a stronghold in several verticals. Graphic design comes to mind, and we know how many of those people helped build Internet companies. Well played Apple, well played. How do you do this? Have a plan. Don’t blow in the wind and jump for shiny object and dollars. Believe your vision and follow your plan, don’t let the naysayers stop you.

3rd
They understand what their customers want. They see a need, make a product and a market. Till the iPad was released, what was the last tablet you saw? My guess is some clunky laptop with a convertible top. Heavy, slow to boot, hard to use. They defined the market, defined the device, own the market. How do they do that? Superior UI design and styling. Hand an iPhone to someone who just got off a call on their old flip Razor phone and ask them to call someone, they will be able to. It works like they think it should. So how do you do this? Get to know your clients and provide what they need. Not only provide what they need, provide it the way they think it should be provided. you need to work the way they expect you to work, or they will look for a new vendor.

Spotifying the Gap in Your (Social) Life

Spotify took some heat from privacy advocates for the way they were handling the interaction with Facebook. They quickly patched that by allowing you to listen privately. So if you do want to listen to, oh I don’t know, Boy George or “disco hits of the 70s”, you can do so without seeming to be uncool to your friends, real and virtual.

Got me thinking about other things you might do that you might not want a digital trail, but isn’t the lack of a digital trail going to raise a red flag? If you wanted to ditch your girlfriend and go to the football game with your friends, how you going to do that? Even if you don’t check in, tweet, post, take a picture that is geocoded, how you going to stop your friends? Even if you stop them, where did you say you were? Where are the check ins from there? Groupon? Foursquare? Even if you said you were sick, you should have checked WebMD. You my friend, have a digital gap that needs to be filled.

This reminds me of the the way the Russians used to find our quietest subs, by looking for places in the ocean that had no noise. Those areas had no noise because our subs were so quite they made no noise, and so big, they blocked the background noise. We solved that by placing mics on each side of the sub that picked up the ambient noise and broadcast it on the other side of the sub through a speaker. Effectively filling the gap with noise. That is what we need, a gap filler.

So if we, the digital social generation, ever want to do anything cool on a “sick” day again, we had better develop a way to post ambient life noise, or the lack of  a digital trail may get us in trouble.

Circle Share, Not Circle Jerk

An amazing thing happened yesterday, Google+ started allowing the sharing of Circles. This seems like such a small thing, but it has made an amazing difference in the number of people who are getting their message out.

I started following Robert Scoble nearly from day one of my Google+ usage. Robert has many contacts in the IT world and he has shared most of them by sharing his circles. Some people who are in circles he shared, posed that they had 4,000+ new people who added them to a circle, LAST NIGHT.

I am constantly amazed at the unique, high quality information that is posted on Google+. There is information that I find on Google+ that I do not find anywhere else. Today I noticed the difference between my Facebook News Feed and my Google+ Stream.

Facebook was telling me stuff I knew, or would discover, a circle people talking to a small subset of friends, family, and associates. Google+ was showing me stuff I needed to know, unlimited information feeds. What a difference. This doesn’t diminish what Facebook does, but it highlights what Google+ can be. So I look forward to more circle sharing, and less circle jerking.

OnStar, What’s your Facebook Account?

Well not yet, but with the announcement of the agreement with Facebook and Spotify (here), how long can it be? I read the story about OnStar tracking subscribers after the support call has been terminated, read it here. Where does it end?

I’m a full blown social media freak. I love the interaction, I love the way that data fits into more data and then can be shared. I love it when I know about it, but I don’t need my car updating my Twitter account for me if I exceed the speed limit, or pull into a drive through. What is the difference between social media and social tattle tailing?

For me it is sharing verses telling. I can share anything I want. If you know something about me and share, that it is telling. Information is power, power equals wealth, so telling is like stealing. Not steal moments of my life, I’ll share the good parts.