Smalltalk with James Robertson

This thread over on Penny Arcade is about as close to a "how not to do marketing" tutorial as you'll ever get. Here's my question: how does a guy (the Ocean Marketing guy, to be clear) end up in a public facing position when it's so obvious that he has no people skills?

Technorati Tags: stupidity

A few weeks ago, my XBox Live account was blocked after a hacking event - someone managed to buy 10,000 MS points through my account. Microsoft was really good about things - they blocked the purchases (when I called my credit card company the charges had been reversed already), and, once the account was restored (today), they gave me:

• 2 months pre-paid XBox Live
• 800 Microsoft Points

They were really nice on the phone when I dealt with them, too. Heck, it doesn't even look like I've lost any of the achievements I picked up while I was offline, and the emails said that would happen. All in all, it went pretty well.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, xbox

Marketing departments spend a lot of time telling you how they need registration screens "for leads" (believe me - a lot of the arguments I had at Cincom centered around that topic). Meanwhile, out in the real world, here's what actually happens:

That's not a rhetorical question -- the answer is 45% of you will just bail out on the purchase, rather than give them an email address, wait for confirmation, click on the confirmation email, etc. When one "unnamed company" decided to finally get rid of that annoying piece of s*** and just let customers shop in peace, they found an extra $300,000,000 in sales by the end of the year. In the first month alone, they generated an additional $15,000,000.

But trust your marketing department - those "leads" are "priceless".

Technorati Tags: sales, stupidity

The only thing I can come up with that explains this mini-revival of cassette tapes is a desperate need to find a way to stand out:

The last car to ship with a tape deck was the 2010 Lexus SC 430. Sony stopped making the Walkman last October. This can mean only one thing: Cassettes are about to be cool again. Indeed, upstart labels like Crash Symbols, Volar, and Bathetic are putting out cassette-only releases. Indie rock favorite the Mountain Goats recently came out with a tape of rarities, and established noise-pop bands Joan of Arc and Of Montreal are also putting out their new albums on cassette.

How many people in the core music buying demographic (teens) even have a tape deck? This is an interesting publicity stunt, but I can't see it having legs. I understand that big audiophiles prefer vinyl (for the analog sound), but tapes? Seriously?

Peter Shankman makes a good point about the "new rules" we live under:

Transparency has to rule the day. You need to go through life, both business and personal, assuming that someone has a camera on you at all times. A bit sad? Sure. But it’s the world in which we live.

You can see that in the almost daily stories about people filming police - those stories tend to get pitched by the police as "public safety" things, but it really boils down to what Peter is on about: enforced transparency.

The same thing is happening everywhere. You can't move ahead with an ossified business plan where you try to keep everything secret. If you're big enough, it'll leak anyway. If you aren't, you'll simply disappear into the background, as the few people who do spot you will immediately move along, in search of more transparent business partners.

It doesn't matter whether you like this - it's just the way it is. The genie isn't going back in the bottle.

David Meerman Scott thinks that companies that block various social media sites are going to face uprisings of a sort:

I'm wondering when will companies that block employee access to social networks go through the same sort of revolution as Egypt? I think it will be soon. These companies are ripe for uprising.

Well - not so much. Sure, it's irritating to not be able to get to various things in a locked down environment, but - what are you going to do? Tell your spouse that you were willing to lose your job (and risk your mortgage, etc) because you couldn't get to YouTube?

The way this might play out will be slower and less obvious. As younger people used to the "always on" culture rise through the ranks, a lot of the restrictions will drop away. The companies that stay locked down will have a harder time hiring (assuming the job market eventually loosens up, of course). In the meantime, I seriously doubt you'll see job actions over this kind of thing.

I watched the State of the Union Speech yesterday - and no, this isn't a political post :) I did notice that the President's catch phrase during the speech was "Win the Future".

So.... when the speechwriters were coming up with that, did no one realize the more common meaning for the three letters: WTF?

Things that make me go hmmmm

Richard Fernandez notes that more authors are starting to move away from formal publishing, and doing it themselves - they get to keep a lot more of the money that way. The problem for new authors trying to do the same thing? Visibility:

Maybe Joe Konrath can go direct to his audience. But he’s got a reputation. Authors without an established readership base face a chicken and egg problem. Nobody buys their books because nobody knows about them, and nobody knows about them because nobody has yet bought their books. New print on demand services like Createspace and Amazon’s Kindle have only solved the self-publisher’s logistics and distribution problem, but they have not solved the self-publisher’s more fundamental problem, which is marketing.

That's certainly a problem, but I wonder how much of one going forward. The Amazon recommendation engine has turned over a lot of books for me, many of them self published ones from fairly unknown authors. I've found the quality of those books varies about as much as it does for "professional" authors.

The thing I don't really know is how those authors make the leap from utter obscurity to that recommendation list. Clearly some people are making that jump, but I have no idea how many, or how hard it is.

Technorati Tags: books, self publishing

And then there's what PR and Marketing types at Yahoo speak. It's like English, but with all the meaning removed :)