I saw another great example of this today when I received an email from seekingalpha.com (the first email ever).  They wanted to let me know that Apps were now available on their site.  There were many free apps and as expected, paid versions as well.

Seeking Alpha is adding value and revenue streams in a way that I’m sure will delight their user base.  I expect to see an explosion of Apps on all kinds of sites that have large user populations.  It is no longer limited to the big boys like Apple or Salesforce.com.

Even Corporate websites would benefit from adding apps instead of “pages”.  It allows someone to configure their most often sought information into one place.  Now, for the big question…where is all this leading?  Let’s address that in a follow on post.

Many sales leaders are taking the right steps to double down on their key accounts and put in place cost effective sales channels among other things to bolster sales results.  There is a tendency, though, to rush through planning and move on to the implementation.  After all, this takes time and a sales organization never has an abundance of time on their hands.  A little up front analysis on the buying process, though, can yield significant insights on how you should best organize your selling efforts.

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal Marketplace section provides a good example of how Estee Lauder has adjusted to changes in buying behavior.  Historically, there have never been visible prices at the counter…if you had to ask then you couldn’t afford it.  That had the benefit of creating panache but also qualifying buyers.  In this environment, that approach has had the negative effect of confirming a buyer’s initial suspicions that they can’t afford it.  Estee Lauder also noticed that women just wanted to try out their products without all those cosmetic technicians floating around.

In response to these changes, they started displaying prices and provided different options for experiencing their products via self serve, computer analysis or live interaction with a technician. Consider how things might have played out had Estee Lauder not revisited their buyer’s preferences and behaviors.  They might have responded by putting even more technicians on the floor or lowering prices.  Both options would have hurt profitability.

The article can be accessed here.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703915204575103604265214346.html?KEYWORDS=lauder#articleTabs%3Darticle

As with any acquisition, there is the cultural challenge and whether or not the new products are truly complimentary to the current portfolio.  The end customer is the marketing department for both companies so they have a common buying center.  I participated in an Omniture study recently that ensured I would receive the results of the study once they were published.  I was blown away by the personalization of the study which included my responses right alongside my peer group and overall responses.  The study had a customized cover sheet describing my areas for improvement and linked those back to Omniture offerings.  That was the best content marketing example I have seen all year.

Ultimately, I think it is a wise move when your product portfolio includes tools that help measure and quantify the ROI of the rest of the tools in your offering.  There could be another not so well publicized reason for the acquisition.  There has been increased talk about outsourcing of marketing and if that trend really takes hold it would hurt sales of Adobe creative tools.  The management and monitoring of marketing’s contribution will likely stay within the four walls as a sort of check and balance – Omniture provides just the sort of oversight capability you would need here.

Kudos to Adobe for venturing upstream while most are looking for safe harbors.

The ad form is similar to the greeting cards that sing to you when you open it.  No doubt, greeting cards will soon have video capability.  Consider the fact that the video cards will probably cost around $3 to $5 and the newsstand price of Entertainment Weekly is $3.00.

I have to wonder who will profit more from the use of the technology?  Hallmark gets the same amount of money per consumer but puts in way less effort and raw material to produce their product.  Entertainment Weekly will need to charge a steep premium on this ad type which will keep demand down in the short run.

This technology is going to have to trim down in size before we start seeing lots of these ads in a single issue but this will come as well.  Now, what I haven’t seen yet is the first direct mail piece incorporating digital video in print.  Will it be Microsoft’s next OS launch?  What other product company has the cash and ubiquity to support such an expensive campaign?

These events typically set off a series of copy-cat moves in an industry so we are likely to see more activity soon.  What is more interesting though is where this is all headed.  The adoption and leveraging of any technology is proportional to how easy it is to adopt in the first place.  StrongMail will make it easier for their customers to use advanced web ads and social media.  That moves Strongmail up one level closer to the source of lead generation.  If you think about it, StrongMail customers need leads to send emails to so initial lead capture is a high value capability.

So, where are we headed?  PopularMedia provides a demo on their website of their Influencer Ads product using the Chicago Fire professional soccer organization.  It is a video of the “goal of the week” and the call to action is to share it with others to build interest in attending games.  That’s cool but imagine this scenario:

• The best moments of the game are captured immediately from the replay reel on the big screen at the stadium
• An SMS text number is provided to get the mobile web page address for fans that want to share that play right now with friends
• The fan receives the link then clicks – they are directed to popularmedia’s interactive ad
• The fan shares the play with a message “wish you were here!”

It is only a matter of time before this type of real time content is provided by the venue as opposed to individuals via their camera phones.  It is much more relevant and compelling in the moment which is what we strive for in marketing communication.  We will look back on these current “goal of the week” type marketing campaigns and wonder why it took us so long to wake up.

There are two main camps developing around public versus private Clouds.  EMC VMware is focusing on private Clouds and there is quite a few vendors out there deploying public cloud platforms.  Given the evolution that VMware took, I would guess that private clouds will achieve higher adoption by large corporations in the near term.  VMware had a lot of initial deployments in the Test/Dev environments of IT and as it proved its worth, those companies moved to apply virtualiztion to their production environments.

It is a logical extension to think big business will deploy clouds internally first to understand them and develop expertise and processes for managing these environments.  The next couple of years’ economic outlook will most likely drive smaller companies to explore public cloud services.  Large companies will have to research the public cloud offerings if for no other reason than checking the box for the higher ups asking for possible approaches to lowering IT spend.  As we move into better times, the increase in adoption could be substantial.

Now, I’m not discounting the challenges…these public cloud offerings will have to overcome the perception of poor service levels (i.e. S3 and EC2 outages earlier this year).  There is always the issue of security and performance but these will get worked out over time.  A recent article about Drop.io’s exclusive use of cloud infrastrucuture gives some good perspective on the decision process they went through.

I see a major disruption in the signage industry looming. As the cost of e-ink film comes down it will surely replace traditional print signage. The folks that build huge roadside billboards have some of the technical expertise to manage and support this new medium but your typical print shop will be ill-equipped to provide turn key solutions. There’s an opportunity for someone to create straight forward solutions that the print shops can market to the SMB space.

It will get a lot more interesting when cab drivers have e-ink film plastered on their cars and marketplaces develop to dynamically display ads that are geo-aware…”Hungry for a Slice of Pizza? Look behind you!”.

Here is a good video:

Here is another video and explanation of the esquire cover from their editor.

In fact, I stumbled across one of my competitors’ engineer’s bio on LinkedIn that tipped me off that he was working on a new feature for his company’s software. That made me wonder if I could look up my sales peers from other companies and get more insight or find them on FriendFeed and monitor what they are doing. Unfortunately, sales people are not really big into Web 2.0 whereas their sales engineer companions are pretty heavy into all that is new on the tech front.

So, this got me thinking about whether anyone has looked at scraping traffic on mico-blogging sites to determine profiles on users based on their conversations. Obviously, if they keep talking about digital cameras then they probably have an affinity for them. You really can learn more about someone from listening to them rather than looking over their shoulder while they surf the web.

Which leads me back to the title of my post – If you have a lot of important stuff to say, be careful who is listening.

— Added post note 7/14/08: Looks like someone is scraping micro-blogging feeds…summize.com and it is exactly what I thought it would be.  It even refreshes results in real time. Now, that is interesting.

:: :: :: ::

Senate hearing on NebuAd, privacy set for tomorrow

Cable companies and telcos say they need software like NebuAd-and it’s British comrade-in-arms, Phorm-to help them develop targeted advertising for subgroups of Internet and television service users. The ad dollars, they say, are critical to their growth. Check out this Wall Street Journal story for a different look at the controversy. — Jim O’Neill

These technologies are being called into question by Congress due to the fact that it can be interpreted as wiretapping.  Cookies, Adware, Spyware, etc. have always bothered me and its amazing how much latitude these technologies and those that develop it have had over the years. This all seems symptomatic of a larger problem these days. Going back to my theme of “too much of anything isn’t good”, there is an enormous amount of product out there looking to be marketed to large audiences in the hopes that it becomes mainstream or at the very least just captures a bit of the long tail.

Just last year, as Ray Ozzie was helping Microsoft redefine their strategy going forward they announced that they would be getting heavy into the advertising game:

“Microsoft is rapidly trying to build up their advertising infrastructure and also give a way for companies to build commercial products with it,” said Jupiter Research analyst David Card. “The twist here is you could pay or dive into their marketplace and let them sell ads for you and use the revenue sharing to pay for the technology licensing.”   — http://news.cnet.com/2100-1012_3-6179901.html?hhTest

I remember thinking – that’s the best you can do for a new business model is ads??

It was an interesting acknowledgment that there are only minor innovations left to be made to the business software landscape for the worldwide e-commerce infrastructure to be complete. And if it is almost in place then we might as well get on with the act of selling stuff.

Here’s where we go back to the future… Alvin Toffler laid out a premise of our civilization going through 3 major waves. The first was the rise of agrarian society that allowed people to settle into a place and the second one was kicked off by the Industrial revolution. The third wave is where we are today in the information age. This last age is also marked by the rise of the “prosumer” in his words. His prediction of the combined producer and consumer turned out to be spot-on and this was well before ebay or the Internet.

He also saw the development of the worldwide infrastructure for commerce slowly reaching its completion. In reality, all the planes, trains, trucks, ports, factories, etc. are in place and he predicted that we would spend less time building that out and truly leveraging it (this is back in 1980). The Internet has enabled the marketing function to finally match the scale of the commerce infrastructure that is in place. The bigger question is…what do you do when the marketing function has finally matured and you can send the perfect message to those that are most likely to buy from you?

Aside from the fact that the “noise” level will go way down…My guess is that the “prosumer” can finally define for themselves what their true economic value is in society by their contribution. Then we can just post how much money we made today instead of how many hits, trackbacks, friends or click throughs. I highly recommend Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave and if someone had handed me the book in high school, I would be a very rich man right now. I didn’t see it until 1999. Check out his latest book, Revolutionary Wealth as well as his website.

I got a mailer at home the other day that was the only piece of direct mail (EVER!) to make it past the trash bin and onto my refrigerator. It was a customized postcard with my last name spelled out in the sky with the sun setting on the ocean below. Here’s an example from the website of the company that produces the postcards for the Realtor that sent me mine…

There is a ground swell of custom content happening out there and the trend is toward dynamic, real time customization. In one of my posts, I brought up the notion of Social Media Theaters and the existing capabilities to project SMS text messages up on big screens in clubs. Here’s another example that I came by recently that brings this all together at an even higher level.

There is a business model here and it isn’t just selling i-bars to the hospitality industry. What happens when you start interacting with customers across all the surfaces in your establishment?  Not just your web page or your social media sites. This can get a little creepy when taken to the extreme but with the right balance it is Experience Marketing at its best. Take this example that I recently read online at strategy+business :

Consider the strategy implemented by ING Direct, a retail bank with no physical branches — it conducts all transactions via Internet, phone, and mail. To promote its banking business among potential new customers, ING Direct opened a café in midtown New York. It serves coffee in a pleasing environment, with a comfortable lounge where patrons can read the financial newspapers, watch the markets’ movements on plasma screens, use the complimentary Internet access to check their portfolios — or simply chat with friends or people-watch.

Surprisingly, customers can’t perform financial transactions in the ING Direct Café. Yet this single “branch” yielded more than $200 million in new accounts and mortgages within a year of opening.

Here’s the part where I tell you the business model but I’m going to wait for someone to ask because so far this has been a pretty one-sided conversation. Thanks to all that have been reading so far during my first week.