Why do efforts by brands to get me to “like” them on Facebook strike me as hopelessly shallow and stupid? There’s this totemic fetishism among marketers to show off their likeable prowess by tallying followers and fans like so many ears on a necklace around their necks.  And I guarantee you, there are more than a million social media marketing consultants and digital PR drones willing to sit on a conference panel or fire up a SEO optimized blog post and debate the “true value of a Facebook Fan.”

Acquisition strategies that involve baiting a trap with a sweepstakes or other freebie and then requiring the sucker to enlist others in their quest are as old as the hills and a throwback to tried and true email marketing tactics to build direct response database. “Refer a friend” is one step removed from the pyramid schemes that occasionally sweep through forgetful societies who are more than eager to enlist friends and family in their quest for riches. These Tupperware parties seem to be the heart and soul of Facebook marketing tactics.

And who cares if a “fan” gives a damn, the more the merrier.

So assume Amazon succeeds in driving me to the more-and-more loathed Facebook and induces me to “invite” three friends to also pile onto the “win a Kindle for yourself and three friend” come-on. What do they do with the names?  This reeks of some shallow brainstorm by a digital marketing agency who is going to declare a specious ROI victory when Amazon’s Facebook fans swells from A to B over the next few weeks. Then what? My “news wall” or “timeline” or whatever the Zuckerborg calls is begins to be ever after polluted with authentically cheesy brand tweets from some junior marketing drone? The fact the Endive Society of America shows up in my Facebook stream  every so often makes me wonder if the world has devolved to the point where it’s just more and more noise signifying nothing.

I know I’m overly cranky, and I know Facebook is the biggest walled garden of the moment, a pool of the world’s names so tempting to try to sell to, but as that pool gets shallower and shallower, and more polluted by corporate messages shuffled like so many jokers in a deck of family photos,  shared links to headlines, invitations to the latest Zynga MafiaFarm, I just want to stick my fingers in my ears, close my eyes, and rock back and forth to shut it all out.

I’m not a fan of anything I’ve ever purchased. I hate my refrigerator. My car only wants my money.  My endives wilt and my laptop likes to crash.

From Google’s ChromeOS team:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was a matter of time before the winds of regulation blew over the mysterious world of digital advertising and behavioral targeting, just as they blew out the telemarketing-junk call industry in the 1980s, email spammers in the 1990s, and pay-per-post blogola two years ago. I think it’s inevitable that the government will regulate online tracking and I believe the result — counter to fears it will decimate digital advertising — will be a much needed catalyst for innovation in online advertising.

From the 12.6.10 New York Times: “If the vast majority of online users chose not to have their Internet activity tracked, the proposed “do not track” system could have a severe effect on the industry, some experts say. It would cause major harm to the companies like online advertising networks, small and midsize publishers and technology companies like Yahoo that earn a large percentage of their revenue from advertising that is tailored to users based on the sites they have visited.”

Nothing gets the public’s libertarian hackles up like a threat to their privacy, even though 99% of them have no clue what constitutes identity and personal privacy in the digital age. The declared intentions of the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on online advertising use of tracking beacons, pixels or cookies is inevitable and has been brewing since 1995 when Mark Andreesen and  Netscape first introduced the cookie to great consternation and misunderstanding.

This is an old issue, one that tracks back to the mid-1990s and was embodied by the famous comment by Sun Microsystem’s CEO, Scott McNeally: “You have zero privacy. Get over it.” McNeally uttered those words at a time when the technology and media industries were trying to head off government regulation by forming the Online Privacy Alliance (OPA). Evidently self-regulation hasn’t been enough, and now the industry is on the brink of having some new regulations to conform to.

Let’s look at what the issue is and how things got to the point that the issue officially was blessed as the most significant story of the day in early December by the front page of the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal’s Julie Angwin gets the most credit for raking the privacy muck in a shrill series that is encapsulated on this page on the Journal’s site which is actually a very comprehensive and chilling catalogue of news about the state of digital privacy in modern America. While some critics like Jeff Jarvis have accused the Journal of being breathlessly alarmist and turning the practice of cookie-based advertising into the modern equivalent of Reefer Madness, the Journal has persisted, making it an inevitable outcome that sooner or later some bureaucrats and Congressmen would take up the  call and file a bill.

Let me attempt to simplify the issue in lurid terms: Web publishers and digital advertising companies are colluding to sneak  invisible tracking devices onto your computer which report back personal information about you so they can deliver targeted advertisements to you and share your personal information with marketers, and other interested parties.

The issue comes down to whether or not a web user has the right, by default, to ban the placement of  cookies or “invisible tracking pixels” on their PC when they visit a website or click on an ad. These cookies are  the digital equivalent of a tracking device snuck under the bumper of your car so your whereabouts can be tracked by the cops or enemy spies.

One of the most prevalent digital bugs or tracking cookies is the Adobe-Omniture 2o7.net tracker.  Omniture is a very powerful web metrics tool that web publishers and corporate web sites use to analyze traffic patterns and user behaviors.  Most major e-commerce sites use the tool and I’ve spent a lot of time in its dashboards analyzing metrics at CIO.com and Lenovo.com. This is an expensive tool, not something a typical Internet scam artist would use to hatch some evil plan, and it never reports back any personal information about site visitors. Your name, your address, your phone number, your social security number …. none of its transferred back to the analyst.

Yet the 2o7 tracking cookie it classified as spyware and a threat by most spyware scanners. Why?

Privacy is becoming a matter of degrees. While your name may not be passed without your knowledge, your IP address is. And someone with a subpoena and some diligence can, in theory, track you down to a specific geographical address. Your personal information — from your online medical records to your bank account numbers — all of it exposed and can be stolen by a criminal clever enough to trick you into parting with that information on a fake site or through so-called “social” engineering.  Identity theft is a very real threat online, and tends to trick the nontechnical, unsophisticated users the most.

But what does a ban on tracking cookies do to online advertising?

First, it will have an impact on re-targeting. This is where a site like Lenovo.com or Filson.com (two online retails I happen to visit occasionally) plant a tracker into your browser and then use it to trigger ads for their products when you visit other sites. So, if I go to Lenovo’s ThinkPad store and check out a T410S, I can usually expect to see a lot of Lenovo ads as I surf around to CNET, PC Magazine, and any other sites that Lenovo’s advertising agency deems appropriate to display the client’s ads on. Do these ads greet me by name? No. Are they intelligent enough to distinguish my interest in one product over another? No. Do they get progressively more aggressive in offering me a better price as time goes by? No.

In some regards, re-targeting is somewhat pathetic. It sounds semi-intelligent to follow a visitor around and throw more ads at them, but in reality you have to keep in mind one very real fact: online advertising is, for the most part, completely ignored by most users. Click through rates have been declining on most display (graphical) ads since they were introduced in the mid-1990s, and only so-called rich media ads featuring video or some form of dynamic multimedia are getting higher CTRs. We’re talking click rates under 1%.  Digital ads remain noise for the most part, and the only stuff that seems to have legs — witness the phenomenal one-trick pony known as Google — is contextual search advertising (which does not use tracking cookies).

As tracking and re-targeting comes under fire a few things will happen. First, advertisers will lose insight into the buying patterns or behaviors of customers, and selecting media for their advertising will become more difficult. Will advertisers regress to what is known as last-click attribution, where credit for a sale, registration or other “success event” be credited to the last ad or link the user  clicked before arriving in a store to make a purchase? Perhaps, but I think what will happen is the 2011 equivalent of New York City’s solution to the threat of being buried under too much horse manure in the late 19th century — technology (in NYC’s case the automobile) will simply cause the problem to become moot. Advertisers and agencies have been lazy and deceiving themselves that they have some semblance of intelligence in their metrics — which they laud as “behavioral targeting” – when in fact it’s ad insertion based on cookie triggers, nothing more. Take away the cookie and I guarantee some motivated entrepreneur will rush to the table with a new ad format that performs without them.

So, bottom line, bring on the era of regulation, punish the most egregious offenders, and stay tuned for the online advertising industry to evolve into a more intelligent form of advertising which has been overdue since the invention of contextual search ads by Bill Gross.

d

This weekend I received a LinkedIn query from an alumni group I belong to asking if anyone wanted some freelance work ghost blogging for some executives. The more I thought about it, the less annoyed I was at the concept.

Then I found this well argued post by Mark Schaefer about other corporate ghost writing examples and all my reservations faded.

“The chairman does not pen his own speech, yet nobody questions that they own it. They don’t write the shareholder’s letter in the annual report, yet this is deemed as authentic. Do you think Former GE Chairman Jack Welch sat there and pecked out his own book? And yet it is seen as his.”

via Why it’s ridiculous to argue about ghost blogging »» Blogging best practices, corporate communications, ethics »» Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

My former colleague in marketing and current partner at Inventive Branding, Craig Merrigan, used to bemoan the use of the “ninety-nines” in pricing as an affront to intelligent customers. “If we think ThinkPad users are the most technically sophisticated PC users, then why do we insult their intelligence with RONCO pricing,” was his argument, a compelling one that would probably fail in testing as “just-below” pricing has existed for over a century, allegedly back to the invention of the first cash register. It has to work, right?

It’s kind of weird, from a psychological perspective, to look at the shopping impulse that would lead someone to chose a 99 dollar or 99 cent option over a round $100 or $1. Of course anyone would take the less expensive option when looking at identical items — a penny is a penny, a dollar is a dollar. Who wouldn’t? But what if the two options were dissimilar but close in value? Would a $39,999 Audi A3 be more attractive than a $40,000 BMW 3 series.  The more complex the item, be it a consumer durable like a refrigerator, or a non-durable like a steak, and the customer has to do some research to determine the specs and sorts the apples from the oranges. Is the $50 ribeye grass fed versus the $49.99 corn fed version? I’ll pay the penny and spare myself the cow’s antibiotics.

But standing alone, without an option, let’s say an Apple iPad (there really are no viable tablets yet on the market), is a $499 price point for the 16 GB WiFi model going to unleash my credit card from my wallet versus a $500 price that eeps it locked sanely away for the sake of my bank balance? One would assume Apple, a brand that prides itself on perfection in its details would shy away from just-below-pricing, but no, they too indulge. Could a competitor come out with a marketing campaign that said, “Let’s cut the bullshit. You’re intelligent. The  machine costs $500, screw the dollar”? I suppose so. But I suspect just-below-pricing is reflexive at this point, and coming out with rounded pricing would need to be baked into an overall campaign that presented the brand as one for thinking people not lulled or duped by stupid marketing jedi-mind tricks.

Now if say there was a viable competitor, and that competitor decided to market their device as a head-to-head competitor with identical specifications — let’s say a clone — then the differentiation needs to be part of the selling claim; as in either “Cheaper, ours is $499, you save a buck” or “Ours is better, you get 17 gigabytes for an extra dollar at $500″

Pricing theory is doubtlessly a dreary science that MBAs are tormented with, but what interests me is the human nature to round stuff up.

The New York Times has an interesting story on how some Wharton professors studied the batting averages of major league hitters and saw a remarkable jump in the population of .300 hitters — men who hit the ball successfully at least 30% of the time they came to bat. The study showed statistically that hitters put an extra effort into the waning days of the season to get those crucial hits that make the difference between being a .299 hitter and a .300 hitter. I suppose if I exercised my Society of American Baseball Research membership I could make the obvious point that .300 hitters have better leverage in their future contract negotiations, and with Sabermetrics putting a lot of value on VORP and PECOTA – (Value Over Replacement Player and Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) crucial metrics that bench marks the value of a player against the population of other playes and gives owners and management a much better benchmark for assigning value in making salary offers.

The Times article said:

“Two economists at the Wharton Schoolof the University of Pennsylvania, while investigating how round numbers influence goals, examined the behavior of major league hitters from 1975 to 2008 who entered what became their final plate appearance of the season with a batting average of .299 or .300 (in at least 200 at-bats).

They found that the 127 hitters at .299 or .300 batted a whopping .463 in that final at-bat, demonstrating a motivation to succeed well beyond normal (and in what was usually an otherwise meaningless game).

Most deliciously, not one of the 61 hitters who entered at .299 drew a walk — which would have fired those ugly 9s into permanence because batting average considers bases on balls neither hit nor at-bat.

Martinez said that “.299 doesn’t look as good as that 3 in front.”

When I am rowing on my ergometer I receive constant numeric feedback about my progress, along with a forecast of my final score for any particular piece of work — if I am rowing a pace of 500 meters ever two minutes, the machine will predict a 30-minute of score of 7500 meters. Obviously the incentive is huge to break certain round number milestones. An 8,000 meter half hour requires an inordinate effort of maintaining a 1:52 split throughout the 30 minutes. The point is that hitting or breaking round number milestones is a big incentive, no one wants to row a 7,499 meter piece over 30 minutes when a little extra effort will break the 7,500 barrier.

So if athletes put in an extra effort to avoid the “ninety-nines” why do marketers flock to it? There is something unfinished, oh-so-close-and-yet-so-far about being less than perfect, from being odd and not even, yet just-below pricing will never go away, even for sophisticated products aimed at sophisticated consumers.

I think it would be interesting for a brand to set itself apart from the herd by eschewing just-below and moving to round-number pricing — as long as it explicitly points out the irrationality of the nines and the insult to the intelligence of its customers.  In technology especially, where consumers have been hit with clock speeds of microprocessors and capacity of harddrives, the insistence on specifications as the primary claim, and not results is astonishing. Does a consumer know what the hell an Intel i7 processor does versus an i5 or an i3? One has to cite that genius of numerology, Nigel Tufnel, and just throw up their hands and say, “Mine goes to Eleven”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The design of a global organization would appear to be a dreary exercise in org charts and bureaucracy. The rise of the multi-national conglomerate in the 1970s in a pre-fax era, made decentralization a necessity. But does decentralization lead to chaos, redundancy, and loss of control?  Bear with me, as I believe it does for the simple reason that the very nature of digital marketing is its capability to be managed, executed, measured and optimized from a single point, a function that revels in the fact that technology destroys distance and time zones. What remains is localization and translation and little else.

• Singing from the same page: Lou Gerstner, the former chairman of IBM, tells the story in Elephants can Dance about bringing in Chief Marketing Officer Abby Kohnstamm. She gathered the giant’s marketing executives in Armonk in a conference room ringed with examples of the chaos the company was inflicting on the world with out of sync advertising campaigns. She knocked heads together, revoked the right for anyone with a bright or “better idea” to execute it, and got the company singing on the same page with Ogilvy & Mather’s brilliant eBusiness campaign.
• Where is it written?: Marketers may have certain “unalienable” rights, but as one very smart marketer at Coca-Cola told me at a Google Marketing Advisory board meeting, where in hell is it written that a country manager in Uzbekistan has the right to her own 30 second spot? Consistency is everything, this is not to say that localization is needed and warranted, but permitting the edges of a brand to dictate what their web presence looks like on any given day, other than to reflect some sensitivity to local culture and mores is insane in my mind.
• Web: to quote Tolkien: “ One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” That ring, being of course, the most Precious of all brand assets, the corporate web site. Here is where the brand begins and launches the customer — existing or prospective — into the brand experience. Operating a global brand web infrastructure makes centralization mandatory. From content management to translation and verification, the notion that a brand would not present the same digital face globally is insane, yet …. I think (fodder for another post) that large corporate brand sites are hopelessly screwed for the most part. Done in by internal politics until they are link fests satisfying internal owners, but doing little in terms of supporting a unified customer experience.
• Microsites: where brands go to die. This is the classic manifestation of marketing going off the rails and into the weeds of inconsistency. First off,the behavior to acknowledge is every one is a web designer and everyone is a creative director. Everyone wants to take lunch with the rep from Google and feel part of the cool-kid club. The local agency proposes a “Twist” on the new campaign and next thing you know you’re sending traffic to a microsite with no tagging, no metrics, nothing but the latest Flash bling and a check mark in the campaign cookbook. Sure, it’s a bitch to get the temple priests running the corporate Web Vatican to build custom pages. Templates and corporate style guides are the anti-Viagra of innovation, but do you really want to find out that the brand is being lit up on some disconnected set of pages dictated by the aesthetics of a junior marketing manager in Moscow.
• Outposts: Facebook to Twitter, Orkut to Flickr — brands are falling over themselves to establish a presence on the highest populated social networks and sharing services. First: you can’t be everywhere, second, this is where the real chaos is occurring. Some bright young marketing professional in a far flung country is just dying to practice his social networking chops, so up goes a Facebook fan page, a country Twitter account — and the brand has yet another outpost to manage and keep consistent with the messaging emanating from headquarters.

That last point, the chaos caused by third-party services and over-eager local teams is where brands are feuding internally. Unless there are consequences and an iron-fisted CMO like IBM’s Kohnstamm, global brands will continue to kill themselves from within trying to defer to the edges in the belief that there is where the creativity lies. Sorry, in digital your brand crosses country sites. That killer product you only sell through one channel? Well good luck concealing it from a Chinese consumer who wants to know why they can’t get it at their local dealer. The very fact that everything is a click away from everything else makes the artificial silos and pigeon holes of marketing management an utter and complete fiction.

The Social Brand bug crawled up Doc Searls’ (Cluetrain co-author for you Philistines) butt and inspired him to say the right thing about brand being for cattle and breweries. I now have a new acronym to go on the wall along with  NMDB: SEFTTI.

“As for social media, all media now need to be social. Mediation is between humans, some of which are inside companies. Hence, “social media” as oxymoron. Sort of, anyway.

“Meanwhile, lots of social media types are talking about brands and branding as if these were new and hip things. They’re not. They’re heavy and old. We need to move on, folks. Think of something human instead.

“When a friend came back from SXSW recently, we talked about how, at the show, it was “social every fucking thing there is.” The term SEFTTI was thus coined.”

via Doc Searls Weblog · Brands are boring.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And now for something completely different, a post on interactive marketing!

Hat tip to Avinash Kaushik for tweeting this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Coming out of the 2008 Summer Olympics I joined a small team within Lenovo consisting of the company’s best engineers and designers to re-invent the netbook category — those small (sub 11″ screen) PCs that have taken the market by storm since their introduction two years ago.

The netbook category has flourished for a couple reasons best explored by a serious PC analyst — my opinion is that sub $400 PCs in a super-portable form factor were the perfect option for consumers slammed by economic concerns in this Great Recession and who are gradually migrating to a “disposable” device model brought on by a constant upgrade cycle in their phone and other consumer electronics.  Alas, the netbook is still the same operating system, the same computing model, just in a smaller, cheaper package.

Consider the smartphone.  Small. Thin. Long battery life. No patches or updates or viruses. No waiting to boot. It’s always connected (almost always). Highly designed. It just works. But it is too small to watch a movie on and is a major pain to compose anything on — aside from simple SMS or email “grunts.”

What happens if you combine the two models — the connected simplicity of a smartphone with the physical ergonomics of a netbook? Well, you get a “smartbook.”

Today Lenovo announced the first smartbook — called Skylight —  in partnership with Qualcomm, the San Diego-based leader in phone chipsets. Using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform, the Lenovo Skylight is designed with cloud computing and social networking in mind.  It is not a phone per se, but it leverages a 3G or Wifi network connection to present the user with a high definition browser experience that assumes most, if not all of the user’s content and activities are up there, in the cloud.

There is no harddrive, just a lot of flash memory.  Productivity applications? Google Docs. Music? Amazon.  This is a device designed for messaging and media.

So what makes it social? The user interface is a proprietary design built around an “app” paradigm. Those apps contain the user’s primary accounts — email, instant messaging, SMS, Facebook, etc. — and are extensible and customizable.  The device is meant to be constantly on and connected, permitting the user to interact with it on an ad hoc basis, not a formal session where the user needs to power on, connect, then log in.

The design of the system is amazing, delivered by Richard Sapper, the genius behind the original ThinkPad.   The user interface is internally developed on top of a Linux kernel and is pretty intuitive and very browser centric. The software implementation was remarkable, particularly given the challenges of porting a large screen user experience to an ARM platform. The engineering teams lead by Mike Vanover, Jim Hunt, and others pulled off a significant development miracle in building the operating environment.

The name — Skylight — is indicative of the device’s mission as a hardware portal into the cloud. With persistent and constant 3G and wifi, the device should have no issues living up to its name.

I presented a prototype to some resellers in London last summer and over the course of a few days was able to play with the machine on a wifi only basis. Given the early, pre-pre-beta condition of the build, it was surprisingly stable and provided a great glimpse into what a cloud device would behave like.  My earlier thoughts on stripped down operating systems and cloud centric computing models all emanated from my week with the Skylight prototype. It also was a device that seemed to sell itself. Thin is definitely in and the Skylight is astonishingly thin for a clamshell form factor. Watching the development process and the way the project leader Peter Gaucher was able to keep the device as thin as its initial prototype was remarkable: essentially thinness comes at a price, but Gaucher was able to defend the machine against the forces of thickness and economics.

As soon as we have seed units I hope to get some Skylights into the hands of the Lenovo Blogger Advisory Council for their insights into how they use the device and ways to improve it as it evolves. This represents a very interesting exercise in innovation, one I was honored to have witnessed. It represents and embodies a lot of what makes Lenovo such an interesting place to be: a place where risks are taken and old paradigms are challenged. Is this the be-all, end-all social device? No, but it is a start that marks a radical departure from old familiar models to a new one altogether.

I discussed this category at length with my former Forbes.com buddy Om Malik last week in San Francisco. He had tablet fever to some extent, and was more focused on operating systems issues such as the convergence of Android and Chrome or the presence of Jolicloud. The issue, as I see it, is one that Lenovo SVP Peter Hortensius has called the “wasteland” — the “tweener” space between a smartphone and a netbook — the space where we all are seeking some device about the size of an airplane ticket. The place where the Apple Newton once lived. And the Sony Vaio P series, and even our own prototype Pocket Yoga. We need a big screen to stream our movies and our YouTubes, yet we want to hold it to our ears so we can talk. We need a device that is persistent, that doesn’t need an outlet to survive more than couple hours of constant use, something that we can show off (consumer electronics are fashion statements).

Does Skylight achieve that? We shall see. I know I am ready to move to the category and expect it will, overtime, morph as carrier 3G/4G wireless models change, the cloud becomes more mainstream, and the  category achives ubiquity.

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