What! No Virtual Booth Models?

I’m “at” the Comdex Virtual event right now. It’s an unusual experience. This is not the first time I’ve participated in virtual trade shows as both an attendee and a speaker. It’s been awhile though and the experience is a bit different than it was in the past. It’s much more elaborate, more like a real conference. Unfortunately, some things are the same such as jumpy video.

I get virtual trade shows. Let’s face it, for a lot of attendees big trade shows are boondoggles. Expensive boondoggles. You have to pay to travel, pay for hotels and meals, and pay for the show. A lot of IT managers used to justify trade shows as part of employee education. That was true for some people but a lot of folks got too little “education” out of these industry confabs. Instead they got a lot of swag (the stuff they give away at booths). Marketing people even have a term for these folks. We call them trick-or-treaters. Besides junk to fill up their cubicles all that most attendees got were vendor pitches masquerading as seminars. Not a good use of limited budget dollars.

From the vendor point of view, you spend a big chunk of your marketing budget on booths and travel and came back with few qualified leads. Instead of customers with money, you waste your time on trick-or-treaters and folks too low on the totem pole to have any influence on spending. Trade shows in general have two business goals. First, spreading the word i.e. marketing. Branding, education, PR, positioning, and messaging are key activities at trade shows. In this regard, trade shows are generally successful. The press is at these events and people have little else to do but listen to your message. Unless the show is in Las Vegas. Then all bets are off. Get it? Bets? Okay we’ll move on.

The second big goal of trade shows, from a vendor perspective, is lead generation. No matter how you look at it, there are better ways to generate leads. Again, you have to pull some of your marketing and sales team out of the field so they can sift through lots of the trick-or-treater types to get a few decent leads. It’s not very efficient. To get anyone to talk to you at all, you have to sink a boatload of money into flashy booths, presentations, entertainment (magicians, comedians, etc.) and other diversions to cut through the white noise of the expo floor. That’s just to swipe the badge of someone unlikely to buy anything in the first place.

Virtual trade shows are intriguing because they are cheap for everyone. No flashy booths or expensive travel for vendors. For attendees it has the advantage of  allowing you to do other things while “attending” (like your job) and it doesn’t take a big divot out of your budget. I can see it for education and messaging. I still don’t see it for lead generation.

I’m fascinated by how much effort has gone into making Comdex Virtual mimic the experience of a real trade show. There are keynotes, breakout sessions, virtual booths and a lobby with flashing advertisements. There’s even hospitality suites that you’re not allowed into without an invite. You get to feel the same pang of of disappointment you would experience walking past a real hospitality suite that you’re not invited into. Ah, the memories.

Despite advances in show design there are still a bunch of annoying quirks. Video is jumpy and makes every speaker sound like Max Headroom. If Hulu and YouTube could figure this out you’d think Comdex Virtual could. The slides for the keynote don’t change. It’s probably a stupid technical problem but it effects the experience. Some of the virtual booths have tiny PowerPoint presentations running. It’s like business for Smurfs. And just like Smurf signs you can’t read the slides. Folks like Microsoft and EMC figured that out and had video presentations. You can hear just fine no matter how tiny the talking head is.

What Comdex Virtual can’t reproduce is, for me, the most important aspect of a real show – running into people I know. A lot of business gets done when you happen upon colleagues and old friends. They try to do this with the VAR Bar - group chat room - but it doesn’t work. It is overpopulated with vendors and the text scrolls so fast that you can’t really see anything interesting. It is tough to search for someone you know (the virtual equivalent of scanning the room) because the application had the annoying habit of suddenly jumping to the top of the list. Besides, looking around a physical room is much faster than scrolling through more than 200 names and icons.

Comdex Virtual goes a long way to making virtual trade shows more enjoyable and interesting. The structure of the event, made to appear like a live event, provides familiar context. It is certainly easier on the budget. Still, it doesn’t allow for one of the most crucial parts of a trade event – human contact.

At least the food is better than it was at live Comdex. And I don’t have to wait for a cab back to my hotel. That’s something the original event could never deliver on.

You are… and you want what?

I’m Tom Petrocelli. I’m about to be an independent consultant (more on that in the future). If you want to know about me, my profile is available right here on-line. I write this blog because I like to write. I also admit that I like to pontificate and, on some level, hope it attracts some positive attention. There. Doesn’t that make things easier?

You would think it would be dogma by now that you owe any person you contact the courtesy of identifying yourself. Identify who you are, who you work for, and what you want to talk about. Yet, I’m constantly surprised how often this doesn’t happen. I can’t tell you how many times, in any given week, I’m contacted without any identification. Someone calls, asks for me (mangling my name of course), and starts talking. No “Hi, I’m Jim and I work for the League of Animal Lovers.” Not, “Hi, I’m Greg and I’m in sales at Acme Catapults. May I speak to Mr. Coyote please?” either.

Instead, they immediately ask for someone and start a pitch. Or even worse, they start asking questions. For example:

Caller: “Hi, is Tom there?”

Me: “Um. This is Tom. Can I help you?”

Caller: “Don’t you want to save money on your personal hygiene needs and help abused farm animals at the same time?”

Me: “What the ….?”

No introduction. No sense of context. Nothing. I’m supposed to sit and answer your questions when I don’t even know who you are? Doesn’t seem likely.

Now, if you think this is all the workings of some sleazy boiler room operation, think again. With the advent of the “Do Not Call” list, fewer and fewer of those type organizations are calling with high pressure pitches. Instead, these are not-for-profits, political organizations, and people who I might actually do business with and probably have already done business with. For example, I’ve gotten calls from various telecommunications companies that ask for me by name then start pounding out the questions. Just before writing this I had a call from my local political party. They forced me to ask three times who they were before they decided to tell me*. I almost hung up on them and I support them! I’ve even had some situations where I had to aggressively interrupt and demand that someone tell me who they were and what company they were from. In a few cases, the caller actually hung up rather then answer. Would I do business with these people? The answer is “Never!”

This type of behavior happens in a variety of contact situations, not just in cold calling. At trade shows and conferences, folks will practically leap out of the booth and ask questions or start pitching before they even say “hello”. You would think it would be harder with social media but a lot of people do the equivalent of it with blank profiles. In some cases it’s intentional (really bad) but a lot of the time it’s laziness. I summarily reject comments to my blog from people with blank profiles unless I know them personally. I can’t tell if they just forgot to fill it out or if it’s spam. Whether technique or lack of attention to detail, it has the same effect. No Id, no comment, no conversation, and no sale.

Sometimes, this is how the contact person is taught to behave. It seems counter productive to me. First off, if I don’t know who you are and what organization you are with, I have no context. That would seem important if you want to get good answers to your qualifying questions. The point of asking someone these questions is to qualify their need and see if they are someone you want to spend your time on. How can you do that if they don’t understand the questions they are answering? Worse than no data is bad data.

You also risk having the listener misunderstand your intentions. Let’s face it, it’s not the social norm to start a conversation without an introduction. To not identify who you are and what you want leads to a lack of trust. That works against the sale. Normally you won’t do things for people you don’t trust. And sales, politics, and charitable giving is about getting someone to do something for you. I don’t have to listen to your sales pitch. I don’t have to put your candidate’s sign on my lawn. And, I certainly don’t have to give you money unless I want to. Given all the people who are asking something from us, we tend to filter out those we don’t trust. Not saying who you are – and I mean right away – undermines your efforts to gain someone’s trust and get them to do what you want them to do.

Part of the reason some salespeople (and other callers/emailers/tweeters/etc.) do this is so that the person won’t say no or hang up. Get them talking and you’ll make the sale! That’s a load of … baloney. People are not stupid and will figure out pretty quickly that you are selling them something. They might be too polite to hang up or tell you to go pound salt, thereby wasting your time. That doesn’t help you accomplish your mission. Instead, build a bond, make them want to listen to what you have to say. That begins with them knowing who you are. And if they still don’t want to hear your pitch, so be it. Better that you move on to the next person than waste time on someone who will never buy or give or whatever you want them to do.

So identify yourself, your organizations, and your intentions first. Then we can talk. You might even get something from me that way.

* I’m aware that political parties are often required to make sure of who they are calling. But would it hurt to say “I’m Ted from the local <Name of Political Party> party. May I speak with Mr. Petrocelli?”

Sales and Promotions Mistakes – It Could Be An Opportunity…

Two things happened this week that made me think about customer service and lost opportunities. The first event had to do with paper. I find the best customer service stories in the most mundane situations. Anyway, I was at OfficeMax and saw a wonderful deal. There was a stack of five ream cases of inkjet paper. On top of them was  a sign that said that the paper was $8.99. $8.99 for five reams of inkjet paper is a great price. The ten ream case was something like $35. Wow! While it was a great price, it wasn’t an outlandish one. Not too good to be true just pretty darn good. When I got to the counter, it rang up $30. Wait. What? Turns out it was $8.99 a ream not a case. Someone was supposed to have taken out the individual reams and stacked them outside the cases. Perhaps it said $8.99 a ream but I’m not so sure. Even if this was the case the type was so small as to not be obvious. Taking them out of the cases and stacking them up was supposed to be the obvious part. I declined to buy it and found a good deal elsewhere.

The second event was the arrival of a $15 Best Buy gift card from Napster. Napster had run a promotion on Facebook wherein you friend them and posted something (favorite song or album maybe) and they would send you a 1GB portable music player. Apparently, the response was so huge to the promotion that they ran out of music players and sent gift cards instead.

Both of these situations have two things in common. First, the company appeared to advertise something they could not deliver on. Second, they could not deliver because of a mistake or miscalculation. Now, I don’t have a problem with mistakes. Stuff happens. A lot of folks want to hold a company’s feet to the fire over honest mistakes. Super travel columnist and ombudsmen Christopher Elliott has written a boatload (pun intended) of columns about airlines or hotels that accidently post the wrong price and have angry customers who want a ridiculous rate. His advice is often summed up as “don’t expect something that is so ridiculously cheap it can’t be right.” Reading his blog I always get the feeling that these folks aren’t just looking for a bargain. They know it’s a wrong price and want to take advantage of the company. Whatever the legalities of the situation are you don’t take advantage of someone, even an airline, that way.

What I found most intriguing was the different reactions from OfficeMax and Napster. In the first case, OfficeMax missed out on a great opportunity with a long time customer. When it was obvious that this was a mistake, I no longer had the expectation that they would honor the price on the stack. I know some people who would demand the $8.99 price, even going so far as accusing the store of a bait and switch. That’s not right. Honest mistakes happen and we need to accept that. What OfficeMax could have – should have - done was offer me something, anything. If they had offered, say, a 10% discount on the case I may have bought the paper. Even if I hadn’t, I would have felt that they made an effort to own my business. It’s about showing the love, not what you get. It’s very likely that the store manager and clerk didn’t have the authority to do more than say “Sorry”. Too bad. OfficeMax lost a chance to sell me something and gain a bunch of goodwill. They lost twice.

Napster on the other hand could have just said “Sorry, we ran out.” The promotion’s fine print likely said something akin to “while supplies last”. They clearly know something about goodwill though. Sure, the player was worth more than $15 retail. However, I really don’t need another one and most people signing up probably don’t either. I only wanted it because it was free. By sending me something, anything, for nothing, they sent the message that they really did want my business and I was more to them than a social media marketing opportunity. A perusal through the comments on the Napster Facebook page shows that this worked. While there were a few grumblers, most said “Thanks for the free gift card!” Napster turned a potential marketing mess into an opportunity to connect with potential customers and say “I care about how you feel about Napster! You matter to us. Sorry about the screw up.”

All too often, companies just want to assuage the feelings of upset customers by tossing out a false apology. For them, it’s about making the problem child go away. I had that happen at Best Buy recently. By the time I left the store I was furious at the obviously fake “we’re sorry” that the customer service representative kept spewing mechanically. Instead, mistakes can be a chance to tell customers that you value them. By proactively doing something positive when you make a mistake, you can signal that your customers matter to you.  That builds a bond that is worth much more than the cost of doing something for the customer.

More than anything, just saying “sorry” is meaningless and annoying. You have to do something to demonstrate that you want to make things right. When you make a mistake, do more, say less, and have happier customers.

The Magic of Magic Hat

Magic Hat, for those who don’t know but should, makes beer. Really good beer. Beer lovers’ beer. Hoppy, complex, flavorful, and often wonderfully bitter. Not your garden variety swill here. Magic Hat is very good at making beer. They are also incredibly good at marketing and brand management. They have built their brand based on magic, Halloween, and Mardi Gras imagery with a hippy aesthetic. They carry that brand throughout everything they do. Cartons, labels, product names (such as the new Hex). Even the factory reflects their image of whimsical scariness.

The Sticker Licker!

On the factory tour (which is actually called the Artifactory) in South Burlington Vermont, they have massive signs that explain what all the machines and process steps are. They are not your typical bland signs though. For example, the labeling machine has been given the moniker “Sticker Licker”. All the signs, of course, reflect the corporate color palette. The tasting room is like none I’ve ever been in (and I’ve been in … a few). Ambient light is kind of orange and dim but not too dim to read. It’s weird and edgy without being threatening. The soundtrack is decidedly hippy with lots of Grateful Dead and Cream. The signage is, like their labels and cartons, in keeping with the overall look and feel of the product.

Everything about the tasting room screams the Magic Hat brand. 

 

You might be asking yourself “What has this to do with technology?” That’s okay. Go ahead, I’m not insulted. I’ve not gone off the rails. In fact, it has everything to do with technology. Technology folks forget that technology is usually realized as a product. Products are bought and sold and how we manage to do that is important. The type of tight brand and product management that you see at Magic Hat is the same that you see at companies like Apple. Everything connects. They have a playbook and stick to it. Deviation from form is not a good thing. It confuses consumers and makes it hard for them to connect to your products.

I can still hear you out there saying “Well, we don’t make consumer products so this doesn’t apply.” What?! You have consumers too, no matter who you are. You might call them customers, clients, or fellow employees but someone is consuming  the stuff you make. Branding matters to them for these reasons:

1. It provides a point of reference. When you see an HP computer you know it’s an HP because of it’s design elements. This is why monkeying around with your logo is a dangerous thing. Not just the logo either but colors, shapes, packaging, the whole tragedy.
2. It attracts people. Consumers need to know about what you have to offer. Branding helps cut through the white noise of the marketplace. It doesn’t matter if it’s the whimsy of a beer company or the messaging of an OEM tech company. Folks need a reason to listen to you. Your being there isn’t enough.
3. If coupled with great product, it builds loyalty. The ultimate goal of branding is to associate your product with some set of emotions that makes them want to keep in touch and consume more. And to tell all their friends too.

So much technology marketing is bland and gyrating, changing with every new model. Shifting branding causes confusion. Again, the technology master here is Apple. You can instantly recognize their products, logo, even color schemes. It changes over time but always in line with the overall branding. Their brand changes incrementally not radically.

Now, there are reasons for radical brand transformation. If the brand has gotten so stale it sends the wrong message, it may need a facelift. If something very bad has gotten connected with your current brand, then a reboot may be in order. Radical restarts of a brand without real need are usually disastrous. New Coke anyone? Didn’t think so. As the Magic Hat (and Apple) example shows, brand is not just a logo. It’s everything from the box it ships in to the design of the product to social media. It all has to come from the same source, from the same core.

So, tech companies have a lot to learn from how a small company like Magic Hat makes it’s presence known in a very competitive field. Take marketing beyond just a graphics manual and encompass all aspects of the company and products. At Magic Hat, even the guy pouring beer in the tasting room exuded the Magic Hat brand. That is the only way to attract and keep customers. That and awesome product. Don’t forget that. Magic Hat would be nothing if the beer was lousy. And their beer is anything but lousy.

I’ve Seen An Elephant Fly

Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, Apple proves that they are more clueless than even I imagined. In fact, I thought that since they had handled the crisis regarding their new product - the iPhone 4 - so poorly that they had already reached the depths of crisis management.

I admit it. I was wrong.

They have shown that they can go further, faster than anyone could have imagined. Only in the wrong direction. I’m impressed but not in a good way. Apple made three mistakes, real obvious ones at that. First, they used the term “Antennagate” during their press conference  and then said they wouldn’t say it anymore. Too late! Not only is it out there now but it will be linked with Apple forever. It sounds petulant to say “Antennagate” then declare it off limits. Does Steve Jobs really think he has the ability to order the world not to use the term anymore? Instead, he validated a concise label, something easy to remember. If Apple wanted the word to go away, they should not have acknowledged it. It would have died out on it’s own. Now it will forever be linked to Apple.

Second, they offered their customers a sop. Instead of vowing to fix every iPhone with the problem, they are giving away a free case. Wow! How generous. The case will actually help reception but it’s clearly a cheap gesture not a grand one. That has not been lost on Apple fans. The company clearly isn’t showing them the love.

Finally, they went on to say this is a problem that all of their competitors have too. The reaction from the other smartphone manufacturers is what you’d expect. They laughed at Apple for trying to make this their issue. Besides, customers don’t buy  the “they suck too” defense from a company that talks about the superiority of its products. When your kids come home from school with a bad grade and say “lots of other kids did bad too”, do you take that? No! Instead they get the well known parental refrain of “I don’t care what other kids did. I only care what you did.” Pointing out flaws in others, even if it’s true, does not relieve you of your responsibility. Apple customers know this. It’s time to drop the excuses and fix their relationship with their customers.

So, it only gets better. Apple keeps setting new lows for crisis management. Someone needs to get over there and pull them out of this infinite loop.

A Swift Kick In The Apple

I’m not a great believer in schadenfreude. Finding joy in other people’s misery does not say something positive about me so I try not to engage in it. However, with some companies, it’s too tempting to ignore.  Apple is one of those companies. In my opinion, they sell a lot of style over substance. Pretty much anyone who has developed for Apple environments such as the iPhone or Mac will attest to them being control freaks. They are the epitome of a closed system. Apple, and Apple alone, decides if your App gets to be in the App Store. They are not exactly forthcoming with the criteria for rejection either. At times it has appeared that they were rejecting apps from competitors for all the wrong reasons. They make Microsoft seem like Open Source.

So, it was with a bit of guilty glee that I have followed the latest iPhone 4 debacle. Why, because Apple approached it with their usual arrogance. Even though it was obvious to a first year Electrical Engineering major that there was a problem with the antenna, they denied it. It wasn’t the signal that was wrong, they said, it was how the software measured it. The first thought that came to mind was “So, it’s always had a lousy signal. Silly us. Thanks for pointing that out.”

Now, they are suggesting but not really admitting that they may have an antenna problem. Still, the reaction is slow. Everyone has to wait for a press conference starring Steve God… I mean Jobs. This is classic Apple. They think they can fix this with a marketing event. The arrogance is astounding.

Here's a quick lesson in Crisis Management 101. First, you admit that you may well have a problem, that your customers are not stupid rubes who don’t know how to hold a phone. You don’t blame partners and faceless engineers. Second, you investigate quickly and offer to replace the product if there is indeed a hardware problem. You let anyone return the product whether you can prove there is a problem or not. Most people won’t but it’s the kind of gesture customers appreciate. Finally, you fix or replace all the problem devices for free. Even if you take it on the chin financially in the short term, you will have built long term value and enhanced your brand. For a company dependant on brand, like Apple, this was an opportunity to build long term loyalty.

What you don’t do is deny that there is a problem before you’ve even investigated it. You don’t act like your customers are morons. Most importantly, you don’t tell everyone to shut and up and take what you give them. This type of attitude takes an opportunity to connect with customers and turns it into a lot fewer customers.

More than anything else, you check your ego at the door. You act humble, sorry for the pain that you caused your loyal and beloved customers. This seems to be something that Apple is genetically incapable of doing. You think they would have learned from the recent Toyota debacle. Silence is deadly here. Arrogance is even worse.

At one point in my career, I was on both sides of this type situation at once. Network boards that we had been shipping were failing. Most were caught by our manufacturing QA engineers. Those that weren’t we offered to take back from customers even if they hadn’t seen problems yet. The contract manufacturer tried to deny that there were problems at all. Then they tried to deny that they had anything to do with it even when we showed them the defects. Finally, we had to threaten to pull all of our business from them. Suddenly, they were willing to admit and rework all the boards. Needless to say, we weren’t looking to send them any new business. We no longer trusted them.

This is classic Apple. Too bad. They had an interesting opportunity to make their customers trust them, to grow loyalty, and turn a bad situation into a positive one. They’ve done the opposite. In the long term, this will haunt them.

Make ‘Em Laugh! But Be Careful…

One of the best ways to gain attention is through humor. Comedy sticks in your brain. It releases endorphins which put you in a good mood triggered by what you are watching. Personally, I think Geico is the Master here. Besides the Gecko and Cave Men, they also have what I call “serious guy”. He tells you that Geico will save you 15% or more on your car insurance. To prove he’s not lying he asks “Was Abe Lincoln Honest?” This is followed by a hilarious fake film clip designed to look like it was from the Civil War. The one with the little piggy crying “wee wee wee” all the way home is equally memorable. Geico has a whole channel of these on YouTube. They are really entertaining and might save you 15% or more on your car insurance.

These ads work because the message is simple (save money on your insurance), are linked to iconic characters, and are genuinely funny. We are talking classic comedy here. The kind your kids and mom can appreciate. It helps you to link Geico to positive emotions. Ask anyone about Geico and they start to chuckle. The simple message sticks in you head. Even if you don’t know how much they claim to save you,  you will recall that they save you money because it is linked to a positive emotional response.

You knew there was a gotcha here though. There are a lot of ways to take that positive feeling, turn it around 180 degrees, and trash your product message. Here’s my hit list of ways to turn funny into lost opportunity:

1. Use mean stereotypes. A recent Storwize video portrays a a storage administrator -  an IT professional and presumably a customer - as an overweight, sweaty guy dressed in a white short sleeve shirt and tiny black tie. In other words, he’s Dilbert. He even gets abused by his data storage. A true loser. This has just got to insult IT people. And overweight people too. Lovely, a twofer. I did check with some sysadmins/IT pros I know about this. They were not amused.
2. Being ironic. As in hipster ironic not real irony. Advertising that is full of snarky, insider jokes never works. Inevitably, someone doesn’t get the joke. Tech advertising can be like this. You try to be funny but it comes across as geeky. It’s all the internal references and acronyms folks. It doesn’t play well with the people who have to write the checks or the end users. Now, reduce it to a twitter Tweet and you get a lot of “Huh?” reactions. If your ad is making a play on the word iSCSI, it will have a small audience.
3. Complex messages. Geico’s ads work (just like the Budweiser frogs) because the message is straightforward. Technology advertising tends to be a tad more complex. As in incomprehensible. How can you be funny when you jam  several technical and business messages into 3 minutes? You can’t. Even if you start out funny, you are soon mired in Dullsville. Keep It Simple! When Dell ran a serious of ads full of colorful laptops being created to the song lollipop, it was cute, delightful, and humorous. It also got the message across that a laptop was a treat, something you enjoy and not just a tool. You ruin funny when you add complexity.
4. No message at all or no connection to the product. Lots of these abound, especially in print. No pictures or mention of a product. Something cute and funny that grabs our attention and then… nothing. You have to connect the good feelings that the humor gives you to something. Otherwise the arousal is lost in space.
5. Overdo it. One of the few places Geico blew it was when they overexposed the Cave Men. A whole TV show devoted to them was quite over the top. When you see or hear something repeatedly, you start to like it more. After a certain point, however, it gets overexposed and you begin to like it less. Psychologists have known about this behavior (called the Familiarity Principle) since the early 1960’s.

I like funny advertising. I love funny blogs, Tweets, songs and jingles, websites, Facebook posts, and videos. It gives me a good feeling which I then transfer to whatever it is someone is trying to sell. It might not close a sale but it puts the company on the list of “products to look at”.

A local company called Mighty Taco (awesome fast food by the way) has humorous placemats that often feature something local like the Queen City Roller Girls roller derby league. They also have a bunch of weird, quirky commercials that you only see late at night when it’s cheap. Even their website is funny. The message is simple - “Eat our food!” If you live anywhere near Buffalo, NY, the very mention of the name Mighty Taco makes you smile. That’s perfect advertising.

Only, now I’m hungry. Perhaps it worked too well.

Let’s Get Something Clear About Transparency

I have noticed a lot of bloggers coming clean about how their blogs are influenced by who they work for. One of my favorite bloggers, Marc Farley (aka 3PARFarley) recently published his statement. To say I was not in the least surprised to find that 3PARFarley worked for 3PAR is a bit of an understatement. His tongue and cheek blog can be found at http://doiop.com/mfmotives

Never to let an opportunity go by to get some traction from the work of others, I wish to add my own transparency statement. Here it goes:

Unlike so many other bloggers, I can honestly say that my blog is not influenced by any company. That’s because I am not part of any company. It’s not what I would choose but it gives me the opportunity to say “No one tells me what to do (other than my wife)!” For the right money I’m willing to change all that. Not the part about the wife. I would never change that. Love ya honey.

I write what I write because I think it’s right. Or maybe because I’m a blowhard who likes to hear himself talk. Perhaps it’s so that I don’t have to find meaningful employment and can call myself a blogger instead. It could be a mental illness such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Who knows. Or it could be that the aliens tell me to write. Good thing they don’t tell me what to write because then this would be one big horrible lie. I couldn’t live with that.

I don’t like to admit this but this has not always been the case. Not the part about aliens silly. They’ve always been there. No, the company part. I have blogged for companies that I worked for and it surely influenced my personal blog. Not in the form of shilling for the company (that’s what corporate blogs are for) but in staying away from certain topics or companies so as not to offend someone who contributed to my livelihood. The unfortunate accident of my current situation frees me from that worry. I am now truly free to annoy anyone I choose… unless I’m interviewing with them. Then I have to wait until they stop calling back to use them as a piñata. Just kidding about the piñata part. No really. No worries. But next time get a non-disclosure…

My problem with transparency statements (mine and Marc’s excluded of course) is that they assume that we are all too stupid to figure out that most blogs are sponsored, paid for, or otherwise influenced by a corporation. Come on folks! What ISN’T manipulated by a company these days? Please don’t act like anyone is hiding something. Gosh, what was the giveaway? The corporate logo on the top of the page? How about the bio that starts with “I work for (insert company name here)”? I’m not cynical, just realistic. Even most of the so-called private blogs say things like “These views do not reflect the views of my company.” The heck they don’t. Let’s have someone lambast the CEO and see if the disclaimer saves his job. Of course it won’t so you stay away from certain topics. That’s influence. See the advertising on the blog? Do you think that comes without strings? Sorry but no. The first time you lose an advertiser because of what you write you learn quickly not to write that again. It might not even be conscience but it’s there all the same.

To the folks who cry about transparency and journalistic integrity I have this to say: This is not journalism. It’s commerce. Most blogs that don’t come out of a new agency are a form of advertising. I would make a Fox News joke now but I hear they have mean lawyers. Just kidding. I love you legal guys.

Most people get that. It doesn’t mean there isn’t value in what the blogger writes but it is, at least partly, marketing. If you can’t tell if someone is selling you something then assume they are. Even me. I’m not but it’s better that you assume I am if you aren’t sure. Trust me on that.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this pledge:

I’m not selling you anything but truth. I’ll NEVER sell you anything but truth. Remember that when I go to work for a big company. I’ll never change. Not even then. I’m just like that. You can take that to the bank.

At least for now.

Author’s Note: Ask about our convenient sponsorships. You too can reach a targeted audience of high worth individuals through blog ads. Inquire with the author. Reasonable rates.

Broadcasters Throwing Away 70 Years Of Practice

It amazes me that an entire industry, when faced with something a little bit new, can suddenly forget everything they have ever learned. TV broadcasters (who started as radio broadcasters) and their advertising agencies seem hell bent on tossing out every lesson from the past 70 years as they branch out into Internet media.

Case in point – CBS. CBS doesn’t participate in Hulu unlike every other major and quite a few minor networks. Instead, they go it alone. To me that just means cutting off an avenue of distribution. That’s like refusing to put out your old programs on VCR and then DVD.

That, however, is not where they really drop the ball. Their worst mistake is when they forget decades of advertising wisdom on CBS.com. What do they do? They run the same commercial at every break in the online program. Every time. Over and over and over again. That flies in the face of all that we know about how to advertise in a broadcast medium. After the first run, no one is paying attention. By the fourth run you’ve actually annoyed your potential customer into no longer being a potential customer. It is not enough that you remember an ad. You have to not hate it too. Otherwise, that irritation translates to the product. You remember the product alright but not in a good way. There is a reason that one spreads ads out over time. It guards against desensitization of the message.

CBS.com goes a step further and will play multiple instances of a commercials in a row. The same commercial. It’s not enough for them to blast the same ad at you three times during the course of a program. They have to give it to you three at a time. That takes you from irritated to numb. Numb to their message, numb to their value proposition and numb to the product. In other words, completely desensitized.

Make no mistake – online programming is still broadcast media. It’s delivered through the Internet but is no different from TV on-demand broadcasting in every other way. On-line broadcasters seem to forget this. They treat the Internet delivered program as something alien and deliver advertising in ways that they never would over the airways or cable. On TV, if you see a commercial run twice during one show, you assume it’s a mistake. Oops! For shows delivered via the Internet, it is the norm.

Broadcasters forget this again when they try to add false interactivity into the show. They don’t allow you to do obvious Internet actions like mouse over a character and have his or her bio popup. You can’t pause a show that has a product placement in it and get information about a product that interests you right there and then. Nope. Instead, they give a choice of what silly commercials (they call it an “experience”) you want to see again and again. Unfortunately, there is no “None” option available. Why not vary the product placements from showing to showing. For digital media that’s not that hard to do. TV Sports does it all the time. Next time you watch baseball on TV look behind the batter. The little sign changes and is localized. You could do that on a TV program with a billboard in the background for instance or change what’s playing on a TV set.

The behavior of CBS.com is probably the most egregious of the broadcasters but you see the same advertising patterns in all of them and on Hulu. They constantly run ads in ways that they never would on TV. Instead, they let opportunities go by for more interesting interactive behavior. Broadcasters don’t seem to know how to embrace the potential of Internet delivered shows while forgetting everything they know from 70 years of TV and radio broadcasting.

Broadcasters have to get this right and soon. The Internet is quickly becoming a major form of delivery for their products. Advertising is advertising. A commercial is a commercial. That doesn’t change because it’s delivered in packets instead of electromagnetic radiation. Sorry but the Internet did not change everything.

How To Mess With Your Brand in One Easy Lesson

I usually write about technology or the computer industry. It’s what I do. Every once in awhile though, I see such marketing idiocy in other industries that I can’t help mention it. Today was one of those days. According to the New York Times GM wants the people who work for the Chevrolet division to stop using the word “Chevy” in reference to their cars. It appears that they only want to use Chevrolet. That tips over from a simple “Huh?” to “What the…?”

Chevy is not just a nickname. It is an integral part of the brand and has been for longer than I’ve been alive. It’s not a ‘57 Chevrolet Bel-Air. It’s a ‘57 Chevy! No one calls the flagship pony car a Chevrolet Camaro. Everyone knows it as the Chevy Camaro. That is awesome branding. And Chevy rhymes with heavy as in heavy metal which makes us think of loud music and fast cars. That’s what men especially like in cars. Why mess with that?

The stated reason is (now get this) to build a stronger brand through consistency. Okay, I get it. Take away one of the most recognizable, most salient parts of your brand to make it stronger. Wait. I don’t get it because it makes no sense. Emerson was right when he said “ A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. It doesn’t get more foolish than this.

There are several reasons why customers attach a nickname to a company, product, or brand. They are:

• The real names is long. This is why we don’t say “International Business Machines”. IBM is easier on the eyes and tongue.
• The official name is lame and/or stupid. Really, there is a reason Apple doesn’t make everyone say Apple iPhone. It’s a great fruit but not a great name. The logo is iconic and the Mac and “i” branding are memorable. Apple was smart enough to stop stapling their real name in front of everything back in 1984.
• The nickname better captures the brand. Great names capture something about the brand that speaks to the audience. What says total car awesomeness better, Chevrolet or Chevy?
• The company or brand is named after a real person or persons. Often companies named after founders sound like a law firm. That’s okay if you happen to be a law firm. Otherwise, not so much.

HP is a great example of the power of a nickname over the official name. The real name (Hewlett-Packard Company) is long and sounds like a CPA firm. If they were to insist that everyone in the company call it Hewlett-Packard and never say HP, it would look downright silly. Those two letters represent the natural brevity and tendency to toss around acronyms that is part of the computer industry. The nickname “HP” has become a big part of the brand and hopefully they would never mess with that.

This is yet another indication of a company that has lost its way. Can you imagine Ford saying “Don’t let me catch you referring to the Mustang as a “‘Stang"? No. They’re not that stupid. They realize (I hope) that that kind of identity is like free extra cheese on your pizza. Viral brand identity is a precious gift so why screw with it.

What is ironic is that this is a company that has no problems with GM instead of General Motors. So, GM, hear me now – I will never buy a Chevrolet. I might, however, buy a Chevy. Especially if it’s a Chevy Camaro. Even better if it’s free.

What Am I Missing?

So, I’m reading Facebook and see a posting from Starbucks. It tells me that I can download ten songs from iTunes on their dime. Okay. I’m not a fan of iTunes but I’ll take it for free. Then I made the supreme mistake – I looked at the comments. To begin with, I couldn’t imagine what the comments might be saying. A coffee company that you have chosen to hear from offers you free tunes. What more is there to say? You can say “Thank you”. That’s a bit vacuous but at least it’s appropriate. What else could there be?

I started paging through the 152 (that’s right! 152 and growing!) comments to see if there was a theme or some meme that I was missing. There were several as it turned out. They could be classified as:

• Inane – comments like “I love Starbucks"!” and “yummy!” They don’t add much to the sum total of the knowledge of the human race but at least they are harmless. Besides, even Starbucks needs to hear the love from time to time.
• Reasonable Complaints – mostly that people have a hard time downloading the songs or that they’re not available in Europe. These are okay too in that it’s good information. Doesn’t change the world but some marketing flunky at Starbucks will find it valuable.
• Whining – folks who complain to hear themselves talk. I love the misspellings in these. It says something about the people writing these comments. If you are going to complain at least take the time to do it properly. And it’s not spelled “sux”.
• The Haters - by far my favorite comments are the ones that say how much they hate Starbucks. Why would someone friend a company on Facebook if they hate them so much? It stretches credulity until it is paper thin.

This leads me to two thoughts. The first is that although social media is about creating community, it doesn’t always work out that way. Clearly, if you have people who friend you just to whine, complain, and say they hate you they have no real interest in belonging to a community. This is one of the biggest problems with social media for marketing purposes. Not everyone is interested in forming a positive community around your product. Quite a few just want to make themselves feel good by dumping hate on you. Unfortunately, social media is like a bug light for antisocial personalities.

The second thought was how difficult it is to control social media. This is yet another risk of social media that needs to be managed. Simply put, you can’t control your message and image the way you would in other media. All it takes is a bunch of complainers and haters to ruin whatever positive thing you are trying to accomplish. Give something away for free to gain a little brand loyalty? Some idiot who only means you ill ruins your effort. This is the same reason I no longer allow comments on this blog. Between the spammers and flamers it wasn’t a healthy conversation. At least with Facebook, it stays in the community of mostly good customers. On Twitter, it gets broadcast to the world. Ouch!

Social media opens up a whole can of risk that wasn’t there before. Part of that risk comes from the unprecedented access we give to our brand. Anyone with an ax to grind or who just wants to rain on everyone’s parade can mess with your message. The worst part of it is that you really can’t reply. If you get into a back and forth with a complainer you will turn off the people who are there for the right reasons. All you can do is hope that the inane and reasonable outnumber the whiners and stupids.

So, unless you already have a strong brand, solid message, and loyal customers, think twice about social media. You might not get what you want.

Risky Social Behaviors

Management (the practice not the people) is, to a large extent, about risk avoidance. Managers spend a lot of their time managing risks. Through a combination of experience and knowledge, managers mitigate market, financial, technology, and legal risks in order to provide a positive outcome for their organization. That’s a big chunk of the job.

Given that, I’m amazed at how many managers and professionals don’t understand the risks of social media. Whenever I talk to managers about these risks I hear the same refrain – It’s new! Sorry, that’s no excuse. It is not an excuse because it is an electronic communication like any other. For risk management purposes, social media is no different than email or a website.

The legal risks of electronic communication are well known. They can roughly be summarized as risks associated with:

• eDiscovery – why would anyone think that social media including Twitter or Facebook is not discoverable? If search results, websites and email are then so are these. The same rules apply including the FRCP in United States. Keep in mind that Electronic Communication is not defined as email but as electronic records of all sorts. This includes private accounts in the same way that private email accounts may be discoverable.
• Privacy – people forget that a lot of social media, especially Blogs and Twitter, are public forums. You don’t have an expectation of privacy in an open forum. If you wouldn’t stand in a crowded room and shout it out, don’t Tweet it. The same goes for Facebook if you don’t set your privacy controls to kill. Leave them wide open and you are publishing to the world.
• Defamation – public speech that is intended to harm is not protected speech in most countries. If you call someone a thief or a liar on Twitter you may as well have put up a billboard. Trash a competitor’s product in your blog? You had better be able to back up what you say.
• Agreements – a recent story about a lawsuit that accused an ex-employee of using LinkedIn to solicit another employee to leave garnered a lot of attention. So what? Solicitation is solicitation. The media is irrelevant. Social media does not give you a pass on sticking to contracts and other agreements including non-competes.
• Misrepresentation, Spam, Phishing etc. – again, the rules don’t change here. If you are NOT who or what you say you are or you are a scummy spammer you are acting legally or ethically by using Twitter or a Blog comment instead of email.

What is different is the ease of which one can fall into legal or ethical traps. We have been trained to think before we send the email. Social media with it’s quick, short, rapid fire bon mots encourages impulsive behavior. For the manager the real risk is that things can happen without people thinking about it. And these comments last for a long time. For the average corporate drone, the danger zone is in not remembering that these are not private communications. If you Tweet that your boss is an idiot, the boss can fire you it. It’s no different from taking out an ad in a newspaper. You are likely violating part of your employment agreement (folks, you really should read those before signing them) and giving cause to terminate you.

Use of social media does represent special marketing risks. Most of these risks are derived from a fundamental misunderstanding of social media – that it’s open. Twitter, for example, is a broadcast media. From a marketing perspective you can think of it like television and radio. Some obvious risks are:

• Forgetting you are talking to the world – I got into this on Twitter some months back. I objected to the use of swearing on Tweets by my alma mater. I was concerned what it would say about my school when they write posts like that. Clearly, they forgot that they were not talking to just a small group of like minded people. Full disclosure: people who know me will tell you I can swear like a sailor, though never in business situations. The risk to my school’s brand was my complaint not the words themselves.
• Not reaching for the shut off valve – legal risks aside, trashing competitors and individuals in public irritates people. Even worse is the back and forth that a lot of techies engage in. Sorry but no one wants to hear that. It’s one thing to point out your competitors shortcomings in person. It’s quite another to scream it all over the Internet. Playful poking is one thing as is thoughtful discussion. Trash-fests turn people off and make them stop listening.

Here’s a few tips and reminders to guide you through the social media forest.

• Remember, it is eCommunication and media like any other. The same rules apply.
• Do not assume privacy exists just because you want it to. If someone can see it, it’s in the open no matter what your intentions were.
• Think before you Tweet or post.
• You are publishing. Act like you are publishing even if it’s so you don’t annoy your friends.
• Remember that you can be punished, socially or legally, for thinks you say. Social media is a form of saying.
• Managers, be clear on what you expect and where the boundaries are. You can’t exert total control over your employees lives outside of work nor should you try. Just make sure they know how to keep private thoughts private.
• become proficient with privacy controls and use them appropriately. Parents, this goes especially for your kids. School administrators do trawl around in Facebook for threats and inappropriate behavior.
• No innuendos or in jokes. You lose the wider audience and annoy people. In the same vein, don’t trash talk.
• Don’t mix personal and business communications. If you usually Tweet about your cat I will not expect to hear about your company’s new product. I might care about one or the other but probably not both in the same context. That means I’m not listening when I should.

Above all else remember that social media allows you to tap into a wide community of people. Don’t be a jerk and don't’ be creepy. People will treat it as if you acted like that in person. That can’t be good.

Obfuscation through non-erudite terminology

I've spent a lot of time around both lawyers and engineers. One of the common complaints about either group is a tendency to say things in non-human terms. The assumption is that there an attempt being made to obscure facts through archaic language. Actually, both groups use their own language in an attempt to be more precise, as do scientists, police, and accountants. It is language designed to communicate to each other not to the world at large. The problems occur when they try and explain what they are doing to folks outside their profession using that same special language.

Marketing folks, on the other hand, are supposed to communicate in ways that customers understand. In my own career, I have often been employed as a geek who can speak, translating from technospeak into plain language. That is the heart of technical marketing.

Instead, we consistently find technical marketing people using language that no one understands. It's not that it's too technical. That would make sense if you are selling to techies. No, quite the opposite. A lot of the time, it simply doesn't make much sense. Let's look at the sampling below. In an attempt to not pick on any one company, I won't say who specific quotes came from. The list was a quick sampling from a number of company websites, technology news sites, white paper titles, and press releases.

• Navigating to Customer Satisfaction

• Innovations in Managing IT Service Quality

• ... To Accelerate Innovation Across The Network

• Improve Business Efficiency and Agility & Enables organizational agility. These came from two different web sites

• Sustainability can help you unlock the value of green

• Provides actionable knowledge

• Reduce costs as you solve IT challenges across your information infrastructure.

Most of these don't make much sense do they? “Navigating to Customer Satisfaction” would kind of make sense if this were a shipping company (it's not). I'm hoping they really didn't mean “actionable”. “Actionable is a legal term that means an action that is grounds for a lawsuit. If the knowledge is actionable, then I don't want it provided.

My favorite is “Sustainability can help you unlock the value of green.” What does “green” mean here? Besides the color, it is often misused as an adjective to mean environmental friendly. That phrase is, I'll grant you, kind of an obtuse way of saying “good for the environment” but at least people get that. When did green become a noun? Can I have two greens to go? Maybe they mean a putting green. Building a golf course around my green will unlock it's value quite nice, thank you. Or salad greens, perhaps? In that case, the value comes from destroying (that is eating) them not from sustaining them. That sounds more like something I would need Ex Lax for.

I'm not against using language in a sophisticated manner. This blog has a plethora of SAT words like obtuse, obfuscation, archaic , erudite, and, of course, plethora. What I don't like is mangling language, especially in marketing. Marketing is supposed to make it obvious and clear why you should buy something. Instead, we are treated to tongue and mind twisting phrases that only confuse. I don't want to hear “optimizes performance envelope capabilities”. Say “It's much faster” or even “ higher performing” instead. I know what that means without my decoder ring.

Speaking of the decoder ring, here is a (tongue in cheek) glance at part of it. I hope this helps in the future.

TechnoBusiness Marketing Speak	What it really means?
Innovate, Innovation	To make something that is totally new. Or something that sounds new but isn't.
Enabling	Helping... you to spend money.
Driving	Pushing... you to spend money.
Solution, Solutions	A fix to a problem. Or, a bunch of stuff thrown together into groups. We can sell you bundles this way.
Mobility	Moving around. Like moving your money into our pockets.
Optimize	To make something so that it is as good as it can be. Unfortunately, we seem to have to optimize constantly so it really doesn't make things optimal.
Efficiency (Attain Efficiency)	Using the least resources possible. Notice, that money is not included in this. Your money anyway.
Productivity (Boost Productivity)	Doing more with fewer resources... including your money.
Smarter	Not doing stupid things. It does suggest that you are doing some dumb things right now doesn't it? Feel insulted?
Business Need	Stuff your business needs to keep going. As in “our business needs your money”

Sometimes though, you hear something that is pretty straight up. It doesn't mean you believe it but at least you understand it. So, from the front page of Microsoft's website comes “Windows 7 is pretty dope.” It's not hard to guess that someone likes Windows 7. If only we could always be that obvious.

FTC Is Okay By Me

I'm fired up about the new FTC rules regarding bloggers. I didn't say I was mad or annoyed about it. Actually, I'm happy and excited. For those who don't pay attention to what goes on in the blog world (and yet you're reading this... whatever.) there are new rules in the U.S. regarding how you present certain information about products in blogs.

The U.S.Federal Trade Commission, commonly called the FTC, is charged with insuring fair trade in the United States. Part of their mission, I would argue the most important part, is consumer protection. These are the federal watchdogs that make sure that business doesn't take advantage of the average consumer. That is precisely what they are doing with the new rules for bloggers. In a nutshell, if you get paid to write good things about products, you have to reveal that. If you talk about the results of a test or a consumer experience that you know are not typical, you have to say what is typical. If a company comps you with free products, services, or tickets to a Buffalo Bills game, you have to reveal that too. Okay maybe not the Bills tickets this season. (I live in Buffalo, NY so no hate mail please. You know it's true.)

Basically, if you are being paid to say nice things, it is a paid endorsement and that has to be disclosed. It doesn't matter if the payment is money or in-kind. You have to let people know that you may be influenced by that compensation. This is not a privacy issue, it's a commercial one. It is important that someone reading a blog know what conflicts of interest may exist that could effect what the blogger says. This is not about free speech. It is about commercial speech which can have restrictions not applicable to individuals.

Frankly, these rules are no different from what you see on TV or in newspapers. When a celebrity endorses a product on TV, at the bottom of the screen are tiny letters that say “Paid Endorsement”. This is because it is really an advertisement, placed by an agency or company, and using the actor as a spokesperson. The only real difference is when they tell you that you can make millions with no money down, they have to let you know that that only applies to those at the top of the pyramid. Getting rich without risking your own money has not been typical since the dot com crash. Unless you are a Wall Street banker of course.

And while the rules don't address Twitter and Facebook specifically, the same should apply in those media as well. While we're at it, white papers should also denote when something is done for pay. When I was in the analyst game, I insisted that any white paper I put my name on be only what I wanted to write. Otherwise, the company could have the paper but leave my name off of it. Even with creative control, I still told the audience that it was a sponsored paper. Despite my best efforts, I still couldn't be sure that my client didn't exert some influence that created a conflict of interest. Not in a nefarious manner mind you. It's just that relying on someone for your livelihood can change your perspective even if you are not aware of it.

So, I'm glad for the new rules. It's sad that we need the government to remind us of our ethical duty. It's unfortunate that we can't trust what we read. Too bad. But until the day comes that all people are perfect, I'm glad to see my government taking a stand and insisting on good behavior for our citizens. Thanks FTC.

Green Clouds and Other Sickening Stuff

Last week I rented a car from Hertz that was supposed to be a “Green Collection” car. Since it was a Ford Fusion, I assumed they meant the Ford Fusion Hybrid. Hybrids are green. This car, however, was not a hybrid. It was a plain old Ford Fusion. I read the fine print and discovered that Hertz defines green as “ fuel efficient, environmentally-friendly cars”. The cars are all EPA rated at 28 mpg but no one gets that with normal driving. Now, a mid-sized sedan that got 23 miles to the gallon on average doesn't seem all that green to me. My fairly large crossover does better (and is rated better ) than that.

Which brings me to my latest pet peeve - meaningless and overused marketing terms that appear to have real meaning. Like “lite”, both green and cloud computing are overused and under defined. Both have come to mean almost anything some slick Willy marketeer wants them to mean.

Green, in the case of Hertz cars, doesn't mean really environmentally friendly. It means not as unfriendly as some other cars. Sort of a “we stink less” kind of promise. That's not what most people understand green to mean. Ask anyone what green is and they will tell you that it somehow helps or enhances the environment, like clean energy.

And all you computer geeks out there should not get too uppity since we have the same problem with cloud computing (and green computing for that matter). Steve Duplessie of ESG has the best definition of cloud computing that I have seen to date. He described it as a strategy for utilization and purchasing. That sentiment is a good description but drives product managers apoplectic. When you sell servers, storage, or software (or increasingly all three) you can't get people to buy a strategy. You need customers to buy stuff. Real stuff. Stuff that can be shipped in a box. You can't ship strategy.

So the response is to slap the word cloud on everything from hardware to software to services. Like green, it's meant to make people feel virtuous about buying something. I buy some VMWare software and slap it on a “cloud capable” server and I doing the cloud thing! Aren't I smart. I buy some offsite storage like Amazon S3 or rent a piece of software from Google instead of buying it and I'm the cloud king! Woo hoo!

There are two outcomes for this type of overheated terminology. One, sooner or later folks wise up and start to get annoyed at the labels, even when they are useful labels. Second, they get confused and stop buying the stuff we need to sell to stay in business. We came perilously close to that with SAN and NAS ten years ago and “Web 2.0” almost became a dirty word. Everyone get hurt when we do this sort of thing.

Here's my rules of thumb regarding marketing terms:

1. When one term can mean many different things, it's a bad term.

2. If you need white papers to simply describe what you mean, it's a bad term.

3. If you start to see a term everywhere even where you shouldn't, it's a bad term. Or at least has jumped the shark.

4. If you ask five people what something means and get three different answers, it's a bad term.

5. If VC's are investing in something with that term, it's a bad term. Just kidding about the VC's. We love you guys. Give us money!

What I'm waiting on now is Pond Computing. You know, green and cloudy.

FCoE is Rubbish

I'm beginning to understand the debate about the Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FcoE) concept and I don't like it. At first it made little sense to me. iSCSI delivered most of what we needed in terms of cheap SANs. It leveraged the IP infrastructure already in place in just about every organization in the world. iSCSI also made use of 40 years of experience, knowledge, and training. For high performance you went with Fiber Channel since iSCSI couldn't meet the very high loads of some systems. Otherwise, iSCSI was good enough for a lot of applications.

So why FCoE? The cost structure is likely to be higher than iSCSI or at best the same. The performance wouldn't be the same as pure FC. The idea that you need a gateway to the IP network doesn't really make sense to me either. Who really does that anyway? A few folks doing long distance SANs perhaps but there are tools for that and cost is not a big problem in those environments. You can always gateway to iSCSI if needed and the hardware for that already exists.

Then it occurred to me. It's marketing, stupid! When networking vendors such as Cisco go out and sell their SAN products, they are generally on the same footing as the FC players like Brocade. Brocade has more experience and knowledge about SANs which translates into an advantage for them. They also know the storage folks inside large companies that network vendors don't. Those storage guys like having their own flavor of network technology. It keeps the network admins out of their shorts.

Now, FCoE starts to make sense. You can sell IT on convergence or native integration or unified platforms or whatever marketing babble you choose. It is hoped that management will rally around the idea of having one networking platform even for two different types of network applications. Don't kid yourself, SANs and LANs are very different network applications with very different technology needs.

Best of all, as a networking vendor you have the upper hand in the sale. You can insert your champions (the core networking folks) into the process. You can sell expertise that the FC guy doesn't have. The worst case scenario has you on equal footing to the FC vendor where you can sell on the merits of the products. Of course, with 30 more years of experience in Ethernet, you will have a few tricks up your sleeve that the FC guy doesn't. Nice position to be in.

FCoE as a convergence/integration/unified platform play is rubbish. No one is going to run SAN traffic and LAN traffic over the same Ethernet network. It will still be two pools of equipment, much of it specialized to FCoE. Most of the real networking expertise in a company is in the IP space so no real advantage there. Once you start to install the specialized FCoE switches and NICs (or brand new unified platforms using a forklift I imagine) the costs won't be that much different.

iSCSI makes sense in so far as it provides a low cost SAN option for low to mid-performance SANs. Old fashioned FC makes sense because it provides a proven high performance storage networking capability for intense applications. FCoE does neither. All it does is give networking vendors a leg up against existing FC vendors.

Great marketing I must admit. Not convincing technology but a good way to position SANs as just another network flavor. If there is a technology advantage here it doesn't seem to create much of a business advantage for the IT folks.

I'm sure I'll get a bunch of hate mail telling me all the minor advantages of FCoE, many from corporate mouthpieces. Instead of wasting your time on that, tell me why someone will pay money for FCoE rather than iSCSI or FC. Tell me why we need to gateway SANs from FC to Ethernet which can't be routed and hence not good for wide area applications like remote backup.

Don't go down the road of the unified platforms either. Saying you need FCoE to create unified networks is not true and, at best, self serving. Unified platforms happen because of software not Ethernet.

Just don't say convergence, okay.

Twitter is Doomed

Twitter is doomed.

You have to admit. As far as opening statements go, that one is pretty provocative. Granted, it's an overstatement for dramatic effect. To be fair, it should only read “Twitter may be doomed.”

Social networks are different from other forms of Internet-based communication or content. Most media rely on the entire Internet not one service. Email down? Use a different account. It's exactly the same. Same for IM. As long as everyone has access it doesn't matter which you use. Web content in general is usually available in more than one place. If Hulu is ill today, you can still watch your shows on CBS.com. MSNBC out of commission? Try CNN.com, NYTIMES.com or any of thousands of news outlets. And so on. There is a lot of redundancy in content and service and one is as good as another.

With social networks, the value is in the network. Not what it does but who it does. Facebook matters because of your Facebook Friends. If Facebook is down, then you can't update your network. You don't care if you update the world. It's the Facebook crowd that matters. Twitter is like this too.

Which brings us to why it is likely doomed. It's down all the time. As in several times a week. Stuff you want to Tweet (as posting to Twitter is called) is meant to go to your Twitter followers and they are waiting for it. There is no alternative since each social network is different. If all the networks was the same, folks would choose only one since you'd see the same content all the time. Even if you post the same thing on different social networks you are addressing different networks of people. Sure there is overlap but not complete and total. Everything else is interchangeable on the Internet since the Internet has 100% overlap. You can always find a substitute. With social networks it is unlikely that you will achieve anywhere that amount of overlap.

The final nail in the coffin comes about because, at some point in time, Twitter has to make money. If enough people get annoyed at the constant outages the value of Twitter over other social media will diminish to the point that the critical mass they need to attract advertisers will evaporate. No money means no Twitter. Twitter is (maybe) doomed.

In fact, the first to go will be the corporate types most likely to want to tie ads to their tweets. Once it reverts back to a handful of teenagers talking about what they had for lunch, no one (not even people who make lunch meat for teenagers) will be there to advertise.

The microblog format is clearly something people want. It just doesn't have to be Twitter. It could just as easily be Facebook, Google, or Microsoft. Which is exactly what it will be if Twitter doesn't deal with the downtime. Maybe Twitter is a victim of its own success. Could be that it is collapsing under the weight of the number of people who like it. None of that matters. People are not that forgiving. Either it gets fixed or Twitter is toast.

How Accountants Ruin Customer Experience and Other Cautionary Tales

I am always amazed at how smart people can make stupid products. The quickest path to bad products is not bad engineers though. It's good engineers listening to accountants, especially cost accountants. Don't get me wrong, accountants are themselves usually good people and pretty smart. They just see the world in a certain way, as a giant spreadsheet. Make a cost number smaller, the bottom line gets bigger. Makes sense but not for customer experience.

A case in point is the new ATM at my local bank ( HSBC – “The world's local bank”). For the past 30 years, since the dawn of the ATM, these awesome machines have accepted deposit envelopes. While I am the first to admit it stinks to be stuck behind someone in line who didn't fill out the envelope before walking up to the machine (why is that anyway?), envelopes serve an important purpose in the deposit process.

• They keep everything nicely bundled. This way you don't have checks floating around your car or flying away in the breeze.

• They keep your deposit protected. Envelopes help make sure your money does not get crumpled, twisted, folded, spindled, or mutilated.

• Envelopes aggregate your checks into one transaction. One envelope, one action. Done.
  

Given that envelopes are an important part of the customer experience when depositing at an ATM, why in the name of all that is intelligent in the universe would you eliminate them. Why indeed but HSBC has done just that. Their new ATMs will not give you an envelope and the machine will not accept one. So instead of taking my five checks as a unit I have to feed them in one at a time. Cash has to be fed in separately as well. The result – lousy customer experience. Here's the result:

• It takes as many times longer to feed checks into the machine as there are checks. Five checks? Five times as long. Nice.

• I am sure to have a check get away from me to be lost in the breeze or trashed in a way that the machine will not be able to process it. Thanks for the paranoia. As if I didn't have enough of that from banks.

• Since it will take longer to process deposits, the folks behind me in line are bound to be more annoyed. Or have more opportunity to rob me. Now that's looking out for your customers HSBC!

• I have to press a bunch more buttons raising the chance that I will make a mistake and have to spend more time correcting it or, more likely, start over. (Okay, for you statistics weenies out there – the chance is not higher, just the incidence since the number of tries is higher. You knew what I meant!)

• Given all of that, more people will now go into the branch, overwhelming the few tellers left leading to even longer lines and delays. I get goosebumps thinking of that one.

• I now have more incentive to take money out than to put money in. Huh? Don't banks need money going in faster than out... oh forget about it. It's too stupid for words.

Why would HSBC be so willing to wreck the customer experience of a technology that benefits them as much as it does the customer? Accountants, that's why. No matter what they might say (“Our research shows that customers like to punch buttons until they have carpal tunnel syndrome.”) this is an obvious attempt to not pay for envelopes. Someone in the bank calculated that so many pennies per transaction will be saved by eliminating envelopes. It probably never even occurred to them how it would negatively effect customers. That doesn't show up on the ledger sheet right away.

One more thing this requires to happen though – a gutless vendor. Likely scenario:

HSBC Bank: “Can you make an ATM that doesn't use envelopes?”

Diebold (ATM maker) : Sure! With out new optical scanning technology we can have customers feed checks in without an envelope. They will then be scanned with 98% accuracy!”

HSBC Bank: “Great! Let's do it.”

as opposed to:

HSBC Bank: “Can you make an ATM that doesn't use envelopes?”

Diebold: “Um. Are you sure? I mean, won't that really annoy your customers?”

HSBC Bank: “Well, how so?”

Diebold: “Where to start? Okay..”

ten minutes later...

Diebold: “and we would be making it easier for people to take money out and harder to put it in. You being a bank and all, they doesn't sound like your business model.”

HSBC Bank: “Holy CDO! Um. Forget we ever asked. And remember, this conversation was under NDA. Whew.”

So remember folks – the best vendor is the one willing to tell you what you don't want to hear even at the risk of a sale. That is the vendor that would not let you walk off the HSBC cliff. Also remember that the customer experience generates revenue. Never, ever even look to cut costs there. That is the path to destruction. Spend money there even if it means cutting executive salaries.

Tweeted by Well Meaning EMC People

The problem with expressing oneself in 140 characters or less is that it doesn't provide an opportunity for clarity. This is why Twitter can be frustrating at times. Folks can't quite get your message. Not because there is something wrong with them but because of the limitations of the media. You have to learn how to operate within the restrictions of the form and still get across what you mean. It's like Haiku. You have to learn how to do it and I'm still learning.

So it was when I commented on the announcements for EMC's newest Symmetrix V-Max. I received a number of replies to my Tweets that defended the new architecture. Looking back, I'm sure that I was not clear nor that we could have a meaningful dialog about the technical aspects of V-Max. It was my bad for trying to make this type of point in the Twitter medium.

See, my problem wasn't with V-Max at all but the way it was announced. I complained about the video of the EMC executives, I complained about the web site description, I complained about the datasheet, and I complained about the blogs that pretty much reiterated what was on the other three. Here's why.

They said almost nothing of value.

I get that the V-Max architecture is somehow great for virtual server environments. The name alone told me that (good name by the way – huzzah to product management). So what? Lots of folks claim that. How does it do that? Even if you could tell me how (which is what most of the EMCers want to do), it still doesn't tell me why I should care. I'm left to ponder the Why.

That is, in nutshell, the core problem. All products and marketing have to pass the “Who Cares?” test. What serious problem do I have that this solves? What is so compelling about this product that I need to run out and buy it? Given my ever shrinking budget and staff, why does this doo hickey deserve a precious slice of my time and money? I don't get that from the EMC marketing.

The other thing marketing has to do is grab my attention so you want to listen to the “Who cares” message. This is not a gentle tap on the shoulder but a grabbing by the ears and shaking kind of thing. It doesn't have to be cute or loud or include music by nearly dead old rock stars. It has to be compelling. Even if you want to turn away, somehow you can't. Like an accident on the highway.

The product marketing for the launch of V-Max fails in this capacity. It is the same old formula. Have the executives get up there and make grand but vague statements followed up by bland and vague marketing literature. This doesn't even work for Steve Jobs anymore and he is as close to a rock star as this industry has. The EMC video, for example, almost looks like a parody of a computer commercial. The white background with the executive talking head is too much like a Mac vs. PC commercial but without the Mac. Actually, if they had made a parody, like the Microsoft parody of the Volkswagen commercial some time back, it would have been much more effective.

Check out the data sheet. It is a nine page white paper full of more hyperbole than this blog. Other than the claim to be able to scale to petabytes (an old claim that everyone makes) and that it supports a variety of disk types (like everyone), it's hard to pick out anything concrete from the first few pages.

I am sure that none of this matters to the EMC faithful. Current customers will bypass all this and get the message direct from their sales rep. EMC sales reps do a great job of connecting technology and features to real world problems. Potential customers on the other hand will see little here that makes them pick up the phone and call EMC. They will say to themselves “So what?” not “Holy storage problems Batman, we need one of those for the Batcave computer!”

So, before all the technical folks tweet me to death, it's not about the technology, it's about the marketing. It's tired. I know you don't want to hear that, especially when your best customers are going out of business, but you need to hear it. You can choose to chalk it up to one cranky, uninformed, blogger. On the other hand, you can see it as a wake up call to find better ways to market your products in tough times. Hopefully to find new customers to replace the ones that have evaporated in the recession.

Start with “The new V-Max will allow you to cut costs and operate with reduced staff by....” You can finish off that line. Then I will care.

Just When I Was Losing Hope

This has been a week of marketing hell. First, we get an ER episode on Hulu about the dangers of teenage drinking attached to an ad selling flavored vodka (thanks again Absolut). Then, I had to wrangle with Northwest Airlines in what has to be the single most frustrating customer service situation imaginable. They actually told me that they wouldn't assign me seats so that they could accommodate people “who don't plan ahead”. That's a direct quote. They penalize me for planning ahead so that they can accommodate people who don't. Sounds twisted. It's also probably not true. I think they want to sell me a more expensive seat.

But then, just when all hope is lost, I am reminded again what good marketing can be like. My reminder came via Marc Farley's StorageRap. For those who don't know Marc, he has been around the data storage industry for a long time. He knows his stuff technically (I have had the privilege of working with Marc on some projects) and has published several excellent books. But that is only part of the story. Marc works for 3PAR, one of the millions of storage array vendors out there. He creates some truly imaginative Internet marketing pieces under the StorageRap moniker. StorageRap combines animation, YouTube like amateur video, humor, music, blogging, and Twitter feeds to get the 3Par message out. The League of Suspicious Avatars and the Steering Wheel Cam are two neat constructs that Marc uses to accomplish the marketing mission.

Sometimes it's weird, maybe even a bit obscure (like the bit on chunklets). That fine because it is also eye catching and memorable. The latest video, talking about 3PAR's F Class arrays, is a classic. It uses hip hop and animation in a sort of video game way. Imagine Weird Al Yankovic combined with 50 Cent and living inside an Xbox game. Out there? Sure. It is supposed to get my attention and succeeds brilliantly. I even bothered to look up the F Class array because of it. I don't know if it meets all the claims on the web site but if I was buying arrays, I would probably call to find out (Message to 3PAR sales guys – I'm not buying any arrays. Don't waste time calling me).

That's what good marketing is about. Not only does it grab your attention but it holds it long enough that you can get the message. Ultimately, good marketing compels you to at least consider the product in question.

So in an age of horrible, irresponsible, offensive, ugly marketing that only seems to want to make you run screaming from the room, StorageRap is refreshing. Too bad the 3PAR palate is so small. Then again, at an EMC or IBM, would Marc be allowed to be this interesting and creative. I doubt it.

In a crowded field of very similar looking products, 3PAR stands out and gets our attention through superior marketing. I don't know what they pay Marc, but it isn't nearly enough for the value he creates.

Now, I want to know how he creates those cool avatars...