Barcode Marketing I - Promotional Opportunities

In this week’s Internet marketing class I played a Tesco ad that plugged both barcode marketing and Tesco’s new app, which has social shopping potential. The ad is fun, but it doesn’t emphasize the social aspect.



Consider this quote from Tesco’s agency:

Let’s say that three of your friends had bought tickets to [a concert] and advertised the fact on Facebook. Wouldn’t it be beneficial to receive an alert letting you know that they would be going to the concert and offering you the chance to buy your own ticket? This is a simple extension of current functionality but already the end user is having their possible needs preempted.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? You might want to read the post for some other ideas including the possibility that your friend Susan might be getting a cold. That one sort of creeps me out.

It will be interesting to see where Tesco goes with the social shopping aspect. They’ve experienced privacy push-back before, so they may proceed with caution. What most interested me about the video, though, was the happy consumers shopping with their smart phones in various settings.

A recent chart from eMarketer shows shoppers using their smart phones for a variety of purposes. Looking for deals is high on the list. Here’s a Reuters video that talks about the marketing implications of Tesco’s barcode app. So barcode marketing, which is essentially promotional, is clearly a growing marketing activity. Who are the enablers?

There are numerous agencies out there that develop mobile promotions (search ‘mobile shopping agency,’ for example). I was interested in DIY barcode promotions, so I kept looking. I found this really interesting case study. A mobile agency headquartered in Portland, Oregon hosted an art exhibit in their own space to test aspects of barcode promotions. They attached a barcode to each piece of art and encouraged viewers to scan them for information about the artist.

By now I had several barcode scanners on my iPhone, so I tried them all. None worked, so I made the correct assumption that I had to download the app from StickyBits in order to read them. That was only the beginning of my annoyance.

It’s a free app on iTunes. No problem there. It wanted me to sign in with Facebook Connect, which I don’t do. I don’t know whether my friends are interested in this stuff, and I don’t want to bug them. That proves I’m old, I know, but I just don’t use it. So I set up an account with StickyBits, no unusual information requested, but annoying on a smart phone. Then after a couple of other now-typical screens—Can I send you push info? No. Can I use your current location? Yes, although that could be a mistake from a privacy perspective.

Having satisfied those screens my scanner was operational and I scanned one of the artworks. The amount of information was disappointingly small. Yes, I know this was a test, but they could have made it more useful to the artists. The test performed as expected, though. Relatively few of the attendees used the barcodes and the ones who did were relatively young and computer-savvy. Read the post for yourself: it’s quite interesting and you can just click on the works of art featured to see the information provided (and consider the possibilities) and to see how few people scanned them.

I see another important lesson from the TenFour case study. Using a bar code format that isn’t recognized by the best-known barcode readers is going to present a problem. The user can prominently post the download link, but it still will probably inhibit use. My phone is already cluttered with apps—how about yours?

My investigation took me down many other paths looking for an answer to a basic DIY question, “Can businesses/non-profits do this for themselves without an agency?” The answer is “yes,” and I’ll follow up on that in a forthcoming post.

Location-Based Marketing 1--Basics

It seems to me that location-based marketing happened during the summer while I was taking time off from blogging. That’s not quite true, but it suggests how fast this phenomenon has taken hold.

When I first heard about Foursquare (from my students of course!) my first reaction was, “Why do I want anyone to know where I am at a given moment??” My second was that I’m not a twenty- or thirty-something out on the town on Friday evening! I got that. It took me awhile to realize that this was potentially a better option than the mobile couponing campaigns I had been writing about (for example, Ford local campaign; mobile trends). Foursquare and the others provide platforms that provide functionality and reach users.

Foursquare and Gowalla are the two largest location platforms. At the risk of oversimplifying, Foursquare looks to be very attractive to retailers who want to run a specific promotion. Gowalla seems to be attracting venues that want something long-term as suggested by Disney’s recent deal with Gowalla. There are many other smaller and/or more specialized platforms. This short slideshow identifies them and does a good job of explaining their similarities and differences. This space got a big boost in August when Facebook introduced its Places application, making it easy for marketers to tap into the huge Facebook population.

10 Lesser Known Social Platforms and How Businesses Can Use Them

View more presentations from Erica Swallow.

The importance of location-based marketing is emphasized by Chief Marketer:

• 37% of customers who searched for a local business in ’09 ended up visiting the store in person (TMP & comScore, October 2009) • Local search currently represents half of all mobile search ad revenue (Kelsey Group, September 2009) • Younger generations embrace mobile in staggering numbers; 97 million 5-29 year-olds in the U.S., 281 million in India and 255 million in China currently have mobile accounts (The Mobile Youth Report, 2010)

They emphasize the ties between search and location-based marketing: “Search teams should be sure to capitalize on these online-to-offline strategies to capture local visibility and in-store traffic.”

Leading-edge marketers are already onboard. Sports Authority has conducted several promotions on Foursquare, including one on Black Friday, and says, "We like the ROI on the things we've been doing on Foursquare." CNN describes some of the other Black Friday action.

My favorite for sheer marketing creativity is KLM’s recent foray, which is “spreading happiness.” When a passenger checks in on Foursquare, the KLM marketing team uses other social networks to find out about the passenger’s “likes” and about her trip. They use that data to provide a surprise to the passenger and take a photo of the surprised traveler.

The KLM team has surprised travellers with champage, notebooks, a watch, and traditional Dutch foods. One passenger, Willem van Hommel, was going to miss one of his soccer team’s most important matches of the year due to his trip to New York. KLM surprised him with a Lonely Planet guide to New York with all the best soccer bars in the city marked out for him. Another traveller, Tobias Hootsen, was surprised with a package to remind him of home during his long stay abroad.

I checked out the KLM Facebook page. The wall page had the usual flight complaints with speedy responses from KLM. One “surprised” passenger wanted to get a copy of the picture taken in the airport. Actually, it’s right there. There’s a link to the photo album on the wall page and it’s what you get when you click through on “what happened” on the promo announcement. As you might guess, the promo is also big on the I Love KLM page with another link to the photo album. Good follow up and I suspect they are integrating it with other media like Twitter. The downside is suggested by an article that uses the word “spies” in the headline, which is actually quite favorable when you read it. I didn’t see any privacy complaints on the KLM site. Wonder if that’s partially due to the fact that KLM already had an app that allows passengers to make a luggage tag with their picture on it? In any event, it’s a cool app and taken together, it signifies a company that’s deeply involved in location-based marketing.

Mashable has a good post with 9 steps for the marketer who is new to location-based marketing. A lot of the steps are not new to regular readers of this blog. Setting clear marketing objectives and monitoring are critical, for example. One that is especially important is 4 Customize. Each of the platforms offers different opportunities to engage visitors like the badges that can be earned on Foursquare. The marketer must understand the options.

There are other examples and strategy approaches. I’ll write about those in a few days when Cyber Monday calms down and we see what’s happened during these hectic shopping days!

The White House Joins the App Craze

It’s been a political week, so I might as well end the week on a political note. The White House must have been reading eMarketer also; it announced its own app on Tuesday.

The eMarketer newsletter (January 21, 2010) quoted a study by DM@PRO and Quattro Wireless that has a lot more good data on building and promoting apps. If you’re the White House, promotion isn’t that much of a problem, but the reasons for the app certainly apply. Think about it; they pretty much boil down to ‘it’s where our customers are’ and ‘it’s gotten a lot easier.’

I downloaded The White House app and it works as promised. Plenty of photos and videos; access to the White House blog, which is pretty informative. Apparently I can watch the State of the Union speech streamed live next week. After just a few days the reviews on the App Store are pretty good. It’s clean and quick and those who have used the streaming say the speed is good. Only real complaint I saw is that it’s not compatible with the first generation iPod, but to be fair, it says that on the store page. I’m a huge fan of the first dog, so I choose a screen capture that included him. The White House furnished several screen captures—they know quite a bit about promotion—and you can see more on Huffington Post.

The study says that Facebook is still the most popular venue for apps with 45% of the marketers surveyed having developed Facebook apps. iPhone comes in second with 42%. Our own site or community comes in third at only 36%. How do you choose? According to eMarketer:

Engagement was the top reason to choose either mobile or social as an app platform, but social sites were perceived as better for many top goals, including engagement, audience targeting, sharing and branding potential, and reach. Mobile scored higher on creative control and persistence.

Interesting! I recently ran across a Facebook app that lets you send a newsletter from your page—sort of. According to Nutshell Mail, you can “Automatically send the latest feeds from your page to your fans' email inboxes.” Not for me, thank you. It’s worth looking at, though, just to see what’s possible.

There are at least two take-aways here:

1. Apps are still in their early days and marketers are finding more creative, and even useful, ways to use them. Think branding, think pushing your message out to people who have indicated willingness to receive it.
2. Mobile is finally here, although it still has a lot of room for development and growth. Think about the moms described yesterday who are using smart phones to manage their lives, shopping included. Retailers were urged to take heed. Brand markets are also.

What’s next for The White House? mobile.WhiteHouse.gov, according to the blog.

What’s next for this app user? While I was looking for this one, I found a camcorder app that is getting pretty good reviews for 3G users who don’t want to spend the money for a 3GS. At $.99, the app is a much better buy. What else does that say about today’s mobilized world?

Google Wave--Killer App for Collaboration?

A student recently posted this link with an interesting application of Google Wave—thanks, Jeff! It reminded me that I needed to try to understand this new Google product. It’s still in preview, not yet in publicly-available beta, so if you want to try it, you have to request an invitation. As of mid-December Mashable said there were about a million users. The slow rollout limits the usefulness of a collaborative tool, but there’s quite a bit of buzz on the web about bugs and general difficulty of use. “Take it easy” seems to be a reasonable approach and Google makes it clear that they will get invitations out as they think the system is ready.

In Google-speak Wave is “equal parts conversation and document,” it is completely shared with all participants, and it takes place in real time. Google’s Dr. Wave explains and demonstrates. The video is better on the Google site, where it’s embedded in a use example (clever of them!), than on YouTube where you can’t see what “Dr. Wave” is pointing at.

Here’s a more fully populated example from Mashable. Mashable people have written extensively about Wave, although the link to their Complete Guide is broken at this writing.

Google says Wave can be used to arrange events, collaborate on projects, share photos, share meeting notes, brainstorm and play interactive games. Ok, but that’s not only generic, it’s more consumer than business oriented. Howard Greenstein has an excellent post on Mashable. It suggests potential business uses and gives a hypothetical example of a team preparing a client pitch from multiple locations. His conceptualization of modes of use is especially helpful, and there are other useful links at the bottom of the post.

Can Wave replace email and other collaborative tools like wikis? That’s not yet clear, but it’s clearly worth keeping an eye on—perhaps giving it a trial when it becomes more widely available!

Augmented Reality meets Social Media meets the Christmas Holidays!

Augmented Reality has been getting a fair amount of attention lately. As Business Week puts it, brands are looking for new ways to engage their customers. Dorian Benkoil, writing in Poynter Online, has more intriguing examples and visions of the future. Can you believe the USPS now has an augmented reality app that lets you identify the correct box size for your item? Even more to the point, can you believe they have an excellent video that shows how it works? Since I don’t consider the USPS a hotbed of innovation, I found it difficult! Watch the video and see for yourself.

Stella Artois, the Belgian beer brand, announced an ecard yesterday that seems to combine the best features of AR and social media. Of course it’s a Christmas card! And it hits all the right notes, especially for the social media enthusiast!









• It’s fun and engaging.
• It’s carefully thought out. To get full benefit the recipient needs a webcam or smart phone to read the digital marker. If there’s not one available, it is viewable as a Flash ecard.
• It’s cause-related marketing. Each card sent will result in a tree saved in an ecologically-important area in South America.
• A live webcam in Hyde Park shows a tree with a light for each card sent. The goal is 1 million cards, 1 million trees saved, by Christmas.



Their video shows how the card works. If you view it with a webcam, you can move the picture around and you can move the snowflakes by blowing into your pc's mic.

What’s not to like about all of that? Congratulations to Stella Artois for the strategy and Bright Spark Digital for the execution! It’s not only cool technology, the spirit fits the season!

Widgets for Content Distribution

My fascination with widgets has been documented from the early days. About a year ago I wrote about Google gadgets and suggested that marketers check them out and see how they work; they can be DIY. If you search widgets on the blog search bar at the top of the page, you’ll find more widget posts, most about marketing campaigns that have a widget component.

Whatever you call it—and Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing term is one of my favorites—marketers have to get the word out and bring people back to their website (or blog) for information or action. For most websites, search is primary in generating traffic. Another important way to bring traffic to your site is to get content out with links back to your site. Widgets are perfect for that; see the McKinsey widget on the sidebar of this site.

Last week’s post on applications and widgets emphasized some of the large players in the space. Can a small blog/a small website use this technology cost-effectively? The answer is “yes.” “Free” is more difficult.

This aspect of the subject came to mind when I received an email from Wowzio.com about a new hosted widget service that’s the brainchild of former Yahoo! social media and software powerhouses. I was interested and checked it out. They have a good explanation of white-labeled widgets. It’s a hosted service, so there are charges. It’s still in Beta, so they are offering free services for personal blogs. I took advantage of their offer, requested and invitation, and took the widgets for a trial run.

The way it works is simple. You provide your blog or website address. They make some connections on the back end and send you a link to your widget page. At present, they have six widget templates from which to choose, as the graphic shows. The “Customize This” link leads you to a page that lets you size the widget and choose background colors. Then it gives you embed code. Even better if you have a blog on a standard platform like Blogger or Typepad, you simply click the button for the platform and it inserts the chosen widget on your blog. Then you configure the sidebar content as you want it. I tried tag cloud and live activity widgets and they showed up on my blog, just as Wowzio said it would. Look at the right sidebar; they are interesting, fun to look at. The content distribution issue is that, if you want to Grab This widget, you can put it on your own blog or website, just like I put the McKinsey widget on mine. Your content has just been made available to readers/visitors of other sites!

I was intrigued, so I asked for an invitation for the natural history blog I edit. It has many beautiful images, so the photo gallery widget was an obvious choice. It’s lovely, but it’s far enough down on the sidebar that it’s below the bottom of some posts, meaning many readers may not see it. I need to work on the sidebar design more and see if I can move it up further without decreasing some of the important subscription and search items—all of which are widgets of one kind or another!

Wowzio enters a space similar to other app platforms like Kick Apps, which has been around for awhile. They have a lot of explanation about how it works and there’s a link for pricing at the bottom of the home page that gives you an idea of what these services run. I don’t see doing this one myself. It really would take a developer, but from what I’ve seen that would be a one-time cost of a few thousand dollars, depending on your location (and how busy free-lance developers are!). Wowzio doesn’t seem to have set a price for small business customers yet, but that will certainly be forthcoming.

The critical question for a small business is whether it’s worth a hosting fee—say $100—each month plus a developer if you need one to create the widget.

I think there’s a pretty simple answer. Do you have content that a clearly-defined target audience would like to include on their own blogs or websites? That would be content that is relevant, engaging and continuously updated.

If you have great content, you may be ready for a widget to distribute it. If you don’t, you need to be working on the content. Great content always comes first!

Kicked-Up Marketing with Apps

Ad Age hosted an Apps for Brands conference last week that produced some interesting advice and case histories. There’s no doubt that apps for Apple’s iPhone represents market leadership with, according to last week’s email, 75,000 apps and 2 billion downloads as of today (the CNET article says 85,000 apps; I took Apple’s word for it). To marketers a more interesting issue is what other firms are doing in the space since few of us have a brand that can attract developers like the iPhone.

First, a couple of layperson’s definitions. An app (application) is software designed for end users. A widget is a graphical interface that allows users to interface (easily) with the application. In practice, the two are often indistinguishable from one another, since marketers are delivering a lot of apps, especially the mobile ones, as widgets. Examples from the conference include:





The Kraft iFood Assistant













Bank of America Mobile Banking















Benjamin Moore’s Catch-a-Color








Ad Age advises that apps must be real time and easy to use and to pay for if not free. They point out that people will pay for value if the apps are useful enough. They also point out that people are even more annoyed by intrusive advertising in the mobile environment than on the desktop as Major League Baseball found out. On mobile, click-through isn't the only metric that matters. Are people recommending your app? Or trashing it on Twitter? "We measure click-throughs, but we don't measure pissed off," said Mr. Bowman, referring to when MLB put an intrusive ad into its At Bat app.

They also point out that apps need to be part of an integrated marketing message, although people are most likely to learn about apps by WOM. Their recipe for success is utility, frequency and viral. Good advice.

Each of the apps above has a demo page; they are all worth looking at. The Benjamin Moore color app clearly wins the prize for most creative, but the other two offer genuinely useful services, and that’s really what it’s all about. The three firms above are all trying to sell a product or a service. Only Kraft charges; 99 cents. The MLB At Bat app (see it on their home page) is $4.99 at the Apple App Store; they are offering a value-added service. Make sense?

But is this another strategy that’s only for corporations with big advertising budgets? Not necessarily—more about that in a few days.

LinkedIn Polls--Uses and Abuses

People have been sending me polls lately. When I see them on news sites, I often don’t answer them. When someone goes to the trouble of emailing it to me, I often do. That said, I can’t remember who sent me a LinkedIn poll about the virtues of advertising during a recession but I answered it, checked to my answer against others (a minority position, I’m sorry to say), then started thinking.
I remembered answering one or two when CNBC partnered with LinkedIn last fall to do what I thought was going to be a daily business poll. CNBC is still doing them, but not regularly. I have the TV set to CNBC several hours most weekdays, and I haven’t heard about them in quite awhile. I don’t see anything on their home page. Do they publicize the polls in daily news alerts? At all? I don’t know.

The Poll app seems to be first cousin to the LinkedIn Answers app (I think you have to be signed in to see both). Either one can be put on your LinkedIn profile page. The Answers page is personalized to interests of the user, presumably issues listed on the user profile. Note that a question about online promotion/advertising by John Batelle is the Featured question on my page when I checked it (clearly they know it’s me; the profile picture is a nice touch to point out that you are identified, non anonymous).
Note that if you want to set up a polling option you can send it to your own network free. If you want to use LinkedIn’s targeting options, you have to upgrade to Premium membership. I didn’t try it because a question to the lovely people in my network “just to see if the app worked” seemed quite spammy to me.

Is this more than just fun and games, social media style? Maybe.

If you have a serious question that matches the expertise of people in your network, it’s worth asking. I would be more inclined to use the Answers app than the Poll for a serious question, so respondents could explain their reasoning.

Can the polls simply be used as an engagement device—clearly the intention of people who have emailed them to me recently? Maybe, but I don’t think you ought to push that unless you have a consistent stream of REALLY INTERESTING questions, and that’s hard. The email I received from a news site asked me to answer the daily poll and to suggest questions. Engaging, but also a suggestion that they don’t have a bright idea for every day! I also ran across a blogger who was annoyed by getting the same poll two days in a row, although my guess is that it was an opt-in. Good point anyway. The rule should be “engage, not annoy.” Where do you draw the line for your own target audience?

I guess I come down on the side of this being a better technique for a specific answer to a professional question than as an ongoing engagement device, whatever your target audience. I have no issue with polls on your page, website, whatever—anywhere they are not intrusive. When you email them to people, they become intrusive, and caution is urged!

Online Content Sharing - The New WOM

The company responsible for the ubiquitous ShareThis icon (see the bottom of this post) has just released a study called “The Ins and Outs of Online Sharing.” The study, conducted by Forrester, provides some fascinating insights into content sharing on the web. Let me give you some of the study highlights.


Who Shares?

A majority of Internet users do share. Interestingly, more adults share email. Not surprisingly, youth (13 to 17) do more sharing of other media types. Are you using videos, wikis (that one surprises me; are there wikis that reach young people, or is it just Wikipedia?), and walls/discussion boards to reach young people?


What Do They Share?
Just read down the list. They share a lot of things! And the only content area where there’s a large difference between adults and young people is the entertainment category. That’s not surprising; how similar adults and youth are in the sharing of other types of content is. Are you providing the kinds of content that your audience most desires?

How Do They Share? Adults mostly use email. Young people share through IM, mobile, and their social networks. That’s hardly a revelation. But marketers need to think about their audience and how they want to share information. Are you making it easy for your audience to share content?


Why Do They Share? Read this one carefully—people share because they want to help others. (I’ve seen/heard that before, especially in discussions of travel sites where you can share experiences.) It’s an overriding motivation, and it doesn’t differ much between adults and youth. Users also share because they’ve found shared information useful, to share information about product quality, and just simply to show their enthusiasm. Wow—the top 4 reasons are positive. Dissatisfaction is number 5 and the incidence is much lower. Are you making it easy for customers to share their experiences with your product?

Is It Easy to Share? The good news is that it’s generally pretty easy. The number is well under 50% for most types of sharing. Youth experience more problems. That’s not surprising; they are sharing various types of media and that makes them more likely to run into problems. Are you removing obstacles that inhibit your audience from sharing?

The study also identified an intriguing segment—the Power Sharers. Power sharers use technology other than email to share content at least once a week. They also:

• Share with more people, regardless of the channel they are using
• Share different types of content more frequently
• Share for additional reasons. They are more likely to be motivated by community and by what the report characterizes as “self-expression.”
• Face more obstacles to sharing, especially lack of relevant contact information.

Pure and simple, these are opinion leaders. They’ve always existed and they’ve always been powerful. The Internet lets them exercise their particular expertise and passions in ways never before possible. It gives them the potential to reach more people than ever before.

Are you trying to identify opinion leaders and harness their enthusiasm in the service of your community?

Take another look at the Pickens Plan. I got an email from two individuals as soon as I joined; one was the regional coordinator. He’s being very quiet about how this now-sizeable community is being run, but I assume these people are volunteers. If I’m right, it’s an impressive harnessing of the enthusiasm and outreach of opinion leaders.

The report is lengthy and well interpreted. You can request a copy from Jeremy Bock at ShareThis.

These data remind me that Web 2.0 isn’t about technology. While Web 1.0 was about communication, Web 2.0 is coalescing around the concept of community. This study goes one step further in suggesting that we have to build those communities around (multi-media) content that is relevant to people’s lives (B2C) or work (B2B) and make it easy for people to interact around that content. People are voting with their Send, Forward, and ShareThis commands.

Are you letting them vote for your brand?

Prediction Markets Speed Innovation

When I wrote the post on Web 2.0 tools last week I noted with some satisfaction that I was familiar--through use or writing or both--with all the tools listed in the McKinsey chart except predictive markets. I thought that concept had something to do with finance and stock markets, and that was the initial focus. This paper seems to do a good job of summarizing the economic foundations of the concept. However, the article made it clear that the applications now extend beyond financial markets. I thought I ought to find out what the management and marketing implications were.

Still looking for the roots of the concept, I found a paper on an experiment at Google in what the economists called “information aggregation and revelation.” That was getting closer. This paper gives a number of interesting applications of prediction markets. One I thought was particularly interesting was the Iowa Electronic Markets, a University of Iowa project that conducts markets on elections as well as business topics like interest rates and corporate earnings. There’s lots of information on the site and you can register to participate if you like. Quoting another study, the Google paper comments that, “In the political domain, Berg, Forsythe, Nelson and Reitz (2001)summarize the evidence from the Iowa Electronic Markets, documenting that the market has both yielded very accurate predictions and also outperformed largescale polling organizations.” See pages 6 through 10 for their discussion of the accuracy of prediction markets. It’s impressive and certainly argues for “the wisdom of crowds.”

The authoritative article in the general media is a New York Times piece from this April. It discusses a variety of uses by major corporations from GE to Best Buy. I was especially taken by the InterContinental Hotels example. I know why it attracted me. All my work in customer service and database marketing makes clear that most companies do not tap the knowledge of their lower-level personnel in ways that can improve their business. The IHG project tapped their 1,000 technology staff in order to develop and prioritize ideas. They used software called IdeaPagent from the consultancy NewsFutures. Two hundred employees participated anonymously, submitting ideas that ranged from spectacularly awful to the basis for new corporate projects. They seem pleased with their experience and interested in other applications.

There are other fascinating examples in the NYT article, worth reading in its entirety. Prediction markets is not a new idea. However, it is one that seems to have been facilitated by Web 2.0 software tools. It’s not news to any of us that the pace of change has speeded up and we need to tap all possible sources of innovation. Prediction markets represent one way to speed successful innovations to market.

Now Facebook is a Cable Company?

When I began this blog, I didn't know much about Facebook and certainly didn't intend to write much about it. Almost a year later--like so many others young and not-so-young--I have a Facebook page. There are over 70 million of us according to the site itself. A couple of weeks ago I asked, only a bit facetiously whether Facebook was the hub of the (Internet) universe. You can answer that question as you wish, but it seems clear that Facebook is a metaphor for much that is happening in the Web 2.0 world. It has a grand vision to be even more.

Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook Vice President of Product Marketing, described them last week as the "cable company of the Internet." Here's the quote from CNET News:

"We view ourselves as a technology company at our core. We're the cable company creating the pipes, and what they carry is social information and engagement information about people."

To prove his point he quoted the following statistics, again according to CNET:

- The average time to build a Facebook app is between 2 and 15 weeks according to a Facebook survey
- It takes between 1 and 5 people to create the app
- At least 1/4 of the apps running on Facebook have 100,000 active daily users
- About 33% of app makers report profits of up to $500,000 each month.

About the same time Business Week (May 14) reported that the site is undergoing a major redesign to try to "declutter" Facebook pages and, in general, make it easier to use. It quotes Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief of Mashable.com, as saying that the proliferation of viral apps is making the pages look messy. He describes them as "spam in disguise." Aren't those the same Facebook apps that are bringing in as much as $500,000 a month in revenue?

That spotlights one of the quandries of Web 2.0--how do we give users free rein to do all the things they want to do and still maintain a reasonable degree of control--control over the content on our site, the visual aspect of our site, and the overall site experience?

Bruce Temkin, the head of the customer experience practice at Forrester, points out in the May 14 Business Week article that Facebook must strike a balance between entertainment and usability. "If you take the fun out of Facebook, you've got a big problem." What the site designers have to do is to restore simplicity while maintaining the features that users love. If they can do it, Temkin says the Facebook redesign could be a test case for "what happens at the next level of maturity for a lot of Web 2.0 companies,"

It appears that one solution the Facebook designers are considering is to provide tabs to organize different kinds of content. But it's not the specific solution they come up with, it's how they resolve the clutter problem in a way that doesn't turn off users.

Obviously, it's a problem many sites wish they had--too much activity, too much love! It's also obvious that Facebook is not perfect, having made visible missteps recently from the Beacon advertising platform to blocking Google's Friend Connect that lets people port their profiles from one networking site to another. That hasn't stopped users; it doesn't even appear to have slowed them down. All that makes Facebook's ups and downs something that marketers must watch seriously. Ask two questions: "Can we engage our users in that way?" and "How can we avoid making the same mistake?"

Mashups--Business and Otherwise

An interesting article that I accessed through the Knowledge @ Wharton newsletter led to another appealing DIY opportunity. The article discusses the changes in software application development that are occurring, partly to satisfy the demands of the Millennial generation for instant gratification—even in software application development. Read the article for yourself and see if you agree with the management perspective.

I was intrigued by the idea of DIY business mashups, so I investigated the Serena Software site. The site is currently in beta and offering its mashup software free. The FAQs say that you only pay when you publish (“in the cloud”) and start using the app. They don’t say how much or on what basis they charge for the working app.

The first video on their MashupTV page illustrates a situation that many of us are all too familiar with—we need programming support but IT has a seemingly endless backlog of requests. The young man must be a marketer; he wants to interface with Salesforce.com. In the video he promotes the idea of mashups in his unit and, in the process, makes his boss happy and confuses the personal relationships of colleagues who don’t understand “mashing.” Are software marketers developing a sense of humor?

Users can create their own app or customize a number of prebuilt ones that satisfy a lot of communications needs in enterprises. There’s a lot of material on the site to convince you that you can do it and show you how.

This slso ties in to an article in today's iMediaConnection. Max Zabrammy urges marketers to move beyond the desktop to give users access to the site or to specific functionality in other contexts including mobile and offline. One way of doing that is special-purpose apps, so we all better get good at creating them.

So back to where this blog started. Marketers need a lot of Internet firepower these days. It can take a long time for IT to build it for them; hence, the demand for DIY Marketing applications. This seems to be another attractive option.
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