Resources consumed:
-Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet article
-Off Target mp3
I enjoyed the concept of the advertising article as it relates to the internet since it continued the discussion that we have been having from earlier in the course. The idea of monetizing internet business models is something that we hear about all of the time, and it seems that companies like Google have gained enough scaled economy to corral the profits from their business model, leaving little room for a competitor like Bing. How many people do you know that use Bing? I know I used it a couple of times to see what the ads were talking about, and didn't recognize enough difference in the results and/or usability to ever return to it. The phrase, "oh just Bing that" instead of Google it sounds ridiculous because there is nobody that says it. A very difficult position exists to assail the Goliath of internet search and ad revenues that is Google. He mentioned Google several times in the article and their entrenched position being safe, which is something that I agree with now that I know a bit more about how their Adwords program works.
His rebuttal in the end of the article to the inevitably emotionally charged reactions was quick witted and right on point. The internet changed finance and travel booking industries overnight when they were replaced with something that had much lower overhead, removed a middleman, and gave a great reward to anybody who put the slightest effort forward to learn how to conduct their own trades in an OTC market or book their own cruise directly from the website. For the people in that industry not to see that trend coming meant they were wearing self-applied blinders and we will continue to see other industries change dramatically as the internet and technology improves. Just as we discussed the improvements in targeted advertisements in my last post, it is a stupid position to take that advertising will remain on course in the mass media paradigm for the long term. It just is not an educated position to take, given the underlying psychology that the author purports that people don't like ads and could do without them. The simple example of the DVR in my own limited TV viewing means that I never see any commercials, which directly affects my knowledge of new movies coming out. I am perpetually out of the loop on both, and I am better off for it. When we do see the rare movie we look up reviews online in our own educational efforts and then decide. We don't need to waste 30 seconds to a minute every of our lives every time an ad comes on for a movie that we don't want to see. He is correct in his argument on almost every level; the execution will just be a matter of time.
Speaking on the issue of advertising and its improvement in the last decade, I like how the discussion of this mp3 dovetailed into my recent posts in the class. Again I wanted to throw in a quick compliment for the design of the course and how the course materials complement each other well. The behavioral marketing puts a fancy label to the concept that I have been elaborating on, and I can see it being a benefit now where more ads are directed and useful to the customer but I understand the somewhat irrational fear of invasion of privacy from the same ads. I think people value their privacy a bit much at times given most peoples' lives are actually pretty boring and would not make a good diary for some unethical business executive to read. The reason things like People magazine exist is to highlight the not-so-boring antics of celebrities which have no legal expectation to privacy at all. They gave that up when they entered the public eye, but laws like libel and slander, while not applying to celebrities unless egregious, do protect the common citizen and for good reason. I don't see any reputable corporations actually using any single packet of data on any random individual and using it to invade privacy but more as many computers crunching streams of data that are sold for legitimate business purposes to target ads, for instance. Now how a computer can creep somebody out without actually being the Dave computer for 2001 is beyond me, but I get the Orwellian paranoia that exists when Google seems to be reading your private email and recommending a good or service. As I mentioned last week, I actually am one of those people who might provide more click-through for targeted ads since they actually appeal to me, and I don't think that my law-abiding privacy is so valuable that a company like Google would even care to invade it. But the future is another thing; technology can easily reach a scary intrusiveness drawn long enough out.
I enjoyed the class!
Signing off,
Glen
Friday, May 27, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Week 6: Final Week Advertising, Promotion and PR
Resources consumed:
-Secret of Googlenomics article
-Camtasia videos on in game advertising
I began the week's activities for this final portion with what I found to be both academic and practical description of the Google AdWords that we hear so much about. I was interested mostly in the concept of how the system is set up as an auction, and how the amount of data that they have access to is finally lending a positive reinforcement system to learning what is and is not effective advertising. The old marketing phrase that I remember goes something like this: I know that something like half of my advertising dollars are completely wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half. What a difference some mathematicians and statisticians make. I was extremely impressed at the concept that it is a learning system and that it was brought about by tweaking an already popular and profitable system.
On a personal note, I have noticed over the last couple of years that Google's algorithms and the presentation of the AdWords have dramatically improved for me to actually consider clicking them once in a while, not that I do. I found it almost inconceivable some years back how ridiculous both the content and appearance of the supposed vaunted AdWords looked to me. I consider myself to be pretty good at spotting irony and it seemed that was almost Google's intent with some of the ads that would appear next to my email, where it was clearly reading the words in the mail and blanketly pulling similar subject ads to appear. In once instance I was making plans for a friend's funeral and the AdWord displayed several casket and other macabre ads which at that time I could only laugh at as a computer version of a sick joke. I thought to myself how far they had to go to make that an effective advertising algorithm that targeted the individual, not just some random keywords one email to get the elusive click.
The Camtasia videos are always wonderful tools to tie in videos, slides, and audio to a pretty seamless and professional package. These were no exception as they were perfectly suited given the subject matter. I personally think that the advertisements snuck into games can be done well or they can be done poorly and could cause empirical harm to the brand. Of course I say these things with no stats or background to pad my position, but the gut reaction of one consumer is at least telling. The free games that are brand centric or offered at insanely low prices for the quality of the game like the BK King game seem to be overwhelming hits and certainly should be an area worth continued effort. The games that consumers pay for are probably the most likely to receive negative reactions from customers if the ads are blatant and take away from gameplay. I think a parallel runs with something like satellite radio, where one has to pay to subscribe to the service and would expect that consequently all stations are ad-free. The cruel reality, and incidentally why I did not opt for a subscription even as an avid music fan, is that not all stations are ad free. It is always an interesting thing to note that another subscription service, cable TV, does not offer any promise of ad-free channels and they get away charging large fees to get those ad filled channels. Perhaps because they are an established paradigm that was spawned from ad-supported network TV or the medium wouldn't be supported by subscription fees alone given costs of producing shows. An interesting argument nonetheless. The only weak point of the videos was that they left me hungering for closure on analysis of the questions posed at the end concerning if advertising in games is effective or not. I would venture that there are studies that could answer these questions and hoped the video would shed some light on the subject.
More to follow tomorrow!
-Secret of Googlenomics article
-Camtasia videos on in game advertising
I began the week's activities for this final portion with what I found to be both academic and practical description of the Google AdWords that we hear so much about. I was interested mostly in the concept of how the system is set up as an auction, and how the amount of data that they have access to is finally lending a positive reinforcement system to learning what is and is not effective advertising. The old marketing phrase that I remember goes something like this: I know that something like half of my advertising dollars are completely wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half. What a difference some mathematicians and statisticians make. I was extremely impressed at the concept that it is a learning system and that it was brought about by tweaking an already popular and profitable system.
On a personal note, I have noticed over the last couple of years that Google's algorithms and the presentation of the AdWords have dramatically improved for me to actually consider clicking them once in a while, not that I do. I found it almost inconceivable some years back how ridiculous both the content and appearance of the supposed vaunted AdWords looked to me. I consider myself to be pretty good at spotting irony and it seemed that was almost Google's intent with some of the ads that would appear next to my email, where it was clearly reading the words in the mail and blanketly pulling similar subject ads to appear. In once instance I was making plans for a friend's funeral and the AdWord displayed several casket and other macabre ads which at that time I could only laugh at as a computer version of a sick joke. I thought to myself how far they had to go to make that an effective advertising algorithm that targeted the individual, not just some random keywords one email to get the elusive click.
The Camtasia videos are always wonderful tools to tie in videos, slides, and audio to a pretty seamless and professional package. These were no exception as they were perfectly suited given the subject matter. I personally think that the advertisements snuck into games can be done well or they can be done poorly and could cause empirical harm to the brand. Of course I say these things with no stats or background to pad my position, but the gut reaction of one consumer is at least telling. The free games that are brand centric or offered at insanely low prices for the quality of the game like the BK King game seem to be overwhelming hits and certainly should be an area worth continued effort. The games that consumers pay for are probably the most likely to receive negative reactions from customers if the ads are blatant and take away from gameplay. I think a parallel runs with something like satellite radio, where one has to pay to subscribe to the service and would expect that consequently all stations are ad-free. The cruel reality, and incidentally why I did not opt for a subscription even as an avid music fan, is that not all stations are ad free. It is always an interesting thing to note that another subscription service, cable TV, does not offer any promise of ad-free channels and they get away charging large fees to get those ad filled channels. Perhaps because they are an established paradigm that was spawned from ad-supported network TV or the medium wouldn't be supported by subscription fees alone given costs of producing shows. An interesting argument nonetheless. The only weak point of the videos was that they left me hungering for closure on analysis of the questions posed at the end concerning if advertising in games is effective or not. I would venture that there are studies that could answer these questions and hoped the video would shed some light on the subject.
More to follow tomorrow!
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Week 5: Web Metrics and Marketing Research Wrap up
Resources consumed:
-Chapter 4: of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
-Video: Kimberly Clark and Virtual Reality Simulations
The wrap up to this week was easy again as I found a couple of interesting optional learning links to bolster my nascent knowledge of web metrics. My team and I are busy wrapping up our online marketing assignment and I think we will be ready to turn it in tonight, after a bit of final editing. I am enjoying the assignments intermixed with the blogging and normal learning assignments but I think I will be glad when I am not trying to juggle both on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
I read the chapter concerning web analytics and found it useful for my e-commerce professional development as a resource that I will most likely either do myself or hire out for my own business. Given the costs quoted in the article as well as an IT estimate that my friend sent to me when I outlined the business plan from the IT perspective, these things can cost a lot of money! I will have to be very good at providing a high volume of sales given my low margin business model. Through this article as well as some of the research on web analytics companies that I mentioned in my last post, I am getting a feeling that if you can draw more useful traffic to your site than the next guy, you will be better off competition wise. Of course, the old adage applies that you have to spend money to make money, but some of the scales of money needed to be spent in producing a quality website, marketing it effectively, and then analyzing traffic to further increase the customer flow were, I admit, a bit off by several magnitudes in my head. I was happy to see the author use actual example numbers for a hypothetical position for a large firm because at least that puts some ballpark numbers in my head. The article was very informative for a large company looking to hire a senior analyst, and I can certainly glean the lessons such as the 10/90 rule but as a small business owner, would have trouble applying his exact advice and would more likely go the consultant route to initiate traffic and analysis if I couldn't do it myself. The final aspect that I enjoyed about this article was the fact that in the very least, he blows apart the notion that extremely costly and complex analytics tools are always necessary and free tools such as Google's can easily produce usable results. And free is always my favorite brand.
I enjoyed the video on Kimberly-Clarke and was impressed first off, with the quality of the video and the editing to include seamless slides and videos. I think the Kelley school productions are far superior to most of the KD videos that professors provide and I don't know if the trend is towards a production quality like this or if it just a resource limitation normally allocated to videos like the GLN network. It really does provide for a much better learning experience and I was glad to see a type like that again in this course. I have had videos, not in this class, where the professor looks about 8 years younger that in his photo in the syllabus, and the video is grainy, misaligned audio and video, and the content is years out of date with current events such as the Great Recession. Moving on to the content, I thought he was an engaging speaker since I became attentive in a subject that I have not any experience in and came away impressed at the ideas and the news coverage that they garnered. I was a neuroscience undergrad and we studied the physiology of the eye and tracking eye movements and I was excited to see the connection they drew in the video between what people will say they are interested versus what they unconsciously fixate on. The best part of the video is that some of this biology based research that could not have been possible several years ago is producing good statistical results and enhancing branding in extremely low margin, competitive shelf stores. There is always something to be enhanced by technology, even something as seemingly settled as fast moving consumer goods marketing.
Ready for the final week.
-Chapter 4: of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
-Video: Kimberly Clark and Virtual Reality Simulations
The wrap up to this week was easy again as I found a couple of interesting optional learning links to bolster my nascent knowledge of web metrics. My team and I are busy wrapping up our online marketing assignment and I think we will be ready to turn it in tonight, after a bit of final editing. I am enjoying the assignments intermixed with the blogging and normal learning assignments but I think I will be glad when I am not trying to juggle both on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
I read the chapter concerning web analytics and found it useful for my e-commerce professional development as a resource that I will most likely either do myself or hire out for my own business. Given the costs quoted in the article as well as an IT estimate that my friend sent to me when I outlined the business plan from the IT perspective, these things can cost a lot of money! I will have to be very good at providing a high volume of sales given my low margin business model. Through this article as well as some of the research on web analytics companies that I mentioned in my last post, I am getting a feeling that if you can draw more useful traffic to your site than the next guy, you will be better off competition wise. Of course, the old adage applies that you have to spend money to make money, but some of the scales of money needed to be spent in producing a quality website, marketing it effectively, and then analyzing traffic to further increase the customer flow were, I admit, a bit off by several magnitudes in my head. I was happy to see the author use actual example numbers for a hypothetical position for a large firm because at least that puts some ballpark numbers in my head. The article was very informative for a large company looking to hire a senior analyst, and I can certainly glean the lessons such as the 10/90 rule but as a small business owner, would have trouble applying his exact advice and would more likely go the consultant route to initiate traffic and analysis if I couldn't do it myself. The final aspect that I enjoyed about this article was the fact that in the very least, he blows apart the notion that extremely costly and complex analytics tools are always necessary and free tools such as Google's can easily produce usable results. And free is always my favorite brand.
I enjoyed the video on Kimberly-Clarke and was impressed first off, with the quality of the video and the editing to include seamless slides and videos. I think the Kelley school productions are far superior to most of the KD videos that professors provide and I don't know if the trend is towards a production quality like this or if it just a resource limitation normally allocated to videos like the GLN network. It really does provide for a much better learning experience and I was glad to see a type like that again in this course. I have had videos, not in this class, where the professor looks about 8 years younger that in his photo in the syllabus, and the video is grainy, misaligned audio and video, and the content is years out of date with current events such as the Great Recession. Moving on to the content, I thought he was an engaging speaker since I became attentive in a subject that I have not any experience in and came away impressed at the ideas and the news coverage that they garnered. I was a neuroscience undergrad and we studied the physiology of the eye and tracking eye movements and I was excited to see the connection they drew in the video between what people will say they are interested versus what they unconsciously fixate on. The best part of the video is that some of this biology based research that could not have been possible several years ago is producing good statistical results and enhancing branding in extremely low margin, competitive shelf stores. There is always something to be enhanced by technology, even something as seemingly settled as fast moving consumer goods marketing.
Ready for the final week.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Week 5: Web Metrics and Marketing Research
Resources consumed:
-Branding Assignment research: Alterian company slideshow on tablet computers
-Chapter 1 of the Numerati
-Brief history of the Internet video
I began this week's class work with research and investigation into the digital marketing efforts of the tablet computer market. My team is currently involved in research and writing to compare the Motorola Xoom with their competitive set and to evaluate their online marketing efforts. I was tasked with identifying Motorola's competitors in this product arena and to judge their use of digital marketing, citing worst and best practices. In the course of that work I cam across a very interesting company that parallels the work of people described in "The Numerati" chapter, discussed below. The company is called Alterian and their efforts are centered in web analytics and digital marketing statistics to include social media and websites. Once I found that site and a product that they produced in the form of a slideshow, I was energized for two reasons: first, it seems that this company can produce web stats on virtually any customer segment and product and their slideshow was exactly the kind of data that we could use for our project, since it related exactly to the latest tablet releases and their online buzz. Secondly, I think any internet based business can certainly benefit from the type of data that these Numerati companies generate, and in two years when I want to effectively target my company's niche consumers, this type of company will certainly be worth a cost/benefit debate for my marketing aims. I turned in my portion of the assignment to the group for review, and looked forward to consuming the required reading and video of the course.
The reading assignment was extremely well written and engaging, and mirrored my feelings of the discovery of Alterian. I found the level of detail to be informative and found the author to relate what could be a boring recount of internet statisticians with the requisite flair for history and perspective. I knew the basics of how cookies worked and could predict that companies would develop that would be able to mine that data in the aggregate to produce targeted marketing results, and I am seeing those more frequently every day in my own internet surfing. An example is where lately I have seen ads online that I am actually interested in, and they seem eerily tied into a shopping club I get emailed about, or reflect the information I have input for interests and likes on social networking sites. It seems that even a year or two ago, internet banner ads were not targeted at all and I could see how the mass-media mindset of marketing had lazily transformed itself to the online arena without much thought for the nuances of the new media. Or perhaps, the technology was not there yet to allow targeted ads. Then Google came along with their Adwords and changed the face of banner/targeted web advertising, although I am not as sure on the details of that revolution as I should be. I remember the discussion about how "creepy" it was that Google ads could surmise a summary of your email to your friend, for instance, and put targeted ads containing the subject right alongside the email while you read it. I recognized then what a difference that made and now feel a bit more read up on the scope of that mindset in all areas.
The video on the history of the internet certainly was informative and served to highlight the important people and organizations that brought it into being. And here all this time I thought that a congressman had invented it in his spare time! Ha Ha. I really enjoyed learning about the creation of ARPA, which is now known as DARPA and is a ridiculously well credentialed and prolific advancer of science. I knew that they were involved but did not know the whole story. I don't know if the video is fully useful to all students for marketing on the internet as it exists today as it is a bit academic, but I certainly enjoyed it and it played to my science passions well. The converse argument for its usefulness is that several facts that I just know from general knowledge, such as how the data is transferred in data packets over TCP/IP and the aspects of lossless digital communication, may not be known to all students of the class and could open a new door of IT discovery to somebody who hasn't had much experience with computers.
Will consume some more resources, continue to work on the Marketing project, and wrap up this week on Sunday.
-Branding Assignment research: Alterian company slideshow on tablet computers
-Chapter 1 of the Numerati
-Brief history of the Internet video
I began this week's class work with research and investigation into the digital marketing efforts of the tablet computer market. My team is currently involved in research and writing to compare the Motorola Xoom with their competitive set and to evaluate their online marketing efforts. I was tasked with identifying Motorola's competitors in this product arena and to judge their use of digital marketing, citing worst and best practices. In the course of that work I cam across a very interesting company that parallels the work of people described in "The Numerati" chapter, discussed below. The company is called Alterian and their efforts are centered in web analytics and digital marketing statistics to include social media and websites. Once I found that site and a product that they produced in the form of a slideshow, I was energized for two reasons: first, it seems that this company can produce web stats on virtually any customer segment and product and their slideshow was exactly the kind of data that we could use for our project, since it related exactly to the latest tablet releases and their online buzz. Secondly, I think any internet based business can certainly benefit from the type of data that these Numerati companies generate, and in two years when I want to effectively target my company's niche consumers, this type of company will certainly be worth a cost/benefit debate for my marketing aims. I turned in my portion of the assignment to the group for review, and looked forward to consuming the required reading and video of the course.
The reading assignment was extremely well written and engaging, and mirrored my feelings of the discovery of Alterian. I found the level of detail to be informative and found the author to relate what could be a boring recount of internet statisticians with the requisite flair for history and perspective. I knew the basics of how cookies worked and could predict that companies would develop that would be able to mine that data in the aggregate to produce targeted marketing results, and I am seeing those more frequently every day in my own internet surfing. An example is where lately I have seen ads online that I am actually interested in, and they seem eerily tied into a shopping club I get emailed about, or reflect the information I have input for interests and likes on social networking sites. It seems that even a year or two ago, internet banner ads were not targeted at all and I could see how the mass-media mindset of marketing had lazily transformed itself to the online arena without much thought for the nuances of the new media. Or perhaps, the technology was not there yet to allow targeted ads. Then Google came along with their Adwords and changed the face of banner/targeted web advertising, although I am not as sure on the details of that revolution as I should be. I remember the discussion about how "creepy" it was that Google ads could surmise a summary of your email to your friend, for instance, and put targeted ads containing the subject right alongside the email while you read it. I recognized then what a difference that made and now feel a bit more read up on the scope of that mindset in all areas.
The video on the history of the internet certainly was informative and served to highlight the important people and organizations that brought it into being. And here all this time I thought that a congressman had invented it in his spare time! Ha Ha. I really enjoyed learning about the creation of ARPA, which is now known as DARPA and is a ridiculously well credentialed and prolific advancer of science. I knew that they were involved but did not know the whole story. I don't know if the video is fully useful to all students for marketing on the internet as it exists today as it is a bit academic, but I certainly enjoyed it and it played to my science passions well. The converse argument for its usefulness is that several facts that I just know from general knowledge, such as how the data is transferred in data packets over TCP/IP and the aspects of lossless digital communication, may not be known to all students of the class and could open a new door of IT discovery to somebody who hasn't had much experience with computers.
Will consume some more resources, continue to work on the Marketing project, and wrap up this week on Sunday.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Wrap up to Week 4
Resources consumed:
Video: Will Twitter Ever Make Money? Twitter CEO Evan Williams Responds (sort of)
Video: Disrupters: eCommerce Presentations by Charlie Kim of Next Jump, Inc.; Jen Beckman of 20X200; and Tebecca Thomsen of Alice.com
I first started with the article centering on taxonomy of internet commerce and found the following quote most prescient when thinking about their main idea: “The native Internet culture has adapted to this imaginary Internet space, which is by definition abundant. Information - the predominant property or commodity - is abundant and largely free. So the native Internet economy is based not on scarcity but on abundance, this is the primary difference between the Internet economy and the real-world.” We all know from general theories of economics that the rule of scarcity drives things like supply and demand and that is the reason that diamonds are more expensive then say, rubies, since one is much more scarce than the other. Not that the internet changes the availability of raw materials or finished goods available to the consumer, but I found the idea of the abundance of information to be a staggering thought that I had not really considered on a fundamental level.
The video on Twitter was enlightening considering my last post concerning the monetization of internet companies. I think that the Professors titled the video well when they alluded to Williams “sort of” answering the question posed very directly to him about how the company will make revenue. I read about these companies all the time that are in the news, are truly groundbreaking in regard to their service or business model but if there was for some reason a temporary vacuum of venture capital, would simply not exist. They can raise money in multiple rounds of VC to keep the employees paid and the lights on but it is a bit baffling that companies like Twitter and Facebook (in the case of FB living up to its monetization potential given its user base) are unable to be successful cash flow machines given their virtually limitless customer base. Every type of person I know is on Facebook and that seems like a great advantage over say, a Wal-mart or Neiman Marcus that attracts only a certain segment of any population. I thought the host of the video was simply asking what a lot of people are wondering with regard to a high profile company like Twitter and it seems even the CEO in the best position to spin an answer, any answer, about summed up his feelings with a statement that Twitter cares about revenue, but not as long as VC funding continues to prop them up. My final thought on this subject is how traditional stocks pay out dividends and conduct splits to maintain more even valuation but the newest type of IT stocks don’t normally pay out dividends or conduct splits and the investor that buys in is rewarded in theory with a faster future growth model than a traditional blue chip. I always find it interesting in that case to study the IT bubble of the 90s as well as note the joke of the “hot IT stock” that turns out to decimate an unwitting investor. Are there parallels to the current social networking problem of monetization from an investor’s standpoint?
I really liked the entrepreneurial San Francisco video featuring the CEO’s and senior members of small e-commerce start ups since I feel like each person that presented had a concrete understanding of how the business would make money, and how each model had a competitive advantage over the traditional model. As a future entrepreneur I am always on the lookout for good advice for avoiding mistakes made along the way so I enjoyed the Next Jump CEO’s take on less is more, which we had studied for Operations Management in regards to overwhelming the customer with too many choices, simply to show off the capability of a computer system. I remember how we had studied how grocery stores went off the deep end for a while stocking too many SKU’s and actually adversely affecting sales since customer’s couldn’t make a choice.
Some key lessons learned, looking for more!
Friday, May 13, 2011
Week 4: Business Models and the New Era of Competition
Resources consumed:
-Gil and Frank Discuss Business Models video
-Business models on the web article
-Business model history, both brick and mortar and virtual at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_model
This week I think that I will continue to enjoy the content of this course as it continues to give me a better perspective on internet marketing, and helps to frame my thoughts on my own small business idea that will be base on internet listing and advertising. As a first time entrepreneur in a couple of years, I plan to get a small business off the ground with myself alone (and some controller and accounting help from my wife) and each subject that I can apply towards that aim will only help give me a better reference for research. For now, it is just an idea that I toy with, but subjects like this on the subject of monetizing an internet business are interesting for me especially. While my idea does not base in internet dealings alone, it just uses the internet as a method to connect customers with my tangible products, I can see the challenge in any model related to a normally "free" information source like the internet.
The video discussion was a great overview of what, in my mind and most other business followers, is an issue that is constantly being debated: how to monetize a service or new web feature that is past the initial euphoric days of exponentially growing traffic and buzz. A lot of the ground-breaking types of businesses like YouTube and Facebook have been surprisingly hard to call profitable in the nuts and bolts sense, even amid wild valuations like Goldman Sach's recent private valuation of the company at a staggering $50 Billion dollars. So it seems that yes, some monolith companies can convince the investor world that their companies are ultra valuable, but what about the rest? I enjoyed the iTunes discussion about its interaction with the music industry and learned a couple of new things like certain artists have withheld their song licensing from iTunes. I also enjoyed hearing about the Radiohead example: I was one of the fans who chose to pay for the album in 2007 and I dug a little from the Wikipedia page about that album and found that "According to an Internet survey conducted by Record of the Day of 3,000 people, about one-third of people who downloaded the album paid nothing, with the average price paid being £4." Now, I didn't go so far as to back up the euro to dollar conversion rate at the time, but I think we can see that 4 Pounds is a bit less than the normal album. Interestingly, their latest album "The King of Limbs," they chose to charge a set price on their website and iTunes. Certainly was a newsworthy new business model for the "In Rainbows" album and I think we might see more things like that in the future as we shift ever towards a virtual market.
I was surprised somewhat at the depth and breadth of models present in the article, although I should have seen it coming given the diversity and growth of internet based businesses. I liked the layout of the pdf since it allowed me to quickly click on links to models of businesses that I had not heard of and learn about the model with a practical example. I learned about several models that I had not heard of before and got to learn a bit more about models that I had heard of, such as Priceline.com and the most surprising thing from the article is that some of these models are patentable. The idea of that had never really occurred to me but it seems that it really falls under the realm of intellectual property just like anything else. Any innovative person with enough gumption to get a business off the ground and make it work enough that others take notice should be able to also protect their proprietary model.
Finally, I did a quick recap of the Wikipedia site to see if I could learn any more about the model of my own business idea and picked up a few interesting ideas. It is hard to believe that a couple of years ago Wikipedia didn't exist but it sure is useful now!
-Gil and Frank Discuss Business Models video
-Business models on the web article
-Business model history, both brick and mortar and virtual at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_model
This week I think that I will continue to enjoy the content of this course as it continues to give me a better perspective on internet marketing, and helps to frame my thoughts on my own small business idea that will be base on internet listing and advertising. As a first time entrepreneur in a couple of years, I plan to get a small business off the ground with myself alone (and some controller and accounting help from my wife) and each subject that I can apply towards that aim will only help give me a better reference for research. For now, it is just an idea that I toy with, but subjects like this on the subject of monetizing an internet business are interesting for me especially. While my idea does not base in internet dealings alone, it just uses the internet as a method to connect customers with my tangible products, I can see the challenge in any model related to a normally "free" information source like the internet.
The video discussion was a great overview of what, in my mind and most other business followers, is an issue that is constantly being debated: how to monetize a service or new web feature that is past the initial euphoric days of exponentially growing traffic and buzz. A lot of the ground-breaking types of businesses like YouTube and Facebook have been surprisingly hard to call profitable in the nuts and bolts sense, even amid wild valuations like Goldman Sach's recent private valuation of the company at a staggering $50 Billion dollars. So it seems that yes, some monolith companies can convince the investor world that their companies are ultra valuable, but what about the rest? I enjoyed the iTunes discussion about its interaction with the music industry and learned a couple of new things like certain artists have withheld their song licensing from iTunes. I also enjoyed hearing about the Radiohead example: I was one of the fans who chose to pay for the album in 2007 and I dug a little from the Wikipedia page about that album and found that "According to an Internet survey conducted by Record of the Day of 3,000 people, about one-third of people who downloaded the album paid nothing, with the average price paid being £4." Now, I didn't go so far as to back up the euro to dollar conversion rate at the time, but I think we can see that 4 Pounds is a bit less than the normal album. Interestingly, their latest album "The King of Limbs," they chose to charge a set price on their website and iTunes. Certainly was a newsworthy new business model for the "In Rainbows" album and I think we might see more things like that in the future as we shift ever towards a virtual market.
I was surprised somewhat at the depth and breadth of models present in the article, although I should have seen it coming given the diversity and growth of internet based businesses. I liked the layout of the pdf since it allowed me to quickly click on links to models of businesses that I had not heard of and learn about the model with a practical example. I learned about several models that I had not heard of before and got to learn a bit more about models that I had heard of, such as Priceline.com and the most surprising thing from the article is that some of these models are patentable. The idea of that had never really occurred to me but it seems that it really falls under the realm of intellectual property just like anything else. Any innovative person with enough gumption to get a business off the ground and make it work enough that others take notice should be able to also protect their proprietary model.
Finally, I did a quick recap of the Wikipedia site to see if I could learn any more about the model of my own business idea and picked up a few interesting ideas. It is hard to believe that a couple of years ago Wikipedia didn't exist but it sure is useful now!
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Wrap up to Week 3
Resources consumed:
-mp3 of Gil and Frank's take on the long tail
-The seven Segment System for online marketing
-Disney world marketing tactics given our family trip to Disney
The required lecture component of the class was the mp3 where the Professor's discussed their takes on the long tail theory that I blogged about last time. I was secure in my foundation of knowledge of the long tail theory from the last course resources from last time. The professors hit on an example or two of how the long tail products might proliferate themselves and I came up with the following aspects of normal media channels that I use to expand my music knowledge: the iTunes "Genius" sidebar, cable TV digital music channels, Pandora music stations, and finally ever more-informed friend networks sharing their "likes" on Facebook. Each one of these is a relatively recent innovation in each of these areas and I find myself always using any one of these in complementing fashion to traditional band writeups in magazines or heard on the radio. Each of these methods is ripe for long tail proliferation where a pseudo-indie listener like myself can find themselves leaning more and more indie and less mainstream simply because there are so many more choices available than were before with only profitable hits being broadcast. Each type of music that I am interested in can be accessed individually, with no commercials and serves to augment my knowledge of each genre. As a point that I will expand on below, I can see that I am a bit less satisfied overall with all of the music choices available, as referenced to traditional hits broadcast that have been vetted through multiple layers of the music industry before release.
I was interested to hear about contra-theories of the long tail such as social commentary exposing the box office sales of a new blockbuster that influences the masses that haven't seen it to view it. I think this was/is the traditional way that most people heard of the new media coming out and based their viewing decision on word of mouth or professional critics' opinions before the committed to consuming it. Until the internet becomes the main vehicle for distribution for things like media, I can see this method remaining to be a powerful influencer. I also enjoyed hearing about The English Patient rule and other evidence pointing towards more dissatisfaction with customer in the long tail as I hinted at above. Occam's razor points to the simplest explanation for an occurrence and it should follow that: if all of the media, lets use music as an example, in the long tail is not a hit for whatever reason, some of it will be a gem and most of it will frankly be crap. I can easily see in that case how the advice to a digital marketer to refrain from putting all of your eggs in one basket when marketing in the long tail is warranted.
I read the 7 segment system for online marketing and found it to be a bit boring and outdated but still conveying some wise principles to think about. Since some of the pop references in the article were to Ricky Martin and the Backstreet Boys, as a 30 year old I do not think it is a timely article to read today, since those guys were popular when I was in high school, and my 10 year reunion was several years ago now. However, that does not change human nature and different motivations when web surfing. As I learned about each type of web customer, I found myself thinking of examples of my own web surfing and how I had fit into each one of the categories that they mentioned and realized their point that not any one person sticks in any category to be completely true. With the advent of mobile surfing, I think this fact can only be more true today as our collective attention spans shortens to the length of a picosecond and we should now have the technology to accurately switch gears on our web marketing to effectively target each type of shopper.
I am currently on a family trip to Disney World in Orlando, and I thought of the subject of this class while walking around the park with family and debating how crowded it is and theorized on how many people are carelessly spending their vacation money. After finding some statistics on the net, it seems that in 2007, around 130,000 people are present in all the Orlando parks on an average day, with around 50 million people visiting all the Orlando parks in 2007. With these vast amounts of numbers visiting and many of them self-proclaimed repeat customers, I just wanted to reflect on the power of their marketing campaigns where the entire park is based on the media that we all have consumed and know which is a wonderful synergistic relationship. As it turns out they are not just traditional marketing geniuses but online also, with Disney's various sites garnering awards from Market Week and other respected sources for their digital marketing initiatives. It seems that they mostly code their sites as family friendly information stops but the juggernaut that is Disney can effectively transition a potential kid customer from a free online game to enticing their parents to "learn more" about an expensive Disney cruise.
As a final reflection I asked several questions as to why Disney needed to take so much information down from me when they issued my multi-day pass, and they answered back that they could better track a lost ticket but all they would need for that would be my name and phone number but they took my driver's license as well. It seems that they now can track everything about me through my resort card purchases and can better target advertisements at my house, for the next time I feel like spending thousands on a Disney vacation.
-mp3 of Gil and Frank's take on the long tail
-The seven Segment System for online marketing
-Disney world marketing tactics given our family trip to Disney
The required lecture component of the class was the mp3 where the Professor's discussed their takes on the long tail theory that I blogged about last time. I was secure in my foundation of knowledge of the long tail theory from the last course resources from last time. The professors hit on an example or two of how the long tail products might proliferate themselves and I came up with the following aspects of normal media channels that I use to expand my music knowledge: the iTunes "Genius" sidebar, cable TV digital music channels, Pandora music stations, and finally ever more-informed friend networks sharing their "likes" on Facebook. Each one of these is a relatively recent innovation in each of these areas and I find myself always using any one of these in complementing fashion to traditional band writeups in magazines or heard on the radio. Each of these methods is ripe for long tail proliferation where a pseudo-indie listener like myself can find themselves leaning more and more indie and less mainstream simply because there are so many more choices available than were before with only profitable hits being broadcast. Each type of music that I am interested in can be accessed individually, with no commercials and serves to augment my knowledge of each genre. As a point that I will expand on below, I can see that I am a bit less satisfied overall with all of the music choices available, as referenced to traditional hits broadcast that have been vetted through multiple layers of the music industry before release.
I was interested to hear about contra-theories of the long tail such as social commentary exposing the box office sales of a new blockbuster that influences the masses that haven't seen it to view it. I think this was/is the traditional way that most people heard of the new media coming out and based their viewing decision on word of mouth or professional critics' opinions before the committed to consuming it. Until the internet becomes the main vehicle for distribution for things like media, I can see this method remaining to be a powerful influencer. I also enjoyed hearing about The English Patient rule and other evidence pointing towards more dissatisfaction with customer in the long tail as I hinted at above. Occam's razor points to the simplest explanation for an occurrence and it should follow that: if all of the media, lets use music as an example, in the long tail is not a hit for whatever reason, some of it will be a gem and most of it will frankly be crap. I can easily see in that case how the advice to a digital marketer to refrain from putting all of your eggs in one basket when marketing in the long tail is warranted.
I read the 7 segment system for online marketing and found it to be a bit boring and outdated but still conveying some wise principles to think about. Since some of the pop references in the article were to Ricky Martin and the Backstreet Boys, as a 30 year old I do not think it is a timely article to read today, since those guys were popular when I was in high school, and my 10 year reunion was several years ago now. However, that does not change human nature and different motivations when web surfing. As I learned about each type of web customer, I found myself thinking of examples of my own web surfing and how I had fit into each one of the categories that they mentioned and realized their point that not any one person sticks in any category to be completely true. With the advent of mobile surfing, I think this fact can only be more true today as our collective attention spans shortens to the length of a picosecond and we should now have the technology to accurately switch gears on our web marketing to effectively target each type of shopper.
I am currently on a family trip to Disney World in Orlando, and I thought of the subject of this class while walking around the park with family and debating how crowded it is and theorized on how many people are carelessly spending their vacation money. After finding some statistics on the net, it seems that in 2007, around 130,000 people are present in all the Orlando parks on an average day, with around 50 million people visiting all the Orlando parks in 2007. With these vast amounts of numbers visiting and many of them self-proclaimed repeat customers, I just wanted to reflect on the power of their marketing campaigns where the entire park is based on the media that we all have consumed and know which is a wonderful synergistic relationship. As it turns out they are not just traditional marketing geniuses but online also, with Disney's various sites garnering awards from Market Week and other respected sources for their digital marketing initiatives. It seems that they mostly code their sites as family friendly information stops but the juggernaut that is Disney can effectively transition a potential kid customer from a free online game to enticing their parents to "learn more" about an expensive Disney cruise.
As a final reflection I asked several questions as to why Disney needed to take so much information down from me when they issued my multi-day pass, and they answered back that they could better track a lost ticket but all they would need for that would be my name and phone number but they took my driver's license as well. It seems that they now can track everything about me through my resort card purchases and can better target advertisements at my house, for the next time I feel like spending thousands on a Disney vacation.
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