Crastinate

A recent article on Crunchgear has reported that Apple has released a statement finally acknowledging the signal issue with the iPhone 4. For those unaware, many iPhone 4 owners have reported signal loss and dropped phone calls if they hold the phone in a certain way (in a way most people hold the phone to make calls). Apple is claiming that the signal loss has nothing to do with the antenna but rather with how the phone reports the signal strength in the form of bars on the phone.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

At best case scenario, Apple is saying that they’ve been lying to us about the quality signal that the iPhone receives. If that were the case, then why would people’s calls get dropped when they hold a phone a certain way? If the problem was simply a visual representation of signal, then how come the signal (i.e. dropped calls) is actually affected by holding the phone in this way?

This is a pathetic attempt to calm people down and I’m not buying it.

I’m sitting on my couch watching Last Comic Standing and most of these comics are not funny. Oddly, most of the audience is laughing and the judges like most of the material. I could go into a whole rant about how America doesn’t have a sense of humor but I won’t.

The truth is, messaging is all about context. The audience is ready to laugh. The judges are ready to laugh. Me? Meh. I could go either way. Same goes for marketing. Messaging only works when and where people are ready to listen.

I’ve been a little blogging hiatus lately. My current job has me steeped in social media strategy and execution all day to a point where I rarely have the time nor energy to write about it when I get home. Some things, however, need to be said.

User-generated content (UGC) is the holy grail of social media marketing. That is what every company wants. They want their customers (potential and current) to get involved with the brand enough to create content (status updates, pictures, videos, etc) in relation with that brand. Haven’t you noticed that every Facebook fan page for a major brand has sort sort of photo uploading contest?

The key to a successful UGC campaign is the incentive. Why should any user get involved? The more you’re asking of them, the bigger the incentive needs to be. The rest of this post will be talking directly to those companies running these UGC campaigns. I’d like to go over some of the misconceptions that some companies have out there. This will save your company a lot of money in market “testing”.

People want to talk about our brand

Unless you’re Apple coming out with your latest “magical” device, no one, including people who own your products, want to talk about your new product/feature/sale. They don’t care. They might enjoy talking about your product if started on a conversation. They might even love your company. But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to take time away from playing Farmville or watching Futurama to go write something on your Wall or even, dare I say it, microsite. People won’t get involved without a reason.

Your definition of value is correct

“You have to add value!” You probably hear that line a lot from social media consultants or agencies. It’s true. You should always be adding value to any engagement/conversation. Who’s definition of value? That’s an easy one. Not yours. You think anyone cares about your latest capabilities deck? You think the average user wants an invite to a free webinar where they could hear you talk about your product some more? They don’t. Think of your target audience. If they saw what your pitching on a billboard on their way home from work, would they go to the website or call the number on that billboard? If not, then it’s not valuable enough to draw anyone in, even if it would draw you in.

Blogger outreach is a cheap and easy way to gain awareness

Wrong. Blogger outreach can potentially be a really good way to piss off a lot of influential people. Think of it this way. You’ve got a contact at the NY Times. You can call any time with a really hot tip. Do you call every time you come out with a new feature? Do you call every time you want to push your product because of low sales? Do you EVER call with information that is already public? You see where I’m going?

Blogger outreach can be so useful when the proper relationships are built between the blogger and the company/agency. This only happens with consistent information sharing that is unique (not out elsewhere), fresh and valuable to readers. Anything else will be ignored and remembered thereby hurting your future outreach efforts. It’s a powerful tool. Use it wisely.

High quality content will be spread

Wrong again. Do you realize how many videos are uploaded every day? Do you realize how every company out there is trying to do exactly what you’re doing? Putting up a great video on YouTube or a funny microsite with all the sharing features won’t change the fact that you need eyeballs and lots of them if you want to hit the point where your snowball can get over the top of the mountain and start rolling on its own. The videos and sites that go viral have LOTS of media behind them. Don’t be fooled. Social media is not cheaper than traditional media. It’s just much more interactive and efficient. You still need to put the $$$ behind getting that initial traffic/reach.

That’s all for now. I’m sure there will be future posts with more of these.

It was only a few years ago that our virtual identities were spread out amongst separate and unaffiliated networks. You had a profile on Facebook which had no connection to your business profile on LinkedIn which had no connection to your blog on Blogger.

Jump to the present and we’ve got Facebook Connect, Google Connect, and a required mandate for every company to have APIs that give access to their users’ info off their site. Information between services is starting to be shared.

The question with all this is where are we going? What will the web look like in five years and how and where will we manage our digital identities? Is there a model we can look at to give us a sneak peek into the future? I’m glad you asked because there is. It’s called Instant Messaging.

While people had been chatting on IRC and dial-up message boards for years, instant messaging only became mainstream with AOL. For those who can remember, at the time AOL was a closed network for those who paid the cost-per-minute charges. All the cool people were on AOL. Sure you can chat on IRC, or via ICQ, but if you wanted to chat with all your friends, you paid for AOL. AOL eventually opened up their chat to everyone but the worlds of chat were still separate. The big players, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo all had their own networks and weren’t willing to collaborate. The way the instant messaging networks used to be set up should look familiar to you.

Eventually, based on start-ups pushing the boundaries and consumer demand, an integration of the chat networks was suddenly possible. The big three had opened up their networks to the world. While you may sign up for an AOL screen name now, or a Google talk screen name, you can talk to anyone on any network regardless of where you signed up.

In some ways, where you sign up doesn’t make a difference. What defines your personal chat experience is the software you use to chat, not the network that you used to be tethered to. Are you an Adium or an iChat mood today? Do you feel like the AIM, Gtalk, or Digsby interface today? The software, with it’s pros and cons, is what defines your chat experience. Because transitioning from one chat program to another takes minutes, developers are under constant pressure to provide the best product in the market. The power is now fully in the hands of the consumers.

If we apply this logic to our current situation, here is what we’re looking at in the coming years.

All our social identities will be accessible from any access point. With a click of a button, all our Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Twitter, Google, etc. info can be integrated into whatever interface or service we choose. The services that provide the best user experience will win the consumer’s pageviews. We already see that happening with twitter clients. Some people like Tweetdeck while others prefer Tweetie. It’s all a matter of preference. The winners of all this will be the consumers. We will get more personalized attention to our needs than ever before. Personally, I’m looking forward to it. So when someone tells you that the future of the web can’t be predicted, give them a history lesson.

Have you ever taken a technology vacation? What I mean by that is have you ever disconnected yourself completely from your digital lives? No email, no Facebook, no RSS feeds, no internet at all? I haven’t done it in a few years but from what I do remember from that vacation I took (it was while I was in Scotland) is that it helped me focus when I came back. When I returned I realized that the world had not fallen apart and I didn’t really miss that much even though I was offline for almost two weeks.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the day-to-day and we forget why we do the things we do to begin with. This scenario is analogous to the online marketing world presented before us today. The daily evolving world of social media has taken over our lives. Everything we do, from getting food (find the menu on Menupages, order from Seamlessweb, review on Yelp) to walking the street (check Google maps for where that bar is, check-in with FourSquare, I’m the mayor!) has become a social web experience.

The marketing world, trying to keep up, has put most of its attention on getting their content in the social stream. Getting users to share their content is the ultimate goal of any current marketer. Is this the right approach?

I’ll be attending a unique conference this week created by well-known video blogger and web 2.0 personality Loren Feldman. The Audience Conference dares us to disconnect from our world of sharing and asks us to focus on the quality list of speakers and presentations at hand. Laptops are discouraged (if not banned). There won’t be any official live blogging. There won’t be a live feed. The goal is not to share this conference but to experience it like we used to experience things before the online social explosion.

Focusing on our audience is something that us marketers might have lost over the past few years (if we ever really had it to begin with). Going back to basics may be the best way to solve this problem. There are still a few seats left at The Audience Conference if you have an interest in going.