Some Assembly Required

Data collection that doesn't suck

Over the past month I've been reading a great book - The Numerati, by Stephen Baker. Baker is a Newsweek columnist who researched the world of mathematical and statistical practitioners who collect massive amounts of data about you and I in order to predict, among other things, our future behavior. He explores a multitude of uses of the data - security, workforce productivity and maximization, and of course, marketing and advertising.

Among marketers this customer data collection isn't anything new. It's actually hard to find a brand that doesn't have some type of loyalty or rewards program for their customers. I'm not averse to these programs - actually many of them sport rewards that are truly valuable for consumers. The best examples of these appreciate the value to their of recognizing and rewarding their consumers. The worst in the bunch merely use the data to subject consumers to relentless advertising. Thank heavens for the opt-out relief valve.

Imagine how valuable this data could be if deployed not only to support the marketing engine of a business but to also improve the consumer experience. The information is out there, it's just that many organizations have failed to perform the necessary integration to make it useful.

Mega Bookseller Example

I was recently doing some holiday shopping at one of the big box national booksellers. My daughter had a number of gift cards she wanted to redeem, and I had a number of books I was interested in reading over the cold winter break. Coincidentally, I had received a book as a gift from an out-of-town friend that was a duplicate of one I had already read. I thought it would be a simple process to exchange it - I had done this before, so I thought it would be easy.

It seems that "easy" isn't in the store operations manual for this company. At the check-out I was informed that without a paper receipt they wouldn't take the book back, even for exchange. It took three of their associates to tell me about their "policy". I asked if they could look up the purchase in their system (both my friend who purchased the book and I are members of the store's loyalty program), or of they could look up my account (I'm not one who normally does returns). Nope, sorry.

Imagine how this could have been a wholly different experience with 

LinkedIn is down...

No "we'll be right back"...just FAIL.

Decision 2008 - for SXSW 2009, that is...

I previously mentioned here that I am in the process of preparing a panel presentation for the 2009 South by Southwest Interactive Festival. The panel discussion is titled Emerging Payments: How the MySpace Generation Will Pay  and is all about how GenY and Millennial consumers will drive adoption of the next generation of payment technologies, much like their parents did with plastic cards. Considering the audience at SXSWi, and their focus on design, media and social networking, understanding the market and technology forces surrounding how their target demographic will transact with them is a very relevant topic. It promises to be a fascinating discussion.

Joining me in this panel is Lance Gentry, a marketing guru with scads of experience in the youth centric arena. Lance is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Mocapay, an innovative mobile commerce company. He previously worked on the launch of IZZE Beverage Company, and started his career in the film industry at Warner Brothers and Touchstone. We will be announcing other panel participants prior to the event.

Panel selection at SXSW is a democratic process. SXSW enthusiasts can vote for panels based on their interest level using an online tool. The SXSWi 2009 Panel Picker is online until August 29. I encourage you to visit the site and vote for your favorites. Even if you don't plan on attending, I would love it if you would vote for mine.

SXSWi 2009

Geez, didn't we just get over the flu we picked up there this year?

It's not too early to start thinking about SXSW Interactive 2009, which takes place in Austin March 13-17, 2009. Panel submissions have already begun, and are due no later than July 11. I got mine submitted over the weekend - watch this space for pleas to vote for my panel. I will also share an outline of what we plan to cover, but I'll need all the help I can get!

Startup Weekend

Next month I'm attending a cool weekend conference called Columbus Startup Weekend. The Startup Weekend concept is a 54 hour event that focuses on building new businesses concepts from ideas to reality by gathering people from a variety of technical, financial and business disciplines and utilizing some unique facilitation techniques to incubate ideas that could become new companies. Here's how it works.

I can't wait to report back on how it went.

Hands-on with the Redbox

Let's face it, a by-product of the explosive growth in technology over the past decade is the myriad of choices when it comes to acquiring media for entertainment purposes. These choices are filtered by our willingness to pay, and how quickly we want to acquire the content. At any time, if I want to enjoy some video content of my choosing and want to see it now, I can rent a pay-per-view movie from my satellite provider, download (or rent) it from iTunes or Amazon Unbox, or if the dark side were to beckon (which, of course, it never does) I could potentially "find" a movie elsewhere on the web.

We don't watch a ton of feature-length movies in our house, but when we do they seem to be in clusters - during school and work vacations, family visits and cold winter weekends. If we consumed content on a more regular basis, we would use the rent-by-mail service from Netflix. The unparalleled selection works great for our family, whose taste vary significantly. The only problem is managing the rental list and waiting for the DVD to arrive in our mailbox.

As someone who fancys himself as a geek of a fairly high order, it pains me greatly to say this, but yes, I do actually visit Blockbuster on a fairly regular basis. Before you make a call to get my nerd card revoked, please understand that our ad hoc viewing schedule, combined with our family's taste in obscure titles (confession: yes, these are sometimes decades old Mary Kate & Ashley movies) makes it a logical step. If we are having a kid sleepover at our house, the pre-teens that infest our place want to pick out their own titles.

It's that same spur-of-the-moment viewing opportunity that introduced me to a service called Redbox. If you're not familiar with them, they have ATM-style DVD rental kiosks that they locate in supermarkets, big-box department stores and (where my experiences occur) at drugstores like Walgreens (that seem to be popping up like mushrooms around here).

The Redbox user experience has almost Apple-like simplicity. They offer a few dozen new- to recent-release titles; you can rent them immediately from the kiosk (for only a buck a night), or as I have done you can pre-reserve titles via their web page, which can point you to locations where your selection is in-stock. They also sell the DVDs from the kiosk in "pre-viewed" form for a mere $7. Many of the Redbox kiosk locations are even located outside these retail stores, so the retailer doesn't even have to be open for you to rent there.

Last night on the way back from dinner my wife decided that she wanted to watch The Other Boleyn Girl (again) with her Mom. We were nowhere near a Blockbuster, we didn't know if it was available on pay-per-view, and didn't want to buy the movie. I logged in to my Redbox account in my iPhone (their site renders nicely on mobile Safari, even if it isn't optimized for it), found the title in two clicks, reserved it in a couple more, and was directed to a Walgreens a few blocks away. I parked at the door, ran in, swiped my card (for authentication) and the kiosk burped out the DVD. Bingo. After a quick stop for ice cream we were watching Natalie stab Scarlett in the back in all their splendor. I returned it this morning on the way to work - cost: $1, easy factor: 9.5.

It's quite the accomplishment for a company to introduce into our connected media-on-demand world a brick-and-mortar DVD rental model that works so well, but Rebox has done just that. They clearly understand that consumers like me frequent these retailers for the package of paper towels on the way home from work, or the late-night prescription for the winter sniffles. Don't get me wrong, I am still way bullish about my other on-demand choices, but this company has found a way to shoehorn its way into our life through simplicity, web integration and a wide location footprint. I hope they do well.

Thoughts about the Amazon - Audible acquisition

Amazon announced today that they are picking up Audible.com for a cool $300 million. As a customer (and some might say a fan) of both companies I have more than a passing interest in how this will all work out. Clearly Audible has established itself as the market leader in the digital audio book space. It's also no secret that Amazon is looking to scale in all digital media in a big way. This transaction represents a logical tuck-in acquisition that complements Amazon's existing products in digital music and movies.

The more interesting question is how this will impact the brewing competition between Amazon and Apple's iTunes Music Store. Audible is the incumbent provider of digital audio book content on iTMS, and at the very least it represents a major step in achieving competitive parity from a "products offered" basis between the two. Beyond that step, one could envision the deal dynamics between Audible and Apple changing at some point in the future, now that they have another major channel for their products.

In terms of all media, digital audio books are a relatively small component (in the sub-billion dollar range), but reports indicate that over 25% of Americans listen to some form of audio books, and with the proliferation and low cost of digital players this is clearly a segment to watch. After all, if we listen to Steve Jobs we know that physical book reading is on the decline.

Where U Been?

So much for the New Years resolution to kick the blog into high gear. A big ass work project landed in my lap the week before Christmas that required my daily attention for the better part of three weeks. A core team of madmen worked 24X7 only taking the 25th off and delivered the goods to a big prospective client on January 3. It went Really Well. This only meant more crazy work hours and more travel.

Last week I did my annual pilgrimage to Macworld Expo. This was my fifth year in a row, but the crazy work schedule out there meant that I only had an hour or so at the conference. I missed the Keynote, but I did get to browse the Expo floor, and put my hands on a new MacBookAir. Darn sexy machine, but with the throngs of people trying to get at them I only had a few minutes to try one out.

In total, I spent less than 48 hours in the Bay Area - flying in on Tuesday for a quick lunch with my team at Buck's in Woodside, a late afternoon meeting at The Mothership, and a late drive up to SF to meet an entrepreneur friend for a late dinner at the Daily Grill on Union Square. The next day I was up for a 6:00 am conference call that lasted until lunch, when I finally hit the Expo until my next meeting. That night I had drinks with some rockstars, then took a red-eye to Texas to meet my true technology rockstar partners for another presentation to The Big Prospect. Whew...

Next week: Texas, Malibu and more sleep deprivation...

"Mac mindset" claim is more marketing than science

My friends have suspected my Mac fetish was a psychological condition all along, so I hesitate to add to the fodder, but Mac elitism takes center stage in the following article at ArsTechnica:

"Mac mindset" claim is more marketing than science

Image from Mike Krahulic and Jerry Holkins

Merry Christmas

Okay, it's embarrassing how long its been since I posted here. I do have tons of subjects that I have stored away on my Basecamp database, and it's going to be a New Years resolution of mine to turn more of them into content here.

Until then, have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

More to come...