Archive for category Technology
Figaro, Figaro, Figaro
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Music, Technology, That's Life on February 8th, 2010
A Saturday night at Opera Colorado’s performance of The Barber of Seville was helped along by an ingenious iPhone app. Almost any event held at Denver’s Ellie Caulkins Opera House both benefits and suffers from the features of its seats, to wit, the incredibly uncomfortable seats (which could only have been selected because the folding chair manufacturer was out of stock) along with the clever electronic seatback titling system called, appropriately, Figaro. Since few of Denver’s opera fans are either fluent in Italian (or French and German) or have an intimate knowledge of the sung libretto, the English translation provided by the pale blue OLED displays makes the performances much easier to follow. Such translation titling in America’s opera houses was once viewed as hayseed – a reflection of the lack of sophistication of US audiences – but has grown to be adopted by other country bumpkin facilities in Milan, Barcelona, London and Vienna.
Figaro Titling at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House
Suffice it to say that none of row D’s occupants had working Figaro’s to accompany Figaro, creating a less than optimal experience and quite a bit of griping to the helpless ushers during intermission. Having seen Barber staged, albeit close to 20 years earlier, I recalled that Act II has a large amount of sung character narrative that propels the action; in other words, it’s pretty hard to follow what’s going on without some type of libretto. So what to do? In the age of the iPhone could there be an app to bail the casual opera fan out? Indeed there is. A quick search of the App Store revealed that the good folks at Intermundia had an app that contained not only an English/Italian libretto, but an adjustable slider that would allow the text to move at a speed consistent with the performance – brilliant. So while the rest of my row scratched their heads through to the conclusion, I was more able to enjoy the chaos of Rossini’s comedy.
Opera App Saves the Evening
As to the performance? Opera Colorado’s production of one of music’s most beloved comedies turned out to be great fun. Director David Gately has staged this warhorse 30 times before utilizing a broadly comic reading that includes plenty of sight gags, cartoonish versions of the Bartolo and Basilio characters and a silly slow-motion brawl that ends Act I that would make fans of The Matrix proud. Rosina was beautifully sung by Isabel Leonard (remember that name as she may the next great young mezzo-soprano), her debut performance in the role. The opening night “talk back” session held by General Director Greg Carpenter and Director of Artistic Planning Brad Trexell was a welcome chance to gain insight into the production planning and thought process of the company.
A hearty Bravo to the cast – and to the inventiveness and ingenuity of the iPhone app.
Streaming Shakespeare & Tina Fey
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Technology, That's Life on January 14th, 2010
Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful...
While the debacle that is NBC’s programming department trying to pick up the pieces of the Conan/Leno train wreck for months will have some entertainment value, it’s pretty clear that there isn’t much worth watching on that new flat panel. There are, of course, a few notable exceptions: Chuck, 30 Rock, Mad Men… I’m told that Dexter and House are worth watching but I haven’t invested the time to find out. So on the occasional evening when free time and curiosity collide – what to do?
When the last cheap DVD player died I picked up a Blu-ray player that also connected to Netflix. I hadn’t had a subscription with the mail-in DVD giant for years – while the model is great (and really, isn’t anything that stomps Blockbuster into the ground?) I just didn’t plan ahead well enough to have the right movie in hand at the right time. Somehow the $14.99/month unlimited movie subscription turned into a $5/movie ongoing expense. Fast forward 8 years and Netflix is rapidly evolving the mail-in model to a content streaming model, i.e., now there is a growing library of content that can be accessed on an “instant” basis – through a variety of devices made by Blu-ray manufacturers like Samsung and Sony as well as stand-alone Netflix devices. Suffice it to say that I have bought into this hybrid rental/streaming model enough to have given a Roku device and a Netflix subscription as a Christmas gift to my inlaws. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’m only a Netflix subscriber and have no affiliate interest)
The majority of the content is back catalog, but there is a growing number of newer titles, particularly TV series. What this means is that one can sample a few episodes of Dexter, Friday Night Lights, etc., without having to cough-up the freight for a 22 episode season on DVD. It also means that some nuggets from the past can be easily unearthed – Ken Burns’ series on Jazz, Saturday Night Live from the beginning to Tina Fey’s deconstruction of Sarah Palin, the Addams Family, Bogart & Bacall, the original Star Trek, Bergman, Kurosawa; from the ridiculous to the classic the list goes on.
For the past several evenings I’ve indulged my geekness for Shakespeare by watching the four part series “In Search of Shakespeare”, a PBS series that originally aired in 2004. I had never seen it – frankly, I hadn’t heard of it. This series, presented by the delightful Michael Wood, explores the religious turmoil of Elizabethan England, the evolution of the theater and how the country boy born in the same year that Michelangelo died would grow to become the greatest writer in the English language. The ability to browse the online instant catalog, find something like this, sample it and then watch it at the time of my choosing is really compelling. No trip to the store or even the mailbox, no incremental pay-per-view or on-demand fees.
These are exciting times for consumers – the choices of content and media platforms have never been greater. The service described starts at about $125 for a basic Netflix device and $9/month. Now the challenge is to find the time to enjoy the treasure trove of entertainment. Will Ferrell or Rashomon?
Measuring ROI 10 Years On…
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Technology on December 28th, 2009
Robot Last Click
To say that there have been seismic changes over the past 10 years in the ways that we market online is to belabor the obvious. That said, let’s belabor anew as the “00’s” come to a merciful end and we head into 2010. Among the most significant have been the erosion of the walls that existed between the online or digital activities of marketers and those of the traditional or offline variety. In 2000 it wasn’t uncommon at all for a company or brand to have a distinctly separate dotcom marketing team (and even business unit) from the majority of its marketing activities. The notion of silo’d digital marketing has become one that businesses adhere to at their peril as the wisdom of integration and alignment of all marketing channels has grown to become the prevailing wind. In other words, your website had better be telling the same story as your retail locations, you catalogs, your customer service teams, sales teams, as well as PR and brand support. Customers have come to expect your brand’s narrative around value, service or pricing to be consistent across each and every touchpoint they encounter. This is no longer about being a visionary, this about basic blocking and tackling.
Another important change has been the increasing emphasis upon more accurately measuring the ROI of those marketing channels. If businesses have learned anything from their online initiatives, it is that a great many of them can be measured in a way that their offline activities cannot. Of course, the fact that an activity can be measured does not necessarily mean that it should be, at least in the way that we have done so to date. What flows out of this reality is that marketers must apply some manner of metric to everything that they do – online and offline. There is certainly nothing revolutionary about the idea of measuring and applying critical analysis of how resources are spent, but it begs the question of whether businesses are measuring the right things and if those metrics are valid. The beauty of the Google paid search machine is that you get a pretty clear picture of what happens when you put money in the slot, i.e., a click costs a dime, it takes 100 clicks to get an action so voila! the cost to acquire is ten bucks. This leads to ROI calculation that is clean, relatively accurate, and aligns neatly with the silo’d activities of ten years ago. Unless you are a pure-play (online or offline) and market in only one channel, this model can lead to inaccurate metrics at best, and poor decision making around resource allocation.
If only it was so simple to measure the investment in marketing collateral, tradeshow displays, online and offline display advertising, direct marketing efforts, customer retention and lifetime values, search marketing, broadcast, social media, and so on. Truly integrated and multi-disciplinary marketing requires more thoughtful measurement models. Relying upon “last click” attribution today makes no more sense than using a print publication’s circulation and pass-along rates did when the magazine and newspaper business was still healthy. The challenge remains to blend the various aspects of a comprehensive marketing mix and emerge with a more holistic view of what is spent and what that resulted in.
Steve Kerho of Organic reported some interesting findings in a recent post on developing an “analytics ecosystem” model for multi-modal campaigns across the web. Paid search, display (banner) ads and branded website activities showed some inter-relationships that confirm what many marketers have “known” but have had difficulty demonstrating. To wit, paid search performs better when a user sees display ads prior to clicking through a search ad; branded sites converted at much higher rates when display ads were viewed in prior sessions, but after too many display impressions performance fell off. Clearly, utilizing a last-click attribution model around your paid search campaigns risks undervaluing concurrent campaigns in different vehicles. The temptation to discard every activity but paid search requires the development of proxy metrics and blended or weighted analytics to more fully capture ROI. The long story short is that being able to model and manage the data will be a minimal requirement for marketing in the coming years. Marketers that can develop or partner with those that can aggregate and segment data will have the best chance of success going forward. Sound familiar?
Facebook Eating Its Young?
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Technology, That's Life on November 16th, 2009
Grandma Wants to Friend You
Everyone has experienced it – the day that what was cool became decidedly not. I remember the day that my mom walked down the basement stairs into the superfund site that was my room and declared that she “really liked that new Pink Floyd guy’s music”. Needless to say, “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall” were not going to be played much until I moved out of the house. While it is possible that my mother was strategically out-maneuvering me, i.e., pretending to like something in order to guarantee that she would never have to hear it again, she was a trained musician and could recognize interesting new trends. After all, she listened to Miles Davis and Ravi Shankar as well as Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.
This brings us to the current conundrum of today’s Gen Y and Gen Z Facebook users. In the brief few years of its existence, Facebook has grown from being the exclusive province of college-age online users to the world-wide social network phenomenon of today. If the site’s self-reported numbers are to be believed, well over 300 million people use the tool and something close to half of them log into the site in any given month. The fastest growth over the past year has been among adults over age 35 with the biggest proportional increase among those over 55. This means that the nightmare scenario of having your grandmother or your mother-in-law (I know this to be true) friend you has come true. My own daughter is still perturbed that her parents want to use Facebook – no doubt to stalk her every movement…
Now comes some interesting data that indicates that younger users may be beginning to abandon Facebook. Mediaweek reports that some advertisers are evaluating how this may require changes in their social media advertising plans. According to comScore, the average number of minutes spent online at the site by people 18-24 fell for the third consecutive month in September compared to the same period a year ago. In July, Facebook usage fell 3 percent, in August 13 percent and September 16 percent. Could be that the drop reflects mobile device users that are not counted, could be that as the fall arrived younger users began to focus more on school (Ha!) or it may reflect the eternal struggle of the young to keep their elders at arm’s length.
When you start getting friended by your grandmother, I think that’s when it starts to lose its cool – Huw Griffiths, EVP, Interpublic Group’s Universal McCann.
Managing Communication Differences
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Technology, That's Life on November 4th, 2009
Texting - Multitasking or Distraction
An ongoing discussion in both the workplace and the home is whether the persistent usage of social communications tools represents an efficiency gain or a distraction. Jeffrey Zaslow writes in today’s Wall Street Journal of the conundrum that businesses, schools and homes find themselves in – are younger workers and students able to accomplish tasks and incorporate and retain new information more or less effectively while they are awash in the continuous waves of text messages, Facebook posts and tweets? It’s safe to say that this is something of a generational difference with teachers and school assistant principals in agreement with most managers of “a certain age” that the non-stop digital social networking represents a lack of focus (at best) and a titanic time suck (most likely).
A great many workers under the age of 30 (i.e., those that have emerged from their teens and college years never knowing that information existed in a world without Google or Wikipedia) not only believe that they are able to effectively multitask but that, in fact, they are more efficient and waste less time than their, ahem, more mature colleagues on such wastes of time as holding meetings or making phone calls. All of us have had to endure our own Michael Scott-like managers at some point in our careers and understand that a significant proportion of meetings accomplish little more than what the average Facebook post does – at least with regard to how everyone’s weekend/game/vacation/kids are doing. Granting that, there is value and a craft to engaging directly with another human being in a non-digital communications channel. While many points of fact can be effectively shared via a text or IM, the nuances of context and agreement, understanding and alignment, are not so easily whittled down to 140 characters or less. Success in school and in business often is driven by strong interpersonal skills and the capacity to understand a colleague’s thoughts, beliefs and motivations.
In most workplaces and schools (as in most homes), trying to deny the utility and ubiquity of modern digital communication tools becomes its own waste of time. Obsessively checking Facebook or texting during classes or meetings is not going to work for any business or school. The challenge will be in setting standards for appropriate usage and in gathering factual data that shows if those Gen Y workers really are as efficient as their more seasoned colleagues believe themselves to be or are a distracted set of hyper-socializers that accrue vast quantities of information that is trivial from relationships that are shallow. For both business executives and school administrators (as well as parents) it is vitally important to become conversant and familiar with these social tools – not doing so makes managing them impossible.
Social Media Strategy for CACI
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Colorado, Technology on October 22nd, 2009
Did You Know? Now You Will
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Technology on September 22nd, 2009
The Economist’s Media Convergence Conference is coming up next month in New York. If the two days are half as interesting as this four minute video, it might be worth the price of admission. Thanks to Marta Kagan at Espresso for posting this 4-minutes of mental calisthenics.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8&feature=player_embedded
Customer Service Redux – Thule’s Response
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Technology on September 8th, 2009
A couple of weeks back I wrote of the high cost of retaining customers when your customer service doesn’t match-up with your marketing message. You can read the original post here – the quick review is that a relatively small but important part of a Thule bike rack had broken. Their customer service, while responsive, was of little help. The rack was returned to the retailer (REI) where it was refunded promptly. The net result was a loyal REI customer and a determination to purchase anything but a Thule product in the future.
Apparently, the folks at Thule monitor the web for blog posts and tweets that mention their brand. The day after the original post I received an email from Thule’s Director of North America Customer Service that read:
Dear Customer Service Reps,
Please take the time today to read the below Customer Service story.
http://mudslingonline.com/?p=475
This is the devastating repercussion of not going the extra mile with our consumers.
I cannot believe this poor consumer service comes from our department. I am shocked and disappointed.
This will be addressed in our upcoming meeting.
Over the course of the next few days I was contacted by Thule and they graciously shipped a new rack to my front door. That may fall into the category of “overcompensating”, but I appreciated both the company’s response and their subsequent follow-up. From the standpoint of customer service, it appears that Thule’s management will be stressing the importance of “going the extra mile”, i.e., to get the small details right the first time. Now to be fair, Thule’s customer service wasn’t unresponsive – the rep that handled the issue initially just let a logical resolution fall on the floor. What is probably a $10 part morphed into a $450 headache.
So a few lessons for those of us in the brand and product marketing spaces:
- Customer retention requires consistent training and management support to ensure that the staff members directly engaged with customers are doing the right things and understand the importance of their roles. The best customer service is driven from the staff level up – when the rep knows the right thing to do and is expected and empowered to do it.
- Leveraging online tools to monitor blogs and social networks can provide rapid and actionable insight into how your brand and products are being positioned – not by you but by your customers.
- Competitive intelligence and opportunities can be captured via monitoring those same online tools. A competitor such as Yakima could have had an easy P.R. win by stepping in through Twitter.
- Visible and direct acknowledgment of identified service issues – both internal to your organization and externally to customers – is a great way to help ensure that the marketing message, product benefit and brand positions stay aligned.
So kudos to Thule’s management for stepping in quickly and authoritatively. They chose to go that extra mile to win-back a customer. Now it’s time for a bike ride…
9-Minute Heartbreak
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, TGIF, Technology on June 5th, 2009
For those unfortunate souls that toil as marketers or advertisers (I know – we don’t have souls either) – here is a brutal musical tone poem on the end of media as we knew it. Don McLean would be proud of this send-up of the classic tune “American Pie” that provides confirmation that much of what we have read, written and worked on for both clients and our own companies is gone and is not coming back. Thanks to Bruce Dorskind for providing a good laugh.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqRcCHk_Pc
Seth Godin Talks Tribes at TED
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Technology on May 20th, 2009
TED is an annual conference that brings thought leaders from Technology, Entertainment and Design together for the past 25 years. Each Spring, 50 speakers come to deliver an 18-minute talk to a group of 1,000. Where else can you hear Al Gore talk climate change, John Wooden speak on leadership, Mike Rowe on dirty jobs and Isaac Mizrahi on fashion – all in one place?
Marketing guru Seth Godin speaks on the idea of “Tribes” as the replacement of mass media influence. Seen through the lens of consumer marketing, Godin challenges business to move beyond the mechanism of pushing a message from one-to-many and toward a model of engaging influencers and passionate followers to build an organic network of storytellers, i.e., marketers. Always an entertaining speaker, Godin provides a quick view of the decline of “factory marketing” and mass-media and the rise and need for leadership via the group of interested and engaged members. While the idea is no longer new and revolutionary – the technology of social media makes understanding the shift a necessity.