Given the Chance, Would You?

A great many articles and blogs have been written about the removal of Carol Bartz as CEO of Yahoo!  While half of them have been written about why she was and what it means for Yahoo!, the remainder have focused on how the termination was handled.  Both by the Yahoo! Board, and Carol herself.

Carol Bartz ran the worldwide sales organization at Sun Microsystems when I first worked there.  As several articles have alluded, I can personally confirm that her manner could be abrasive and, yes, that if you liked salty language you certainly enjoyed a warm comfort in Carol’s presence.

On one occasion, following a day of meetings with her, two dozen of us dined privately at MacArthur Park in Palo Alto.  At its conclusion, Carol shook everyone’s hand as they exited, smiling and saying to each, “Make your number.”  That was Carol.  Business first and last.  Fun in between.

Carol was not out to make friends.  If you made your number, you were good in her books.  If you didn’t, you were still in her books.  But listed on a different page.

I’ll confess to being surprised to read that she was terminated via a phone call.  Barring extreme grounds for cause, or imminent notification by the Board as is required in some CEO’s employment contracts, notice by phone is not a class act.  (I’ve had to do it a few times in my career due to unique circumstances - though once because a boss refused to grant travel approval.  Terminating anyone is unpleasant business.  Having to do it by telephone has always lingered with me as an indignity to the person whose position is being terminated.)

Though, I wasn’t at all surprised to read Carol’s response in the Forbes interview, referring to the Board as having “f___ed me over.”  Sour grapes?  Perhaps.

But who among us did not smile just a bit when reading it?  It is seldom, if ever, that voice is given to our most visceral and personal thoughts. On that score, Carol Bartz is no shrinking violet.

You Just Killed My Dog

In 1973, National Lampoon kicked off the new year with this cover:

The staff at National Lampoon - many of whom would later join Saturday Night Live - liked the dark side of humor.  Both the photo and its warning, If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog, were a cultural shock almost 40 years ago that sent circulation soaring.

The stuff of National Lampoon was parody and satire.  What I am writing about, however, is not.

In working with several non-profits this year, I’ve examined the online practices of other non-profits operating in the same field.  It doesn’t take long to conclude that most of them are hurting in this economy.  Some more than others.  Donations are down.  And, more than a few are showing how anxious they are about it. 

I only had to observe the marketing of 20 non-profits, and sign up for email from a half dozen of them, to see examples of how the difficulties facing some non-profit managements are affecting how they market to their donor base.  

The Tactic of Fear

A typical email I receive (monthly, sometimes more often) follows a now-familiar formula.  I won’t crass and call out names, or charitable objectives.

1. The beginning paints a picture of imminent disaster.  Someone - or thing - is going to do without (and sometimes, die!).  All usually laid out in one sentence.
2. The middle both describes the calamity if funds are not raised, and (compassionately, for the reader’s sake) what the world will look like if tragedy is averted.
3. Not unsurprisingly, at the end the choice is mine: donate and save the dog, or risk having the poor bugger shot.
4. A conspicuous Donate Now button - usually in amber yellow with black letters - sits close by.  Occasionally, there’s a Donate Now button near the top of the email (presumably so that one can spare oneself the torment of reading any further).

As a tactic, all of this would be fine if it worked.  But it usually doesn’t.

Numerous research studies (among them, Ray and Wilkie, 1970) have shown that the use of fear (more typically, threat or anxiety) walks a mighty fine line with an auidence Too little is boring; too much is a turn-off.  Both end up being ineffective. 

How much fear is the right amount to use?  It turns out that it all depends on how familiar an audience is with the subject - or issue.  The general finding is this: the more familiar the topic is to an audience, the lower the optimal level of fear appeal required to work.  In other words, if the audience is sensitized to an issue, a little goes a long way.

So, if I was to learn that the demise of a beetle I’d not heard of would eventually have a devastating effect on the food supply, an amped-up appeal would be in order.  But, as I’m already sensitized to the plight of starvation in some third world countries, it’s careful-does-it on the anxiety control knob.  

Accentuate the Positive

Most non-profits take enormous risk with fear marketing.  It’s hard to do well.  Most aren’t skilled at it.  And also, their email programs typically are directed at an audience that is already knowledgeable about the issue - their donor base.

Their managements may feel their gut churning over the decline in funding, but they do themselves a poor service by carrying that angst into their appeals.  

The best advice parallels that of Seth Godin: lead with benefit and value, and you'll never go wrong.

The best non-profit appeals out there (some are very well-crafted) go the extra mile to construct an appeals around what is accomplished via the good works they do.  Progress made.  Smiling faces.  Happy puppies.

People are more willing to contribute to a cause that makes them feel good inside about what they’re contributing to, than one that shows the glass half-empty.

I’d rather see a photo of a happy dog, than one with a gun pointed at its head.

Would You have an Intern Develop Strategy?

In 2008, I received an email from a colleague with a link to a podcast produced by three of the Sun’s 300 or so interns.  It was one of those evenings when I had time on my hands, so I listened.  The podcast was a fast-paced, spirited, take-the-bull-by-the-horns discussion on how to use social networking to do what the company’s enterprise applications could not.  

It became a wakeup call.

The problems they discussed were familiar: lack of management support, few juicy projects to work on, students wandering through an enterprise culture, an absence of good tools to get their jobs done.  But, the solutions were not.

I understood the gist of what they were doing, but the ‘how’ was new to me.  The 25-minute podcast was peppered with terms I only vaguely understood - mashup, Facebook, Digg.  I was impressed and curious.  I also had that sinking feeling that the people you least expected to contribute much had quietly figured out workarounds to the sluggish enterprise solutions we had spent large sums on

I met with them the following week.  They were all perhaps 21 years old, and keen to explain what they were doing.  They described, example after marvelous example, why they didn’t care to use our enterprise tools, and how they collaborated more easily using cloud-based social applications.  I was dumbfounded.  My mind began racing with ideas for how to put their talent and enthusiasm to work on some meaty challenges.

Fast Forward to 2011

It came back to me as I read this Ad Age article describing how 5 ad agencies used interns this past summer.  They shared a common objective: how to attract young, new users to an offering.  Some of the outcomes are no-brainers (newspapers are dead) while others may be surprising:

• Millennials prefer Facebook to Twitter
• CNN is a trusted online news source
• They are not impulsive buyers, but active comparison shoppers

It is worth the read.

Takeaway

If you want to market to a young demographic, then use young talent with the agility to see around those corners that the rest of us will surely miss.

The Brilliant Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is arguably the best marketer to come along in the past 60 years, and perhaps even the last century.  Within the technology industry, he has no equals when it comes to giving the customer what he wants.

Jobs may have started out a brash, young inventor; his genius, though, lay not in applied technology, but in the marketing of it.  He lacked formal training, and had no interest in doing market research to learn what his customers wanted.  He went with his gut.  He had an intuitive, uncanny sense of what the customer wanted, and he was most often right.

Photo April 1, 1976: Steve Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak

Photo circa 1978: Steve Jobs and Apple co-founder Mike Markula

He retired on Wednesday as Apple’s CEO, but history will judge his legacy not as the executive of the American firm with the largest capitalization, but as the executive with the gift of anticipating the next great thing and serving it up to people in irresistible fashion.

Steve Jobs may not have created the term “buzz”, but under his leadership the term has become synonymous with Apple’s skill in introducing new products.  Jobs understands theater.  

Beginning with the iPhone, Jobs seized on the tactic of stimulating demand by holding back supply.  No one in consumer technology does it better.  Every technology executive I have talked with about Jobs secretly wishes for his or her company’s own “iPod moment”, yet none have been able to duplicate it.

This past January, after 20 years, I switched my desktop from Windows back to Mac.  I spent a good hour and a half in Apple’s Palo Alto store choosing the model, chatting with sales associates clad in the familiar royal blue tee-shirts, and making mental notes of “the experience”.  

It is part art, and part science.  Shaped by formula, yes, but sculpted by culture and attitude of the staff.  It is not something easily copied.

Two months later, a week after the release of the iPad 2, I revisited the store at 8:00 on a Saturday morning for one-on-one training.  I was truly surprised to see fifty people - several with lawn chairs and coolers - waiting in line for the store’s 10:00 opening.  A week after the launch!  When I left an hour later, there were more than 100 standing in the queue.

I have the greatest respect for Steve Jobs, and thank him for showing the world how a business can achieve enormous success when choosing to focus on delighting its customers.

 

Facebook Advertising is a Bust for Brands

I casually read a blog post by UK-based Market Sentinel that I gave a second look at a day later.  It deals with Market Sentinel’s examination of how effective Facebook advertising is for brands.  Their conclusion: it’s not.

As with any analysis, it has its pluses and minuses (more on that shortly) but what caught my eye on second read were the online metrics used.

Did you know that you can:

• track your Facebook fan base online, just like rock stars do?
• find the popularity of any Facebook application?

Read on to learn how.

But first, a look at the job Facebook does for advertisers.

The Money Still Flows to Google

My gut tells me that the folks at Market Sentinel are right: Facebook is not a mecca for brand advertisers who use Facebook like they use conventional media.  Few have cracked the code.

Earlier this month I provided stats on social media advertising (the data excludes Google) showing that 98% of companies are either already doing advertising on Facebook, or plan to do so this year.  What the data does not show, however, is how much skin advertisers have in the game, i.e. ad spend.  This chart, though based on data gathered 6 months earlier, sheds light on share of ad spend.

If projections turn out as forecast in this scenario, then Google is expected to capture almost half of online ad spend next year.  Facebook, though growing, would take share from AOL yet still lag behind Yahoo! in 3rd place.

Of course, the marvelous thing about projections, as I blogged yesterday, is that they cannot anticipate future events.  They are predictions of how the future might be, not how it will be.  One of the events this projection could not anticipate was the launch of Google +.  My betting is that Google’s ad spend share can only go up, not down, as a result.  Time will tell.

What’s Your Fan Base?

The visual centerpiece of the Market Sentinel blog is a table showing the Facebook fan base for the Top 20 celebrities.  Eminem leads the pack with 42 million fans.  All of the celebrities leave big brands and their fan pages in the dust.

Here’s the interesting metric though.  Eminem only has 575 loyal fans - as defined by those who write comments more than the average for the other 41 million.  The most active fan base of the Top 20 is that of Lady Gaga, who has 1,231 active fans out of her 39 million followers.

Why should this matter?

Because only Facebook users who actively interact with a page receive updates.  In other words, only those fans who frequently visit and interact with a company’s page automatically receive the company’s updates in their Facebook stream.

So, all those clever “Like Us” promotions don’t end up streaming company content to the thousands - or millions - of fans who signed up.  If Lady Gaga updates are only reaching 1,231 or so of her 41 million fans, you have to wonder who is receiving those promised American Express updates.  I know I’m not.

If you’d like to find out the size and loyalty of your Facebook fan base - it’s free.

Visit Skyttle Friends  

Just be sure you are signed onto your Facebook account, then the rest is easy.  Warning: prepare to be disappointed.

What Facebook Apps get Traction?

This goes to show that, online, there’s a metric for everything.  If you’re familiar with Alex website rankings, you’ll find this similar.

Appdata is an online traffic tracking service run by Palo Alto-based Inside Network.

Here’s its Top 100 Application Leaderboard.

Scroll through the listings and you’ll soon notice, as reported by Market Sentinel, that brand applications, though many, don’t garner much usage at all.  Why?  Likely because few companies have figured out what is truly of value and interest to their customers and followers.  They’d all be better off understanding, as Starbucks did, why the game applications garner large followings.

You can track both Facebook’s top applications and apps developers, and call up all sorts of interesting time graphs - just as you can with stocks.  Here’s what the headings mean:

• DAU - Daily Active Users
• MAU - Monthly Active Users (a summation of each DAU count for the month)

Takeaways

1. Companies (brands) are still figuring out how to promote themselves on social networks like Facebook.  Activity and experimentation is high, but ROI is low.  With repeated trial and error, they’ll catch on.  And when they do, ad spend will catch up.
2. Corporate brands should use Facebook as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, and not as a substitute for email marketing or display advertising.

The Last Woman on Earth

Forecasting is part art, and part science.  Unfortunately, far more art than science gets applied - you’ll see a stunning example shortly.

The most dangerous of all forecasting techniques is the simplest - extrapolation.  To many planners and forecasters, taking an historical trend and extending it in straight line from past to future is like looking at a traffic accident.  No matter how grisly the scene may be, you just can’t take your eyes off it.

It matters little whether the straight line is derived from a linear regression.  The underlying assumption regarding historical events - that is, that conditions which occurred in the past to produce events will occur in the future - is a risky assumption.

Ask anyone who has been in either the stock or the housing markets the past few years.  Averages, and the comfort of narrow and orderly deviations from the mean, rarely align to produce predictable outcomes.

Population Projections

In the eighteenth century, The Reverend Thomas Malthus, a British political economist, understood the fallacy of drawing straight lines from past events.  He explained the fallacy in his 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population.

In put forth his theory that, as populations grew to the point of outstripping the capacity of the environment to sustain them, that war, famine, pestilence and disease would keep populations in check.  The work considerably influenced social policy leading, in part, to the creation of the census poll.

It certainly stirred up more than a few arguments in is day - both in support, and in refute of his theory.  It’s interesting to note that, 200 years later, the arguments still persist.

In 2007 the liberal-leaning New York Times claimed that man’s inventiveness would free him from the bondage of a Malthusian catastrophe, whereas the conservative Wall Street Journal devoted a front page article supporting the view that Malthus had his mojo working for him when he published his work.  

Who’s right?  Who’s to know!  Thank goodness for politics and the miracle of elections.

A far more sensible view of the future that entirely avoids straight-line extrapolation comes courtesy of a 240-page United Nations study published in 2004, suitably titled, World Population to 2300.  It contains this graph, showing world population projections through to 2100.

The analysts who prepared the report know better than to draw a tempting continuation of the blue line representing Actual worldwide population.  Instead, their projection consists of three flavors: each is dependent on varying assumptions about the future.

The U.N. has certainly covered its bets: at the high end the population could double from its 2004 level, and worst case could decline to 1990 levels.  There’s a projection in there to suit just about every glass half-empty or half-full outlook.

Kidding aside, this is not an exercise in wiggle room.  The U.N. has rightly shown enormous variation in outcomes for one simple reason: it is impossible to predict what will happen to conditions that affect population growth with any certainty.

Will the Last Woman on Earth be a Hot-blooded Brazilian?

Which brings us to the stunning example I promised.

This week, The Economist published this article on declining fertility rates in Asia.  Whereas three decades ago China imposed strict measures to control the number of children couples had (presumably, Communist Party members support the Malthusian view) there is a different problem today.  In a period of unexpected increases in wealth and living standards across Asia, it turns out that fewer people are getting married.  Hence, there are fewer children being born.

In its blog, Daily chart, The Economist had some fun with what it admitted are “back-of-the-envelope calculations”.  It took U.N. data on fertility rates, and simply extended them in a straight line to see what would happen.  The end product is this graph projecting the end of human civilization as the last child-bearing female leaves this world.

 

Don’t for a minute think that the editors of The Economist buys into this.  They don’t.  They are simply having “what if” fun, and end the blog by stating the condition, “if present trends continued unbroken,” to assure its readers of the unlikelihood of such events.

(That said, I’m intrigued by the Canadian fertility rates relative to other countries.  Seems it is a very different country than the one I left in 1994.)

Takeaway

Most projections we see span no more than 5 - 10 years.  It’s easy to take them as gospel.  

Next time you see a forecast (projection) that piques your interest ask yourself this: what would the projection look like if it extended out 40, 50 or 100 years?

If that outcome seems absurd, then it would be prudent to examine the underlying assumptions used by the forecaster.  Especially if the forecast concerns something you would bet your retirement or career on. 

 

 

 

 

 

How We Use Facebook and Twitter

Facebook users: have you had the sense that how you use Facebook today is a lot different than you did a year or two ago?  If so, the research bears out your suspicion.

First, a little history on just how quickly Facebook reached its 750+ million users, as compiled by eMarketer:

• 90.3% yr/yr growth from 2008 to 2009
• 38.6% in 2010
• 13.4% in 2011 (forecast)

UK research firm Global Web INdex completed a study of social media usage behavior globally, publishing this rather impressive visual map of its finding.

0823.Global-Map-of-Social-Networking-GlobalWebIndex-June-20112.pdf Download this file

The map chock full of useful information, yet extracting conclusions from it takes some getting used to.

It’s easier to examine the data in the following two tables.

Changes in How People Use Facebook

The first table shows how Facebook usage has changed since 2009.  On the growth side, more people are uploading video content and - at least globally - people are joining company-sponsored (branded) Facebook pages.

There’s plenty of things for which use is declining - when was the last time you sent a digital gift, or used Facebook for messaging?  Of particular note are these three items:

• Applications: my hunch is that so many of them end up spamming friends with useless information (do you really care to know what restaurant I just walked into) that users have grown wary.  Marketers seeking to promote applications may have a tough go of it.
• Groups: aside from branded groups (many of which are very well managed) most groups languish unattended as people realize that it takes time and effort to update them meaningfully and often.
• New contacts: just how many people do you know and want to follow - or, importantly, know and want to follow you?  It does not take more than 300 - 400 to be overwhelmed with content, and reach diminishing returns.

Microblogs are Meant for Content

Here’s a different slice of data for mircoblogs like Twitter.  This table shows frequency of various ways of uses a service like Twitter.

At 144 characters, Twitter clearly limits what one can say.  Twitter’s dominant use has become referral - connecting to other sites, photos, videos, blogs, news updates and such where there are no limitations on size or nature of content.

There’s plenty of back-and-forth commentary on Twitter, but it almost always follows someone posting a link to originating content for followers to see and, in turn, comment on themselves.

Understanding the difference in intention between community sites and microblogging sites saves frustration:

•  Facebook lets users post and share content directly
• Twitter is a gateway to content posted elsewhere