Tag Archives: Marketing - Page 3

Seeing Dollar Signs

Out for lunch today I saw one of those roadway signs: “100 Signs for $299!!”  I’ve been seeing quite a few of these lately (although I have definitely not seen 100).  It’s made me think of a scam.  I’m not sure of I have a nose for identifying scams or a brain for creating scams.  But anyway, here’s what you do.  And, just for the record, I didn’t think of this until I saw a potential giveaway one day.

So you find someone who will print the signs for $179 (100 of them!!!).  You create the sign to say “100 signs for $199!!!!”  Then you put the signs out in a place where Mr. $179 is not advertising.  You get a call, take the order, then place the order for $179 with your competitor.  You just made $20.  Do that 8 times and everything from there on out is profit.  The signs should last for quite some time and you don’t really have any expenses to keep up.

The only reason I thought of this is one day seeing a sign for $179 on one side of the road and $189 on the other side.  I wondered if the one guy used the other for printing.  And like I said, today, I saw a sign for $299.  That dude’s got some real balls.  He wants his investment back right away.

Executive Non-Profits

I recently found an article or post saying that the Firefox browser was considering putting ads into its “new tab” page.  Now to read the announcement, you’d think it was a great thing for the user, because when you install a new browser and run it for the first time, clearly you do not know what to do and where to go.  Welcome to 1990.

That lunacy is not the reason I felt compelled to write.  It’s been out of my thoughts for a long time that the Mozilla Foundation, who creates Firefox, is a very large non-profit organization.  It was just kind of in my thoughts that the Firefox team was a very large group of programmers, possibly headed up by some architects.  I envisioned a bunch of great minds working together for a noble cause.  That’s not really how it is.

It’s a company.  It’s a big company.  And there are a lot of people who get paid from this company.  I’ve talked before about how large non-profits are paying people with a lot of other people’s money.  And these people essentially have a perpetual conflict of interest.  Non-profits are typically created to solve a problem.  What happens when you win?  The non-profit isn’t needed anymore.  You’ve put yourself out of a job.

So there’s that part of it, that you’re getting paid to fight a war, but you don’t really want the war to end.  But then there’s the other part, which is, if you’re joining a non-profit, you should believe in the cause, right?  And your experience can further that cause, right?  But what if you have experience, but not the passion?  Then, money talks.

And money seems to be talking pretty well at Mozilla.  The directors of the foundation are doing ok.  $150k+ for a couple of them.  That’s actually pretty much in line with executive pay.  The others?  I mean only three others?  $500k+ each.  That’s kind of ill-proportioned, maybe.  For a non-profit, remember.  This is about a cause.  a cause you can’t begin to put a price on – keeping the Internet free.  I think these three are less about the cause and more about the salary.

Blah, blah, blah.  Big company, big salaries.  But here’s where it ties in with the article I read.  Mozilla hired a new person, brought in at the Vice President level, to use his skill to bring in more money for the organization.  The salary is unknown, but $100k+ is safe to guess.  His idea?  Advertising, under the guise of helping new users.  His job is to create the money to pay himself and all the other executives, because cost-cutting would be backwards.

The revenue for 2012 was in the range of 9 million.  The total salaries were 4 million.  The executive compensation was 2 million.  Nearly a quarter of revenue.  Nearly half of all salaries.

Let me sum this up.  Mozilla is about keeping the Internet free, so that it can’t be manipulated by corporations (never mind the recent failure of net neutrality).  Their solution to losing donation revenue given to them by corporations – primarily Google – is to use advertising by corporations, who will direct/inform/influence users to use the internet that best benefits them.  Anything wrong with that model?

I Guess I Won’t Bother

One of my new fun things to do is find the source of images that are used in Facebook ads.  Copy the image URL, paste it into Google image search and see what comes up.

I had this ad:

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And I found the same picture used on Twitter, so I was like, I should let her know her Twitter profile picture is being used for a dating ad on FB.

This was the start of “her” Twitter feed:

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The same post, over and over.

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And over and over.  I gave up after I got back to posts from 2010.  I guess that face was made for spam.  Poor girl.

Facebook Ads

Who even thought this was a good idea?

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Prime Season

A little while ago I was shopping on Amazon’s website and the product I found had two sellers from which to buy.  One seller was cheaper, but wasn’t eligible for Amazon Prime’s free shipping.  The other seller was Amazon itself – so, free shipping – but the price was more expensive.  If I had to pay shipping, the cheaper vendor would have won out.

This got me thinking about a couple of things.  First, I had a little bit of pity for the seller who wasn’t Prime, but he probably gets business from non-Prime members, so that’s ok.  The other thing I thought of more carefully is the Amazon Prime membership itself.

Let’s forget the other benefits of Prime like the free streaming videos.  Let’s just say that when you buy a Prime membership, you are paying shipping costs in advance.  That is, you put $80 in a shipping escrow account and you use it up throughout the year as you buy Prime-eligible products.  How long will it take to use up that $80?  Maybe 10 purchases, give or take a few? 

Now, what if all the products you were buying with free shipping were a little more expensive than other sellers, but still cheaper than whatever it would cost with shipping from those other vendors?  Even if it was just a couple of dollars, it’s still cheaper, right?  A bag of gummy bears for $8 with free shipping or the same bag for $6 plus $4 shipping.  It’s $2 more on the product, but $2 less after shipping is considered.

But… you’ve paid for shipping in advance, remember?  You are chipping away at your escrow account slower than you might have thought, because you’re contributing a little bit towards shipping by paying a slightly higher price.  So, while you may think you’re getting an awesome deal by purchasing Prime, it’s not that awesome.  It can still be very good, though.  That 10-purchase, break-even point we estimated earlier could easily double.

The more important part is that Prime incentivizes you to buy from Amazon and not from other sellers – even other sellers on Amazon.  This means the profit from the sale of the item stays with Amazon.  And if Amazon is lucky, you won’t use so much free shipping as to burn through your escrow.

To summarize:  You pay more for a product from Amazon than from another seller.  The additional profit for Amazon goes to offset the cost of the “free” shipping.  You are also paying for some of that shipping from your purchase of Prime.

This is like a wet dream for number-crunchers: to come up with the perfect balance of item pricing that undercuts the competition by the smallest amount and still convinces the buyer to choose Amazon.  Can you imagine the computing power that is likely devoted to this formula every single day?

Resume Retardation

I’ve bitched before about the quality of resume we’re getting for our software developer positions.  We have another spot open and we got another resume riddled with errors.  I counted 18 major errors and I skipped a lot of minor errors.  This is just plain stupid, people.  I’m going to show you what you are doing wrong, so that you can review your own resume and possibly correct some of these before someone like me sees them.

First of all, this resume has the unique presentation where commas have been replaced by ellipses.  For example, when listing skills, it says something like, “This language… that language… some other language… some server software…”  I don’t know why people try clever things like this.  It reminds me of a goofball new-age manager who always used semicolons instead of periods.  So, sure, I noticed it and it makes me read your skills list with ridiculous, dismissive pauses as if after every skill you’re saying, “You know, I could go on…”  But if you’re going to do it and be pretentious about it, at least be consistent.  Don’t have the last three items separated by commas.

Now the offenses:

“Develop SSRS Reports in a ASP.Net Application using SQL, Silverlight, ASP.Net 3.5” – “A” should be “an”.  I am lenient when people talk about “a SQL database” or “an SQL database”, because of the two different pronunciations of “SQL”.  I know of no other way to pronounce “ASP”.  A/an errors appear three other places in this resume.

“Developed a WCF to be used by collages to receive leads for their schools” – “A WCF” means nothing.  “A WCF application” is probably what was meant.  “Collages” is completely wrong.  “Colleges” is the proper word.  There’s no excuse for this.  You are writing software for academics!  A similar problem where sentences end with “a SQL 2008” excluding any descriptor like “database”, “procedure”, or ”application” appears in two other places in this resume.  Another completely wrong word (“from” as “form”) is in the resume.

“Developed and Deployed an Company Intranet site (Oracle, HTML, JavaScript, and Java)” – “An Company” is improper.  You can read it and say, oh, it used to just be “an Intranet…”, but he added “Company” and didn’t change the “an”.  Yes, that’s probably correct, but it’s not an excuse; it’s just an explanation.  By the way, the random and inconsistent capitalization is a lot of the minor errors I didn’t count.  Also, note the proper use of an ellipse.

“SharePoint Sever 2007” – Really?

“Windows Phone 7 Developments” – How many developments are we talking, here?

“Wrote to chapters for the WROX SQL 2012 Bible on Row Level Security and Data Encryption.” – I hope those “to” chapters were proofread by someone capable of writing proper English.  This is not someone who should be writing or contributing to books.

So what we have here is a resume by someone who has been working professionally longer than I have. This resume has not been proofread by anyone, not even the recruiter that submitted it.  This person, who has been working as a contractor, has had to update his resume seven times in the last three years.  It appears he has not reviewed his work in full.  This is someone who clearly does not have an eye for quality and when the work is done, he moves right on to the next thing.  This is why contractors suck.

Postscript:

The interview was a total failure, so I didn’t need to voice my opinion on the quality of the resume.  However, as a personal embarrassment, I found the worst resume mistake during the interview.  The heading: “ACCOMPLIMENTS”.  I never would have thought a heading to be misspelled.

On Community

The big, huge, #1, all-important “thing” right now in online business is “community”.  No matter who you listen to, you will hear that you have to build a community with your customers.  There’s one case where I feel this business dream was present long before it became a “thing” and just as the concept of “community” was gaining traction, they went and blew it all away.  That business is Woot.

Woot has had spectacular growth in its relatively short life.  It started as a deal-a-day website, offering one different product every day until it was sold out.  We’ll call that Woot 1.0.  Then there was the idea that Woot could offer more than one product a day, in multiple  specific categories.  Thus became Woot 2.0.  Then there was the idea that Woot could offer many products in each category for periods longer than a day.  This ushered in Woot 3.0, where it continues today.

Back in the 1.0 days, there was a very active community in the product forums.  You could discuss a product all day.  When 2.0 came along, this community became diluted.  And if it wasn’t diluted, it was stressed in that the members had to participate even more.  They didn’t have to, of course, but they wanted to because the brand was fun and all their friends were there.  When 3.0 landed, there was simply no way to keep up with the sheer amount of products begging for discussion.  And it showed.  Products would go days without any discussion on them.  Maybe due to lack of interest, maybe due to people not finding them or maybe not even bothering to look for them.

This change, while certainly increasing the bottom line of the Woot company – because stuff did still sell – created an environment totally different from past versions.  Imagine walking into a room and there’s a product on a display stand in the middle.  Also in the room are 50 friendly (sometimes sarcastic) people chatting.  All of these people have an opinion about this displayed product and you can listen to them talk about it or you can directly ask anyone about it.  Now, imagine a room with 20 products on display.  Still 50 people, but some are huddled around one or another product.  Your source of feedback is lessened and the credibility of the products and your business suffer.

So that’s the business aspect in favor of remaining small.  You have a group of loyal followers and they’re going to support your choice of product (or limited products) because that’s what you offer.  You’ve made the work easy for them to help support because your product offerings are limited.  As much as it pains me to make the comparison, look at Apple.  They have, what, like 5 products?  Anyone can help you to some degree on those.  On the other end of that comparison, just as painfully, look at Microsoft.  Such a massive selection, it’s so difficult to find any assistance with some obscure product like Small Business Accounting.

But getting back to “community” in Woot, you have to look back to the 1.0 days to find where that community really shined: the Woot-off.  Because you had one site, but the products constantly refreshed after being sold out, you’d have people discussing products all day.  And if the products were slow sellers, the people would stick around and chat about anything else.  It was normal for people to admit their work productivity dropping to zero because of involvement in the Woot-off.  Today, in the current 3.0 incarnation, there is a Woot-off happening on five different sites.  How are you going to possibly keep up on conversations on five different sites?  Why would you want to?  And the effect is very obvious.  Products now turn over much, much more slowly during a Woot-off.

So you have a brand community that is stretched too thin over too diverse a product base.  Could it be made any worse?  Sure.  These changes I described are also creating a strong sense of community apathy.  No one really cares anymore because there’s just too much.  I see some people becoming specialists in one category or another,  and bravo to them.  But you have to wonder if there’s any benefit to being a lone expert.  Where are your peers?  If you leave, then what happens?

There’s another change in Woot that is feeding this apathy – actually two changes.  The first change is the “no dead air” policy Woot seems to have adopted.  If a product sells out too quickly, another product is posted in its place.  This goes against the old policy of “you snooze, you lose”.  Yeah, you still lose out on the earlier offering, but there’s still something for you to buy, so no hurries.  The other change is the recurring items.  When you see Gunnar glasses sold for a week on one site, then sold for the next week on another site, then sold in a woot-off, then back again afterwards.  Or if you see another product on a side sale also appearing in a Woot-off, or like what just happened – a product comes back a second time in a Woot-off, what are you supposed to think?  There’s no shortage of supply, there’s no exclusivity, there’s nothing special about the sale at all.  You are cheapening your offerings.  Call it the Starbucks effect; or the Best Buy effect.  When it’s always available, the desire to have it drops.

So in conclusion, just when other companies are discovering how to rally their customer base and make strong advocates for their brand, Woot has figured out how to lose one of the most valuable company assets it could ever have.  If you’ve lived through Woot 1.0 and 2.0, you can see what you need to do with your business (and what not to do).  If you came in with Woot 3.0, you can only read history of what it was like.

Thought Followers

I got an email from LinkedIn with a title that struck a nerve with me: “Don’t miss out on updates from thought leaders” and it went on to list a bunch of successful businesspeople and a link at the bottom that said: “See more thought leaders".  This newly-coined term, “thought leader” infuriates me.  What does that title mean?  Who designates these people?  Why should we even care?

The title “thought leader” can be taken a couple different ways.  The way that initially perceived it was condescending and elitist, as in “you can’t even think at the level of these people.  You need to listen to them.”  Screw that.  Like I want anything to have to do with Richard Branson and Arianna Huffington.  You could also take the term to mean that these people have ideas that shape the entirety of industry, finance, and technology.  That’s a bunch of crap, too.  Everyone has ideas.  These people are just in a much better position to execute them because of their money, power and influence.  I just did a search on “thought leader” and discovered this is a “thing", going back to at least 2010.  Another Dilbert-world industry buzzterm so we can discover that this is what we must aspire to and buy books and seminars.

From a website: “To be a thought leader, you need to immerse yourself in your professional domain and search for new things to say that add value to your organization’s objectives.”  Search for new things to say…  All you have to do is say shit.  Sorry, this is not sufficient.  It seems to me that you can’t get anything done by having a bunch of “thought leaders” in a conference room coming up with new things to say.  Meanwhile, there’s a bunch of awesome people keeping their mouths shut and getting things done.

Here’s the other issue with this idea.  In our polarized, black-and-white world we live in today, you are a leader or you are a follower.  If you’re not a thought leader, all you are is following someone else.  And that’s exactly what LinkedIn is suggesting I do.  I need to follow these “leaders”.  I need to do what they say, because my thoughts are not at their level.  Obviously, because I’m not a multi-billionaire.  You know what the real thought leaders say (and have said in the past)? “Don’t listen to me.  Think for yourself.”

English, Motherfucker, Do You Write?

Ok, you idiots.  You want a job?  Do you know how to get a job?  You have to present yourself well.  No, you have to present yourself as perfect as you can be.  There’s a lot of conflicting advice as to whether you have to answer questions 100% perfect in an interview or whether you should just be yourself.  The answer is both.  Be yourself and be 100% perfect.  If you’re good, this should be easy for you.

Now, the reason for this bitching is because I’m doing interviews now.  These are interviews for decent jobs.  I don’t actually know the pay scale, but 50-80k is not out of line.  The jobs are for computer programming, so a level of precision is somewhat expected.  Why then, of the last four resumes, do I see spelling and grammatical errors?  Why, you stupid people? 

The two resumes I got today each had at least five mistakes in them, and I even purposely ignored punctuation and poor sentence structure.  How can this happen?  The one resume was five pages long – which is ridiculous to begin with.  Apparently, all the technical terms were generating spell-check warnings, so spell-checking was probably turned off for the document.  Stupid.  Are you in some kind of hurry?  Do you not understand proofreading?

You’re not solely to blame, either.  Your resumes are being submitted by recruiting firms.  They missed the errors as well!  Do you realize you are literally giving money to people who are doing nothing but sitting between you and an employer?  This recruiter is doing nothing for you.  They copy your resume text into their template and call it a day.  In one of the two resumes from today, the document formatting changed midway through.  The recruiter’s standards are just as low as yours.

It gets better.  The first interview for today has cancelled.  You don’t cancel an interview unless you got a great offer.  Someone out there looked at the resume, either didn’t notice the mistakes or didn’t care about them, interviewed this guy and hired him.  This is what we’ve come to.  We’ve had candidates come in wearing business casual clothes instead of a suit.  We have resumes submitted with multiple mistakes.  We have to accept these shortcomings from candidates because if we don’t someone else will snatch them up?  Screw that.

But I’ve been instructed to not point out these problems in the interview.  So go ahead, fools, see how low you can take the standard.

On Advertising

I got into a conversation about email and spam, which led me to think about advertising in general.  I don’t like unsolicited sales pitches – at all.  To me, the amount of effort you put into selling your product or service is directly related to its worthlessness.  Obviously, if something is completely useful, all you should have to do is show it or briefly explain it and it should sell itself.

But on the other hand, I don’t particularly hate advertising.  I actually appreciate and enjoy clever, well-crafted messages.  This difference of opinion made me think of three different types of advertising.

  • Hard Sell – This is the worst kind of advertising, done via phone call, street selling, mall kiosks, or even direct mail.  The ads that urge to to buy and sometimes warn, scare, or threaten you if you don’t.  There is always a consequence to not taking action.  Think about it.  Why would you ever want to attach a negative image to your product or service, even if it’s true?  Some people can’t afford the product or service or may not be in a position to buy it at all.  Now all your advertising has done is made them feel miserable.
  • Informational – This type covers a wide range.  There’s a fine line between Informational and Hard Sell and it usually depends on how much negativity or fear the ad generates.  However, in the median of this range, the primary intent is to simply inform the recipient that your company exists at all.  This type of ad combats the “I would’ve called, but I didn’t know such a place existed!” problem.  This is why I enjoy browsing random shops, because it’s good to know what’s out there.
  • Reminder – This type of ad is for well-established brands, like Coke, McDonalds, and most beers.  All the ad does is make you think of them.  These brands will also use Informational types of ads when they introduce new products, but lots of times, it’s just to evoke a mood or make you consider buying their product again.

The one that I was most interested in was the balance between Hard Sell and Informational.  When you are starting a business, you have to get your name out – Informational.  But at what point does it seem like desperation and start entering into Hard Sell territory?  The exact example I am thinking of is a former co-worker, who fell hard for real estate.  His focus within the broad scope of real estate is kind of in the scummy part: “We buy homes for cash!” “Invest with me and get a great return on your money!”  So, because his business focus is questionable, he’s going to have to push harder and yell louder for anyone to hear him.  This just moves his messages into the Hard Sell, where they are naturally resisted.

Although I do some work on the side, I don’t advertise anything.  In fact, I rarely even bring it up in conversation.  But somehow, whenever I am needed, an opportunity arises.