Telemarketing/Spamming on Mobile Phones

Simon & Schuster and the marketing company ipsh! recently lost a court decision after spamming mobile phone owners with text messages promoting Stephen King's new book. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act currently limits the use of autodialing technologies

So long as consumers incur any sort of direct "per transaction" cost for the traffic they receive on mobile devices, any marketer that tries to use those platforms for unsolicited advertisements is begging for trouble (and risking cutting themselves off from their audience permanently). It wouldn't take much for an enterprizing programmer to have a hit iPhone or Blackberry app that blocks unsolicited texts.

Rather than wasting their time and money lobbying or trying to create systems that skirt the law to advance ineffectual mass-marketing campaigns - marketers should be concentrating on developing relationships with their key audiences so that they WANT to stay connected because of the valuable and relevant communications from the advertisers.

It will be interesting to see how mobile device pricing evolves. One could imagine marketers offering to pay mobile service providers to make the cost of, say, an SMS text message free. One could also then imagine mobile service providers creating a new "service" that allows users to block advertising for a monthly fee.

Whatever happens, the current price structure can't continue as more and more people begin to use phones for mobile computing as opposed to purely for phone calls because it's ass-backwards: even though it's all just data moving through towers and pipes - users are charged more for SMS text messages and data transfer than they are for phone calls (which use more data).

Seth Godin vs. the Textbook Industry

In a recent blog post, Seth Godin took the textbook industry to the woodshed ("Textbook Rant"). I have a couple of points of disagreement, but overall I think most of his analysis was spot-on and highlights some of the paradigms about education that need to change.

• My first point of disagreement was his assumption that marketing textbooks are representative of textbooks in general - I don't necessarily think that's the case. Some fields (like marketing) are more malleable (for lack of a better word) than others (like algebra). Compared to algebra, marketing is somewhat newer and is inherently more subjective in nature. Moreover, while there are always new developments in mathematics, they don't happen as rapidly as those in fields like marketing.
• My second point of disagreement is that I think Seth tends to interact with self-directed, high-achieving individuals who function very well independent of the traditional academic system. For the majority of students, the approach most textbooks take tends to be more effective because they have a bit more difficulty following the more esoteric references or directing their own activities/exercises to reinforce the material.

That said, however, he's right: textbooks are too expensive, lack an innovative spirit, do too little to inspire students about a particular topic, and are impractical. This is why so many faculty rely heavily on coursepacks (or even multiple texts for a single course).

That's partially due to the industrial design of our [now-outmoded] education system, and it's partially due to the constraints of having to aim for a very broad audience (which limits how creative one can be in the presentation of subject matter). It takes a long time to put together a textbook because the text is only a small portion of the whole job. I would wager nearly half of the work involved in a textbook goes to producing the host of tools, assessments, guides, and other materials for use in the class which reinforce the material and help faculty assess the progress of the students in retaining and applying the material.

These realities don't excuse textbook manufacturers from their culpability, however. They could be innovating, but they're not because they've hit upon a lucrative way of doing business and have grown complacent ... which means it's right about time for someone innovative to come along and upend their business model and run them out of circulation.

As Godin notes, one could imagine the model of textbooks moving completely away to exhaustive, one-time paper texts and toward a constantly-evolving web-based model that is updated/maintained by a collaborative of faculty and experts (I would say even students would bring some valuable insights to the process).

Unfortunately I don't think it's as simple as Godin suggests. A cursory glance at the debate raging over where scholarly research should be published hints at the unseen complications that exist. Here are a few I can see (and some possible solutions):

• The first barrier will be the publishing industry (which includes some academic institutions that have their own publishing houses) which won't go down without a fight. Similar to the music industry's reaction to file-sharing - they'll likely try to maintain their monopoly by suing or lobbying their competition out of existence (a lawsuit from a single intellectual property violation could decimate a start-up venture). They're also not above bribing faculty in the same way drug companies schmooze health professionals.
  [Solution: have a powerful academic institution house the effort so that it could fight off vexatious lawsuits.]
  
• Second, though many engaged faculty would leap at the model he suggests (of cobbling together a customized text from crowdsourced "chapterettes"), there are a lot of more complacent faculty who won't be interested in assembling their own text (or in doing it for free, as many receive a slice of the profits from textbooks).
  [Solution: Make the platform user-friendly and compatible with enterprise content management systems like Oracle/PeopleSoft and Blackboard.]
  
• Third, it may also be difficult to find people to do the less fun tasks associated with producing textbooks (like creating the test banks of questions, exercises, classroom activities, lecture guides, etc.) which is what makes the traditional model appealing to over-worked faculty looking to outsource as much of the labor associated with teaching a class as possible.
  [Solution: If a prestigious academic institution backed this effort, one could appeal to creators by allowing them to associate themselves with that institution.]
• Fourth, someone also needs to create the platform or build the network that would enable enough creators to gather together to create enough content to make the system viable.

Fortunately I think the wired world is up to the task, and it's only a matter of time.

Marketers Miss the Point of Social Media (Again)

As audiences continue to fragment and marketers scramble to find the next big thing that is going to save the traditional advertising industry, they continue to mistakenly apply the traditional one-way mass media model to the tribalized digital environment. It's the equivalent of using chess pieces to play Halo 3.

Either as a result of naivete or a concerted effort to mislead those who buy advertising, they also continue to use delusive statistics to quantify that the traditional media is still on top. The latest example is a study by Knowledge Networks (written up in MediaPost). It concludes that in spite of the fact that 83 percent of the population on the Internet is using social media, "...genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks' analysts, likely never will."

The conclusion is based on (among other things) the statistics that "5% of social media users regularly turn to these social networks for 'guidance on purchase decisions'" and "only 16% of social media users say they are more likely to buy from companies that advertise on social sites."

Based on these statistics, a Knowledge Networks VP reaches the conclusion, "...word-of-mouth is still the No. 1 most influential source, followed by TV. The influence of social media isn't at the bottom of the list, but it is somewhere in the long tail of marketing - about the same as print ads, or online [display] ads.'"

It sounds compelling until one realizes that they're completely missing the point.

First, social media enables people to broaden their social networks and to interact with friends and family in new ways. It not only greases the skids for interactions within one's social circle, but it indexes them and makes them searchable. Put another way - social media is a more effective iteration of word of mouth.

This makes it very difficult to draw the line between a decision influenced purely by word-of-mouth and a decision influenced purely by an interaction within a social media environment. For example, if I buy a car because my friend recommended it to me at a social function, but I learned this friend was an expert because of articles they posted on their Facebook profile - which medium gets the credit for the transaction?

Of course social media fails when used for traditional marketing efforts. It's created a completely new paradigm that has made possible entirely new economic systems and business models (to say nothing of how it has affected aspects of business like marketing). If you're a business built on volume trying to reach a mass audience - you're likely going to fail using social media. In fact, your failure is virtually guaranteed if you go about it in the traditional ways.

Invariably some percentage of those sales attributed to "word-of-mouth" rightly belong to social media, because of the way social media allows individuals to maintain contact with those they take "word-of-mouth" recommendations from.

The point of using social media for marketing is that allows one to easily target a very small, specialized audience in a very inexpensive way. So if you're trying to sell the most popular car (Toyota Camry) in the most popular color (White), you're wasting your time. If, instead, you're trying to sell a custom-crafted automobile (Tesla Roadster) in a custom color (Chartreuse) - you can now find and influence your audience more cheaply and easily.

"Fool us Onc...": Why Social Media Renders Most Marketing/Advertising Worthless

When it comes down to it, most marketing/advertising (and a lot of public relations) in the modern era is about fooling people. Fooling them to infiltrate their social sphere to influence them, fooling them to thinking they need things that they don't, fooling them into thinking that one product is better than another.

So the model goes, you think of a new way to fool a bunch of people into paying for your product/service, they get wise, they stop paying, you think of a new way to fool them into paying for your product/service (and lather, rinse, repeat as needed). It's a dance.

That model is only economically-viable when you're able to fool a large number of people at once for a relatively low cost. In an environment saturated by ubiquitous technology and social media - that model fails because the costs and barriers change. Even if you figure out a way to game the system, the lifespan of that new tactic is extraordinarily short because people are now always networked and communicate with each other. The lifespan is so short that it's a fraction of the length of many advertising / promotion campaigns, so before you can even get the word out - the verdict from the audience is already in.

Here's how it works:

First, it's increasingly difficult to even find the people you need to fool. People are opting out of the traditional mass media in droves, so one must spend vastly more resources piecing together an audience of any considerable size. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Second, once you do find a way to reach your audience, they've become highly tribal and have set up discourse communities with increasingly-esoteric communication codes to police their membership. The time you'd invest learning the communication codes of a discourse community in order to infiltrate it isn't worth the comparatively small payoff of the tiny "Long Tail" audience you reach. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Third, even if you find the audience and learn their language - if you disappoint them (either with a product/service that doesn't meet their needs or that is inferior), you stand to lose them forever. Worse, if you disappoint them enough, they may tell their other tribes about you. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

That's the bad news.

The good news is that there's a world of opportunity for good products/services (as Jonathan Coulton will tell you) provided by organizations that are responsive and accountable to their stakeholders, and the barriers are lower than they've ever been. There are even opportunities for big companies, provided they're willing to stop trying to fool themselves (and customers) into thinking that they can be all things to all people and they're willing to shrink down to the size that best serves their stakeholders. (Seth Godin just expounded on this point in his blog).