According to a report in B2B Magazine, the next edition of Microsoft Internet Explorer – IE9, to be released during 2011 – will include a feature that enables users to block 0nline tracking of their internet browsing by marketers.
Thank you Microsoft, for taking our privacy out of the hands of the calcified Congress, and putting it back where it belongs: with each of us. If you’re not careful, people might start to like you again.
I had breakfast with an entrepreneur who is at that point where his young business ought to be gaining traction. But he’s bogged down in building the next generation of software that supports the business.
The problem is that he and the software developer – to whom he has given equity in exchange for the development work – disagree on their vision for the 2.0 version. They’ve been deadlocked for six months as competitors begin to pop up around them.
I suggested he set a two-week deadline to either achieve a shared vision or amicably end the partnership.
Good people become entrepreneurs because they want to get things done without the slow and layered process of corporate decision-making.
Good people work for corporations because they want to get things done without the cash-flow constraints of a small business.
Either is fine. But if you find yourself in a position where you can’t move forward and you don’t have cash, then you need to change position.
Once you get past the viral thrill of rehashing Steven Slater’s “bailout” from a career as a flight attendant that he could no longer stand to hold, the debate – to the degree that any debate is required at all – quickly gets to the question of who was more wrong?
Was it Slater, who cursed at his passengers, deployed the emergency slide on the Jet Blue plane to which he was assigned, and (worst) stole two cans of beer before escaping?
Or was it a still-unnamed woman passenger, whom he accuses of berating him and hitting him in the head with either the door of an overhead compartment or one of the bags in that compartment?
How about this third option: It’s the airlines.
They have to accept responsibility for helping to turn passengers into snarling beasts with overbooked flights, endlessly punitive fees, optimized fares that make no sense to consumers, and a practice of setting flight schedules that they can’t possibly maintain. Then they exacerbate the effect of all these insults by bombarding us with irreconcilable advertising campaigns to convince us how much we’re going to love the experience.
Further, they have to accept responsibility for their role turning flight attendants and other customer-facing personnel into recalcitrant and uncaring bureaucrats. The tools? Serial layoffs, confrontational union negotiations, low pay and a general disregard for their value. (When stranded near Chicago O’Hare during the 9/11 crisis, I met a dozen flight attendants from a handful of airlines – all of whom told me the hotel and meals were on their own dime during the unscheduled grounding.)
I’ve flown enough to know the truth of the matter. Some passengers, maybe even many, are simply boors who shouldn’t be out in public. And some flight attendants should probably find another line of work before they give their next safety briefing.
But for the rest of us, the airlines need to shape up. I can only imagine how complex and difficult it is to operate in this industry. Executives throughout the industry make incremental decisions that help the bottom line, and they are skilled at justifying why these decisions are in the long-term best interest of the customers.
But it’s simply not the case; there is no justification for selling a ticket and then notifying the passenger a day later that the flight is overbooked and an extra $25 will guarantee he isn’t bumped (this has happened to me a handful of times).
It’s simple really: Each airline needs to figure out a way to make money while treating passengers and employees like something other than refugees and wardens, respectively.
For a fee, Frontier Airlines is now allowing people to bring their caged pets into the passenger cabin to fly along. In doing so it joins United and Southwest in liberating dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters and small birds from the dark chill of the hold.
It’s all part of a larger strategy. Between narrower seats, reduced legroom, baggage stuffed in every cranny, elimination of in-flight meals and every other nicety, the airlines are getting closer to their end-game.
For yet another additional fee you’ll soon be able to buy a seat and meal service for your beloved pet, and forgo the noise and discomfort of the main cabin with your own spot in the cargo bay.
Win your side.
On days when the wind is shifty, the winner of a race usually comes from one side of the course our the other; rarely from the middle.
That means you have to choose which side you’re going to sail. No remorse allowed. Eventually, you may realize you’ve picked the wrong side; the winner is going to come from the other side.
What do you do? Experience teaches you not to cross the course and get to the other side. In doing so, you’ll probably end up as the last-place boat on the right side of the course.
Instead, focus on winning your side. If you do, the worst you’ll end up is in the middle of the fleet. And often, the winners on the wrong side still finish better than the losers of the right side. So there’s plenty of upside potential in just winning your side.
How does it translate to business? Back in the ’80s, IBM and Apple took opposite sides of the race course – IBM choosing a common platform (MS-DOS) on which to build its computers, and Apple choosing its own proprietary operating system.
IBM chose what turned out to be the right side, allowing it to build computers for the largest share of the desktop/portable computer market.
Since that decisive moment, dozens of companies on both sides of the platform debate have fallen away; even IBM has exited the PC businesss. Apple, meanwhile, won its side; it became the best among proprietary operating platforms.
As a result of its earliest decision, Apply may never become the largest producer of computers. But because it concentrated at winning its side, Apple today has one of the most admired brands – and P&L statements – in the business.
Never chase the wind.
In many racing conditions the wind is always changing – in both velocity and speed. The boats that are winning are probably those that find themselves in the best patches of wind.
When things aren’t going so well, it’s usually because you’re not in the good air. But if you see another part of the course where the wind looks better, it will invariably be gone by the time you get there.
The lesson is to find your way to the part of the course where the wind is going to be – not where it is now.
It’s the same in business. When your toughest competitors leap ahead of you, you can’t catch up by simply doing what they’re doing.
Instead you need to figure out the next thing a good company should be doing. When you figure it out, you don’t need to set your course for where your competitors already are; you can set it for where you want to be.
National Geographic Adventure has lost its passport. It’s the latest casualty in the 2009 media meltdown. Staff was told today that the magazine, a 10-year-old extension of National Geographic, would close, according to a report by Folio:.
Seventeen staffers will lose their jobs, the report says. The brand will continue online and with other affiliated products.
This article in Media Buyer/Planner goes into more detail about AOL’s plan to differentiate itself with original content. With a staff of 3,000 journalists, AOL could differentiate itself simply by assigning them beats and cutting them loose to go report on stuff. It would be, by far, the largest deployment of journalists from a single U.S. media source.
But I don’t have much faith in the ability of algorithms to deliver pleasant surprises. By shackling its journalists to algorithmic results, I can’t help believing that they only thing we’re going to get from AOL is more of the same that it’s TMZ.com website is already producing. And heaven knows, nobody is sitting around wishing we had more of that.
A week ago, I wrote about the futility of AOL’s rebranding unless it figures out how to become more relevant to its audience.
This week I have to write about the futility of AOL’s effort to become more relevant to its audience.
The centerpiece of that effort, according to PaidContent.org, is a three-pronged approach to generating new content:
1.
Hire lots of journalists. It’s good news that AOL is trying to generate original content, and I’m pleased that it’s using trained content professionals – of which there are plenty available. It has a staff of 3,000 journalists, according to PaidContent, which puts it into the top tier of U.S. news-gathering organizations.
2.
Use algorithms to predict what stories people want to read, and then assign these to the journalists. The objective is clear. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong hopes that by giving people content they want, AOL will become the content place to go.
He’s wrong. This is the kind of thinking that puts Jon and Kate Gosselin in our faces day after day, week after week, month after tawdry month. It takes variety out of the news cycle, just as Wal-Mart’s unceasing desire to stock only the best-selling SKUs limits the variety of what you can buy at the world’s largest retailer.
When someone says, “I want more stories like the one about Jon and Kate,” they aren’t really saying they want to hear more about the Gosselin family. They’re saying they want information that makes them feel the same way they did when they heard it (for better or worse), and that makes them feel as informed as they did when they talked about it at work the next day.
People can tell you what was important to them yesterday, but they don’t know what’s going to be important to them tomorrow. Media have not succeeded until now, nor will they in the future, by giving people what they want so much as by giving people what’s new, important and interesting.
The real function AOL’s journalists could serve is to present information that is new, important and interesting. AOL has hired the journalists but it’s about to screw up in deploying them.
3.
Get advertisers more involved with content. This isn’t unique and it isn’t new. It’s just one more effort to help marketers bludgeon their target audiences into submission. Hey, I’m a marketer and I still can’t stand the thought of this. Everybody on one side of the equation is doing this, and everybody on the other side of the equation is trying to tune it out. Creating more and more advertorial microsites – no matter how well intentioned some of them will inevitably be – is not the big-internet business model of the future.
In fact, this is the very reason why social media is so hot right now: because social media lets users find the information they want. AOL’s model is to deliver the information, fire-hose style, right down the user’s gullet. It may generate some short-term revenue, but it won’t make AOL relevant or desirable.
It will do the opposite.
None of this is to say that AOL’s plan is evil or particularly dreadful. I think it’s pretty typical. But that’s why it won’t work. AOL is trying to distinguish itself by doing what every other large media company is trying to do. For a company in trouble, that’s a formula for failure.
© 2009 “TheMarketFarm.com” · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
