The Joy of Shipping

Hugh Macleod, May 16th, 2011.If you haven't already, I strongly suggest checking out Hugh's cartoons. Hugh inspires me because he ships so often, just like Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. 

As Hugh alludes to in his post about the starfish cartoon, doing something you love every day, regardless of who is affected by it ... will make you happy. 

This is the joy of shipping. The beauty of shipping is that you don't necessarily have to ship world-changing things, only things that you intrinsically enjoy doing. 

Find something you love doing, create something worth sharing and discover the joy of shipping. 

Product Placement 2.0

Before you read on ... hop over to Facebook ... find a picture you've posted or perhaps one that a friend has posted, which has some kind of product placement in it. One of Facebook's latest features will allow you to now tag this photo with the corresponding brand page! 

This raises 3 questions in my mind: 

1. Why did Facebook choose to launch a feature like this? - Is this Facebook's attempt to grow it's marketing tools offering? One of the things this features allows for is the auto-population of a brand's photo gallery. Brands that are more likely to appear in photos have a higher chance of being tagged and as such have a higher chance of gathering free marketing materials (customers using products)! That leads me to question number two... 

2. Should customers in some way be rewarded for tagging a brand in a photo? After all if companies pay TV shows to have their products placed ... why should they not reward Facebook fans in the same way? It doesn't necessarily have to be a direct monetary reward (in the form of a Facebook credit), it can be something like a discount code perhaps or even a coupon. However ... this idea certainly begs the question... 

3. If customers don't tag brands in their own photos, is it ethical for brands to go out and tag themselves in fan photos? This was the premise of a great article by Todd Wasserman on Mashable. Since brands can now act as people on Facebook (another recent feature), a brand could technically go out there and look through some pictures of all the people who have liked them and potentially start tagging their photos. This seems a little beyond the line because it completely violates the underlying principle of permission marketing that Facebook is built upon. 

Final thoughts: It will be interesting to see how brands use this feature to enhance the permission model and potentially leverage it, rather than abuse it. What are your thoughts? 

p.s. Later this week I hope to record a special episode of The Digital Marketing Lounge with my friend Ben Wise. We will be discussing all things Facebook! If there is something in particular you would like us to talk about, drop it in the comments below! Thanks in advance :)

Transparency Rules (Podcast)


Listen to the episode on iTunes

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Episode Summary:

On this episode, Dave Silva and I talk about a mixed bag of news from the past week including: the ongoing Playstation network saga, other PR blunders, Microsoft's biggest acquisition yet and some cool things coming out of Google. Hope you enjoy the conversation! (Runtime: 39:10)

Sources for the discussion:

Interesting sites to check out:

Dave's Blog

The Power of Ideas

The stage was set ... for awesome ideas. Tonight was the inaugural #kwawesome foundation event! It was held at a lovely venue called the Little Bean Coffee Bar and turned out to be a night of pure ... awesomeness. 

If you are reading this and you happen to be part of the Kitchener-Waterloo community, I strongly encourage you to come out to the next event and learn more about the wonderful people that help make this community amazing. There are also other awesome foundations around the world and so I encourage you to seek them out and spread the word because the world needs more of what happened tonight. 

So what happened tonight? 

Well it was pretty simple really ... the stage you see pictured on the left became a platform for a group of select people from the community to come and spread their ideas. 

Close to a month ago, I wrote a post about the spreading of ideas; however, tonight I bore witness to the sheer power of ideas. The feeling in the room as the event was going on was truly exhilarating. It was a combination of excitement, joy and the overall feeling as though you were all part of something awesome. At the end of the night, two people were rewarded with some cash to go and kick start their idea ... but what's more interesting ... is that others who shared ideas were also rewarded by meeting people who were willing to help bring their ideas to life! 

That to me was the most awesome part. 

When people say they want to change the world, the statement is always relative ... because an individual's definition of the world may differ. You have your world and I have mine. Tonight, everyone in attendance had a small peek into the worlds of different people within the community and at some point in the future ... the power of ideas are going to help change those worlds. 

Battle of the Ecosystems

Google has been announcing some pretty cool things over the last few days. One of the biggest and most recent is the launch of Google's cloud music service called ... Google Music. 

The more announcements I hear from Google, the more I think about the bigger picture. If you look at what Apple has going for it and then also contrast it directly with what Google has going for it... ultimately, both companies are trying to create an ecosystem. 

In this ecosystem there are a series of connected devices (phones, TVs, computers or other hand-held devices) and one unified platform that ties them all together. This raises two pertinent questions in my mind: 

1. Will consumers continue to cross platforms? ... or will there be a movement toward buying solely into one ecosystem and having everything you own controlled through that? Undoubtedly this method will have trade-offs but will consumers be willing to let those go, in the spirit of unification? 

2. Will these juggernauts keep marketing 'products' or will we see more marketing around 'platforms?' - I can especially see this with Android being open source, thereby making it product agnostic essentially. However, I can also begin to imagine Apple doing this if they begin to focus more on the future of their operating systems and the unification of iOS and OSX. It will certainly be cool to see consumers having platforms marketed to them versus the products that deliver these platforms. I'm sure Apple and Google both will market the two (products/platforms) together; however, I can only imagine how the focus on the platform may tend to eat up more and more of the conversation over time. 

I don't think there will be a 'winner' in this battle of ecosystems, because the pie will certainly be cut different ways (e.g. market share vs. revenue share); however, what I do think will be interesting to see is how these ecosystems develop. Microsoft just bought Skype... is Microsoft an ecosystem too?

Which ecosystem do you belong to? Why?

One Trait Every Entrepreneur Must Have

If you're looking for some inspiration ... watch this video. 

If you're into tech in any way shape or form ... watch this video. 

If you like the Matrix and want to see what it would be like if Neo and Morpheus met in real life ... watch this video. 

If you're older than 20 ... watch this video. 

I think you get the idea by now. Watch this video. 

There are a couple of things that amazed me about Brian: 

1. Desire - Many times Brian keeps referring to his intrinsic need to understand why San Francisco and New York were the places to be. What he did when he got to those places was truly nothing short of amazing, I am not going to spoil the story here because I really want you to hear it from him... so watch the video. In summary though, it is truly amazing what you can accomplish (even Kevin Rose was amazed) by simply having the desire to do so. You should always be thirsty for knowledge. 

2. Creating luck - Brian's story is a great example of what happens if you work hard enough to create your own luck. At one point, he describes his entire whirlwind of a journey in the past year or so as, "serendipity." You may consider it oxymoronic, but I believe someone can create serendipitous events. Brian understood the power of networking very early on and that played out much later in his life. His story tells me that if you work hard enough and get to know enough of the right people ... you can create your own luck. 

The main message that I took out of this interview though, was a trait that both Brian and Kevin exhibited. Brian did so by admitting that despite his overwhelming intelligence (skipped 4 grades in grade school and started University at 14) ... there will always be someone in a room smarter than him ... always. Kevin, despite all his success, exhibited this trait by commending Brian on the brilliance of some of his ideas. 

This one trait ... is humility. When you are as successful as either of these two guys, it's so easy to be proud/arrogant/boastful ... but what makes them heroes in my mind, is how humble they are. 

The Dangling Carrot

One of the most interesting stories I came across this past week was regarding a unique marketing move by Facebook. Here is a quote from a great insidefacebook.com article that sums it all up: 

"Facebook has just announced an expansion of its partnership with social game offer provider TrialPay on its DealSpot product that gives users Facebook Credits in exchange for watching branded videos."

This move really caused me to think about how we as consumers view and ultimately consume advertising. I've realized that the consumption of advertising and our reaction to what we see is analogous to the psychological principle of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  

Facebook here is using an extrinsic model. The dangling carrot being offered are free Facebook credits which, consumers can then use to purchase real items. Seems like a pretty tasty carrot and given the amount of people who play social games on Facebook, this method of delivering an ad - in a social game - combined with the fairly strong reward ... may just work. However, the question still remains to be seen whether these ads will actually be effective. 

The problem with offering an extrinsic reward for something like the act of watching an ad, is that consumers would probably be more interested in earning the reward rather than caring about what's on the ad. Who's to say that the consumer can't just hit play on the video and walk away from the screen? Considering the years of training we've undergone through traditional TV ads, this act isn't totally out of the realm of possibility.  

There is another model to consider here and that is the intrinsic motivation model. In this one, a consumer would naturally seek to do something and gain pleasure from the very act of doing it, rather than from the reward that is waiting on the other side. One of the best and simplest examples of this would be the fostering of brand advocates. In order to do so of course, a company would need to create a product that is worthy enough to be advocated. 

When thinking about applying this to the Facebook/Social gaming model... what if companies tried something truly drastic and gave customers the opportunity to tell their friends about something ... yet not reward them for doing so? Would this prompt customers to naturally want to tell their friends about what they were doing? Is this is a stronger form of advertising? 

It'll certainly be interesting to see how the dangling carrot story unfolds.