Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Nikon whipped RAW: Canon are you listening?

Recently there’s been quite a bit of hubbub about Nikon’s D2x camera, and it’s compatibility with Adobe’s Photoshop. While not normally a topic of general public interest, both the controversial (and ill-conceived) DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and DRM (Digital Rights Management) both surfaced as components of the discussion.

The background and timing of the story follow:

March 1st, 2005	Complaints (readers can log in as guests) regarding the Nikon D2x’s lack of documentation for the NEF (Nikon Electronic Format), and ACR’s (Adobe Camera Raw) subsequent inability to import NEF into Adobe Photoshop begin to appear on Adobe’s corporate hosted user-to-user forums.
April 14th, 2005	A Nikon representative sends a response and link (to a page Nikon has subsequently and mysteriously removed) to an Adobe forum member that complained to Nikon, outlining Nikon’s position regarding NEF, Capture (Nikon’s own image adjustment software), and Adobe Photoshop (the text of which is posted on the Adobe Forums). The page is particularly disparaging to Photoshop, stating: "Where does Photoshop come in? As graphic arts software, it's great for removing a telephone pole, or adding a drop shadow, or affixing a caption to your photo. But if you're using it to crop or straighten an image, or adjust contrast, brightness, saturation and curves, or to apply filters, you simply don't need it." This suggests to many that Nikon is purposely not releasing information and or support Adobe to boost the use and sales of its own product.
April 17th, 2005	Thomas Knoll, the original author of Photoshop, posts to the Adobe forums regarding ACR’s support for NEF, accusing Nikon of encrypting the white balance data, and states that due to conventions of DMCA (which makes it illegal to build   devices that circumvent encryption), Adobe would not take the legal risk of decrypting NEF’s white balance data without an indemnity from Nikon.
April 17th, 2005	A story about Thomas Knoll’s post and a link to it are posted on PhotoshopNews.com.
April 19th, 2005	The PhotoshopNews story is linked to by Slashdot, where the story generates heavy commentary.
April 20th, 2005	Nikon gets a positive mention in BoingBoing, with a link to photos taken of the space shuttle with its D2x camera. This is negated with an update to the developing story on PhotoshopNews and Slashdot. Controversy is also sparked by the idea that Nikon may be claiming some sort of ownership of the digital negative, because it is in a proprietary format.
April 22nd, 2005	Nikon issues a response to the controversy, here at Digital Photography Review. The repose is widely criticized as meaningless, ignorant, incomplete, and did I mention meaningless? It specifically tells developers to use Nikon’s SDK (Software Developer Kit), something Thomas Knoll addressed as early as March 1st as being insufficient (scroll down from the top to see his commentary).
April 22nd, 2005	The response is linked to on BoingBoing.
April 25th, 2005	OpenRAW group founded website launched to encourage and motivate  common Raw standard open documentation of Raw formats. A link and further background appears on BoingBoing.

One of the most interesting features of this story was how often Canon came up as an alternative, and how many people said either that they would purchase a Canon camera, or that they would do so if Canon were to adopt an open standard. An example of this sentiment can be found here on O’Reilly Radar. There’s a real opportunity here for Canon, if they’re listening.

To get conceptual, the information age has spawned the hyper-informed consumer, one who is increasingly tiring of limitations and restrictions placed on the products they buy (are you listening, RIAA? How about you Verizon?). Consumers will reward companies who recognize this, stop trying to spin faults and lock-in as features, and start concentrating on, shock, producing a better product.

Shout-out to BoingBoing, as an old fan of the zine and The Happy Mutant Handbook. Keep up the good work.

UPDATE: There have been requests for a more formal version of this write-up. A pdf of it can be found here.

Blog Bits - Week of April 25th

  On the Web Digest for Marketers, Larry Chase predicts the top 10 trends for the next 10 years. Good news marketers, "email marketing will survive" as "spam issues recede dramatically."  How spam is going to recede dramatically is another blog post.  I'm still getting discount offers for Viagra.

  Jeremy Pepper  interviews Al Golin, Chairman, GolinHarris.  The biggest issue in PR according to Golin?  Credibility.  He says, "it is being focused on the mainstream, trustworthiness."  He dedicates an entire book to it, Trust or Consequences.

  Almost everyone is talking about BusinessWeek's, Blogs Will Change Your Business.  It's worth checking out if you haven't already.  According to the article, "(blogs are) going to shake up just about every business -- including yours."  Yikes.

Measuring Brand Promise and the Placebo Effect

One of the challenges marketing and PR people face when developing messaging strategies is in conveying messages to target audiences that bolster the value and perception of their product while maintaining consistency with the company’s core values and brand promise.

A few weeks ago I attended MIT’s CMO Summit where two examples of this problem were presented to the audience. The first was by Mark Colombo, VP Strategic Marketing, Fedex and the second presentation was by MIT Sloan School of Management Professor, Dan Ariely. Mark Columbo explored the challenges of maintaining a strong brand reputation and customer loyalty while driving growth. Professor Ariely, who researches behavioral economics, presented the compelling results of several studies that have been done on how marketing actions can effect consumer beliefs and perceptions. Both presenters recommended that marketers need to regularly test and measure marketing ideas and actions such as pricing and positioning to understand how they effect consumer beliefs and perceptions.

Mark Columbo pointed out that you need to "measure what you treasure", integrating customer behavior analysis with customer attitude analysis. Each company should ask themselves: Why are customers loyal and why do they leave? For a company the size of Fedex they also had to ask themselves, how can we grow an established business organically or through acquisition without diluting our brand and losing customers?

Fedex decided to follow a mixed growth approach while continually measuring the effectiveness of their brand promise of providing an outstanding experience every time a customer interacts with Fedex. They also measure the actual customer experience to see if it consistently meets the expectations of their brand promise.  Because Fedex views every customer touchpoint through marketing, PR or direct interaction as an opportunity to fulfill their brand promise, they have done an excellent job of maintaining customer loyalty in a very competitive market. Mark's presentation is available at the MIT CMO Summit website.

In the second presentation, Professor Ariely explained the role of research in marketing and the power of context in influencing buyer behavior. Simple changes to marketing actions such as pricing and how products are displayed can have an enormous impact on the value consumers perceive of the product. 

Professor Ariely has also done important research on the placebo effects of marketing actions. Most people are familiar with the effect placebo drugs can have on patient health. Many people claim to feel better or experience reduced health issues when they think they are taking a new drug even if it is simply a sugar pill.  Professor Ariely tested the idea that pricing and messaging can have a similar placebo effect on consumers, however sometimes it can result in a negative response. In one of his research studies, he provided two sets of gym members with the same energy drink. One set was told that the drink cost $2.89. The second set was told that the drink cost $2.89 but was purchased by the University at bulk for $.89. The first group experienced much greater satisfaction with the product than the second group who thought they were drinking a discounted product.

Was the first group of participants influenced by the perception that the drink was more valuable because it cost more? Perhaps. If these participants had actually purchased the drink themselves would their perception of the value have changed? Maybe.

The point is that we should test out messaging, pricing, distribution channels and other marketing variables for different audiences before making assumptions about consumer response. Even though messaging appears to work well for one product or audience it may not have the same effect on a new audience. To learn more about this study and other areas of behavioral economics, visit Dan’s website where there are many interesting papers available. 

I recommend reading the paper "Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions: Consumers May Get What they Pay For" published in the Journal of Marketing Research and authored by Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely.

Trend Watch: Addressing Loyalty and Audience Fragmentation

Thanks to CMO Magazine's Analyst View, we have insight into the JupiterResearch Q1 report on Key Trends in the Internet and Emerging Consumer Technologies by David Schatsky, Senior Vice President JupiterResearch.  I realize the report was issued in Jan.  and in the fast paced digital world, it could be considered old news.  But what compelled me to bring it up again is the fact that Jupiter hit on what we believe is going to be a very important area for marketers to focus on as peer-to-peer commentary continues to evolve: erosion of loyalty and audience fragmentation.  

Jupiter reveals that in 2005, key trends will include broadband reaching critical mass; continued convergence of technology and entertainment inside and outside the home; as well as erosion of loyalty and audience fragmentation. Wise investments and savvy strategies will be necessary to seize new opportunities.

And thanks to CMO Magazine again, we know what Jupiter describes as erosion and fragmentation:

Audience Fragmentation and Channel Complementarity
Audiences are fragmenting and channels are proliferating. The number of channels for reaching consumers has begun to jump dramatically, fueled by the growing popularity of a few enabling technologies such as rich site summary (RSS), peer-to-peer, satellite radio, and voice over Internet protocol. In particular, RSS will have a dramatic effect on the channels through which consumers experience news and media, as RSS fuels both blogs and next-generation news aggregation services. Marketers must embrace cross-channel synergistic strategies. However, they must do so now, with an eye on the rapidly expanding universe of options available to consumers. The cross-channel mandate became both increasingly important and increasingly challenging in 2004; this challenge will not abate in 2005.

Erosion of Loyalty
Loyalty, or lack of it, is keeping businesses in all sectors awake at night. Companies with which JupiterResearch works-including publishers, search engines, broadband providers, retailers, wireless carriers, as well as travel suppliers and agencies-are confronting the challenge of restraining customer acquisition costs by retaining customers. For example, JupiterResearch data have shown loyalty to retailers is down; wireless, broadband, and cable providers commonly experience monthly churn rates of 1.5 percent to three percent or more; and online travel consumers, seeking the best deal, use an average of 2.5 sites and off-line agents in their research process. Companies are looking beyond conventional loyalty programs to find new ways to keep hard-won customers from wandering. Research in 2005 will look at strategies that can stem customer defection and win loyalty in the face of these trends.

As with any "trend"  once it's identified, everyone starts to take notice.  Most marketers (hopefully) realize the need to address this change and adapt accordingly.  What once seemed at least manageable to monitor, analyze and understand audiences (consumers) by traditional channels has changed dramatically.  Yet, even as this trend takes place (by the way, it's not a passing trend), leading edge marketers will embrace this opportunity to gather unaided market information and research directly from new channels to understand their ever changing audience.  Think opportunity...

Podcasting: Disruptive and Exciting

Podcasting, a buzz word around the technical crowd, has been making headlines lately.  Most recently, Sam Whitmore authored an article for Forbes.com entitled Podcasting: Making Waves.  In my opinion Sam hit on what many of us are thinking, "just when we've grasped what blogging was all about, along came podcasting, which in some ways is even more disruptive and exciting than blogging."  Podcasting is still in an early growth stage and as Sam points out there's already disruption within the podcasting community itself.  But with the growth of blogs and RSS feeds making it easier to self publish audio files, podcasting is not going away any time soon. 

To go back to the basics, Wikipedia defines podcasting as a way of publishing files to a website that allows users to subscribe to the site and receive new files as they are posted.  Most podcasts are spoken word audio created by individuals, often on a particular theme such as technology or movies.  Because new files are downloaded automatically by subscribers, podcasting allows individuals to have a self-published, syndicated radio show.

Users subscribe to podcasts using podcast reader software, which periodically checks for and downloads new content. It can then sync these to the user's portable music player (hence Apple's "iPod" and "broadcasting.") However, podcasting does not require an iPod: any digital audio player or computer with the appropriate software can play podcasts.

The main advantage of podcasting appears to be convenience for the listener.  Unlike traditional radio or even streaming media, listeners control when they wish to hear the recording.  Also podcasting allows individuals to easily transmit content worldwide. 

A few sites come to mind if you're interested in learning more on podcasting or downloading podcasts such as iPodder and Podcast411.  Also, For Immediate Release is a weekly podcast for professional communicators from Shel Holtz, ABC and Neville Hobson, ABC.  And Corante, described as the worlds first blog media company authors its own blog dedicated to podcasting.

How Many Blogs Should You Read Every Day?

For marketers with little time on their hands, there is a tendency to focus on either a small set of blogs to read every day or to rely on RSS aggregators or blog search engines to find important new stories. Each strategy has its attractions and its problems.

Most people can easily find a dozen or so blogs that focus on most of the topics of interest to their industry or customers. If they only review this small set of sites every day, they could limit their research time to several hours of reviewing posts and following links to other interesting sites. But this strategy is only successful if those sites focus on all of the topics, products and people related to your business, which is unrealistic. The downside is that you may miss some important discussions that were not picked up on these selected sites.

Another strategy is to use blog search engines and RSS aggregators daily to collect new posts. These services do some heavy lifting for you in terms of organizing posts so that you can quickly scan titles and abstracts. Search strings can be set up so that you can look for key terms across a broader array of blogs. The problem of course is that you end up scanning many more sites that contain posts with no relevance to your business. You also have to set up a long list of keyword searches to try to find stories about specific issues. Again, this strategy can work but it takes a lot of time and effort every day to peruse the many relevant posts and sift through those that aren’t meaningful. The upside of this approach is that it is currently free to get started with many of the good blog search and RSS Aggregator services available such as Technorati.

Business Week wrote about many different tools in their cover story on blogging this week. The authors, Stephen Baker and Heather Green, did a great job summarizing the rapid growth of the blogosphere and the tools used to build and search blog sites, but what they failed to mention were the new solutions like Cymfony’s Digital Consumer Insight (DCI), that use a very different approach to monitor and analyze millions of blogs, message boards and user groups every day. They had an awful lot of ground to cover so I hope this is an area that they can get to soon. One of their readers, Nombert DePlume already made that request in a comment on their new blog site Blogspotting.

So for his benefit and many others who have recently come to know Cymfony, let me describe our solution briefly. Cymfony's approach to reduce the review time for executives down to minutes is to look for new posts across a wide array of online content that are directly related to their company, brands or industry. The posts are automatically analyzed for contextual information that would provide clues to valid mentions of the company or brands. But DCI goes even further. It also identifies posts on sites that you probably wouldn’t have found using the first two strategies. With an automated analysis approach, you do not have to limit your scope to tens or even hundreds of sites. The software does the work to identify what’s important to focus on. It also finds stories that you weren’t looking for in sites that you never thought to look at.

As an example, we have a demo site focused on the technology industry. We often find posts about people’s favorite new laptops, operating systems and consumer electronics. People regularly express what they love, hate and desire. It makes sense that we find many comments on product review sites, usenet sites and technology oriented blogs. But we also find important comments on many other types of consumer sites such as automotive forums and blogs. A hot discussion on one BMW site is compatibility issues of Bluetooth enabled devices with the new BMW models. In a thread on www.bimmerfest.com a contributor shared a letter he received from BMW North America explaining that "Your Palm Treo 650 will probably not ever be able to pair with the Bluetooth system in your bmw ." Other people responded with similar integration troubles but they also described work-arounds.

If you were the brand or PR manager for either the Palm Treo 650 or the BMW X5, you would definitely want to know about both the problem and the solutions so you could share helpful information quickly to consumers, partners and your colleagues.

By looking outside of a narrowly defined sphere of 'top' blogs, you can discover great nuggets of information by people who are excited about new features and even marketing promotions. This insight provides you with an opportunity to get more compelling messages out to new audiences by co-marketing with other industry leaders. It also provides a new dimension to measure the effectiveness of your communications strategies.

Getting Customers Right

GM's announcement today of their largest quarterly loss since 1992 was expected by industry watchers, many of whom have been saying for years that GM isn't getting what it takes to meet customer needs. In 1992 the company had roughly 40% market share in the US. Today, GM has somewhere between 24-26% share depending on which source you consult. Although many of the company's profit woes are related to health costs, it's hard to argue that health costs are contributing to market share loss.

Problems with marketing and poor design of models are two key factors that are having a major impact on buying decisions. GM Execs keep saying that they are trying to "get it right" when it comes to listening to customers and creating great products. A little research across news sources, websites and consumer auto sites reveals numerous instances of GM execs using similar phrases over the last year.

But are they really making any strides to get things right? In a post in the BusinessWeek Online blog Brand New Day, David Kiley takes GM marketers to task for getting things wrong despite changing marketing strategies multiple times in the last few years.

But let's look at the stuff GM can control and has botched. New products and advertising. Pontiac and Buick have had recent marketing makeovers, yet GM marketing chief Mark LaNeve says they aren't right yet. Huh? How'd you get through a process, practically a new brand strategy every year for the last four years for those brands and still not get it right. Press GM executives on Saturn and Saab, and they'll tell you that the marketing strategies hatched for those brands aren't right either.

Maybe they weren't looking online for some of their marketing ideas. If you review the many online auto enthusiast sites you can plainly see that there has been a tremendous amount of feedback available for a long time from their most loyal customers as well as people who don't like GM cars. People post ideas about product features (tranny's, power systems, grills etc.) mentioning both what they like and dislike as well as what promotions and discounts are attractive or completely uninteresting.

Whatever the feedback, it's important that companies listen to all voices, not just those filtered by support staff or cumbersome surveys, in order to understand what's important to people today and what trends are emerging over time as the economy and other buying influences change. GM has taken a step in the right direction by launching a couple of blogs where people can write comments directly to their engineers and Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz. Not everyone likes the GM blog but it is good to see that they are accepting comments on their posts, positive and negative. That's at least one important step towards "getting it right".

Blogging Goes Mainstream: Is Your Company Ready?

The Business Development Institute has organized a seminar on blogging entitled "Blogging Goes Mainstream: Is Your Company Ready?"  The event is set to run on May 3rd in NYC.  BDI has done a great job attracting an impressive group of participates and advisory board members including Charlene Li of Forrester, Steve Rubel of CooperKatz, Steve Boyde of Corante, Steve Hall of Adrants and Robert Scoble as keynote (among many others).  Expect an update from the conference.

The Future of Accessing News

Interesting speech by Rupert Murdoch found in Times Online in which he talks about the future of accessing news and information. Interesting that traditional media leaders are embracing change while acknowledging he (traditional media) has been slow to react.

In his arguments he talks about that today's news and information digital consumer want much more personalized news, news on demand, and also want to discuss it with others in a community as it occurs.

Thus, he calls this revolution the need to deliver news "in ways consumers want to receive it." To me, this is just reacting to changing consumer needs. However the challenge to do this is great when you have legacy media such as newspapers, TV stations etc... He also wants to embrace bloggers to help improve the quality of the news as well as be a barometer for what the "digital" consumer wants. It is almost as if he says the train is moving quickly out of the station and I, as a business leader am embracing this opportunity to help reshape the media industry because if I do not, I may not be a global media leader. The famous adage, listen to the customer is the only way for his industry to become healthier.

Do Blog Ads Bother You?

BlogKits released their first blogger survey focusing on general attitudes about blogs and advertising.  One interesting question was whether or not bloggers found blog ads bothersome.  Surprisingly, 71% (of 1,000 surveyed), indicated that blog ads did not bother them.  BlogAds gives some examples of the best and worst blog ads out there.  They've named AudiA3 as the best blog ad and Network Solutions as the worst.   As a marketer, I don't find ads bothersome as long as they are not pop-ups, especially if I have to actively "skip ad" to see what I'm really trying to look at.  I find one of the biggest offenders here to be Weather.com (not a blog but nonetheless, an enormous sell-out to advertisers).  Just show me the weather!   

Blogging's Impact on PR

Yesterday I attended a PRSA webinar lead by Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion.  He talked about some interesting winners and losers in the blogosphere.  Some of the winners included Maytag, GM and Microsoft.  All of the winners were using their corporate blogs as a way to have an online discussion with consumers.  On the other end of the spectrum, Captain Morgan and Kryptonite were dubbed, the losers.  One of the reason's Steve criticized Captain Morgan's blog is because it has been flagged as a "fake blog" by several avid bloggers, including Scott Baradell at Media Orchard.  The general complaint was that blogs should not be for advertising and in fact, "marketing and PR firms that don't get this will make fools of themselves". 

Learning to be a Citizen Journalist

The concept of Citizen Journalism has been bouncing around for a long time but the rise of blogging has given new meaning to the term as millions of people are now sharing their thoughts online. Wikipedia has an extensive definition of Citizen Journalism stating first that it is also known as participatory journalism. While sharing thoughts alone is not journalism, it is participatory. People who consider themselves Citizen Journalists tend to write about events and topics that are bigger than themselves but they often have a personal connection to the topic. This makes it more interesting to write about could also influence their perspective and introduce bias to the reporting.

This brings up the question of whether companies, news organizations or other online writers should take on the responsibility to educate the masses about how to be a good journalist. Steve Outing wrote an interesting article about who should train Citizen Jounalists on EMedia today . Steve suggests that news organizations should offer programs to train anyone to write.

I think this is a great idea for everyone from teenagers to retirees including all of us in between. In fact, there are several news organizations that offer classes for journalism such as Poynter Online and community papers such as The Standard-Times, my hometown paper. I've been taking a community journalism class for the last few weeks at the S-T even though I've been writing for trade publications for years. It's been great and I encourage other business people, especially marketers to do the same. Journalism requires a more rigorous approach to fact gathering and balance. The S-T wasn't focused on online journalism when they designed the class but I think the same rules of good writing and reporting apply.

As David Humphrey, the special projects editor of the Standard-Times stated in the first class: "The five essentials to good journalism are: Accuracy, Balance, Clarity, Humanity and Brevity."

I'm still working on a few of these...

Women Bloggers Unite

Thanks to Steve Rubel's blog, I read about a new conference scheduled for July 30th in Santa Clara called BlogHer. The event is targeted to those "interested in enhancing their online exposure, learning the latest best practices in blogging, networking with other bloggers, and specifically cultivating the female blogging community." Sounds like an interesting venue for men and women, beginners and active bloggers.

Analyzing Blogs for Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence is one of the most important functions of a marketing organization yet many CI professionals are missing the connection between CI and online discussions. I was at the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) annual conference in Chicago this week where Cymfony was a sponsor.

I had the opportunity to speak with many people from large organizations in the healthcare, technology, telecom, consumer products and financial services industries. The level of commitment people had to the CI profession was refreshing to see. When I asked people what the greatest value was that they bring to their organizations I received a variety of responses.

But the most common response was that CI brings key insights to marketing, customer service and sales to help these organizations increase performance. For marketing, that means designing products that meet customer needs. For CS, that means identifying and responding to problems quickly. For sales, that means arming the sales person with information that will help them explain their competitive advantages.

Most CI teams spend a considerable amount of time and money on primary research peforming interviews with customers and analyzing lost opportunities (people who said see you later). Most were well aware of user forums and discussion groups but only a handful had spent considerable time researching blogs as a rich source for competitive intelligence and market research. The driving factor for the new interest in blogs is that CMO's and CEO's are asking questions about the impact of blogs on consumer opinion and corporate reputation.

While primary research will always be an important tool (this is what I was doing at the conference) for gathering intelligence, the number of conversations any researcher can have is limited by time and expense. Supplementing primary research with tools that enable researchers to gather comments quickly from hundreds or thousands of customers (yours or your competitors), makes tremendous sense. Cymfony offers it's own solution for gathering and analyzing this information but every researcher who isn't already doing so should start tapping into the rich commentary from users today by searching and reading blogs focused on your industry or products. I'll guarantee you that some of your competitors are already doing this.

Men Check Out Luxury Cars; Women Look at Practical

The Center for Media Research pointed to some interesting research this week pertaining to women's and men's preferences when visiting automotive Web sites.  According to Hitwise, women comprised 40 percent of visits to automotive Web sites for the four weeks ending  March 19, 2005. The research reveals that although the car buyers are often thought of in the man's domain, women are actually the majority to several sites delivering information about automotive finance, registration and vehicle insurance.  This type of information is extremely valuable to marketers.  And with all the new digital consumer commentary appearing on the Internet, companies can capture even more detailed and unaided consumer requirements for product design and execution.

The Hitwise report also reveals that in contrast to women's preferences, men are more likely to visit online auctions, forums and enthusiast groups.

Bill Tancer, vice president of research, Hitwise, said "The higher tendency of men to seek out car sites geared toward knowledgeable enthusiasts would be expected, however the fact that women are comprising the clear majority to many other major auto segments is a valuable insight."

Top 5 Automotive & Manufacturers Web Sites* with the highest proportion of Males and Females. (4 Weeks Ending March 19, 2005)

MALE

Auto Sites	Male Visitors	Auto Mfg. Sites	Male Visitors
www.manheim.com	75.90%	www.ferrariworld.com	72.78%
www.iaai-bid.com	73.80%	www.landroverusa.com	67.47%
www.honda-tech.com	73.65%	www.us.porsche.com	66.75%
www.VWvortex.com	72.44%	www.bmwusa.com	64.26%
www.copart.com	70.38%	www.jaguarusa.com	61.44%
Source: Hitwise Online Automotive Report, March 2005

 

FEMALE

Auto Sites	Female Visitors	Auto Mfg. Sites	Female Visitors
www.americredit.com	60.94%	www.mini.com	57.48%
www.aaa.com	57.21%	www.saturn.com	53.13%
store.nascar.com	56.24%	www.hyundai-motor.com	52.59%
www.dmv.org	56.23%	www.kia.com	51.09%
www.esurance.com	53.99%	www.mercedes-benz.com	49.66%
Source: Hitwise Online Automotive Report, March 2005

*From top 100 sites for specified category. Does not include car rental sites, duplicate sites, or sites for motorcycle, RV, or parts manufacturers.

You can find a copy of the Hitwise online Automotive Report here (registration required).

CTO's Blog Produces "Just-In-Time" Customer Service

I'm an on-and-off reader of Chad Dickerson's column in InfoWorld.  Chad is the CTO at Infoworld, and his March 21st column ends with an anecdote that might reveal something of the future of customer service.  The relevant section:

One recent experience proved to me just how valuable this real-time element of blog publishing is when it comes to dealing with IT problems. I was installing a piece of software called Quick News on my Treo 650 when I ran into some trouble, so I blogged about it in some detail. Within minutes I heard from a fellow Treo 650 user who suggested using an entirely different piece of software. Within an hour I heard from the support department of Stand Alone, the creator of Quick News, with some thoughtful suggestions that solved my problem. I don’t know precisely how they found me, but I do know that by subscribing to the name of their product as a search term in PubSub, Technorati, and/or Feedster, they would have found me quickly.

We all know that any company interested in understanding how their reputation is fairing in the land of consumer-generated media needs to pay attention to key bloggers.  But what isn't stated strongly enough in Chad's column, is the business opportunity provided by rapid index & alert services (such as Technorati) to customer service organizations.  Data is coming in fast via ping servers and it's going back out the other side just as quickly via alerts. 

True, Chad happens to be the CTO of an widely read technology publication, so maybe the response time was a little faster than for some average Joe having the same problem.  But we've all read the impact of not responding fast enough to blog chatter (see: Kryptonite debacle) and I think that Chad's experience with a software vendor is really a fine example of how the management of publicly advertised issues can be managed by the front lines.

Planning for Global PR Blog Week 2.0

The planning for the 2nd Annual Global PR Blog Week has started.  The event is described as an online conference on how new media technologies are changing the practice of Public Relations and corporate communications.  For more information visit PR meets the WWW. 

CMO Magazine - Taking the Pulse of Marketing Executives

CMO Magazine released the results of its new RealityCheck(TM) survey of leading marketing chiefs across all industries.  According to the press release, the survey measures 13 marketing areas and asks marketing executives from hundreds of the nation's largest and well-branded organizations to weigh-in on spending priorities, best marketing practices, strategic marketing planning, measurement, professional development, interaction with top executive management, job satisfaction, and use of emerging marketing techniques.

The findings show an increased vitality for marketing spending and budgets, with an average marketing budget of more than $35 million ($35,099,178) and overall marketing budgets estimated to rise 10% during the next 12 months.

MARKETING PRIORITIES AND MEASUREMENT
The top three priorities for marketing chiefs are to:

drive revenue growth (45%);

acquire, satisfy, and retain customers (36%),

and align the marketing function with business strategy (35%).

While 26% do not have a formal measurement system for tracking ROI, the top three metrics used by respondents are customer satisfaction (51%), market share relative to key competitors (44%), and monitoring web site traffic (43%).

The Quality of Measurement

The Business Marketing Association (BMA) recently held a seminar on Landing Page Optimization:  Learn to track and optimize your landing pages.  The seminar was lead by Stefan Tornquist of MarketingSherpa.  He presented some interesting statistics regarding measurement.  According to research by MarketingSherpa, 66% of marketers make measurement a top priority however, only 33% claim that their measurement program is "good" or "outstanding".  What does that mean for the other 33%?  Unfortunately it would appear that less than "good" is good enough.  For now.  MarketingSherpa later indicated that the average CMO only spends 23 months in his/her position.  It would be interesting to see the correlation between CMOs who implement outstanding measurement programs and their average tenure versus CMOs who implement mediocre programs and their average tenure.               

The Rise of Consumer-Generated Media

There is a great cover story in the April issue of Media magazine entitled "The Rise of The Consumer-Generated Media Machine," by Cable Neuhaus.