Viacom gets it or Jon Stewart .vs. YouTube

Viacom moves on without YouTube CNET News.com:

"YouTube throws down the gauntlet for any television network or content producer to ask, 'Why is it better for people to consume our video on YouTube rather than my site?' Erik Flannigan, senior vice president of digital media for Comedy Central"

I can't believe I'm saying this but Viacom gets it.

Around 33% of Generation-Next watches Viacom's Comedy Central channel's Daily Show every week. That is ONE FREAKING THIRD of the KEY generation! I doubt that as many of them actually visit YouTube.com on any given week (but I didn't look for statistics to back that up.)

Who believes that now when Jon Stewart says something funny, his viewers will be too confused by the lack of "youtube" in the link that they couldn't possibly email it to their friends?

YouTube is a great storage place for videos and they have built an unbelievably great community. For people making amateur or short independent videos there isn't any place better right now, and there may never be one. And I agree that they have changed the world in wonderful ways and that they still have a lot of world changing zing left in them.

But I agree with the Viacom CEO when he described what he would have said to YouTube -- "You are not going to take the stuff that we made in our house and control it for other people." Not to mention a little thing like giving up the advertising profits.

So, step one in the fall of the current mega-sites has begun. The circle of life continues.

The Platinum Rule

Over in the Seattle Biznik community, I got into a discussion about Squeezed Pages (see below). And I came up with a particularly clever turn of phrase, even if I do say so myself! Below are my replies from that discussion, edited a little to keep this as small as possible. But the phrase is:

Just goes to prove the Platinum Rule, which is “There is no Platinum Rule.”

It seems like there are all these rules of marketing and management. There is always somebody telling you that you should do X because of some rule. And then somebody else will come along and tell you that doing X will break another rule. I have always found that when people start quoting rules, it is really time to rethink the project. But now I have the the Platinum Rule to quote.

Ok, here is the phrase in context:
--
Squeezed .vs. Non-Squeezed Web Sites

Non-Squeezed world:
1) Visitors can explore your site without joining first
2) When they join, you gather just the name/email visitor information
3) You send out generic mass mailings

Squeezed world:
1) Site visitors must join your site before they can see anything
2) You gather email and as much other information as you think you can get from site visitors
3) You send personalized mailings to individuals.

How do I say this? A squeezed site is considered slimy by many people. Not that slimy is necessarily wrong, but there is a cost to be paid for employing those tactics.

Modern trends suggest implementing this using transparency and reciprocation.

Visitors are able to play around your site and get to know you before you ask them for their information. And when visitors do give you something (their information), you should give them something. So a more polite version of Squeezed Marketing would be an offer to email them one of four eBooks for signing up on the site. You can then make your response back to that user more personal by using something from the book they chose.

- - -

Overnight I thought of two squeezed sites that are good: The New York Times and LA Times are very quick to make visitors join and ask for a lot of information and they send targeted mass mailings. But somehow it's OK coming from them.

Just goes to prove the Platinum Rule, which is "There is no Platinum Rule". :-)

The Sacred Trinity of Marketing: Relevance, Credibility and Value

Quote by Dominic Caterbury or for a link to his web site

The Sacred Trinity of Marketing: Relevance, Credibility and Value

He argues that start ups are only lacking Credibility, so they can put all their potatoes there. His overall message is that the power has tipped to the customers and that the old rules don't work.

Although simple enough to have come from one of my college marketing text books, is deep enough to make me think.





And yes, I'm still working on post 2 of the matrix.

Brandy's Market Matrix

I just couldn't get the blogger tools to accept a 6 page HTML document with any kind of grace and I don't have time to re-write it here. Maybe if I checked out Google Writer, but that is for another day.

http://www.galos.net/Brandy/Blogive/Matrix1.htm.

I'm sorry for the inconvience.

Or you could also to to my spaces blog (3 clicks to publish from Word 2007) if you know that URL.

I think it is worth your time.

Super Bowl Ads

Link to Super Bowl Ads: 2007 - IFILM

I thought they were especially bad this year. The Coke commercials were happy, but I couldn't believe how much bad will there was in most of the commercials. Maybe because I watched them all on line in a row, but it really got to me after a while.

Some of the worst ones:

• All the Budweiser commercials.
• Snickers: Kiss
• All of the Career Builder ads
• American Heart Association - Gotta Have Heart
• GM: Robot

I don't think every commercial needs to be happy or up lifting, but is this the best they can do? With almost unlimited resources to bring to one short commercial, they have to fall back on physical and mental abuse, homophobia and capitalize on our fear of being destitute?

OK, I did like the Robert Goulet one. It was, at least, an original theme.

Draft: Brandy's Market Matrix

Here is the matrix I'm working on. It's taking a while to write it up. Keep watching this space.

Here it is with Word 07 SmartArt making it all beautiful. Except, there isn't a way to label the arrows, so it's pretty useless.

Still, when I think back to the old days when you had to enter raw postscript (read "printer driver") commands to get basic stuff into your document, it isn't so bad!

Spaces and Want Ads

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been working on something in my mind and it’s taken a lot of thought to figure it out. But first it seems like I need to get this rant off my chest.

I’ve applied for a job at Microsoft Windows Live Spaces. I especially liked the want ad: “Windows Live Spaces is the world’s largest blogging, photo sharing, and social networking service with over 135 million monthly unique visitors and is available in over 30 countries. Despite its size however, Windows Live Spaces has limited brand recognition in most markets and does not have a deep connection with users as of yet. …”

I can’t believe how many job descriptions make my eyes glaze over by the time I’m on the sixth word. I doubt that you can find a more motivated audience than me and yet sometimes they are just so badly written. Here is a real example of an average want ad:

… enterprise customer communication solutions that enable dynamic conversations between companies … Our interactive communication solution is a blend of advanced multi-channel applications built upon enterprise software. It delivers its services through a software service model. Businesses use their technology to leverage their rich enterprise-level customer data to proactively and personally interact with their customers with timely, relevant information.

But I really liked how the Spaces one started with obvious passion about the
product and an acknowledgement that not everything is perfect.

The average want ad can be summed up as:

We are the perfect company. We have the perfect product. Our people are perfect. You must have demonstrated expertise in being perfect and everything this job might ever need and being able to do the bosses’/teams’ jobs for them would be good, too.

A few weeks ago I was nibbled by a company that basically wanted me to do the same job that I did around 10 years ago. It was a very high prestige start up, but I just couldn’t go there. Yes, I was qualified by their exacting list, but I would have been miserable by the lack of challenge and lack of growth.

In The Macintosh Way, my hero Guy Kawasaki says, “…Experience is frequently a false god. It is better to hire people who can get you to where you want to be than people who profess to have been there before.”

Kawasaki says to hire people that are passionate, have high bandwidth, have the ability to deal with stress and ambiguity and are high energy. That would certainly make for a job description that wouldn’t glaze my eyes over.

OK, now on to the real posts where I will eventually give you my take on the Spaces issue.