CrowdFluence

Cozi: Service-As-Marketing

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 08:58:19 -0800

Sometimes the best way to punch through is to build something useful.

Today John Cook is reporting on Cozi’s service agreements with Hasbro, General Mills and Parents.com. Visitors to these partners co-branded sites will be able to use Cozi to plan and organize their schedules. This is a great example of the kind of Service-as-Marketing approach Nike and others are taking that I described in an earlier post about Developer Marketing. If you want to punch through the DVR force field, create (or license) a useful service and embed your brand in it. Nice work shout outs to Robbie, Tim Tiscornio and the rest of the Cozi team.

Is Developer Marketing Different?

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:46:48 -0800

I was asked a question recently that made me think hard about my skills and experiences: “How is this ‘developer’ marketing different from other sorts of marketing?”

The short and easy answer is they are largely the same. You identify a need, create a product or service that fulfills that need, analyze and test, find a path to market and promote. The 4 P’s (Product, Pricing, Promotion, Placement) are definitely in effect.

The software developer market does have some idiosyncrasies, e.g. lots of valuable things are supposed to be free, but the key to consistent, non-random success is avoiding the kool-aid jar, i.e. committing to analytical rigor.

Then a few days ago I read this article by Steve Saenz in the Times: “The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life”

It’s about large brands making marketing investments in service creation to activate brand loyalty. It occurred to me that this was a tactic pioneered in the developer marketing world. If you’re trying to reach an audience that has a histamine reaction to the content-free, fear/greed pitches that characterize so much b2b marketing, the best way to reach them is to create a useful service. Something that solves a problem. Ideally it should be something they need on a daily basis, something that makes them more effective and enhances their career with training and business contacts.

And maybe most important, lets them shine in their own and their fellow’s eyes.

All the various developer communities I’ve helped launch or design (Microsoft Developers Network, BEA Dev2Dev, Swik.net) share some of these benefits. At the core they are brand loyalty campaigns packaged inside useful services.

According to the article this is what the Nike is doing in the fitness realm: “[through the site], he has made friends with other runners around the world who post running routes, meet up in the real world and encourage one another on the site.”

What’s changed out in the larger world is that educated, discerning, affluent consumers have gotten as fed up with empty pitches as devs are. Maybe they always were fed up, and DVR’s, spam filters and pop-up blockers are just handy enablers for the rest of us. It’s just that devs got there first (like they did for other phenomena now commonplace: email, online chat and forums, and the internet itself).

4 Steps to Create a Developer Frenzy Around Android

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:24:37 -0800

I was reading Marguerite Reardon’s piece on CNET just now, which made me think about what it will take for Google to win.

1) Permission to believe on distribution. The list of early partners was obviously newsworthy, but Google is going to have to show continuing momentum here. They don’t have to deliver the entire universe of operators, or even the US, as some have said. But continuing drumbeats of momentum will create permission to believe and free up capital to build new apps.

2) Killer app(s). Every new platform needs at least one user experience that was not available before elsewhere, a reason for customers to buy something. For DOS is was Lotus 1-2-3. For RIM it was email anywhere. This customer desire for an application is what forces customer-owning gatekeepers (in this case the carriers) to forego their natural greed and appropriate desire to maintain proprietary differentiation. Developers, developers, and more developers (i.e. having a range of different offerings for the long tail of humanity) are important, but a very small number of killer apps makes the platform. If you want to know if something has, or is, a killer app, ask yourself whether you would buy it for someone as a present.

3) No friction, developer-friendly distribution and deployment. (i.e. use the Web). Why are there so many more brains writing code for the web than for mobile devices, when the mobile world is potentially so much bigger? Working through carriers to get a mobile app in front of users is a nightmare. If Google can use its leverage and capital to make this simpler (maybe a hosted virtual service exchange? Google’s long awaited answer to EC2?) Android wins, big time.

4) The Right Stack. If the alien stuff supports web/mashup development and ties into Google’s impressive collection of gadgetry this will appeal to the larger webdev audience, if it is also Java based, it will suck in the current mobile app code base which is significantly smaller but more leveraged. Thierry Brethes of Unyverse does a good job of laying out the run time options in his comment to the CNET story. I think it’s likely Google gets this right, and Ajax and Java are both supported, to bring in both the new world and the old.

The CNET piece comes coincident with the “leak” of screenshots of “What’s Open” this morning. I am even more impressed by Andy Rubin’s slow reveal. Again all this for an SDK…it’s really masterful. SteveB declaring Microsoft the incumbent is an appeal to calculated reason, but note that you don’t see Apple (the perceived thought leader in mobile platforms) even acknowledging Google’s efforts at the moment.

Maybe Apple gets that it’s not about facts, but about hearts, minds, permission to believe, and most of all hope. And as most hetero males know so well, few things stoke the fires of hope like a slow reveal.

Open Handset Alliance, Open Social and the Platform Marketing Playbook

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:24:36 -0800

Google’s recent platform announcements are both classic Platform Marketing coups, but show a profound difference in style which has deep roots in two competing business cultures.

As OM, Rob Hof and others have pointed out, there is a lot of PR going on here. These are well packaged announcements of future releases of (hold you breath)…..SDK’s. But often that’s what Platform Marketing is all about. At this point, I’m sure most of can spot the playbook:

- The Goat Rodeo: Assemble ranks of supporters, preferably featuring a kingmaker or two

- Have a more-open-than-thou participatory architecture creating new business opportunities for all

- Demo. Show some demos if you can, particularly important if you don’t have any code to distribute to would be developers

And, perhaps most importantly…

- Disrupt the hegemony of some oppressive, proprietary villain, transforming them quite suddenly into “that which has been holding us all back”.

When performed well, this kind of move creates widespread permission to believe, mobilizing capital, developers and media observers, and can turns into a giant commercial success.

What struck me was the difference in style between the two announcements. One sounds like Redmond, while the other shows Steve Jobs’ imprint. The fact they are so different in style but came out of the same company says good things about Google’s culture, and suggests a healthy neutering of central marketing bureaucrats.

Open Social, led by Vic Gundotra (a friend and a truly fine human), comes out of the Microsoft genome, cerebral cortex marketing at its best: here is partner evidence and compelling demos of commercially relevant apps, proof positive of future success. The impression left is that these guys are so well organized, so on-message, that you would be a complete idiot to bet against them. I’m looking forward to training videos, Open Social developer certifications, and “Open Social For Managers” whitepapers.

Android and the Open Handset Alliance, run by Andy Rubin, who spent his formative work years at Apple, sounds a lot more like humanities-trained, enlightened SF Bay Area, more like a movie trailer than what it actually is: the announcement of a release date for an SDK.

Here you have the goat rodeo conference call of supporters, and the architecture of participation, but instead of focusing on evidence, with demos and code and forums and such, the Alien team aims for the heartstrings. Google has produced two videos, one in which Andy and the engineering team open up to the camera about their dreams for what Alien will enable, and one, “If I had Magic Phone” features pre-school children talking about their phones “going to the moon” and “getting them anything they want”. Goodness.

Back in the day at the borg, we didn’t spend a lot of energy trying to pluck developer’s heartstrings.

10 Things I Still Want to Know About Open Social

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:24:36 -0800

So I RTFM’d: watched VicG’s show, read a gushing GoogleBlog or two as well as the official Google PR, sampled the API docs for containers and apps, read Berlind’s stuff, read the pieces from Marc the first, Marc the second, Mark Cuban and Dion Almaer.

And I still have some questions:

1) Compatability. Is there a test suite to ensure that containers implement this in a consistent (enough) way? While Vic paid homage to Ballmer: “distribution, distribution, and distribution,” Google’s PR utterly bowdlerized McNeeley: “learn once, write anywhere.” Given the heterogeneity of container business models (linked-in, vs. Hi5, vs. Second Life or potentially Adult Friend Finder) it seems likely that this will get implemented quite differently if there isn’t a way to enforce consistency, through a compatibility mark or testing suite or something.

2) “This Standard is Standards-based.” Hmm. I get the “standards-based” part….

3) I like this bit about open sourcing the container side components. Nothing drives de facto standardization like availability of some source. Are container providers going to hold off until they get their hands on this, so they don’t have to re-implement when the new OSS stuff ships?

4) Does Open Social give me a way to gather up friends from different social networks? I.e. punch a hole in the walled gardens and plant some nice veggies? Build a hub app that wires up different Open Social Containers to find a friend that I might like in another network, or what networks my friends belong to? David Berlind describes how difficult it would be to map the identity semantics of different social networks here , but then Joe Kraus spins exactly this vision quoted in this piece in the Times: “The long-term vision, he said, was to enable social networks to be portable: “You want your friends to go with you — you don’t want them to be locked up.” How am I going to connect up friends identities across multiple networks, and break down the walls around these gardens? As Marc1 says here: “Just because MySpace and Friendster say they’re gonna support OpenSocial - is completely different from them actually allowing a user to export their list of friends - with unique emails for each friend. This I gotta see.” Or is this going to be like Unix on minicomputers: the same, but different enough?

5) Where is Amazon? Amazon Associate, probably the second biggest river of dollars on the web (after AdWords) was absent. Wouldn’t it be great if you could query for friends and interests from a service that has every member’s credit card on file (uhh..not to steal from them but to have a very low friction way to effect purchases). There is some cool stuff that uses Amazon on Facebook now (Facebook log-in reqd).

6) I can write an app in Ning’s sandbox now with Marc2’s caveat: “real good-old-fashioned will-probably-break kind of beta!” and for the Orkut sandbox if I’m invited. When can the rest of us write apps? What is the schedule for other containers?

7) If I want to build a container, is there anything I can do beyond putting a plaintive petition in the Google Developers Forum? What if I am not a FOG (friend of Google?) at the moment?

8) Will there be any consistency on business models between containers? I believe the Sherman Act says any such consistency must be a coincidence, which is one of the reasons that open standards bodies exist, to allow competitors to collude in constructive ways that might be illegally anti-competitive behind closed doors. See question 2 above.

9) When Facebook opened up their platform, the stunner was that developers kept all ad revenue. Without this, support would have been a lot slower in coming. In this model, no social network container is incented to give away revenue to get apps onto their networks competitor’s networks, so can app developers expect any sweet spiffs from any of the Open Social containers?

10) I want to go to the campfire next time. Hey Vic, can I be a FOG too?

Know Thy Skew

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:24:36 -0800

I was talking to a friend who had commissioned some web-based market research recently. He is an eminent, big brained technologist whose team is building a service for affluent consumers who own multiple computers and connected devices.

He was kind of amazed at the techniques used to pull together a sample, and how skews in the population were adjusted to compose a group of people that mirrored a hypothetical target audience. If the researchers know the incidence of that audience within the general population, they can perhaps estimate a market size as well.

This got me thinking about how literally every market research carries bias, some of it intentional, as in this case, but more often hidden. I remember one market researcher I worked with sitting me down early in a project and asking “Which sacred cows are you goring this time?” a sly way to get at my agenda and identify the biases I was carrying into the project. There were several.

In my friend’s project, a deliberately skewed sample was constructed to profile a population’s interests and behaviors. It sounded like the first step was to glean a homogeneous population out of a (non-random) group of web surfers, do some profiling on that population and then recruit focus groups out of it to validate their interests in prospective offerings. The precision of the study depends on the existence of a population that one can identify (consumers making >$150,000/year who own 3 or more connected devices) and reach (Adwords? Walt Mossberg?) with a new product or service.

This kind of market research project exists to validate somebody’s ideas or existing plans, i.e. buying courage and resolve. Or in organizations where purse strings need to be loosened, buying putative evidence. (”The research came back and they loved it!”)

A good demo presented with well, by an enthusiastic junior product manager can almost force people to say they love your idea (i.e. can introduce a powerful skew). And how seductive is the focus group ritual! The voyeurism of the one way mirror, the ruthless, puppetmaster culling of possible competitor plants and trouble makers from the participant’s list, the catering, the darkened room and the swanky chairs!

As Seth Godin says in Free Prize Inside “The reason for focus groups, market research, and the like is the continuing mirage that somehow, if we do enough work, we can figure out in advance whether we have the right idea or not.”

Fortune telling seems to always be conducted in a darkened room.

I think market research can be really risky, particularly when desired results are already known. The energy and dollars put into the project almost always exaggerate the perception of the research instrument’s accuracy and precision.

There are a lot of reasons to hire third parties to help manage research projects, but for me the most important one is to identify and document the effects of research biases. Unfortunately epistemological discussions tend to distract from organizational resolve, which is, in fact, what we usually pay research contractors for.

So: know thy skew. Which sacred cows you are turning into hamburger, this time?