Digital Media

My dad worked for MCI for most of his career which later turned into WorldCom under the regime of Bernard Ebbers. Those who do not know the story of some of the largest frauds in U.S. history should at least know the characters involved. News reports today told the sad, but conclusive tale that another Bernie has bit the dust. 

Bernie Madoff, for over 20 years, ran the largest ponzi scheme known to man and now he’s behind bars for 150 years. Sadly, 150 years may not seem like justice to those whose lives have been completely devastated by his actions. I know personally that the Bernie Ebbers fraud caused a lot of grief for WorldCom employees, including those in my family.

I listened to a heated debate on NPR this morning regarding new regulation proposals to separate the power from the money on wall street. Something has to be done. Interestingly, the warning signs are always there. It’s just that no one suspects anyone in such a position of trust to be so moronic. I guess it’s our own fault for being nieve and turning a blind eye to the facts. Let’s just hope we can all get our act together and pull our head out. 

It’s events like this that make people tight-fisted, unwilling to invest in wall street, and keep the economy from booming. It may be super cheesy to quote Uncle Ben from Spiderman, but I think it appropriate: “with great power comes great responsibility.” The problem I see is that in many instances great power reduces requirements for accountability. Such was the case with these two sleeze balls. 

My brother is finishing up a degree in communications, advertising, and business. He helped create a quick video they placed on YouTube which he wanted me to post. The graphics are not very good. I guess it’s a time when it’s “the thought that counts.” He’s not in the video, but if he were, he would certainly not be included in the “I like this guy app.”

I just picked up an article of great interest to me on TechCrunch. Specifically because I was involved in the MicroCredit, MicroFinance Club while an undergrad at Brigham Young University. The concept of MicroFinance was originally brought about my Muhammed Unas, who later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. 

Someone new is coming to this space. The organization is called Kiva. The TechCrunch article has some great info on the company and their efforts in MicroFinance: 

Kiva is a peer-to-peer lending site that facilitates micropayment loans between citizen lenders and extremely low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries. Through Kiva’s platform, anyone can loan $25 or more to support an entrepreneur and the specific progress of the loan can be tracked from initial funding to repayment. Upon receiving repayment, lenders can withdraw their funds from Kiva or lend again to another entrepreneur, thereby continuing the lending cycle.

In April alone, Kiva members loaned $4.5 million to entrepreneurs, a 56 percent year-over-year increase and a record month for Kiva. Since the microfinance platform’s birth in 2005, over $75 million has been loaned through Kiva.org to support more than 180,000 individuals from 44 developing countries. Kiva’s president, Premal Shah, says this new initiative to include U.S. businesses increasingly made sense as the financial markets deteriorated and traditional lending began to dry up even in the U.S.

According to Kiva, small businesses represent more than 87 percent of all businesses in the United States, and, on average, these micro-enterprises are responsible for 900,000 new jobs created per year according to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity. This number seems small to me but the impact of small businesses on job creation is clear. To make matters worse, Kiva says more than 10 million business owners faced difficulty obtaining capital—even before the credit crisis and economic slowdown.

I have always loved the concept and think it is a great way for developing nations to contribute to the impoverished countries around the world. It has that “feel good,” “philanthropic,” “altruistic” feel to you it. I can imagine that as an organization, these folks will do fine. 

Google Wave is being introduced and will shortly take the place of email, gchat, and lifestreaming. But the biggest looming question is, will Google Wave be a Facebook killer? 

I love Google apps. They are super useful, including Google Reader, Gmail, and iGoogle are great. I’m using Google Chrome as we speak. Google Wave is the next best integration of all three with it’s Google Wave application. 

Google is positioning the new app as a kind conversation and collaboration system. It’s as logical as the jump was from mail to email, telephone to chat, or blogging to microblogging. Wave is described by Google as “equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” It sounds to me like a bit of social networking that may end up being a nice competitor for our Friends at Facebook. 

Create a Wave, add people to it, toss in some gadgets, feeds, and photos, and mix with a rich text editor. You’ll see new content in near-real time as your friends add it, and you can even hit the rewind button and watch your Wave evolve from scratch. Wave’s power will come from its extensibility and ability to integrate with existing activity sources like GMail, Facebook, and Twitter.

Wave is built on HTML5 and the Google Web Toolkit. What’s more, the team plans to make the source code powering Wave open source to encourage developer involvement in the project’s continued growth and evolution. If you’d like to get involved, head over to the Wave Developer Blog for API information and a look at what you can build with Wave.

These are at least 4 reasons why Google Wave Will Kill Facebook: 

1. Google is Google. Have you seen the Compete.com #s for Facebook vs. Google? Facebook may be gaining, but Google already has a base of Gmail subscribers worldwide that could trump the monkey. 

2. Facebook doesn’t have search. Imagine what the Google search algorithm mixed with Wave will do? 

3. Google’s revenues dwarf Facebook. More money for diversification? I guess Facebook did just get the influx from Russia…

4. Facebook has apps, Google has applications. Think about it. Facebook is a good networking center, but I’m sorry Google just has too many applications that have more useful applications than Facebook. 

These are some of my thoughts. What do you think? Will Facebook be killed by Google Wave? 

Last week I posted an article on how common name searches are more prevalent online. While this is true, I read an interesting article today saying the exact opposite was found in a recent study on names when it comes to children. 

Marketing Charts cited a recent study wherein they spoke about how common baby names are slowly dying. This sad, but true phenomenon has been happening over the last several decades. 

From the report: 

“Unique names may have some benefits such as creating a more individual identity, but they run the risk of promoting separateness, which is linked to narcissism,” said Campbell, psychology professor at the University of Georgia and co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.

“These days, you don’t have to be the child of a celebrity to get a name as unique as Shiloh, Suri or Apple,” said Jean Twenge, SDSU psychology professor and co-author.

Twenge links the shift toward unique names to the increasing value of uniqueness in today’s society. “Parents used to give their children common names so they would fit in and their names would be easy to pronounce and spell. Now, they give their child a unique name so their kid will stand out and be a star.”

While this may be true for children, it is certainly not true for online search. When it comes to online search engine targeting, the more common names, phrases, monikers and acronyms you can use, the better. Perhpas parents can learn something from search engine optimization. 

My little sister is expecting here in a few months and the chosen name for her son-to-be is “William Thomas.” Seems common, but it seems that the common will one day be uncommon. 

I picked up an article from Marketing VOX where in they spoke about the fallout of branded searches. The article also speaks about the increases in longer search terms. Much like my post a few days ago about how generic domain names are gaining, this recent information helps give us wind of how habits with online searches are changing. 

The article reported that keyword searches that were eight words and longer increased by 20% in March of 2009. This means targeting the millions of online niches means targeting keyphrases and not just keywords. Online search will mean anchor sentences and not just anchor text.

From the article: 

The way that users approach the search landscape is changing, said Andrew Girdwood, head of search at bigmouthmedia. As consumers continue to become more comfortable with the technology and the sheer volume of online information proliferates, it will be interesting to see how this trend develops over the next few years and how it may force many big brand companies to reassess their digital marketing strategies, he said.

I picked up a great post from randfish over at the SEOmoz blog a couple of weeks ago along with a report by Marketing Charts that coincide nicely. The SEOmoz post talks about how the Google ranking algorithm has changed, while the Marketing Charts post gives some great information on the benefit of generic domain names. Both posts were great reads and coincided with some of the work I’m currently doing at DigitalSignage.com. 

The SEOmoz post gave the following as the largest contributing factors to Google’s ranking: 

The Marketing Charts report gives some of the reasons for generic domain name success: 

Memorable Domains attributes the strong performance of generic domain names to several factors:

• Because a generic domain name describes a product or service using the words people automatically associate with the topic, it encourages them to click more.
• The presence of search terms in the domain name leads to higher organic rankings or a
• better ad quality score in pay-per-click ad ranking algorithms.
• Search engines commonly automatically bold any word in the domain name that matches the search term, drawing attention to the listing.
• There is a potential positive impact of the domain name on ad quality score.

“generic name is an established brand or website with a strong awareness and trust factor for the product or service search terms in question. Even in such cases, a generic domain name has potential value in targeting very specific product or service search terms with an appropriate keyword-rich domain. The findings suggest that established brands should consider a generic name for minisites associated with a particular product, service or ad campaign.”

I just thought all these facts were interesting and some might benefit from me sharing them here. 

I picked this up from Operand.com and thought it would be worth a post here, partly because it has been a really long time since I’ve posted to my personal blog. A captive audience at a bus shelter, complete with a touchscreen sign, there is no better way to have an LCD advertising screen. 

I just posted an article at the digital sign post, interviewing Digital Signage Show’s Lawrence D. We discussed several industry issues and some of the things he’s been working on for the show coming at the beginning of May 2009. He had some interesting things to say regarding both show attendees as well as conference highlights.

Check out the original post by clicking on the link above. 

Slowly, but surely I’m getting through posting my favorite quotes from Paco Underhill’s “Why We Buy.” 

For more great quotes, please visit “Why We Buy” Part I or “Why We Buy” Part II. If you’ve not read my most recent post regarding Helius and Helios, please visit the Digital SignPost. 

“In retail, the easiest way to make more money is to sell more stuff to your existing customer base.” pg. 55

“The company [that had smaller shopping carts] immediately replaced the carts with new ones that were roughly 40 percent larger. Just as fast, the average sales per customer rose.” pg. 57

“You can’t know how much shoppers will buy until you’ve made the shopping experience as comfortable and easy and practical as possible.” pg. 57

“I attempt to remind everybody that people in storesor restaurants or banks are almost never still; they’re moving from one place to another. And they’re not intent on reading signs–in fact, they’re usually doing something else entirely, like trying to find socks, or seeing which line is shortest, or deciding whether to have the burger or the chicken.” pg. 61

“To say whether a sign or any in-store media works or not, there’s only one way to assess it–in place On the floor of the store.” pg. 61

“There are companies that will measure sign readability by putting subjects into high-tech helmets that measure the smallest eyeball movements, then holding signs before them. But even that won’t tell you if you’ve put the right sign in the wrong place, which happens all the time ( and which, by the way, is actually worse than putting a so-so sign in the perfect place). And it surely can’t predict whether shoppers will read and respond to a sign on the floor of a store, where distractions abound.

“Once you know whether people are reading a sign, you can begin to measure its influence on their behavior. But not until. So the first thing you’ve got to do is get the hell out of that conference room.” pg. 61-62 

“First, you have to get your audience’s attention. Once you’ve done that, you have to present your message in a clear, logical fashion–the beginning, then middle, then the ending. You have to deliver the inforamtion the way people absorb it, a bit at a time, a layer at a time, and in the proper sequence. If you don’t get their attention first, nothing that follows will register. If you tell too much too soon, you’ll overload them and they’ll give up. If you confuse them, they’ll ignore the message altogther.” pg. 62

“So you can’t just look around your store, see where there are empty spots on the walls and put the signs there…every store is a collection of zones.” pg. 63

“Each zone is right for one kind of message and wrong for others. Putting a sign that requires twelve seconds to read in a place where customers spend four seconds is just slightly more effective that putting it in your garage.” pg. 63 

Ideas for locations to place digital signage from from the book: 

• Shoe department
• Escalators
• Digital Menu Boards
• Condiment bar
• standing in line to pay
• @ the tables where people eat
• fast-food tables
• Banks

“When it comes to positioning a sign, the difference between an ideal viewing spot and a terrible one is often just a few feet.” pg. 64

“It’s no surprise that the number-one thing people look at is other people. That’s why some of the most effective signs in fast food restaurants are the ones sitting atop the cash registers–more or less at the level of the cashier’s face. Smart sign placement simply tries to interrupt the shopper’s line of vision and intercept her gaze.” pg. 64 –this is why the reflective/mirror LCDs are great for digital signage applications: people get to look at their favorite person, themselves!

“How much can you read in a second and a half?” 

“Thinking that every sign must stand on its own and contain an entire message is not only unimaginative, it’s ignorant of how human brains operate.” pg. 67

“In one of the prototype stores we studied, hanging behind the cashiers were large baners promoting various services. Fourteen percent of customers read those banners, our reasearchers found, for an average of 5.4 seconds each.” pg. 67 In retail signage, that could be considered an eternity!

“Banks, fast-food restaurants and the post office have this in common: lots of customers standing still and faceing the same direction–ideal opportunities for communication.” pg. 68 

“It’s futuile to try to tell shoppers anything until after they’ve completed their task.” pg. 69

“When you see a sign with a gas pump, or a for and spoon, or a wheelchair, you understand at a glance. That’s the best way to deliver information to people in motion.” pg. 71 

“Anytime pedestrians had to slow down or stop, we concluded, it was because the signs had failed to do their job…the best sign in either case is one you can read fast, and positioned so you can read it while moving.” pg. 71

“If the sign doesn’t work in an imperfect world, it doesn’t work.”  pg. 72 

“One display or sign too many and you’ve created a black hole where no communication manages to get through.” pg. 72 

“Some signs are perfectly fine, except they’re in places they were never intended to go.” pg. 73

“Often retailers simply ask too much of a sign–more than any sign can deliver. A fast-food chain tested a sign systme explaining one version of its ‘meal deals,’ then tried to make the signs clearer, then tested them again and fixed them again until they realized that i wasn’t the signs that were bad–the meal deals were just too complicated to be explained. The deals were changed and the signs worked just fine.” pg. 73

“…a moving digital menu board was read by 48 percent of customers, compared to 17 percent for the same menu board–a nonmoving version–tested earlier.” pg. 73

As you can tell, Paco has got some great stuff and I’m only to page 73! Stay tuned more still to come!