Marketing 2010.

Marketing 2010 will be the same as Marketing 2009.

Media sellers will continue to claim their media is the best vehicle for you.
Advertising agencies will continue to create many bad advertisements.
Prognosticators will continue to declare that we face a new paradigm.

And reality will go on. Unaugmented.

The true role of marketing will continue to be about meeting customer needs and retaining their patronage. So, rather than make wild guesses about future trends that may or may not impact on your business, I'm going to start 2010 by getting some smart people to offer their answers to the basic marketing questions that will.

Thinking From Outside The Box.

Thinking outside the box is a phrase that has always annoyed me because it conflates two very different problem-solving approaches.

If you think the box is the problem, then you should be discarding it completely rather than merely thinking outside it (with the incremental change that implies). On the other hand, if you're happy with the box but need to approach it in a different way, you could quite profitably focus on thinking inside the box rather than engage in flights of fancy outside it. But, as the following example will show, you crucially need to do that thinking from outside of the box.

Rather than assume that technology has destroyed the "box" marked newspaper production, my friends at Newspaper Club have re-thought the box and acknowledged that is has definite customer benefits in terms of design potential, tactility and portability. By combining that insight with the spare capacity of digital printing presses and some new technology, they will soon be able to let anyone create their own small-run "newspaper" for whatever purpose they choose.

Their initial efforts have been things of beauty and people are lining up to create "newspapers" as promotional giveaways, wedding souvenirs and product samplers. But not everybody gets it - as this comment on a tech-site illustrates.

Ok, how much do you pay for something like this? Would having ads in distract you? Would they distract if they cut down on the cost? How often would you buy it?

If you're a writer, what sort of compensation would you want from an ongoing newspaper such as this.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea and it's great to see how they did it, but am I curious how much cost and how long it took to do. There's a lot of steps between a one off and regularly published newspaper like this.

That's static inside the box thinking - where your product/service/market is defined by WHAT it is and what it has always been. By contrast, you can build in agility, dynamism and a degree of future-proofing - simply by defining the product/service/market in terms of WHY it is. By thinking from outside of the box.

The Media Is The Message.

Having written in my previous post that Eurostar's failure was a communication issue, I noticed a letter in today's Times from one of the passengers who had been trapped for 14 hours.

"The worst part wasn’t the length of the stoppage, nor the unbearable heat and darkness in the train before our painfully slow evacuation in the tunnel, nor even the lack of food and water. It was the deplorable dearth of information that really made it difficult.

I would much rather have been told that it was going to take 20 hours, then at least I could have accepted my fate and relaxed."

It's nice to have my wild blogging assertions proven correct. If you have to disappoint your customers, it's much better to disappoint them sooner rather than later, it's much better to then tell them what you're going to do rectify the situation and it's imperative that you apologise.

Social Media Panacea.

Snow arrives and the UK grinds to a halt. So too, it seems, do Eurostar trains. Techcrunch highlight the lack of communication 2.0 to bewildered and suffering customers, but that's to miss the wood for the trees.

The problem is not that they're not using Twitter - that's a symptom. The problem is that they have no information to provide. Social media is not the solution to that. A joined-up customer service strategy that acknowledges the ameliorating power of a flow of information, how ever depressing, would be.

Membuat Wallpaper / Background Slideshow Untuk Desktop GNOME

Contoh source code skrip. Perbesar gambar.

Jika kita pernah menggunakan sistem operasi Mac OS X, kita akan mendapati satu fitur dsesktop yang cukup interaktif, yaitu gambar latar belakang desktop (wallpaper) yang selalu berubah setiap tempo waktu beberapa detik (sildeshow). Ternyata, di desktop GNOME Linux, kita bisa membuat wallpaper seperti itu, dan dengan cara yang cukup simpel.

Dari hasil searching saya di internet, saya mendapati sebuah skrip yang berfungsi untuk membuat slideshow wallpaper di desktop GNOME, yang berbentuk file konfigurasi .XML. Intinya adalah, skrip tersebut berfungsi membuat slideshow dari beberapa gambar yang sudah kita pilih, dengan jarak pergantian waktu yang kita tentukan sendiri.

Skrip tersebut sangat sederhana, seperti halnya skrip HTML, yang isinya berisi pengaturan gambar-gambar mana saja yang kita gunakan, dan kemudian waktu transisi antar gambar. Untuk skrip aslinya, saya men-download-nya dari sebuah | halaman internet |.

Dari skrip yang saya dapat tersebut, hanya tersedia empat pilihan gambar saja, dan untuk menambahnya, kita tinggal meng-copy dua section dari skrip tersebut, yaitu Section nama file awal, dan section nama file berikutnya dan waktu transisinya (dalam detik).

Dari skrip defualt yang saya dapat tersebut, waktu transisinya sangat lama, yaitu satu jam (3600 detik). Karena saya mengharapkan efek pergantian yang cepat dan interaktif, maka saya ganti saja menjadi 15 detik.

Cara mengaktifkannya sangat mudah. Setelah kita selesai membuat skrip XML, kita bisa meletakannya di manapun yang penting satu direktori dengan gambar kita (misal /home/anu/Pictures, atau /usr/share/backgrounds). Setelah itu, kita klik kanan pada desktop GNOME, dan pilih 'Change Desktop Background' kemudian pilih 'Add`, dan pilih opsi 'All Files', kemudian pilih file skrip XML kita tersebut. Jadilah sekarang desktop slideshow di GNOME aktif, dan tentu saja, menarik untuk dinikmati!

Begitulah, skrip untuk membuat wallpaper/background slideshow di desktop GNOME. Sangat sederhana, dan tidak membutuhkan efek compositing desktop ataupun resource memori yang besar.

Akhir kata, selamat mencoba, dan salam Linux selalu !!

The Importance Of Being Consistent.

The national rail company changed their website and it led me to send a couple of intemperate emails to their senior executives because the new journey planner left me baffled. I tweeted about it and some people seemed to agree with me.

Now, admittedly there were seeemingly issues with Firefox which meant that the crucial calender icon did not appear, but there were also loading time and loading order issues for others who could see it.

My main gripe was, as the screengrab above shows, that the user is faced with a variety of visual cues (drop-down menus, and empty boxes)which meant for me that I had no idea what protocol to use when I came to inputting a date. There was no drop-down menu, there was no calender icon and the box being filled with "Today" gave no clue as to what date format to enter.

In this era, it's fine (and perhaps obligatory) to speak in multiple voices to your heterogeneous audience, but that doesn't allow you to do so within the same instruction/message. At best, that leads to confusion. At worst, you commit the grievous sin of making your prospects feel stupid and helpless when you should be making them feel smart and empowered.

Getting Close To The Customer.

In Gary Vaynerchuk's talk that I mentioned in the last post, he recounted how officials of the NHL had resisted his idea that they should respond to every tweet and social media message. They felt it would be costly in terms of time and staff even though he pointed out that he personally got more than they did and he responded to all of them himself.

I'd go further. I'd insist that every senior executive regularly spent a day with the people employed to do that job. It's a much better way of understanding your customers than an orchestrated focus group and shows more internal commitment than that gimmicky policy of working on the shop-floor at Christmas.