It’s like I don’t even have to go around with original content… I can just use marketing geniuses like Seth Godin to make the case for BettrAt as a superior long tail based marketing tool (what we’ve been calling content heavy advertorials for the web) that fit into someone’s SuggestBar.
It’s about time service providers, publishers, and content creators paid attention to what people actually wanted.
I *love* how often the word “attention” is coming up lately, too. We’re most definitely skating to where the puck’s headed this time.
It turns out that the almost infinitely long tail of attention varieties is what will kick open the monetization of online attention. Yes, I will give my attention to an ad, but only if it’s anticipated, personal and relevant. We still give permission to marketers that earn it, but so few marketers do.
Today, with billions of tiny micromarkets, it’s not hard to imagine many audiences of one or two or three or ten that would be delighted to know about their products. Right now, there’s no easy way for a marketer to conceptualize that effort, never mind execute it, though it’s surely coming.
Big companies, non-profits and even candidates will discover hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant… this is where we are going, and it turns out that this time, the media is way ahead of the marketers.
Recently, I stopped by the new Whole Foods in Lincoln Park here in Chicago. Immediately after stepping into the massive space, I was impressed by its ability to stay and feel fresh, and more like a marketplace that you might see in another country. Because it was so big, it contributed to a feel of open air. There were separate stalls or spread out all over the store that visitors could shop at. It felt a lot more like a series of little merchants: It would not surprise me if the same employees worked there at the little stalls, week after week and started developing a relationship with customers. I myself had a great discussion with a man who had a huge beard and looked like Rutherford B. Hayes. The employees that I talked to were all smiling, friendly, and incredibly approachable.
As I strolled through the store, and looked at the prices (I don’t normally shop at whole foods) I realize that shopping here would be extraordinarily pricey. And yet, I walked out with breakfast and an arm full of groceries.
This got me thinking about the benefits that are conferred to a company that does the “right” thing. Perception in the marketplace is incredibly important, any more, and companies cannot afford to have a tarnished reputation.
One interesting thing that happened while I was on vacation was the news that Wal-Mart is test-marketing imitations of the two best-selling Girl Scout cookies, Thin Mints and Tagalongs.
But when “everyday low prices” is the solution to every problem and — despite lip service to other constraints — almost nothing else drives your behavior even when it hurts you badly (as in this cookie caper), your core cultural values can hurt you badly.
My prediction is that they will come-up with some bullshit business reason to do so. If they were smart (and there is research on this, on how to deal with mistakes, which we talk about in Hard Facts and I touch on here and here) they would: 1. Confess it was a mistake, that they should have been more sensitive to the importance cookies to Girl Scouts; 2. Explain this episode has made them more sensitive to how pure business decisions need to be considered in light of community relationships and their corporate image; 3. Announce and take formal steps to show they have learned this lesson.
Apparently Walmart executives are not this bad typically. It’s interesting to me that good people can make terrible decisions sometimes. I wonder what the best way is to stop horrible decisions like this from happening in the first place.
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La.
She continues, “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.“
“In five years, I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks,” said William M. Habermehl, superintendent of the 500,000-student Orange County schools. “They can be better than traditional textbooks.”
Schools that do not make the switch, Mr. Habermehl said, could lose their constituency.
“We’re still in a brick-and-mortar, 30-students-to-1-teacher paradigm,” Mr. Habermehl said, “but we need to get out of that framework to having 200 or 300 kids taking courses online, at night, 24/7, whenever they want.”
“Students learn the same concepts, but in a different way,” said Matt Donaldson, Empire’s principal.
“We’ve mapped out our state standards,” Mr. Donaldson said, “and our teachers have identified whatever resources they feel best covers them, whether it’s a project they created themselves or an interesting site on the Internet. What they don’t do, generally, is take chapters from textbooks.”
This is embarrassing, but I have to admit a remarkably cheesy thing about myself.
When you’re working on a somewhat crazy, new to the world idea, and your primary intention is to “make meaning” and to improve people’s lives, people doubt you a lot. “Why would I use that? That doesn’t make sense to me… Well, isn’t this just like Facebook? Or is this like Twitter or something? It’s never going to work. Why don’t you just go find a job?”
I call these people the “love-to-haters” or LTHs. If you’re an LTH, have fun working on someone else’s idea for the rest of your life, if you can hang on to it, that is. I sincerely hope that the idea you align yourself with truly matters and enriches people’s lives and yours. Most of the time, I am emboldened by these LTHs and try hard to explore ways that they could use Bettr@, but sometimes the aggravation they cause and the perverse impact on my psyche is just too high. So sue me, I get emotional.
OK, now on to the embarrassing confession. Sometimes when I get ground down by the LTHs, I have to watch my favoritest scene from my favoritest movie of all time, Gattaca. The music score, if you like it, is by Michael Nyman. Listen to the song “The Other Side”. Gives me chills everytime I listen to it or watch the scene and I feel like getting “back on the saddle”.
I traveled Korean airlines, and they gave these tubes of hot sauce for the Bibimbap. (Awww, snap) I tried to snag an extra one. I love spicy food. I might even be tempted to use it AS toothpaste… Perhaps its best I didn’t get one, huh?
Neato, a Skype store at the Incheon Airport in Seoul. They also had a free wifi zone from a company called Naver (they’re the number 1 internet portal in Korea I hear).
I can’t wait until there’s a Bettr@ store in the airport where people can buy their own “Bettr@ in a box“.
Ain’t nuthin’ but a Mr. G thang
This is an extremely popular restaurant in the mall my hotel was next to in Zhongguancun. and I pretty much visited every corner of the mall in my quest for vegetarian food, so I know what was popular and what wasn’t.
Mr G’s secrets explained
Basically, you put what you want in this large bowl, they weigh it and charge you, and then they stir fry it and give it to you in 5 minutes. It’s really quite good (and they can make it super spicy with lots of chili peppers). Delicioso.
Ummh
I’m not going to speculate, or judge.
RICH hair salon
This particular mall in Zhongguancun (and actually lots of stuff that I’ve seen in China now) is extremely commercial, aspirational, and arriviste-sounding. Or maybe I just don’t go to the mall often enough in the US and this is what its like there too.
RICH hair salon
This particular mall in Zhongguancun (and actually lots of stuff that I’ve seen in China now) is extremely commercial, aspirational, and arriviste-sounding. Or maybe I just don’t go to the mall often enough in the US and this is what its like there too.
We went to the mall because I needed to have a “service” done on an iPhone I bought from Vince *cough cough*.. Ahem. We walked into this store and lots of vendors were trying to sell us random trinkets (and $700 lenses for the now sub $200 camera that I was carrying on me). Look closely in this picture or just scroll below.
“I shall call him mini me”
Yes, that’s right. a MINI iPhone, suckers. The large screen iPhone that you can actually see and use the applications on is so old news! who needs that when you can have a defeatured device that does essentially nothing of consequence, for only 600 kuai?
From the actual feel of the device, it’s hard to tell that it’s fake until you turn it on and start using the interface which is dog slow (uses java- perhaps BREW?). I couldn’t read any of the characters, they were all in Chinese so I didn’t play much.
“Fail faster, Succeed Sooner”
Now, this is hilarious. I have no idea what this is for, but if this kid is going to get an MBA at like the age of 4, all bets are off for what the 21st century is really going to look like. [Wow, sorry to get all Thomas Friedman on ya there]
Whatever, I bet I have more work experience than she does. So there, take that, little girl!
Laptop? Check. Student Playlist? Check. Classroom of the Future? Check.
…The program, conducted in a converted library, consists mainly of students working individually or in small groups on laptop computers to complete math lessons in the form of quizzes, games and worksheets. Each student must take a quiz at the end of each day; the results are fed into a computer program to determine whether they will move on to a new topic the next day.
Mr. Klein said the program would allow learning in a way that no traditional classroom can, because it tailors each lesson to a student’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the child’s interests.
Once the students arrive at school, they receive their individual playlists identifying the lessons they have to complete for the day, which could involve virtual tutoring online, computer worksheets or small-group lessons with a classroom teacher. Their schedules are also displayed on large television screens, akin to flight schedule displays in airports.
If you saw my face right now, there’s a huge smile on it.
This article is great because it corroborates the core idea behind Bettr@. The only difference is that we believe learning is a lifelong endeavor, and we don’t think that learning playlists should stay with you just while you’re in elementary school. There’s no reason you adopt the same metaphor to learn something relevant to your job or a hobby you love.
At Bettr@, we believe that content will be the new advertising. We hope we’re not martyrs on this one, because the current state of web browsing really sucks.
Look around, and you’ll see that most of the stuff that’s out there is so irrelevant. I mean…it’s painstakingly obvious that we’re going to be adblind when we encounter stuff like this.
It really doesn’t HAVE to be like this, if you think about it. Everyone is talking about how advertising as a model is dead. In its current form, it probably is dead. But who is to say that it cannot completely evolve, starting now?
Listen up companies. I don’t buy much (being a poor, recent grad student with lots of loans and working on a startup), but if you actually want me to buy any of your stuff, or at the very minimum, know you exist, here are some ground rules you might follow. Make me smarter, or at least make me feel smarter by knowing about your product and how it can help me reach my goals.
And then? Use something like Bettr@ as your channel, because we’ll get it to the people that really care. I promise.
Mark Sigal, blogging over at O’Reilly radar has an interesting post about the breakdown of analog media business models, as does Fred Wilson (A VC), and Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch. I thought I’d add my few cents to the discussion.
Mark hits pretty close to home as he discusses the New York Times, which is one of the very few newspapers that I actually even consider looking at online. (Besides for the “Big Picture” at Boston.com).
Mark lays out a strategy that he believes content sites like the New York Times should pursue in uncovering a new business model (one that is not based on revenue solely from advertising, or from classifieds)
1. Come up with well-defined linkages between online and offline workflows. For example, print subscribers get access to deeper analysis, better tools for saving, excerpting, sharing and finding related content;
I mostly agree with this one. It seems that on the Internet the two activities synonymous with building social currency are: 1 sharing links that might be relevant to a friend or colleague, and 2 contributing concise, snarky commentary (most often in a 140 character snippet).
However, I’m not sure that having a print subscription would enable me to do this any better. I assume it should still be possible to have an online version with the deeper analysis, and better tools. It seems like this is probably what is floating around in the New York Times lab. Now, being a technophile, I realized that my viewpoint on this is probably skewed. But I do believe that releasing the cool new features they have envisioned in the lab that are better ways to solve the same problems that people seek to solve anyway (I have many friends whose parents send them snippets from a newspaper from one state to another… Really? You couldn’t just e-mail that, Mom!?)
2. Create new types of media/engagement units that reward loyalty, communit-ize it, perhaps game-ify it;
This is also pretty interesting idea. Personally, my take on this would be to deliver information in smaller chunks, more visual, and better suited to mobile applications. If I weren’t already starting a company right now, this would be a really interesting design project to undertake.
The game idea is a distinctly remarkable possibility. More engaged ways to consume content interactively are always welcome in my book.
3. Re-think segmentation (and pricing) across high-end, low-end, hyper-local, and vertical-specific distinctions, and re-work the product accordingly.
This is probably the best idea, not just for the New York Times but any content producer. Variable pricing, and some mode of price discrimination for different access levels is easy to do ( and easy to prototype), but has not yet been attempted for some reason.
I know that my next answer might be kind of unpopular, considering that it’s been tried so many times now unsuccessfully: I still think that the distribution of micro-content, provided that it’s really good (engaging) content will sell. If the user interface were as easy as purchasing via one click (like on Amazon.com), and there was a quick way to verify/authenticate a user, I would not at all mind having an account on NYTimes.com and pay-as-I-read.
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While I’m talking about this, I thought I would just comment on Michael Arrington’s post:
– While I don’t exactly understand the economics of newspapers in full detail, I do know that the world in which we live in, the tech community is all about hyper competition and seeking optimal economic returns. Mike proposes that the best NYtimes writers go off and start their own newspaper “startup” (which as he pointed out, is never to happen anytime soon because of the attendant culture required). A newspaper, or media company almost has a moral obligation to check facts, keep people to their word, and inform the population. *Editorial is not the same as reporting*. Yes, it’s more interesting to read stuff with opinions– it’s natural that human beings like reading stuff that has a point of view attached. This is probably the reason why people watch talk shows, right? While there is a time and place for the editorial section newspaper, we still need to know facts. Until there is a way for twitter ( or some other simultaneous knowing application) to be immediately verifiable and credible, the newspaper still does a very important job. That job cannot be accomplished by a small team alone. One strategy that might work (mentioned in the comments) is using a team of freelance fact checkers, and using the core group of staff reporters to do the reporting.
