This is the time to look back or look forward. People are making lists. Lists of the best of 2006 and predictions for 2007. At Wowza we like to think about the future. Since everyone but Will and I took the day off, we get to make the predictions for 2007 here they are:

Even bigger trouble for the middle class. Over a trillion dollars of ARM mortgages are going to adjust, devastating a lot of homeowners who can’t.

Cheap Cable TV. Online video is going to reduce the value of cable ad space. Small businesses are going to have more opportunities to use TV’s as it’s value (and perhaps cost?) continues to decline. But that doesn’t mean they should.

TV meets the computer. The lines between watching TV and surfing the net will fade even more.

Blog relations will matter more. Businesses that don’t maintain their blog reputations are going to regret it. Big brands are catching on and politicians are on top of it, but most marketers are still ignoring the power blogs have for good and evil.

War will make people cranky. Under stress some people spend more, other spend less. Some people eat more, some less. As world tensions grow, and other problems like global warming become impossible to ignore, consumptive habits will change. Some marketers will benefit while others suffer.

You may try on clothes online. It’s not going to be enough to just show pictures on your e-commerce website. Online retailers will have to use the technology to make shopping more interactive and functional. Video demos, interactive Flash tools and integration with other technology, like camera phones, will make online shopping more like real shopping.

The presidential election brought to you by Youtube. It started the other day when John Edwards announced his candidacy on Youtube. Watch for some really ugly and strange campaigning as voter-generated media meets PAC generated media.

Cell phones as Big Brother. More and more people will use their GPS enabled cell phones to keep tabs on friends and family. The marketing opportunities are huge to those with the imagination and technical ability to invent them. Maybe it’s time to re-read 1984

Your Granda might get hooked on Nintendo. Now that there’s a video game that doesn’t require highly evolved thumbs to play, we expect a lot of older people to start playing.

Have a great New Year

Jeff and Will

Tom Monahan posted this very funny Andy Dick video on his blog, Before and After. Monahan points out that unlike Dick's character in the video who literally sleeps on his ideas, most people neglect a very important step in the creative process: incubation. Think about the "brainstorming" meetings that happen so often in companies. The group meets. They put ideas on the board. Then they pick the "best" idea and run with it. Inevitably a better idea will occur to someone after the meeting. But often it's too late. Company brainstorms should always be broken up into at least two sessions. Even better if there is a process where ideas are generated before the first brainstorm. Remember: ideas need sleep. The more sleep they get the fresher they are in the morning.

Today Time magazine named "You" person of the year to recognize the explosion in consumer-generated media. So I thought I'd honor an old form of consumer-generated media that blinks brightly this time of year. Christmas lights represent a tradition of energetic individuals investing time, money and creativity to share their celebration with others. I've yet to see ads affixed to a Christmas light display, but if it isn't already happening, I'm sure it will soon be commonplace. What the rise in Christmas light displays, Flickr photo sharing and Youtube videos demonstrate is just how much people want to express their creative urges and share their creations with others. Big marketers seem to think that "consumers" generate "media," but what is really happening is that people are sharing their creative spirit with other people because that's part of what makes us "human." We've always "generated media" what's radical is the degree to which our personal creative expressions have been commercialized.

Jeff

(photo from Flickr)

Someone once said that intelligence is learning from your mistakes and wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others. And so I thank the good people at Sony, and their agency Zipatoni, for letting me learn from their flog misfortune. Flogs, otherwise known as fake blogs, have been getting a lot of brands in trouble recently. Sony and Zipatoni’s attempt at creating word of mouth with a flog, alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, didn't go the way they must have hoped. Word of mouth spreads quickly throughout the gaming world.It’s true that gamers like games, but they don’t like being gamed.

Ad Age columnist Noelle Weaver’s real blog offers four hard-learned lessons to all of us in the communications business from the misfortunes of Sony and Zipatoni. I'm sure they have the intelligence and we have the wisdom to learn from their mistakes.

1] Good advertising doesn't rely on tricking, lying to or deceiving your target audience.

2] The consumer is smarter than you think, alternative marketing tactics must be genuine, authentic and in today's world, transparent.

3] Today's interest in brand politics means that everything you do will come under scrutiny from someone. See number 2.

4] Involve your consumer in the brand conversation, give them the tools to do so and they will repay you four-fold.

Jeff

I just bought my first Mac. This computer is the nicest thing I have ever owned. I love it. I treat it like a Ming vase. I carry it around like it's a donated kidney on its way to a transplant hospital. I take REALLY good care of my child... I mean my Mac. But something strange happened last night.

You see I recently installed Windows using Apple's Boot Camp, an application that lets you go between the Mac operating system and Windows. Last night, I booted up in Windows to install some new software, but got sidetracked and starting casually looking around the web. About 20 minutes later I suddenly realized that I was laying on the couch, the computer haphazardly placed on my stomach with a sandwich in my left hand.

What was I doing?!

This was my Mac. What if crumbs got in the keyboard? What if something startled me and my baby fell to the ground? What if mayonnaise soiled the track-pad? I couldn't believe my carelessness. Then I looked at that screen and realized that I was in Windows. In the world of Windows, I stopped caring.

Seth Godin recently said "People use a Dell. They are an Apple."

No kidding.

-Will

Susan is attending the Word of Mouth Marketing Conference in Washington DC this week and she reports that her head is swimming in new ideas. You can read all about it on the Womma blog but here is a sample from today when David Binkowski from Hass MS&L and Michael Masnick from Techdirt offered ten simple guidelines for blogger relations:

1. Be truthful and don't relay false information.
2. Say who you are and who you work for.
3. Respect the rules of the venue. You're on the bloggers' turf, mind your manners.
4. Don't ask bloggers to lie for you ... ever ...
5. Use extreme caution (and extreme common sense) when communicating with minors or on blogs intended to be read by minors.
6. Don't manipulate advertising or affiliate programs to impact blogger income
7. Don't spam or use bots or automated systems.
8. Don't compensate bloggers without full and honest disclosure.
9. If you're going to send trial products to bloggers, understand that they don't have to comment on them -- and know that they are free to send them back to you.
10. If they write about the products you send them, proactively ask them to disclose the products'source.

They also remind us to:

* "READ THE DAMN BLOG FIRST"
* Find out their preferred method of contact (phone, email, form, comments)
* Don't spam them (ever ... seriously ... don't do that)
* Keep the initial contact short -- this is not the time to try to get your brand message across

-Jeff

The Washington Post reports that The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.

Unfortunately the new ruling by the FCC isn't likely to stop shills from posting bogus testimonials on the web. Nor will it expunge the zillions that are already out there. But let’s hope, at least, it can make those desperate product hawkers think a little harder about the ethical implications of all the new marketing tactics they’re playing with. We can only hope that the FTC's involvement proves to be good for the word-of-mouth marketing industry and not just another jobs program for lawyers.

-Jeff

Last week I attended the Acres USA conference on eco-agriculture, where Jeff McPherson, a grandfatherly organic family farmer, presented a lecture on the ins and outs of what he calls Honor System Marketing. Honor System Marketing could be described as a retail strategy where merchandise is sold without supervision. For twenty years McPherson has run his produce stand on the honor system. He piles fresh produce on the open shelves and in the walk-in cooler and then he walks away. Customers help themselves and put their money in a metal box. Here is some of what McPherson has learned using Honor System Marketing:

1) You will get ripped off.
2) Most people are honest.
3) Some people pay more than the asking price.
4) Always use a cheap lock on your pay box.
5) The cost of loss is far less than the cost of labor.
6) There are people who are truly needy.

Once someone left a note in the pay box with a sad story of poverty and hunger. They assured him that they would return to pay for the food. Three years later they did. And when a hailstorm destroyed Mr. McPherson’s entire crop, he was too distraught to visit his empty stand. When he finally did go to the stand he found his pay box stuffed with notes of thanks and wads of cash – enough to buy all the seeds he needed to replant.

During his lecture McPherson made sure to hammer home a very important point. The honor system is a two-way street. If a merchant is a trusted member of the community most people will be honest. Apparently it’s easier for people to justify stealing from a jerk. Which may explain why most big retailers must spend millions protecting their merchandise from customers and employees.

-Jeff