The Wowza team went to lunch this afternoon in Uptown to celebrate our 4th anniversary. On our way we passed a lost cat sign posted on a light post. It had a phone number and a website. www.lostsammy.com. Missing cats have better websites than a lot of businesses.

In Uptown there were a couple of guys on Segways passing out samples of Honey Bunches of Oats. Being on a Segway made the stupid cereal seem a lot cooler. I'm guessing it was also a lot more fun for the people passing them out, and they were able to pass them out a lot faster.

At lunch we had a great meal and not so great service. We talked more about the poor service than the great meal.

Jeff

Astronomic discoveries don’t always get the kind of media attention they deserve in the United States. So the discovery of a habitable planet just outside our solar system didn’t get a lot of buzz. According to an article on Wired’s website, scientist believe the planet has a temperature range between 32 and 104F and a sun, much like ours. Their sun is 20.5 light years away from us. It would take 15,000 years for us to get there if we were traveling at a million miles per hour.

It doesn’t surprise me that there are other planets like ours. What amazes me is that scientists can measure, with a fairly high level of confidence, the temperature of a planet that’s 20 light years away. They can measure the distances between planets and know the chemical compounds found there yet when it comes to advertising and marketing we still don’t have accurate ways to measure television viewership. Web metrics, considered the most measurable, are still suspect and measuring word of mouth or buzz is a lot closer to astrology than it is to astronomy. Surely it’s not for lack of talent or investment, as I’m sure more money goes into global market research than astronomy.

Human behavior is not an easy thing to measure and we’re light years away from understanding it. Maybe when we’re able to get to that other planet, their people will have figured us out.

Jeff

Would your customers be willing to throw a party just to talk about your products? If people get excited by your products, then you may do well to shift some of the money you spend on advertising and develop a program that gets customers to host parties and introduce your products.

Tabasco needed to introduce their new sweet and hot dipping sauce. Instead of launching a huge ad campaign to get lost in the maddening clutter, they engaged an army of influential "Buzz Agents" to invite friends to try the sauces.

MoveOn.org uses house parties and viral email invites to organize millions to donate money and participate in social action.

This isn't the same as Tupperware or Mary Kay. The hosts aren't being paid by the companies, these people have parties or share products with friends because they want to.

Why not have people who are excited share your product with people who trust them? Wouldn't that be a cause for celebration?

I'm not a big fan of punk music. But I'm a big fan of Punk Marketing, Richard Laermer and Mark Simmons' new book is a fun read and a powerful call-to-action for marketers of every stripe to stop bothering customers and start having meaningful, engaging conversations.
The book starts out with a manifesto of sorts. Here are some of the articles:
1. Avoid risk and die.2. Why not ask, "why not"?
3. Take a strong stand.
4. Don't pander.
5. Give up control.
6. Expose yourself.
7. Make enemies.
8. Know who you are.
9. No more marketing bullshit.

-Jeff

I just got back from New Orleans for the third, my second, WOMMA Basic Training. I could write a hundred blog posts on all the ideas I thought of over the last few days. But for now I'll just send you to the great work of the bloggers who covered the conference.

Jeff

I learned a new term the other day, for a concept that I suspected was out there, I just didn't know it had a name. Greenwashing is what corporations do when they try to make themselves look more environmentally friendly than they really are. I assumed this would become a problem, since being "green" and "eco-friendly" are hot that every company wants to get in on the marketing action. Since not every company actually wants to change their practices to BE more green, they may be tempted to bend the truth a little, or spin things, a la GOP propaganda wizard Frank Luntz, to make the general population believe it. But it's becoming more and more difficult to fool an increasingly savvy consumer base.

Consumers who truly care about buying local and organic, reducing emissions and living simply could generate a backlash against companies that cynically practice greenwashing.




--Sarah

The video-game market is huge and therefore extremely competitive. This past Christmas both the Nintendo Wii and Playstation3 were released to the public.

The news about Nintendo's console was massive. They had decided to go with an affordable, graphically simplistic, innovative, group oriented, beautifully designed, system at the sacrifice of a technologically robust one like the PS3.

They did a great job and made record breaking sales across the country.

But now something interesting has happened. After months of being on the market you still (for the most part) can't find a Wii at your local retailer. This isn't the case with the PS3.

As it turns out, the shortage of Wii's is now being considered by many a clever marketing plan to increase and sustain the demand for the product.

It's a risky idea: Only make enough product for a handful of your market.

Apparently however, it's working as well as the rest of Nintendo's marketing plan.

The Word Of Mouth is at a surprisingly high level, everyone who doesn't have a Wii seems to want one, and perhaps most importantly something strange happens when a consumer such as myself walks into a video-console retailer:
I see the PS3, the XBOX360, I have the money to buy either, but there's something about the fact that if I just wait a little longer I could get the one that I have to wait for, and I have to admit, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

-Will

The Washington Post conducted an interesting experiment in Memetics. They asked Joshua Bell to play the violin in the subway.

When Joshua Bell, one of the worlds great violinists, plays his $3 million Stradivarius wearing a tux on a concert stage a ticket goes for as much as $150 ...and it's hard to get one. But when he played in the subway at rush hour almost nobody stopped to listen and hardly anyone threw money in his case.

What does this say about the value of a brand and the importance of a story?

Two memes. One is Joshua Bell, world-class violinist, classical music superstar playing a Stradivarius in a grand building. The other, a street fiddler in a baseball cap playing an old violin in a dirty subway. The music is the same.

It's the memes that matter.