Is More Data Always Better?

There has been a discovery in the online marketing and data/statistics world in the last few years. We have had more websites, products and tools created online than we can possibly keep track of. The terms to describe this deluge of activity we have been hearing the most are “data overload” and “information overload” from both companies and consumers. This Google Magazine uses the term Data Obesity to describe this phenomenon.

They ask the question, why is more data always better?

I think the idea of “more data us better” is common from people who lived before the Internet was prevalent. We had to work hard to find data. Researching something meant going to a library and looking in a card catalog (or maybe something called Gopher) and then finding your way around the Dewey decimal system to find that book. And then sometimes they didn’t even have the book because it was checked out or possibly it was just filed wrong because nobody understood the Dewey decimal system.

On a related note recently we got invited to my cousin’s wedding in Santa Fe New Mexico. My dad promptly went to the library and checked out 3 books on Santa Fe and New Mexico. I cringed. He asked how to find out the flights to book something without a travel agent. I realized I have been traveling since 2000 this way and he stopped traveling about that time so he never has. I introduced him to Travelocity, it was mind blowing and a bit of data overload compared with the OAG book he used to use in the 80′s.

The point here is that finding data was really difficult. People had control over its distribution because it was in print. When it became more freely accessible due to Google and other companies efforts we assumed this would be good, because people could remember where to find it and use it whenever we wanted. We never thought it would get this big so fast. Now travel sites are overwhelming, they have too many choices and there are too many of them trying to get you to opt into something you don’t want while being over charged for bringing a suitcase on a flight. This is just one example of how data has gone exponential so quickly.

Others of us have come to a data overload conclusion when they have 200 emails in several in-boxes, 1000+ rss reader posts from feeds waiting, several work projects, 500+ Facebook wall posts in their feed and hundreds of tweets that have gone un-read. This is among a climate where you have to follow-up with projects 5-10 times to get things done, post blogs/tweets/FB status updates daily to keep on people’s radar, empty the DVR so it doesn’t get overloaded and auto delete something you really wanted, listen to the radio on the way to work just in case something big happens and still find time to scoop the litter box before it gets full and the cats poop on the floor.

And the real purpose in all those tweets/FB posts and feeds is that you business changes yearly and if you don’t know about the latest trend and some real insights about it before your boss asks about it, you won’t have a job for all that long. (in digital marketing)

Having data overload be a “good” problem to have from some people’s perspective (as in that it is growth oriented). The democratization of publishing combined with tracking methodology and databases have all contributed to this problem, giving everyone a voice, a potential following of readers, a data trail to analyze and method to say something important online 24/7/365.  And then we have an even bigger problem of processing what is being said, figuring out if it is important or not and sharing/processing/saving it in some way if it is. Acting on that data is way down the line and many of us don’t even get there.

And this isn’t even the big problem with data overload. Where will we store it all? Why do tweets disappear from search so quickly? Because there are millions of them and the failwhale is full. According to the ThinkQuarterly UK, there are 800 Exabytes of data/information created every two days. It took humans from the beginning of civilization until 2003 to create the first 800 Exabytes, and we’re on a roll now.

Where does all this seemingly random data go? How will we know what it says without having to go into a database table and read specific field information? Where are the software tools to manage all this and still give humans the ability to customize the out put in ways that match the behavior or business purposes that we really need? Does any of this stuff ever get deleted?

These are all huge questions we have to answer as more people publish, share, create, track and do business online. We also have to weigh the possibilities of sharing data openly and locking it behind walls as well as how will people comprehensively find what they need when they want to as well as gauge the validity/accuracy of the information presented?

I’m betting on paid services for personal and business data management/archiving & Analysis tools. We will pay for good analysis, good data access & processing and good reliability/backups when we feel the pain of missing good insight, losing good data and just too much happening. Both personally and professionally. But unless you know how to work with SAP, SPSS, SQL, Oracle or a bunch of other systems data management is largely out of your control at this point. They are the librarians of our digital data and they need to find a workable way to Dewey decimal system it back into order and allow us to use it as humans need to.

The Future of Marketing

I’ve been thinking about the future of advertising & marketing lately sincem y boss is off to SXSW this week. I’ve found that in the last decade there is a new trend that takes over as the next-big-thing in online marketing every 2 years.

Before that, the TV/Radio/Print models lasted for about 50 years. I used to think that we were looking for the next big model/philosophy for advertising and things would settle into a steady pattern for the next 20 years but I am beginning to doubt that is going to be possible.

Either we’re still evolving or we’re going to always be evolving from now on. I don’t see any stopping in the development of new devices that use the internet nor the methods in how people use them.

This could prove exhausting for companies having to add another “expert” to their teams every year or so instead of making sure their staff has time to learn on the job, which they really should do. It also means that unless there is a new person or time to learn for companies, their effective advertising will become less effective every year they use it just because behavior is changing so rapidly.

A look at what is hot now and what has been popular in the last 10 years.

Facebook seemed to be the biggest advertising/marketing trend of the year in 2010 and companies I work with have jumped on the bandwagon in 2010-2011. I think this is definitely where people are online for a large chunk of their day, turning it into a communication channel for your company isn’t as easy as it looks. I’ve been on FB since they opened it to people with a company email address and I have been hesitant to share that much personal info with a public database like that but the general public seems to either keep it fluffy in content or not care. Ads on the site do generate interest, but at lower click through rates than any other ad medium I’ve seen.

Twitter has also become laser-hot in the last 2 years and has exploded because of celebrity use and the popularity explosion of smartphones on the US market. Direct P2P marketing is the main method if twitter use in my opinion, and they really don’t charge for it in any way. The downsides here are that your tweets are really only alive for 1 day and then they die, and are taken out of the searchable database if someone is not a subscriber.

Blogs have been all the rage for the last 2-4 years but people have backed off lately because content farms were really making them look bad, content is expensive/time consuming to produce and all the blog ad networks that provided a reliable income from it have either gone under or are paying less than 20% of what they used to or have no inventory. So even if you’re hosting for $10 per month and paying some person in india $5 per article you really can’t make the Google AdSense $ to cover it anymore, and there are few networks paying more than $0.25 per CPM. And since you’re less likley to get blog traffic via search these days you have to build a loyal following, and that is either long hours researching cutting edge news content/analysis or going out and shaking a lot of hands in person. Bloggers typically don’t like people all that much. Also, RSS push notifications were supposed to make Blogs portable to any reader anwhere and instead they just became geeky things body understood and nobody used. Bummer. WordPress (and earlier TypePad and Blogger) were the real catalysts here. They gave regular non-programming people the ability to publish anything they want on the web for free without programming a site or knowing HTML. It was revolutionary until we all remembered how hard the Newspaper business really is and how it is far too time consuming to be profitable. Real bloggers blog because they love it, not to make money. Blogs are also a great way to publish content for free if your business is content, that’s not going away anytime soon.

Blogs were super valuable when they were super influential for Search. Search engines were the marketing darling of 2004-2006 and have slid in ROI ever since. Google has made higher minimum bids a regular practice and people have become desensitized to ads. These super targeted ways of reaching people with relevance have also been taken over by giant companies that used them for branding rather than content relevance and watered down their effectiveness. People have also noticed the spam in search and trust Google results less knowing people work the system. Some blogs gained traction as content/news sources that people subscribed to instead of newspapers and propelled real people into the reporting limelight, the rest became archives of people’s personal lives or were spammy and forgotten. Some people will probably stay with search as their core online activity for the rest of their lives because it made such an impact, but others are moving on.

SEO has been the secret marketing tactic of the last 5 years and it has only lasted that long because it has been so hard to build links for SEO and figure out how the algorithm has changed. Lately though companies have been gaming it more than ever and there is too much knowledge on how to Google Bomb something and people know garbage results when they see them. So, there has been more trust transferred to social networks where people rely on their network of friends to filter the news and just pass on what is really meaningful. This method isn’t about discovery or archiving like search was, it is about instant feedback and the trust of the people you know. Bing has not gained much traction and with Google as the only worldwide player, they will continue to do what they want to maximize profits and favor big companies rather than work on the algorithm and better understanding how people want information. SEO will always be needed and always be challenging.

Email is the old skool way to do things online and time spent in email these days is dropping significantly. People have taken their communication with friends to FB & Twitter and we know how to read/process email a lot faster than we did years ago, so less time is needed. Yet it is still the main method of communication/task management for businesses because of the electronic paper trail it creates for projects/accountability. Real Spam, marketing spam, inbox “work” association and other instant means of communication over the years have tarnished Email’s image. That said, millions of people are still tied to their email as an official method of communication that can reach the most people because it has been around the longest.

Analytics is also a trend but in my opinion this has been the most consistent of all in the last 10 years. It is basically looking at and interpreting data from websites and advertising campaigns and making sense of them in a way to make positive changes in the media/ad choices and web content/development to better serve customer’s and the companies’ needs. I hope more analytics programs allow better/easier integration with all links/ads/impressions across the web because this is the key to understanding customers. There have not been many companies willing to get into this ginormous database product area over the years because it is so costly and complicated to get it right. The looming battle over cookies and privacy could change some of the validity of the data if it means that we lose 50% of the data on visitors. More disclosure is needed with consumers to get a better understanding of how these systems work in order to overcome this.

Display Advertising online is the unpopular element to talk about here but this type of ad had grown dramatically in the last decade. You may think back to old times when Gator or WeatherBug installed spyware on your computer from banners and wonder how it would grow. Well a lot has changed. Seriously. As soon as post impression conversion tracking was created we understood that people see and read banners even though they don’t usually click. Waiting for someone to click is pointless in banner advertising. If you track who views each ad (with a random ID number in a cookie) and then who converts and lands on the thank you for purchasing page that is all you need to know. In this space we’ve also seen advances in brhavioral targeting based on demographic data people share with networks (Like your Yahoo or Google profiles) and retargeting based on which sites you’ve visited in the past and may be interested in again. The end result is that Display advertising works, but only if you buy a lot of it. Like millions of impressions and you track from the impression through conversion and not just the click.

Some recent trends that have fizzled are:

Surveys/Customer sentiment measurement gauges. They’re more annoying than useful for the consumer, pretty much a waste of time even with some small incentive. Unless you pay someone $10-$20 they’re not going to care enough to tell you the truth. Nobody wants to say something negative that gets someone else’s job in trouble. If you pay attention to your feedback through customer service you will probably find out more useful information.

Feedback/Comments/Rating Systems. These are a good tool if you have an engaged customer base. I’ve seen some work well like Amazon and Nordstrom, but others like travel sites and restaurant ratings just get slurped into Google as content and your site doesn’t benefit from the functionality. People do trust ratings from customers (real people) more than ads or third party rating systems.

IM Instant Messenger. Some people still use IM as a method of chat, but it never became the hub for activity that we thought it would. AIM and Yahoo had it after ICQ and never really capitalized on it. GMail and Facebook added this as an additional functionality making the original IM programs kinda obsolete when people could do everything in one place.  Skype is the one standalone place this may live on. Skype’s claim to fame is video calls via internet and free voice over internet calls to anyone else online with Skype. Yahoo IM does this too but nobody really seems to use it there. Maybe they should have had that featured in their TV commercials.

Affiliate networks. These were all the rage in 2003-2004 and they have been a big reason for the prevalence of spam in blogs, social networks and search. Farming your online marketing out to people who are not responsible for the brand of your company and will do anything to make a buck is an invitation to get played. A lot of the payouts have dropped from these systems have been shut down or have less than 20% of the payout they once did for a conversion/lead. The message here, don’t trust anyone who says it’s “easy”. Some high level revenue sharing or lead trading relationships between large companies make sense but should always be handled in person by people not through 3rd party electronic networks.

Video may be a success for many people (including cats) but for most of us (and companies) it is still out of reach and vastly misunderstood. From a behavior standpoint, people can’t watch video/audio at work while at their desk because it is too noticeable that they’re not working (the largest audience base that the internet has) and the video content is not searchable because there is no transcription of the content automatically to make it searchable or translateable into different languages. Most people don’t know how to edit video and companies don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for this either. Editors may also have a tough job going through thousands of hours of content in the future to find the meaningful stuff. Professional content creators like TV/Movie studios still have the upperhand here in creating really good quality video and we may not have affordable tools and education for a while yet. Monetizing it is another problem and YouTube is an example of really popular sites not making enough money to really pay the bills since they rely on Google to subsidize them. I think Video may get easier if there are good online video editors (with good tutorials) that become available cheaply.

The Question & Answer format completed by volunteers/users of the site. Yahoo Answers is moderately successful from a search perspective but the general public never caught on and a lot of the answers were pretty bad. I never understood why companies never took advantage of answering questions as a way to create permanent links to their site for people looking for their products/solutions. Now Quora is trying to do the same thing somehow combined with Twitter. More companies seem to be embracing it but again the success of the site depends on the quality of the answers and without paying someone how good do you think it will be when the newness wears off?

Wikis. I wanted Wikis to be big. I am such a fan of Wikipedia and I also work in an industry where sharing content is a daily occurence. Wikis help when you need a reference material to be updateable quickly within a group. It served the encyclopedia niche really well and not many other companies needed something like this.

Now that I have rehashed the past and the present, where does that leave us on the footsteps of SXSW needing to understand what is next?  Some ideas I have may not be fully developed, but that is what the future is all about, speculating.

1. We need more databases, more user friendly-visually configurable-cheap-secure-web based databases. We have a lack of public knowledge about how to collect, maintain and report on multiple databases in marketing. This has only been for the IT and Web departments in the past, we need to free the data to become accessible to more people, although probably not everyone wants that. Some people may find that overwhelming and it does take experience to understand multiple layers of marketing and the effects it has on the data. We also need to find more user friendly ways to link separate database systems like analytics with accounting or orders and web ad servers. We need to resolve traffic flow/identity across all of them in order to understand things better, and we need more processing power to do this. It is also getting easier to collect data at so many points in everyone’s day on so many networks. We need ways to process all these potential new forms of data from wearable sensors to car/directional related sensors to all the video people post online that has no text for content. Basically we need to find better ways to process and understand all this data.

2. Mobile use is exploding but in my opinion very few web functions work well on phones due to the small screen and the variable network connectivity. Email works, Facebook also works. Twitter was made for phones. Advertising was not. How to monetize this channel is a challenge, as is how to reach new consumers in a relevant way while on these devices. One thing is clear, a mobile phone is with someone all the time, possibly even while they sleep, and people very loyal to their smartphones. The checkin-foursquare thing has caught on for some functions and some needs but it is not widely excepted. (more relevant to brick and mortar businesses offline) There is still frustration when full website functionality isn’t included in a mobile design and there is confusion between apps and mobile websites for consumers and marketers. This all may get resolved in time because of popularity. A Nielsen poll found that 41% of the respondents used their cell phone in the bathroom. We’re also not sure if tablet computers fit into this category or not yet. We will see more advertising opportunity on Mobile in the future but it should always be paired with regular Display & Search advertising (and offline) to make the connection.

3. Cloud computing, bye to VPNs and servers and hello to clouds. Also hello to more hacking, more data loss and more outsourcing of IT jobs to somewhere else. This can be a good technology to make your content/data/work available wherever you are.

4. QR codes, maybe? Eh? We get how to use them, not sure what the point is for the consumer? Coupons? Wireless rewards points systems? How do you get this data into your existing order and web analytics database systems?

5. Internet on TV and vice versa. The internet being an on demand database of content you can choose to watch at any time makes a programming schedule obsolete. Live events will have a certain lure but otherwise people will use Google TV, Apple TV, Netflix to access content while using the web in their living rooms all at the same time. Video chat will be better when its on your TV too. This will be very tricky for advertisers. In an on-demand world nobody will wait for a commercial anymore and it will have to be all subscription based. Companies will have to partner with content creators to get products seen, mentioned if there are no commercials.

6. Fragmentation. People may get tired of the constant need to reformulate their entire communication method with family/friends/work every two years and just pick something and stick with it at some point, but in the mean time we will have a lot of noise from a lot of signals all clamoring for a consumer’s attention and that means that they listen less to each of them. This makes marketers have to work harder to be louder and more frequent in their messaging and in turn makes consumers turn it off or change methods yet again. I find that to combat fragmentation you have to advertise on more mediums to be seen in more places. Billboards, Radio, Online & Mobile for example all at 4:30 pm advertising the evening news.

7. Task management - this is the factorization of web and white collar workers. Log into a closed system and a task list tells you what you have to do today and how long you have to do it. No critical thinking allowed without flexibility and more of a contractual-short term-task relationship with highly skilled workers. This could mean people work from home from anywhere, but forget the benefits of collaboration or connection with your job. It may improve productivity to a point, but at some point it is hard to motivate someone to do something as fast as possible when they’re not personally invested in the business (or getting rewarded that way) and working remotely.

8. Digital Archives - People are not able to really keep tabs on all the digital information in their lives. I feel this with digital photos. If Flickr didn’t exist with all my photos tagged and dated I wouldn’t be able to find anything with image names like DCIM21531 and file folders of random events on my computer that aren’t backed up. (ok that isn’t true, my tech husband just started an automated backup on an external drive he put away in a safe place, but until now it had never happened before). What about medical records for someone’s entire life history? What about family history? Emails, correspondence, daily diary blogs and other forms of electronic data? My brain can’t really remember everything and creating an archive to refer back to is an appealing idea. I also feel like I need a secure place to subscribe to in order to save/manage all this content and I’d pay for it gladly. Especially f they sent me a backup version of it on a drive in the mail. It also would serve as an archive for people if someone passes away.

9. Content managers – they used to be called Editors and paid a lot more money. Now they get paid to know the content subject matter and be an expert and may be responsible for writing the content themselves.

Why I dislike Large Blogs

I love blogs. I have been blogging since 2002 when my friend Mugsy emailed me and told me to sign up for LiveJournal. A lot has changed about blogging since then, but the revolutionary idea that if you can type, you can publish easily in a word-processing-like interface on the internet has not. The method of blogging to share knowledge by and for non-programming type people is still spreading to the corners of the globe and helping people’s voices be heard in ways we never thought possible.

At the same time I am growing more frustrated with the technorati and the overload of emails, posts, rss feeds and spam arriving on my accounts daily. I am trying my best to stay on top of the active topics in  the  user generated content world as it has forked into many roads that include blogging, social networking, social ads, microblogging and a whole host of a million little startups with other concepts they want to share with the world. (more than can be kept up with or can survive even if they do all innovate)

I have had to scale back my online content consumption several times over the years when it was in danger of taking over my life and all my time. But lately this getting married thing has taken a large chunk of time out of my life too, (even after the wedding) and as a result I am trying to glean all my updates and news knowledge into smaller and smaller bits of time. (apparently being married means I have to do work around the house and spend a lot of time trying to motivate my husband to stop watching hours of TV and do things around the house. Life just got more complicated and we have to learn how to cook, fix things, do laundry and empty the cat-poop-box with much larger quantities now). My work is also very busy (analytics and metrics seem to go nuts in recessions) and no spare time is to be had anywhere in the schedule.

Therefore, I have gone through many iterations of un-subscribe weeks in my email boxes and cut back drastically on email newsletters, of which once I found very enlightening. Most marketing/advertising/analytics/metrics/SEO/SEM email newsletters  these days aren’t as willing to share any real actionable info without you spending a lot of $ so out they go.

I tried to update myself by trying an RSS reader again (3rd try) and I think its been a few months but I am overwhelmed by that too. Its way to easy to get more than 1,000 unread items in the reader and when it doesn’t tell me the exact number anymore I am less motivated to tackle it because it seems impossible.

I have found Google Reader to be good for sunday afternoon fun feed reading and more personal fun  topics/blogs though. Home design is a great topic in the reader since you really have to see it all to learn.

On the other hand I am re-subscribing to some email newsletters and just un-subscribing altogether to others who insist on posting 30-50 items per day! (assholes!) How is one person supposed to read that many posts per blog per day? It’s impossible and on some level, rude.

I know why they do this. It is partially a play to keep new items being published every few hours to keep the Internet addicts coming back for more traffic and it is also a play for search engine dominance by having more content in the engine for every possible term than anyone else. These teams of writers churn out mostly regurgitated posts about content repurposed from other blogs without much new insight. Some do deliver genuine news and content you can use but scanning through 50 posts is way slower than scanning 5 emails. The content and pics seem to load soooo sloooowly and an email you read, scan and go to what you want quickly. Big offenders of this are ReadWriteWeb (on volume and not separating feeds), Silicon Valley Insider (regurgitating and trying to predict the future even though they’re usually wrong), SEO Roundtable, Apartment Therapy (OMG, holy re-post everyone elses content and fill up with summary posts daily to waste everyones time, generate page views and sell ads), Jalopnik (jebus stop showing us every detail of the 24 hours of Lemons in every city across the country and asking us what our favorite imaginary dream car in a movie with Bruce Willis: waste of space, use summary feeds please! On a cable bandwidth line it takes forever to load all these damn images!) and Media Post (phhbbtt). ALL THESE BLOGS have been banned from my RSS Reader. Some have been demoted to email updates but others are just gone.

Also, I’m not programmed to think to go see my rss feeds yet either so I often forget about them for several days after a good several hour scanning session finally getting the numbers down to below 200 new items. then I return the next time to see 1,000+ again and feel defeated. In contrast I have OCD about keeping a clean email box, and completely forget about facebook until I am completely bored. I guess that is a sign of my age bracket. (34)

I wish that this spammy fluf put out there to fill space could be eliminated. I also wish that these blogs would split their feeds into sections so you would be able to just get the posts you were interested in. Like if new original content and re-purposed other people’s content were separated in 2 feeds, it would be a big help.

I would also recommend that they stop doing summary posts. They piss me off. I wait a minute or 2 for something to load in the darn reader only to see its the same posts from the local editions of the same blog.  Poo, if that happens 15 times in a day I could have spent that time sleeping and then I’m annoyed. 

These blogs also do this because they are in some get-rich-quick rush to make money as a profitable business before Google figures it out and bans them or something. Yes, blogs have an elitism to them that says, duh, if I can make a slice of the money publishing from what the Tribune used to, I am going to do this as fast and as hard as I can. And it over saturates the web with watered down content that is just filler mostly, even if it does increase ad impressions and some adsense revenue if you’re into web-welfare payments.

I also would like to recommend that if you want to start a blog you keep the posts to no more than 2-3 a day and resist the urge to just regurgitate other people’s posts and link to them saying how great they are. Research things you are really interested in and share your own unique experiences. Any web-bot can be an aggregator, what we need more of is real people sharing experiences and knowledge to make social media stick and not die out because of spam/splogs and info-overload. It is these people who become trusted advisors and get the visitors who come back again and again.

And this is also better for the rest of us who have to go clean the cat-poop-box and have a life offline now that they are married.

Update 10/29/09

http://scobleizer.posterous.com/why-i-dont-use-google-reader-anymore

I guess Robert Scoble agrees with me to a point, though he blames Google Reader for a bad format and experience and not the blog owners for copious amounts of useless content hiding the good stuff. I guess there is always room for improvement and certain people discover it before others depending on how they use the info/product.

Update 11/5/09

How much content is too much content? Read Write Web chronicles these mega content sites and their race to populate the web all by themselves by posting 200+ posts per day. We should call it the Answers.com business model.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_age_of_mega_content_sites.php

The Apple iPhone wasn’t a miracle just a repurposed design from arrogant salespeople

 

It really needs a glove with the case built in for the left hand.

I just got an iPhone.

 Since all the hype has died down about these iPhones 2 years later, and people have accepted this device as the most amazing thing ever I thought I would post my reactions to this nice but not miraculous device.

The first thing that I realized when I got this iPhone was that its a video iPod. (of which I also own) It is a repurposed design of a former product. That isn’t revolutionary at all.

It’s like someone at Apple said, wow I like my iPod so much I’d like to make calls from it and ditch my phone. And they did it. All the technology was already developed for a former device. Some new things did have to be added and re-engineered. But there is so much re-purposed from 5-7 years ago, the development costs were probably not that high because they knew pretty close how to use the materials to do this from past experience.

Now I see this Apple tablet image in the news and think they are re-purposing it again on a larger scale. I get the if it’s not broke don’t fix it idea, but their marketing and PR hype is a bit off.

I think these functions work really well:

• The touch screen is better than the old Palm Treo one and more intuitive. I am impressed at how they solved the QUERTY problem with a touch screen.
• I think the apps are also very good and its nice that they share the love with the app companies that develop them. I don’t think $5 an app is a bad price for what they deliver and plus you should think before you download a ton of apps and a cost helps you do that. The alternative is that your HD gets full and crashes quickly.
• It syncs with Yahoo email very well, which is what I use for one of my accounts. It turns out that email is very doable on a small screen.
• I like the pull the corners effect to read web pages and increase the size of the fonts so you can click a link. This is very intuitive.
• The GPS is pretty good. I watched my phone show a blip of my location on a map that was about 2 seconds behind where we really were as we drove home. That is pretty good bouncing off a sattelite that fast. I think the directions from where we are to an address will be very helpful in the future.
• Doing the convergence thing and having the phone, music player, GPS, camera and email all together works great.

I think these things need work:

• The rss feeds don’t always work on the iPhone. Not that it doesn’t literally work, but these are items I’d like to read in more depth, and on a tiny screen its hard. Also all the links go out to the web and I am finding that I can’t get that data very easily in Chicago.
• The web issue is still an issue with web enabled phones. I hated that things took so long to download on my old Treo 650 and 4.5 years later its still an issue with the iPhone. (heck its an issue on my computer sometimes with Google reader)
• I think people who have iPhones use them on the go a lot and the backup for the wireless network are free wireless networks. Which means you’re in trouble if you want to download an rss feed in google reader online. (meaning the bandwidth exceeds the ATT mobile network and that is sometimes spotty with its coverage)
•  The Metra commuter train and Chicago CTA don’t have free WiFi on their trains and busses and you can’t always find one when you are on the street either. (neither do our cars) So, there are a lot of times/places I look down at my phone and can’t connect to anything (phone or internet network). fail.
• I feel like we’ve developed content and a device for reading things in real time that wants to be downloading info/updates 24/7/365 and the networks still look like swiss cheese or a spider web, with gaping holes in them. We need more ubiquitous universal access before these devices can really be life changing.
• The touch screen is great but then switching to a physical button for on/off seems counter intuitive. Why not make all the functions be a part of the touch screen? I keep looking for an off button in the screen itself. 
• The battery life is horrendus. If I read email and rss feeds on the train and bus between home and work I use 50% of my battery life. Holy Monkeys, this needs a better battery or a plug that pops out the side that you can stick in any outlet you find.
• I also like that Steve Jobs has the kind of what I say goes power and involvement in the details to make his products good on many levels and keep the design level very high. It’s impressive he has been able to hang on to that power in a large company, it is rare to see and keeping one person in charge makes decision making faster, easier and true to the original purpose. Its how things get done if that person is well rounded in knowledge and willing to enforce what they preach.
• There is also the annoying problem that on any field you need to enter text you can’t click to put the cursor anywhere on the field to start typing except the end. If you want to change one letter you have to backspace the entire field until its blank and start over. We need to have a click to cursor ability/function, do apples just not do that?
• The me.com thing they sell as an add-on is cool but way way overpriced. I cited that 1 yr of Flickr unlimited access is $25 and 1 yr of full LiveJournal access is $25. Why is syncing my phone to the web $100 for the year? Assholes. I did get a small discount and got it for $65.
• The Apple sales guy was over the top. I really hope I never have to go back to that Naperville Apple Store again. He was about 18 and very arrogant. He made me (age 34) feel stupid for not knowing everything about the iPhone or web phones and his Apple Brand Arrogance and demeaning tone was disgusting. Why ask us about our computers at home? Why rip on them in front of us? When you don’t even own one? Admit most people have windows machines and then say why you might consider the Apple, don’t just say everything else sucks. OMG, and don’t explain everything for 2 hours when I just want to buy the damn phone. Dragging things out forever and then asking 7 times if we want to buy the apple care program that I didn’t want. And when someone says they will look it up online and then decide later, don’t say look it up now on this Apple, that is a high pressure sales technique and if I didn’t need a phone that day I would have walked out of the store at that moment. Totally unethical and wrong to do to a customer while you are looking over their shoulder. So, at all costs avoid Apple sales assholes that admit they don’t even own any of the Apple products they sell.  Just buy stuff online if needed. 

The basic thing is that the phone was worth the $288 that I paid (for the 16 gig). I paid like $300 for the Treo 650 in 2005. I think if this works for a few years it will be ok, and worth the purchase. But it really doesn’t need the hype or the arrogance.

SEO Update from Chicago

Everything just got a bit harder with the new Google Caffeine update for the search engine. If you haven’t heard about it yet you can check out the API to see how your website will rank in the new engine compared to the old engine.

I would say that most people began to understand the old engine in a logical way from experimentation over time and many businesses thought they were just “following the rules” building sites in a way that fit with that logic. Now the new engine will be completely different and all that work will be gone. I looked at some sites and saw how they will compare between the 2 and the results are a challenge.

One site went from 12th to 44th for a key search term. Another went from 5th to 23rd. It is almost universal that everyone who develops a business model around search will be hurt by the change whether they are spammy or not.

I am all for reducing and removing spam/affiliate networks/link schemes from google to reveal the real content but the actual companies with the products/services/tools that businesses and professionals use will be hurt by the update and some may suffer financially as a result. Google just doesn’t have the human ability and reasoning skills in a robot algorithm to tell whether a site is spam or not. They’re going after spam and hurting other legitimate businesses.

Investing in marketing might be something we start looking at like investing in stocks/bonds/401K/the market. They have had long standing recommendations on asset allocation between stocks/bonds/international funds/currency and other types of investments. They associate risk levels with each one and say things like; invest the percentage in bonds that matches your age or diversify and reallocate to maintain that level of diversification between investment types 2-3 times per year.

Investment Strategy with Marketing may look the same someday. SEO might bring in X% of revenue and cost Y% of budget but is highly risky, so you don’t invest as much in it, because it is all potentially going to vaporize when Google decides to update. Things like Branding on TV and Radio and Outdoor are more expensive and not trackable, but companies have been using them for decades and they are very low risk. You spend that money on awareness and people know who you are after that. PR is another wild card and social networking (viral) marketing is another component with low cost and high risk.

Companies may want to diversify their marketing and advertising dollars based on risk as well as the ROI because within a few clicks of a mouse in California, the entire web changes and all your efforts may go up in smoke. This idea definitley favors the old methods and in some ways, internet banner ads. Display advertising on the internet is way undervalued right now and people are also starting to look at ads online like they used to on TV. They are actually paying attention sometimes. The conversion rates have gone down on average, but for mainstream brands and trusted sites they are near 5% (up from .01% years ago) when you include post impression data (people who never clicked, but went to your site anyway).

So, I guess the mood I am feeling today is one that is cautious optimism about old advertising methods in light of Google pulling the rug out from under companies, in the way they always do. It doesn’t help that adwords pay per click costs are as high as $20 for many mainstream words and can go as high as $100 perclick. Then when the conversion rates are so low, nobody will pay that. Most of my clients are abandoning ppcads and someday may do the same with SEO. It just doesn’t pay.

New Media and New Information Paradigms

I have been hearing about the demise of the newspapers, the rise of search/social networking/new media and the internet fragmentation concept for years now. (almost a decade?) And I just read about it again today with the newspapers secretly meeting to try and sort out monetization methods to save their business. At the same time I am a Guinea pig living through this time of change/shift in how people find information, use information and consume things. Here are some of my observations although not in a concise dissertation format yet. 

• We are at an odd time in internet evolution, on pause between big developments. We got email, IM, web sites, RSS feeds, Blogs, social networking and now Twitter. We don’t need more services or ways to interact on the web. We need better all inclusive ways to connect and consume all in one. Ways to make the experience more relevant and more inclusive of many kinds of content at the same time. Not wasting our time.
• I can’t help but notice that at 33 I have never really “read” a newspaper. This indicates to me that newspapers were not that important back in the 1980′s to my generation when their profits were healthy and the internet was but a dream for most of us. (Except being something to line litter boxes and bird cages with.) I hate the size format, I hate the ink and I always have. I actually like the ads though, especially the Sunday fliers. 
• Weeks go by without my watching any TV. This started about 3 years ago when I got high speed internet. It’s not that I don’t like TV, I just don’t have time to sit for 2 hours plus and I know if i sit down I won’t get up and get anything accomplished in the evening/weekend. And I don’t like overly repetitive things. I was watching the sell that house shows on HGTV to get ideas about how to sell mine and after about 3 I got it and didn’t need to watch any more. Reruns aren’t nostalgic to me really, more just boring. And reruns is all Cable TV is about.
• The only TV I will drop everything for is Top Gear UK. When it is in Season we trek over to my parent’s house and watch wwith extended family weekly. Everybody drops everything to watch that show. It makes you laugh, it makes you dream of fancy cars and it inspires you to take grand adventures regardless of what the outcome is.
• This leads me to a general cluelessness about a lot of local and newsworthy (?) events. Things like buses that are Hijacked and what the weather will be tomorrow. I also find that these things weren’t essential to me in the first place. I carry an umbrella, what’s the big deal?
• I find myself focusing on things I’m interested in. Maybe this is the political polarization people speak of? I read my marketing emails/newsletters/blogs as well as home design blogs and write my own blog as well. I check status on Facebook/Twitter/Flickr and maybe update if I have something interesting to say. And I work a lot. I also am always investigating 2-3 new directions for my work/career. Not all of them pan out, but they help me figure out what is evolving that I need to know about.
• I do still use the phone (yes the land line). It is the best way to reach my parents and Steve’s parents. Steve’s parents email but mine are not really into it. And we try and go visit once a week in person. In person time still matters.
• I am a book reader because I am a train commuter. I have been for years now and it has created a small library of business/marketing/analysis books. I order from amazon when I see something I like and then go consult the pile of books for something new.
• And that is all I have time for. Now with a husband (fiancee really for one more month), 3 cats, 4 litter boxes, a yard, wedding planning, condo selling, house hunting, family organizing, laundry, food shopping & cooking I am overbooked. I don’t even get to skype/call my friends very often. A party invite seems really daunting these days with the schedule we keep.
• I wonder about new media uses and if we will really care about anything not personally relevant to us in the future? Will a police chase matter to everyone in Chicago or just the people who live by the highway where it happens? Will we be less distract-able by sensational news and distracting entertainment? Will we be able to channel the news, information and analysis we really need into our lives and ignore the products/content we really don’t care about?
• On the other side of the coin, how will we ever discover new things? I find myself looking to find out what is happening on the internet a few times a week and look to Google News and the Yahoo home page. Not the Trib. Yet somehow the list at these sites is always limited and not really anything relevant either.
• There has to be something in-between a completely open fire hose of information and one select rss feed with just content from one niche area. There has to be some middle ground between being hijacked by ads for 20 minutes of a 60 minute program on TV and not knowing at all where to find a dress for my rehearsal dinner when my usual 5 clothing websites didn’t pan out. (who has time to go to a mall?) ((and why does Google shopping suck when the main search is generally good??))
• People won’t pay for news. Period. They will pay for some kind of extra relevant cool service though. They will pay for innovation, new products that are noticeably better for some reason. Things that simplify your life.
• Ads should not be integrated more with content as if they were the content. It blurs the line in what is really true and what is marketing speak. And although they may pay the bills for a while, people will eventually figure it out and abandon that medium that does this.
• We need another search player. Google is not enough and although they do some things well, I am not a fan of everything they create. I would like more companies to work on real time indexing of information as well as historical archiving to keep information accessible if anything happens to Google’s accessibility. At some point people will be so hooked they will be able to charge for a (low cost) subscription to the search engine itself. 
• More people need web enabled phones with internet use active. I just read yesterday that out of 57 million people in the US with internet capable mobile phones only 18 million have internet enabled! (netpop stat comparing us to China) 31.5% of the people with internet use phones don’t even pay for internet access? (only 13% of all the cell phones total) This is a huge hurdle to making info more relevant and accessible because people carry their phones everywhere. Things like bigger screens, flatter profiles and easier software app use on these phones will help the adoption rates improve. 
• Identity management and security is also a problem. We might like something like OpenID but only if sites still allow anonymous comments too. Privacy and being able to say something important without being hunted down in person for your opinion necessary for getting people to adopt this identity management software and make our lives easier between all the hundreds of web sites and e-commerce activities we do in a day and consolidating that information for our own personal use.   
• Data mining is going to have to improve. If statistics are wrong 25% of the time like stated in the Numerati book, we really need to combine automated data crunching with human decisions about data more often. Numbers are meaningless without someones explanation. This completely changes what and how data is configured, crunched and reported and can determine/undermine your results even if you manage to collect it perfectly.
• All this plus the only way out of a recession is through innovation. We’re waiting.

Chicago CTA Rant – Where are the Busses? Commuting Problems

I have been a commuter in Chicago for about 3 years now. I was initially excited to abandon my car in it’s parking space during the week and walk to the EL train and then to work every day. I have saved a bucket-load of cash not paying for gas or parking downtown since I have worked in that area. I was able to get to work in 1 hour from door to door, and it would be faster if I caught the CTA Train right when I got to the station. It was never more than a 10 minute wait for a green line though.

All these things changed recently when I moved in with my Fiance in Warrenville. (I had been living in Oak Park for the last 7 years) Now I am only tied to downtown Chicago by the METRA trains. Which is very frustrating since the BNSF only comes in to Union Station which is all the F way over west of the loop and not walkable to Michigan Avenue. 

This means you have to fill that gap with more public transport since cabs are too expensive to take every day. Your choices are the CTA elevated Trains which aren’t really by Union Station or Michigan Avenue either or the CTA Buses. Everyone said the Buses were the way to go. And for all the ranting about Metra, the CTA Buses have ended up being far more problematic than the Train. (although the train has been so packed the last 2 days that people have been standing in the isles in all the cars)

This morning for example it was a 1/2 hour wait for a 121 bus by Union Station. WTF? They are supposed to run every 12-15 minutes per the CTA Site. Last night was no better. I caught the 151 bus to Union Station for a change (most days I wait a 1/2 hour for that at 6 pm also) and then there was no Train until 6:50 pm. I spent a 1/2 hour sitting in the train station doing nothing. Where was the 6:20 BNSF?

That is the first time a METRA train has been missing but the CTA buses are there at about a 50% rate . I can walk to the train station in a 1/2 hour, but if I can get a bus it only takes 15 minutes (even stopping on every block). But if I knew there would not be a bus for a 1/2 hour I would just F-ing walk.

I get to start working from home on Fridays this week. I won’t miss the 1.5-2 hour commute each way.

How have your experiences been with Chicago CTA & METRA commuting?

TopGear USA, Canceled – 2nd try

TG USA NBC FAIL - Who is up next?

I just read that TopGear USA or Gear as NBC was going to call it, has been canceled before it has even begun. (because of the epic fail of Knight Rider??? WTF?)  This is disappointing news but it also doesn’t surprise me since this has been the 2nd try at getting a sister show in the US running in some form.

There was a BBC developed test pilot about 2 years ago called TGUSA that never left the ground, and in 2008 NBC started the process of developing a series and selecting hosts and now that has stopped too.

The Top Gear Show people at the BBC say that they are shopping the concept around to cable broadcast networks via the Jalopnik post, but I am not all that sure this will work either. I think that finding a network in the US for TopGear will be tricky because of a few things:

1. All the shows in the US change their content to please advertisers. TopGear does not. This is a huge risk for US networks, (cable or free tv) because they could loose a huge amount of revenue if an advertiser doesn’t like a comment about their product on the show. (not just cars remember, TG rips on anything they don’t like from caravans to clothing to speed cameras)

2. The only people who will want to fund this show would have to be fans. (even if they are executives or media moguls, they still have to be fans to believe in the concept) They would have to understand the intricacies of what TG is, how it is produced and why people love it so much all over the world. You can’t mess with that formula. They are trying so hard in Australia to get it right and my brother still calls it “Bad Top Gear” that we watch when UK Top Gear is off-season. It is a show that is incredibly hard to get right  and the chance you can replicate this in a formulaic way is slim. Just think, the UK  Top Gear has been running since 1977 and only since the late 1990′s has it been really good. It took them that long to get the UK version right and they are still tweaking.

The TopGear show not only takes the best improviser hosts, it must take a huge staff of researchers, a boatload of talented car mechanic guys for all the race and experimental stuff they do, a boatload of the best camera guys and the most excellent editors and sound people. And I am sure I am unfairly forgetting half of the staff. And then there is the constantly updated website. This is a large overhead cost when networks may not know if they can make any ROI from it and don’t know heads or tails about what would make it successful.

Maybe they should start small instead? A small TG-USA blog with short 5-10 min segment clips once in a while? See if it generates enough web interest and then take it to TV? Smaller staff, less hours needed in all the functions and it lets you get your bearings straight on all the details before going on to a higher cost/risk situation. Just a thought… 

Or maybe produce one time hour long ”specials” to see how they take without a huge commitment in set building and long term contracts? More the on the road stuff, challenges, trips, building/breaking things? I am just trying to think of ideas on how to keep costs down and limit the risk in the beginning so it can catch on.

Another idea is to pitch it to a sports network, the speed channel or odd indie channel on cable like FX. Or go wild and produce it on the BBC America channel. (and take off those neutered versions of the show that are running there now) That might be it’s best chance of succeeding. Get some large (non-car) sponsors of the show and see what happens. 

Regardless of who ends up producing and funding TopGear USA I hope it lives and I still look forward to seeing the final product. (even if it ends up kind of crap)   . . .

Hey can I help? My brother and I plus my fiance make 3 redheads who know negligible things about cars and have great banter. (my Brother and Fiance actually do know something about cars, I am really the goof of the bunch) If nothing else these pics prove we are real people.

Ok, I know that is a crap idea, but I had to try…

We’d be the super low budget version.

Here’s a camcorder duct taped to your window, good luck, don’t break it. 

Seriously, it would be funny… Ok I’ll forget about it…

How GM should restructure for a Government Bailout and streamline Brands and Cars

How can GM save itself from Implosion? Which GM brands and cars should bekept and which should be cut?How many jobs can be saved in Detroit? Should GM, Ford and Chrysler be saved at all? Will the consumer demand for vehicles (cars) ever pick back up again? These are all good questions.

Everyone is all a buzz about the American Car companies and their pitch to the Government saying that “bankruptcy isn’t and option” so give us billions in free money that has no strings attached and we can spend on anything we want. Ouch! I think congress was right to send them packing the last time they showed up in private jets and asked for money, and we have learned that in the other bailouts, the banks aren’t spending their money on what it was “proposed” for so more oversight is needed for any government bailouts of companies.

Back to my thoughts on GM specifically, since I am not an expert on Ford or Chrysler.

GM has some opportunities to be successful in the future but much of that opportunity comes at the cost of getting rid of the past, completely and starting over from scratch.

Almost every GM car or truck sold in the last 10 years has been either: inferior in quality, reputation or design. They also tend to make cars for segments that people don’t need and then wonder why people won’t buy them even when pushed. (Hello: SUVs) I read yesterday that the 4 brands that GM intends to keep are Buick (yay!), Cadillac (ok), Chevy (a necessity) and GMC (WTF?). 

I think they should throw all the brands out and come out with 5 new ones with distinctive market segments and niche products. Here are the segments in automobiles that I think will be big in 10 years that GM or any car company needs to invest in, and cut everything else:

1. The new shiny reliable car below $8,999. Developing countries and low income people in developed nations will need this kind of transportation as the cost of transportation increases consistently. (think college kids and retail hourly wage workers) It isn’t sexy or cool or updated every year. It is a 5 year design of an extremely reliable and simple car and only available in 1 color and maybe with 2 seats. If people want variety they can customize on their own. These cars are cheap super basic transportation and low cost is what sells them and fuel efficiency is also important. They have to be more reliable than a used car or this won’t work. Think old VW Beetle, Geo Metro, India’s Tata, China’s Cherry Motors or simpler version of a Honda Civic/fit.

2. Super eco friendly green cars. This segment has a product range from cheap eco friendly basic cars to luxury eco friendly status comfort cars. Performance isn’t really a priority but style and design is. Comfort comes at a price but miles per gallon is always in the 50-75 mpg range for all vehicles. Leather heated seats is an option on the lux ones. Think Toyota Prius and GM Volt. A 5-door option is nice here too. Eco people are practical people. Plug in charging in your garage and solar panels in roof are also great pluses if the cost can still be comparable to a non-eco car. People need to have one of the eco cars start at $15,000.00. Then fancier ones can be higher priced. Pricing people out of the market is bad for business, you loose sales and customers to people who do have the affordable eco cars.

3. Business/Industrial/Delivery Trucks & Vans. No consumer needs a truck unless they live in the mountains of Colorado or live on a ranch, but telling people they needed huge over-sized utility vehicles for their family use has been a strategy used in the past 15 years to re-purpose existing designs to new markets. This era is over and the SUV needs to die except for people who have 5 kids. (relatively few) There is a continued opportunity to sell trucks to businesses that deliver, transport and create large products in the US but it is a far smaller division of the company and of sales. And living in the US and seeing firsthand how people use these vehicles for business should give GM an insight that the Japanese, Chinese and German car companies don’t have and lead to building and innovating better vehicles.

4. And most importantly: The everybody car. I think GM has no way of recapturing a significant part of the 4 door family sedan but there is an opportunity to innovate it. There have been a few cars that are appealing to everybody because they contain multiple category characteristics. (um, crossovers without the truck part plus luxury) The everybody car I am talking about is the 5 door hatchback sedan. Don’t think 1970′s! Think of the Prius and Saab 9-3 when it was a 5 door, think Subaru WRX. More needs to be done in developing practical sexy cars like this because they take over where SUVs left off. You can haul things in them and get good fuel economy at the same time. You can even structure them for performance and luxury and fuel economy at the same time. So, the 5-door sport/luxury/green/family sedan is the everybody car of the future. Will GM make it and market it properly? (it could be the volt if they lux it up a bit)

5. The Luxury Performance car. Lastly, GM needs a super-car or luxury flagship vehicle that basically walks on water and inspires a generation. (more than the Pontiac solstice) These cars aren’t always profitable themselves, but they make the other brands you own more profitable and can make your brand one that people believe in. How Toyota and Honda don’t have one I don’t know, but maybe that is why they do so much racing now?  The Corvette makes Chevy feel cool, the R8 made Audi sought after. Vipers dying off made Chrysler seem even less cool and less reliable. Plus so few people will be able to afford a luxury performance car in the future that this will need to be a niche business with limited production.

And for fun here is what I think of the brands GM currently has:

Keeping Buick: Buick makes an extremely reliable car (yes like Honda/Toyota reliable) so this is a good place to start and they get 25-30 MPG. What Buick needs is a few smaller car options and even better fuel economy without sacrificing the comfort, luxury and quality that people need and love. They do need a new logo though, that doesn’t look like the 3 old 80′s shields.

Keeping Cadillac: Caddy is all about Flagship dream cars and it may share a few parts with Buick so there are manufacturing cost efficiencies there.  Caddy needs to keep innovating on performance, style and (surprise) eco materials and fuel economy.

Keeping Chevrolet: Chevy has been the all American fleet of everything (soup-to-nuts) vehicles for a long time. Many of the other brands aren’t needed because Chevy offers most everything. They cover work trucks, family sedans, performance cars with the Vette and with the Volt an eco car of the future. They should make them less fugly though, because they aren’t selling against other lux GM brands anymore, they are selling against Toyota and Honda’s flagship cars. 

Keeping GMC: Wouldn’t it have better to just sell trucks under one brand as Chevrolet since we need so few trucks? I am at a loss on this one. GMC offers nothing new, interesting or innovative at all. (yuck)

Cutting Saturn: Apparently this is just Opel cars from Europe now.  The Saturn brand name needs to die since it means cheap, flimsy, crappy, cars that break down a lot and are ugly. Re-release Opels under the Opel name? How about Vauxhall in the US? We like them.

Cutting Pontiac: Well Pontiac has been loosing it’s battle to streamline its designs and be a sleeker performance division of GM because of it’s cheap finishes and lack of quality. Plus the dealers don’t really help here either when they don’t look like a performance dealership. I think the concept of performance only exists at the same time with luxury because who will pay all that money and not want to be comfortable in their car? And quality in finishes and reliability is ultra important. As Pontiac is now, it should be cut and their logo scrapped.

Cutting Hummer; Duh! Sell it to the Norwegians or Russians or UAE or something. Wherever it is cold and has mountains or endless oil. The military division of Hummer should be retained and put into Chevy for developing military/industrial products.

Cutting: SAAB Well we saw this coming. They made an over engineered car un-reliable so GM deserves this one. From personal experience I will never buy another Saab again because of the reliability problems and obviously no one else is either. This is typical GM strategy, cut quality, save money, increase profits in the short term, piss off customers, loose customers, wonder why they can’t win customers back after costing them 5K in repair bills. Basically if you screw someone over financially once, they never forget it. This should not have happened because Saab had a lot of potential, but it’s pretty impossible to fix now.

 

National Marketing Email Unsubscribe Day September 1st on Labor Day

Get your life back (and time) from your inbox. Unsubscribe from email newsletters and marketing messages on Labor Day September 1st.

I am proposing that everyone take (an hour or so of) time on Labor Day to clean out your overloaded email boxes and unsubscribe to the emails you always delete or file to read and never come back to. If you have not read it in a month or longer or you delete the email newsletter or marketing messages every time you see them, just scroll down to the end of the email window and click the unsubscribe link.

I think that everyone has the best intentions when they subscribe to email newsletters and marketing messages. I have subscribedto a lot of them over the years and only this week did I finally get to my breaking point when hundreds of messages were commonplace after only a few days away from the computer. Most were from companies I had purchased things from in the past, social networking sites that send you an email every time something happens, blogs which send updates via feedblitz and news sites that send news and links as they happen. Oh and the ubiquitous google alert on anything I was a fan of or working on at that moment. There were also some marketing newsletters from publications that write about the industry that I work in but as time has gone on some were relevant and others, not so much. Sometimes you also have to subscribe to and email newsletter in order try it and see what info they send. If you get all kinds of stuff that isn’t helpful, it’s time to unsubscribe.

I am guessing I unsubscribed to around 100 email newsletters. Everything from travel sites with airfare updates to flights to Paris to the Anthropologie and Nordstrom sale newsletters. (I’m sad to see those go but I never buy anything there, too expensive) I aim to take back the 3-4 hours a week it took to weed through all these alerts and updates on everything from celebrity news to Chicago entertainment options. I still get some alerts and some emails I am actually using but we will see if I can weed it out further and regain another hour of my week back.

If you think about it, you only have so much free time after work and why would you want to be mildly entertained by marketing messages when you could be out living your life? Or writing your own email messages to real live humans.

Update: I went from 150 messages in a weekend and 100 messages a day to 45 messages in a weekend and about 40 messages per day in the email account that was in question. I still have another email account I have not completley pruned and my work email that also needs pruning but this is a start! Information overload and email overload have been taking place too long. I aim to get my time and life back.

Update: I just spent the last 2 months ignoring this email box after it was initially pruned. What happened? I got 2,000 email messages and had to spend my christmas vacation cleaning it out. I took about 3 hours on 12/20 and about 3 hours on 12/29 to read, skim, file, delete and unsubscribe through this list of 2,000 emails. I also had to change alerts to weekly from daily and reroute some newsletters that are useful to a new email address I use more often. I hope now that the box won’t need as much maintenance but as soon as I get the list down more marketers seem to get my address and start emailing me. Most of what I unsubscribed from today was newsletters I never signed up for in the first place. Some were others I had a hard time letting go of (Etsy and Chicago Mom’s Blog) but knew it wasn’t going to get read.

Are you going to unsubscribe to more emails in 2009?

TIME Magazine Article – The Social Contract in America

I was reading my parent’s TIME Magazine this week (that I usually swipe to read on the train) and they had polled Americans on the state of the economy and their take on how they plan to personally ”get by” in the coming years. You can read the survey results and the article about this concept of a social contract online at TIME.com.

I had never heard of this concept of a “social contract” that business and government have with America. I work in a recruitment related field so if it existed, I thought I would know about it. As a human being I was aware of it as a colloquial dream we have perpetuated by the stories told by our parents and grandparents.

My family history doesn’t go back that far here in America. My great grandparents arrived from Poland and the Ukraine pre-WW1 and went to work in the gritty factories of Chicago because it was a better living and opportunity than they had back in Europe. (poor peasant potato farmers I usually say) and the economic opportunity has kept us here in Chicago ever since.

My grandparents generation went on to slightly boring but consistent blue collar jobs with pensions and my parent’s generation went on to white collar jobs after getting college educations. Some of them got a pension and health insurance and others did not. My generation doesn’t even get a shot at a pension. Companies have found that they can hire good people without it and they tell us that a 401K is really the same thing. (for reference I am 33)

So, we have these 401Ks that seem to never make money fast enough to accrue enough funds to equal what a pension would. They plummet in value every 10 years or so in recessions, and someone changes the funds available without asking or telling us. Most of us have health insurance through our jobs. We pay handsomely for it, between $100 and $300 per month per person.  And then when something happens that requires medical care, the insurance only covers 1/2 the costs. It is totally possible to go bankrupt with health insurance coverage these days because most coverage is crap compared to what my family had back in the 1980′s.

TIME says that there is an “implied” social contract in America where you give a company (or number of companies) your time and energy and they give you “a basic level of economic security provided you work hard and took responsibility for your family”. (direct quote from TIME July 28, 2008 p 42) And I think things have changed. This contract implied or not doesn’t really exist anymore. I see businesses every day making decisions to give workers less and people have to get more creative trying to survive.

I think the social contract is more like this now.

1. A company promises to pay you as little as they can for your time. This sounds pessimistic but I have seen the proof on paper that you are paid what they can get you for with your experience rather than what you are worth or how much “the job” pays. You have to wait years to work your way up the ladder to make a good wage and then marketers and your neighbors taunt you daily to buy everything in sight to keep up with the Joneses. 56% of the people who made over 100K a year said even they can’t expect to afford health care, college or a secure retirement anymore.  And 100K a year is a lot of clams. (I don’t make anywhere near that. ) I do realize that these businesses have to keep costs low in order to compete with India and China, but somehow I’d rather see the cuts come from other areas that don’t erode the culture in America and impede our ability to raise families. 

2. Marketers will prey on you from every direction. A lot more people could make it through hard times if they had savings but the national savings rate is negative now. All the “stuff” and services you “must” have seems to replace the financial security your grandparents achieved. Just say no didn’t work for reducing drug use in the 80′s and I think that the disposable consumer culture will probably continue here too.

3. Health Issues will cost you. Most young people don’t need much care because you haven’t gotten to the age where things start falling apart yet and we don’t have any concept of how much it costs to survive a serious health issue like cancer or bypass surgery. Both my parents had heart surgery in the late 1990′s and they were 50 & 60K each. We paid about 10K each of those costs and the insurance paid the rest. I just heard someone at my dad’s workplace had bypass surgery last month and it cost $100K. I know they have really poor health insurance there, and I can guess that the guy might have had to pay 50K out of pocket. Even dental issues are expensive. I need have needed a crown for about 5 years and because there is no pain or damage being done since the root canal and filling, I am holding off on the $1,000.00 price tag since dental insurance is only going to pay 1/2 and I would rather save the $ for a real emergency like fixing the 7 year old car I have or paying for the radiator heat to be fixed in my condo.

4. Retirement is going to be difficult. Very difficult. Some people wonder if social security will be around in 2040 when I turn 65. I personally, think it will be. It may not be nearly enough though. Most of us will have some 401K savings but as the Frontline Retirement special found, most people make crucial mistakes with managing their 401K and end up loosing a lot of money and getting little out at the end. (and then have to go back to work) Some tips include, never take a lump sum benefit, due to the tax penalty, never just let it ride and not watch the performance and watch for trading and management fees eating up your money. It also helps not to own a McMansion when you retire and live within your means before retirement. Saving money (like 10% of after tax income) on the side and investing it in some low risk but higher than inflation yields is also a smart way to prepare. And well let’s hope medicare still exists in 2040 also, and that doctors and hospitals still accept it as payment.

5. Creativity & Leverage are the new working hard. Money makes more money, it’s all who you know and being clever with side jobs or side businesses usually helps. Yes, saving a large percentage of your income by living simple and investing it can help you have the “power of compounding interest” as they say. Keeping in touch with people and maintaining your network helps with job opportunities and side opportunities to make some income. Starting weekend jobs or part time businesses online or otherwise helps too. I find people living simply and leveraging clever ways to work in more than one place are the ones that will have what they need later on. Getting into an industry that is doing well in the economy also helps but that may take pro-active skill re-training. Paying off your mortgage early and not moving also helps. You loose thousands of dollars on the services and fees associated with that transaction every time you move, and  we all know you pay 3x the value of your loan in interest if you really pay your mortgage over 30 years. After that you are seriously in the hole.

The only contract I think we really have now is that everything will change by the time the 30 somethings reach retirement age. The only thing we have to rely on is ourselves. In general business is struggling because the US has passed it’s peak and we will be in a pack of “also rans” soon. Companies in the US will not see the skyrocketing growth that they saw post-war in the last 60 years with China, India and Eastern Europe emerging as super-economic powers. This coupled with dwindling natural, energy and food resources will make the next 50 years a post US dominant era that will be much harder and more global.

I actually believe if the US was more competitive with skills and education we would do well in a world economy but I haven’t yet seen the expertise or drive to innovate. All I see every day is the drive to reduce expenses and cut resources in business and make short term gains with little or no thought about long term survival. I feel like the country is being run by the lowest common denominator MBAs right now and the next 10 years for us commoners are going to be difficult as a result, as we all lack the jobs/growth that they sucked/poached out in the short term and ran off with the profits.

So, enough about all that negativity.

How do you plan on coping with the changing game living and working in the US in the next 50 years?

TopGear USA Interview with Adam Corolla and my show suggestions for BBC & NBC

So, I saw this article by popular michanics about the new USA version of TopGear and their interview with Adam Corolla today and since so much seems to be up in the air about the show I thought I would post some topic suggestions for fun. I am a car fan, although not a gearhead. My brother is a gearhead so I’m related to cars, I guess. Anyway don’t expect me to decode the technical imperfections in blockbuster movies or anything, but I do have a database of TG episodes in my brain to off-sett any lack of technical knowledge.  Oh yea, just to clarify one last point: I am a girl. (needed since most people who write about TopGear are always guys)

1. INDIANAPOLIS SPEEDWAY - you have to work it in somewhere. It is an icon of American racing and cars and history all in one. Occasionally TG gets into the history of cars by exploring the past and how crazy ass those people were driving without seatbelts, air bags or windshields. Indy is an icon and the track isn’t busy most the year, so stop by, build something, race it, put the stig against some real drivers, drive some vintage racers and see what happens.

2. The Bonneville Salt Flats – We all know this institution for it’s land speed records and it’s yearly speed week. I would love to go, but alas I have a day job that pays fairly well and I can’t leave. So, go out, build something, race something, follow the stories of some teams, see what it is all about. OMG! TopGear UK is doing this!!!! (holy shit that is going to be a good episode!)

3. Nurbergring – Ok I know it isn’t all one word like that, but it’s how I say it. This track has gained heavenly status since it’s TG inclusion and it is the 3rd most interesting car place to go on my list. A major feature of this trip would be the lack of German language knowledge of the presenters and the colorful regulars that race there. Sabine is a super bonus since she is an amazing driver.

4. Route 66 – Hello road trip. I think most of it is still available or close to being travelable now. It might be a fun challenge with vintage cars. They say they were easy to fix because there weren’t all the bolt on power accessories back then, so if they break down it shouldn’t be too hard to fix a 57 Chevy right?

5. Fuel economy cars – hey, we are all affected by this running out of oil because “we taught the rest of the world to worship cars and now they have them” problem. So, why not do some alternative fuel conversions? I have a 2001 Saab 9-3 that I would love to convert to electric. How on earth does one do that? What ever happened to electric car magazine from the 1990′s? Import some Hot Hatchbacks from Europe that should be for sale here based on their fuel economy stats.

6. Demolition Derby – Hello; fun times at the state fair. Every show should end with a Demolition Derby or breaking stuff.

7. NASCAR – Um, I am not much of a fan, but at some point you have to respect the speed that they travel and their innovative use of duct tape. I would suppose there could be a lot of interesting challenges here. Not sure what though since I don’t watch because of that annoying rev-it-up segment they have. Do they have what it takes to be on a Nascar pit crew?

8. Figure out why American cars suck. Seriously, why do they suck now when they didn’t 40 years ago? Take a poll, comparison shop, talk to the US manufacturers and ask why they suck and why I have to buy a car from Sweden just to get a decent looking one, even thought it is still an unreliable piece of crap from GM. Why can’t they bring back the 50 mpg geo metro for the eco-people who want it or the EV 1 for people who love it, why can’t Ford design a fuel efficient car to save their life and why can’t Chrysler make a car that doesn’t break down every 3rd week?

9. Buick of the week segment – just a suggestion…

Ok, that is all I could come up with in 15 minutes. I will post more later if I can think of additional ideas, but alas I have to go back to my real job now. I would think also that as many new car reviews as you can get for hot cars is great, but don’t forget real people cars too like low cost entry level cars and family cars. You can forget the trucks and mini-vans though. No one really needs to test them, they are all the same.

What did you spend your economic stimulus rebate check on?

I have not yet received my rebate check from the US government for economic stimulus purposes. I have read though that people are planning on saving it, paying down debts or using it for necessities like food and gas. All very good things. I think the people who will loose out will be the ones that think it is good for another fancy handbag or 100th pair of red shoes.  I think some Americans are coming to the conclusion that you are not what you own and that a simpler lifestyle has less financial risk in these uncertain times.

I have lived on both sides of the fence, a child of a uber-frugal dad and a spendy mom. I currently feel the urge to get a pair of dark jeans trouser pants even though I have plenty of pants. I feel the urge to pay extra principle on my mortgage every month even though I probably won’t be living there in 20 or 30 years. I feel the need to buy a car that gets 35 mpg or better AND has leather heated seats AND an automatic transmission AND costs less than $20K (used). Why do none exist? I guess I am a paradox that car makers don’t accommodate.

I am not suprised at the high cost of gasoline right now and fully expect it to get higher. (it’s not that they don’t want to increase oil production, it’s that they can’t because there isn’t more to be tapped) That said, it is scary that I spent $120.00 in May on Gas and I only drive on Weekends since I take the train and walk to work. If I was still driving every day to and from work that would be about double at $240.00. A full tank just cost me $65.oo and I have a 16 gallon tank.

What I didn’t see coming is the rising cost of food. Everything is not only going up in price at the grocery store, there is a difference in the regular prices of food depending on where you buy it in Chicagoland. I have started shopping at the super target in far west suburbia where Steve lives rather than pay about 10% more in Oak Park. And that doesn’t even include the difference in sales taxes by county.

I think people’s budgets will be pushed even further to the edge and breaking point in the rest of 2008 and that it will be a lean Christmas because the high cost of basic necessities will make it hard to afford non-necessity gifts. I would say that a good place for the rebate check would be an ING savings account and hopefully it will generate some interest before it becomes a Christmas gift fund.

Google Search Box on the Search Results Page Sucks – Site Search

I noticed this search box on the Google search results page beneath the Amazon.com listing a few weeks ago and thought, cool. Lets see if it gets me past the home page amazon and to the search results page on Amazon.com. It would take me one step closer to what I am looking for on this site if it worked.

But instead it just brought me a list of pages on Amazon while still being in Google’s search results. YUCK! That sucks. I don’t want to stay on Google longer, I want to get to the book/dvd/whatever I am looking for and it’s on Amazon. This added another step in my process and I hate when sites do that for profit. It’s like a big interstitial ad that interrupts your log-in process on Monster or those stupid interstitial on Forbes articles. It is bad usability and bad user experience and people should complain about it so they remove this feature. (and of course don’t use the feature because if they see usage numbers in their stats they will think people like it and keep it)

It doesn’t surprise me that Google would want to keep you on their site longer so they can serve adwords against the results and possibly distract you away from what you originally intended to do or find but what I was surprised about  was that they thought they were better about finding products/pages on amazon than amazon itself. And that is a self centered conceited view to think you know Amazon’s business better than they do and to use that as justification to poach their traffic and users. Ouch.

I think Google also may be looking at this new search box in the search results as a way to get more into vertical search using their main search box as a starting point for picking your vertical and then the second search box to search within the site or specific vertical you choose. Google probably thinks they are prime for this kind of use because they already index everything and just need to figure out a hierarchical interface to display it all and make the difference in level of detail in the results visual. Then they can conquer the world…muhahaha…The only problem with that idea is that I don’t know an real live humans that like or look for vertical search. The sites that create content around a vertical are brands and have a real product that cost money to produce so they aren’t just web companies that crawl, slurp, scrape and steal other people’s original content and display it with advertising along site like Google.

So, overall I give this search box in the search results change a thumbs down, grade F for bad user experience keeping people away from what they want longer while displaying more ads and bad traffic poaching from genuine product sites. Google should remove this feature as it does no one any good and will deteriorate their relationship with real publishing and product sites over time. And if Google thinks they can play hardball and corner companies into accepting this, think again. I am sure there are some legal eagles out there that will be happy to bring this to court.

TopGear USA Names New Host Adam Corolla

As Jalopnik reported last week Adam Corolla has been named the first host of TopGear USA in it’s newest iteration of GEAR on NBC in 2009. (per an announcement on his radio show and some pix with TG cars, see K Nob left.) I have read all kinds of mixed reviews online and heard people’s opinions on this pick and here are my thoughts to add to the fray:

1. I don’t know Adam Corolla from a bag of rocks but a lot of people seem to know him from The Man Show and they seem to think he is funny and willing to get shoved in frozen lake for a laugh. (which sinefeld and leno wouldn’t do) This is encouraging. He doesn’t have a persona that is so well known it is career limiting (being typecast) yet people are pretty sure he can do (or has done) Improv in his day and has some snark. This was a big qualifier for this job. I am sure they did some pilot episode recording or something to compare the candidates on film (per Richard Hammond’s book where he mentions his interview & audition) and I bet Adam probably does ok in the snark category. (he also seems to do well in the 1991 wardrobe category) This is probably the most important part of the selection process.

2. Many people seem to be up in arms about the TopGear USA show needing to be an exact replica of the TG UK show down to the exact personality traits of each host. (presenter) They say they need an overbearing stubborn tall guy, and an emotional and hyper short guy and a long haired geeky guy. This couldn’t be more wrong. You need some great personalities, some strong opinions and some great improv and mucking about to make a great show. You can’t re-create the actual people and their attitudes over here that Jeremy, Richard and James have in real life. That would be monkey-stupid and not at all viable. The mix should be diverse but the personalities all will be different.

2.5 I have also read that people think Adam Corolla doesn’t have a car background. He must have some car knowledge though or else they wouldn’t have selected him. I would guess that you would have to have all of the following skills to host: know how to drive a manual transmission well enough to talk to the camera and drive at the same time, know some basic autocross skills for the lap times and tests, be familiar with fancy and race type cars so that you know how to power slide and such. I would also hope the person genuinely enjoyed power sliding and pushing a car’s limits. I think a lot of the technical things that Jeremy, James and Richard say are discussed with the producers and prep people of TG to give them some topline analysis from the team of research geeks behind the scenes. Hopefully NBC’s GEAR will have a team of car geeks behind the scenes too.

3. Some people are complaining that the show will be all about NASCAR and that will suck ass. Yes, that would technically suck ass if it happened, but I think the show will have diverse talent and diverse activities all around the different car type groups. (Imports, Domestics, Pony Cars, Muscle Cars, Roadsters, Trucks, Minvans, SUVs, Street Racing Mods, Low Riders, Classics, Really old Classics, Classics with wooden wheels, Green Ecological leaf-eating Cars, Exotics and Supercars. And hopefully there will be some fun crossover with the auto racing sports in this country Indy, CART, NASCAR, Funny Cars, F1, Unlimited Fuel Dragsters, Autocross, Sprints, and Demolition Derbys at the county fair. (please use the last one I beg you) The content is usually based on a couple things:

    A. Supercars awe inspire us all, so cover as many of those as possible and make the editing and camera work turn it into car pron. This keeps the 10-50 yr old boys happy, and the beauty of the cars even makes it interesting to some of us women. We also enjoy the speed.

    B. People need practical every day cars reviewed in a non-sleep inducing non-autoweek way. This means everything from the YuGo to the Mercs. (by merc I mean Mercedes not Mercury, I can’t believe I just said that) I can’t believe MOTORweek is still on TV. I want to shoot my television when I run across that show accidentally.

    C. Challenges building things and Road Trips through other countries are the comedy and entertainment portion of the program. Do the ridiculous, seriously. Do the serious, ridiculously. And please Fork it up in ways we never thought possible. The only difference here is that it should require less passport use in the USA. Route 66 anyone? Highway 1 PCH?

    D. Weird sometimes stupid stunts. Jumping minivans and seeing how long a car runs with all the coolant drained out of it. endurance, destruction and general stunt-ness is needed here. These segments are short on time and long suspense and hopefully provide either humor or carnage or both. (ala the car chases in the blues brothers movie)

    E. The Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment. It allows the BBC to make some marketing money and it gives us some interesting non-car related person in an autocross race situation. This either ends up being impressive or rediculous, it works great either way. I recommend a Chevy Malibu as the car here. It’s so average it hurts. It will also be painful seeing George Clooney actually sit in one instead of the fancy schmantsy things he is used to.

But the question I want answered that no one was asking is: Did Adam Corolla get the job just because he was named after a cheap econo-box Japanese car? If so it’s a really bad pun, and I wouldn’t mention it. I think using the corolla as the reasonably priced car is out too.

Also read about the interview with Adam Corolla and my suggestions for the show here.

Also, I am a little baffled that this got ranked #1 on a TopGear USA search in Google. I am not sure how that happened. This blog isn’t really that great, except possibly when I write about TG or Marketing. Anyway, if for some reason you officially want to contact me about what I write here, you can through my other blog here. My stats say that about 50 people a day are looking for TG USA info and come here. I hope that is enough for NBC’s to keep the show on air this fall.