Notes & Links by Casey A. Gollan on
art, design, creativity and technology on
marketing

 
The internet is made of people. People matter. This includes you. Stop trying to sell everything about yourself to everyone. Don’t just hammer away and repeat and talk at people—talk TO people. It’s organic. Make stuff for the internet that matters to you, even if it seems stupid. Do it because it’s good and feels important. Put up more cat pictures. Make more songs. Show your doodles. Give things away and take things that are free. Look at what other people are doing, not to compete, imitate, or compare … but because you enjoy looking at the things other people make. Don’t shove yourself into that tiny, airless box called a brand—tiny, airless boxes are for trinkets and dead people.
Maureen Johnson

I don’t need flat furniture nor do I need a desk. I have enough pens and journals. My closet of full of shirts and while I still wonder what a hibblygizmo is, I’m certain I don’t need one. What I need is shop full of people with opinions — because it’s not what I know that I’m worried about, it’s what I don’t know that’s really interesting.

The shop I want is full of people who are dedicated to their opinion. Who are happier understanding a thing rather than wanting it. These people will happily tell the story of happened upon this opinion and I want to hear it because the opinion of someone I trust is just as valuable as my own.

The Shop I Want by Rands In Repose

QVC is expert at creating what consumer psychologists call “parasocial relationships”—bonds that tickle our subconscious in many of the ways that real friendships do. And as anyone who has ever been to a Pampered Chef home selling event can testify, when a friend is pushing the goods, it’s very hard not to buy something.

Projecting that sort of intimacy when you’re alone on a set isn’t easy.

Megan McArdle, The Genius of QVC

(via Raul)
We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them.

Joel Spolsky, in his announcement that he is quitting blogging. (via @caterina)

Spolsky has really interesting opinions on running a company (these are the posts that have always brought me to his blog) and I understand the whole corporate responsibility thing—grow the business!!—but it’s a shame that he’s quitting blogging because, he says:

  1. It’s too time consuming (no ROI)
  2. He has fished out the blog-reader-as-customer market
  3. He can’t please every single one of his customers while voicing his opinions.

He continues:

My hope is that giving up blogging and the rest of it will be the equivalent of making a cross-eyed kid wear an eye patch on his good eye for a while: The weaker eye will grow stronger*. My company needs to get better at what every other company already knows — how to promote and market products without depending on one single channel. We’ve completely saturated a small slice of the target market, and now we have to go after a much larger group of potential customers.

It just seems kind of sad to see businesses transition from startup to corporation and leave their voice behind.

On the advertising end of the communications spectrum, which Spolsky is hoping to skew towards, is this profile of pants-by-mail company Bonobos from AdAge:

Mr. Dunn says the company spent little on advertising until its second year when it took to Facebook with the slogan, “End Khaki Diaper Butt.” About 20% of Bonobos’ current base was acquired through Facebook. Because of its direct-to-consumer model, Bonobos can be efficient with ad dollars, tracking which sales result from a specific click-through behavior.

With the average Bonobos customer spending $200 on his first visit, Mr. Dunn drew up a cost-per-acquisition model that concluded the company can spend up to $100 per new customer and still have a profitable first transaction.

…

“You’ve got to focus on the product, not the marketing,” Mr. Dunn said. “If word-of-mouth isn’t there, it’s hard to get to those first 10,000 customers.”

Though the advertising clearly works, I’m wary of all this coming from AdAge (a publication about how great advertising is). But $100 per new customer is a pretty enticing number…imagine all the things you could do with that!

* Is that even true? Either way, best metaphor ever.

The way [Pandora] hooked me in with the free hours made me feel like this is something I should probably pay for because I clearly value the service they are providing. Thinking about it more, this perhaps might be an interesting model for publishers. Not sure how it would work or if tracking time spent on a website is the way to go or not, but it would be interesting if content producers could come up with easily digestible measurements to show consumers how much they value the service or content that’s being provided. This would weed out the fickle viewers and for the power users it would make them realize how much they actually value the content they are consuming. The goal is always to hook your dedicated power users.

There are clearly some challenges to something like this, but from a psychological point of view Pandora has put me in a position where I understand how much I value their service and the great benefits I will receive if I subscribe. Regardless if I end up paying a subscription fee or not, they have made a compelling offer, and no matter what, that’s what content producers and service providers need to do. Make compelling offers and show consumers how much they value the content or service that’s being provided.

Bryan Formhals — la pura vida: You Are Running Out of Free Hours

The $6 purchase price of the McSweeney’s iPhone app comes with delivery of free iPhone formatted web content everyday forever and six months of exclusive, bespoke (designed) content once a week. It’s totally worth it. If they keep up the good job, I have no qualms about renewing for another $6 (from within the app, charged to iTunes!) when my subscription lapses…I’ve been hooked.

I jotted down some thoughts on the night of the iPad announcement about why it’s awesome but my opinions have basically been reiterated across the web. This is an incredible opportunity (big screen, touch based, app store, always online) to design interactions!

I was skimming through Apple’s iPad Human Interface Guidelines last night (Google it if you want to find a leaked PDF) and one part that struck me as particularly interesting was to let users play with your application before asking them to provide any more information than the system provides. If it’s still necessary later, do it as soon as you can, but not until the user has gotten a test drive and run into a situation that requires filling out a form—or in this case, buying a paid subscription.
People, both women and men, should be so fiercely passionate about good ideas that self-promotion is a natural extension. Otherwise, why is it worth doing in the first place? It’s when confidence and self-promotion are obfuscated from passion that the claims become flimsy and empty. Confidence can bridge the gap between desire and outcome as long as the integrity for what we believe and the authenticity of what we create remain in place. We have the ability to both do good work and to recognize it — the choice is ours to make. Confidence is good’s natural extension.

Liz Danzico (Bobulate: Confidence for good)

There, the debate has been settled.
While the rest of the publicists in her company were sending out mass emails to everyone, hoping to get bites from Perez Hilton, Gawker, HuffPo, or wherever, this publicist focused on a lower traffic tier with the (correct) understanding that these days, content filters up as much as it filters down, and often the smaller sites, with their ability to dig deeper into the internet and be more nimble, act as farm teams for the larger ones. A site can be enormously influential without having crazy eyeballs, because all eyeballs are not equal.

Lindsay Robertson - The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Publicity

Lots of good advice here.

There’s a swank new apartment tower going up, and the developers pay a writer to compose a book of short stories about it. (It would be great arbitrage: a fortune in writer-terms is a pittance in developer-terms.) When you move in, there’s a crisp, limited-edition copy of that book waiting on your polished-concrete kitchen counter. The action is all set in and around the building: characters move in and out of spaces you recognize. They walk down your street, shop at your grocery store. They have the same view out their window that you do!

Why do I like this? Well, one of the things writers need desperately, I think—especially writers of short fiction—is new venues, new contexts.

What if every product shipped with a story?

It’s fanciful, but I think it connects to the idea of a data shadow—the idea that every physical object has tons of metadata attached to it, cascading away from it—and expands it. That “metadata” can be more than, like, a stream of usage information. It can be narrative; it can, in fact, be fanciful. Call it a story shadow.

Robin Sloan Story shadows (and a quick Friday read) on Snarkmarket

Some choice excerpts from a great post on Snarkmarket.

A New Old Freebie - Matches Surge as Restaurant Giveaways - NYTimes.com

Their overriding utility, aside from lighting the odd candle, is promotional: “They go out into the world, and they bring people back.”

“We view our matchbooks as advertising, and what they are advertising is a memorable experience someone had,” he said.

Advice on What to Do as a New/Unknown Artist by Trent Reznor

Very good points and, as Powazek notes, all applicable to print media as well.