Behavioral Ad Targeting Debate

Date: 2009.10.07 | Category: Advertising | Response: 2

An article by eMarketer spread word on a new study saying people don’t want targeted ads. Earlier studies say differently. How conductors educate the participants within and around questions is just as important as the actual question itself. Context can easily change meaning. Even the order of questions affects respondent perception and subsequent answers. Issues in this conclusion (i.e. data security and customization) need to be approached separately at first and combined down the questionnaire so that customers prioritize their opinion aptly and fears controlled.

My opinion remains unchanged. Customers dislike loosing control of their personal information, yet appreciate customization services. If we communicate our responsibility to protect their information, they will appreciate the benefits we serve and their purchases and activity will speak that message. Read the rest of this entry »

The Palm Pre, by Sprint

Date: 2009.07.13 | Category: Gadgets | Response: 0

[Photo taken from CNet's review of the Palm Pre]

I’ve had it for three days now. Spent a few hours working on getting it up to speed. It’s an awesome phone and I’m glad I have it. I certainly recommend it.

Check out Sprint’s website for the Palm Pre for a fancy presentation. The phone goes a little slower than the presentation. Sometimes quite slow. But I found based on several videos on YouTube that the phone is faster with most things compared to the iPhone 3G and a few things on the iPhone 3Gs. Read the rest of this entry »

Importing Audio Books into Your iPod

Date: 2008.06.27 | Category: Digital Publishing, Gadgets | Response: 2

Okay, so this isn’t web related, but it’s important enough to put it out there.

Working for a book publisher and owning an iPod and liking audio books means I want audio books on my iPod. Thomas Nelson has many audio book products (fiction, nonfiction, bibles, gift books, Spanish). If I don’t buy audio books off iTunes or Audible, then I have to import them from MP3 CDs or audio CDs. The problem with iTunes is that Apple didn’t really consider the process of importing audio books. Instead, iTunes treats any audio file like a music file unless it has an M4B extension (as of iTunes 7.6 and earlier versions). M4B is Apple’s audio book file format.

What You Really Need to Know: If you change the extension of any AAC file (mp4 or m4a) to M4B and add the files to your iTunes library, it automatically applies its audio book features to the file. There is no special encoding to the file needed. Read the rest of this entry »

We Are Media

Date: 2008.06.03 | Category: Digital Publishing | Response: 1

I cannot authoritatively speak for all of us, but from what I have seen, we in the print publication industries find it hard to include digital products in our business. But I think it’d be no surprise to all of us that if we don’t consider publishing more digital products in the near future, our business will be on track for exinction.

But I want to take the concept farther. If we don’t intricately integrate digital publishing into our publishing process and product concepts, we will eventually fail in the dust of other publishers who do. And I’m not looking 10 years down the line as we may naturally feel it is. It’s much, much closer.

I’d like to give some basics to be sure we are on the same page. When I speak about digital publishing, I’m not talking about creating a book or magazine in Adobe InDesign or Quark and then having it printed out. I’m talking about two general concepts.

The first is creating a print product and making it available in a digital form. Magazines have been doing a much better job of this in the last couple of years. You can get many of them in both an online form and print form. Books on the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader fit into this as well. Google’s Books Library Project relates as well. And practically all educational text books are available in a digital form now. Read the rest of this entry »

Trusted Sources of Information

Date: 2007.08.06 | Category: Internet Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing | Response: 1

In a growing Web 2.0 world, consumer-generate content is becoming a staple for successful sites and sales. This is a big advantage for word of mouth marketing (WOMM) and those of us interested in using it. But as a novice in this area, you may not be sure what mediums to start with. eMarketer posted an article today with studies indicating people’s most trusted sources and where influencers flock.

As I say in most of my posts, identifying the niche for your product is most important place to begin. The niche(s) determines the subject of your messages and where you go to advertise your product. This perspective still applies with word of mouth marketing.

Information in the following charts can help us understand where consumers trend. We can use the information to choose where to begin our word of mouth campaign or even our general advertising.

We all know family and friends typically give us our most trusted information. The following graph presents consumer-trusted sources by popularity. When thinking about your WOM or advertising campaign, your goal is to get people on board with the following type of classifications or experiences.

People spread the word about a product with varying intensities. The most intense word-of-mouth communicators or “influencers” are the most attractive. One major component of WOMM sometimes crosses with publicity by attracting key persons to review your product and talk about it in articles or on their blogs. The chart bellow from eMarketer, based on a 2006 study, identifies key places influencers go to get their information. The first column, adult influencers, represents key influencers who shape consumer attitudes.

If you want to attract key people to your product, locations in the chart above is where you should start either advertising or request them to review your product.

For those of us who don’t think our product is excellent or that flaws in the product will be learned quickly, I suggest not advertising in some of the locations above. If your product is sub-par, people in these places will be the first to find that out and potentially spread the information on how much your product fails. That statement may seem unethical, but most of us at some point represent products we don’t have in confidence. Yet, we still want to do our best to make it sell as best as possible. Word of mouth marketing doesn’t work positively for weak products. The word will get out about its ineffectiveness (or people will simply not say anything about it). But, it’s possible to slow down the discovery and get strong initial buy-in using other traditional forms of marketing.