August 19
Poignant Ad Placement
by Drake Pusey
On a (rare) McCain-focused story on CNN.com, there is a great ad placement by DoubleClick:
If it doesn’t come up for you, here’s a screenshot:
Obama ad appearing next to McCain story on CNN.com
August 12
Know your customers personally: A mathematical approach to segmentation
Back when I was a student at U Mass Amherst, I would frequent a used clothing store near my home. I spent a lot of time and money there and enjoyed chatting with the owner, a friendly woman named Melissa. One day, I walked into the store, and Melissa immediately reached under the counter and pulled out a pair of shoes and placed them in front of me. She said that as soon as she’d seen them, she’d known I’d want to buy them. And she was right. You can be right about your customers, if you collect and use the same type of information that Melissa regularly learned about the visitors to her shop.
August 11
Brand-jacking
by Tim Lynch
Twitter - ExxonMobilCorp
Last week I received an email notification that “Janet at ExxonMobil (ExxonMobilCorp) is now following your updates on Twitter.” Normally, I would block an unknown user from following my Twitter updates without much of a thought, however, after a cursory look at Janet’s public page, this seemed a bit more interesting than the standard “OMG I made a zillion dollars click here to find out how!” business
I saw conflicting things: the poor branding (a lossy, tiled background of gas stations and stock art) spoke to this as clearly not an official ExxonMobil outlet. However, the tone and content (at first blush) of the seemingly reasonable and informed updates made me think twice. Discussing the challenges faced by an oil company balancing energy needs with research? I’ll accept that. Maybe Janet was, as she states “an employee of ExxonMobil, who has decided to put forward her pride in her own company.”
August 11
Shuttleworth on Project Management
Mark Shuttleworth, of Thawte fortune and Ubuntu fame, has some (IMHO) neat ideas on how to manage software development efforts that may be interesting to spend a few human processing cycles considering.
http://lwn.net/Articles/292031
Despite the article being written for Free Software and Linux, I think it’s incredibly relevant to all development efforts - read it as if he’s talking about Molecular projects, and not Linux distributions.
Here are two key paragraphs:
One of the key requirements that Shuttleworth sees is the need to “keep the trunk pristine”, by doing integration on the trunk and feature development on branches. Along with this is the need for more and better tests. While not necessarily believing in test-driven development, he certainly leans that way. In any case, all the tests should pass before committing to the trunk.
Many projects do not yet have an extensive test suite, but this needs to change. He quoted a Chinese proverb that “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today”. He mentioned that he is working on a robot that controls the trunk of a development tree. Developers will request it to merge from a branch, so the robot merges the branch and runs all the tests. If the tests pass, it commits, otherwise it gets kicked back to the developer.
This approach sounds pretty good to me.
August 7
Bacon, Brands, and Social Networking Success!
by Evan Gerber
Bacon is more than the smoky, salty, savory strips of deliciousness that garnish our breakfasts and more refined cocktails (the Mitch Morgan). It’s the subject of deep and meaningful philosophical debate (just ask Sir Francis Bacon or Thomas Bacon), the center of the acting universe (Kevin Bacon), and the bane of well meaning but conflicted vegetarians everywhere (A friend of mine in engineering and strict veggie calls it “the gateway meat”). It is also an example of how a brand can actually succeed on a social network, using it to drive retail sales and build awareness.
Now, I’ll be honest. I really have some questions about social networking as a brand platform - it’s not right for everyone, and in some cases is worse than a waste of money, it’s a public failure. But, the makers of Bacon Salt, a line of seasoning salt that makes all food taste like bacon (and is kosher, to boot!), it was the cornerstone of their success.
They launched their business by finding users of MySpace and Facebook who said that they love bacon on their profiles. There are at least 35,000 people who say that on MySpace, and the I love bacon group has almost 2500 members. While some would scoff and say that’s not much, others would point out that 2500 is far better than the majority of branded fan pages do. And in the case of Bacon Salt, it propelled them from zeros to heroes in no time.
“We basically launched the product on MySpace and Facebook… the week we launched, we had orders from everywhere” said Dave Lefkow, co-founder and bacon genius. So many orders, in fact, that they couldnt handle the volume of work.
Now, obviously, anything with bacon is going to succeed wildly. (possibly with the exception of the bacon flavored tuxedo available at archiemcphee.com). What is interesting in this case, is how social networking helped this particular brand, and why. The only brands that will do well on a social network are those that people want to align themselves with. Social networks are about branding oneself to friends, colleagues, and that ex-girl or boyfriend from college. Bacon is not only universally adored, it’s a little campy and fun, and it’s something that people want to associate with.
So if you’re thinking about bringing your brand into the social networking space, dont just think about the costs, and risks. Stop for a moment and think about if the brand is something people can relate to, and want to identify themselves with. It might save you a lot of hassle, and give more time for the eating of delicious, hickory smoked bacon.
