Greg Krehbiel on Publishing and Online Marketing

A while ago I came up with a way that Google could get on the right side of the copyright issue. See How google can be the good guy for publishers.

At the time I had regular calls with some Google Adwords reps, and when I shared my idea they told me “Google doesn’t want to be the web’s policeman.”

It was obvious that my suggestion was butting up against some internal Google mantra.

But the real world has a way of messing with mantras. Now Google has become the copyright cop on Youtube. See Google to sentence YouTube violators to ‘copyright school’

Google’s goal is to organize all the world’s information. You can’t do that without taking copyright into account.

Google is successful because of other people’s content. They have a moral obligation to use that content properly, and in the context of their operations, that does mean becoming the web’s policeman, at least to some extent, and at least as far as copyright violation is concerned.

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Who wants a paper store receipt? What are you going to do with the thing? It’s a bother to collect them, and they always fade after a couple months anyway. Are you going to scan them, or what?

The store should do that for you.

Most stores try to get you to sign up with them anyway, right — to get discounts and whatnot. This would be an added benefit of having an account with the store. They would automatically send your receipt to the email address on file.

This way the store collects your email address and you get copies of all your store receipts. Seems like a fair trade to me.

So then, taking this a step further, wherever you have your email (e.g., Google) could provide a service that sorts your receipts by company and by type.

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I just got a long and complicated email from The New York Times about their new pay model for digital subscriptions. I think it’s a dumb model (more on that later, perhaps), but what immediately strikes me about it is how the people at the NYT think everything is about them.

Today marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, …

What? Why do I want to invest in the NYT?

Will I get a dividend?

This reminds me of the signs I see on the D.C. metro encouraging people to use dollar coins. The “benefit” is that they last longer and save the country money.

Huh? What do I care about that? I care if it’s convenient to use, if it’s less of a load in my pocket, if vending machines take them, if I’ll mistake them for quarters, etc.

This is basic marketing stuff. When you’re trying to sell somebody, you tell them how your product benefits them, not some weird pitch about how you’re investing in their business or helping them to save money.

I can understand the Treasury Department getting that wrong. But for heaven’s sake, you’d think the NYT would have a better copywriter.

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Here’s a good article about some of the dangers of technologies that try to choose what content you’re going to see online.

The Danger Of Personalization: A Lesson From TED

Personalized content is a great thing, so long as you know that it’s been personalized, you know that what you’re looking at is an unrepresentative sample, and you have a way to free yourself from the bias of your own opinions.

I’m sure you’ve heard the old joke about the political liberal who couldn’t believe that Reagan had won, since “none of his friends voted for him.”

I heard something similar at the office lunch table. Somebody read a story claiming that on any given Sunday, X percent of the country goes to church. One of my co-workers said, “That can’t be. None of my friends go to church.”

There’s way too much information out there, and we need the ability to cull through it and find the stuff that’s relevant to us. But we also need to know when that’s happening. If search engines started showing us the results we’re likely to click on, we’d dig ourselves into a dangerous spiral of bias.

As far as web design is concerned, a box that says, “Based on your past choices, you might like these articles …” seems to cut the right balance. It’s nice to have content selected for me, but I need to know what’s going on.

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The link below is PG-13, so if you get offended by scatological jokes and such, give it a pass. But it actually makes some really good points about store design issues, required fields, and some of the silly things people try to put their customers through.

How to make your shopping cart suck less

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I’m reading What Would Google Do? Generally speaking, and to over-simplify, it’s about the new relationship between producers and consumers, and how consumers are in charge. Companies that allow their customers, clients and partners to do what they want to do will succeed. And if at all possible, companies should strive to make their products free.

It’s a good perspective and I agree with a lot of it, although sometimes I think this approach is overblown.

Anyway, it’s all well and good thinking about these things in terms of internet content and services, but it’s another thing to apply these concepts to something tangible. Like beer.

So I tried, and this is what I came up with.

An old-school approach to brewing would be to pick a demographic, try to find out what kind of beer they like, brew something like that, and then get your marketing team to convince your chosen demographic that this is really the beer for them.

There’s nothing wrong with that approach, except that people’s tastes vary considerably. Just go the local mega-beer store and look at all the styles and varieties of beer that are available.

The WWGD approach might ask how you can put the customer in charge of the brewing process?

So what would that mean? To oversimplify things, imagine that beer can be …

+ more or less malty,
+ more or less bitter, and
+ have more or less hop aroma

Now imagine that the customer is at a tap with three dials, one for each characteristic, and he can dial it up or down to suit his tastes.

Then, when he picks his perfect blend, he can order a case made to his own specifications.

That seems like step 1. But there’s more to “putting the customer in charge” than just allowing the customer to define the product. The customer also needs to be able to mix your product with other things.

A snakebite is a mixture of beer and cider, and there are various kinds of shandies and other drinks out there that mix beer with ginger ale or what have you.

The next step would be allowing people to share their particular recipes and discuss / review them, or bring their own mash-up with them to the bar.

(Re-posted from here.)

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This morning I had to get the emissions inspected on one of our vehicles, so I was in the car listening to morning radio, which usually goes something like this — The host picks a juicy morsel out the news, possibly adds something salacious, and then tosses it out to the hungry masses who wants to have their say.

(People with a neighborhood pub or coffee shop, where they can jaw with their friends, probably don’t need that kind of outlet.)

Anyway, the topic of the day was Juan Williams’ comment that Sarah Palin is not up to snuff with Obama on an intellectual level.

To which, it seems, several obvious responses come to mind.

1. Palin can seem rather ditsy at times,
2. But there’s no question she communicates well with a large segment of the population,
3. Who says Obama is so smart?,
4. But he does speak well and has that professorial manner about him, and
5. Is Williams simply trying to mend fences with the left?

Everything on the radio this morning focused on points 2 and 3, with a large emphasis on the claim that Obama blithers when he doesn’t have a teleprompter. (Does he? I haven’t paid attention.)

In other words, the morning listeners to WMAL were only getting a slice of the story.

Later in the morning I sat down with my Nook and started in one of Wodehouse’s Psmith novels, which began with a soliloquy on journalism in New York City, and that got me thinking.

What niche is not being fulfilled in the news publishing world today?

The answer, I believe, is a review of the daily buzz that covers all the angles on every story — briefly — with links to more if you want to dig.

That would be worth dialing up on the metro every morning.

It would have to be non-partisan, by which I mean that it would have to have partisans from all possible sides.

I think that would be a good daily read, so long as it’s short, and so long as it can balance the talking points of the various factions.

(Ignore this — JJCKCYP2GEJ3)

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There’s a really dumb story in the news right now. (You’re thinking, “Just one?”) Well … I have one in mind that I think is really dumb.

But what if I write a post about how dumb it is? I have no illusions about the effect of this blog, but to some very small degree that only makes the story “what people are talking about,” and therefore “news.”

This is an uncomfortable fact about the modern world.

Back when there was a small cadre of newscasters who controlled the public’s access to stories, they could exercise some taste and common sense and say “a story about [dumb thing] isn’t news.”

Now you have “what’s hot” on Alexa, and “most emailed” on the NYT, and “top searches” all over the place.

“This is what people are talking about! We need a story on that!”

No, you don’t.

That’s where niche publishing comes in. There’s obviously a market for niche stories about pension and benefits legislation, but there’s also a niche for news content that is selected and presented from a particular point of view. That means bias, of course — because the editor is deciding what’s worthy to be reported and what’s not — but … so what? Bias is unavoidable. Just be honest about it.

When the world is overflowing with content noise, content curation is the order of the day.

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One of my concerns with asking customers to do a transaction on a mobile device is the trouble of online forms.

If you think online forms are a pain when you have a big monitor and a full-sized keyboard, try completing a form on a silly little device with a keyboard made for gnomes. I don’t think people are going to want to fill in registration / payment screens.

Some will. The Wall Street Journal has had some success. But we’re in the business of eliminating barriers, and asking customers to switch back and forth between the ABC, the 123 and the Symbol option on their mobile devices is a nightmare as far as usability is concerned.

If you look at mobile commerce from the user’s point of view, Apple and Amazon offer a great experience. If you want to buy something, you’ve already set up an account with all your payment information, so you just enter your password and you’re done.

The trouble for the merchant is that Apple and Amazon keep the subscriber record, and that doesn’t work at all for publishers. We have to have the customer record.

But there are other systems like iTunes and Amazon where the merchant does get the customer’s information. PayPal is the most obvious.

So is PayPal the right solution for mobile commerce for publishers? Should we be integrating our e-commerce (and m-commerce) systems with PayPal? Would that make form completion easier on the user?

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At the SIPA marketing conference in Miami I gave a presentation with that title. The presentation is based on my own experience as well as quite a few interviews with marketing and IT professionals.

Some of the slides might not make sense on their own (like the ones about the bicycles), but if you’re interested in viewing the slides, here you go.

Slides for What marketing needs to know about IT.

And feel free to post questions.

So … about those bikes.

There are lots of things that you think you know — like what a bicycle looks like — but when you have to get down to details, you often miss some important things. Not because you’re stupid, but because that’s how your brain works.

People make funny mistakes when they try to describe simple, everyday things. For example, when some people draw bicycles, they’ll connect the chain to the front and back wheels, or forget the seat, or something like that.

The relevance to “what marketing needs to know about IT” is that you can’t give an engineer a half-baked drawing of a bike and say “build this” any more than you can give IT a half-baked web concept and expect them to make it happen. It doesn’t work.

The two drawings in my slides are from two helpful marketing professionals, and they actually did pretty well. But there are some minor problems. See if you can spot them.

And here’s something else, just for fun. I wish I’d had it for my presentation.

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