Cyberventing
I took a trip to AdAge.com looking for some recent articles on online advertising and couldn’t help but notice this week’s cover story: Comcast Must Die! Definitely, a strong title. The author of the article has been frusterated to the point of alienation by the cable provider’s customer solution. His solution: create a blog comcastmustdie.com. And this is nothing new, this ‘criticism culture’ has been flourishing online and many companies must be bracing at past embarrassments. But can some good be made of this?
Why not. This is a great way for companies to monitor the successfulness of its customer service. With more customer service being outsourced and evenoffshored and or – as from my work experience – the obsession to turn call centers into revenue machines through the perfect mix of a great upsell and an aggresive rep or a well-played ’saving a cancel’, companies should see this as a report card. Sure there’s some negative publicity, but its a way to monitor the effectiveness of their programs. Companies often staff a position to look for any references to the company within their PR Staff; maybe its time for companies to do the same from within the operations department.
Other sites for venting online: Complaints.com and Consumerist.com.
Looking for a plumber, here’s a neat site I found in the article that has a rating of local services: Angie’s List.
Using An Auctions Market: Blog Assignment #4
Suggest two other business cases in which this method can be used to collect information. What problems do you see besides the ones mentioned in the Background information section? What kind of information system do you need to design to support this method of collecting information? Provide a simple hardware/software configuration.
The concept of information coming from many different directions and sources aligning in one direction through an electronic market is clearly expressed in the financial concept of efficient markets. This theory generally states that stock market prices are perfectly aligned when insider-information is available, generally aligned when there is a abundant information available and expert interpretation and disaligned when there is deficient information and/or lacking interpretation. In a B2B marketplace, electronic auctions could hypothetically be very valuable a New Product Development where as new products could be traded in some way as a ‘commodity’; employees working on the project and or industry people like retailers, financial analysts and others could interact in such a way that the product’s forthcoming arrival in the marketplace could be monitored by interest in the product from these sectors. For instance, we could determine if retailers are confident the project would sell. The marketplace could even be started at the nascent stage where designers and engineerings could provide feedback on new products — would be especially applicable when there are patent protections. A second possibility would be for venture capital firm. A precursor this idea is the website, f*ckedcompany.com, where bloggers would go onto the site and blog inside information about the possible and often probable demise of a startup company. Suffice to say, it was a popular website when the eBubble burst. A more grown up venture with a marketplace of sophisticated investors and financial experts could similarly provide information about the company and sell existing shares in the company. The biggest concerns would be making sure that the proper people were using the marketplace and people honest and secure enough to participate in the exchange. There would be huge financial ramifications with improper use of information.
In order to make either exchange happen, there would have to be a server which housed the actual exchange with authorization for those involved in the marketplace. For instances when there would be automatic buy/bid triggers, the marketplace would need to exist in data formats that could be synchronized with company/personal computers/database. Security and encryption software would also be very important. A diagram of a possible configuration can be seen below:
The Kindle
Amazon launched its new wifi ereader which allows for quicker uploading of books, free blog subscriptions and paid newspaper subscriptions. This was a topic of discussion in my New Product Development class where people generally panned the look and design of the product (it looks like Amazon’s attempt to mimic a book didn’t really work well) and people questioned who was the partner behind this. Definitely more negatives were listed than positives but undoubtedly this product will bring more publicity to ereaders in general and the easy-to-read/like-ink font design is definitely nice.
My thought, if I have to carry an ereader around, separate from my phone and my ipod, does it really matter how small it is. I’ve seem models larger and thinner and that’s what would make sense to me….unless my phone and my ipod and my ereader can become one. I am sure they will be within the next two years. Without knowing much about it, I’d say Amazon would be happy with the publicity of this project launch even if this foray into the merchandise business doesn’t pan out.
Kindle’s promotional video below:
Content is King
When I worked for the web department for business magazine, often one of the biggest challenges was to get editors more involved in the website. Some were. Some wanted to be , but just didn’t have the bandwidth. But some just didn’t care. One of the key points in my job was to project manage website redesigns and the first thing we’d do is a dog and pony show where we’d show a powerpoint and describe just how much more money the new site would make. Editors, sales people and others would be there. There’d always be a slide with the text, Content is King, written out. And we believed it, websites are only as good as the content – no matter how much Flash.
For this reason, I am happy to hear about the writers strike. A recent OpEd in the LA Times looks at this issue from the perspective of a writer. Their quest to claim a small percentage of revenues from new media will undoubtedly be one step in shifting the perspective of how websites are viewed as business entities.
Even more so, that all the talks of optimism about online advertising and downloads generations millions of dollars is interest as we are so much more apt to hear about all the comparisons about online piracy. As things sort out it will be interesting to see how the new compensation impacts the digital rights move as profit margins undoubtedly will become a bit tighter.
Best Inventions of 2007
Time released an annual ranking of its best invention of 2007. The Overall Winner: the IPhone. What’s interesting perusing around the different categories is how unexpected the invention are. Like the phone below that rolls up like paper (The picture below)and the sugar-powered battery. Full listing is available at Time’s website.
Reinvigorate the buyer
Barron’s Online recently downgraded ebay’s stock from Outperform to Peer Peform. The reason stated essentially amounts to Ebay has to take a small step back in 2008 to take bigger steps forward in the years ahead. For instance, Ebay must figure out a way through category-based pricing or other measurues to give more leverage to the sellers to encourage them to list more and their more valued-items. And buyers need to be reinvigorated which amounts to more investment in the every e-commerce activity that is the lower-margin portion if its site producing yet lower profit margins in that side of the business stunting growth overall.
