Yesterday I blogged about an emerging challenge facing small businesses — adapting their web content so it’s more usable and accessible for people who use smartphones or tablets to go online. It’s amazing what you can learn in a day by simply focusing your attention on a business issue.

From Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, I’ve discovered that experts refer to this kind of content challenge as the need for a transmedia design strategy. At minimum this is a “two screen challenge” — desktop + smartphone — but some businesses may need to consider other screen types as well, such as kiosks or digital signage.

From Kristina Halvorson, content strategy guru, I’ve learned that this is a “responsive web design challenge,” and will be exploring what that means. [Editor’s note: web designers and developers are more likely to refer to this as “responsive web design.” That said, this is the Wild West — this whole area is new to everyone.]

Why You Need a Transmedia | Responsive Web Strategy

If you manage content for a B2B firm, or a B2C brand that serves affluent or well-educated consumers, many of your customers already use some combination of:

• a desktop/notebook PC or Mac
• a smartphone (about 40% of all Americans now own smartphones, and the ratio goes up every month)
• increasingly, a tablet device, such as an iPad, for media consumption or online shopping from the comfort of the couch

Under different situations or at different times of day, the same person could be accessing your online content from any one of those devices.

And as every marketer or content strategist knows, the holy grail is to deliver a coherent experience across all device classes, especially when targeting your most valued customer or audience segments. You want your brand to be consistent across touchpoints.

This problem won’t go way; it will just increase in urgency as more and more people shift the frequency or duration of their online interactions to the mobile web.

As Jakob Nielsen writes:

“Use of mobile devices will dramatically increase, but much high-value use will remain on desktop PCs. Most companies must support both device classes [PC + mobile], and our usability research shows that this must be done with separate UI designs that target the different characteristics of the two types of user experience. One size UI does not fit all screen sizes.

— Jakob Nielsen, “Transmedia Design for the 3 Screens”

The speed of mobile web adoption on the part of your customers, partners or employees is what will determine how quickly your organization must respond to the transmedia design challenge. (Hint: pay attention to your Google Analytics stats, so you can anticipate when you’ll need to take action.)

“Different But Similar”

Although Jakob Nielsen recommends separate UI strategies for different classes of devices, he also points to the need for consistency across key dimensions of user experience:

• Visual continuity (recognizable coherence in color schemes, layouts, fonts — even when targeting different screen sizes — so users recognize these elements as coming from the same company)
• Feature continuity (such as user reviews, if yours is an ecommerce site)
• Data continuity
• Content continuity (such as tone of voice in the editorial style, or recognizable characters, brand marks, etc.)

And then there’s the issue of download speed… Remember the early days of the Web?Broadband isn’t the same when it comes to mobile web users. 3G is slow, and 4G is still more myth than reality.

Because wireless spectrum is likely to remain congested for years to come, content designers and producers need to minimize page download times and bandwidth requirements when serving online content to smartphones or tablets.

As Jakob Nielsen reminds us:

“Mobile users suffer as if it were 1998, and frequently complain about slow downloads…

— Jakob Nielsen, “Transmedia Design for the 3 Screens”

So unless you’ve got a magic solution for dynamically resizing or rejiggering content assets on the fly, now you’re facing a digital asset management challenge as well… Just for grins, do a Google search on “WordPress digital asset management” — and see how few choices there are…

We Need Intelligent Technology Solutions

The content management implications of “different but similar” are what drives the need for a scalable technology approach, because siloed or one-off solutions aren’t sustainable over time.

And while I approach this subject from the POV of a small business owner, the implications are similar for businesses of all sizes. Larger organizations simply have the luxury of more money, and more technically savvy talent to throw at the problem today.

Today’s situation is particularly painful for smaller organizations, due to the complexity and high costs that result from today’s incomplete solutions (many of which are cobbled together from different vendors, and are poorly architected or integrated).

The current generation of SMB-class tools was designed with “desktop/laptop” viewing or interaction as the primary use case. As soon as you decide to add mobile, the complexity factor goes way up. The work-arounds require expensive, custom development investments — beyond the reach of many smaller businesses, I would imagine.

As a starry-eyed optimist, I wish there were SMB-appropriate alternatives in market to consider. Instead I’ll wait, somewhat patiently, for the software community to recognize this problem, and then aim to “engineer out” the complexity via intelligently designed solutions.

This is a classic opportunity for disruptive innovation, as the current tools are over-priced and over-featured when it comes to the needs of smaller organizations.

I wish Steve Jobs were still here, to push the technology industry toward a dramatically simpler solution.

Holiday shoppers who buy Apple products can give them with confidence, knowing that their gifts will be desirable and well appreciated. In 2011 these gifts will reflect Steve Jobs’ special touch, his passion for excellence, his vision.

They’ll embody Steve’s Zen-inspired values and design principles, everything he has taught his staff about how to design products that consumers will treasure.

This year’s gifts may even take on an emotional halo, a reflected glow from all the media attention showered on Apple and Steve Jobs since Steve’s passing in October.

But What About 2012?

Will Apple products still be as desirable next year as they are now? Will consumers continue to beg Santa for Apple phones, tablets, laptops and other gadgets?

It’s safe to assume that Apple has major products in the pipeline for 2012, such as the widely rumored iPad 3 and much anticipated iPhone 5.

Apple watchers are also speculating about key updates to the MacBook Air line, featuring more power, improved graphics — and a brand new 15-inch model. If their predictions are accurate, we could see these products in the first few months of 2012.

And what about a reimagined TV, a digital connected hub for intelligent couch potatoes?

Steve’s Lasting Gift

Will Steve Jobs’ true legacy prove to be the enduring culture that he fostered at Apple, the values learned and embraced by the people lucky enough to work with him at Apple or Pixar?

Will this culture be capable of identifying significant latent opportunities, things consumers don’t know that they need or want until they’ve experienced them? Will their contributions continue to delight and inspire us for years to come?

But Apple is a public company, and Wall Street expectations can have a polluting impact… How long will Apple’s product execs have the courage to reject design-by-committee decisions? To refuse the many tiny compromises (in the quest for better margins) that inevitably result in the boring mediocrity that plagues so many product companies?

I find myself somewhat reassured on this point, having read Walter Isaacson’s masterful biography, Steve Jobs. I was moved by Steve’s reflections on where he invested his energy, once he learned his cancer would be a death sentence.

I can’t wait to see what happens over the long term to the company on which Steve lavished so many time and attention. Time will tell.

Like other former Apple employees, I hope that Steve’s legacy will have a lasting impact on the people who now must translate Apple’s brand into future generations of inspiring products and services. As Steve noted to his biographer:

“ My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary….

Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do…. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

— Steve Jobs, reflections cited by Walter Isaacson in the Steve Jobs biography

If his legacy proves to have lasting impacts, our holiday gifts from Apple will be eagerly anticipated for years to come.

Importantly, what will today’s entrepreneurs learn from Steve’s legacy?

When it comes to technology marketing and messaging strategies, clarity often seems to be deprecated — in execution, if not in intent. Instead, knowingly or not, many marketers pursue its mirror opposite: obfuscation, particularly in complex product categories such as enterprise software. (See definitions below.)

Positioning — The Intent to Clarify

Ever since Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote their groundbreaking book on positioning, marketers have tried every tactic imaginable to differentiate their products from all others in a crowded marketplace. This strategy worked pretty well, for at least a decade or two, until media fragmentation and audience attention deficits became so overwhelming that few marketing budgets can break through the clutter.

The goal of positioning is consumer or buyer clarity — “conditioning the mind” of the potential customer so that when she thinks of _____ (your product category), your brand name is the first or second to come to mind.

This is the essence of positioning strategy as preached by Ries and Trout in their classic Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Successful positioning makes the shopping process easier, by reducing or simplifying the choices the consumer needs to consider before making a purchase.

The same dynamic works in B2B marketplaces, reducing the number of brands that end up in the buying committee’s final “consideration set.” Or at least, that’s how things are “supposed to work,” under the traditional rules of marketing.

The Purple Cow Mandate — Be Remarkable

Seth Godin approaches the quest for clarity from a somewhat different perspective.

He writes about the importance of standing out — by being remarkable — in Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable.

He advocates that marketers and product teams invest in improving qualities intrinsic to the product or service, rather than rely solely on messaging and positioning activities that take place after the product is a fait accompli.

Godin points to the need to invest upfront — in product design, use case simplification — in activities whose results will make the product experience truly remarkable in the minds of customers. (This is the strategy that Apple pursues.)

In his usual spirit of asking provocative questions, Godin writes:

“What would happen if you gave the marketing budget for your next three products to the designers? Could you afford a world-class architect / designer / sculptor / director / author?

– Seth Godin, Purple Cow

Godin implies that positioning and messaging strategies that were effective in the era of mass media and mass marketing no longer suffice. Therefore the pursuit of clarity demands that we do things differently.

Why don’t we?

Where Does Clarity Get Lost in Execution?

Technology marketers lose the benefits of clarity when naming or messaging efforts go astray, despite the best of intentions. When KPIs require your product to be #1, 2 or 3, you may choose to re-segment the market and rename the category in order to carve out a space that you can dominate. If the market agrees with your reframing, you can sometimes win big.

When it works, you own the frame of reference when people compare your product to competitive alternatives. And you can more readily achieve a leadership position when you’re a bigger frog in a smaller pond. From a marketer’s standpoint, this is goodness.

But it’s hard to pull off if you don’t have enough of a marketing budget to “educate” people on what you mean, to infuse the [new] frame of reference or basis of comparison with enough meaning to make a difference in customer’s behavior…

Sadly, there are multiple causes of obfuscation. For example, clarity in external communications can be obscured:

• when the way you reframe the category is just “hair splitting” — re-segmenting based on things of minimal value to the customer
• when you don’t have enough resources, or can’t attract enough influencers who share your interest in reframing the category, and as a result the market rejects or ignores your efforts
• when you’re not listening to market conversations and refining your story until people “get” what you say, and care about it (AKA, lack of resonance)
• or when your messaging is larded with too much proprietary jargon or poorly defined concepts, and therefore meaning is obscured from all but a narrow niche of category wizards.

People who work for large enterprises complain that clarity also gets lost when technical product managers work through the typical shared services marcom team. They say too many people are empowered to tinker with the messaging and “dumb it down.” This happens, they say, when generalist writers don’t take the time to learn what is significant about a complex product category, the key purchase factors for buyers, etc. In their attempts to write short copy in plain English, they strip out the meaning.

Definition of Terms

Clarity: clearness of thought, style or expression; lucidity.

Obfuscation: to make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand.

Sources: online dictionaries.

Image via Wikipedia

 

Apple is the master at crafting the buyer experience: whipping consumers into a frenzy of anticipation and then, delighting the new owner with all that happens starting with the out-of-box experience.

The recent iPad 2 launch appears to be following the usual Apple playbook:  months of product speculation in the techno-geek blogosphere, breathless blog posts from die-hard enthusiasts, saturation press coverage, brand fans waiting in long lines for hours, hoping to get their hands on one of those scarce devices. The same phenomenon is happening now in Apple’s overseas markets.

Like other loyal but not crazy brand fans, I ordered an iPad 2 on the first day of US availability — only to get a promised ship date one month later. (And that delay was before the impact of the Japanese quake and tsunami!)

I can’t help but wonder if the lengthy delay to fulfill orders was planned as a means of stimulating even more frenzied consumer demand? Or does it reflect a more cautious inventory management approach on Apple’s part? If so, they really blew the product forecast… A month of high demand with limited ability to ship means no revenues for that product line during that period.

Drip Delivery: Is This the Best Strategy?

Adding insult to injury, the accessories I ordered, a video adapter and an orange Smart Cover, have arrived this week in 2 separate shipments. Two weeks before the iPad itself will arrive (assuming no disruption from Apple’s Japanese supply chain).

From the standpoint of buyer experience, is this “drip delivery” approach the best way of managing the customer relationship? Normally, I’d say yes. But in the case of a highly desired but unavailable product, each partial delivery is an irritating reminder of how long the wait will be. As it stands, the Smart Cover and video adapter are useless to me at this moment, which compounds my feeling of aggravation.

As for me, I’d prefer to wait for a complete shipment, getting all 3 items on the day the iPad itself arrives. (I’d have a different opinion if the accessories served a larger purpose, or could function with something other than my iPad 2.)

Putting myself in Apple’s shoes, I can understand why they want to ship those items in advance of the iPad — it means they can bill now for the shipped goods, rather than wait another 2 weeks or more.

But from a marketer’s POV, I see this experience as a misstep on Apple’s part. A sign that the king of buyer experience doesn’t always get things right.

I love brands that place an enduring value on customer delight, especially when they aim to do so across all touch points, and invest accordingly. The contrast between brands that aim for customer delight versus those that are, at best, transactional can be really stark. Two contrasting customer care experiences illustrate my point (B2C examples).

My stellar customer care experience was with Apple, obtaining support for an App Store purchase under $15. And then there’s KitchenAid. My not-yet-completed KitchenAid purchase involves a $50 item, to complement a $300–400 appliance. My story involves the systems these 2 companies have developed (or not) to deliver the kind of customer experiences that reflect their brand values.

If you’ve had a multi-year experience with the Apple brand, as I have, you’ve probably encountered multiple examples of the systems they put in place to serve customers. Apple’s customer-centered investments are probably driven by a deep understanding of customer life time value, and business KPIs to maximize LTV across years’ worth of brand purchases, both large and small.

In stark contrast, KitchenAid’s siloed systems reveal a manufacturing driven, channel-centered value system, with little investment in a workable infrastructure for customer care. I’d be surprised if there’s any strategic connection between customer LTV and their customer-facing infrastructure. (KitchenAid has never been a client, so I’m inferring this from my experience as a consumer.)

By way of example, here’s how 2 brands approach customer care.

Apple Sets the Gold Standard for Customer Care

Apple has designed a comprehensive set of services to support customers, ranging from an in-store consultation with a specialist at the Apple Genius bar, to a variety of online options, such as the Apple Support Express Lane. I had a very positive experience with the Express Lane this weekend, for help with an App Store transaction that cost $14.99.  (I’ve had similarly productive experiences with their scheduled callback support option.)

In this case I described my problem via the handy online form. Soon afterwards, a support specialist who works for the iTunes Store sent an email with links to articles that explained how to resolve my problem. I didn’t have time to deal with it at that moment; it was a Friday night.

On Saturday the support specialist sent another email, asking me whether I’d resolved the situation yet, and if not, how might she help. She also explained that she’d be off for a few days, and that someone else would help me if I couldn’t resolve my problem right away. At that point I read the suggested knowledgebase articles, followed the instructions, and the problem was resolved to my satisfaction.

So I sent the support person a thank-you email, and got this in response:

“You’re more than welcome – my pleasure! Nothing makes us happier than to hear that we have helped our customers. I wish you the best and hope that you will continue to enjoy shopping the iTunes Store in the future. Have a great day, Christine!

What I liked about this experience is that it was very efficient, took little time and energy on my part, resolved my problem quickly, and featured an authentic human touch at several points. I never felt as if I were dealing with a robo-CSR. The personality of the rep came through in her emails (even if they’d been pre-scripted).

KitchenAid Needs a Major Customer-facing Overhaul

A recent experience with KitchenAid shows what happens when you deal with a consumer products company that optimizes its system for selling via retailers, and has not yet mastered the direct-to-consumer relationship, or the implications of a multi-year relationship between the consumer and the brand.

Here’s the scenario. I’ve been trying to buy a second mixing bowl for my 5-quart stand mixer. If you’re a serious baker, having a second bowl is a huge timesaver.

My mixer was purchased several years ago from Costco. Unfortunately, this model is a slight variation from KitchenAid’s standard 5-quart models, which I discovered while shopping for a new bowl. If you dig deeply into Amazon’s customer reviews, as I eventually had to do while shopping for my bowl, you discover this issue from other disgruntled customers.

Apparently, KitchenAid has had a practice of making retailer-specific models of its appliances, but not backing them up adequately with post-sale accessory or support infrastructures. There’s no information on KitchenAid’s website to help you match your model numbers with the corresponding part numbers of compatible accessories. If you’ve purchased your KitchenAid appliance from any of a number of large chains, you could encounter issues similar to mine.

My Multi-week Saga

My attempts to buy this $50 accessory involved the following steps, over the course of several weeks, and it’s not done yet:

• digging through old files to find the purchase records and accessory options booklet, looking for a part number for the bowl (info was generic and incorrect)
• turning the heavy mixer upside down to find its model number (why isn’t it displayed in a more convenient location?)
• shopping for a 5-quart mixing bowl at Amazon, but not finding an exact match for the model number of my particular mixer
• buying the most likely candidate from Amazon, receiving it 2 days later, only to discover it doesn’t fit my appliance
• going online to Amazon to request a refund or exchange
• packing up the bowl and shipping it back to Amazon for a refund
• going online to KitchenAid’s sites
• failing to find resources to help me identify the correct part number of compatible accessories
• shopping for a bowl using the specific model number at 2 company-sponsored KitchenAid websites — and finding no match on this model
• clicking KitchenAid’s online Support button, and finding a dead link
• switching computers and browsers, in case that dead link was due to some browser plugin compatibility issue (it wasn’t)
• selecting the Live Chat option at the KitchenAid shopping site
• spending about 15 minutes in the LiveChat queue, despite a promised average hold time (when I started) of about 2.5 minutes
• watching my place in the queue move up and down (for quite a while I bounded around between first and second positions in the queue)
• eventually chatting with a rep who gave me a specific model number for a bowl that should be compatible with my mixer
• asking to place an order online, right then and there (no dice)
• the rep explained that I could not order that bowl online from KitchenAid, and would have to call their 800 number instead
• going back to Amazon, entering that part number, and ordering the bowl from one of Amazon’s affiliated merchants
• now awaiting delivery…

Dealing with Trusted Brands

I chose to order the bowl from Amazon because I trust Amazon to take the bowl back for a refund if I discover it doesn’t fit my mixer. Even though my order will be fulfilled by a third-party merchant, not Amazon, I still trust that Amazon will ensure I get a refund, if that becomes necessary.

KitchenAid may have a similar RMA policy, but my experience to date doesn’t inspire me with confidence about their policies. And they’ve certainly taught me that I could waste a great deal of time trying to resolve the situation.

As of this moment, I’m still waiting for the new bowl to arrive, and don’t yet know if this saga is complete.

Take-aways

There’s a reason why I’ve shared the gory details of the KitchenAid saga. Taken as a whole, they reveal system-wide issues with customer care policies, and an under-investment in the product strategies or customer-facing IT infrastructure that can lead to customer delight. They reveal outmoded, industrial age thinking and business practices.

Where Apple aims to “engineer out” hassles or other things that would inconvenience the customer, companies like KitchenAid appear to focus on the needs of their resellers, with too little attention paid to the needs of the ultimate customer (the consumer).

As a case in point, KitchenAid develops and manufactures retailer-specific models. This meets large warehouse chains’ needs to differentiate their offerings from competing retailers’ on-shelf inventory. This wouldn’t be a problem for the consumer, as long as KitchenAid designed in the necessary post-sale inventory systems and informational resources to support the ultimate customer. But that’s not what the consumer sees… KitchenAid does not appear to think through the implications of the consumer’s multi-year relationship with KitchenAid’s branded appliances.

And that’s not a good long-term strategy for companies like KitchenAid, because it’s the ultimate customer who provides the money that fuels their business model, regardless of their distribution strategy.

Despite Apple’s reputation for product innovation, Apple’s behavior also  reflects a deep investment in customer-centered service innovation, to ensure customer delight. (I know this from my experience as a consumer, former employee, and from the stories I hear via industry sources.)

Sadly, KitchenAid, in contrast, comes across as mired in old line industrial age thinking; focused on optimizing its systems for their resellers’ needs… With no appreciation for what it takes to drive customer delight over the long haul.

What Could KitchenAid Do Differently?

Here are some of the things KitchenAid could do to preserve their retailer-differentiation model while improving customer satisfaction:

• Develop model-specific user guides and accessory catalogs, and include them in the box (with Adobe products, this would not be difficult)
• Include a coupon in the box to promote purchase (with appropriate channel support) of accessories that are guaranteed to be compatible with that particular appliance model
• Work with their retailers so it’s easy for consumers to buy compatible accessories from their original retailer (or get post-sale service)
• Work with Amazon (or comparable online mega-retailers) to provide appropriate information to help consumers navigate the model-matching maze when they’re shopping for accessories or consumables
• Provide model-matching information on the brand’s own websites, even if KitchenAid does not maintain an inventory of those items at that moment (the consumer may be able to find them via the after-market or other resellers)
• Make it easy to find the model numbers on the appliance, without having to turn heavy items upside down
• Make sure that any model number manufactured for the ultimate consumer will serve up some search results when a consumer searches for it on KitchenAid’s website (e.g., user’s guide, model-specific accessory catalog in PDF form, where to purchase supplies and accessories, etc.)
• Adapt the behavior of successful tech companies, and develop use cases and personas for representative customer segments; and then apply those insights to product and service development across the customer life cycle for that persona
• Refrain from designing retailer-specific features that cause incompatibility with consumer appliance accessories or consumables
• Maintain an inventory of compatible accessories and repair service items for the expected lifetime of the appliance model

These are tactics that might help the situation. Then, of course, there’s the larger challenge of retooling their customer-facing IT and support infrastructure to emulate the best practices of respected brands like Amazon or Apple.

Content strategy and content marketing challenges have sparked some great online conversations. Although the emergence of digital media has put “content” in the crosshairs, it’s the proliferation and diversity of new digital devices that are forcing marketers to rethink how to communicate with customers, partners and influencers with the best mix of digital channels, media and content. As someone who has worked in the digital content field for 20 years, I’m delighted to see today’s thought leaders taking a deeper look at what content marketing entails, and its implications for brands and marketing organizations.

Today I came across a thought-provoking blog post by John Bell, head of Ogilvy’s 360° Digital Influence team. Reflecting on announcements from CES, he discussed implications for marketers: the need for a more coherent cross-organizational response, now that people are “accessing content in more ways via more devices.” As a consequence, Bell writes, brands need to step up to the challenge of retooling their content strategies and processes, and potentially their organizational strategies, to behave as if they were “their own media company.”

Organizing So You Can Execute a Content Strategy

When most people think about how to organize for content marketing, they’re focused on tactical implications, e.g., editorial calendars, tools and processes for web content management, etc. Or a single type of digital content… To see what I mean, just Google “organizing for content marketing.”

Olgilvy’s Bell writes about it more holistically. He describes content activation as a strategy and process to “create, distribute, promote and measure” content:

“Today, the corporate marcom lead has plenty of reasons to see the value in developing a complete content strategy to reach corporate communication goals and to reach product brand marketing goals. Brands can build virtual engines to create a mix of multimedia and more spontaneous content that is designed to either be useful or entertaining.  This causes people to spend time and interact (i.e., engage) or spread that content across their social graph (i.e., advocate). Brands must distribute that relevant content across an ever-changing ecosystem of owned, co-owned (e.g., Facebook), earned (e.g., bloggers, media) and paid platforms (e.g., all types of ads from advertorials to print ads to online display).  But feeding the fire hose with the right content is not enough. Brands must take responsibility for promoting content to get in the hands of people who will engage and advocate. Lastly, true content activation culture requires constant measurement to understand performance and the diagnostics or levers that can be pulled to improve impact and outcomes.

He then went on to discuss several key factors, potential organizational drivers for building what he calls a content activation culture:

• The relative benefits of  centralization versus federation: “Chief Content Officer vs. Process”
• The need to develop clear brand themes as an over-arching context to unify content strategies, messaging (product, corporate or brand), and external communications, including promotional campaigns
• The need for more training on processes, techniques, and emerging digital capabilities and competencies; and their implications
• The on-going need to measure progress and impact
• Implications for teams and process development

My POV on Content Marketing Organizations

Here is my feedback on John’s post, informed by experience with client engagements over the past couple of years:

“John, I couldn’t agree more with some of your comments. Having said that, one of my concerns about today’s almost faddish focus on “content” is how often the discussion is divorced from the context of customer needs and buying processes. In other words how will the content strategy and each component of it serve what the customer needs to know, believe or feel to progress that customer’s relationship with the brand or potential purchase decision. (I’m thinking of considered purchase categories here, rather than impulse buys. IMHO considered purchase categories will benefit more from a coherent content strategy than brands that represent impulse buys.)

Yes, social listening and monitoring software represents an important advance here, but let’s be honest, it’s just revealing the footprints a customer leaves behind, and even those are imperfect or potentially misleading. A 140-char tweet doesn’t leave a lot of room for insightful dialog… So we need to inform our customer insights with a much richer set of sources, of which the social inputs are just one set.

Enterprises (i.e., your firm’s clients) need to develop a coherent view of buyer personas, people’s needs and motivations, and how those qualities evolve across the purchase process through to product usage, and hopefully the advocacy phase. And we need a context or lens to connect these buyer/customer insights to our content strategies (and of course, the product/brand strategies over the customer lifecycle).

As I’m sure you agree, the marketing funnel has outlived its usefulness. We need a new insight and engagement framework, mapped to the customer lifecycle, to guide our architecture of the content strategy, so we can deliver the right content (informative or entertaining), to the right person, at the right time/place/context, respecting that person’s likely device preferences for that type of content consumption. And we must know the purpose that content is intended to serve, from the buyer or customer’s POV. This to me is one of the most important, and challenging, aspects of the shift from the broadcast– or publisher-centric view of marketing to the customer– or buyer-centric view. This is the true meaning of “sympathetic” (or empathetic) intelligence that you refer to.

Developing a new framework like this is hard enough, but when you’re also dealing with entrenched marketing functional silos, disconnected information repositories (or lack thereof), as well as outmoded skillsets — this whole marketing makeover becomes very daunting (and ultimately will require significant investments on the part of your clients). Not to mention “instrumenting” the change process so clients see measurable benefit, payback, ROI — whatever they care about — to keep them incented to work through the painful changes.

I agree that federated approaches are most likely the best; however, some empowered change agent with a direct connection to the CEO and COO will have to play a key role in driving these changes.

Your thoughts? Has the time come for enterprises to step up to what it takes to build a content activation culture?

Like other Mac users eagerly awaiting 4G LTE service in the US, I was angry to learn that Verizon’s initial 4G modems will support Windows only. There’s no official word when the service will be extended to Mac and iPad users…

Initial Reactions from a Long-time Mac User

How could that be possible, I fumed: Mac and iPad users tend to be enthusiastic early adopters, especially for services that help us express ourselves, communicate, or help our companies stand out from the rest.

Surely, I thought, we must fit Verizon’s ideal customer profile for their new 4G LTE data service. If we can afford the Apple brand premium, we must be attractive prospects for Verizon’s top-of-the-line wireless service.

And we’re increasing in number, too. Professionals who work out of the office, travel often for biz dev reasons, sell or consult — and importantly, those in roles with direct purchasing authority — are increasingly likely to use Mac laptops and/or iPads when our device choices are not dictated by IT or purchasing policies. Although fewer in number than the Windows community, we traditionally drive spikes in demand for groundbreaking services that suit our multi-faceted modes of work and play.

Surely we’d be very attractive customers for Verizon. Why would Verizon take the risk of alienating us by denying us a service that we want?

Over dinner I talked about this with my husband who, though not a Verizon employee, has a well-informed view of wireless industry behavior. His POV made sense, although it didn’t resolve my disappointment. Here’s how the thinking unfolded as we tried to imagine what drove Verizon’s decision to support PCs only, at least at first…

A Plausible Business Scenario?

Let’s start by assuming that Verizon expects Mac, next-gen iPad and future iPhone users to become significant 4G customers over time. They most likely represent Verizon’s most strategic customer acquisition opportunity over the next few years. Not to mention ARPU boosters (margin improvements). So this is a high-stakes play for Verizon and its shareholders…

Here’s why the delay probably makes sense from Verizon’s POV.

Technical/Business Factors

• Verizon’s LTE network is bleeding-edge technology, especially at the scale needed for the whole US market
• The shift to an LTE nationwide network is capital intensive and fraught with risk
• Verizon must resolve many technical and infrastructure issues before the service is reliable, their LTE footprint covers all of the major markets, and actual bandwidth delivery meets people’s inflated expectations
• Service will be rocky for early customers
• Verizon faces unknown scaling issues for network provisioning, customer on-boarding, etc.
• Unlike AT&T, Verizon lacks real-world experience scaling up to respond when actual bandwidth demands exceed forecast by orders of magnitude
• Verizon has watched AT&T scramble to add bandwidth capacity after dramatically under-estimating what iPhone users would consume — with brand tarnishing consequences for AT&T when iPhone users screamed loudly in San Francisco, New York and elsewhere, not to mention billions in unforeseen capital investments
• The USB LTE dongles are first-generation technology comprising 4 radios, each with its own chipset, so they’re large and clunky
• Qualcomm, Verizon and their technology ecosystem must move up the learning curve before they can afford to miniaturize and deliver the LTE-enabling technology in smaller and more elegant form factors, with improved reliability

Brand/Reputation Factors

• Apple has trained its customers to have little patience for unreliable services or devices
• Apple customers expect superior user experiences (that’s why they pay extra for the Apple brand)
• Apple has taught its customers to expect elegance of form and function — in Apple devices, and the peripherals and accessories that are designed to work with those devices
• Apple/iPhone customers expect the same caliber of user experience from their wireless carriers that they expect of Apple
• The Mac and extended Apple brand fan community have proven to be highly vocal when angry, frustrated or disappointed
• Macs are widely used by media businesses to produce magazines, newsletters and other mass media, online or offline, so the brand fans’ voices will be amplified by the media
• Verizon doesn’t want the brand risk of large numbers of disappointed Mac and iPad users blogging and tweeting about how awful the LTE service is
• Verizon wants to deal with a manageable set of users during what is essentially an in-market pilot phase for the early LTE service

My Conclusion

Verizon plans to extend LTE service to Mac and iOS devices once Verizon is assured that the service experience and overall quality will meet what Mac and iPad owners have come to expect of their technology providers.

So, disappointed as I am, this scenario seems plausible to me from a strategic perspective, given the stakes for Verizon.

Having said that, I won’t be surprised if there’s an announcement by Apple and/or Verizon in January (at CES?) with service availability announced for H1 2011. Perhaps in Q1 we’ll see some off-brand drivers hacked together by eager techno geeks serving bleeding-edge users who can’t wait for the Verizon-branded modems for Mac users.

Oh yes, and there may be a wee bit of revenge operating here as well, payback for the long wait before the Apple-AT&T exclusivity terms expired so Apple could bring the iPhone to Verizon customers.

So, happy holidays, Mac and iPad owners. There won’t be a Verizon LTE gift card in your Christmas stocking this year…

Update: If you’re willing to use Bootcamp and Windows on your Mac (and probably jump through some other hoops), you can use Verizon 4G LTE on Macs with Intel processors, someone has tweeted to me. At least in Houston, that is.

Update #2: Here is some discussion about the Verizon iPhone offer (3G at first, not 4G) and reasons why. Source: ZDnet. My guess? A 4G Verizon model will be announced in June, for late summer availability. Based on Apple’s past patterns…

LinkedIn aspires to be for businesses what FaceBook is for consumers: the go-to social media connector for B2B marketing. Until recently LinkedIn’s primary benefit for organizations was employee recruitment. Now LinkedIn has launched a beta level service that lets companies promote their products and services, and show customer recommendations for each product or service. This increases LinkedIn’s value for smaller firms, especially those with only modest recruitment needs.

I’ve been taking advantage of the Thanksgiving holiday respite to experiment with LinkedIn’s early capabilities for B2B marketing. Here are some early impressions.

Simple But Limited Functionality

Thanks to some how-to guidance from Portent Interactive, I’ve begun developing a simple profile for my consulting firm, Informing Arts. The profile now shows a couple of our consulting services.

If I think of LinkedIn’s profile as a simple directory listing, I find myself less critical of its current limitations. The underlying platform affords only simple editing and display capabilities. You cannot style your text, other than using all caps. Here’s the basic content entry form for the company profile:

Tiny Logos & Product Badges

Options for displaying the company logo are very confining, 100 x 60 pixels for the standard logo, 50 x 50 for messages delivered as network updates. The standard logo is displayed next to your company’s description; network updates include things like tweets, notifications about changes to your business’ profile, etc.

For example, here are the 2 variants for my firm’s logo, boxed to show you the dimensions (the larger boxed image is our “standard logo”):

To my eye, when displayed by LinkedIn, the logos appear muddy, having lost some clarity, crispness or color saturation when compared to the originals I uploaded to LinkedIn’s server. Note that I uploaded images with the pixel dimensions required so that LinkedIn’s platform did not need to resize these graphic objects. Maybe this image fidelity issue is just a symptom of the beta service…

Curiously the constraints on the images used as badges for each product or service are slightly different: 100 x 80 pixels, just a little bit taller than the standard logo.

You need some basic skills with Photoshop or other image editor to ensure your images, when uploaded, meet LinkedIn’s dimension requirements. Otherwise they could be scaled in awkward ways by LinkedIn’s platform.

Basic Text Entries

What you can display as your primary company description is very limited: just over 4 lines of text before LinkedIn truncates your message with a “…more” link. Enough for about 2 pithy sentences.

No text styling: no font changes, no colors, no bold or italics. Just plain simple text. Hence my notion that this is like a simple old-fashioned directory listing. If you place high value on the impact of your LinkedIn company profile, you may want to engage a copywriter’s help with your company description, unless you just repurpose the public-facing positioning statement.

LinkedIn controls your options for URL links: you can link a single website to the company description. No embedded links are permitted (at least for now) within your text entries. So choose your URL wisely.

Similar limitations pertain to text entries for LinkedIn’s latest feature for organizational marketing, the products and services tab. One badge (or image) per product, one URL linked to the service description.

Unlike the company description, you can add a small number of bullet points to identify features, or list benefits or use cases. There are tight limits on the number of characters permitted for each bullet point (about half the length of a tweet, I’d guess).

Content Editing Is Limited

The beta level of this service does not offer a “draft mode” so all edits go live as soon as you hit the “Publish” button. This implies the following workflow for content development:

• Investigate LinkedIn’s detailed requirements before you start creating or editing your company profile
• Create or resize your logos to the correct dimensions in advance
• Identify URL specifics in advance – or know which page you intend to link, and use drag-and-drop to enter the correct URL in the appropriate field
• Write your text descriptions in a simple text editor, and then cut-and-paste to LinkedIn’s form
• With all your ducks in order, then enter everything in one fell swoop
• Hit “Publish” – and voila!

Or, enter the basics, hit Publish, and plan to use the “edit profile” feature to add or correct content details when time permits, knowing your published profile will be incomplete until you’ve finished your edits.

Once you’ve published the company description, if you’re authorized to do so, you can easily make changes, replacing logos, tweaking content, etc. Within limits this seems to work quite well, assuming you don’t encounter server time-outs.

Having said that, if you enter bullet point features for your product or service, there is no way to change the sequence of bullet points once they’ve been published, unless you change them all.

Geared for Social Networking, But Members Only

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn has emphasized social dimensions — the relationships:

• between people and the companies that employ them,
• people who work on or with those featured products or services,
• and the customers (or users) of those products and services.

For each product or service you list, you can request recommendations from your customers or clients. Needless to say, the people making the recommendations must be pre-existing LinkedIn members; LinkedIn doesn’t accept external email addresses for this purpose of sharing recommendations.

Similarly, if key employees are associated with specific products or services, you can link their names and LinkedIn profiles to the appropriate product. LinkedIn allows multiple people to be associated with these product or service descriptions, as long as they are LinkedIn members.

I suspect that LinkedIn believes the social networking dimensions of the company profiles will become their most valuable contribution over time. No doubt this is how they hope to differentiate their offering from Google’s.

Promotions & Advertising

LinkedIn offers 2 ways to promote your company, via a “direct ad” for the company or a branded product/service, or a special promotional offer linked to a specific product or service. The UI is still a bit rocky. It takes a lot of clicks to find the place where you can showcase a product-specific special offer.

If you click the “Promote your company” button, which appears when you’re editing the company profile, you will be redirected to their new beta service for direct ad placements. The first page that you’ll see is entitled “Create Your Ad Campaign.” Here’s the form to get started:

I’ve not tried this feature, but it appears to be just a bit more feature-rich than Google’s PPC ads, from the display standpoint. I haven’t explored its targeting capabilities or likely ROI.

After multiple clicks, when you’re creating or editing your product/service description, LinkedIn displays a spot where you can showcase a special offer. Here’s the UI for describing that offer:

Note: I have not tried the simple promotions capability that LinkedIn offers, so I don’t have an informed opinion about its merits. It does appear that you can link to a landing page, via the URL field, but I doubt you have any options for A-B testing…

Net net: it’s interesting to see LinkedIn’s early forays into social influencer marketing. I’ll look forward to SEM experts’ assessments of their relative merits, as LinkedIn’s capability unfolds.

As a girl, I shivered one night in the basement where our TV had been banished, and thrilled to the Beatles’ American debut. Not all my shivers were from the cold of that unheated room… I’d fallen in love.

A landmark event in 20th century music, the 1964 Ed Sullivan Show ignited the outbreak of Beatlemania in America. Like every other girl in America, I fell in love that night. With rock ‘n’ roll, and the Beatles.

Photos © Apple & the Beatles

Today marks another landmark: the Beatles have finally agreed to distribute their music via Apple iTunes (to their relief and Apple’s). This agreement has been more than 20 years in the making (and has probably enriched multiple lawyers on 2 continents in the process).

Apple’s web site offers a loving tribute to the Beatles via streaming videos of landmark performances, gorgeous photo albums, and more. All presented with the design flair you expect of Apple.

A Long Journey to Resolution…

Anyone who has been following the Apple vs. Beatles saga knows that the two have been at loggerheads for more than 2 decades over trademark disputes to the name “Apple.” Here are logos from the 1980’s for the two marks.

If you’ve owned a vinyl Beatles album (pre-CD days), you may recall the Granny Smith apple symbol, a reference to the Beatles’ corporate entity, Apple Corps Ltd, a multi-media publishing empire. One of their main divisions was “Apple Records.”

As long as Apple Computer competed only in the computer and IT technology realm, the two giants maintained an uneasy détente. But once Apple started to market enabling technologies for music, such as the early MIDI board that connected synthesizers and musical instruments to their computers, the battle began in earnest. Since then Apple’s amazingly successful ventures into consumer electronics and music distribution — their achievements of the past decade — have dramatically upped the stakes to this conflict.

The Labors of Many…

As a former Apple employee, I had some insights into this dispute… For some of the time I worked in Apple’s marketing organization, the music marketing team reported to me.

Charged with market development, those marketers were passionate evangelists: driven to educate musicians and composers that music could be created, performed, or enjoyed with the help of Apple Macintoshes. (This was 10 years before Apple introduced the iPod.) Those were early days; so few musicians recorded or performed with Macs on stage that my team knew everyone who was doing anything.

Even so, that 2-person music marketing team spent an inordinate amount of time briefing Apple’s lawyers. (Inordinate relative to the revenues being generated.)

The legal team was locked in a seemingly endless dispute with the Beatles’ business managers over rights to the “apple” trademark. My team was frustrated by the fact that the Beatles themselves couldn’t be bothered to venture an opinion on the subject (most likely because Apple’s impact on the music business 20 years ago was so small). Year after year, Apple’s lawyers engaged with their lawyers — and the army of “suits” who sheltered the Beatles from nasty real-world issues like copyright disputes and competitive realms.

Fast-forward 20 years, iTunes has become the most dominant force in music distribution, Apple’s brand the world’s most respected (or one of the most respected), and the Beatles have finally reached agreement with Apple… Everyone wins, especially music lovers.

It’s a bittersweet moment for people who know how long this dispute has raged. But it helps me understand why Apple has devoted so much time, energy and money to the Beatles tribute that appears on their website today.

It’s been a long journey. Finally, music to our ears: the Beatles’ music can now play on our iPhones, iPods and iPads.

While updating Informing Arts’ website I was reminded, the hard way, of the need to keep digital brand assets current. We stumbled on issues relating to trademark renewals and obsolete digital file formats. Even strategic marketers like me can overlook details like how current are your brand assets — can you still make changes with existing software tools?

While neither issue is life threatening, dealing with brand asset “hygiene” issues has consumed time and money better spent on more productive activities. Although I do confess to having fun with the designer and getting my hands dirty with Adobe Creative Suite 4… Informing Arts’ revised site is not quite ready to “go live,” but it’s imminent.

The Backstory: Informing Arts Brand

A top-notch designer created Informing Arts’ corporate logo and business papers in 1997, and her design strategy has served us well since then. A former Aldus/Adobe designer, she now leads the creative team at PopCap Games. No doubt the quality of her work enabled us to go years without having to update our brand identity, except for minor tweaks to adjust from print to web. We printed reams of business papers, and now that most communications are electronic, we still have lots left in inventory! Only the business cards need refreshing.

Unfortunately, the software tool used to create Informing Arts’ corporate identity, FreeHand, is no longer on the market. Time has marched on, and arch-rival Adobe Illustrator CS4 can no longer open our 10-year-old FreeHand files. During the decade since our design was done, Adobe acquired Macromedia which had acquired FreeHand from Aldus and the original designers of the software. It’s been years since Adobe updated FreeHand, a lingering death, I’d guess…

So I had to hire a designer to recreate the corporate identify files, to fix the consequences of imperfect file conversions. Had we stayed up-to-date with version changes in file formats, some of these costs might have been avoided. Luckily we had some ancient EPS and TIFF files to build upon.

Fast Forward to 2010

Having said that, I chose to take advantage of this file update project to change fonts for Informing Arts’ logotype and business papers (in case we ever need to reprint them!)

The original design specified Berthold Garamond, a typeface which is very elegant, with delicate ascenders and descenders. These details look fabulous on commercially printed materials, or when reproduced on a high-res laser printer.

But all that finesse disappears on most computer screens, let alone mobile devices. We’d struggled for years when we had to insert a small rendition of the logo in an Office doc or a web file. So it was time to switch to a typeface that remained elegant and legible even when displayed on lower res screens and printers. We chose Cronos Pro.

And here are the results: Informing Arts’ revised mark, displaying the company name in Cronos Pro Subhead.

Lessons Learned

One of the interesting lessons we learned along the way was the reminder about documenting all those last-minute design decisions, like exactly what Pantone color did the printer end up using… Our files called the color swatch “goldenrod.” Not a PMS spec, and not a color that has a consistent meaning across PC and Mac platforms, to say the least. My files did not contain written records of those final decisions, so we were having to make guesses about color choices and color ramp details.

We were also reminded that there were visual effects the commercial printer could achieve (in terms of a very subtle color ramp) that are still out of reach digitally.  Or at least, out of reach digitally for those of us not blessed with Apple-size creative budgets.

Net net: a project we thought would take an hour or two consumed a day of a designer’s time plus half a day of my time. And when you pay by the hour for an experienced designer, the cost is comparable to what you’d spend on a new PC. Not huge in the grand scheme of things, but definitely a reminder to stay current with file formats!