Category Archives: Blog-Shoppers&Shoplifters

News from the world of digital marketing:

It’s a better day to be Apple than, say, a European country. Apple is sitting on $194 BILLION in cash. Meanwhile, Greece is about to start confiscating money from pension funds as its cash reserves run out in the next few weeks.

Reality Makes Writing Fiction Superfluous Department: Copyrights were established in the Constitution by the Founders who were troubled by the lack of value creators received for intellectual property in 18th Century Europe. The balance has swung pretty hard in the other direction in the last century. The latest: car manufacturers are claiming home and non-dealer repairs are a copyright infringement. 

The Luddites Were Right Department: Today’s contestant in “Let’s Fight a Rear Guard Action Against History” is ESPN, which is suing Verizon over unbundling. Because that’s going to stop cord cutting…

And finally:

Why does this seem like switching dinosaurs mid-(evolutionary) race? Political reporter jumps from CNN to Snapchat.

News from the world of digital marketing:

Facebook changes the rules-again. Shockingly, the rule changes favor you spending more money on Facebook ads.

Google’s Mobile Friendly rule changes may clobber more than 200 Fortune 500 web site rankings.

What Google thinks: Micromoments are changing the rules.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature: Apple Watch makes iPhone battery life even worse.

And finally:

Apple fanboi: I’ll buy anything Apple, even if I don’t understand it. Rest of world: We know, we’ve seen you waiting in line overnight for stuff you could have preordered online…

It’s easy to tell the real HealthCare.GOV website from all the scammers, some wag told me when that site first went up and couldn’t stop crashing.

You can log into the scam sites instantly.

Which leads to the overwhelming question: how could it all have gone so wrong? How hard can it be to build a web site?

It’s easy to build a website, as those scammers have proven.  What’s hard is unified information – the right information to the right people at the right time.

Take HealthCare.Gov and the scammers.  All the scammers have to do is 1). Ask for your personal information and then 2). Save it some place convenient. (For them. Not so convenient for you, if it’s your identity that’s getting stolen…)

So why can’t HealthCare.Gov just work like that? Ummm…because it actually has to work. It has to:

·         Figure out what healthcare plans you are eligible for, and then retrieve them from a plethora of government and insurance company web sites

·         Verify you are you; retrieve your income from the IRS, and determine what subsidies you should receive

·         Route your choices to the correct insurance company while maintaining your security and your privacy

Now take just one simple piece of that information pie: how much money did you make last year? The site could ask the IRS database for your tax records, but…those are for last year. How do we know what you’re making now?

So the system could query for your current employer’s pay stub filings for you, but…that doesn’t include things like your mortgage deduction, other income…

So the only real way to do it is to query the IRS for your tax returns, query it again for your current pay stubs, and then merge the two. And chances are high there will still be errors, and your tax preparer will take umbrage with the results.

Web sites are easy. Data is hard.

When last we left our tale, we were discussing how curation has built some of the most-heavily trafficked site on the Internet:  Gizmodo, which curates tech news; Jalopnik and The Truth About Cars, which curate automotive stuff, and Instapundit, on libertarian topics.

Here’s why: It’s a little known fact that most people have these things called Lives. They can’t just spend all their time figuring out what information is good, what’s bad, and what was posted on Facebook by crack-addled capuchin monkeys.

Think of a subject you know little about; say, medium format digital cameras. Type that into Google; what are you going to get? A bunch of companies claiming to produce The Very Best/The World Standard/The Ultimate Photography Machine.

Puzzled? That’s how your clients and prospects feel when they are researching that voodoo that you do so well. As we established in Part One, you are An Expert At What You Do. Wading through the content morass and separating the good from the capuchin monkey shines is called curation. It’s a service your customers and prospects will reward with their time, attention, and trust for you as an expert.

A shaggy dog marketing story:

The executives of a pet food company are meeting, and the Chief Marketing Officer stands up in his bespoke suit and announces a new product: Gourmet dog food in cut crystal containers. The trucks roll out to the stores to great fan fair; weeks later they roll back full, their cargo unsold and returned. So the CMO is fired, and new one is hired, fresh out of the Ivy League.

“Heart-healthy dog food,” he announces, standing in a suit so crisp you could cut a $2 steak with the creases. Trucks filled with the rebranded, repackaged product roll out to the stores to great fan fair; weeks later they roll back full, their cargo unsold and returned. So the CMO is fired, and new one is hired.

“I’ll be back in a few weeks,” he announces to much consternation. When he returns, he stands before the execs in muddy boots and jeans, and announces the marketing problem with the product:

“Dogs won’t eat it.”

 It’s a sad truth that too many companies have no idea what purpose they serve. Media companies have mostly collapsed over the last decade because they thought they were in the content creation business. But the world is drowning in content. Some of it good. Much of it bad. And an egregious amount that was apparently created by crack-addled capuchin monkeys.

Here’s blogging’s dirty little secret: YOU DON’T NEED TO CREATE ANYTHING. As we established in Part One, you are An Expert At What You Do. There’s already infinite (OK not infinite, but close if you round up a bit…) content about what you do.

Wading through it and separating the good from the capuchin monkey shines is called curation. It’s a service your customers and prospects will reward with their time, attention, and trust for you as an expert.

Don’t believe it? Look at some of the most-heavily trafficked site on the Internet: Gizmodo, which curates tech news; Jalopnik and The Truth About Cars, which curate automotive stuff, and Instapundit, on libertarian topics.

Next: On Being a Curator

A dad picks his son up from first grade. As they drive home, the boy asks a question: “Daddy, where did I come from?”

The dad swallows nervously. He knew this day would come, but so soon? No matter; manfully, he plunges in. He explains the birds and bees, mommies and daddies who love each other, the miracle of birth, and the circle of life.

When he’s done, the boy is quiet. Finally the dad asks “Son, do you have any questions?”

“WHY is our family always so weird? Pete’s from Pittsburgh. Can’t I just be from Pittsburgh?

Here’s the first rule of being a Blog Star: You know more than you think.

Here’s the second rule: You cannot make things simple enough.

You are an expert at what you do; that goes without saying, no? So do a simple thought experiment: how many articles in your field do you see every day? How many are smart? How many aren’t? How many make you wonder if the author was under the influence?

So here’s a secret: People who don’t have your expertise – also known as prospects and customers – place great value on this knowledge.

Tomorrow: Turn that knowledge into a blog, doing what you already do

A dad picks his son up from first grade. As they drive home, the boy asks a question: “Daddy, where did I come from?”

The dad swallows nervously. He knew this day would come, but so soon? No matter; manfully, he plunges in. He explains the birds and bees, mommies and daddies who love each other, the miracle of birth, and the circle of life.

When he’s done, the boy is quiet. Finally the dad asks “Son, do you have any questions?”

“WHY is our family always so weird? Pete’s from Pittsburgh. Can’t I just be from Pittsburgh?

Here’s the first rule of being a Blog Star: You know more than you think.

Here’s the second rule: You cannot make things simple enough.

An old joke: Guy goes to a doctor and says “It hurts when I raise my arm like that. What should I do?”

Doc says “Don’t do that.”

Funny, but oh so true. And, if you were wondering after reading Electro Services! Part Trois! Technology Hop-Scotch! how exactly to win at technology hop-scotch, the answer is simple:

Don’t play.

Business ONETouch is your opportunity to hop-scotch over all those systems that get in the way of you simply doing your business. It’s been designed from the ground up as a single seamless service that provides everything you need to do business: Manage phone, web, social media, print, even video from the start of your marketing to final sale.  Drive leads directly to the included e-Commerce engine. Know immediately what is and isn’t putting dollars in your pocket.

Services must be ubiquitous to be truly useful.  Think of electricity: it used to be so amazing that tons of products were named ElectroThis and ElectroThat. (Kind of like calling everything iStuff, nowadays.)  Now…who thinks about electricity? It’s just everywhere. It just works. That’s when a service changes the way we live.

That’s what Business ONETouch enables you to do: stop thinking about tech, and just go out and do business.

Next: You, too, can be a blog star!

Now I know what you’re thinking, friend, after reading Part Un et Part Deux: I’m trying to do business here! I can’t waste years and millions of dollars – heck, if I had millions to waste it wouldn’t be on a web site!

Truth, my friend. But the good news is that you don’t have to do that – you can instead play Technology hop-scotch. 

My Dad was a home builder, and one of the very many smart things he taught me is that there comes a point where it is easier and cheaper to build a new house than to fix up an old one. (He said that point was the first time anyone said “Let’s remove this wall.”)  Technology is like that; it’s often much cheaper to build something new than to upgrade a bunch of horrible old legacy stuff.

When I was a young cub reporter wandering the Pacific Rim I was amazed by how hard it was to get a phone.  The infrastructure in, say, the Philippines was so minimal that you could not get phone lines for new homes or businesses. They never had the landline infrastructure we took for granted in the United States.

A decade later, when US television shows were still using cell phones to show that someone was rich, I went back and was amazed to discover that everyone had cell phones – even kids. 

Which neatly demonstrates both sides of this dilemma: If you have millions of customers using your landlines you can’t just abandon them, or all their shiny money.  If you don’t…well, have at it, and all that shiny money.

And that’s the problem with HealthCare.gov; not the shiny new web site, but all those dusty decades of IRS records…

Web sites are easy. Data is hard.

In our last chapter, we discussed the Not Fun At All launch of HealthCare.GOV, complete with spectacular crashes, copious complaints, and a general lack of amusement.

Except among the enterprise IT community – the people who build Very Large Things – who have been laughing about this project since it was proposed. Why?

 Well, past performance is no guarantee of future results, but it’s the smart way to bet your rent money.  So let’s look at past performance: the decade-long effort for a single federal department to integrate its own systems. The Federal Bureau of Investigation spent years and $170 million on the Virtual Case File system, and…then trashed that whole thing and started again in 2005. It took the FBI another six years and a half-billion dollars to finally get to the point where they could declare victory.

Then remember that the complexity factor is exponential.  That is, you need one connector to meld two systems; three connectors to meld three systems; six connectors to meld four systems; 10 connectors to meld five systems… Then imagine the complexity of melding all the systems necessary for this project from the Internal Revenue Service, Health and Human Services, a gazillion insurance companies, state agencies, health systems and Babbage knows what else.

That would be ambitious under the best of circumstances. Given that the design was still being redesigned 90 days before launch…it was not the best of circumstances.

And how does it work now, more than a year latter? Note the spate of recent news about the millions in over/under/we’re not really sure subsidies. Yep-slapped some spit and duct tape on it so the web site would look like it was working…

(Note to my enterprise architecture friends: yes, you’d be better off with a data mart than umpteen connectors. You’d be even better off with a proper middleware tier. Now go architect something or other.)