Maybe enough digital ink has been spilled already, but here’s the thing… something else showed up in my newsfeed recently that made me think, “You’re kidding, right? No one’s buying this.” (It was the AdAge Article: Out-of-Home Viewing Erased the NFL’s Ratings Deficit Last Season.) As product people, some of us focus on features, functions, benefits. And others on marketing. However, all of us should at least be interested in marketing and what the NFL faces now is a really interesting marketing business case. Whatever your level of interest in football might be, or your belief in some of the league’s issues, the legal monopoly that is the NFL has massive economic impact. While there’s some argument as to whether a stadium or Super Bowl has net positive impact on a city, (when you add in taxpayer subsidized stadium builds, etc.), football nevertheless generates massive economic activity overall. As a result, the challenges the marketplace faces should be of interest from a marketing perspective.
Another Reason You Might Have Trouble Recruiting
This – long – post is a reaction to more than a handful of recent conversations I’ve had with friends or networking friends who have had some sub-optimal experiences lately in various company’s recruitment practices. (Actually, these have been some piss-poor really @#$@#$ experiences. I’m just trying to clean things up a bit.)
What’s the Problem?
There’s some big, obvious reasons you could have trouble recruiting. Maybe your company/brand reputation is lousy. Maybe you’re not paying enough. Maybe you have some crappy managers and one or both online networks and the whisper network knows it. (After all, it’s become a cliche that people often don’t so much leave a job or a company so much as a manager. Not always true of course. But often enough the case.)
There could be a whole lot more reasons you’re having challenges getting the right people in the right seats. But here’s a new pair for you to consider. Horrible initial contact and really bad Application Tracking Systems and Candidate Evaluation Processes. As a hiring manager, you might have limited control over this sort of thing at a larger company where Human Resources is in control of such systems. But if you’re senior enough at your company, you may want to take a peek at these things because they may be hurting you. This blog post was motivated by a couple of my own experiences along with discussions with others who’ve had similar – or worse – experiences. It could be just a statistically random blip with a raft of recent issues of which I just happened to become aware. Or things could be getting worse in some cases. So I’ll just throw these thoughts out there into the world and you can take them as you will. [Read more…]
Hidden Costs of Poor Innovation Strategy
If you’re in an older company suffering from Innovator’s Dilemma type issues, you may have hidden costs beyond what you realize. (If you’re not even familiar with Innovator’s Dilemma issues, then you have hidden costs and major hidden risks far beyond what you realize.)
Over the past few years, I’ve had some interesting experiences interacting with companies attempting various types of innovation strategy that struggle to do so. I’m not talking about my Clients of course. They’re innovating for real. Some of my more negative experiences have been via pitching business or participating in various networking events.
Anyway, here’s some of what I’ve learned about companies that are doing a poor or at least a sub-optimal job of new product development or innovation. (Even if they have so-called Innovation initiatives.)
You Can’t Recruit the Best
I go over a variety of issues regarding recruiting in this post Another Reason You Might Have Trouble Recruiting so some aspects of this section may be a repeat for the two of you that hungrily eat up each and every post.
The short version of that other post is that your company has a reputation and it’s both public and on the whisper net. The whisper network is that cohort of potential employees and recruiters in the industry who talk to one another. For real. As in on the phone; not just via posts on Glassdoor or whatever. They’re networked in ways not always obvious on LinkedIn, but they know the deal at your place. If you have crappy managers or if you talk innovation, but don’t really do it, they know. And they take a pass when the recruiter calls. To get past this, you might need to hire a serious disruptor that’s at least somewhat known in the industry or at least can quickly demonstrate that you’re really going to be doing some interesting things.
This cost to a company may be the greatest ever. Because you won’t be able to get the best people to show up. Or even really good people Without that, how do you produce great new products? And the thing is, you won’t even know this is going on.
You’re Not Really Innovating
It’s one thing to say, “Here’s our Innovation Group,” and it’s quite another to actually do anything that’s interesting and also creates business value.
Let’s also remember there’s different types of innovation. The cool kids in tech and startup land like to think of themselves as the Super Innovators and think just about anything old school corporate is ripe for disruption. (And ok, a lot of times they’re correct.) But there’s another reality as well. Large corporate does innovate. All the time. There’s a constant flow of new products. And those products come from doing world class core basic research from materials science to semiconductors to whatever. Product ideas also come from piles of customer service information, working with customers and hearing their problems, and so on. Startups likely have a lot to learn from such companies. Just as one of many examples, 3M is what most would consider to be a fairly old guard manufacturing company. Yet, they’re increasing R&D spend to 6% of revenue in 2017. (See Forbes: R&D: One Of The Driving Factors Behind 3M’s Growth.)
3M actually invented the Vitality Index to use as a KPI, and it measures the percentage of sales that are coming from new products. What is “new” in terms of a product and how long something is new might be debatable and different by company. But assume we’re talking about at least a material improvement and within three years. What’s 3Ms current number? It’s a bit over 30% in 2015. I’d argue that in this case, 3M is definitely innovating! Are you? Really? What’s your vitality calculation look like? Don’t have one? Figure it out. If you’re in single digits that’s maybe a problem.
What about you? Are you really innovating? Minor “new and improved” changes are probably not going to take you to the next $100M or beyond. Or maybe they will if your volume is high enough. But will what you’re doing be enough to hold back a true disruptor? Are you listening carefully enough to get a sense that something might be changing in your customers’ needs? Are you trying to do the hard work of changing cultural DNA to include innovation? Or do you have an elite innovation team somewhere? If a team, are they able to get anything done? Or do they face overwhelming pushback everywhere in the organization?
It’s possible you have “Innovation” on some business cards. And a few consultants training some special teams. But if new products or services aren’t being pushed out within months or if none of them are making inroads, chances are you’re not getting new things done very well just yet. This could have a triple negative effect: 1) Cost of the effort resulting in nothing; possibly not even much learning in terms of failure, 2) negative momentum in the marketplace, 3) a feeling that nonetheless you’re doing something even though motion certainly doesn’t equal progress.
Event Web Sites & Postings – Best Practices
Planning an Event? Great. I’m sorry to say I can’t help you much with the event itself. What I perhaps can help you with is avoiding some major mistakes with your online presence. During a recent project, I’ve had occasion to look at a lot of events sites. And I’ve come to realize that there’s way too many folks out there damaging their prospects. Starting with the obvious; make sure to communicate the What/When/Where asap! Amazingly, many just don’t do this. [Read more…]
Product Manufacturer Marketing via Digital – Challenges & Practices
In some of my past work, I’ve help lead product teams or design sites for various types of direct selling of products. And a few past posts discuss some aspects of ecommerce. But you know what? Ecommerce in some ways just isn’t that hard. Yes, it has its many complexities and there’s all kinds of technology coming out all the time to help from the top of the funnel through the bottom and ongoing support, etc. Still, what you’re left with – when you get done with multi-channel attribution, multivariate testings of every element on a detail page, etc. – is a fairly simple binary thing: A prospective customer bought from you or not. And you should have the data to know that. Also, ideally, some direct and inferential knowledge as to where in the sales funnel you’ve lost shoppers along the way. [Read more…]
Finding Web Page Publish Dates When Not Displayed-Part-2
Welcome to Part 2 of Finding Web Page Publish Dates when they’re not displayed on a page. Why would you care? Well, you have your reasons. Please see Part 1 of this topic to get a sense of why we’re bothering to look at this stuff.
In any case, continuing then…
- See if images have a date stamp.
- Click on an image or right click and open in a new window. See if the URL has a date stamp on it.
- A more extreme option might be to look at image info to see if there’s EXIF data in the image with a date. This doesn’t necessarily tell you much as the image could have been taken any time. Maybe it’s years old stock photography.
- Try Google’s Structured Data Tool.
- The tool is to help web site creators validate data within their pages. But it can also be used for discovery.
Finding Web Page Publish Dates When Not Displayed Part 1
In an earlier post, I expressed by own annoyance when certain types of sites choose to not display publish dates on their web pages. And how this is especially annoying when it’s an article that presumes to be talking about current statistics or other aspects where knowing the date context is useful. My goal in that post was to convince any publishers who might happen across the article as to the value of including the date. (Here’s the link to: Should You Put Dates on Blog Posts and Articles?)
This blog is mostly geared towards the Product/Business side of things. But today, it’s more for end users, whom of course may be business users with the need or just desire to find publish dates of content. I’d like to try to offer web users, surfers, researchers, whatever your self-identifying characteristic may be, some techniques to try to find content publish dates when they’re not clearly provided. These methods are not necessarily accurate, precise, or at all reliable. But they may be all you’ve got.
Why does this matter? Well, it might not. The assumption here is that there are certain types of content, (business research for example), where knowing the date is important enough to warrant the effort to look into the publish date, and possibly the last modified date. [Read more…]
Should You Put Dates on Blog Posts and Articles?
This is an old argument. Which I had hoped was mostly coming down on the side of keeping dates in, even though there are allegedly still potentially SEO benefits to leaving them out due to Google’s “Freshness Algorithm.” Supposedly, this was adjusted sometime around 2015 to fix this problem. (The problem being people playing SEO games with content publish dates regardless of impact on end user value.) One recent research task I was performing landed me on a variety of blog and lower end news sites that had chosen to not put visible publish dates on their articles. (We’ll leave aside the old issue of just what is ‘blog’ vs. ‘news’ site.) So I looked into this a bit and it seems there’s still info out there suggesting lack of dates is a good idea. Maybe it is in some special cases. But I think mostly not; at least from a user perspective.
This is a User Experience issue that screams, “I don’t care about users’ needs.” If you’re a Product person or Publisher that’s running a site where you’ve chosen to not display the publish date, please take moment to consider the following… [Read more…]
Any Useful Tech from the Advertising Industry’s Toilet Bowl of Fraud?
Right, wrong or otherwise, online technology innovations were – and are – sometimes driven by pornography, (See PORN: The Hidden Engine That Drives Innovation In Tech), gambling (See VR is a smart bet for the future of gambling), and crime in general.
Leaving aside moral judgements on those industries, they’re generally considered on the seedier side of business in general even if they’ve become more mainstream. I recall early in the digital business, (around mid 1990s), there were some companies that just didn’t want business from such industries more due to a higher incidence of fraud and such more so than any other reasons. Over time, of course, ad fraud has become more prevalent everywhere. It seems everyday there’s something about ad fraud in at least on of my industry news feeds. I’m starting to wonder what – if any – spinoff benefits there might be from AdWars. Pick a study, any study, and you’ll find ad fraud to be in the billions of dollars. Here’s just a small sample…
- SlideShare – State of digital ad fraud 2017 by Augustine Fou
- Businesses could lose $16.4 billion to online advertising fraud in 2017: Report
- The Bot Baseline: Fraud in Digital Advertising 2017 Report
- Adweek’s Ad Fraud Section
- ‘Biggest Ad Fraud Ever’: Hackers Make $5M A Day By Faking 300M Video Views
Amazon Eats Whole Foods
So if you’re a Digital Product Manager and you’re looking at that Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, are you asking some questions? Such as…
- “What’s Amazon’s strategic imperative here?”
- “How might this affect my business and do I need to do anything differently?”
- “Even if this move doesn’t appear to directly impact my business, will there be cascade effects through the marketplace that will eventually change something to which I’ll need to respond?
I’ve seen a lot of digital ink spilled on the whys of the Amazon/Whole Foods deal. It makes sense for anyone working in digital to be looking at this and considering the strategic implications. And while we don’t know exactly what’s on Jeff Bezos’ mind, this article Amazon’s Whole Foods Strategy: It’s Not What You Think from Forbe’s Jason Bloomberg is the best survey of possible strategic imperatives I’ve seen yet.
There just a couple items Jason doesn’t cover that I’d add: [Read more…]