So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.
Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction.
This is the standard corporate line:
We had no idea this was going on.
It was the act of a single (often ‘low-level’) employee (the Lone Gunmen Theory of Corporate Deflection).
It is, in no way, a reflection of our organization.
The letter itself is pretty goofy. First, why say “may have posted”? If there was any ambiguity, the company’s president wouldn’t be writing a letter on Sunday afternoon. Additionally, the guy worked for Belkin. So to say that “Belkin does not participate in…unethical practices” is inaccurate. If a Belkin employee promotes Belkin unethically, in the course of his work day, with Belkin’s money, then there’s no question that Belkin does participate in those practices. And “great surprise and dismay” is protesting a bit too much, isn’t it?
In the so-called age of conversation, surely we’re all tired of companies acting unethically, and then deploying waffling, corporate language to deflect or evade blame.
I’ve been meaning to mention that Julie and I are teaching a couple of social media courses for UBC Continuing Ed. They’re each three-hour sessions over three Mondays, for a total of nine class hours. Here are the course descriptions:
Introduction to Social Media
This introductory course provides an overview of social media: its history, theories and the principles behind online communication. Through hands-on demonstration of a variety of social media tools including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, RSS, wikis and social bookmarking, you discover how these tools are shaping modern communication and how to incorporate them into everyday business and personal communications. Topics also include upcoming trends as well as predictions for what’s next in social media.
Social Media for Marketing
Adding social media into the marketing mix is increasingly important for marketers who want to establish an online presence for their businesses. In this course, you learn how to incorporate social media tools like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, social bookmarking and web monitoring tools into your overall marketing strategies and tactics. We discuss the dos and don’ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette. Students are asked to develop ideas for a social media marketing campaign of their own.
Friends Susie and Rochelle are also teaching courses in the program.
While in New York, I watched two movies at the Angelika Film Center. As usual, there were several ads before each movie. I saw this one twice:
If you watch it all the way through, you’ll see an artfully-shot piece that’s vaguely about making journeys. At the end, you’ll discover that it’s a commercial for Louis Vuitton.
Both times this ad was shown, the audience laughed when the Louis Vuitton brand was displayed at the end. As far as I can tell, they were responding to the disconnect between the high-minded content and the ordinary brand associated with it.
Calvin Klein and Laser Pointers
I was reminded of another ad, from years ago. It was, in my memory, one of the first ads before a movie that I ever saw. It featured a bunch of heroin chic kids moping around the house, and I distinctly remember that one young lad was toying with a laser pointing and aiming it at the camera.
The audience responded the same way at the end, with a kind of mocking contempt for the way their expectations were raised and then disappointed. Do you remember this ad? I tried to find it on the web, and even asked Metafilter, but no such luck.
In any case, it’s interesting to see these long-form commercials receive this particular response. Some of it, I’m sure, has to do with the fact that they’re being viewed in a social setting. The audience has a collective reaction as well as an individual one. And, obviously, we’re responding to the disconnect between the promise of the high-falutin’, edgy ad and the banality (or total irrelevance) of the brand they’re promoting.
Did you have the same reaction to this ad?
Incidentally, I’m not sure why I’m on an advertising kick at the moment. Don’t worry, it won’t last.
For at least a year, Barracuda Networks has been running large ads in Vancouver’s airport. I think I’ve seen their ads in other airports, but can’t confirm that (anybody?). I snapped a bad photo of one of several large display ads in the baggage collection area:
I’m always puzzled when I see these ads. Barracuda makes humming boxes that companies install in their networks to protect against email spam, viruses, phishing and so forth. This one costs about CAN $650:
The Barracuda Spam Firewall is compatible with all email servers and can fit into nearly any corporate or small business environment. It is used by small organizations with as few as 10 employees and large organizations with as many as 200,000 employees. A single Barracuda Spam Firewall handles up to 100,000 active email users. Multiple units can be clustered together for even greater capacity and high availability.
According to YVR, about 4.1 million international passengers passed through their gates in 2007. What tiny fraction of those passengers are potential buyers of Barracuda’s products?
The math gets murky, but according to BC Stats, there are about 81,000 technology workers in BC. Of course, not all of those are potential Barracuda customers. Plenty of those have no interest in the IT concerns of their companies. Others work for companies that have fewer than 10 employees. Let’s be generous and imagine that one third of these tech workers might possibly be or know somebody who could become a Barracuda customer.
That works out to 6 out of 1000 British Columbians who might be the target market for these ads. That fraction is certainly lower for foreign visitors. So–best case scenario–that ad might be relevant to one out of every 200 passengers. In truth, I suspect the number is closer to one in 1000.
And yet this is a sadly commonplace scenario. Most offline ads are incredibly dumb–they’re irrelevant to 99.9% of people who see them. Barracuda runs these ads as an act of faith. That one or two out of the madding crowd of visitors grabbing their bags might take an interest, and start on the long, treacherous path towards an IT purchase. And do the folks at Barracuda Networks have an accurate sense of the return on investment of these airport ads? What do you think?
On a vaguely related note, I saw an enormous barracuda in shallow water in Panama a couple of weeks ago. It was at least three feet long, and just cruising gently by in about three feet of water.
James likes to say that advertising is an act of faith. That’s generally true, and it’s a concept that I rail against whenever I speak to marketers. The ad industry of the twentieth century was built on a house of sand: immeasurability. Most of the time, most marketers failed to measure most of their advertising spend.
How effective is that full page ad in that industry magazine? How many people actually see that billboard? How many people actually pick up and read your brochure? These are questions that, too often, assaulted the faith of ad buyers everywhere.
Of course, all of that changed with the web, where we can measure the cost of every click, every conversion, every customer. It makes the newspaper ads and movie posters seem hilariously antiquated. When we talk to ad reps on behalf of our clients, we’ve always got an exact cost-per-conversion in mind. If they can’t offer services below that cost, we don’t advertise with them.
If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
We always discourage our clients from undertaking any advertising that they can’t measure. If they’re running offline ad campaigns, we urge them to have a unique call to action (such as a specific URL) so that they can track a campaign’s effectiveness.
We were in the McNally Robinson bookstore in Nolita yesterday. It’s an excellent store, full of great books. As it turns out, it’s Canadian-owned (other stores are in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto) and shares a space with a tea house owned by Moby.
Inside, I noticed a couple of book-selling ideas that were new to me. Neither was particularly original, I guess, but they struck me as clever ways to repackage the dead tree tome.
The first was a series of tree thematically-linked books, pre-wrapped as a ready-made-gift. Very handy for the lazy gift buyer (and wrapper):
I also spotted these attractively-packaged bundles of a DVD and the book on which it was based:
Neither idea is earth-shattering, but if I were a book seller these seem like to handy ways to sell more product.
This, incidentally, is an ancient but still very useful marketing tactic. I’ve written about it before: visit country X, steal clever ideas and implement them in country Y.
I enjoyed Paul Graham’s recent essay on corporate bureaucracy, and how there’s such a thing as too many checks and balances:
Checks on purchases will always be expensive, because the harder it is to sell something to you, the more it has to cost. And not merely linearly, either. If you’re hard enough to sell to, the people who are best at making things don’t want to bother. The only people who will sell to you are companies that specialize in selling to you. Then you’ve sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency. Market mechanisms no longer protect you, because the good suppliers are no longer in the market.
In thinking about my day job at Capulet, this article really resonated with me. We’ve been lucky to have no shortage of work over the past few years, and the luxury to be pickier about which clients we take on.
We’ve got sundry criteria for what makes an ideal client. One consideration is the formality of their processes.
When talking with a potential client, I start to worry if they ask for a lengthy, formal proposal. It’s rarely worth our time to write such proposals (and, you know, they’re no fun to do). More importantly, such a request tends to imply that the client may be running a formal and (at least in my experience) inflexible operation. That may work for them, but we like nimble, open minded clients.
Generally our proposed strategies can be summarized in a longish email message. If that, plus referrals to existing clients, isn’t satisfactory, we’ll often take a pass. This is why, for example, we’re not likely to get much work out of the Olympics.
Another sign of this issue is if they want us to talk to a half dozen people in an organization. If they’re not respectful of their own staff’s time, they’re unlikely to be mindful of ours.
As it happens, we’re running not one, not two but three contests (or, rather two contests and a survey) for clients at the moment. Let me run them down, in case they’re of interest:
Jiibe Connection - This is a fun video project for Jiibe, kind of eHarmony (or Lavalife, if you prefer) for jobs. It’s hosted on Strutta’s new contest platform, and Giant Ant Media made one of the videos. Watch the job seeker’s video, then each of the employer videos, and match the seeker with the appropriate employer. All of the employers are from Vancouver companies–you might recognize them. One participant will win an iPod Nano.
DreamBank’s Giving and Getting Survey - An 11-question survey about your gift giving and receiving practices. Again, there’s an iPod Nano up for grabs, or an equivalent donation to your DreamBank dream.
I’m currently writing the chapter on YouTube in our forthcoming social media marketing book. I’m puzzling over a pretty basic phenomenon of the new media world: the stealth marketing video. Common examples include:
Bike Hero - Recently revealed as promotion for Guitar Hero: World Tour.
The process usually goes like this: These videos are posted with only obscure or oblique references to the brands they’re promoting. They’re remarkable and amazing feats (either real or CGI) make then viral hits on YouTube. Sooner or later, the companies behind them disclose the videos’ true origins.
What Do The Brands Stand To Gain?
As in the case of the Cardo Systems video, the company sometimes replaces the video with a new one promoting their brand. Alternately, as in the Ray-ban video, they add a link to their website.
However, in other cases–Levis and Guitar Hero–there’s still no indication on the video page that the video isn’t a legitimate, user-generated and unaffiliated with a corporation.
So why bother? The only tangible, measurable result that I can think of is the free media the companies earn when they go public with the revelation. Of course, this only pays off if the video itself is a success. How many of these corporate stealth videos never get revealed because they only received 8700 views?
There’s considerable value in that earned media. However, this article indicates that “Bike Hero” required four weeks worth of production by an ad agency. That’s quite an expense for what I imagine to be fairly middling media exposure.
As far as I can figure, there isn’t much of a brand awareness gain. After all, the videos usually don’t promote specific brands–that only appears in the subsequent media coverage. And “Bike Hero” isn’t effective unless you’re already familiar with Guitar Hero, the game.
There’s also the question of possible damage to the brand when it’s revealed that the videos are, in fact, from lame corporations. I don’t think that matters very much in the fluid world of YouTube, but it’s worth considering.
For one of our clients, we’re doing an informal series of audio interviews with tech gurus and web geeks about how they manage and back up their digital life. There are various marketing angles on this little project, but one is search engine optimization.
The first interview was with man-about-the-web Chris Pirillo. We talked for about 15 minutes over a dodgy Skype line. I had it transcribed by one of our contractors, and it turned into 2500 words of text.
That’s 2500 words of relevant text that’s reasonably rich with keywords. Assuming a going low-end rate of $25 per blog post, and 250 words a post, that’s $250 of text for the price of transcription and, all-in, about an hour of my time.
Exploring My Transcription Options
Yesterday I did the second interview in the series with the incomparable Vanessa Fox. I figured I could get the transcription done for less money, and I didn’t want to torture our contractor. I started shopping around for options. I also asked on Twitter, and these were the options that I came up with. The interview is 18 minutes, so I’ll include the pricing for that duration where available (all amounts, presumably, are in US dollars):
CastingWords - Basically an administrative layer on top of Mechanical Turk (more on this later) - $27.50 for a six-day turnaround.
Escriptionist - $27.50 for a three to five day turnaround.
Podclerk - $22.50, they charge $0.75 a minute, but have a 30 minute minimum
Points West - Starts at $120 for an hour of audio. It’s unclear if there’s a minimum fee.
I decided to give Turk a try. It’s a little more work than just sending off the file to one of the aforementioned services, but I’ve always been charmed by Turk’s micro-task model. I divided the transcription into three six-minute chunks and posted the job. I offered $6 per chunk, or $1 per minute. I’m sure I could have gotten it done for less, but I’m looking for inexpensive, not cheap as humanly possible.
Mechanical Turk-Powered Transcription
It was mostly a success. The turn-around time was ridiculously quick. Despite my specifying a turnaround of a week being acceptable, I got all three transcriptions back in less than six hours. The quality seems excellent, though I don’t have a ton of experience with transcription to compare.
Despite my best efforts to ensure it didn’t happen, two workers transcribed the same section. Thus, I had to re-post a section to get complete results. And, of course, I have to paste the three chunks of text together and do some proofing. After Amazon’s fees, I paid $19.80 for 18 minutes of transcription.
Next time, I may just give CastingWords a try, as it would save me time and the difference in price is pretty marginal. There’s some interesting discussion on Andy’s blog about the ethics of pricing jobs on Turk. I was interested to learn that 75% of Turk workers are American, and that they have a variety of motivations for working on the service.
Posting Transcripts for Their SEO Benefits
I wondered on Twitter why more people don’t have their podcasts transcribed. The general response was that, for the hobbyist, it was too expensive. I guess it depends on if and how podcasters are monetizing their sites.
If you can get reasonably good transcription for $0.75 per minute, then you’ve got about 3700 words (my two transcriptions average out to 185 words a minute) to post on one or more pages for $15. Can you generate more than $15 from advertising on those pages over, say, two years? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s worth considering if you’re relying on advertising (and particular Google AdWords and the like) for revenue.
In any case, if they care one iota about SEO, a company has no excuses for not posting transcriptions of audio and video content. It’s not world-changing, but it’s another few steps in the marathon that is marketing.
UPDATE: Speaking of Mechanical Turk, Andy’s fruitful link blog points to the Turker’s Gospel, where Turk workers (’Turkers’) rewrite Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in their own words.
