I read yet another article in the Wall Street Journal this past week about cable customers up in arms about their online behavior being tracked even though they would remain technically anonymous. Not sure what the big deal is if they can remain truly anonymous. They would essentially see your online shadow, would allow you to turn it on or off and would enable on-demand personalized marketing. I...
I went to see Wall•E with my three year old (almost 4) on opening day. When we bought our tickets the girl handed us the commemorative piece of schwag you see just the the left. It is a piece of rigid board with a small watch made of inexpensive rubber attached. When she handed this I thought to myself that it was a cool little thing to give to a child and that someday it could be worth a lot...
I have been thinking about how product placement might play itself out in a mobile video environment. Screen size is the obvious limitation and I’m not convinced that short-from video will be the primary form of accepted video. I have mentioned in the past some of the amazing things that Japan has done on the mobile phone and the potential future that mobile discovery holds (which is...
I have been talking about the Internet as the delivery mechanism for entertainment, information and communication. I now also think of these as the core of the Corporate Social Graph (CSG). But I also I recently realized that I had left out one of, if not the most important elements that the Internet affords, which is interaction. When I talk about interaction within this context, I’m...
For those of you keeping score, my first four posts focused on the kinds of relationships businesses can have with their clients online. These relationships in my mind went from the as shallow as possible to as deep as possible. We started with the concept of findability and the fact that the Internet is a purely on demand medium and then went on to recommendation which is arguably one of the...
I recently had the good fortune to sit down with Eric Lyon, one of the founders of Scapegoat to talk about their goals, their brand and their desire to return to niche. Eric along with Jason Olden have been consultants under the name Sid Factor Seven since 2002 and have worked with companies such as Nike, North Face, Camelbak and Specialized. Eric used to work for Adidas and I asked him what was...
I have been thinking about the social graph concept quite a bit lately and decided to find out exactly what a social graph is. What I finally settled on was the “official definition”: Social Graph is the network of connections that exist through which people communicate and share information. Applications like photos and events are examples that leverage the social graph. Dave...
The Super Bowl was yesterday and about half of the way through one of the commercial breaks I realized that I was watching with a new set of eyes. I usually watch the big game and Fox did an amazing job as they have for several years presenting the game in the context of America and being an American. Kind of ironic if you’re Pats fan given the outcome of the game. The new eyes had to do...
The first time I saw Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was in concert for the Pretty Hate Machine tour in 91. It was at the Gothic Theater in Denver and I remember thinking at the time as he swung out over the audience on a long rope; ” if he falls, they will eat him alive”. That is they type of fervor (almost rhymes with Reznor) that NIN has always elicited. A recent article in Wired...
My last two posts I have covered the first two steps in creating deep customer relationships; findability and recommendation. I would now like to turn my attention to the next step which is transparency. In their groundbreaking work, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger proposed that businesses behaving as walled gardens and giving their customers whatever the...