Saw this on Designer-Daily.com. Wonder which came first: a timeless design or the discipline of constancy?
Filed under: Media, technology | Tags: Facebook, Nucleus Research, employee productivity
Companies lose 1.5 percent of productivity on average when employees can access Facebook during the work day, says a new report from Nucleus Research, a technology research consultancy.
Nucleus interviewed 237 randomly selected office workers about their Facebook use. Here are the findings:
- 77 percent of workers have a Facebook account.
- Nearly two-thirds access Facebook during working hours.
- 87 percent of them couldn’t give “a clear business reason” for using Facebook at work.
- The other 13 percent had legitimate reasons for accessing Facebook as part of their company’s social media programs.
- Those who access Facebook at work spend an average of 15 minute doing so each day.
- 6 percent of respondents said they use Facebook only at work, meaning they’ve built their entire Facebook profile on company time.
Some old research I found from 2007 claims almost half of all companies use firewalls to block employees’ access to Facebook. Apparently, people have found ways to circumvent company firewalls and get on Facebook, or else how could so many people be squandering work hours on the site?
While Nucleus’s Facebook research is certainly provocative, I would’ve liked to see more context around it. For instance, how much time do employees squander on personal phone calls? Or on lingering in the break room to discuss Top Chef Masters? (The Champions Round begins tonight!) On the flip side, it’d also be revealing to see how much “personal” time gets inadvertently sucked up by work. My suspicion is it all balances out in the end.
It’s likely that employees who get so caught up in Facebook that they don’t do their work are unmotivated for other reasons. After getting locked out of Facebook, these employees probably redirect the time they’d otherwise spend alone on the site to finding other employees to chat with – idling two people (or more) instead of just one.
Filed under: Media, technology | Tags: comScore, Nielsen, social media, Twitter
Since we’ve been blogging for more than a month, it’s probably time to talk about Twitter. After all, it broke the news of the earthquake in Sichuan, served as the Iranian protesters’ communication link to the world and proved Ashton Kutcher is (still) more popular than CNN. (As of today, Ashton has 2,966,965 followers to CNN’s 2,424,700.)
Twitter is one of the most popular sites on the web — and one of the fastest growing. Nielsen’s web traffic statistics once again ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in June, with usage skyrocketing 1,928% year-over-year, from one million unique visitors in June 2008 to 21 million unique visitors in June 2009.
Similarly, Nielsen’s main competitor, comScore (a client we helped to position in 2000) reported that Twitter finally cracked its list of the top 50 websites in June, with 20.1 million visitors that month.
There’s no doubting Twitter’s popularity and curiosity as a social phenomenon. The only doubt people seem to have is if and when Twitter will ever make money. Becoming profitable probably isn’t a problem so long as the site remains fun and sticky. I think of how I signed up for the enhanced version of Yahoo! Mail for $20(?) a year in 2004. I’ve never looked back. At some point, Twitter could launch a for-pay version of its service. $20 per year x 20 million users isn’t a trivial sum.
But money isn’t the most valuable or important thing about a site like Twitter. It’s valuable for the bonds you build, the enjoyment of reading a clever or funny tweet, the surprise of clicking on a link and stumbling on something relevant or new. It may not be productive in the economic sense, but it’s certainly productive in terms of aimless learning, aided discovery and pure, silly delight. So how do you put a worth on that?
Filed under: Leadership, branding, technology | Tags: Amazon, Apple, customer service, recruiting, Zappos
Amazon is buying Zappos for about $900 million. It’s the largest acquisition ever for Amazon. In a YouTube video about the deal, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says his company is buying Zappos for “its customer obsession.”
If you’ve ever bought anything from Zappos, you understand what he means. Zappos has earned the same customer service reputation in online retail as Nordstrom has among mall stores and the Four Seasons has among hotels.
Many people regard the idea of buying shoes without trying them on as a risky thing — almost like getting a mail-order bride. But Zappos eliminates the risk: if you don’t like the shoes you bought for any reason, it’s easy to send them back. Just reseal the box and call UPS to pick it up. Plus, with all the information listed about each shoe — 360-degree close ups, customer ratings and whether a shoe “felt true to size” — Zappos gives buyers confidence they won’t be disappointed.
Apple also tries to ensure good customer service at its Apple retail stores. Company recruiters look for prospective employees at other stores. When they meet store clerks who provide great customer service, they hand them this card:
Zappos and Apple both seem to understand, when it comes to employees, that it’s better to hire the right attitude and teach the skills than to hire the skills and teach the right attitude.
At the company level, I imagine the same holds true: it’s easier to acquire a strong customer brand and then grow the assets than to buy the assets and then grow a strong customer brand. As the former chairman of Quaker Oats, John Stuart, said more than 100 years ago: “If this business were split up, I would give you the land and bricks and mortar, and I would take the brands and trademarks, and I would fare better than you.”
Zappos fared very well by building its brand on strong customer service. Good for them.
Filed under: marketing, technology | Tags: customization, Galapagos Syndrome, innovation, Japan, mobile phone, Post Shredded Wheat, product development, telecom
Sharp's 912SH launched two years ago with GPS tracking, a bar-code reader, digital TV, credit card payment functions, video conferencing, a camera and facial recognition security features.
Here’s a problem you don’t see everyday. According to a New York Times article, Japanese mobile phone makers have products that are so innovative they’re practically unsellable. Both the wireless networks and the way people use mobile phones in Japan have become so advanced that Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic, Sharp and Toshiba are finding it impossible to export their high-tech handsets elsewhere.
The Japanese have coined a term for this domestic-market specialization: Galápagos Syndrome, a Darwinian reference to the fantastical species that evolved on the Galápagos Islands as adaptations to the unique ecosystem there. Galápagos Syndrome warns of the pitfalls of customization, which not only can increase product development costs, but can also reduce your customer base. Japanese mobile handset makers appear to have overcustomized, adapting products not just for the peculiarities of their domestic market, but also for the preferences of each mobile network operator.
In retrospect, Japanese handset makers are probably wishing they hadn’t segmented their user base quite as much and had taken a more global view of product development. Like the guy in the Post Shredded Wheat commercial, they should’ve put the “no” in innovation.
Filed under: Media | Tags: Dilbert, Michael Jackson, Parkinson's Law, The Office, Walter Cronkite
Parkinson’s Law, one of my favorite aphorisms, says, “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” This brilliant observation was made in 1955 by C. Northcote Parkinson, who could’ve given Dilbert’s Scott Adams or the writers of The Office a run for their money. In his classic book Parkinson’s Law: And Other Studies in Administration, Parkinson observed that the number of people employed within a bureaucracy rose by 5 to 7 percent each year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”
Today, there are many variations of Parkinson’s Law. Data expand to fill the space available for storage. Projects expand to fill the budget available to fund them. Software expands to fill the computing capacity available to run it.
In the past couple weeks, it seems media coverage of Michael Jackson has expanded to fill all the discretionary airtime previously filled by the Octomom, Jon & Kate, Brangelina and Lindsey Lohan. That’s a staggering amount of airtime, much of it wasted on pointless innuendos about MJ’s life and shameless speculation about his death. Contrasting the grotesque coverage of MJ’s death to the reverent handling of Walter Cronkite’s, I have to wonder, do the media create an enduring image of the man or does the man create an enduring media image?
Walter Cronkite died Friday evening at the age of 92. He represented an era of media that no longer exists: one in which most Americans relied upon a single broadcaster to relay the news of the world. Cronkite was viewed as “the most trusted figure” in America. It’s said that when he spoke out against our country’s continued involvement in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson told his aide, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” It’s unlikely that anyone in media will ever again achieve the renown and influence of Walter Cronkite.
And that’s the way it is.
Filed under: Oddities, branding, marketing | Tags: brand extensions, Burger King, Cheetos, Ursula LeGuin, Villeroy & Boch
Ursula LeGuin, a well regarded sci-fi and fantasy author, is releasing a new book in September. Barnes & Noble sent me an e-mail about the book, because I’ve bought her books before. But the new LeGuin book isn’t what I was expecting. It’s called Cat Dreams, and it appears to be a 32-page children’s book about — what else? — sleeping cats.
It’s commendable that Ms. LeGuin is extending her personal brand at the age of 79. Perhaps the cat thing should’ve been predictable, but it’s a brand extension I didn’t see coming.
Here are some other surprising brand extensions I’ve noticed lately.
Villeroy & Boch, the company we know in the U.S. for fancy china and tableware, also makes toilets under the same brand name. And urinals. You see them primarily in Europe — in fact, in almost every rest stop between Paris and Bordeaux. To clear up any confusion, V&B Omnia is a line of bathroom ceramics. V&B Olbia is a pretty, white china pattern.
Cheetos Balm is a lip balm that tastes and smells like its extruded-cornmeal cousin. I think the value proposition is it lets you savor the scent of fake, orange cheese without staining yourself with fake, orange cheese. Or maybe it’s just to show your friends how “dangerously cheesy” you are.
Obama Fingers are a fried chicken snack that comes with a tub of curry dip. A German fast food company introduced it in March. A representative for the company said in a Guardian article that the product “was supposed to be a homage to the American lifestyle and the new U.S. president.” Nice.
Burger King has stretched its brand in all sorts of crazy directions lately. The brand extension most widely panned is BK’s line of T-shirts and sleepwear. If you can get past the off-putting picture of the king, the BK logo does serve a practical purpose. It’s like a label of origin — not too different from a “Made in China” sticker. When people see your physique, they’ll know just where you got it.
Filed under: Media, communication, marketing | Tags: bloggers, consumer protection, endorsements, Federal Trade Commission, FTC, New York Times, testimonials
A couple interesting articles about online media ran in the New York Times.
In one article, researchers at Cornell found traditional media outlets typically broke news 2.5 hours faster than blog sites during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign. While most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, the study found that 3.5 percent of story lines started in the blogosphere and were picked up later by traditional media. The Cornell researchers also identified a few blog sites — led by Hot Air and Talking Points Memo — that were often quickest to pick up news stories that eventually gained wider media attention.
Another Times article looked at the changing nature of consumer testimonials, questioning the ethics of bloggers who write favorable reviews for products they’ve been paid to evaluate. The article also raised questions about “sponsored posts” on Facebook and Twitter accounts. The concern is, many consumers don’t realize the social networking and blog sites they follow may have been compensated in cash, trips or valuable merchandise for endorsing certain products. Because online word-of-mouth marketing tactics are evolving so quickly and aren’t well understood by the general public, the Federal Trade Commission is considering revising its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. It’s still early in the process, but the first round of “public” comments are already in. Unsurprisingly the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the American Advertising Federation are against the FTC’s proposed changes, which they characterize as “the most sweeping changes in testimonial advertising in 30 years.” In their official comment to the FTC, the AAAA and AAF write:
While we appreciate the Commission’s desire to protect consumers from deceptive advertising, there is little evidence that consumers are deceived by testimonials or endorsements, whether in the traditional media or new media. In the absence of such evidence, the overly-broad amendments would not appear to be warranted.
What do you think? Do more stringent disclosure rules need to be put in place regarding sponsored “testimonials” from Joe Blogger?
Filed under: Media, Oddities, branding, marketing, technology | Tags: Electrolysis, Firefox, Mozilla, Polish language, Sci Fi Channel, Syfy
Mozilla, the org that evolved from Netscape, is rewriting its popular Firefox browser to take full advantage of multicore processors. (For the unconverted, Firefox is an open-source alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It’s favored by Linux users, web-surfers in Europe — particularly Scandinavians for some reason — and has almost 25 percent of the browser market. Unlike IE, Firefox rarely ever crashes, and it’s terrific and everyone should download it for free here.)
Clearasil and Ivory Soap should be lining up their ad buys on Syfy Polska.
But I digress.
Firefox project for multiprocessing has been dubbed Electrolysis. Maybe the Mozilla folks are thinking of the chemical process that’s used to make aluminum, but the rest of us are thinking of singeing human hair with electricity. Ouch.
Is that what Mozilla’s developers are expecting it to feel like when they have to rewrite all that code?
Tracking back to our blog from this past Tuesday, it seems that the Sci Fi Channel’s new name, Syfy, has unsavory meanings in Polish. It means something along the lines of “filth,” “crap,” “junk” or “pimple.” The Polish-speaking population is pretty small — only 38.1 million in Poland and maybe a few million expats — but still. Maybe Syfy execs will exempt Sci Fi Channel Polska from rebranding.
Finally, on the theme of questionable brand names, Russian energy giant Gazprom started a joint venture with a Nigerian natural gas company. The name for the new venture is Nigaz.
All of this just goes to show the importance of vetting brand names with international audiences, particularly in our increasingly interconnected, global economy.
