Back in the saddle

The news was announced today that I’ve joined Naverus as Chief Marketing Officer.  Naverus designs and deploys high-precision, highly efficient flight paths for airlines.  It’s a little hard to explain the business to those not in the airline industry (I’m working on that) but suffice it to say that Naverus saves airlines fuel on every flight.  With oil hitting almost $139 per barrel today, that’s an exciting place to be.

 

This blog has been quiet for awhile, but I plan to re-activate it as I begin the journey at Naverus.

In honor of my mother

My mom Ella Hall died of lymphoma in 1975.  She was 53, the age I will reach this year.  So on Sunday, to honor her memory, I did the Big Climb here in Seattle, which is a fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and involves climbing the stairwell in Columbia Center, Seattle’s tallest building – 69 flights, 1311 stairs.  My time was 20 minutes, 6 seconds, which is by no means a record breaker but very satisfying to me.  More importantly, through sponsorships, my climb has thus far raised $3,990 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  My great thanks to those of you I hit up for this cause; you have been exceedingly generous.  Now I’d love to break through the $4,000 mark by the April 4 deadline.  If you’d like to contribute, you can do it very easily online at my personal Big Climb sponsorship site. 

Smarter or dumber than I was in high school?

A couple of weeks ago I signed up to receive The Official SAT Question of the Day via email.   It’s a lot of fun.  And it has confirmed what I pretty much knew to be true already – if you don’t use it, you lose it.  When I took the SATs in high school my score was pretty decent. Most pertinently, my math and verbal scores were almost identical. 

Now most of the math questions seem impossibly difficult.  Two recent examples:

What is the volume of a cube with surface area 54x²?

or

A woman drove to work at an average speed of 40 miles per hour and returned along the same route at 30 miles per hour. If her total traveling time was 1 hour, what was the total number of miles in the round trip?

(didn’t I learn how to solve that second one in 6th grade?)

In contrast, the language ones seem exceedingly simple.  I haven’t missed one yet.  Two recent examples:

Part of the following sentence is underlined; beneath the sentence are five ways of phrasing the underlined material. Select the option that produces the best sentence. If you think the original phrasing produces a better sentence than any of the alternatives, select choice A.

Since William the Conqueror in 1066, every British sovereign has been crowned in Westminster Abbey except Edward V and Edward VIII, neither of them were crowned.

A.           neither of them were

B.        neither were

C.       neither of whom was

D.       with neither being

E.        with neither who had been

or

The alarm voiced by the committee investigating the incident had a ——- effect, for its dire predictions motivated people to take precautions that ——- an ecological disaster.

A.           trivial . . prompted

B.        salutary . . averted

C.       conciliatory . . supported

D.       beneficial . . exacerbated

E.        perverse . . vanquished   

So some days I feel really smart and other days not so.  But it’s fun to compare my performance against others and also to track my cumulative score.  I recommend it. 

Why marketing agencies need clients (besides the obvious)

As a group, ad agencies and design firms have among the worst web sites of any category of company.  I realize that’s a gross generalization but it is true much more often than not.  I know because I visit a lot of agency web sites in search of resources for my clients.   

The most egregious missed opportunity:  The number one thing a prospective client wants to see at an agency’s web site is examples of their work.  Yet, way too often the portfolio is unorganized and hard to view.  Check out Publicis’ web site to see just one example — what I think of as the “filmstrip approach.” You have to scroll sequentially through the myriad panels of individual images, most of which do not make sense out of context.   Yes, you can click on any frame to see more but the individual images don’t tell you enough to even know who the client is most of the time.   

The problem, I’ve concluded, is that when agencies develop their own web sites there is one essential piece of the equation that’s missing – the client.  The client is the one who insists that the creative work serve a purpose, the one who measures each creative concept against an articulated strategy.  What I too often see in these sites is creativity run amok, cleverness for its own sake that makes me think less of the agency instead of more, even from agencies that otherwise do great work.   

I used to use a creative firm’s web site as a litmus test for the quality of their work, but I’ve abandoned that notion because I’ve found there isn’t a strong correlation.  And I’ve resisted the temptation to link to many of these sites for the exact reason that I do work or will work with lots of these folks.  What I do, is point out to my clients that they play as critical a role in creative work as their agencies do.  To get great work, you need both.

Throwing the baby out with the bath water

From today’s NYT:  In reply to a blogger’s complaint about a current Target ad, Target sent an email to the blogger that said “Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets.”  (emphasis mine). 

Wow!  The notion that any company has the chutzpah to completely disregard a major communications channel takes my breath away.  I’m not commenting on how seriously they should take ShapingYouth.org, the founder of which sent the complaint — I don’t anything about that particular blog, though I’d guess they’ve had record traffic today.   

I do know that “conversational marketing” is the most fundamental shift in marketing that’s happened during my career.  To eliminate all blogs – one of the major manifestations of conversational marketing — from consideration, with the arrogant-sounding, broad-brush, across-the-board statement that Target used makes me wonder what they’re doing over there in the marketing department.  (Jeez guys, at least don’t say it that way, even if that’s what you’re doing.)

Figuring out how to “participate” with the blogosphere is hard.  It requires resources and it’s messy because there’s no control on the number or quality of bloggers.  It requires a willingness to slog through a lot of meaningless drivel to make sure you don’t miss the important stuff and to engage on some issues that normally wouldn’t get your attention. 

When giving credit, get it right

Mitch Kapor, in Jim Fallow’s blog, has weighed in on who did what back in the early days of spreadsheets.  While I gave him credit for being the first to adapt the spreadsheet to the IBM PC, Mitch points out that both VisiCalc and MultiPlan (Microsoft’s first spreadsheet product) were available for the IBM PC before 1-2-3 shipped in January 1983.  He’s right of course and I should have remembered that. Thanks to Jim for straightening that out.

Dan Bricklin and  Bob Frankston’s distinction stands:  they invented VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet product for personal computers and one hell of a killer app.

Give credit where credit is due

In the category of “this really bugs me.”  In his NYT tech column today, G. Pascal Zachary credits Mitch Kapor with inventing the spreadsheet.  Specifically he says: 

“While at the Lotus Development Corporation, Mr. Kapor created another such “killer app,” or application: the spreadsheet for the PC.”

He is just plain wrong.

That distinction goes to Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the inventors of VisiCalc for the Apple II, which was singlehandedly responsible for moving the Apple II into widespread business use.  Lotus’ 1-2-3 was notable as the first spreadsheet on the IBM PC.  It propelled PCs even more into the mainstream of business and that was a big deal but not close to the level of innovation in the original invention. 

I know this first hand.  I was one of the original editors for Computing Retailing magazine when VisiCalc was introduced (yes I know this dates me).  Much later, Dan, Vern Raburn, Tom Byers and I started Slate Corp., one of the early efforts at software for the pen interface.  Bob Frankston joined us there soon after and I have very fond memories of working with both Dan and Bob.

Just stay home?

I’ve started following more closely efforts to reduce airline greenhouse emissions so today’s story that Virgin Atlantic will test fly an airliner powered by biofuel generated caught my attention.  My local paper The Seattle Post Intelligencer gave this a lot of ink, as did the Dot Earth blog in the New York Times. 

My increased interest follows my recent epiphany that air travel is the single largest contributor to my personal carbon footprint.  I found this out when I recently calculated my footprint using two different free online calculators:  Carbon Footprint and TerraPass.  While the results were somewhat different (accounted for, presumably, by differences in inputs as well as calculation assumptions), the conclusion about air travel was startlingly clear.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  I put about 6,000 miles on my car each year, yet I fly, by Terra Pass’s calculations, more than 46,000 miles between regular business travel, two trips to Atlanta to see family each year, plus one international trip just for the fun of it.  Holy mackerel!  So much for my puny efforts to walk more and stop using disposable water bottles. 

I applaud Richard Branson’s high-profile efforts.  He has pledged billions of dollars to find energy sources for transportation that don’t contribution to global warming (and presumably DO contribute to oil independence).  There’s tremendous controversy about the viability of biofuels of course with a sister story in the NYT today about banning some biofuels in Europe.  But at least he’s trying. 

In the meantime, airlines and manufacturers are scrambling to increase the fuel efficiency of their existing fleets – economically motivated by oil at $90 barrel plus.  That’s great news for my friends at Naverus, whose technology lets airlines save fuel by flying highly efficient routes.

Wikia and Big Think: Contrasts in user-generated content concepts

The New York Times today featured articles on two nascent web sites: Wikia Search and Big Think.

There’s an intrinsic marketing problem in launching any site built around user-generated content:  The site is useful only once there’s lots of user-generated content, which is really hard to get until you have lots of users, which you achieve by getting lots of press coverage for your new site.  But of course, the PR drives people to a bare bones site that doesn’t showcase the site’s vision very well.  The more interesting question is whether the core concept will be compelling once the site is well populated.  In this case, I think there’s one potential winner and one site that’s missing the mark.

First a little background:

Wikia Search (by Wikia, the for-profit sister organization of Wikipedia) launched the alpha of its search engine today. The idea behind Wikia is laudable – it will rely on the user community to fine-tune search results by allowing users to rate search results for quality and relevance.  To his credit, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales admits that people using the search engine “should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a ‘Google-quality search engine.’” Read the article. 

The Times also featured a large article on Big Think – a kind of YouTube for intellectual ideas.  It features video interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, broken down into short snippets on various topics.  Users can post comments, creating an online debate, and also post their own original ideas. 

Of the two sites, Wikia Search has much less value as of today – the search results are laughable and the features to allow users to refine the content aren’t really there.  Yet I can easily see its potential. 

Big Think worked diligently to pre-populate its site with interviews of intellectuals and celebrities ranging from John McCain to Calvin Trillin, to Alan Dershowitz.  But I have a much harder time ever seeing it succeed as founder Peter Hopkins envisioned it:  “a web site that could do for intellectuals what YouTube did for bulldogs on skateboards.”  The sad truth that is that most people are pretty darn dull when they’re giving a monologue to a camera.  The short snippets are banal and the longer pieces are downright tedious.  (No, I didn’t check out every single example — but enough)  The big opportunity is to figure out how to empower the user community’s version of Charlie Rose or James Lipton to truly engage with Alan Dershowitz or you or me.  Till then, Big Think will have a bigger problem than just chicken and egg.

On long poles, sportiness and belly buttons

Each Sunday, as those who know me well can attest, I read William Safire’s On Language column in the New York Times Magazine before pretty much anything else.  If you love language, you love his column.  This week I was surprised to see him credit “long pole in the tent” as the hot metaphor emerging in the new year.  But it all made sense once he identified the expression as an “aviation term.” 

It took me back to my days at Eclipse Aviation (2000-2005), where the long pole in the tent was a topic of regular discussion.  Among the various definitions Safire ponders, the one closest to our use was the one attributed to Tony Velocci editor of Aviation Week as “the thing among a list of tasks for a project that will take the longest to do, or alternatively, the thing that will ‘hold everything up.’” 

I’d come from the high-tech world into Eclipse, a company that was composed of equal parts computer industry folks and aviation world folks with a sprinkling of military veterans.  It was a fertile environment for cross-pollinization of metaphors and buzz words.  “Long pole in the tent” was the first of many expressions I picked up there. 

Two other favorites: 

Sporty – aggressive, optimistic.  A schedule could be sporty, as could a sales target or an aircraft spec.  I believe that Ken Harness, our VP Engineering, now COO North America of Diamond Aircraft, brought this phrase with him from a previous life at Sikorsky, though fellow Eclipsers should feel free to correct me. 

Belly button – responsible person.  As in “Who’s the belly button on this?”  Gene Garnes, our VP Program Management, contributed this expression and if memory serves correctly, he brought it from his former career in the U.S. Marine Corps. 

Put them all together and you get.  “X is the long pole in the tent for getting into flight test, which we’re planning for May.  That’s sporty!  Who’s the belly button on this?”