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Egg On Your Book. Again

By
Steve Poppe
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As fast as Facebook is growing and as many smart decisions as it has made technologically, I am amazed by some of its miscues. The latest is to passively allow a research study of an unnamed East Coast college over Facebook. Conducted by Harvard and UCLA, this study will report on users’ social networking values, behaviors and attitudes. 
 
I work for a social computing property called Zude. Our reason for being is to promote user freedom, so internally we often find ourselves in discussions about what we should allow users to do on the site. We most always decide in favor of freedom. So, were this research project to take place on Zude, you would think I’d be okay with it. Wrong.
 
In my view the project should be allowed, but the users should be alerted they are being studied. Let them decide whether or not to participate. As far as I can tell from the press the Facebook study has received, the unsuspecting college students don’t know they are being monitored and that is an invasion of their privacy. 
 
Shopping malls let research people in to conduct research but you see them coming a mile away. Would they allow researchers in with surveillance cameras? I think not.
 
Facebook, college kids are your franchise. You have just found another way to piss them off.
 

Cap This!

By
Steve Poppe
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CapGemini is a very good IT Consulting company. A large chunk of its revenue is tied to outsourcing. I have had the pleasure of working for Cap as a marketing agent and they have always had a good product and a good strategic angle but their communications strategy, especially in the U.S., has faltered. It is nowhere more evident than in their latest outsourcing print ad campaign.
 
This stuff is “we’re here” advertising at it very worst. “We’re here” advertising explains what business you’re in and gives customers a way to get in touch. No selling. No art. No emotion.
 
In today’s ad, adjacent to a cartoon of a hotel employee dressed in desert fatigues collecting car keys from a couple getting out of a car is the headline “In our hands, your system will never get out of hand.” The metaphor, apparently, is “your car is in good hands, while in the hotel.”  OMG! The copy prattles on about outsourcing giving you the freedom to do what you do best, or some such nonsense.
 
I did some planning for the outsourcing group at Cap and they are way smarter than this. The top bosses may not be, but the line general certainly was. This is a disgrace. Who would want to outsource their business to a company who can’t communicate clearly.
 
In case anyone is reading the business press: Capgemini is in the outsourcing business. Woo hoo!
 

Old School Boards Vs…

By
Steve Poppe
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Kids growing up in the U.S. today are listening to rock and roll and so are their parents. That cultural divide is behind us. But a divide still exists in the area of technology and media consumption.
 
It is for this reason that boards of directors at large consumer companies need to begin including younger blood. Most boards need at least one 20-something member to add a more contemporary worldview. And they need to listen to them. The time has long passed when women and people of color were added to the “wild eyebrow” set, now it’s time to get younger.
 
If kids in their twenties are capable of building new media empires with billion dollar valuations, I figure they are old enough to sit at the table with 20th century captains of industry.
 

The Wall Street Journal or The Journal?

By
Steve Poppe
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0
I’m a brand guy. I like to know what a brand stands for and what its mission is. If people on the inside know what a brand stands for, presumably people on the outside will too. The Wall Street Journal has always stood for financial reporting and analysis. Rupert Murdoch, as it was reported in the New York Times this morning, 
 
has been pondering upping the content on hard-hitting news and political reporting in the Wall Street Journal when the News Corp ownership becomes formal. Indeed, he is considering the removal of the Marketplace section of the paper next year.   Marketing is a component of financial news — certainly a driver of it, in many cases — so that section of the paper is on message and on brand. Replacing it with something more general, in my mind is a mistake. Competing with the New York Times and other more generalist media properties will water down the WSJ mission, also a mistake. Mr. Murdoch’s new plans might make the “Journal” (yes, there have even been discussions about removing “Wall Street” from the title ) more profitable near-term, but it is not be a good long-term solution. 
 
Should they to move this route, in will step The Financial Times to fillthe void and the Journal will get really dinged. Stay tuned.
 

Boeing, Boeing, Gone.

By
Steve Poppe
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Are you one of those people who really, really loves to fly? One of those people who has never had the thought that the only things keeping you from free fall at 30,000 feet are a bunch of nuts, bolts, wires and metal? If you say “yes” then read on. 
 
Following are some heart warming quotes from the lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal about the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner. This may be one of those cases where it would have been better for Boeing to have gone all George Bush and keep this information from the public. (Please note the use of some of some very special verbs and adjectives.)
 
“Boeing Scrambles To Fix Problems With New 787. Hostage to Suppliers. Fuel-sipping jet. Build much of the plane from carbon-fiber plastic instead of aluminum. The first jet in Boeing’s 91-year history designed largely by other companies. To lower the $10 billion or so it would cost to develop the plane solo, Boeing authorized a team of parts suppliers to design and build major sections of the craft, which it planner to snap together at it Seattle-area factory. The supplier problems ranged from language barriers to snafus that erupted when suppliers themselves outsourced chunks of work. The first Dreamliner to show up at Boeing’s factory was missing tens of thousands of part….”
 
Stewardess, another beer please?  
 

Badvertising

By
Steve Poppe
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Is it possible to strengthen a commitment to generate value and sustainability by changing a brand? Yes, it is possible.
 
CVRD is now Vale. This new name speaks to the company’s globalization and mineral diversification today. However, our values and policies have not changed; our commitment to ethics, corporate social responsibility, discipline in capital allocation and risk management remains strong and steadfast. The constant quest to transform mineral resources into essential elements present in the lives of its communities is Vale’s passion. Learn more about Vale at www.vale.com
 
This has to be one of my favorite headlines ever typed (see bold.) Written would be an overstatement. The ad ran today in the Wall Street Journal and must have cost in excess of $100,000. I clicked though on the URL for giggles and the homepage was in another language. Quite fitting. 
 

TV is for Geezers.

By
Steve Poppe
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Want a snapshot of U.S. media habits? Broadcast TV is for Geezers. Cable is for kids. Magazines are for women/girls. DVDs are for teens and college kids. CDs are for suburbanites. Music downloads are for the hip-hop crowd. And Box Office Movies are for the young and old with a big donut hole in the middle.  
 
So says Nielsen Media Research, M:Metrics, Screenline, Internet Movie Database, Mediaweek and Nielsen SoundScan/Billboard.
 
Did someone turn off the radio?
 
 

The strawberry shortcake effect.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

 

I’m not sure if this is premeditated, but the Writer’s Guild of America strike is going to profoundly affect the future of television. Don’t click — it’s not what you think. With scripted shows receding into the sunset (unless the strike is settled), reality shows will step in to fill the void.  Reality shows are already a bit too numerous, so with their frequency turned up viewers will become over-sated and the genre will lose its appeal.
 
As a kid, I remember eating strawberry shortcake until I couldn’t see any more. I got so sick I wasn’t able to go nose in until my 20s. That’s what’s going to happen to reality TV if we get too much. The strawberry shortcake effect.   
 

Gawker With a Capitalist G.

By
Steve Poppe
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Gawker is one of my favorite blogs. It’s the reason I love blogs. Attitude is what makes Gawker work for me. It speaks to me in a voice I rarely hear anywhere else.

Today, its managing editor Choire Sicha and two key writers left. Their gripe? They don’t like the new compensation system that will pay them based upon the number of page views their stories generate. They want to be paid by the post or, perhaps, by the hour. The pay-per-view approach, the departing writers say, will encourage them to be more competitive and outlandish. Hello? Have they read their own stuff? That’s what they do. 

 
I am very sorry to see them all go`and do hope the writing will not go so cartoonishly over the top it becomes unreadable, but the pay-per-view compensation system is here to stay. It’s the American way baby! 
 

Social networking vs. social computing.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Here’s the difference between social networking and social computing: The underlying premise of social networking is “help people make, keep and grow their circle of friends.” It enables the like-minded to find one another.   The whole Facebook Beacon thing, where users are alerted to the purchases of friends, is the latest example of an application built to keep friends networked.  Social computing, on the other hand, is less invasive.  Its reason for being is to assist users in the creation and posting of content, commerce, and art to the web.  It’s not about the “share” or the size of one’s friends list. 

 

I work for Zude, a social computing platform, so I’m biased.  But we provide tools – both advanced and rudimentary — that give people unprecedented freedom to be Web authors.  We don’t tell them what to post or with whom to share.  That’s up to them.  (You can certainly add contacts and doing messaging on Zude, but that’s not what keeps us up at night.)  

 

Developers of social networks spend their time trying to figure out ways to insinuate their products into users’ lives so they spend more time on the property.  Developers of social computing applications spend their time thinking up ways to make users more powerful Web authors.

 

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