Ideas, insights and inspirations.

I just finished Numerati by Stephen Baker. Enjoyed the book with chapters on how Numerati are watching, monitoring, and modeling people as workers, shoppers, voters, bloggers, terrorists, patients, and lovers. Not much here if you are interested in B2B space, but I met two people recently who I would classify as B2B Numerati. The first one works for a GE team, which monitors data streaming from worldwide turbine installations, and generates maintenance alerts and senses imminent GE engine and turbine failures. If you think that is cool, I met another person who works for Industrial Scientific who generates maintenance alerts and senses imminent failures of gas detection sensors in mission-critical applications. Love to hear any B2B Numerati stories and examples that you would like to share.

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In this day and age of the algorithms, everyone including me is gaga over algorithms. However, algorithms have limits, especially in matters of inalienable rights such as healthcare, education, liberty and justice. For instance, if algorithms are applied to increase healthcare insurance costs for select individuals/organizations based on sex, age, past use of health benefits, something has gone wrong. This is where ethics need to kick in to ensure that algorithms aren’t used to impinge on fundamental inalienable rights of individuals. Also, if biometric algorithms are used to discriminate based on race, religion and my social networks, I believe that we will have moved from a civil society to a draconian soul-less society.

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What happens when the economy goes south? Well, the obvious stuff — as consumers and as businesses we buy less, postpone major purchases, waste less, and try to develop a sense of financial aikido to defend ourselves from an unforgiving market. One of the things we get really good at is stretching dollars by keeping more things inside our own house, our own business, our own life. My experience may be similar to yours: I try to do more things myself, which means I have more things to get done. And on an already full to-do list, that’s a challenge at home, and at work. The popularity of the GTD (Getting Things Done) system authored by David Allen in his book and website, tells me that people are feeling the press of lotsa things to get done, and not enough time to do it all. If you’re a marketer, the good news here may be that if you can help … Continue reading

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Well, “nag” is a strong word, but here’s an interesting site that will keep you electronically engaged. A friend of mine pointed me to I Want Sandy (www.iwantsandy.com), a web assistant . Sandy is very nice, for a figment of my digital imagination, and sends timely, pleasant reminders to my email inbox and/or my mobile phone. It would be nice if Sandy had a built-in text-to-speech app that could say, “excuse me Abu (or even, “Hey, baby” if I want to get digitally intimate) but here are some things you need to take care of…” but for now it’s nice just to have someone who cares enough to keep me on track. The next-gen part of it all is of course, when can I get Sandy to actually do the things for me (like automatically pay the bills I specify on a date when I’m certain the money will be there, as opposed to the extant system of being date-specific), … Continue reading

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A million years ago (well, 1978) I was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York enjoying an exhibition put together by then-curator John Szarkowski entitled “Mirrors and Windows.” The thesis of the exhibition was that photography was either a mirror of what was around the photographer or a window into the photographer’s or subject’s reality or worldview. It was an extraordinary exhibition of some of the greatest photographs by some of the greatest photographers (Dorthea Lange, Gene Smith, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander; you get the idea). As I check popurls every morning (one of my morning rituals), I’m always a little taken aback by some of the images on the flickr feed. Many are very good photographs, but the thing that often strikes me is how intimate some of them are, and I’m not speaking just conceptually. Some of them are almost exhibitionistic; many are striking windows into a person’s life. Which makes me wonder: is this part … Continue reading

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Back when my day job was advertising, the Holy Grail of advertising was WOM: word of mouth. If your spot or print ad could generate positive WOM (“buzz” in those days was something only insects did. By the way, this was only 8 years ago), it was golden. I just blundered across an eMarketer report today entitled, “Word-of-Mouth Marketing:
Winning Friends and Influencing Customers” which notes that “64 million US adults regularly share advice on products or services, and over 25 million of them (26.4, to be exact. That’s 17.5% of the online population) wield their influence online.” In just four years, by 2011, eMarketer predicts that over 35 million adults — representing 20% of the internet population — will be online influencers. Increasingly then, another facet of electronic engagement is going to be iWOM: internet word-of-mouth. Which forces the question, how do we as marketers go beyond “viral” and “buzz”, which to me have purposeful or “manufactured” implications, and get … Continue reading

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I recently took my 6-year-old son to the Ringling Brothers Circus and was really impressed with the focus on the customer. Buying tickets from Ticketmaster was comparatively easy (though the nanoseconds you have to actually make the purchase could be extended), and printing out your tickets ala airline e-tickets was great, but the really impressive stuff happened upon arrival. While we were in line to get into the arena, we passed the essential “guy selling programs” (I’m sure there’s an official title for this, I just don’t know what it is). We bought one ($7 as I recall; not cheap, not expensive: good price point) and instead of the usual take-your-money-enjoy-the-show moment he paused, looked directly at my son and me, and said “I hope you enjoy the show” with real earnestness (and, it seemed, sincerity). A long time ago, when my then-girlfriend and I frequented a very small restaurant called the Fallen Angel, the maitre d’ there (Geoffrey: a … Continue reading

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I have a Starbucks card, given to me as a thank-you by some folks at school. I don’t drink coffee (after drinking 7-8 cups a day my first year at the ad agency, I gave it up forever), but I do drink tea, Izze, and eat chocolate chip cookies and iced lemon loaf. Oh, and buy music. From a marketing perspective, wouldn’t it be great if my Starbucks card captured my purchases to a database so that I could be emailed a coupon for cents-off one of my favorites next time I’m in? This is so basic that it’s hard to believe that Starbucks — a genius marketer — isn’t already doing it. The in-store part is totally engaging; the obvious opportunity is to extend it online (even to Second Life). There’s a reward for me (cents-off) and a reward for Starbucks (incentive to purchase, increased frequency of visits, visit starbucksstore.com); especially appealing since I’m not one of those three-times-a-day … Continue reading

Look around. What are people doing? If you’re at work reading this, chances are pretty good that you and all those around you are banging away on a keyboard, that you’re interacting more digitally than you are humanly. Admit it: when you’re in a meeting, how often are you more focused on checking your email from your laptop or Blackberry than you are on the meeting? In a presentation, how often is the presenter (and often, the audience) more engaged with the Power Point than the humans? If you’re in Starbucks, chances are that the same kind of thing is going on: people are having coffee with each other, but with a measured amount of Blackberry use. If you’re at home, odds are you and your family members are connected: not to each other (although I hope that happens too), but electronically to the news, the weather, friends, games, or God-knows-what. And everywhere, people are talking or texting on their … Continue reading

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I learn a lot talking with customers, but I learn a lot more talking with lost customers. I think losing a customer should hit a company like losing a friend or lover hits a person: you should (usually) just feel darn bad about it. But even losing a customer can be turned into a good experience, and the concept of electronic engagement can help. In fact, if the experience is right, you might not lose the customer after all. In a July, 1990 article in Harvard Business Review entitled “The Profitable Art of Service Recovery,” the authors offer evidence that organizations who respond immediately and decisively after a bad customer experience are actually more likely to retain the customer than if no blip in the experience had occurred in the first place. Now, while I’m not suggesting that we should all go out and develop strategies to create bad customer experiences that we can respond to, I am suggesting that … Continue reading

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