Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Apple’s Changing of the Guard and the Lessons from the 49ers and Pro Football

By admin / August 25th, 2011 8:51 PM / View Comments

I’m going to begin this post with an acknowledgement: as much as I am loathe to use sports analogies in a business setting, this post is one giant sports analogy. More specifically, it’s pro football analogy, and even more specifically, a San Francisco 49ers analogy.

Like much of the rest of the business technology world, I took particular note when I heard yesterday’s announcement that Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO at Apple. Like many technology consumers, I am an admitted Apple fan, having made the switch to the iPhone from my BlackBerry several years ago and having stood in line for the original iPad 3G version the day it went on sale. My roots go all the way back to college days when I typed my papers on a shiny new Macintosh computer.

So a number of thoughts struck me when I heard the news, but the one that really stuck was the comparison to the departure of Eddie DeBartolo Jr., former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, during the 1990s. Like Apple, the 49ers had built a legacy of success and innovation. They had enjoyed nearly two decades of unrivaled excellence on the field, fuelled in no small part by a culture of success and by innovations in offensive strategy, scouting, and player/personnel management.

It all started from the top. DeBartolo put in place a world-class front office management team that hired the most brilliant coaching minds in the game and assembled one of the most talented sets of players ever. DeBartolo set the tone of the organization as well, with a win-at-all-costs mentality and spare no expense approach to creating the finest organization the game had ever seen. The results were impressive, with the 49ers winning 5 super bowls in less than 20 years, and showcasing the careers of multiple hall of fame players.

Unfortunately (for us 49er fans), it all began to unravel when DeBartolo was indicted on gambling charges in Louisiana and had to give the team to his sister and her husband, Denise and John York. Of course, nothing much changed overnight, as the solid management team, coaching staff, and all-star roster continued to practice excellence, even dominance, in the league. But little by little Camelot was chipped away. Carmen Policy, the team President, left for Cleveland and his position was redefined. Coaches left and were replaced by less capable football minds. Draft picks were wasted and the best players went to other teams. The drive for success and culture of innovation and commitment to excellence was gone, and a culture of mediocrity seeped in, little by little.

Of course, that’s my worry for Apple. I realize Jobs has put in place a world-class team and that many of the brilliant minds behind the innovative products and tenacious, even ruthless, business practices are still there, with executives like new CEO Tim Cook. But without Jobs I doubt Apple will be able to retain the magic, the certain indefinable characteristic, that unified the company behind a single vision and enabled it to pursue that vision relentlessly to perfection. Like the 49ers, I don’t doubt that Apple will stay at the top of its game for several years yet at least, but little by little I expect it to fall back to Earth. And when that happens I think we’ll all be little poorer.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Incorporating Gaming Mechanics Into Your Products and Services

By admin / December 31st, 2010 11:45 AM / View Comments

I’ve recently been doing research into game mechanics, and have been thinking a bit about how companies are probably not taking nearly enough advantage of using them to deepen their experience with their customers.

First, a bit about what I mean by “game mechanics.” Quite simply, game mechanics refers to the elements of (computer-based) gameplay that makes games fun (and addictive). Different authorities list them slightly differently, but broadly speaking, they include things like the ability to compete with others to get the best “score”, the ability to earn achievements or awards, the ability to collect items, frequent and regular feedback, and some others.

All, some, or most of these mechanics are found in games like Angry Birds or World of Warcraft, and whether through conscious design or just because they have an intuitive understanding of how to make good games, most game designers incorporate them as a matter of course. But in my experience, most marketers in other sectors of the tech industry and outside the tech industry don’t do much of it at all outside of things like “look under your bottle cap to win” promos and the like.

It can be as simple as repackaging your products so when the customer purchases each of them they “complete the set” and get some sort of achievement recognition for doing so. Or if you have a service, providing regular feedback to customers as to how they are doing, especially relative to their peers, can help build engagement. Turn retention into a game with rewards, milestones, and transparency into how customers are doing and you may see a big increase in stickiness.

This isn’t all theoretical. FourSquare and Gowalla, two of the current darlings of the location based services industry, are using game mechanics in a clever way to get their customers to build a rich and potentially very valuable geolocation-aware database of businesses.

It doesn’t necessarily require vast new marketing investments. What it does mean is introducing new ways to interact with your customers. Bringing a little more game play into your customer relationships can go a long way.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

Shout Out to Scout Labs – Coming Up to Speed Quickly on a Wide Variety of Topics

By admin / October 4th, 2010 4:48 PM / View Comments

I don’t know if this is good blogging etiquette or not, but then again it’s my party so I’ll blog if I want to, so here’s a shout-out to Scout Labs, a relatively new service I started using recently that I’ve found to be incredibly valuable in terms of coming up to speed incredibly quickly on just about any topic under the sun. It was recently purchased by Lithium Technologies, but still seems to be branded as Scout Labs.

What Scout Labs does is track mentions in the social media space (blogs, forums, Twitter, news, other commentary) and allows you to not only search against any keyword under the sun, but then to keep a running tally of those results so you can track the number of mentions of the terms you are interested in over time.  They even track “positive” versus “negative” mentions so you can see if people are blogging/Tweeting positively about the item care about or not.

The way I find myself using it for the most part is for the search capability.  If I need to learn more about, say, “social media”, I can simply enter the terms (including terms that are mandatory, optional, and prohibited) and it comes back to me with a list of blogs, forum entries, and Tweets that are relevant to the search in question. I have found this to be much more valuable than Google searches for many of the things I do, because bloggers are often writing informed opinions about the topic in question while Google results can be anything under the sun. By having it so concentrated in one spot I get an incredibly quick crash-course on the subject and am much more efficient than just using Google.

I also use the tracking service a bit, and while it’s less relevant for me personally I can see how it would be incredibly valuable to most of my clients. You can put your product or brand name in a search, say “iPad” for example, and you can track not only the number of times people blog/tweet/etc about the term “iPad”, but what percent of them are positive mentions and what percent are negative.  And you can see how this has changed over the past six months.

So it’s been a fun thing for me to play around with, and has allowed me to learn a lot.  More important, I’ve found it to be an invaluable business tool for technology marketing professionals.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized