DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

Fascinating

Thin and inexpensive netbooks. Coming to a household near you.

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This article in the NY Times highlights how there is a wave of new smaller, lighter, and most importantly, cheaper, laptop computers coming onto the market. Appropriately called ‘netbooks’.

There a lot of change indicators on the Internet’s horizon. Mobile is certainly a big one, as is higher broadband rates. But I think the laptop trend could change things quickest of all.

Accessibility can’t be overestimated when it comes to the Web. Time and again, we’ve seen as computers and technologies get cheaper, simpler to use, and easier to transport, there’s a resulting surge in usage.

I remember my first home WiFi network in 2001. Spectacularly liberating. Suddenly, instead of being sequestered in an upstairs office, the computer could now move down to where the people were, and quite literally join the conversation. Simple online tasks improved noticeably. Receipes were researched online in the kitchen, where you could quickly check the ingredients needed with what was in stock. Looking up TV schedules could be done while actually watching TV! And simple things like planning a vacation happened on the couch instead of the office, an environment far more fitting for the task.

With the netbooks slated to practically be given away with an accompanying data plan, suddenly the computer isn’t precious anymore. It’s more like how we currently view our phones. Take it to the beach. Use it at the ball park. Homes could be stocked with several of them, one for each person watching TV.

And because these are already shipping, the impact will likely be felt soon. Certainly sooner than they’ll roll out the needed leap in broadband speeds. Unfortunately.

Heralding the death of non-social media

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My latest article for iMedia Communications.

Right before the end of the year, there was a strong backlash against marketing through social media channels. If you were working anywhere near social media, it was hard to miss: People said it doesn’t work. People said it doesn’t work as they’d like it to. And people said it may work, but it takes effort (my favorite).

It was probably inevitable. There’s never been a more explosive media format than social media. As someone wrote on one of my newsfeeds, “Is there anyone out there who isn’t starting a social media company?” At any rate, backlash is practically street cred for the internet set. It’s right there in the arc of the internet’s growth.

Personally, I have no question as to whether social media is a proper marketing channel for a company, and that’s because of one simple reason: In the very near future, all media will be social media.

Here’s why.

Read the rest …

Creativity and data: A marriage, if not a perfect one

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In this post, Seth Godin writes about taking the high road. I want to lead with his summary paragraph, because the high road is too often seen as prima donna boulevard.

“Data is your friend. And the data shows that the top blogs, top lenses, top magazines… they all follow the high road. If you need to be manipulative or non-transparent to make a buck, time to rethink the plan.”

My point is, for anyone in emerging media marketing, pretty much from here forward, the creative and the analytics are inextricably linked.

Campaign analytics have progressed to a place where very few people in a company’s marketing department are going to ignore them. Especially in digital media.

One of the benefits of analytics is that the more you understand them, the quicker you can assess the latest emerging technologies and how to create for them.

I break campaign metrics down into 3 sequential categories:

  1. Response
  2. Engagement
  3. Conversion

That roughly parallels the buying decision funnel.

  1. How does the customer respond to the general proposition you’re offering?
  2. Does that proposition keep their interest and cause them to dig deeper?
  3. At the end of the day, did they want the product? And if not, where did it fall through?

Campaigns today are fluid. Or at least they should be. The creative job no longer ends at campaign launch. That’s when things really heat up.

Of course, analytics aren’t perfect. People flush their cookies. They use different computers. The husband sends the link to his wife, who makes the purchase.

But marketing will probably never be about perfection. It’s about information that improves your intuition. It reminds me of a quote that fits digital marketing tightly:

“It’s better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.”

NY Times article on ever-expanding cookie tracking

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Tracking technology has been on a growth spurt. After post-impression tracking in the early 2000’s, we’ve recently added a lot of different BT techs, and now an even more comprehensive system in which you pretty much have an interest profile that the so-called Behavioral Exchanges are trying to align their ads with.

I had an interesting discussion at SXSW with some friends about where this is all going. If you summarize techs like Disqus, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever, you can already pull a pretty complete picture of someone’s life. But that’s all consciously opt-in. And any conjecture beyond what you’ve shared is up to an individual to pull together.

These new cookie-based technologies are starting to make projections about your interests based on a lot of data, much of it less public data than what we’re currently putting out there.

The online industry thrives on this type of information, and I hope, like the financial world, we’re not getting into something that’s going to spur a major backlash and set things back quite a bit.

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