More from Barclaycard Ring

I’ve now got a lot more insight into this card as the result of an online exchange with Product Manager Jared Young and a phone conversation with community manager Jen Hitchens. I didn’t get a clear answer as to how I happened to be solicited for the card—there were a number of test programs in place etc—but did glean some other insights of interest to marketers.

The Barclaycard Ring MasterCard grew out of an alpha experiment called Innovation Lab, as documented on the timeline of their Facebook page. Paul Wilmore, Managing Director-Consumer Markets, Barclaycard US, wanted to launch a new product that a/combats the low trust level of the banking industry b/leverages the popularity of social media and c/includes a financial literacy/education component. It evolved into Barclaycard Ring, which was launched in March 2012.

As I mentioned previously, I was looking for a new rewards card (Citi’s Thank You had changed its program and shafted me by expiring my nearly 400,000 points) and got a solicitation via email. But Jen says it’s not intended to be a rewards card. People are attracted by the low interest rate (currently 8% APR) and the transparency and they really enjoy talking about financial literacy topics on the community website.

In a post called “Community Share of Giveback™” (access for cardmembers only), Jared calculates that the average cardholder will earn $9 in giveback over a 6 month period. Assuming that cardmember averages $1000 a month in charges, that’s a much lower percentage than the 1% minimum that’s typical with rewards cards. So there have to be other benefits, and evidently there are.

Jen reports that the conversations have been almost universally positive on the forums so far—she’s got controls to handle negative or abusive posters but she’s never had to use them. The cardmembers are very happy to discuss arcane features of CILs (that’s credit line increase), nominate charities the community should support, and (especially) lend their recommendations about other card features they’d like to see. They also like to see the financial statements although I personally find them rather opaque.

Barclaycard Ring Community Stats June 2012
Active cardmembers were up 3% in June 2012.

One concern I have is that all these folks are early adopters… there were only 1090 active cardmembers as of the June reporting period… and the community may change as more people join. But it’s a very interesting experiment with its heart in the right place. If you’re involved in social media, you should get this card just to keep up with what they’re doing. (That’s my referral code, of course…. it will generate Giveback™ to the community if you are accepted.)

The Writer’s Diet

Pompous, stilted and jargon-esque prose may be popular in corporate marcom departments and annual reports, but it turns readers off and causes copywriters to lose their jobs because we’re putting people to sleep. That’s why we need to stay ever-vigilant against that dark inner voice that keeps whispering, if we aren’t saying anything or don’t know what we are talking about, we better sound smart.

Along with the beloved we-we calculator that tells us if our copy is too me-centric, we have a useful new tool in the Writer’s Diet from Kiwi pedagogist Helen Sword. Cut-and-paste an entry from 100 to 1000 words and her program will score you from “Fit and Trim” to “Heart Attack Waiting to Happen” for readability based on your choice of various parts of speech.

A snippet of my direct marketing copy was labeled “fit and trim” with a recommendation to tone up some abstract nouns. (I was writing about an abstract concept.) My intro to a fiction piece was labeled “needs toning” based on a “flabby” score for my verbs in which a passive observer is commenting on what he sees around him. Busted. This sucker seems to work pretty well.

I had originally encountered Dr. Sword through her article “Zombie Nouns” in the opinion pages of the New York Times. These are “nominated” words in which a verb or adverb is transformed into a noun: participation, perception, observation, nominalization. A few of these are fine, but when they are overused they suck the life out of the text as in this example from a social sciences book:

The partial participation of newcomers is by no means “disconnected” from the practice of interest. Furthermore, it is also a dynamic concept. In this sense, peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way of gaining access to sources for understanding through growing involvement. The ambiguity inherent in peripheral participation must then be connected to issues of legitimacy, of the social organization of and control over resources, if it is to gain its full analytical potential.

For those of us who work with technology companies, this is new yet oddly familiar—companies in this space (another word to hate BTW) tend to turn verbs into nouns (verbalization?) that have the ring of authenticity without really meaning anything; cf. “impact” (how will this initiative impact our bottom line?).

In both cases, the construction of active, well-structured sentences using simple yet evocative words will awaken our readers and, hopefully, keep the zombies at bay.

Advice for RIMM: make BlackBerry a prepaid phone

Last week brought yet another dose of terrible news from Research in Motion Limited, the company that makes BlackBerry, and I kicked myself for not going short on RIMM a few weeks back when the stock was more than twice as high as it is now. The handwriting is on the wall for BlackBerry just as for Betamax and HD-TV before them, and the shovels are busy in the boneyard of failed technologies.

BlackBerry, however, has something most other zombie technologies lack: an established user base that is, or was, enthusiastic about the platform. So here’s my plan to save the company: turn BlackBerry into a prepaid phone. This solves the problem of users abandoning BlackBerry for iPhone or Android because they don’t have to; they can continue using their BlackBerries as a backup. Many BB users already have multiple phones (remember Obama on the 2008 campaign trail?) so this concept will be an easy one for them to accept. And a package of text messaging can be sold at an attractive yet profitable price that will allow those thumb virtuosos to continue their real-time updates even while in the air. (I never was able to figure out why this is OK.)

The prepaid texting will be offered at a discount for in-network messages, encouraging current users to continue their text relationships with one another. And RIMM can keep its rock-solid network but, since far less bandwidth will be required with a reduced user footprint and no expectation of rich media, sell or rent off the capacity it doesn’t need.

I’ve never had a BlackBerry myself but have had plenty of prepaid phones. They are useful little gadgets with lots of applications. They’re great for kids who tend to leave them in their pockets when doing laundry, for example. And I am about to buy a TracPhone for a guest house where we’re required to have a phone for some weekend guests; it fits the contract and offers a number for them to give out, yet it’s miles cheaper than installing a landline or VoIP modem. Make the prepaid BlackBerry attractive with an initial offer and I would probably try one. Give me or my kids or guests a taste of that thumb power and we just might get hooked and go for an expanded package. There’s a reason they used to call it “CrackBerry” after all.