Entries Tagged 'Everything else' ↓

So I am going again to South by Southwest Interactive, and glad of it. As I mentioned last year, this is the conference where everybody has something interesting to share and everyone is interested in what YOU are doing. The days (and nights) are packed and it’s frustrating if you happen to miss out on anything because of logistical problems. Here are a few tips from a last year first timer:

• If you have a car, you can park for free along one of the frontage roads near the freeway below the convention center. It’s a 10 minute walk from there, probably faster than paying for parking and waiting in line to get in/out of the garage.
• The check-in process was horrendous last year and I hear there is 40% more registration this year. It’s a mystery to me why you should register in advance and still have to wait for an hour or more to get your badge. Bring a fully charged iPhone (hopefully the ATT network is not overloaded like LY) and strike up a conversation with your line mates.
• Don’t get too wedded to the program list online. Many of these descriptions are off the wall and written months in advance. Plus, you may not get in some popular sessions. If you do see something you really like, get there early and grab a seat… near the aisle in case you are disappointed.
• The conference center is shaped like a U with no direct access from one end of the U to the other. You may end up walking 10 minutes or more between sessions so look at the map and factor that into your planning. Sessions in double rooms (eg 18AB) are organizer picks for those likely to be popular, as are those held in ballrooms. “Core conversations” are generally moderated audience participation and if the topic isn’t of passionate interest you may not be happy there. The sessions in the Hilton are very developer focused even if the title may sound somewhat general.
• The parties really do have free food, booze and music but GET THERE EARLY… as soon as the doors open is not a bad idea. Late comers will stand in long lines and find many of the freebies gone.

Any more tips? Comment here or to @otisregrets, or just look me up when you get to the show. Let’s ride!

Go look at the reviews for a popular item on Amazon.com. Compare the volume of people voting on the “most helpful favorable review” and the “most helpful critical review”. In most cases, the number of “helpful” votes on the “favorable” reviews will swamp the “critical” numbers. My hypothesis:  people reading these reviews mostly want to support their own positive impression because they’ve already decided to buy the item.

Some time ago, I accepted an invitation to be a “Vine” reviewer on Amazon. This honor came to me because I had written a couple of reviews on the site that got a high number of “helpful” ratings. Now I get a monthly email offering me some products for free as long as I agree to review them. This is not a boondoggle: if you regard your time as worth anywhere close to minimum wage, the hours you spend in reviewing the items are going to be far more than the value of the goods received.

But here’s the thing. Most of my Vine reviews have been negative and POSSIBLY as a result I’m getting less attractive Vine offers now. I have no ideas how this algorithm works. Maybe Amazon merchants are subsidizing this effort in some way? I’m certainly not suggesting that there has been any pressure to give a positive review but maybe Amazon is able to say “we’ll offer your product to a certain number of our top reviewers, they’ll likely review it favorably because they’re getting it for free etc.” In any case the net result is that fewer people are giving me a “helpful” nod now and I’m less well-rated as a reviewer since I started to write more negative reviews.

I love peer reviews and am a frequent contributor to Yelp, as well as Amazon. I read and use these reviews in my own buying decisions. If I want to know how to do some trick with a kitchen gadget that came with a poor instruction manual, I can bet that an Amazon reviewer will have filled in the gaps. But Amazon and other social media outlets need to make sure they provide a venue for intelligent negative opinions to express themselves, even if those reviews are not beloved by the readership. Maybe a helpful negative review gets extra weight, if it’s of a certain length and not a rant?

In spite of my own recent issues, I had thought Toyota was doing the best it could with its massive recall. James Lentz, president of Toyota USA sales, was all over the press shows last weekend with the two key statements considered essential in the post-Tylenol era: “we screwed up and are sorry” and, “we care about our customers and are very concerned.” (Tylenol took a similar open, earnest tack when someone poisoned some of its bottles in the late 1980s and, coupled with an intensive “get to the bottom of this” campaign [they never did, but they were obviously trying]  it saved a brand everyone was writing off. For how NOT to handle a PR disaster see “Woods, Tiger”.)

But today I read this Reuters article that points out Akio Toyoda, the REAL president of Toyota, has said not one single word on the recall problem. And that another Toyota executive blamed the problem on (presumably inferior) U.S. made parts, chosen out of a charitable desire to help struggling American economy! Meanwhile the recall expands to the Prius (different problem, but nobody’s tracking the details any more) and Twitter #Prius traffic, which I’d been following because of my own recent posts, goes from sleepy to through the roof.

Concidentally, my original post about my dead Prius battery has become one of the most-read articles ever on this blog. Lots of new readers are discovering it linked to articles on the Toyota recall as they lick their chops for other Toyota schadenfreude. Speaking of which, my request for some financial relief led to timely response and some nice talks with friendly people in the Toyota Customer Experience Center, but a firm turn-down. I was frankly surprised at that.

My casual research suggested a hybrid battery failure at 70K miles was extremely unusual if not unprecedented. It would seem like a good investment to fix an anomalous problem and placate a good customer who’s been evangelizing your product. Instead, here I am writing another post about problems at Toyota. How is that good for their brand?

I wasn’t too incensed about the dead battery on my Prius, just surprised, but after a bit of research I’m getting my dander up. Turns out, according to this article in the Toyota Pressroom blog, that the Prius battery has a 10 year warranty… EXCEPT for the first three model years that have only an 8 year warranty. (Mine died at 8 years and 8 months.) In other words, the earlier adopters who put their faith in Toyota and spread the word and built the Prius brand potentially get a $3700 repair invoice while later adopters would get a free replacement for the same problem.

I predict there is a bit of trouble ahead for Toyota if more owners see their batteries go south* and discover the company isn’t going to replace them. This is a classic example (getting back to marketing which is what this blog is supposed to be about) of taking your best customers for granted and treating them worse than your marginal customers.

Speaking of marketing, there are some other not-to-do’s worth learning from the Toyota Pressroom post. They acknowledge that “battery replacement in a Prius is neither as simple nor as inexpensive as replacing the battery in a conventional car.” That’s disingenuous because the massive and complex hybrid battery has no basis for comparison to the battery in a conventional car; in fact the Prius ALSO has a “conventional” battery. And they quote a bargain $2,299 for that replacement battery without mentioning that installation and tax at your Toyota dealer are going to add another, oh, $1400.

In a day when anyone can and does have access to your press releases, glossing over the pesky details is not a good idea. What exactly is this article trying to accomplish?  How could anybody who actually has a battery problem not feel pissed? And how could any news source that picks it up, then later discovers the truth, avoid feeling duped?

* Fortunately for other early Prius owners, mine may be a fairly rare occurrence. According to the Driving Sports blog only 306 Prius batteries had failed as of 6/09, out of 750,000 installed. “The life of the battery pack is generally about the same as the life of the vehicle,” said Toyota’s Jeremiah Shown. Well, that’s good to know.

Ok, now I’ll stop. No more about Toyota. I promise. Maybe.

As I mentioned, I am in the process of prepping our SF house for sale. Lots of realtors advertise with a website that is the street address of the home. Out of pure curiosity, I went my home’s URL… and discovered the domain had already been claimed and parked by one of the realtors I interviewed. NOT the one that got the business, by the way.

A colleague who referred this realtor says they do it as a matter of practice, in order to set up a great presentation. Apparently they were going to set up a website for me and surprise me with it, but I made my decision before they could do this. She says as a marketer she admires their moxie and intent.

I disagree. First of all, there is no need to have a live URL to develop a website. Millions of websites are under development right now using local files on the developer’s desktop which will eventually be ported online. At any rate, the URL was parked, not active. The only thing this accomplishes is to keep another realtor, or me, from getting rights to the domain. (This realtor later said they’d relinquish the domain name at no charge.)

We know that in the early days of the internet there were entrepreneurial cybersquatters who grabbed domain names of recognizable brands such as Panasonic, Hertz and Avon, in hopes of reselling them for a fortune. The Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999 put an end to this practice. But how is grabbing somebody’s meatspace address any different?

I think by rights the domain name that corresponds to a street address belongs to the entity that owns the physical location. Am I all wet here?

Last week our 2001 Prius started acting strangely, and today SF Toyota gave me the bad news. The hybrid battery is shot and a replacement will cost just under $3700, tax included. We’re a year and half 8 months out of warranty, it turns out,  so the repair cost is 100% our responsibility.

Our 2001 Prius in happier times. Photo courtesy sfgate.com.

This is a vehicle that was on the front page of the SF Chronicle in 2001, as a poster child for early adopters of green technology. We’ve bought another Prius since then and I’ve been looking with interest at the lithium-powered next generation coming in 2012. But this changes the equation. If you can expect to pay for a $3700 repair at 70,000 miles, the car suddenly becomes much more expensive as well as less reliable… what happens if the failure occurs elsewhere than in a major city?

I remember the naysayers when we bought it: “the battery’s going to die and it will cost you a fortune.” The reviewers scoffed at this: batteries don’t last forever, but it is unlikely to fail in the driving life of the vehicle. Too bad that’s not true. The $3700 new battery is warranted for 12 months. I guess that tells you something.

News like this could have a chilling effect on hybrid sales, just when we need a nitty-gritty, ready-right-now antidote for energy waste and climate change. (I love seeing the MPG on our 2006 Prius creep over 50, combined with the fact that the car has actually been made less efficient in order to come close to zeroing out the emissions.)

Toyota needs to fix this. I’ll update if they do.

We’re putting our house on the market in San Francisco and I’ve been interviewing agents all week. Each neighborhood in San Francisco (ours is the Lower Haight) has its own personality and a corresponding base of people who want to live there, so a realtor’s knowledge of our area was very important. I prepped for this process in part by looking at names on “for sale” signs and visiting nearby open houses… which, it turns out, is a strategy almost nobody uses any more.

I learned that today most buyers start their home search on the internet and that the vast majority of sales in San Francisco are originally researched direct from the online Multiple Listing Service. That would be different in some areas, but in SF there is strong cooperation among agents and nobody has proprietary listings.

So, it follows that two things are critically important in choosing a realtor: a/the way in which they actually utilize the web to present their homes and b/their overall comfort level with the web in the way they market their services and the homes they represent.

Agents that don’t put multiple photographs of the property online, so prospective buyers can see what it looks like before they go to the house, are putting their sellers at a big disadvantage. I’d say the more information the better—floor plans, detail photographs, go for it—so long as they are organized so I know what I am looking at. And, don’t do it with a slow-to-load flash presentation on a third party website accompanied with a music track. One of our top choices did just that and it hurt them in the final decision.

Romancing the home is fine (and it can and should be done with good staging and good, well-lit photography—and of course a great verbal narrative!) but it can’t be at the expense of accessibility to the basic information that a buyer is looking for as they click through many listings.

As for web savvy, the realtor we went with didn’t have the flashiest (nor Flash®-iest) website but it was solid. He was one of two, out of 7, who was following me on Twitter prior to the appointment. (The other one sent me an email announcing that they were following me, which is not cool.) He had also researched me personally and knew, for example, of my lack of success in selling a screenplay. (Fortunately he did not offer opinions as to why that was.) And, after we met, he was one of the few who followed up with a PDF version of the presentation.

But this was also the only realtor who sent a personal thank you note via snail mail after the meeting. And he was totally and immediately attentive to follow-up contacts from me or my wife (who was 3000 miles away, making email accessibility essential). In the end, the day was won with smart selling using all the tools available, both old and new.

I hardly ever use this blog to promote my own services, so please indulge me. I want to make an analogy to Southwest Airlines, whose CEO David Kelly explained he gained market share in a dreadful economy by doing nothing. Other airlines started charging for checked bags, Southwest didn’t. “Bags Fly Free” was news.

The commercial side of Otisregrets can be found in the tabs at the top of the page. Though I’m a copywriter, I came out of a Master of Fine Arts program at UCLA Film School. I can’t help thinking in terms of stage management. How will the recipient interact with the elements of the direct mail package? What will the reader see “above the fold” on a web page that keeps them reading?

From the beginning, each of my copywriting deliverables has come with guidance on how to execute it graphically. Sometimes this means detailed design commentary within the copy deck; sometimes it’s working with an in-place designer; every now and then I do an old-school “copywriter’s rough”.

I don’t see other writers doing this as much these days, when we all are re-inventing ourselves to stay viable. Maybe it’s my own “Bags Fly Free” story. Check it out.

In my town lives a master carpenter named Chris. He donates his time to serve on the town historical preservation board, and he donated his time last fall to supervise a bunch of Saturday amateurs who volunteered to help rebuild a dilapidated but beloved local building. It was in this context that Chris provided a sweet example of a carpenter’s jig.

A jig is a made up structure which holds your work in place while you are performing a carpenter’s task such as sawing, drilling or glueing. A jig is handy if you are doing a number of repetitious operations (for example, drilling a row of holes at exactly the same position in a cabinet so you can hang a perfectly level shelf) but can also be used for a one-time operation if you don’t trust your ability to control an unpredictable process when wood meets a powerful force.

Making a jig is one delineator between a carpenter who cares about their work and a hobbyist tacking boards together. It’s the physical embodiment of laying the groundwork which a good marketer is going to do as well: define your problem, determine how you are going to approach it, then be clear in your mind about your plan of attack so you don’t get distracted and veer off course during the executional phase. Good copywriters do this without even thinking about it; less-good copywriters just hammer away.

But back to Chris’ jig. The job given to me and a couple of other guys was to hang siding along a 20 foot run. As he described the project Chris asked me, “do you want a jig?” That was music to my ears. Each row of siding needs to be perfectly level and it needs to overlap the previous row at exactly the same measure from the bottom. Trying to eyeball this with a long floppy board would create something ugly. So Chris made a jig. He took a 10” length of 2×4, ripped it down the middle to the 6” mark, then turned it 90 degrees and made a crosscut that met the first one to create a piece that looked like an L if you held it sideways. And then he made another jig exactly the same as the first one. If each guy takes a jig and fits in the shelf of the L under the previous row of siding, then rests the next piece on the top of the L, the work is in perfect position to nail into place.

Now it may occur to you there would be an easier way to do exactly the same thing. Just get two pieces of wood (you could even use scraps from the siding) then fasten them together offset at 6” to produce the two shelves you need to hold the work. But Chris did it the hard way because it gives him pleasure to make something that works well. Not a bad role model for copywriters.

A search for free range Thanksgiving turkeys led me down a rabbit hole today… culminating at two websites which were probably quite artful in a very different time, but don’t fit the expectation of today’s web users. We’re tired of hearing about Web 2.0… but here’s what we looked like before it got all interactive.

Meatpaper is a magazine about responsible meat practices when raising animals for food. It’s a cause I believe in and in fact I think I encountered these guys during a writing assignment. But now it all looks very unhelpful and self-absorbed. The cow in the preview pane has long since gone to her reward. The two ladies posed at the table are not nearly so interesting to me as to themselves. And if I go looking for content, there isn’t any. I have to subscribe to the magazine to get it.

Then I click through to the site of Julio Duffoo, who took the picture of the two ladies. Take a look:  Nothing but the guy’s name and an arrow I can click to start a slide show, no instructions. Once that would have been sly, now it’s haughty and ultimately ineffective.

Web 2.0 users want instant access to a fire hose of information. We make fun of the ubiquity of content but this is the alternative. And I’m not saying either of these sites was bad in its day. But the assumption that “I’m important and interesting and creative and therefore I will put up a website and you will appreciate it” is not viable in the Web 2.0 era. And I think that’s a good thing.