Stop Whining About Google Mail

September 24, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes 1 Comment

gmail_logo_stylizedSeriously? The blogosphere and Twitterverse (and whatever other celestial body references we can make for social media sites) are obsessed and “freaked out” by a second Gmail outage in a short time.

I think it’s an indication of people who’ve never worked for a large company or within an IT infrastructure. As usual, those who grew up getting everything for free, and then complaining if it doesn’t work.

First, some facts. It wasn’t a wide spread outage this time – I had some slowness with contacts, for instance. Second, it’s painfully obvious that most of these people have no experience spending hours a week where email doesn’t work, or having at least one outage a month. And at VERY large companies who’s IT staff supposedly is a crack team. Even more hilarious, the regular outages at IT firms I know about.  Stuff breaks.

I have personal experience working at 1000+ person organizations where mail is out for mornings or afternoons at least a few times a year.

Meet Elmer FUD

But here’s the real FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) behind all of this – there’s a lot of IT people who do not want Google Mail or apps to succeed in the business marketplace, because it threatens their jobs.

There’s a saying – “You can’t convince a man of something that’s against his wallet.” And it’s true. Many in-house IT people (of which many are on social networks) are petrified of the mass outsourcing of core functions because in their view, it’s their job.  Not to mention the purchasing folks who have spent thousands on office, Exchange servers, et all. You can be for darn sure those who have skin in the game are waiting to pounce on everything Google could perceived as doing as a misstep.

Not saying GMail is the perfect answer for everything – but it’s good, and those paying the relatively paltry fee to get Google Apps for business are getting pretty good service. And for the cost/benefit, even if it’s as reliable as your in-house mail service, it can be way cheaper and you’re not dealing with the headaches. And there’s other options too – Gmail is not the only player by far – but housing all this infrastructure in your company is a recipe for expensive disaster.

What are your thoughts? I’m a proponent of the cloud in some cases – it’s served us very, very well. But I’d love to hear your perspective.

Filed Under: Business, Industry News, Rant Tagged With: gmail, google mail, outages

The Problem With Making Money Online Is Perception

September 21, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

There’s tons of talk about Hulu going paid or subscription of some sort.

Also, talk of how journalists are worried about how they’re going to get paid.

Well, it’s for a simple reason – it’s because, for instance, a Hulu viewer is worth $920 less than a broadcast viewer. Nevermind the ads could stick better, stand out from the flotsam, and can’t be easily skipped. There’s no financial choice to keep things the way they are – either programming or costs need to be cut drastically, or revenues increase. Either way, in a few years if trends continue, TV could be the next financial victim of the digital age.

The common saying is, “Trading traditional dollars for digital cents.” It’s so far proven mostly true – but why?

Perception.

I’ve learned, from personal experience, people are willing to pay more for a physical product even if the content is the same. I also know that ad buyers still “feel” like they don’t get as much benefit from online, and in some ways it’s because of the exact metrics they get (we only could guess if real TV metrics were rolled out how much damage that would do – yes, there’s Nielsen, but those ratings are nothing more than educated guesses and miss all kinds of niche audiences).

As long as ad buyers and media folks continually feel that digital is worth less than traditional, it will be. The real question is – how to change that perception? Why is digital so darn cheap, even though real numbers and even actions can be counted? Is the future in the affiliate marketing world, where there’s lots of folks making handy profits – of course, that limits you to certain kinds of products.

I know that in business, once you start out at a price, it’s easy to cut but very hard to increase – which is always a model that befuddled me. But that’s the past – what to do now to move the bar? If you buy media, what are the things you’re looking for that would warrant higher rates? Or, are we just going to have to adjust to this new reality that viewers or audience are only worth so much?

Filed Under: Advertising, Business, Industry News, Social Media, Web Sites Tagged With: dollars for digital cents, Hulu, Making money online, psychology, revenue

Facebook is the Microsoft of Web 2.0

August 10, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

logo-facebook-microsoftWith the acquisition of Friendfeed, it’s clearly obvious (if it hasn’t been for awhile) that Facebook is the Microsoft of Web 2.0.

From patterns like buying innovation (Friendfeed, Parakey) to adopting the features of it’s perceived competitors (recent change of status updates to being more of a “feed” like Twitter), Facebook is acting a lot more like Microsoft – or any large corporation.  At the end of the day, the rules of business still apply whether you’re wearing Brooks Brothers or Birkenstocks. Let’s talk about that.

You think there wouldn’t be such focus over a company that only had $150 million in revenue last year (notwithstanding that the whole vociferous internet community uses them).  To give you an idea, local (to us) computer services company Compuware has 1.2 Billion in annual revenue as of 2007 and cleared what Facebook makes all year… in profit. Salesforce.com did one billion in revenue in 2009.

In short, Facebook isn’t a true financial success… yet.  But that’s like Microsoft, too.

Facebook hasn’t found their “key” product yet – but there’s a lot of venture capital money saying it will. Microsoft didn’t make their first operating system – and it wasn’t their hit product – until five years after the creation of the company.  Their success in operating systems came a year later – from a product they bought from someone else and renamed (again, not in-house innovation).  Facebook is at about that stage in it’s lifecycle.

Lessons To Takeaway – And More Reasons Mark is Like Bill

There’s some lessons we as business owners or watchers of business should takeaway.

1) Overnight Success is almost never overnight.

It’s amazing how many people think companies like Facebook or Microsoft or any other of the “hits” look like they came from nowhere. But the reality is, it’s years of work to find the right mix. Very rarely does a company “hit it big” off the bat.  Friendfeed is almost two years old already, after all.

2) “Innovate and get arrows.” It’s a waste of money to be the developer of what someone else is going to do for you. Move into spaces where there’s already been innovation and capitalize on it.

Rarely, also, does the first with an idea or the first to popularize an idea succeed.  The ones who usually succeed from a business/revenue perspective are the ones that see an emerging market and invest/move in at the right time.  Too early, and no one gets it.  Too late, and you’ve missed your shot.  Facebook is like Microsoft here, too. Friendster and Myspace were both ahead of Facebook (as well as others) – but Facebook found the right mix and had the right timing to dominate and built off of their innovative success, leaving them behind holding the bag.

Is The War Over?

I personally believe there will NOT be another Facebook, and the space is now closed for new entrance success. The last thing I would invest in is another social network that aims for supremacy – the market is going to stabilize, and there will always be niche plays to jump in on, but Facebook is here to stay as top dog.

What do you think? Am I wrong? Am I right? Where do sites like Twitter (big on buzz, but comparably small on users) fit in?

Filed Under: Business, Industry News, Social Media Tagged With: acquisition, bill gates, facebook, friendfeed, mark zuckerberg, microsoft, web 2.0

Lesson Learned From Robert Scoble and Rocky: Keep Your Stars By Keeping Your Team Together

March 15, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

Recently, “Rocky,” Robert Scoble’s Aide De Camp, was let go from Fast Company.

Scoble, however, wasn’t.

But it wasn’t too long until Robert had followed his friend and producer to Rackspace – to work on “Project 43.”

There’s a lesson to learn here for businesses.

You can’t cut your way to prosperity.  You can’t take out important parts that people need and expect them to do the same work.  It just doesn’t work – and your competitors will see what you’re doing and quickly move if they can.

This recession is showing the truly strong companies – this is the time to invest in yourself or your company and take advantage of the opportunities out there – and Fast Company’s loss is Rackspaces’ gain.  Fast Company now doesn’t look so fast, and Rackspace has instantly jumped ahead in the social media game, which one of the Rackspace folks on the Gillmor Gang podcast said very succinctly, “If your company is not in social media, in five years your company won’t be into much of anything.” Obviously hinting if you’re not starting to get into social media now and making moves, you’re going to miss the boat completely.

He also mentioned the same thing for Cloud computing for hosting – which I agree.  Our personal experience with cloud computing for us, our projects, our project management and our clients has been reliable, flexible, and scalable, able to do many more things for much less price.  Some of the things, when hardware folks come to me, think we spend five or ten times the money we do; but, as always, being near the cutting edge with a protective cover (i.e. being cautious yet still getting it done) gets our clients more for less.

Because that is the way of the world.  Big iron is dead; flexible iron is here to stay.

Filed Under: Business, Industry News, Social Media Tagged With: cloud computing, fast company, gillmor gang, keeping your stars, rackspace, recession tips, techcrunch

Why Marketers Are So Desperate For Trust

March 3, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes 1 Comment

Having read the RWW article on paying bloggers after Jeremiah Owyang making the statement that paying bloggers should be “part of a toolkit,” it jogged my memory.

Here’s a study from 2008 from Gallup.  What it shows is that the perceived ethics and honesty of advertising practitioners is less than congresspeople, lawyers, building contractors – in short, the very bottom of the list only to be rated as “more honest” or “more ethical” than telemarketers, lobbyists, and car salesman.  Around 10% of people think that advertising practitioners are very honest or ethical.

So news flash – there’s not very much trust from the public there with marketers.  Hard to build a “trust economy” (brilliant term by Chris Brogan) when there’s little trust to start with (not a reflection on individuals, but the industry).  There’s a reason why Leo Laporte does not allow marketers on his “This Week In Tech” or “MacBreak Weekly” shows.  The audience, and he, does not trust that there will be honest opinion.

In short, with the influx of all of these already not-trusted by the public marketing and advertising professionals, the “run” on social media is in many ways all about people wanting to “create” trust in a field where the public does not trust advertising professionals.  You can’t create trust – you build trust.  And turning bloggers into salespeople isn’t the way to do it.

Some of the new folks on the scene may not remember this, but why did/do advertisers pay premiums for news content?  Because it was perceived as trusted information.  That seemed to transfer to the companies and brands that advertise during the news (not saying news reporting was perfect in every instance – but rarely, and never where I worked, were stories traded for monetary compensation).

By doing pay-for-post campaigns, as marketers, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot as one will erode the initial trust that social media has built up mainly because it’s up until now not as touched by marketing (or perceived to be).  Sure, everyone needs to eat, there needs to be money made, short term gain will be had, but I think it’ll cannibalize the long-term possibilities of the space (and possibly, just for the properties that partake in this trust auction).

If the social web continues to move down this path, that trust factor that’s been built up is going to flip, and flip hard.  Google knows this and I can surmise that’s why they’re having such hard and fast rules around not allowing page rank to be passed on through sponsored links or posts.  It’s their job to provide the best results, not the bought results on organic search.

A good sign of someone who I know what they’re doing is if I see them cringe around promising a “viral” video. Viral video promises are bull, plain and simple.  We’re not interested in lying to our client’s customers, and I’d rather make a little less money but say we had honest conversations, and created compelling content directed at people that they enjoy and get value from.  It’s about giving value to get value, and this axiom is decades old, if you look back on Jeffrey Gitomer and his predecessors, Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightengale… the list goes on.

Although it will work in the short term, selling away trust in increments will eventually bankrupt the relationships built with people.  We should take a lesson from mortgage/financial disaster hit that all of our stocks have taken after people figured out the truth, and tread carefully.

Filed Under: Advertising, blogging, Business, Industry News, Online Marketing Fundamentals, Rant, Social Media, Web Sites Tagged With: forrester, jeremiah owyang, pay-per-post, read write web, trust economies
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