wikipalmer

Handlebar Mounted Projector Turns Any Surface Into A Bike Lane

Wed, 25 May 2011 11:14:49 -0400

Handlebar Mounted Projector Turns Any Surface Into A Bike Lane:

This is cool, but … in Chicago we have tons of bike lanes which are pretty much ignored by everyone, most of all by the riders.

Top Engaged Facebook Pages

Mon, 02 May 2011 13:31:45 -0400

Top Engaged Facebook Pages

How prices have changed over the last year

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:04:28 -0400

How prices have changed over the last year

semigoodlooking: I’ve waited a long time and worked hard in...

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:06:48 -0400

semigoodlooking:

I’ve waited a long time and worked hard in this business to say this. It’s time we did more with our talent than just sell crap. This is a call to arms to all the writers, designers, artists, creative lunatics and misfits out there. I hope it speaks to you. I hope that all of you with talent and passion take what’s in this video to heart. And anyone who is restless, and weary and discontent with the current state of our industry, contact me. Enjoy.

P.S. Music by Michael Montes of Sacred Noise (thanks Michael)

Diet Coke Blasts Past Pepsi in Market Share - Coke Brands Now First and Second

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:15:59 -0400

Diet Coke Blasts Past Pepsi in Market Share - Coke Brands Now First and Second:

The news is not just a major blow to PepsiCo financially, as Pepsi sold 45 million fewer cases last year, but also psychologically. The beverage portfolio has been in the midst of a restage, which has had its fair share of hiccups, since 2009. The news that Diet Coke has surpassed Pepsi as the second leading brand caps a nearly three-year period in which Gatorade has stumbled, Tropicana has weathered an ill-fated redesign and new logos have come and gone across the portfolio.

“We are worried about the morale implications for PepsiCo’s beverage people of having the company’s namesake brand and its top beverage brand dropped to a tertiary spot within its category at a time that a tangible sign of brand momentum for the core brands would help,” wrote Credit Suisse analyst Carlos Laboy in a research note. “From our perspective, strong core brands for Coke, upgraded marketing and a better partnership model will feed nutrition and innovation with lower risk and higher rewards to investors.”

Mr. Laboy recently downgraded PepsiCo, saying “there is no U.S. beverage category problem, just a Pepsi problem.”

Zappos Founder - Why a Brand is a Lagging Indicator of Internal Culture

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:42:26 -0400

Zappos Founder - Why a Brand is a Lagging Indicator of Internal Culture

Worth Reading: Pew State of the News Media 2011

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:10:12 -0400

Worth Reading: Pew State of the News Media 2011:

“In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public’s changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user. That knowledge — and the expertise in gathering it — increasingly resides with technology companies outside journalism.

In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.”

Why Foursquare is Doomed

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 18:42:18 -0500

I picked this up from DigiDayDaily. I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know the author, Theo Fanning, but I am sure I would like him a lot. One of my good friends and business colleagues is now mayor of a local Chinese restaurant. I do not know why this matters.

————

I don’t like Foursquare. I never have. Just writing about it irritates me a little. While there are are countless reasons for me to continue to dislike and mock Foursquare and all it stands for, I will narrow it down — for the sake of brevity — to the big three:

1. Broadcast static: I have a big problem with social apps whose primary word-of-mouth functionality is to encourage users to clutter the social landscape with pointless “updates” that add little or nothing to the conversation. “Hey, I’m at Starbucks on California & Van Ness!” “I’m the mayor of 24 Hour Fitness!” Who cares? These pointless broadcasts are incredibly irritating, irrelevant to the majority of people who receive them, and often feel like limp-wristed boasting. They remind me of a small child screaming: “Look at me! Look what I can do!” And the whole becoming the “mayor” of a location jumped the shark after it became obvious that it was akin to being McDonald’s Mayor McCheese: you have no power and nobody respects you for your title.

2. Everyone’s a winner: We all love to play games — well, those of us who aren’t dead inside — and I am all for the trend of adding game logic to online, mobile and real world activities. But when the gaming-engine is just pointless incentives that have no real meaning, value or prestige, I cry foul. Adding weak, transparent incentives to “checking-in” does not make for good game play. It’d be like playing Monopoly without the board, community chest, and property cards. You’d just roll dice and stick money under the little metal dog, race car or battle ship. I’ll return again to how Foursquare is making us like children. When kids play sports, everyone has to get a trophy. Same logic here. Real games need strategy. The only strategy in Foursquare is checking in more often (not really a strategy) or cheating like mad, which I guess a few bored people have started doing by creating clones of locations (misspelling the name or address). And while I applaud these rogues for hacking the system, this is pretty pathetic.

3. Mindnumbing pointlessness: My biggest gripe with Foursquare ultimately is functionality. What is the user benefit to using Foursquare? Is it really social? Sure, I guess you could use it to see which of your friend’s are at the location you just checked-in to, like the nearly forgotten app Loopt. I know of few who really use it for that. Besides outside of high-density cities like New York and San Francisco, this isn’t really all that useful. Is it tips? Perhaps. But there are some many other apps that are more review centric that you can get more qualified information. (Think Yelp, Where, Urbanspoon, UrbanDaddy.) Sadly, once you strip Foursquare of it’s quasi-gameplay, lame incentives and weak social mechanics, it is an app that let’s you announce your location and get random tips about where you are at. Oh and if you are really lucky, they may have a drink coupon or appetizer for checking-in. Good luck explaining to the wait-staff that as “mayor” you are entitled to free buffalo wings.

I believe so little in the value of Foursquare that I actually bet against them. Nearly a year ago, I bet my business partner, Adam Kleinberg, $100 that Foursquare would not reach critical mass — we arbitrarily defined it as 20 million users — by March 10, 2012. This hasn’t made me popular among the “super mayors” that spew endlessly about how the location-based social app is the future, but it has made for some wonderful dialogues (arguments) between myself and some other industry luminaries (my idiot coworkers).

Now, to put my opinion into context, I will share the following disclaimers. When Twitter launched, I also thought it was stupid and irrelevant idea. (I was wrong.) And in 1999, I didn’t show up for a job interview at Google because I thought the Internet didn’t need another search engine. (I was stupid.) So really what the hell do I know?

Theo Fanning is executive creative director at Traction, a San Francisco advertising agency.

A VC on Marketing

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:56:38 -0500

A VC on Marketing:

Feb 252011

Marketing

You asked for it Arnold and 84 others (so far). So I’m gonna talk about marketing.

I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).

A very experienced and successful entrepreneur came into our office a week ago to pitch his latest company. At the end of his pitch he showed us some numbers. Normally for a raw startup we see almost all product and engineering expenses (headcount). But his plan had a monthly budget for customer acquisition. After he left, we talked about his plan and my partners focused on the customer acquisition number. It bugged us. It felt wrong.

So a few days later, I called him. We talked about what we liked about his plan and pitch and what we didn’t like. I brought up the customer acquisition line item at one point in that call. He said “every company needs a marketing budget.” It seemed like a strong reply but in truth not one of our top performing companies had a marketing budget in their initial business plan.

Zynga has spent millions on customer acquisition and continues to do so. But in the beginning, when Zynga was three or four people and they launched Texas Hold’em on the brand new Facebook Platform, they didn’t spend any marketing dollars. That was the beauty of that time and that plan. The Facebook Platform was free distribution. Zynga rode that free distribution to millions of users, profits, and additional games. Only then did they start marketing.

In my talk at Harvard Business School, I said “Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven”. I’ve seen that line tweeted a thousand times since then. Clearly people like that rule. Here’s another.

Early in a startup you need to acquire your customers for free. Later on, you can spend on customer acquisition.

So if you need to acquire customers for free early in a startup, how do you do that? There is no one right answer, it depends a lot on who your customer is and how hard the sell will be (consumer/enterprise and free/paid). I’m not an expert on enteprise focused SAAS businesses. I am not going to address that part of the market here.

For the consumer/free part of the web, there are some obvious things you will want to do:

1) Twitter - so many entrepreneurs have asked me “how did you start a company before Twitter?” Twitter is that free distribution that Zynga got on the Facebook Platform. You can and should get the word out about your product/service on Twitter and Facebook. You should encourage your friends to post about it, retweet about it, and encourage people to try it out. The digerati hangs out on Twitter and will see the tweets and RTs and many of them will try it out.

2) Social hoooks - Your product/service must be social. It must encourage your users to invite others to try it out. Hooks into Facebook and Twitter are obvious. Email invites are another obvious feature. The product should allow people to express themselves in it. Profiles, personalization, etc will allow the users to feel ownership of the product and tell others about it. Foursquare’s adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly clever implementation of a social hook. Games are the most social of all things on the web.

3) Find entry points - MySpace launched in the holywood crowd that were friends of Tom and Chris. Twitter launched in the SF tech community that were friends of Ev and Biz and Jack. Tumblr launched in the “roll your own blog” avant garde community thatDavid was part of. Quora launched in the Facebook alumni community. Facebook launched on Ivy League campuses. You get the idea. Find an obvious group of like minded people who know each other and launch into that community. If they like it, it will spread throughout that community and eventually beyond.

4) Events - Find live events to launch at. SXSW is famous for breakouts. Twitter and Foursquare are the two most talked about examples. I worry that SXSW has become so big and so many companies are planning to breakout there now, that it can’t happen anymore. We will see. But there are many live events that you can attend and galvanize users at. GroupMe did a version of that at the Austin City Limits music festival. I’ve heard of companies breaking out at Burning Man, The Democratic National Convention (Airbnb), and the Sundance Film Festival.

5) PR - Do not hire a PR firm to do your free marketing for you. This is a core capability you must own. You can and may want to hire a PR firm to supplement your efforts, but that’s a different story. The best companies know how to become the story and work it. Being in NYC helps a lot. Foursquare is a great example of this. You can laugh at Dennis and Naveen doing fashion shoots but think about how many new users they got for doing that. It was a stunt like any other stunt they’ve done. And they have done hundreds of them. The media eats it up as they always need something to write about. Twitter is another example of a company that owned its PR. Biz is a master. At the same time Biz and Jack were iterating on the product, Biz was thinking about the brand, the story, the bird, the logo, the meaning of Twitter in the world. And he got out there and started telling the story. He is an evangelist and he did it so well. Twitter would not be Twitter without that effort. If you don’t have a Biz or Dennis on the founding team, find someone who can do this for you. But I will say that the best PR centric startups have the “media DNA” in the founding team.

6) Search - It is not first on the list for a reason. I don’t think search driven businesses are interesting. Live by SEO, die by SEO. Don’t be a google bitch. But you will notice that many of the top consumer web brands are higly SEO’d. Try searching on a person’s name who is active on Twitter. I bet their Twitter feed will be one of the first five results. It is for my name (if you take out dups). Flickr did this very well. So does LinkedIn and Crunchbase. SEO is something that takes time to pay dividends. But you should build your product day one to be search friendly and keep at it. You can break your SEO with product changes and be careful not to do that.

7) Developers - I’ve said many times that developers are the new power users. Twitter is the iconic example. By launching with an almost totally open plaform and a dead simple API, Twitter got thousands of developers to build products that had “Twitter inside.” Those developers and their products pulled Twitter into the market. Soundcloud is another great example. There are a ton of apps that people use to create music and other audio experiences that have “soundcoud inside.” Each and every one of those apps is a distribution channel for soundcloud. They are pulling Soundcloud into the market. So build your product as platform from day one. And once you get traction on your product, do things that will cause it to become a platform, Foursquare is doing this well. They first got millions of users and now they are developing a vibrant ecosystem of third party developers. They did a hackday this past weekend that was very successful.

8) Build a great product - I’ll end with a return to where I started. Marketing is for companies who have sucky products. If you build something that is amazing (think Flipboard or Instagram or Instapaper) people will adopt it because it is amazing. And you won’t have to do much marketing, at least at the start.

So that’s what I got on marketing Arnold. What do you think?

Learnings from Egypt, Nokia and The Huffington Post. | Reinventing

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:10:16 -0500

Learnings from Egypt, Nokia and The Huffington Post. | Reinventing

Photo

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:33:19 -0400

Iconic Advertising from Leo Burnett

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:22:56 -0400

Iconic Advertising from Leo Burnett

Star Wars Modern

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:23:36 -0400

Star Wars Modern

semigoodlooking: tetris (by tamjpn)

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:35:21 -0400

semigoodlooking:

tetris (by tamjpn)

Newspapers: Think of Sand Falling in an Hourglass

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:35:02 -0400

Newspapers: Think of Sand Falling in an Hourglass:

“Unless some system of financing the production of content is developed, it is difficult to see how reportorial journalism will not continue to shrink, regardless of the potential tools offered by technology.”

digital muse for a beat poet

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:41:00 -0500

digital muse for a beat poet:

This one is for Haley and her class.

help wanted: account planners

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:09:05 -0500

This post is directed to friends and associates in the business: we are seriously looking to fill several open account planning positions at all levels, including director, across multiple accounts at Leo Burnett and Arc Worldwide. Definitely open to freelance. Please contact me directly to express interest or refer candidates. I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn, or email. Thanks!

wired: the decision tree for better health

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:45:07 -0500

wired: the decision tree for better health

typefaces in the new world of pixels

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:58:30 -0500

typefaces in the new world of pixels:

Amazing article from the NY Times on designing type for digital applications.

the complete get a mac campaign

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:54:00 -0500

the complete get a mac campaign:

For all of you Apple freaks - here is a complete listing of all the “Get a Mac” ads since 2006. Adweek recently named this campaign the best of the decade and I would have to agree, although some would argue the strength of the campaign is that it gets out of the way of the products. Nice when that happens.