And you thought the first Facebook showdown was rough...
Facebook has a new ad model...
"The new Sponsor Stories ad unit will initially be placed in the third position within each user's News Feed - as either a small banner-like placements or video clip. When users elect to click on these ads, their entire network of friends will be automatically alerted and then given the chance to interact with that particular marketer's group."
Something tells me that if Facebook users didn't like it when others were notified when they left a note on someone's wall or added a friend, they're not going to like it when everyone can tell they clicked on an ad for Bad Credit, Victoria's Secret, or GMHC. This just sounds really... weird.
A Maven at Work
Literally, as I'm reading the mavens section of the Tipping Point, I see this guy on the train telling this other guy what to do, who to see, and flipping through his notebook getting the info. This info broker "doesn't know how to work that internet" though.
What's in a name?
So we're having some serious issues naming our upcoming consumer product.
We came up with three names. One that is related to our company. One that I made up that was inspired by something a naming consultant gave us. And then one that the naming consultant came up with.
One name is Oddpal. I don't know why we didn't come up with it before. It is so obvious, but it was never on any of our lists.
So I circulated the name around in an informal survey:
"Oddpal – don’t like it, hard to remember"
"Oddpal makes the most sense but is boring."
"Oddpal - u said u own this one but out of the three i wouldn't pick it it doesnt seem catchy enough"
"
Ok, so that's out... or is it....
"I really liked Oddpal because it's cute and I can see someone saying like, "Did you get your Oddpal?" lol its cute"
"I think because this is so new and people who aren't as tech or new-media saavy as say, you and I are, they can relate more to this name. It's an explanation of charachter or product. It's your pal. Essential, your pal who is going to lead you through the site. That's my take on it. "
So, it isn't fancy and it tells what it is... but maybe it is too close to Sitepal or not catchy enough.
So, then I came up with a totally made up name and this was the response:
"Cool idea - nice combo of word smithing. I would rank this at numero 2, on my favorite scale. There is a ski company that has a similar name, but I think this one could be fun and is completely separate from the Oddcast name. It def stands out and you almost have a back-story/history for your character just solely based on the name alone."
"love it! its catchy u right away think of vocals and there could be like a cute lil *** character or characters could be named ***'s which is also really cute and i would totally make one"
"sounds like fun, irreverent, spunky."
Awesome! Score one for me!
Or not...
"sounds like an item on a sushi menu. I don't like this word"
"Simply not like it...I guess it sounds weird..."
"– dislike it. Looks like a Russian word and not sure how to pronounce it."
Then we had a third word that everyone loves.... everyone who is a 12 year old girl...
"It could work if you were skewing this to more of the younger tween generation. I think that could get a nice buzz. I mean we are talking about the youthful generation that went from Barbie to Bratz Dolls"
"it's cute"
"too cute, too toddler, too tickle me Elmo"
"adorable"
"there's something feminine about it - i just can't imagine most guys wanting to say "oh yeah, i'll leave a message for you on my ***"
Great... so, we're kind of at square one. I think Meez and WeeMee and these people have pretty cornered the market on Me words...
Does it even really matter?
You know, part of me thinks of the name that I created as like a Chrysler 300C. A lot of people, including me, don't like it, but just as many people love it. Maybe you need a brand that illicits a strong reaction either way. Would someone really not use a product because it has a name they don't like.
And does the product have to describe what it is? For every Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Wordpress there's Skype, Google, Yahoo! and Napster... names that have nothing to do with the product.
Throw on top of that the fact that namesquatters... scurge of the web that they are, have pretty much covered almost ever prounouncable word in the english language. Just mash your fist onto the keyboard and try and secure the domain name of the random letters that came out. I guarantee you it is taken.
Ideas?
I really really want to use Performancing, but it never works
I love the little popup blog posting thing from Performancing... but 3/4 of the time I click Publish, it doesn't do anything.... I click and I click and I click... nada. Plus, I really dislike forums that require me to login. I don't want to register to be able to get tech support.
Click click click. Dammit. Select. Copy. Typepad. Login. Paste. Publish. *smacks head*
Ok, maybe it wasn't me... No Sleep 'til Google?
The last few days, I've had trouble using Google at home over Time Warner (sold through Earthlink) Cable internet in Brooklyn. Google Search, Gmail... have either been really slow or completely non-responsive. I thought it was a Google issue until I saw this. Plus, it is working fine in the office.
Are we seeing the beginning of the pipeheads tiering the traffic... testing out some filtering? Did anyone else experience this? Is the net neutrality debate coming to a head in Bay Ridge?
Du Hast UPnP
I don't talk about music a ton on this blog, but I do like music... just never really been that good at discovering new music. Plus, I could never tie together all of the different ways I listen to music. I used to have XM in my car from GM, and really liked it, but let the subscription slip after I changed addresses on my credit card. I guess I didn't really like it that much.
I like Pandora, but never really listen when I'm sitting in front of the computer, so that's pretty much out. I've found some cool bands on MySpace, like Deep Metal Mechanic, but I can't do anything with them except put them on my page... can't stream them anywhere... can't even pop the player out of the page. Kind of useless for really empowering my music discovery.
Breaking my music free from the computer is important to me, so I bought two Netgear MP-101 routers and have been really happy with them considering how much I paid (less than $100 each). That's been nice, but the real break is that all of the great discovery services out there don't work well off the computer.
If you visit my site, you'll notice I now have a Last.fm
badge on the right sidebar. It contains the last ten songs I listened
to, plus after it has enough data, I guess, my most popular artists of
the week. Think of it like del.icio.us and Google. Google is run by a machine that eats data as is Pandora. The results are certainly good, but people powered stuff like del.icio.us has the potential to be even better. That's what last.fm is. If someone out there listents to similar stuff, it recommends the things that they listen to that I haven't found yet. Last.fm promises to be a great discovery tool for me, except for the fact that I listen to my stuff through the Netgear routers and my iPod...never on the computer itself. So, getting it my music listening data isn't easy.
Jscrob solved the iPod issue, which is why you can now see what I listen to when I ride my bike and go to the gym. It sucks all the data off my iPod when I sync/charge, so you'll be sure to see lots of dark techno, industrial, and movie themes... but don't think that I turn on Rammstein when I get home at the end of a long day... this is only half of my music story, lest you think I'm peculiar.
I need to solve the apartment problem. Enter UPnP. Universal plug and play compatability promises to allow me to stream my music to other devices... so I just needed a UPnP server that was compatible with Last.fm and I was good to go. I tried Tvedia and that looked really promising. It works with Last.fm just by getting me to enter my Last.fm id/pw, but I haven't gotten it streaming to the routers yet. The company keeps telling me its something on my end, but I can easily switch back to the Netgear server and that works just peachy. I'll keep plugging away... hopefully, I can get it working. I also tried Winamp+this plugin but the plugin didn't seem to install properly. I wasn't sure if it was on, installed, working... whatever... nothing happened.
So that's where I am... hopefully, I'll be able to get the music I play in my apt into Last.fm through one of these UPnP solutions, and also get Streampad working as well. Then I can get some better music recommendations than what I get from these Arctic Monkeyheads. Bring on the hard stuff!
Call me a purist, agist, or whatever...
But now that Facebook is more open, I've gotten a lot of invites from very cool people that I know professionally. I haven't accepted them yet and probably don't think I will. So, sorry, Fred. Nothing personal... It's more a matter of maintaining a community identity.
To me, Facebook is very college-y... very my generation. The actual physical "facebook", which we called the "meetbook" or "meatbook" depending on how you looked at it, was a very important document as a college student.
I'm not really a fan of the "open" Facebook, but I'll admit that it works to Fordham's advantage, b/c they can't get their act together to give us alumni e-mail addresses (seriously, how hard is that.. its just e-mail forwarding...). So, at least this way, my Fordham friends in my year can join. I'm going to keep my Facebook connections within a generation, if that's ok with you folks. You can still connect to me on LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, MyBlogLog, Last.fm, and del.icio.us.
Bring out your dead. Bring out your... Wait. Friendster's not dead.
Kinda makes you wonder...
Facebook's traffic never comes out right b/c its been mostly inaccessable to anyone w/o a .edu address... but as for Hi5 and Friendster, they certainly seem to be gaining in traffic.
So what are we supposed to make of these sites? How valuable is 3rd place? You have to imagine someone like AOL or IAC making a run at one of these. I think, more then anything else, they need an identity. People are clear what MySpace is like and who Facebook is intended for (well, they were until a few days ago anyway...) but everytime I mention Hi5, Tagworld, or Friendster to someone, they immediately say, "Who's on there??" Well, a lot of people, actually.
I do think there's an opportunity to create a "quieter" version of MySpace. That was Friendster at one point, and perhaps they've solved the performance issues that drove so many people away in the first place.
Marks of a great coach? Great CEO?
Jeremy Shockey said the Giants were outcoached yesterday.
And frankly, I can't say Tom Coughlin has ever really impressed me.
But then again, this Giant team, save for Tiki, hasn't really impressed me. So, how do you know when it is the players and how do you know when it is the coach? Certainly Bill Parcells seemed like a great coach and he's won to prove it... but what about someone like Willie Randolph? Second best team in the bigs... so-so starting staff, and yet somehow, I really don't think Willie is such a great coach. He's made a lot of questionable moves.
There are always going to be standout CEOs--obvious people that everyone points to... Gates, Jobs, Jack Welch... but are there examples of great CEOs at mediocre companies? How long does it take to go from good to great or turn something around? Can a mediocre CEO take a great product to success? I mean, seriously... I could do Joe Torre's job, I think. With that payroll and lineup... I'd just say, "Hey guys, Jared Wright is pitching tonight, so do me a favor and score 9 runs." I mean, he doesn't even need a bench... never needs to double switch or pinch hit for the pitcher. How hard could it be?
How do you seperate what a single person has done for a team, a company... hell... even a whole country? Does Bush suck or are we all collectively sucking? Or maybe just all the politicians? As bad as you might say our president is, you gotta admit that there are probably others who deserve blame as well... people on both sides of the Pantone wheel.
Black Dahlia
Scarlett Johansson will be the best actress of this generation. There, I said it. Black Dahlia is a cool movie with great style that perhaps gets a little bizzare at times, but she does another fantastic job. I think I need to find a way to get her an avatar for some kind of promotion.
The story is based on a real life unsolved murder, and the writers come up with a highly implausible scenario for the truth that, in the movie, kinda comes out of nowhere and got a few unintended laughs. Still, the acting is really good and I was also pleasently surprised by Josh Hartnett, who I still sort of think of as the guy from The Faculty. This was also the first time I thought that Hilary Swank came anywhere close to being attractive. Its that mouth... I dunno...
Anyway... cool, but only a must see because of Miss Scarlett.
New Year Oddcast Style
The senior members of our team here at Oddcast are Israeli, so today, we got a little culture for the office related to the Jewish New Year...
links for 2006-09-22
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Check out our wifi section
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24% of Gen Yers read blogs, which is twice as often as the 12% of Gen Xers (ages 27-40) and three times the 7% of Young Boomers (ages 41-50) that read blogs. So skeptics of blogs should suspend their disbelief
Feeding the Monster
This is exactly how I felt about Salesforce:
"Feeding the Monster": Like many knowledge management initiatives, CRM requires end-users to take actions that are not part of their natural work process in order to "update" the system. After all, CRM output is only as good as the input -- "garbage in, garbage out." Most end-users in small businesses, whether a partner in a law firm or an account manager at a consulting shop, interact with customers in their email system (usually Outlook). The act of opening the browser, putting in your password, navigating to the proper account, and filling in a form, fundamentally wastes that user’s time. The only way to motivate most users to "feed the monster" is by forcing them to update the system prior to the weekly meeting. Many sales organizations make updating the CRM system a requirement for getting paid. In fact, we added a paragraph in Groove Networks' sales compensation plan requiring the updating of our customer systems (feeding the monster) as a requirement for getting paid. […CRM needs to learn a lesson from Del.icio.us and the rest of the web2.0 crowd where the application provides real value to the user and incidental value to the network/community.]
Brian hits it right on the head... so much so that I just signed up for the Beta for Hubspot.
Tags: small business, crm, salesforce
And you thought monkeys were fun...
"There's a guy on our team who dresses like a pirate?"
Check out Dead Man's Mail... a workshop we just built to help promote Pirate's of the Carribean's upcoming DVD.
If you send me a Dead Man's Mail, I'll link to it in upcoming blog posts. Extra points will be awarded for creativity. :)
I love these workshops... they're so addictive. I think we need a Mr. Met workship, no? How about Christopher Walken? (I don't even know what product he would pitch, but I'm not sure it matters.)
Tags: marketing, viral marketing, pirates, movies
And I'll add one more Typepad feature request to that...
Fred is right on with his Typepad comment request. When I hit "Reply All" to Typepad's notification e-mails, I'd like that to autopost to my blog in addition to going to the sender. Typepad's comments should Reply to both them and to the commenter. So many times, I e-mail the sender back, then cut and paste that e-mail right back into my comments. Its annoying.
Plus, I don't need a comment notification for this for when I post back through the mail.
Also, when I get a spam comment notification, I should be able to hit Reply All and just write "junk". I hate logging into Typepad to clean up my spam comments... especially when I'm on the subway and offline.