Marketing Ninja

Consumer activist sites like The Consumerist and online review aggregators like Yelp and Amazon have helped put more power into the hands of the consumers; corporations who run unethical marketing campaigns or ones that treat their customers poorly are rightly ousted by sites like these.

Ultimately bad reviews and stories from these sites force companies to stay honest by hitting them in the pocket book, and that’s one of the beautiful things about the Internet: the complaints of a few “average Joes” can be leveraged successfully against powerful companies.

But what happens when an army of misinformed consumers use these sites as echo chambers for false claims about small businesses? What happens when a small business is caught in a self-feeding storm of inaccurate, yet damaging buzz with no opportunities to defend itself?

This hit close to home for me recently - we had a negative review pop up on Amazon, one that also happened to be grossly inaccurate and speculative. The details of the review wouldn’t make such sense here unless you’re familiar with our product, but the spirit of the article was something along the lines of someone who didn’t understand why this product didn’t work like an entirely different product aimed at a different market.

Imagine if someone bought a rider lawn mower and complained about how it was a pain in the ass to push - that’s the level of inaccuracy that went into the review about our product.

Of course, being that most of the people who came to check out our product on Amazon have never actually used the product they have no inhibitions about voting up the review, and that has quickly made the review the most popular. I also suspect that there’s some psychology at work here - I think a lot of people want to be talked out of spending money on a product, even if it’s good, and are relieved as soon as they see a negative review which gives them a legitimate excuse for not purchasing.

We’re not the only ones who’ve had this problem - Dino Esposito, a prominent .NET author, has had issues with trolls writing zero-substance digs at his books since 2004.

I wonder how many sales have been lost to totally inaccurate reviews; probably a lot. Amazon began using the Real Names engine a while back in order to eliminate trolling, and that’s a good start, but it still doesn’t do anything to enable companies to fight back against inaccurate reviews written by real people.

Why should a company lose tons of potential sales because a customer couldn’t figure out that you’re supposed to sit on top of a rider lawn mower and drive it per my absurd example? Giving customers a voice is a great but when that voice starts shrieking inaccurate information, aren’t companies entitled to clear their names?

I say “yes.”

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Back when I was just getting started blogging I made a mistake that I think many new bloggers make - I started blogging about blogging because I wanted to share my excitement, my new experiences with my developing audience.

Most new bloggers who get sucked into that morass quickly veer into another vapid tangent, namely the area of corporate blogging.

“OMG, this is so easy and effective - I can’t understand why every small businesses doesn’t start doing this right away!!”

I did it - I wrote about why corporations should have blogs without any first-hand experience as a corporate blogger. Thankfully, I’m not the first blogger to drink the Kool Aid and make that mistake.

Fast-forward to August of 2008

I’ve been working as a corporate blogger for a small software company since May. I have certain performance goals that have to be met each month (subscribers, sales) and my performance has been solid. However, this job has not been easy - not nearly as easy as many overly-enthusiastic newbie bloggers make it out to be.

What I’ve come to realize is everything that I ever thought about what it’d be like to blog for a business is wrong, and today I’d like to share some of the insights I’ve learned over the start of my career as a corporate blogger.

There are a number of myths perpetuated about corporate blogging that need to stabbed in the heart with a wooden stake, so let me begin:

Myth #1 - In the eyes of readers corporate blogs are just personal blogs authored by a corporation

Personal blogs are very straightforward - an individual or a group of individuals author posts around a central set of ideas with the objective of getting as many people to read the posts as possible.

Corporate blogs are a different animal. Personal blogs have a significant advantage - they’re authored by humans. Readers trust humans, not faceless, monolithic organizations like corporations.

Therein lies a whole set of challenges that rarely occur in the sphere of personal blogging - corporations have to continuously demonstrate their humanity just to catch up to that basic level of reader-author trust that personal bloggers take for granted.

Humanizing an organization, no matter how small, is a delicate operation which requires a lot of forethought and gruesome trial and error.

In addition, corporate bloggers have the additional problem of anti-corporatism innate to social media - people are more hesitant to subscribe to, link to, comment on, and vote on corporate blogs. That’s a fact. Unless a company is part of the “cult of free,” its corporate blog is going to have a much harder time finding the same kind of success as personal blogs.

Myth #2 - Corporate blogs are just like TechCrunch, ZDNet, CNet, TechRepublic, Etc…

The biggest misconception about corporate blogs is equating them to major news and commentary blogs like TechCrunch. Here’s the difference: even if TechCrunch and ZD Net are incorporated, those blogs are the business, not marketing mechanisms for the business.

They have the advantage of not having to use the content of their blogs to sell stuff - they have advertising to take care of that for them. The bloggers at all of those big publications rarely have to put themselves in the crosshairs at the risk of being called “corporate shills.”

Corporate bloggers run a much larger risk - they can’t distance themselves from their own monetization activities like how advertising-supported blogs can. Instead they have to put themselves into the fray and use their content to lead potential customers towards their own products while still retaining the trust and confidence of their audience. This is hard.

Myth #3 - Producing a blog post for a business takes about as much time as a personal blog entry

It doesn’t take that long to write a personal blog entry, and heck, a business blog isn’t really all that different - it seems pretty reasonable to assume that it’d take about the same amount of time to produce a blog entry for a corporate blog, right?

NOTHING could be further from the truth. Blog entries for corporations are time-consuming and expensive, because a corporate blog has to be 100% consistent with all of the company’s other marketing messages and because the corporate blog has to be treated as though every customer will read it.

In addition, there are some very tough objectives that have to be accomplished by corporate blogs - you want to use your content to lead people to eventually buy your product, but you just can’t shill it at non-customers mercilessly. Each piece of content requires careful planning and coordination at a level beyond anything I have ever done for Marketing Ninja, and it’s hard to describe just how difficult and time-consuming that coordination and planning really is.

When you write a personal blog entry you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want without significant ramifications, so long as you don’t do something absurd. When many of your readers happen to be paying customers the entire situation changes - they’ve given you money and now you owe them something of value - you can’t get away with writing any thing that comes off the top of your head, your readers often won’t let you.

Myth #4 - Traditional marketing tactics for personal blogs work just as well for corporate blogs

Ugh. I wish. Read point #1 again for background on this area. Here’s what doesn’t work for corporate blogs:

• Signing up on a social media account and submitting your own stuff  - doesn’t necessarily work well for personal blogs, but it’s not even an option for corporate blogs.
• The “Beg and Thank” StumbleUpon model - Most social media experts advocate a system that amounts to asking people to give votes to your article and then thanking them afterwards in order to retain them. If I think this is a bad practice for personal blogs (I do) then I also think that this behavior has the potential to be a PR disaster for corporate blogs.
• Commenting on Other Blogs - I’ve made it work for my corporate blog, but only because I have a methodical way of determining what blogs to comment on - I read a blog for a full calendar month before I even consider commenting on it. I don’t think most other corporate bloggers are nearly as diligent or proactive.
• Blog Carnivals - IMHO, blog carnivals don’t jive well with the required clean-cut, professional tonality of most corporate blogs. I’m sure there are exceptions, but that’s just my take.
• Classic Linkbait - List posts, link posts, gimmicks, and other types of classic linkbait are actually counter-productive for corporate blogs. Professionalism and engaging the right kinds of visitors are the two most important aspects of running a corporate blog, not blanket broadcasts. Some companies can actually pull off some pretty ingenious linkbaiting - Blizzard’s April Fools’ gimmicks are a fantastic example, but bear in mind their audience. What works for video game manufacturers doesn’t work for people who make CRM software.

Myth #5 - Getting paid to be a corporate blogger is just like getting paid to do your hobby

The biggest misconception of all - once you get paid to do your “hobby” then it is no longer your hobby. It becomes your profession. When you spend most of your time formulating blog posts, integrating other marketing activities into your blogging, coming up with content ideas, getting the IT team to make changes to the blog engine, and so forth then some of the original “fun” of blogging dies on the vine.

I enjoy my job immensely, but for different reasons than I enjoy personal blogging. I enjoy my job because I get to educate potential and current customers on the best practices for using our products and I see sales generated as a result; I enjoy personal blogging because it’s an opportunity for me to share my experiences and learn from them.

The satisfaction from professional blogging and personal blogging are two entirely different things and I am sure that there are some people who cannot make the adjustment from blogging as a hobby to blogging as a professional. Bear that in mind if you’re ever faced with the decision of doing this stuff full-time.

To Conclude

There are likely a ton of other myths that I’m forgetting to include on here, but I’ve spent enough time ranting about how big the difference is between “perceived corporate blogging” and “actual corporate blogging.” The point is that there are a lot of things that personal bloggers take for granted which corporate bloggers have to claw and fight for. So to all of you people who remain blogging hobbyists and personal bloggers - count your blessings and stop taking some of those nice bonuses for granted.

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Jeremiah Owyang’s latest post, “Forrester Report: Best And Worst Of Social Network Marketing, 2008,” answers a question that came up constantly in the early days of F8 and the Facebook goldrush: “how can my business leverage the success of social networking technology?”

The answer: companies who leverage the member-to-member aspect of social networks outperform companies who try to use social networking technology in a website-to-member fashion.

A more succinct way of putting this is “content dumping onto social networks doesn’t work; enabling your customers to interact with each other through a branded web service does.”

This is what I said in my original post about monetizing Facebook applications: apps that make it are ones that add new dimensions to the interpersonal experience of Facebook.

Jeremiah’s post points out some companies who get web 2.0 and some who don’t, and I thought his examples were actually pretty good case studies in themselves. I actually liked his post so much that I might throw down some cash to buy his company’s report on the subject.

If any of you have some examples of good or terrible marketing on social networks then please leave them in the comments; I’d really like to take a look at some more of the bad ones, although we could all learn a lot more from one or two good ones.

If you want to use your own company as an example, you have my blessing: please promote yourself.

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AdSense and I have enjoyed a fantastic working relationship over the span of half a year or so. I haven’t made much money off of it, but that’s not really the point. I think having some AdSense units embedded on my site actually makes it look a bit more professional, and AdSense saves me the work having to hunt down advertisers to get them to slap some banners on this site.

But honestly, AdSense has been pissing me off lately. I don’t give a damn what ads people click on when they’re on my site, but I hate it when I see crap like “Adventure Quest, FREE RPG” being advertised on the banner of my site. In fact, I hate it when any of the following things make it onto the banners on Marketing Ninja:

• Dating Sites
• Obvious Scams
• MPE or Male Enhancement
• System Registry Cleaner (hope you like spyware!)
• Stupid Online Games

I dislike all of those things because I don’t feel that those ads represent the interests of my audience nor do they represent my blog.

So what have I done to take care of those sites?

The only I thing I can do, which is to say that I’ve dumped URLs of offending websites into my “competitive sites” filter for AdSense. If there are any Google Accounts executives reading this, please note that I obviously am not competing with FilipinoDating.com nor any of the other sites that share FilipinoDating’s high honors in the Marketing-Ninja competitive filter.

So I ask AdSense, why not give us a “topical filter” to weed out advertisements that bear little relevance to the interests of people who come to this site?

Right now I can filter site-targeted advertisements (there are none here,) but I can’t do much about the untargeted ads. I would love something that would let me  specify a preference as to what kind of content can be displayed in any advertisements on my site.

Think of it this way - a topical filter would increase the utility of the advertiser’s AdSense impressions; if site owners could say “hey, my site is about XYZ” it could fill in a lot of the intelligence that the AdSense contextual engine apparently lacks. 

Update: In the middle of writing this article Marketing Ninja’s banner AdSense unit displayed an advertisement that said something along the lines of “Do It Donkey Style.” Seriously, Google, please give me something that can cut this crap off of my site or I’m going to ditch the AdSense altogether.

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In case you didn’t know we’re in the middle of one of the biggest domain name sales bonanzas since the release of the .tv extension; today was the day which GoDaddy was going to distribute the coveted “.me” domain name extension, the extension which belongs to the country of Montenegro.

TechCrunch reported that GoDaddy is having a tough time keeping up with the demand for these domain names and is actually canceling a large volume of the orders.

The comments on the TechCrunch thread are pretty hilarious, most of them are from spammers looking to buy up trademarked domain names in hopes of getting a premium from corporate slowpokes in the future. Given how much I dislike the industry of domain parking I couldn’t resist sharing my schadenfreude in the TechCrunch comments:

I have to admit, I am really, really enjoying listening to the domain parking crowd squeal like stuck pigs over this one. Those guys make it a pain in the ass for startups to get decent branded domains without having to come up with goofy names. If GoDaddy decided to run a train on anyone, I’m glad it was those low-lifes.

And I think that comment accidentally made me the center of attention. Whoops. So I’m going to go ahead and clarify myself here:

Domain Name Parking is a Useless Industry

Capitalism is great; I love it. The idea is to exchange valuable goods and services in exchange for currency. What value does the domain name parking industry offer? Nothing.

Here’s the business model behind domain name parking:

• Be the fastest person to go to GoDaddy.com;
• Buy up potentially popular domain names, including registered trademarks and brand names;
• Mark up the price;
• Hold them indefinitely, adding zero value to them other than giant AdSense units and “male enhancement” advertisements; and
• Hope that someone has a branding need for a given domain name which is so urgent that they’re willing to pay you for the rights to the domain name.

Basically all the domain name parking industry does is make things more inconvenient and expensive for people who actually want to produce valuable web services. Domain parkers aren’t paid because they add value, they’re paid off to stop preventing other people from creating value!

Domain Parkers Are Counter-Productive

So why do I dislike them? Because they are the enemy of efficiency - they make it take more effort to buy domains and they make it more difficult for entrepreneurs to create web services with names that are easy to brand and remember. The biggest reason for having a good domain name is to make it easier for users to remember!

If anything makes me dislike domain parkers, it’s not because of my work as a marketer, it’s because of the basic economics concept of utility, and domain name parkers don’t have any utility! These guys are low lifes - they don’t do anything to add value to anything; all they do is take possession of intellectual property and become an annoyance for anyone who actually wants to use that property until someone decides that it’s finally worth it to pay them off.

Should Anything Be Done to Stop Domain Name Parking?

If domain names didn’t cost $10/year and nothing to maintain then we wouldn’t have this problem. A higher cost per domain would keep a lot of these parasites out, but it’d also make it much harder for people who want to add value to buy up good domains too.

What about making the domain name purchaser demonstrate that he or she is going to utilize it before agreeing to sell them a domain name, like how patents and copyrights work? That won’t work either because it’s a giant pain the ass - ask anyone who’s filed a patent.

Really, there’s no feasible way to keep domain name parkers from being pests and the best way to get around them is to come up with unique domain name ideas, like many of the Web 2.0 service names. In addition the costs domain name parkers present to fully-funded startups and profitable companies isn’t that high - the people who get screwed are private individuals and bootstrapped startups.

So is there anything that should be done to stop domain name parking? As much as I’d like to see an end to the practice, there isn’t anything that can or should be done. But hey, at least we can enjoy watching the fur fly over at TechCrunch.

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TechCrunch, reporting on this morning’s antitrust hearings regarding the Google/Yahoo search deal, ran the following headline: “Google’s Talking Points For Today’s Antitrust Hearings: The Only One Who Won’t Like Our Yahoo Deal Is Microsoft.” I figured I’d go ahead and give the correct headline while I’m at it.

I know that my employer has seen a sharp rise in its AdWords expenses in the past two years, partly because the online advertising laggards took until 2006 to discover paid search and have started bidding one keywords sense and partly because of a phenomenon called “Google Profit Optimization.”

What’s Google Profit Optimization, you ask? Simple. It’s a few automated actions that Google takes to ensure higher profits for Google at the expense of the customer: keyword obfuscation, optimizing placement for high CTR but low performance keywords (Google basically ignores its own Analytics Goals data,) and so forth.

GPO is a phenomenon that only started after Google went public and gained and insurmountable lead in the paid search advertising market, and I think this is a direct result of lack of competition in said market. So back to Google’s talking points for today’s antitrust hearings: Microsoft will be the only one who won’t like our deal? Well, here’s one customer who’s not happy with the deal; keeping Yahoo! out of GOOG hands is the best way to keep Google honest.

If someone, whether it’s Microsoft or not, can finally take the reins away from Jerry Yang and run Yahoo!’s search business with a hint of competence, we might see Google roll back some of its advertiser-gouging policies. The only way paid search advertisers, the people who pay for your free lunch whenever you do a Google search, are going to start getting treated with some more respect is if Yahoo! and Live Search stop losing market share, or if they offer better ROI.

Update: Search Ignite Says the Google Will Raise Yahoo! Search Advertising Rates by 22%. Don’t be evil, indeed.

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Another year, another iPhone. This year’s 3G iPhone release didn’t quite capture the majesty of the first iPhone release, did it? I figured that Apple was shooting for true market penetration in the smart phone industry; however, like many other bloggers, I was mislead by the initial $199 price tag.

As it turns out, the costs of the 3G iPhone are actually higher than the service plan & hardware of the original iPhone. I personally was planning on buying one (despite how much I hate the Apple fan boy culture) until I read article after article about the pricing discrepancies. I know there were plenty of other people who felt the same way I did.

Watching the 3G iPhone buzz erode from early June when some of the deceptive pricing bubbled to the surface of the blogosphere to disastrous iPhone App Store debacle was like witnessing a train wreck in slow motion.

Apple’s marketing campaign had all of the potential to be just as big of a blockbuster as the original  iPhone launch; look at what we consumers were promised:

• Support for high speed cell networks (3G)
• Support for enterprise business applications (Exchange)
• GPS
• And an application store.

But yet the 3G campaign ended up being a horrible comedy of errors when launch day arrived. What the hell happened?

• Pricing disaster - Protip for AT&T and Apple: if it’s easier for me to calculate all of my living expenses for two years than it is for me to figure out how much your phone + service will cost me over the same period of time, you’re doing it wrong. The data plan doesn’t cover text messages, the syncing features cost extra, existing iPhone customers can’t figure out if they’re going to have to pay the full price or $199, and the beat goes on. It’s easy to figure out who screwed this one up:  Apple let AT&T dictate the pricing in the usual giant telecom conglomerate fashion which is to say “vague and unintelligible.” This pricing fiasco deters people not because they’re unable to pay the costs of the phone, but because the apparent disorganization of the pricing makes potential customers insecure. I can’t fit a new wireless service plan into my budget if I can’t figure out how much it costs.
• Apple killed the goose that laid the golden eggs - Most of the people lined up around the street to buy the damn phone were the same fanboys who threw down $599 for the original iPhone, many of them already pissed off about AT&T/Apple’s deceptive pricing. Apple made it abundantly clear that it does not give a shit about these people; let’s review:
  • Apple dropped the price of the original iPhone by $199 not long after the first release, and their “store credit” apology was not well-received even by many hard-core Apple acolytes.
  • The new 3G iPhone pricing is revealed, and guess what? New AT&T/iPhone customers get a better deal than the same folks who already got screwed over once before by the price drop.

  The same hard-core user base who kept Apple alive during the dark days of the mid-late 90s are the same ones who’ve gotten slapped in the face with every update since the iPhone release, and you know what? I think that this time Apple actually killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, and for what? 1 million units sold on one day? What about a lifetime of sales from loyal Apple customers? If Apple starts an annual product cycle for its line of phones then I don’t think we’re going to see as many people line up so enthusiastically next time. They’re not going to drop Apple like a bad habit, but I don’t think those same people will be so quick to shell out money for a new unit every year.

• Apple’s “Bluescreen” moment, the App Store Activation Cock-up - Face it: the opening day activation process for the iPhone was an unmitigated disaster. This is something that we’ve come to expect from Microsoft, not Apple! What happened? Poor scalability design, which is insane given that Apple knew the exact number of maximum activations, which is to say every iPhone old and new. This epic failure is to Apple as what Bill Gates’ infamous “bluescreen moment” is to Microsoft.

Maybe if AT&T figures out its pricing I’ll revisit the possibility of buying a 3G iPhone, but I have to admit, when my service plan with Verizon expires in December I am awfully tempted to buy another Treo.

On that note, what are all of you buying? iPhones? Gphones perhaps?

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Let’s just face it - early adopters of any technology are going to be technical people themselves; they’re going to be engineers, enthusiasts, hobbyists, or something else. Early adopters are a blessing for small companies, like the one I work for, because they are willing to take the risk of trying out your product without a lot of prodding. On top of that, if early adopters like your product, they’re generally very vocal about it and provide invaluable word-of-mouth press.

Early adopters are also very vocal when it comes to product feedback; they are never short on suggestions to help you make your product “better.”

Conventional wisdom from TechCrunch, Scoble, or any other big name startup profiler is to treat your early adopters like enlightened sages, to understand that the synergy of their various experiences, their passions, and your company will take your technology across Geoffrey Moore’s chasm.

I don’t question the notion that a technology needs early adopters in order to eventually cross the chasm, that the manufacturer needs the evangelism of passionate early adopters to help get just enough momentum to start attracting mainstream consumers.

But there is one major issue that I take with the sacred value of early adopters: the recommendations of early adopters for your product’s technology can almost certainly prevent you from crossing the chasm, and I’ll explain why.

An Anecdote

Over at the blog that I run for my employer, I published a screencast which demonstrated an important feature in our software. The subject matter of the screencast was crucial; it demonstrated a feature unique to our product that every single one of our users needs to know. However, the feature itself is simple to the point of being trivial - it’s a single button that eliminates what used to be a ton of work. In short, I published a screencast that showed our customers how to click on one button; seems pretty obvious, but what’s the #1 rule of UI design? Nothing is obvious enough.

Anyway, the screencast was incredibly well received; by the numbers it was the most popular screencast that we’ve ever published. However, it was also the first screencast to receive a strikingly negative comment from one of our own customers.

This customer, someone with obvious technological expertise, was angry that we’d waste his time trying to show him how to do something so simple and, to him, unimportant. “Why don’t you show me how to do something tricky with your software, like how all of the Excel and PowerPoint tutorials do!?”

I explained my reasoning behind producing such a trivial screencast, which is that many of our users don’t know about the feature (it can be easy to miss) and they find that spending one minute learning how to use it and how it works is well worth it. What’s “painfully obvious” to many early adopters can be valuable to many mainstream users.

Later I had a discussion with the User Experience Manager for our product about the fine line that we have to walk on; this “fine line” boils down to balancing two equally important concerns:

• Do we keep the product simple for first time users and infrequent users (mainstream users)
• or do we allow for more features, more customization, and more content for advanced users (early adopters) at the expense of the a steeper learning curve for mainstream users?

The answer to this question is the life or death of the company I work for.

A Reality Check - Your Most Valuable Customers Might Be the Least Vocal

During my conversation with the User Experience Manager he mentioned a passage from Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences, which said the following:

Your most vocal users will come from the two fringes of the technical expertise curve: your expert users will complain that they don’t have enough control over their experience and that they want more fine-grain control over what they can and cannot do; at the exact same time, your users with the least technical expertise will complain that your program is too hard to use!

So which is it? You have tons of people telling you that your product is too simplistic and too complicated at the same time! Who’s right and who’s wrong?

The answer? Both of them may have good suggestions from either end of the adoption spectrum, but often times both groups are wrong.

How Early Adopters Can Steer Companies in the Wrong Direction

Laggards aren’t pursued heavily by most tech companies, JitterBug being a notable exception, simply because the cost of marketing a new technology to them outweighs the benefit. A laggard also costs more to support and they are always the first to complain that “your product is too hard to use.” Generally speaking, laggards are considered the “most expensive” kind of customer to acquire.

Early adopters, on the other hand, are considered to be “ideal” target customers:

• they are intuitive and can solve most tech problems themselves,
• they are instrumental in building communities around products and technology,
• they spread the word to other potential customers, and
• they all have ideas to help make your product better.

However, the question that needs to be asked more often is: early adopters want to make your product better for whom?

Technical people, like early adopters, will rarely push a product towards simplicity; they will push your product towards open standards, towards interoperability, towards new features, towards increased efficiency, but hardly ever do they push it towards increased usability for the masses.

Oh, don’t worry, all of the input from your early adopters will make your product more “usable,” for other geeks maybe, but how does it affect the other customers you need to cross the chasm, the early and late majority?

Truthfully, the input of many early adopters can actually prevent your products from being adopted by the majority and can drive your company to invest time and money into the wrong features.

Here’s how early adopters can lead companies astray:

• They push towards over-engineering - Early adopters get hung up on the details, sometimes to a fault. Issues like execution speed, file size, memory usage, and so forth are issues that come to mind; if your product takes forever to run or it has problems with runaway resource consumption then yes, your early adopters are right to tell you that you need to improve your technology in those areas. However, if you have a relatively stable product with speeds that are more than reasonable in the eyes of average consumers, your early adopters will still tell you that you need to spend more time optimizing this and that in order to use less memory, disk space, CPU power, bandwidth, etc… At some point it becomes compulsive engineering for the sake of engineering aesthetics, not engineering for the sake of increasing value for the average user.
• They push towards feature bloat - Microsoft haters constantly whine about the “feature bloat” of Microsoft Office, which is ironic given that they’re the same people who are responsible for feature bloat in the first place. They want new features for the sake of automating complicated, yet obscure tasks, features that will only be used by a tiny fraction of the entire user base. These features have to go somewhere in the interface and each additional feature adds some increase in the overall complexity of your program.
• They push towards increased control - The biggest problem with some of the product suggestions by early adopters is that many of them ask for increased user control over aspects of a technology; product developers put barriers  in place intentionally to prevent average users from digging themselves into holes. For instance, you’d want to lock the toolbars on a piece of software by default just to prevent users from accidentally trashing their interface and being unable to restore it. Many developers refer to this disdainfully as “baby-proofing” software, but it’s a necessary evil. Your early adopters are often the same sort of people who decry the act of “baby-proofing” software; they want more control and they want more access. However, each increase in control that you hand over to the users also increases the total number of pits that the average user can fall into. Increased control can be good for technical users, but it can be just another empirical example of Murphy’s Law for the majority of your technology’s adopters.

The Majority of Your Users are Silent

The point I’ve been alluding to is the fact that the majority of your product’s adopters is the silent majority; user feedback is always a blessing when it comes to product design, but never forget the needs of your core users. The users who scream the loudest usually aren’t representative of the majority. Early adopters are great, but their suggestions might actually make your product less likely to be adopted; after all, it’s that silent majority who has the most say when it comes to crossing that chasm.

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As Tom from TomsTechBlog has pointed out, a major incident that should have incited many bloggers to question Google’s modus operandi occurred with hardly a peep from the normally boisterous blogosphere.

To recap, FeedBurner’s traffic reporting service went down last weekend - no blogs were able to receive any of their normal traffic information from the service, and yet the blogosphere remained silent. Tom and Michael Krigsman are the only two people who said “hey, shouldn’t we be worried about the total lack of Google’s customer service?”

Google’s entire business model revolves around giving advertisers exposure to massive numbers of potential customers, whether it’s through paid search or through the world’s largest contextual advertising network - they don’t give a shit about people who consume Google’s free services; they’re not Google’s customers!

I’ve had a few discussions with my boss regarding whether or not we should continue syndicating Working Smarter’s readers to a FeedBurner-controlled URL; the idea of questioning FeedBurner/Google’s benignancy must seem insane to many members of the blogosphere, but here’s why we’re considering it:

• Google has no reason to respond to you during service outages; all of your readers are entirely dependent on FeedBurner and Google. What the hell are you going to do if the quality of the service degrades? Plead and beg with your users to switch all of their feeds to a new URL? Good luck!
• Google has all of the control; you control the content, but when you use FeedBurner you’ve ceded control of your readership to Google. This means that you have to accept whatever Google does if it changes the terms of FeedBurner’s service in the future. Even if you can get most of your loyal readers to switch you’re still going to lose a large chunk of your audience (and your blog’s value) in the transition.
• Worst of all, what if Google decides to start a per-subscriber fee to all blogs; this may be a bit radical, but let’s suppose that Google decides to charge any blogger who uses FeedBurner $1/year for all of their subscribers. Big, popular blogs run by private individuals, like 25 Hours a Day, will become too expensive to maintain; I doubt that Dare has an extra $80,000k a year in disposable income that he’d be willing to donate just to keep his blog running.

I don’t buy the notion that Google is a benign company just trying to fight for the common good on the Internet; the fact is that it’s a multi-billion dollar goliath with one concern: it’s bottom line. If Google decides that it’s in its best financial interest to rob bloggers at gunpoint then I don’t think that it will hesitate to do so. Do I think it’s likely to happen? No, but can it happen? Absolutely.

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Those of you who follow me on Twitter might be aware that I bought my dad a Kindle on Father’s Day. My dad’s a busy guy and the only time he really gets to sit down and read a new book is when he’s sitting in the airport wishing that he had bought one before he stepped into the gate - I figured the Kindle’s ability to instantly grab a book any time, any place would be something that he’d love.

This morning I came across Seth Godin’s blog entry entitled “Random thoughts about the Kindle” and was a bit disparaged when I read:

“[The Kindle's] for women and women are buying it. The bestseller list of Kindle titles is much less tech-heavy than Amazon’s list was in the early days of the web. An Oprah book is #1. And the colors and feel of the machine don’t feel like the current uber-geek tech dream device.”

Naturally I’m not going to let some damn marketer insult my manliness and my father’s manliness! How dare he? HOW DARE HE?!

In all seriousness though, the point I take issue with is this:

The Kindle does a fine job of being a book reader, and a horrible job of actually improving the act of reading a book. This is a surprising design choice, I think, and a mistake. Here are three simple examples of how non-fiction books on the Kindle could be better, not just cheaper and thinner:

–Let me see the best parts of the book as highlighted by thousands of other readers.
–Let me see notes in the margin as voted up, Digg-style, by thousands of other readers.
–Let me interact with hyperlinks and smart connections not just within the book but across books

I can think of ten others, and so can you. Instead of making this a dead end (like a book) they could have made it a connector (like the web).

Seth is essentially arguing to make the Kindle an interactive book - make it a social connector where you can interact with other readers and see what they’ve thought about the author’s work. While this sounds well and good there are some, in my opinion, cultural, technological, and feasibility issues that make socializing the Kindle a poor decision.

Reading the Book + Reading Thoughts of Other Readers = Polluted Reading Experience

Book clubs and English classes are existing social mechanisms for discussing books - you read a section of a book or the entire book and then you get together and talk about it among your peers. You can share ideas on what the author’s message was, what you liked, didn’t like, and so forth. What’s the difference between those mechanisms and having a widget inside an eBook that keeps you up to date on what your peers think of any particular section of the book?

The difference is that you don’t have your entire book club looking over your shoulder and shouting out their thoughts in real-time as you try to read the damn book!

I can see where margin notes would be helpful, like in a technical book for instance, but if you’re trying to read a novel, the sort of book that demands your full attention in order to appreciate it, then what would happen if you had additional “social” information on every page of the text? Your reading experience would be ruined.

A book club or an English class is an effective means of engaging other readers about a book because you’ve already had a chance to digest the work by the time you end up discussing it. Discussing the book as you’re reading it simply adds noise to the experience and ultimately cheapens it.

Social Widgets Require Frequent Screen Updates + Kindle’s LCD Doesn’t Use Power Unless It’s Updating the Screen = Bye Bye Battery Longevity

The Kindle uses a special power-saving LCD technology which doesn’t require any (or much) electricity to display an image on its screen; The Kindle only needs juice to change the image on the screen. What this means is that a Kindle doesn’t have to waste energy displaying a single page from a book on the reading screen at any given time thus the battery can last for a very, very long time.

This is also why the Kindle has a separate LCD for the scroll bar.

Social information updates constantly and if that information is to be displayed on Kindle then consumers won’t get to enjoy the extraordinary longevity of Kindle’s battery.

If we were to force consumers to make a choice between

• Getting to have access to all of your books for days and days of use without having to recharge the battery or
• Getting to read comments from idiots who don’t “get” Into the Wild

then what would consumers choose? I think the answer is obvious.

I have nothing but respect for Seth Godin; I’m almost finished with Permission Marketing at the moment and I’ll be reading All Marketers are Liars after that, but Seth’s wrong about messing with the Kindle and adding social networking to it. Reading a book should be a personal experience - discussing a book is something that you do once you’re established your own opinion. Being exposed to hundreds of opinions about what you’re reading at the same time you’re reading it pollutes the experience.

Think about it - if all of the comments from my blog popped up in a constantly updating widget that followed you down the screen as you read my entries then how would that affect your reading experience? Would it be different than if you got to read my entries in their entirety, then read the other comments, then added your own? Absolutely it would. Interacting with other readers is something that shouldn’t be performed synchronously with reading.

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