RSS MAD

An iStudio alumnus returns - Welcome back Vicky Beach!

There can’t be a greater compliment to a team when a former colleague elects to return to the team.  We’re very pleased to announce Vicky Beach’s recent return to iStudio.  Previously a senior consultant, Vicky is rejoining the company as a Vice President in our Toronto office. In addition to her digital expertise, Vicky has a strong background in communications and marketing and has extensive experience in the financial services industry.  She is a consummate professional, and as her colleagues will attest, a marvelous person to work with.  Welcome back Vicky!

Holiday Greetings from iStudio

It’s December – and you know what that means. I’m not talking about busy shopping malls, overplayed music or embarrassing credit card bills. Sure, all of those things hold true. But for agency folk like us, there’s another priority that fills our consciousness as each year draws to a close. And that’s the annual holiday greeting we prepare for clients, colleagues, partners and friends. Yesterday we launched the 2007 Do-Not-Want-Ads, iStudio’s holiday greeting for this year.

For those not keeping score, listed below are a few of our favourites from previous years:

2006’s Build-Your-Own-Holiday
There’s a special kind of magic that’s created when you combine seemingly unrelated concepts together – and then apply it to the holiday season. 2006’s greeting made users the artists, encouraging experimentation to create the most ridiculous holiday scene ever.

2005’s Hot Toddies for the Holidays
As RSS adoption rose, our 2005 greeting put a new spin on the advent calendar, revealing a new tip for the holidays each day. A winner of 4 industry awards, this year’s greeting featured contributions from each of our employees.

2003’s Holiday Memories
Back in 2003, before the blog and social networking boom, we presented a kindergarten-like play with each of us sharing our fondest holiday memories.

With all of the season’s madness, year-end deliverables for our clients and planning for the new year, one has to wonder why we do this to ourselves. Indeed, conceptualizing this year’s greeting began late in the summer, with production taking us all the way to the 11th hour on December 3rd. And so you may ask, don’t we have other things to worry about?

Of course we do.

But truthfully, there are a number of reasons why our annual holiday greeting is so important to us. And they may not be what you think.

Proving our Chops
Okay, let’s get the obvious one out of the way first. Sure, to some degree we do use our holiday greetings to showcase our talents. So yes, a bit of showboating. Just a little bit though.

Team Building
It may not be immediately apparent, but each of our holiday greetings requires hands-on work from virtually every employee at iStudio. We each have a hand in this and it helps to ensure that the flavour of our greeting properly reflects us as a whole.

Personality Plus!
Whether you’re a client, partner, supplier or colleague, our holiday greetings provide a simple way to get to know each of us a little better. As mentioned above, it requires significant input from each team member, with specific topics or content directly related to individual employees.

Keeping us on our toes
Whether it’s being more innovative, making better use of technology or being more strategic with the concept itself, each year presents us with a new challenge – to outdo the previous year’s entry.

It’s Fun!
You may not believe it, but we have a blast creating these things each year.  Brainstorming sessions, late-night photo shoots, shopping trips and basking in the satisfaction of launch day. It’s amazing.

Considering all of these reasons, this year’s holiday greeting is no exception.
 For those who haven’t yet seen it, 2007’s Do-Not-Want-Ads brings a new twist to the concept of gift giving.  iStudio’s team members have selected one or more gifts that, for one reason or another, are so bad – they’re good. You know the type.

Visitors can receive the actual gift (shipped to you free!) by simply telling us why they’d like it. Witty responses are encouraged, and the best submission wins the product on December 19th.

Using a classified ads metaphor for the interface gave us a number of opportunities to inject humour and sarcasm throughout the piece with both the want-ads themselves, or supplementary advertisements found elsewhere in the newspaper spread.

Also be sure to check out our companion Facebook application that allows those who install the app to send virtual versions of these terrible gifts.

After less than 24 hours since the launch, we’re positively blown away by the response we’ve received so far. Already over 70 terrific submissions from users! Thanks to everyone who has participated..and to those who haven’t, don’t be shy! Show us your love for the horrendous gifts we’ve collected for you by entering your bid on one!

Selling in the Virtual World (Part III of III)

In parts I and II we talked about how the Web is evolving to provide more sensory-rich interaction between the user and an organization’s services, products, and people. We talked about virtual brand representations, improving customer service and fulfillment, and choosing in-world sales and business models.

In this final segment, I’d like to talk about another key trend contributing to the importance of in-world brand representation – facilitating greater social interaction with your brand and the implications for your sales cycle and brand initiatives.

Facilitating Interaction: Reaching the Community

Selling or marketing in-world means connecting with your customers on their terms, engaging in the conversation and becoming a part of the existing vibrant communities. Many companies today are still following a traditional means of SL communications; build an island and traffic will come. In the 90s, it was build a Website and traffic will come. Today many islands are beautiful but deserted. Significant in-world presence - but no community and no connection. Organizations need to take the lessons learned from communicating with bloggers and other online participants and apply these principles to the virtual world.

In-world, this means identifying the key influencers within the communities most likely to be responsive to your brand. These people may be in-world journalists, musicians, DJs, association or island leaders which have high interactivity with your target audience. In communicating with these individuals you should consider the current motivations for why people travel in-world: to discover, to explore, to have common experiences, and to share creative visions of the world around them. Many organizations are tuned in to these motivations and cater their marketing accordingly.

Building Community around the Brand

1-800 Flowers knew that its audience was motivated to explore and be creative in-world. The approach? Open a store where your audience can create and collect a free assortment of virtual flowers, allow them to enter an in-world photo contest where they explore the world and submit their photos for the most beautiful fields of Second Life. Ensure your store is populated with real people so that your target can share questions and suggestions with in-store representatives. President Chris McCann noted that the nirvana of it all would be to allow users to submit their virtual bouquet to receive the real thing. McCann noted of the experience, “We recognize that this is not just a place to jump into so we can sell more flowers and gifts. It’s a different environment and an emerging world.”

Coca-Cola recently tapped into the community with its Virtual Thirst contest. The approach? Engage in a conversation with the existing communities and allow them to determine how the Coke brand can creatively enhance the virtual world experience. One suggestion included the traditional elaborate island. This represents the “build it and they will come” approach that many companies tried and failed to sustain. Another suggestion was much simpler, less costly, and much more engaging; the winning idea was an in-world vending machine that offered not drinks but experiences and a means to be truly creative. One such machine dispensed a gigantic pink coke puzzle bottle that residents could play with and solve like a Rubik’s Cube. Each bottle displays a surprise experience after the puzzle is solved. The puzzle also gives users a SLURL (a link to the other areas of the virtual world) to find other bottles to solve.

While Second Life, as with other virtual worlds, will experience hype and anti-hype, many companies are continuing to explore its possibilities for enabling greater interaction between audience and brand.  KPMG went out to the communities with an online job fair to attract and meet with potential recruits. CNN trains and equips citizen journalists to contribute eyewitness reports in-world; news is delivered via kiosks scattered throughout the community. The State of Missouri recently sent out its CIO to stroll the streets to recruit IT staff. 

CSI creator Anthony Zuiker developed a virtual Manhattan to promote the television program “CSI: NY”, tapping into desires for exploration and creativity with tours and puzzles such as “Murder by Zuiker”. As a contest, Zuiker evaluates entries by people trying to solve a crime based on evidence found in a crime scene in-world. Similarly, Microsoft used puzzle solving to promote Visual Studio for its campaign, “All Things Possible.” For the promotion of the film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, IMAX and Second Marketing recruited two dozen avatars, paid in real-world wages, to act as virtual street teams, handing out free virtual promotional items and engaging fellow avatars in discussions about the film. 15,099 unique avatars engaged in conversation about the film; the campaign logged 25,189 individual IMAX brand interactions – all within a span of roughly seven days in-world.

Implications for Organizations

With respect to encouraging social interaction around your brand, your organization may want to consider the following:

Who are we trying to reach? Why does this group go in-world? Is it for general exploration or creativity, or a particular cause, hobby, or interest?  

• Who are the key influencers within the community? What is their connection to the group? Island leader, head of an association, musician, builder, businessperson, artist, in-world citizen journalist? You may want to also consider in-world journalists from Virtual World News, Second Life Insider, the Seventh Sun, Second Life News Network, and the Second Life Herald.
• What are the motivations and preferences of the community? This often means logging on and striking up a conversation not related to the brand. Get to know them, participate in the conversation, share insights and opinions. Listen to their responses.
• In communicating our brand, what can we offer that will add value to their experience. Will our offering allow them to explore new aspects of the world? Will it allow them to create? Will it allow them to share their creation with others in the community and gain recognition in the process? Ideally a good campaign can integrate all of the above. Also, sometimes the best ideas come from the community itself. Don’t be afraid to solicit their opinion.
• Which key influencers (determined from the initial assessment) will we approach to communicate our brand experience? Why should they share the message? What will they gain in terms of recognition and respect within the community?
• How will we measure our engagement? Given that community outreach is typically reaching those at the beginning of the sales cycle, sales should not be the primary metric. Many companies use number of avatar engagements per unit of time and length and quality of conversations as measured by number of positive and negative brand mentions. Once you’ve developed a relationship (showing that you understand their lifestyle and needs) you’ve built the foundation for a discussion of more specific product and service offerings.

Looking Ahead:  Commerce on the Virtual Web

Many tools are moving the virtual Web in the direction of mainstream adoption. Recently Second Life added voice as a standard option, eliminating the requirement for text-based conversations. Vodafone now offers pay-as-you-go calling between the real world and in-world avatars. Don’t have money? First Meta offers participants virtual credit cards with daily interest. Linden Labs is actively working towards interoperability, allowing you to share your avatar (appearance and assets) across platforms. IBM is teaming with Pelican Crossing to develop a universal open source client for all virtual worlds, allowing companies to embed virtual worlds (including Second Life) directly into Web pages.  

In The Coming of the Virtual Web, PARC’s Moore notes “what’s missing from online shopping is the social and recreational experience. That’s exactly what you get with virtual-world shopping.” Joe Miller, VP for platform and technology development for Second Life notes, “In contrast to the Web, where there’s no assumption of a human heartbeat behind the Web page, virtual worlds are inherently social settings. You go up to an avatar and you know there’s a real person on the other end.”

Throughout this series we talked about the degree to which online commerce has come to not only compete with traditional commerce but also to complement the offline world and to facilitate innovative means of product interaction, customer service, and social engagement in and around your brand. In the bestseller Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping, Underhill concluded that “in the cyberworld the best is yet to come.” Fast forward to a Web based on sharing and participation, with all of the tools for interaction at our disposal, and the best is only limited by our imagination.

Summer of social media

It’s been a busy summer at iStudio. We’ve been picking up our collaboration with sister company Fleishman-Hillard, to build upon their digital communication strategies with clients. The “west wing” of our Toronto office has been a real hive of social media activity – with projects involving my colleagues and office neighbours Dave Jones, Julia Stein and Ed Lee, our hallway has become saturated with it!

In the past month we launched social media news releases for big names like Yahoo! (Yahoo! Canada and Canadian Soccer Association Launch The Kick) and Gatorade (Stanley Cup Winner JS Giguere Tackles Hydration Issue with Sweat Test), and it’s really satisfying to have well-known brands participating in the brave new world of building relationships with bloggers to get a story out.

We’ve been knee-deep in online audits, monitoring and influencer outreach for a real variety of programs, from issues management to consumer marketing to fundraising. I’m personally up to my eyeballs in search optimization and I’m happy to say that it’s becoming less and less challenging to convince clients of the need to increase their online “share of voice” – oftentimes, they’re actively requesting this from their iStudio counsel.

It’s incredible to see how much online communications work has changed so much over the past three to four years.

And on that note, heads up that iStudio is on the prowl for a Managing Supervisor at our Toronto office, so if you’re as nuts about online communications as we all are, drop me a line. More details on that soon.

Tags: social media news release, social media press release, smpr, online communications

The True Meaning of Accessibility

When people are starting up a new site development project, questions usually come up around the "accessibility" requirements of what’s being built. Does this site need to be accessible to screen readers? Does it need to conform to federal standards of accessibility? What kind of audience will be visiting this site? And so on. All good questions, and questions worth asking.

But I think these questions are too often asked not with the intention of providing conveniences specific to certain audiences, but instead to find grounds on which to ignore the concept of "accessibility" as a whole, an excuse to knock it off as one less thing to worry about: "No blind users coming here? No need for accessibility then". Yikes. This points to some confusion about what it really means to produce accessible content, and I’d like to try and clear up a bit of that by taking a closer look at what it really means to be "accessible".

Right, so let’s start with the word "accessibility". The term has been fashionable for years now, but it grew to be a little ambiguous as the idea became more popular and more people starting tossing it around. All in all I think it’s still centered around the right idea, but there are at least two sides to that coin (the um coin of accessibility?) and I think we might stand to benefit from a quick look at what those are.

We can all agree that one of the great things about the web is the way that published material can be accessed from pretty much anywhere with a connection, and using a huge variety of software tools. Properly coded content can be syndicated, redistributed, rewrapped, re-styled and reborn with little or no effort, due to the clever design of the technology involved. Now this is nothing new - we’ve all heard it a million times by now - but we’ve also learned from experience that it’s not quite so simple, either. Things do go wrong - and given the complexity of it all, there are a number of ways they go about doing it.

Take me, for example. As a user, I’m pretty mainstream. I run Firefox or IE on Windows with a big, full-colour screen and good multimedia support. I don’t exactly fall into the category most people think of when they’re worrying about "accessibility"… but nonetheless accessibility problems still arise. Server is down? Then I can’t access the site. Connection dies between client and server? No access. Google can’t see the site? I can’t find it. Flaky browser chokes on a piece of code? No access. What I’m getting at here is that, strictly speaking, the word "accessibility" refers to "the ability to access the material being presented".

But as the industry matured, people began to give serious thought to what they called "universal accessibility", in an attempt to understand the difficulties faced by those of us working with physical limitations. Not only should mainstream audiences be able to access the site, the thinking goes, but so should those using screen readers, braille devices and voice-activated software, too. Enter initiatives like the Canadian Government’s Common Look and Feel standards, and Section 508 in the United States. All noble goals, and all worthy of attention, which they received.

However, the development trends at the time were such that the main challenge for "universal accessibility" was not in finding ways to make things easier for the so-called ‘disabled’ crowd, but in finding ways to allow them just to get in the front door. Unnecessarily heavy reliance on images, scripts and non-standard widgets to deliver core content resulted in the majority of websites being almost entirely inaccessible to people using assistive technologies. It was in this atmosphere that the term "accessibility" took hold and really started to go somewhere.

Support for the idea grew, which at first seemed to be motivated by ideas of equality and non-discrimination - the worthwhile pursuit of being as inclusive as possible. But as time went on and people began to understand web standards and move back towards using these technologies the way they were intended, it became clear that universal accessibility is already inherent in the design of the medium… if you publish a plain HTML page, everybody will be able to access it simply because it’s in HTML.

Where the problems kick in is when people pave over their plain HTML content in a way that accidentally locks out certain segments of the population. And that’s sort of the sad part of the story here… the way we were building sites those days, we were actually starting off with an accessible solution and then inadvertently erecting these barriers as we put more effort into construction. Then, failing to understand where we had gone wrong, we took what we had and tried to address these barriers by putting even more effort in - on top of the slightly misguided construction done so far - to try and make our inaccessible product at least "degrade gracefully". Like spending cash on building a wheelchair ramp to get people over a high curb that arguably shouldn’t have been put there in the first place.

Now - without a doubt - a site that "degrades gracefully" is better than one that is totally inaccessible, but in truth there is no need for anything to degrade at all. Instead it is better to remember that the pure content we’re putting online is the product and is already accessible to all sorts of different people - and that the visual designs and snazzy scripted widgets are upgrades to the basic offering. Done properly, nobody gets a degraded version at all - instead it’s just a question of how many of the upgrades the user takes advantage of during their visit.

So back to the two sides of accessibility, that stupid coin I was talking about. The old-school approach sees accessibility as "the ability of disabled or ‘alternative’ users to access your content". People coming from this perspective understand the challenge to be about the elimination of accessibility barriers that would lock these users out.

The other take on accessible design is based on a more modern approach in which universal accessibility is achieved by keeping core content clean, to allow everybody and every machine access to your content… and then applying layers of enhancements for those who can make use of them. The big difference between this approach and the other is that the old way is about removing barriers to entry - and the other is about ways to make things even easier for alternative users to make their way through the already barrier-free content. And from here it becomes clear: any effort taken which confounds, obscures or otherwise mangles your core content is not only creating potential barriers for alternative users, but also may be locking out other segments of your audience based merely on their choice of browser, operating system, bandwidth or display setup.

Clearly, the modern approach has won out, not only due to dreams of equal-access-for-all, but also largely driven by the fact that the most modern and powerful technologies are not steered by human eyes but are instead software entities operating in much the same way as screen-readers do: by reading the HTML. People began to realize that if the screen-reader couldn’t read their website, then neither could Google. That got people’s attention pretty quickly.

So I guess what I’m saying is that we should try not to talk about accessibility as if it were just an option to be applied as an afterthought, or as some kind of favour for blind people. If your server is down, if your fonts are too small, if your site is too heavy to be downloaded easily, if your content is hidden behind proprietary plugins or buried away in scripts somewhere, these are all accessibility problems. This is about so much more than just catering to some ‘disabled’ demographic… it’s about making sure people can get what they came for:

• ensuring search engines can see all the content, so the content makes it into the web at large
• ensuring that automated tools can see the content, and do things with it (search crawlers, link checkers, translation tools, etc.)
• building sites and pages in such a way that all current browsers, old legacy browsers, and browsers that haven’t been released yet will be able to see the content and do something with it
• writing clean HTML to ensure compatibility with devices that don’t run scripts, won’t display images, or devices with ridiculously small screen sizes
• making things easier for people on slow connections
• ensuring browser functionality works as intended (ie. not breaking the back button, allowing people to right-click and "open in new window", allowing people to bookmark pages, etc.)
• making things easier for people with broken mice, broken keyboards, or monochrome monitors… broken fingers, broken glasses, broken browsers… AOL users, Lotus Notes users, paranoid users, government users, etc etc.

Okay then. So if we can agree that the old notion of the "accessibility problem" is best left to the modern, standards-based design tactics, then what is there to talk about when it comes to making things easier for people with actual disabilities?

Well, as I said, most of the old "accessibility" tricks were less about providing conveniences for disabled users and more about dealing with the problems that kept them out entirely. Now that we don’t have to put effort into providing workarounds for those barriers any more, what better way to spend that time than to work on implementing bonus features that make their visit a little easier? Having now removed the barriers to entry, we’re in a better position to think a little bit about things we can do to help out… this is where "skip navigation" links come in. Or special stylesheets that help screenreading software do a better job of reading your site. Or setting up a more useful tab-order in your site’s links, or establishing keyboard shortcuts, or… you get the idea. Lots to talk about there, but that’s a whole other conversation. For now, just remember: Accessibility = Interoperability.

Where would we be without it?

Social Media Shines at IABC International Conference

I had the opportunity to attend the IABC International Conference in New Orleans last week and was pleased to see the strong attendance at five social media sessions that took place during the event. A couple of sessions provided solid social media 101 information, with definitions of podcasts, wikis, RSS and more, complemented by some excellent examples of how they are effectively used in organizations such as Verizon and General Motors. 

It was clear from the questions asked that some delegates were still unsure of how to enter the social media space. The strong message in many of the sessions was that even if you are not ready to dive into a blog or podcast, at least become familiar with the online conversations that are taking place about your organization. In a session called Building Brands and Community via E-Marketing, presenters Ryan Buchanan, CEO and founder of eROI and Kent Lewis, president of Anvil Media, encouraged attendees to search for their organization’s name in Google and know who is in the top 10 list. They recommended taking this exercise a step further by searching, I love “organization’s name” and I hate “organization’s name”.  These are simple ways to get an initial sense of how an organization is perceived and discussed online. Communicators can then determine if they need to introduce an online monitoring and outreach program to track and manage their reputation on the Web. 

Alan Scott, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for the Enterprise Media Group of Dow Jones spoke in detail about how blogs and message boards are affecting corporate reputation. In addition, Christopher Barger, director of global communications technology at General Motors spoke about the company’s successful corporate blog, FastLane, as well as provided practical advice on how to work with bloggers to communicate a story online. Interviews with both Allan and Christopher are available on the IABC Web site.  
 
This year’s sessions gave communicators a wealth of insights and examples of how to introduce social media in their organizations. Hopefully, there will be many more social media success stories to present at the 2008 conference! 

A Golden Star : The Lazy Man’s Comment

Ever watched a YouTube video and found yourself overcome with respect/envy/validation that you literally want to “thank” the video poster? It actually happens to me all the time. I’m not talking about episodes of the Daily Show or music videos. I mean honest, original content being pumped out by so many members of the YouTube community.

So how do you express your thanks to these people? YouTube offers a variety of mechanisms: subscribing to the user, posting a video response or posting a text comment. The simplest (and easiest) method though, takes little more than one click – rating the clip. Using those lovely red stars, we can immediately package up all of our love and appreciation for the users video and unload it all with one triumphant 5-star rating.

Sure, there are times when you may feel so strongly (positive or negative) about a user’s video that you’ll be pushed to actually post a text comment. And in certain situations, you may feel SO strongly that you deem an actual video response is warranted.

Fair enough. But there are a couple reasons why the rating system wins – at least for me.

Aside from taking some effort on your part (presumably you have something to say, constructing a sentence, physically typing out your comment), the text comment comes with a lot of baggage.

Consider this: if you’re commenting on a video blog where the host explains his or her position on abortion to be entirely pro-life, you’re just setting yourself up for flaming comments by subsequent comments, no matter what your position on the subject may be. Sure, this shouldn’t matter – it’s just your typical comment thread. But to a lot of people, it does matter. Look through any such thread and you’ll find comments upon comments from the same people, essentially having a threaded argument for everyone to see. And just like everything posted on the internet, there’s a good chance your comment will be there for years to come, whether or not your stance on the issue has changed.

And again, let’s not underestimate the “laziness” thing. Your hand’s already on the mouse – what could be easier than just clicking a shiny little star to express your feelings about something?

Enter – my point. (I know, I was wondering if there’d be one too)

I was just reading a tech biz blog at Fortune.com and completely agreed with the poster’s explanation of all the iPhone hype. Did I agree enough that I’d be willing to think up a thoughtful response and type it out? Hell no. Yet, I still would have appreciated a way to give the blogger a pat on the back. A thumbs up. A golden star.

Why isn’t the rating model being applied to blogs as well? 

Are we afraid that a star rating is inappropriate for evaluating the quality? Is it a sense that this type of rating system is irrelevant or not useful? I don’t think so. In fact, the star system is something we’re all so familiar with – not just with YouTube, but so many other scales of “quality” – that it seems entirely appropriate.

Of course I’m not suggesting we all go silent and stop our commenting in favour of stars. But adding in such simple functionality for the lazy lurkers like me seems like a no brainer.

So until we upgrade the iStudio blog to include a rating system:

Wireless Experts - Please help me understand why my dreams can’t come true

If you’re like me, all of the recent chatter about Apple’s highly anticipated iPhone has made me entirely giddy with excitement and anticipation. Ever since Mr. Jobs presented the product at MacWorld, I’ve been literally fantasizing about all of the happy that this beautiful piece of electronic bliss would bring into my life. I’m serious.

But then, as is usually the case when you build something up in your mind, reality comes trampling in, shattering my idealistic techno-nirvana. And I really thought this time I wouldn’t be disappointed.

A bit of background. First off, I’m not an expert (indeed, I’m pretty much in the dark) when it comes to understanding how mobile phones work. Sure, I know how to USE one, but as far as the logistics of how voice or data is transferred from one place to another, it’s kind of a black hole for me.  I take it that those big communication towers have something to do with it. Maybe a satellite? Perhaps it’s all magic. Who knows.

At the same time, like you, I’ve seen hundreds (if not thousands) of mobile devices released over the past few years – devices positively screaming for across-the-board, hands-down, ANYWHERE-Internet access. Meaning, whether you’re at a grocery store, at the gym or camping in the middle of nowhere, you can get online. From mobile phones, to handheld gaming devices, to laptops, digital media players, digital cameras – these things are only reaching half of their potential in an offline setting.

But there’s a gap, apparently.

Sure, you can set up a Wi-Fi network at your home or business. And that should get you about as far as the end of your driveway, or maybe on the fringes of your neighbour’s yard. Short of that, at least with respect to mobile phones and PDAs, your only option is to deal with the obscenely priced “data plans” offered by wireless carriers. And honestly, “obscene” doesn’t even begin to describe the shameful pricing structures we’re faced with in Canada.

In a typical scenario, consider this:

• Initial purchase price of a decent PDA: $500.00
• Monthly voice package (let’s say 350 weekday minutes, with unlimited weekends/evenings): $65.00
• Monthly Data plan (up to 200MB of data transfers, after which you’re hit with an outrageous 5 cents/kilobyte rate): $120.00*

* Just so we’re clear, the 5 cents/kb means that if you’ve exceeded your monthly 200 MB limit, loading, for example, the CNN home page *once* would cost you around $30.00(!)

Total for one year (before taxes and other hidden fees): $2720.00

What the hell is going on here?

With respect to data transfer, 200MB might seem decent. But think about how quickly that limit would be exceeded when purchasing music, downloading videos, posting photos and basic web browsing – not to mention email use. If that wasn’t hard enough to swallow, consider that most carriers will require customers to sign up for a minimum of two (usually three) year contract. Talk about a sweet deal for these guys.

Now, let me reiterate, I don’t profess to be, by any stretch an expert in this, but doesn’t this pricing structure’s fairness seem on par with ENRON’s violation of the state of California during the energy “crisis” of 2000-2001? I don’t mean to be dramatic, but seriously – that’s hands-down insane.

So, for a minute, let’s go back to the pie-in-the-sky utopia I was referring to earlier. When I’m referring to ALL mobile devices being online, here are a few of the applications I mean:

Digital Cameras: Email the photos you take to friends/family, transfer them to your home computer (thus eliminating the need for massive storage on the device, posting to Flickr)

Handheld Gaming Devices: Multiplayer gaming, downloading demos, micro transactions for additional content)

Digital Media Players: Purchasing audio content, scrobbling, sharing (a-la-Zune).

For laptops, PDAs and mobile phones, I think the uses are obvious. In the past five years, we’ve seen a convergence of many of these uses. Most mobile phones now come with cameras. Gaming devices do offer download/online services. And of course the Microsoft Zune does provide a simplistic music-sharing system among Zune users. So the practical applications are there. The big missing link is a way to get all of these devices online. Of course, then came the iPhone.

And apart from Apple’s track record for creating beautiful, useable pieces of delight, the real source of excitement (for me certainly) was seeing a device that effectively combined nearly all of these products into one while presumably offering true online connectivity. And indeed, when their plan pricing revealed yesterday, it seemed entirely reasonable.

At a glance, you may think it’s still relatively close to the pricing structure I broke down earlier.  But there are two fundamental differences here:

First off, the iPhone combines the functionality of more devices – and with much more functionality than your typical BlackBerry. Consider also the “revolutionary” touch-screen interface, the fully integrated iPod, the Safari browser to name a few. On paper at least, this phone eats blackberries for breakfast.

More importantly however, notice how the plan pricing INCLUDES unlimited data services. Your monthly service fee ($59.99-$99.99), on par with what we pay in Canada I might add, covers both your voice and data. In fact, the variance in monthly fees only relates to the amount of voice time associated with a given plan. You can imagine my delight when I saw the pricing plans and it seemed as though my dream would actually become a reality. Thank the heavens for Apple!

Not quite, actually.

At least not yet. While there hasn’t been any official announcement from Rogers or Apple regarding service/data plan pricing, it’s not looking good. Based on the limited (albeit sketchy) information available online now, looks like we will be faced with more of the same maltreatment we’re currently receiving.

So it comes down to this. Either the wireless carriers in Canada are making a killing with these data plans, or – more likely – I’m missing something with respect to the technology. Is the technology different in the U.S – enough so to allow for “unlimited” data transfer?

And so, if you’re an expert (or even just marginally less clueless than I am about this technology) please share your thoughts. We’ve had this discussion around the office and no one seems to have an answer.

Micro Marketing

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how Web 2.0 and the social Web gives clients (and us) the ability to track conversations about them and their industry.

It’s not that this sort of peer-to-peer chatter hasn’t happened before, or that companies haven’t been trying to generate buzz around them before – in fact many companies spend huge amounts of marketing dollars on companies such as Bzz Agent and Agent Wildfire to build up excitement – it’s the fact that every online conversation is indexed and searchable.

When you write about the great experience you had with the cable guy or the awful food you were served at a top restaurant, your post will stand for the rest of time (or until you forget to pay your server bill), and will continue to appear in search results for that cable company or that restaurant.

So if I search for the restaurant, depending on your “Google juice” the first experience I have of the restaurant will not be their fancy Web site or local listings, but your negative review. Your review will be in a language I can understand, relate to and empathize with. In Cluetrain terms, we will be having a very real (although one sided) conversation about the restaurant as part of its “marketing”.

Why is this relevant?

Think about how you get your information. When you hear about a band, do you go to the corner shop and buy a copy of Rolling Stone or do you search YouTube for a live performance? When you hear about a new line of clothes, do you watch a fashion show on TV or do you google them?

Just the fact that Google has become a verb is proof positive that people no longer sit back and passively wait for information to come to them. If we want information, we go get it. We read what our peers write and make decisions based on that information more than the obtrusive marketing messages that are foisted upon us every day.

So, to recap. Consumers now get their information in a new way that doesn’t fit into the traditional media landscape and are finding that information in new ways – whether it’s Google, Facebook shares, RSS feeds or social bookmarking sites.

As a result, if you’re tasked with managing and monitoring your company’s reputation, you have to be online. You have to be in the thick of things, responding to criticism, gracefully accepting praise and, all the time, building up a bank of online good will, for the next person who searches for you, to find.

Marketing and communications isn’t about spraying messages at the media and hoping they drip down to the end user or consumer anymore. It’s about convincing people to engage with your brand and your product, one person at a time.

We’re no longer concerned about quantity, it’s all about quality. It’s about micro-marketing to a niche demographic of one in order to achieve the greatest possible affect.

As one prominent blogger would say, it’s about micropersuasion.