Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Southwest Understands Conversation

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

I’m probably a bit late to the party on this one, but I flew Southwest up to & back from the MD/VA area this past week. It was unlike any prior flying experiences, and as far as I can tell, they know they’re doing it. It’s intentional. The staff are happy and conversational with passengers. They joke with you, they aren’t afraid to laugh. Probably the best customer experience out there as far as feeling like a person, rather than cash-dispensing cattle.

What really shocked me though was when, on the flight up on the 17th (#522 if someone from SW wants to look it up), the flight attendant sang to the crew. Thrice. I was on a non-connecting one-stop flight, and was treated to amusing, silly, fun singing three times. It put a smile on my face. She got applause each time.

Someone needs to introduce that flight attendant to the marketing director, because that was just awesome. It really shows that they’re doing a great job, too: Checking baggage, the lines at every other airline were ghost towns. Southwest was almost spilling out of their guide thingies.

Keep it up, SW.

(I’ve got a lot of posts to make about the latest update to Listy.us, but this seemed a more pressing post. I felt it was worth mentioning before I forgot about it.)

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Marketing’s Bad Name

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

I’d like to share an experience I had a few years ago: I was at the supermarket, making smalltalk with the cashier, and she asked what I do for a living. I answered truthfully: “I work in marketing.”

I’ve never seen someone go from friendly and cheerful to all business so quickly. From the reaction, you’d think I’d said “I vivisect puppies.” I haven’t told someone “I work in marketing” since – at least not out of context.

The thing is, they’re partly justified. Think of marketing as a consumer and the first things that come to mind are probably an inbox full of spam, copious handfuls of junk mail (physical spam), phone calls while you’re eating dinner, commercials interrupting your night on the couch, and so on. Hell, why stop there? Don’t forget the bots posting nonsensical links in your blogs, or the bots and slimy “marketers” on Twitter (those guys with 50-100X more “following” than “followers”).

Yeah. Nowadays you’d better clarify: “I work in marketing, but I’m not one of the guys you hate.” Luckily these days I can say “I run my own business through websites,” and folks don’t always realize that that job description includes marketing. Being an entrepreneur is much more smalltalk-friendly than working in marketing.

Rule number 1 of modern marketing: Don’t be a dick.

Don’t send people any marketing materials they didn’t ask for: No spam, no junk mail. Blog comment spam, twitter spammers, etc, are Internet extensions of the old-and-broken mechanic of “I will interrupt people, steal their attention and valuable time, and they will buy my product.” People don’t react like that anymore. They hate you for it. I know I do. Don’t do it.

My projects will never spam you. I refuse to be that guy.

Listy.us will feature Google ads for non-paid accounts. Context sensitivity is it’s main selling point; If I have no choice but to show ads to support a project, I’m going to make sure those ads are something you want to see. As soon as a site can stand on its own without ads, the ads will be gone.

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Virtual Currency and Freemium Services

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

Here’s a monetization idea I’ve been playing with since participating in post-GDC “Idea Exchange: Emerging Trends in Game Development,” a sort of virtual conference that was held in both Metaplace and Second Life via a chat bridge between the two (pretty cool in itself). You can see a side-by-side screen comparison here.

During that chat, a lot of ideas were covered, and Raph briefly touched on how he thought offer-based marketing was a big new trend at GDC. Here’s the chat log, edited for relevance:

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3 Disciplines that Shape My Work

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

I’m at an interesting place where I’m influenced by several different “disciplines” of design, and I think that’ll show in my work. There’s a lot of resonance between these; While the first two are pretty obvious, the third may not be. I’ll compact the first two into one for brevity:

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A Few Software Recommendations

Friday, March 13th, 2009

So, I’m now self employed. That means I need software, and I need it to be either free or inexpensive. Since my business is web applications, I put a little research into a cheap software kit for getting started on this kind of thing. Dreamweaver’s nice, but it’s pricey, and has less-than-awesome support for full-on software development. I’ll spare you the comparisons (for the most part) and just get right down to the results. These are all for Windows…

[edit: Added note to NetBeans bit to reflect irritation at them for republishing without permission.]

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What’s in a Verb? “Meep” vs “Nudge”

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Metaplace, a project lead by Raph Koster of Ultima Online & Star Wars Galaxies fame, is an open-ended platform that allows anyone to create their own virtual world. You want a room for people to play chess? Cool, code up a chess game, board, design and decorate the room, and you’re on. Want a role-playing experience that teaches people about history? You can do it.

Something unique to Metaplace is the idea of the Meep. It’s a small dustbunny like critter that rolls or jumps around. It’s kind of the unofficial MP mascot, and the testing community loves them. So much so, that they created a world purely to protest the potential change of the verb “Meep” to “Nudge.”

Meep, as a verb, was (as I understand it) an idea of Cuppycake, community manager of Metaplace, that got put into the game on their free time. It was intended to be like a Facebook “poke.” There’s a context menu option when you click other players to Meep them.

The problem that prompted the suggested change from Meep to Nudge, and the backlash that ensued, was that new users just didn’t get it. I even suggested myself that people don’t really know what Meep is, and might not feel comfortable doing something they don’t really understand. I suppose I never fully explained my concern there: My problem was that users didn’t understand the idea right away, it wasn’t with the idea of Meeping people.

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