Year: 2010

Subaru announces in-car WiFi

Dave

I was just perusing Facebook, as part of my getting-ready-to-write ritual. “It’s also part of my taking-a-break-from-writing ritual and my winding-down-from-writing ritual. Essentially, if it weren’t for Facebook, I could have finished this book in an afternoon.”

I came across a link to an article at PCMag.com entitled Suburu Slaps In-Car Wi-Fi into its 2011 Outback.

Interesting idea, but I was reading the article thinking, “I’m not sure it’s worth paying $29 a month for another Internet connection that you can only use in the car.” At least not for me. The only device I’m likely to connect when I’m in the car is my iPhone, and that’s already, you know, connected.

I am becoming increasingly averse to monthly fees. I will almost certainly cancel my XM Radio subscription, the next time I remember. Yes, there’s some good content, but there’s also lots of good content out there for free. “It should come as little shock that I spend the little time I have in the car alone listening to marketing podcasts like Six Pixels of Separation/Media Hacks, Marketing Over Coffee, For Immediate Release and Managing the Gray. Those are all free, as well as valuable. Those nine and ten and eleven bucks a month fees add up, after all. Then I came to this quote:

“We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: It doesn’t make sense to pay for most in-car Wi-Fi solutions from automakers,” writes editor David Thomas.

So I guess this idea isn’t playing very well with David Thomases.

Dad, what do you think?

photo by germanyengland

Please, personalize your LinkedIn requests!

Dave

I’ve been writing like a fiend all weekend, trying to finish my part of The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy. Last night around midnight I finished a particularly thorny section on listening, monitoring, analytics and calculating the ROI of your social media activities. I think I’m feeling a bit punchy, because here’s a paragraph I just wrote, about sales people using LinkedIn to make connections.

There is one thing many LinkedIn users agree on: if you’re requesting a connection to someone you don’t know or who you met in passing, for the love of all that is holy, personalize the message that LinkedIn sends with the introduction request. Nothing says, “I’m in a hurry to get as many connections as possible more loudly and clearly than sending the standard, “I’d like to add you to my professional network message. Your request is much more likely to be well-received if you say, “Looks like we share similar interests in particle acceleration,” or “We met at the National Association of Underwater Taxidermists conference in Poughkeepsie. I spilled pomegranate juice on your man purse”

photo by smi23le

Five key lessons of the Old Spice campaign for enterprise social media marketers

Dave

Last night The Mrs looked over my shoulder at Tweetdeck and said, “Everybody’s talking about Old Spice” It’s the hottest topic in social media, marketing and advertising right now. Built on the success of the video embedded above, which now has more than 13 million views on YouTube, the integrated social media campaign features shirtless ab merchant Isaiah Mustafa, who recorded dozens of personalized YouTube responses to all kinds of people who mentioned Old Spice on Twitter and Facebook. And not just Ashton Kutcher and Alyssa Milano: in a quick scan I saw three videos addressed to people I know personally, not just through social media.

No doubt this campaign will win dozens of awards and be the subject of multiple case studies. I look forward to seeing some hard analytics showing how this campaign actually affects Old Spice sales. In the meantime, assuming one of the goals was to raise awareness of Old Spice, I think we can mark that goal achieved.

I just had a lunchtime conversation with my colleague John Mosier, who leads our content strategy initiatives. We talked about the reasons we think this campaign succeeded. In essence, they used the techniques of social media and raised them up to the brand level in a way that few companies have done.

In other words, they made it scale.

“It was no mean feat. This excellent article at ReadWriteWeb talks about the team that made it happen.”

Here’s what they did right:

  1. They understood the communities they were addressing. They knew how people communicated in those channels and how they liked to be addressed. They spoke the right language. They even got positive responses to their video directed at the “anonymous” users of 4chan, which is perhaps not the easiest community to impress.
  2. They understood the channels they were using, what the individual characteristics of those channels were and what benefit they could derive from each.
  3. They had great content. Everybody wants their campaign to “go viral” and the Old Spice campaign demonstrates once again what it takes to make that happen. The scripts for the videos are genuinely funny, edgy and innovative.
  4. They had great talent. Despite my description above, Isaiah Mustafa is much more than a pretty torso. He’s a talented comic actor with great timing, and is apparently an ironman, considering he stood in a towel for a very long time, cranking out video after video. Isaiah was supported by a social media team and a group of writers who are obviously at the top of their game. I’ve watched a dozen of the videos and haven’t seen a single one that wasn’t genuinely funny.
  5. They knew when to quit. Rather than milking it to the point where people were sick of it, they left on a high note, ending the personalized video responses today with a thank you video to everyone. The comments to that video on YouTube are mostly along the lines of “Oh, no! You can’t go!”

No doubt we will see a flood of imitators trying to duplicate Old Spice’s formula. Many of those efforts will ring hollow. Inevitably, some will be downright embarrassing. I’m sure a lot of corporate marketers are looking at this and thinking, “All you need to make a splash on the Web is a good gimmick”

Good marketers already know that breakthrough campaigns are built by smart people with great ideas, amazing content and a solid understanding of their customers and the places they congregate, backed by intelligent execution.

This blog post is now diamonds.

Update: the Big Boy Bed

Dave

As described here recently, The Boy made his desire to transition from crib to big boy bed known last week by flipping himself over the rail and busting in on his parents’ morning ablutions. So far, it’s been fairly smooth. Most of the time he gets that he’s supposed to lie there.

There have been a couple of nap- and bedtimes in the last week where I despaired of our decision. On two occasions when I put him down, he was so wired that he was literally doing somersaults on the mattress. It was at those times that I fully realized the import of what we had done: his bed was no longer a holding pen where we could dump him against his will and slink away.

That realization felt as though something really significant: a safety net, or backup plan that we had seldom used but still relied upon: had been taken away. I remember thinking on one of those occasions, “Am I going to have to sit here like a nightclub bouncer, barring his exit until, after hours of struggle, he finally gives up and goes to sleep?”

Of course, as with almost all of my more dire parental worryings, that didn’t happen. Some nights he fights it, some nights he accepts it. He has slept through the night every night, and wakes up where we left him.

Today at nap time, though, it seemed especially touch-and-go. The Mrs was putting him down, and after quite some time “and effort” she came out into the hall, said goodnight, and sat down on the steps to see what he would do.

He called for her for quite a while. Then we heard the sound of him trying to defeat the slippy plastic childproof door handle anti-turning devices. Then we heard a short burst of determined footsteps. Then nothing.

We sat and waited for close to ten minutes. “If he was fashioning a weapon of some kind,” I suggested, “I think we would have heard something by now.”

Eventually we went downstairs and haven’t heard anything since. I just took a risk and slowly, carefully stuck my head in the door. He’s not standing on the windowsill or lying under the dresser or swinging from the light fixture. He’s asleep in his big boy bed.

Of course. Where else would he be?

Connecting your computer to your TV for streaming video

Dave

This isn’t the kind of thing I normally write about, and this post is far from comprehensive, but I got into a conversation with two colleagues recently about how to connect a computer to a TV and stream your shows without needing a cable box. I wrote them a long email with my experiences, and, as is my wont, I decided I’d post that email here in case it’s helpful.

The Mrs and I shut off our cable TV service about seven months ago and have since been using a Mac Mini plugged into our Vizio HDTV for streaming video. It’s not necessarily an easy transition and takes some fiddling, but if you’re the kind of person who likes fiddling, it’s a good way to save about a hundred clams a month “for now, until the cable companies and content providers figure out better ways to charge for it”.

Here’s the advice I gave my colleagues:

Here’s a good video that lays out all the steps. It gets a bit bogged down in all the cable options. My advice would be to Google specific questions about your TV and your computer, e.g., “connect Macbook Pro to Vizio HDTV.” Most likely someone has already done what you’re trying to do.

Basically, hooking up your computer to a modern TV is no different than hooking it up to a monitor. You just need to find the right cables.

For us it was easiest to connect our Mac Mini to our Vizio TV using a VGA cable plugged in to the TV, and a mini display port to VGA adapter to plug it into the Mac.

A lot of PCs have a VGA port already, so for a PC you can get a VGA cable and just plug it in to both devices. I did that when I was using an HP laptop with the TV.

The next challenge once you get it plugged in is setting the display and finding the right resolution. The video gives a good overview of how to do that. One thing that helps is finding the “native resolution” of your TV, which is probably shown in your TV manual, or you can probably find it online. If you set your computer’s display properties to the same resolution as your TV’s native resolution, you should be able to get full screen video with no letterboxing effect.

Of course, as with all things computer, sometimes it works easily and sometimes it doesn’t. I tried to use my Mac Mini with a mini display port to HDMI adapter, following specific instructions people had posted on the web, and could never get the color or resolution right. I gave up and went back to the VGA cable, which works fine.

The VGA cable doesn’t transmit sound, however, so I had to plug my computer into my stereo with a headphone-out-to-RCA-in cable to get audio output, but I was going to do that anyway. If you can get an HDMI cable to work, it will transmit sound as well, through your TV’s speakers.

We mostly watch network shows free on Hulu.com. We also have Netflix, so we can stream movies and TV shows from netflix.com. For the few shows we like that are not available in either of those places, we buy a series subscription through iTunes and download them.

There’s also a free web-based service called Boxee that aggregates a lot of feeds and attempts to make this all more streamlined, but I haven’t given it a good try.

None of this is simple and tidy. It requires a lot of fiddling at the start and a lot of web searching, unless you hit it lucky right away. Then, you have to hunt to find the shows you want. Depending on the strength of the network connection in your neighborhood, you may find that streaming video starts and stops. Most of the services like Netflix and Hulu will allow the show to “buffer,” so that it runs smoothly, but that means you might wait a minute or two for it to start.

You can run a free test at Speedtest that will tell you the download and upload speeds for your network and give you an estimate of the time required to download different types of files. Be sure to test it more than once, at the times you are most likely to be streaming TV shows. If you get a reading significantly below average, you might want to call your cable company and ask. One of our neighbors found ours to be very low, and the cable company investigated and made some changes to match the high load in our neighborhood.

All in all, for us it’s been worth the $100 a month savings, and we find we’re watching TV more selectively, which was one of our goals. Also, there are fewer commercials on Hulu.com shows than on the broadcast equivalent, but already we’re seeing signs that is changing.

In other words, the free lunch won’t last forever. But for now, it’s worth it.

photo by Paulpod