a shel of my former self

Monday, November 20, 2006

A lot of online marketing is being done based on the premise that more and more people who use the Net have made the switch to broadband/high-speed access. That s true: broadband growth continues at a healthy clip, a 60% compound annual growth, according to . But that doesn t mean everybody using broadband fits the same profile, a mistake that marketers could easily make when lumping these folks into the same bucket (e.

g., they are able to consumer lots of videos from services like . In fact, there are five distinct types of broadband users, according to Netpop | Portraits, part of the Netpop series of studies conducted by strategic market research firm .

Those types include the following:

• Content king Looking for entertainment, 76% of content kings play online games and 75% of the sites they visit are for personal reasons. They spend about 2-1/2 hours online every day.
• Social clicker Spanning the age demographic (younger and older), social clickers use the Net as a communication channel.

  Younger social clickers use IM and social networking sites while older clickers rely more on email. This is a participatory group: 78% contribute content each month. Nearly 60% of the time they spend online is devoted to communication; the rest is divided between news, information, and shopping.

• Online insider According to the report, these folks see the net as a rich, personal, and cultural phenomenon. Their behaviors mirror those of early adopters, trying out a lot of online resources and contributing to the content and conversation mix. According to coverage of the report from , Eighty-six percent contribute to Internet content or information each month, including posting to blogs, community sites, and chat rooms.

• Fast tracker Fasts access to news and information is the primary reason these folks go online. They are the dominant users of map services, public transportation information, and other data.
• Everyday pro These people are all about personal productivity and use the Net to reduce hassle in their lives and make life easier.

  For example, 84% of this group use the Net for online banking; 68% make purchases from online retailers. The point, of course, is that treating the broadband audience as a single demographic is a huge mistake. As with any population, they can (and should) be recognized as individuals who are online at high-speed for different reasons, and each segment should be addressed based on what we know about them.

  I know this study will inform any efforts I take to communicate to audiences based, at least in part, on their high-speed connectivity. When was the last time a search engine made you say, Wow ? For me, it was probably the first time I tried ; I was wowed by the fact that the folks at the BBN-owned company had figured out how to catalog words spoken in audio and make them searchable, then take you just to that part of the audio file where the word was said.

  I had another wow moment today trying out the OWL music search, hosted on the Creative Commons , as well as on . (The difference between the two: the Creative Commons search allows you to find Creative Commons-licensed work.) The search suggests you can find music through music.

  Click on the graphic that invites you to open an MP3 file, and the file you select appears as a waveform in a blue space that occupies the top of the page. Click the play button and you can listen to the song as a slider moves across the waveform. Stop the music from playing when you hit a spot you really like, then click the search button.

  OWL will find other songs like the one you were playing from a current database of more than 10,000 songs from independent music sites. I picked Missing Person from the new Eric Clapton/J.J.

  Cale collaboration, The Road to Escondido; OWL found 55 songs by artists I d never heard of, providing me with information but also the ability to play the song and specifically, the part of the song that matched my original selection. You can also limit your search to genres like classical, new age, rock, jazz and blues. I can t get the OWL music discovery engine to work in Internet Explorer 7, so be sure you have Firefox or some other browser before giving it a try.

  I was delighted to get an email from John Wolf, senior director of media relations for , in response to about getting poker ads served up on web pages (including my own blog) while using the service that hotels like Marriott use to provide guests with Internet access. This occurred while I was staying at the Renaissance in downtown Toronto, both in my room and in the meeting room where I was presenting a workshop. These ads showed up despite the fact that I was paying for the service, and was paying for access during the two-day session I was teaching.

  John s email first of all noted that Marriott follows my blog, which by itself puts them head and shoulders above most companies. They recognize that customers will talk about their experiences good and bad on their blogs. He then explained the circumstances that led to my getting those annoying ads: Marriott s relationship with the Internet service provider Superclick includes an agreement to exclude all popups on our high-speed service.

  However, Superclick explained to us that whenever upgrades are made to the system, pop ups are automatically activated and need to be manually turned off. Apparently, we got upgraded and were unaware of it until you notified our front desk. At that time, we notified Superclick and the pop ups were immediately turned off.

  We are talking with Superclick to ensure that they alert us about all future upgrades. John apologized, expressing regret for the inconvenience, and assured me Marriott is taking steps to ensure there is no repeat of the experience. If I thought companies would pay attention to blogs, I would simply articulate my complaint and wait for a reply.

  But you can t make that assumption (although now I can about Marriott). I like the idea, in response to one of , that companies assign every product and service a tag that customers could use when posting items about their experiences, making it easy for companies to track what customers are saying about them and to respond. In the meantime, Marriott is back on my good guys list.

  Content summary: Shel s in D.C.; the anti-Walmart grassroots website; UK government launches e-petitions; the Reuters/Pluck deal; preparing for US daylight savings time changes in 2007; Casecamp Second Life; putting the public back in PR; Dan York interviews Martyn Davies; listeners comments discussion; PodcastCon UK 2006 in London on November 18; Luke Armour s social media PR parody; the music; and more.

  Show notes for November 16, 2006 Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson Holtz Report, a 63-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Washington, DC, USA. (MP3, 29MB), or to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you ll also need a such as , , or , or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as ).

  
  Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - for info. If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at ; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments.

  You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!).

  We ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show. So, until Monday November 20 The sixth and final podcast produced by the participants of the Ragan Communications workshop today in Toronto, Ontario, Canada has an interviewer (Rachel Hilton from the Stratford Festival of Canada) talking to three workshopparticipants about some memorable seatmates on airplane flights. As always, the idea here to show participants how drop-dead easy it is to produce a podcast.

  Using a portable digital recorder, the interviewer wanders the room to do the interviews. I pull the WAV file into Audacity on my laptop, edit and add opening and closing music, save to MP3, add ID3 tags and post here. The class watches it all on the screen.

  The second episode, with participants from New York, dealt with you ever had. The fourth episode, with participants from Chicago, Illinois, took a look at some (the workshop took place on Halloween). Note: I am cross-posting this from my .

  I m pissed off enough that I want to give it as much exposure as I can. I m at the Renaissance Toronto Hotel Downtown, and until a few minutes ago, I was pleased with the hotel. I was upgraded due to my Rewards status to a nice split-level suite that overlooks an empty SkyDome.

  The food is good. The service is good. However, I am now disgusted with the hotel, and with Marriott in general.

  Here s the story: I noticed earlier that spam-like banner ads were showing up in my browser. I would navigate to a page that I knew had no ads, and one would appear anyway, mostly touting online poker. Curious, I clicked on over to my own blog, and the same ad showed up there (see image below).

  I assumed I had picked up some adware. Since the laptop is new, I haven t had a chance to install spyware/adware software, so I paid for AdAware Pro and ran it. The ads kept showing up.

  A little investigation determined that all these ads link to a company called . I visited their site and learned more than I wanted to, enough to get my blood boiling. Superclick provides a guest interface for hotels that includes in-room services, which is fine.

  But it s also dishing up these ads. So anybody staying at a property using Superclick who visits my blog will see an ad associated with it. I would never take advertising from an online poker site, and if I did, I d expect to get some of the revenues.

  Instead, I m paying $12.95 per day to see these ads. The graphic below is from the Superclick site, listing presumably satisfied customers.

  Before I book a reservation at any hotel in any of these chains, I will ask if the broadband connection for which they will charge me is going to serve up any ads I don t want to see. If the answer is yes, I ll book elsewhere. I ll stay at a freaking Motel 6 before I put up with this kind of crap.

  Unbelievable. Talk about a lack of respect even outright contempt for your customer.

  Manufactured or mobile?

  Who decides?

  has begun a very interesting experiment I ll be watching with keen interest. In response to founder in PRSA s Tactics, Kami has followed Wales advice and posted suggested changes to a Wikipedia entry in its related discussion section.

  Wales is vehemently opposed to anybody altering or adding content to Wikipedia if they have been paid to do it. He finds the practice hugely unethical, regardless of whether the contribution was truly neutral in its point of view (a requirement for all Wikipedia posts). Instead of posting directly, Wales suggests PR reps (and others representing an organization) use the discussion page to make their suggestions, then let others who agree and are not being paid make the change.

  Kami, who used to work full-time for the Manufactured Housing Institute, has posted to the discussion page for the Mobile Home entry. She s not actually asking for a change, but providing clarification around an earlier discusison about the interchangability of the words. It ll be interesting to see if her expert advice leads to any alterations in the entry s content.

  I ve read and heard a lot about the issue of PR practitioners and wikis ranging from blog posts to Wales own arguments to an Edelman discussion on its EARshot podcast, and I still don t know where I stand; it s complicated. But I m sure that there are plenty of Wikipedia entries that are not characterized by a neutral point of view and that the exclusion of people paid to manage companies reputations from contributing merely drives many of them underground. Still, Wales approach making your case on the discusison page sounds reasonable.

  Now, thanks to Kami, we can see if it actually works.