Jonathan Mendez's Blog

Spastic Comcastic

For the past 4 years I have purchased Major League Baseball’s premium cable TV package. It costs around $160 for the seasons and I’m sure my cable company Comcast and MLB are making a tidy profit. While it has been on my radar to order it again this season I just haven’t had a moment over the past month.

So finally I go to order MLB extra innings spurred because earlier in the day I picked up Chicago White Sox pitcher Freddy Garcia in a trade for Radhames Liz and a 2nd round draft choice. (My uber-fantasty league has a 36 player minor league system for each team and Liz looks like one of the top pitchers in the minors).

This should have been easy. I grabbed the remote and found channel 753 that the game was on. I selected the game and I’m greeted with a pop-up that says, “for ordering information press info.” Another click on info (actually the OK button on my remote) and a new page appears on the screen that has a link to “buy”. Of course, the buy button is an undistinguishable icon. Hoping I’m finished with this checkout process at last, I click on “buy” and instead of seeing the game I get another pop-up with a toll free number. for ordering.

As of now I have been on hold 7 minutes and 26 seconds. It’s 8:45 EST.

Comcast is a digital company. Their backbone is bandwidth but their focus has been on expanded service offerings for consumers. The funny thing is they are trying to market these products based on user experience. We are being told that using Comcast is “Comcastic”

With my kind of “Comcastic” customer experience why would I ever want to sign up for the Comcast digital phone service that’s being promoted while I’m on hold. I even am getting a bad feeling about getting the DeLa Hoya-Maorga fight on PPV.

This is nothing new for Comcast. I stopped using their email app for my personal email because the web based functionality was awful. And let's not even get into their homepage and their web page builder tools. What a lost opportunity that was for them to grow their online business. Isn't extending relationships and touch-points with customers their business model???

2.0 Marketing will be more reliant then ever on user experience. How difficult is it for Comcast to put a button on the first screen that let’s me buy the package and charge it to my bill? And let’s not even discuss their CRM failure.

10 minutes and 42, seconds still on hold….

2.0 Expectations & Relevance

“People have the power.”
-Patti Smith

Web 2.0 is not a so much a technological revolution as a cultural one. Such is the power of the people or as we marketers refer to it, critical mass. The irony and challenge is that 2.0 marketing success will be predicated upon dividing this mass and making sense of the pieces. Segmentation, clustering, behavioral targeting, targeted content, whatever you want to call it and wherever you want to do it (ad side, site side or both) will only be successful if you understand the goals of each segment and meet these goals with relevance.

So how do we embrace Web 2.0 and deliver relevance? First we must understand that relevance means different things to different people. From search to social, B2B to B2C at its core it is important to keep in mind this revolution is about ceding power to the people by enabling them to control, create or define their digital experiences. In effect, users will be (and are) creating relevant experiences for themselves. If we accept this, then it means that we must rethink how we define online user experience. One thing I’ve begun to believe and evangelize is that in this evolution of the commercial web a static environment will not be able to provide the kind of optimized relevancy businesses will demand and marketers will need to deliver. Advertisers and businesses will need to dynamically optimize ad and content delivery based on segmentation.

There is also another 2.0 force at work within user experience that will begin to have greater impact as users define their experiences and marketers define their targeting. That force is user expectations. Marketers and businesses will need to exceed expectations at every touch-point. But how can this be accomplished when the very definitions and expectations are changing in the minds of users?

The changing use of digital media has been met with the tools will help define new expectations within the three dimensions of user, device and application. Most important is that these tools not only help exceed expectations they can also create more relevant experiences. The keys as always will be to observe your audience, listen to your customers and test, test, test.

The iPod is a classic and a fascinating case study of how the evolution of expectations and experiences can drive success. A key reason the iPod was successful at launch was that the size and capabilities of the iPod were beyond consumer expectations. There was nothing really comparable in the market. However, that was only half of what was needed for the iPod to succeed. The iPod was incredibly easy and fun to use (iTunes). Also, it was a dynamic experience. The user, based on their preferences modified the content. And since the user controlled content, the device was always relevant.

I’d argue there is no device more relevant to this day and age then the iPod. Apple neither invented the mp3 player nor the portable music player. Heck, there were quite a few portable mp3 players prior to the iPod. However next to the iPod these others became irrelevant.

How can you protect your digital business from becoming irrelevant? Every company can begin to look at their digital assets and ask a few questions. Do we exceed user expectations of what is possible within our digital business offerings? Are our digital assets simple and easy to use? Is the content we provide being defined by the user in order to ensure relevance?

Very few companies can answer yes to any of these questions at the moment let alone all three. Success however will be determined by the speed at which companies and marketers are able to release their own iPod. Maybe with a little Patti Smith loaded in it too.

Emerson: The First 2.0 Marketer

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’m not sure how many self-reliant marketers there were in Marketing 1.0. These marketers of consistency probably sat around a big conference table making fun of Emerson’s middle name. Countless billions they spent building campaigns around consistent messaging. Now, they are dinosaurs. 2.0 is causing a sea change in marketing tactics and tools. The critical mass of broadband and the open source movement are the catalysts for this. For marketers, the long awaited holy grails of targeted content delivery and automated optimization are upon us allowing “wisely inconsistent” marketing. James Roche, CEO of OTTO Digital has coined this, dynamic experience (Dx). Unfortunately many marketers and businesses are slow to embrace these tactics. Even if they want to, many others don’t know where or how to begin.

Tools like AJAX, JSON, Ruby, and Flex are doing more then rekindling Berners-Lee’s original vision of the web as community of ideas. These dynamic experiences are not the Flash bells and whistles of yore. Now they can deliver relevance. Today’s top metric driven marketers understand that relevance=ROI and the best strategy is NOT showing everyone the same message. The same message…even if you get it right for one type of user or goal path, is only effective to the same bucket over and over again. And there is no shortage of buckets that businesses need to define and target in order to maximize performance.

The benefits of creating Dx go even further. Dx enables fluid, rich environments and interactions where testing the delivery of targeted content can occur. Within this dynamic Dx optimizes by creating rules-based relevant experiences to any user segment marketers desire. Dx also decreases the reliance on heavy IT investment and involvement. This all works because it is serverless programming. Most of all, done right, Dx, creates simplicity and exceeds users expectations.

Dx is already all around us online. Maps, SERPS, RSS, geo targeting. These are fundamental changes in the way users experience the web and when done right clearly these tools are for the better. Sooner than we think the first ten years of the static commercial web experience will look like ancient. The website is dead. Long live Dx…and self-reliance.