Archive for the 'General' Category

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Part 2: Thoughts on Buzzmarketing

Published on March 26, 2011 in General. 0 Comments

Empowered Interactivity

A while ago I read an article on the lessons to learn from the DropBox marketing model. After reading the chapter on empowered interactivity I immediately recalled that article and how incentivizing referals increased signups by something like 60%. People generally want to share what is useful to them, and they really want to share something if it can benefit them in someway. When thinking of what the word ‘benefit’ (or more specifically, economic incentive) means to a given person I immediately think of the RSA Animate video about what motivates us and the example they give about Wikipedia: experienced professions and academics who could easily use hours spend researching and writing Wikipedia articles working for sizable monetary reward instead choose to work for free. Why? Because it is satisfying: there is a social currency that one receives when achieving something that a community of persons respects and affirms. This is why the FAQ model that Stackoverflow employs works so well (although the model has changed a bit since they tied site reputation to the ability to interact with the Careers site).  This is why monetary referrals without social recognition don’t always work so well.

Secrecy

These couple lines rung true with a couple recent products / marketing efforts I’ve seen:

Secrets are currency. Revealing a secret is a definite conversation starter… Limit those in the know of a secret, those not in the know want the currency of knowing – they want to be part of the exclusive circle. (Buzzmarketing, P.37)

Push Pop Press immediately came to mind while reading this. They haven’t released anything yet, they have only demoed the product to a select few, and there are no publicly available demo videos. They are near 6,000 followers on twitter and really haven’t put any money into marketing their product. I’m interested in what they are coming out with, and I’m sure many others are too. They are definitely playing the secrecy card correctly. The MacHeist bundle was successful because of exclusivity and secrecy that they built up around the bundle. Apple (obviously) does this with almost all their product releases. Gmail did this with the invite system when gmail originally launched. Being in the know is attractive, and people will ‘spread the word’ if they know something others don’t.

Thoughts on Buzzmarketing

Published on March 10, 2011 in General. 0 Comments

I’m currently reading Buzzmarketing by Mark Hughes, a book about word-of-mouth advertising. I’m only about a 1/4 way through the book but as I’m reading through the book I keep comparing the ideas that he is presenting to experiences in my own life in order to understand the practical application of his ideas. I’m not a marketer by trade, this book is the first step in my goal to achieve a better understanding of marketing methods (especially marketing via social networking channels).

The two key concepts I’ve pulled from the first section of the book are: 1) the human desire of having something worthy of the interest of others 2) the effectiveness of creating a ‘pre-packaged conversation’ that people want to share with others. As I was reflecting on these two key concepts I’ve thought of a couple examples which show how these concepts play out in the ‘real world’.

The ‘Bed Intruder’ Song

The bed intruder song, virtually overnight, became the funniest most watched “have you see this?” video on YouTube pushing the song to the top 100 chart in iTunes. This video definitely pressed the ‘hilarious button’ that Mark talks about in his book.

Failed Door-to-Door Marketing

Open Range is a new internet service being rolled out in the town I’m currently living in. I don’t know much about the service other than it is lest costly than the standard cable + internet combo offered by Comcast. There is a door-to-door marketing effort going on in our neighborhood. I don’t like door-to-door marketers, I don’t want to talk to them and avoid conversation if at all possible. Mark recounts a story about a car company that used a ‘moose button’ to start the conversation between store employees and customers about a new brake product / sale. Each employee had a big button with the image of a moose pinned to their shirt. Something wierd or different that inspires the customer not the sales person to start the conversation. If this open range salesman had something interesting or weird to attract me to him I probably would of asked him what was going on, instead he approached me with the classic boring line “Have you heard of open range?”.

Having something worth sharing makes you feel as though you have some sort of unique worth, giving others this worth or ‘buzz currency’ in a way that is connected to what you are marketing seems to be the key to effective social / word-of-mouth marketing. The interesting thing about this marketing model is it preys on the insecurity of the human race, it assumes that people want to be noticed and approved of by others.

Economic Analysis & The App Store

Published on September 3, 2010 in General. 0 Comments

I read two articles – the app bubble and bad news about iphone economics – which surprised me a bit.

Their analysis, which doesn’t account for gain in human capital and the value of lock-in (or alternatively the cost of switching), seems to posit that the App Store is bad for everyone. I could be completely misevaluating the arguments presented, but I believe that if you dig into the arguments presented significant benefits are not being accounted for.

Apple is Paid to Advertise

Apps aren’t very profitable for Apple either. According to Apple Insider, “Apple has long maintained that the App Store isn’t meant to be a profit generator, as much as a means of attracting customers to the iPhone and iPod touch.” The App Store’s gross profits amount to just 1 percent of Apple’s total gross profits.

If something is a ‘means of attracting customers’ then it is a valuable asset, a marketing tool. Even if Apple were losing money running the App Store they would still continue to operate the store because it is incredible marketing tool. The fact is that Apple is being paid to advertise the iOS platform. There is alot of time and money being pumped into advertising individual iOS applications and the more those applications are being designed and developed vendor lock-in takes place which is extremely valuable (vendor lock-in is what makes Microsoft so valuable, valuable enough that Intel just bet 7.68 billion on a more-or-less Microsoft specific technology). Many smaller companies have to choose between the iOS platform and the Android phone (it really isn’t a platform… yet) and most – in my opinion – are choosing the iPhone. Every application that is released on the App Store increases the marketing value of the App Store.

iOS Apps Keep Customers Happy

The decision to adopt a technology sometimes depends on whether or not your current hardware will support it. This is why Square Space developed an iOS app – it keeps customers happy and helps future customers more easily make the choice to using Square Space. Additionally, developing an App Store application to tie in with your product prevents a second-mover from jumping into the uncaptured market and pulling customers into a separate service which integrates with your free / paid iOS application (ex: some sort of Square Space competitor).

Experience is Valuable

Developers don’t develop open source applications such as Seashore, Sequel Pro, and Adium for profit. Open source applications are developed for the experience and for the gratification that comes with knowing you are the master of something (this video has some thought provoking ideas about the reason people spend time on tasks which do not result in a direct monetary gain). Developers are more valuable when they can bring an idea from conception to release and when they can prove their ability to quickly master new technologies. Having an iOS application published on the App Store gives concrete evidence to an employer that an employee has those skills – it is a screening device. Yes, an individual developer may not make a profit on an app they developed, but if it allows them to earn 20% over the next 5 years then there is most definitely a net gain.

AppleScript Tips & Tricks

Published on July 4, 2010 in General. 4 Comments

I’ve done a fair amount of applescript work (mostly automation & UI scripting related projects) over the last couple months and – although very frustrating – applescript can allow you to achieve some incredible automation tasks. I’ve compiled a disjointed lists of tips, tricks, and source code that some trying to wade through applescript (specifically ui scripting which can be especially tricky) might find useful.

Enable Access for Assistive Devices

tell application "System Events"
set UI elements enabled to true
end tell

When “set value of text field” Won’t Work

set value of attribute "AXValue" of text field 1 to "String"

How To Iterate Through Rows in a Table

repeat with r in rows of table 1 of window 1
log r
end repeat

Retrieve Every UI Element Available in a Window

tell application "System Events"
tell process "Process Name"
set visible to true
return every UI element of front window
return name of every UI element of front window
end tell
end tell

Get a List of the Children of a UI Element

return value of attribute "AXChildren" of UI element 1

Create / Update / Connect Network Preferences VPN Services

Although since OS X 10.5 we have been given better applescript access to network preference settings, it still isn’t possible to create / update services / interfaces through applescript. With some tricky UI scripting and the help of the UI Element Inspector (or the advanced UI Browser) it is possible to create and update VPN service information. I also wrote a couple functions that allow you to check the existence of a VPN service and the connection status. You can check out the source code here. Note that although the code is VPN service specific it wouldn’t be terribly hard to modify the code for use in automating the creation of aiport, ethernet, etc services.

Take a Screenshot of a SWF

This is a bit more complex that one would expect. Because the Flash Player isn’t built using cocoa it doesn’t support alot of native applescript methods and getting a screenshot of the actual content (not containing the title bar!) of the swf is actually pretty challenging. The script will take a screenshot of only the content of the actual swf. This is useful if you have a flash app that has loadable swf components that the user should be able to preview through a thumbnail. Coupling the script with the following bash script allows you to easily generate thumbnails for all the swfs in the specified directory.

#!/bin/bash

function normalize_path() {
eval "NORMALIZED_PATH=$1"
NORMALIZED_PATH=`php -r "echo realpath('$NORMALIZED_PATH');"`
}

find ../path/to/swfdirectory -name "*.swf" | while read line; do
# remove the relative reference
normalize_path "$line"
line=$NORMALIZED_PATH

# open the flas
open -a "Flash Player" "$line"

sleep 1

thumbnailPath=${line/.swf/.jpg}
osascript slide_preview.scpt "$thumbnailPath"

killall "Flash Player"
done

exit 0

Other Applescript Code Snippets:

Helpful Applescript Articles

Going Social

Published on June 27, 2010 in General. 0 Comments

It is often hard for me to find the time to actually finish a blog post for this site, I have many many drafts that are about 70% complete but as of now I can’t find the time to finish them and get them out onto this blog.

However, I’ve still been trying to push as much work as I can out into the public realm. Here are some sides that I frequently post code / projects / findings onto:

Hopefully you will find some of the code / ideas I post on those sites useful.

As an aside, I’ve been fascinated with Twitter: there is no ‘right way’ to use Twitter. Facebook is pretty straightforward – connect and stay and in touch with others. Twitter is a generic searchable database accessible from anywhere with easy ways to create relationships between different pieces of data and connect with the larger web as a whole. I use my Twitter account mainly as a bookmarking service; I find the traditional bookmarking model to be very lacking, I’m surprised Apple / Google / Startup will reinvent the wheel. It will be interesting to see what these different massive social sites end up turning into.

Videobox & Mootools 1.2.x

Published on May 30, 2009 in General. 12 Comments

I love MooTools. I’ve been using it before the 1.2 days; it has been great watching how much it has matured. One of the best things about MooTools is the amount of components that have been written for it: Videobox, SlimBox, and TextBoxList just to name a few. However, the switch from 1.1 to 1.2 broke alot of existing functionality and with that broke alot of the existing components.

Just the other day I found just the component I was looking for: Videobox. The examples on the site looked great, but it didn’t work with the newest version of MooTools. I spent some time converting the animation code over to the new 1.2 syntax and fixing some other random bugs, you can grab the fixed version here. I emailed the developer with the fixes, so hopefully he will post it on the project page soon.