Archive for category Funny
Social media complements search and email marketing (for now)
Posted by Jose Mallabo in E-Commerce, Funny, Public Relations, Shopping, Social media on November 11, 2011
Looking at this Forrester post almost a year later feels a lot like going back to high school after your first year in college. You thought it was a good idea to visit but then you realize by the end of it — not so much.
The blog post’s conclusion is to draw your own conclusion about social media’s impact on holiday purchasing. The post meanders from having an opinion that the ForeSee research was limited to having no point of view whatsoever. How am I going to join a conversation or rebut your point of view if you don’t have one?
While there are no official rules to blogging – the universal and unspoken rule is to have an opinion.
Here’s mine: The idea of social commerce (buying stuff on Facebook) is still a pipe dream. Rather, social media can drive brand, product and deal awareness and therefore serve as a complement to a retailer’s larger search and email marketing programs.
Since this post in late 2010, LinkedIn and Groupon have gone public. Facebook’s IPO has been delayed – but will be the biggest one in the history of ever. The point being, these companies are all well capitalized, have hundreds of millions of subscribers and are not going anywhere. So industry pundits and luddites alike need to bite down on the reality that marketers will continue to throw marketing dollars at them to hock their wares regardless of whether we have any proof of a causal relationship between the social media consumption and clicking the “buy” button on a shopping site.
At 2.9% e-commerce conversion rates there is no proof needed.
While this question of “Was social media a big factor in holiday purchases?” will come up again and again over the next few weeks and months, I encourage marketers and PR people to do one thing: challenge the question.
As Augie Ray correctly points out social media is a mere infant and it will take time to prove its correlation with purchasing behavior. In the meantime it serves a lot of other organizational needs that are no less important than shopping cart clicks. Don’t get suckered into the conversation about social media and its impact on transactions because you’ve got more to attend to with your 2012 social and media dollars such as:
- Reputation management
- Product and corporate branding
- Influencer relations
- Partner relations
- Customer service
- SEO
- Issues management and crisis communications
- Recruitment and workforce engagement
While the analyst community continues to look under the hood for purchase conversion evidence, what they’re missing is that the owners of these social media programs may not at all be focused on driving holiday (or non-holiday for that matter) transactions.
Pause.
Bite down. Chew. Gulp.
And therefore, there might be some reason why the transactional or purchase conversion evidence is not to be found.
In fact, most brands and retailers I know are still investing more in tried and true search and email marketing initiatives to drive transactions and conversion online and in stores –- while using Facebook and Twitter as complements to those initiatives and for all of the other communications objectives listed above. That explains why search and promotional email remain the primary drivers for purchasing behavior for the holidays.
There. I said it.
Don’t go back to high school. But do take my poll on LinkedIn
-Jose Mallabo
Laker dissenters: Shhhh.
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Funny, Sports on February 18, 2011
All season I’ve endured all the dissent and whining about how the Lakers are done. How Kobe is no longer the man. With LeBron still choking at the end of every big game, I have one thing to say: Shhhhhh.
The banners still hang at the Fabulous Forum. And Kobe is still the best player on the planet. If you need proof that the Lakers as a whole have some athleticism. Click this and Ray Allen, get in my poster.
On a pass from the center Pau Gasol while Big Baby wonders "When do we eat?"
Social Exuberance
Posted by Reid Cox in E-Commerce, Funny, Public Relations, Work on February 1, 2011
I’ve lived through a couple of bubbles in my time – dot.com and housing come to mind, anyone? And something tells me the longer I’m around the more I’m going to have to live through.
Is social media another one of them? Maybe. Is a market cap of $80 billion for Facebook rational? Alan Greenspan must be trying his damnedest to make those old thumbs Tweet #social-exuberance.
Exuberant smile? Greenspan retired a while ago.
It strikes me that my framed Pets.com certificates and my wall have more than a nail in common – both were worth a hell of a lot more when I bought them (yeah, that was a stretch, thanks for sticking with me on that one). So now that I’ve said it, let me compare the stock market bubble to the housing market bubble to see what these bubbles might have in common.
There are basically three ways to value a stock, and they are pretty much the same as how the real estate market valued my wall.
My house:
- Price per square foot (adjusted for how nice the stuff in my square footage is)
- How much an identical house in my neighborhood sold for
- Make shit up
A stock:
- Discounted cash flows (predictions of how much money a company will make in future years, adjusted for how fast they will grow and how long they might last)
- What comparable “peer” companies are trading at (adjusted for cash, debt (including options), assets and risks)
- Make shit up
Both Facebook and Amazon have market caps of around $80 billion ($82.9 billion secondary market estimate for Facebook on 1/28, $76.8 billion actual market cap for Amazon on 1/28). So if they were houses, and I was pre-qualified for an $83 billion mortgage, I could take my pick (well, my wife would, let’s stay grounded here).
As far as revenues go, estimates for Facebook for 2010 are around $2 billion while Amazon is on track for something north of $30 billion. In housing terms, Facebook is listing a very funky two bedroom loft conversion while Amazon is listing a 30-bedroom ancestral estate. So, there are either some really, really nice upgrades in that loft or there are 28 secret bedrooms priced into the deal.
Yes, an $80 billion estimate for Facebook is likely high. And yes, Facebook and Amazon don’t have identical business models. But yes, the same people who sold me Pets.com shares are the same people who collateralized my mortgage and are the same people selling Facebook shares to foreign investors to avoid SEC regulations.
That must be one amazing loft. I need to go check it out, I do need more wall space.
-Reid Cox
If my George Foreman grill could order meat it would be a Kindle
Posted by Jose Mallabo in E-Commerce, Funny, Public Relations, Work on January 20, 2011
If my George Foreman grill could order meat, it would be as important to kitchen appliances as the Kindle is to the book and e-commerce industries. In June, this ZDNet blogger said he felt the Kindle’s days were numbered because of the iPad. But just this month ZDNet posted a story that outlines wall street analyst projections that Amazon sold 4 million Kindles in the fourth quarter alone — and is projected to sell 10 million more in 2011. I just got my Kindle this past Christmas and love it like the year 1987 and the 2002 World Series. (That’s a hyperbole.)
My two favorite Christmas presents
Since getting the Kindle, I’ve spent $475 on Amazon.com (about double what the typical Amazon customer spends per year) — only $20 for e-books. Obviously, the Kindle is my personal gateway drug back to Amazon.com. And it’s far easier to clean than my George Foreman grill. See smashed left thumb.
Dear Jeff Bezos, You now have 121 122 million customers. I’m back.
Everyone wants to talk iPad vs. Kindle. Not so fast. The Kindle is different than my iPad. It replaces paper books while my iPad seems to replace part of my laptop, TV, MP3 player and portable DVD player that I never did buy. The beauty of the Kindle is that it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. Like the Cadillac CTS-V Coupe that tries to be a BMW 6 Series and a Corvette at the same time.
The book is dead. Long live the Kindle.
- Jose Mallabo
Dog sits on cat.
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Friends and family, Funny on November 25, 2010
“Social Networking is a Stupid Fad!”
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Funny, Public Relations, Work on November 10, 2010
I hear that sentiment a lot since leaving Silicon Valley.
It’s a refrain that reminds me of the woman on the bus in New York who scolded me with her eyes for answering my Motorola StarTAC — a decade ago. She’s probably tuning her TV with bunny ears now. I get it — not everyone will get on the bandwagon. Cable TV in the US still doesn’t have 100% penetration. But –
Note the price: $1,000 in 1996.
– at some point quantity does become quality. Breadth and depth of use changes the nature or quality of something — and in this case it’s social networking and everything it touches.
- Facebook has north of 600 million members and is easily the most important force on the Internet for marketers of every kind.
- Twitter is closing in on 200 million members who are producing 90 million Tweets per day. That figure was 27 million just a year ago.
- LinkedIn has more than 85 million members and is ever so quietly disrupting the rusty recruiting industry while simultaneously pushing into enterprise commerce.
A lot of people will never network online, let alone write a blog about it. Having worked at eBay and LinkedIn and now sitting in an e-commerce company whose clients are pushing hard into social media, it’s easy to say that this is not going anywhere. It’s becoming the way people and companies communicate with each other. If anything the term “social networking” may be passe. The breadth of adoption and use cases for it may have blown by the term two or three months ago.
It’s not just about discovering where old friends and colleagues are anymore. It’s about exchanging ideas, knowledge, working collaboratively and even transacting commerce.
That my technology loathing friends is a marketplace. Marketplaces are the basis of communities, cities and dare I say empires. Google: “Roman Empire” or “Dutch trading” to prove me right. Remember it was New Amsterdam before the English said otherwise.
The big 3 networks (sound familiar?) are quickly replacing the phone, TV and soon the mall. If you don’t think that possibility is compelling. . . go home and tear the telephone out of the wall, dump the HD-TV in the pool and move to the plains.
I’ll be here in my marketplace.
- Jose Mallabo
All my piazzas are dead
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Friends and family, Funny on October 21, 2010
When I was a young geek (defined largely by the act of avoiding eye contact with girls at all costs) I didn’t have an iPhone, hundreds of Twitter followers or even this self important blog to create the illusion of cool. That divide between cool and geek was the Grand Canyon. In fact, I’m not sure if I even considered trying to bridge the distance. Dunking a basketball was more likely than being cool.
Some people have been known to be hung up on those lockers.
While geek has become chic since then, unless you ever had to wear an eye patch and glasses you have no clue what it’s like. Most folks think geeks were loners or anti-social. Mostly we just were afraid of girls.
In reality pre-chic geeks roamed the earth in small packs — like hyenas. In a world of knuckle dragger popular kids with IROCs we found safe haven in small groups. If chased, we’d scatter to confuse the attacker and reconvene at the jungle gym at the local grade school. Mostly we trolled the aisles of Tower Records where the universal language of music tilted the field of cool our way. Nowhere else could the guy from the “300 Club” (this was a club in my high school comprised of jocks that could bench press 300 lbs. Most of them looked to be suffering from slight cases of Paget’s Disease. I can blog about this now because as I recall, reading was not requisite for the 300 Club) be humbled by the kids on the AV Squad. It was the projector and audio geeks who knew the difference between pre- and post-Roger Waters Pink Floyd.
There is a difference, you know. Pink Floyd without Roger Waters is like all-natural organic peanut butter. It just sucks. It has no soul and it just thrashes the bread when applied.
Napster, iTunes, digital music and the Internet killed off Tower Records — one less piazza for me and my other sinewy friends to avoid girls in. What to do, what to do? Enter the video store.
While we could spend hours thumbing through albums and tapes at the record store, once you’re done there that’s it. It’s over. You don’t go home with your friends and listen to an album together. Only losers afraid of girls do that. But with movies, you could kill an hour or two in the store then go watch the movie. Including drive time, that’s like 4 whole hours of absolutely not talking to a girl.
All of these memories came rushing back to me as I walked by the boarded up BlockBuster video store in my neighborhood a few weeks ago. It was dark and the signage had been removed from the front of the building. But anyone who was alive in the past 20 years could figure out what that store once was. They were unmistakable in design and screamed to me: “safety and coolness in here!”
Another piazza of my childhood killed by, yes, the computer geeks behind the Internet, Netflix and on-demand video.
I guess standing there looking at the old video store looked kind of bizarre to passersby.
I caught myself and spun around on the sidewalk and this girl was looking at me from her bitchin’ cool car.
“What the fuck are you looking at?! I have a blog ya know!”
- Jose Mallabo
A work rant
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Funny, Public Relations, Work on August 14, 2010
Occasionally I share some thoughts with my teams and colleagues. This was an 11 item rant. Why 11? I was in a This is Spinal Tap kind of moment.
11 things in my head
- Media coverage is not a panacea. If it were, Monica Lewinsky would be president of the U.S. and BP would be company of the decade. I subscribe to the doctrine of agenda setting when it comes to media relations. The media doesn’t tell people what to think, it tells them what to think about.
- I’ve launched more than 100 products, announced more than 125 acquisitions, 50 partnerships and dozens of events across North America, Asia Pacific and Europe – two or three were memorable.
- The best PR campaigns are those that are experiential and drive activism at the grassroots or customer level. Most of these can then elevate into media coverage.
- TiVo was the worst press launch I’ve ever worked on. It was 100% focused on the technology and never considered the lifestyle play. It remains my biggest learning lesson. HP’s “e-services” launch was the second worst project I was involved with.
- One of the brands I admire most for its resurgence is Lacoste. Once a brand for preppy suburban teens that died with the advent of hip-hop and grunge culture – now transcends both demographics and two generations of consumers while maintaining its niche appeal. I own no Lacoste clothing.
- Everyone in the company does PR and will tell you how to do your job — until there is a crisis or someone asks how to measure PR. The best PR people are prepared for both.
- My favorite quote is from the late great John Wooden: “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.” It’s both a memorable sound bite and universally applicable for anything.
- I am frustrated by the fact that we agreed on what our number 1 priority is months ago and we’ve done a total of 2 tactics worldwide to address this in the first half of the year.
- Your biggest challenge as an in house PR person will always be staying focused. See #6 above.
- PR people train spokespeople on the fact that audiences remember very little about a message and are impacted mostly by the visuals and experience of the communication event – yet we spend most of our day-to-day time spinning on messaging.
- Occasionally I hear a PR person say something and I think, that’s bang on. This is bang on – and Nick is one of the best PR people I know.
My one lazy eye
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Friends and family, Funny on April 12, 2010
Ever wonder why you don’t see too many cross eyed people anymore? It seems like I haven’t seen anyone with strabismus (cross eye) since I was being treated for amblyopia (lazy eye) in grade school. Just before the 2nd grade started I was diagnosed with lazy eye. To treat it, my eye doctor made me wear a gauze eye patch over one eye and eyeglasses on top of the whole mess.
I can still remember the first day of school. The horror. I lived right across the street from school, so I walked there with my trumpet case in one hand and books in the other.
As I approached the school on my right side, I felt the sudden impending doom of 400 school kids playing in the playground all zoning in on my gauzed up eye and military issue frames. They looked like this:
But with my natural dorkiness and the cotton eye patch, it made me feel like this:
The closer I got to the school entrance the more self conscious I became and almost involuntarily I put my trumpet case on my shoulder — carrying it how an 80′s breakdancer lugs his boombox and cardboard dance floor. Of course, the moment I made the right turn into school, my classmates got full view of my half mummified face. Years of therapy and endless amounts of beer later, I can laugh about this but what I’d give to kick the crap out of that optometrist.
I’m convinced that while the glasses over the patch did next to nothing to cure my lazy eye, it probably scared off dozens of would be abductors and allowed me to roam the neighborhood un-menaced by playground bullies and overly aggressive homeless people. That aside, I’d've rather just walked around with a baseball bat in my hand and sharpened wood chisel in my pocket vs. wearing scuba gear on my head.
Needless to say, I’m glad kids and parents have medical alternatives to this today.
Now to get rid of band camp.
- Jose Mallabo
We talkin’ about practice?
Posted by Jose Mallabo in Funny, Work on April 4, 2010
One of the most epic post game interviews ever. Allen Iverson and practice.
Iverson challenges the media's question. God love it.
A lot of people think Iverson is a thug. Who knows? Who cares? I don’t. I just know he’s a flat out great ball player who throws his body around with abandon. I’d pay the absurd NBA price for tickets to watch a 6′ tall guy play wall to wall for 48 minutes.
From a PR perspective he tries very hard to do what all PR people in a turnaround situation try to do — change the conversation. He makes a couple of tactical errors — largely baked in the mistake of repeating the question around ‘practice’ in his answer, not once but over and over — but God love his approach. If not, I do. Challenge the damned question and don’t roll over to an uninformed missive pointed your way.
That said….
Are we really talking about the iPad? It’s a tablet PC. A tablet PC. We talkin’ about a tablet? Not a game. Not a real PC. A tablet?
As Allen would say, ‘c’mon man!?’ It’s a tablet.
Let’s call a duck a duck. The only reason that people are taking what would be a chubby BMW car payment and putting it into an oversized iPhone, is because its design is pretty slick, not because they really need it. It’s frightening to me that in an economy like this where California still has an unemployment rate that is second only to Michigan’s, people are dropping stupid money into a toy they don’t really need. What would that money do for something really worthy? Like rebuilding Haiti or something closer to home, like rebuilding the hideous Interstate 880 freeway that looks like something a 3rd world country would be proud of (barely)?
These 2 iPads will go right next to the 2 Betamax players I bought from Crazy Eddie's
People. We talkin’ about practice? We talkin’ about a tablet? This device will not make you taller and it will not serve as a proxy for having a personality that makes you more attractive (except for in certain parts of San Jose). It will not fill that chasm in your lifeless overworked lives. You’ll need humanity for that.
Quack.
- Jose Mallabo