Synchronicity

While reading Scott Bedbury's "A New Brand World," I have become more aware of how little details can influence a person's impression of a brand.

Scott gives the example of how travelers judge gasoline stations not just on the price but also on the quality of the restrooms.

I was struck by a similar thought, might viewers judge your product by the channels through which you issue press releases.

Case in point, I receive Google alerts and one arrived recently that pointed me to a particular web site. A press release about a product called "Alerts," which I thought was amusing. However, one of the banner ads was an embedded video hawking embedded video. Again, more recursion! The irksome thing was that it auto-played when the page was loaded and there were no controls to pause or silence the video.

I took a couple of screenshots but won't embed a video of the video.

What I've Also Been Reading

A New Brand World: 8 Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century
Bedbury, Scott with Stephen Fenichell
Viking, New York, 2002

This was recommended by a colleague. Each chapter highlights one of the principles with many examples from the author's professional life at some very high profile companies.

For the sake of brevity, I will share the three that left the greatest impression on me.

Chapter Two: Cracking Your Brand's Genetic Code
Bedbury suggests that a brand can be not just about the suite of products or services a company provides but also about the core values it represents. It is important that all members of the company understand what that is so better decisions are made regarding the features and alliances the company makes.

Chapter Four: Show Some Emotion
The author gives examples of customer's devotion to Harley Davidson and Starbucks, then decodes in detail the emotions at play for each of those brands. He lets the reader come to his or her own conclusion with a number of other brands and their key emotions. The key is that while customers may not remember exact words or actions in a campaign or an interaction, how they feel about a product or a brand is not so easily forgotten.

Chapter Seven: Branding and the Corporate Goliath
Bigger does not always mean "bad." Rather than "hide the elephant" by pretending a company is smaller than it is, the author suggests "teaching the elephant to dance," so it can use its power for good. Like donating time and resources to charities and programs related to its field.

If you are interested in reading more, you may purchase this online from a variety of locations or in person at your local bookseller.

Powells: http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780142001905-0
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/New-Brand-World-Principles-Twenty-First/dp/0142001902/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235445449&sr=8-1

Personally, I found this a very insightful book and keep it on my bookshelf within arms reach.

Have you started thinking about the time change?

It's coming early this year.

The US and Canada will turn their clocks at 2:00 am local time on the second Sunday of March, March 08, 2009

Most of Europe will do the same at 1:00 GMT on the last Sunday of March, March 29, 2009

Here is a web site that not only tells you...

• when different countries "spring" forward or "fall" back
• some of the reasons why countries choose to do so or not
  
• the variety of benefits of adopting the practice and the disadvantages
  

It also presents the information in a very fun way!

Snippets International

Here's an interesting article highlighting a New Zealand email marketing company, Jericho, that also explains the industry to a lay person.

Best line from it "Email marketing works best by building loyalty."


Second, this article caught my eye because it shows how print advertising In Japan has moved past URLs to drive customers to web sites.

Basically, the ads show what search terms to input to get where you want to go. At first I thought that might seem like spoon feeding... But a term or key word is easier to remember than a long URL string. Don't you think?



Finally, a new development in the UK. Software that puts banner ads in your emails and keeps track of analytics! It appears to be a solution for small and medium size businesses.

Agile Estimation and Planning

I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Agile Estimation and Planning this Monday, presented by Mitch Lacey, author of Adventures in Promiscuous Pairing, at the Executive Center of the Doubletree hotel in Portland, OR.

The workshop was organized by the Software Associate of Oregon (SAO) and thankfully subsidized by the government so it cost a tenth of what it normally would.

Here are some key, basic points to share with you.

1) At the daily stand up, say what you did yesterday, what you plan to do today and what is blocking you if anything.

2) Story points are different from ideal hours. Story points are for gauging the relative size of a user story, so the product backlog can be managed. Ideal hours are for scoping out the tasks needed to bring the user story to fruition.

3) If you have a large number of stories to estimate, start with what you feel is the smallest and estimate it at 1. Then estimate the rest relative to the effort of the others.

Overall, it was a useful workshop for me. The attendees were a mix of developers, QA and "PM"s (like myself) with varying levels of familiarity to Agile processes, so he had he work cut out for him. On top of having a cold.

If he were to do another workshop in the area, I would probably go to it.

Metrics...

Metrics...

It's a fact of life. If we don't measure something, we don't know where we are or how well we are doing.

And once we start measuring, then we should all use a ruler of the same size, shouldn't we?

How many cubits in an ell? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Now this is not going to turn into a plea for the US to join the rest of the world and start using the metric system.

But I am going to ask is what does a term like "open rate," mean to you?

If you are not involved in online or email marketing, that term is probably Greek to you as well, but you can probably guess it means the number of people that opened something (an email?) per something.

Where opinions diverge is

• whether to count the people or the events
• whether to count them all or just unique events
• what events to count as an "open"
• is it just a person opening an HTML message?
• what if the images are blocked and they click a link?
• what if they clicked on a link in the plain text version?

The Email Experience Council has suggested a way to clarify these data points in their white paper "The Email Render Rate," available in their white paper section.

They propose the word "Render" instead of "Open" but also the use of "Total" or "Unique" to clarify whether unique or total events are being calculated.

In addition, they suggest the use of "Action" to include not only "Opens" -- excuse me, "Renders" -- but also people who click on a link in a message that was not rendered (whether due to having images blocked or being a text email)

Finally, they state after they finalize these definitions, they request support from email marketers and email solution providers in helping to use the new terms.

What are your thoughts?