Just to give some sense of the potential impact, there are about 38,000,000 visitors a year to science centers and museums in the United States – that is more than the NFL and NASCAR combined.  So what if these organizations started to actively collaborate and expand that collaborative network to include major media companies and science and technology corporations…  You begin to get the idea.

This week the Center for Science launched a beta version of its web site – a well designed and developed site that was made possible through the generous support of Paradowski Creative, a nationally recognized design firm and Contegix, a leading international open source hosting company.  Please take a minute to visit the site.  More on this exciting project soon.

Reviewing some SEO work for one of our companies this morning I was surprised to see that last night (according to Google) we grew from about 20,000 pages of content cached to over 3,780,000,000. What was more alarming was Google now showed under the search result a little note that said “this sight may harm your computer”. The site was listed as a spam site! I started to fire off a string of emails to get the technical team working on the problem, tried calling the CEO and then I noticed something even more alarming.

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This concept creates an authentic value exchange with the customer – the advertising is giving something to the customer and in return the customer has the option of reading the advertisement, possibly many times.  According the an article in Japan Times, over four billion tissue packs are handed out in Japan every year.

In a recent Internet survey of over 100,000 Japanese consumers conducted by Marsh Research, 76 percent said they accept free tissues. (That’s a much higher acceptance rate than for leaflets.) When asked if they look at the advertisement accompanying the tissues, slightly more than half said they either “definitely look” or “at least glance at” the advertisement. When asked why, many respondents said they hoped to find a coupon or special offer. Yet others displayed a very Japanese sense of obligation for having received a gift, giving answers like “sekkaku kubatte kuretakara (because they were so kind to have given me something)” and “yappari moratta ijo minai to shitsurei ni naru ka na to omo tame (given that I accepted them, I figure it would be rude not to look).”

As you surmised, the concept of tissue-pack marketing was indeed developed in Japan. It dates back to the late 1960s, when Hiroshi Mori, the founder of a paper-goods manufacturer in Kochi Prefecture called Meisei Industrial Co., was sniffing around for ways to expand demand for paper products. At the time, the most common marketing freebie in Japan was boxes of matches, often given away by banks and used primarily by women in the kitchen.

Figuring tissues would have wider appeal (because everyone has to blow their nose, and carry insurance against public toilets with no tissues), Mori developed the machinery to fold and package tissues into easy-to-carry pocket-size packs. The new product was marketed only as a form of advertising and wasn’t sold to consumers. Even now, pocket tissues hardly exist as a retail category in Japan because everyone expects to receive them for free.

Japan is still the main market for tissue-pack advertising, but the practice is beginning to spread overseas.

Off Campus Media, a integrated marketing company focused on the college demographic is planning to use the tissue pack marketing concept on several college campuses this fall.  “We have student ambassadors that are often distribution funny postcards and promotional items to increase awareness for our advertising partners”, said Mark Sawyier, CEO.  “I think the tissue pack marketing idea is great.”

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Why Not Ask Your Customer?

There are many missed opportunities to engage and communicate with your customer regardless if you are a start-up, hospital, retailer, etcc…  As noted in the previous blog there can be great upside when engaging in brainstorming and improving your product.  But there can be a downside as well if you do value the time and feedback of your customer.

According to a study published by Stanford University there is a significant downside to asking too many questions and even placing too much emphasis to the customer on grading the experience.   According to Itamar Simonson of the Stanford Graduate School of Business

…some popular survey methods actually put consumers in a negative frame of mind, hardly the results the companies paying for the survey had envisioned.

The study primarily highlights how creating emphasis on the review of the experience puts customers in a mindset to find fault and that asking questions in advance significantly skews the perception of the experience.  In conclusion  the article’s author Bill Snyder writes:

the costs of surveys taken in advance of shopping exceed the benefits of these surveys by introducing an unacceptable level of bias and producing negative evaluations.

A few suggestions for producing more accurate customer feedback:

1.    Don’t ask questions in advance.  As the study referenced above shows, consumers focus too much on finding the faults in the experience.

2.    Keep questions brief.  Unless you are paying people for their time, value the fact people are willing to share and ask less than ten questions.

3.    Measure what can be changed.  Although there is a great deal of interesting information that can be gathered for research purposes, but only measure what is most impactful.

4.    Ask peoples opinions.  Often surveys attempt to put people in a position to give feedback in an area they have no expertise.  Survey what people are experts in, their own experience.

Additional Reading:
Be Careful What You Ask Your Customers.  Stanford Graduate School of Business News, 2007.

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Twitter’s PR team must be working late each night because over the past several weeks dozens of articles have appeared in almost every media channel.  Many of these articles examine the twitter business model and try to hypothesize a path to prosperity or failure.  Read the rest of this article

Listening to NPR the other day there was a passing comment regarding the relationship of the US economy to consumer confidence – about 2/3 of the US economy is directly connected to consumer spending.   Not news in itself but with confidence in Bush at an all time low what could be the potential economic impact of Obama just winning the election.  Some of the data is pretty surprising.

According to recent survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs, 8% of respondents said they are likely to increase holiday spending because of the election of Sen. Obama.   Although it does not say how much the spending is likely to improve, a little back-of-the-napkin math can help put this into perspective.

In the 2007 there was about $70b in holiday spending and according to Mastercard about 40% ($28b) was spent online.  If 8% of people spent just 5% more that translates into an additional $280m.  If it is more like 8% of people spending 25% more the number jumps to $1.4b, or an overall increase of 2%.

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The obvious answer is when you run out of money and in many cases that is a reality, but many companies should have enough data and market insight to wind down a company well in advance of depleting their bank accounts.

Relationships with investors (regardless of family, friend, angel or VC) should be considered long term opportunities. One of the panelists presented a great story about an entrepreneur friend who was able to return about 70% on the dollar back to the group of investors once the entrepreneur realized that the business was not going to succeed. Although I am sure all parties would have preferred a more positive outcome, the entrepreneur was able to establish trust and credibility with the investors. This trust allowed the entrepreneur to raise funds from the same group of investors a few years later for a new venture because they understood this entrepreneur was a good steward of their money.

The story also highlights another important concept; most entrepreneurs are serial entrepreneurs and will have many ideas through the course of their life. The greatest success an entrepreneur can have with their first venture is that they learn to be a successful entrepreneur. There will be many opportunities to make money so the primary focus in not money but understanding how to develop an idea into a successful company.

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If you have ever attended a business plan seminar, an elevator pitch class or a forum on how to pitch your company to investors you will realize a common theme exists – your idea provides a solution to what problem? Another way to describe this concept is what value do you provide to your target audience? Generally this concept is held in high regard – except in the world of the Internet business.

Almost on a daily basis there appears an entrepreneur with a new widget or concept that has little market value. One of the most recent examples is Cuil, a search engine launched last month by a few x-Google employees claiming a better search engine. Even if technically it is true, to the average user it offers no visible advantage. And because the search results return in a manner that is unfamiliar on the site it appears different but offers no real advantage. Might be some brilliant technology folks, but did they ever ask what problem they are solving for their respective target market?

The Internet is in its second major phase of evolution driven by the Web 2.0 platform that is enabling a radical change in how content is developed, distributed and received. One result of this shift to digital, is a massive shift in online advertising spending driving a great number of new “media” companies and concepts. From what I can tell most of these are touted by the early “techadapters” but never cross the consumer divide to reach the mainstream. At a macro level that means lots of supply, little demand. I am surprised there is not a widget that is tracking how many new widgets are created every day.

There are some compelling new media models like Huffington Post that focus on providing all media that would appeal to a certain demographic. The value proposition to Huffington is that it not only generates some new content – but it aggregates content from hundreds of sources making it easier for the user to keep up to speed. Another is MovingOffCampus.com that focuses on helping college students better manage life off campus – pretty straight forward value proposition and full of advertising opportunity.

With advertising still climbing online we can expect to see a great deal of innovation (good and bad) in the next two years and regardless it will be an interesting experience.

According to a press release on the Tickle web site the company was acquired for about $55 million (50/50 cash and stock) or about two times revenue by Monster (NASDAQ: MNST) in May 2004.

The suite of services that Tickle offers provides the easiest, safest, and most comprehensive experience online. From career advice and personality reports to social networking, Tickle is able to apply science to help members build and manage relationships. Tickle’s “Think Tank” of certified PhDs ensures that the sites’ services are useful and the content is relevant. Thus, members have access to practical scientific data that helps them to discover themselves, and better connect with others – a combination that makes the platform truly powerful.

The recent series of social networking failures raises questions about the future of social networking portals in general and how many social networking models will survive as the novelty of their respective “unique” experience grows old. What most social networking sites fail to understand is the dynamic and fickle nature of the Internet audience, the need for serious collaboration and that social networking is a means, not the end. Well I guess in the case of Tickle it was the end after all.

By Chris Dornfeld of the Dornfeld Management Group | June 6, 2008

Yes, magazines’ paid circulations have declined 1.1% since the report a year earlier (excluding titles that can’t be tracked because they stopped publishing or just launched between reports). But magazines’ overall audiences — counting copies that are distributed free or passed among friends — have climbed 4.4% in the past year, providing the second straight gain after a long period of doldrums, the Mediaedge analysis noted. And the data suggest audiences include a population of magazine readers that’s younger than a year ago.

“For every magazine that is aging, there are magazines that are trending younger — and are gaining new readers at the same time,” the Mediaedge analysis found.

Look across a longer period of time, and the trends take on new clarity. Allure magazine’s median reader age has fallen 1.1 years to 29.1 from 30.2 since the spring 2004 MRI report, while the size of its audience grew 67%. Wired saw its median age fall to 34.6 from 37 in the same span as its audience increased 47%.

Some of those effects stem from getting the right titles into the doctor’s offices, salons and cafés where people can sample them, said George Janson, managing partner-director of print at Mediaedge:cia. “Magazines are doing a better job of managing public-place distribution, which helps build audience,” he said.

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