Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

How do you measure the Response in Direct Response? How do you measure its effectiveness?

You could just stop all other marketing campaigns, give it a three-month cooling-off period, and then send out your DM piece. Then wait another three months, and watch what happens. Once that's all smoothed out, you're ready to test something else!

But there are probably better ideas, huh? Here are a few I thought of recently:

Newton's Law of Gravity:

Gravity is that force which pulls Apples to the Earth.

=================
He didn't stop there, did he? So why has every media theorist in the world done that? We have all these partial, incomplete theories. Each one describing its piece of the elephant.

My textbook defines "mass" communication as communication to an audience homogenous only in one practical aspect: that of receiving the communication. The author separates "group" communication, to a set of people with many aligned interests and identities, and "public" communication to a set of people with aligned interests. A "mass" of people, he suggests, cannot be identified as having any definite characteristics.

That's an interesting definition, and very useful for certain types of communication. (Public relations, for instance.) As a general framework for the body of communication theory, though, I'm not sure it really fits with reality. It seems to me that a better-fitting approach would be to define "mass" communication as "mediated" communication.

One of the problems with current definitions of mass communication is the rise of feedback and other loops in the process. The Internet allows for flows of information that do not fit into most models. Theorists seem desperate to disparage any theory that takes into account specific technologies, but I think the technology is the essence of the communication.

Understanding the technology of communication helps us predict how information will flow, what limits it will have, and what areas it could expand to. Without technology, there is no communication. Studying communication without understanding the technology of it seems like studying the life cycle of fish without understanding the water in which they live.

So I propose a new name for the field formerly known as mass communication. Mediated communication. Telephones, mail, internet, whatever emerging media you want to consider. I think all mediated communication shares more theoretical underpinnings than difference. Each specific type of mediation allows for varying degrees of feedback, storage, reproduction, multiplication, repudiation, and so forth. But it is those factors which comprise the field we study.

Why don't more businesses offer free ringtones?

My sister just spent $2 for a new ringtone for her cell phone. (It was a song clip.) That got me thinking. If M&Ms were to come up with a catchy line, use it in a funny commercial, and then offer it for download as a ringtone on their site -- people would go and download it.

This would work for almost any company. Especially any that try to appeal to kids, teens, or techno-weenies.

Imagine:

Counterfeit passports are a rising problem. Terrorists have found ways to produce pretty convincing, fake passports and cross our borders at will. There is also an increasing 'phishing' operation, tricking unwitting people into buying from bogus sites that provide 'discount' passports.

The government decides to try and curtail the 'phishing' by providing ATM-style passport validation kiosks. After people buy passports, they can take them to these kiosks and get instant verification.

Good idea?

Maybe, until the terrorists start using the systems to validate and improve their fakes. Over time, the terrorists are overwhelmingly the biggests users of the validation kiosks. How handy, to have this simple way to test their new fakes! Ultimately, the terrorists become completely undetectable.

BYU's communications department has purchased a license to access turnitin.com, a system that allows people to submit their assignments and have them "checked" for plagiarism. The original intent was for teachers to be able to quickly check 'suspect' assignments. However, BYU has opened the system up to students as well.

Legitimate students -- first off, probably don't need this service at all. Fear-mongering might persuade them to use it, but all it will do is add another step to the already difficult process of writing a good paper.

For students who are interested in lightening their own loads through copying, however, this system is a great blessing. No longer are they forced to refrain from plagiarism out of fear of being caught -- they can use the same system the teachers will be, to modify copied text just as much as necessary until it is pronounced clean.

The technical process behind turnitin is a great idea. Providing stats on duplicate content, comparing against a wide body of known work -- fantastic. And allowing teachers to use that to help determine if a questionable paper has, indeed, lifted content verbatim from a little-known article published decades ago is a great step forward.

But opening that system to students serves no positive purpose, and assists the willing cheaters greatly. Indeed, it makes them virtually undetectable. It defeats its own goal.

No, I'm not going to add the near-requisite "oh my." (I know you were expecting it -- don't deny it!)

I'm writing this because I spent far too long trying to figure out what applets, servlets, and Java are. Well, not Java. I knew what that was.

So that makes an easy starting place:

WHAT IS JAVA?

Java is a programming language. The biggest thing that makes it different from any other, really, is that Sun (the creators of Java) have put a great deal of effort into making Java as universal as possible. That means a program written in Java can run on just about any computer in the world.

WHY DO I THINK JAVA IS COOL?

First, it's really easy to find tutorials and sample code and discussions about how to do specific, weird things with Java. That may also be true of other languages -- I don't know, because I've never looked.

Second, Java has lots of great functions that make it easy to do web stuff. I wanted to write a program that would search the web for me -- went from knowing absolutely no Java to having a working program in a couple days. When I needed to access the web through a cascading series of proxies, the functions were there. It was the simplest thing in the world.

Third, Java is free, and so is just about everything associated with it. "Eclipse" is a great tool to help write Java code, by the way.

WHAT ARE APPLETS?

No, they're not little apples.

Java Applets are Java programs that are designed to run inside web browsers. Basically, if you write an applet, people can browse to your web page and -- bingo! They're running your program, right in their browser. They might not even realize they're running a special program.

To convert a regular Java application into an Applet just requires you to change the main class to extend the Applet class, and rename your main() to init(). Basically. Then you have to debug all the other little things that break when you do that. But if you start there, Eclipse will walk you through the rest.

WHY ARE APPLETS COOL?

Applets are better than static HTML because the user interface is so powerful. They are faster than dynamic HTML because users just download the whole Java program at once, then it runs on their local machines. They don't have to download every new screen every step of the way.

I am using a Java Applet as the front-end user interface for a complex system I'm putting together.

WHAT ARE SERVLETS?

Servlets are Java programs that are designed to respond to web pages or applets. They run on the server, as opposed to applets (which, as I said, run on the client -- the end user's computer). As such, they are invisible to the users. Users should probably never need to know (or at least think much about) the servlets.

WHY ARE SERVLETS COOL?

Here's the groovy thing. Applets have a tiny drawback -- they can't read or write data on the user's hard drive. Part of the Java 'sandbox' that keeps us safe. (Because wouldn't it make you mad if a site you visited loaded up an applet that played a pretty song at you while it reformatted your hard drive?)

Since servlets run on the server, though, they can write to the server and do all sorts of other cool things in the background. If you have a program that takes some time to run -- for instance, a bulk email program (which is NOT what I'm working on!) -- an applet can start the servlet and then let the user get on with his browsing.

If you were running the long program in the applet, the user would have to sit there until the whole thing finished. If the window were accidentally closed (or if you clicked on a link from an email and it automatically moved your browser to the new page) you'd lose everything. Kind of a bummer.

HOW FUN!

Yes. I just figured out the last part (about servlets) today. I am excited to write my servlet piece and see if it really works. I suppose I'll let you know how it goes.

THE END?

It sure is.

Ever seen those crazy arcade games where people dance on metal pads to Korean techno music?

For under $100, I can play DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) at home on my PC -- and I can dance to crazy Korean music or Disney songs or whatever I want.

As a recent convert to this particular fad, I thought I'd share my PC DDR setup story with you. Here's what I did:

1. Download Stepmania -- www.stepmania.com

2. Buy two pads -- www.buynshop.com

(They have other pad sets as well -- the extra $30 for the 1" thick pads is probably an option I would take, realizing now how fun the game is. It was not an option when I ordered my pads, though.)

3. Buy an adapter -- www.ebay.com

(Make sure to get one that matches your pads -- I needed a PlayStation2 to USB version)

4. Download songs (SMZIP files -- Google has a bunch!) and put them in the Songs directory of Stepmania

5. Put on some good socks and turn the volume up

===============

I'd have a hard time playing this in public; I tend to fall over quite a lot. But in the privacy of my living room, the game gets amazingly intense. And it really is a good workout!

The coolest advantage (for tech weenies like me, anyway) of Stepmania and doing this all on the PC is that you get as many songs as you like. If you go for the XBox or PS2 version, you are locked into whatever songs came on the DDR game you bought. On the PC, you can even make your own new "step files" for songs!

Sort of like Spider Man (the movie) is to Spider Man (the old comic book) -- Metroid Prime (the GameCube game) is to Metroid (the original Nintendo game). I loved the old, in both cases, and the new is amazingly a thousand times cooler.

But that's not what this entry is about. What I wanted to address is the shift in focus on video gaming. The GameCube comes with four controller ports. The games that we got for it (aside from Metroid Prime...) become more fun the more people you have playing.

This is a great step forward for video games, but it is not the only change happening. The bulk of the market for video games is still the ultra-realistic violent or sports games. Aimed at single, male players. And generally imbued with very little plot or real strategy.

Real life is about stories. And family life is a cooperative story. Why don't we see more games like that? Even most of the GameCube games (vaunted earlier as great examples of the progress in video gaming) are simple, skill-based games.

I think this is the idea I love most about Alternate Reality Games -- they are almost nothing but story! When a game company hires twelve 3d animators and three engine programmes and one writer, we have a problem. When a game requires a team of six writers and then a tech guy or two to pull it off, that's a much more promising mix.

Ender's game, the Giant's Drink, is the game I most want to play. But until the computer can write, I want to see a team of writers (or one very hard-working writer) supporting the ongoing development of a plot. Interacting with characters.

ARGs as presently constituted are more about advertising than fun. A truly fun ARG would likely start a huge shift in gaming as we know it.

So, as soon as I get fired, that's what I'm starting. :o)

The Citizen Project.

I searched for "Paul Allen."

Yahoo suggested, "Did you mean 'PAUL ALLEN OCTOPUS?'"

I figured that must be what I meant, really, so I clicked on that.

The first result was this fine example of Internet Spam:

http://www.yachtinglovers.info/yacht-rental-chicago/paul-allen-yacht-octopus.html

Check out this compelling marketing copy:

==================
If you're looking for a high standard paul allen yacht octopus site you know you can count on, we suggest the above web site. We have taken the tiresome task out of your paul allen yacht octopus shopping and reduced our list of paul allen yacht octopus web sites down to only finest around.
==================

It boggles the mind, hey? But at least it will speed up my paul allen yacht octopus shopping.

Thank goodness for the awesome power of the Internet.

Want to sell stuff on eBay? The picture makes all the difference in your final price.

Here are a collection of articles with enormously practical tips for taking professional-looking product photos.

http://pcworld.about.com/news/Oct142003id112658.htm >> General overview of taking the picture and applying perspective

http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/extracting/index.html >> Talks about the "extract" filter -- a quicker, often better tool than the simple lasso tools

http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/Tips/rotating.html >> An overview of Photoshop "actions" -- a system to automate removing backgrounds, applying the "auto-levels", or whatever else

http://www.betterphoto.com/forms/qnaAll.asp?catID=198 >> A Q&A-style forum with relevant questions and some very practical, simple advice (scroll down!)

http://www.connectedphotographer.com/issues/issue200407/00001331001.html >> Another detailed article with good suggestions for taking the picture right to begin with

Remember, when taking pictures for the web: high resolution is not that important. Good lighting is the most important thing!

(And, yes, I did post this just as a reference for me, someday.)

Why do people 'chat' with coworkers across the hall?
Why do we IM people instead of calling them on the phone?
Why do we put up with the spelling mistakes, the poor grammar, the inability to use facial expressions?

I think it's because of the tremendous advantages of introducing just a bit of asynchronicity to the conversation.

When somebody asks you a question in person, you are on the spot. You have to answer right away. You maybe get half a second to 'compose your thoughts' -- but you don't really get to compose your thoughts.

And what if they're away from their desk? You don't have to remember to ask them again later. The question remains, until they return and answer it. And if you're not around to catch the reply, why, it waits until you return.

When somebody asks you a question over IM, you can think about an answer. You can type a reply, see how it looks, edit it, or even delete it and begin anew, before you send it.

Further, the vaunted 90% of communication that happens non-verbally is actually a great hindrance to many people. We don't know how to control all of that 90%. We may not have worn our best shirt, or we may be out of breath. Maybe we had onions for lunch.

None of that matters over an IM session. The message becomes the message -- not the mass of other signals we send in person. The 'noise' of our personal presence is removed from the signal, and we can communicate much more precisely.

I'm not going to develop the idea much more now, but IM sessions can also be recorded and referenced quickly and easily. You can't 'search' through the history of conversations you've had with another person in real life.

Is this better than email?

Chat is, essentially, email. The underlying premise is exactly the same -- the benefits highlighted only by the increased permission we give to 'chat' to occupy a share of our workspace.

So will chat take over our lives?

Quite probably. Run while you still can!

Here's a fun challenge that was presented to me at work:

We had one hour, to take 100 newly registered domain names and put up websites and tracking on them. We needed to be able to tell how many people visited each website. I figured there was no way we were going to be able to create 100 separate websites, so I'd have to make one and have it automatically display the right content. I'd never done that before, but I've seen it done in other places, so I figured I could do it.

The domains were registered at Godaddy, so I used their batch editing tool to point all 100 at my (personal) hosting reseller space. (We didn't have time to register new hosting or anything like that, so it's handy that I had this reseller account available!)

On the backend of the hosting space, however, no bulk editing tool was available. I needed to add all 100 domain names to the nameserver, so I wrote a macro to loop through the names and enter them for me. That took about five minutes to write, then I started it running.

While it did that, I went to Google and looked up the PHP commands to read a domain name -- to figure out which domain people had entered to get to the website. There were numerous examples, so I grabbed the code from a clean one and dropped it into my page. It worked the first time I tested it. (How often does THAT happen?) That whole process took about another five minutes.

Then I needed to get tracking code up on these sites. We usually use Omniture's enterprise-level SiteCatalyst for tracking, but there is a lot of overhead and it takes a while to set up, in several areas. Way more time than we had available.

I briefly considered adapting a simple php page-tracking script I wrote last year for another client, but that didn't feel right. I'm still not sure if it really wouldn't work, but it's not the most reliable script even when it's working properly. (The client I wrote it for originally didn't pay us for it, so I never built in any error-checking or bot detection or any of the hundred other things a robust tool should have.)

One of my coworkers had been pushing us to look at another site analytics tool, WebStat. I called him in and asked if they had a free trial. We discussed it as I browsed quickly through the website to make sure it would do what we needed. I downloaded the free version and installed it on the web page.

Amazingly, that, too, worked the first time I tested it. I plugged the php variable for the detected domain name into the WebStat tracking code, so it would read the domain names and report those as pages viewed.

And that was that! I had 100 websites created and configured with tracking code. I had reporting that would show us how many visitors each domain got. And I had done it all within the ridiculous one-hour window we needed it in. In fact, the whole process took about 37 minutes.

Hooray! I don't think anyone at work truly appreciates the enormity of that accomplishment. So I post it on my website and hope that someone, somewhere will read this and say, "what a guy!" :o)

(Even if that someone is only me!)

Here are some ideas for thesis projects I'd like to do:

=============================
1. Search Engine Relevance
=============================
What are the clickthrough rates for different ranks on the various search engines? They each surely know their own rates, but they have no real incentive to share those numbers, so we'll never see a good comparison. Unless someone like me partners with Omniture and does this study, see, to compare companies' rankings with their traffic from search engines, and the Overture search volume, to determine it.

For example:

Company A, Google [cliff diving], ranked number 4.
Overture [cliff diving], queries 3600.
Page ranked at 4, clicks from Google 36.
Google's number 4 spot CTR is 1%.

Do that enough times, and you might come up with some interesting data.

=============================
2. Linking Security Tech to the Internet
=============================
I'd love to study the companies whose 'web-enabled' security cameras have turned out to be a major mistake when Google indexed them all.

=============================
3. Brand Monitoring - Corporate Intelligence
=============================
How about developing a tool to track and monitor brand popularity online? Some company called TNS Media tracks ad spending and stuff, and as I was reading about them, I thought it would be cool to put together a tracking system for the Internet. I could enter a list of brands, and then watch their rankings and frequency over time. That data could be overlaid with product lifecycle data, ad spending information, or PR things that are happening, to see what sort of aggregate effect it is having online.

=============================
4. Content Analysis of Internet Advertising
=============================
Is the stuff being sold online different from that being pitched on TV? Clearly, SPAM tips things that way. What about the products featured on major websites? Which industries have embraced the Internet, and in which is there still a potential first-mover advantage to be exploited? Have any tested the waters and fully turned away?

=============================
5. Integration of Offline and Online Campaigns
=============================
Which companies are successfully integrating real-world marketing with the Internet? Which are doing it inadvertently? (That kind of gets back to the brand monitoring idea.)

=============================
6. Educational Gaming
=============================
What do we know about using games to teach? People remember 9/10ths of what they DO, right? What if we can get them to do it in a game?

=============================
*** 7. Search Engine Personalization ***
=============================
An update to the 1994 study would probably be the easiest thing to do. And it would be fascinating! So much has changed since then. Their study saw only periphery -- personalization of the interface, and accessories, with no meaningful effect on the results themselves. Today, powerful intra-search personalization is available. What is the real state of personal search?

This amazing story was emailed to Google and posted on their site. Briefly, a couple's baby was diagnosed as needing an immediate blood transfer. The couple Googled the condition on their cell phone and found a medical journal that suggested the symptoms the doctors saw were actually quite normal for twins (of which their baby in question was one). They showed the phone and results to their doctor, who went quickly and met with several others. Couple hours later, they came back and and agreed that they didn't need to perform the transfusion.

Search literacy is literally saving lives. The Internet gives us access to more information than anyone could ever hold in their brain. "Access to is better than ownership of..." A financial principle that applies to knowledge as well.

Original story at the "read more" link...

If you think about it, moist bathroom wipes are a really good idea.

But most people still don't use them. Kimberly-Clark developed Fresh Rollwipes in 2001 and tried to get us all to use it. In typical, large company fashion, their approach was a $40 million marketing campaign.

The marketing campaign involved a lot of TV commercials with a bear and a duck. ("Wet!" says the duck. "But just barely," bellows the bear.) The ads were deliberately low-key, a company rep said, "since there's only so much people want to hear about a product like this." Ogilvy & Mather, one of the vaunted ad firms of the world, developed the spots. Print campaigns and even a customized "freshness museum" truck were also featured in the campaign. Kimberly-Clark pulled out all the stops for this launch.

The campaign failed miserably.

From an article by Copernicus Marketing, "A year and a half after Kimberly-Clark's big announcement, Fresh Rollwipes were in one regional market and executives said sales are so weak they are not financially material."

I could have made that launch a success, for a fraction of the cost of their failed, traditional, overblown and simultaneously underdone campaign.

What Would I Have Done?

Realizing that this product can't really be addressed directly in an ad on TV, they should have stayed away from TV ads altogether. Instead, I would have focused on getting the product 'out there' -- installed in fashionable restaurants and malls. Signed contracts with custodial companies and business parks. A soft launch would have allowed other people to talk about the product.

Kimberly Clark couldn't go on TV and talk about how gross it would be to wipe off muddy hands with a paper towel and then sit down for dinner. But many other people could have.

Was Seinfeld still around in 2001? Talk about an ideal venue for product placement. A clean-freak who stars in a show about the idiosynchrocies of pop culture. It wouldn't even have looked like product placement, and they could have practically read the script of a radio ad for the thing. "It's cleaner!"

Just one person using the product on a Reality TV show like Big Brother, and millions of people would have been exposed to a frank discussion of the benefits. A columnist who encountered the product in an airport could have written a piece for the Washington Post Society section. One comedian making a joke about it would have opened discussions that -- well, that a $40 million daytime TV ad campaign couldn't.

The power of TV advertising is enormous. But for a product where even in the early stages of marketing, people are urging subtlety in the TV ads because the product is too delicate for polite discussion... They should have hired me as a consultant. They needed another channel of communication -- one that could more directly address the concerns and benefits and reasons for this product.

It's not too late! This is a product that the marketplace needs. We just need a company to market it right. A company that understands that marketing doesn't always mean driving a "freshness" truck around the country and producing a lot of TV commercials.

According to a recent study by Stanford researchers, overall graphic design is three times more important than the actual accuracy of the information on a website, in helping people determine credibility.

Why isn't every web design company in the world posting this data to their homepage?

The following elements come from a study conducted by BJ Fogg and the Standford Credibility Project. (That's probably not it's real name, but I'm in a hurry.) They had 2500 people take an online survey, where each person assessed two sites from each of ten different categories (sites chosen from a pool of 10 for each category). Participants reported their opinions of the credibility of each site, and researchers coded the responses into the following groups:

This justifies a pretty expensive designer, if you ask me. Amazing.

Canyoureadthis? I bet you can. How is it that we can read sentences without the spaces?

More to the point, how can we teach computers to read without spaces?

A nifty paper by Matt Mahoney, from the Florida Institute of Technology outlines one approach:

http://www.cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/dissertation/lex1.html

The paper cites research by another scientist, showing that infants are able to parse the continuous sound of English before they are even able to speak their own first word.

Matt shows a way to apply stastical analysis to the breaks between characters and determine which breaks signify words. I need to put together something like it, if I choose to go that route for a project I'm working on.

But then I have to figure out how to words in get order the right. And that you do how do?

A puzzle for another day.

Psst... Wanna' buy a digital camera, cheap? Yeah, the new Canon Rebel XT. Eight megapixels, SLR, fully featured... A great piece of hardware. Going for eight, nine hundred bucks at Amazon? A thousand or more at big-box retailers?

I got here for just $449. Too much? You're breaking my arm! Okay, $399. That's as low as I can go!

==============================
Google Adwords:
Digital Rebel XT New $449
www.InfinitiPhoto.com/Canon_RebelXT Canon Digital Rebel XT w/18-55 $549

Canon Digital Rebel XT
www.superhotdeal.com Canon Digital Rebel XT Bargain! Starting from $0.99.

==============================
Amazon Reseller Marketplace:
entirelypets.com Canon Digital Rebel XT (Silver) New $540
Feedback Rating: 85 (97% positive)

==============================
All fake. And that's just a tiny sample. There are dozens, if not hundreds of sites on the Internet making totally fraudulent claims to sell products at hundreds of dollars below the retail price -- often below the minimum wholesale price to the retailers!

I made two purchases through Amazon's marketplace, to see what would happen, and of course Amazon caught and cancelled both of them. (They don't want to have to pay me back the $600 when it all falls through!) These vendors sell tons of low-cost items to build up a positive reputation, then burn it with a few high-cost, high profit margin sales.

The websites don't even need to go to that effort -- a few hundred bucks to get a "credible" website, and per-click fees for Google ads.

I'd like to investigate this from any of several perspectives:

1. Con men -- how do they manipulate credibility to get our money?
2. What can organizations do to detect patterns of fraud? (How could Amazon keep its marketplace clean?)
3. What can individuals do to stay safe?

It's a fascinating subject.

(Read more for a list of websites that look fraudulent to me:)