Have you ever wished it was easier to print something out while you were on the road? Whether it's a boarding pass or a list of local restaurants, or a guide to a local attraction you are standing in front of. Right now, we can carry 20 GB hard drives in our pocket, and access the internet through many kinds of portable devices. Printing, however, remains a chore.
To print at a hotel business center, you need to email a file, then open it, send it to a printer and hope that all the fonts work out and things look ok. And you pay exorbitantly per page. If you happen to be out and on the road, you're pretty much out of luck. Which brings me to the idea of this post ... why can't HP or Canon or any of the companies that make printers create an APM?
Working in the same way as an ATM, an APM or Automated Printing Machine would allow anyone on the street to walk up to a kiosk, send a file in a variety of ways (USB flash key, bluetooth, infrared, etc.) and get it printed. You can already do this to print photos in drugstores. You can do it for directions at a rental car agency (though it's limited). Airlines also do this at the airport with boarding passes already as well.
So why can't I go to a kiosk on the street in Manhattan and print that really long email from a friend telling me where to go, or get a printout of those crucial 4 slides a colleague is sending me on my way to a business meeting? One day I suspect we'll see these APMs - because despite how digital our lives have become, sometimes you just need a printout.
About the Idea Bar:
Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas. We
come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas
that just don't fit a client. They are too big, too different, or just
not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project,
the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source"
and offer new ideas for marketing. Take them and use them ... all I
ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and
talk about them. Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.
The toughest part of being in China, or any other country that uses a completely foreign language to native English speakers, is finding a way to communicate for products you are looking for. Some products are available and some aren't, brands are often called something different for different markets, and knowing how to ask for something by name can be a very difficult challenge. One thing I wished for often in Beijing was some sort of a foldable brand picture book. My idea for this is essentially an international folding map series customized by country. For each country, the map would have a combination of common phrases, gestures and items pictured (so you can point to the pictures instead of trying to describe an item), as well as a grid of brand logos for brands that you can find in the country.
The last part is the real secret, because often when you are in a new place, you know what you want but you aren't quite sure how to explain it to someone. And even the same brand could be marketed under a different name in different countries. In this map, you would have logos for all sorts of products, from candy bars to laundry detergent. The point is to be able to ask for something quickly and to get familiar with the top local brands all at once. I would definitely NOT want to be the person negotiating with all these brand's legal teams to get usage rights for all those logos, but if someone could tackle this monumental hurdle, this could really be a picture book series (or folding map) worth talking about. It might not help you find your way to the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, but at least you could find the Chinese equivalent of Band-aids when you need them.
About the Idea Bar:
Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas. We
come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas
that just don't fit a client. They are too big, too different, or just
not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project,
the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source"
and offer new ideas for marketing. Take them and use them ... all I
ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and
talk about them. Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.
I've been speaking at a lot of events lately, and several focus on similar topics in social media or interactive marketing. One of the consistent problems with speaking at events like this is that there is a danger of using or hearing the same examples and stories over and over. As my volume of speaking increases, this is one of my big concerns ... that people will opt out of coming to hear me speak because they feel like they've heard my point of view before. The other problem, of course, is that nothing makes you look worse that sitting up on on stage talking about an example that everyone has heard a million times before.
What if there could be a central list of interactive marketing or social media campaigns that were so overused we could retire them? Once a campaign or product makes it onto this list, the idea is that speakers would voluntarily avoid mentioning it, treat it as a cliche and think of other examples to use in their presentations. The only exception to this rule would be if you actually worked on one of the retired examples personally.
I'm starting with five examples, and looking for more from you. If you have one, leave a comment and I'll keep updating this post. And if you disagree with one, say so and maybe we'll get it off the list. My aim with this list is to get us all (and especially anyone who will be speaking at an event in the near future) to think more deeply about examples to support what we are talking about and not use the same obvious examples over and over. To that end, if you are about to speak at a conference, check this list and if you are
moderating a panel, be sure to pass this list on to your panelists. Let's all aim to be smarter and more original. The end result won't just be better discussions, but better events too.
About the Idea Bar:
Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas. We
come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas
that just don't fit a client. They are too big, too different, or just
not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project,
the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source"
and offer new ideas for marketing. Take them and use them ... all I
ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and
talk about them. Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.
YouTube is everyone's default location now for not only videos, but music, entertainment and just about any other piece of content you might have seen somewhere and want to see again. Copyright issues aside, having this global library of material available gave me an idea for an interesting social experiment the other day. What if everyone took the time to create a compilation of three videos from YouTube that explored a certain theme or subject they are passionate about?
One compilation could explore the art of making musical instruments. Another would explain winemaking. Another could pull together three videos that explain a complex subject, such as Web2.0. The only thing bringing them together is that each group of three videos is compiled by someone who knows that subject and wants to share that knowledge.
What are you passionate about? Can you find three videos online (doesn't have to be on YouTube) to describe it to the world? Leave a comment here with your ideas for three, or post about this on your blog (use the tag "3videoproject") and I will create a list of other compilations here on this post. Here are my three videos to start the project:
The 3 Video Project: Inside India
1. Vande Mataram - One of the most popular videos about India produced by a combination of film and music celebrities, this video has been a national phenomenon in India since its release to commemorate the anniversary of Indian Independence.
2. Deewangi Deewangi - This video is a Bollywood music hit, but is interested because it features probably the most popular current Indian movie actor (Shah Rukh Khan) in a compilation of all his most popular dances and songs from other movies (along with the stars from those movies) in one song.
3. Peugot 206 Ad - This last one is an award winning ad for the Peugot 206 in India. It is also a brilliant and funny commentary on the rise of consumerism in India.
About the Idea Bar: Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas. We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a client. They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing. Take them and use them ... all I ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and talk about them. Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.
Booking travel for this past weekend, I was reminded of the brilliance of the business model that Priceline pioneered for travel booking. In an industry where prices were known to fluctuate and most transactions followed a simple search -> buy -> sell model, they let the buyers set their price and allowed the sellers to decide if the price was acceptable. That alone was not the brilliant part, though. What Priceline inherently understood is that no seller would participate in a model like that unless they knew that their sales from other channels were safe from this price-focused approach. So Priceline hides the identities of the sellers until you complete your purchase. Simple, useful and innovative.
I read an interesting piece in a marketing trade talking about how advertisers were planning for the new year given there was likely to be an election year spending frenzy on television ads that would drive prices up and availability lower. Scott Berg from HP was interviewed in BusinessWeek and made an interesting point about how advertisers need to be flexible. His strategy is to move more spending online and leave standing orders at lower rates with regional TV stations to fill their ad slots once regional candidates drop out of races and leave more availability. This is essentially the same model as Priceline - set your price and let the merchant accept or decline it.
So what about online advertising? Most of that is sold on an inventory vs. expected traffic model, and for popular sites, it is sold far ahead of time. As more and more do it yourself models of online advertising become popular (Federated Media, BlogAds, Google Adwords, and Facebook being the most notable examples), the idea of last minute advertising is not so hard to imagine. What if there was a site like Priceline for online advertising (let's call it Adline, for fun)? You could enter your flight dates, the demographic details of where you are trying to reach, the type of placement, and the maximum CPM you are willing to pay. Placements would need to be rated on some sort of neutral system so you would not be overpaying for obscured inside page placements, as well as by relative visibility of the site, but the idea is that I could decide to do a five star ad unit on a five star site and set my own CPM. The site could choose to accept or dcline my offer. Could something like this work?
About the Idea Bar: Working in a creative team,
the life of our business is new ideas. We come up with them every day
for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a
client. They are too big, too different, or just not quite right.
Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project,
the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source"
and offer new ideas for marketing. Take them and use them ... all I
ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and
talk about them. Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.
I am a big fan and user of del.icio.us. In fact, I am planning to do the entire index for my book in del.icio.us - sort of a visual version of that thing in the back of every book to help you find who is mentioned in it. When it comes to seeking information, del.icio.us is a big source of information for me because I rely on the way that others have tagged and saved information to find relevant content. It is the wisdom of the crowds in action. The thing I recently realized, though, is that there are two things that I found myself searching for quite often, trying to use del.icio.us for, and getting frustrated. The main problem with del.icio.us is that most of the content for a particular link lies behind a click. While the tags describing content are often strong, the description that people enter is usually not as useful.
The end result is that you follow a link, but then are forced to scan the entire text of the page to find the one small piece that you were looking for. The two situations this has become most evident for me is when I was seeking a stat or a quote. Both situations are essentially a search for a single relevant line of text, instead of a full page of material. So this leads me to the idea for this edition of IdeaBar ... what if there was a version of a tool like del.icio.us just for stats and quotes? People would still save links for original source material, but the text of the quote or stat would be included automatically in the description. The keywords would also describe the context of each quote or stat, making it easy to find.
Quotes may be a bit book or presentation centric, but imagine a tool like this for stats ... every person who has had to pull together a presentation and use noteworthy stats to prove their point would probably find it useful. At the very least, it would help me to more easily file the stats that I do find so I can use them later. What do you think? About the Idea Bar: Working in a creative team,
the life of our business is new ideas. We come up with them every day
for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a
client. They are too big, too different, or just not quite right.
Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project,
the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source"
and offer new ideas for marketing. Take them and use them ... all I
ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and
talk about them. Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.
I've been to a lot of conferences and tradeshows recently, and as most attendees of those types of events know, you get a lot of freebies. The whole idea of many exposition halls is for companies to find ways to give away the right free crap with their names on it to that they can increase awareness of their solution among the right influentials and maybe even sell their solution or product to a few people as well. I have long said that the companies who get the most benefit from events like this are the ones that no one has yet heard of. For them, the awareness is often worth paying for, whether they can close any deals or not. Yet in a sea of sameness where everyone is giving away pens, flashy light balls, or USB drives, how can you stand out? One common way is to have the "uber bag" - which is larger or of higher quality than other bags. Then attendees use your bag to carry around all the other free stuff they get, and you get the free branded exposure as they carry these bags around throughout the event. That's pretty obvious, I think, so doing a whole idea bar post on that is probably not going to offer you much.
Yet what if someone extended this idea to another area of difficulty - business cards. At most events, I collect lots of business cards, and usually I just create a stack and put them into my bag to sort out when I get home. What if someone could create an "uber business card" which acted like a folder to store all your other business cards? It could be expandable like a file folder, and sealed on 2 or 3 sides so you could slide in average sized business cards into it. Plastic or card stock could be used to create the cards and because of the wider profile, you would have several additional 3-D sides to use for relaying information or placing custom imagery. What do you think? Could this be the next kind of card that Moo.com (or anyone else) should offer?
Photo Credit: "Business card loot from Blogher '07" from kerflop's Photostream on Flickr (by Jessica, who also authors a great personal blog called Kerflop).
About the Idea Bar: Working in a creative team,
the life of our business is new ideas. We come up with them every day
for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a
client. They are too big, too different, or just not quite right.
Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project,
the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source"
and offer new ideas for marketing. Take them and use them ... all I
ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and
talk about them. Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.
Many of you may have already caught this yesterday, but this blog was cited in the Recommended Reading section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article by Keith Huang. As Jay Berkowitz from Ten Golden Rules shares on his team blog, my blog was one of 60 resources that they recommended to the journalist as part of their reading list and was selected from that list as a recommended resource for companies looking to "optimize their online presence." Here's the writeup:
Influential Marketing Blog, rohitbhargava.typepad.com Rohit Bhargava's blog is intellectual and educational. In a recent post, he discusses the art of stamp collection and how, even today, many smaller countries use stamps as a key marketing tool. He writes, 'Next time you pass a post office in any country, pay attention to how they are using their philately to promote the country, cater to tourists, or commemorate moments of significance.'
It is a great media hit and to be selected from a list of what I am guessing were 60 stellar resources is flattering. I'm in awe at being included among the other bloggers and authors mentioned in the article - including Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, Joseph Jaffe, and Danny Sullivan. Thanks to Jay for including me in this great list, and to Keith for selecting to include my blog!
People often ask me how long a blog post takes. Some take months of collecting information, most take an hour or two, and then there are posts like this one. A quick idea, written in about 5 or 10 minutes ... in this case, the quick idea came from going through my emails and realizing that I have way to many of them to delete. I am getting more and more in my inbox, particularly as activity on my social networks and blogs increase. The problem with all of this email is that it sits rotting in my inbox until I take the manual effort of deleting the ones I don't want anymore. This led me to think about the emails that I get, and what I realized is that they all fit into two types. The first are substantial emails about things that I care about and that I need to save and archive. The other type are the notification emails.
It is these "notification emails" that make up the bulk of my inbox. There are several types of emails that fit this category:
Blog comment or trackback notifications from Typepad
New friend requests from Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Flickr, etc.
News subscriptions, live NFL scores, blog post email subscriptions, etc.
CC emails where I am copied as an FYI but with no action required
Sales or promotional emails I have signed up for (ie - not spam)
All of these are types of emails that I want to receive BUT NOT KEEP OR ARCHIVE. The problem with most email tools is that they do not let you make this distinction. They let you mark emails as urgent or not urgent, store them in folders, mark them as spam, but not decide what you want to do with them automatically after you read them. Of course, I could delete them after I read them, but I don't and this leads to email clutter. Why can't I set up certain types of emails to "self destruct" (automatically delete) after a certain period of time? My notifications of friend requests and blog comments would automatically delete 1 hour after I read them. The sales or promotional emails would automatically delete after the expiration date of the sale has been reached. Other types of emails would be ones I could set the self destruct time for (number of hours or days after reading). Then I could read my emails and then have them go away without having to do anything (of course, allowing me to undo if something is accidentally deleted). How cool would that be?
I have a profile on just about every social network that I can find. That doesn't mean I use all of them, of course, but I am starting to run into a very interesting problem that I have to assume others are running into as well. The problem is keeping my social network synchronized. I have nearly 250 contacts on LinkedIn, and nearly 100 on Facebook, and they are different. I know most of those people have accounts on both, but if I am already connected to someone, it requires an extra step to connect again on another site ... which I don't take/have the time to do.
Add to that the fact that now I have over 4000 folks who subscribe to this feed, but I am only connected to most of them through the fact that they read this blog on occasion and not through any social networks. So you can probably guess where this idea is heading. What if there was a universal button that I could just put on my blog to let someone connect to me? Period. And that button would let them send me an invite for LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and whatever other network I choose to set up. Then I could review the invitations individually and approve or decline them. The only argument against this that I could see is if you want to keep your communities separate (for example use LinkedIn for business contacts and Facebook for personal contacts). Still, under this idea you could still choose to only approve certain types of invitations. What do you think - would this work?
About the Idea Bar: Working in a creative team,
the life of our business is new ideas. We come up with them every day
for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don't fit a
client. They are too big, too different, or just not quite right.
Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project,
the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source"
and offer new ideas for marketing. Take them and use them ... all I
ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and
talk about them. Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.
Rohit works at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, part of WPP - a world leader in advertising and marketing services. The views expressed on this blog are his personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer or its clients.
