No smoke and mirrors...

Marketing 101 teaches the subtle art of "smoke and mirrors" I am glad that being part of the network.com team I can assure you that we don't do smoke and mirrors, but smoke and fire is another thing! Amazing complex to get this right, and it takes a ton of compute power, but we have the power and for $1/CPU/hr we can do it for you.

 -Mark

Posted at 11:35AM Oct 08, 2007 by Mark Herring in General  |  Comments[0]  |  | |

Facebook's Achilles Heel

I have been having some great time playing around in Facebook and reconnecting with friends, acquaintances, and work colleges. Facebook is absolutely phenomenal in finding all these people and makes the connections pretty easy, but the big problem is that not all friends are alike. 

Perhaps I am even understating the problem. Consider just a typical set of facebook "friends" Some are going to be close family friends who I would love to share my personal blog, my favorite foods, my anniversary date, my pictures from the last family BBQ, etc. They get to see my "Family Persona" Now for my work friends I have another set of information I would like to share, like my work blog, my photos from the company picnic, my current work travel schedule, etc. Basically my "Work Persona"

We all have many persona's here are a few I think I use every day: Professional Persona -- dealing with customers and partners on behalf of my company; Network Persona -- like linked in, connecting with people who I can either help, or that can help me in my profession; Neighborhood Personal -- the neighbors who I interact with on a semi-regular basis; Son Persona -- how I would like my parents to view my profile; Acquaintance Persona -- for those people who I interact with irregularly; etc. Basically the information is shared between the different personas and everyone gets to see a view of the real me. All these personas together probably form the real me, but I am not willing for that many people to see the real me!

Wouldn't it be fantastic if Facebook had this ability for every widget, application, field etc. Now it so happens I have a great friend of mine who is building this very application and I couldn't be more excited -- Check out his blog on the subject.

 So the good news is that there is a cure for Facebook's aliment, the bad news it isn't out yet! Common Tony get coding!

-Mark

Posted at 08:52AM Oct 08, 2007 by Mark Herring in General  |  Comments[0]  |  | |

A Marketeers Worst Nightmare...

I am sure you have all heard the news that Halo is out and if you queued up and got the super special collectors edition of the product and took it home you were less than impressed because the disk just didn't work! All that has been written about the subject talks about the problems Microsoft faces with having to reissue disks, the bad publicity, the problem the company has wrought on the poor gamers, but I have yet to see an article written on the "Poor Marketing Guy/Gal that signed off on the packaging"

Now it is no secret that Microsoft and Sun compete, but you really have to feel for the person behind the blunder. I imagine their day went something like this...

T-1day: So excited that my product is going to hit the shelves tomorrow. I can't wait to see how excited all those gamers are going to be. My packaging I created is absolutely beautiful.. Check it out.. lovely metal box, Disks all in there. Wow I might even get a promotion out of this one. I know there were a few bugs in the product, but no one is going to notice them my awesome packaging. These 150 hour weeks are sure paying off..

T-1hour: OMG this is exciting. I have given out T-shirts with my box design to everyone I can find on campus. The dummy packaging looks great. Told my whole family to check the news when the midnight sales happen. Every box they see.. is MINE! I couldn't be more proud. I know I chose marketing for a reason, this is the best day of my life. Steve is sure to promote me after this!

Launch Time: It is out.. just saw it on TV and heading to the store to see it first hand. Halo 3 is going to rock this world.. Yippee... I am going to be famous. Those engineers scoff at us marketing types, but they will see.. we complete the whole product experience!

T+2 hours: Off to the Halo 3 developers party to bask in my success. I wonder what I will get to work on next, perhaps the whole redesign of Microsoft's visual presence? The opportunities are boundless. Maybe Google will call me and offer me a job? I would never accept -- life is so perfect..

T+2.5 hours: SMS Message "Call Customer Service Immediately" Wonder what they want, don't really speak to them, Oh well I will call them after the party. My speech is next....

T+3 hours: My boss comes over apparently my speech isn't needed and I need to go handle an "Issue" with customer service. WHAT! This is my night... oh well better do what the boss wants, anyway with my performance I will soon be his boss.. who cares...

T+4 hours: OMG the disks are getting damaged by my packaging.. Who checked that? The metal box didn't break, but the disk fell out and got scratched. This can't be happening to me.. I checked the fonts, colors, spelling everything. Not one typo, not one off brand color, it was all perfect. Finance, Legal, Tax, Support, everyone signed off on this... So how could this happen?

T+1week: OK, the crisis is over, Steve has stopped yelling at me (Well he at least he knows I exist now!) My boss thinks it best that I work on another high profile product.. Microsoft Bob... thought we killed that, but maybe not?

 So what's the moral of the story? We all make mistakes, engineers make mistakes called bugs and they get promoted. Marketeers make mistakes and they are called morons and are never seen in public again!

Have a great Friday...

-Mark

Posted at 09:30AM Oct 05, 2007 by Mark Herring in General  |  Comments[0]  |  | |