Phillip Nones

How “social” should your office environment be?

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In the early years of the Internet, companies worried about the loss of productivity if employees were tempted to surf online in amongst their work duties. There was also the issue of the “appropriateness” of the web content being viewed. In response, various web tracking capabilities were introduced that enable companies to monitor online activities on networked computers.

On the other hand, as the Internet became all-pervasive in daily life, many companies also adopted a policy of allowing a modest amount of web surfing during work breaks to allow employees to conduct personal business such as shopping and bill-paying.

Now, with the rise of social media, the whole issue has been brought to the fore once again. The proliferation of Facebook accounts in particular has resulted in a new spike of personal online activities at work. A recent study by Nucleus Research bears it out. Based on study findings, Nucleus deduces that companies allowing employee access to Facebook lose an average of 1.5% in total employee productivity. And in an era of cutthroat competition globally, 1.5% of productivity is no slouch amount.

To reach this conclusion, Nucleus Research found that slightly more than three-fourths of the employees surveyed have a Facebook account. Of those who do, nearly two-thirds admitted to accessing their account during working hours.

The average amount of time spent per day on Facebook on office time is about 15 minutes – although the study uncovered a few employees who spent upwards of two hours daily during work hours. (Shame on those employees … but shame on their employers, too, for being so utterly clueless about those employees’ behavior!)

Of course, some people’s activities on Facebook have a business purpose, don’t they? Well … it is true that some employees manage “fan” pages for their company as an adjunct of their personal Facebook account. But that shouldn’t represent more than a small portion of any firm’s workers – perhaps those in the marketing, sales, HR or shareholder relations departments.

And the Nucleus Research study findings reflect this as well, because nearly 90% of the respondents who access Facebook at work could not articulate a business justification for doing so.

Perhaps the study’s most surprising finding was the ~5% of respondents who never access Facebook anywhere but at work. What this may mean is that they built their entire Facebook profile on work-time as well. Chalk up some more wasted hours!

The Nucleus Research findings demonstrate that as time progresses and various social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter become even more pervasive communications tools for people at all levels in the organization, the old guidelines for balancing work and personal life must continue to evolve.

The kneejerk reaction is to simply block access to Facebook on all office computers. But there will always be some employees who have a legitimate business reason to be on Facebook. And then there are the the ever-growing ranks of telecommuters working offsite, who surely have access to alternate laptops or PDAs even if their company-issued equipment blocks access.

As is usually the case with situations like this, the easiest fix is sometimes not the best one. And at the end of the day, “big brotherism” could reduce employee morale even further — hardly the result one would hope for in the current difficult business climate where “improving company morale” is far more just an abstract concept in an HR textbook.

Sandford Dody: The most famous biographer you’ve never heard of.

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Sandford Dody, ghostwriter to the stars.
Sandford Dody: Ghostwriter to the stars.
The American author Sandford Dody died a month ago. You’re forgiven if you don’t know who he is – and not just because, at age 90, he was a throwback to another era.

Mr. Dody was, in fact, the author of numerous autobiographies of American stars of the stage and screen. But the public never really knew that, because his name didn’t appear on his books.

Dody was a ghostwriter. Acclaimed “autobiographies” that in actuality he authored of celebrities like Bette Davis (The Lonely Life) and Helen Hayes (On Reflection) became best-sellers, with readers delighted to find out how “good” Miss Davis and Miss Hayes were as authors – almost as great as their acting abilities!

Most would never learn the truth – that Sandford Dody, as confidante and gentle interrogator, was the person who coaxed and teased these great stories out of his subjects.

How did Dody end up becoming “Ghostwriter to the Stars”? Like so many people who made their careers in the field of entertainment and arts journalism “back in the day,” the native New Yorker started out wanting to be in show business, perhaps as an actor or a writer. And like many others with stars in their eyes, he made the trek to California to try his luck in the film industry.

Back in the 1940s, it wasn’t so hard to meet the famous as well as not-so-famous who inhabited the then-relatively small world of the Hollywood film industry. Even as he dreamed of becoming a playwright, Dody took bit parts in a few films.

But as it became clear he would never ascend the heights either in front of the footlights or on the marquee boards, and in need of money, Dody turned to ghostwriting beginning in the 1950s. His first project was authoring the autobiography of a now-obscure silent film star, Dagmar Godowsky. (One could assume Miss Godowsky was obscure even then, some 30 years after her film career had ended!)

The assignments with Bette Davis, Helen Hayes, the Metropolitan Opera star Robert Merrill, and members of the Barrymore family came along later, in the 1960s. (The Davis autobiography was particularly successful, and is credited with leading to a late-career renaissance for the aging movie star.) And while these projects would prove to be financially lucrative for Dody, it is clear from his own writings that the author was somewhat ambivalent about the whole business of ghostwriting.

In fact, he stopped doing it after his book on Miss Hayes was released. Why? In his own autobiography, published in 1980, Dody gives us a clue. “The most suitable way to view stars is from a long way off,” he declared.

For Dody, it seems that spending so many hours with his subjects as he prepared to write his manuscripts, experiencing their egotism and petty vanity “up close and personal” inevitably came as a letdown. “Let the next star write her own damned autobiography,” is how he would sum it up after he retired.

In later years, Sandford Dody returned to New York City, where he resided quietly in Lower Manhattan, living off his royalties and indulging in his passion for the musical and visual arts. For those of us who know New York as a “walker’s city,” it will come as no surprise that Dody kept up a nearly-every-day regimen of walking an eight-mile loop from his Greenwich Village apartment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center and back. It’s an important clue as to how he was able to reach his tenth decade despite having battled asthma from the earliest years of childhood.

Ironically, it is a poignant passage from his own autobiography, Giving Up the Ghost, that illustrates the uncommon talent Dody possessed as a writer – and hints at what he might have produced had he taken a different literary path:

“When a ghost’s job is done, he wanders, unheeded, unseen in a half-world and in circles now too grand for him. Unseen by everyone – except on rare occasion by the subject who pretends blindness but winks conspiratorially when the unfamiliars are looking the other way – I have been able to slip through closed doors and between locked mortals as they engage in their earthly affairs. Impossible to be heard, I for one have cried out in protest, in joy, in vain. Isn’t that what death is all about, finally?”

The single most important success factor in e-mail marketing …

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Marketers are continually looking for ways to tweak e-mail campaigns to improve their success. From direct mail tradition, we know the “list” and the “offer” are highly important success factors, followed by the creativity and appearance of the promotional piece itself.

But what’s different about e-mail marketing campaigns? Doesn’t a compelling and informative “Subject” line in the inbox also have a lot to do with their success?

Well … yes. But in field research conducted recently by Epsilon, a leading direct marketing agency and consulting firm that queried more than 600 North American respondents, the findings revealed that there’s another factor that is far more important than the “Subject” line. It’s the “From” line on the e-mail.

In fact, nearly 70% of the respondents cited the “From” line as the single most important factor determining whether or not they’ll open an e-mail message. And this figure is up from 60% in Epsilon’s 2002 survey, so the trend is clear.

By contrast, the “Subject” line is the most important factor for only about a quarter of the respondents.

What this means is that people are looking to see if they know (and trust) the sender before they do anything else … even before reading the subject line of the e-mail. Thus, a poorly performing e-mail campaign might have less to do with the campaign’s specific marketing elements than it does with the sender’s familiarity and reputation.

With groaning e-mail inboxes, is it any wonder that people are inclined to eyeball the “From” column, quickly scanning for the (few) e-mails they’ll open as opposed to the scads of other messages they’ll delete without a second thought?

In short, the “From” line offers comfort. It’s the familiarity of people they know … companies with which they have a relationship … brands that they trust.

That’s also why it’s so important for marketers to send “welcome” or “thank you” e-mails to new registrants without delay. Why risk having someone forget they signed up, and then hitting the unsubscribe button (or worse, lodging a spam complaint) when your messages hit their inbox later? That’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Where are B-to-B buyers these days? Online, of course.

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Everyone knows that online consumer sales have exploded over the past five years. But what about B-to-B customers? Where are they going when it comes to buying the products they need?

Recent market research reveals that they’re going online, too … and they’re migrating there in a hurry.

In a survey sponsored by MarketingSherpa and ZoomInfo and conducted by Enquiro, a search engine marketing and research firm, a cross-section of B-to-B respondents was asked how they prefer purchasing the items they order all the time for their businesses.

The results were a blowout: nearly two-thirds (63%) prefer to order online. The remaining respondents are divided between preferring to order over the phone and ordering in-person from a sales representative.

Faced with such an overwhelming preference for online buying, the logical follow-up question is whether B-to-B firms are focusing their tactics and allocating resources to online sales in the same proportional effort. In many cases, it’s not even close.

As often as not, B-to-B firms have treated online not as the core of their sales engine, but more like an incremental revenue channel. Frequently, e-business is treated as a separate silo. This makes it less likely for online to interfere (or otherwise cause “issues”) with traditional sales channels. But it also makes it a lot harder for online to be treated with the critical importance that it clearly deserves in today’s sales environment.

And even if B-to-B firms don’t sell directly to end-users but rely on reps, distributors or dealers instead, they need to make sure that their marketing partners are making the necessary investments in online sales functions to support those end-users.

Consider how quickly B-to-B customers have moved online — not only to research products but also to purchase them. By moving too cautiously, B-to-B firms risk being outflanked by Internet “pure plays” — some of which seemingly spring out of nowhere to achieve prominence in only a few short months or years.

To quote a phrase from a nursery rhyme, “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick …” Hopefully, you have a Jack (or Jill) in your marketing department already. Now, give them the tools and the resources to succeed.

A word of advice to customer call centers: Location matters.

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In the drive to become low-cost producers in their industry categories and to be price-competitive in a down economy, many companies are looking into every corner of their business to wring out excess costs wherever they can.

And with business as soft as it is right now, one would think that telephone customer contact centers are a prime target for outsourcing and offshoring. After all, it’s one of the more labor-intensive operations. And relying on resources in English-speaking Second and Third World countries is far cheaper than employing American workers — 50% to 75% less costly by some estimates.

But instead of migrating offshore, evidence is mounting that some companies are beginning to bring their call center operations back into the United States instead.

Why is this happening? Well, when one considers that the purpose of a call center is to promote customer satisfaction, placing these functions offshore hasn’t exactly accomplished that. It’s a topic I’ve addressed before in this blog.

And now, we have new survey data that prove it. A recently-published survey conducted by CFI Group (Claes Fornell International) covers 2,200 respondents who rated telephone customer contact centers run for retailing firms, cable/satellite TV providers, cellular phone service providers, financial service firms, computer equipment manufacturers and government agencies.

The annual survey uses the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index to rate overall satisfaction. In this year’s study, that satisfaction index stands at 74 on a 100-point scale. Not a great score by any stretch; in fact, most companies would surely want to score better.

But when comparing the ratings for domestic call centers versus offshore ones, the differences are stark. The domestic satisfaction index was 84, while the offshore index was only 62.

Moreover, the survey respondents were nearly twice as likely to recommend a company or product to others if they thought the customer contact center reps are in the United States … and three times more likely to abandon the brand if the call center is located offshore.

Is this disparity in results simply the result of American nativism or chauvinism? Perhaps. But it becomes a lot harder to discount the differences when we see that respondents reported that U.S. call center reps resolved their problems 68% of the time during the first contact — “first-call resolution” in industry jargon — as compared to only 42% of the time for contact centers located offshore. That’s a difference that can’t be ignored.

Looking into every corner of a business to find ways to drive down costs certainly makes sense. But in the case of customer call centers, there’s clearly a danger of being “penny-wise, pound-foolish” … and risking a customer backlash that ends up negating any cost savings you might have realized – or worse.

College Textbooks: It’s Time to Throw the Book at Them

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college textbooksConsidering that the digital revolution has dramatically improved access to information pretty much across the board, while also lowering the price of delivering the content to consumers, doesn’t it seem like college textbook publishing has been operating in something of a time warp?

Anyone with kids enrolled in college in recent years (present company included) has likely been confronted by obscenely high bills for textbooks. In fact, stats reported by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group reveal that college students spend an average of ~$900 per year on textbooks. When you consider that some courses don’t even have textbooks, the average cost for those classes that do is even higher than the overall figures would suggest.

What gives here? You can blame a number of factors. High among them are publishers that issue new editions of the same textbook every year or so; never mind the fact that 95%+ of the material is identical to prior editions. And so, perfectly good textbooks that could be used by different students over multiple years are instead relegated to the trash or a box in the basement. Or they languish, unwanted, at the book nook at the local thrift store.

And how about publishing books using expensive and high-margin hardcover binding when soft-cover would be more than adequate? That’s a common publisher ploy.

Finally, let’s not forget the “unholy alliance” between college bookstores and book publishers to try to corner as much of the college textbook business as possible. After all, those textbook sales represent a major contributor to college store profits.

Thankfully, recent developments suggest that real alternatives for students (and their beleaguered parents) have now emerged. Some of these resources are web sites like eBay’s Half.com where students can purchase books for substantially less than the published price. Or Chegg, where students can rent the books and return them following their use. Of course, this is assuming you know the correct ISBN number of the books in question and can be sure you’re ordering the correct edition. Often, that’s not an easy feat at all based on how hard some school stores try to hide the ISBN information from purchasers.

The ISBN information will also serve you in good stead when searching for used textbooks on sites like Amazon where the ISBN numbers are included in book listings.

But beyond simply finding sites to purchase books at a cheaper price, there are new digital alternatives that are also cropping up. CourseSmart provides digital versions of textbooks that are viewable online or can be downloaded. Not only is the cost much less, but students can choose to print out texts chapter by chapter or simply keep their textbooks on their computer, leaving more space in their backpacks for more important things like electronic gadgets, food and bottled water. For now, most of the CourseSmart choices are from major publishers like McGraw-Hill and Wiley, but these offerings are sure to expand in coming years.

Another interesting development is engaging the course instructors themselves in developing custom reading materials. That’s what Flat World Knowledge is doing: It’s an open-source textbook provider that offers online books through a web-based reader, free of charge. Professors can get in on the action by customizing what’s offered to their own specific course by rearranging book chapters and removing or adding text. Not only does it make their course syllabus more user-friendly for students, it’s a labor saver for the instructors as well.

How does Flat World make money doing this? Students can pay for “premium” upgrades such as PDF printing, audio files, and interactive quizzes that are offered along with the free basic text information.

As to which of these new services will turn out to be tomorrow’s standard way of acquiring course instruction materials … who knows? But one thing’s for certain: the cost of buying textbooks won’t be nearly the monetary challenge it’s been for students and parents up til now.

Mag Drag: The midyear report on magazine closings says it all.

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The “gone for good” list has been compiled for the first half of 2009 … and it looks pretty grim for the magazine industry. In fact, Oxbridge Communications’ Media Finder, a database that tracks U.S. and Canadian periodicals, reports that a record 279 magazine titles ceased publication during the first half of the year.

The news that 187 new magazines were actually launched over the same period is little consolation. The net loss of 92 magazines is more than ever, and demonstrates all too clearly how the recession has hit key market sectors particularly hard – finance, automotive, fashion and several others that have traditionally been major contributors of advertising revenue to print publications.

Which categories of magazines fared worst over the past six months? Media Finder’s data show that “regional interest” publications suffered the most casualties, with 27 magazines in that category folding. “Lifestyle” publications were also hurt, with 14 titles biting the dust. And magazines catering to the construction business and related segments were also hit hard, no doubt reflecting the depressed real estate and housing market.

What’s particularly interesting about the YTD 2009 list of shuttered magazines is that many of them were well known in their category and boasted significant circulation. Certainly, periodicals like Country Home, PR Week, Portfolio, Nickelodeon, Hallmark Magazine and Teen weren’t slouch publications by any means.

What can we expect for the rest of 2009? Is the worst over? Seeing as how the economic recovery is (optimistically) still months away, you’d have to bet on additional magazine titles folding during the second half of the year – including a few more of the big ones.

And we’re certain to see editorial format and other changes being made to some of the more famous publications (such as Newsweek’s recent makeover) in a bid to reestablish their relevance and maintain their financial viability.

Twitter’s Law of Unintended Consequences

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As I’ve outlined in a recent blog post, where Twitter has shown it has “legs” isn’t in the area most hyped by its founders.

As it turns out, “What are you doing?” hasn’t been much of a foundation for building a money-making social media platform. And in fact, the inevitable media backlash has now set in — even as the number of new Twitter users have begun to plateau and the majority of current members use the service hardly at all.

But hard on the heels of the Iranian and Moldovan unrest, in which Twitter played an important role facilitating the organizing of anti-government public demonstrations, comes another use of Twitter that few could have foreseen.

A recent article by Steven Sears in Barron’s Magazine outlines how Twitter is being used to affect the share price of stocks. According to Sears, “Before the market opens and throughout the trading day, Twitter lets you tap into market-moving news .. and link through attached URLs to more detailed analysis … You can control your information streams by deciding who to follow, and who can follow you.”

That’s hardly revolutionary behavior. But here’s the interesting part: By law, brokers must save instant messages and e-mail correspondence, but no such mandate exists for tweets on Twitter.

What this means is that some of the more sensitive information or speculation about a company makes it onto Twitter long before it’s broached elsewhere.

One example noted in the Sears article was Matrixx Initiatives, the manufacturer of Zicam nasel spray. Speculation that using Zicam might damage people’s sense of smell started to circulate on Twitter. The result? The stock price fell dramatically from $19 to $13 … and those following the news about Matrixx on Twitter were “in the know” a lot sooner than others.

So here we have yet another example of the unintended consequences of adopting new communications techniques. Twitter is effectively replacing instant messaging capabiliites — without the attendent legal paper-trail requirements.

I wonder what’s next?

Spam-a-lot? You Bet-a-lot.

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It’s no secret that corporate inboxes are stuffed with e-mail messages that are – let’s be kind here – unneeded or unwanted. And the latest report from anti-virus software maker Symantec Corporation confirms this in spades.

The report, covering April activity, claims that unsolicited e-mail makes up nearly 91% of messages on corporate networks. And it turns out this is nothing unusual, as earlier surveys have shown that spam makes up anywhere from 80% to 95% of all e-mail volume on the Internet.

So when you look at your own inbox, you might be pleased if your spam volume isn’t that high. And probably it isn’t, because corporate spam filters are blocking a big volume of e-messages before they ever hit your own inbox.

So where is all of this spam coming from? Symantec reports that nearly 60% of it comes from botnets, which are networks of hacked computers that can do all sorts of mischief – not only e-mailing spam, but also swiping financial information or launching cyber attacks. The “worst of the worst” are donbot spammers, which are computers that are available for rent on the black market. According to Symantec, those represent more than 18% of all spam e-mail volume.

But of course, nothing stays the same for long in the cyber environment. A new, even more alarming trend is being noted with an increase of non bot-driven spam. In those cases, spammers are renting legitimate network services (usually located offshore) and blasting huge amounts of spam at large individual Internet service providers. The objective is to push as many messages as possible onto the network before the ISP’s filtering software is able to detect it.

How much of this is going on? Hundreds of thousands of messages each day, and getting greater all the time.

And if that wasn’t enough, just like flies at a Fourth of July picnic, spammers have now discovered social networks, taking over an alarming number of Facebook and Twitter accounts and phishing for user passwords. These swiped passwords are then used to spam the friends of victims with obnoxious unwanted promotional mail about various products let’s just refer to euphemistically as “personal” or “intimate.” Experts say these types of attacks are particularly effective because they can’t be filtered at a corporate firewall level, and because any such message looks like it’s been sent by a friend of the recipient.

So if you’re on any of these social networking platforms, despite their apparent safety, the watchword should still be: “Caution.”

Robert lays down the gauntlet. Would anyone care to pick it up?

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My recent post on U.S. airlines’ sorry consumer ratings led Robert, one of this blog’s faithful readers, to make a broader comment about America’s standing in the world today compared to years past. Here, in part, is what he wrote:

“… people are more or less brainwashed to think that the USA is #1 in everything. I think some people in the USA (the smarter ones) are now slowing waking up to discover that the rest of the world has really moved on since the early 80s — and at a very past pace … Where the USA was clearly leading the world in the 50s and 60s, the last 30 years are very, very different in that respect. An interesting topic [for your blog]?”

Robert is a true citizen of the world. He lives in the Far East currently, but his business activities have had him a resident in the U.S. and in Europe also. He’s brought up an interesting, perhaps controversial point to ponder.

Agree? Disagree? Somewhere in between? Feel free to contribute your own thoughts by posting your comment below!