Harrah's Adopts Surface Computing

I’ve written about Microsoft’s surface computer before. It offers lots of opportunities for entertainment and interaction but it’s still pricey at $10,000 per unit. Also, I’ve long been fascinated by Harrah’s and their incredibly comprehensive and successful loyalty card program.

When I saw the article in CNET about Harrah’s installation of six surface computers in a bar in one of its Las Vegas casinos I read it with interest. The computers offer bar patrons a variety of applications—they can develop their own mixed drinks and send them to other patrons, watch YouTube videos, play games, and use an app called Flirt. You can see the uses on this seriously lame promotional video from Microsoft. I’m having trouble deciding whether the women or the men are most insulted by the content, but it does show the tables in action. View the video here.

The implications are broader than just empty-headed beautiful people flirting in a bar. Harrah’s has long been famous for its Total Rewards program and the way they use the resulting database to market their individual casino locations. If you know this story, your first thought is, “Data; I wonder what use they are going to make of it?” A lot of their marketing is based on knowing what individual customers do in specific casinos and marketing to their interests and needs. The surface computers are meant to fit into their databased marketing program in some way. I can’t see anything very profound from the features they currently offer, but it may be only a first step.

If you don’t know the Harrah’s story, it’s an excellent example of disciplined database marketing. If you have access to the Harvard Business Review there have been several articles by and interviews with CEO Gary Loveman since he took over in January 2003. There is a recent interview on The CEO Show with Robert Reiss. The 18-minute audio interview focuses on customer service but the importance of data about customers and how they use it at Harrah’s is frequently emphasized in the discussion. To listen, follow this link and scroll down to the March 9, 2008 interview. It’s worth it.

The Total Rewards program is deservedly famous. Take a look at its tiered strategy, which has emerged from segmentation analyses over the years. Harrah’s SVP of Relationship Marketing, David Norton, says it’s more than just a rewards program. Another way of saying that is that Harrah’s captures, mines and develops and executes marketing programs based on the customer data they capture from the program. That applies to individual customers and individual casino locations. In 2005 Norton said that 50% of Harrah’s revenue was driven by [targeted] marketing. That’s a major achievement, especially in an industry where glamorous properties, big-name entertainment and marquee chefs are the essence of strategy.

It’s about both data that drives programs and people who execute them. Gary Loveman has understood that from the beginning. It doesn’t happen overnight, but once a company puts a disciplined databased marketing program into place, it just gets better over time.

The Internet is now a chief source of data about our customers. How many of us capture and use transaction and activity data well? How many develop customer-effective programs that provide more of the kind of data we need to serve those customers better and win their undying loyalty? Very few!

Of Blog Spam and Twingley

The IAB Smart Brief (June 13) recently referenced an article on a new blog search engine with the improbable name of Twingly. I took a look at this Swedish site and found its content and business model interesting in several respects.

Of course I searched for this blog and was pleased to find it there. Not all posts were listed, so I pinged it to try to get the entire blog indexed and available for listing with their partner sites (one way they monetize), which are mostly content sites. So far so good! The link to the blog took me to the most recent post, which was fine. Then I clicked on the profile, expecting to find my own profile. Instead, I found a profile of the blog itself, which was interesting. There was some activity of which I wasn’t aware. That surprised me because I think I watch it carefully.

But I was most interested in the concept of spam-free blog search. This blog doesn’t show up when I search using the spam-free function, so I clearly have some more work to do. First, I needed to read up on blog spam. These are some of the basic types:

•Comment spam, in which a comment links to a totally unrelated, often malicious, site
•Comment spam flooding, in which a robot leaves so many spam comments that the server may crash
•Trackback spam, in which spammers take advantage of the trackback function which is supposed to report that another site has linked to your post
•Referral spam, in which spammer basically creates invalid links.

There are a variety of reasons for these activities, for example to get links thereby increasing visibility, to acquire visitors with the hope of capturing data or placing malware of some kind, or to increase traffic and therefore ad rates. There are probably others, but you get the idea. Wikipedia has an extensive discussion. A blog called The Spam Diaries deals exclusively with the topic of spam.

There are some important take-aways from this in addition to the attractive idea of finding out (on Twingly) that certain blogs are spam free. Just be a bit cautious because not all valid blogs are listed there. Active bloggers need to use the basic protections like CAPTCHA verification and moderation for comments. They also need to use common sense. I had several comments earlier in the year that purported to be offering advertising opportunities. A quick web search for the site from which it said it came (the relationship wasn't obvious) revealed that other bloggers though it was an attempt to place malware of some type. Flush that one!

If you’re thinking of starting a blog, the protections offered by the blogging platform are something you might want to consider. All the major platforms have their own blog and have discussed this subject extensively. My reading suggests that basic comment protection is much the same on all the platforms but they have different solutions for the more esoteric types of blog spam.

This all started with Twingley, which has an interesting business model. Not only do they offer content for sites that want feeds, they say they are developing “kick-ass products” based on the knowledge they acquire. So far they have the Twingley Blogstream widget, apparently the way they supply content to traditional media. They also have the Twingley Screensaver, which they say monitors the state of the blogosphere in real time.

A site to keep an eye on!

The Internet is Changing Politics Too

As if we didn’t already have enough to content with, politics is undergoing change as a result of the Internet. Facebook is one aspect, but not the only one.

View the video here.

In case you missed this video focusing on the presidential campaign on Ad Age last week, you should take a look. It features some major moments of televised political campaigns while focusing on the changes that have taken place just since the last national election. The changes are major and they are leading to a different kind and level of political participation, at least for some segments of the voting population.

Over the weekend Pew released a study of the impact of the Internet on the campaign (get the full report here). There are few surprises, except perhaps the magnitude of the trends. A quote from ClickZ captures the essence of the summary data in the chart:

"What this report confirms in the particular case of politics is that the electoral world is moving in the same direction as the broader Internet world," said Pew Internet & American Life Project Director Lee Rainie. "Everything we are picking up for politics is playing out in the commercial and non-commercial space online in the same ways."

We probably shouldn’t be surprised at that, but in spite of the use all the candidates have made of the Internet, the campaigns may still be underplaying its importance. Michael Bassik, VP of interactive marketing at MSHC Partners said in ClickZ that the percentage of campaign advertising budgets allocated to the Internet has not changed since the last national campaign in 2004.

"When you look at the fact that nearly half of all adults got information about the primary through new media and compare that with fact that the candidates collectively spent less than 2 percent of their ad budgets to advertise on the Internet, clearly there is a tremendous disconnect between the amount of information people want to receive from the Internet and the amount of information candidates deliver to these audiences," said Bassik.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The dollars aren’t yet following the audience—in politics just as in brand marketing. It’s an imbalance that will be remedied over time, but some brands, perhaps some candidates, will lose out by being too slow to grasp the magnitude of the shift.

Social Networks and Travel Planning

With another summer weekend approaching, it seems a good time to think about travel. It’s pretty much accepted that the booking of travel has seen a huge shift to the web. When I ask my students they look at me like “is there any other way?” Penetration is not complete, however, as this recent chart from eMarketer (newsletter, June 3, 2008) shows. The Internet is a huge factor, whether or not travel is booked online. Describing results from a study of American families conducted by AOL the newsletter says that, “Almost three-quarters said they used the Internet for vacation planning. Of these Web-savvy consumers, 72% browsed search engines, 58% went to online booking sites, 26% visited consumer testimonial sites and 19% browsed travel information sites.” The web is clearly an important source for these family vacationers, and they are consulting user-generated content as well as travel industry content.

The social aspects of this reminded me of a site a friend brought to my attention when she was planning a business trip several weeks ago. Dopplr is a Finnish site; I was especially interested in the fact that the invitation was delivered by LinkedIn. When I investigated the site, I found that the site allows travelers to share itineries with contacts from Gmail and Facebook, and perhaps others—as well as from LinkedIn. Or you can invite people and create your own network on Dopplr (names in the graphic are not real names).
So this is clearly cool. Most of us have dined alone or attended a concert by ourselves in a strange city, so this is attractive. Whether it’s worth the effort is another question. My guess is that it is not unless you are extremely social or—more likely—a frequent traveler. It’s also nice to see who is going to be in your own city also in case you want to do some networking.

But something else occurred to me. A few companies have pages on LinkedIn; not long ago I wrote about Basho and their LinkedIn Group. It seemed like a cool idea to network B2B customers, but I couldn’t see that there was a lot going on. LinkedIn makes it possible to ask a question to find if contacts are going to be, say, at an upcoming conference. It clearly works but doesn’t seem terribly efficient. Among other things, it seems to depend on people checking their LinkedIn messages. I wonder how many others don’t do that very often.

I’m not sure exactly how to do it, but if a B2B firm or trade organization could use the Dopplr technology to allow people to network at conferences, that seems to be a useful addition to conference services. That would seem to be an idea whose time has come, and Dopplr appears to have the technology to do it!

Google Gadgets and White-Label Widgets

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of widgits. They offer useful content and functions. Even more important, they are completely controlled by the user and improve the web experience instead of interrupting and degrading it.

So last week when this video floated into my inbox, I took the time to watch it. It was filmed at the Google Developers conference and the quality reflects that. The content is well worth the 4.5 minutes it takes; it ranges from the new Gmail widget (available only for iGoogle pages at the moment), to a Google Maps applications that lets you follow a soapbox derby down city streets, to an app that lets you control the way you embed videos into blogs and web pages.

Most of these are entirely DIY; the YouTube video embed may require some knowledge of JavaScript. That means, for most of us marketers, that it may require a developer to install. That’s doable; the question we should ask is will we be able to maintain it without undue difficulty once the developer is finished? The answer is “probably yes,” but it’s a question that needs asking. If the freebies don’t work, you can get rid of them as easily as you acquired them; most of us want to exercise care when we actually spend money on these things. Do you have an iGoogle page—or any other personalized page (if you have Gmail, I think you automatically have an iGoogle page; you just may never have used it)? I’m surprised how many people don’t. It’s a useful experience to see how some of their widget collection works. Some is useful content—notice that weather is the first listed. Others provide an often-used function—I saw both a calendar and a calculator. Some are just plain fun—I loved the Yoda-speak gadget. Note the comments and that the developer is responding to his users. Don’t find one you like? Create your own from easy-to-use templates! The downside is that these are only for iGoogle pages, at least at this point.

There are alternatives—the so-called white label widget (or, more generally, marketing services) providers. TechCrunch defines the concept in terms of a social network; it applies equally to the creation and deployment of widgets. “The idea of white labeling a network is to make the platform provider as invisible as possible to the social network’s users and to brand the network with the builder’s identity or intent.” According to today’s Media Post one of the white-label widget makers, KickApps, is partnering with Clearspring Technologies to allow marketers to distribute their widgets through its network and track their use.

Whether you want a Google Gadget or you want to create your own branded widget from scratch (note the National Geographic widget in the Google list), there are platforms and services to meet your needs. Become an avid user of widgets and use your experience to think about how you can use them to provide branded content to your target audience. It’s content they have chosen and are likely to pay attention to. Can we say that about most advertising?