Moving Servers

Crastinate is moving off WordPress.com onto it’s own servers. This is the first step towards the improving Crastinate of 2009 that has been promised. It means, however, that we’ll be down for a few hours as we move everything over. Don’t worry, we’ll be back in no time.

Are You a Twitter Whore?

I’ve written previously about the so-called influence that is perceived based on how many followers one has on Twitter. I got some comments by “popular” Twitter users that a 1 to 1 ratio of followers to followed does not mean that they are not influential (I was claiming the opposite). These conversations made me wonder how many Twitter users out there follow someone who follows them or as I like to call them, Twitter whores. The reason for the crude name is that in the Twitterverse, we use the follow button to denote who we like and who we don’t. It’s, in some sense, the currency of the Twitter economy. And these people give it away way too easily.

So I decided to do a quick, very unstatistical, Twitter social experiment. I created a Twitter username and went to the list of followers for one of the very popular Twitter users, Kevin Rose. I went down the list and signed up to follow 2000 people, the maximum Twitter will allow. I was curious to see how many people would follow me in return for no reason other than I followed them. Here were my results:

People I followed: 2000
People who blocked me: 4
People who followed me: 309
People who direct messaged me to thank me for following them: 59
Percentage of people following me of those that I follow: 15.45%

I understand that my experiment is not statistically viable at all. But still, 15%! That’s pretty high. And I wouldn’t be surprised that if I was selective on who I followed (I randomly selected and even chose people who were private) this number might be close to 30%.

Basically, this experiment says nothing other than that there are a lot of Twitter whores. Not that I’m knocking them. They provide a valuable service to those people who can’t gain followers on their own. Thank you Twitter whores. You’ve been providing users the fake impression that they’re popular since Twitter began (I’m practing for the next Budweiser ‘we salute you’ radio commercial).

Cablevision Calls Me About My Complaint

I just got a call from Cablevision letting me know that they received my complaint email and are escalating my complaint to the Vice President of Cablevision. I had written yesterday about my disappointment with Cablevision’s recent promotion tactics. It seems that my complaint email (there is no phone number to call) which linked to my blog post complaining about the issue did not go unnoticed.

While I’m not going to let Cablevision off the hook until I see what they end up doing about these situations in the future, I will say that a phone call was appreciated and am hoping that what I was told was not just rhetoric, but actually an honest approach to fixing this type of behavior.

Should I Try to Stop “Bad” Sales Pitches?

I got an email from my graduate school alumni group on LinkedIn. The email was as follows:

Hi Ely,

We haven’t met, but I’d like to change that. I honestly believe that I have the opportunity of a lifetime for you or someone you know. The millionaires in our company just keep getting younger…that latest millionaire is just 29 years old.

I believe that Baruch Alumni were groomed to be millionaires and not just six-figure earners. If you also believe that, we should meet for about 20 minutes to see if there’s a mutual interest.

If it’s not for you, no worries. You’d have made a new friend, and maybe you could refer me to someone who may be interested. With that being said, would you be interested in meeting with me?

My first impression was that this was a scam. The company he works for (part-time) is called Primerica and it seems like it’s a life insurance and financial planning company. From what I’ve read, you have to keep on recruiting others to sell insurance and services to make real money. I replied to his email giving the sender my impressions and asking him to not use this group as a place to recruit members for his “initiative”. This was his response:

You have insulted me I do not accept your apology. You do not kick a person down and then try to help them up. That is what you have done with your response to me. You have disrepected my years of sales training, my recognition for sales excellence and the mentors who have spent years mentoring me and countless others.

Did you even read my background? I suggest next time you do your due diligence before you compose an accusatory email such as this. I’m sorry if you were among the unfortunate to be taken advantage of by Amway. That was before my time, and I’ve only heard horror stories about them. Just because my email acted as a negative trigger about your past experiences, did not give you the right to attack me.

Your response only needed to be one question…”What is this about?” I’ve recieved nothing but professional responses to my message except for yours, and your “honesty” was unappreciated here. Your “honesty” will be appreciated by someone else, when you have done your due diligence.

I would never digrace my Alma Mater, or my family with such a stunt. You definitely did not look at my page. At my office I’m known as the “dude of integrity”, you really barked up the wrong tree buddy! Please, do not ever do this to another one of our Baruch Alum. I wouldn’t want anyone else to lose respect for you.

So you tell me. Was I wrong for writing an email with my impressions that his sales pitch sounded like a scam? Is this type of selling ok? I think it’s very pyramid-scheme like and I wish that the people who are on the bottom of this food chain can see what they’re doing. But maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I should let him continue his “selling” ways. What do you think?

UPDATE: People have asked me to post my reply to this guy that he responded to. Here it is. You can let me know if I was too harsh in my criticism.

Christopher,

I’ll be honest. Your pitch sounds very much like a scam. And if it is, in any shape or form a scam or a pyramid scheme (or a non-pyramid scheme ala Amway), please do not use the Baruch list or name in your correspondence with people. If not, I apologize, but I thought I’d tell you how your sounding. I will be notifying the person who manages this alumni group on LInkedIn to hear their thoughts as well. If you have any objections or believe I am mistaken, please contact me.

Thanks,
Ely Rosenstock

We had gone back and forth a few more times and once I mentioned the term multi-level marketing, he stopped communicating. It seems I scared him off. It was fun while it lasted.

Cablevision Changes Their Promotion After the Product is Sold

All those who live in the New York area have probably heard of the Optimum Rewards card. For those who don’t know, the Optimum Rewards card is a benefit for the customers of Optimum’s (Cablevision) three media products: home phone service (VOIP), cable internet, and cable television. Cablevision also owns Clearview Cinemas and the Optimum Rewards Card gives every cardholder two free movie tickets on Tuesdays to any Clearview theater. It’s a nice benefit of having all three services.

Today I went from being a happy (relatively) Cablevision customer to an unhappy customer. I was told that an email was sent out to all Clearview Cinemas that Optimum cards are not to be accepted today. Reason being…too many people are using them. I know that during holidays that the theaters don’t accept the Card but today is not a holiday. Cablevision is realizing that their customers are actually taking advantage of their promotion that got people to sign up for their service and they’ve decided to yank that promotion without any warning.

I might get some comments that I’m overreacting but I’m not. This isn’t about a free movie. I don’t care about paying the $12 to see Benjamin Button. I do care about companies who think they can create a promotion to sell their product and then yank it away after the product is sold. I would be less upset if Cablevision had come out with a calendar of dates where the card is not acceptable but I don’t think they plan that far in advance. I believe it’s a last-minute decision based on complaints from their theaters about all the free movie-goers.

I urge you all to send this post to your friends who live in NY and/or use Cablevision. It’s important they know how they’re being screwed from time to time. It’s important that Cablevision knows that we know.

UPDATE: Cablevision called me.

Solving the Known and Unknown Problems

I recently read an article which discusses how infomercials come up with products and then market them. The product development process revolves around finding a problem that people never realized they had. Let’s look at this new one that I recently saw for the Big City Slider Station. You probably never realized how much trouble you were having when trying to make hamburgers a good shape. That’s because you probably weren’t. Regardless, along comes a product that solves this non-existent problem.

The marketing behind these products are hysterical. Watch the video at the Big City Sliders site and notice how the colors are muted whenever they show the ridiculous incompetence of others trying to handle their meat. The whole thing creates this sense of urgency to buy their product. And sadly, it works really well. I find myself all the time wanting to buy the products they offer even though I know they’re rarely useful. I usually can hold myself back.

Now to a real problem that’s been solved. I went to my local Chase today to deposit a check and couldn’t find any deposit slips. I’ve heard that Chase has new ATMs that don’t need deposit slips but haven’t seen them for myself until today. All you need to do is insert the check into the designated slot and the check is instantly scanned. The ATM analyzes the writing and tells you how much the check is for. After confirmation, it is instantly deposited into your account. BRILLIANT! I never realized what a waste those deposit slips were. And how come I needed to write my account number on the deposit slip? Why couldn’t they read my account number from my ATM card?

The reason I bring this up is to point out the different and strange roads to success. Those informercials create the problem and then provide the solution. Chase solves an already existing problem. While I prefer companies that solve REAL problems, it’s hard to knock the ingenious in the infomercial approach. If you’re an entrepreneur, don’t just try to solve the problems people complain about. Let people know about the problems people never realized they had, and then provide them with the solution.

(Okay, I hate the informercial approach and think entrepreneurs should avoid this approach if possible. But hey, it works.)

2008 Was Good…2009 Will Be Great

Crastinate started as a simple blog for me to relay my thoughts. It quickly grew into something more than that. I know I’ve been neglecting the site for the past few weeks but that’s all about to change (business school finals can be very time consuming). I’m planning a redesign, more videos, guest authors, and much more. So make sure to keep Crastinate on your feed reader this coming year.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Social Media “Experts”

I’ve recently seen an upswing in people claiming to be social media experts by starting their own social media consulting companies. I have to be honest. I question anyone who claims to be a social media expert. Reason being that to be an expert in something, that something has to be somewhat well defined. There has to be a body of knowledge that the so-called expert has consumed and can use better than others. So I decided to a little research into whether these so-called experts have the valid experience (according to me) to act as consultants.

To my surprise, many of the social media consultants seem to understand the potential for social media to help businesses communicate more effectively with consumers. What I didn’t see much of was examples of how these consultants intend to help these businesses. Let me explain.

Social media is a tool. A very powerful tool. Very few companies have found the right way to use this tool and continued experimentation will be necessary to figure out the best approach. Regardless, these seems to be some confusion by many of these so-called experts on what value they can bring to their clients. My theory is that many of these consultants have convinced themselves that since they have a blog, have 500 followers on Twitter and 250 friends on Facebook, they can be a social media consultant.

Let me be clear about this. Social media popularity does not make you qualified to be a social media consultant. When I want to see if a person has a REAL following on Twitter, I check to see the ratio of “following” to “followers”. If you follow as many people as follow you, then you’re not it’s not likely that you’re influencing people (edit was for @GeorgeDearing). You’re probably just trading fake popularity. If you have lots of friends on Facebook, that doesn’t mean you know how to market to people on Facebook. If you use GetSatisfaction, that doesn’t mean you know how businesses can use it effectively.

Social media doesn’t change the way consumers make decisions. They’re still going to use standard decision-making analysis when choosing to purchase a product (compensatory or non-compensatory). They’re still going to be affected by their attitudes and involvement with the product. The fundamentals of consumer behavior have not changed. Not by the internet and not by social media. To truly claim to be able to help businesses reach their consumers, a consultant must not only be aware and knowledgeable about the latest and greatest new tools, but must also have the experience and/or education in  consumer behavior and how consumers go about deciding on which products to buy. The tools are new but the fundamentals are the same.

I have plenty of faith in the majority of these new social media consultants. Mainly because, as one of my friends put it using the old saying, “in the land of the blind, the one eyed man in king.” Companies are in dire need to get involved in these new networks of communication. Even if you don’t have the right experience or education, if you can help them connect to this new world, you will probably be helping them to some degree. But I feel that after the dust settles, many of these companies will realize that they’ve paid a hefty price for very little return. The real value will come when people combine the fundamentals of marketing and consumer behavior and apply them to these new tools.

I potentially see myself moving into this area of social media consulting. But before I do, I’ll make sure I can provide real value to businesses other than making them a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page, and getting them lots of fake followers that will never amount to any consumer spending or solid brand awareness.

Not a Fan of Ad Blockers

One of my friends was surprised when I told him that I don’t like ad blockers. For those who don’t know, ad blockers are little programs that block ads on web pages as you browse the web. These programs eliminate those annoying flash ads, pop-up ads, and general display ads that you find on almost every website nowadays. And the question I always get is why don’t I use one of these programs.

It’s a valid question. Considering I consider myself to be a consumer advocate, and these ads annoy the consumer, I should be fine with removing these ads. Well, I’m OK if others do it but I don’t want to do it for my own browsing. Here are my reasons.

1. I don’t want the filtered web

While I use Google News as my homepage, I check CNN many times during the day to get my news. I know I could create a personalized news page that caters to my interests, but I don’t want that. I don’t want my internet filtered. I want the news that is relevant to everyone. I don’t want them to tell me about the tech news and world news and not the entertainment news. Regardless of whether I care or not, if it’s important to make the front page of CNN, I want to hear about it.

This applies to more than news. I don’t like it how when I go to Amazon, my page is filled up with products similar to my previous purchases. Just because I recently bought a Malcolm Gladwell book doesn’t mean I want to buy his other books. I know this customization increases sales, but I don’t like it. I don’t want the customized filtered web. I want the best of the web. Not the best of the web that sites think is right for me.

2. Ads make the web better

Yes. I did just say that ads make the web better. They do so by allowing the free market to dictate what sites have good advertising (and by good I mean advertising that isn’t annoying to the consumer) and what don’t. If I go to a site and it has annoying bright flash ads I’m going to stop going. If enough people feel the same way, that site will fail. If I go to a site that has good ads (like reputable sites like the New York Times) then I’ll go more often (if the content is good) and thereby giving that site good traffic.

3. It’s my job

As a current/future web entrepreneur, I need to see what’s happening on the web and figure out the best business model for my business and my customers. If I block out the current system that is used by most websites, I won’t be able to see what is working and what isn’t. If you work for a web-based business, you shouldn’t be using ad blockers. You’re missing out on important research.

That’s it really. Ad blockers are great for some but I prefer the web unfiltered and choose to be a part of the free market that helps internet businesses succeed.

The Bubbles We Live In

The tech bubble. The real estate bubble. Financial bubbles always seem to be in the news. But financial bubbles aren’t the only bubbles that affect our daily lives. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m getting my MBA right now. And when you’re in graduate school full time, you’re in a bubble. Your life is focused on getting assignments done, reading what needs to be read, and getting the best grades. It’s hard to directly connect how what you’re doing on a daily basis is beneficial to your long term goals. But you hope that the hard work you are putting in will pay off in the end.

That bubble was shattered yesterday when one of the international students in my program physically attacked another student. Something in him just snapped. I don’t have much information, but I do know that he was arrested and that charges will be filed. He will probably be kicked out of the Honors MBA program I’m in which would cause him to lose his student visa and be sent back to his home country. This student was top of our class and had a highly coveted Chase internship last summer. He was heading places. And in one fell swoop….all is gone. We’re living in the real world. And the real world has consequences.

This idea of bubbles bursting is even more prominent in the horrific terrorist attacks in Mumbai. These events of the past few days have shook me to the core. I know that terrorist attacks happen all the time. And I have never been naive enough to think that we should sit down and try to compromise with these people. But what happened (and still happening) in Mumbai goes beyond a typical attack. This was a coordinated event that targets Americans, Britains, and Jews. Hostages weren’t taken first. Random acts of killing came first. Life was not valued at all here. These people had no agenda (that we know of) other than to kill and terrorize. And regardless of what world opinions are, we all need to come together and not only condemn these attacks, but work together to find and eliminate these terrorist groups (and ALL terrorist groups). We need to stop living in this bubble that makes us think that we’re safe. There are people out there who want to kill us (the civilized world). And we (the civilized world) need to find them and kill them first. Some may call it war. I think of it as self defense.