Christopher Carfi

Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells, Grace Davis, and many others are trekking to New Orleans next week. Why?

Chris Heuer writes:

“Though I have only been to New Orleans once before, I have a deep love for this great American city and I really want to help bring it back from the tragedy that was Katrina. As a technologist, business strategist, entrepreneur and humanist, I have been been working with BrainJams over the last few months to bring people together to learn from one another in the real world. While I can’t rebuild the houses that were lost or donate millions of dollars, I can work towards connecting the small businesses of New Orleans with an understanding of how they can make the most of emerging Internet technologies. More importantly, I can help facilitate real, personal connections between the people who are building these Internet tools and the local business community in New Orleans who need the best available thinking to help rebuild their local economy.

BrainJams is about people sharing what they know with one another – people helping people, treating one another with respect and working to understand each another’s unique ability to contribute towards a common goal. If you are interested in working towards
revitalizing New Orleans, won’t you join us for a conversation between the business community in New Orleans and people who understand emerging Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, tags, open source software such as Drupal, and other Web services?

I believe that together, we can discover innovative solutions to the business problems that are being faced today, as well as learn from one another how to make the most of what we already have. We know from firsthand experience that the traditional way of running a conference was seldom best for the attendees. The most interesting parts of the conference were often the hallway conversations we had with other attendees. Often times, the people in the audience have better insights to share than those speaking on the panel. BrainJams takes away the “power of the podium” and puts it in the hands of the people in the audience. We turn attendees into participants, and in so doing, make it easier for everyone to get what they need from the event while having a turn to step up on the soap box to share their ideas, concerns and experiences.”

Register here. It’s free to attend.

Seth points to an article about “how KitKat became number one.”

The two quotes from the article linked above that raised my hackles:

“Year 3: Some ads began to appear. They didn’t look like ads. They were cute little stories about teachers, mothers, students and the lucky charm. The ads were fiction, but real Japanese moms began packing KitKats for their kids when they left home to take the exams.

Year 4: Real people began to appear in the ads that didn’t look like ads. No product was ever shown. Just a subtle little KitKat logo.“

This is why marketers are distrusted.

Now, I’ve got some questions. I did a quick Google search on kitto katsu, and came up with only about 700 hits. Almost all of those were references to this story. (Granted, most “real” references would most likely be in Kanji, and therefore not picked up by Google. But still.)

As best as I could tell, very few of the references were actually people wishing each other luck, except in the context of this story. Wouldn’t you think that if this were a “real” phrase that had been around for a while, it would be in more common usage?

I’m not a Japanese speaker, although I can order the nihon biiru with the best of them. I am willing to admit that kitto katsu, as a phrase, now may be being used in the manner described in the article above. But I wonder: did kitto katsu, as a phrase, exist in the language before KitKat’s marketing machine began pushing this story? Or did some marketing suit look up kitto and katsu, and create the phrase in order to push the product?

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a link to Fred Wilson’s description of the “Freemium” business model.

Now let’s segue from there to another reason why freemium really makes sense. Erik Keller at SandHill writes:

“Now this approach may be seen as foolhardy by those who believe that products are always sold rather than just bought. This assertion, however, must be reexamined in the light of rampant license-fee discounting as well as the fact that [a typical enterprise software company] spends over 90 percent of its license fee revenue on sales and marketing expenses. The reality in enterprise software is while most companies do not give away their software, they might as well, given the cost of sales as well as market conditions.” (emphasis added)

I had to reread that paragraph a couple of times to really grok it, but Erik is spot-on: many companies could, arguably, eliminate their “traditional” sales and marketing expenditures, give their products away for free, and still do just about the same on the bottom line.

Put another way…what if your company could turn its sales model on its head, and respond to customer pull, versus selling and marketing via “push?”

(Bonus quote from Erik, from the same article: “When a value-oriented buyer’s point of view is taken, the core of this inefficiency becomes obvious. From an income-statement perspective, the cost of delivering a product and service as well as R&D are customer value-adds: buyers get something direct and of value from these costs. On the other hand, sales and marketing as well as general & administrative expenses are seen as valueless to the buyer. They represent the overhead that a vendor needs to engage the market.”)

Yes, RSS and feeds are where things are going. That said, the pragmatic folks over at FeedBurner have enabled enhanced email subscription capabilities for blogs. From Burning Questions:

“It turns out that not everybody is quite ready to ditch the old Inbox just yet. People like to be notified when their favorite publishers have something new posted, but a large audience still finds the familiar setting of email to be the most comfortable and reliable way to receive updates. We initially announced feed-by-email support back in October. Since then, we have been asked by a number of our publishers to integrate our own feed-powered email update service, and we are the kind of people who do what is asked of us, if the question is asked nicely, in lower case, with a minimum of question marks.”

FeedBurner actually has three email delivery options: their own, one via FeedBlitz, and another via Squeet.

A quick test run of the service showed it’s easy to set up, and seems to work as advertised. Good job, FeedBurner people!

You can try it here, if you want.

Enter your email address:

(Email subscription is now a feature of the Social Customer Manifesto sidebar as well.)