A few weeks ago, Microsoft halted production of the Kin, their new smart-phone focused on social networking. 6 weeks after launch, Microsoft sold less than 10,000 Kin phones.

Why the poor sales? The pricing? The features? It’s widely debated.

My biggest surprise: failure in light of Kin’s marketing. Bloggers hailed the social media campaign as Microsoft’s magnum opus. 200K Facebook fans. 600K views on YouTube. A multi-city underground concert tour. Audience engagement (e.g., the sacred social media “dialogue”). Every social media box checked and obliterated. All this and the Kin failed to find customers.

Even the video is brilliant (is Facebook+hipsters ever a bad idea?). Featuring a girl’s exploration of her Facebook friends, thousands of people followed her journey on Facebook and Kin’s site, garnering enough attention to make any marketer salivate. Hell–even I was enchanted to watch a few episodes.

Reportedly, Microsoft spent “upwards of a billion dollars to bring the Kin market (if you count the $700 million Danger acquisition plus further R& D cost).” That’s $1,000,000,000 costs plus ~$5,000 sales = sad Steve Balmer.

Rock-star “Old Spice Man” had a similar fate. The Internet meme, reportedly, has not significantly impacted sales. Goals aside, Old Spice destroyed every digital marketing metric but didn’t tip the revenue scales.

The ROI and nuances of each campaign could be debated at length. And product launches fail all the time.

But for me, I’m reflecting on expectations. That is, Kin’s campaign is applauded an A+ by pressing the right digital buttons. The agency, Exposure, should very well have rejoiced at their success–at least by how we define digital success in fans, followers, views, and visits.

Something to think about: it’s easy to circle back through the Kin’s marketing and find the flaws. But like buying a used car, the trick is to know how to avoid a lemon beforehand. Could any marketer be that good? Am I an idealist?

One way to classify marketers: analytic vs. emotional. An analytic approach is scientific and rational; decisions are based on data. It’s about website optimization, ROI, and metrics–a Google-esque view. Alternatively, an emotional approach is artistic and instinctive. It’s about the fluffy stuff–branding, positioning, buzz, and sexy commercials.

I want to be a damn good emotional marketer. And it’s why I’m psyched about recent developments that will make emotional marketing more fact-based and analytic. Research led by neuroscience and behavioral economics are proving the tricks of the marketing trade, those widely practiced but never logically explainable. This growing fact-set peaks my [...] Continue Reading…

Lately, a few startups have been re-writing the holy grail of marketing: how to get referrals. I wrote about Bonobos’s use of two-sided incentives for referrals–users earn $50 for each friend referred who becomes a customer (friend gets $50 off their purchase at check-out too).

DropBox ran a similar strategy for referrals as well (via Clay Parker Jones):
After a failed attempt to get users via search – and spending upwards of $200 per acquisition – they incentivized digital word-of-mouth by offering two-sided referral bonuses. If a new user shares a link to the Dropbox signup form, and their friends sign [...] Continue Reading…

Over a year ago, I wrote that “no one wants to be a friend of laundry detergent.” It marked my beginnings as a social media skeptic, that social media isn’t something to be frameworked or strategized. Within 2 months, I unsubscribed from the social media gurus and divorced myself from the subject.

To my chagrin, work immersed me in social media again. I’m memorizing case studies and quoting Facebook stats.

I did learn one thing.

Lesson #1 of #1: studying social media “strategy” is a time warp back to b-school. Like a scientist re-learning the scientific method, social media strategy is about [...] Continue Reading…

Lately, I’ve been discussing digital marketing with co-workers. We cover the familiar: digital media and online campaigns. Or the buzz-worthy: social media or mobile.

But we typically overlook an important digital marketing world– website design, optimization, and analytics. When I mention it, I often hear:

“Oh–that’s marketing?”
“Isn’t that for programmers?”
“I’m only interested in the significant stuff”

In short, websites are not on the marketer’s need-to-know list.

The best-in-class online brands, Amazon, Google, even Twitter are web analytics rock-stars, optimizing the hell out of their sites and mining Omniture/Google Analytics for nuggets of insight.

Enter Performable.

Performable is a new startup out of Boston led by [...] Continue Reading…