I wrote that last piece on Brian Mueller and, with all the good stuff I’ve been hearing about him as our new CEO, I can’t resist posting a link to this video of Steve Ballmer doing the “Dance Monkeyboy” thing, some of his own special breed of motivation. This has been the legacy of Microsoft for some time now, easily since 2000, and you have you ask yourself: is he like this … on a dare?
Technorati Tags: Brian Mueller, Leadership, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer
This isn’t a surprise to anyone by any stretch, but it’s an interesting reminder of just how dramatic the changes around this place are right about now.
PHOENIX–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 29, 2006–Apollo Group Inc. (Nasdaq:APOL) announced that Brian Mueller has been appointed to its board of directors.
Mueller has been with the company for 19 years and is currently its president. In his career with Apollo Group and University of Phoenix he has held many positions, most recently as CEO of the University of Phoenix Online campus.
Dr. John Sperling, acting executive chairman of Apollo Group, said, “We are pleased to appoint Brian to our board of directors. He is an excellent complement to our board and we look forward to the contributions and guidance he will provide as we continue to grow and expand.”
Members of the company’s current board of directors are John Sperling, Peter Sperling, John Norton, John Blair, Hedy Govenar and Dino DeConcini.
The campus directors and regional vice presidents just got back from a meeting in Phoenix discussing the future of the organization with Brian and his team as we all move forward with this long-overdue integration between Online, the ground campuses, and Axia College (come April 1). These are shake-up meetings, designed to make people feel just uncomfortable enough to take action, to force change in the way we perceive the delivery of eduction. He — Brian — comes to the table with an interesting reputation. From people who’ve worked for him directly I’ve heard the following:
“If he wakes up with a brainstorm, it better be implemented by 1:00.”
“He’s a mercenary…. Very good, but very determined.”
“Tough love. Exhastive, tough love. If he doesn’t love you, tough.”
But the real response came from a campus director I trust and respect dearly, who hasn’t had much contact with Brian and was skeptical about his role in the organization, She came back from the meeting and said, “I don’t care what you say about this guy. I don’t care what people call him. This time around, people are following him. He’s a leader, and we’re following him. We’ll get through this.”
Makes me want to do that much more today. Nice feeling.
Technorati Tags: Apollo Group, Brian Mueller, Education, University of Phoenix
Here’s a wonderful Spike Jonze mini-doc on Al Gore and family. It’s only 13 minutes and worth watching in its entirety. It paints just the right picture of the Gores, albeit a few years too late.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-29385328971143264&q=al+gore
Having spent many years in New Jersey, I completely sympathize with the filmmakers of the following. These guys got together and obeyed the speed limit in Atlanta and brought a major highway to a standstill. Danger, potential loss of life and limb, damage to property, everything you look for in a sound traffic system. This is five minutes long and worth a watch!
The marketing world is abuzz with the notion of blogging and podcasting as tools for greater saturation, visibility, touch, whatnot. We’ve been hasing out some of those concepts around here and I thought I’d take a minute to outline them.
I started experimenting with podcasting last month for a public relations course I just wrapped up. It was a small class, a good one full of guinea pigs for my tech machinations. The course is offered as a hybrid — on ground one week, online three weeks, on ground one week — so I pitched to the students that it might be a fun experiement to try podcasting my online lectures for the three weeks we’re not together.
Using GarageBand, a new condenser microphone, a PreSonus breakout box, and my previously typed lectures as my scripts, I jumped in. The feedback was wonderful. I had students telling me that the whole concept changed the way they interact with the content. That they gather around their computer with their families and listen together — a la some sort of post-modern “Fireside Chat”.
Hyperbole aside, it helped me, too. Being able to provide the tone of the lecture along with the slides allowed me to connect with the material in a new way, to connect in a way I hadn’t experienced with the traditional on ground lectures to boot. They’re focused. They’re tangible. They’re tactile, in a strange way, knowing that the students are out there warehousing my material on their iPods makes the whole process brilliantly fused with distance education.
When I finally took the lid off my little experiment for University administration, the response was guarded, but positive. While the technology was dazzling — certainly dazzling to those who have no experience with this sort of wizardry day-to-day — the cynics and technical folks rallied against the concept for every reason you can probably already imagine: too expensive to host, too expensive to serve, can’t put University intellectual property on a publicly accessible site, etc, etc, etc.,
But it sparked dialog, and gave me a soapbox to talk about this technology from a PR perspective. Here are my points:
The Whims of Professional Media
The PR role is a tricky one. Aligning an organization’s message with the needs of the media public is not an easy job. To do it well, it requires a mind-numbingly detailed awareness of media outlets in the markets and within that understanding, a grasp of the timeliness of news as it passes through the public filter. When hard news is heavy, when trends fall out of favor, getting your pitches acknowledged can be chronically difficult.
Our contract and in-house PR pros are wonderful. They get it. They understand our message and they drive to spread the word by defining and crafting messages and delivering stories to media outlets with whom they have a sound history — a relationship. But if the news cycle drives our segment out of the spotlight, our story is canned no matter how strong the reporter relationship is.
What this technology delivers organizations is opportunity. Opportunity to define and craft your messaging, define your core audience, and deliver your message yourself in a cost effective medium. Organizational PR pros can now control the distribution of their messages and take advantage of timeliness and targeting that compliments the news cycle, not combats it.
Transparent Relationships
I’m a subscriber to the idea that markets are conversations. The brains that have lead the charge on that front are certainly greater pros than I at this stuff. So, what I have to say here really serves to amplify a point that I’m not satisfied is trumpeted loudly enough.
Publics expect the conversation.
Marketers do their level best to figure out how to start the conversation because it feels like value-added to let our customers in on our little secrets. Value-added is no longer of value, it’s assumed. If we stand on our walls and open doors for minions to enter and behold our inner-workings, we’re shuttering the rest of the world — we’re inviting the masses to go elsewhere, to find the conversation.
We’re not doing our customers any favors by building transparency into our operations. We’re doing just what they have expected all along.
Ignorance is Alienation
The time to start the dialog is yesterday. The technology is far too easy to adopt, to build upon, to produce passable content. With another day that goes by, so goes another of our peers leveraging these tools against us. The generation we’re marketing with, the Echo Boomers, Millenials, Flip-Floppers, Thumbers, they are already the MySpace generation. They’re raised on distance education. They’ve studied their online games, they’ve IM’d across fanboards and now they’re Skyping all around us while we’re just getting used to DSL.
Content
But it’s more than just the technology. Right now, blogs are read if they’re pertinent. Podcasts are devoured because they’re cool. If that timeline persists, blogs should be completely outmoded in three years and podcasting will be a vast new advertising sponsored audiovisual black hole. Popularity will be defined by utility: the level at which we’re able to deliver use beyond cool.
Here are a few things I’m working on right now.
They’re weather balloons, but we’re doing our best to get on board now. Does the organization understand it? No. Is it our charge to push, and keep pushing until they do? Absolutely. Our customers expect it.
A new feature to the iTunes Music Store is users’ ability to purchase an iPod completely through iTunes. Why is this important? Several internet critics have speculated that the iTMS browser is the future of the internet: easy-to-use, simple, and graphically pleasing. This is one more step towards making iTMS a web browser.
Agreed. I’ve been thinking about this for some time. We need an iTunes Software Store, iTunes Amazon Store, iTunes eBay Store, and so on, and so on. This interface works because of the trick of the eye — you don’t believe you’re online when you’re in it. The metaphore of your iTunes library allows you to be in the sale without knowing it — just click on an artist in your library and POOF, you can buy more just like that.
This is one of those wonderful ads that cuts to the core of what it means to be a dad for me. Of course, this is coming from a guy whose primary purpose in breeding is to develop smaller versions of myself for movie buddies. As it is, many thanks to the Ad Council for this kind of positive reflection and cinematic genius!
Technorati Tags: Fatherhood
Hat’s off to Lewey Geselowitz. I never played Quake 2 — believe it or not, I was a Deep Space 9 guy — but this is the coolest mod I’ve seen for a game yet. Crazy, crazy — I actually expect a dragon to pop out, or an American eagle, or Pamela Anderson.
“Quake II AbSIRD is a modification of the standard Quake II rendering engine so that it can create SIRDS instead of normal 3D environments. This means that you can play Quake II just as you normally would (single player, network play, most mods, etc) except all the 3d objects and characters will jump out at you with the full 3D power of SIRDS.”
Jump out, yeah. I still can’t quite figure out how your visual acuity is affected by mutants with chainsaws. I know my reaction time ain’t that great.
Apparently, real researchers have finally found the rosetta stone of public speaking, and it’s intercourse. That’s right, all your visions of fright and peril are awash in a warm glow with only a quick brush of love in the back seat.
Volunteers who’d had PVI [penile-vaginal intercourse – ed.] but none of the other kinds of sex were least stressed, and their blood pressure returned to normal faster than those who’d only masturbated or had non-coital sex. Those who abstained had the highest blood-pressure response to stress.
Check out the new truth here. Then get busy.
For those who don’t know much about University of Phoenix marketing, if you haven’t run across a banner or pop-up, let me bring you up to speed. Organization’s like UOP are cost per lead shops; advertising has only as much value to the company as can be assigned each individual new prospect on a volume basis. For example, if we do 20,000 blow-in inserts in a market that costs us $10,000 and see a return on that of 50 new leads, our cost per lead is $200. If we do a direct mail drop to 75,000 that costs us $30,000 and we see 200 leads, our cost per lead is $150. Internet? I’ll spare you the volume, but shooting for a cost per lead between $45 and $80 is pretty darned good. These are all just broad strokes examples.
A List Apart: Articles: Web 3.0: Yeah, I read Zeldman. Most of the time, I don’t understand him. In this case, I don’t understand him.
Until the end. Then it all comes together and affects me. If you are wondering what AJAX is, this isn’t the piece for you. If you’re wondering whether it’s OK to keep going to work in the morning and serve your customers with integrity even though you haven’t stumbled on the next Pet Rock, give it a read. That Zeldman. Good guy.
Sophie’s in school, if I haven’t said anything about that already. She’s attending the Goddard School in our neighborhood four days a week. So far, we’re thrilled about the experience. Sophie loves it, she’s making some good little friends and the program brings the world to her, right in the playground: everything from the Oregon Zoo’s petting zoo program to the Children’s Museum.
Each week, the kids work on one letter of the alphabet. They write it, the bring things to school that begin with that letter, etc, then they bring homework that consists of tracing pages full of dashed glyphs of that letter for them to trace.
This is good stuff.
The Myth of the Product Adoption Lifecycle
One of the giant insights of the new marketing is that the only way to introduce a new idea is to move across the curve. Sell to the little tail, they tell the next group, which passes the word on to the mass market. That’s why the little tiny green tail is so valuable… these are the people who are listening, these are the people who will become your marketing force.
So, where’s the myth?
The myth is that marketers think these people actually care.
People don’t care, certainly not about marketers.
There was a time when bots were all the rage. I remember instant messaging with bots a decade ago through the university research departments that were attempting to simulate human intelligent conversation. They were charming enough, but you could always stump them with curses.
Soon after, the major players started using them to help customer call flow and voice response systems. Annoying little beasts that can’t understand the slightest hint of Jersey accent still pick up with Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, you name it — the list goes on.
But check this out. John Battelle writes a bit about the MakeBot, and instant messaging search utility that links the RSS of these particular sites with a back-end search function allowing access to site updates through your IM client of choice — providing, I assume, it’s AIM compatible. I’ve signed up to get the boingboing.net feed update every two hours and so far it works swimmingly.
But wait, there’s more! To see this really take off, add MovieFone to your AIM buddy list and type a bit. This bot allows you to search the MovieFone database by title, location, theater, whatever, all through your IM client. I find it faster — far faster — than checking the site through the web. All I need to do is type 1 – 4 – Y – 1 to see a list of movies and times at my favorite theater in my neighborhood. It’s the Century Cinemas over at Cedar Hills, the one that serves warm KettleKorn instead of lameass movie popcorn. Of course, the bot remembers the last time I ran a search and so my zip is still cookie’d somehow, which cuts down my keystrokes.
The implications of this sort of connectivity are huge. It has the potential to have the same impact on customer service than online billpay had five years ago: it eliminates a simple problem with an elegant solultion. With billpay, it eliminated the hassle of managing checks and stamps with a few mouse clicks and auto-payment schedules. With MovieFone, it eliminates the interactive voice response program on the phone and the graphical nonsense and ad programs of the sites with a convenient and unobtrusive “buddy.”
Would advertising play? In a heartbeat. As John mentions, Google is probably salivating over this program. For me, the more interesting implications are in teaching remedial programs to university students. For example, we’ve completely automated our grammar tool online with 90+% accuracy. What if students could open their IM client of choice and paste in a paragraph to the GrammarBot, and receive a near-instantaneous response with corrections, suggestions, tips, and tools? More important, what if a student could submit passages to a PlagiarismBot and get a Google search return of the top ten sites with 85% or greater likeness?
Ah, the heady odeur of success.
Or, whatever.
This year, as my Christmas present from the office, I got promoted. That’s right, it’s the best Christmas present ever, if you’re on the look-out for a bright new pair of golden, fuzzy, warm, vibrating handcuffs.
