"The reason most people do not use open source is ignorance. They simply asume that software that's not expensive is not worth their time. So let them know. Tell them: This is the best 3d graphics package, this is the best office package, this is the best... " from this comment. A Linux Switch campaign... I like it, speaking of memes...
Comments 11:44:53 AM    

This wasn't really grousing about "the good old days". Linda is a very savvy and focused product marketer, and she has always measured the results of her marketing spending. In theses down days, when the noise of multi-million dollar dotcom marketing budgets has all but evaporated, you'd have thought that current marketing dollars would buy more, not less bang.

I think there are 2 things going on here: one is just the reluctance of people and businesses to spend in a down economy - this is what recession is all about, people's perception of their short-term prospects. As long as perception is dim, spending will be down, even if your messages are reaching the target audience. Few bosses are incenting employees to spend money these days.

But I also think there's another phenomenon going on here, not related to the slump. I think it's an unforeseen consequence of our newly networked world.

On any network, noise rises faster than signal as new nodes join the system. The Internet has some 400 million nodes and is still growing briskly. That amounts to a tsunami of noise, that's daily getting bigger. There are 7 million new Web pages every day, and spam is doubling at ever shorter intervals, currently something like every 3 months.

The fact that Google and other search engines exist (see Danny, I learned something) is evidence of this sea of noise: how do you find anything? But it goes beyond 'obscurity through proliferation'. It goes to the nature of memes, and a peculiar quality of the Internet.

A meme is defined as "A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, has famously described memes as 'replicators', ideas that parasitize minds much as viruses ravage bodies. Marketing messages are memes.

A recent finding by Italian researchers proposes that the threshold of infection or propagation on scale-free networks like The Internet is zero. Think about that for a moment.

What it means is that any idea that's set loose on the Net, has the potential, at least, to take over the attention of a large population. It doesn't matter how much money, or how little, is spent on the idea or the promotion thereof.

Remember the Tommy Hilfiger hoax of a few years back? The one in which it was claimed that the clothing designer had appeared on Oprah and made racist remarks? It was patently and provably untrue, and said to be the work of bored Sophomore sitting in a computer lab at large midwestern university.

So, Hilfiger spends millions annually promoting the clothing. Bored Sophomore made no greater investment than however long it took to make up the tale and post it to a discussion group. Yet hoax trumped marketing to the point that Hilfiger had to bring in crisis managers to defuse the affair by widely publishing a refutation to the thousands of sites that carried some version of the hoax. Clearly, Hilfiger's marketing spending was not only diluted, but had to be increased.

In this case, it's easy to see the effects of a. noise and b. a zero threshold to propagation. I believe that you will see this at work in nearly every modern marketing scenario, though it won't likely involve hoaxes or other extreme stuff.

For one thing, all of your competition has the same threshold of zero propagation that you do. It once was probably the case that the least well-funded of your competitors didn't make much of a dent in your mindshare, if they couldn't spend alongside the market leaders. Nowadays, their $9.95-a-month Web site is as easily accessed as your $50,000 designer-produced Web pages.

They can email potential customers at least as as easily, and inexpensively as you can. Ironically, if they spend less time qualifying leads and otherwise trying to avoid spamming the market, their costs are less, maybe a lot less. And their spam raises the noise barrier to your more thoughtful, and careful email campaign.

And, it probably doesn't matter if you use the Net to promote a lot or a little. The point is that customers do, increasingly so. Things that may be completely unrelated to your business - mp3 downloads come to mind - will be competing with you for mindshare. Unless your product only appeals to rural customers in developing nations, you're likely to have to cope with this phenomenon. So, what to do about it? Good question, to be answered Monday...
Comments 9:16:53 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures