The future can’t come fast enough.

You know how it is with consensus, though - as soon as people reach it, someone proves them wrong.

Given the questionable (based on mixed reviews) direction Facebook has taken, should we expect “premium treatment” to be given by Twitter to its paying subscribers? Such as the ability to “tweet” into your stream based on your profile, interests, and activity so far? So far we can only speculate.

One thing is certain: there is already a lot of commercial activity going on Twitter; I get followed by at least 2-3 consultants every day. Twitter has to introduce some kind of system into the game or else I’m afraid its service will become another stinking ad channel where 99% of all content is pure, unadulterated crap.

Specifically, I got plenty of post taken at SXSW where HD was present.

Harley-Davidson staff at SXSW

One could make the argument that since I pre-qualified as a person interested in Harley-Davidson bikes, their posts - not primarily commercial in nature - will be relevant to me. And to the extent that I care about this particular brand a lot more than, say, Ariel or Tide, they are. Harley can communicate with me in a way that is certainly more personalized than a random TV ad.

Why, then, do I have to fight the impulse to click the “X” mark above a post they made to get rid of it, anyway? And by doing so, banishing them from my newsfeed forthwith?

Their posts are not quite-relevant to me because I am not buying a bike NOW. They are not actionable. That is true for many updates coming from the people I know, but these are my friends; I let them in. Harley-Davidson is not my friend.

Advertising is most relevant when it’s part of the conversation going on in my head right now. And so for these messages to speak to me, they would have to come to me based on my action, an impulse that I would send, something along the lines, “it’s warm outside, sun is shining, pity I don’t have a bike”. THEN a post by Harley-Davidson would make a very good sense indeed.

Again: I would drive the conversation. I would decide what is relevant, where and when.

The direction Facebook has taken is certainly a good one, compared to the old ways of advertising. Hopefully the next step will involve taking the user’s initiative and intent into account, and responding in a way that is focused on what the person is thinking or doing at the time.

brand does not need to be relevant to mobile in order to successfully run a mobile advertising campaign

And I am wondering who says otherwise?

BUT - if the question were, does mobile advertising have to be relevant to its mobile recipient, we should get a different answer alright.

Given that mobile advertising is far from being a settled matter, there is still an opportunity to do it right - this time.

I wish I could have attended this week’s MoMo London event themed “What are Operators Doing to Support Developers and Innovation?” Simon Judge’s report suggests it was noteworthy. Things are definitely evolving for mobile applications; once only for geeks, operators can now push them towards your grandmother smoothly.

The question I am pondering is: is the operator’s store the natural place for apps to converge and descend upon the customers?

YES

It’s a perfect place for the operator’s existing customers - their subsidized handsets can have the app-store placed prominently in the menu, download / install / payment can use the operator’s well-oiled machinery, global reach in some cases, co-promotion, etc. It’s good for developers, too: they get to use some very cool services and APIs.

NO

Operators’ app stores are silos. They are designed to support the operators’ core business - data usage, messaging. Apps that have the potential to disturb said business are unlikely to get very far there (just as Apple is cleansing its store of apps threatening its business).

WHO ELSE?

If the choice is between a platform owner’s app store (Google, Apple, MS) or that of an operator (O2 Litmus, VF Betavine), then the end result shall be similar. What I’d like to see is some sort of P2P infrastructure that would allow app developers to connect directly with mobile customers. Yes there is one - the Web - but we’ll have to wait for phones with rich web experience to reach mainstream for that model to become viable.

PS (Mar 15, 2009): the “walled garden” analogy comes to mind.

What will be there? Technical stuff, howtos, hints and tips on how to leverage Playground to set up your project’s scope effectively.

As for this place, I’ll occasionally promote a new release or a major milestone here but the day-to-day happenings are going to be covered there.

Although I’ve been a promoter of “CRM 2.0″ myself, I am not surprised by Paul Greenberg’s analysis of the state of affairs. The money quote:

Have the vendors really kept up with the strategy in their desire to provide CRM 2.0 applications? Is this even something they need to do? [...] When marketing is removed and a cold hard look is taken at the applications out there with a view from the CRM 2.0 precipice, the answer is that as of now, there is very little that can be called true CRM 2.0.” [taken out of context, rather ruthlessly]

But that’s only true as long as we’re talking an integrated, full lifecycle solution that would perform all the operational, analytical, and also social functions.

Instead, there is:

• the traditional CRM 1.0 toolkit, now with “social” flavor. Don’t let that mislead you; as Paul writes: “Oracle Sales Prospector, Sales Library etc. [...] are designed for sales person collaboration (and other appropriate parties) so that the changes of sales success are increased by whatever multiples they can be. But they are not built around external customer engagement but, instead a model for employees and perhaps partners.
• the vast CRM 2.0 userland of ad-hoc, beta-quality, loosely coupled tools that customers people are using to communicate and trade both among themselves and with vendors: blogs, Twitter, uservoice, etc.

Will and should those two be integrated more closely?

I thought so. I don’t anymore: vendors’ interests are dramatically different from those of the (small ‘p’) people, and only companies are buying Oracle, anyway. And companies are going to “open up” to those tool that people use, one way or another. As Paul writes:

It doesn’t matter if the fully integrated suite of CRM 2.0 products has been produced by a vendor somewhere now, somehow. Not as long as the capacity to combine traditional CRM with social tools exists in a less than onerous way. Which it does.

This conclusion is well aligned with the direction that VRM gang took: forget companies for a while, and build the infrastructure that people can use to connect to companies in their preferred way.

Companies will follow. Eventually.

http://getsatisfaction.com/colladeo

Not only I’ll be thrilled to hear from you, prospective customers and supporters, but I’ll also be handing out coupon codes for the best / most useful suggestions. How’s that for a customer-driven approach?

(Sure, the service is free for now, but not for much longer!)

Interesting idea, but the law of unintended consequences suggests that some people just won’t pay… what was that smell?

Maybe Ryanair could just as well tear the seats out, too, and fly people the way soldiers fly. Oh no, wait, soldiers do get some personal space, to make room for baggage and rifles. Perhaps stuffing folks atop one another not unlike cattle is transported would be the way to go fly?

It’s not called “cattle class” for nothing!

My point being not to poke fun at Ryanair but rather contest the notion that extremist business models are the way to go today, when the “middle of the road” (as in being out there to please everybody) is a dead end.

Surely there are limits in how much you can reduce value to decrease cost; at a potentially hard-to-define but certainly easy-to-feel line, beyond which there’s more pain than gain for the customer, and the whole deal becomes a parody of itself.

It is my opinion that low-costs need to look back to see the line.