Let’s go back to talking about discounts… these days most online retailers offer most of their discounts and sales offers via e-mail. That’s part of the problem… your e-mail list generally consists of customers who’ve already purchased from you and your most loyal followers. Giving them discounts isn’t the only way to entice them to buy. If you’re selling clothes online maybe when you get a new shipment in you offer it first to your e-mail list… talk it up, “Exclusive First Look”. Sometimes relevant information is all it takes to generate revenue from your e-mail list. A highly targeted, relevant e-mail blast with great information always generates revenue.

To me being discount heavy to your current customers is backwards… I believe that discounts are a great way of enticing on the fence buyers to pull the trigger, but after that it’s the job of every other aspect of your business to keep them coming back. Worst part of being discount heavy is you start to train your best customers to wait for discounts to make purchases.

Kevin Hillstrom of MineThatData has a great quote: “Discounts and promotions are our version of ‘financial weapons of mass destruction.’ They are taxes placed upon brands for being unremarkable.”

Plain and simple, you’re acting like big bullies. The two of you on the playground that are being the most troublesome bullies right now are Warner Bros. and Viacom. Let’s start with you Warner Bros., bullying companies like Netflix and Redbox into doing what you “think” is right for business. Notably, Warner Bros. strong arming a deal with Netflix to implement a 28 day “sales only” period in which Netflix will now wait 28 days after a DVD/Blu-ray sales release before allowing customers to rent the movie. Netflix in return received streaming licensing rights to a large collection of Warner Bros. catalog. It’s a no-brainer that Netflix’s business model is shifting focus from physical media rental to online streaming and the movie studios know this. The studio heads think that by implementing this “sales only” period they’ll increase the sales of physical DVD’s, highly more profitable to studios than movie rentals. One problem… it’s a horrible idea. Thanks for making piracy look better and better everyday. Making people wait 28 days before renting a movie won’t make them more likely to buy, it’ll just make them more likely to pirate it.

When will the industry learn that people don’t like obstacles to accessing the content they create. We’re willing to pay for it, we understand you don’t do this for free, just make it easy for us to access it. There is a reason the iTunes store is so successful… you make it so easy to download a song, sometimes I don’t even realize how much money I’m spending, such a simple, quick process. I’ve even found myself renting movies from iTunes for $3.99 a pop just because it’s so easy and I don’t want to leave my place and walk downstairs to the Redbox.

Next bully is Viacom… Viacom this week announced that they’ll be removing all Comedy Central shows from Hulu. Hulu has quickly became the premier website for watching TV shows online, with over 40 million visitors a month. Two of the most popular shows on Hulu are “The Daily Show with John Stewart” and “The Colbert Report”, both Comedy Central/Viacom shows. From the looks of it negotiations broke down when Viacom demanded more share in the advertising revenue and Hulu couldn’t afford to do so. Typically content owners like Viacom receive 50 to 70 percent of any advertising revenue generated.

Again a horrible decision…I turn to Hulu for TV shows, because it’s user friendly, very fast content delivery and they have a wide variety of TV programming from different networks. I’m not going to seek out Comedy Central’s shows on ComedyCentral.com, instead I’ll watch something else on Hulu. I’m not sure what Hollywood is thinking, but the current thinking of pulling content away from the marketplace is not the way to go. Make content more accessible to consumers and their wallets will follow.

Sincerely,
A Viewer

P.S. Stop building around the wants of the advertisers and start building for the viewer… when you do so the advertisers will follow, I promise.

This one leaves me scratching my head… is that really the best scratch off game you could come up with? #Fail

Those of you that know me well know that I’m a raving fan I am of Zappos, not just their external facing business, but also their internal business. If you’re ever in Las Vegas I highly recommend calling them up and arranging a tour of their offices. You might see a parade, a talent show, a phone being tossed in a blender… you never know what you’ll see there. You’ll leave wondering how they can possibly be making money while having so much fun. You’ll also probably leave wondering why your workplace isn’t this fun. The good part is it can be that fun, the hard part might be convincing the decision makers in your company that this is something they should try to adapt.

There were only about ten of us at the boot camp… entrepreneurs, executives and even a college student who was about to launch a very successful iPhone app. Some of us were there ready to soak in everything about Zappos and we had already been supporters of Zappos culture. There were also those who were skeptical… not believing that this could honestly be so fun, yet so productive and efficient. I learned a lot during those few days, but one of my favorite moments was seeing the non-believers turn into believers. The time we spent with Tony and Alfred soaking up every bit of knowledge is something I will never forget.

Almost every aspect of their business is very “Zappos” like… during interviews it’s common to be asked what superpower you’d want or what song should play every time you enter a room. It’s also standard business to turn down the most talented programmer, lawyer, manager or any position if they’re not a good culture fit. Would you hire someone you can’t see yourself going to get a drink with? They also do tons of training, but a lot of the training isn’t what you’d see in most other large companies. It could be a simple grammar class or a class centered around a certain book. They even have a class on how to conduct a tour of their offices. They’re always looking to promote from within and constantly educate every single employee.

I think a lot of companies today focus so much on the top line and profitability that they lose focus of what culture really means to a company. I truly believe that one of the most important factors that goes into how long your company will survive is culture. Company culture is the heart of the company… it’s the living, breathing part of your company. Your employees will make you or they will break you.

The goal of Vevo is to basically create one funnel from which videos are provided and by controlling that funnel they can control not just the user experience, but also control all the ad sales. The ad sales is the reason why Vevo was created… it wasn’t created to be the ultimate source of music videos for the fans… the ultimate music video fan experience… it’s attempting to be the ultimate cash cow for the music industry. By providing one venue for these videos Vevo is able to charge anywhere between $25-40 CPM(cost per thousand impressions) to advertisers compared to $5-10 CPM.

If this all plays out the way Vevo CEO and President Rio Caraeff wants it to it’ll be a huge win-win for the industry(labels/artists) and Google/YouTube. Oh yeah… about those fans… um the industry blames you for their demise and you owe it to them to visit Vevo 200 times a day… I’d love to ask Mr. Caraeff a few questions about the future of Vevo… I’ve got some ideas that can make this a win for the fans as well.

I’ll leave you with something I found interesting… so Vevo had their launch party last week in NYC and Rihanna was there helping Vevo promote the launch. She also did a quick YouTube video promoting Vevo, etc… She’s on Def Jam Records, which is owned by Universal Records… who is one of the biggest owners in Vevo. Funny thing is Rihanna is launching her new video “Hard” on Thursday… premiering exclusively on MTV and all MTV online properties… that means no Vevo premiere. Who dropped the ball on that one?

Photo source: MTV.com

As I’ve mentioned before Vevo is being built up to become the “Hulu of music videos” and it definitely has a strong shot of doing just that. With the launch roughly 30,000 videos will be hosted on Vevo, but the crazy part is HD videos won’t be available till next year. I don’t understand that… What is kind of cool though is Vevo will include synchronized and integrated lyrics and there won’t be a preroll ad every time you watch a video, ads will be served based on aggregate usage.

Speaking of ads on Vevo… All ad inventory and sales will be done directly through Vevo and they’ve already put together a strong roster of advertisers including: McDonald’s, AT&T, Nikon, Dove, Colgate-Palmolive, Mastercard, Axe, Infiniti and Stoli. These advertisers will pay a near premium rate of around $20 to $45 for every 1,000-page views, Vevo Chief Executive Rio Caraeff said in an interview.

Vevo will certainly be a nice little income stream for the declining record companies, but Bono thinks it’ll be a little more than just a little income. At the Vevo launch party tonight Bono said on stage: “We are here to launch the great cash cow that was the music business. But we are also here to celebrate a new model for the music business. It’s also a great vehicle that will allow fans to go behind the scenes with their favorite artists.”

What’s really going to determine the faith of Vevo will be the partnerships Vevo is able to create with not just record companies, but also other media companies. One step in the right direction is that both AOL and CBS are joining the Vevo music network and Warner Music might be signing up to join soon.

It has potential that’s for sure… two companies in particular should be worried, MTV and MySpace. MTV needs a huge strategy and focus shift and stop pretending it is the premiere venue for music videos and MySpace has made a huge shift towards music and Vevo’s launch definitely won’t help them succeed…. survive.

The Google SERP(search engine result page) has become way too cluttered, Google shouldn’t try to do everything and anything from within one page. A search for “tiger woods” not only brings up his last tournament info, but also the recent Google News results, then the “latest results”(real-time) and then the organic search results, followed up by Google Images, then Video results, then related searches… seriously now?! What happened to good, natural results… I have no problem going into Google Images if I’m looking for pictures of Tiger Woods or how about setting up a Google Real-Time Search that is separate from the standard organic search. Did I mention in the real time results for Tiger Woods you get some real racy, discriminatory, false and just nasty twitter posts?

So now think of this as a company… opens the door to so much malicious content. Malicious content right there on the first page of the SERP’s and in many instances right up top before the first organic result. Google, please clean up the SERP and don’t try to do everything from one page. I really would advise against real-time results in the default SERP… does anybody really even use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button? Why not just make that “Real-Time Search”?

Owen Van Natta – Current CEO of MySpace, previously Chief Revenue Officer of Facebook and former CEO of Project Playlist
John Sykes – Current CEO of Project Playlist, co-founder of MTV, former president of VH1 and former CEO of Infinity Broadcasting
Nada Stirratt – Current Chief Revenue Officer of MySpace, former EVP of MTV’s digital ad sales
Jason Hirschhorn – Current Chief Product Officer at MySpace, former Chief Digital Officer at MTV
Ali Partovi – Current SVP of Business Development at MySpace, former CEO of iLike
Hadi Partovi – Current SVP Technology at MySpace, former president of iLike

The current strategies for Facebook and MySpace are obviously pointing in two different directions… Facebook is concentrating on “social communication”, while MySpace goes after the “social content” market. MySpace looks like they want to be a place where you share content like music and videos to people who share similar interests. Personally I think it’s their only hope, but I don’t think it’s going to be successful for them in the long run unless they severely cut their current efforts in the social space and concentrate fully on the entertainment industry. There is no way they’ll be able to do it alone either, it’s going to involve a lot of partnerships with sites like Google and Facebook… yes Facebook and MySpace. MySpace’s acquisition of iLike was interesting as roughly 30 million Facebook users are using iLike on their Facebook pages. MySpace also teamed up with Google Music to bring music more directly into search results allowing users to listen to songs and even purchase them. Google’s entrance into the music world is a whole another story… I think Apple saw this as a major threat into “music discovery” and hence the purchase of Lala. Apple definitely wanted Lala’s technology and developers as Apple takes another step towards “Music Anywhere”… definitely advancement to taking music to the cloud for Apple.

One thing can’t be missed… MTV is losing good people left and right and they’re gonna be losing the music game soon… if they haven’t already. If MTV assumes they’re above all this and that artists will always turn to MTV first then they’re in for a big surprise. MTV hasn’t been exactly sitting back in all this as they’ve launched MTVMusic, but let’s just say that wasn’t a very good launch. Personally I think music is a battle MTV shouldn’t fight… there’s just too much money companies like Google and Apple will spend to dominate this area. Plenty of other areas in which they can dominate, they’re definitely an influencer, but with this generation it comes with their programming, not music.

I miss being involved with the music industry… can’t wait to see how this all plays out.

Salute is a wonderful charity started by Will and Mary Beth Beiersdorf in 2003 after Will was called to active duty. When Will was deployed the Beiersdorfs household finances took a huge hit and Mary Beth had to raise their three sons with the strain of a financial hardship and the emotional strain of Will being deployed.

Through the help and support of their family, friends and the community they were able to survive, but upon Will’s return they felt the need to “give back” to others facing the same hardships. And that’s pretty much how Salute started…

One thing I’ve learned is that a lot of charities survive thanks to the fundraising efforts of others in events like marathons and walks. The surprising part was how little support there is for veterans organizations like Salute. I took a look at the list of contributing charities at the Chicago Marathon just this year and I was shocked to see how many charities there are for pets and how there were only two charities for veterans, with Salute being the only one who provided support for non-wounded veterans. That’s just a damn shame… wrong on so many levels. Politics aside we should be much, much more supportive of the men and women who defend this country.

If you’re interested in learning more about Salute and how to donate please visit: Salute

1. Go to Google.com.
2. Once it loads, enter this code into your web browser’s URL address field, without the URL, just the code:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:
TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

3. Hit enter.
4. Reload or open a new tab with Google.

Note: I had issues trying it in Firefox, but it worked perfectly in IE.

Let me know what you guys think, it’s fast!