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Gateway Brand Reborn

gateway-cowBack in 2007, Acer bought Gateway and took ownership of a brand that had a deep value but had also lost much of its original strength after years of Gateway’s failure to live up to its brand promise.  A brand that once dominated the personal computer market became a victim of its own success by forgetting that consumers had expectations for the brand based on its brand promise.  As Gateway tried to reduce costs by offshoring customer service and forgetting why consumers chose to buy Gateway-branded products in the first place, the brand was tarnished and eventually lost its appeal. 

The question now is whether or not Acer can revive that original brand promise or create an entirely new brand promise for Gateway that consumers will believe and ultimately buy into.  We’ll find out soon as Acer prepares to launch its first Gateway-branded products in the coming months.  According to The Register, Acer plans to debut Gateway-branded notebook computers and servers before the end of 2009.  The Taiwanese company will unveil its first Gateway-branded products at the Channel Expo event this week in the U.K. [Read more…] about Gateway Brand Reborn

Does Your Corporation Need a Twitter or a Facebook Page?

There is something quite interesting going on in the social community network that doesn’t quite make sense to me. I write a lot about social media and media relations, discussing how phenomenal these platforms are and how great for business they are. I focus a lot on the effects of effectively strategized efforts can have on a business’ sales and exposure. It works. It’s good for business. Everybody’s doing it. Or are they?

While on one of my social platforms the other day, an acquaintance found me and in almost a giggly nature, asked me how is it that I had a Facebook page. They were surprised that I even knew what Facebook was. Really? I thought most all business people knew what the highly effective online platforms were. After all, that is the gas that powers our online business engines, right?

Reaching the Masses

Honestly, Facebook and Twitter is not for a certain demographic or a particular social group, specifically. Although there are certainly some demographics that make up the bulk of their membership, it is not completely indicative of who makes up their community. Quite frankly, these social platforms can’t afford to be picky, as their business is driven from word-of-mouth and social buzz. So really, you want to make sure people are talking about you and your business’ products or services.

Staying Connected

But, back to social platforms. I am just about addicted to my Facebook and Friendfeed pages and find myself checking them at every chance I get. I’ve even downloaded the app to my iPhone so that I can check my updates and correspond with my “friends” even when I’m at my children’s soccer practice. I’ve gained new business, answered questions, resolved issues and even bid on new writing  jobs all while multi-tasking from my iPhone. As a freelancer, we must stay connected to the heartbeat of the writing industry and be prepared at every available opportunity. As business owners, they too must be connected and prepared to make decisions.

Since I have a business, and a small business no less, wouldn’t it make sense to me to market, advertise and drum up business everywhere I go and to everyone that I talk to? Of course it does! Therefore, the use of these social platforms has become a daily lifestyle for me and has added a new depth to my online writing services. And quite frankly again, I feel that I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of connections and possibilities.

Do large businesses do the same? Do corporations talk with and keep in touch with regular, everyday people?

Do all corporations have a Twitter account, a Facebook page or even a MySpace account? If not, they really should.

Scobleizer also wrote a rather compelling piece on his blog that talked about some of these very same things. After all, why have a business or a corporation if you’re not going to market them or create buzz about them? I think corporations err when they don’t extract as much as they can from an available resource.

What do you think about corporations using social media platforms? Does it enhance or detract from their images and goals?

Going Native


web-strategy

Most articles, news stories and blog commentaries about social media seem to be written by someone looking through a tourist telescope, like the ones in Battery Park or on the edge of the Grand Canyon.  The general approach is “Look, people are tweeting!”  Or “Quick! Get in there and make money.”  And at the other end of the spectrum are writers who seem to be so immersed in the social media world that they speak a secret language.

But Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang is one blog that’s consistently substantive without taking itself too seriously, and leading-edge instead of merely trendy.  Although Owyang works for Forrester Research–which provides a lot of access–this is his personal blog, and it covers a wide rage of topics relating to how businesses can and should use the web.

There’s even a job board for “web strategist” positions, which have recently included openings for an “online connection pastor” and an SEO analyst for the Oprah Winfrey Network.  Just browsing these postings provides another angle for understanding the scope and reality of social media and web presence in today’s marketplace.

I’d sum up by saying Owyang’s blog is not so much “about” the social media space as it is about thinking in a social media way.  And that involves a lot more than just jumping on the Twitter-wagon.  If you’re interested in really understanding the web landscape and its inhabitants, race to read What Companies Should Know about Digital Natives.  This post–live-blogged from a conference on corporate social networking–explains some key factors about folks who are either born into the digital world (i.e., from 1980 on) or have arrived there as immigrants.

I’m an immigrant, of course, but I was an early homesteader on the digital frontier, so in many ways I feel more kinship with the natives than with my own generation.  Though my friends and colleagues are all “computer literate,” even those who work in IT are mostly still living and thinking in the age of the individual user.  Not that they don’t get their maps online, got to virtual meetings, IM like mad, and put their snapshots on Facebook!  It’s just that they don’t think of the world as one big open, creative, accessible digital space.

Non-natives worry about privacy, for example, and piracy.  They read newspapers (which I’m definitely not saying is a bad thing), buy physical media (CDs, DVDs, paper books), and don’t see the point of Twitter. They shop online but don’t have a PayPal account . . .

So in addition to the digital divide between those who do and those who don’t have computer access, there is also a divide between those who do and those who don’t “get” digital life.  Not as in Second Life and virtual reality–which is sort of a specialty interest–and not as in the early chip-centric visions of “ubiquitous computing.”  More as in Zoho instead of MS Office, Hulu instead of Tivo, and WordPress instead of Writer’s Market.

Want to recruit digital natives?  Create a digital environment.

More to come.


Surfing the Boards: And Now for the Funny


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The humorous aspects of CareerCast’s Comprehensive Ranking of 200 Different Jobs come from (a) some charmingly improbable job descriptions, and (b) results produced when the matching engine returns “related” job listings.  My personal favorite is Philosopher, which ranks as the twelfth best job and has the following job description:

Studies questions concerning the nature of intellectual concepts, and attempts to construct rational theories concerning our understanding of the world around us.

I actually haven’t been able to think of a single person in history who had this job.  For a living, philosophers (even Socrates!) typically teach–and “Teacher” ranks 127, right after “Vending Machine Repairer.”

To be fair, the job description for Teacher plainly refers to the K-12 variety, not to college teachers, and there is no listing for Professor.  But as we all know, MANY people with degrees in philosophy are lucky if they can get a job teaching high school.

So, speaking of jobs . . . what’s available for job hunters who want to “study questions concerning the nature of intellectual concepts”?  The first three listings returned on CareerCast are, fairly enough, college teaching positions.  Followed by:  “Facilities Loss Prevention Engineer” and several positions for life guards and swim instructors.  Along with jobs in health care and restaurant management.

The job ranked number one by JobsRated–Mathematician–actually has a very realistic description:

Applies mathematical theories and formulas to teach or solve problems in a business, educational, or industrial climate.

And there are many non-teaching jobs for Mathematicians!  Really good jobs, with the Federal Government, Booz Allen Hamilton, Gaming Laboratories International, et cetera.  And according to JobsRated, a typical Mathematician salary is around $100,000 a year.

Plus–Mathematician rates very low on the “Own life at risk” factor.  So clearly, it’s a dreamy job.

Yet there is a problem.  How many of you readers could have chosen to be a Mathematician if you’d realized what a great job it is?   They might just as well have announced that the most desirable career is “NBA Point Guard” or “Concert Pianist” . . .

In reality, being a mathematician requires native abilities as well as training.  And it appears that being good with numbers is a huge asset in today’s job world, since three of the top twenty spots (Mathematician, Physicist, and Astronomer) require very high levels of math ability, while seven more (Actuary, Statistician, Software Engineer, Computer Systems Analyst, Accountant, Economist, and Computer Programmer) require very good math skills, and four others (Industrial Designer, Biologist, Economist, and Meteorologist) also have a significant math component.  That’s fourteen of twenty, or 70%.

What can you be in the top twenty if you didn’t do well in math?  A Philosopher!  Or a Sociologist.  Or a Historian.  And if you just don’t want to teach for a living–a Parole Officer.

By now it may seem as if I am merely poking fun in this second part, with no constructive purpose.  To keep that from being true, I will add what I think are two important takeaways:

1.       Job search engines often perform absurdly. Obviously, the jobs returned for Philosopher are just those happening to contain the term “philosophy,” as in “Ability to interpret YMCA Aquatic program philosophy.”  And CareerCast is certainly no worse in its matching than most job boards.  Job seekers and recruiters should demand better.

2.       The career advice industry frequently seems divorced from reality. It really doesn’t matter whether math jobs are great if you’re not a math person, and Philosopher is not a career choice, even if you are philosophical.  Here again, CareerCast is not worse than most–and they have clearly put effort into research for this list.  But it takes thoughtful analysis to turn raw data into useful information.

Final thought: The bottom jobs in the comprehensive list are all by definition high stress and high risk.  Does that make them “bad”?  Some Lumberjacks (#200) undoubtedly enjoy their jobs more than some Medical Laboratory Technicians (#16).   So JobsRated also published a list of the 10 Most Satisfying Jobs, as determined by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.  And it turns out that “Firefighter,” which is near the cellar (#181) on the JobsRated list, came in at a very happy number three in terms of satisfaction.

Could your corporate Careers site highlight “satisfaction factors” more effectively?


Thanks to Kevin Dooley and his Vivitar for providing a philosopher’s viewpoint on surfing.


Surfing the Boards: Thought-provoking Hilarity


surfboards-1

In a new occasional series, I’ll be browsing the emerging generation of job search sites to see what kind of  career information seekers are finding these days.  And my first outing is to CareerCast (“Your job search portal”), which has a component called JobsRated.com.  Using a variety of criteria, they have come up with A Comprehensive Ranking of 200 Different Jobs.  Each job type (such as “Software Engineer” or “Roofer”) is explained briefly, and then you can click on a button to see related job listings.

According to their methodology page, the JobsRated evaluations are based on five aspects:  Environment, Income, Outlook, Stress and Physical Demands.  Several are broken out into multiple factors.  Stress, for example, is divided up into 21 factors, and each factor has its own rating scale, ranging from 0-5 through 0-15.  Among the stress factors are two I don’t ordinarily think of in association with jobs, which I now realize is a failure of imagination on my part.  They are:  “Own life at risk (0-8)” and “Life of another at risk (0-10).”

“Competitiveness” has a scale of 0-15, while items such as “Lifting,” “Confinement,” and “Quotas” have a range of 0-5.  Which is confusing at first–and actually remains confusing.  As explained by JobsRated, relative placement of the factor on its scale is based on the amount of X that would typically be present in the job.  So firefighters get a maximum number of points on the “life at risk” factors, whereas accountants get a minimum number.  However, the use of different scales would seem to have a net effect of weighting the factors, in that competitiveness can potentially yield a much higher number of stress points than lifting–or risking your life.

Plus there seem to be overlaps among Environment factors, Stress factors, and Physical Demands.  But let’s move on.

Ratings on various included factors for each of the aspects are rendered into numerical scores (lower=better), with some manipulations applied along the way.  (The factor total of the Stress aspect, for example, is divided by the average number of hours worked weekly.)  Then the five aspect scores are summed up to produce the final rankings.  Data for the evaluations comes from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, trade associations, and industry groups.

In the presentation of the list, rated jobs are divided into sets of 20, and an interesting commentary is added to each set.  For example, characterizing jobs 141-160:

Some jobs in the lower half of our 200 rankings still require extensive higher education, such as physician and surgeon, but a larger percentage need only specialized training or, in the case of janitor, waiter/waitress, and salesperson, basic instruction to master. Surgeon may be a highly-paid, well respected profession, but scoring dead last in stress and fourth from the bottom in work environment helps to lower its overall ranking.

That may lead you to ponder the meaning of “best” in the whole scenario . . . .

First, however, let’s end the suspense:  According to JobsRated, the very best job of all is “Mathematician,” while the very worst is “Lumberjack.”

Reader alert: The foregoing was not the hilarious part. This was the thought-provoking part. The funny bits (and the takeaways) are in the next post.


Thanks to Bob Bobster for the way cool surfboards.


Mobile web experience: could do better

People are increasingly using the internet on mobile devices and companies need to provide an equal user experience for visitors accessing their online information in different ways.

However, a recent Gomez/dotMobi report says that mobile web performance is getting worse (in the airline, banking and search industries at least): there’s an increasing gap between ‘traditional’ and mobile websites, with the former getting faster and the latter getting slower.

Are two websites better than one?

Many organisations (such as Vodafone) are producing two websites: a ‘traditional’ one for PCs and another version for mobile browsers. This is generating a lot of discussion in the industry (including among accessibility professionals) regarding the need for – and wisdom of – separate websites.

The arguments are wide ranging, from making the same content available to everyone (without forcing people with different browsers to use a different version of a website) to providing a good user experience across all devices.

It also raises issues of doubling maintenance efforts (and therefore costs) as well as ensuring content is consistent and up to date across both sites.

Mobile performance criteria

The Gomez/dotMobi study looked at the mobile web experiences provided by leading companies in the three sectors, across major wireless networks. It measured:

  • availability – making sure customers get the information they need, when they need it
  • response time – how quickly visitors can access content and perform tasks
  • consistency – consistent user experiences, no matter where they are
  • discoverability – how easily customers can find a mobile site from various URLs
  • readiness – making sure the mobile website renders as intended on popular devices

American Airlines, Bank of America and Amazon ranked highest among the selected companies in their respective sectors (Google wasn’t included because its mobile web application “did not meet the technical requirements for benchmark participation”).

What are the roots of the problem?

Gomez says that despite consumers’ high expectations for mobile web experiences, quality experiences continue to be a challenge for many businesses. The company says that this should be a concern for both brand managers and technical teams.

I’d be interested to know what the study team thought were the main causes of these performance issues: bloated code, poor navigation and content that’s not fit for purpose, for example? Of course, this is common to all types of websites; not just mobile ones.

The majority of these issues could begin to be addressed by following standards and accessibility guidelines. Sites that do often perform better, make maintenance simpler and decrease related costs. In addition, effective use of CSS can also avoid the need for separate websites for different devices.

I’d be curious to know how some of the other corporate sectors perform, those that aren’t as consumer facing as the three chosen for this study. If anybody’s aware of any reports, let us know.

Further reading