Direct and Indirect

MazeWi-Fi Planet, part of the Jupiter Media keiretsu, reports on a Jupiter Research study that claims municipal Wi-Fi (wireless) costs about US$150,000 per square mile over 5 years, and wouldn’t break even even if it charged users $25/month.

But .. not everything gets built to make money. Freeways are an example. They are considered enabling infrastructure. A municipality’s self-interest is improving the “way of life” for its citizens, and having access to services such as wi-fi certainly do that – first as a unique offering, later (as more cities offer it) as a defensive or “me too” offering. But they also build wi-fi to attract people with laptops, on the assumption that they have money to spend in the area. Maybe not every time they open their laptop. But eventually they learn about local restaurants, notice there’s a playhouse or theater, etc. Maybe with the character of the area changes subtly, attracting people to live there. Tax revenues increase.

If everything was always cut along profit & loss lines, there’d be no instant messenger services as we know them today. But Yahoo!, MSN and AOL consider IM a draw, a gateway if you will, into other services that do make money. Producing and maintaining an accurate multi-channel contribution model is tough .. it’s one of the things that SDS does today, and as you can imagine, plenty of business units have strong opinions on how much they should be credited for their contribution. So yeah, there’s a cost involved to build out infrastructure, and it’s worthwhile knowing what the cost is. But there’s more to infrastructure than just the direct cost.

Direct and Indirect

In The Dark

http://www.flickr.com/photos/suckamc/18101888/Harte-Hanks surveyed 1,000 companies and found that 71% of them want to monitor their web site for problems, but only 34% do. Also, 71% want tools to find the root of problem, but only 21% have them.

The survey was commissioned by Symphoniq, a provider of monitoring tools, who additionally note that more than 3/4 of the time, IT departments find out there’s a web site problem from users calling the help desk.

In The Dark

92466 (I Got Your Number)

Y! search blog talks about a new way to access Y! search by SMS. Yeah yeah. But wait, there’s some cool stuff here. First, no dorking around putting your phone in Internet browser mode, just send an SMS to 92466 (YAHOO). Even better: there are shortcuts (e.g. “d” for dictionary definitions) for when you’re deep in discussion with somebody about the usage of the words “indefinable” vs. “undefinable”. And it’s smart enough to reply with dumb text or rich content (e.g. maps) links, depending on your phone.

Frankly just typing “movies 94089” would be enough to meet a common need I seem to have. I pay 10c for sending an SMS message, but $1 or something to call 411. And don’t get me started with mobile web – I’m still on a prehistoric cell phone (which people like to point out any time I use it).

92466 (I Got Your Number)

Writing Press Releases is Hard

Lost Robot
I probably read (OK, scan) a couple dozen press releases every morning, in the industries (or keywords) that are of interest to me. If you’ve done much of that, you tend to get jaded pretty fast, with organizations announcing essentially nothing, or obviously piggybacking on other big names in the hope that they’ll get some coverage. It sometimes works.

But this morning I laughed when I read this lead:

July 6, 2005 — (organization) has taken a step in the right direction (by adding a feature) …

I don’t mean to poke fun – it appears to be a Good Thing for their customers, and may get them more customers. But wow, doesn’t this illustrate how hard it is to write compelling copy? A step in the right direction? I get images of an organization lost in cyberspace.

Writing Press Releases is Hard

Satisfying Customers

ForeSee and FGI Research produced an insightful report called the Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index (pdf is available here). It looked at the top 40 eCommerce sites and used the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to scientifically measure (1.6 million users) how satisfied each retailer’s customers are. Here are the top dozen:

Website Score
Netflix.com 85
Amazon.com 84
QVC.com 84
Newegg.com 82
LLBean.com 82
OldNavy.com 81
TigerDirect.com 81
Apple.com 80
Avon.com 80
BN.com 80
Williams-Sonoma.com 80
HarryandDavid.com 80

They had some great takeaways, like

Don’t waste time and money driving people to your website if you haven’t maximized the browser experience.

Netflix Amazon

Netflix and Amazon have both been a couple of those “no brainer” destinations for a while now — known for their customer-friendly site and features, as well as innovative approaches to customer satisfaction. So it’s not surprising to see them at the top of the list.

What might surprise you is that Netflix’ original product manager of customer experience — who’s quite passionate about retailing and user experience, and scientifically proven (!) to be great at it — is available. Interested?

Satisfying Customers

Hooked on Banking

Fish hooks - Dan Jaeger - http://sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=view&id=327710
According to Gartner’s June 23 press release discussing their phishing report:

Approximately 77 percent of online Americans shopped online in the 12 months ended in May 2005, according to Gartner. An estimated 73 percent of respondents regularly logged on to banking accounts and 63 percent paid bills online.

Amazing stats, eh? Much higher than I’d have thought. I’ll assume that “online Americans” really means “online American adults” as I can’t imagine 73% of 10-year olds checking their banking accounts. Then again, kids are pretty up on things…

Hooked on Banking