Real Valley Stories: Search Marketing With the Open Directory Project

Editor’s Note: Part 12 in an irregular series of stories from my many years in Silicon Valley. Part 11 talked about the time I got called into HR's office to meet with lawyers over industrial espionage. This time, a story involving gray hat search engine marketing in the early days of the Web.

DMOZ is now closed. 

Believe it or not, before the world of automated spiders that crawled the entire Web and ranked the results for your searches, much of the way we found content on the Internet was thanks to manual updates from an invisible army of directory editors. Yahoo! defined the initial dot-com era, with its hierarchical oracle making or breaking traffic downstream, as sites were organized and shuffled into categories by unseen text tweakers, much like the editors of Wikipedia try and keep its tens of millions of article pages up to date, with a seemingly fluid mass of edits to keep the live encyclopedia current.

But Yahoo! wasn't the only Web directory. Rich Skrenta and others, also behind Web 2.0 efforts Topix and Blekko, introduced the Open Directory Project, referred to as DMOZ, for it was hosted on the directory subdomain of the Mozilla.org site, with an objective of harnessing contributions from around the world (like Wikipedia), to build a directory, similar to Yahoo!, that could plug into any site that wanted to host one. In a time when many sites were seeking Internet traffic and riches by acting as the front page for the Web, attaching the open directory project to your portal could give you an edge and not require you to bring on a ton of staff.

As with Yahoo!'s directory, a company's inclusion in the DMOZ directory could act as a binary gate as to whether or not potential users would find you. In 1999, working as a Web marketing manager for a Web startup that offered internet faxing and conference calls, I found myself irked to see that our services were not included in DMOZ. Making things worse, the categories I would expect to see us listed in seemed slapped together and without an official owner. Given my understanding of the space and knowing our many competitors, I registered an account and requested to moderate the relevant category.

The DMOZ Internet Fax Listings from 1999 (via Archive.org)

Not too long afterward, I was given the option to update the category, including those of our competitors. As it was nearly two decades ago, I honestly don't remember if I used my company email or a Yahoo! email or equivalent, but I didn't try and disguise where I worked. My application had gotten through.

FaxCube from the year 2000.

When I did log in, I found the content in a state of abandonment. There wasn't much you could do with a site's listing. Give it a title, a link, and a short description, literally about a dozen words. It was fairly impossible to differentiate services from one another, especially in a commoditized space where the core function was pretty straight forward. But I cleaned up the descriptions for all the entries, including our competitors, to accurately display their offerings. Some offered email to fax services, while others offered the reverse. Some offered broadcast faxing. Some required a proprietary fax viewer, and others were completely Web based. That kind of thing.

When content was edited in DMOZ, edits would later propagate downstream. Sure enough, my colleagues noticed a spike in Web traffic to our main sites, with referrers coming from all the places DMOZ was set up. For no cost, I had a clear impact in our customer acquisition funnel, and maintaining the DMOZ became part of my ongoing work.

Later, DMOZ added the option to highlight two entries in the group, which were solely up to the moderator. This, of course, gave me the option to expand from a gray area, to clearly going over the line into promotion. It went without saying I thought our service was the best, and highlighted it at the top. I also chose to highlight a partner site (the Netscape Fax Center) that was white labeling our service, essentially the 1 and 1A positions.

This got even better when we soon realized DMOZ was fueling search results for AOL. The more people who searched for Internet Faxing on AOL, the better we were to see results.

DMOZ listings for Internet Telephony in early 2000. (Via Archive.org)

In early 2000, we introduced a new Web based conference call and meeting product. Addicted to the free traffic from DMOZ, my team asked me to see if I could get our content similarly included on whatever the equivalent was for Internet conferencing. I poked around, and, again, applied to be an editor for the Internet Telephony page. It wasn't a perfect fit, but it was pretty good.

Again, I got approved, and again, I added our sites, and again, I promoted our main site and a partner site to be included as the pair at the top of results. Again, we started to get plenty of Web traffic from DMOZ and its downstream partners, accounting for more than double digit percentage of our traffic to both properties. But this time, it wouldn't last long. Maybe it was the clear marketing copy promoting both services, but one day, I logged in and saw our service demoted to the standard results, with another in its place. I reversed the change, and it wasn't too long until there was a debate upstream as to whether these listings were in good faith.

PhoneCube, in all its glory, from 2000.

Not too long afterward, my moderation rights had been removed from both sections. I'd essentially been fired from my side job of gray hat SEO, long before most of us knew what that meant. And yes, my engineering peers lamented the loss of traffic, as our more organic listings, on AOL search and elsewhere, didn't carry as much weight, once we became one of the fold.

Had I just stayed content to include our services in the listings, or even just to stay a moderator of the less exciting Internet faxing space, it's possible I could have been editing text descriptions for our sites and our competitors indefinitely. But pushing our own products and our partner sites turned out too good to be true. The "Wild West" Internet traffic rush didn't last forever, and, as it turns out, neither did our products. I was laid off after we couldn't get a funding round closed at the beginning of 2001, and a few months later, the company was parceled off to become part of Oracle (see 2006 post). Some of my colleagues still work there nearly two decades later. As for DMOZ, it too shut down a few years ago, a relic in the world of Google and Facebook.

Disclosures: This whole post is a disclosure! I worked at 3Cube during this time. I work at Google now, a perceived competitor to whatever Yahoo! and AOL call themselves now. And as I work on Google Analytics, this is not a post about SEO to all you SEO/SEM folks.

Having a Clear Call to Action Can Drive Real Results

As a member of the Google Analytics team, I regularly field questions at events or on our social channels about how online and offline activity can drive results, and what metrics have value. As no two businesses are the same, it's critical to determine the status of your company and find if your activity can bring impact to results that matter, be they clicks, leads, registrations, opportunities or real revenue. When the goals are determined, and you have stakeholder buyin, then you can start your work. (See: Measure What Matters Most)

Among the most common questions I see are those around driving visitors to a specific call to action. Most websites have many different routes for visitors to take, and the many choices can be overwhelming. But in some other cases, only one outcome is required, and all efforts should be taken to get the user there.

Nearly 15 years ago, I held a role with the inconspicuous title of eMarketing Manager at a company whose product line was in stealth mode. As we approached the launch date, our small marketing team debated how we were going to handle the first version of our website, and just what our calls to action were going to be.

Most Sites Have Many Calls to Action, Which Distracts Visitors

We knew our product would have a long sales cycle of more than six months, and the average sales price would be north of a hundred thousand dollars per unit. We didn't yet have any customer success stories, and our target markets were an educated guess, based on how we thought the product would perform, and colleagues' experience selling competitive products. We didn't even really have photos of the hardware we expected to sell, as that too was a work in progress.

But what we did have was a launch date, to coincide with the announcement of our product and corresponding news coverage. We had to ship a site with our new company name, and it had to give just enough information to keep people interested, even if we couldn't deliver all the details.

The BlueArc product page in February of 2001 (via Archive.org)

After some debate, we decided to make the website a massive demand generation tool, with every page driving us to a single call to action: Sign up for our newsletter. Every page had a button on the sidebar encouraging new signups, and where data was scarce, we had links to the newsletter. Even before we'd sent out a single issue, we had thousands of registered emails, ready to be updated.

Our Solution: A Single Call to Action from All Pages

Our monthly newsletter, which shipped with my name as the sender for more than eight years, gave us a consistent customer database to talk to for years, and was responsible, in the long run, for prospects, ongoing communication to soft leads, and updating the press and analysts.

This result was from keeping our mission simple. Instead of trying to dazzle visitors with things to download, an array of phone numbers to call, or videos to watch, we just took the casual visitor coming from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and gave them the chance to hear from us again, so that when our message was ready for them, we would have that channel in place.

When you know what to measure, driving toward a goal becomes easier. And if you don't, not only are you confused, but so are your users. This is a lesson I learned firsthand a decade and a half ago.

Disclosures: I work at Google on Google Analytics, and worked at BlueArc from 2001-2009.

I Heartily Endorse This Event Or Product

Everyone's a cynic. Or at least it can often seem that way, when the concept of 'balanced' reporting means to find the gray cloud for every silver lining, giving equal weight to unequal issues or looking for ulterior motives from well intended people who genuinely find value from products, groups or communities.

Many years ago, I made a decision to use my blog for good and not evil, per se. I recognized there was little value in tearing things down, and that my readers and I would benefit more from a series of highlights than a trolling muckery through half-finished products and half baked business models. (See: Does Negativity Deliver Credibility? If So, That's Nuts.) There are enough good companies and good products that you can showcase the very best - something I've gotten even tighter at since reducing my regular posts here to something less frequent.

Krusty's Endorsement: Not Always Genuine

But when I do find something I really enjoy, and use regularly, I want to tell you about it, and that position is a genuine one. I want you to see the same benefits I do, and give the company or service more users, improving their chance at success, and extending the network effect, which often brings me value. As +Mark Hopkins said back in 2008, regarding my consistency: "Forget product evangelist. When he likes something, he's a one man crusade."

This weekend's Twitter discussion about sponsored posts.

In a world where many people are using their streams to promote self interests, be it their companies, their stock investments, or pimping their latest book, I'm hyper aware of being trusted. My posts aren't sponsored. So this weekend, after highlighting MightyText, a personal favorite app I helped unveil and have since covered regularly, one Twitter user snarkily suggested the update was an ad, or sponsored. And that's annoying. With Twitter being at times overrun by self-promoters and shillers, it's no good to be lumped in with the dreck.

I use MightyText daily because it's an exceptionally fast way to text from my computer or tablet. I switched to Android more than four years ago because I was very happy with the product's direction and the wealth of choices available compared to iOS, let alone Blackberry or Palm. My preferring one over the other doesn't mean that your choices are bad or that I wish ill on anyone who has selected an alternative. It's just what I prefer, and I'm more than eager to tell you why.

If you're pushing products you don't actually care for, you're in danger of losing the trust earned with those in your community. Sonos and Spotify made sense to me right away. ChromeOS was alluring and is now my go to OS all the time. I've been a happy eTrade user for 15 years. Sunrun and Rachio are saving me money and helping the environment at the same time. The list of brands I've interacted with that I can point you to are many. But it's not because I have hollow self interest. If I did, you could wait to see my disclosures. That's what they're for.

Disclosures: I work at Google, which in some ways competes with Sonos in hardware, Spotify in software and MightyText for messaging. But I still love those products. And Sunrun has a great referral program. But that's not the point.

Either you are in Engineering, or you are in Sales.

At BlueArc, our longtime CEO and executive chairman Gianluca Rattazzi had a saying which he often weaved into his presentations at our company all-hands meetings. "Either you are in engineering, or you are in sales."

The idea was to have employees from all corners of the company take ownership of our shared revenue goals, or think about what each of us could do, whether we were in Marketing, HR, Finance or Support, to encourage us to meet our number. Even if we weren't dialing for dollars or meeting with customers, if we weren't the people actually building the product ourselves, we had to think like salespeople. It also was aimed to reduce conflict between teams, as we wouldn't shake our heads at the antics of account managers, or point fingers when one territory or account proved harder than expected.

Meanwhile, engineers have to keep being focused on what they do best, which is design and deliver incredible products. Most engineers, as Dilbert often points out, make terrible sales people. They would likely rush to tell you the product's latest flaw or highlight the bug list of the week instead of working to find a way to make the current offering fit your needs - which would delay or block the sales cycle.

As I see it, product managers are the buffer between engineers and marketing. Marketing is the buffer between product management and the real world (aka the customers and press). Between those two hops, code turns into features, and features turn into benefits. If lucky, those benefits can turn into revenue, and as most companies tell you, revenue solves all problems.

Which brings us back to the split - either you are in engineering, or you are in sales. Even if you don't carry a quota-bearing number, as an employee of a company, you take some amount of pride from the work delivered there. When the company is having a hard time, you have a hard time. When the company is preparing a new product, you are probably eager to try that product, and tell the world about it.

At Google, as I mentioned last November, that process includes early access and beta testing, which we call dogfooding. Many of us are lucky enough to get early access to things like +Google Glass or the Chromebook Pixel. We are more likely to be using a Nexus 5, Nexus 7 or Moto X than the average +Android user, and have a more-encompassing understanding of the company's vision and products than those outside the company.

As an early adopter and technology enthusiast, promoting products I like is second nature. I've been touting ChromeOS for years. I switched to Android well before picking up a Google badge. I always tell people when products I like are fantastic. And that extends to visionary new ideas like Google Glass. I've recently seen some memes on various tech blogs about a perceived dropoff in use by Google employees of this early version of the product - saying the product should be so fantastic that people clamor to use it, and trying to read the tea leaves into saying the product won't succeed - a curious proposition considering it hasn't even launched yet beyond a small circle of Glass Explorers.

My Kids, Racing #throughglass

Without diving too deep into those weeds, I can say I do use it, and I find having a first-person view for recording video and taking photos incredibly valuable. I get instant notifications of email and texts and can respond by voice, hands-free. And wherever I go while wearing Glass, the questions are from excited people who are delighted to see how simple it is to use, not to mention how it non-intrusively lets me continue a conversation, while making eye contact, with the small viewer being out of the way. I take Glass with me on walks to the park with my kids. I took Glass with me to the +San Francisco Zoo on Monday. It becomes another lightweight way to capture the experience.

A View of My Wife and Twins #throughglass

If you're inclined to be skeptical, and that sounds like sales, that brings us back to the original thought - as an employee of a company that makes things, you represent the product. You can help others see how a product can be used, and if you're spotted using the competitor's phone or OS, or you prefer a competitive service or platform, people see that. That's part of why Steve Ballmer's kids weren't even allowed to have iPods and Bill Gates' kids used MSN search instead of Google. Those kids didn't work for Microsoft, but by extension, it would be a fairly bad case study to see them using competitive products.

The good news is I don't believe I'm at a place where I'm asked to use low-quality products like the Zune and MSN Search. It's easy to get excited about products that are making it easier to get information and share updates more quickly, or to get to my data no matter where I am, from any device. I can't go back twenty years and become an engineer, taking all the required computer science courses needed to be the true alpha geek, but I know I can do my part to improve the product from the inside, and tell the world about it on the outside. Think about yourself in your role. If you're not in engineering, aren't you in sales?

Disclosures: I work for Google, obviously. I often get to dogfood our products, like Glass, the Chromebook Pixel and others, free of charge. I paid retail price for my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7, and prefer Android to alternatives. If I forgot a disclosure, I should disclose that too.

Enthusiasts & Evangelists: Pushing Product, Begging for Features

There's a fine line separating an enthusiastic user from that of an evangelist, even if the two terms are often thrown out there as equals. For as excited as a user may be about consuming your product or your ideas, it takes an extra level of effort - working as a partner, testing early versions of products, and seeing where a product is headed to be truly considered an evangelist. An enthusiast is typically on the receiving end, a consumer of the benefits, while the evangelist not only takes in the benefit of your work, but can help accelerate it.

Evangelists are often early adopters of your product, who have been converted to your story and ideas, and are willing to advocate on your behalf. Some of the top consumer-facing companies have turned to evangelists in house, and their fingerprints are all over the successful growth of their customer base, and regularity by which their products are seen in the press, while others rely on end-user evanglists to bring the story to new communities.

Enthusiasts, while excited about your product, are likely to be found breathlessly awaiting morsels of information, be they rumor or news. They may have their fingers on the buy button and refresh your product pages as they get ready to buy, and make cash available. They debate your benefits and beg for feature enhancements, but if their demands aren't met, they'll just as soon as wait for the next one, debate amongst their peers where you went wrong, and suggest why it just might be high time to switch to a competitor. Enthusiasts are never employees of the company, though they may be close to the teams, be courted in user groups and given early access to items to provide beta stage feedback.

Some of the Best Evangelists I Know

The most well known evangelist in Silicon Valley lore is very likely +Guy Kawasaki, who while at Apple in the early Mac days, fought to bring the Macintosh story to developers, schools and customers everywhere. Guy's moved on to promote other products, including +Motorola Mobility, but his Apple legacy remains intact. More recently, the work done by Shak Khan for Spotify and +Thomas Meyer of Sonos put both those products on the map for me. In both cases, Shak and Thomas delivered a 1:1 relationship with me as an early adopter, providing access to products, trading feedback on improvements, and finding ways to get their services in the hands of new users.

The ideal scenario is one telling many who tell more.

The best evangelists can help to convert enthusiasts into evangelists. As discussed in depth as the first stage of early adopter behavior, the enthusiast can graduate from being a consumer of your work, and instead works as an unpaid advocate for your story and your ideas - accelerating the network effect. As the 1:1 relationship at the initial touchpoint cannot scale past several dozen or even hundreds of top-tier influencers, one must hope that they evangelize on your behalf why your product is better, why you can be trusted to keep coming up with exciting new innovations, or, if you're behind in a certain area, why you can be counted on to bridge those gaps.

Seeing Potential Instead of Problems

An evangelist can believe strongly in a direction for a product and buy in early - in the same way as an investor can see potential a company and buy its stock. In 2010, my move to Android from iPhone was done at a time when the case could pretty easily be made that iOS' user experience was better and the list of applications available was longer. The debate as to which installed base was larger was also up for question. But I could see the trajectory, and, as I was later proven correct, the applications caught up, the user growth accelerated, and in the minds of many, the user experience is equal, or at least arguable. Even from a point of perceived weakness, I believed strongly that their choices as a platform were right.

The same could be said for Spotify's early trial back in 2009. While iTunes was the big fish in the pond, Spotify changed the game for me almost overnight - and every online music service has followed their model, even if the product hadn't yet officially shipped in the US, and there were occ

Crossing the chasm from enthusiast to evangelist is a lot like moving from a hobby to a religion. It's one thing to dabble, and quite another to commit. It's no surprise then, that evangelists are most commonly associated with religious institutions and converting people to the one true way.

Like a good religious person, one publicly glosses over the challenging parts, promising only purity and bliss. For example, in a 2007 post I wrote for +GigaOM, I highlighted "five lesser-known tips for being an Apple fanboy". The number one rule? "Never admit fault with Apple around non-Mac people." Giving the perceived opposition a weapon to use against you was never a good idea. It was better to suffer in silence, or quietly find a peer to help you with your issue than to growse publicly. The same goes for the converted evangelist. It is better to report product issues back to the company or their rep, or a fellow user than to complain publicly. Obviously enthusiasts have no such shackles - as they're all too eager to break apart your product and tell the world where you've done wrong.

My father raised me to believe that bad news travels much more quickly than good news. A person with a bad experience will tell seven people, and a person with a good experience will tell three. That requires a higher percentage of positive interactions, and to make this success repeatable. But while an enthusiast will share the good news and the bad news at equal volume, an evangelist will simply amplify the good news, and constantly work in the background to solve the bad stories. It's not blindness, but discretion.

Especially in the fickle world of consumer marketing and outreach, you need to find evangelists, who will find you enthusiasts. If your product can't convert people to share your story, your story probably isn't that good. Your service has to be that much better that an early adopter or evangelist will take that bet and invest their time and effort to tell your story - like I did with FriendFeed and Google Reader years ago, later Spotify and Sonos, and now with great stories like ChromeOS - which I strongly believe presents the platform of the future. People like Shak and Guy and Thomas are rarities, but they can be the accelerant that moves your flame to an inferno.

Usual Disclosures: I work at Google. Google is the proud owner of Android and ChromeOS, of course. We also make Google Play Music All Access, an assumed competitor to Spotify. Any bias is my own and I'm not speaking on behalf of Google at the moment.

Balancing Act: Building for Both Future and Current Users

As companies mature and gain an installed user base, it can become easy to continue forward with incremental and iterative updates that bring features that improve customer satisfaction, but much more challenging to step outside the comfort zone and try something new. Usually, with rare exceptions, to create a new idea and marketplace, it takes new people and a new company with a new goal.

In Silicon Valley, it's more accepted that you will challenge the status quo and take a higher level of risk. Companies' ability to innovate is often measured by how much they spend on research and development, but new products that haven't yet debuted often take attention away from users on the products that are bringing in revenue today. How you manage this balancing act of preparing for a future, while managing the present, can have dramatic impact on your quarterly earnings sheet, and how you're perceived by your customer base.

One of the most well-known quotes bandied about in front offices comes from sports legend Wayne Gretzky, who said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been," which can be boiled down to preparing your company and product line for future years, not for what's already happened. Companies like Google (where I work), Apple, Tesla and others are well known for creating new product lines for future customers and helping convince new audiences that their inventions will have an impact on their lives.

But to create new services best categorized as potential can come as risk if you take your eye off the ball and discard existing customers and their interests. I remember having a discussion with Apple's Ellen Hancock way back in 1997, when she was speaking at Berkeley's Macintosh Users' Group (BMUG). To hear her story, Apple, deep in a mess of trouble at that time, had big plans to revamp their operating system to a next-generation OS called Copland, but hadn't planned any updates to their existing product for more than a year.

Her quote, from my story in the Daily Cal that day: "I said, 'What do we have planned between July 1996 and December 1997?' and they said, 'Nothing...' I said, 'I think that's strange -- we have 25 million users; don't you think they want anything?'"

Somehow, in the excitement over Copland, Apple had asked their 25 million user installed base to wait around and be patient for them to get their act together. Hancock, who no doubt painted her role as a glowing benefactor, pushed the company to make improvements to the aging Mac OS in parallel, bringing value to that installed base, while the company continued efforts on the future product that never did quite make it out the door. (Postscript: Hancock was later demoted by Apple CEO Gil Amelio and had run-ins with Steve Jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal) 

In my own career, I've seen this push/pull relationship between future product lines and enhancements to existing lines rear up regularly.

In my eight years working in Marketing at BlueArc, a network storage provider, from 2001-09, I often found we would put practically all our engineering resources on one product line instead of another, instead of assigning some product leads to one task and a second group to the other. We would go "all in" on the high end product, launch it, and then turn around and go full bore on the low end product, and then repeat. There was no balance at all - the result of having a scarcity of people available and trying to compete with market heavyweights with significant resources.

In the meantime, while working on the successor to the current generation of hardware, our existing users practically served to annoy us with their problems which we hoped to eliminate once the new new thing came out. There always came a point in the support chain when we would find them an upgrade path to the next generation - if simply to alleviate the problems with the existing one.

Even earlier, when I was at 3Cube from 1999-2001, we had two product lines. One was a Web faxing service that wasn't sexy, but brought in practically all our revenue, especially from broadcast faxing customers. The second was a conference call and early stage Web meeting service. As I highlighted way back in 2006, our meeting platform was the first volley into building an online office suite called OfficeCube. Our small engineering resources were all focused on this future product - to promote the next stage in our growth, even while our existing customers saw innovation in our core service stall. I remember aggressive and frustrating discussions from our business development and sales lead who begged for us to do something to promote the product we were getting our money from, going so far to call our future suite vaporware - which eventually turned out correct.

For smaller companies, especially startups, where revenue has not materialized, a change in course to a future product is well-known as a pivot. It's easier to pivot when you're not walking away from an installed base and needing to have revenue each quarter than it is to tell an established company to change course. Apple's pivot from PC maker to lifestyle device maker took years and incredible effort - and their success is so well-known in part because it's so challenging. Other companies previously well-known for their hardware and software leadership turn, like product managers going the VC route, in companies that live off service and consulting revenue instead.

The topic of branding and marketing is a long one, with libraries full of books on what defines a company's personality and culture. When I see brand extensions from companies I know, I'm always curious what they're trying -- if this new product is a move to evolve their story, a grab at a growing market, a desire for an increased balance sheet, or if they can solve an issue for customers that nobody else can. When you start to tell your own customers that you represent something new now, and that what they've known you as and expected from you is changing, you had better know you're making the right move, and not abandoning what's concrete for something grounded mostly in potential.

Usual Disclosures: I work at Google, which is in a variety of businesses. This isn't intended as a commentary on any of those projects. I don't currently own any stock in Apple or Tesla, but have before and might again if the price is right.

Devoxx France Video: Early Adopters, Press and Social Media

Last month, I had the opportunity to travel to Paris, France and speak at Devoxx 2013, with a focus of helping startups raise their "visibility seed round". Often, companies focus on their product, and yes, to raise money - but there's a missing piece, gaining the first customers and first press. Before stepping on to the stage, I sat down with fellow Googler +Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine to talk about mistakes company often make in reaching out to first users and press, and how they can leverage social media.

We also talk a bit about Google Developers Live (+GDL), the program I manage, helping Googlers interact with developers directly, worldwide. Hope you take a look and find this quick video valuable.

Adam Singer of Future Buzz Going Google

Since 2008, when I first ran into Adam Singer (author of the Future Buzz) online, via his blog and other social circles, I have been trying to find a way for him and I to work together. I was immediately impressed with his analysis of search engine optimization (SEO), digital media, public relations and finding real value in social activity all of us, as individuals or brands, were doing.

Every time my partners and I at Paladin (from 2009 to 2011) would talk about expanding, and I would draw up a future organizational chart, I would write Adam's initials on the board, because from our interactions, I knew he bridged the gap between social media worship and real analytics-driven work. But I couldn't lure Adam all the way from Minnesota to join us and eventually my own efforts changed. But as Adam joined us in the Bay Area just over a year ago, the stage was set to bring him to wherever I was headed next. Today, I am excited to announce that Adam is joining Google in a product marketing role in what I think is a perfect spot for him - Google Analytics. So my dream of working together (even if not in the same group) is finally realized.

Longer-term readers of the blog may remember I opened up for guest posts for an extended period, and of course, Adam's work was highlighted. He wrote fun posts like Social Media Topics That Have Jumped The Shark and Face It: Facebook Needs A Facelift, and I've always enjoyed his regular posting on The Future Buzz. As someone who has worked multiple angles on the media front, from pitching stories in the world of PR, to being pitched, to working on a highly-watched product that has media looking for regular news, seeing someone like Adam who understands the entire process and works toward metrics is exceptional.

So this is a huge day for Adam and a cool day for me too. Pretty exciting. And yes, I referred Adam in to Google. The company's hiring some of the best people, and I look forward to bringing some of the best of you in to do incredible stuff. Check out http://www.google.com/jobs and let's talk if you want the next "joining Google" post to be about you.

Real Valley Stories: The Unfinished Booth

Editor's Note: Part 6 in an irregular series of stories from my 13 years in Silicon Valley. Part 5 talked about the tradeoffs of speed, quality and budgeting. This time, a would-be trade show nightmare.

For the first few years in my Marketing career, I spent virtually all my time behind the desk. Relationships were largely through e-mail or by phone, or vendors could come to our office for the occasional pitch, onsite meeting, or creative review. At one point, I must have not left California for as much as a decade, be it for vacation, trade show, or any other reason. That all changed in 2004, when with the sudden departure of a colleague who had to date held the role of events manager, the luck of running the entire experience fell to me - from pre-show promotion to materials transport, handling and setup to lead collection and pipeline tracking.

That summer posed the first real challenge with the arrival of the Siggraph trade show in Los Angeles. Our company, well before I had taken over the role, had selected an exhibit space of 400 square feet, with a standard 20 foot by 20 foot configuration. We had customized our booth after buying it from a company that had once seen better days. The previous events manager had kept the procedures around trade show planning an undocumented secret, so I set out weeks in advance to make sure we booked and shipped everything to Southern California in time for the important show.

A month or so ahead of Siggraph, the operations manager and I visited the warehouse to see the booth materials for ourselves. But the boxes containing the booth and its pieces were stacked high above us. Between us both, we selected the boxes we were sure contained all the walls, poles and signage needed, and were good to go - all without demanding the warehouse owners took them down by forklift to be further examined. As far as we knew, that was true. But come the day before show start, I quickly learned different.

As most trade show veterans know, the day (or multiple days) before an event starts, event planners and experienced union workers band together to assemble trade show booths, from unrolling carpeting and laying electrical, to propping up signage and setting up the welcome area. This time, as the crew came to get started on my booth, they examined the instructions, glanced at the boxes we had brought, and quickly determined it wasn't all there. They gestured to me, we looked two or three more times, and it was obvious we had basically shipped half a booth, and the rest of the booth was in boxes hundreds of miles north, in the Bay Area.

Not a good thing, considering securing space at the trade show was tens of thousands of dollars, and revenue from the show should be much higher. So I called another colleague back at headquarters, who zipped back to the warehouse to find the missing pieces, and had them put on a truck immediately, to begin driving south toward Los Angeles. The boxes, in time, would find us, and somehow we would get it done. So the union team and I caught up and decided they would go work on other booths until our equipment came.

The morning turned to afternoon. Afternoon turned to evening. No good news. The only update was from the driver of the truck, who called to say he had hit traffic from an accident on I-5, which would make him hours later. The union team, meanwhile, called me, and said they had completed all other work, and that we were now on the clock, with or without our booth. I couldn't disagree.

Around 11 p.m. the night before the show, with doors opening at 8 the following morning, the truck containing the missing boxes with our missing pieces arrived at the convention center. Our small team of union workers and I worked around since-locked doors and the array of quietly finished booths to get started. They were now on overtime pay, obviously, and probably on double overtime.

As the booth started to take shape, around 1 a.m. there was more discussion and commotion and clear confusion among the team - as they couldn't find the largest piece of the entire booth, a vertical pole which supported a top branding sign and the right wing of the booth itself. It was nowhere to be found. At this point, I just said to continue and do all they could. By 2 a.m., approaching 2:30, the booth looked like a booth, only without our brand name at the top. Instead, it just said "Network Storage", which confused attendees to no end in the days ahead.

Thanking each of the workers, and giving them each an equal share of all the cash I had personally pulled out of my own money from the ATM, I considered the night done, and wrapped up just five hours before we were supposed to open. One of the men, not wanting me to walk back to my hotel that late at night, gave me a lift home.

The following morning, I was at our booth in uniform ready to greet customers, to the odd stares of those neighboring booths who had finished their setup days with our area being a blank square of carpet. More than one person came by to ask what had happened as our booth had seriously popped up overnight. Later that afternoon, a man came by and interrupted me saying that he had found the missing long pole that belonged with our booth, in the back of his truck, wrapped in carpeting, and that in all the haste to get down the state, and to unload, he had overlooked it. The following question was, "Do you want to put the rest of the booth up overnight tonight?"

I thought about it for a brief second, and said no. One night was enough. Somehow, we finished the event in fair shape, though it was not perfect, and somehow, I didn't see any ill effects of the incident in my job. But it was something I didn't want to experience again - a perfect example of needing to be fully prepared and adequately making sure that no one person, especially one eager to leave the company, has all the information you need to succeed. And that's a real story.

Quora Opens Doors to Self Promoters, Bias and Marketeers

Quora's differentiation from more established but less respected question and answer forums has typically centered around the quality of the discussions and those participating. It's not too infrequent that one finds the perfect person situated to answer a question pops up in Quora to take on challenging queries, from how companies started, to strategy and history. But as the site's grown in visibility, attracting more a wider swatch of early adopters, including social media marketers, there has been something of a tug of war between those looking to keep the site pristine, lacking self-promotion, and those who are hoping to leverage the site as yet another outlet for branding and positioning.

On Thursday, Quora's Marc Bodnick, famous for leaving Elevation Partners, where he is a cofounder, to focus on the site after gaining addiction as a user, posted that users are "encouraged to contribute helpful content about topics where they have relevant personal experience", which deviated from one original mission of the site to prohibit content that was considered "primarily self-promotional." As he put it, the old rules were too restrictive, that the quality of the answer trumps the objective the answerer may have had for posting, and that users with direct knowledge are invited to contribute. The ban on self-promotion could have potentially led those with direct knowledge, but continued vested interest, to avoid participating.

Marc Bodnick's Announcement of the Policy Change

While the floodgates are now open for any brand to insert a representative to start answering questions directly or tangentially related to their products, Bodnick reiterated that disclosure of affiliations (and therefore potential bias) was still required, such as whether you work for the company, are an investor, an school alumnus, etc.

While there is some debate about Quora's ability to cross the chasm to more mainstream users, it's clear there is significant potential in a high quality alternative to today's collaborative knowledge bases, without the relative anonymity and dryness of Wikipedia. Meanwhile, many people are extremely bullish on the company, given its objectives and its founding from well-respected early Facebookers, Charlie Cheever and Adam D'Angelo. See Wired: Does Quora Really Have All the Answers? for one particularly recent effusive take.

As Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all crossed the chasm from early adopter plaything to mainstream acceptance, brand advocates and marketers followed. Similarly, Foursquare has gained tie-ins with marketers and advertisers, while other recent tech hits like Groupon and Zynga have always been all about the money. With Quora becoming a magnet for high quality discussions, and the shackles being taken off self-promoters and marketers, there's a chance that one person's insight could be seen as another person's spam. The good news is that with Quora, the community's upvote and downvote capabilities might be able to keep the sleaziest of the gladhanders away and let the quality float to the top.

If you've represented a brand and to date, Quora's ban on self-promotion had you slinging your wares elsewhere, the game is now afoot.

Did You Know All Your Emails Were In One Basket?

Prior to this weekend, most of your thoughts around the word Epsilon were probably about Greek fraternities or toga parties, but headlines in the tech and security world over the last few days have us instead associating Epsilon with a company most of probably never heard of before - a massive email marketing company used by many top brands. A major security breach seems to have escorted customer email lists from respected companies many of us interact with every day, and with the names piling up, I have to wonder if we had any idea that this centralization of our relationships with companies was happening, or if we are all the unlucky benefactors of outsourcing gone wrong.

The fun started late Saturday when I first got an email from TiVo saying my email address and first name had been exposed due to unauthorized access to their email service provider.

Of course, if you know me, that's no big deal. Everybody and every spider in the world knows my main email addresses are louisgray@mac.com and louisgray@gmail.com. Tough finding that out and combining it with my mysterious first name. You know I don't have too many issues around sharing my cell phone number either - this being a key focal point of a CNN.com article on the "death of privacy" back in December.

The String of Notification Emails

Modern anti-spam measures from both Apple and Google prevent most garbage from missing my in box. For more insidious emails, that fraudulently pretend to be something they are not, which is made possible from this breach, I am wary enough not to do anything foolish.

But, as many others soon found, the first notification of a breach was followed by a second, a third, a fourth, maybe more. The next two days saw more apologetic emails following the breach, from Best Buy, Hilton Hotels and Chase Bank, to name a few. The issue reminds me a bit of the Gawker hack in December that forced people to change their passwords everywhere, myself included. So now what's exposed is not just my email address and first name, but that many companies passed the buck by putting their customer lists in the hands of a single third party who wasn't prepared for such a responsibility.

(Of course, this single third party shrugged it off as impacting a 2 percent subset of their clients)

In the 8+ years I managed our company newsletter and mailing list, from 2001 to 2009, we used a variety of partners, including Responsys and GotMarketing. Later, we put our data into Salesforce.com, and never once suffered such a breach. But in the last few years, companies have gained the ability to self-manage one's database and marketing tools, and do so independent of other companies. There's no great reason that a single third party's mistake should open up the vault to such a bonanza of brands. What this specific failure does is expose that the type of multiple verification systems and complexity expected from us as consumers isn't followed quite as well at the very companies whom we trust to watch over our personal data.

I don't have any problem with putting my email address out there. I don't mind sharing my data with TiVo and Best Buy. I shrug at Hilton and have to trust Chase, or we're toast. But I have to think we're lucky this time that the type of data accessed was so relatively harmless. People are worried that this will lead to phishing attacks and later successful breaches that get more impactful information, but for now, it seems we'll be more annoyed than ever. But think about whether you knew that all of these companies were putting your data in one basket to be raided by one intelligent hacker...

Does knowing that all these brands stuck your data in one place make you feel less safe or more safe? I think we've got to have an alternative, and self-hosting with self-managed security is looking a lot smarter these days.

In Defense of Marketing, Polish and Geek Translation

It is with pleasure I can say I never got an MBA and I didn't get a marketing degree. I never even took a marketing class, and when first told I should go into Marketing, I was concerned about having to go door to door to get customers. So don't throw me in a big pile of suit-wearing glad-handing shiny smiling hucksters trying to spin lead into gold.

But as someone who has a dozen years in Marketing roles in the Silicon Valley, I have been watching this weekend's skirmish about the value of Marketing (or lack thereof) for technology companies, spawned by Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, (who is a great blogger besides) with considerable interest. I know that we are in an industry that makes rockstars out of code jockeys, and who values warehouses and incubators full of entrepreneurial engineers who site side by side at long tables encumbered by little more than computer terminals and close access to shared cafeterias. But for every company that has managed to subsist primarily on word of mouth from customer to customer, growing without any marketing push, there are many more who would value greatly from the help, and others who actually do make marketing a key component of their efforts. Seeing the difference is obvious.

In Fred's first missive against Marketing, since followed on by two more posts, he stated simply, "I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them." He argued headcount dollars should be exclusively focused on product development and engineering, to encourage social hooks, leverage industry events, avoid outsourcing PR, deliver focused SEO and above all, build a great product. Despite the leading quote, which I disagree with, he makes some solid points which parallel my view as well. (His comments in the second post also outlined some of the shortcomings in the first post)

The issue is this. Many engineers have great ideas and are very bad at explaining these ideas. They may have smart ideas and can't get the point across to customers, partners, press, VCs, or any influential folks. Often, engineers are so heads-down in their code they don't adequately understand the competition and their strengths and weaknesses. They don't know what people are saying about their products or those of the competition and don't know the backgrounds of people making comments.

Marketing is not about jumping in to save a sucky product. God help those marketeers who have to work with sucky products. That cannot be fun. Marketing is about translating geeks' efforts for human beings, reducing sales cycles and translating intrigue into value.

Marketing is often called in to help analyze the product to determine its benefits, to collaborate on the feature roadmap, to influence the influencers, and make the many tweaks in the product and the way it is described to graduate it from a good product to an amazing one.

The most valuable technology company in the world today is Apple and they do incredible marketing in practically every respect in how their products are designed, executed, sold and discussed. Wilson's argument could match Apple's, saying their profit per customer is so high that they should spend more, but the company has achieved a cult-like status through delivering through traditional Marketing efforts a way to make you think something which is possibly marginally better than the competition is dramatically so and has no equal. Nike, Sony, BMW and many other household names deliver panache that enables them to drive higher profits and premiums by making equivalent seem extraordinary.

Silicon Valley (and its ecosystem, not geographically limited) seems tilted against marketing as a discipline now thanks to the high profile successes of a handful of companies that let the network effect drive them. Google's product leadership practically all have engineering backgrounds. Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare all relied on viral mechanisms to grow astronomically with relatively imperceptible marketing. Google famously avoided traditional advertising for most of its life. It's got geeky marketers often feeling like they are on the outside looking in, unable to make an impact at some of the industry's top startups. But have you ever seen the typical cofounder describe their product or give a presentation for any more than ten minutes? Have you seen a product manager sit down with an eager reporter asking more than softball questions, cringing at what they might say, or how their personal oddities could submarine the company's reputation? I have. Many times.

And besides, think of all the many products Google does have that should get a Marketing push that you've never heard of. Google Code? Web Elements? HotPot? Buzz? Sometimes I am tearing my hair out watching companies that should market this stuff sit relatively idle.

My first real marketing job came in 1999, when I was tasked with running a consumer Web company's Web site, writing product descriptions, FAQs, customer support interaction, press releases, etc. At a nine or ten person company, basically anything that wasn't code came my way, made extra challenging by the development team being Russian. So I was constantly translating Russian English into real English and hoping it made sense on the other side. We had a great product for online conference calls, faxing, Web meetings, which was arguably comparable to WebEx. But WebEx had a $35 million marketing budget, including budget for a Super Bowl commercial starring Ru Paul, and we got eaten alive. Working relatively for free, we were lucky enough to be covered in TMCNet and others and attract thousands of customers to our low-end plans before Oracle came calling in mid 2001 to buy the company.

More recently, in my Marketing role with my6sense, there is some of the same element - translating Israeli English to "real" English (they'll forgive me for saying so), and again, being challenged with a fantastic idea with real value, and translating it to customer benefits, finding new opportunities for partners and discussing future roadmap plans. Our recent launch of a Chrome extension for Twitter.com, the first step beyond mobile, gained coverage from practically all the top tech blogs in our space, and pushed significant new customers. We clearly lack some of the social elements in our application for virality today, and have more work to do on the Web site, messaging, etc, but without efforts to expand our customer base directly and through influencers, we would be much further behind.

Marketing often gets a bad rap in today's world because it is seen as a cost center. In my 8 1/2 years at a network storage startup from 2001 to 2009, I started in a role of eMarketing Manager and grew into the role of Director, Corporate Marketing, seeing all parts of the marketing, PR and business development craft - good and bad, through high times and recession. When budgets were eviscerated in 2001 to 2003 following the 9/11 attacks and global economic slowness, I violently made sure I was not part of the problem, but part of the solution,finding ways to bring new customers for free or inexpensively, avoiding high-cost advertising and maintaining high visibility for the company when others were going out of business.

An Engineer's View of the Typical Marketing/Sales Guy

Smart marketing does not have to be expensive - and smart companies would not invest in high costs with low return. I do not believe in high priced sponsorships for trade shows. I do not believe in run of site banner ads and sponsorships. I do not believe in demanding flashy collateral or Web demos when simplicity rules the day. I do not believe in valuing one's success based on Facebook fans and Twitter followers but in real deals, customers and dollars. Smart marketers will adjust to the new world of communication, partnerships and PR instead of digging in their toes and getting outflanked by those more flexible.

What's needed in Marketing for these changing times is for the average Marketeer to get more technical. One must grasp the venues where your products can be distributed, must know how to speak the customers' language, and must be working hand in hand with the product development team to deliver a top-quality experience. We're not rated by how much we spend. We're rated by how much we deliver, and there are too many products out there today - many I get pitched on - that could use a little retouching by somebody who knows something about Marketing.

Leak Corporate Data, Get Caught, Get Fired.

After an "anonymous loyal reader" tipped Business Insider on Tuesday to an internal memo from Google saying the company was rewarding employees with both a cash bonus and a raise, news broke Wednesday that the leaker, a Google employee, had been tracked down within hours, and fired. With all proper sympathies to somebody who just lost their job, there can be little flexibility in this regard - for if the person cannot be trusted with information deemed confidential and secret, they shouldn't have a home in a place where strategy and secrets are required. This becomes especially true at a public company like Google, a company that works on many future projects at once in a competitive market.

While the impetus to the reported pay increases is being debated, you can see Google (and other companies that face the same issue) really has little choice.

Unlike Yahoo!, which is leaking like a sieve to smart journalists like Kara Swisher, who seems to have every internal memo that leaves Carol Bartz' desk, Google traditionally has been very good about keeping most of its internal news under wraps, with few exceptions. Their launch of the Google Chrome Web browser caught practically everyone by surprise two years ago, as did their introduction of robot cars just last month. Other projects, like their next iteration of social, and the Nexus One, are discovered, but usually, details are few and far between. So the full-on e-mailing of an internal memo to a blog was a big breach indeed.

The practice of sniffing out rumors around Apple's future announcements has practically spawned an industry. Just prior to Steve Jobs' arrival, leaks were so common that the actual news was boring and anticlimactic. Since Jobs' return, official leaks have practically been extinguished, and violating blogs and anonymous commenters have been sued. The absence of leaks adds to the showmanship and impact the official unveiling of new products and strategy can have, and can help companies avoid the Osborne Effect, which can happen if new products are discussed before the old ones are done shipping.

As a veteran of corporate communications and PR teams at tech companies in the Valley, the usual process for speaking to press is handled by a select few people who know their roles and range. Those found speaking out of turn are challenged and, if necessary, removed, if they cannot be reigned in. During dark days at one startup where I worked, we were under siege from anonymous commenters who trolled industry Web sites saying we were days or weeks away from going out of business. Rumors of layoffs were mentioned, with little merit. But amidst the negative BS, there were elements of truth, with clear insider knowledge that had to be coming from people inside the company - directly or otherwise. At an all-hands meeting, our CEO addressed the anonymous attacks and warned that if anyone were in the room participating in the practice, they would be asked to leave. Eventually, the posts stopped.

As someone who also covers tech companies, I can understand the intrigue of happening on a big story, or an "exclusive" that can raise headlines, have people discussing your scoop, and rave about your access. Access to key people is a major reason why some blogs get traction and others don't. Access to information that is made available without permission can be fun too, if you know where to look. But forwarded internal memos from public companies are cheap - and the people sending them out to the press have a misguided perception of their own importance ahead of loyalty for the company. Leaking internal salary bumps endangered the company in terms of possible disclosures to the SEC, and immediately alerted competitive companies in the Valley that they too may need to adjust their hiring approach to job seekers. This lost element of surprise negates much of the benefit and simply can't be tolerated.

The good news is that the person who made this clear mistake has not yet been outed. For their sake, I hope they stay anonymous, learn from the error and find a new place quick where they don't find the need to play the part of press quite so inviting.

Podcast With @hackmanj on Blogging, my6sense, Marketing

Wednesday night, as the Giants and Rangers were battling in game one of the World Series, BlogTalkRadio's Joe Hackman and I sat down to see if we could cancel out the jocks and reaffirm our position as geeks, participating in a podcast to discuss how bloggers can gain visibility through access and insight. We discussed my personal decisions to join my6sense as VP of Marketing, my conversion process from iPhone to Android, and how I try to juggle having three kids under 2 1/2 with all the other tasks that compete with my time.

Among the key discussion points, which might be fun for you to check out:

1) Defending one's turf, rather than being pragmatic & investigating alternatives.
2) Google's innovative moves versus struggles they have had in other areas.
3) A next generation of bloggers in their teens you should start watching now.
4) Microsoft's challenges in mobile a parallel for search.
5) The history of louisgray.com.

For those of you who have read louisgray.com for some time, or heard some of my previous podcasts, some stories may be familiar to you, but there's always something new.

Joe posted the discussion on his site here, and I have embedded it below. You can find Joe on Twitter at @hackmanj.

Listen to internet radio with Joe Hackman on Blog Talk Radio

Steve Jobs' Opportunity: Apple Products are for Humans

At 10 a.m., Apple CEO Steve Jobs will take the stage once again at WWDC, no doubt introducing the next generation iPhone, along with its already previewed iPhone OS 4 software, as part of what will hopefully be many announcements in the day, which point to the future of the company and its application ecosystem. His remarks will come at a time when Apple as a company is tremendously strong, firing on all cylinders, with the launch of the iPad looking like a tremendous success. Yet, in the background, the company's iPhone juggernaut seemingly looks like it is vulnerable, thanks to continued momentum from Google, Android, and Sprint's record-setting sales of the newest device, the HTC EVO (which I've discussed at length the last few weeks).

Steve Jobs is a master visionary for foretelling the future of tech, and also a master salesman, convincing you to think he was the leader, in the occasions when Apple is actually late the game. He and Apple have been among the best in convincing customers that features or products are not needed, or markets are not interesting, right up until the minute they introduce their own version. At this WWDC, Jobs will need to convince those watching and listening not only that the company's present is strong, but that their future is as well, that they can remain atop the charts in the smartphone race, in the face of the onslaught from Mountain View. One way he can turn this tide is to turn Android's marketing around against them - taking on the harsh, metallic, robotic, messaging directly, and say that in contrast, Apple's products are designed with soul, by humans, for humans - connecting with one's emotional side in a way that Google hasn't traditionally been able to do.

As far as robots go, the Android robot is cute - friendly and appealing even. So too are the code names for the Android releases themselves, each sounding like a calorie-rich dessert one would lust for. But, at the end of the day, it's still a robot, and Google, so far, hasn't been known for a soft, creative, approach. The stories about the company being data-driven and letting the numbers tell the story have reigned supreme, often being pointed to as one contributing reason behind the company's false starts in social, and, amusingly, the lack of a Google Sports to go alongside Google News. In contrast, Apple is all about emotion, and creativity, and how one feels about an experience - be it on the desktop, on a tablet or from a mobile phone.

Apple once said its operating system was so divine that "you would want to lick it". Licking and loving? Human emotions, not something robots desire to do. I don't see Google wanting you to lick your Nexus One or your Droid Incredible any time soon. They just "do". And even though I am enjoying my Android experience still, I am working around some of the lameness when it comes to non-humane error messages, non-intuitive software design and things that take more steps than they should, which Apple already tackled in the simplicity department long ago.

Do you know the primary use for the pair of iPads we got the first day they hit stores? Playing YouTube. Now, before you say that's a Google product (which it is)... what I left out is that the primary users are my nearly two-year-old kids. The two of them are constantly on the iPad, browsing videos or playing simple arcade games. That we have two iPads for the two kids is a must, for when one is in the room, they are fighting over it. The simplicity and human approach Apple took to the iPad is so well executed that the twins don't hesitate in learning how to approach new apps and to swipe between screens. But when they look at my EVO, they're pretty much lost.

Jobs may not try and present iPhone as the alternative to Android at WWDC, in the same way Google presented itself as the alternative to iPhone at Google I/O. Maybe he doesn't want to give them that much credit. It's just as likely that he will tell us how much better iAds are to AdMob, or tell us how many more cool apps there are for iPhone and iPad than there are for Android. Maybe talking about one's human nature and personality is too much of a throwback to Jobs' hippy days, but it's certainly an opportunity, one that would resonate with many people considering their computing choices going forward. We're not robots, and Apple is a touchy-feely company who understands touch and feel better than anybody else in tech. Therein lies the opportunity to remind customers.