Pin me baby

Pinterest - it's blowing up.

Everyday I'm getting notifications that people are joining, pinning and repinning things. Why is this site going to continue to grow and become more popular? My two thoughts:

1. People crave visual stimulation. Knowingly or not, we love to flip through pictures of things. It has become habit thanks to Facebook and others. Pictures are worth thousands and thousands of words and they are powerful. Pictures can make you feel exstatic or depressed all in an instant. Pinning pictures on Pinterest is super addictive, fun, educational and inspiring all in one.

2. Pinterest allows people to express themselves in a more abstract, but secure way. Not everyone is so effusive with their feelings that they like to come right out and proclaim how they're feeling in a written statement. But by pinning some images to your Pinterest profile you can say a lot while saying very little or nothing at all. I think the process compiling pieces of art as a means to express oneself will have widespread appeal. 

Switchcam - An awesome new way to relive a show

If you've been to a live music concert lately, you've likely noticed a ton of people taking pictures and video with their smart phones. Once taken, these videos are often loaded to their final resting place on YouTube, where, because of bad tagging on the part of the creator, they can sometimes be lost and essentially gone forever.

Well thanks to Switchcam that's all about to change. This new site recreates entire shows by sourcing pre-existing content from YouTube and organizing it all to match the original setlist. Even better, you can "switch" back and forth between different "cams", or videos and see the same show from different viewpoints in the audience.

What I like about YouTube from a business perspective is they do a great job of keeping you on the site by always serving up another video, or selection of videos that are just as enticing as the last one. But what's so cool about Switchcam is they keep you on the site without asking you to choose a new video every 3-5 minutes. I was watching David Guetta's set from Electric Zoo on Switchcam and before I knew it I had been on the site for nearly 25 minutes.

The best part is that the quality of this site is only going to get better. As smart phones become even more ubiquitous than they already are, more and more people are going to take video that's of increasingly higher quality. More video taken means more people putting these on YouTube (or other sites) and before long you might be able to take in a single song from 15-20 different vantage points. Who knows, we may even get to the point where phones can steam live video - wouldn't that be something?

My only initial wish would be for Switchcam to find a way to standardize the sound level from clip to clip. Not that I would ever watch YouTube in the office, but it can be startling when new clips start up louder than expected!
-Bill

Black Friday Midnight Madness at Best Buy

I’m not big on shopping in general. The everyday chaos of a shopping mall or department store can be headache-inducing for me, but this was the Christmas I was going to get a new TV. On the Tuesday of Thanksgiving I came across a deal from Best Buy; they were offering a 42” flatscreen for $199. I had to go.

I arrived at 10:45pm expecting to wait in my car until the store opened at midnight. But a 300-person line was already in place so I had to join in. Though I waited in line for 75 minutes, there were no Best Buy associates looking to sign me up for their loyalty program - a missed opportunity. The shoppers in line were nothing if not a captive audience. The associates that were walking the lines were passing out flyers that guaranteed you a chance to buy certain items. The only problem was they were all dressed differently, so I couldn’t even be sure that they were real employees.

I think you’ll see even more stores opening at midnight next year, with stores placing more emphasis on the quality of the entire customer experience. After a post-thanksgiving-dinner nap I felt energized and ready to go shop. I’d much rather stay awake and stay up late than wake up early to be in line at 6am.

For Best Buy specifically, having associates in bright blue, branded wind breakers would be a start, but how about partnering with Dunkin Donuts and offering (free?) coffee to people waiting in line? Wait staff equipped with mobile credit card machines would have been awesome. A partnership with a food truck would have worked well too, since the line was over 300 yards long. What about partnering with a 24-hour quick service restaurant like IHOP to pass out coupons? Who isn’t hungry for breakfast after participating in the feeding frenzy of Black Friday? On a day where demand is so large, there’s real opportunity for marketers to improve the customer experience.