Theres a lot of hubbub about 3DTV at the moment – Sony are pinning their hopes on 3D TV as the product that will increase their market share in a market that is getting increasingly competitive. The TV market, having had few major innovations in this category for some time  (most consumers were pretty passe about thin screen LCD or OLED technology), has become heavily relient on price – which can only be squeezing manufacturer and retailer revenues. Previously Sony were slow to move into LCD televisions having focussed on projector and Plasma technology and as a result lost out heavily when a change in direction was required – they are still loosing out – in order to stay competitive they are taking huge hits in profitability (so I’m told).

So, for Sony, 3D TV is an incentive for customers to upgrade as well as a means to add value (read ‘demand higher prices’) and therefore take bigger margins from products which are historically its staple. The technology also works better on larger screen TV’s – so here we are also seeing a reason for consumer’s to part with even more cash. But will the strategy work? I for one, can’t see people sat around at home wearing 3D TV glasses – TV viewing is increasingly fragmented, with many people concentrating on more than one task whilst watching ‘the box’, so getting up to do something else whilst wearing a weird set of glasses? I just don’t see it.

On top of this, 3D TV technology does not work for between 4% and 10% of the population. And what the hell do you do if you already wear glasses? Or some friends come round and you only have 2 pairs?

Not convinced. I guess we will see what the world cup was like in 3D (they will be filming it, but we are yet to hear if it will be broadcast in 3D), unfortunately the current opinion is that high speed action like football just doesn’t work well in 3D (rapid movement can make you disorientated / feel sick)!

My next big project: Systematic communications strategy. We need to talk to all our customers at each stage of their relationship with us. We need to promote ourselves to different customer segments accordingly. We want to know how we are doing, what they think of us, so it must feed this information back to us for easy reporting. We need to talk to them on a level that is higher than a basic account management level – it has to be meaningful and adding value to the relationship.

All very well and good, but we need the data. We need it in the right place. We need it to be easily accessible and automated.

Herculean?

We don’t yet have this. I know collecting and managing customer data like this is a major task in all organisations and few do it really well (most do it badly!) – but I really want to get this cracked and I do love a challenge!

Well the beast is now live – much work has gone into refreshing our corporate website into something that is much more useable, accessible and modern with information that can be easily found and digested – take a look here.

Much testing has been done – it works in all major browsers, with or without flash and doesn’t look too shabby on an iPhone either. The launch of the site has also coincided with some new releases by Google for the Analytics platform including (at long last) new Goal types and more of them too!!

The new Intelligence features look very promising and should allow easy tracking of interesting or important changes in visitor behaviour! Now all I would like to see is the ability to segment visitors by their unique session events from event tracking!!

There is quite a lot being written about streaming services such as spotify lately, but I really don’t see what the palaver is about! I’m, sure their is a place in the music market for streamed, ‘free’ music that uses advertising to pay it’s way – but my view is that this section of the market will be made up of people who certainly do not describe themselves as music lovers, but more occasional listeners.

The problem with this is that this section of the market will not be motivated enough to adopt the product thoroughly and certainly won’t be seen as trend setters amongst their peers with the influence to promote the service across society to make things happen.

Yes, music lovers and techies will try out this software, since there are few barriers to adoption but what these people want is a system where they can store the music locally or as part of their cloud and take it with them for playback on the many devices they own – which includes iPhones and the media servers in their lounge. This is not possible with services such as Spotify, so I don’t see a long term lifespan for this.

Apple will never allow such a service to be used on the iPhone and iPod Touch as it will directly compete with their revenue streams from ITunes music.

The only thing that Spotify does do is allow the recording of high quality music on your computer (which you can add to your iTunes library!) – much like what we all used to do with the radio, a cassette deck and the Top 40 on a Sunday…

I’ve been a/b testing a lot lately – I usually do this with most of my campaigns, using a sample group to test and then sending the best subject line to the rest of the list. Our email providers latest update claims to do this automatically (if you want) – but I’m not sure I trust it entirely…

Anyway – I keep reading that the best way to write good subject lines is to pick up a newspaper. Many believe if you use journalistic style headings then people will want to read your emails. I don’t believe this is accurate.

Journalistic style headings work in Newspapers because someone has already shelled out money to buy a product from a brand they trust – they already want to read the paper. If they are buying it as a one off, for the news title, they are likely to buy the paper they trust and are loyal to.

Your email in their inbox doesn’t work like this. People are filtering out the emails – what get’s past the filtering technology is then up against the filtering done by the recipient themselves – anything too pushy is likely to be skipped over or trashed.

The key to a good subject line is just to tell them facts regarding the email content – if you sell too hard in the subject line, it will be sniffed out as SPAM by your recipients and the resultant open rate will be poor.

Just include the main theme, matter of fact. If your audience is well targeted, try and include some facts in the 50 character limit. Whatever you do don’t make it look like a question – I hate these emails and my mouse goes straight for the delete button.

If you have a company name that is well regarded and your recipients will recognise it, use it. Your company name conveys a certain amount of trust in your relationship with your customer, so this can only add value.

If you really need to use ‘buy, buy, buy’ and money off techniques then maybe your email isn’t that relevant – if the content is not good, then you don’t really have a leg to stand on and no matter how good your effort to promote it, it won’t do much good.