Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

Video On Demand is Amazingly Cool

As part of our cable internet package we got a reduced-price trial of the HBO, Showtime, STARZ and Cinemax movie packages.

With the holiday this weekend, we had a family movie festival, and it was SO neat to pick the movies we wanted, when we wanted them, instead of the old days when you had to have a program guide. Being able to hit the pause button, or to rewind to catch missed dialogue, or coming back to catch the end of a movie after leaving for a graduation open house, was fantastic.

Of course, I remember the old days, when if you missed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, you had to wait until the next year to see it again.

My wife’s grandfather was born in 1898 and died in the 1990s, and we always used to marvel at how things had changed during his lifetime, from the Wright Brothers’ first flight to space travel.

But think about it: I bought my first Apple IIe in 1984, with 64K of memory. My brother-in-law bought a 5 megabyte hard drive for $1,800. I bought a flash drive/key chain with 200 times as much storage at one of those day-after-Thanksgiving sales last year for $10.


I bought a monster boom box in 1980 for $270. That’s $713 in today’s dollars. It could hold one cassette at a time. Today my $300 iPod can hold 15,000 songs. And instead of having to go to the library to look for the information to compose this paragraph, I can get it by Googling the phrases “60 gigabyte ipod how many songs” and “consumer price index 1980.”

And even if I can’t buy the Rudolph movie on iTunes (yet), I can hear Burl Ives crooning the theme song for 99 cents in just a few seconds. And I can go to YouTube and find parody videos like this one:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=MvWVzjBfrn0]

When I was growing up Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock had personal communicators, and George Jetson had a picture phone. Now (almost) all of my kids have cell phones with cameras and video capability. We have web chat. My Dad has a camera built into his laptop for video chat.

And of course, through services like WordPress.com, we can publish our observations to the world (in color) for free. No printing cost. No distribution cost. And we can include video.

We talk a lot today about “Death by Powerpoint.” But I remember overhead transparencies. And 35mm slide carousels. And filmstrips.

Grandpa George saw lots of things change in his lifetime. The last couple of decades have brought changes at an even more breathtaking pace, and rate of change is accelarating.

Ultimately, it goes way beyond the fact that we can watch Raising Arizona, The Man in the Iron Mask, and Mission Impossible III on our timetable. With YouTube and other web video sites, and iTunes, and TiVo, the number of “channels” available to anyone with broadband internet (and that’s more than half of the population) approaches infinity.

The implications for people in public relations or corporate communications are immense. We need to make our message something people want to see and hear instead of interrupting with ads. And more importantly, we need to remember that it’s a conversation, and hear what our customers are saying.

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Taking a Dive

At a meeting this morning there was some talk about Miss USA falling from her high-heeled perch during the Miss Universe competition.

We wondered whether it was getting lots of traffic on YouTube. I guess so…there are several versions, and this one has 171,000 views as of now.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=WQ_Iiz0moxk]

It’s also number one on the viral video chart, with more than 806,000 views.

I haven’t been watching, but I guess it was getting beaten to death on TV, too.

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Avoiding Irrelevance

Jeremiah’s Web Strategy blog has a great post about evolving your irrelevant corporate website.

Here’s a taste of his view of the future:

Websites are created with customers
This is disruptive, but I predict that the most relevant future websites will have customers building websites alongside employees. The most effective websites will contain a balanced point of view of both the product team and customers –even if they have qualms with the product.

Unfiltered customer testimonials will appear
You’ll no longer only be the only one publishing to your website, customers, prospects, and other members of the community will have direct access to publish on your website. Sure, there will be controls to make sure the content is somewhat factual or reviewed, but it will be obvious to many that the only voice won’t be the marketing one.

Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace. We know from research that the highest degree of trust comes from those ‘like me’, a savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism, the goal? To take that feedback, and demonstrate in public how you will improve your offerings in plain view. Case study: Dell has done this with IdeaStorm.

Check out the rest here. It’s certainly thought-provoking. Some organizations have high levels of trust. I think what Jeremiah is advocating will be keys to building and maintaining that good will with the public in the long term.

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This makes me really proud of my hometown…

Austin, Minnesota, my hometown, the place where I’m raising my kids, and the home of non-electronic SPAM, is in the news again:

Man in deep doo-doo over ticket protest

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

AUSTIN, Minn.— An man who allegedly included dog feces along with his payment for a parking ticket has been charged with disorderly conduct. The 22-year-old man was charged with the misdemeanor May 11 in a criminal complaint filed in Mower County District Court.

The man’s vehicle was ticketed on April 18 while it was parked in front of his residence. He put an envelope containing his payment and dog feces in a drop box at the law enforcement center, the complaint stated.

On April 25, an office employee for the Austin Police Department smelled a rank odor as she gathered envelopes from the box. Opening the envelopes, the woman noticed one leaking a brown fluid, which got onto her hands and her desk, according to the complaint.

The next morning the woman awoke with a headache and vomited repeatedly. She was hospitalized for about two days with an undetermined illness.

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These columns must be mixed up

That’s what I thought at first when I logged on to my Wells Fargo on-line brokerage account today and saw $27.39 as the increase for the day for my aQuantive (AQNT) stock.

“That must be the stock price, not the increase,” I said to myself. “It’s been trading in the 30s. A $27 increase can’t be right.”

picture-1a.jpg
Then I read the daily news and found out Microsoft had agreed to purchase aQuantive for $66.50 a share, an 85 percent premium over the previous day’s close. It’s all over the blogs, too: here, and here, and here, and here.
Good for my IRA.

It just goes to show what a BIG deal on-line advertising will be. With Google having announced a deal for DoubleClick, Microsoft needed to buy a seat at the advertising table.

I first bought AQNT stock (but unfortunately only 100 shares) because of trends I had been following in media and advertising. Spending on TV ads is huge, but audiences are getting smaller and people are skipping the commercials. But so far there hasn’t been anywhere near enough on-line ad inventory for current TV advertisers to buy. So I figured companies like aQuantive would have a great long-term opportunity for growth as they figured out how to create advertising opportunities.
In this investment, I was partially taking advice from two money people I respect, and partially going against both. Phil Town in his Rule #1 Investing suggests purchasing single stocks in industries you follow and understand. That I did. This is an area I work in and blog about.
Town says, however, you should look for companies with long track records of earnings, but which are currently trading at a significant discount to projected future earnings. That wasn’t true for AQNT, but the long-term market upside looked too good to wait until this stock got cheap by his standards.
My real financial hero, Dave Ramsey, the get-out-of-debt guru, says you shouldn’t buy single stocks, but instead should invest in mutual funds with a long track record. He rightly points out the examples of Enron and others, in which employees who had all their retirement eggs in the company stock found themselves financially ruined.

So because I like the Town tactic and the Ramsey rule, I just try to, in essence, create my own mutual fund by limiting each individual stock to no more than 10 percent of my IRA. That meant I had to sell Apple because it had gone up enough that it was too big of a part of my portfolio.

Yes, I’ve had my share of losers, too. Nortel hasn’t been great (and that was one that did have accounting problems that whacked the stock.) And then there was the STUPID Tax I paid by falling for a “hot tip” on Pangea Petroleum (PAPO). But because they were small percentages of my account, they were just aggravating, not devastating.

aQuantive isn’t a Peter Lynch 10-bagger for me (although if you had bought it five years ago, it would have been), but having it go up 130 percent in six months, and 78 percent in a day, makes up for some mistakes.

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