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You’re the Boss Blog: Turning Facebook Followers Into Online Focus Groups

January 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Tech Support

What small-business owners need to know about technology.

Aaron Schwartz, ModifyCourtesy of Modify.Aaron Schwartz, Modify

Aaron Schwartz founded his three-person watch company last year with an unusual slogan: “We’re not craftsmen, we’re just good listeners” — listeners to customers, that is.

Clearly, Mr. Schwartz was not aiming at your typical fancy-watch buyer. Rather, he was looking to capture a younger, cooler buyer who would want a watch with aggressively hip designs, that could be worn swimming, and — this being the age of everyone wanting everything their way – that could be customized. “You can buy a great watch for $1,000 but a hundred bucks can get you nine different watches,” said Mr. Schwartz, referring to the fact that his watch faces and straps can be mixed and matched. The name of his Berkeley, Calif., company: Modify.

Given his stated dedication to listening to customers, Mr. Schwartz was all over Facebook from Day 1. But while he got a fair amount of attention, quickly building his following to more than 2,000 people, he found Facebook didn’t provide an opportunity for the sort of close, interactive engagement he believed would be critical for word-of-mouth marketing and, more importantly, to figure out which products and features would score with customers. After all, people can post whatever is on their minds on Facebook, and however valuable those exchanges might be, they don’t always answer the questions owners have.

So Mr. Schwartz turned to a relatively new service called Napkin Labs, which essentially helps companies funnel followers from Facebook and other sites into more intimate, more structured online communities intended to serve as focus groups. Mr. Schwartz has used his online “labs,” which can run as a Facebook app or on a separate Web site, to get people to chip in ideas about what new colors and designs they’d like to see, and where they’d like to see the watches sold. Each lab poses a “challenge,” such as “help us design a new watch,” and anyone can pitch in with ideas. As with real-life focus groups, anyone who joins in knows what other participants are sayings and can comment on their comments, creating a real dialogue among customers.

So far Mr. Schwartz has run five labs since he started a few months ago, and he said they have pulled in about 100 different participants and have attracted more than 100 suggestions. “There was a surprisingly big interest in seeing the watches sold in surf shops,” he said. (The Facebook-app labs are free, by the way, but Napkin Labs charges $99 a month and up to set up Web site-based labs.)

One potential bonus of turning ordinary Facebook followers into focus groups is that it can provide a marketing bonanza. “Involving people in the product-development process makes them a network of evangelists,” said Riley Gibson, who founded Napkin Labs in 2010. Mr. Schwartz doesn’t claim to have created an army of evangelists just yet, but he noted that many of the lab participants have been happy to keep up one-to-one conversations with him on product development and other questions, suggesting he may indeed be creating super-fans.

While Napkin Labs seems fairly unusual in creating something akin to the focus-group experience online, it isn’t the only company offering to help businesses convert online communities into idea-generating engines and collaborators. Other crowdsourcing services include Userlytics, UserVoice, Get Satisfaction, and Jive, each providing its own take on getting online customers and potential customers to chip in with feedback and suggestions. And eYeka and Jovoto enable companies to offer contests and challenges intended to solicit new ideas and designs.

Mr. Schwartz remains enthusiastic about the concept. Correctly guessing that I’m a gadget guy, he assured me his new line of techie watches, now in the works and shaped in part by the results of his labs, will have special appeal. Hey, maybe I’ll surf by a lab to suggest bringing one out in my favorite color — stainless steel. O.K., hip, I’m not.

You can follow David H. Freedman on Twitter and on Facebook.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1267cd8807099df84cbdd20f5f684ec5

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DealBook: European Regulator Criticizes U.S. on Banker Bonuses

June 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Michael Barnier, the European Union's top financial regulator.Olivier Hoslet/European Pressphoto AgencyMichel Barnier, the European Union’s top financial regulator.

5:43 p.m. | Updated

LONDON —The European Union’s top official for banking regulation has accused the Obama administration of being too lax on bonuses for bankers and not putting in place capital rules fast enough.

Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for the internal market and services and a former foreign minister of France, warned that a failure to unify financial regulation in Europe and the United States could give some banks an unfair advantage over their foreign rivals.

“The level playing field must be a reality, not an empty slogan,” Mr. Barnier wrote in a letter to the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, whom he is to meet in Washington on Thursday.

At the meeting, Mr. Barnier indicated that he planned to discuss the difference in progress between the United States and the European Union in tightening financial regulation and to urge Mr. Geithner to bring American rules closer to those of Europe.

As lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic push ahead with their own changes to financial regulation, senior officials and banking executives accused one another of lacking the political will for stricter rules. The issue has also been a great source of controversy on Wall Street, where banking executives warned about so-called regulatory arbitrage.

“As you may recall, we implemented Basel II already in 2006,” Mr. Barnier wrote in the letter, which was reported earlier by The Financial Times. “It is essential to respect the deadlines agreed last year.”

Mr. Barnier also criticized the American approach to restrictions on bonuses as leaving “too much latitude” for financial institutions to “circumvent globally agreed principles.”

“I think you agree with me that ‘bankers’ bonuses’ is a matter that continues to cause public outrage,” Mr. Barnier wrote in the letter. “Getting this matter right is key to restoring our citizens’ confidence in the financial system — and ultimately — their confidence in the public authorities regulating the financial institutions.”

The United States and other major economies agreed at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh in 2009 to find ways to limit incentives for excessive risk taking, which was partly blamed for the financial crisis. But Mr. Barnier argued that only the European Union had imposed binding rules for bonuses.

Under those rules, which were approved last year, banks must defer as much as 60 percent of bonuses to senior managers for at least three years. Half of the remaining amount must be paid in shares as opposed to cash.

Mr. Barnier also plans to ask Mr. Geithner for an update on the writing of Dodd-Frank rules for derivatives markets, credit rating agencies and accounting standards.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=65ee6e2d39e6338e5ce66fd4eb4059be

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Retooled Car Series Revives Summer Box Office Hopes

May 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment

That is what should have happened to “The Fast and the Furious” car-racing series five years ago when a third installment, “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” sputtered, selling about $62 million in tickets in North America, or 50 percent less than its predecessor.

But Universal Pictures didn’t give up, and a souped-up fourth movie, “Fast Furious,” showed surprising strength in 2009.

Over the weekend, a new entry, “Fast Five,” rocked Hollywood by selling almost $84 million in tickets, by far the biggest opening of the year and — if the prayers of movie moguls are answered — signaling the beginning of a box-office turnaround.

“Relieved” is one word Adam Fogelson, Universal’s chairman, used to describe his state of mind on Sunday morning. “We made a lot of very specific and very strategic choices that were not obvious.”

Studios and theater owners urgently need a big summer. Domestic box-office revenue has fallen 14 percent in 2011, to about $3 billion, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles statistics on ticket sales. Higher prices, particularly for 3-D screenings, have probably kept some people at home. But the likeliest culprit is quality, which many studio executives concede has been lacking in a lot of releases.

The movie industry’s high-stakes summer season traditionally stretches from the first full weekend in May to Labor Day, when studios record about 40 percent of their annual box office revenue. With “Fast Five,” Universal decided to stretch the period, using the marketing slogan “summer starts early.” Ticket sales easily surpassed the record for the weekend, set last year by “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which took in $33 million.

“Fast Five” is an unusual sequel because of Universal’s fix-on-the-fly approach, but it is as good a marker as any of what the movie capital is counting on in the months ahead: sequels and more sequels. There are 10 this time around, including “Fast Five,” more than there have been in any summer in recent memory.

“They’re stacked one after another after another, which will help give the marketplace momentum,” said Phil Contrino, editor of BoxOffice.com.

Of these films, one in particular is expected to be a multiplex monster — “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” from Warner Brothers. It is the first Potter film to be released in 3-D and finishes out the series.

Expectations are also high for “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” (Walt Disney Studios), “Kung Fu Panda 2” (DreamWorks Animation) and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” (Paramount Pictures).

Pixar’s “Cars 2” doesn’t open until June 24 but has already broken one record: the biggest array of related retail merchandise, beating “Star Wars.”

Hollywood is taking some enormous risks in the coming stretch. One of the biggest gambles is “Green Lantern,” a space opera that Warner hopes will put to rest criticisms about the degree to which it has mined its DC Comics library for movie characters. Early buzz has been mixed, with questions about the visual effects and the skin-tight costume and mask worn by its star, Ryan Reynolds.

“There is also the worry of superhero fatigue,” Mr. Contrino said, noting that “Green Lantern” will arrive after Marvel’s “Thor” and 20th Century Fox’s much-anticipated “X-Men: First Class.”

Another question mark is “Cowboys Aliens,” an expensive genre mash-up starring an aging Harrison Ford. It’s an alien movie set in the Old West, and some industry experts fear it could fall flat. On the positive side, the companies behind this picture, DreamWorks Studios and Universal, recently released new marketing materials to positive response.

Nobody needs hits more than Universal, which, despite a few bright spots like “Hop,” was recently labeled “a bomb factory” by the entertainment news site Deadline.com. The studio has a new corporate parent, Comcast, which is watching to determine whether management changes are needed.

“The Fast and the Furious” franchise, which made its debut in 2001 as a counterculture car movie, underscores how hard Universal executives are trying.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=42536f821c1ac4b9627cdc60ae00e5e1

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