Togather lets authors crowdsource book tours

Here's an interesting idea for author promotion--although it's just entering beta testing. Togather is a new website that brings crowdsourcing to book tours. Authors post their profiles and calendars of days available for promotional events. Fans can then propose events, or authors can create their own events. Togather lets authors negotiate terms and conditions for appearances within the service, including pricing (which is going to be moot for most authors, especially new ones.) Once the events are created, people are encouraged to promote them to their friends on social networks. Authors can set criteria for confirming their appearance--number of tickets sold or RSVP, or number of books sold--and when the goal is reached, ticket and book sales are processed by Togather and the event is on.

I can see Togather as being very valuable to established authors as bookstores close and the number of legacy venues for book tours declines--although authors with big social media presences can do much the same thing from their own Facebook pages and websites. I'm not sure how valuable Togather is going to be for new authors, unless it's one component in a much bigger marketing campaign.

Check list marketing, or why vendors put useless features into their products

Yesterday, I wrote a post about Pentax's new K-r DSLR. Like all new DSLRs, it has a video mode, but the K-r's is fixed at 720P at 25 fps. Fine for Europe, but completely useless in the U.S. Pentax isn't the only offender, of course; it's virtually impossible to find a DSLR from anyone that has usable audio, which is why the Zoom H4n audio recorder is so popular.

Why do manufacturers add features to their products that don't work or are useless? It's usually due to "check list marketing." You've probably seen the comparison lists that show how the features and functions of various products compare. The lists are almost always put together by a vendor to show how much better their products are than the competition's. No one wants to look bad on one of these check lists, so the sales team or product managers will push the engineering team to add features. The engineering team will usually resist, but sales and product management will insist that engineering implement the features in some way, so that they can add them to their check lists.

That's probably how the K-r got its video mode. The website and data sheet for the camera boast that it has HD video. Yes, at the lowest resolution that can be called HD, with a frame rate that's useless in North America. They don't say that in the headline, of course; you have to read down to the specifications to find out the bad news. The check list only says "HD video". Canon? Check. Panasonic? Check. Nikon? Check. Sony? Check. Pentax? Check. It didn't say "HD video that you can actually use," or "HD video that you can edit," or "HD video that won't make you throw your camera through a plate glass window." There would be some checks missing on that list, and not just for Pentax.

I'd rather see companies implement features the right way, and have the courage to leave out features that can't be done well, rather than implement useless features simply to fill out a check list. If Pentax's engineers didn't have to implement video mode, could they have used that time and those resources to make the still features of the camera even better? There are many photographers who buy DSLRs for their ability to shoot stills and couldn't care less about video. It would have been a retro step by Pentax, but in this case, it would have been the right thing to do.

You're (probably) not your target market

Many years ago, my Advertising professor said something that's stuck with me ever since: "Never forget that you're not your target audience." He meant that we weren't representative of the consumers to whom we were advertising, and that something that we really liked might not work at all with our target audience, while something we hated might actually work perfectly.

The lesson applies not only to advertising, but to product and market development as well. We're rarely representative of the customers that we're trying to serve. Product features that we think are essential may be far less so to customers. On the other hand, customers may want or need something whose importance we discount.

There are, of course, counterexamples. For years, HP used a technique called "next-bench marketing": Go talk to the engineer at the next bench, and ask them what instrument, device or feature would make their job easier or more successful. Then, go build what they asked for. The engineer at the next bench was representative of a whole class of engineers at a whole lot of benches, so solving a problem for one of them solved a problem for all of them.

If you're truly representative of the customers you're targeting, then by all means use next-bench marketing to figure out what products or services to make. But be sure that you're not making assumptions about customers that you don't fully understand. The best way is to actually go out and talk to them. Find out their pain points. Let them not only tell you, but show you, how they live and work. You're likely to find out that some of your hypotheses are dead on, and others are way off base. By talking to customers, you can spend more time developing products and services that have a real market, and less time pivoting away from products that "seemed like a good idea at the time."