“We have a small marketing team here at Jott, which makes it all the more important to have efficiency tools like Scout Labs to manage web communications. Making sure we are on the pulse of what our customers are saying helps us be more responsive in everything we do, from product development to pricing.”

Jott Networks operates a voice to text service that helps users capture notes, set reminders and calendar appointments, and interact with web sites and services. Since fall of 2008, the company had been offering both free and paid service levels to users, with about 30% of users converting from the free to the paid service.

In January 2009, Jott announced an end to its free service and the introduction of a new voicemail to text service. Jott has an active community of users who blog and tweet about the convenience and ease of the service and the company was not expecting all of them to welcome the news. As an internet startup, the marketing team is small and Doug Aley, the VP of Marketing, was handling public perception of the announcement and launch pretty much solo:

“We have a small marketing team here at Jott, which makes it all the more important to have efficiency tools like Scout Labs to manage web communications. Making sure we are on the pulse of what our customers are saying helps us be more responsive in everything we do, from product development to pricing.” — Doug Aley - VP Marketing and Business Development, Jott Networks, Inc.

Scout Labs helped Jott to find all the mentions of Jott that came up during the critical time period, prioritize items for response, and track which posts had been responded to. The Scout Labs application is still helping Jott do the work of converting users of a free service to paying customers by helping them find instances of social media they need to respond to. Jott also continues to use Scout Labs to monitor key competitors and provide insight into the personal productivity and voice to text space.

It’s been been less than 24 hours since the most exciting Superbowl game in recent history has ended, and buzz is off the charts for the Steelers — and the Cardinals — and Santonio Holmes — and Larry Fitzerald. Looking at the graphs, you can barely tell who even won:

This kind of buzz is great if you’re a smaller brand and you bought that spot specifically to drive awareness — look at Cash4Gold:

But while graphs and charts can do a good job of event detection — something happened! — they don’t give brand or product managers insight into what, exactly, just happened, or inform what they should do about it. There’s no doubt that major marketing events like superbowl ads have some, perhaps enduring, perhaps fleeting, influence on brand perception. Witness responses to the Doritos ad from Twitter:

@dmgerbino Are you not “aware” of Doritos? What about launching new flavors or packaging, some reason to buy?

I have watched the doritos crystal ball commercial like 5 times now but I still won’t buy chips.

Or GoDaddy, which so alienated both male and female customers that by midnight Sunday their one competitor was offering a “DumpGoDaddy” coupon to anyone who wanted to switch hosting companies, and that competitors 1and1 and Register are getting awareness bumps:

@kdpaine oppty for someone to provide a classy, female friendly web host alternative to GoDaddy I’d switch now.

Whatever the fallout from the Superbowl ad spot, it’s the flavor acquired over time that lingers on the palate. Think about Steelers fans. I dare you to walk into the Steelers bar in your city or town (and chances are that you already know which one it is) and talk smack about Roethlisberger or Holmes. At any point in the next 25 years. You do not, if you follow sports AT ALL, need to know that this would be a bad idea. I could almost hear them in Florida from here in San Francisco. Yeah their buzz is up- the most Superbowl wins ever!- but the basic Steelers identity remains unchanged: tough, blue collar, fanatic, an American legacy, the beloved flagship franchise of benighted post-industrial Pittsburgh. That’s the Steelers brand. Never seen an ad about it.

For those professionals who need to manage their brands and companies in the everyday, in the here and now, with few Superbowl moments to provide glory, there aren’t always cues that say “Look here. Look at me now. Pay attention to my opinions” and if there are, they’re likely to be PR disasters (how familiar were you with the Peanut Corporation of America before the salmonella outbreak?). The best way to do conversational marketing, to mine the world of consumer opinion and stay on top of customer zeitgeist, is not to be event driven. It’s to be everyday insight driven. A smattering of relevant blogs and tweets for Superbowl advertisers:

i just saw a kid crush up 2 bags of doritos and pour them over his salad.

Nice, gas light just came on at 450 miles on the tank! #hyundai

Toyota working on solar-powered cars. Will it work in Seattle? Doubtful.

How much more interesting than ad ranking is the insight that people smash up Doritos and use them as toppings on other foods? Could that become a product extension or a marketing campagn? How interesting that people are noticing miles per tank for their cars — talk about a viral promotion idea! How interesting that there are doubts about the efficacy of solar powered vehicles in cloudy climates. Is this a real product deficiency or a marketing challenge? These are the customer insights, this is the context that product people and marketing people and customer service people need to have in order to understand, to evolve, to compete. In marketing, every day is game day.

Marin county had a teacher training day yesterday, crowding the commuter ferry with teenagers headed to the city for the day. I was crammed into a booth seat with five of them. Most of their conversation revolved around themselves and the remainder of their high school careers: who was going to college, who wasn’t, who was failing English, who was dating whom (only dating wasn’t exactly the word used), all conveyed with that teenage langour that is supposed to communicate just how little they care about anyone, how little they are shocked by anything, how very boring the world is to sophisticated sixteen year olds such as themselves.

And all of them carried phones. “Ryan’s meeting us at Peet’s in the ferry building,” says one to the group. Conversation shifted to Ryan for all of 30 seconds before “Al Franken won his senate seat by 215 votes!” said another. Conversation shifted in the Al Franken direction for another minute or so (“Who’s Al Franken?” asked a young woman whose outfit suggested the desire to evolve into more of a Donna Rice kind of politician). “My mom says me to be home by 7. Can you believe it?” “Shell says she’s driving in but she doesn’t know where to park.” “Dylan thinks we should see an IMAX. Lemme just see what Caitlin is doing…” murmured another young lad, all of them texting away on devices seemingly integrated into the palms of their hands.

Which is just what they are, of course. Fully integrated. Not with those particular hardware devices, but into the fabric of a world that provides the instant access to people and information via technology. My nanny’s sixteen year old kid routinely incurs mobile phone bills she can’t pay because 2000 text messages a month is “not enough.” As I understand it, she is far from alone. The speed and quantity with which teenagers create and consume these microbits of information seems astonishing to all us oldsters still tapping away at spreadsheets on the way to our job-jobs in the city.

But then again, maybe not. All humans are all social creatures. The main limitation on how often we connect, at any age, is our means of doing it. My 65 year old dad is still figuring out Vchat. Throughout my workday I am treated to glimpses of him cursing at the computer as he invites, disconnects, and reconnects: waltonjf has invited you to chat. “Hello? Margaret? Is it-” waltonjf has left the chat. waltonjf has invited you to chat. “G-dammit! How can you tell if-” waltonjf has left the chat. waltonjf has invited you to chat. My 80 year old neighbor types three sentence messages on yellowing index cards and leaves them stuck in the doors of people in the neighborhood, a sort of old-school Twitterer. She often watches for me to come home at night and knocks on my door for a glass of pink wine if I make it home during cocktail hour. Over Christmas, I visited my 95 year old grandmother at her home in Virginia. She is physically very fragile but still compos mentis. She told me that email was becoming difficult for her to manage, what with her vision and the arthritis in her hands, and not to expect emails from her any more. My eyes filled with tears.

“They’ll be coming from Zee’s grandson instead,” she said, beckoning forward her middle aged Ethiopian caretaker. Shyly the woman showed me a picture of her roughly 10 year old grandson. Buck teeth, black skin, intelligent eyes, a sweet smile and ears like giant antennae. “He comes over to use the computer after school. Are you on something called Facebook?”

Long live her inner teenager.

I am not one of those people who decorate for holidays. No fall wreaths on the door come October, no bowls of decorative Easter Eggs on the sideboard in April or green Jell-o desserts on St Paddy’s Day. Most of the year I can get away with this but at Christmas people find it shocking. Every person over my threshold after the first weekend in December invariably asks, “Where’s your tree?” So I explain about not wanting to kill even sustainably harvested trees and create fire hazards in the living room and spill water on the Ikea laminate flooring and that the kids are so small that ornaments would be a safety hazard and besides I don’t own any ornaments and we’re going to be on the East Coast starting on the 21st and…it all washes right over them. “You have to get a tree,” they pronounce, in tones of absolute finality. “For the kids. Everyone has a tree. It’s not Christmas without a tree.”

“They’re right,” my husband will say, after the door shuts behind every tree-happy visitor. “Everyone has a tree. Even the Jews next door have a tree.”

“Um,” I usually reply, looking over the edge of my laptop, or up from the floor where I am mopping up dried applesauce, or over from the couch where I am reading Ping to the kids for the 99th time. “You go right ahead.” But somehow my participation seems critical to getting it done and I just don’t prioritize holiday décor. I am Type A about enough things in my life that I can live with my lack of holiday decorating ambition. I put a dried wreath up on the front door back in November as my token offering to the season. It’ll get shoved on a shelf in the garage sometime before Valentine’s Day, missing a few more plastic berries and manufactured twigs, and I’m ok with that.

Back east for the holidays, the selection, erection, and decoration of the tree was a major event at both grandparental gatherings. While there is something magical about a well decorated Christmas tree, I was grateful to get on a plane and fly away from the post- Christmas cleanup ritual of picking pine needles and sap balls out of the rug, dealing with murky tree water and untangling light strings. Back in California, I found a box of secondhand tree ornaments on the front porch. They were a thoughtful Christmas gift from the aforementioned Jews next door, who apparently think we lack Christmas spirit and ought to get a tree next year.

All this got me thinking: Am I a Grinch? Am I the only mom in the world so lacking in holiday spirit as to NOT get and decorate some kind of tree for the holidays? Aren’t there other moms out there who are avoiding the tree ritual because they don’t have the time, the space, the desire, the sheer holiday energy to take on the whole tree thing when they are already baking and wrapping and cooking and shopping? Am I alone?

Turns out- I am alone. The only people who don’t have a Christmas tree are a) on antidepressants that clearly aren’t working, b) homeless, c) about to be abandoned by their feckless parents, d) victims of a natural disaster, or e) completely broke, in which case they are advised to decorate a houseplant or a build their own tree out of scrap wood. One of the greatest things about Web 2.0 is that you never really feel alone. There’s always someone else’s reality to immerse yourself in, a blog, a video, a flickstream, a twitter stream. There are people out there making aircraft out of bic pens and filming transgender OK GO tribute videos and raising worms on organic raisins. Somehow this awesome display of variety usually makes me marvel at the sheer range and exuberance of human endeavor, makes me glad to be a part of it all. This is first time it has made me feel completely alone.

Time to go scoop up some Christmas ornaments in the post holiday sales, I guess.

No one within range of a TV, radio or computer could have missed seeing recent news about last week’s vicious paramilitary attacks on civilians throughout Mumbai. There was a great deal of footage from the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which as one of Mumbai’s flagship luxury hotels was targeted for attack as a symbol of India’s amicable relationship with the modern (and Western) world. I took a look at the most frequent words appearing in a Taj Hotels search today and found:

• Terrorists
• Hostages
• Attacks
• Police
• Armed
• Killed
• Gunmen
• Fire
• Dead

How sad. The top words pre-attack were:

• India
• Indian
• Luxury
• Mumbai
• Hotel
• Business
• Guests
• Palace
• New

Taj Hotels has put up a special site with press releases, contacts, and help for guests- phone numbers to call, a procedure for retrieving bags, priority service for getting back passports. There are also denials of employee involvement, blustery statements about rebuilding, and promises to take care of employees who were injured in the attack or are out of work as a result of it. No one could reasonably have expected to defend a bustling luxury hotel in a peaceful civil society from a full scale military attack. Nevertheless the Taj group is going to have to spend a lot of time and money dealing with the impact to the operations and to their brand.

I wonder if they realize that one of the best ways for them to acknowledge and cope with this tragedy are to let their affected guests, employees, and employee’s families testify as to what went on in the hotel during the attack — and how the Taj Group handled them afterwards. If they can exemplify the values of compassion, service, and dignity, this tragedy need not be the swansong for this landmark hotel.