The other great thing about Sendible is that it’s just not very expensive. I’ve now worked with literally dozens of CMS, social media and email platforms, and a lot of them are just stupidly over-priced for the level of performance they deliver. I don’t care if your company has offices all over the world, if all your doing is updating my Twitter feed or sending out emails, I don’t need to pay you $10,000 a month. Ever.

I’ll keep working with this little tool and let you know if the whizbots and doohickeys really whiz and doo. (Rethinking that metaphor.) For now, consider me impressed.

Note: This update has been lovingly crafted and placed into the tender care of Sendible. If it craps out, expect a “Sendible is poo” post shortly.

Unfortunately, I followed the link to the original article and found the numbers to be a little suspect. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying anyone is providing intentionally false numbers, but I will say the original post makes a couple of assumptions that most people wouldn’t.

Here’s the problem:  The $4.6 million in savings is calculated based on a survey of users of a knowledge repository. The users claim an average of 12 seconds saved per search. The post then multiplies those 12 seconds times the huge number of searches done every week (Over 286K–remember, this is IBM so they’re probably hitting this database all the time) to come up with 955 hours saved. That’s the first problem. Those 955 hours are made up of 12 second bits of work that it is assumed will be spent doing something else instead of watching a computer churn through a search. That’s not the way people work.

On Twitter I compared this to a company forcing employees to wear zippers on their coats instead of buttons because it saves 12 seconds to take a coat off and on with a zipper instead of buttons. A company with 1000 employees could then claim they saved $552,000 a year based on the aggregated time savings from not buttoning during the six months when coats are required. (See below for the hourly rate I used to figure that out.) That’s not even really an accurate comparison since you really could use 12 seconds not buttoning a coat to do something else. Waiting for a computer to churn through a search still requires your computer, i.e. the tool you’re using, to be occupied. But you get the point.

The second issue is that the 955 hours per week are then said to equal “roughly” $4.6  million in savings. By my calculation, that means that every person making a search is earning over $191,000. ($4.6 million divided by 955 hours x 52 weeks a year.) That’s a pretty high median income. I’m betting it’s based on the average billable hour for a consultant from IBM since it comes close to $92/hour. But that’s the problem: I have to make some assumptions to get to $4.6 million.

What is really interesting about the original post, and the savings claim they make on behalf of bookmarking, is that they mention the system they instituted the program on was not very well liked. By adding tags, standard taxonomy, etc. to it they made it more efficient and more user friendly. As I said, I’ve built things like this before and the changes they put in place are usually considered just good organization of a document system. So it seems to me they’re making the claim that doing the work right saved time over the way it had been done. To me that seems as though they are trying to use work done the wrong way as a benchmark for work done the right way. That’s like claiming you saved time by not getting lost.

As I said, I would love nothing more than the $4.6 million claim to be true, and I’m afraid it will now be a part of social media lore that gets quoted over and over. That’s too bad and won’t help with the perception that social media is not serious about numbers.

PLEASE NOTE: If I’m reading the blog posts wrong, or if the assumptions are clarified/explained somewhere, please let me know. This post has been hastily written and I’m not trying to be combative. I also do not want to imply that blogging and social bookmarking are not great knowledge-sharing tools. They are. I just don’t think they should be oversold with numbers that might not meet the sniff test.  I would love to discuss this with anyone and figure out what the numbers mean. And if no one disputes my numbers, and you use the $4.6 million in a presentation where I’m in the audience, expect to see me during the Q&A asking how they arrived at the numbers.

At this point I’m holding to my earlier opinion that it’s simply too soon to tell how the Old Spice social media campaign has affected their shower gel sales. As I’ve stated many times here and elsewhere, the real measure of social media success if it is to be accepted as a “real” marketing channel is how it affects revenue. There are lots of sides to take in this debate (well, there’s my side and then the wrong side), but I think figuring out if filming 186 YouTube videos makes a difference in sales is a pretty important exercise for P&G. Anyone who says otherwise, or who is saying it doesn’t while using bad data without checking it out first, may be pushing an agenda that has little to do with the merits of the actual effort. I’ll get to that in a second.

What prompted this post is an article from Advertising Age that came out today. What’s interesting is that their numbers seem to be coming from the same source (Symphony IRI) that BrandWeek (and then Yahoo) got their numbers; and yet they show that even with the caveats I mentioned in my earlier post, the Old Spice Guy is helping shower gel sales and market share. I don’t have access to the full report, but I can’t figure out how BrandWeek/Yahoo could come up with a story that says the Old Spice Guy is a bit of a failure using the same data that AdAge says shows Old Spice “consistently gaining market share.” Something isn’t right.

So why is all of this important? Why am I spending this much time on the data and its interpretation and not the campaign itself? Let me answer that second question first. The ad campaign is getting plenty of coverage elsewhere. Go use your google muscles and you’ll find lots to ponder on everything from the making of the campaign to Isaiah Mustafa himself. All good stuff, but I’m not really about that, now am I?

What is more striking to me is how quickly the “Old Spice Fails” meme spread around social media chatterers and how fast it became “conventional” wisdom. I saw snarky comments popping up almost within minutes of the Yahoo post. I read the post, noted the issues with the data, and assumed that someone somewhere would defend the social media campaign on something more than creative arguments. But all I saw was “A for effort” posts.

I couldn’t figure it out until I realized that many trashing the Old Spice campaign have a vested interest in keeping social media nebulous. They like the idea that it’s somehow a new and different form of marketing where a specialized skillset separates them from traditional marketing types.  Along comes a very calculated effort based on creating solid, funny content and it simply has to be squashed (or at least devalued). It’s the exact opposite of the “no one knows what makes a meme go viral” ethos and the “content is dead/long live curation” stuff. What’s more, the campaign came out of a traditional agency, not some specialty shop set up to navigate the intricacies of the social media universe. (Here‘s a good AdWeek article on the digital/traditional divide as it relates to Old Spice.)

I am certain there will be lots written about the Old Spice social media campaign. (Probably some of it by me!) But one thing that may be overlooked is how quickly many social media experts either wanted the campaign to fail, or how spreading that idea demonstrated how many of them don’t really know what they’re talking about when it comes to measuring success.

Many thanks to Eddy Badrina (his blog here or follow him on Twitter @eddybadrina) and Ross Kimbarovsky (his blog here or follow him on Twitter @rosskmbarovsky). I found the AdAge article through Eddy and the AdWeek article through Ross. They’re good guys and I recommend you follow both of them. (Heed my words!)

UPDATE: Fixed the link to the AdAge article.

This may have to be quick, since I want to do this before I forget it, but simply put: you’re wrong about Old Spice. (More links to come later.)

If you’re retweeting the Yahoo post (here) referencing a BrandWeek article about how Old Spice sales are down despite the great social ads featuring Isaiah Mustafa in a towel (aka The Old Spice Guy) then you’re not looking at the numbers closely enough. There seem to be some serious issues with the BrandWeek data as far as I can tell. As I tweeted this morning, here’s where I see some problems:

1 – The numbers do NOT come from Proctor & Gamble but from an analyst firm. I have no reason to doubt the numbers are fairly accurate, but “fairly” is a word that can cover a multitude of sins. What does make me wonder about them, however, is issue #2

2 – Walmart numbers are excluded from the data. I’m not an old CPG hand, but I would think Walmart (y’know, the world’s largest retail company) could skew figures considerably in either direction and affect the data set. Plus, I’d bet Walmart’s shoppers (who are ridiculously hard to pin down demographically regardless of what you might think) tend to be above average Old Spice buyers. (That’s a total hunch with no data, but it makes sense.)

3 – The numbers are for a 52 week period ending June 13th. The viral component of the campaign only began on July 14th. (I may be off by a day or two, but it was well after June 13th.) I would have said the numbers were too soon to draw conclusions even if they ended a day after the social media effort, since not everyone ran out of shower gel on the same day and it isn’t something you run out and buy spur-of-the-moment. But the fact that the numbers end well before the ‘second wave’ of social videos featuring the Old Spice guy makes them almost meaningless.

So before you begin dismantling the viral campaign as an “epic fail,” maybe you should check out this from PR Week on July 21st. It says JULY sales to date (as in the month containing the actual viral efforts) are UP 107%. And these are numbers coming directly from P&G (as in the folks who actually know).

I’ll come back and fix links, add some pics  and some clarifications to this post later, but I wanted to get this up right way.  Feel free to comment.

Now I’m on a horse…

Photo Credit: Michelanglo. It’s Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel. It’s funny. Oh, shut up.

UPDATE (already?!): I’ll do some follow-ups on this post. I’m also digging out some old posts I did after the Skittles social media campaign. It seems like what I said then is still apropos now.

UPDATE II: Added the pic and made some spelling fixes. My original post was rife with typos but I did it quickly lest anyone think I was late to the party on this topic. I hate to be a tooter of my own horn, but I was actually pointing this stuff out as soon as the Yahoo post came out (I admit to not seeing the Brandweek article) and the social media ‘mavens’ began pushing the “Old Spice Guy Fails” meme. I was actually surprised that meme caught on the way it did.

UDATE III: My new post on this topic here. BrandChannel has a more in depth look at the numbers here that echoes some of what I said in my post. It looks like I was right. (Woo hoo!) Some discussion on the BrandChannel numbers with lots of insights from Stephen Denny here. (Follow him on Twitter @note_to_cmo.)

Don’t get me wrong, I still think Twitter is a great tool and a valuable channel worth using and watching. But the fact that it’s a private platform being controlled by private interests, and not open-source being run by and for the good of all users, means I am becoming more and more leery of it as it grows. I’m not saying that the folks at Twitter are up to any nefarious plots, but sooner or later they will assert some control somewhere–a decision here or there to limit or eliminate a heretofore free feature–and it is going to make someone unhappy. Or more likely, it’s going to make lots of someones unhappy. It will probably be short-sighted third-party developers and those who depend upon Twitter for their livelihood who get burned, but the burning sensation will also extend to those who depend on those developers as well, i.e. their customers. I do my best to avoid burning sensations.

And one more thing: You may notice the tone of this blog becoming a little more confrontational. I’m not being provocative for the sake of angering anyone, but I think some of my posts have been bland for the sake of being likable. That’s not the way good ideas come about. So I suspect that my opinions may not always be in line with the current shared wisdom. Please feel free to let me know what you think. I hate arguing for the sake of arguing, but I also think that due to the easy ability to resend, retweet and repackage opinions and posts, ‘conventional wisdom’ becomes conventional a lot sooner than it used to. We’re building some big structures these days with quick-setting stupidity, so to speak. That’s too bad. So I intend to look at that wisdom a little closer, not to be intentionally provocative (that’s the realm of gadflies and pop stars), but to see if I can shake loose some of the aggregate before it becomes permanent. (That’s a cement metaphor and it’s brilliant.) If you disagree with me, let me know. Your comments, even the disagreeable ones, will be cherished. I promise.

In that time I have seen vast sums of money spent on bad ideas, watched enormous quantities of shareholder value dissipate and participated in more than a few Whacking Days. (No, not this kind.) I know the ups and downs that come with working for a technology company. You wear your experiences like badges of honor. When you start at a new company, you and your new co-workers share your histories.

“You were with Synegistix? I worked for Ingeniko Corp before they acquired them.”
“No kidding. I was a part of the transition team on that.”
“Really? Yeah, I took the package right after.”
“Yeah, I got laid off during the next round.”

You start a job knowing that your tenure will likely end one of two ways: move on or get whacked. Retirement is not a part of the picture. The people I know who have been with a job longer than 10 years is very short indeed. The people I know intending to stay with a company longer than 10 years is even shorter. It’s not that anyone wants to leave a company, but no one believes that to be possible. No one.

To the grizzled IT veteran, a layoff isn’t the end of the world. It comes with the territory. But there’s something a little different to me about the recent economic troubles and the rise in unemployment numbers. This time, it isn’t just us (or is that “we?”). When Internet companies began to implode around 2000, technology companies contributed mightily to the rolls of the unemployed. Then the recession following 9/11 hit sending more companies into “restructurement.” It happened so frequently that even when times began to get better, tech companies still shed jobs on a regular basis. Again, to those of us who had been through it a few times, we never considered that the companies we worked for wouldn’t have layoffs. (There’s a post in there somewhere that I’ll have to tease out sometime. Something along the lines of technology companies and the poor managers who ran them using the Q4 layoff as a means to fill a budget gap.) You pack up your necessities, leave the company t-shirts, tchotchkes and awards (MARKETING EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH) in your cube and drive to the after-layoff party. It’s the way it’s done.

On this go-round, even though there are people from tech companies being kicked to the curb, for the first time in my career they are being joined at the curb by a lot of people with surprised looks on their faces. There are some layoff newbies who are coming from companies and departments that have been relatively untouched in past cycles; people who seemed to think that they were untouchable.

To those poor folks I say this: Welcome!

Welcome to the world of the newly unemployed. You’ll have a couple of weeks of telling everyone you’re fine and that you’re actually glad to have been let go. It was a good thing, you’ll say. The company was on its way out, you’ll contend. Then you’ll tell yourself how glad you are that you were let go while there was still some money for a package. Then you’ll begin the process of rewriting your resume a couple hundred times trying to make the last few years of your life sound like you were curing cancer. (“Hmmm….Did I ‘interface’ or ‘liaise’ with the project budget operating unit? And was I ‘crucial’ or ‘imperative’ to the success of the Q4 Logistical Re-engineering Process?”) Oh, and just wait until you see the typo you missed before you sent it out to 200 prospective employers. Sometime after the third or fourth week you’ll discover that one of your cable channels in the upper 150’s (Is there an 80’s Channel?) runs Magnum P.I. marathons on Thursdays. At that point, you’re nearing the bottom.

But don’t worry…

Just like that “friendly” break-up you once had after college that sent you into a tailspin where you gained 25 pounds and became addicted to the original Duke Nukem, you will survive. After all, if nothing else there’s 75% of the stimulus package still waiting to be spent putting you to work on our nation’s infrastructure.

Good luck, my friend!

First some background: “Personal brands” is a subject about which many social media mavens love to wax philosophic. Just like a brand message for a product, it’s the bundle of qualities and characteristics that your online presence projects. In short, it’s the various answers to the question “What is Person X all about?” And just like a corporate brand, it has real value, especially to those who look to their online personal brand to help them with professional and career advancement.

A friend of mine who spends a lot of time considering personal brands (he’s a recruiter) recommended sticking to a few networks, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. That struck me as almost counterintuitive. I’m already on those sites, but why not put my stuff out on a few more. No harm, right? From a PR perspective, it’s all about presence. Yet here is a recruiter saying it’s possible to over-extend. Why? Because social media is different from PR in that it’s not all about projecting a presence. It’s about relationships, and relationships are as much about listening as they are about talking. (Somewhere my wife just had an urge to say “duh!”) I can’t maintain a relationship everywhere and hope to provide updated content, feedback and responses. On those sites where my presence is lacking attention, I do myself a disservice by seeming disengaged.

There are all sorts of discussions to be had about social media and personal brands. How do you create them? How do you expand them? How do you protect them? I have come across a ton of people who are self-proclaimed experts on creating and sustaining a personal brand. Some are completely full of themselves, but others make good sense and I’m fascinated by the entire phenomenon. After all, it’s about people taking control of the online reputations that are coming to define them more and more.

And here’s my follow-up question: What does this mean for the social media sites themselves? How does the market determine where people congregate and where they simply abandon a network? Is their an online equivalent to the old real estate adage about location, location, location? How will this play out for these companies once people begin to sense that their social networks are basically located in a bad neighborhood? Is there room for all of them? We’re all buzzing about social media at the moment, but how soon before we start hearing about social networking sites closing down or migrating somewhere else? It’s a mean old world right now. Doesn’t something have to give?

Reed’s Law says the value of a social network scales exponentially with the number of its members. If members begin to leave, is there a tipping point where the value diminishes exponentially as well? Will people abandon a network because they just don’t perceive any value to themselves or their personal brand? How do networks that see that behavior in their members react? Do they rebrand? Do they become niche networks, something like “the network of left-leaning European pop artists,” or just whither away?

I just tweaked some tools on this blog last week and redid the plug-in that allows readers to post content on their network pages. It had a list of social networks that was huge, literally dozens of sites, many of which I had never heard of. Someone feels it’s necessary to make these sites available via a coded link, so obviously there are people using them. Is that how they all will survive. Will they end up being so linked together through API’s and shared authentications that users barely know when they’ve crossed into another network, and updates migrate out to various parts of their online brand automatically. All I know at this point is that keeping an eye on content at more than a few places is time-consuming and difficult. I’ll hope that some smart coder figures out how to keep it all updated and relevant. If that same coder can figure out how to make me sound smarter, funnier and more accomplished, that would be great too.

I have also found there are a lot of very smart people that are wishing to put their own blogs together. Many friends and relations have said, “I’d love to have a blog about something,” where “something” is politics, dogs, knitting or fish cookery. My advice to them? Do it. Now. There are some obvious reasons to express yourself in an online forum, such as it’s great for your psyche. Cleans out the brain, so to speak.

It’s also great for your professional development. It’s a hugely marketable skill. I have another post I’m working on about technology skills, the job market, etc., but for now realize that being proficient with designing and running a Web page shows a host of qualities that employers are looking for, even those not Web or tech-related. I’m not saying you should have a site to rival something professionally produced, but thanks to WordPress and other WYSIWYG editors, you can create something worthwhile very easily.

The market is tough. I don’t doubt that. But those willing to market themselves well, spend some time on their “personal brand” (an overused but not worthless term) and put their creativity on display will have an easier time finding their next role.

Here is one more reason: there is a lot of real garbage out there.

I’m not one to judge, but…Well, actually, I am. Somewhere I heard a number like 4 gazillion blogs are rattling around the Interwebs these days. That’s a lot. And the 2 gazillion (?) I’ve looked at were pretty terrible. (No comments about this one!) So find your passion, fill your niche, sharpen your pencil, gird your loins and dive in. The myriad tools now available for the beginner blogger make it so very simple. Get started and maybe you can help drown out some of the noise.

Now get to it.

I wrote the following post after a particularly frustrating conversation with a fellow co-worker who had recently moved into the marketing department from an HR/training role. She was pretty certain that she knew more about marketing than anyone in the marketing department and wasn’t shy about telling us. When asked to provide some justification for her wisdom she made some mention of metrics that smelled a little fishy. It got me thinking about how often the topic of metrics comes up when I speak with other marketing people, especially the hardened ones who have been through it all.

There are a lot of people in “marketing.” There are also a lot of those people who have never once been held accountable for the failure of their ideas because they are “creatives” of some kind. That usually means they are designers or copywriters by training who have ascended to some leadership or management role. They have kitschy stuff in their offices, framed samples of their “graphic artwork” and a lexicon of “brand” words that sound vaguely important and/or meaningful. Lucky for them, they have usually been far upstream from the actual effort of getting a project off the ground on time and on budget. You know: work. Work requires adherence to certain fundamental rules, like “Don’t spend more than your budget” or “Don’t miss a deadline.” Of course, those rules are more difficult to follow when the people far upstream from the delivery, i.e. creatives, have wasted time and/or money at the beginning of a project. That puts the project managers in the bind of making things work by any means necessary.

The punchline is that project managers must show much more creativity in getting a job done than any creative person did in designing a piece that adheres rigidly to a brand architecture they probably didn’t design in the first place. (“Let’s put the corporate logo IN REVERSE TYPE! Wow!”) Sadly, such creative folk ascend to leadership roles specifically because they never have the stink of failure on them. This isn’t because they and their ideas have never failed, it’s because they are removed from the actual results of their ideas. That lot falls to the operations person trying to figure out how to get the logo made completely out of chocolate and mailed First Class…in August. When promotions are decided, management has a choice between the person who “thought outside the box” and designed the chocolate logo campaign or the operations person who failed to execute. Guess who wins.

Eventually, once those creative types do become senior management, some pesky person from Finance will ask them how they measure the success or failure of a project. That’s where they show their true creativity: They come up with something like the China Syndrome, i.e. they make it up.

I should note that I’m borrowing the phrase “China Syndrome” in this particular usage from a co-worker who told me that was the name for this particular phenomenon at IBM. It was a good name, so I’m lifting it from him. (Thanks, Aaron. There will be no remuneration.) I should also mention this has nothing to do with that terrible movie with Michael Douglas from the late ‘70′s that was instrumental in ending clean, safe nuclear power in the US. But that’s another post.

The China Syndrome is when some bright light in a marketing or sales organization looks at the total universe of potential customers and says “All we have to do is get 1% of that universe and we’ll (fill in the blank),” where the blank can be “make lots of money” or “see huge returns” or “get promoted.” It doesn’t matter what the goal is, what matters is that the universe is very large and the percentage needed is very small. That makes the goal seem so very easy to achieve. For instance, if you can capture just 1% of everyone in China, you’d have 1% of a billion people. That’s 10 million customers! (Thus, the name.) I believe that it in logic this is called a hasty generalization. (I’m no logician, so someone correct me if that is incorrect.)

This is what oftentimes passes for “metrics” or “marketing analysis.” It’s even explained away sometimes as a “back of the envelope” calculation. (I’ve never actually seen that envelope.) Unfortunately, that type of rough calculation is enough to keep a project running long enough for people to become invested in it. At that point, hopes of killing the project, even if it’s a really bad idea, become slim. It can be done, but it takes a strong person to stand tall as the snowball comes rolling inexorably downhill.

I have learned the hard way that I should be suspicious anytime someone uses a phrase like “only” in relation to a number I must achieve. I have also learned that whenever someone does a “back of the envelope” calculation, the math never shows the project is a big waste of time and money. Funny how that works.

Radian6 Brand Bowl: Go here. I’m not as clear what this one will look like in real time, but their site looks great.

Alterian SM2 Buzz Bowl. Go here. Their chart looks great. I’m looking forward to seeing how it performs in real time.

Believe it or not, marketing, as a practice, is real. It’s about more than “engagement” and “touching a customer” and “establishing a connection.” It should be able to prove its value to an enterprise. Value is best expressed in financial terms. Any value that is expressed in non-quantifiable, subjective terms like “engagement” is, in the end, too squishy to be worthwhile over the long term. It may make some consultants and speakers a lot of money to speak in those terms, and demonstrate to companies how they can “think” in those terms, but that isn’t really “business.” That’s motivation. As much as I hear that marketing isn’t about ROI anymore, I know I’ll have a hard time selling that to the powers that be. (That’s actually something I read recently on one of the “expert” blogs. I won’t link to it, because I truly think it’s one of the most idiotic statements I’ve ever read. I don’t want to drive the guy’s traffic up by a single click. Let’s just say that he describes himself as “internationally recognized” for his social media expertise. He doesn’t need my help selling himself.)

You may be asking yourself is there a point to this post or is this a simply a tirade? The point is that I believe the sun is peaking through the hype clouds. Sanity is beginning to prevail. The folks who jumped on the social media bandwagon as a way to become an overnight expert are beginning to run into the reality called data. It turns out that even social media can be measured. Who would have thought that possible? (I mean, besides everyone who actually has done any marketing and isn’t a tech guru turned social media gadfly.) At the forefront of this change are companies like Techrigy (now a part of Alterian), Radian6 and Nielsen. The tools they have developed to search through social media channels for references to brands, products, companies and such are very cool. They then score mentions for sentiment, placement, etc. and provide feedback on what the social media sphere has to say. It’s the same thing PR practitioners have always done, but automated to cover the much larger universe that encompasses social media. Their timing could not be better. The sooner companies begin using these tools the better.

I truly do not begrudge anyone any success. If a social media expert earns top dollar speaking at conferences about “Social Media 2.0” that’s great for him or her. (Slight digression here: I have a lot of respect of Tim O’Reilly, but I really do want to barf whenever I hear “two dot oh” placed after any phrase other than a software release. Mr. O’Reilly is not responsible for the proliferation of naming any online trend with 2.0, but I do wish he had never come up with the whole Web 2.0 stuff.) I wish the whole lot of them well. My advice to them is this: make your money while you can. (I’d suggest you invest in companies making social media monitoring tools!) Agencies and marketing departments have very different expectations from the channels they employ than fluffy concepts like what you profess. They expect results that can be communicated to clients or finance departments. Those results are almost always reported in data. And agencies and marketing departments are already beginning to discover the tools that convert social media results into that data. I, for one, hope it happens quickly.

I came across the Buttered Cat Paradox while doing some browsing on Wikipedia about the terminal velocity of cats.

I’m not making that up either. I really did need to know the terminal velocity of a cat. In order to make some bigger point about test designs and irrelevant statistics I was going to include an anecdote about a study that I read 20+ years ago about the survival rate of cats falling out of high-rises in New York. Mentioned in that article, and remembered by me two decades later, was that the terminal velocity of a cat is 60 mph. Heaven knows why or how I remember that fact lo these many years. I was concerned I had misremembered so was searching Wikipedia to verify that fact. Turns out it’s true. I also found information on the study itself.

The crux of the study was that cats falling from higher than around five stories seemed to have a higher survival rate than cats falling from lower floors as judged by 132 cats brought into veterinarian hospitals. The theory posited by the study was that once a cat hits terminal velocity, which requires five stories or so to achieve, it spreads out, relaxes and take the impact on its feet, thus minimizing, uh, cat-astrophic results. (groan) The obvious flaw in the research, of course, is that the cats used in the study were brought into animal hospitals. No one brings dead cats into animal hospitals, so those that perished from great heights likely never made it into the sample.

What does this have to do with buttered cats? The Righting Reflex. That’s the reflex cats have to always land on their feet, something I’ve always found to be pretty cool. According to the buttered cat paradox, the other thing that always seems to land the same way every time is buttered toast, i.e. it always lands buttered side down. The buttered cat paradox says that if you put a piece of buttered toast on a cats back, with the buttered side “out,” when the cat goes to right itself, the attractive force of the buttered toast will rotate it towards its back. This, in turn, will cause the cat to try to right itself again, and so on and on. Eventually, it is suspected that the cat and toast will end up in some kind of suspended animation, dangling in the air when the two forces reach equilibrium. (See comic left. It’s from Greg Williams, who does “WikiWorld.”)

In that little thought experiment is a perfect metaphor for much that takes place in marketing departments all over the tech world. It’s called “thinking outside the box,” or some such, and it leads to really terrible ideas parading as originality. Just combine a couple of features, some bells and whistles, and you can solve problems that weren’t even known to exist before the previous release or product. Mind you, it doesn’t matter that the bells and whistles were never meant to work together, or that the problem is more than a problem and more like a total failure, just pat yourself on the back for thinking “outside the box.”

Example: At one company I worked for, a bundled plan for service was slapped together to head off some customer attrition. It was thought to be a brilliant and bold strategic move, connecting two disparate needs and increasing customer “stickiness.” It turned out that for every customer saved to a longer contract, the company actually lost money. It would have been better to have let the customer churn. Ooops.

Lesson: Crazy ideas that succeed make great anecdotes, but most of the time they’re just crazy.