Molecular Voices » Dirk Reckerman

Dirk Reckerman

As a program manager for Molecular, working with clients like adidas, BostonCoach, HumanOne, PerkinElmer, Boost Mobile and Intersections has allowed me to incorporate my passion for technology into my everyday life. To me, technology is an enabler, rather than a solution unto itself.

XMPP/Jabber: dreckerman

Posts written by Dirk Reckerman

October 16

Reaching your target audience uniquely

by Dirk Reckerman

As marketing professionals, our main goal is to try to cut through the clutter and create time with our key constituency. Delivering key messages in terms and forums that are relevant to users allows these messages to have a far higher impact. Furthermore, uncovering white space in the media market that allows your message to be delivered without dilution gives the advertiser an unparalleled advantage.

An organization that has done this very successfully recently is the Obama campaign. A key part of Obama’s key target audience are young people. One can assume that the primary infotainment outlets that these individuals dwell on are online and television. Gaming and ‘wired’ gaming however, is a very interesting and in my opinion hugely effective channel to consider. The Obama campaign leveraged the gaming channel, by delivering its campaign message in the context of the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise.

This type of innovate advertising delivery requires that an organization very clearly understand their target audience, where they dwell, and where a marketing message can have a high impact. Gamers might spend multiple hours a week playing these games. If this advertising message (without relavant competition) appears to the user multiple times during this period, an organization may well be getting the marketing impact that they might be looking for.

posted to: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Molecular News | No Comments »

June 16

Tangible Communities - online meets offline

by Dirk Reckerman

Over the weekend I ran my first 10K race. It was pouring rain, the course was very hilly but it was all worth it at the finish line. The event was terrifically well organized and it was for a good cause - to benefit the Cape Ann YMCA and the Wellspring House. I had my trusty miCoach with me - this time collecting data on my first real long distance race outing.

So what does this race have to do with communities? Well, as I thought about it during my commute into work this morning, it was a great example of the fusion of online and offline communities. More importantly it was a great example of what makes online communities successful.

My wife had heard about the event at the local YMCA and had signed me up after she had found the ability to register for the event online. She was able to submit my information through the North Shore YMCA website. I turned up to the race and was able to simply pick up my race bib number and warm-up for the event.

The event itself was a great example of a real-world community where the participants created a melting pot of regulars, newcomers and one-timers. The inclement weather and the occasion (Fathers Day) all made for a lot of discussion and information sharing - about the course, about warming up in cooler conditions, about race strategy and about motivation.

At the end of the race, I was very impressed to see the results being immediately entered into a computer by the race organizers. By the time I had changed and made my way to find out about results, the complete roster of participants and times were already posted on a wall. Little did I know that these same results were also being posted to the CoolRunning.com website. Offline goes online!

This morning I checked out the results of the race and was surprised to discover how robust the online community around running actually was. Within hours, the results from hundreds of events and thousands of participants across the country were posted to CoolRunnings.com. As I browsed the online community I was able to find a wealth of information on upcoming events, tips on running, nutrition, schedules and injury recovery. So I signed up for Active.com where I was able to complete a comprehensive online profile that also allowed me to register associate the results of my recent run.

Suffice to say that within 36 hours I have become part of a community that transcends the offline and online paradigms. It occurred to me that a key characteristic of communities is the this trait. Attempting to create online only communities is in fact foolhardy. The most successfully online communities are successful because they are inextricably part of our offline world. Think about Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn etc. Without direct correlation and information being generated from the offline world, these communities will become stagnant… or even worse - will die.

So as we think about how to take advantage of social media and online communities, we must attempt to thing of them in light of how users interact with their offline communities. The ability to port and enhance offline communities into the online rhelm is what creates vibrant interaction, discussion and value to those who use participate in these communities. It is critical for us to divorce ourselves from the technologies and techniques that focus primarily on the online because without our offline daily lives, there will be nothing to take online.

Cool Runnings!!

posted to: Digital Strategy, Molecular News, Web 2.0 & Social Media | 1 Comment »

April 14

Simplicity and Complexity - better together

by Dirk Reckerman

Word for word, I think I just completed reading a book that in my opinion packs a very impactful punch. The book is - The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. Many of your are likely familiar with his work, and for those of you who are not - might I recommend an investment of 4 hours in reading this 100 page book. I was personally introduced to it by a designer here at Molecular and how thankful I am that he did. I found that the book put a ‘finer point’ on many of my own thoughts around the utility of technology and helped accelerate their evolution in my mind.

I read the book as I navigate a complex project - from the solution, to the dynamics of the team, and the user experience we were engineering. As I began to internalize the laws of the book I began to very clearly see the fifth law in play - simplicity and complexity need each other. I also realized that it can play a very central role in enhancing a users experience in the rich web experiences we are trying to create for users.

Law 5: Differences. Simplicity and complexity need each other.

The most successful way in which to highlight the complex is to pair it effectively with simplicity. It is human nature to want to be challenged by complexity. If we are not, we become bored and move on. Interestingly however, we do not want to be bothered with complexity if the result is not worth the effort. (more…)

posted to: Digital Strategy, Experience Design | 2 Comments »

April 10

Coaching made personal, effortless and accessible…

by Dirk Reckerman

So why is a Molecular program manager talking about coaching you ask? Well, Molecular is part of an amazing team that conceived and delivered the Adidas miCoach personal training system. I was fortunate enough to be part of this team and the experience has been and will be a highlight in my working life.

To me, it is the meeting of my passions - sports, technology and marketing. More over, it is the fact that this product is not technology for the sake of technology, but rather technology as an enabler in allowing a user to achieve their goals.

The system itself consists of a phone, heart rate monitor, foot pod (to measure your stride length and rate) and a web application (www.micoach.com). In conjunction, the system offers you an unprecedented training experience without tying you to a gym, location, or a real life coach with whom you need to make an appointment. miCoach allows you to set your own schedule, run where ever you want, when ever you want and provides you with coaching, motivation and purpose. (more…)

posted to: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Experience Design | No Comments »

February 7

Digital communities… not just a pretty ‘face’

by Dirk Reckerman

It is so easy to get caught up in the astronomic growth of online and offline communities - both social and business oriented. Of course I am referring to the Facebook’s, the Linked-In’s and the iPod communities of this digital world. There are a myriad of others of course, but they all have one thing in common - coverage and user volume. This is to say that these communities have proliferated our daily lives and while we as consumers may take them for granted these digital facades cover tremendous untapped value - data.

Community Rainbow

The key advantage to digitally based communities is measure-ability. If the ‘owners’ of these communities have in fact structured themselves in this manner, they are holders of a tremendous amount of knowledge - even if this knowledge is diluted in millions of pieces of data.Stay with me here… Lets take the iPod community as an example. By tracking the types of music that its customers download and mapping this data to basic geographic and demographic data which they have about their customers, Apple is able to provide amazing insights into music trends globally. This information can then be used to influence investment in various types of artists and marketing initiatives. In addition, Apple has an amazing ability to derive product requirements for their physical and digital products - such as the iPod and iTunes. As it finds that the average size of a users iTunes library grows to be 40 gigs, they can preempt this by developing a device that can easily support this amount of music and media.

More powerful yet are ‘open’ communities like Facebook where users have free reign to create their own content. By mining the behavior of users, Facebook ought to be able to provide authoritative data on a huge number of trends across the world - from the political inclinations of ‘tweens’ to travel habbits, Election music tastes, food tastes and clothing. Privacy concerns are raised with this type of data mining - but the pros and cons of this topic are better addressed in a separate blog. Companies ought to be able to make informed decisions on things like their marketing and advertising strategies, product strategies and even investment strategies globally.

Getting to a place where a company is effectively able to do this requires investment in both infrastructure and manpower - data warehousing does not come cheap. But I would wager that a ’smart’ investment in data analytics to uncover the behavioral patterns of your community will provide the company with a significant competitive advantage over its competitors both direct and indirect. While I have picked global names, I strongly believe this principle can be effectively implemented on a smaller scale. Knowledge is power!

posted to: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy | No Comments »