On Friday, October 23rd 2009, adidas launched the next generation of miCoach – the interactive coaching system that delivers audible coaching while you run. At its conception miCoach was a means by which to allow users to experience the adidas brand in their daily life.

An innovative blend of hardware, software, and web experience – the system empowers users to set and achieve goals – being coached by adidas every step of the way. The system allows a user to manage their active life, and be motivated by seeing their workout results on a highly immersive web experience.

For adidas, the interactions that users have with miCoach reinforces the users relationship with the adidas. In other words, it creates time with the brand. This approach is a more effective investment of marketing money because of the depth and longevity of the interaction with the target audience. Moreover, the interaction creates valuable insights into customer behavior and allows adidas to market to the user in a more relevant way – in the context of the users life.

The service itself has been extended to allow users to take miCoach into the users social realm – namely Facebook. Users are now able to share their latest workout with their personal friends via Facebook or email. The benefit for the user is that they can share an important aspect of their life with friends. For adidas, this is an invaluable manner in which to get trusted referrals for their service (and brand) to a broader populous.

Molecular has been a key part of the realization of this adidas service from its conception. By partnering with Molecular, adidas has a partner capable of pairing insightful user experience design, stellar creative and deep technical expertise to bring miCoach to life. As the nascent marketing initiative transforms into an exemplary digital and business marketing stalwart, Molecular is enabling adidas to push the boundaries of interactions with its key audiences.

miCoach has successfully bridged the gap between the users analog and digital daily lives. By providing hardware to coach you while you run and then parlaying that information to the web where the users transformation is illuminated, adidas is establishing its brand in the users life. miCoach is the future of marketing and branding.

After years of anticipation – the shift from traditional to digital is becoming real. The UK became the first major economy to achieve this milestone – according to the Internet Advertising Bureau of Britain. Internet ad spend accounted for 23.5% of the British advertising market . Print was still in first place, with 30% of the market, but had recorded steep declines.

As the internet begins to replace print as the primary source of consumer news and information, as well as encroach upon television as a deliver vehicle for info-entertainment, this trend will only continue to be more exaggerated.

The industries recovering from the global economic downturn will demand  measurable channels in which to spend their marketing budgets. Internet has an inherent advantage around measureability – although solid practices enabling this are still in its early stages . As he internet transitions into the central medium around which overall marketing campaigns will be based, digital marketers will be tapped to deliver robust strategies to lead the marketing initiatives within their organizations.

I checked out the Google Wave preview that was offered up at Google I/O 2009 and I was impressed. The demo itself was an hour and twenty minutes long, and when you watch it, you know they were doing some rather clever and special things, but it is more powerful to think about what they are building in the context of your digital life.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Wave is, it is a Google Wave is “a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web”. Another one?! Yep, it is another one, but I appreciated their take on communication and collaboration. The go to market strategy for this innovation will be the key to its success, because I believe it is dependent upon proliferation to be successful – i.e. you and I both need to have one to unleash its true power.

Let me come back to the ‘powerful to thing about what they are building, in the context of your day’ comment – above. And here, the little things matter. I believe the Wave team managed to answer the following challenges -

1. Don’t you hate it when you get an email, or a post on Facebook and someone rattles off a bunch of questions and you can only reply to one of them? Or you can’t split the conversation so that you can insert your answers at the end of each question they asked?
2. Doesn’t it both you to get added to a group conversation (on email) late, and you need to decipher the context of the content?
3. Don’t you wish you can combine your IM and email clients into one solution? And more over, take the content that you might have just collaborated on and spit it out into a document or blog?
4. How about contextual spell checker so that you don’t get suggestions for spelling correction that have nothing to do with the content you are authoring?
5. Wouldn’t it be cool if you can convert a conversation or document into a Blog and then see and respond to the responses to the blog from one interface? And do so for all the external ‘publications’ that you might have?
6. What about collating pictures that five different friends might have captured from the same event into a single album?

And these are just some of the day-to-day things that they thought about. The technology itself is pretty darn cool – like the fact that multiple users can edit the same content at the same time, and they call see what’s happening in real-time, while the system also manages history, tracks changes and mergers these changes. Oh… and you can do this on a mobile device!

See how Google Wave might answer some of the small (and big) experience challenges in your digital life… (I promise Google didn’t pay me to say that – I just appreciate technology with purpose!)

When you live in the middle of the digital marketing and media revolution, it is sometimes easy to overlook the problems and changes that many industries are experiencing. Not long ago, Public Relations (PR) was considered the most cost-effective way of getting an organization’s name out to the masses. Here in Boston, there are a myriad of PR organizations, and they are fighting tooth and nail to retain business. I wonder, however, if they don’t see the change that is happening around them. Or perhaps, similar to print media, they see it, but are not quite sure what to do about it.

As I pondered this dilemma, a few possibilities occurred to me. I segmented my thinking in the three ways- short, medium and long term. I also realize that painting in broad strokes affords me liberties that are not true in business.  Oh, the beauty of blogging!

I strongly believe that the goal of public relations has a great deal of value. It is not the value proposition that needs to change, but rather the mechanism/tactics through which it is delivered. Therefore, in the short term, the tactics employed by a classic PR agency must evolve to embrace and leverage social media elements. If you consider the capabilities being offered by many PR agencies today, they still tout old school capabilities like press releases, media tours, messaging, highlighting executives, by-lines etc. These are all well and good, but how many of us read a press release? And if I wanted to learn about an executive, I expect to hear what that person has to say on YouTube or perhaps read it on their blog. A PR agency does not have to change the overall strategy, It simply has to  incorporate these social media elements and tactics.

In the medium term, there may be opportunities for intersection of PR and digital marketing. To this point, digital marketing has been focused around traditional marketing through digital media. The skills and approach that PR experts bring to the table might be key to understand what drives people to organically and virally consume content. Communication strategy has not been the strong suit of digital agencies, but by virtue of being a rapidly evolving space, it may be time for the digital team to drive this strategy. In other words, leverage the experience, approach and thinking that is the corner stone of PR , but apply it to the digital medium and realize that the sum of these parts will be greater than the whole (i.e. PR + digital agency = future)

The long term approach is far more radical. It is anyone’s guess as to where the quickly changing environment will settle. The good people in the print media are having one summit after another to morph their operational and profit models to return to viable businesses. These media outlets have been the main stay of PR – not to mention the bane of their existence. My belief is that the trade of PR relations will begin to focus on experts and consumers. The middle ground of journalists and print publications as we know it will seize to exist. They will be replaced by centers of interest (i.e., think communities or groups), who create and maintain their own ecosystem content creation, commerce, reviews, communities – specific to that interest. This would not only impacts PR, but digital marketing and business in general.

There is a future for PR, but it is irrevocably coupled with the digital medium and digital marketing. The scary consideration is that these PR agencies must act now so that they do not face the same predicament as the print industry.

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.

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!!

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. In the context of my current project, the complex nature of what we are trying empower the user with is enhanced by making certain aspects of the solution simple for the user. Notice that I said certain aspects. Making everything simple will actually reduce the value of the solution itself, while the strategic exposure of complexity will enhance the users overall respect for the solution.

In order to successfully find where to introduce complexity and where to keep things simple, we must understand the key drivers that bring a user to interact with this system. In our case, we are transposing a very human activity (coaching and personal training) into a web application – the application I refer to is miCoach. This decision means that the user is willing and expecting to be introduced to the complexities and knowledge associated with coaching. An activity normally performed by trained professionals. The words – trust, authority, expertise and mentoring come to mind when you think of coaching. We can use complexity to allow the user to identify these values in our solution.

We must then balance this ‘introduced’ complexity with simplicity for all other aspects of the system. This approach creates the necessary contrast to pronounce the very values we are attempting to promote – trust, authority, expertise and mentoring. Peripheral tasks that enable the experience, such as signing-up for a user account, navigating the application, and the use of equipment must be made simple for the user. This allows them to immerse themselves in their key driver for selecting the solution – in this case coaching.

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. The science of the system is based on Heart Rate zone training informed by the experts at Athletes’ Performance.

You are accompanied at each step in the process just like (or perhaps even more so) than a coach or personal trainer would. You can take your training program where ever you go. And you can track your progress in a very tangible and visual manner.

I have personally been using the complete system for 5 months now and can honestly say that I cannot imagine going for another run without miCoach with me. The system works. The recommended workouts each day are less than I would normally have done if I was doing it myself. The reason is that many of us over train and there by plateau at a certain level without actually seeing improvement. The coaching plan that is created for me matches my level and focus’s on achieving my goal and it does this in a manner that is transparent to me. Just to be clear – I am doing LESS and getting MORE!! When does that ever happen?!

Nothing I say can be more powerful than the facts -

So let’s consider for a moment the brand angle. As a user, I spend about 20 minutes a day on the adidas miCoach application. I review the workout that I completed and I look forward to the next workout tomorrow. That’s 20 minutes with the adidas brand. When I run, I carry my adidas Samsung device with my adidas footpod and adidas heart rate monitor. Depending on the length of the workout, that’s another 30-40 minutes of adidas brand time. That’s an hour a day of me, as a consumer, interacting with adidas.

To say that I am excited about the product and the possibilities is an understatement. miProject, miPassion, miCOACH.

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.

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, 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!

For years, companies have spent money to develop one-off brochure-ware websites to represent their organization on the web. The web has now become the leading medium through which customers and potential customers interact with product and service providers.

Organizations must reconsider their approach to developing their online channel more thoughtfully than ever before. The old approach of putting together a one-off project team to conjure up an approach to gather requirements, build and then deploy a corporate website is quickly dwindling. The web is a strategic channel which can impact the perception that customers have of your brand, product or service offerings and can material impact revenue.

Product development as a discipline has existed for years. In fact, there are books, courses and processes developed specifically to develop products in the high tech industry. This however has inserted itself specifically for ‘website’ development. Yet. By web I mean corporate websites as opposed to ‘software as a service’ applications. However, it is plainly clear that the gap between the former and the later needs to be closed.

Why you ask? It is because in order to offer the ‘correct’ experience to your end consumer, you must adopt a product mentality. Fundamental steps in adopting this mentality are to -

1. Satisfy a need that the user has;
2. Brand that experience uniquely to your company;
3. Invest in developing the users web experience with your company;
4. Assign ownership of this web experience to an defined long term owner – the product manager;
5. Develop a strategy for the web experience that mirrors the guiding principles of your business;
6. Continually add to and enhance the user’s experience with your website;
7. Carry out research around the user’s needs and what of these can be met online;
8. Differentiate your experience from that of your competitors;
9. Evaluate ways to monetize your web experience – directly or indirectly;
10. Establish metrics and performance indicators associated with your web experience;

Adopting this approach will help ensure that the web experience that you offer to your end consumer is relevant. Your website will no longer be a ‘me-too’ site, but rather an integrated channel that highlights why your company is different from your competitors. Further, you will be creating reasons why users should do business with your company rather than your competitors – a competitive advantage.

In the long run, the net result will be a shift that will embrace the web as a tangible way for your company to do business with your customers. You will avoid the apathy associated with the web and its ability to fundamentally affect your business.