Tim Kilroy's Blog

Last week, I had one of those mortality-reinforcing events.

It wasn’t an unusual event. At the hospital, it was clear that this was an everyday happening for the staff. No big deal, in fact. For me, this was a forceful reminder that I am likely closer to the end than the beginning…not by a lot, mind you, but fundamentally, it seems pretty clear that I have more past than future.  And as I thought of my wife, and my kids, the tears welled-up in my eyes. I could not leave them. But my body was in charge. My desires were subjugated to the autonomic reactions of cells.

But, I wasn’t going to die in the hospital. They were going to make me better and I was going to go home in a few days. Back to my wife and my kids. There is no greater gift than back.

A few days past the crisis, home again, back to work, back to shuffling the kids out the door, back to doing dishes and sweeping up, back to a world of laundry and tuck-ins, of baseball games and soccer games and car payments and whatever else with which we fill our days, I want to know why I am lucky enough to be back where I want to be. Why do I get more time? Why do I get more?

It doesn’t matter why I get more time. I have it.

I have work to do. Every day I need to remind my wife that she is the love of my life and that our love affair, though tempered in the quotidian of domesticity, is as grand and sweeping as any in the history of the world. And every day I need to make my kids understand that they are the most precious things ever created and that their lives are extraordinary and can only written by them. (Q,C,N, L & A – You are unique and powerful and supported with all that we can give to you. Make yourself proud.)

And I have work to do for me, too. Part of my view of the world is thinking about what’s next and the future and what is possible. I have allowed the abstraction of the future to take away from creating the now. I have 20, or 30, or 40 years left. The actual number doesn’t matter. What matters is that my days are finite. And wasting them imagining what can be rather than creating what will be is a crime. I have been guilty. But today, I speak to you with the zealotry of a convert. Time is ticking. The future is happening. I am building.

What are you doing to make today the way you want it to be?

I get the rage.

If I were young, instead of vibrantly middle-aged, and I faced low employment prospects, a strong likelihood that I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably in a place that is safe, I’d be pissed, too. In fact, I am angry that there is a sense of despondency and hopelessness that has lead to Occupy movement.

It is clear that this country’s youth faces difficult prospects. In fact, the American dream looks pretty grey right now. We are stuck in an economic malaise, in a political stalemate that looks like it is a decade from ending, saddled with wars and worldwide responsibilities on the rise while our influence wanes. It looks like things suck all over.  If I were in college or in my twenties, I’d be pissed, too.

But I am not in my twenties. I am comfortably in my forties. I make a good living. I am not downtrodden. I believe that I can make a better life for me and my family through my own efforts. The only one holding me back is me. So I am not the 99%.

But I am not the 1% either. I work because I must, because my kids need food and shoes and hot water. I am not a master of the universe. I do not engage in speculative option derivatives that require governmental bailouts. I am NOT Wall Street.

Where do I fit? I am deeply concerned about this country. We are breaking apart, but not viciously like in the 1860′s or the 1960′s, but rather like a married couple who slowly move apart because it is easier to not talk than to fight. We take a step away from the other side, liberal or conservative, into the silence of our own beliefs. The discourse between left and right has ended.

But then come the children, with their ideas and their visions of opportunity and fairness and equality. But for their acts of civil disobedience, I have yet to feel the fire. Many talk about the Occupiers as if the are spoiled brats who do not wish to fix, but rather only point out blame. They have the ideal, but no vision of how to execute it. And those that they occupy against, well, they are entombed in their own privilege.  An occupation of public streets has little impact when you have no reason to use them.

This is a battle of the haves and don’t yet haves, not the haves and the have nots. The social issues aren’t about race or gender-equality, or even wars. The issues are ones of class in a classless society. But I am neither a have or a yet to have.

I have some. I want some more. But I want my kids to have even more. I don’t want them to feel entitled, but I want them to have what they deserve, which is everything that I have and whatever they are willing to work for on top of that.

So, I am neither the 99% or the 1%. But I, too, am full of rage. But my rage is at both the 99% and the 1%. For 99ers -if you want more, work more. Be creative and kind and generate your own opportunities. For the 1% – if you haven’t asked yourself what your responsibility to the society that gave you the opportunity to be a 1%er, then shame on you. Put your money and your mind to work to make this a better place.

For those of us on the left or right, remind yourself every day that they are not wrong and you are not right on every issue. Responsibility can be exercised in the paying down of debt or in the spending of money to make a difference. Both sides are right. It is our responsibility as the stewarts of our society to make collaborative decisions, not partisan ones.

My protest song would be short – “Come together.” Who wants to march?

My son & his friend have started a blog…all on their own. They are focused on living the green life. You can find it at The Green Life Blog.

They get together and write the blog posts. They talk, they plan, they care.

So, yeah, my kid is amazing. But what is MORE amazing is that this is their idea, and they do it, and the topic was of their choice. This tells you what kids are thinking about. But what is more interesting is how they chose to communicate. They didn’t do flyers, or lemonade stand, they took to the digital space to voice their concerns and hopes. They are the digerati.

Rock on, boys. May you make a difference.

And check it out: http://thegreenlifeblog.blogspot.com/

The Unimportant Stuff:

1. The Red Sox: Seriously? Lose 3 out of 4 to the Orioles in a playoff chase? Lose 14 out of 18 in September? OMG. I thought that my son would never have to experience the ignominy of being a Red Sox fan like I did when I was a boy. (I can never see the numbers 1, 9, 7 and 8 in any order without thinking about 1978 and the collapse.) Dear Red Sox, he is 8. Please be nice to him. Your failure to make the playoffs will scar him (and, as a side note, I have tickets to ALDS game 1 in Fenway…I don’t want to get a refund for them…I’d like to use them….thanks).
2. REM: In so many ways, along with The Beastie Boys, The Violent Femmes and the thrash metal that blared endlessly and painfully out of my college roommate’s speakers (Hi, Danny!), REM was the soundtrack to my college years. And although they have passed from relevance, them breaking up leaves me saddened…not for them, or missing future music that they may make, but rather for the loss of connection to that me who was 18, away from home for the first time, and discovering the world. (“We Built This City” was also big then, but weirdly I have no emotional attachment to Grace Slick and Starship. thank goodness).

There is a huge brouhaha about mobile payments, and I am keen on anything mobile. I love mobile. I love iPhones, I love Androids, and I am even vaguely fond of Blackberrys. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out why mobile payments are easier/faster/better than regular credit cards?

Here is a nice write up from TechCrunch, but still it didn’t immediately grab me why this was better? I still have to be near a cash register. Likely, I need to sign something or otherwise prove my identity. Is it the ability to choose from different payment accounts? I can do that by taking another card out of my wallet.

I want to be thrilled by this. I really do. But it strikes me as a solution in search of a problem. Can someone enlighten me?

1. Word of the Conference: “Mocial”. It’s what is happening when you put mobile together with social…Imagine that very shortly, your CEO will ask you what your “mocial” strategy is…hard to say with a straight face.
2. If Google is the new Microsoft, Amazon is the new Google: Every retailer I talked to is thrilled with Amazon’s marketplace because of the revenue, but they are concerned about the costs and the implications of making their brand subservient to Amazon’s, just as retailers have uneasy feelings about Google’s power, they too fear Amazon.
3. Marketplaces are Hot: Everybody from Best Buy to Barnes & Noble is doing it. Amazon’s marketplace model has really changed the competitive landscape and many retailers and non-retailers are on the same wavelength. Check out my friend Rick Watson’s blog post on marketplaces and brands. (He is the GM of Barnes & Noble’s Marketplace….
4. SEO is still a mystery: Everyone is concerned about it, but few retailers are making a huge push into baking in SEO best practices. A predominant themes – “It’s too hard”, “We are already SEO’d by our platform”, “It doesn’t work” or “Panda killed us because we tried to do SEO”. All false. SEO isn’t just about search bots, its about creating valuable, deep content that provides context.
5. Baseball is Cool: Thanks to the delightful folks at MyBuys, I got to meet Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry and thanks to the lovely folks at iProspect, I got to get my picture taken with the 2004 World Series Trophy…you know, the one that ended the curse?
6. Social Sharing is Everywhere: I ran into now fewer than 10 social sharing companies (from Moontoast to ShopSocially to Curebit). Although these social sharing sites (“Hey, I just bought a sweater at J. Crew and you can get 10% off there too!”) may drive incremental revenue, it is hard to imagine that these are full-fledged companies, but rather features that belong to a larger enterprise marketing play (no offense to any of the companies I mentioned).
7. Retailers without huge Facebook fan followings think that the number of Facebook fans is totally irrelevant: Guess what? They are right, as are the number of Twitter followers (it is engagement, not scale that drives incremental revenue).
8. Paid Search Is Still the King: Big budgets, big spend, nobody is happy (retailers and providers). The only people that like paid search are the search engines.
9. Comparison Shopping Engines Are Dead: Not really, but as a core acquisition strategy, they don’t cut the mustard…nobody sees them as anything but a necessary evil.
10. eBay is back: Lots of folks see eBay as a viable alternative without diminishing their brand. Good on you ebay….
11. Clearance Items are Still a Pain: The clearance racks that drive volume in offline retail don’t work as well online. There are few effective ways to dispatch of clearance inventory while keeping a straight face if you are a specialty retailer.
12. Everyone is Wondering When the Hype of Social Will Be matched by the Reality: It probably never will be, but retailers need to understand that for the foreseeable future, social is brand advertising, not direct response. Not a hard thing to wrap your head around, but it is hard to wrap your budget around that.
13. The Year of Mobile Still Isn’t Here: But many are panicking that they aren’t ready. Retailers, you won’t miss the boat online, but make sure that you spend smart and look for ways to be creative. Mobile, local and social have all mushed together…

Thank goodness for TED. Eli Pariser of MoveOn talks about the dangers of algorithmic curation. While I am loathe to insist that a company be forced to share or show their algorithmic wares, Pariser makes an impassioned plea to embue the equivalent of “journalistic ethics” so that the filter of the Google or Facebook algorithms so that what is displayed to us is both fair, but also open. As someone who makes his living helping companies structure their websites to be algorithmically favored, this is important stuff.

Currently Google controls about 75% of the search market. And they do an amazing job. I can think of no company that takes its duty more seriously. But in this age of click-stream analysis and personalization, we have ceded our critical thinking to Google. Google tells us what we want to see. We may, however, NEED to see something else. Pariser makes an important analog – today’s web is like the newspaper game in 1915. Every city had dozens of broadsheets, each espousing their own agenda. There was no sense of objective reportage. And while today we trust that Google is making fair choices, how can we know? Google’s algorithmic uber-curator is closed. And obviously, because Google wants to deliver fair and accurate results, they keep the algorithm closed – otherwise it would be endlessly gamed.

But, fundamentally, how can we know that Google is truly fair? And certainly we can’t (or shouldn’t) compel Google to turn over their secret sauce. (And if we did compel them to make the algorithm transparent, who should hold in escrow? Politicians? The government? Certainly not.) How can we see if Facebook is really telling us what is happening in our friends lives? Are news sites telling us everything? This is so impossibly complex and hairy that it is hard to comprehend how to insure that we do, in fact, get both what we want and what we need.

It is diversity that is the key. A healthy eco-system of information from multiple sources will create the confluence of so many filters and their variations that somewhere, between all of your uniquely personalized web experiences is something that amounts to an objective view. Below is Pariser’s TED talk. Damn, I hate it when I am forced to think about big issues that are monumentally important. This has just made my day significantly more complex. Thank goodness.

And here is a link (affiliate) to Eli’s new book that expands on these thoughts: The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You

Hey Gang, I am giving a presentation today to the American Catalog Mailer’s Association about how catalogers can effectively leverage QR codes. This compelling tie between print and mobile or print and web creates a bounty for catalogers. The entire eco-system can be energized when the immediacy of enticement can be fulfilled by augmenting the catalog presentation with new, interactive content. 10 examples:

1. If you are multi-channel, and a catalog consumer accesses a QR code, you can point them to a mobile web page that ascertains their location to give directions to your store.
2. You can present a “How-To” video to help the consumer understand how they might use your product every day.
3. You can point it at a PURL (personalized URL) that welcomes the customer by name and has personalized recommendations.
4. You can point the QR code at your Facebook page and increase your share of “earned media”.
5. You could offer a discount for a mobile-originated purchase.
6. You could enter them in a fantastic contest.
7. You could sign them up for an e-mail newsletter.
8. You could send them to a QR-Code only sale page.
9. You could sign them up for text alerts.
10. You could give them a coupon for an in-store purchase.
11. (Bonus) You could point them at your loyalty program and give them a bonus for joining through mobile.