Bill Snyder [A Life Beyond Traditional Media]

As I was saying ...

#Dear Netflix: This is so 2006!

It’s old news now. Netflix is changing its pricing structure. Well, it’s raising prices. OK, “raising" wasn’t actually the word used.

This was announced on July 12, more than two weeks ago. So, why am I writing about this now? Because Netflix is a great example of how to use social media to damage your own brand.

Let me start with the email sent out on July 12: Netflix announced that it would be “separating [its] unlimited streaming plan from [its] DVD plan offerings." In other words, it wasn’t a price increase; you just had to ... ummm ... pay more money for the same service.

Wouldn’t you know it, people were pissed. And its not Netflix’s first price hike of the year.

Let me use my subscription as an illustration. I have the Three DVD and Unlimited Streaming plan. Back in January (yes, 2011), my rates went from $16.99 to $19.99. OK. Three dollars. Prices go up.

Then, a few months later, the email comes:

Your current $19.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:

• Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month
• Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 3 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $15.99 a month

Your price for getting both of these plans will be $23.98 a month ($7.99 + $15.99).

$16.99 to $23.98 in less seven months, that’s a 41% — lets call it what it is — price increase.

In addition to announcing this by email, it did the same on its Facebook page, with no effort to explain the reasoning behind the change. People were pissed. Go figure.

On July 12, angry posts were coming in faster than I could count, and over on Twitter, “Dear Netflix" was trending (and those weren’t love tweets). As I write, the Facebook post has received 81,187 angry responses to the announcement.

Cloud Computing, Product Silos, and How to Confuse the Consumer

or

If the sky fell, would the internet go down?

So, I picked a fight with a Google Apps product manager. (OK, it wasn’t really a fight.) He was presenting at a session called Cloud Computing for Small Business, which was really just a session on web-based office suites.

The invite only told me that it would be about cloud computing, with representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Drop.io speaking. Minutes into the session, though, everyone working in technology realized that this wasn’t intended for us. It was designed to convince small-businesses owners to use Google Apps or Microsoft Office Web Apps. (The representative from Drop.io, the most interesting product represented, received a minimal amount of time.)

I watched the speakers confuse those poor business people with babble about The Cloud — a dubiously useful term, conveying huge, vague concepts in two words. I mean, my business runs on cloud services, but every time I hear talk of The Cloud, I have these images of binary lightening bolts zipping information from one computer to another.

Telling users you’re offering them cloud computing when you’re really talking about web-based spreadsheets, is about as valuable as telling them a website was coded in PHP. Those products are truly useful to business people, but the representatives from Google and Microsoft made major mistakes.