• Why are you penalizing your customers? Jackie Huba has an interesting post on rampant fees in the airline industry. The airlines are probably the worst offenders of this type of pricing, but others do it as well. I think the guiding philosophy is that, in a price-sensitive market, you can lure the customer in with an initial low price and then whack them with many, many hidden added fees. You know, like the Bag Check Fee, the Gate Check-in Fee, the Breathing Our Cabin Air Fee, etc. This might make sense if you only wanted to maximize your customers in the short term; but aren’t you destroying their experience? What will make them want to come back? This is gotcha marketing at its worst. [Church of the Customer]
• Promising signs for Windows 7 launch. Full disclosure: Microsoft is a client, and AMG has worked on the Windows 7 product launch. That said, the surprising pre-sales results bode well for one of the more closely-watched launches of the year. The core reason why I believe Windows 7 will help Microsoft get past the Vista hangover is that it is a great product, but also because the company is taking a vastly different approach to marketing and positioning the product this time around. Does anyone remember Vista’s "the Wow starts Now" positioning (if you don’t, the company helpfully still has it up on this site)? Microsoft has wisely chosen to dial down the message this time and let the product speak for itself. [Mashable]
• Yahoo! tries to explain. We remain fascinated by Yahoo!’s $100M ad campaign. Why do this, and why do it now? Is the problem really that you need to redefine your brand through marketing – or that you need to redefine it through, you know, your products and services? What’s with the "it’s your Internet" idea that smacks of AOL circa 1999? Was this really the best use of the money? So when I saw this video interview with CMO Elisa Steele, I was hoping for some good answers. The short of it: the campaign is their way of reminding customers of all the good stuff they have. Really? [Yahoo! corporate blog]

A roundup of marketing and communications news…

• Facebook access: the new corner office? Jeff Elder has an interesting article on the new trend in companies large and small: selective behind-the-firewall access to social media sites. Our own Chris Boudreaux, of Arlington Mill Group and SocialMediaGovernance.com, is quoted here on the shift towards role-based social media policies. [Charlotte Observer]
• Yahoo! capitalizes on that hot new trend: yodelling. Not all of Yahoo!’s widely panned $100M ad campaign integrated global cross-media brand revitalization effort is to be spent on ads like this. After all, this social media thing seems important, right? So we get the Yahoo! Yodel-Off. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but the press release promises to "give the yodel back to the people by inviting them to participate in the creation of the next generation of one of its best known brand assets – the Yahoo! yodel." Nothing excites the young people like creating next generation brand assets! Did I mention that Jewel, Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, and Randy Jackson are somehow involved? [Yahoo Inc.]
• Pepsi AMPS UP its crisis communications. There was no possible way anyone involved could have anticipated that anything would go wrong with Pepsi’s "AMP UP Before You Score" application. An iPhone app that gave users advice on how to "score" with different types of "chicks"? Brilliant! Oh wait, maybe that’s not such a good idea for a brand that has worked hard to build its brand with women. Or to gain credibility as a supportive, diverse employer. Hey, critics: LATINA Style selected PepsiCo as one of its 2007 50 Best Companies for Latinas to Work For in the US! So back off. [Huffington Post]
• Would you prefer "take a chill pill"? Frank Strong takes Twitter to task for its support. Apparently, being told to "chillax" while waiting for your service to return isn’t really enterprise-grade customer service. Twitter: compelling enough to make it the communications and social outreach platform it has become, immature enough to frustrate users who trust it with their customers and business. He makes a great point that Twitter should either fix itself or sell to someone who can provide the support power users need. Meanwhile, possibly they could at least update their error messages with a more "now" and relevant term, like "chiznill, my brother."  [The Sword and the Script]
• Visualize your bank stocks dropping. A catastrophic economic collapse, the breakdown of social norms, and human society deteriorates into a free-for-all of violence as the survivors battle on motorcycles for water and gasoline. It’s all in Ellie Fields’ new data visualization post on bank failure trends. There is a small chance that we might be projecting the plot of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but we’re pretty sure that’s the main theme. [Tableau Software]
• We’re holding out for "diminished reality." Urbanspoon’s useful iPhone application is the newest entry in the "augmented reality" space, and Mashable is very, very excited. Most of the augmented reality applications work with the iPhone’s camera feature, layering on visual data onto the image that changes as the user moves her phone. If this catches on, you can look for a lot more iPhone users staring lovingly into their phone screens, blind to the world. So really nothing will change. [Mashable]