Manhattan Marketing Maven

4 Reasons the MSFT-YHOO Deal Doesn't Matter

The highly publicized Yahoo-Microsoft deal doesn’t matter.. It’s a corporate strategy, balance sheet and market share play for the participants. There’s nothing in it for those of us marketing products, services or ideas online.

Here’s four reasons why you can safely ignore this development, just like Wall Street did.

It won’t change search traffic patterns. Google still rules. There’s no reason to believe huge numbers of well-trained Googlers will switch to Bing-Yahoo. There’s no technical improvement, no consumer incentive, no perceptual difference and no reason to think that we will have exposure to bigger or qualitatively different search audiences.

Google will still have a dominant share. I’m not only talking share of search. I’m talking about of advertiser and agency share of mind. The deal might motivate Google to love buyers and middlemen more but they’ve been on a love jihad for the last couple of years and already have a robust set of tools and a pipeline filled with new ones. Their early arrogance has been tempered with a corporate sensitivity to agencies and advertisers. We are not feeling oppressed by an ogre nor are we yearning for relief from a Ballmer in shining armor. 

There’s no price deals. The auction mechanism doesn’t put any more money in our pockets. We have no financial incentives to change our behavior. 

It will take a while to close. We’re struggling day-by-day to stretch budgets and deliver more ROI faster. There is no quick impact to the deal or savory short term benefits because it will take months of regulatory scrutiny before this becomes real.

 

 

How the Big Brands Use Social Media

A new study looked at the BusinessWeek/Interbrand top 100 global brands, audited and catalogued their social media activity, ranked their activities and compared the brand's financial performance to create what they are calling an "engagement database."

It's a cleaver exercise, a good PR move for Charlene Li, who left Forrester to establish herself at Altimeter, and an blogable way to point out the relative penetration of social media among the planet's top brands. The data was weighted so that those who use more of the 40 identified social channels got a higher rank -- kind of putting a thumb on the scale.

As you might guess early adopters and tech-forward giants like Dell, Starbucks, Google and eBay top the list while embattled and security-conscious financial services giants like AIG, Goldman Sachs, AXA, Allianz and Citi bring up the rear. 

The premise is "resembling any in-person exchange, socializing requires more than just being there -- you have to interact with others, instigate discussions, and respond during conversations." The study "implies value in social engagement on top of social presence -- it pays to actively and continually participate and invest in your networks."  

The authors claim a "direct correlation" between top financial performance and deep social media engagement." But this is hyperbole not mathematics. It turns out that the most active social brands do well financially, but, as the authors and Lance Whitney at CNET point out, "the findings don't necessarily indicate a direct cause-and-effect relationship between social media and sales." Its a lucky coincidence that makes a nice headline.

This happy coincidence -- the fact that the most active social media brands do well financially -- is probably a better indication of a company's culture and openness to innovation, according to Steve Rubel than a new financial KPI. And I agree. 

What's both interesting and hard to sort out are the applicable "lessons" from this exercise. 

The HubSpot Blog argues that social engagement is self-perpetuating. That when a brand uses social channels, it "exponentially increases in engagement."  This feels tautological and obvious. Hubspot also thinks that social media is like marketing hamburger-helper; extending touch points, extending reach and frequency, opening up the prospects for viral communications and starting an adjunct process for monitoring and handling customer service issues.

Directionally this study is an interesting barometer of the risk and investment appetite of well known brands in a media world gone topsy-turvy. It suggests that media, technology and select consumer and retail brands are willing to take a flyer on emerging media and that other categories are happy to wait-and-see. It also might be a rough indicator of who desperately or practically needs to better engage customers and who needs to reconnoiter the markets to extend their share lead or to save their skins. 

Get the complete study here. 

   

Setting Up a Social Media Policy

Social media has complicated the already stressed employer-employee relationship. In a tight economy where everyone is overworked and under paid and where emotions run high and staffing levels run low, a few angry clicks can turn things upside down and make public things never meant to be shared.

Think about it -- you have people who know bits and pieces f everything you and your clients are doing. They can potentially disclose proprietary information or trade secrets, give away IP that you spent time and money to create, betray the confidence of your clients or customers, reveal personal information, embarrass or defame other employees or clients or generally tell the world what a jerk you are. And while most employees won't do any of these things -- ever. It only takes one to sink the ship.

The responsible and prudent organization needs to create a policy governing employees responsibility in using social media which threads the needle between an employer's needs for secrecy and fiduciary responsibilities and an employee's rights to free expression. The law is fuzzy on a lot of these issues so your existing non disclosure agreements and/or employee handbook policies may or not fully cover you. The trick is to create and implement a policy that is respectful and sensible without becoming Nixon, Stalin or the censorship division of the Chinese Communist Party.

Lest you think this is just a theoretical problem, Dana Mattioli reported in the Wall Street Journal that in a survey 14% of employee's responding admitted they had sent confidential or potentially embarrassing company e-mails to outsiders. Many a firm has discovered that the author of a blog entitled "X Sucks" was a disgruntled employee or former employee. Plus the emergence of gossipy and insider blogs in almost every vertical fuel the interest in insider info and encourage people to spill the beans. Evidently the threat is driving growth in web-monitoring software. Optenet reported 50% growth in the first six months of 2009.

This is further complicated by the fact that 41% of US businesses have people assigned to spending time on social media sites according to a survey conducted by Social Media Today. Of those only 21.8 percent have a formal policy in place while 41.9 percent have no social media policy what so ever.

If you were a detective or a moderate paranoid, you'd now be thinking that you have access, awareness, experience and possibly motive.

Laurel Papworth lays out 5 considerations in formulating a policy.

1. Involve staff in crafting the policy. Agree on issues and terms. Don't impose anything by fiat.

2. Frame the policy in positive terms and affirmative language. Don't assume a punitive posture. Its part of building your brand, your positioning and your IP. Treat it as such. 

3. Tone Matters. Don't talk down to employees. Don't assume evil or criminal behavior will happen. 

4. Focus on the details. Be sure you cover all your names and subsidiaries. Include freelancers, contractors and vendors. Make appropriate adjustments to your NDAs and employee handbooks. Check with your IP lawyer. Decide if making the policy public beyond the walls of your firm will serve your purpose or make you more vulnerable. 

5. Look at what others are doing. To help you Laurel has collected more than 40 policies from government and industry in the US and in Australia here that you can study and adapt.

I'm impressed and proud of the effort made by my former employer SAP, a German firm, in writing guidelines that are intently sensitive to private, individual participation in social media channels. Written in plain language in a collaborative, respective tone, the guidelines aim to "represent an opportunity to facilitate conversation with all our constituents regarding the enterprise software industry and our place in it." The policy includes inputs from employees and management but squarely puts the onus on individual and personal legal and ethical responsibility for statements made online.

You can download a copy at Social Media.com.

As social media continue to grow at explosive rates, getting a viable social media policy in place is a must-have for companies hoping to grow and thrive online. Put this on your Q4 priority to-do list. 

 

 

Listening to the Voice of the Customer

The driving dynamic tension that animates advertising is the need to address customers on their own terms. The critical variable that separates a great campaign from a hopeless flop is how marketers craft the delicate blend between what customers want to hear and what marketers want to tell them. 

You could argue that all communications is a tug of war between listening and talking and between what you want to say and what they want to hear. 

Every client seeks to hear the voice of the customer. Many firms have ongoing crusades to discern, distill and distinguish the distinct voice of their customer. Many others wave the VOC flag vigorously to filter creative messaging and/or to justify all manner of creative, media and promotional choices.

The elusive voice of the customer is often sought after in surveys, focus groups, promotions and direct encounters not to mention in purchase and POS data. And yet more often than not when creative and editorial choices are made the hunches, the sensibilities and the voices of the client trump the voice of the customer. Anyone who's ever worked in an agency has experienced this.

Now courtesy of Harris Interactive and Linkedin we have survey data to document the phenomenon and to suggest just how far apart the instincts of marketers are from the interests of their customers. 

By surveying 2025 customers and 1015 advertisers over two days in June 2009, the fault lines have been exposed.

Here are the top line learnings:

1. Marketers think ads that interrupt, prompt stop-and-think or convey information are very effective.  Consumers, by the biggest differential in the survey numbers, don't.  

2. Marketers think ads that look and feel like the content around them work better. 

Consumers don't buy it.

3. Before and after comparisons strike 1/4 of marketers as a good idea. 

Only half as many customers agree.

4. Marketers value frequency and ads that reinforce what is thought to be a known message.

 Consumers aren't so sure.

Marketers and their customers agree that funny ads work better, though there's probably a difference of opinion on their ability to drive sales. And both parties are in agreement that scary ads and ads that try to make you feel guilty rarely work.

Apparently a rotten economy doesn't make marketers better listeners. These days -- when everyone is desperate seeking a deal -- marketers are pushing empathy which is falling on deaf ears. Consumers prefer deals and "value propositions" or "luxuries for less" rather than cheerleading ("we can get through this together") or faux sympathy ("we feel your pain") messages.  

The lesson now documented is that the voice of the customer can be pinpointed. 

The real question is --  will marketers actually listen and act upon what they hear? 

Sorting Out Social Media

Marketers are desperately trying to make sense of social media. But social media is still in its infancy; a period of creative and commercial confusion. Do we wait-and-see and jump right in?

We are groping our way forward. Some of us are rushing to be the first on our block to embrace the latest and greatest. Many of us are personally playing around with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others to get the hang of things hoping to be able to offer clients and colleagues context and constructive ideas. And still others are waiting to see; waiting till social media attract enough sustained audience engagement, enough measurable and predictable behavior and enough media dollars to no longer be the just the flavor of the week. 

Meanwhile observers -- traditional consumer, business and trade press plus genuine and self-appointed marketing gurus, bloggers and social media pundits of all stripes -- are weighing in with opinions, observations, blovations and data. With as many as 110 million Americans participating in social networks, roughly 60 percent of the online population have embraced social networking. Each person goes to a social network site 5 days a week and checks in 4 times a day so its fair to conclude this is a mass media phenomenon worth following.

Social networks also mirror the real world. Almost half (45%) say they will only link to family and friends. Another 18% will only link to people they've met in the flesh. The technology that extends existing relationships is the driving force. Making new connections looks like a secondary consideration even though 52% have associated themselves with a brand as either a friend or a fan. 

Consider the massive quick growth of Twitter, expected to reach 25 million users by year's end according to their own purloined internal estimates. And they are projecting growth of 250 percent or more for the next two years. Median use is 1 tweet per day and the Harvard Business School projects most users just send 1 tweet per lifetime. 

This astonishing growth has also brought a bail out rate of 60% per month and a registered base where 75% haven't filled out a profile, 55% aren't following anyone or have never tweeted and 52% have zero followers, according to Hubspot.

From a qualitative standpoint Twitter is easy to use but maddeningly difficult to explain. There are a number of conventions that are tough to find out and understand. Users have difficulty getting into it. Non-users are clueless about what it is and why they should care.

Neicole Crepeau has done of series of UI tests and surveys to discover that the interface itself and the labeling of the site contribute to user attrition and session bailouts. Getting started isn't easy. Nicole concludes " Twitter will probably need to lower the barriers to entry and find ways to make itself less intimidating to people, make it easier to learn the Twitter model and easily enable people to see the benefits that can be gained from returning to Twitter on a regular basis." FYI. She's also done similar nose counting and UI assessments for Facebook and other social media like social bookmarking sites.

Anderson Analytics surveyed 5000 social networkers and discovered that your favorite social network says a lot about you and that birds of a feather flock together. 

Facebook is the digital version of Our Town -- average people interested in average things. Facebookers are loyal, late adapters and the population skews toward married white baby boomers who have embraced Facebook as their favorite network and personal CRM tool to keep in touch with friends and family. 

Twitter attracts the hyper-active, hyper connected information junkies eager to know about news, politics, sports, finance and restaurants. They do more, buy more, connect more and invest more time in Twitter than other social network populations. Forty-three percent say they couldn't live without this network which didn't exist 18 months ago. 

MySpace skews younger attracting 67 million of the young, fun and fleeing. This network has the lowest income, the most racial and cultural diversity and a high proportion of singles and students.

LinkedIn, the only network with a higher percentage of men and the highest income group is focused on getting jobs, making deals and doing business. News and sports as well as individual performance-based sports like golf, tennis, yoga and working out are high on their agenda as are gambling and soap operas; classic forms of Type A stress release.

Anderson teamed up with Greenfield Online to create a social media user profile and taxonomy. Take the 5 question survey and find out which bucket you fall into.

Social networks probably have staying power. There will be a shake out as those easily monetized survive and the others fall away. Prices are low and networks are eager to build case studies -- an environment ripe for testing and learning. There will continue to be enormous amount of hype about the social networking trend, companies will start creating social networking policies for employees and the horse race among the players for user growth and investments. 

My best advice ... do both... Jump right in and wait-and-see. Play around. Test campaign ideas and messages. Watch closely. Start collecting friends and fans. And stay tuned. 

How to Hire A Digital Agency

The RFP process for hiring a digital agency is 22^nd century Kabuki. Highly trained, costumed and perfumed players sing and dance well rehearsed traditional lines in ritualized set-piece scenarios. Unfortunately the process rarely predicts the texture or substance of the subsequent client-agency relationship or the quality of the services likely to be delivered.

The process for finding an agency partner ought to be less arduous, more fun and more likely to foreshadow the working relationship. Yet getting there requires a willingness to break with tradition by confronting your demons, identifying genuine needs and political or psychological realities upfront and structuring a search process designed to elicit critical information about an agency’s competence, finances and operating style while and laying bare the tone and texture of how agencies operate day-to-day. 

Identify Your Practical Needs. Do you need a big brain, tech savants, masters of media, social media experimenters, an army of coders or just reliable arms and legs to execute your strategy, compensate for your too lean staff or interface with your IT guys? Understanding the real need and the division of labor between you and your agency is the first step in the RFP process. Be clear about how much control, direction and outsourcing you intend to do. 

Next recognize that different agencies have different levels of name recognition, positioning and points of origin which shape their competence, their processes, their ability to engage and their price. No single agency is great at everything. Every agency has its core competences and its good and bad days.

Don’t Re-fight The Last War. Often RFPs seek to overcome and compensate for the failures and disappointments with a current agency. Yet be careful not to over value  or over correct for these specific issues since they are likely to be a product of a particular agency-client pathology; partly a result of  your technical, political, personality  or marketing landscape and a partly a matter of casting, chemistry, timing or emphasis by the agency.

Focus on the mission – what needs to be done. Do you need a dramatic increase in market share, an improvement in eCommerce conversion, regular technical tweaks, media optimization, a more systematic and integrated campaign management approach or a complete brand re-stage? The task required compared with the state of the business ought to be the prime directive in shaping your agency search.   

Take the Political Temperature. You have to decide how much brand equity, brainpower, speed, creativity, media intimacy or technical chops you want, need or are willing to pay for at the outset. Do you need quick-and-dirty or famous-and flashy? Are you looking to impress the C suite or are you looking to augment or compliment the skills of your staff? Ask yourself how much validation or blame will you assign to the agency 

Then compare the needed skills with the budget you have to spend. How much of the budget are you willing to spend on travel, out of pocket expenses and infrastructure? Do you want a marquee New York agency owned by a global holding company, an independent firm with a hot reputation in your vertical or two renegade guys in a room completely dedicated to your brand? What will your management accept, appreciate and buy? 

Once you clarify your own needs and the desires of your management, you are ready to structure the RFP process. Give yourself 6 months. Assume the exercise will take 90-120 days and that a subsequent notice, transition and contracting period will be of equal length. Some firms prefer to outsource the search effort others do it themselves or construct a hybrid division of labor. The critical variable is a sense of control. Pick the solution that gives you optimal control of the process and the outcome.  

Cover the Basics. The three fundamental questions you need to answer in any RFP process are: a) who are they; b) what are they truly good at and c) can we sue them if they screw us?  Every agency worth its salt has standard language to answer these questions and financial details and references to substantiate their fiscal viability. You have to ask these questions but you’ll be surprised at how similar the answers are and how little real differentiation you get when comparing responses. Everyone is fabulous, with the greatest teams skilled at every task you can imagine. Everyone has great case studies, screen grabs, intricate process maps, snappy bios and ironclad financials. 

This material is the basic ante; table stakes in the game. All this material should be understood as a check off rather than as critical variables. Those who can’t produce this kind of information on a dime aren’t ready for your serious consideration.

Surface Your Working Team. There are pitch teams and working teams. Pitch teams are the agency’s smoothest, senior, accomplished veteran players. They are smart, glib, practiced and polished. Working teams are the munchkins behind the scenes you rarely see in a pitch. In many cases an agency will not empanel a working team until they win the business so in many cases your working team is a fantasy. Require your working team to be the pitch team. This will ensure that you get a clear look at the people you’ll be working with. Allow the senior supervisors to help, but insist that the agency identify and engage the account executives, account supervisors and frontline creative, media or technical  people who will actually work on your business. Be sure to meet the digital producer and/or the project manager because these individuals will really run your business and your budgets day by day. 

Probe for Process. Mechanics, skill and speed determine productivity. Agencies are notoriously slower and more expensive than client organizations and frequently have ad hoc processes that can leave you vulnerable. Figure out how the agency works and how it takes in and processes the information you give it. Compare that with your internal processes and your productivity tolerances. 

Are you willing to wait 4 weeks for a 5 paragraph e-mail? Will a mini-site or a landing page take 30, 60 or 90 days to complete? How many levels of editorial review and QA will those banner ads get? Will they traffic drafts digitally or on paper? Will they deploy secure intranets or just use FTP sites? Ask for process briefings and go through the agency process carefully to understand who does what to whom and when. Give them hypothetical assignments and ask for production time lines. 

Identify Agency Partners. In this climate it makes little economic sense for agencies to retain full-time people to manage occasional or contingent tasks. Almost every agency relies on freelancers, vendors and partners to round out their service offerings. List the tasks they do themselves and those they share with vendors or partners. Compare the home-grown tasks with your top priority needs. Then ask about the freelancers and vendors and how they manage these partner relationships. Require case studies to show productivity and business results. 

Illuminate Experience. If they did for somebody else, it’s likely they can do it for you, too. Identify your top priority needs and seek out analogous work that the agencies have done. Map their experience to your needs. Be as specific as possible. Carefully examine the planning process and the business goals and connect the dots. Look at creative examples and media plans. Get them talking about how they came up with the ideas in competitive contexts. You are looking for insightful thinking, smart execution and the ability to redeploy these skills on your behalf. And while experience is not 100% predictive of future results, all things being equal an agency that has done the task you need has a greater chance of doing it again right for you. 

Look for Efficiencies. Will the agency learn how to do things on your nickel or do they bring well-established learnings, relationships, procedures and added value to the table. Ask the agency about standing relationships and deals with technical vendors, media outlets or infrastructure suppliers. Ask them to outline and document approaches and philosophies on topics of importance to your marketing effort. You are looking to leverage their experience and their network to your benefit. Your goal in investigating these relationships is to assess the likely added value you get by selecting a particular agency on the basis of its experience and contacts. 

Be as specific as you can and be relentless in follow-up questioning. Ask pointed questions like ---Do you believe rich media yields incremental conversion? Do you prefer one web platform over another and why? Which off-the-shelf CRM solution have they used most often and why? Which media will grant you (and us) most-favored nation deals? Ask for examples of skillful media and vendor negotiations and then ask for the marketing and business impact of these financial efficiencies. 

Check References. No one will give you a bad reference. But ask probing questions about the nature of the relationship, the timing of projects, any claimed victories and/or the day-to-day working experience. Ask pointed questions about the leadership, the working team, timing and costs. Ask specifically about the things that went wrong. There always are a few. Sometimes understanding how an agency recovers from a screw-up is the most illuminating insight into their operation. 

Once you have satisfied yourself that the short list agencies have the requisite experience, relationships and energy, its time to get creative. In many cases your finalists will have equivalent experience, relationships and skill sets. They will have jumped the financial bar and provided strong references. You’ll need to devise an ordeal to establish true differences and to gauge how well you are likely to work with each of them. 

Road Test the Finalist Agencies. Don’t ask for spec creative or free strategic thinking. Instead ask agencies to participate in a live 90 minute strategy session. This more than anything will give you a live feel for what it will be like to work with any given agency team. 

In structuring the live working session, follow this formula:

 

1. Prepare real data to identify and document a real business issue or scenario that they agency will face. Supply this to the agency 1 week ahead of the session. Be sure all participating agencies have signed NDA agreements in advance.
2. Insist that only 2 senior people and the working team assigned to your business can participate.
3. Limit the session to 90 minutes. Set a clear outcome for the meeting. For example, the meeting should yield a campaign theme and 3 tactics to address this particular marketing problem.
4. Have your team, the people who will interact with the agency each day participate in the session.  Run it as if the relationship existed.
5. Use an independent leader. Don’t lead the session if you are assessing the outcome.
6. Devise a scorecard that accounts for the quality of the ideas, the creativity of the team, the experience demonstrated and the chemistry between the participants.
7. Measure how prepared the agencies were and what outside data, information or experience they brought to the party.
8. Try to understand the relative contributions of the senior agency people versus the working team members.
9. Ask your people which team they liked the best and why.
10. Weight this exercise relative to the other intelligence you’ve developed to make a final decision.

Finding the right agency partner can be a crucial step toward getting better business results. You want to break through the expected and sidestep the pat answers. The process should force contenders out of their comfort zones. Agencies have significant differences in style, skill and leadership. Using these concepts  should give you a head start toward identifying them and comparing them to your individual marketing needs .

    

Published my client side thinking on designing RFPs for effective ad agency searches @imediaconnection.com

McNamara & Metrics

Robert S. McNamara, who died this week at 93,  was the original metrics wonk. An early whiz kid he pioneered the use of  data to inform and direct the strategic bombing initiative in Europe against the Nazis during World War II. Subsequently he brought process discipline and data-driven decision-making to Ford and to the business world in ways that revolutionized industries and dramatically improved competitive postures.

As the longest serving Secretary of Defense, he brought the orthodoxy of counting, measuring and making data-based decisions to the Pentagon. The effect was to achieve some economies of scale and to reign in the desires of the uniformed services for countless toys and new weapons. But his perspective and process also led to our disastrous extended engagement in Vietnam. 

McNamara's metrics legacy has several dimensions:

1. Data Illuminates. By studying data of what actually happens, we can identify patterns and inflection points and find ways to pull costs out and built efficiencies into many systems.

2. Data is not always clear cut. The numbers can be spun many different ways to support or defend a broad range of inferences, suppositions, resource demands and ideologies. The famous Missile Gap was a politically-motivated distortion of the data.

3. Data People Can Be Neutral Observers. Sometimes the number crunchers are neutral observers. They dig deep and report out their findings to leaders who use the facts to make decisions. 

4. Data Players Can be Advocates. At other times the number crunchers have an affirmative moral obligation to use the data to advocate a point of view. McNamara was unable to persuade his clients, JFK & LBJ,  to make peace when the stakes were much lower.  

In our current fervor to measure, monitor and monetize everything we can, McNamara's experience reminds us that data mining and data-driven marketing are not pure science. They require a fair amount of interpretation tempered by context and conscience.

Thinking about independence and wiggle room at work, at home and in my own relationships and thinking

Read With Your Ears

I’ve been wondering why computers aren’t more helpful. Sure, they connect us and perform a bunch of basic tasks, but I expect our programming ability and artificial intelligence skills should be able to help us understand, grasp and connect the dots much better than they do.

Then I came across ReadtheWords.com, an online subscription text-to-speech service has completed a year-long BETA test and emerged with 30,000 registered users. ReadtheWords.commakes it possible for the computer to read the words on the screen – any written material, any words that appear on a computer screen.

The site is aimed at one-third of the o learners,” the people who comprehend better by hearing rather than seeing.

ReadtheWords.comcan upload text documents of up to 80,000 characters, from Word documents, web pages, RSS feeds, PDFs and many other sources. Users have 15 different avatar and speaker choices which include options to vary the reading speed and instantly save, store or e-mail recordings. Optimized for easy use, home page visitors are greeted by a female avatar offering a free test use and a video tutorial.

 

According to founder Michael Ziman. “Text-to-speech is a utility that helps people grasp concepts, improve reading, pronunciation and language skills, follow audio directions, and remember or review critical information gleaned from notes or documents. A third of Americans understand best when they hear something. We have built the site by relying on input from subscribers who want a simple tool for integrating text-to-speech into their lives. We aim to make text-to-speech easy and fun for everyone.” 

 

Using a 3-step model (select a document-select a reader-listen), ReadtheWords.com can turn 1 hour of reading material into verbalized speech in 1 minute. The 15 avatars vocalize texts in US English, UK English, Indian-inflected English, French and Spanish. 

 

Subscribers can save recordings and switch between avatars and languages with a click. They can create MP3 files, save recordings, e-mail recordings, embed recordings on web pages or turn them into instant podcasts. A free downloadable toolbar to enable routine use of ReadtheWords.com is also available.

 

If you are playing around with this over the long Independence Day weekend, paste in the Declaration of Independenceand then punctuate it to alter the pacing of the reading or switch between avatars to get different readings.      

 

ReadtheWords.comis a subscription service But anyone can try the service for free. Its a step toward the higher order value from computers I've been searching for.