Year: 2005

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The Reach Of Great Customer Service

Evelyn Rodriguez pulls out the stops and writes a gorgeous piece on her recent experience at The Market Grill in The Pike Place Market in Seattle. Here’s a taste:

“I’m reminded of chado, the Japanese tea ceremony, in the way he slides open the drawers, turns over the salmon, and deliberately spreads every inch of the bread evenly with the rosemary mayonnaise. His companion worker’s movements are just as fluid…Everything is fresh. And they let you know it if the time is right. Slicing the bread: ‘We baked it this morning.’ The emphasis wouldn’t work if every bite didn’t salivate wholesomeness…”

No one on the planet would connect with that description of The Market Grill if it were written by a copywriter, and pushed out through the traditional channels. It has to be external, unsolicited, authentic to ring as truly as it does.

Although a great deal of attention is cast on the less-than-perfect customer experiences that can be highlighted through blogs, it’s also true that happy customers blog, too. Shel Holtz points out the RedRoomChronicles, Marriott hotel stories as they are told by Rob Safuto (who has racked up over 350,000 awards points in their perks program). Safuto writes:

“For all the time we spend in these hotels it’s important that we’re in on every perk possible that might make our business travel just a bit more tolerable.”

These aren’t just blogs. They are links to active, vocal, social communities.

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Improving The In-Store Customer Experience

Some thoughts from Noel Franus. My fave line in the article:

“It should be stated, however, that each of these places, these environments, are much more than spaces…they’re more than just furniture, paint and carpet. They’re marketing tools. Relationship opportunities.”

Some suggestions from Noel:

  • Provide a comfortable space. A couch or coffee table is the first step you can take in shifting the mood from annoyed to relaxed. (Relaxed customers usually shell out more money than annoyed ones.) Investment: $2,000 (furniture).
  • Do you have any coffee? A little java goes a long way toward making customers feel like valued guests. Get a decent coffeemaker and good beans. Or outsource the opportunity to a local brandofcoffeebucks that people know and enjoy. Investment: $1,000 per year (coffeemaker and supply).
  • Dish up the fishwrap. For less than a buck a day, you can give them something to read or watch while they pass the time. Newspapers and magazines can keep those rambunctious customers under control. Investment: $100 per year (daily news and magazines).
  • Nothing but net. Most people are missing out on work while they’re in the store. Give them wi-fi, give them access to information, give them back their productivity, give them back their time. Investment: $700 per year (wireless router and high-speed Internet).

Hat Tip: Jake McKee.

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Resist The Siren, And The Harpy Within

Paul Greenberg writes:

“So the customer is now social, global, knowledge aware, ready to take control of their lives, and the repository of value. This is a new era – and we’ve only just begun.”

Paul, I know you’re on the other side of the continent, but can you see the vigorous nodding happening over here?

Another gem, on the concept of getting big, ossified organizations to make this change:

“When you get directly into the logic of the enterprise, you are at the beating heart and transforming this is a bigtime PITA. What are you going to do? Redirect an auricle? Retool a ventricle? No you have to replace the heart and that is nightmare central. But it has to be done. The enterprise logic has to be replaced so that there are new ways to deal with the new customer that is already out there.”

Read the whole thing.

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When Customers Blog

Susan Getgood has a great, two-part post on customer blogs (that is, enterprise-sponsored blogs that are written by customers of that organization). Here they are:

Customer Blogs: What type of company should do one? and
Customer Blogs: What you need to do to make it work.

Good stuff, read the whole thing, etc.

Some tidbits, to help stack the deck in favor of success. Susan says consider a customer blog if…

  • Customers love the product
  • Customers are already talking in some fashion
  • Others can learn from the customers’ conversations (Susan calls this “exploting an information gap,” but isn’t it more about conversation and learning, rather than “exploitation?”)
  • The hosting company is willing to give up control

The last one’s the biggie, isn’t it? It goes back to trusting the customer, I suppose…

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Jerry’s Brain And The Heresies It Contains

Jerrymichalskihillsideclubaug2005
At last night’s Hillside Club “Fireside Meeting,” Jerry Michalski presented his thoughts on the question that’s been nagging at him…what is it that caused some of the great thinkers of the past 300 years to become “outcasts?” Why have certain types of outside-the-mainstream thought been marginalized and their proponents ostracized?

Part technology demo, part presentation, part sorta-participative-performance piece, Jerry started out with an overview of what *he’s* been using for the last decade to capture, collect, and organize his thoughts, a piece of visual software called TheBrain. In some ways, The Brain is sort of like del.icio.us on steroids, in that it enables someone in the period of just a few seconds to tag a website, book, piece of music, document or any other “thought” with user-defined tags, index it, and store it for easy future access.

Thebrain_1

(from here)

Where TheBrain goes beyond tagging-and-bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, however, is in its ability to create some basic relationships between the different bookmarks (parent, child, peer/sibling, etc.). Although the fundamentals are straightforward, the power of this approach becomes evident when Jerry shows that over the past 10 years he’s logged over 60,000 bookmarks into the system (62,864 as of last night, and counting…), each one connected to a handful of others, creating an ecosystem of links that touches on many of the key areas of human thought.

(Side note: Tracking bookmarks in a dynamic medium such as the web is a Sisyphean task, as web sites change and companies are born…and die. However, the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine really are the “4th dimension” of the web, and allow one to chronicle the life and death of startups with quite a bit of clarity.)

After showing one mechanism for organizing thoughts, Jerry moved over to discussing some of the “heresies” of a number of outcast thinkers of the past few hundred years, including:

Disparate thoughts. Disparate ideas, spanning hundreds of years. Yet, Jerry theorizes that there is a common message that each of these thinkers was railing against. That message they opposed?

“We don’t trust you.”

We. Don’t. Trust. You.
…to self-educate.
…to enjoy authentic art.
…to minister to one another.
…to tell the truth about your lives.
…to design the places we inhabit.
etc.

(Kenneth Tyler asked the question-of-the-evening here, in wondering “Who is ‘we?’ in the statement above…is “we” the government, some other authority group, distrustful organizations, ourselves…?)

The remainer of the evening was wide-open and interactive, with the 40-or-so folks in the room batting around the ideas presented, and finally splitting into emergent groups discussing their various takes on the implications of the discussion.

Moving from the esoteric to the practical, however, the points made at Hillside ring strongly. There are myriad examples where “We Don’t Trust You” is the rule in business with how customers are often treated:

…and so forth.

Jerry was recording the evening on his iPod, so when it goes up as a podcast (at Sociate, I’d presume), definitely check it out.

Note to self: Today, make an effort to notice the places where rules, structures, and physical barriers have been put in place based on lack of trust and/or to ostensibly protect me from myself.

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BlogHer: Stretching Outside The Comfort Zone

(photo: whitneybee)

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I’m still in that post-conference, brain-spinning-with-ideas afterglow after spending the weekend at Blogher. Elisa, Jory, Lisa…what to say? Brilliant execution. And this was just version 1.0.

Three of the stated goals of the conference were to better enable “exposure, education, and community.” There were tons of education sessions (typically multiple ones running in parallel). The face-to-face aspect of the community gelled immediately at the dinner on Friday night, and only accelerated throughout the weekend. Education? Check. Community? Check.

That leaves the “exposure” goal.

The argument has been made that “the number one rule to getting traffic to any site is content.” (Of course, the implication is the converse: if you’re not getting traffic, your content must be poor.) This is only partially true, and only to a point. To get readers to return to a blog, the content must be there, must be good, and must be relevant. That’s not the problem. The problem is getting a getting discovered by a critical mass of readers in the first place.

There’s a lot of discussion going on today on this topic, as a result of BlogHer. Jarvis (who disses the “A-list” and them embraces it in the next sentence) says “It’s not the list that makes me happy. It’s the links.” Nick Douglas asks “Why do people bitch and moan about lists of popular bloggers, then grumble ‘but you have to do what they say’?“

Roots Of The Problem

This problem has deep roots, and a number of them. How did it come to pass that “number of links” became a surrogate for “quality?” It’s a result of a number of factors that lie in the technical underpinnings of how we currently “discover” new things online, namely PageRank and related algorithms. If a lot of people link to something it must be good, right? Well…sort of. The concept of “a link is a vote” is a blunt instrument.

A comment was made in the discussion at BlogHer regarding various types of relationships and connections: “weak ties” are those numerous, yet not strong, versus “strong ties” such as those that we have with family, freinds, and our close community. PageRank, the “Technorati 100, TruthLaidBear and other “TOP x” lists are based on number of links, which are based on weak ties. In the current infrastructure, quantity IS quality, based on how these systems have been implemented.

There is a second problem as well that’s even more slippery. When venturing out into blog-land, there are two tools that most of us use, our blogroll and our aggregator. And, strangely enough, these contribute to the echo-chamber problem as well. Blogrolls, once set up, are largely “set and forget.” Similarly, each of us only has so much time in the day to go through our aggregator to read what’s out there. Once our initial list is set up, it takes an increasing amount of energy to add someone new to our list of daily reads (“I don’t have the time!” we cry). And, additionally and oftentimes, the sites that DO make it onto the list are others that agree with our viewpoint, or at least cover a similar set of topics as ourselves. We may be hard-wired to read reflections of ourselves. We all contribute to the echo chamber. Beth Kanter calls them “reading ruts.”

Inertia is a bitch.

Ok, there’s a problem. Stop talking. Do something.

With the tools available today, there are steps we can each take to give more exposure to those we think are deserving. (Of course, this presupposes that “more exposure is better,” and I did hear a number of comments over the weekend that took issue with this point. There were a number of attendees who write purely for themselves, or purely for a small community.)

The first thing is…we need to make an effort to actively find new people to bring into the conversation. Staying head-down in aggregator or blogroll will NOT find as many new voices to bring to the conversation as getting out of the comfort zone and getting outside our normal haunts.

The second this is…as long as the infrastructure continues to reward links, and equates link quantity with content quality, it is exceedingly difficult to increase exposure without links. As such, actively linking to the new voices that you discover (and, mind you, quality voices as Ethan discusses, not doing it for the sake of the appearance of “being inclusive”) is something we all can do to highlight those who impress us. It’s not just lip service. It’s doing something. Scoble does it (and does it again and again and again…right on, Robert). Others seem to have a more difficult time (“Interesting that I find it easier to read and point to a man’s account of the conference.”) C’mon, Dave…there were damn near THREE HUNDRED bloggers there. You can’t find a solitary one that makes you feel “comfortable” to link to aside from Jay? (n.b. Jay’s post IS spot on, and is worth a read.) (UPDATE: Dave now has a link to Lisa Williams as well.)

Two other other things we can do are to use the tools that are there to find new voices, as well as create new tools that take into account other mechanisms to get to the subtleties of the implications of what links mean (check the comments here). Mary Hodder is doing a lot of thinking on how other “social gestures” and measures can be used to better capture the complexity of relationships, above and beyond the link. Mary writes:

I pointed out to them that 4 or so years ago.. when there were only 100k blogs, that a relatively small group of people all linked to each other in blogrolls, and so those blogroll links are sometimes old and the networks dense, for A listers, and yet, Technorati doesn’t do anything to express a blogroll link that is years old from a current blogroll link. They simply scrape the front page of a blog, and treat all links, old or new blogroll links, and current post links, as the same and then count them, for their rankings.

Mary, sign me up to help.

Stream-of-consciousness snippets and freerange mollifications from the weekend…

Was captured in an interview of “BlogHims” by Beth Kanter on Friday night at the pre-event dinner. Definitely contains one of the more, um, interesting quotes I’ve ever given…

Talking with Anna John of Sepia Mutiny on Friday night…

Starting off Saturday at some barely-caffeinated hour working shoulder-to-shoulder (literally) with Nancy White, who was signing folks up for the various Birds of a Feather sessions while I was helping to check folks in and get them badged. Close quarters behind the check-in table, they were. Nancy, you rock…

The Identity Blogging panel (“How to Be Naked“) was standing-room-only, and then some. The epitome of “unconference” sessions…although there were three folks with mics in front of them, it was a real, civil, thoughtful conversation between and within a roomful of people. Awesome. Thanks Heather, Ronni, Koan for leading it, and leading it well…

Getting a bunch of opportunities to connect and chat with Staci Kramer throughout the weekend. Trouper…

The mommyblogging panel was awesome, and had a great conversation afterwards…How does one separate the various facets of one’s personality? Where do you draw boundaries about what gets revealed in online, offline, business, and personal situations? How do you balance personal and professional, without destroying either while feeding the needs of both?…

Kim, Rahat, and Jill…was great to meet you at the happy hour…

danah. and her hat…

Chatting with Kitt Hodsden and Skye Kilaen at the final session (Kitt, thanks again for correcting my addled transcription!)…

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PRWeek: Podcasts Open New Doors For Customer Relationships

Keith O’Brien gets it right in this article: Podcasting: Podcasts open new doors for customer relationships. Jason Calacanis has a great quote:

“I think it’s a great channel for companies to go direct to the consumer. I love JetBlue, and if they had a travel show that incorporated where it goes, what you can find at its destinations, and travel tips, I would certainly download it. If you’re a Flash designer and could listen to a podcast each week on Flash design produced by Macromedia, that would be of high value, as well. Just like blogs can engage customers in a conversation, [podcasts] can, as well.”

Additionally, although I normally try to avoid The Mouse at all costs, Disney’s Duncan Wardle also makes a good point:

“Say a single mother from San Francisco is thinking of coming to Disneyland. When she’s planning her trip, what if she listened to a podcast of a single mother talking about what’s good and [bad] at Disneyland? Right now, consumers are in the marketing mix, as they should be. There’s a huge change of focus where you will not be marketing at consumers; you will be marketing with them.”

http://www.prweek.com/news/news_story_free.cfm?ID=239677&site=3

(disclosure: I was interviewed for the article)

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The “newvoices” Tag: Throwing On The Floodlights

The “newvoices” Tag Is A Chance For The A-List, The Z-List And Everyone In Between To Lead By Example

Measured by inbound links, or references, or by any other measure, blogs are still very insular. We find the folks we like to read, either blogroll them or add their feeds to an aggregator, and that is the view of the world we see. Sure, we occasionally serendipitously trip across someone new and add them, but when was the last time you updated your blogroll since you set it up? How many feeds can you read and track? Even someone like Scoble (who reads, what, 1500 feeds?) is only scratching the surface. I refuse to believe that all the good ideas are in the top 0.01% of all the blogs that are out there. What’s worse, once those patterns are set up, it’s tough to break out.

We read what we know…and we link to whom we know.

Halley Suitt threw down the gauntlet back in March.

She wrote:

“So I’m throwing down a month-long challenge in March, to promote TEN NEW VOICES. I’m asking all the bloggers in the room at Harvard (Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger, Rebecca MacKinnon, Susan Mernit, Shayne Bowman, Ana Marie Cox, Lisa Stone, Chris Willis, Craig Newmark, Bill Gannon) to find TEN NEW VOICES and promote them by writing a post about each as an introduction and blogrolling them.”

Jay Rosen and Lisa Stone went out and found fourteen. A great start. But then it seems to have fizzled.

Additionally, to this end, Scoble seems to have an interest in going down this road as well. He even seems to have a system. But…he can’t share it.

“I’m playing with some secret new technology that makes the tech blogging world even flatter. Not from Microsoft (the inventor asked me to keep it quiet until he’s ready to release it). But, it totally is going to change how I blog (and it really already has although I can’t change my style until you all get it too). It brought me Leslie’s blog, for instance.”

Secret. Greeeaaaat.

So. Here we are. The one-shot crusades don’t work. Too time-intensive. There’s some secret technology in the works, but that’s not very open, is it?

Here’s what I propose: At least once a week, do a very simple thing. Find someone to whom you’ve never linked before, link to them, and tag the post with the following tag: newvoices.

Then, either in your aggregator, on your MyYahoo or MyGoogle (I know it’s not really called “MyGoogle,” but whateverthehellitis) page, or wherever you want, subscribe to a feed of newvoices-tagged posts. Here’s what’ll happen: the good, emerging folks will come to you. Now for the really cool part.

This is a self-dampening system. It can’t evolve an “A-List,” since once you’ve linked to someone and tagged that initial post with a “newvoices” tag, that individual ceases to be a new voice for you. The next time you link to them, don’t tag the new post in this way, since for you, it’s no longer new. But…and here’s the cool part…the really smart, cool, funny insightful folks who emerge will gather a lot of “newvoices” tagged links as they become visible. (N.B. Even if someone else has pointed to somebody with a newvoices tag, you should too! It’s not a contest to see who’s first…it’s an endorsement of someone to whom you haven’t linked previously.)

In this way, there may be a lot of links to a particular new voice that show up in the newvoices tag-stream over a short period of time. The new voice gets the spotlight it deserves for a day, or a week, or a month as the person gets widely “discovered” and linked to for the first time by a number of people. But then, it’s someone else’s turn. The newvoices tag is a catalyst, in the literal sense of the word. It enables the reaction, without being consumed.

How to tag a post in this way:
In Technorati:
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/newvoices” rel=”tag”>newvoices</a>

In IceRocket:
<a href=”http://blogs.icerocket.com/tag/newvoices” rel=”tag”>newvoices</a>

In Typepad:
If you set up a “newvoices” category, this should happen automagically if you put the post in the “newvoices” category.

In del.icio.us:
Simply tag the URL with a “newvoices” tag. It’ll show up here.

Subscribing to the “newvoices” River-o-Goodness:
Here’s how to do it in Technorati. Subscribe to this feed:
http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/newvoices

By the way, as of today (27Jul2005), “newvoices” tagged items bring back:

    None on Technorati

  • None on IceRocket
  • One on del.icio.us.

So, here we go!

Gonna start this off with a two-fer. Starting out on-beat and on-topic in SocialCustomerLand, Amy Gahran has a great rant on “Let’s Put Press Releases Out Of Their Misery.” A sample:

“The next time you’re tempted to issue a press release: STOP!!!! Instead, post a web page or blog item that explains what’s new – and more importantly, why anyone should care. The “so what” should go right up front. Even more, you should indicate who should care about your news, and why.

Then make sure your announcement gets picked up by the blogwatching services like Technorati. (Blogging tools and feeds make this very easy). It’s more likely to get noticed there fast.

Then talk it up – in forums with your target audience, in appropriate, constructive comments to other blogs, etc. Include a direct link to your posting. If you’re honestly adding value and not just shilling, this is not spam. It’s part of the public conversation. (By the way, to do this well you need to actually read and pay attention to what other people are saying.)”

The other, while off the typical subject, is Melissa Summers who is just a friggin’ great read when she’s on. Like this.

The drill and your mission, should you decide to accept it…

  • Once a week, find someone new on your beat
  • Link to them and tag your post with the “newvoices” tag
  • Subscribe to a newvoices tag feed

Steve Rubel, are you in? Jeff Jarvis? Dave Winer? Dave Sifry? Ross? Hugh? Doc? Susan?

That’s it. Simple. Distributed. And ridiculously powerful.

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The Fourth Wall

There was an amazing, emergent effect at the AlwaysOn conference this week. Although the conference was set up in the “traditional” conference format (talking heads on stage, audience in neat, supplicating rows), there was a balancing factor between the two groups. Perhaps, actually, it was more than a “balancing” factor…it turned the “balance of power” in favor of the participants.

Aochat
Take a look over at Denise Howell’s photo over to the right. See the HUGE screen, stage left? That was a live text chat, consisting of people both inside the room and from around the world who were “participating” in the conference via the streamed webcast. Sometimes the commentary, floating above the heads of the folks on stage, was civil. To whit:

Chris Heuer: a bad strategy – mostly because we are bad at storytelling and getting the people behind our casue – but this is changing with the blogosphere

mike symmetry: NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE!!!!

Lisa: ok – so this is what I was talking about in tems of being disatisfied with having my options limited by the entertainment chain of power

Ed Daniel: everyone should read Lawence Lessig’s the future of ideas

disrupter: THIS IS SMART PAY ATTENTION

(from here)

Then again, sometimes the chat was less-than-civil. This, from the opening panel on Wednesday night that went awry:

Chris Heuer: you know, we could always start talking about innovation between ourselves and not get into flamable conversations

PA: change the questions!

Tom: yet we wont attacck North Korea will we?

Doctoro: Please bring up subjects common to silicon valley and uncommon to cable news.

x: innovation summit?

whats going on:: okay..if on politics..

Allan: Wait, wasn’t Shock and Awe(TM) innovation?

(from here)

By the second day of the conference, the chat became as much of a participant in the conference as the individuals on stage and seated in the room. And, wisely, Tony and the moderators chose not to control it, but instead embraced it.

As expected, some of the very public comments were spot-on, many were snarky, some were downright rude. But they were there, a part of the event. The Fourth Wall had been not broken, but obliterated.

One challenge with the chat, however, was that it was pseudonymous (was that really Ray Kurzweil asking Bill Joy a question via the chat window? If it was a good question, does it matter? What if it was asked by Ramona?). This seemed to allow more incendiary ranting than would have taken place in a face-to-face situation, or even in a situation where someone needed to stand by their words in perpetuity (say in the case of a blog by a named author). Although some of the comments were perhaps inappropriate, the words on the wall added an element of reality to the conference, a check-and-balance that wasn’t afraid to call B.S. when the folks on stage were perceived to be acting below-board. (The folks on stage knew this was happening when the chuckles would roll through the audience in response to a particularly sharp riposte on the screen.)

And, judging by the number of people commenting on this, I hope this meme continues to spread, and becomes integrated into conferences across the board. Web 2.0, indeed.