Year: 2005

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Sunny, With An 80% Chance Of Kicking Some Serious Ass

Based on a recommendation, was checking out the WeatherBug site. Was scrolling around, and found an interesting, but mostly innocuous post:

“Why do you use your WeatherBug?

Hey WeatherBug users, we want to know! Why do you use your WeatherBug? Is it deciding what to wear in the morning, scheduling your weekend plans, checking on vacation locations… Open up to us and tell us why! While you are at it, let us know what else you would like to see in WeatherBug and ask us anything. Seriously, anything.

Click on the comment link below and scroll to the bottom of the page to let us know!”

Now, check out the footer on that post:

(234) Comments

Holy cow. Customer stories. And more customer stories. How about this, from “Pete”:

“I’m on disabilty so I’m kind of the Weather Guy for My Wife. I go to the Weather Bug all the time and then I go to my wife with the updates. I have had the weather bug for a long time now and I just enjoy everything about it. I like to call my friends all over the States and I look their weather up before I call them.”

Or this one, from “Jim”:

“I am a Wildland Firefighter. I use WeatherBug to keep me posted on the current and predicted weather. This allows me to prepare myself and the crew for extreme fire behavior due to high temps and low humidity, thunderstorms, etc.”

Or another use case, from “Jeff”:

“I am a Paramedic and working in the weather is what I do. I rely on Weatherbug for the accurate forcast and realtime weather stations so I know what to expect where I am working. I also access WeatherBug from my Nextel phone.”

And “J.D.”:

“The reason I use my WeatherBug is because I not only like to get my local weather, but I also use the feature for other towns across the United States, because I am a huge NASCAR, and IRL racing fan.”

These are not members of some homogeneous “market segment.” These are real people, conversing and telling their real stories, voluntarily. Good on ya, WeatherBug folks, for reaching out to them.

Connecting like this can’t help but serve them…and you…very well.

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Sun’s Blogs For Customers

Sun’s business blogging efforts get a nice spotlight piece in the Technology Review that just landed in the mailbox, which was penned by Wade Roush. Blogging and customers…whyzit matter? Here’s why:

“Sun’s Simon Phipps, whose job title is chief technology evangelist, says that researchers and developers can swap more ideas, build better software, and meet customers’ needs faster if they are active in online communities, where blogs play the dual role of soap- and suggestion-box. ‘In a world where you must speak with an authentic voice,’ says Phipps, ‘the obvious way is to let the people you most trust—your employees—speak directly to the -people you most want to appeal to—your customers.'”

and

“…not only do Sun’s blogs show customers that the company is paying attention to their concerns, but they have also become a major channel for communicating with programmers outside the company who write crucial third-party applications that run on Sun’s hardware and operating systems.”

and one more for good measure

“Consumercustomer-oriented (ed. – sorry…had to do that) companies that abjure the blogosphere are missing out on opportunities to generate buzz, monitor customer concerns, and—perhaps most importantly—show their human side.”

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More On How Podcasting Affects Sales, Marketing and Advertising

Quote of the day, regarding podcasting:

“…it sounds like that’s what diabolical sci-fi villains do once they’ve body-snatched a WOMMA.”

Actually, a nice little bit on business podcasting posted up at BtoB Online. Includes a wee little blurb on what the home team is doing with respect to podcasting competitive intelligence information (from a phone interview conducted last week whilst cooling my heels at Logan), as well as noting that the creatives at ad agency Sullivan Higdon & Sink are now podcasting “American Copywriter,” a once-a-week podcast on the advertising industry.

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Plotting The Trajectory

(from the Social Customer Manifesto, www.socialcustomer.com)

Being that I spend a fair amount of time attempting to read the tea leaves of where particular companies are going, was listening with interest to today’s Daily Source Code podcast, where Adam Curry showed a bit of leg with respect to his new venture, PodShow.com. The PodShow team is addressing three separate groups of users or, if you will, customers of the service — listeners, advertisers and podcasters themselves.

One piece that was connected was with respect to the last group, the podcasters. Remembering back a few weeks ago, around the 26th of January, Adam was talking quite a bit about a technology he was calling the “CastBlaster.”

Adam says, “I’m still working on the CastBlaster I mentioned in the Source Code. I’ve updated the test feed again. This is really cool, I drop an mp3 into a folder on my desktop and the rest happens automagically!”

Let’s go out and take a look at who owns the CastBlaster.com domain. Interesting. It was registered on 8 December 2004 by none other than Adam’s partner in PodShow, Ron Bloom.

Tracing backward, it’s apparent Adam and Ron realized that for their customer base, an easy and trivial method of creating and distributing podcasts was going to be imperative to their success. So, they listened to what they were hearing, and tested it themselves first.

If I were one to wager, I would bet an easy to use facility, and perhaps even an easy to use desktop client or browser plug in based on the CastBlaster concept will be a part of their new venture. What do you think?

The following bit is for everyone listening in on the podcast:

“By the way, if it seems as if my voice has changed a bit since the last time we had a chance to chat, we are currently experimenting with one of the automated speech generation technologies we’ve found. Would love any feedback you might have on this method of distributing information. Thank you!”

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Why…Hello, Navel!

I love finding posts like this show up in my aggregator. Ten weeks into the year, and some folks are already out of original thoughts. (Names have been changed to protect the uninspired.)

“The Best Posts of 2005 (so far… 10 weeks, 10 posts)

By (author’s name)

For the infrequent visitor, here’s a quick look at what’s been happening at (author’s name)’s blog since the beginning of the year. I picked them for variety, for the frequency of referrals and because they made me think.

Link: self-referential link #1
Link: self-referential link #2
Link: self-referential link #3
Link: self-referential link #4
Link: self-referential link #5
Link: self-referential link #6
Link: self-referential link #7
Link: self-referential link #8
Link: self-referential link #9
Link: self-referential link #10

And two bonuses for you!

My new blog: self-referential link to new new, self-referential blog
and last year’s list: self-referential link to last year’s list of self-references.”

The original post, by the numbers.

Number of times author used own name in post: 15
Number of links to own blog: 12
Number of connections outside own blog: 0
Ability to engage with readers (read “customers”): none…comments are disabled

Didn’t The Divinyls write a song about this?

(or, put another way, how can one learn if one doesn’t listen?)

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This Is Kind Of Like Customer Service Reality Television

John Winsor’s blog, Beyond the Brand, is becoming a hive of activity where customers and vendors are partying together. Three bits:

One: Your Approximte Wait In Customer Service Limbo Will Be 121 hours

John tracked his interactions with Audible.com regarding a support/billing issue, and challenged Audible to get their act together. How? By putting up the “Audible Response Time Counter.”

“To keep track of how long it takes for Audible to respond to my email and share that response time with you I’ve started the “Audible Response Time Counter” located in the upper right-hand corner of my blog.”

(n.b. the issue finally was resolved, but it took a while)

Two: Best Customer Response Contest

He’s now running a contest. Here’s how it works (n.b. this is taking place over at BtB, not here…if you’re interested check it out at the source)

1. You select the brand you think gives the best customer service. I will post your name and the brand you selected in the right column.

2. Send an honest and creative comment/complaint email to them. Send me the comment. The comments will be judged by other readers on a scale of one to ten.

3. Post the brand’s responses and the response times here. Other readers can then rank each response, including response time and creativity on a scale of one to ten.

4. The person and brand combination with the best overall score in both categories wins…

Three: Getting Social

Let’s see what happens. I have just jumped into the fray, with an open letter to JetBlue (check the comments).

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I’m Not Dead Yet

Is it that “traditional” sales and marketing are dead, but haven’t fallen down yet? Shel Holtz covers the topic eloquently:

“If we’ve learned anything over the last several years, it’s that all new media and communication channels are additive. I would defy you to name one—ONE—new medium that has outright replaced an older one. These predictions have always accompanied the introduction of a new channel. Radio was supposed to replace print. Television was supposed to replace radio. Now blogs are supposed to replace Web sites.”

You’ll find no bigger advocate for the social customer (ed. — heh.), the business/audience conversation, and the value of new communication channels than me. To achieve genuine and meaningful business results, however, it’s important to temper enthusiasm with practicality. Blogs, RSS, podcasts, and wikis are exciting and important and transformational, but they are a part of a larger communication landscape. Communications that integrate them will be far more successful than those that rely solely on them.”

Net: Depending on the customer’s need, and mindset, and way of doing business, he or she may want to use any (or all) of those channels to connect. A customer who knows exactly what she wants (having done a ton or research, or perhaps being an industry expert already) will have very different needs then someone who is new to a topic area who requires and desires education and interaction.

As service providers, we need to be flexible, and leave the options open. There will be different customers with different needs at different stages of the uptake curve. The organizations that can put the right mechanisms in place to connect cost-effectively with the most constituencies over time, meet those constituencies’ expectations, and develop ongoing relationships with the individuals in them will be the ones who do very well indeed.

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Communities, Customers, Relationships

Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a fascinating amount of connection between a number of folks writing and thinking about communities and relationships, and their impact on how customers and companies interact. A few pointers:

Jake McKee, CommunityGuy

“A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.”

Jennifer Rice, BrandShift

“I see community as a group of people who come together and interact based on a shared interest. But that community may not result in relationships, and it may dissolve in a day. Or an hour.” (I disagree with this.)

Jake, Followup #1

“I think you have to make a distinction between “community activities” and “community”. Community happens when all parts of the community definition are fulfilled. When only parts of the definition are fulfilled, community activities happen. Epinions, Amazon, and ThinkGeek all do these very well, but since they’re missing the “form relationships” piece of the community definition, I wouldn’t call them communities.”;

and a clear, wonderful distillation of the whole concept (emphasis added):

“Too often these days, businesses are seen by their consumers as entities rather than the groups of people that they really are. Small companies are often the bastions of interesting, non-traditional business. Small business either doesn’t care or doesn’t know enough to be risk adverse. They also have more fun, and as such, come across as a group of humans, and not some big floating head in the sky out to steal your money.”

Lee LeFever, CommonCraft

“Community building is not about tools like message boards and blogs. Community building is about people- about developing trust, relationships and emotional connections. Community is more tool-agnostic than you might think- if the people want to create a community, it will happen.”

Jake, Followup #2 and Followup #3:

“At it’s core, asking the question “What is community?” is inherently flawed. What we’re really been talking about Social Connection – an umbrella that covers a range of activities and interactions…We can even think about this as a spectrum. On the left end of the spectrum, we have lightweight, short-term, or loose connections. On right end of the spectrum you have deep, long-term, relationships.”

Tomi T Ahonen and Alan Moore are coming out with a book that seems related, as well. (I love the concept, and therefore I hope that the content is able to overcome the buzzword generator. “Generation-C?” Puh-lease.)

Wonderful, heady stuff. Maybe this needs a fourth level:

Transactions => Conversations => Relationships => Community

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Witless Protection Program

“…it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air. “ – Alistair Cooke

Although Cooke was referring to Los Angeles, the sentiment seems relevant in another context. Dennis Kennedy is one of a number of voices chiming in on the futile practice of trying to shield employees from public view by removing their professional, biographical, and contact information from websites. These are employees in firms that practice a relationship-based industry, mind you. Mushroom management, sheesh.

Why are firms doing this? They think it will make it harder for headhunters to poach people. Riiiiight. Now, let’s take this out of the recruiting dimension, and focus on the customer.

It’s almost as if these organizations feel that their employees, and therefore the connections they can make with customers, are completely interchangable. The implication is that the customer is interacting with the “brand,” and not a person. That’s simply not the case.

“After all, the customer can get to know a brand, but the brand can never get to know the customer, so it’s no surprise that customers are much more loyal to individual employees than to the logos on caps or business cards,” writes Frederick Reichheld.

Take away the person from either side, and what’s left is a synthetic relationship, a connection with a fabricated ideal.

Note: Thoughts on this are currently being colored by the first couple of chapters of The Loyalty Effect, which I finally got around to starting during this week’s adventure. The book makes the argument that companies that elicit above-average loyalty in:

  • customers,
  • employers, and
  • investors

end up being noticably more profitable than the average.

(hat tip: legal blog watch, carolyn elefant)