Year: 2005

Posted on

Marketing, From The Customer’s Point Of View

Want to come out and connect with others who are thinking about how social media are changing marketing and customer relationships? You may be interested in attending one of the upcoming sessions of How Consumer Controlled Media Is Re-Shaping Your Online Go-To-Market Strategy.

The program is being hosted by the American Marketing Association, and we’ll start out our 3 city tour in Chicago, IL on October 28th.

Who else will be speaking? Check it out…

Podcasting/Video Blogs
Stowe Boyd, President, Corante, Get Real

RSS
Bill Flitter, Chief Marketing Officer, Pheedo, Pheedo Blog

Word of Mouth Marketing
Pete Blackshaw, Chief Marketing and Customer Satisfaction Officer, Intelliseek (New York session)
Andy Sernovitz, CEO, Word of Mouth Marketing Association, WOMMA (Chicago session)

Interactive Social Networking
Randal Moss, Project Specialist, American Cancer Society’s Futuring and Innovation Center

Social Networking
Christopher Carfi, Principal, Cerado, and author of The Social Customer Manifesto. (Chicago and Scottsdale sessions)
David Teten, CEO of Nitron Advisors (New York session)

Power Law Structure
Judith T. Meskill, Principal, Meskill.net, Judith Meskill’s Knowledge Notes

Session dates:

  • October 28 – Chicago
  • November 11 – Scottsdale
  • December 2 – New York

More info here, including how to register.

Hope to see you in Chicago, Scottsdale, or New York!

Posted on

Evocative

Went to the store with the five-year-old yesterday, with the intention of picking up a scooter. You know, one of the Razor-like things for cruising up and down the sidewalk.

Then we both saw it at the same time. It’s even more gorgeous in person.

(But it’s a friggin’ bike. Nope. It’s a work of art.)

When he insists on riding his bike before school in the morning, you know they did something right. Here’s their site, which keeps the promise intact. And here is the action shot of the little guy tearing up the sidewalk.

I may need one as well.

Stingrayburn640x480

Posted on

American Airlines, YACTW (Yet Another Clue-Train-Wreck)

Jake McKee has flown over 415,000 miles on American. Platinum status. Uber-loyal. Has flown them when other options were cheaper, in the belief that at some point in the future when he needed flexibility, they’d be able to provide it.

Nope, they hosed him. Here’s how (letter reprinted from http://www.communityguy.com ):

“My name is Jake McKee. I’m a highly loyal AA member (#80E04C2) since 11/18/98. I’ve acquired 415,000 miles. My AA number is one of the few numbers other than my wife’s birthday and my social security number that I actually know by heart. I typically spend anywhere from $10K-$30K USD/year with AA. I travel all over North America, and have used AA to fly to Europe a number of times this year.

I’ve encourage many to fly AA, and skipped cheaper tickets. With my status, I believed that if I had problems AA would treat me right.

After a call to American to redeem miles for a ticket, I’ve decided that my loyalty has been clearly misplaced. The cause is outlined below:

I booked an award ticket, and was told by the rep that I could pay the fees up to the day of the flight without fees. I called in to settle the fees and was told there was an extra $50 charge becausee I was under 21 days. After talking to a supervisor (who knew my status), I was told the fee was required, regardless of what the orginal sales agent told me. The supervisor said that knowing my status, I should know the policies. I said “so basically you’re punishing me for having flown a lot with you”, she said “If you’d like to think about it that way”.

She made $50 off of me, she effectively lost tens of thousands of dollars. United Airlines has assured me that my status would transfer.

This letter is an offer to save my business. I will be blogging this experience at communityguy.com

Jake McKee”

He’s also running a contest over there. Place your bets on when/if AA will get back to him…

Posted on

Information Is Social

Outsell has just published their 2006 Information Industry Outlook report (free reg. req’d), which is chock-full of great findings on how individuals and enterprises are using information their day-to-day and business lives. One of the headlines that jumped out of the report: Information is Social and Peer-to-Peer. Outsell:

“Now, instead of looking ‘up’ to oracles, users are looking sideways – to peers and to social contexts on the Internet, where published information is instantly unveiled, vetted, praised, condemned, corrected, and altered through the ‘wisdom of the masses.'”

This subsection of the report goes on to note the following items as evidence:

  • The increasing reliance on colleagues and peers as a source of information
  • Blogs and other social publishing media are becoming a key resource for knowledge workers
  • The emergence of open models in scientific publishing
  • Instant verification (or refutation) of news and peer reaction to events
  • Credibility derives from scrutiny of peers
  • Youth are sharing and remixing information and will continue to do so (and adults do, too)
  • Information intermediaries are still relevant in order to relieve users from the information glut

The points above are from pp. 10-11 of the report, which runs about 30 pages.