Mei Lin Fung postulates on The Seven Levels of Customer Relationships: “I was surprised about how much there is in common between personal relationships and business relationships…Basically, the story about relationships is that relationships are about stories about people. Over time, our stories might change as our perspectives and priorities change. But our relationships with people who knew us in the past mean that they know the stories of our past, and as we evolve, the people we knew, help to keep us honest, keep our stories straight even for ourselves.”
Trust, Parry, Riposte
Lee Lefever: “Yes, successful communities thrive on trust. But, what comes before that? How does trust develop? It happens through consistent interactions. It happens through exchange.”
“Sony, You Went Wrong With Your PS3…”
Wow. I was simultaneously howling with laughter and cringing for Sony when Paul Greenberg showed me this video last week. It is, to date, perhaps the best example of the cold, hard fact that a company no longer can have a hope of “controlling” its message. Three minutes of scathing commentary from the customer’s perspective on the mis-steps that were made in the go-to-market strategy, the design and the positioning of the PlayStation3.
Click here to view the video. (Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, watch it. It is brilliant.)
Spike has some more thoughts on it here.
But ‘PhonographAsAService’ Just Rolls Right Off The Tongue
Our customer Paul McNamara, CEO of Coghead, writes:
“Jeez. What’s up with the term ‘SaaS’? (‘Software as a Service’, for the uninitiated). Seems like everyone’s using it. I hate it. And it’s not just the psycho UPPERlowerlowerUPPER case – it’s the whole concept of the acronym that bothers me…the best term we can come up with is ‘SaaS’? Come on people, we can do better than that.
We don’t call radio ‘Phonograph as a Service’ (PhaaS) – although if today’s “visionaries” were alive in the ‘20s maybe we would have. It’s true that radio lets you listen to phonograph records over the air. But that’s where the similarity ends. Radio is a whole lot more.
I imagine that to the horse and buggy manufacturers, the automobile was nothing more than the ‘Horse and Buggy as a Self Propelled Vehicle’ (HaBaaSPV).
And to the manuscript producers of the middle ages, the printing press (which in the early days was operated by Scribes) was simply the ‘Scribe as an Operator of a Repeatable and Automated System for Increased Productivity and Broad-based Distribution’ (SaaOoaRaASfIPaBbD).
When technology changes the patterns of consumption in a fundamental way, then something very important is happening. A new era is dawning and new terminology is needed. Words matter.”
Paul prefers the term “webware,” by the way. Your thoughts?
Jeff Jarvis Delighted With Dell (Wait…What?!?!)
Long-time readers will remember the Dell Hell episodes of a while back. My, how things change. Jeff Jarvis recounts his story of getting together with a number of Dell representatives last week. The key quotes from Jeff:
“It is clear, through them, that at least at some levels, Dell has changed its culture and certainly its attitude toward bloggers. They now see value in reaching out. As they’ve said before, bloggers tend to state their problems clearly, which makes it easier (and, I assume, more efficient) to solve them. A problem solved is not only a customer likely to be saved, but also often leads to good PR and branding as the bloggers recount their happy endings.”
and
“Welcome to the age of customer control. This isn’t just crowdsourcing. This is crowdmanaging. Companies still fear this. But, hell, if even Dell can lean back and let its customers begin to take charge, anyone can.”
and
“[Here] is the genius of Lionel Menchaca [Dell blogger]. In a flash, he transformed the image of Dell in my eyes. From a company that wanted to look at but not touch people like me, that wanted customers to come deal in the company’s space on the company’s terms, here suddenly was a guy who spoke honestly and directly. He admitted the company’s problems. But he also answered back…Here, we all could see, was a reasonable man. He immediately earned the respect of me and many other bloggers; this, too, was a point of coalescence. Like Robert Scoble, he gave a borgish company a human voice. He gave us respect and got respect in return.
It works.”
Indeed, it does work. As technology life cycles shorten, real connections — real relationships — between people are the long-term differentiators of a business.
(hat tip: johnnie moore)
The Indie Balancing Act
Rachel Lyra Hospodar, on the coexistence between independent creation and being subsumed by corporate interests:
“A strange undercurrent of the new indie crafts movement is the sponsorship of events that many promoters are seeking and accepting. Is this a compromise of the integrity of what we do, or voluntary sponsorship of the arts, good citizenship on the part of corporations? I think each case is different, and each relationship must be examined with care. I also think that the arts have never been lucrative, and the idea of corporate citizenship acts must be considered because those big entities are not going away, and they are not going to stop having all the money. The fact of the matter is that money is the way that our society places value on time and at some point if a profession does not include any money the practitioners of it will not be able to sustainably establish a career.
Career span allows an artist or artisan to hone finer points of craft and understanding, allowing these fundamental aspects of our culture to move forward, making progress the same way technology or medicine must progress. The anarchistic bent inside of me looks forward to a time when we can all support ourselves diffusely, through person-to-person interactions. If in the meantime I can get a hand up towards this goal without being asked to compromise my goals, I am going to examine the hand stretched towards me for filth and then, detecting none, grasp it firmly and reach upwards.”
More:
“Scion spent a bunch of money sponsoring music events and throwing its swag everywhere in the hip hop community, and there’s been a recent backlash against it. They have been sponsoring arts events for a while now as well, including the [Craft Congress] itself. It’s interesting that their involvement there was much more low-key; they in fact did not want their logo on materials or branding present in any way.”
Note Scion’s change of tack from the in-your-face to the experiential; it mirrors what General Motors did so well last year.
A Win For The Customer: EMI/Apple Announce DRM-Free Music
Great news from the UK this morning, with EMI Records and Apple announcing that the entire EMI catalog will be available without DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions. The key bit:
“EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.
The new higher quality DRM-free music will complement EMI’s existing range of standard DRM-protected downloads already available. From today, EMI’s retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality. EMI is releasing the premium downloads in response to consumer demand for high fidelity digital music for use on home music systems, mobile phones and digital music players. EMI’s new DRM-free products will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.
Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group, said, “Our goal is to give consumers the best possible digital music experience. By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans. We believe that offering consumers the opportunity to buy higher quality tracks and listen to them on the device or platform of their choice will boost sales of digital music.”
It’s about time.
Other key bits:
- DRM-free tracks will be priced at $1.29 (a 30% price premium over DRM-restricted tracks)
- The new tracks will be encoded in higher-quality
- Customers who already have old (DRM’d) tracks can “upgrade” them for $0.30 each
More choice is good. More interoperability is good. And the customer can decide whether the additional capabilities are worth an extra $0.30 or not. I like it.
Thank You, Jamie
Some nice words from Jamie Grenney, who attended this week’s Social Media and CRM 2.0 seminar. (Jamie works at Salesforce.com and is one of the authors at the Successforce blog.)
Thanks for the good words!
Clue Unit #9: Kathy Sierra and Cyberbullying – March 30, 2007
(click here to subscribe to this feed)
Episode 9, about 30 minutes.
Today’s Topics
- Kathy Sierra and Cyberbullying
With Jake McKee, Lee LeFever and Christopher Carfi.
Links for Podcast #9: Kathy Sierra, Cyberbullying, Anonymity
Kathy Sierra – Creating Passionate Users
Kathy’s Post on Death Threats
ETech
F*cked Company
Chris Locke, Rageboy
Cluetrain Manifesto
Quote on Meankids from co-founder Frank Paynter
The Well – You Own Your Own Words
43 Things – City Hall and Neighborhood Watch
Tor anonymity online
Open ID
Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 Presentation
Hope is Emo
Doc Searls’ Post on Kathy Sierra’s Death Threats
Lisa Stone on Kathy Sierra Death Threats (Post from 2006 What do you do when you are cyberstalked, taunted or abused online)
Business Blogging Quickstart: Anatomy of a Blog
Tuesday morning kicks off the 2007 Social Media & CRM 2.0 Certification Seminar Series here in San Francisco. With over two dozen executives scheduled to attend from organizations such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SAP, Fleishman-Hillard, Rearden Commerce and many others, we’re looking forward to a great couple of days.
While we wish everyone could attend in person, we know that logistics sometimes conspire otherwise. As such, we’re making a portion of one of the cornerstone modules, Business Blogging Quickstart: Anatomy of a Blog available here. From the description:
“What are the pieces that make up a typical business blog? This example-rich presentation demystifies the components of typical business blogs, including explanations of concepts such as trackbacks, permalinks and RSS.”
Click here to view the slide show.
(And, if you’re not able to make the San Francisco session this week, we do have other opportunities coming up in other cities.)