Category: social customer

As alluded to below, some great things going on today. Macromedia. Microsoft.

In social customer land, blogs are going to be first. For a non-technical customer, it’s easy. Click “comment.” Speak. Repeat. It’s great to see some of the leaders out who are not only getting it, but doing it. Smaller companies (Clip-N-Seal, T-ShirtKing) that understand have been doing this for a while now.

Now, the challenge for Dowdell and Scoble will be to take it to the next level. Now that the forum is open with the customers, what is going to be done? And by when? Despite all their hassles over the last few months (oh geez, the colo is on fire!), Technorati has managed to navigate through adversity and challenges that directly affected customers, and has done it the right way. Let’s call it the “Sifry method” of dealing with customer issues:

1) Say what happened – State the case, tell what happened, explain what the situation was. Don’t BS, don’t make excuses. Just the facts.

2) Say what you’re going to do about it – The short term fix. How are you going to put out the fire. (Usually, this is a figure of speech.)

3) Plan for Murphy – Ok, the immediate crisis is over. What are you going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

4) Report back – Let the customers know what’s going on. Was the short term fix applied? Are the long-term changes happening?

I’m chomping at the bit for the wiki and social networking tools to get easier to use from a customer point of view. They’re likely to be the next enablers, but they have to get to the point where the non-technical customer can intuitively understand what they can do to inject themselves into the process.

Update: Holy cow! GM is blogging…with comments on, even! (hat tip: dave)

(UPDATE!: Mac Mini unveiled.)

Oy. I was all queued up to write about someone doing something positive with their customers (check the comments; they’re awesome), and this comes across. Dan Gillmor, Om Malik, and many others are reporting that Apple has just sued Think Secret, one of their most rabid fan sites, which has been hosting rumors of a $499 iMac. Gillmor:

“I’m fairly sure of this: If the party leaking information to Think Secret had sent it, say, to the San Jose Mercury News or New York Times, and had those publications run the news, Apple wouldn’t be suing them. Both have deep enough pockets to defend themselves.”

Sony v. Kottke anyone?

So, Apple is going after Think Secret in order to plug the leaks that Apple has in its own organization. Sony is going after Kottke for information that he had gotten from a source.

Eugene…Craig…anyone…help us out here!

As the customer guy, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Why go after the customers, when the root of the problem is internal? Do it once, you make a point. Do it twice, and “ok, already.” Do it three times, and it may start to put people off. In fact, this is starting to happen. From Allen George, an Apple customer:

“Many Apple fans (in this context I prefer “Apple apologists”) have sided with the company, citing dubious reasons such as ‘protecting the investors’ et. al. I disagree with their point of view.

I ask:

• In what material way do these rumors hurt Apple?
• Does Apple ever consider the fact that people are actually interested in their products as a result of this?
• Why is this suit being conducted?

At any rate, this site – one of the most reliable Mac rumor sites out there – will almost certainly be shut down as a result of this. Apple’s legal department is well known for its bulldog like tenacity and ferocity, so it’s unlikely the owner will be able to stand up to their wrath.

Another example of corporate power against the ‘little guy’? I think so.

And a reason for me to actually consider _not buying_ Apple products.

[shakes head]

Why Apple why?”

MacHeads discuss the situation here.

(I’d made a commitment to a certain reader a few weeks back to follow up on why Real does things the way they do.  Here’s what I found. Photo credit to Christopher Chen.)

After listening to Real’s most recent conference call, it certainly does appear that Real views its customers as a nuisance and as a necessary annoyance.  In over forty minutes of presentation and Q&A, customers were barely mentioned.  Instead, the discussion focused nearly exclusively on what Real’s competitors were doing, and on the various distribution deals that Real was landing (and losing, such as Major League Baseball).

Perhaps this is a result of some sort of Rob Glaser myopia.  In the ten years Glaser spent at Microsoft (1983-1993), he managed a number of different products, including Microsoft Word.  Locking up the channel, and wielding the power of being thrust upon customers (as opposed to being chosen by them) seems to continue to be the M.O. of Real, as it is at Microsoft.  This does not appear to be changing any time soon.

What does seem to be changing, however, is Real’s focus, which is now not only on music but other downloadable content such as games.  Real seems to realize that the audio/video space that they’ve been playing in since their inception is now crowded, and that they’ve been pushed to the sidelines in the process.  It must irk Glaser to no end that, not only was he rebuffed by Steve Jobs, but now Apple has a 70% market share of the downloadable music market that he and Real, ostensibly, pioneered.  So, in what was quite likely a move based more on emotion than sense (and probably driven by Glaser’s reported bull-in-a-china-shop personality), he decides to trump up a petition and rally Real’s customers to rail against Apple.

This was a bad idea.

Here’s the wakeup call, Rob.  Apple’s customers love them. (And the ones who don’t are at least creative about it.)  Yours don’t.  In fact, your customers former customers such as the beloved CarTalk guys from NPR have gone so far as to publicly state why they are "uncermoniously dumping RealMedia."  Here’s why:

"Why? Because, for a long time, we’ve had tons of complaints about RealNetworks. And the one that ticks us off the most is the perceived trickery they use to sell their premium products. This is just our opinion, mind you, but it’s shared by enough of our listeners, that we finally decided to take action.

Here’s the problem. In order to hear our audio, you have to go to Real.com and download their "free" RealPlayer. But when you get to the web site, the free player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night. And the site seems to do everything it possibly can to get you to "buy" a player instead. You have to work very hard to get the free player. And we think that stinks. And get this. It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That’s something, huh?"

Even when asked directly by a Slashdot reader, "Why try so hard to force your software on the user? Is it worth the market share to anger and confuse your core audience? Mention Real to the average user, and their first response is ‘I hate that software. I wish I knew how to delete it.  I’ve always been taught that it’s best to make your customers happy, instead of holding them hostage. Does your business model say otherwise?" Glaser answers in PR-speak and evades the issue, instead focusing on competitors (Microsoft in this case) and his technical team.  Glaser:

"We have put a lot of effort into making our users happy and in giving users lots of choice in how they install and use our software. We have learned a lot over the years and I think if you look at RealPlayer 10 for Windows, Mac, or Linux carefully, you would find that it gives users much more choice and control over how our player works than any other major media player, including Microsoft’s Windows Media Player or Apple’s iTunes.

While I’m not 100% sure, from your description it sounds like you have a previous version of RealPlayer. In RealPlayer 10, the user can select Tools/Preferences/Automatic Services and configure all of the background activity, including features that remain active when RP is not running. With just a couple of mouseclicks, the user can disable all background services.

Compare how our software works to Microsoft’s. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player? All Windows does, in its own words, is "removes access to Windows Media Player from the Start Menu and Desktop," yet it doesn’t actually get rid of the software. If you uninstall RealPlayer, we uninstall the whole enchilada. Same with mime types: we ask you what mime types you want our player to play, and then we only play those. On the other hand, when you upgrade your version of Windows, it takes the mime types it wants to without even asking. What’s more, we’ve been told by reliable sources that Microsoft writes into its contracts with computer OEMs that the OEM MUST make Windows Media Player the default player for major mime types, otherwise the OEM doesn’t get access to critical marketing funds that every PC manufacturer needs to stay in business.

Regarding your question of why we have put the features you want on specific menus, I will ask the guy who runs our player product group to take a close look at how we can make control of the specific features you have described even more obvious. My guess would be that the tradeoff is making the features available to technical users without confusing average users. Even so, we’ll try to do even better next time. I promise that we will do our best to keep improving our software for both regular consumers and technical users. "

"We’ll try to do even better next time," says Glaser.  Good grief, man…you’re on version ten of this thing already.  You haven’t listened to customers since the company was founded.  Your marketing department is out to lunch. You make it impossible to cancel a subscription once it is started.  Your product is accused of being spyware and adware (so much so that the BBC apparently requested its own version that was malware-free).  Why should customers believe you?

Here are my predictions on where this story is going to go.  Real is going to continue to swim upstream against not only Apple and Microsoft, but also a host of others such as Buy.com in the downloadable music and video space.  They will continue to attempt to cut deals with "last mile" intermediaries such as Comcast, Earthlink, and others to get automatically installed on desktops in the gaming space.  They will work with Vodaphone, Nokia, Sprint and others to get their players as the "default" media and game players on mobile devices.  And maybe this "ignore the customer, but focus on the intermediaries" strategy will be successful for them, which will only happen if they are able to get complete lock-in, which is increasingly unlikely as other alternatives become available. 

I wonder if at some subconscious level, Glaser knows that this strategy is too broad, and opens Real up to a death by a thousand cuts from a variety of competitors.  This is almost inevitable, since he doesn’t have a customer base to back him up (as was shown by the Apple petition debacle).  Maybe that’s why he’s already picked out his next career?

As originally noted here and here, there have been accusations of workers being run into the ground at Electronic Arts. Today, NPR is reporting that three heroes of the revolution employees (Jamie Kirschenbaum, Mark West and Eric Kearns) have filed a class action suit against EA for failing to pay overtime compensation. The lawsuit alleges, among other things:

“In failing to properly compensate Plaintiffs and the Class for overtime hours worked, Defendants acted maliciously, oppressively, and/or fraudulently, and such despicable conduct designed to maximize the Defendants’ economic gain was carried out with the wrongful intention of causing injury to Plaintiffs and the Class, in willful and conscious disregard of the rights of Plaintiffs..”

A quick scan seems to say that anyone who worked for EA in a similar role as Kirchenbaum, West and Kearns between July 29, 2000 and whenever the case gets resolved may be part of the class.

If you’re into lawyerese, the full complaint is up here.

As this evolves, three things to watch for:

1) The original post from ea_spouse has now generated nearly four thousand comments. Will that post, ea_spouse, or any of the commenters be involved in this in any way, either as part of the proceedings or as members of the class?

2) In skimming some of the chatter around the original ea_spouse post, it seems that the practices around overtime and a high-stress, micromanaged work environment may be endemic to the whole games industry. Will other game providers also face similar lawsuits?

3) What, if any, will be the customer reaction to this? Will customers begin to move to fix this, a la Nike?

(this post had originally started out as a response to Jay Rosen’s comment here, but then one thing led to another and, well, you know how these things happen…)

Google search: “I hate RealNetworks“: 92 results
Google search: “I love RealNetworks“: 0 results

Real *is* an interesting case. One line of discussion could be: “How does a company that brutalizes customers, ruins desktops, forces actions, and bombards users with phony upgrade messages stay around?” However, I think the crunchier aspect is to ask the question “What are customers who are feeling brutalized doing about it? And how?”

Since there seems to be more work to do here, we’ll be chugging down a couple of parallel paths:

Path 1) If anyone has any stories, either pro or con, regarding Real, would love to hear them. Comment away!

Path 2) I will be going out and trying to collect and solicit some additional data points (not unlike the MSN Spaces discussion of last week), as well as see what, if anything, Real has done to address any of the issues raised.

That action taken, there is another interesting aspect to this discussion. Jay states:

“And here you’re [the] blogger for the social customer perspective and all you have is some lame, cliched line when Jarvis rips them: ‘tell us how you really feel?'”

In the case of that post, the answer is “yes.” Sometimes, I’m all about the cliches. And the snark. In case there was any doubt, I’m going to out myself right here: I heart the snark.

I personally have given up, written off, and completely exorcised Real from my online existence. The only time within recent memory that I’ve interacted with them in any fashion was during the 2004 debates, where I signed up for the two week trial of their service in order to get full streaming video of the coverage. I too despise them for having intrusive, overweight, and altogether clumsy products and services. (Full disclosure: I watched the debate and then cancelled that same night.) As such, I really didn’t intend to spend many personal cycles thinking about Real. They’re dead to me, so I had no reason to elaborate further. I simply found the Jarvis comment to be a good example of a customer who was speaking out in unambiguous terms about one of his service providers.

There are varying types of posts you will see in this space. Posts are the blogger’s tools. Some, like this one, are participation in an ongoing discussion. Some, like the posts on how technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks, etc. are affecting the customer experience, will be researched and (gasp!) maybe even edited. Some other posts, like the post that initiated this whole discussion, may simply be pointers to other sources out in the media/blogosphere that seem to exemplify the idea(l) of the social customer.

The tool reflects the task.

Ubermarketingguruguy Seth Godin has sold a gazillion copies of his books, and has had his e-books downloaded ten gazillion times. The trouble is, according to Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls, that they (his readers and customers) hate the format his e-books are in.

“Seth Godin is the god of listening to your customer, giving your customer what your customer wants, giving your customer something extra, making your customer feel special. But for some reason, he refuses to give many of us customers what we want: HTML. I ranted about it again and again. No response then.” (the full rant from Jeff)

“Have I made it clear I hate .pdfs? I do. Says here ‘our PDFs don’t suck.’ Because they’re beautiful and ‘a joy to read.’ Excuse me, they do suck if what they contain isn’t also on the Web in relatively ugly but open, unowned, nonproprietary, standard and non-infuriating HTML…” – (the full rant from Doc)

So, Seth does the right thing and replies, publicly. Unfortunately, he completely dissed his customer in doing so.

“Anyway, we use PDFs because they’re a lot more booklike. They read better. They stick together when you forward them. They print better. I know they’re not in HTML. There are 6 trillion other web pages to choose from if you want that.”

Wow. Translation: “I’m going to keep doing things this way because it’s better for me this way, and you, Mr. Customer, can go somewhere else if you don’t like it.”

We here at The Social Customer Manifesto would also like to humbly point out that this page is created with 100% HTML, for the convenience of those customers who prefer it.

Jeff Jarvis is not shy in sharing his thoughts on Real and the issues he ran into in using RealPlayer to access online news content from ABC News.

I had to walk through glass to watch two minutes [of video using Real]. And then when I tried
to cancel it all, I had to stay on hold on not one but two calls to
Real for 40 friggin’ minutes. Real sucks. Real Audio sucks. Real Video
sucks.

So Jeff…get off the fence.  How do you really feel about it?

In a related post, he does pose some very sage suggestions on how broadcast news can better manage their content and give viewers what they want, where and when they want it.

Rita Jenkins (or should we say "Jill"?) tells the world about a Best Buy rebate experience gone awry.  And then a couple of thousand others add their voices to the chorus.

Ok, once again, in small words.  Customers have conversations with each other. When companies pull stuff like this, we’re going to let others know.