Category: Uncategorized

Jenny Ambrozek and team used a collaborative environment (in this case, a wiki) to author an article on "Connected Intelligence."  The wiki can be found here: Learning Through Participation and Connecting Intelligences: Experimenting with a Wiki to Co-create an Article

The project was very interesting in its introspection on what was working, and what wasn’t, as the process evolved.  The page on "Lessons," in particular, provides a great data point into what actually happened.

"June 29, 2007, with deadline looming. co-author Jenny Ambrozek posted
an article update and invitation to participate to the 21st Century
Organization blog 21st Century Blog

June 30 Knowledge Jolt blogger, Jack Vinson, blogged about our article writing experiment Jack Vinson Blog

July 2 Jenny Ambrozek in checking Technorati www.technorati.com for activity around our blog post also noted Jack Vinson’s Policies Can be Changed post and added a comment.

A Facebook www.facebook.com and email exchange followed. The Jack Vinson Wiki Page was created and we captured Jack’s insights about “policies” impacting knowledge sharing and learning in a real laboratory.

It took the wiki+blogs+Technorati+Facebook+email to gather the laboratory example.

Co-Creating Takes Time

It was 14 weeks from wiki creation to article deadline but the bulk of
activity happened in the last month. The authors had competing
commitments and it was only as the deadline approached and focused
their attention that real structural activity began. What we didn’t
realize was that although a collaborative product benefits from
connected intelligence, the production cycle must allow for more review
and reflection by the various participants.

Unknown is how many more people we could have reached, and how much
richer or different, this article would be if we had started outreach
earlier. As the wiki remains open so readers can contribute their
reactions and tell us what we’ve missed.
"

Check out the analysis of the evolution of the wiki here.

photo: tanio

(iTunes) (MP3) (click here to subscribe)

Episode 21, about 30 minutes.

Today’s Topics:

• Recap of "Community as Business" Focus
• Craigslist and Small is Beautiful
• Other Examples of Community as Business
• MySpace and Marketing
• iPhone Release as Cultural Event
• Personal Updates

Related Links:

JPG Magazine
Threadless
Next Week: CRM and VRM, Doc Searls
Small is Beautiful
Craigslist ; Craig Newmark
Cult of the Amateur
Business Lifecycle in Community Context – What Can Community Do?
Fon;  Community Delivered Wi-fi
Moo Cards;  Appended to Existing Community – Flickr
MySpace  as Marketing Vehicle
X-Men Promotion on Myspace
iPhone  as Cultural Event
Categories of iPhone Line-Waiters
Will You Get an iPhone?
Nokia 770
Jake’s New Biz: Ant’s Eye View 
Cerado Gets New Offices
Common Craft – More Videos coming soon
Blogher 2007, Chicago

Interesting research from my alma mater CMU, on the neurological processes that occur at the moment we’re making a buying decision as customers.

"Their findings, recently published in Neuron,
suggest that there’s a battle in the brain between immediate pleasure
and immediate pain when we’re deciding what to buy. This contradicts
conventional economic theory, which states that people make decisions
based on immediate pleasure versus saving their buying power for some
future pleasure. The subjects in the MRI study weren’t thinking about
what benefits they would gain at some later date if they chose not to
purchase The Family Guy DVD set now. Rather, they were deciding based
on how painful (or not) they thought paying for it would be right now.

Loewenstein says that the findings helped
confirm what he and Prelec first noticed (i.e., that spending money can
be painful) in the early 1990s while collaborating on a paper. At the
time, they had to rely on mathematical models to prove their point. But
MRI technology now allows them to back up that claim with hard
data–real pictures of human brains that show real activity in the
brain’s pain center. Hard data is what Loewenstein hopes will
eventually lead to the acceptance of the field among doubters who still
hold fast to traditional economic theory.

Loewenstein hopes to follow up his research regarding the "pain of paying"
by exploring a growing and looming problem in the United States–why so
many people run up so much credit card debt. Much like he did in the
study with Knutson and Prelec, he wants to see what goes on in the
brain when someone pulls out plastic instead of money when making
purchases. His hypothesis is that credit cards numb the brain’s pain
center (i.e., reduce activity in the insular cortex) because no
currency is exchanged and costs are postponed, thus weakening the
body’s built-in defense mechanism against unnecessary purchases. He
believes that MRI testing could provide definitive answers." (empahsis added)

Read more here.

Sprint has fired over 1,000 of their customers.  On June 29, 2007, Sprint sent out letters to a number of customers that stated:

"Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information…Therefore, after careful consideration, the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement effective July 30, 2007."

Here’s a copy of the letter:

image: MissDiva

I think Sprint’s move is terribly, well…uncreative.  You’ve got a group of over 1,000 very vocal customers.  Is there not a way to turn all that energy to good, mutual, use, where the customers can get their problems solved and can provide the organization with information or ideas that could help the rest of the customer base?  It makes me wonder — were the problems that these customers were having with the service unique in some way that made them difficult to resolve?  Or are the problems endemic within Sprint’s processes, and it’s just this group of customers that were actually following up and attempting to get them resolved, instead of rolling over?

(If you remember, I’ve had my own issues with Sprint over the past couple of years.)

Who else has had issues with Sprint recently?

More on the story here:

• MissDiva’s thread on the SprintUsers forum (over 103,000 views and 2,200 comments – wow.)
• Engadget – Sprint Lambasted
• Joshua Karp – 1,200 Sprint Customers Getting The Boot
• Alexander Muse – Sprint Fires Customers
• WJXT – Sprint Cuts 1,000+ Customers

Our local Half Moon Bay and Coastside community site, Coastsider.com, puts up its community guidelines.  I loved this one in particular:

6. Please use your real name. We don’t require this but we’d like to know who you are. If you sign your name Bill Clinton or Frank Zappa, we’ll in all likelihood delete it, unless we’re certain you’re the former president or the reincarnated Mother of Invention.

Related:  Backfence closes its doors, with commentary from Terry Heaton and Jeff Jarvis. And a spot-on review of a Backfence meeting from last year from Adina Levin.

image: Barry Parr

Seen at today’s Half Moon Bay 4th of July parade.

What’s going on in this picture?  Invent a caption and put it in the comments below:

Remember the unexpected detour to Omaha a couple of weeks back?  Just got a well-handled followup letter in the postal mail from Southwest.

Update:  Whoa.  Looking again at the letter, I just noticed that the department that Melissa works in at SWA is the Proactive Customer Service Communications department.  That’s very cool.

(click the image to make it larger)

When does a customer service process stop serving the customer, and begin to become detrimental to the relationship?  David Cushman tells us:

"My payment for my credit card bill had, apparently arrived a day late. I pay the bill with online banking from an account with another bank. I had set up the instruction to give it the requisite four days to travel through the banking system (and will someone, somewhere please explain to me why that’s still necessary when all that’s being transferred is a notional value carried in digital form?).

A Bank Holiday screwed up the calculation. The punishment for my crime was to be charged a £12 ‘late fee’.

I called to object, pointing out I’ve been a model customer for them for many long years and had made every effort to pay on time on this occasion.

No joy. The poor employee – reading out the script – is clearly told they must stick to the line no matter what the logic of the argument they are met with, no matter what the quality of the customer.

It’s their customer policy not to refund late fees.

Let me tell you. it’s not a customer policy at all. I asked how much my late payment had actually cost. Couldn’t answer. I guessed in the region of a couple of quid. And for this, you are willing to end your relationship with a model customer? How much more is it going to cost you to recruit the next one? Staggering!"

Staggering, indeed.  Remember the levels of interaction that occur as a customer relationship progresses:

Transaction => Conversation => Relationship => Community

If a vendor chooses to only concentrate (and remain!) at the Transaction level, that vendor is guaranteed to eventually become a commodity, lose its competitive differentiation and eventually be supplanted.  A customer service strategy that rigidly holds internal process over serving the customer’s needs is destined to fail.

(iTunes) (MP3) (click here to subscribe)

Episode 20, about 30 minutes.

Today’s Topic:  A Conversation with Derek Powazek

•     The Story of JPG Magazine
   
•     Gaming the System for Good
•     Extremism and Sites Like Digg
   
•     Wikipedia and Big Ideas
   
•     Threadless as Community Business
   
•     Assignment Zero and Pro/Am Journalism
   
•     Community Hangover?
   

Related Links:

Derek Powazek
Design
for Community
Publishing Before the Web – Newspaper
JPG Magazine – The Story
8020
Publishing
Access and Control Lead to Relationships
Gaming Can a Positive Impact – Embrace the Game
– 10 Photos per day
– Use Theme
– Encourage Friends to Vote (Digg, etc.)
Editors Make Final Call
Extremism and The Problem with Digg
Kuro5hin – Built Without an
Editor
NewsAssignment
Tom Coates on Wikipedia
Wikipedia Required a Big Idea
Threadless and Creative
vs. Financial Rewards
Threadless as Example for Doing Community Business
Lulu for Printing
Community Business Model
AssignmentZero
for Pro/Am Journalism Wiki
"Community" – Using the Web For What It’s Good At