Category: Uncategorized

As noted here, BrainJams New Orleans is tomorrow. A few quotes via Jerry Cashman, who has traveled down for the event.

Jerry writes: I took time on my flights and during the hours it took me to find a wireless connection to pulse the “spirit of New Orleans”, ask locals a lot of questions, and listen, listen, listen. Here are some of the quotes:

“You go BrainJams! There are so many needs in New Orleans. We will need help for at least 10 years. The help can be almost anything. However, it needs to be on things we have identified that we need help with.” — Small business owner with four food processing plans on the Louisiana gulf coast and a fleet of 10 fishing vessels.

“You mean the technology community wants to help? We got all these checks from technology companies into the American Red Cross for the first few months after Katrina. Now, they are nowhere to be found. Don’t people know thisis when we really need the help!!! We haven’t even cleaned up and the Hurricane season is just about to start again.HELP!” — New Orleans City government employee.

“This is my first time back to New Orleans after Katrina. If I known things were still this bad, I would be organizing a group like BrainJams for the Airlines industry. In fact, I will bring it up at our convention today,” — Continental Airlines executive attending an Airlines industry conference in New Orleans.

“BUSINESS SUCKS! Please help us,” — small business owner on Bourbon Street.

“We have so many technology needs it isn’t funny. For example, it would be great to have a community web site with functions like bulletin boards. For example, we still don’t know where all our former staff is after Katrina. Each hotel, such as us, posts a request for updates from our employees on our web site. But, it would be much more efficient if there was a New Orleans wide web site for that kind of information, updates on the rebuilding process (so dispersed people know about key updates – such as the Superdome reopening on September 24, 2006), etc.” — Hotel manager, Central Business District.

“Jazz Fest used to bring in a lot of tourists who’d revel in staying at one of the many Historic Hotels in New Orleans. We just haven’t seen it yet. We hope Thursday, Friday, and Saturday will be better. But, right now it is mostly locals. Could you use the web to simulcast Jazz Fest performances next year. I bet people would pay good money and the proceeds could go to the festival and to the rebuilding efforts. We need virtual events to supplement our biggest treasure and asset – our music!,” — Night club owner.

“Could you link Houston and New Orleans better electronically? They are currently housing 400,000 of the 500,000 Katrina refuges. There is no effective linkage on schools, housing, FEMA assistance, rebuilding efforts, and basic details for the residents of both cities in one simple, easy to read spot on the web. Plus, there are lot of dirty little secrets no one wants to talk about. For example, crime has gone up by 36 percent in the past three months in Houston (mostly in the neighborhoods where Katrina refugees reside). I don’t want to say there is a corelation, but it is very interesting that crime went up right when the federal assistance started to slow down or go away).” — Business owner in Houston that has involvement with three partnerships in Louisiana.

“People do not what is going on here!!!!! A girl from a club at Bourbon Street was killed two days ago because a dispute over $500. $500!!!! Guys can’t find jobs and they are killing people because they are desparate. And no one is telling the story. Why can’t you use those blog things you are talking about to get the stories out that the media won’t tell????” — New Orleans native and Bourbon Street bar patron.

Check it out here.

Bonus: Perspective from Tom Foremski

Great bit from Jacqueline Church: “Confessions of a DiningIn 12-Stepper“.

“[The customer service supervisor] can understand why I’m upset, he’d like to help me. He suggests that it’s probably that they’ve run out of the items I ordered. I’m not buying it. He offers that it might be that the website had items that the catalog (printed four months earlier) did not have. (that’s the ‘sympathize with the customer’ part of the script) Nope, ordered from the admittedly more current website. Then he says, it’s probably an issue with the time of day. The items I selected might be only available on the lunch menu and by the time I finished the order, it was dinner menu time. I ask him why there is no indication on the website or the catalog of limited availability. Has no answer. Now, he’d like to help me by taking my order.

FOR GOD SAKES WILL SOMEONE MAKE ME A G&T ALREADY?”

Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells, Grace Davis, and many others are trekking to New Orleans next week. Why?

Chris Heuer writes:

“Though I have only been to New Orleans once before, I have a deep love for this great American city and I really want to help bring it back from the tragedy that was Katrina. As a technologist, business strategist, entrepreneur and humanist, I have been been working with BrainJams over the last few months to bring people together to learn from one another in the real world. While I can’t rebuild the houses that were lost or donate millions of dollars, I can work towards connecting the small businesses of New Orleans with an understanding of how they can make the most of emerging Internet technologies. More importantly, I can help facilitate real, personal connections between the people who are building these Internet tools and the local business community in New Orleans who need the best available thinking to help rebuild their local economy.

BrainJams is about people sharing what they know with one another – people helping people, treating one another with respect and working to understand each another’s unique ability to contribute towards a common goal. If you are interested in working towards
revitalizing New Orleans, won’t you join us for a conversation between the business community in New Orleans and people who understand emerging Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, tags, open source software such as Drupal, and other Web services?

I believe that together, we can discover innovative solutions to the business problems that are being faced today, as well as learn from one another how to make the most of what we already have. We know from firsthand experience that the traditional way of running a conference was seldom best for the attendees. The most interesting parts of the conference were often the hallway conversations we had with other attendees. Often times, the people in the audience have better insights to share than those speaking on the panel. BrainJams takes away the “power of the podium” and puts it in the hands of the people in the audience. We turn attendees into participants, and in so doing, make it easier for everyone to get what they need from the event while having a turn to step up on the soap box to share their ideas, concerns and experiences.”

Register here. It’s free to attend.

Seth points to an article about “how KitKat became number one.”

The two quotes from the article linked above that raised my hackles:

“Year 3: Some ads began to appear. They didn’t look like ads. They were cute little stories about teachers, mothers, students and the lucky charm. The ads were fiction, but real Japanese moms began packing KitKats for their kids when they left home to take the exams.

Year 4: Real people began to appear in the ads that didn’t look like ads. No product was ever shown. Just a subtle little KitKat logo.“

This is why marketers are distrusted.

Now, I’ve got some questions. I did a quick Google search on kitto katsu, and came up with only about 700 hits. Almost all of those were references to this story. (Granted, most “real” references would most likely be in Kanji, and therefore not picked up by Google. But still.)

As best as I could tell, very few of the references were actually people wishing each other luck, except in the context of this story. Wouldn’t you think that if this were a “real” phrase that had been around for a while, it would be in more common usage?

I’m not a Japanese speaker, although I can order the nihon biiru with the best of them. I am willing to admit that kitto katsu, as a phrase, now may be being used in the manner described in the article above. But I wonder: did kitto katsu, as a phrase, exist in the language before KitKat’s marketing machine began pushing this story? Or did some marketing suit look up kitto and katsu, and create the phrase in order to push the product?

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a link to Fred Wilson’s description of the “Freemium” business model.

Now let’s segue from there to another reason why freemium really makes sense. Erik Keller at SandHill writes:

“Now this approach may be seen as foolhardy by those who believe that products are always sold rather than just bought. This assertion, however, must be reexamined in the light of rampant license-fee discounting as well as the fact that [a typical enterprise software company] spends over 90 percent of its license fee revenue on sales and marketing expenses. The reality in enterprise software is while most companies do not give away their software, they might as well, given the cost of sales as well as market conditions.” (emphasis added)

I had to reread that paragraph a couple of times to really grok it, but Erik is spot-on: many companies could, arguably, eliminate their “traditional” sales and marketing expenditures, give their products away for free, and still do just about the same on the bottom line.

Put another way…what if your company could turn its sales model on its head, and respond to customer pull, versus selling and marketing via “push?”

(Bonus quote from Erik, from the same article: “When a value-oriented buyer’s point of view is taken, the core of this inefficiency becomes obvious. From an income-statement perspective, the cost of delivering a product and service as well as R&D are customer value-adds: buyers get something direct and of value from these costs. On the other hand, sales and marketing as well as general & administrative expenses are seen as valueless to the buyer. They represent the overhead that a vendor needs to engage the market.”)

Yes, RSS and feeds are where things are going. That said, the pragmatic folks over at FeedBurner have enabled enhanced email subscription capabilities for blogs. From Burning Questions:

“It turns out that not everybody is quite ready to ditch the old Inbox just yet. People like to be notified when their favorite publishers have something new posted, but a large audience still finds the familiar setting of email to be the most comfortable and reliable way to receive updates. We initially announced feed-by-email support back in October. Since then, we have been asked by a number of our publishers to integrate our own feed-powered email update service, and we are the kind of people who do what is asked of us, if the question is asked nicely, in lower case, with a minimum of question marks.”

FeedBurner actually has three email delivery options: their own, one via FeedBlitz, and another via Squeet.

A quick test run of the service showed it’s easy to set up, and seems to work as advertised. Good job, FeedBurner people!

You can try it here, if you want.

Enter your email address:

(Email subscription is now a feature of the Social Customer Manifesto sidebar as well.)

Pimpin’ Peep Mods!

When Peeps Go Bad

Peep Research Labs

Great Moments In Rock History, Re-Enacted By Peeps

All Peeps, all the time.

A missive from the “sales follies” department. Joel Snyder, from NetworkWorld, was trying to help a consulting client of his choose an email security system. One of the vendors under consideration at the time was CipherTrust, and Joel was going to purchase a number of systems in order to evaluate them firsthand prior to making a final recommendation to his client.

Here’s what happened:

Joel: “The salesperson was ready to give us a local value-added reseller (VAR) so we could buy the $5,000 unit. But then he passed me over to CipherTrust PR, which passed me over to the vice president of sales, who passed me to a fourth person so we could apply to be a member of their partner program. This was getting ridiculous, so I explained again that I simply wanted to buy a box for my own company to use. This time, silence. No reply.

After waiting a week, I found a VAR and ordered a system. Then the VAR called back: CipherTrust refused to fill the order. Why is CipherTrust unwilling to sell me a box? I don’t know; they aren’t talking.

More frightening than my experience is the possibility that the company might do this to an existing customer. What good is a security product if the vendor refuses to sell you service on it? Without updates, most of these products are barely useful as doorstops.

In our tests, we look at products, not companies. Things such as training, finances and corporate style don’t come into it. But when it comes to buying products, our tests aren’t enough. It’s important to investigate all those peripheral aspects of the vendor before you sign a purchase order. I was reminded of that the hard way.“ (emphasis added)

Here’s the full story.

Any other good stories out there of cases where a vendor simply chose not to show up?

(hat tip: mike)

In a riff instigated by the previous post, commenter Steve over at Tame The Web adds his entry to Guy’s list. Steve:

“I would add:

Find the barriers to customer service and knock them down.

Eliminate policies and procedures that don’t pass the “Let’s not look stupid.” test.”

The “Let’s Not Look Stupid” test is the seed of all of the cookie-cutter, undifferentiated, commodified “messages” that pummel us every day. Another way to say it: “If BigGiganticCo is doing it, it must be ok for us to do it as well.” This applies to marketing, infrastructure purchases, business models, etc.

Take the risk. Do something creative. Companies are made up of people. And people sometimes look stupid.

That’s ok.

Your customers will forgive (and perhaps even embrace) that humanity.

Devil’s Slide is a Ferrari-ad-worthy stretch of CA Highway 1, on the Pacific Coast between San Francsico and Half Moon Bay. It clings to the cliffs, a few hundred feet above the Pacific. On sunny days, it’s nothing short of stunning. When the fog hits, it’s the perfect Stephen King backdrop.

Over the weekend, a number of things started to, well, slide. Barry Parr has the coverage here. Highway 1 is now closed, indefinitely, between Montara and Pacifica.

For those into the whole schadenfreude thing, we set up a wiki to capture drive times between various points on the Coastside.

Barry and Darin Boville are doing a phenomenal job covering this. Check out Darin’s video, below. (This was shot yesterday, April 5, 2006.)

(photo credit: coastsider)