Category: Uncategorized

“…it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air. “ – Alistair Cooke

Although Cooke was referring to Los Angeles, the sentiment seems relevant in another context. Dennis Kennedy is one of a number of voices chiming in on the futile practice of trying to shield employees from public view by removing their professional, biographical, and contact information from websites. These are employees in firms that practice a relationship-based industry, mind you. Mushroom management, sheesh.

Why are firms doing this? They think it will make it harder for headhunters to poach people. Riiiiight. Now, let’s take this out of the recruiting dimension, and focus on the customer.

It’s almost as if these organizations feel that their employees, and therefore the connections they can make with customers, are completely interchangable. The implication is that the customer is interacting with the “brand,” and not a person. That’s simply not the case.

“After all, the customer can get to know a brand, but the brand can never get to know the customer, so it’s no surprise that customers are much more loyal to individual employees than to the logos on caps or business cards,” writes Frederick Reichheld.

Take away the person from either side, and what’s left is a synthetic relationship, a connection with a fabricated ideal.

Note: Thoughts on this are currently being colored by the first couple of chapters of The Loyalty Effect, which I finally got around to starting during this week’s adventure. The book makes the argument that companies that elicit above-average loyalty in:

• customers,
• employers, and
• investors

end up being noticably more profitable than the average.

(hat tip: legal blog watch, carolyn elefant)

9:40pm Boston just got smacked with another blizzard. MassPort has closed the airport “indefinitely;” it may open sometime after 3:00am EST. Inbound international flights being diverted to Montreal and points beyond.

9:42pm Pleas coming over the intercom now: “Anybody in the boarding area speak Greek? Any Greek? A little Greek?” No takers.

10:32pm JetBlue has pulled the snack carts off the planes into the lounge area. They’ve been ravaged. Ditto the pillows and blankets. Does not bode well.

1:08am Weds In line at the ticket counter with several dozen new friends. Next flight out is Thursday, unless Our Lady of the Standby comes through. Commencing vigorous tithing.

*nods off. inexplicably, dreams of bacon. *

4:51am JetBlue ticket counter opens.

5:23am Put on standby for today’s flights. Tithing continues. I’m #5 on the standby list. There appears to be a couple of dozen other folks who are also trying to get on the list.

8:20am The flight boards. They only clear the first four standbys. Crap. Looks like another day here doing the Tom Hanks thing.

8:23am Sweeeeeet! They did a physical check of the flight, and there’s one seat open. Thanking graces, etc. Hopefully the other folks will get on the evening flight.

12:15pm PST IFR touchdown at Oakland.

Overall, have to give the JetBlue gate folks pretty solid marks for dealing with a great many number of rude, tired, short-tempered customers (demands to have JetBlue materialize a $50MM plane in the middle of a snowstorm, etc.). The place where they fell down a little was on the communications aspects of the evolving situation. At one point in the evening, we were assured that since the inbound plane had arrived, everyone waiting at the gate would be able to get out when the airport opened, since “the plane is here and ready.” However, when the flight was cancelled around midnight (how can it be cancelled…the plane is right there?), it was not communicated as clearly as possible that an entire new set of rules were in place,requiring a completely different set of actions other than “just wait” which was the M.O. of the first couple of hours of the saga. Suggestion for them would be to have in place a FAQ, or decision tree, or the like clearly stating the different things that need to be done in each situation.

Glad to be home. Feeling for the folks who are still stuck, some apparently until Friday.

Speed: 533mph
Altitude: 34313ft
Out the window: Valentine, South Dakota

You can take it with you.

Sounds: Brian Ibbott’s Coverville is on the headphones. (I had no idea that R.E.M.’s “Superman” was a cover tune…this version, the original, is much trippier than R.E.M.’s version. I like it.)

Reading: A couple of weeks ago, I moved all my subscriptions to Bloglines, and I love the access to everything regardless of what machine I’m using. Last week I installed Feeddemon on my laptop, and the automatic offline synching with Bloglines seems to work like a charm. Had the laptop synch feeds before running out the door. Perfect.

Related: A plea for full RSS feeds. Jay, yours is one of the blogs that requires undivided time to digest. Any chance of seeing the full feeds up via RSS, not just an excerpt? When do I have undivided time? On the airplane! When am I not connected to the network and unable to click through to read the full post? You guessed it…

Email on the fly: (Elisa, I got your note, by the way…a considered response is under construction.) About the same time I moved all my feeds over the Bloglines, I started routing email through Gmail (thanks again, Neville). It’s a great service, and I just figured out a way to make it one better.

Having just picked up an email-enabled phone (one of the Sprint PCS ones), I tried to get POP working with Gmail from the phone. No dice. However, the native Sprint email works great on the phone. Easy fix…when heading out for a couple of days, have Gmail forward copies of the email to the phone. Again, piece of cake. Since the phone is using Sprint’s tuned / designed email app, everything looks great on the device, easy to read, etc. (This is definitely not the device of choice for replying to emails, obviously, but having a quick way to know what’s going on, regardless of location, is outstanding.) When I get back home, two more clicks within Gmail turns off the forwarding.

The unifying meme: The “systems of record” are somewhere in the cloud. That’s where “everything” lives, be it a podcast, or a feed, or an email message. A killer app for mobility, and more importantly, for focus, is being able to chisel off just the parts you need and take them with you.

Heading to Boston tomorrow for client meetings for a couple of days…time for a get-together!

When: Monday evening, 7Mar2005
Where: Boston Beer Works on Brookline Avenue (across from Fenway)
When: 8:30
Details: Location details

Who’ll be there: Chris Selland, Michael Sikillian, myself, a host of others, and you, hopefully. Email me if you need more details…ccarfi (at) cerado (dot) com

Jeff Jarvis with another great example of a customer remix:

“The ultimate consumers are the ones who design your products for you — so you know they will like it and buy it. In this new world, consumers will also market for you and handle customer service for you but the ultimate is when they go to the effort to tell you exactly what they want in the hopes you will give it to them, if you’re listening.”

Yes.

De rigeur, Doc jumps into the fray in the comments with his thoughts on the “c-word” (that’d be “consumers”):

“Why not ‘customer’ instead of ‘consumer?’

The problem for most manufacturers is that they still think of their customers as consumers, which Jerry Michalski defines as ‘gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash.’

When customers had no choice but to behave as consumers, the difference between the two was academic. Now that customers can contribute real ideas to manufacturers, and not just cash for sales, the difference is much larger, and more important.”

Again, yes.

Nice article in the Wall Street Journal (and at least as of today it’s still not behind a pay wall). The salient quotes:

“…blogs with character are seen as more effective than some more traditional online-marketing strategies, such as static, brochurelike Web sites and electronic newsletters that may get blocked by spam filters.”

“Another strategy company blogs use is to engage in direct dialogue with customers by using a ‘comments’ feature that allows visitors to post remarks. While some companies post comments selectively or edit them first — typically to avoid embarrassment or having to write many responses — others let it all hang out.”

“If you slip into PR lingo, you will lose your visitors. They will know it’s not really you.”

“Blogging is one of a wide range of ways that we can connect with people [and] strengthen what I call our handshake with the consumer.”

and the kicker:

“Communication through a blog is ‘as intimate and personal as somebody sitting in your kitchen. It’s a great privilege to be able to have that kind of dialogue.'”

Good piece.

(hat tips: NevOn, Elisa, Scoble)

Charles Cooper, Executive Editor, CNET News.com spends two hours on hold with Symantec, and then is asked to pay for the call (and pay a price more than the original cost of the Norton Antivirus 2005 software). My favorite bit:

5:08 How long does it take to answer a telephone? If Clint wins best director, that would make my day.

5:12 Bored beyond belief. Starting to impersonate the Numa Numa guy. My two cats keep their distance.

5:15 How many miles does a phone connection span from San Francisco to India? Mind wandering. I’m picking Hilary Swank for best actress, but Annette Bening was pretty damn great in “Being Julia…

Read the whole thing.

This is the third time in a week someone has posted their experience on a call like this. Instant business plan, for the taking:

1) Set up a call center to call customer support lines on behalf of customers
2) Each person in the call center can be on hold with multiple vendors
3) The call center reps timestamp / document / record the time they’ve been on hold
4) When a live customer support person answers the call, the call center rep connects them with the “actual” end customer
5) The actual end customer has access to the notes made in (3), and further documents the rest of the call
6) There’s something very post-modern about this
7) The revenue model? Competitors can put their ads next to the transcripts of the calls.

(via TechDirt)

Way back when, I got to hear Doc Searls speak passionately about Identity Commons. Now, it looks like the folks in Boston are also taking a stab at this. The Berkman Center has paired up with a couple of technology providers to create SocialPhysics, “a new open source project” that aims to “acquire corporate and foundation sponsorship to undertak[e] a series of ‘experiments’ to explore models in digital self governance and alternative intellectual property regimes.”

Big plus: Love the fact that the customer/individual is at the center of this:

“As part of the SocialPhysics initiative we are developing both a software framework, and on top of it, an initial base application. The framework embodies a set of principles that govern natural, real-world relationships. It is based on the idea that a person should have full control over information about themselves and their relationships with others. People participate in multiple groups and systems, each with its own social protocol. Since what people are willing to share and say about themselves depends enormously on the context, there is a need for persons to be able to manage multiple versions of their identity. The framework makes it easy to create and join many different kinds of networks (e.g. groups, teams, and communities), each with its own rules for what is shared, what is private, and what is measured.”

Things to watch:

• This project was initiated by a stealth-mode startup that aims to “create the software platform and conduct the issues research upon which [the company] plans to base its products and services.” It’ll be interesting to see how they pull this off.
• Although “YOU” are in the center of the picture above, a deeper dive into the site gives a feeling that the project seems to be very technology-driven (lots of talk of “frameworks” and such). Hope this project doesn’t get too friggin’ “elegant,” if ya know what I mean…

Oh, man. Helluva week. After the new powder beginning of the week, the skies cleared and midweek was ridiculous…postcard-blue skies and springtime temps from first run to last. Tweaked a knee in a futile attempt to keep up with she who skis too fast on Silverado (what the hell was I thinking?), but other than that, no major injuries. The offspring all had fun. Many Cuba Libres were consumed. Aaaaah.

Now for the draining of the email / RSS / podcast queues…

Light blogging this week, ensconced up at 8200′ and all. Recommendations so far: Squaw‘s Granite Chief and KT-22. Snow’s been great in the mornings, turning to Sierra Cement in the afternoons. If anyone’s interested in getting together, there’s more snow on the way…