Christopher Carfi

On the subject of frequent flier miles, Gary says:

“Miles are evil. They create apathy on the end of the service
provider.”

The he asks the real question:

“Have decades of frequent flyer programs instilled institutional apathy on the part of customer facing employees? Perhaps we are talking about apathetic DNA across entire corporations or even within the entire airline industry. If one believes customers won’t
leave even when treated poorly, where is the incentive to ‘step it up?'”

Back in the late 1990’s, I was flying weekly between Chicago and Palo Alto. 1,846 miles out on Monday, 1,846 miles back on Friday, week in, week out.  I racked up hundreds of thousands of miles, was “1K” on United, got an upgrade every flight, and was willing to put up with a lot of their crap. 

Flash forward a bit, and then I’ve moved to the Bay Area proper, and am no longer flying over 100,000 miles a year.  Now, all the compensating behaviors have gone away from the United side since they no longer view me as a “high value” customer since I’m no longer part of their super-premier program.  I’m still flying a lot, but not on a route that they have a lock on.  And instantly, all the poor service that I used to tolerate became untenable.

Since that time, I may have flown on United half-a-dozen times in the last ten years.

So, it’s interesting.  For me, it was less about “loyalty,” and just about the fact that I happened to frequently travel a route that they had a systemic lock on (since I was flying between two of their hubs).

I agree with Gary.  The mileage program did nothing to induce “loyalty” for me.  Once there were trips on other routes, all bets were off.

Kudos to Seth Godin on fixing the most very broken thing about his 2005 book "All Marketers are Liars."  He convinced the publisher to change the cover on future editions, and the book is now called "All Marketers Tell Stories."

Seth says:

"So, go tell a story. If it doesn’t resonate, tell a different one. When
you find a story that works, live that story, make it true, authentic
and subject to scrutiny. All marketers are storytellers, only the
losers are liars."

I was fairly harsh when I read the book in 2005, and while some of those criticisms still stand, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Well done.

Had a blast chatting with danah boyd this morning on this week's SupernovaHub Network Age Briefing (disclosure: Supernova is a client).  The link above is to a rebroadcast of the call, which ran about an hour and covered "Class and Connection in the Network Age."  We also had some great conversation with @nwjerseyliz and @evanwolf the others who joined live in the conversation.

One of the big "a ha" moments in talking to danah was the fact that, as has been noted in many other places, we typically hang out (more-or-less) with "people like us" online, as well as offline.  However, Twitter's "Trending Topics" are a bridge to the other neighborhoods, a bridge to the "not-like-me."

Example:

As you can see in the sketch above, the "people like me" are typically talking about technology and business oriented things, not surprisingly…things like "Google Wave, CRM, VRM" and so forth.  But if you look at the Trending Topics, from my neighborhood of connections, perhaps only one of those (let's say "Google Wave") might have enough oomph to make it onto the Trending Topics list.

Other neighborhoods have other interests…online gaming, fashion, celebrity gossip, politics, TV shows and the like.

When we see these other topics bubble up, what we're seeing is a surfacing of the other groups that are in the network; we are seeing patterns made visible.

The take-away: Even though your Twitter and Facebook networks may make it seem like "a lot" of the people online are "just like you," that's not necessarily the case. 

As more and more individuals come online, and especially as mobile and smartphones really start to hit critical mass and broader adoption worldwide, this visibility into these other neighborhoods will only become more pronounced.

In conjunction with this week’s Internet Identity Workshop, a number of folks including

• @dsearls
  
• @deanland
  
• @joeandrieu
  
• @judico
  
• @juliangay
• @dariusdunlap
  

and others have been thinking a lot about ProjectVRM.  As part of the conversations, an activity this group was doing was trying to distill down to its essence what “makes” something “VRM” (or VRM-like, at least).  We came up with a couple of core concepts, the first of which is that in a system that is VRM-ish, the following holds true:

“VRM Law #1: The individual is the point of integration.”

In other words, instead of myriad entities holding various “slices” of data/information about an individual, that individual instead is the place where that information comes together.  The individual is the place where it all happens.

We want to keep kicking this rock down the street (or rolling this snowball downhill, or keeping this ball rolling, pick your own metaphor for “imparting forward motion to some type of spheroid object”).  However, I’ve noticed that in trying to determine these traits of VRM-ness, we sometimes are getting caught up in the semantics of the words, and instead are not clearly communicating the core concepts.

So.  Going to try something a bit new here.  I’ve embedded an open, editable presentation below.  Taking a page from the sketchbooks of Armano and Dave Gray and Dan Roam, let’s see if we can do this better visually.  

Think of this as a “visual wiki,” if you will.  Feel free to go ahead and change it, mark it up, tweak it, and adjust things.  You should (theoretically) be able to edit the presentation by clicking here.

Let’s see what happens.

Lots of folks have looked at integrating online identities, and there are various types of "single sign-on" (cite) systems around.  Thought experiment for today:  what would single sign-off look like?  In other words, what would happen if an individual had the ability to conceptually "unplug" from the Network?

A good case study in how a customer can start a snowball rolling that effects vendor change.  Back in August, David Pogue of the NYT went on a tear to get the major telecom providers to eliminate (or at least give customers a way around) the voicemail instructions that are given every time an individual calls her own, or someone else's, voicemail.  It doesn't sound like a big thing, but at 15 seconds per, times millions of calls, it adds up to a whole lot of wasted customer time and money (in the form of minutes) in a hurry.

Here's the story.

Cross posted from 1to1, where Ginger Conlon and the 1to1 team were kind enough to allow me to guest post.

Original is here.

—

Should Customers Control Their Own Information?

by Christopher Carfi

Information about us–our actions, our
activities, our current "status," and the like–are increasingly
public, shared…usually willingly…on sites such as Facebook and
Twitter. However, a number of current trends and issues highlight that
we, as customers, may want to take a more active role in managing those
bits of social information (and much, much more). As more of our
information moves into the Network, do we really know who is looking
after it on our behalf?

On October 11, T-Mobile announced the following
to customers of their popular Sidekick mobile device: "Regrettably,
based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their
systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on
your device–such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or
photos– that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been
lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger." (Note: On
October 15, T-Mobile issued a follow-up message that some of the data
had been recovered, and the restoration would begin "as soon as
possible" for affected users.)

Similarly, on October 12, a group of more than 3,000 customers on the
photo-sharing site Flickr found that one of their favorite online
community discussion groups had been deleted by a Flickr staff member,
effectively deleting more than 5,000 community-created conversation
threads, according to this account by one of the group members.

So, what would you do if you were one of those affected customers? What if all
of your phone book contacts disappeared overnight? What if a community
that you had helped create suddenly vanished, and took with it
thousands of the words and thoughts that you had passionately created
over a period of years?

As the Network Age has evolved and more services have moved into the
"cloud," many customers have delegated authority and absolved
themselves of the responsibility of controlling their own information.

We are seeing, however, a number of initiatives that have the
possibility of bucking this trend. Groups of active customers are
beginning to take charge of their own information–information as
diverse as heathcare, fitness, and home power consumption. (An
exhaustive list of "personal informatics" resources can be found here in a great post by Doc Searls at LinuxJournal.)

So as more and more of service providers take more and more of your information, always be cognizant that it is your
information, and that you do have the opportunity to take an active
role in how it is curated (can you make local backups of the
information in your phone's contact book?), shared (do my service
providers have granular levels of privacy settings that I can set?) and
protected (is my data stored in an encrypted form, and who has the
keys?).

We as customers are becoming increasingly "virtual" as more of our
information moves into the network. It is our responsibility to take
care of our "data assets" in the same way we take care of our physical
ones.

Had the chance to have a great conversation with the Google Wave dev team today.  Here’s the audio and the full chat transcript.

Sneaky Gnome, by Chuck Revell

Friend and Bay Area photog deity Chuck Revell has a show going up tomorrow night (15Oct) at Minibar (837 Divisadero St, San Francisco).  I think the show tomorrow is 6p – 11p.

Check out more of his stuff here.  Best. Eye. Ever.

Seeya there…

Why should you, the customer, be able to control your own information?

Why does all this esoteric-seeming VRM (cite) stuff matter?

Why should you actively manage your digital identity, and your digital creation, and not delegate it to others?

Why should you care?

Here's why.