Christopher Carfi

October 25, 2007

Desert Island Blogs

My desert island in the sun.
Originally uploaded by elvis_payne.

The folks over at my alma mater have created a nifty algorithm that answers the question: Which blogs should one read to be most up to date, i.e., to quickly know about important stories
that propagate over the blogosphere? The method they used was intended to answer the following: "If we can read only 100 blogs, which should I read to be most up to date if we want to be the first to know about something with many people blogging about the story after us?"

Here’s a link to the paper and supporting information.

And here are the 100 desert island blogs:

October 24, 2007

In It For The Long Haul

Logo2
A nice writeup on myCRMcareer from the folks over at Chief Marketer. (Cerado Haystack is the social networking engine behind myCRMcareer.) Read the whole bit here.

October 24, 2007

Rex Hammock:Viewing Presentations On Your iPhone

When I ran into Jerry last week at the Consortium summit, he showed me a cool little bit where Google Docs / Presentation functionality was specifically tuned for the iPhone. Just did a quick search, and Rex Hammock has put up a quick (90sec) video on how to do it. Check it out.

October 24, 2007

Offtopic: CommonCraft, The Zombie Edition

Lee and Sachi give some brilliant instruction on how to survive a zombie invasion. Braaaains!

(RSS subscribers, click here for the video.)

October 23, 2007

Monkey, Sí

bounce monkey, chillin’
Originally uploaded by dogwelder.

David Cushman has started a new Facebook group called "No More Call Center Monkeys!"

He also distilled down a number of his key points thusly:

I want to talk to someone who is listening to me – not reading a script from a computer screen.
I want to talk to someone with the power to do something about my problem.
I want to talk to someone who knows how to get round the moment when ‘the computer says no’
I want to talk to smeone for whom reason is allowed to mean something.
I don’t want to input my account number on my phone – then have to tell three more people what it is during the same call.
I want a full response to my complaints.

We urge these companies to stop insulting the intelligence of both their customers AND their employees. Giving the poor saps on the end of the phone a script they must stick to effectively turns them into a computer. We don’t want to talk to a computer.

We think it is grossly unfair on call centre staff – the very people charged with dealing direct with your customers – to leave them with no power to think or act for themselves.

October 20, 2007

Open Spacing Out

One of the sessions at yesterday’s Consortium summit was an Open Space. This particular conversation was on the topic "How can our company involve the customers more fully in creation and adding content to our [customer support] knowledge base? What are the risks? What are the benefits?"

I tore a page (an admittedly clumsy page, but if you don’t try you can’t improve…) from the Eileen Clegg school of notetaking/journaling; the results of which are included below. So. The high points, in a mostly stream-of-consciousness form…

The conversation centered around how to enable customers to contribute more fully to a collaborative workspace that is shared between a company and its stakeholders, primarily centered on the support and service functions.

– Templates were suggested as a means to make it easier to customers to contribute. That is, instead of starting with a blank page (we were primarily talking about wikis as the collaboration mechanism), templated, more structured pages may encourage participation.

– Should customers be encouraged to create entire "documents" to contribute or, perhaps at the outset, is allowing "commenting" on existing documents an easier path? Are there varying methods of collaboration – creation, editing, commenting, etc.?

– Context is key.

– Is there a "certification" process? That is, if an individual has invested the time and energy to be "certified" in a particular domain, does that individual obtain more advanced privileges in the community with respect to contribution?

– Contribution privileges may be granted with increased reputation in the community

– "Flag it" or "Fix it"…Dave Kay asked the very relevant question of whether a customer should be "flagging" content that needed further attention (e.g. how flagging is done on Craigslist) or should that customer be "fixing" things that needed attention (a la Wikipedia).

– "Extra premium" content is a lose/lose (Exhibit A: The about-face of Times Select)

– Let customers rate support content

– Watching what is actually being searched on is a great driver to highlight the most relevant information

– The best information that is most useful to customers might not live within the walled garden

The group also brainstormed a number of different ways customers and service professionals within the organization could collaborate online. These methods included:

– Comments (both visible internal to the organization as well as externally)

– Forums

– Integration across multiple support mechanisms (e.g. integrating forums and the knowledge base)

– Search

– Recognition and attribution contributing to the reputation of a customer in the system

– Differing levels of "spidering" of content could encompass internal, partner or Rest of World sources of information

– Not losing sight of the fact that the best material will likely be outside the firewall — realize that external monitoring is ultimately critical to success

October 19, 2007

The Hidden Mickey

Landed in Orlando for the Consortium for Service Innovation Annual Summit. Will be talking about online identity and reputation; full schedule is here.

Thanks to Jerry for the Hidden Mickey reference.

October 17, 2007

Goodbye NYC

Goodbye NYC
Originally uploaded by christophercarfi.

October 16, 2007

Social Apple

In NYC today and tomorrow for the Social Media and CRM 2.0 certification workshop. See you there.

October 11, 2007

Thought Experiment: Second Google Life

Link: Google embeds YouTube videos into Google Earth.

The thought experiment: The satellite imagery in Google Earth is just data, information, bits. What if Google recreated Google Earth using the underlying Google Earth engine, but instead of skinning it with satellite imagery, they started it as a blank sphere (tabula rasa) and they let common, everyday folk create what a (building, block, township, county, state, continent) looked like? And then let folks create their own world by weaving together the terraformed creations? That would kinda be like SL, wouldn’t it?

image: lat long blog