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“We’re Listening”

Shel Holtz recently had some issues with his computer setup. Shel:

“I’m running Windows XP SP-2 and have been happily running the public beta for Office 2007 (which I love). A minor problem has occurred whenever Microsoft releases an update. I have to repair the Office 2007 installation in order to get it working again. After this past week’s update, though, bigger problems occurred. I cannot get into Outlook, so I started a repair but got a message telling me the Office 2007 installation was corrupt and that I should reinstall. So I tried reinstalling, but that only got about 20% through the process before it gave me an error (2711, I believe). I tried uninstalling Office 2007 but got the same corrupt installation error. And reinstalling Office 2003 did no good at all—I cannot launch Outlook 2003 because of a mismatched .dll file.

So I have no Outlook and, effectively, no Office installation.

So…any Microsofties out there with a clue what I should do?”

This triggered the thought: instead of this being a process where a customer puts a note in a bottle and throws it into the blogosphere, what if this were a pre-meditated process? Here’s how it would work:

  • When an organization puts out a product, the organization defines and publishes a particular tag that they will listen for in the blogosphere when there are customer questions (for example, “office2007question” would have been a good tag the MS could promote with its Office 2007 product)
  • If a customer has a question with a product, he posts the issue (just like Shel has done) with the tag(s) of the associated product(s)
  • The vendor organization, which is theoretically listening for posts tagged with its “support tags” takes notice, and addresses the issue on the customer’s turf.

I believe we’ve just (re-)entered the era of the customer support “house call.”

Further reading: A Customer Support Barn-Raising

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Fundamental

Georgia Patrick: “Succeeding in business is not as hard as many try to make it. As long as you start with the customer in mind and keep that central to everything you do, you will do just fine.”

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“Bubble” Like In “Soap,” Not “Bubble” Like In “Gratuitous Excess Where You Drive Your Stock-Option Ferrari Into A Ditch”

A nice series of metaphors of what connectedness really means vis-a-vis the Internet (go read the whole thing):

Craig Burton:

“I see the Net as a world we might see as a bubble. A sphere. It’s growing larger and larger, and yet inside, every point in that sphere is visible to every other one. That’s the architecture of a sphere. Nothing stands between any two points. That’s its virtue: it’s empty in the middle. The distance between any two points is functionally zero, and not just because they can see each other, but because nothing interferes with operation between any two points. There’s a word I like for what’s going on here: terraform. It’s the verb for creating a world. That’s what we’re making here: a new world. Now the question is, what are we going to do to cause planetary existence? How can we terraform this new world in a way that works for the world and not just ourselves?”

Doc riffs futher (cite):

“It’s silly to say, ‘I’m going to get in the middle of this thing and improve it.’ More importantly, [it] needs no mediation. It puts everybody, including The Media, on the outside. This doesn’t mean The Media have no advantages, or that they can’t help terraform the Net’s world. It just means that their business isn’t helping make the Net more of what it is.”

The implications:

  • If the above is true, every one of your customers is a point on the sphere.
  • So is every one of your employees.
  • How can you get out of the way, and enable them to connect to get their respective jobs done?
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Valuing Social Software

Scoble on social software valuations: “Doing the technology is fairly straightforward. I’m sure that could be built for $100 million or less. Probably far less if they really are smart about how they go about it. But duplicate the community and brand (er, those eyeballs, as Ballmer calls them) is far far far more difficult. The fact that he insists on calling me a set of eyeballs tells me Ballmer doesn’t understand the trend here.”

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More On Context

Nancy Scola: Can It Still Be Facebook If You’re Mom’s On It?

Scola’s key bit:

“Take this for example. Facebook has a feature…Enter in your login name and password for your Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, or Hotmail accounts and Facebook will spider through your address book to tell you who you know already has a profile. And with one click, a note is sent to your contact asking if you might be Facebook friends.

If they happen to be in my same regional network — so for me, the one for little old New York City — then bam!, they’ve got instant access to my profile.

With that, Facebook me is the me I am to my entire real world address book. (And with Gmail, that’s everyone I’ve ever emailed.) I’m no longer protected by the narrow confines of the organization I work for. It’s almost too much for me to take, to open myself to inspection by every possible future employer/professor/friend/enemy in the world.”

More on this context issue here.

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Facebook: A Great Way To Hobble A Brand

There’s been a ton of Facebook news recently, first with their “privacy trainwreck” (which was not really a “privacy” issue per se, but more of a perceived exposure issue, more here from danah and here from Doc), and most recently with the opening up of Facebook to all comers.

Now, with respect to this issue, Facebook’s Carolyn Abram writes:

“I’ve been asked to explain why we’re launching this expansion. You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again; here at Facebook, we want to help people understand their world. We started at one school, and realized over and over again that this site was useful to everyone—not just to Harvard students, not just to college students, not just to students, not just to former students. We’ve kept growing to accommodate this fact.”

This is very interesting, I must add with a bit of irony, as three days prior, Facebook’s Abram wrote:

“I have received and rejected over eighty friend requests from people I don’t know. It’s not because I’m a terrible person, and it’s not because I think all of my would-be friends were sketchy people; it’s because I wasn’t comfortable with people I didn’t know seeing my information.”

danah adds:

“Facebook is open. I’ve already received friend requests from companies selling their wares by creating a Profile. I am also faced with more contexts than i can deal with.”

This context-switching is the challenge that other “mass market” brands in the social media area are going to continue to have as they expand. As danah noted directly above, there are certain aspects of one’s persona that are “in context” in one case and “out of context” in others. (Here’s a real-world example, snark here.)

This issue is especially acute when trying to force-fit a mass-market brand into the business context. Design decisions that may that have worked fine in one context might be jarring in another. For example, I recently received a Facebook “friend request” from Stowe Boyd, who I know professionally. After accepting the request, I was presented with the following screen (click to enlarge):

Facebookhookedup

Some of the choices (e.g. “We dated” and “We hooked up,” in particular) just don’t work in the business context.

Bottom line: When designing a system that may be used in multiple contexts, it’s critical that the people using the system have the ability to tailor it to their world. One-size-fits-all decisions can’t work and, even worse, will undermine the brand’s credibility in the market.

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It’s Official: Google To Buy YouTube For $1.65B In Stock

Google says:

“Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.”

More here.

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Self-Inflicted Trademark Dilution

Selling a house is always an activity frought with the possibility of customer service peril. This is especially true when, in addition the buyer and seller, thirteen other organizations are involved (4 different mortgage companies, a title company, lawyers, three different banks, one brokerage, one utility, one airline and one phone company). The whole story from Shannon Clark spans three thousand plus words, but one particular vignette to share here.

Shannon writes:

“A national bank, Bank of America, told me that internally they can’t deal with customers of their bank from any state for any state. Instead if you want to, say deposit almost the FDIC limit into a new account, but happen to be doing that NOT in your (new) home state, you are just out of luck – they can’t figure out how to handle their divisions (all with the SAME branding mind you) as one, merged entity. Needless to say, I didn’t take them up on this rather shocking display of completely horrible service.”

This leads me to my new favorite quote, from Wendy Seltzer, regarding what happens to brands and organizations after an ad infinitum series of M&A activities and corporate roll-ups. Seltzer:

“I call it ‘self-inflicted trademark dilution.’ Companies get so big they have nothing but brands and trademarks holding them together, then they treat customers with so little regard that they make the trademark stand for haphazard indifference, rather than goodwill. I think after a certain amount of this, the customers should be free to reappropriate the brand for their own uses — perhaps making those mergers somewhat less attractive to the investors.”

Nicely put.