Christopher Carfi

john t unger @ mars cafe
Originally uploaded by christophercarfi.

split plate
Originally uploaded by christophercarfi.

John T Unger (friend, blogger, uber-artist and global microbrand) was in the Bay Area this week, and we decided to head over to Mars for a bite and a beer. After shooting the breeze for a while, we both ordered the same thing (french dip, fries) from our outstanding server Kelly and went back to the conversation.

A few minutes later, Kelly returns to the table, two plates in hand, confident-yet-sheepish.

“Hi. I screwed up…I only put in one order. So what I did was I split it, and also put the second order in on a rush. It’ll be up in just a minute.”

Now, think about this. The two “default” things to do would have been to either:

• Hold the first order until the second was up, and pretend nothing went wrong.
  • Upside: Appearance to the customer that all is well in the world
  • Downside: One customer gets a great meal, the other one is cold

• Bring out one order
  • Upside: It gets the first meal to the table
  • Downside: The meal sits there and gets cold, since anyone in polite society would wait until his or her dining companion was also served

What happened here, however, was not either of those things. This was a case where the person who was serving the customer had the latitude to do something that is out of the ordinary in order to solve a problem. And did.

Well done! (And the food’s good, too.)

The folks at Social Media Club (bios) are working their mojo in San Francisco next Monday, 23Oct2006. Here’s what’s going on:

This workshop is a unique hybrid of a traditional conference and an unconference, blending the best of both worlds. During the course of the afternoon on Monday October 23rd you will hear short talks from leading Social Media practitioners and engage in conversations with other Silicon Valley professionals, leaving the workshop with an understanding of how your company can benefit from producing Corporate Media using Social Media tools. Registration costs $150 and can be done online using Mollyguard. After the workshop, stay for an evening cocktail reception hosted by SAP and Social Media Club. If you are unable to attend the workshop, you may purchase a ticket for the reception for only $25, which is included in the cost of event registration.

What follows is an approximate schedule for the day.

1:00 PM
The Corporate Media Opportunity – Chris Heuer will kick off the afternoon with a short talk based on his Blog post that shares its name with this workshop. After a brief round of Q&A, he will explain the format for the rest of the afternoon and provide other logistical details for you to make the most of the experience.

1:30 PM
Social Media Strategy – Robert Scoble will present a short talk on the strategic imperative presented by producing your own corporate media as well as empowering your employees to create Social Media that engages customers, potential customers and other stakeholders. After a brief round of Q&A, Robert will leave the stage and join the participants for the first World Cafe of the day.

1:50 PM
Strategy Cafe – The World Cafe format is based on group conversations around small tables and focused on thought provoking questions that help participants learn from one another’s experience. You will join in three different conversations with three different groups of people, including the session leaders who are also participants. After a 12 minute conversation focused on the first question, a facilitator will ask each table to share the most important points of discussion which will be collected and posted to a special wiki for reference after the event. At this point, everyone except one person will change tables, joining another table with totally different participants and the next question will be revealed. The process repeats itself for a total of three rounds of conversations.

2:50 PM
10 Min Break

3:00 PM
Social Media Engagement Tactics – Lisa Stone will present a short talk on specific tactics that organizations can and should employ for properly engaging with different audiences, with an emphasis on customers and potential customers. Social media can be a vital tool for attracting and keeping lots of new customers, especially when you manage to get free instagram followers to promote your brand to a wider online audience. Consider this a practical guide to properly becoming a participant in, or convener of, conversations in the Blogosphere. After a brief round of Q&A, Lisa will join participants for another World Cafe.

3:20 PM
Tactical Cafe – This session will follow the same format as Strategy Cafe, with the emphasis switching to practical tactics for engagement.

4:20 PM
Social Media Case Study – Giovanni Rodriguez will interview Geoff Kerr of SAP to discuss their experiences and lessons learned from deploying Social Media strategies in the real world.

4:45 PM
15 Min Break

5:00 PM
Social Media BrainJam – One randomly selected (and willing) participant will get a free strategy session from the workshop’s discussion leaders, brainstorming possible strategies and tactics that will help their company to be more successful with their efforts. Other participants will get a unique look into the process and techniques employed in crafting creative plans for engaging with stakeholders. This session will be run as a “Blue Sky” session, that will take into consideration certain constraints, but will mostly look beyond those to provide insights into what sort of things are possible today. After 30 minutes, the floor will be opened for a conversation that will include all participants.

5:45 PM
Closing Points – Each participant will have a chance to share their key learning from the day or pose any questions they have that remain. This will lead us into the cocktail party and provide the basis for further conversations throughout the evening.

6:15 PM
Cocktail Party Presented by SAP and Social Media Club – Beer, wine and light appetizers will be provided for all participants to continue the conversations from the day, to network and to simply relax.

Seeya there.

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

“‘Authority’ is the permission we give others to change us.” – D.Searls

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.”

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?

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.”

Coghead just went live! Here’s a full review over at TechCrunch.

Guy Kawasaki pens his take here.

Having worked with Paul, Greg, Sarah, Steve, Brian and the rest of the team for many months, I can tell you that they’ve been cranking round-the-clock and have put a great app together.

Congrats to all.

(disclosure: Coghead is a customer.)