Tuesday, 21 March 2006

We Are All Silos

Another day, another MacLeod (the word I’m using to describe my heavy-handed, Hugh MacLeod-inspired imagery).

How many login/password combinations are you (or your browsers) remembering?

Aside from the security issues inherent in having multiple keys around the web, each login/pass is another barrier to adoption, integration, usability, and usefulness.

Customers are the silo, not publishers – application or otherwise.

Great conversation with J Wynia on this topic this morning. The point is, we all have the ability right now to hold, serve, and control our own data. Fifteen minutes into the future, we won’t be adding information to services – we’ll be pointing our own urls to them.

Trackbacks & tags, trackbacks & tags. This is where EdgeIO is pointing to the future. Aggregators and other services pulling in distinct tags, basically taking ownership of a word. While authors still own their original posts. The opposite of Technorati.

Saturday, 4 March 2006

Two Tips for Cingular to Improve Customer Service

I caught Matt Ritchel’s Suddenly, an Industry Is All Ears bit in NYT on how Cingular is trying to improve their customer service.

On page two of the article, Ritchel identifies two small, yet high impact changes Cingular could make to dramatically improve their customer service experience:

“There is also a timer that tells the representatives how long the call is taking — the goal is to average less than 500 seconds a call, or about eight minutes.

The databases also instruct representatives how to address hundreds of billing and technical questions for a hundred different phones and multifunction devices.

To gauge the success of its new efforts, Cingular has deployed an automated questionnaire that gives a third of callers a chance to rate their customer service experience.”

First, drop the timer. Or if you must keep it, don’t show it to the representatives. Removing it will keep them focused on solving the customer’s issue rather than racing the clock. The representatives can’t serve both masters equally. Replace it with a metric more reflective of the business; subscriber counts, churn rates, or the stock price.

Second, send the questionnaire to every caller via email immediately after the call ends. A third might return with useful responses. That’s OK. Offering it to everyone means you care about every customer – not just some random third.

Monday, 30 January 2006

Save Your Customers A 39 Cent Annoyance

Ironically, since the USPS raised the postage for a first-class letter to 39 cents, I’ve found myself with more outgoing mail.

Both Netflix and my bank provide postage paid envelopes for my correspondence with them. So, it surprises and annoys me when I have to hunt down a stamp for things far more important than my latest DVD rental.

39 cents.

A trivial amount to bring a little joy to your customers and better guarantee timely replies.

Friday, 20 January 2006

Distribution is Marketing

When we podcast the 2005 MIMA Summit – someone suggested we restrict access to the recordings. They’d be correct if the value of the conference was in the sessions. It’s not.

The value is in the hallway conversations, the handshakes, business card exchanges, and direct personal interactions. The sessions themselves are strictly the focal point, the common conversation piece, the marketing.

Every session ITConversations distributes is marketing for them, the conference, and the speaker.

Mark Cuban talks about the same phenomenon in the movies and television:

“It wasn’t that long ago that some people in the sports business thought that having games on TV would reduce attendance. After all, why go to the game when you can watch it for free on TV? Then someone decided to do some research and as it turns out, the more games you broadcast on TV, the more people who go to your games.”

This is also why the most effective use of ad dollars is in product development.

Update 21 January 2006:

“…a downloaded file is not a lost sale it’s a gained fan…” – Joichi Ito

Wednesday, 18 January 2006

We Need to Build More Parks Not More Prisons

Smarter people than I can debate the title of this post literally, I’m using it as a metaphor for web development and customer relationships overall.

Vendors don’t have full control over their customers. Never did. Best they can do is encourage, support, and remove obstacles impeding their customers’ success. Especially if the vendor wants to build any notion of community among their customers.

This is where the metaphor comes in.

Each business needs to be an ecosystem where customers are free (free to move to a different vendor, free to congregate) rather than locked-in or “allowed to”. The same reason file formats should be plain text, xml, or another standard format, is the same reason DRM is a bad idea – it’s not usable if the vendor disappears.

The next question is whether we build one big park or a system of smaller ones. Personally, I’m a fan of the system (if I wasn’t I wouldn’t publish regularly to multiple blogs). It allows focus and gives you the power to say, “No, We don’t do that here – we do it over there.”

In the end, best we can hope for is customers leave the place better than they found it.

Update 21 January 2006:

“…you don’t try to force a behavior change, you look for a behavior change and try to make products for it…” – Joichi Ito

Tuesday, 3 January 2006

What if Your Customers Took Over Your Company’s Blog?

The Work Better Weblog is 2 years old this month. To celebrate, I’m starting an experiment in multi-author business blogs, community-building, and transparency – each Working Pathways client gets posting access.

That’s right – if you’ve hired Working Pathways, you automatically receive a login and password to publish whatever you’d like to the Work Better Weblog.

As I stated in the invitation email:

“Post anything you’d like. Yes, anything – your thoughts on the internet, work process, whatever’s on your mind, even about working with me, and this experiment. Everything’s fair game.”

The first batch of invitations has gone out.

There’s a good chance there’ll be some new voices here in the coming months. Keep an eye on the by-line.

Saturday, 26 November 2005

The Difference Between Consumers and Customers Part Three

I’ve always found the Cathedral and Bazaar metaphor compelling.

Movie theaters, newspapers, television, radio, magazines are all cathedrals. The publishers place an artificial separation between them and the audience/consumers/eyeballs/gullets for their complete, discrete, highly-produced artifacts. One-size fitting all.

Weblogs, Wikis, Bulletin Boards are bazaars. Down in the dirt. Personal connections, relationships, conversations, building-blocks. Each new topic, event, person, site, the start of a new conversation. Custom, individual interactions.

This weekend I finally watched the Aviator on DVD. I’m sure this was fantastic in the theaters, on my non-HD, non-50″ television – the special effects were obvious and cheap looking. The story itself was good. Though, with the lack of Hughes biographical information and resources on the DVD, it felt like the end of a conversation. Not the start.

Saturday, 19 November 2005

Lawyers That Get Niche Publishing and Podcasting

Some of you may remember the 6-part series I did with Parsinen Kaplan Rosberg & Gotlieb P.A. over at the First Crack Podcast. For your convenience, I’ve consolidated all the PKR&G podcast conversations including 2 bonus conversations that didn’t make the original series.

This week PKR&G came out with their annual lifestyle magazine, “Perfectly Legal”. It includes text versions of many of the conversations and – just in time for the holidays – many other recommendations from the firm. There’s also a nice article on how podcasting builds and extends personal relationships written by yours truly.

All the articles in the 32-page issue were written by the someone with a relationship to the firm, all the photos are of people in the firm, and the magazine itself gets sent out to those again – with relationships to the firm.

This isn’t millions of people. It’s the right people. The people that trust and respect PKR&G, the people that will recommend PKR&G to their friends.

You don’t pick a lawyer by scanning a directory, why would you do the same for a podcast?

Tuesday, 15 November 2005

On Measuring What Matters

I’ve been itching to see Dave Slusher’s reaction to the Audible Wordcast announcement and he didn’t disappoint.

“What matters to me are the number of sensible comments, the other shows that quote me, the number of people that came up to me and talked to me at PME and told me they enjoyed the show. These are not simple numbers, but the simple numbers are flawed and odd and full of fraud.” – Dave Slusher

Earlier this year, I was asked how I’m measuring the success of the First Crack Podcast. With robots and aggregators hitting the feed, people downloading and not listening immediately (or at all), and so many other factors throwing off the simple numbers – I’ve also decided they weren’t good measures.

Instead, I’ve decided on two factors:

  1. Showing up within the top 10 results in searches for the people I talk to.
  2. The number of comments and ratings for the individual conversations.

Both of these factors are driven by people interested in the conversation and have an indefinite time period associated with them. Two things that map very well to podcasting’s inherent characteristics.

UPDATE: Hugh’s got a great comment on metrics

“Metrics don’t really matter. What matters is your network, your readers, the quality of your writing etc etc. It’s an easy thing to forget, once you first start seeing your traffic exploding and the lucrative consulting offers start landing in your inbox.”

Saturday, 15 October 2005

A Consumer Moratorium

Today, Doc pointed to Tim Jarrett saying (emphasis mine):

“As I’ve mentioned before, I want a moratorium on the word consumer—both because it is disrespectful and because it builds bad thinking habits in companies that sell to ‘consumers'”.

Smart, clued-in companies can signal they respect people by eradicating the word ‘consumer’ from their vocabulary (and the handful of other words on the Buzzword Blacklist).

Tim’s “I am not a consumer, I am a human being” nails the difference between a customer-oriented marketing effort and a consumer-oriented one.

Thanks Tim.