Edward R Murrow was describing the London Blitz and the fierce resistance of the British people as Hurricane Bill attacked me not once, but twice yesterday. Amidst steely grey skies and giant sea swells in Brigehampton, the waves ultimately engulfed my iPod shuffle, sunglasses and me in a first surprise attack as I was running. Seconds later and 1.5 miles away the waves washed up on the entire beach where my friends were, claiming beach towels, Conde Nast magazines whose only possible purpose in life is Hamptons beach reading, and... my brand new iPhone 3G . The iPod Shuffle hung on through Bob Edwards' audiobook description of Murrow on the courage of pensioners and flower ladies during the blitz. And while telling the story of brave resistance of 1941, the shuffle finally gave way, its valor not lost on me.
And then, silence. I was without communication and humbled. But also awed by the power of nature who was merely playing around and not serious at all. (The hurricane, after all, was 500 miles to the east...)
Minutes later, I see it. Amazingly, improbably buried in the sand-- one wet, sandy iPhone. And remarkably, still displaying incoming texts though otherwise going haywire (Intermittent RF electronics, warnings flashing constantly.) And sand in every orifice preventing any connections at all. I won't go into the ensuing unpleasantness.
Yet now, 22 hours and a big bottle of compressed CO2 air blast cleaner later, the iPhone and iPod recover. Completely, it seems. I'm left wondering: did they really just survive an encounter with a sandy, briny Atlantic? Or is this just borrowed time, and a good time to schedule an appointment at the Genius Bar? Either way, I'm impressed!
Comcast has achieved renown for how they respond to customer service problems on Twitter. An interesting social media case study, until it happened to me.
9:45 AM. Internet and phone crash, just before a big client call. I'm a Comcast triple play customer. I got no data, only TV. Fortunately a colleague has a draft of the prezo so I'm able to call in changes from my iPhone and she sends it off before the meeting.
10:00 AM. Service is back. We start the call.
Over-the-next-hour AM Comcast service craps out twice more. Good thing for cell phones. They make everyone (including ISPs) think "land lines, who cares?"
11:00 AM I call Comcast to complain, asking elegantly "WTF?" Comcast informs me, "We can get to it in 48 hours. If you were a business customer, we could do it sooner. But you're not." Worse, until they send the repair guy out to investigate, they can't have their network people look into whether there is a problem in my neighborhood.
My response? "NOOOOOOOO." (Cue SFX: guy throwing a fit) "That's a terrible way to run a carrier. Even the phone company of yore was more on the ball." The customer service rep assures me TINMWCD (There Is Nothing More We Can Do. Why does Jarvis get all the nice acronyms?)
And then it dawns on me: I am An Empowered Consumer. In the Post Mass Media World. In the wake of the Jarvis Playbook I don't need to threaten to throw a stink, I already stink! I've got 1,132 Twitter followers . So I wonder, if I Tweet, will anything come of it?
What follows is tweets,with commentary in red.
hirshbergComcastFAIL: "Since ur a 'residential' subscriber, Comcast can't fix your internet/phone service for 48 hours." I feel so 2nd class!27 minutes agofrom web
Yikes That was fast! Less than a minute. And it wasn't automated, Bonnie was talking to me! But what she said didn't square at all with what Comcast told me on the phone.
Holy contradiction, phone man! How can you "not distinguish based on type of customer" and simultaneously serve "business accounts" better because they contract for good service? That's what I'm talking about. I'm feeling distinctly steerage about being a residential customer. Even AT&T didn't say this to me before I threw them out last year!
So in the space of a few tweets we've gone from the lofty possibility of customer service in the era of transparency to "Dude, don't you know, phone service can suck. Just call my mom. Help in today's world...."
My takeaways:
1. Its just amazing you can complain and they are on it so fast!
2. Comcast is in a world of hurt about what kind of service they guarantee mere residential customers. Beyond the "we can fix it in 48 hours," sillinessthere is the fact that residential customers can use only so much high speed data, or else. Or that if you actually transfer data for more than 15 minutes continuously at the maximum speed you signed up for, they'll put you in the slow lane
3. I heart transparency. Tell me what service level I do or don't get as a residential customer. When you tell me that triple play is such a deal, let me know that you are the cheap carrier with less service unless I'm a business customer. Tell me what I gotta pay for you not to cap my speed or throughput.
4. Of course we do have more transparency than before. When i was a kid in New York in the '70s both phone lines went out one day and mom had a fit! She looked at me, then outside (at manhattan, mind you) and yelled, "We've lost communication with the outside world!" Back then she had no one to complain to but me and the wall. I was sent down the street to call New York Telephone from a pay phone and then hope they'd show up. Which may explain why mom, in addition to using the phone more than anyone I know, is so damn curious about twitter.
On Monday we set a goal of 140 people using the Aspen Ideas Festival Tag #aif09. We put out the word, threw a tweetorial, published our how to tweet guide... and wondered what would happen.
It worked: We've blew through 269 unique people using our #aif09 tag (for detail, chick on the chart to the left), and as of
now there have been over 1500 tweets.
Crains Chicago Business took note, tweeting, "Wonky Ideas Festival gets sexy with Twitter." And wrote this article.
Today Lews Black recorded this urgent
message to Ideas Festival tweeters:
You can follow tweets in real time here via twazzup, and tweets by speaker here in a great page built for us by Adam Hertz at Tweebase.
Friday Morning I'll be giving the tweetorial talk again at 7:45 AM in the Greenwald Pavillion. Festival Attendees, please come! (Best comment on the first talk was from Gawker's Nick Denton, who in his best British Tabloid sensibility told me, "I came by to make fun of the Tweetorial, but you actually explained Twitter better than the Twitter guys.")
Friday's tweetorial is part tutorial and part tweetup. So #aif09 tweeters, please come! I'll spend the first part of the talk on why this unlikeliest of mediums works and run through some great use cases for our audience. I'll also look at how twitter has been been used here in Aspen, and then go through how-to's . Finally, we'll break into groups where the twitter activated (which probably means you, if this link reached you) can help teach the rest how it all works.
The last tweetorial was standing room only... I was amazed by how many people (many my mom's age) came out, learned, and tweeted.
Here's text of the message we've shared with Ideas Festival Attendees just a couple days ago:
The Aspen 140 Engaging the World in 140 Characters at a time
The Aspen Ideas Festival gathers leaders to do the best thing you can do with ideas: share them. In years past all the action was on campus, aided by media (and bloggers) who reported on what was said. This year we're adding a new dimension: extending our reach by tapping the community of speakers and attendees to participate in open conversation about the ideas that are generated and shared here. We call this the Open Ideas Project, and the people who will make it happen at The Aspen 140.
How does it work? The Aspen Ideas Festival is teaming up with The Conversation Group to recruit at least 140 attendees to participate in reporting the Festival using a number of social media tools, and linking and distributing the content via Twitter. The guide on the other side of this handout tells how. The Ideas Festival will present a Friday morning "tweetorial" with Peter Hirshberg on the hows and whys of Twitter. We'll be aggregating all of the content originating from the Ideas Festival and posting daily a recap (a twecap?) of the best.
Our request: join twitter and share your Ideas Festival experience. Recruit your friends and speakers. Amp up the conversation! More than ever tools exist to weave the Aspen Institute Community into a global conversation. And that's something each of us can do!
I'm at the Aspen Ideas Festival working with the Aspen Institute and our Conversation Group team on a project to get great swaths of Ideas Festival attendees and speakers to tweet the festival and thus share the conversation broadly. The Festival hits many broad topics--- Media, Environment, Health Care, Science, International Relations--- of interest to many on line communities, and thus a real opportunity make this event more open and globally engaging than it has been before.
On Tuesday at 4:00 PM I'll be giving a Tweetorial with Jeff Jarvis to share the hows and whys of Twitter. Whats great about the Aspen community is they've all heard about Twtitter, see how its changing politics, news, brands, conferences... so there is a lot of interest in learning how to do it. And getting such a smart, connected group online really furthers the purpose of the Ideas Festival. We're also telling everyone to use our hashtag: #aif09
Here's the message we're sharing with Festival Attendees:
The Aspen 140
Engaging the World 140 Characters at a Time
The Aspen Ideas Festivals gathers leaders to do the best thing you can do with ideas: share them. In years past all the action was on campus, aided by media (and bloggers) who reported on what was said. This year we're adding a new dimension: extending our reach by tapping the community of speakers and attendees to participate in open conversation about the ideas that are generated and shared here. We call this the Open Ideas Project, and the people who will make it happen are The Aspen 140.
How does it work? The Aspen Ideas Festival is teaming up with The Conversation Group to recruit at least 140 attendees to participate in reporting the Festival using any number of social media tools, and linking and distributing the content via Twitter. The attached "how to tweet the conference" guide tells how. The Ideas Festival will present a Tuesday afternoon "tweetorial" with Peter Hirshberg and Jeff Jarvis on the hows and whys of Twitter. We'll be aggregating all of the content originating from the Ideas Festival and posting daily a recap (a tweecap") of the best .
Our request: join Twitter and share your experience of the Ideas Festival. Recruit your friends and speakers. Amp up the conversation. More than ever tools exist to weave the Aspen Institute Community into a global conversation. And that’s something each of us can do.
Download the pdf , above. Its fun. For those who are bandwidth challenged , the text of the how to guide is below:
The
Aspen 12-Step Great Ideas Program
Sharing the
Ideas Festival With The World
In 140
Characters or Less Using Twitter
1.
Admit there is a higher power: sign up for a free Twitter account:
www.twitter.com
2.
Tweets are (very) short messages: 140 characters or less.
3.
Always include #AIF09 in your tweet. That's our unique Ideas Festival tag
4.
Tweet from your laptop, Blackberry, iPhone ... or any phone that can text
5.
Full how-to instructions at www.www.aifestival.org/HowToTweet
6.
A good format: idea, speaker, where you are. As in an idea from a session:
Now
listening to @hirshberg at the Aspen Ideas Tweetorial. What a riot.#aif09
(a quote, the speaker, the conference)
7.
Tweet the essence of a session. Memorable quotes. Big ideas
8.
Tweet what moves you. What makes sense. What's bunk
9.
Tweet the sessions you're going to
10.
Tweet ideas from your conversations
11.
If you blog or upload video, be sure to tweet the link
12.
Learn more at the TWEETorial 4:00PM Tuesday, Mcnulty Room, Doerr-Hosier Center
Why
all this? Newsies, bloggers, people who follow ideas will see all these
thoughts coming from Aspen. They will take note. This will make the Ideas
Festival more open, more accessible, and more connected to more people.
Before the Social Media Revolution, before Twitter, before blogging, before even the internet itself there was the Iranian Revolution.
In 1979 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was able to mobilize his supporters and fire the Islamic shot heard round the world with the subversive, emergent media of the day--- cassette tapes and the telephone. The Shah may have had complete control over mainstream media, but nobody was in charge of all the cassette machines that copied Khomeini's message of Islamic fundamentalism from France to Iran and ultimately into mosques across the country. So there is some irony that the revolutionaries of that era who now run the place are cast as today's reactionaries, on the receiving end of uncontrollable social media which relentlessly and inevitably are spreading the word, despite the state's desperate effort write history in its image and control the message. Honestly, Stalin would have been just as annoyed at Twitter and would have dispatched the KGB to shoot up the internet.
Back in the day the United States was on the wrong side of history as we watched the Shah's power crumble and then endured revolutionaries occupying our embassy and holding Americans hostage. Today things are flipped as the Iranians are outraged at a regime backed by Fundamentalists Gone Wild. Or to quote the 1968 Chicago Yippies who were the media influence for the 1979 Iranian radicals, "the whole world is watching" as the credibility of the Iranian state and its elections are challenged. Which raises a tempting question: are the forces that led to Islamic fundamentalism in the first place now about to self-organize once again and begin to lead to its undoing? After all, the first great manifestation of the Fundamentalist Islamic state was Iran 30 years ago. Al Queda and the Taliban simply open-sourced the Khomeini idea and extended it. The greatest challenge to fundamentalist Islam ever seen is being witnessed right now, in Iran as its people question the legitimacy of their ruling regime.
Well, almost. After 9/11 the USA mounted he greatest, most intense challenge to Islamic fundimentlaism ever. But that took untold billions of dollars, thousands of lives and ultimately ended up picking a fight with a non-fundamentalist regime that wasn't responsible for 9/11 in the first place. Which hurt us at home, hurt us in the eyes of many people of the Middle East, and will take us years to clean up. One could argue that what has been accomplished in the name of self determination , freedom and the power of democracy in the last 100 hours by the thoroughly pissed-off and energized people of Iran is more leveraged, sustainable and likely to spread virally that the efforts of the USA over the past 100 months in its endeavor to bring democracy to Iraq by force. This is not to diminish the valiant effort of our armed forces or our diplomatic successes. But it does point out that the top down, were gonna impose it approach we took is incredibly expensive and has a lot of annoying side effects that you don't have to worry about in bottoms-up people led movement. Many a CEO might note that top down imposed change in a corporation is a lot tougher to make stick effectively than engendering a bottoms-up movement among employees. This seems to be part of the fundamental grammar of the distribution media of our day.
President Ahmadinejad would like the world to believe that the forces opposing him are so much American and western hooligan meddling (Has any state that blamed hooliganism for its woes ever been anything other than a bad joke?) Its true that we Americans are contributing to the Iranian proto-revolution, but not in the state led manner that Ahmadinejad imagines. His problems stem from the modern version of the cassette tape. A set of thoroughly western, nee American, nee practically Northern Californian innovations: Twitter, the blogosphere and the Internet. There is a certain symmetry that the very nation that ushered in the Islamic revolution a generation ago with bits of subversive western technology may be returning to their playbook to remake themselves today. So, viva la revolution! Viva open media! And viva the first mass self-determination movement made possible by APIs! ( Okay, Obama used a lot of these techniques last year. But he had the advantage of operating on the home turf of a great Democracy. So watching all this play out in Iran is particularly stunning. )
I've been part of an email thread at Monitor Talent about "Personal Brand Assistants," a term I never heard of until today. Think folks who might help you manage your online presence. At first I thought, "How absurd." But this was a serious thread that demanded a serious response.
So I decided to write a job description. Which I posted on Craig's list. It was flagged and removed as fast as you can say, "Whoa, that's not in our terms of service."
I can't believe Craig is killing new job opportunities at this moment in history. (And I'm not even gonna make the cheap Craig's List joke that comes to mind...) So for an economy that sorely needs new jobs, here is the newest of all:
Personal Brand Assistant Can you help make this brand fabulous?
Wanted: someone with the unique talents and drive to help build one of the most important brands of all, me. The brief: in order to be me, to do a really good job of being me, I need to twit, blog, respond, post pictures and engage with the market 27 hours a day. You see the problem. In the age of television being me was a relatively mindless thing to do. No longer. And that's where you come in. Now that I realize that I'm a brand, the matter of brand development, Search Engine Optimization, beating the competition, and looming large in the loomisphere has become of utmost importance. As a Personal Brand Assistant you'll be a key contributor to the team that is the digital me. You'll report on parties and post embarrassing photos. Respond to events in technology and media in real time while minting status updates in Facebook. You'll make my twitter followers feel special, because they are special. You'll help insure that my 2,100 facebook friends have a friend. One that cares. Listens. Is authentic.
And because authenticity is so important in this era of social media, you'll receive ongoing training on the finer points of being me. Training that will serve you well for the rest of your life, even offline. Whatever that is.
You'll work in programming, content development and partnerships helping to insure that I not only don't forget to eat breakfast, but that I remain relevant to today's audiences and delight sponsors. Over time, you'll drive strategy monitoring the blogosphere 24/7, refreshing and refining the brand to meet the changing tastes and requirements of my followers.
Is this necessary you ask? As necessary as the air we breathe. Vital for our species development. A couple million years ago humans didn't even exist. All we had was Homo Erectus. He walked, but didn't friend. A half million years ago humans were born: Homo Sapien, man the wise. Just like your parents. Today we, you, I are beyond that. Today we are all individual brands, connected, in need of brand management and ongoing global engagement. Homo Brandus, man the brand. Only we're evolving so quickly we can't quite do it alone. Which is why I look forward to interviewing you as my personal brand assistant.
Much has been made of FDR's and Obama's first hundred days in office. It was Roosevelt who popularized the hundred day milestone: it marked the passage of the initial New Deal legislation and the conclusion of the special session of Congress that accomplished all that. One thing Roosevelt got that Obama didn't was broad bipartisan support. Obama aimed for that goal. Instead the left is leftier and the right plays to its base more than ever.
Here is an fascinating piece of history that illuminates the Roosevelt administration at the same moment in its history: FDR's twin thank-you letters to congress upon completion of the 100-days legislative initiative. FDR was inaugurated on March 4th, so his hundred days occurred in June.
On June 15th he sent these letters to Congress as it completed its special session: the document (above) which Speaker Henry R. Rainey read to the special session, and a brief handwritten note to the speaker asking him to thank the congress.
FDR writes:
Before the adjournment of the Special Session, I want to convey to you and the members of the House of Representatives, and expression of my thanks for making possible, on the broad average, a more sincere and more whole hearted cooperation between the Legislative and the Executive branches of the United States Government than has been witnessed by the American people in many a long year.
This spirit of team-work has in most cases transcended party lines. It has taken cognizance of a crisis in the affairs of our nation and of the world. It has grasped the need for a new approach to our problems both new and old. It has proved that our form of government can rise to an emergency and carry through a broad program in record time.
My grandfather, Modie Spiegel, was an avid collector of American historical letters and acquired these in the 1960s. I was a tot back then, but even as a kid I realized this was pretty cool historic stuff. And history it was until history began repeating itself. Suddenly we found ourselves in uncomfortably similar circumstances with a similar need for extraordinary leadership. FDR's words went from a piece of history to timely --- and a playbook to learn from. My friend (and grade school classmate!) Jonathan Alter at Newsweek has chronicled FDR's leadership efforts as he came to office. He points out that only three Presidents in our history accomplished so much in so little time: FDR, LBJ and Obam. Alter writes:
"Crisis leadership is, above all, about restoring confidence. Just as
FDR got the country believing again in capitalism and democracy, Obama
is so far making good on his pledge to navigate in a new direction. The
people are responding. From January to April, the percentage of
Americans saying the country is on the "right track" went up 23 points
under Obama."
And, one could add, Obama is connecting with the American people despite a legislative environment more polarized than ever. Roosevelt pulled off his hundred days with a 72% Democratic Congress. Obama has only 60%. Its a testament to the Presdient's leadership and to the strengths of our system that Obama can claim, as Roosevelt wrote 76 years ago, "That our form of government can rise to an emergency and carry through a broad program in record time..."
At the Google Zeitgeist conference this September I interviewed Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson about his efforts to
accelerate the company’s growth strategies through the use of social media. We
often think of social networks, wikis and the like as impacting onlymarketing or the media, but Best Buy is
a great example of how they can fundamentally transform the enterprise and the
art of management. And in so doing unleash new productivity, creativity and a
smarter customer experience. I think Best Buy is a leading indicator what
businesses will start to look like in the near future, which is why I found Anderson's insights so relevant.
I’ve been fortunate to have a front row seat to many of these
developments: our company, The Conversation Group, has worked closely with Best
Buy’s VP of Internet Strategy Michele Azar over the last year on implementing some of these changes and fostering an open, collaborative approach to partners,
employees, customers and developers. The talk with Brad opened with a short
video highlighting much of what Best Buy has been up to: click on the player
below to view my entire conversation with Brad Anderson, starting with “the company as Wiki.”
I first asked Andersonhow a company that grew up in the distribution and product availability
world came to adopt social networks, predictive markets, and an open approach
to innovation and cooperation. Traditionally, we associate companies like this
with classic top-down management approaches. Brad points out that as their
business challenge shifted from simply distributing product to insuring
customer delight under countless usage scenarios, only a method that tapped the
wisdom of everybody made sense.
Next we discussed the impact all this had on traditional
management and managers. Brad told me that it “absolutely flips the role
leadership” since great ideas often come from the edge, not the brass. And, all
this “ can be murder on middle management”
One reason Best Buy provides insight into management to come is
the perfect storm of a workforce and business challenge faced by Best Buy.The company has 170,000
employees, most of them of the under 30 net-generation that grew up with
collaborative technology. They go to work every day solving technology problems
for customers, where they are all potential experts. In retail, Brad told me,
“You are exactly as motivated to deliver service as you feel like you are
engaged in the work… so if you can create your job, you’re a lot better off!”
Next we discussed some specific projects:the “Loop Marketplace” which replaces
the suggestion box with a market where employees can submit and share ideas…and
often get them funded. And a prediction market (like a stock market simulation)
that was dead-on in predicating Christmas sales because, “It reveals insights
in the system that aren’t captured by the hierarchy.”
Here we discuss Blue Shirt Nation…the employee social
network which was build by Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling in the advertising
department to garner customer insight from employees. But from the moment it
was turned on it was clear that employees would call the shots on this system
and define how it wouldbe
used.
One of the most dramatic examples of using a social network
like Blue Shirt Nation to surface employee talents and enthusiasm is the case
of The Employee Tooklit. When the IT system that employees used in store was
getting tired and old, six employees (who turned out to be very talented computer
geeks and coders) came to corporate and rewrote the system themselves in six week for a couple hundred thousand dollars (spent on pizza, coke, and hotel
rooms.) All to the astonishment of the company’s IT consultant who said the
project should cost $6,000,000 and take the better part of a year. Talk about
unearthing hidden talent and creating new career paths for your employees!
Brad talks about the fact that when you start using social technology to connect employees, everyone become a lot more aware of each individuals talents and stories. And this can lead to a lot more productivity and creativity. This has become something of a mantra at the company, under the mantle of I Am Best Buy. This thinking is beginning to affect strategy company wide. For example, this year's Holiday TV campaign is all about the highlighting the individual stories of Best Buy employees. It was shot by documentary film maker Errol Morris and blogged about here by Best Buy CMO Barry Judge. This is a direct example of how the "Company as Wiki" thinking is impacting the company's brand. By making the brand a lot more about people, it opens up up avenues for more social marketing in the future.
This theme of using the social network to tap unexpected
employee talents shows up repeatedly. When employee participation in the
company’s 401k plan wassub par, it
was the employees themselves who took on the problem in a way that an HR
department never could.
This has all lead to half the employee turnover
Best Buy used to experience, and its also highlighted the importance of culture and values in management. In
the days of top-down command and control, you could get away with telling
employees what to do via procedures. When so many employees are collaborating,
creating content, and inventing things only a shared culture to can deliver
aligned behavior. Now, corporate values serve as boundaries and management tools the way process used to.
The same activities that are being used internally, are now driving external customer experience, growth, and revenue generating activities. Best Buy employee Ben Hedrington articulates how the company's mobile strategy might evolve, and Brad comments on why Best Buy is increasingly in the customer experience business.
Brad observed that while Best Buy is just at the beginning of deploying systems that tap the networked wisdom of its people, this is clearly one of the most powerful growth strategies he's ever encountered. The collective knowledge of customers, suppliers, and employees can lead to both a more informed customer support and relationship experience, as well as a better retail experience. The company initially grew by opening several thousand stores. Now there is the opportunity to open thousands of virtual stores, tapping the experiences, networks, and insights of its many people.
As we wrapped up, I showed brad a clip an employee at the Best Buy call center as she used Twitter to monitor the lousy experience a customer was having at a competitor, and how Best Buy intervened. Brad talks about the future and about how much more fun and productive enterprises will become as they move from top down, command and control to actually tapping the capabilities and networks of employees and customers.
In spending time with Best Buy over the last year, its been interesting to watch how consciously they've been wrestling with the meaning and impact of collaborative technologies. They've realized that the best ideas bubble up, emergently.So management doesn't dictate what's gonna work, it has to listen for it. And then nurture it. There is also a darwinian aspect to all this: Best Buy has allowed for a large number of experiments to happen and then resources the ones that work. Not quite ever having enough resources forces collaboration between the various teams working on projects as they need to come together in a broader strategy. And the CEO himself has been recognizing and highlighting this success, which creates a culture if innovation even in a company facing the incredible challenges of today's retail environment.
Richard Nixon was ultimately done in by the White House Plumbers who botched an operation during his reelection campaign and got him thrown out of office. For McCain, it was simpler. It took only one unreliable plumber to help McCain botch Ohio and ultimately the election. Proving again that American presidential politics is never kind phony plumbers. And that in both cases the winner was America herself, which despite it all, has a nose for talent. And, evidently, knows phonies.
You have to be especially clueless to run an online wedding registry and piss off both bride and wedding guest alike. But Macy's and its partner the Wedding Channel seem to know the magic formula to deliver both a hostile site and 1995 style web marketing in a 2.0 world where merchants can and must do so much better.
I went online last night to buy Andreia and Justin a wedding gift. Ahh: they want an espresso maker from Macy's! And its on sale! How perfect. But before I buy the thing, I figure I should ask Andreia about it. A decent espresso machine is a considered purchase, and since this is a gift I figured I ought to hit pause and ask some questions of the coffee-drinkers-to-be: would they prefer a machine that grinds its own coffee, or do they really prefer the one that uses pods? Did anyone else give them one? Were they considering another model? Standard stuff before you buy something.
I reach the bride a few hours later and we conclude yes, this is the perfect machine. So I go back to Macy's... and the price just went up 20%. I'm suddenly not so happy about coffee. Sure sale prices end, but it helps to post things like, "Hurry... its the last day...buy me now." Isn't this the first thing they teach you in merchandising school? If you don't tell someone the sale is ending you loose both the urgency of the close and you create an unhappy prospect a moment later. Plus, when you're buying a gift for someone and you wanna check with them and make sure its a good thing, there's a bit more going on in the sales cycle. I fire off an email to Macy's asking if they'll extend the sale price to me. I get back a form letter telling me how to use the wedding registry function at any of the many merchants owned by Macy's. Retail demerits are rapidly stacking up.
So I Google the item and find that the Macy's (now expired) sale price is everybody else's retail price. Amazon has it for a whole lot less than Macy's sale price; $100 less when you include no tax and no shipping. And then I realize that all those Amazon reviews are even more useful when you're buying a gift in a category you know little about. All the questions I discussed with the bride are covered in the Amazon user reviews. More than ever before I realize, "Why do business with some merchant who only gives you a teensy product description when smart web merchants tell you what the world thinks of a product and items like it."
These days great cataloging and merchandising is no longer just about a product detail page with a picture, brief description and a brand like Macy's that says, "Ask no more questions. Were Macy's. Buy the thing. Trust us!" No, I'm not going to. Not only do you have a deceptively bad price and about the worst sale price merchandising practice imaginable, but you are cutting me off from the oxygen of the whole social conversation of what people think about the product. So please, go back to 1961 and leave me alone.
Long story short, Amazon is delivering the espresso machine Monday. I'm happy. Andreia is happy. Amazon is doing its thing. And I've got no time for Macy's.
Sure these issues aren't an issue if you're helping a couple complete a set of Champagne flutes, but there is no reason for gift registries to be the low IQ end of online retailing.
But it gets worse. Because really, what could be worse than a bride scorned? I call up Andreia to tell her about my Macy's experiece . And she exclaims, " Those guys are so lame I never want to deal with them again!"
Item: Andreia wanted to return a wedding gift from Macy's registry because she got the same thing from someone who bought it elsewhere. Macy's would only credit the return back to the original purchaser, not to the bride's account. In other words, the system made it impossible to exchange a wedding gift if the transaction started on line and ended up in the store. Which is where most gift exchanges do end up. Great for CFO's, lazy IT guys and rigid policy makers. Enough to recuse yourself from the wedding registry business if you want to delight your customer. After talking to three different people Andreia finally got what she was after. Sure this is a multichannel sale--- online transaction, in store return--- but these days that's a lousy excuse for lousy service. After all, retailers had at least ten e-years to fix problems like this.
Item: Andrea wanted to remove some knives from the registry. This requires a call to customer service to get it right. And the customer service person manages to mark the knives as purchased rather than deleting them. Sure this means no one will get her the knives she doesn't want. But it also means folks will think she already has the cutlery she needs, so she'll end up with no knives at all. I don't want to tell you what Andreia wanted to do with her knives when she finally got them.
Before posting this I wanted to check with a couple of other very savvy friends whose weddings I attended to make sure these weren't one off experiences. From Donna: "The whole experience was arduous at best. Wait until the part where crappy wares rip, rust and tarnish in week one of the marriage and they tell you to mail a microwave back to the manufacturer! " And for my benefit she adds, "Just get us a Home Depot gift certificate. Thats what we really need!" I got the most succinct response from Ali, who must have done her research: "Did not register at lame Macy's or Bloomingdales!"
Note to Macy's CEO Terry J. Lundgren: unaided two out of three brides used the word lame to describe your service. The other called it arduous. At best.
A big part of the problem is Macy's and the Wedding Channel (which operates the Macy's and many merchant's wedding registries ) are separate companies. And Macy's stores and its online operations are operated separately. But if you're a busy bride-to-be you don't want all this separateness, you'd like a little seamless integration to make life easy. And in a world of API's, mash-ups, social media and the rapid development of systems that keep up with customers, this seems like so much corporate cluelessness. If I were Macy's I'd appoint a wedding czar--- probably a bride with a lot of friends--- and ask her to come up with something that worked better for brides and wedding guests alike.
If you're a bride or groom and have had similar experiences, I'd love to hear about them.
The glasses. The closed mouth resolve. The angle. The military
pageantry of it all. Yahoo news runs this shot of VP prospect Joe
Biden today. Did the photographer know what a "leader who knows his military stuff" money shot looks like? Did he think, "I've seen this picture in the history books. I gotta get one too!"
My first reaction was one of familiarity. Then i realized I had General Douglas MacArthur, some one I don't usually think about, on my mind. And in this week of geopolitical saber rattling and jockeying, I felt "yea, we could use a little Doug MacArthur in an Obama administration." One guy wears a fancy hat, the other a big-ass military transport. Its all good.
Did Joe Biden know exactly whose glasses he was pulling from
history? Who told him about that facial expression? I duuno. But it seems like a very timely and evocative shot to
show up hours before Obama has to pick his running mate. And make the
single biggest brand development decision of the campaign.
Last month my friend Josette Melchor and I opened a gallery space in San Francisco to celebrate computer-based art. We're having an opening and gallery talk tomorrow, and things will continue well into the night with DJ Cosmo Vitelli whose come in from Paris for the occasion. Details here Grey Area Beacon event details.
We're featuring the work of Aaron Koblin. His work is participatory, data driven, intriguing and immersive. We're projecting the work onto special frames that are 10' x 10' (thats ten feet square!).
The evening begins at 6pm with cocktails. From 7-8pm I'll be giving a talk on the history of computers and art and Aaron will be speaking about his work. We'll have a reception with music at 8pm. And starting at 10pm and well into the night it's an after party featuring DJ Cosmo Vitelli.
I love the way Aaron's work show the underlying meaning in data and explores how web services can be used in the creative process. His work is...
Participatory ---- SheepMarket is a work created by 10,000 people using Amazon's mechanical turk web service. In this case all 10,000 were paid two cents each to create a sheep facing left. Some were delighted others outraged; hear Aaron tell the story tomorrow night.
Data Driven--- Flight Patters (pictured above) is a visualization of all air traffic above the United States in a 24 hour period. New York Talk Exchange uses real time IP and Telephone call data to illustrate global conversations.
In addition to all this being "Art," I think visualizations like these point towards new kinds of creative and communications opportunities for all of us to understand a world rich in data and connections.
Remember the good old days when you saw something and decided whether or not to post about it? Or when you took all those pictures at a party and got up the next morning and thought about which ones were appropriate for Flickr? Or all that stuff you went through editing video and deciding what to post? All that is so loaded with 20th century values. Flixwagon lets you turn on your Nokia N95 camera phone (in the U.S.), click the "broadcast now" soft button and anything you see or say... anyone can see or hear! In this interview Xen from Flixwagon tells me about the time she made a pocket broadcast. Like an unintended pocket call, except the video stream when out--live from her life---unintended. And there is the story about the Hillary Clinton event that was closed to the broadcast press... except it was broadcast. And through the combo of Flixwagon and Twitter the press tuned in live via camera phone.
I suggested to Xen they post set of best practices or warnings, like all the stuff we ignore about operating potentially dangerous machinery. My list might include:
-Warning broadcasts are live. Use with discretion when you're inebriated.
-Warning. You're not likely to have much discretion when you're inebriated.
-The Golden Rule of Broadcast: Ask permission to broadcast others as you'd hope they'd ask permission of you
-If your are under 18, read the warnings.
-Warning: No one under 18 heeds warnings.
I'm actually delighted that all the stuff that sat in the way of shooting video and posting it has gone away. Now everything's a post, life's a broadcast, and going live has also been completely democratized.
Things will never be the same. Sure its a cliche, but here's a place it applies. Or, as I said just a moment ago:
So either its a bogus rumor, or its goofy, true and real... in which case the news is more about silly publicists and the power they yield. As in, "Kill the following: A publicist for Paris Hilton says Hilton never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India."
Remember the old saw about you cant make this stuff up?
I'm at a conference in Athens put on by the WPP group on the future of advertising, media and technology.
A session on online advertising inspired me to post links to two documents: The Memo on Monday Morning,a white paper written by Steve Hayden (Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy), Doc Searls (Cluetrain Co-author) and myself on conversational marketing. I also posted on the topic at Technorati.
If you look at the conservative blogosphere as a whole, and not just the few who reliably spread the party line the meme doesn't seem to be playing out particurlarly well. A Technorati search of blogs tagged "conservative" that use the term Libby shows a lot of anger and disbelief from the rank and file.
Here is an additional Technorati seach that further constrains the results to more authorative conservative bloggers. Folks aren't much happier here either.
Earlier in the day, before this news broke, the Washington Post ran an article on the increasingly detached bunker mentality of Bush Presidency headlined, "A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease." It provides a prety good explanation of the tone deaf thinking that led to the Libby decision. The founders granted our President extrodinary powers of clemency and pardon, but when the collective reaction to their use is, "what an awful decision from a clueless guy" the political fallout can be equally extraordinary.
Post Post Script: The last time I got riled up with such clarity was Watergate. For years it seemed like we were living in ambiguous times. No longer. If there is one thing this President is doing well, its helping to unite the country in realizing that things are going very wrong--- and with little ambiguity about who to hold accountable.
Only this president could mange to pack the equivalent of the tragedy of the Vietnam war and the hubris of Wategate into a single administration.
Newsweek has discovered that the President Of The United States has a science advisor, and they are asking readers to submit questions!
Not only is it encouraging to hear that the President is aware of science, but the fact that they are listening to the audience shows what an enlightened democracy we really are. I'm patriotic, so I've fired off my questions for Newsweek to take to the White House and learn more about science. In the off chance that my questions and the answers from Science Advisor Marburger don't make it back to Newsweek, I'm reproducing my letter here:
Dear Dr. Marburger,
I'm excited to hear from the White House on issues of science, especially given how controversial this has become in Washington. A lot of the President's supporters have pointed out recently how suspect science is, and how science has not really been too supportive of the facts as the Administration would like them to be. So here are my questions:
I understand the earth is only 8,000 years old and this geologic time stuff is so much liberal hooey. What is Genisis, chopped liver? As supporters of the President we really need your help here. Can you please help explain why science keeps coming up with million year old rocks and then puts all this in text books?
This bit about mankind evolving from alge and apes. Why isn't the white house doing more about this? Science is getting in the way again, and isn't this your job to fix ?
Global warming. Isn't it scientifically proven that there is co2 in soda pop? Our GI's live for soda. We take away co2 and the soda's flat. Flat soda and you have a bunch of demoralized GI's. We have enough of that already (damn scientific polls telling us its an unpopular war, but I won't hold you responsbible for that, Dr. Marburger.) So the more we push this global warming stuff the more lakluster we Americans become and then we just poop off and loose our mojo. Dr. Marburger this is no way for a great people to be!
So can't we just put science in its place, in a museum perhaps, and get on with a more convienient truth.
This is a great example of how brands can really engage their audience. Here you have the Hollywood--- home of the ultimate media companies. And film marketing--- which has been about posters and junkets. Amazing things happen when you let the brand side of a media company go beyond traditional marketing behavior and actually engage in conversation--- and act like a media company itself.
Technorati and Paramount Classics have announced an eighteen-month relationship to bring blogosphere discussion about each of their upcoming films directly to each film's web site. We've begun with An Inconvenient Truth, the global warming documentary starring Al Gore, which will be in select theaters beginning May 24th. The site, with live blogger commentary, is here. Here's a link to our official press release.
Film sites have traditionally been one-way marketing vehicles. A place to find trailers, synopsis, actors' pictures, and bling for fans to download. But seldom a big tent for conversation and ideas. Paramount Classics recognizes that their film site will be more vibrant and authentic if the unfettered conversation about a film plays out on the film home page. Its a terrific way to shine attention on the word of mouth about a film--- which is traditionally difficult to find since blog discussion is spread out over thousands of blogs, but never in one place. The studio is both making word of mouth about their film easy to find, and creating traffic for bloggers who are writing about the picture.
The Inconvenient Truth site highlights both posts about the film, and posts about climate change and global warming which may never mention the film. About an hour after the site went live I dropped by and found a fascinating post that led to an oil-industry funded organization that is starting to run TV spots proclaiming that global warming is bogus. Throughout the weekend I checked back to watch the blogosphere's reaction to that drama. A film site that tunes into the live web really is a lot more lively than the alternative.
By the way, this is a well crafted film. Unlike Fahrenheit 9/11, which was a polemic and made the left act left-ier and the right behave right-ier, this picture does a great job of laying out its argument and --- just when you're wondering if an argument holds weight-- coming back with evidence to make its point. In many ways this film and the blogosphere were made for each other. Its going to be fascinating to watch how the left and right, the energy industry and environmentalists speak to one another in the coming weeks. No matter where you stand on the issue, go see the film. Blog about it. Its going to be a quite a consequential discussion!
Sunday February 19, 2006: show day for a giant performance art happening in oh-so-chichi Aspen, Colorado. Japanese-born artist Yutaka Sone worked with the Aspen Art Museum to build a pair of Giant Dice (8 feet square) and then roll them down the halfpipe of Buttermilk Mountain. In the name of Art I hightailed it over to Buttermilk just in time to record the festivities.... Click Here to see the video
The Vatican has announced that is is enforcing copyright on the Pope's writings and encyclicals. You heard that right, if you spread the word... you now have to pay a 15% royalty to the Church. And you thought the whole point of the Church was to Spread The Word. Forget it... Now its, "If you quote the Pope, you pay the Man." This isn't evangelism, its antivangelism. The Vatican seems to have learned a bit of "this ain't no fooling around" from the RIAA, Disney, and the New York Subway System:
A Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500.
At first I thought this was an Onion comedy piece. "Pope Sues To Prevent Spreading the Good Word," is a very funny gag. But.. its true! And further proof that calcified old institutions can act incredibly stupid when it comes to understanding a world where publishing isn't about control but about spreading ideas through a network of influencers. The Times article is full of quotes from the Italian versions of Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen expressing outrage and confusion at all this.
The article goes on to say that if the Church approves of how and when you use the Pope's words, they would be willing to waive the fees, but only by "prior agreement." This is an egregious mashup of bad copyright policy, bad free speech policy, and Nixonesque strong-arm tactics.
But in the end its only fair to give Vatican the last word:
"A Vatican spokesman said that the Holy See had to defend itself against “pirated editions.”
No, come to think of it, I get the last word. "The Cluetrain will not be making any stops in Vatican City anytime soon."
The Transport Workers Union Local 100 has a blog. The Blog had comments. But no longer. Fortunately the comments were cached before the union tried to make all those angry New Yorkers go away. Bloggers wrote a lot about the strike, but the comments on the union site really seemed to catch the enmity of a lot of New Yorkers towards the union.
Sample Quote: "You guys really have a lot of balls. All you do is drive around in circles. Your job isn't hard at all. You get paid as much as cops and firemen, while much more as teachers. Something is wrong. You're asking for way too much here. Back down and know your roll. You guys aren't as high and as mighty as you think."
Hey, Local 100: you guys weighed the options, asked for support and chose to go on strike. So you ought to own and acknowledge citizen's reaction. Censorship is so lame.
The fact that your leadership---which wrapped itself in Rosa Parks, dignity, and Dr. Martin Luther King--- also embraces censorship and revisionism says more than a little bit about their openness and ethics.
With all the attention on Live8 and Africa relief, its jarring how little content there is on the official Live8 site about the underlying Africa issues and what actually needs to be done to help people on that continent.
The take away from Live8 seems to be its the G8's job to fix Africa and that George Bush is the main bad guy. You're left thinking these poor Africans are helpless, can't do a damn thing for themselves, and are just lying around waiting for the Rich Countries to come on in and clean up the mess. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of some LBJ, Really Big Government Approach and of 60's idealism, but not necessarily in good way. So come on people now, lets all get together and try and love one another right now.
Pope Poses Eternal Question: Who’s the Target Market?
Haven't We Seen This Positioning Before?
We’re only days into the new papacy, and already Benedict XVI is honing the Church’s positioning and strategy. And have you noticed how similar the Vatican strategy is to the Karl Rove strategy? "Dictatorship of Relativism" is linguistic genius, up there with "Right to Life” as a meme. What a brilliant way to frame the issue: anyone who isn’t a doctrinal hard-liner is now cast as a wayward westerner, rolling his own morality, with no reliable sense of good and evil, and quite possibly a secular humanist with no need for God. This is up there with Rove implying that all Democrats are faith-free people.
Both Bush and Benedict XVI are playing to a very conservative base. Difference is, if you live in a democracy and you’re outvoted you still gotta obey the law. If the President gets a tax passed, you pay. If gay marriage is illegal, gays don't get married. If conservative judges get appointed, we all get judged conservatively. In religion, when folks get fed up they actually have the option not to go to church, or ignore teachings, or more actively, change sects or religions. Just ask Martin Luther. Ratzinger would prefer to have fewer, but more devout followers.
This is an accepted brand strategy, but implementing it is tricky and I’m not sure it’s the best way to manage an already huge, mass-brand religion. It certainly doesn’t look like a growth strategy. I’ve been around this mass/targeted market issue my whole career, and since the new pope hasn’t appointed his deputies yet, I figure I have a responsibility to chime in.
The blogosphere is pondering the papacy and.... blogging. For example, Tony Gentile asks, "Will The Next Pope Blog?"
Here's my take: the papacy is one of the last great one-way broadcast “we're in control and you’re not” entities left on earth. Popes don’t listen, they hear from God and pronounce. The last pope used lots of travel and communication technology--- but to the end of extending his centralized reach and minimizing the sway of local bishops. The pope doesn’t care about comments. (Confessions yes, but that’s not really the spirit of the blogopshere). The Church is not a conversation. The Vatican is not a particurlarly fertile Cluetrain , the "customer defines the brand" kind of place. Popes seem swayed by big trends over time (the U.S. Church scandals, rise of 3rd world) but the whole short time-frame, fast feedback-loop thing doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant to a 70 year old guy who’s elected for life, is deemed to be infallible, and speaks to and for God. Contrast that with a US elected leader who faces pundits daily, must deal with interest groups that can organize around the blogsphere and is elected every two years. Its good to be the pope!
On the other hand, the Vatican and churches in general will happily adopt any communication technology that lets them preach more effectively. Sermons are one of the killer apps of podcasting--- why settle for reaching just your flock on Sunday morning when you can reach them on their schedule 24/7 with a podcast and easily reach beyond your local parish and speak to anyone who wants to listen. Podcasting is the first technology that lets any preacher preach beyond their local territory easily, instantly and at no cost. They don’t call it Really Super Sermon technology for nothing. If parishioners can listen to any of the priests in town (or anywhere) via podcasts, will that improve the quality of sermons as competition sets in?
Sure marketing's a conversation. And a relationship. But if a brand really got that idea and didn't just pay lip service, what would they do? They'd trust their customer to do some marketing, make the commercials, and be the voice of the brand. (Note to those who haven't spent a lot of time around brand marketers: this is kinda rare behavior.)
This is just what Converse, the shoe company owned by Nike, is doing at Conversegallery.com. They've invited their customers to make 24 second films and submit them. Spots that make it to TV earn $10,000 for the film-making customer.
Converse's instructions to their customer: "Make a film, not a commercial. It’s a great opportunity for you to tell us what Converse means to you". Translation: "We don't want you to just parrot our marketing and commercials, you're the customer dammit, you get it, so interpret the brand as you see it. We're just the guys at headquarters...." That's trust, thats really listening, and that's treating your customer as an equal, not some consumer. And thats definitely unusal behavior for a brand.
Bob Kalsey and I made this brief film for Bill Gates in 1994. It was pre-internet; we still called it "The Information Superhighway." But a decade later the industry is still chasing after the same Digital Livingroom vision. And we're as hopped-up on convergence as ever!
You could read all that stuff on blogs, in the mainstream press, on the left, and on the right about the tango between blogging and journalism. Or you could watch this recent segment on The Daily Show. Longer than most segments, it really uses humor to nail the issues. First half summarizes recent examples of bloggers setting the news agenda (and the mainstream media's response), while the second half is a very funny commentary bit by Stephen Colbert.
In five minutes it not only hits the major issues (mob psychology issue, main stream media playing catch-up, the power of emergent media...) but sums of the last year of this stuff in a pretty coherent manner.
Friendships seen evolving in face of social networking, technology.
Is companionship-light a fad, or a new staple in our emotional diet?
Laura Bellingkamp has no time. This 33 year old New York marketing consultant has met over a hundred cool new acquaintances on services like Friendster and J-date. She goes out every night, but at parties she meets more people, not less. And in addition to her work and social schedule, Laura must leave time to process all the content captured on her TIVO, iPod and four voice mail accounts. She’s exhibit one of what techno-sociologist Linda Stone calls “the continuous partial attention generation.”
Academics say the problem faced by Laura and those like her is how to deal with all those budding friendships. A hundred years ago a person was lucky to meet 15 new acquaintances a year. Now thanks to technology, people often meet that many in an hour. “Our species was never programmed to adapt to such an onslaught of potential intimacy” says Harvard biologist Irving Bockman. “ Yet we still have an innate need to meet people. So you can see the frightening implication of this codependent cycle. We now believe Traumatic Friendship Stress Disorder is rapidly emerging as the premier psychological ailment of our era.”
"God’s Batter" Invades Los Angeles Moral Value in Chicken Fried Steak?
President Bush’s landslide 3% victory margin is heralded as a mandate to bring red state values and sensibilities to all Americans. Just this week incoming NBC News anchor Brian Williams declared he wanted to spend nights in "Dayton and Toledo and the middle of Kansas" because the New York/Washington axis can be a journalist's "worst enemy." What elitism! What blue state resident has enough time, money or frequent flier miles to get politically reeducated in the heartland? Clearly a more populist and accessible form culturectomy is needed for urban America.
