I’m having lunch with the CEO of Compete Scott Ernst, after speaking at his client event, we’re kidding each other about who’s blog is better, in fact there’s been two rankings about it, Ad age and we’re at a photo finish over at technobabble, . Many of you may be familiar with compete.com, but they do more than that.

In his presentation I learned a lot more about what they do, but over lunch, I just told him that awareness is very low: “Until today, I had no idea these other services you provide”. He agreed, and I suggested we do a market test to ask people what they think

I know from my recent survey that most of my readers are the people he also wants to reach (see graph), so lemme ask you

Leave a comment below, what do you think Compete does?

Scott, who blogs on the Compete team blog, is interested to hear what you have to say, I hope he responds from his blog, and I’ll update this post.

23 comments

Left: Results from a survey: “How do you consume the content on Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang?”

Well, that’s an understatement really. The readers of this blog are collectively smarter than any author, and I recognize that.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, I ask questions, as I want to know what people think. I read every single comment, and often respond to comments , questions and followups.

I recently ran a survey to find out how people are using my blog, and most are reading this blog via RSS in a feedreader, they’re not even visiting the site. While feedreaders are great for getting content when you want, where you want, and in the format you want, you’ll miss out on the wisdom being generated in the comments.

For example, last week’s post on Six Career tips generated dozens and dozens of juicy tips that can help you in your career, but if you’re reading that only in the feedreader, you’re really missing out.

So I encourage you to once in a while come back and visit to see what’s happening in the discussions, that’s where the real value is.

Update, a few hours later: A few people in the comments requested a summary. Ok here’s a comment summary: A few people requested a comment summary. This is the last time I’ll be doing a comment summary, ha!

Related: Shoemoney, a master at search marketing doesn’t take his commenters that seriously, I know many of those who have commented, I have a high degree of trust for my commenters.

24 comments

Embrace your Customers
At Forrester, we use the term Embracing as a social strategy where customers and employees work together using social tools to build next-generation products. Quite a change for the strong headed product manager, who now has to set the roadmap, while in collaboration with customers.

Popular Examples: Dell and Starbucks
We’re all familiar with the popular Dell “Idea Storm” website that let customers vote for which features and products they wanted to be bore to the marketplace. In Dell’s case, the linux community asked for a UBUNTU box, which was created and launched and sold. I wish I was a fly on the wall when Dell’s strategic partners at Microsoft found out about this.

Recently, Starbucks has launched My Starbucks Ideas, where customers are voting for improved services or products in each of the stores. Looking at the site, the request for free wireless or ‘punchcards’ for frequent customers is under consideration or has been improved.

Both powered by SalesForce
Both of these sites are powered by Salesforce’s product, Ideas. Move on over, there’s a new player in town called UserVoice that offers the same features right on their site.

UserVoice, a new kid on the block
I’ve played around with UserVoice and even created a version for my own Web Strategy blog, the simple features made it easy to setup and let others submit ideas. I’ve not stress tested this service to see if it can withstand enterprise activity like SalesForce can, but it’s a nod to a common feature (voting) that we should start to expect to see in white label social networks. (in fact, I know of a few that are going to launch this)

Reporting, Query features, and easy to setup
Other UserVoice features to include Google Analytics, and the ability to collect demographic information and let owners know of suggestions. Owners of voting sites can also segment their customers by different purchasing sizes, in order to help prioritize. Also, polling features will help to put color around suggestions from users, and other conduits to improve the connectivity between employees and customers.

For example, I created this own Web Strategy UserVoice page where you can go and make suggestions on how I can improve this website.

Recommendations
If you’re a small company or individual blogger, or run a niche product, I encourage you to try out UserVoice, test to see how it scales, and come back and leave comments on your experience on this post. If you’re from a large company that has thousands or millions of customers, start with SalesForce and also trial UserVoice. Anyone that wants a fully custom user experience should start with SalesForce.

Update: I’ve received some tweets and comments also suggesting IdeaScale (which I think is the same as this product of the same name), I’ve not looked at it, please leave a comment if you’ve a review. Also, passionate CEO Matt from BrightIdea left a comment about his enterprise class competitor to SalesForce, I look forward to a formal Forrester briefing from him, let’s take a closer look at this growing segment.

What to Expect
UserVoice would make for a good partner for any of those white label social networks, and could even be an acquisition target for a vendor that’s not up to speed in this emerging feature set.

Expect other White Label Social Networking vendors to offer this feature, soon it will be on the ‘checklist’, of features. Customer voting? “Yup we got that.”

They aren’t the only ones to watch, Get Satisfaction, a support site for any product, anywhere, (no reason to go to that irrelvant corporate website) has launched, and customers are self-supporting each other, and some savvy companies have their employees there participating. Without surprise, I’m there representing Forrester, although there’s been no activity. Satisfaction is still very startup focused, I hope to see some Fortune 1000 companies appear on their site.

Lastly, UserVoice itself is, “eating their own dog food” so to speak, using their own service to improve their product, there’s already a small flurry of votes happening.

27 comments

Apparently, Sam is sending me back to school.

Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive Software is one of our customers, and he’s reviewed the service that he’s received from Forrester and another analyst firm. One of scored a “C-”, and the other scored a “B”, read his report card to find out who scored what and why.

Customers in every industry (even the Analyst industry) are being empowered by social media tools, they can directly talk to each other, share experiences, and make decisions –often without the marketer or sales person present. I’ve been preaching this on my blog and in presentations and at my former employers for nearly 4 years.

Is this a disruption? Absolutely.

I advise my clients that the key is for the company to be an active part of the conversation in their marketplace, this is where customers, prospects, and partners will be. I was in a NY taxi when I saw this on Twitter, but pointed to it instantly (Carter says that was the right move), and wasn’t able to respond in the comments, but tweeted it, and I think my colleagues quickly saw it, two of them commented before I was able to get online, and Rob, who was with me at the event also commented.

More important that being part of the conversation, companies need to listen and when appropriate, act on the feedback. So now I need to go back to school (a “B” isn’t good enough), study up and find out what it’s going to take me to get an “A” from Jive and other customers.

Aiming for the honor roll, we’ll keep at it ‘till we do.

3 comments

I’m very conscious about listening to my community, it’s one of the practices I suggest to my clients, so I’d better eat my own dogfood.

A few days ago, I asked you what you thought about my Twitter usage. Here’s the results, I took some time to count up the 89 comments that came in (some were not relevant) and tried to put them into buckets. I’m pretty anal, so being a researcher is really a good fit.

At SXSW I met someone who works at a PR agency, most of the account managers are following my tweets, and some of them complained to him about my high frequency, ironic.

Here’s what you said (please note some were subjective, I had to force them into buckets, although there’s clearly a trend)

What you told me about my Twitter Usage:

1) How are my tweets doing for you?

A) Too little 4
B) Just right 43
C) Too many 8

2) How is the content?

40 respondents said it was positive
4 said it was mixed or varied
2 said it wasn’t relevant

14 people told me that I shouldn’t care about what anyone says, and just do what I want, since Twitter is opt in.

Conclusions:
Well it’s no surprise that I’ve not changed my behaviors at all, and this feedback has reinforced that.

I’ve indicated how I use Twitter, most of the time, I point to things that I think are interesting, and it sends about 50 clicks (and up to 200) clicks from an active opt-in engaged audience of early early adopters.

13 comments

I’ve been meeting a lot of folks that are readers of this Web Strategy blog here at SXSW. It’s overwhelmingly an amazing feeling to know that folks are improving their careers by learning, connecting with others, and finding links to other resources.

Beyond the initial buzz of meeting all of you, I ask nearly everyone “how could the blog improve?” I’ve received a range of responses, including the following:

“Be more transparent about your day job as an Analyst”

“Don’t be afraid to proudly wave your Forrester reports, you’ve worked hard on them”

“Make it easier for me to find information”

“You post too damn much, slow down”

Feel free to leave a suggestion below, style or content suggestions.

The most common comment by the way is “I don’t know how you do it (in regards to the time) and “Do you have a hobby or loved ones?” You’ll have to find me in person to hear my answer. I love meeting readers, please do come up and say hi, it’s really a pleasure for me to get to know you!

4 comments

On my twitter profile page, I have a link to a post that indicates how I use Twitter. I try to be forthcoming on what to expect. It’s also no secret that I tweet links to just about anything I think is interesting, add anyone who adds me, and I ask many questions to my network. I rarely talk about my ‘lunch’, and nearly everything I tweet about is related to social media, web marketing, business, and sometimes politics. On average, I’ve calculated I tweet about 15 times a day, pretty much once an hour per awake hour. For me, it is the most immediate conversation I can have, I love the interaction.

Spectrum: My tweets are too much
Last night, Tom Foremski, a former colleague of mine and current friend, suggested that my tweets were becoming near “scoblish” due to frequency. Ted Shelton, entrepreneur and one of the leads at the Conversation Group whipped out his iPhone and showed how I’ve dominated his news feed as an example. Most people aren’t following as many as I am (I follow over 4000), so to me, I don’t appear to be dominating the main feed when I visit it, I’ll be revisiting my perspective to think bigger,sorry.

At the GSP conference, I warned folks that I’d be doing a blow-by-blow of what I thought was interesting, and about 3 people complained that it was too much. Of course, I let folks know on Twitter I’d cut back, but there were over 10 people who told me to keep it up, and those that don’t like it could simply unfollow. I shifted my behavior and put all my notes on blog posts instead.

Spectrum: Some would pay money for my tweets
On the other hand, Bill Johnston, who is one of the community manager mavens told me last week that he’d actually PAY MONEY for my tweets. He later followed it up, and said only a small amount of course (as my eyebrows went up, heh), as he says my links are a filter for him to all topics social media and I’m actually saving him time.

Also, the more I tweet, there’s intrinsic personal, career, and business benefits, the more I’m in the conversation the more I’m learning about the social media sphere I’m being paid to analyze, and it helps me get the word out about things that help what’s important to me. I also ask questions, to gauge responses, understand viewpoints, it fuels and focuses some of my research activities (but not all). I also noticed that it’s a great way to send traffic, I get 50-200 click throughs (from an engaged and opt-in audience) on anything I point to on twitter, and it costs me 5 seconds.

I continue to get more and more followers every day, and I think that’s great, but I really want to respect everyone’s experience, but at the same time, I know it will be impossible to please everyone.

Your opinion wanted
Social Media is about listening and about coming half way or more to those you’re trying to reach, and I’ll abide by that, so I’m asking you for your opinion.

So I’d like to take a blog poll, and get your feedback, if you’re a friend, client, colleague, vendor, whoever. Please be brutally honest, I don’t mind, I’ll be pretty damn honest with you about what I think, so I’d expect the same, besides, it’s in your best interest for your experience. If you’re feeling shy, feel free to leave an anonymous comment, but please chime in regardless.

Please respond on the comments below:

1) How are my tweets doing for you?

A) Too little
B) Just right
C) Too many

2) How is the content?
Open ended question

I’m listening, I really am, and your feedback will shape my actions.

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Update: A few hours later
over 80 comments on the first day, I don’t even need to tally, but it’s clear that based upon the feedback of the community, that it’s suggested that I continue to tweet the same way as before. For those that find it too much, I don’t mind if you unsubscribe, in fact, I encourage it, as I don’t want to disrupt your experience.

I did learn a few things: I’ll strive to keep the value high (and not talk about my lunch) but will try to space out the tweets a little better, so I don’t totally disrupt your stream.

Thank you all for your honest feedback, I’m listening and reacting to your comments.

Updated: A week later
Being the anal guy I am (a good reason to be an analyst) I’ve tallied the results from the comments in the blog, see results.

91 comments

Although scary for product teams, feedback is great, I do my best to welcome it.

Last week, I announced my Forrester report entitled Online Community Best Practices from my blog If you’re a client you can access the report on the site, or you can purchase the report from the site, if you’re not satisfied, Forrester has a money back guarantee. This product, designed to help our clients make a logical and methodical way to benefit from community took me months to compose.

There was quite a bit of discussion: ComputerWorld covered it, over 17 blog posts discussing it, including those that agree –and disagree — with the report.

I often preach how product teams should be open and transparent as possible with their development and support process (and welcome feedback), and as an analyst, reports are one of my products. I welcome all points of view, and think that it adds to the overall value, here’s a few interesting takes on the report:

Here’s what the community said about my report:

Not everyone agreed. The loudest criticism comes from Nick O’Neill, one of the thought and practice leaders in the social networking space. He suggests that the graphic isn’t realistic (compared to crossing the chasm), and many, many other commenters bring up other curves, charts, and concepts. Education for me, and anyone else in the space.

A starting point for additional resources. Nancy White gives a very thorough review of the report, highlighting what she thought was great about the report, and what could have been improved. Believe me, if I could have included the many topics she suggested, I would have, but then we would have been approaching a book, not a short and sweet succint report.

Spikes, not curves. Karen O’Brian of Crimson Consulting does a great job re-analyzing the graphic, and suggested that a real world community will grow with ’spikes’ of activity rather than a smooth gradual flow, she’s right, and I suggest if the line was smoothed out, it would closely resemble –therefore, we both agree.

A detailed process. Jacob Morgan suggests two additional phases in the community lifecycle graphic, Brainstorming and Customer communication and feedback, both which are absolutely critical elements that I would consider to be part of other phases, good commentary.

Not every community will be successful. Nick Gonzales, former Techcrunch writer now with Social Media created this humorous ‘mash-up’ showing the demise of communities, pretty entertaining.

Ratings and comments. For Forrester clients, when you login to the site you’ll see an extranet view. This let’s customers leave comments and rank the report. I stand by my product, I read every comment, and will respond to any questions that clients may have, so far, the report has scored 9/10 but that’s only two votes and two comments from clients.

During the research process, one of the key findings I learned was the importance of roles. To be successful, corporate community initiatives requires an executive sponsor, a social media or community strategist that will fight the internal battles, and a community manager that will be an active member of the community.

This was an enlightening process, but even after the research is completed, there’s still a lot to learn.

4 comments

I learn a lot from you, thanks for commenting.

I want to take the time to thank you for commenting. In my opinion, a successful blog is a dialog between more than two people. To date, there are 1,697 posts and 12,159 comments, so a conversation rate (comments divided by posts) of just over 7. Sure, not as impressive as some other sites, but it’s the quality of comments that matter.

This actually came up in discussion yesterday on a client call, where he pointed out that the comments you’ve left were insightful and thoughtful, I readily agreed. Sure, other blogs may have quantity lightweight comments, but here, they are often filled with details, opinions, and insight.

We’ve done research on technographics (how people use social computing tools) and for North American adults, the inactives far often outweigh those who leave comments. I read every single comment that comes through, and I end up learning a lot (not everyone agrees), in some cases, I’ll sometimes update the post and add links or point to your insight. In some cases, like yesterday, I get corrected for my mistakes, and that’s ok too. I certainly appreciate you adding links that add to the conversation, keep on doing that when there’s something to see.

In the near future, I plan to run that survey to find out more about the readers and commenters here, stay tuned for that.

So again, thanks for adding to the conversation.

12 comments

As an analyst, I watch the online community space very closely, and am always interested in seeing how traditional institutions and organizations approach, adapt, succeed or fail in adopting social tools.

Fast Company, a forward thinking business publication has revamped it’s corporate website to now be an online community. Their initial three page announcement written by Edward Sussman: “The Media is Social”

[Fast Company, a traditional publication, has featured community as it’s primary focus. But success isn’t guaranteed as: innovating without a clear objective is dangerous, the bottom-up approach must cascade to the whole organization, and they must rapidly make course corrections]

Opportunity
Fast Company is the first, but certainly not last, mainstream publication to integrate the majority of their site as a social community. The starting page of their website isn’t the magazine, or it’s articles, but is the community site. Traditional media is under fire from social media, the power has shifted to the participants, so in return Fast Company is participating: hiring bloggers and video bloggers (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel) and are integrating within their site. In many other cases, websites have bolted on social forums around content, this is clearly a full replacement of community over Fast Company content.

Objectives
Fast Company is attempting to involve readers and the market to be involved in creating content. We’ve listed out there are five major social computing objectives, (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing) and this one could fall under embracing, where customers and employees collaborate to build next generation products and services.

Challenges
Once the initial buzz wears off, we’ll have to see who will remain leading the and joining in the conversations. Will the lines between professional created editorial and community continue to be blurred? How will high quality content be elevated so usefulness is found? Most importantly, with the many reports showing that advertising on social networks is ineffective, how will Fast Company monetize?

What they deployed
Fast Company deployed a community platform using Drupal, and hired experts to implement, it contains a variety of features from profile building, forums, user created blogs, media rooms, event calendars, and many other features. They have made this the primary experience from the homepage of Fast Company, and have a control navigation bar at the top of each page.

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Initial Analysis of the Community, Fast Company should:

Determine a Goal
Being creative for the sake of innovation isn’t enough. It’s great to see that they are trying something new, but what is the end goal? How will they measure results? Does the team know what success looks like?

Quickly Squash Bugs
I noticed a few hiccups that aren’t uncommon on a launch. 1) Site error: the site was not available for some time, Chris Brogan has screenshots 2) I tried to message Edward, but it got stuck in an endless loop of clicks to add him as a contact before messaging him, confusing. While all excusable the first week, this needs to quickly be resolved.

Focus on fewer features
The community site launched with too many features, as a result, the initial interface is overwhelming. I encourage clients to launch with only three major features, (such as a profile, forum, blog, media, q&a, etc), unfortunately, Fast Company launched without all of those

Elevate Fast Company Editorial
The professionally created content that we seek from Fast Company is hidden, which is too bad, as that’s why we come to them in the first place. There’s currently a saturation of online communities on every given subject on Ning, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Google groups. How is this different? I think the order is backwards: Lead with the editorial, attach the social features second, the social features should orbit (in context) the articles.

Clean up the Interface
The interface is crowded and unclear, resembling enterprise software, there are too many options and tools. I’m not the only one, I received feedback from some of my 3000 followers in twitter: “@jowyang I agree, the site was bewildering at first” The deployment looks like the features were determined by the developers and not a user experience designer. Let tools be hidden, and show more on a mouse over or let them cascade out. It’s confusing to understand what the top categories are compared to the control bar, then the many features on every page. Think Zen: articles first, social second, features and tools third.

Start with a tour
Develop a quick and dirty walk through video or animation that highlights how the website will serve the users, and how they can be involved and contribute. Highlight at the lead in video, and have your top bloggers post quickly.

Make community a core ethos of company
Being first has it’s advangtes, you get the buzz, but there’s also disadvantages: the path has not been cleared before, and innovators must quickly course correct when mistakes happen. Editors, writers, journalists, management and support must all be involved in the community, taking input, talking, and discussing. For success, Fast Company will need to involve a social way of thinking in everything they do, this can’t simply be a flash or wine thrown in the pan by management.

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The Big Picture:

Can a business publication blend journalism and online community to create something better than either by itself? This is the ‘fast’ question posed in the community, and there were a myriad of responses, most positive. My response was the following:

“Yes it can, and it can also learn more from it’s audience, fuel research, ideas, and stories. The successful business will learn how to get the community to be part of the content creation, and how to monetize on top of this.”

The Future
Expect this to be a success for Fast Company, but they’ll need to act on the previous recommendations. Expect other business publications to quickly launch similar communities, and soon the industry will be inundated with ‘me toos’. The savvy publications will still realize that the web is distributed and won’t limit their community efforts to their corporate domains, but will also spread to where the people are. The savvy fishermen, fish where the fish are.

Conclusions: Being innovative doesn’t guarantee success
Fast Company has launched an innovative community site, unseen by most mainstream publications. When the shinyness wears off, the company will need to involve community in every aspect of it’s strategy for it to thrive. This is certainly a website and community to watch, I’ll post additional analysis in a few months, and hope to get some numbers from the team.

28 comments

Twitter no mo’ Kidder
‘Less you become Litter

The time for fun and games is over, Twitter needs to step and be the robust communication platform it’s fans are expecting it to be or users may end up leaving. The cracks are starting to show.

Shel Israel puts forth a passionate open letter to the founders of Twitter, RE: Fix it before we nix it, exposing the weakness of fast built ruby on rails experiment that is not scaling. Sadly, I’m not surprised to see the ‘bring that beat back’ or lol cat, as Twitter is the website that had more than 5 days of downtime in 2007. I know of some pretty creative developers that wanted to build applications on top of Twitter but were restricted due to limitations in APIs. There are currently over 600 messages in Get Satisfactions support forum for Twitter, there’s a lot of requests, and a lot of passionate users. Lastly, Allen Stern wants to see a business model, members of the site should know what it is, as it directly impacts them.

It’s time for Twitter to grow up, both for it’s infrastructure, communications with customers, find out what features are needed, and start to grow. Put that $5.4 million funding you received last month to good use.

11 comments

Update, Monday Jan 28: I’m holding off on publishing the web strategy survey (details here) for a few days, I may get my hands on some better tools/process, so please hang tight.

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A few days ago, I asked if it would be appropriate to run a survey on this blog, the overall answer was “yes”.

This survey should help both readers to understand their peers, as well as for me to understand the readers.

This Monday, I’m going to publish the first ever survey for this blog. The goals? To learn about readers, (who they are, what they do, what their challenges are) and will publish the findings for all readers to learn from. Secondly, I want to learn about what you think about the web strategy blog, what works, and what can be improved.

While not all feedback will be incorporated (it’s not physically possible) I’ll take considerations into mind. While this blog is serving the web decision maker, it’s still mine, and I’ll maintain editorial control. I can’t be all things to all people, so ultimately, I’ll be the final judge.

I won’t be using this data in any malicious way, and respondents can stay anonymous. Of course, if there is a business opportunity, and someone needs help from my employer, I will pass on any messages, but of course this will be voluntary and completely opt-in. If I didn’t you could leave comments and my reputation would quickly be tarnished, the control is in your hands.

Here’s my proposed survey questions what do you think?

1 About you
-Title
-Kind of work/industry
-Experience
-Do you use social media?
-Budget
-Size of team under you
-Open ended section

2 About your challenges
-Is your organization ready for social media?
-Where are you as far as implementation?
-How many months/years has your company been implementing social media?
-What type of tools have you deployed?
-How would you describe the reaction of your company to this change?
-What are your biggest challenges (open)

3 About the web strategy blog
-How did you find this blog?
-How do you consume the content on this blog
-How do you rate the blog/share with others?
-How do you rate the amount of content being published (frequency)
-What’s woroking well
-What needs to be improved
-Open ended section

4 Contact info (optional)
-Name
-Email
-Company
-Option to receive follow-up email

I’m being very open-source in this survey process, as I want to make sure readers get as much out of it as I do, your feedback encouraged.

16 comments

As a good example, I should take a dose of my own medicine.

One of the things I preach about is the objective of ‘embracing’, which in essence is about companies and customers working together to design, create, and market new products and services. Lego, Microsoft, and certainly Dell are case studies of success.

I want to apply that same strategy to this blog (which I feel is as much yours as it is mine) to improve. About a month ago, I asked for some feedback in a blog post (it was a very scary thing to do), and got a flurry of responses, I read each one several times, and internalized many. Sadly, it was hard to find specific trends as some members wouldn’t echo what was already written, or would mention something different than others –it was hard for me to weigh.

I’m contemplating doing a formal survey for this blog, to get your input in a more organized fashion than raw blog comments. I want to understand who my readers are, and how I can do better.

So, Do you think this is a good idea? And what would you want to know from your other Web Strategy readers?

And by the way, you too as web strategists should elicit feedback both in real time as well as periodic surveys to your users, members, customers, and prospects. I know it’s often scary, as you’re afraid of what they will say, but in reality, it’s opportunity to be better, and learn how to improve.

16 comments

Every company makes mistakes, and I’m actually quite forgiving about it, what they do next is what will make or break me as a customer, and I have the habit of telling a few thousand people.

I’ve been a customer of Dreamhost since I’ve had this domain and have had quite a few outages, and recently my blog was 403 (forbidden to others), as they forgot to fix all the settings when I moved to a dedicated server. Despite these hardships (which I’m willing to let go, you know I used to work at Exodus, a web hosting company) I’m sympathetic towards web hosts.

Despite my willingness to forgive, I have a hard time when I feel like I’m being patronized when I received the following email:

Hi jeremiah!

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!

We’re really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on your account (#198980) and fixed everything up.

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!

To add insult to injury…

Despite the misspelling (embarassed) what really caught me was the blame of a ‘fat finger’ (I subdued my original title for the post). That’s not the cause, and companies need to take accountability in a human, and up front way of what the problem was. Later, I discovered an apology and explanation blog post, entitled “Um, Whoops.” sadly, they used cartoons (Homer Simpson) and images from pop movies (as well as elsewhere on their blog) to back peddle. I don’t need language written in chat-room-type language, I expect professional and sincere communications. The Dreamhost status blog (is this run by a different group? it must be) provides the information in a succinct, yet sincere manner.

While we complain about the cold heartless press release, I think the Dreamhost communications is a swing too far to the left, and recommend that we all find a place somewhere closer to the middle. I’d rather see pictures of the employees working on the problem (or live streaming) from the data center to demonstrate to me how professional they are working.

This patronizing doesn’t get my sympathy, instead it makes me irritated.

29 comments

A few days ago, I asked in public how could I better improve myself. I received over 20 comments of recommendations, (10 emails, or private message) and all of them were genuine and helpful. This was a healhy (yet humble) process, and I think that every bloggers should consider doing this.

Although I won’t be incorporating every suggestion, as I need to have self-focus to make myself happy, but many I will. In either case, I’m acknowledging I heard you, thank you, twas a wonderful holiday gift. Message Received.

2 comments

Ellen Lee did a great wrap-up article over at SFGate on Facebook in 2007, she called me up for my opinion on the company over the last year. I suggested that Facebook is very innovative (the first to lead an application platform, and to do social based ads) yet remains very arrogant. (twice not including customers to make decisions over their very own privacy of the newspage and beacon).

Having betrayed the trust of it’s users twice, a third time is going to result in mutiny, and users will start leaving, it wont be hard for some users to organize and move.

What could Facebook do better? Involve it’s customers members (Update: See Doc Searls comment) in testing and decision making. I would advise them to bring customers members closer and involve them in the testing and decision making process. Create a small private group of members that really understand the program and involve them in the decision maker process. This group would be empowered to talk to the product team, test out new features, and provide honest and thoughtful research. You can reward them with insider knowledge (they won’t need to be paid) and many of them will become advocates and help promote (and sometimes defend) the feature releases and the brand in general.

To Facebook’s defense, I’ll bet they didn’t know the full ramifications of their innovative actions (or didn’t think it all the way through), and as a result, were learning about it from reading blogs.

With Facebook being a community or “social utility” it will be nice to see them living some of these values we hold dear before they release their next feature.

Get closer to members, and be more successful, a social network is only as good as the collective of it’s members.

Please chime in with your suggestions for Facebook.

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My transition into my new role has been an interesting one, I’m still adapting to the changes both in the day job and how it’s impacting and influencing communications on the open web.

Recently, I may have come across in a way that I really don’t want to be associated with. Donna suggests that I was being hollow, and EdLee agrees, being focused on tweeterboard is exciting but lacking depth. Former mentor Shel Israel puts forth a public challenge and Doc Searls suggested that the topics and languages I’ve been leading in conversations were unbalanced towards marketers and not community. I’m in an interesting position, as my mission (the web strategy one, as well as the one at the day job) is to help companies use the web to connect with customers. These are often marketers, and my job is to educate, show, and guide them.

The recent conversations around community ‘ownership’ and join vs build appeared to some as leaning to hard in the direction that marketers have control, yet if you look carefully, I was trying to incite a discussion, I know that those who participate authentically are the ones that are really in charge, and it’s often not marketers, although I’m going to try to help them achieve this. I’m confident I can achieve both the goals for the community and for marketers.

I’ve been messing up, and I’m sorry for that, so let’s fix it. I just wanted to be clear that I’m thinking these through, and am putting it out here for all to read, feedback encouraged.

I guess this is a good time to ask, how can I improve?

Update: On comment 26, I recap the feedback what I’ve received. I also received emails from others with honest opinions. I want you to know I heard you, and am internalizing the feedback. Some I’ll adopt, some I won’t, but please note your opinion is important –I’m writing for you and me.

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I recently received into my possession a Nokia N95, one of the top phones from the Nokia line. I was intending to buy this phone, but apparently Nokia had provided Charlene with one for analysis. I’ll be reviewing the phone, it’s features, and web capabilities over the coming weeks.

Initial Attractions: Large screen and 5 megapixel camera. The last time I ran into phones of this quality, I was in Japan (live video streaming via cell phones were already available). I take a lot of pictures (over 20,000 in flickr) so this will help me reduce gear –gotta love convergence.

Setup: I went to AT&T, the only service provider (I asked my twitter network for help, responses came in fast) and signed up for a low voice plan and unlimited data plan ($20) and $5 worth of monthly text messaging (for Twitter). Picked up a jawbone headset, will test this too.

Expectations:

1) I hope to be able to fully manage my blog comments, approving comments, and alerts easily.
2) Access websites like Techmeme and my feedreader with ease, and the rest of the world wide web.
3) Use this as my ongoing camera and video capture going forward. (see this flickr pool of N95 photos)

What’s better, the iPhone or the Nokia N95? Robert says the iPhone is better, but the N95’s camera saves it.

One of Nokia’s top bloggers and social media strategist is, Karl Long who I run into quite frequently, if this topic is of interest to you, I recommend you read his blog, or connect with him.

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Today is Thanksgiving, an American Holiday where we give thanks for all that we have, and we do it with others. What a perfect time to discuss sharing and feedback in the social sphere.

Social feedback is a good thing, if done correctly, it can help companies include customers and prospects in shaping better products and services, I’m all for it (and have written about it extensively) and am in the position companies to participate.

A few days ago, I gave my public feedback about three brands on my blog, most of which responded in a timely fashion. Having been on the receiving end many times for public feedback for my employer, I know what it feels like.

[While it’s so easy for consumers to ‘blast’ at brands with negative criticism, let’s consider taking the high route to encourage better behavior from brands, give them actionable recommendations, and be accountable as brands respond. These social tools give us the opportunity to build a better products and services, let’s use them responsibly and maximize their abilities]

Today, I’d like to set forth some ground rules for those who plan on leaving feedback from their social tools. These will help both the customer, their network and peers, and the brand to make improvements.

How to give Feedback to brands using Social Software:

1) Put yourself in the position of others
For many, posting their brand grievances online is a frustrating and liberating experience, a swell of emotion will be part of the experience, including the desire to lash out and spread the frustration you once had. While it’s never a great idea to post when you’re emotional, consider how the readers of the post will feel. Your network and friends, will they glean the helpful information about the dangers in the product or service if it’s filled with emotion and four letter curse words? Secondly, consider yourself in the position of the recepient of the bad news, by griping will it make them more likely or less likely to respond? Try substituting the name of the brand you’re complaining about with your own company’s brand and see how it goes.

So write out your feedback in the way you feel, then walk away for an hour, and take another look, does it meet the criteria listed above? Remember good online feedback isn’t just about you releasing your frustration, but also about improving products and services for you, your friends, and the brand. Also, be sure this is the right place for feedback, if the company has an active support forum, you may want to at least post there first, or cross post, linking them together.

2) Don’t just complain, give recommendations
It’s so easy to point out the faults of others, I could spend all day writing a gripe post about every brand I come into contact with. The responsible and sensible contributor will offer recommendations or scenarios to help improve the service. Really call it out, and spend the time to make it actionable for these companies, it’s quite possible they’ve never looked at it directly from your perspective (scary huh?) and when management reads your post (not filtered through corporate politics) they’ll have a better sense of what you want.

Spend the time to make sensible and realistic recommendations, what could a brand do that would win your trust over and you’d be willing to tell others about. Do keep in mind that there are often strategic limitations that can’t appease every request, but at least these brands have a starting point.

3) If the company responds, acknowledge, be collaborative
Now the table is turning. I’ve spoken at many conferences for PR and marketing and I encourage those on point to respond quickly, authentically and with genuine concern –even if they don’t have the answer right away. Many times, bloggers just want to know that they are being heard. Here’s how the roles reverse; after providing your feedback (given the two conditions above) and the company responds via email or comments, you are expected to update your post to reflect the actions of the brand. Why is this? remember that we’re working in a collaborative sense to offer feedback, and that requires communication both to and from. Secondly, it’s likely your feedback will easily be found on the internet (for many years to come) and you should certainly offer a company reprise if they’ve really earned it. If you remember the example of Jeff Jarvis’ Dell Hell example, he’s know touting the virtues of Dell –as they’ve come full circle.

So update your posts when your brand first contacts you, but more importantly after issues have been resolved or fixed, it’s the responsible thing to do. No need to do in real time, just be sensible.

So there you have it social folks, here’s some guidelines that I will be following in my online feedback, and I hope that you pass this to others, as with these many social tools the opportunity to build better products and services is here.

This is one of the ways a web strategist gives thanks!

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I’ve a few experiences recently where I found very frustrating, and think it’s important to share with others. One, so others are aware of potential pitfalls, and secondly, hopefully brands can be improved in the future. Rather than just rant, I’ll provide some analysis and make some recommendations how things could be done better.

Real Player:
Recently, I downloaded Real Player to my new business laptop, it was required for a specific media format. I was disappointed in all the ways they tried to embed themselves as being the default player, adding different features, and trying to ’spider’ itself across my PC. Most of the options required a savvy user to opt-out, rather than opt-in for these unwanted features. Despite my being careful (this is not time being spent productively) apparently I missed one and a Weather Channel desktop widget was deployed in my system tray on my desktop. I did not want his tool, and removing it became equally as painful.

As a user, I don’t feel that Real Player has respected my rights, and I recommend they make these extra features (most laden with marketing and advertising) as an opt-in, not a opt-out. Instead, build resources for your community that they actually want, and have asked for, rather than pushing it on them.

Update (A few hours later): Ryan Luckin from Real Networks has left a comment, suggesting that the recently launched upgrade will solve these issues, including the removal of popups in the current player. Thanks Ryan for the prompt and helpful comment. I’ll check out the product when I get time.

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Delta Airlines:
I almost didn’t make it to Barcelona last week, as I wasn’t able to get my printed tickets in hand on time. I thought it would be ok to check in using my confirmation numbers, but they required printed tickets (which were at home). The gentleman at the desk, without even looking at me, said he couldn’t help me, and I’ll need to get my printed tickets. Unfortuantly, I was in Las Vegas, the tickets were in San Francisco and the flight was leaving in 2 hours. Needless to say, not a good situation. He didn’t offer any suggestions to help me but encouraged me to contact my travel agent, and reiterated “I can’t help you”. That really pissed me off (as well as made me panic a bit), I had to collect myself, and then after a few minutes request to purchase new tickets (which he didn’t even suggest) and then he asked another attendee to help me, he didn’t even want to deal with me. Obviously, things got sorted out, as I purchased new tickets, but had to leave 16 hours later, and be bounced from three planes from Vegas to Barcelona.

What could have been done better? The customer service folks can always help me, don’t ever tell customers ‘you can’t help them’, yet where there are options to help them. Ultimately things worked out, but the customer service reps that go the extra mile win the adoration of their customers.

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PeopleSoft:
Recently, I had to use this enterprise software to input my travel expenses, it’s a long and tedious process, with a cludgy user interface, and non-intuitive controls and buttons. I always know enterprise software when I see it, as it comes with a manual, and often a training class. Products on the world wide web that I frequently use are often so easy to use –respecting my time. As I completed entering in dozens of entries, I would continue to ’save for later’, and the system acknowledged these changes. Apparently this was not sufficient, as you exited the system you needed to do one more save in order for the previous saves to go into account. I didn’t do this, and was surprised to find the next day the hour (or more) of data entry input was reduced to only 4 entries. Frustrating to say the least.

How can enterprise software be fixed? I’m not sure, I’ll bet it’s complicated, but let’s try to put users first, when they press ’save’, let’s really mean it.

Update (A few hours later): Jake from Oracle Mix labs left a comment suggesting I join their online community to provide feedback. In the spirit of social collaboration (that’s what I’m all about) I signed up, my user profile is here, if you’re already a member and want to connect.

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It’s rare that I criticize products and companies in public, but I’ve highlighted my experience, and was thoughtful enough to provide recommendations, rather than just rant.

What should brands do to get back in my good graces? Acknowledge my situation and strive to make improvements. I’ll be gentle (having been a community manager) so don’t feel intimidated, I’ll treat you with professional courtesy I would expect in your situation. Curious to see which brands respond first.

By the way, that was great therapy, I feel much better.

Special Note, on being a responsible blogger I’m keeping this post updated as the companies respond. It’s the right thing to do as a responsible blogger, as when a company embraces a customer back, the blogger should point out responses. So far, we’re setting a good example between social collaboration between customer and company, and living the benefits for both parties –let’s build better products and services.

Update: (A few days later) This post has inspired me to give some practical ways you can give feedback to brands, please read: How to give Feedback to brands using Social Software.

28 comments