shannonsays.com

See No Evil, Hear No Evil

In case you needed more proof as to how dumb big companies are, and just how "valued" your feedback is, Chris (The Social Customer Manifesto) reports the following:

"Forbes did a profile on ten customer-initiated corporate hate sites. Every corporation mentioned was contacted for the article. The responses from a few of the corporations, from the article:

Walmart:  "We have seen some corporate complaint sites. We don't spend a lot of time on them."

Microsoft:  "No comment."

Verizon: "What's really pathetic is not Verizon but this sort of lame Web site. In this day and age, anyone with a gripe can put up a Web site and make outrageous claims as the authors of this one did."

American Express:  Did not return repeated phone calls.

I can just hear the spinmeisters now:  "Shhh...no...no...just ignore them.  They'll go away...

One word folks: Cluetrain

Joe Trippi's Latest Trick

Regular readers of my blog will know what side of the political fence I sit. 

But I am a big admirer of Joe Trippi- the man behind the failed, but nonetheless very innovative Howard Dean for President campaign.  Trippi is straight out of the Cluetrain mould; a visionary who understands that the Internet and all it's small places (loosely joined, of course) is where future campaigns will be fought and elections won or lost.

Whilst his candidate- Howard Dean- failed (by a long way) in his bid to secure the Democrat Presidential nomination last year, the "Blog for America" campaign was far from a failure.  Dean and Trippi ran America's first presidential campaign organised primarily through the Web, attracting hundreds of thousands of supporters to their grassroots movement, and amassed more than $15million in campaign monies.   

Sure, the White House remained elusive, but the campaign did manage to turn an obscure ex-governor into a real presidential contender. It was anything but politics as usual.  It was great stuff.

And now Trippi has outlined his next trick:

"At the Politics Online Conference at George Washington University,   Joe announced he is planning to release a website that will ask grassroots donors for their email address and a pledge of $100 for the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign. Here is the catch. Those pledges are only going to go to the first Democratic candidate who promises they will NOT take contributions of more than $100."

WOW!  This is true campaign finance reform, funded and controlled by the voters.

But more than just handing over your dollars, Joe wants his pledgers to help.  He wants them to come up with some criteria -- some guidelines as to what thresholds they think a candidate should accomplish for them to feel comfortable that their pledges would be going to a legitimate contender and to make sure that it is not tampered with and the true intent is upheld.

This is really great stuff, and as much as I hate to say it, I can't imagine any Conservative Party coming up with such an exciting idea.

So, if you thought Howard Deans Internet and blogging campaign was the future, stay tuned!

Who needs innovation when you can have am Acquisition Manager

Oligopoly Watch points to a Wall Street Journal article that looks at the current boom in corporate mergers and big eating small acquisitions; "Bosses Prefer Buying Businesses To Building Them", 2/17/2005). The author sees the following points about the current boom:

1. Many big companies are flush with cash right now. Many have used that money to pay down debts, buy back stock, and increase dividends. The next logical place to put that money is into acquiring new companies.
2. While the world economy is doing better than it was after the Internet bubble burst, the actual growth in capital spending is increasing at a modest speed, and that looks likely to be an upcoming trend. Therefore, expanding through internal growth is getting harder.
3. Corporate heads are more optimistic than ever about mergers and acquisitions, in spite of the relatively high valuation of suitable targets. But the key is investors. In contrast to some of the thinking before, investors have been rewarding a number of skillful acquirers with high stock prices. Since execs get highly compensated (options, shares, incentives) when stock prices go up significantly, there's a good reason. (Of course, we often see executives get highly rewarded when stock prices go down, so that may not be the sole motivator.)

Whilst it's all good and well for the Big end of town to swallow up whatever and whoever they want, in the end it strangles many new ideas and innovation that generally only occur "down the other end of the street." 

What tends to happen is that Big Slow Corp (who is too lazy (dumb?) to do something WoW itself) buys Fast Little Company in order to latch onto and eliminate what might become a threat to them; which they simply see- from afar- as being the systems, technology, people, reputations etc within the Little Co. they are eying off.

But they always forget that it was the company culture of Little Co that nursed and encouraged the innovation that allowed the Little Company to be so fast in the first place; enabling it to leverage its systems, technology and people.  That culture (= the real, inimitable source of the competitive advantage) is inevitably killed off following the acquisition (Just ask Tony about trying to be innovative in a Big Company), because the Big Co isn't really interested in maintaining a culture of innovation, they just buy other peoples.  So why do they need creative people?  They don't, just Acquisition Managers.

But the potential threat to Big Co has been killed too; so they win anyway.

But if it works, then Big Co still wins:

"Exploiting a product that someone else has made by giving it the big company treatment in marketing, sales, and distribution is a lot less painful than finding ways to make serious and effective internal changes For all the talk of re-engineering the company, most companies would rather just buy another one. That move is high-concept, ego-gratifying, and relatively straightforward. Rethinking a corporation is complex, painstaking, and often tedious."

Sharing

Seth wants to know what the point of this is (Numanuma).  I dunno if there is one Seth, but it kept me amused for a while.  Maybe it is a lost "Idol" audition or something...

Whilst the video itself might be pointless, the absurdity and humour of watching some fat kid sing some bizzare opera-cum-disco-techno song, does proove a point at how rapid the internet is, and in particular blogging, when it comes to letting people share stuff.

In the space of about two days Technorati lists 388 links from 352 sources for this kids' space on the web.  So it's obviously kept lots of other people amused (or something!) as well!  The mind boggles at just how many people have seen this dude belt out his tune.

Call it Viral, call it Word of Mouth or even Buzz, it doesn't really matter.  It's just another small piece, loosely joined, that is being shared around.

A nation of journalists

It seems that the Cluetrain is echoed louder and louder with every passing week.

Here is another example from Ashley Highfield, director of BBC New Media and Technology, forecasts that a cultural shift where personal media expression is merging into collaborative media (like weblogs) will change the mass media monoliths we have today.
"Media will become a substitute for society as the society we will live in will be fragmented," he says. "People want to be fundamentally more involved in media, as they no longer know their neighbours. The major shift will be that media will become a two-way process.  The people will be in control. Everyone will offer their own stories. We will become a nation of journalists and cameramen."

Conversations.  Communication.  Stories.  Involved.  Journalists.

Get it yet?

(NOT) Rewarding Customer Loyalty

Edward Deming on profit

"Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them."

(via Tom Asaker)

Except when your are a oligopolist, apparently.  They don't give a stuff about loyal, repeat, evangelistic customers. But they make huge profits all the same.

Both Tony and Jon have had similar customer experiences to me during the last week, and we have all been left scratching our heads at why big telco's and ISP's don't understand the value of customer loyalty.

I have been using Optus as my ISP since 1996, diligently paying my money each month by direct debit.  But I want to move into the "now" and switch from dial-up to broadband.  So I contacted Optus to see what they could do... Not much.  No great deals, no free installation.  Nuthin.  The  only way to great a great deal from Optus is if you are not already an Optus customer, or I switch all my phones over to them.  It doesn't matter a bugger to them that I have been a long-term and loyal customer.  They value new customers more than me.  Go figure.

What about Telstra then?  Well, as a new Telstra Bigpond customer they'll give me my ADSL modem for free, and because our home phone is with Telstra they'll toss in some extras too.  So I'll probably go to Telstra and save $130.  You don't get that deal if you are an existing Telstra Bigpond customer though.

Why don't these companies recognise that it is a damn lot easier to keep a customer than to acquire one:  Here is Tony's take:

"Wouldn't it be more cost effective for Telstra and Optus to automatically look at how long I've been a customer for, how much I've paid over the last 1-3 year as a customer, and give me some sign that they acknowledge me as a customer, with price reductions which are better than losing me as a customer"

So no doubt, Optus will lose me as a customer.  Of course they won't care.  Just like Telstra really don't care that I will be spending more with them each month.  They'll both continue to make hideously huge profits.

And when my contract with Telstra runs out, I'll probably move to some other dumb company that is prepared to spend squillions trying to lure in new customers, rather than spending half us much trying to keep the ones that they have already.

Big Business.  Big Oligopolies.  Big Dummies.  But even bigger profits.  Oligopolist's don't need Deming....

2004 Zeitgeist

Ross over at the excellent Strategize Blog reminded me that the 2004 year end Google Zeitgiest has been published.

The what, you ask? 

Zeit-geist| Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst,   'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date:   1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.

Basically it is an annual summary of Google search trends based on the gazillions of searches conducted by Google.

The Australian summary is interesting.  Coming with a bullet from number 8 in 2003 into the top spot for 2004 is super-bimbo Paris Hilton.  Yep, us Aussies searched for her more than anything or anyone else during the last twelve months.... I think that means we are either as obsessed with Paris Hilton as she in with herself, or we enjoy watching celebrity porn....

Whatever the case,  it could be worse.  Why are the Russians so facinated with wallpapers and plastic windows?  Probably because they haven't heard of Paris Hilton yet...

The end is nigh

Stumbled across this today.

Oh well.

Michael Dell on Mergers & Acquisitions

Here is a great quote from Michael Dell:

"It's hard to think back on a successful large merger in the computer industry, and I don't see this one being different," Michael S. Dell, chairman of Dell Computer, said yesterday. "We like to acquire our competitors one customer at a time."

(via Crossroads Dispatches)

Seth issues an "Up-Yours"

Seth Godin: A guru who has penned a stack of books and articles around the theme of listening to your customer, giving your customer what your customer wants, giving your customer something extra, making your customer feel special.  Except if you one of  his customers, apparently.

You see, Seth publishes a lot of his works in PDF e-book format (like the excellent Bootstrappers Bible), so readers can dowload them, print them and read them like real books.  But some folks (like Doc and Jeff) would prefer that Seth use the more open format HTML, and wrote to him to tell him so.

Surprisingly, Seth offered not much more than an "up-yours" to the feedback from his customers:

"We use PDFs because they're a lot more booklike. They read better. They stick together when you forward them. They print better.

I know they're not in HTML. There are 6 trillion other web pages to choose from if you want that."

So there!  Do as I say, not as I do, hey Seth.  Or like Chris noted, the above could be translated as the very un-Seth like  "I'm going to keep doing things this way because it's better for me this way, and you, Mr. Customer, can go somewhere else if you don't like it."

It is an interesting discussion though: PDF's vs websites (HTML) for publishing.  I was thinking about it and recalled a discussion on documents and books inside Dave Weinbergers Small Pieces Loosely Joined:

"The concept of the document has become elastic.  Before computers we knew exactly what documents were.  (But now) the word document has different meanings inside and outside of the computing world.  Outside, documents are are unchanging; inside, documents are there to be changed."

So is Seth really saying; that he wants his publications to be "unchanging" by not publishing them in "relatively ugly but open, unowned, nonproprietary, standard and non-infuriating HTML?"  He wants them to move into the outside world (like a normal book) so that they are "unchanging."  And isn't this fair enough?  Isn't this a reasonable expectation of an author?

Trouble is that his customers want more, they want to discuss them online, they want to offer suggestions online and want to have the power to force changes via these discussions and suggestions...