A hard row for Kettle Ho – Business – The Barnstable Patriot – Cape Cod & Islands
Churbuck said that he’d witnessed patrons “drinking, urinating, sprawled on the sidewalk, vomiting in the gutter.”
I always knew I’d grow up to be a grumpy old man. Now I have.
Going for a sail with your youngest in a 60 year-old boat built by your grandfather in the shop attached to your house.
This year’s Tour de France has been fascinating to watch, with Lance retired and the pre-race favorites taken out by the Spanish doping scandal. Some solid riders are left, and the race seems invigorated by anarchy in the peleton, with no one rider emerging as the padrone to take control over the tactics over the 23 day affair.
The Sunday New York Times magazine has a compelling article about the travails of Floyd Landis, the Mennonite cyclist who backed Lance in 2004 but quit to join Phonak, emerging as one of the top four American cyclists in the Tour this year. Floyd is riding with a bad hip — a a very bad hip — the kind of injury that would send normal people howling for the Demerol, but yet the guy was able to capture the top slot and the yellow jersey after an astonishingly difficult stage in the Pyrenees last week, surviving four consecutive cols or peaks and coming out in the lead.
The tradition of cyclists who ride through immense physical pain, in the world’s hardest sporting event, is part of the lore and drama that draws me in every July. Tyler Hamilton riding with a broken collarbone, Lance coming back from cancer, there’s a rider this year riding with a cracked vertebrae.
And now Landis is gritting his teeth (Hamilton allegedly needed dental work because of the griding his teeth were subjected to during his collarbone tour) and powering through what well may be his last Tour de France. No rider has come back to the peleton with an artificial hip, so Landis appears to be sacrificing everything this year for his one and only shot at the palmeares.
And I beef about a concussion?
I’ve wondered if there has ever been a human resources study or survey that correlated an enterprise’s internal communications platform with job satisfaction. Are Notes users happier or unhappier than Exchange users? Has a job candidate ever turned down a job offer because he or she hates a company’s IT architecture?
I wonder how many people engage with a company and ask, as part of their personal due diligence, whether or not a company permits access to a personal POP3 mail account? If the company supports Pylon synchronization with Treos?
I wonder how many people have subconsciously slipped into the despair of job dissatisfaction due to overly restrictive IT policies, or just a general hatred of the systems driving communications. I’m not asking due to personal issues.
I heard a podcast interview with Tim O’Reilly when he spoke about the phenomenon of developers running two systems at their desks. The “official” corporate machine, and their own notebook with their own favorite apps, bridging the two environments with sneaker-net or email files back and forth through a web mail account. This seems to be the classic story of the PC. Machines sneak in the door, under the IT department’s radar, and eventually, the users begin to self-select the apps and tools they need. I suspect for high end users, those tools are Open in nature and regarded as high security risks by the CSO.
Case in point. I live on my churbuck.com email account. It is the one most constant variable in my contact information and people have been trained for the past ten years that they can always communicate with me at that address. Off the corporate net it works wonderfully with a Thunderbird client. In the office, on the corporate lan, I can fetch mail for the account but due to security restrictions on SMTP all my replies have to simmer until I get off the network and onto the public networks. A minor irrritation, but an irritation nevertheless.
I somehow picture a gang of angry cubicle drones pulling an “Office Space” and setting their most hated corporate apps on fire in the parking lot.
How not to study Chinese online – Little Red Blog – Reviews – CNET Asia
Will Moss, aka “The Imagethief” has a great post on how to learn Chinese online. Like me, he finds the average Chinese portal to be …. well, cluttered.
“Clicking into your average Chinese portal or social networking site is like being dropped into the Web equivalent of a raging, psychedelic pachinko parlor. The page scrolls on forever, there are countless hundreds of links, boxes, windows and options, and every other thing blinks, waves or breaks loose and starts gliding across the page. If you read Chinese laboriously and slowly, like me, this is extra painful.”
The McKinsey Quarterly: A reality check for online advertising
“…recent McKinsey research finds that supply bottlenecks could limit the pace of online ad growth and drive prices higher. Moreover, a dearth of ad agencies that can manage both traditional and digital campaigns could further slow the shift in spending to online ads.”
The cost of online advertising has been a strong meme for the past six months as online publishers enjoy the lift of the interactivce renaissance that started in 2004. The problem is page views are not keeping pace with advertisers’ demands for impressions and targeted placements. Dow buys Marketwatch to get page views after limiting itself with the WSJ’s cost wall. AOL drops the last of the walled-garden walls. Every online publisher from Yahoo to niche trade sites needs impressions — the crack cocaine of the business — and more impressions. Now, discount those impressions due to click fraud, the fact that banner and skyscapers and IMU’s are old-school, and you turn to the fringes of the craft — behavioral targeting, RSS ads, viral, word-of-mouth and non-traditional tactics.
What’s an online marketer to do? Higher prices at a .02 click through rate makes “traditional” online advertising a non-starter. Keyword bids for commodity terms and the corrosion of click fraud makes that a non-starter as well.
If you’re in durables — autos, real estate, cars — you lean towards behavioral. If 25% pf the population is in the market every four years for a new automobile, then figuring out how to surround them with a car ad at that specific point in time is a huge bonus. This leads to detection of the intention and folks like Yahoo are masters at detecting it. Which leads to the insane prices being commanded for Yahoo’s auto placements.
For consumer non-durables — a pair of pants — well, is the agency going to go above a $50 cpm for a banner campaign to build the brand or a search campaign with a predictable cost per click model?
Me, I predict a collapse of the current blind impression model, a breakthrough in the behavioral side, a big shift to word of mouth and consumer-to-consumer activation, and more grassroots transparency. Couponing, just-in-time discounting, and other affiliate driven tactics will rise as well.
Sitting in the middle of this, I can say with some assurance that there is a massive generational gulf in marketing right now between traditional offline tactics and online. While online marketing is now nearly 20 years old, the competency and realization of its potential is only now beginning to creep into the CMO’s office. I’m fortunate to work for a CMO who gets it, but it’s still an evangelical sell to persuade many to take the leap of faith out of traditional marketing tactics into the new world, let alone the new-new world of WOM.
Southwest Airlines Contact Information
Two consecutive trips on Southwest — my primary conveyance between home and work — and I’ve been boned in Baltimore. First time was in June when the flight leaving Providence was hopelessly delayed by thunderstoms. I asked the gate geek if I would make my connection to Raleigh, and being told that I would I boarded the plane, only to land in Baltimore to find the Raleigh connection had departed five minutes before. Stranded in Baltimore, I went to the bank of telephones in the baggage area and started dialing for a room to spend the night. Hah. No one had rooms. So I went to the Southwest ticket counter where I was handed a green slip of paper with an 800 number on it. Some outsourced displaced persons service that also said there were no rooms. Okay, guess I was going to sleep on a bench, but I kept dialing and finally found a cancellation at 1 am, paid $150 for four hours use of a mattress and shower. I didn’t even expect Southwest to pony up for the pain in the neck. Weather is weather. But getting sympathy in the form of a green slip of paper that doesn’t work just sucks.
So there was that.
Now I sit at Baltimore, having deduced, on my own, that the connection to Providence was yet again delayed. First beef: Southwest’s mobile site for phone access only permits one to check in for a flight, not check status. So I went to the normal site, waited a few minutes for the thing to load, pecked my way through the menu on my Treo and found out the flight was seriously delayed. I immediately called home, alerted my son not to leave too soon to pick me up, and went to the flight monitors which only stated the flight was delayed.
Okay. Lots of passengers are eavesdropping on my conversation and start bumming out and dialing to warn their pickups that they too will be delayed. Second beef: Is there anyone at the gate making announcements? No. So I go to the ticket counter where a very bored guy confirms that indeed the flight is delayed. Finally, after he got tired of one individual after another asking him what was going on, he made an announcement, well after the original departure time.
Ticked off, I fired up the laptop, logged into Southwest.com and tried to send an email to them to essentially say, “Hey, would be kind if you warned passengers on a timely basis about delays so they can make plans, etc.” No serious rant, just a suggestion. Steven O’Grady makes the same.
And then I find this, my third beef:
“E-mail Policy – Why We Don’t Accept E-mail
Call us traditional, but we elect to steer clear of the chat-style, respond-on-demand, quick casual format and focus on meaningful Customer dialogue. This is not because we don’t care. It’s because that style counters our commitment to Customer Service.
Our Customers deserve accurate, specific, personal, and professionally written answers, and it takes time to research, investigate, and compose a real business letter. We answer every letter we receive in the order it arrives, and we streamline in order to keep our costs low, our People productive, our operating efficiency high, and our responses warm and personal.”
Great, except the customer service line closed at 5 pm. Losers. So I go to their blog to vent my spleen and knock off a few hats and I find this under the rules of engagement, my fourth beef:
“One final disclaimer — the Southwest Blog is not the forum to address personal Customer Service issues. All of us have “day jobs,” and we simply don’t have the resources through this blog to resolve individual concerns. Even though this is not the forum, Southwest is eager to resolve your concerns. Our Customer Relations/Rapid Rewards folks want to assist you, and you can contact them by mail at Southwest Airlines, Customer Relations/Rapid Rewards, P.O. Box 36647, Dallas, Texas 75235-6647; by phone at (214) 792-4223; or by fax at (214) 792-5099. For reservations, please visit southwest.com or call our Reservations Center at 1-800-I-FLY-SWA (1-800-435-9792).”
Okay, so no email beefs. No blog beefs (but I can submit a funny caption to their photo contest and read about the forthcoming Chili cookoff). Bottom line: pick up the phone (when we’re answering it) or lick a stamp. So progressive. This is one of the existential horrors of the travel life.
Just for grins I went to southwestsucks.com. They get bonus points for registering that domain:
“Southwest Airlines strives to maintain a high level of Customer Service and is proud of its corporate reputation and responsiveness to its Customers. As part of that effort, Southwest wants to control the release of inaccurate and irresponsible information about the Company via the Internet. If you would like more information on Southwest, please go to www.southwest.com.”
So I’ll sound off here.
There isn’t a single airline except for JetBlue that at one point or another flipped me out into vows of “never again.” I was able to avoid United for a decade. I cheered when TWA died. I’ll suffer, but not in silence. And I’ll continue to fly on Southwest, the Greyhound of our times, wedged into the center seat with the wheeled baggage people, the babbling cell phone teenage girls, the angry salarymen and the Clampetts, figuring out their delays on my own.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2
I need to change my underpants.
Funny how suddenly Austin, Texas has surpassed New York City and Durham, N.C. as the place sending the most traffic to this blog. The volume of traffic coming from Dell has been stepping up since last month’s proactive support post and with the launch of Dell’s blog earlier this week, as well as its stepped up activity in the blogosphere, I guess I now know why. Stay tuned for Lenovo’s blog play. Let’s just say it will be different, not built atop Telligent, and focused on a different mission. It should have gone out the door sooner, but let’s just write the delay off to my turning into Massive Headwound Harry after the Memorial Day bicycle incident.
On my way back to Cape Cod now. EVDOing from the Southwest lounge at RDU airport on my X60s, back to RTP on Monday, where the state pastime is perspiring.