Month: March 2008

Customer email of the day (or year)

Subject: Your company …

“said it would be 2-3 weeks to get my computer and yet it arrived in LESS THAN ONE WEEK!. I intend to tell all my friends about this, so consider yourself warned.”

The stupidity of metrics

I have been in solid meetings the past two days and yesterday watched a presentation that reminded me of the story of the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401 in 1972.
The pilots were coming in for a landing but the “gear down” light didn’t illuminate in the cockpit. They tapped the light. They flipped switches. The co-pilot opened a hatch and climbed down to see what the problem was. They continued to obsess about the light but they didn’t notice when one of them bumped into the steering column and turned off the autopilot, putting the jet into a slow descent.

No one looked out the windshield. They were looking at the dead nose gear light.

Splat. 99 dead. 77 survived.

Metrics — the act of collecting data about systems and processes — and then reporting them in dashboards can lead to the type of tunnel vision those pilots displayed 36 years ago. The obsession with gathering status reports for the sake of gathering status reports can divert the organization and its people from the task at hand. If you’re trying to smelt gold but you spend so much time tracking ingot development that you fail to notice that you’re in fact smelting lead — then you’re going to be really good at ingot development, but oblivious to the quality of the final output. This is why formerly good things get ruined when big companies acquire them and start to obsess about the efficiencies. “We’ll just swap out the good stuff for the okay stuff and no one will notice.”
Subjectivity — the measurement of quality — is it good? is it bad? Do we suck or do we rock? Those unmeasurable intangibles are dismissed by technocrats as “feeling” behavior prized by people to sloppy to appreciate precision. Or, they attempt to quantify the subjective with surveys and stupid metrics like “sentiment.”
Objectivity — the measurement of facts — has become de rigeur ever since Neutron Jack Welch of GE set forth the commandment that you have to measure it to manage it. And so commenced the age of the tyranny of metrics. The Excel tyrants are really really good at demanding status reports and updates, but the reality is no one looks at their work and is terrified to say: “Go away. Here’s a beach. Start counting grains of sand and give me a TPS report by tomorrow.”

Metrics people — turn yourself into analysts by looking out the window and telling your boss the swamp is getting really close.

Enough is enough — social media fatigue

I was clicking through and found this wonderful column of “add-to” tags on someone’s blog.

You have got to be kidding me.

Nerd Grief — Gary Gygax has passed away

You have to be a paste-eater to understand, but the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons — Gary Gygax — passed away yesterday.

Constantine von Hoffman and Tim Abbott are blogging.

Con writes:

“Also at some other time I will tell you the story of how Mrs. Collateral Damage got me to come out of the geek closet. The punch line, though, “How many Friday nights do the you have to spend playing D&D with the guys from Worcester Poly before you admit you’re a nerd?”

In the words of one of my favorite t-shirts: I am not a nerd. I am a 12th level paladin.”

Tim:

“I grew up with Dungeons & Dragons.  Back in the analog 1970’s, all that virtual reality required were some odd-shaped dice, pencils, graph paper, and above all a passion for all things swords and sorcery and someone to share it with.  While the power of persistent digital worlds has supplanted the bibliocentric medium that Gygax created, it owes a tremendous debt to D&D (as D&D, it must be said, owes another to Tolkien).”

I never played the game — knew some people who did and they were definitely wedgie-bait (not to say either Con nor Tim are deserving of a wedgie). I suppose World of Warcraft has basically ended D&D.

Capturing The Demand Curve « Cheaper than therapy

Capturing The Demand Curve « Cheaper than therapy
Ben the Lip — Uncle Fester — blogs cogently about the future of the music industry:

“From the artist viewpoint, there are a few priorities:

1. Make money
2. Get music into the hands of fans
3. Don’t rip-off the fans”

Is the future of the music industry contained on this screen?

The State of the Magazine Giveaway Rack

At the US Airways Shuttle lounge in Boston, proof I am happy to have left the magazine business in 1994. These are the giveaways and their cover art– the rags in the bin when you absolutely, positively have nothing to read:

  • The Absolute Sound (picture of a stereo speaker!)
  • Ebony (Michael Jackson — looking butch)
  • HR (Neil Gaiman. Right. Him)
  • Pool & Spa Living (a swimming pool)
  • Latin Finance (cartoon, dude with a flag)
  • Laptop (HOT GEAR)
  • PC (Best Mobile Services)
  • Dream (A kid)
  • Washington (A dude with two women looking pre-kinky)
  • The American (that big Chinese basketball dude with the tag “Glo-BALL-ization, get it?)
  • Stylus (who knows)
  • Real Estate Portfolio (six average white guys)
  • Luxury Spa Finder (semi-clad lady in a bathtub)

May your circulation swell and your BPA audit be a smooth one. In the 30 minutes I sat here, only one magazine got snagged — an issue of LAPTOP by two people. Two other  people looked and walked away, doubtlessly sad about the trees.

Dot.com Stupidities

Has the dumbness of the late 90s come back to plague the interactive world? Is the ghost of the Pets.com sockpuppet haunting Silicon Alley? Are the days of Flooz and Beanz and tightpants.com back as indicators of Bubble 2.0?

Here’s one found by Constantine von Hoffman at Collateral Damage. A video site with the unfortunate name of CashTomato.com took to the streets of New York’s Union Square to hand out tomatos and envelopes containing $29. A melee ensued.
He missed the YouTube video:

Whereabouts – Week of March 3

Monday – 3.3 Cotuit

Tuesday – 3.4  New York City

Wednesday-Friday 3.5-7 North Carolina

Big travel week – NYC for some Olympic discussions, then HQ for some HR and fiscal 09 planning. I’m booked to Bangalore on Sunday but may cancel due to persistent vertigo/migraine stuff. Need to get checked out before I can consider the big plane ride.

Social Media 201

I guess I stepped in the big cow-pie last week when I called out the SMM Pundits for overworking the elementary level of social media discourse – “be authentic!” “be transparent!” “it’s a conversation!” – as 101 Thumbsuckers. Now I am officially Mister SmartyPants 201 and feel compelled to play the part of know-it-all weenie. I guest blogged on a sample “201” topic for Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester on how to avoid blowing a corporate policy through a private action. I also threatened to give Jeremiah a list of example topics I want to see more discussion on. Here we go. In the Kawasakian Tradition of Blog Lists: here are ten random things that I don’t see a lot of discussion about:

  1. Tool and platforms: what tools a corporation uses for its social media platform says volumes about its credibility. I look at the footers: Is it a WordPress blog? Do they use Flickr for their photos? Do they license those photos as Creative Commons 2.5? Do they use MediaWiki for their wiki platform? Do they launder their feeds through Feedburner? Are there Digg and del.icio.us tagging tools? There are smart tools which to me indicate a deep understanding of certain basic precepts crucial to effective SMM. Are the tools favored by the organization also widely adopted by users or did the company seek a commercial vendor relationship and non-standard proprietary tools? Is an agency supporting and providing sysadmin functions?
  2. Pronouns: I have a bug up my you-know-what about the overuse of the Royal We in addressing one’s audience. Am I alone in viewing “we” as an attempt to dilute personal accountability for an organization’s actions? How many corporate SMM, community managers take accountability and responsibility on their shoulders by using “me” and “I?”
  3. Metrics: this is a 101 topic that is a 301 headache. SMM has no Internet Advertising Bureau or Web Analytics Association to codify a set of uniform measurements, and as all of us have to bow to the God of Accountability, how ROI is proven is going to be debated forever and ever. Let’s get off the “engagement” thing and go to the next level. Is it comment counts? Rank and influence? Pageviews and gross tonnage? Net Promoter Scores gathered through surveys?
  4. Rogue SMM: what do you do when a member of the organization launches into a blog brawl by stepping into a customer’s comments and says, “Blow it out your #$%, you have no idea what you are talking about you whiny $*%#%$@!” How can you manage the unmanageable? How do you keep you employees from editing the Wikipedia entry for your brand? What do you do when legal and security ask you to help them track down the identity of an anonymous employee blogger who is leaking company secrets? How do you educate rather than discipline?
  5. How to do SMM/SEO right: how do you promote favorable expressions about your brand and should you? When is it ethical to promote a piece of social media (e.g. “Digging”) and when is it unethical? (demoting a negative comment or flagging a negative comment as “objectionable” without identifying yourself. Knocking off hats to draw attention to yourself (something I a good at, it would appear.)
  6. Going Uplevel: what are your escalation paths? When do you pull the fire alarm? When do you declare Code Red and ask for all hands on deck in resolving an SMM crisis? Have you established crisis “service level agreements” with the legal and PR teams? Is there a formal mechanism for bringing an issue to the attention of an owner and getting a public statement out within a reasonable amount of time?
  7. Organizational Ownership: where does SMM belong? Customer service? Marketing? Public relations? All three?
  8. One vs many: a single corporate blog or many? How does SMM loosen control without losing control over the organization’s burgeoning ranks of bloggers? Where do you drawn the line between corporate and personal blogs.
  9. Review mechanism and buddy systems: how do your SMM statements (blog posts, forum discussions) get vetted and approved? Should they? How do you make your bloggers sensitive to the “RSS is eternal” phenomenon so that there is no such thing as a “deleted” post. Do you use a buddy system.
  10. The politics of being a know-it-all: okay, you’re the authority. You’ve done the Social Media 101 stuff, you’ve read the books, you went to the conference, you have all the right pundits in your RSS. You can b.s. about transparency and Marketing 2.0 and the ClueTrain with the best of them. You get your wish and now you’re the SMM person. How do you deal with those less enlightened recesses of the organization that view you as a loose cannon? Who do you threaten? How do you navigate the shoals of internal politics?

I could do ten more – throwing out topics is easy — delivering something substantial and actionable is another issue altogether. If 101 is theory and broad practice, 201 is operations and execution, the sort of stuff you’re going to stumble into as you go along. Dealing with customers and partners, critics and competitors – that stuff is either natural or it isn’t. Writing a solid corporate Social Media Marketing strategy document, knowing the difference between it and an SMM policy document, building a strong operation without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in licenses and agency fees …. That’s SMM 201. I’ll try to tackle one of these every week – amidst posts about clams, the King Phillip War, sculling, and interactive/digital marketing. And, in the spirit of 101 advice, always end your blog posts with a call to action to your audience: tell me what is on your mind.