Category: Interactive Marketing

The saga of bluetoothing on an X60s

So yesterday I spent most of the day with Lenovo’s top support engineers trying to figure how to pair a Motorola Bluetooth headset (the H700) with my new X60s.

Bottom line — the support team were wizards at reforming how my machine’s Bluetooth drivers are configured — but I am unable to achieve the goal of using the headset with Skype through the machine. Who is to blame? Well, we were able, after four hours of serious fiddling and diddling, to get the headset to work on a Skype call, but it was so problemmatic that we have to point the finger of blame at the headset after reading the Skype forum and other users’ negative experiences in getting this particular borg-set to work with any machine.

The eye opener for me, in light of my post last week about my philosophy on tech support, is that the complexity of peripheral compatibility with XP and any particular hardware platform is maddening and almost overwhelming. The support team — as I protested that I was killing their productivity — said they have to assume that there are other people out there like me, who, when they buy a Bluetooth enabled Thinkpad will come to expect that their Bluetooth headset will work with it. And not to listen to iTunes, but to use VOIP. I may be on the front lines of the problem, but gauging from the depth of technical analysis performed by users on the Skype and Thinkpads.com forum, there are a lot of people spending a lot of time trying to figure out what should, in theory, be a simple out of the box experience.

The other insight from this experience is that the intelligence and expertise is out in the user community. We need to figure out how to plug into that expertise, leverage it, and learn from it. Our tech gurus are googling outside of the internal knowledgebase to find solutions just like the “rest of us”, the challenge is how we can help enable that, contribute to it, and learn from it.

I’ll continue the Bluetooth-headset-Skype-X60s experiment later today with another Bluetooth headset (non-Motorola) to see if I can achieve success. If not, then my next move is to go to a Bluetooth dongle. Following that, it will be time to call Skype for a solution.

If anyone has sorted this one out, please speak out. I want to make sure we get this one right.

Corporate Journalism

As an ex-journalist inside of a corporation, I’ve been giving more thought lately to a concept I dubbed “corporate journalism” when I joined McKinsey & Co. six years ago. While my initial assignment was to create an online experience for the firm’s clients, a site focused on so-called “horizon” technologies, the popping of the dot.com bubble doomed that initiative — woefully named — TomorrowLab — and I soon found myself wondering if I’d have to crawl back to Forbes.com and debase myself to get my old job back.

One McKinsey partner, Lowell Bryan, evidently saw some value in keeping me and a former PC-Week colleague : Rob O’Regan on the payroll, so we were re-pointed in the direction of a problem that had been nagging the firm since Powerpoint overtook Word as the Firm’s preferred communications medium. In the good old days, a McKinsey consultant would share his or her learnings with the rest of the firm by writing up a white paper sanitized to keep any one specific client’s identity confidential. That document, which took several forms, could hold huge intrinsic value to the firm if it contained a framework or solution that could be reapplied to another client’s problem.

Alas, along came Powerpoint, which, when combined with McKinsey’s famous “up-or-out” policy, which gave the average consultant an expected tenure of little more than two years, meant a huge amount of the firm’s knowledge was being lost. Once the topic of admiring case studies by the Harvard Business School for its pioneering efforts in the new science of “knowledge management,” McKinsey was confronted with a huge loss in its institutional wisdom due to the pernicious evils of Powerpoint and the high degree of ongoing turnover. The expertise wasn’t getting written down — Powerpoint requires a presenter to narrate the pretty waterfall and boat charts — and moving to a horizontal, presentation formation meant the old vertical Word documents of old; those classic narrated case studies which could be read without the guidance of the original author, meant the firm was losing its edge.

Bryan understood this and stepped up to the plate to reform the system. My job (and O’Regan’s) was to provide some journalistic instincts to the process of figuring out how to “capture” (that was the verb) what was locked inside of the heads of the Firm’s partners and consultants before they made the transition to the real world as the CEO of a company like Enron or IBM. Continue reading “Corporate Journalism”

Proactive tech support – further thinking …

Technical support has always been an oxymoron for most owners and users of anything electronic. The dreaded process of dialing an 800 number, navigating the voice prompts, and then being told there is a 45 minute wait before a person can help you has made tech support a universally deplored experience. The oxymoron part is the doomed belief that there will be no support at the end of the whole tedious affair. As someone who has been tangentially involved with the tech industries since 1984, and who has spent his fair share of time on hold, I can empathize with anyone who rants off on a blog about how vendor X’s products suck.

When my microwave died last month, there was no inclination on my part or my wife’s to dredge out the documentation and call Sharp’s 800-number. There was no way the machine was going to get fixed through the kitchen version of CTRL-ALT-DEL, one is not encouraged to pop the screws and start messing with jumpers, and the price point is low enough that in our minds, after a few years of hard use, its failure was marked down to old age and the cost of living.

But when a notebook or desktop computer dies, the stakes are incalculable for the profound reason that these things are our lives. Deadlines live in these things, works of immeasurable creative genius, MP3 collections stolen over years of Napster downloading; it all lives in these things. If the machine dies, that stuff dies with it, and I don’t care how obsessive you are, no one backs their stuff up enough. Continue reading “Proactive tech support – further thinking …”

Video blogging — on its way

I’ve been a DV geek for a year and want to mess around with some embedded video on Churbuck.com to trial here some efforts for Lenovo. The question is which WordPress plug-in to enable to make this happen, and whether or not to use Google Video or YouTube as the host — the way I use Flickr for image hosting — so I don’t utterly hose my ISP bills moving video torrents through Churbuck.com.

I need to do more research, but any quick and dirty display options would be appreciated. I have the camera, I know how to firewire the capture into Adobe Premiere, now I want to figure out how to rapidly post it.

So Scoble moves on …

thanks to John Bell for alerting me last night that Microsoft uber-blogster Robert Scoble is moving on to a startup. I have no hands to wring or thoughts to cogitate on his decision, but Microsoft will suffer the loss of a highly visible ambassador that won’t be easily replaced by an expensive Spencer Stuart executive search.

This opens the question of how valuable a corporate blogger is in the market today as the medium becomes au courant with every company under the sun getting the advice to start blogging. I believe the best corporate bloggers emerge organically within the organization — not a hired gun riding in from the outside — which would dash the notion that there is going to be an active free-agent market of hot bloggers going to the highest bidder.
It’s also crucial to note that Scoble was not Microsoft’s official, nor certainly Microsoft’s only blogger. He was an evangelist and primarily focused on Channel 9 who happened to run his own personal blog on the side. The fact that he was an extrovert who was adept at wading into the sometimes savage world of Blogistan stood him, and by extension, Microsoft in good stead. But he was not the holder of an official square in the MSFT org chart.

Now, with PR firms recommending that a company get on the blogging band wagon, the notion of opening searches for effective bloggers to ride in and start a strong program seems a bit doomed. The companies that are known for good blogging practices rely on grassroots voices to emerge from their ranks.

Proactive customer relations

I’m participating in the beta test of a pretty cool product that helps marketers track the blogosphere buzz about their brand. Everyone and their brother was freaked by Jeff Jarvis’ Dell Hell last summer, rushing to identify the dissatisfied before they convert from a complaint to a veritable s%$t storm of negative sentiment. Enter the vendors to fill the need.
All this monitoring of commentary leads to inevitable question of what to do about it. You’ve identified the squawks, seen the pain, but how do you engage in the conversation? Rick Klau at Feedburner had a couple hard disk failures, so I phoned him — didn’t post a comment to his blog post — and told him, based on our pre-existing relationship that harks back to IDG, that I’d like to help him, should he need any. Well … what about people I don’t have a personal relationship with? What about Joe Consumer who is beefing on a blog or forum about what a terrible experience he is having with the product? Do I phone him? There isn’t enough hours in the day. But ….
Which leads me to the notion of “pre-emptive support.” What if the service and support model was changed from an inbound, you-call-us system to the reverse? That if a customer complains in the wilderness, the monitoring tools alert an outbound customer support person of the issue, who in turn reaches out and solves it. The question is whether or not a person posts after they’ve struggled with phone support, or before.
Seems simple enough, but having no experience in support, I can’t predict how it would drive costs or impact margins.

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Co-Creation & Customer Made

Digital Influence Mapping Project: Co-Creation & Customer Made

John Bell at Ogilvy PR on the concept of co-creation. Provocative concept.

Genuine VC: The Simple Online Inventory Equation

Genuine VC: The Simple Online Inventory Equation

Great post by David Beisel at Masthead on online advertising and the transformation of CPM to “cost per reaching the right customer.” Developing this efficiency is not going to be fun, but expect the behavioral targeters like Tacoda to lead the charge. Online advertising is beginning to walk upright from its old posture of crawling on all fours and measuring CPM, CPC and other blunt “stupid” measures.

“The beauty of the interactive medium is the ability to more effectively target the right consumer for the advertiser’s message. Whether advertisers realize it or not, the right metric to view media buys isn’t CPM, but rather effective cost per reaching the right target customer. And while television and print advertisers have striven towards improving this measure though demo- and geo- targeted buys, the interactive medium allows for much more granular targeting. Witness e-mail marketing, contextual CPC campaigns, and search. Now with behaviorally-targeted networks like Tacoda, advertisers can reach consumers with even more precision (e.g. demonstrated car buyers who are surfing ROS news, weather, or sports pages). So while publishers are earning higher CPMs for their pages (thus raising the weighted-average CPM on the ‘net), the technology allows advertisers to more effectively reach who they want, which is the true goal in the first place.”

What would constitute success metrics for a corporate blog?

Sort of a rhetorical question, but this comes down to answering the age-old question asked by senior management everywhere: what are the key performance indicators that should be applied to a corporate blog to determine its success, failure, or general indifference from the audience?

I took a crack. There is the obvious “gross tonnage” statistics of visits to the blog itself, then there are RSS hits — filtering out the crawlers of course — and then there is the rankings — Technorati, etc. …

What else should and could be enumerated? Number of post comments? In-bound links? Bloglines subscriptions? Happy comments vs. angry comments? Google juice?
I need to dig more into blog metrics/analytics. It’s one thing to monitor external blog activity around a brand, but another to measure activity on one’s own blog. And again, I mean more than the old “hit” crap.

I did find some qualitative measures by Jeremiah Owyang from last November and I am too lazy to go dig out my copy of Naked Conversations to see what Scoble and Israel recommend — gauging from the b—h slapping they got from Amazon’s CTO earlier this spring, I don’t think they had an answer at the tip of their tongues either.