When CRM backfires

The Leaders Club, a chain of luxury hotels, recently sent me an email that I had to "renew my membership," which is free. The email did not have any links in the text version. The link in the HTML one sent me to a page with multiple upsells and a small "renew membership" button. Clicking the renew button sent me to the Leading Hotels of the World home page without a confirmation or thank-you page.

Snapfish sent me three warnings in December that they were disabling my account--not because of inactivity, but because I hadn't made a purchase. I could have logged in, emailed a request, posted new photos, sung the site's praises on this blog. But because I hadn't completed a paying transaction in a year, they turned off my account and wiped out my photos.

These organizations share the same shortcoming: in an attempt to cleanse their database of inactivity, they purge much of the loyalty and positive experience that was once part of the relationship. Both companies have a service that I once found compelling enough to join and, in both cases, spend money on. But somewhere along the line, an administrator set a renew-or-kill point in the database.

Consider how the competition handles this. Unlike Leaders Club's renewal request, Starwood has had my Preferred Guest account for years. I use it once a year, give or take, just like Leaders Club. They have twice upgraded me to Gold status after a period of inactivity, to encourage me to interact again. Marriott and Intercontinental send me monthly reminders to pay them a visit, despite the fact that I've not used either account in more than a year. Meanwhile, Leaders Club suggested I'd lose my privileges if I didn't go through the renewal process. Which one is more likely to get my business the next time I book a hotel?

The Snapfish situation is even worse. I have photos on Kodak Gallery that date back to the Ofoto years, and I've never had trouble with my account (although people have lost images due to inactivity in the past). My Flickr account is free and accessible in perpetuity. What makes Snapfish so inscrutable is their hypocricy: I logged in today, several weeks after not taking action on their last "You're going to lose your account" warning, and my photo album from December 2006 is still there.

Maintaining links to opted-in consumers is the prime objective of today's marketplace. Doing it right leads to better word of mouth, retention, and revenue. Do it wrong, and, well....

They're baaack!

My life has been previously sliced up into distinct, and mostly non-overlapping chapters. I've lived in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco and New York (and a couple of adjacent suburbs that I won't get into). In each place there have been a number of people that I've known. In time, I've moved on and only marginally keep in touch with friends from the old 'hood. I'm what they used to call a lousy letter-writer.

It's not so bad. I have great memories from each place, and my life is organized into distinct chunks. I've gotten used to the idea of thinking in terms of  "so-in-so from my former life at location X". Frozen in time, these memories provide a nice back drop for my identity.

Now, however, Facebook is screwing it all up. My entire life (in people) since high school has all been sucked into Facebook. Everyone I've ever known is already there. And they're all friending me (or I them). Twenty years of time, compressed into nothing.

When yet another mysterious figure from my past "friends" me, I'm suddenly privy to some very disturbing photographs, where I can see the effects of 10 to 20 years of aging all at once. ("Dude, you have no hair! What happened?") Often they're accompanied by mysterious young short people in these photographs. Short people that weren't there before.

I feel like I've fallen into a time warp, or maybe am watching my life flash before my eyes. Except it's the life that I didn't live, all the paths that I didn't go down, with people that I didn't keep in touch with. They're all back. They're on Facebook, they're my friends and they've escaped from their neatly delimited chapters in the past to invade my present.

Ai job news

Ai is seeking an executive producer to lead our talented and currently executive-less team of project managers. Details are on the Ai site as well as some popular industry job boards. We're excited to staff this position and provide another senior-level resource for our projects.

I was startled by how many irrelevant replies the craigslist post received. Fully one-third of the first day's emails have been from people offering their services to our firm--recruiters looking for a fast buck, of course, but also people selling Flash, IT outsourcing, software solutions and the like.

With apologies to Loren, who is a better rant-and-rave blogger than I am:

If a company posts a job ad, and you work in a parallel, unrelated and unsolicited area, and you're not really looking for the type of work we're hiring, emailing the in-box shilling your services is not going to get you any business. Quite the contrary: odds are, we will remember you as a spammer and a cold-caller, which will negatively affect our view of your work before we even get to know you.

But never mind all that, we're on a talent search. Know anyone?

SLA's for Web Services?

On Friday, Amazon's S3 online storage service went down for awhile. Many different online services now use S3 as a way to distribute content and store media online, and everywhere S3 is used - things didn't work for awhile this morning.

Is this an unacceptable failure of an automated business process? Or should we just accept it as the normal behavior for the web? Clearly a service like 37s Basecamp can't ensure that S3 stays up, because they have no control over any of Amazon's services. But their paying customers were nonetheless compromised when Amazon's service went down.

Wikipedia defines a Service Level Agreement as an agreement between parties that defines a "level of service" in terms such as percentage of uptime, power uptime etc. It has its roots in agreements between telecom companies and their corporate customers.

As more and more mission critical business is moved over to online services that themselves may outsource functionality to other parties, the question of reliability comes up. Where is the assurance that the third party will be there when you really need them? It was these kinds of questions that led to SLAs in the first place.

SLA-backed web services could be viewed as premium - something that you pay an additional amount, in order to ensure that the vendor is investing in the infrastructure to ensure the required level of service. Vendor's could look at SLA-backed service as a potential profit center.

Mobile phones and the Internet

Earlier this week Google announced it was seeing 50 times as much activity from iPhone users as any other mobile handset.

Yes, 50X. "We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again," Google's head of mobile is quoted as saying.

The article goes on to discuss Google's plan for expanding mobile services, but that's not the real news here. It's more about how iPhone users view and use the device, which is unlike any other cell phone.

1. The iPhone renders full web pages. No other phone does this or even comes close. It's so easy to use, and so attractive, that iPhone users (like me) don't seek alternatives, like using SMS to contact Google or buying standalone GPS devices.
2. The iPhone has wifi. A few other smart phones are getting into this, but they're still restricted to mobile-web renderings and all the scroll-wheel-and-chiclet-clicking activity that they imply.
3. The combination of the above two features turns the iPhone into a pocket-size computer. Which means that someone with an iPhone finds it easy to jump online on a whim, and use it in ways other phone (and laptop) owners do not.

This is where the iPhone is shifting paradigms. It's not just about the touch-screen UI; it's about the immediacy it provides.

I can be sitting on my couch, watching TV, become curious about something a broadcaster says, and in seconds google the information with the gadget in my pocket and my wireless network. No reaching for the laptop, waking it up, sitting properly; no fiddling with a typical smart phone's menus and cell towers.

After a while this becomes second nature, which increases the frequency of use and creates the snowball effect Google is seeing from iPhone searches. More and more consumers will move in this direction as the rest of the mobile device industry catches on.

Marketing smarts

New York is enduring nasty weather today. Cold, rainy, slushy, don't-go-outside weather.

At 11:30, as if reading my mind, I get this email from Seamlessweb:



Perfectly timed and positioned to capitalize on the day.

Tales of the Walled Garden

I think we should coin the equivalent of the famous "Don't Fight the Fed" slogan from the finance world. The concept, as I understand it, is that the central banking powers of the Federal Reserve are so potent that it never makes sense for an individual investor to try and move the market in the opposite direction from where the Fed is pushing it. The overwhelming correct strategy is to move in the same direction as the Fed, and thereby profit.

I tend to think in the online world the saying should be "Don't Fight the Internet". Given enough time, anyone who bets against the general direction in which the Internet is moving will lose (and often lose expensively). Unless there is some sort of intervention in the form of catastrophe or massive government action (which doesn't seem terribly likely - why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?) I don't see this changing any time soon.

The Internet favors data abundance, not scarcity. All information, including digital media, is data. Businesses that have models based on data scarcity (the music industry is the obvious one, but some people at Microsoft may fear it's going to catch them as well) are in trouble - given enough time.

The Internet places a premium on data relevance. There's a ton of data out there, but how do you find the right data for you? Companies that answer that question (through search, through social networks etc) prosper. Companies that take a one size fits all approach (newspapers) falter.

The Internet favors openness. The ability to move around from one provider to the next - anyone can send or receive an email, anyone can put up a website, anyone can sell or checkout online. Historical attempts to compete against the entire Internet (such as CompuServe, or the original MSN) have always failed. They're not open enough.

Right now there are social networks (FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn...well all of them really...) that all have their little walled gardens. Their own networks. They don't seem to notice that there's already a big network there - it's called the Internet.

Social networking is very rapidly maturing into another application layer for the Internet. People are going to want to maintain profiles in one place and use them anywhere. People are going to want to have friends who are based out of different social networks. Perhaps I'm on FaceBook, but I'd like to friend someone based out of MySpace. People want that to happen, and when I say people, I mean the Internet. It didn't work for CompuServe or MSN, and its not going to work for FaceBook or LinkedIn. Don't fight the Internet.

The consumer experience

My wife and I went shopping this weekend for a product about which we know virtually nothing. We hit four stores to look at varieties and learn how it works. This is an item where first-time buyers usually go in cold, so to the retailers, we were typical clueless shoppers.

Store #1 was full of customers, employees, and stock. We spent a long while (15, 20 minutes) looking around the overstuffed sales floor and were never approached by an employee. Finally we asked for help, and the woman behind the counter shrugged, and said, "Maybe in a few minutes someone can help you." She did not offer to help us herself, nor did she attempt to ease our wait. As soon as she turned away from us we left.

Store #2 was as busy as store #1, but had clear aisles for browsing and an inviting atmosphere. Sales clerks had their hands full, yet when we made eye contact with one, she responded with, "I'm with a customer, but I'll make sure someone gets to you as soon as we can." Moments later she approached us, saying, "My client stepped away for a minute, I'm still with her, but can I help you in the meantime?" She worked with us until the client returned, politely refocused on the other customer, then came back to us a second time when she was free. She patiently walked us through different products, pros and cons, noting her favorites--which seemed unbiased by price point or commission.

Store #3 was quiet, and a saleswoman approached us immediately. She answered a few questions, then faded into the background, letting us explore without pressure. Each model was on display in several colors and with varying options, making it easy to compare styles. A few minutes into our shopping, the saleswoman returned to us with a print catalog and handy photocopies of each product's dimensions. On the sheet she had handwritten the prices of each item we were considering, too, so we could review at home and make a decision on our own time.

Store #4 had the smallest display collection we'd seen. Half the items had no tags displaying product names or pricing. The store seemed to have very few sales staff, and after a few minutes, we shrugged and left.

At home, we reviewed our one piece of printed literature, and spent time measuring and discussing our options. We looked around online sparingly, since we'd seen so much in person.

Guess which stores are most likely to get our business.

Assigning categories in Entourage 2008

My first blog post. The clever commentary on the state of ecommerce will have to wait. Below is an Entourage 2008 applescript that allows one to assign categories to emails/tasks with the keyboard.

tell application "Microsoft Entourage"

set theDialog to display dialog "enter categories" default answer "" buttons {"OK", "Cancel"} default button 1
set theCatNames to text returned of theDialog

set theCats to {}

-- find or make the categories
repeat with theCatName in every word of theCatNames
try
set theCat to item 1 of (every category whose name is theCatName)
on error
set theCat to make new category with properties {name:theCatName}
end try
copy theCat to the end of theCats
end repeat

set selectedMessages to the selection
repeat with theMessage in selectedMessages
set the category of theMessage to theCats
end repeat

end tell

Social Graphs and Marketing - The Truth

There's a fair amount of excitement recently about Google's Social Graph API.   In a nutshell, the API aggregates various social connections from any number of compliant social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc) allowing an application to see the entire picture.  I had a strong hunch that social  networks  were going to break out of their walled  gardens and  just become another app on the internet.  It seems to be happening.

It sounds great, but it might be worth spelling out the driving force behind connecting you all together.  It's marketers, coveting the power of endorsement.

When one person, with no personal stake, makes a recommendation of a product or service to another - that's marketing gold.  No advertisement, no sponsored search result, no viral message comes close to the power of a personal recommendation.   Marketers would love to harness that.

Facebook went down this path with their Beacon disaster initiative.  Every move that a Facebook user made that involved one of their partners was broadcast to their friends.  All of your friends would suddenly be told about the tennis shoes you had purchased.  Of course this was immediately seized upon as a gross invasion of privacy, and Facebook backed down from it.

Still, this shows the real goal of social networking - it's a marketing platform that harnesses the power of recommendation in order to sell things.  It's that goal that drives so many new companies towards the social networking space.  That's what social networking is really about.  Re-connecting with your high school buddies is a side effect.

MicroYaSoftHooPaq

Poor Microsoft. I almost feel sorry for them. Well, I would except for the whole evil empire of the 90s. Ah, screw 'em.

I just don't get them. They have so many brilliant, talented people working there, and they just can't be an excellent company. Why are they so competition centered? Instead of going out and finding new markets, its like their standard operating plan is to sit around and identify a competitor, and then just try and knock them off of their roost. They seem to miss so many opportunities - for example:

• X-Box could have been the "digital hub", the way the iTunes / iPod / AppleTV is shaping up. They could have owned that.
• They disbanded the IE team after the end of the browser wars and left IE6 sitting around for five years, allowing Firefox to ascend to its current status. They just ceded the market they had fought for so hard, previously.
• They have more than enough engineering firepower to own the online document collaboration space, but instead they just sunk everything into the black hole that is Vista. People still struggle with good online collaboration tools.

It might be classic Christensonian disruption mechanics at work. Or maybe they're just trapped by their own culture. I just don't know. But know they're starting to get into corporate M&A hijinks. I woke up this morning to find they've offered to buy Yahoo for about $44.6 Billion.

Ok so clearly such an acquisition would be a customer grab - getting Yahoo's ad revenue and market share. But would MS be able to stop with that? I doubt it, I think we'd see Yahoo get sucked into the whole MS technology wormhole - no more FreeBSD for Yahoo servers, you need to run IE to use it, etc. Sigh.

I can't help but think about this in terms of the HP-Compaq merger a few years ago. They're moving towards where the game used to be, instead of where its going. A MS outright purchase of Facebook would have been a lot more interesting. At least then you might get a sense of where there game was going ("trading documents with your social network on XBox!!!!"). They really need to start to actually innovate, or they're going to be about as relevant as IBM in a couple of years.