Three simple lessons from a visit to Starbucks. Or Four.

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Retail spaces can teach you a lot of things. I once interviewed a guy who worked for auto-supplies store in California filling the racks and managing the register. He ended up as president of the company. How? He says he looked beyond the boring details of his college job and saw retailing as a learning ground for all kinds of management ideas.

I was reminded of that at my stop at Starbucks last morning. The shelves and the signage were screaming with marketing messages but the barristas were doing some pretty amazing –if basic– things. Those we take for granted as communicators. So here are the three takeaways:

  1. Know your audience. Not the trite know your audience by name, but know their preferences, to the point of knowing a bit of their personal lives.
  2. Ask a lot of questions –even though you may *know* a lot about the audience, and have a big database of information in your head and on the corporate server. Ask and you will engage…
  3. Engage in a genuine conversation –Go beyond the mundane  greetings, and leave brand conversations to the brand folk.

I don’t think managers set a timer to make sure a patron is served within a certain time. If they do, it sure doesn’t show. The lines are long, but unlike the wait in a grocery store checkout, no one seems to get impatient when the customer interacts with the service provider. Which brings me to the fourth point:

4.   Reset Expectations: Starbucks seems to set –or reset– people’s expectations when they step inside.

Do you?

Ecohes of Ogilvy in Creative Refinery

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I have to applaud Nathan Wagner, a friend with whom I chat about all things marketing and branding. he occasionally leaves a comment on this blog, and that starts an offline conversation.

Having worked for some pretty cool interactive agencies, he’s launched is own shop, called Creative Refinery. Intriguing name, that. (Previously there was BaconPony) Nathan is one of the few marketing practitioners I know of who rather than parrot the marketing-speak from business books, coins his own expressions. His recent blog post (the blog is called “Relevant Chews” – go figure!) talks of something after my own heart. The ordinariness of the consumer:

“I am not a consumer.  I am a husband, father and a hard working guy – but I could be your next loyal customer.”

I found it almost echoes a famous David Ogilvy idea: “The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife.” Actually I think that’s a  misquote. It is most likely Ogilvy said “The customer is not a moron. She is your wife.” Big difference.

The refinery guys should know.

The Oprah effect on Twitter doesn’t bother me

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Now that Oprah has put her stamp on microblogging, does that mean we’re going to be drowned by too much interest in branding and celebrity and too little attention to innovation and communication?

As the niche medium begins to gain mass medium status, a lot will change. The downside to all this could be the wrong kind of interest in quantity over quality. Oprah has 75,000 followers when she had founder Evan Williams on her show. As of today she has 453,000 (an increase of 61,000 since yesterday).  Yet, it’s those small communities that will thrive.

Todd Defren said it best: “It’s OKAY if “everyone joins Twitter.” You still only need follow your friends & allies. No one’s gonna *make* you follow @Oprah”

Twitter’s value to me is in how it can be an antenna not a loudspeaker. A filter, not a vacuum cleaner for every dust bunny that floats by.

Why do carriers still sell locked phones?

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Imagine this scenario. You buy a tuxedo online from Kohls for an upcoming event. When it arrives you realize that it still has a security tag you cannot break. You call the store to find a way to remove it and they give you the runaround. Thy say they need to contact manufacturer, Croft and Barrow, to get an unlocked code. Please give them 48-hours until they they hear from the manufacturer, and email you. Meanwhile the event you need to attend comes and goes, but the product you paid for is unusable.

OK, hypothetical situation, but that’s what a locked cell phone represents. A crippled product. Companies such as T-Mobile that sell locked phones are blind to the reality that (a) the device, once paid for does not belong to them or the manufacturer anymore. It should be open by default (b) the world is flat and boundaries have blurred. People should not need customer service intervention to replace a SIM card when roaming.

I had the bad luck to travel to Sri Lanka earlier this month with such a crippled phone — a T-Mobile Dash made by HTC– because I had no time to call to check if it was locked or not. I realized my problem when I tried to swap my SIM card. I got online and found a way to chat with a customer service rep who said it can take up to 48 hours to get the phone unlocked.

I told her they had to be kidding. What kind of unconnected world were they operating in? Two days was a sort of a good turnaround, apparently.

She: When we have to email the manufacture it can take up to 14 days to get a response.

Not good enough, I said.

She: I will inform my supervisor of this issue to see if there is anything that we can do however when we have to e-mail the manufacture we just have to wait for there response as that is out of our hands to get a sooner responses.

Sooner, as in two weeks and counting. I am back in the US. Still no unlocked code. I called twice, checked my email and junk-mail folder. Still no code. That’s why there’s such a thing as text messaging, I tell them –to bypass email.

But the bigger question is not how long it takes to solve a problem, or how to communicate with a customer. The real question is: Why on earth do mobile phone companies sell locked-down smart phones?  I can only imagine three reasons:

  1. Forced loyalty. It makes customers feel they have to grovel to get their basic rights.
  2. Easy revenue: Even if 10 percent of customers get trapped in a situation like this and roam, the money to be made is just too good to forfeit.
  3. Clueless. Carriers don’t take trouble to understand just what usage patterns their customers have. They are still trapped into the old marketing mindset of selling ‘packages’ – few sizes fit all. Customers’ social, professional and economic patterns have changed but carriers have never bothered to find out.

It will take legislation for companies this backward to comply with basic customer rights. It will take a lot of disgruntled customers who say bye-bye to them, for the T-Mobiles of this world to wake up.

Think before you share (or thank God for real journalists)

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This is a follow up to my oversharing post that got some interesting feedback.

I blog, I tweet, I sort of ‘report’ since I cover a variety of issues in a few venues. But the closet journalist in me always holds me back in the urge to just spew off stuff like “I am on a flight, the cabin doors are closing” (who cares?) and such.

Those who whip out their phones to generate content based on unverified facts, a.k.a. citizen journalists, sometimes get it wrong. Or often they only ‘report’ one fraction of the story. In some instances those fractions or slices are hugely valuable. Like the tweets and photos form the United Airlines splashdown last year.

But contrast that to this story, by Austin American Statesman journalist, Robert Quigley, who used Twittter to fact-check a story that the citizen journalists with itchy thumbs had got skewed. They had broken a story that a gunman in a local bar had taken people hostage. The gun and the hostage situation proved to be wrong.

once we confirmed what was actually happening, the rumors stopped flying …having a journalist who has access to the police and the habit of verifying information is valuable. It did turn out that the guy did not have a gun, and police now say he was never in danger of harming himself or others.

Wow!

Or from another point of view, thank God there still are some solid journalists –who happen to use social media– who know their job.

So the lesson to those wanna-be journalists, and information sharers: think before you type. You may be the only ‘reporter’ on the scene, but a string of words that help nobody, especially when unverified, amounts to dangerous oversharing.


Quotes for the week ending 18 April, 2009

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“If we’re still in the first inning of social media, we’re clearly at the bottom of the first, with two men out, runners on first and second, and a hitter who routinely hits into double plays at bat.”

Catherine P. Taylor, in MediaPost, on the Dominoes’ viral video fueled by social media

“this lately exploded pustule on the posterior of the British body politic.”

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, writing in The Telegraph about Damian McBride, the communications strategist at the center of the email scandal in the British Prime Minister’s cabinet.

“The real impact of a blog story happens only when it moves into the traditional media”

Stephen Pollard, Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, on how the scandal surrounding Gordon Brown has shifted and exploded.

“The emails were sent from an official government computer email account, so let’s just assume he was at his desk when he wrote them, shall we?”

Editorial in the Daily Telegraph, saying the Prime Minister cannot excuse his political strategist lightly.

“The online social world is about as two-way, multi-way, any-way…”

Josh Bernoff, in Advertisng Age, on why the term ‘social media’ is fraught with too much baggage to inspire people to participate in it.

“It’s a hostage rescue operation, something like the Entebbe rescue mission …It has to be discreet and surgical.”

Gotabhaya Rajapakse, Defense Minister, on the Sri Lakan government’s decision to reject the UN appeal for hostages held by the terrorists to leave the so-called safe zone.

“We are linked by geography and history”

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, on the digital town hall meeting from Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, on the eve of the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago.

“@statesman: I see people on Twitter calling this a “hostage situation” at the Apple Bar. We have NOT been told that by police.”

Robert Quigley, a journalist, on how journalists can still play a role in verifying information. The Austin American Statesman was 35 minutes late to the story, but got it right, debunking the story. People had ‘reported’ via Twitter that a man with a gun was threatening guests.

Blogs suffer collateral damage in U.K. email scandal

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As I was passing through London on Monday I couldn’t help notice the communications storm ripping through Number 10 and the media.

The case of spin doctors being used by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, seems to have consumed everyone from political consultants to the media and communicators on both sides of the political aisle. It was initially a story about slanderous emails, intended to generate content for a web site –one of those attack sites some organizations use. But it soon generated a lot of collateral damage.

As Stephen Pollard, an associate editor of The Jewish Times, in a commentary in The Times observed:

I am no starry-eyed fan of blogging per se. But I am evangelical about the benefits that it can bring – and I accept that the price of being able to print genuine exposés may be the freedom to print rubbish.

As a newspaper man who has turned to blogging he believes crises like these don’t create quite the firestorm unless mainstream media pours on some gasoline. (Note the headline the Times gave his piece: “Don’t be fooled by the power of blogs.”)

Other in-depth analysis included The Independent‘s story on the “Axis of spin” and the raging battle of other newspapers editors’ blogs.

Yes, blogs have become the connective tissue between much of PR, journalism and political communication. We all rejoice in this, but that’s a two-edged sword. In the UK, several cabinet MPs have their own blogs, more or less bypassing the traditional communications teams. Which has another interesting side effect: Not updating one’s blog during a communications crisis, could hereafter be construed as a bad move, too! Almost like offering a “no comment” when a microphone is thrust in one’s face.

Take  Tom Watson, the Labour MP who was one of the earliest to have his own blog. The Independent slammed him for being tardy on his posts saying “The digital expert staying strangely silent on the internet.” Apparently he’s stopped tweeting as well.

Oddly enough few are paying attention to the fact that this was basically an email scandal, since it’s now turned into a political PR issue, with blogs at the center of it.

For crisis communictions experts paying attention to blogs (or not) this will go down as a great case study. Stay tuned!

Tweeting needs some pruning as we #speak

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion about etiquette (please don’t tell me ‘twetiquette’ is a word!) on Twitter, and I am looking for some guidelines about good practices.

A few things that bother me about Twitter, even as I use it for a variety of reasons.

  • The constant use of the @ sign to acknowledge someone  in a tweet. This kind of name dropping is just visual clutter in such a format
  • The volume of re-tweeting that passes for useful contribution.
  • The cut-and-paste tendency of those prolific micro-bloggers –especially those who are auto-generating posts.
  • Hash-tagging – another bit of visual clutter

Speaking of hash-tags, I recently did a Twinterview, and found myself revolting about the need to drop in the tag #twitview, which I know is useful way to follow the conversation later. But it’s akin to prefacing everything you say with “Listen to me!” before every word you say (or the irritating “I’m glad you asked me that question” line some speakers use to every question asked by the audience.)

I know, as we grow more attuned to the format, and wean out our follower/following list, things will get better. Remember, blogs back in the day also struggled with these naval-gazing, clumsy tone-of-voice issues. Until then (note to self, here) let’s try to use a tool like Twitter to prune, rather than clutter the conversation.