The TrueTalk Blog

Whuffie Or Not, Most Hate Advertisers

Tara Hunt's fun new book, The Whuffie Factor, is gaining a lot of well-deserved online attention. Whuffie is the reputation-based currency introduced by Cory Doctorow in his 2003 science fiction novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. Hunt's book takes up where the Cluetrain Manifesto left off by citing many examples of ways that companies are using social media as means for engaging customers.

But, none of that matters to many of us who've been ground down by advertising and now recoil reflexively at the notion of being pitched in still another form. We've been having a conversation about these ideas on VloggerHeads, and here's my most recent contribution. If you're interested, my first video on the subject is here. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Find more videos like this on VloggerHeads

Project VRM Workshop

Getting ready to head up to Boston for Project VRM Workshop, hosted by Berkman Center for Internet Law at Harvard Law School, organized by Doc Searls. Should be very interesting. Here's a quick video.

Null Hypothesis: Time-Warner Roadrunner Sucks

These days, I view every customer service contact as an experiment.

If you've ever conducted formal experiments, you'll recall the concept of "the null hypothesis." That idea took me a while to grasp back in college but at the end of the day, it comes down to this: experiments don't really yield statistics that prove anything. In fact, if an experiment is successful, its results disprove something: the null hypothesis.

So, the null hypothesis is presumed to be true until the experiment's data show that hypothesis to be incorrect.

And, my null hypothesis for every technical support interaction is as follows: "the customer service experience I am about to have will demonstrate that this company sucks."

Don't ya' just love science?

So, I got a chance to gather some experimental data last night. Let me tell you about it.

Cable TV and high-speed Internet service for our New York City apartment is provided by Time-Warner Cable and their Roadrunner division. Yesterday, I had occasion to interact with both. The DVR in the apartment went kaput last night, endlessly re-booting. A quick conversation with the tech folks confirmed my fear: dead DVR. Solutions: wait for a tech or go pick up a new one ten blocks away. Great, I'll get one myself, thanks a lot.

Null hypothesis, Time-Warner Cable sucks, is disproved by the data. (Hey, it's my experiment, I can set the N anyplace I want!)

Well, that left me with no TV for the evening. Hey, no problemo, it's the Internet Age! There's tons of stuff out there to watch, even the Yankees game.

Ah, but this intense focus on the Internet forced me to come to terms with a nagging suspicion that had been creeping into my thinking recently: "there's something screwy about the Internet connection at the apartment."

Armed with time and interest (two-thirds of the magic triangle of success for any task), I sought to fill in the missing piece, talent. I needed to diagnose the quality of my connection, which isn't too hard thanks to a free service like this one. I ran the test and got these results: Download, 351 kbps; Upload, 96kbps.

Uh oh. Bad juju, bwana.

So, for the second time in two hours, I now attempt a second experiment, this time with the Roadrunner customer service folks. Herein, the lab report for that experiment.

Null hypothesis: Time-Warner Roadrunner sucks.

Data collection: I begin with the usual procedure, calling the customer service number, indicating that my problem is with high speed Internet service. I am immediately channeled to a voice recognition system that will attempt to solve my problem "using the same methods that our technical support staff use."

I think, "Uh oh."

But, I'm a compliant guy. For the most part, I follow the rules and go along with requests. I give it a shot.

First question: "Are you able to connect with the Internet?"

I'm already in trouble. Yes, I think, I can connect with the Internet but at speeds reminiscent of my Compuserve dial-up days.

Faced with this dilemma, I do what any compliant, rule-following customer would do, I say, "no."

This didn't help because the automaton on the line begins to take me through the process of rebooting my modem and my Airport router (yes, I'm one of those deviant Mac users), both of which I'd already done to no avail. In fact, I've taken the Airport out of the equation entirely by hardwiring the modem into the ethernet port.

So, I say, "yes" when asked if I've rebooted the modem.

Now, she says (why do they use women's voices on these systems? Come on, think about it. Most geeks are at least a little less likely to go apeshit ballistic on a female, even a robotic one, than on a guy, right?), "OK, shut down your PC and..."

OK, I think, "this isn't working." So, using a tactic I've learned from other despair-eliciting encounters with voice recognition systems, I say, "agent."

Now, here the Roadrunner system demonstrated some real ingenuity. Other systems I'd used simply complied with my request by saying, "hold on while I connect you with an agent."

Not Roadrunner; no pushover they! Instead, my automatic helper said, "I know you'd like to speak with an agent, but we're almost finished solving your problem."

"No," I think, "we're not even remotely close." So, I just started saying "agent, agent, agent, agent" in an increasingly agitated voice.

Voila! "Hold on while I connect you with an agent."

Now, you've already followed the details of the experiment's methodology pretty closely if you've gotten to this point, so I'll spare you some of the more arcane procedural bits. Rest it to say that the young fellow I spoke with took me through a Ping procedure to determine the number of microseconds it took for signal to make a complete loop from my apartment to some Google servers somewhere. (This after verifying the speed of my service using Speedtest.net.)

After reflecting on the meaning of the Pinged microseconds, this fellow says: "Well, your connection is fine. I suggest you contact Apple to resolve your problem."

[You know those cartoon characters who run into frying pans or doors or anvils? You know that look they have on their faces? OK, so you can now picture me at that moment.]

Stunned, but still conscious, I say, "wait, this configuration works flawlessly on Internet connections all over the country; in my home in Connecticut, in Starbucks all over the place, in hotels. You're telling me that the fact that it only doesn't work here, with your service, is an Apple problem?"

"Well, sir," he replies, "you have a fast connection with the Internet according to our test. The problem must be with your computer."

Now, I've been using computer systems since 1979. For a moment, I'd like you to consider the number of hours I've spent in technical support conversations during that time. Hundreds? For sure. Thousands? Maybe. And one thing I've learned as a result of those torturous hours: "don't lose your cool; it will only come back to bite you in the ass."

Deep breath. Another. Then, "OK, I'd like you to escalate me, please."

[We all know about escalation, right? You talk to first line support  people and they follow tightly scripted algorithms to try to solve the run-of-the-mill technical problems that millions of users confront daily. Imagine the kinds of stuff that happens on Level One support hell.

But, I'm not a Level One problem kind of user. I've usually done all the stuff they want you to do on Level One before I called. But, because of the way customer support works, you invariably have to do it all over again in the company of the Level One support person just to prove that a) you're not inept, and, b) the Level One support agent will not get his/her ass kicked for passing you along to Level Two.]

There's a pause on the other end of the line in response to my request. Mr. Level One then asks, "you'd like to speak with a supervisor?" [At this point I get a vague feeling I've walked into one of Plato's Dialogues; this has to be a trick question.]

"Yes. Yes, I would."

"OK," says Level One Man slyly, "but, supervisors aren't technical, so they probably will also say that the problem is with your computer."

[Now, I can say with almost Thomistic certainty, that this was the moment that the data began to strongly favor not rejecting the null hypothesis. I can say that because that was the moment when I really got pissed off. In my experience, there is very strong correlational evidence for getting pissed off and companies sucking.]

"Well, let me speak with a supervisor anyway," I say, as calmly as I can.

Minutes pass.

A youngish sounding woman comes on the line and officiously says to me something like, "I understand that your computer is having difficulty connecting with the Internet."

[First word that pops into my head: "Kafka." "I'm doomed," I think.]

"Well," I say after gathering my wherewithal, "I am getting really lousy throughput and want to speak with someone with a little more technical know-how than the fellow I was just working with."

"Well," she says, "we only have one level of technical support. There is no one else to speak to about this."

[Recall here the image you conjured up earlier of me walking into frying pan. Repeat twice.]

"Wow. Well, how about this? How about you connect me with another agent and we'll take another shot at resolving this?"

"OK," says Ms. Level Two, grudgingly. "Please hold."

Fourteen minutes of irritating muzak later, on comes a new voice, Ms. Level One, saying: "Roadrunner Customer Service, can I help you?"

[Insert frying pan look Number Three here.]

"Um, did that supervisor just decide to not even bother to come back to speak with me?", I ask.

"Well," Ms. Level One says, "my information indicates that the problem is with your computer so she said I should speak with you but there isn't anything else we can do."

[Imagine if you will the terms in which this insane caller had been assigned to poor Ms. Level One? "A crazy man says it's not his computer! You talk to him!!"]

Calling on my decades of experience and now definitely as far down the tech support rabbit hole as it is possible for a modern human being to go, I say, "well, how 'bout you and I take one more shot at diagnosing the problem?"

"OK," sighs Ms. Level One, "but because there weren't any asterisks in the millisecond lines of the Traceroute report, there's nothing else we can do."

This, of course, could have just as well been Klingon rather than English, but it occurred to me that Mr. Level One and I had never, in fact, conducted a Traceroute test. We had only performed a Ping test.

So, I say to Ms. Level One: "Well, we never did Traceroute, only Ping." "OK," she allows, "let's do a Traceroute."

[For the record, I have now been on this call for one hour and fourteen minutes.]

Ever done a Traceroute? Kind of cool, actually, as packets of data scurry through connections trying to get to, from and through routers all over the net, and back. And, it turns out, if the data report from a Traceroute contains asterisks, there's trouble in River City.

I now needed to read Ms. Level One ever character on ten lines of my Traceroute report: "asterisk 169.37.135; 34.123 ms, asterisk"; stuff like that. Finally, I'm finished.

Ms. Level One then announces, "Well, since there are asterisks in your Traceroute report, I can escalate you to the next level of Technical Support."

[Remember those frying pans? OK, this time I want to you recall those rare moments when the cartoon character is standing in the middle of the desert and a nuclear explosion occurs. You can tell by the mushroom cloud. Great billows of smoke rising in that archetypal horrific shape. Eventually the cloud clears. A crispy, pathetic, singed creature stands before you. Eyeballs bulging, the creature blinks twice, in perfect synchronization with a sound effect like <clink, clink>, then disintegrates. OK, you've got a picture of the look on my face.]

"Wait," I say, "so when I was told that there wasn't another level of technical support, it was a lie."

"Well, we say that to everyone," says Ms. Level One, sheepishly.

"Oh, I see, so since you lie to everyone, then that makes it OK."

"I'll pass you along to Level Three now," she answers.

Of course, by this point it is obvious to me that the null hypothesis has been supported at the .001 level of significance.

I'll wrap this up for those still here. Mr. Level Three comes on. We diagnose my connection using Roadrunner's speed test. My download speed is bad an my upload speed hardly qualifies for the conventional use of the word; it's nonexistent. "I'll set you up for a tech appointment," he says. We agree on a date and time. He's all business and spot on. We finish up.

"Oh," I Columbo him, "one more thing. You might want to give anybody who cares a little feedback: it's never a good thing to lie to your customers."

"What do you mean?", he replies.

"Well, I was told that Level One was the only level of Tech Support you offer; that there was nothing anybody could do technically beyond them."

Pause.

"That's insane," he says.

"Yup," I agree, "it sure is."

End.

Results: The results of this experiment make it clear that we cannot reject the null hypothesis that Time-Warner Roadrunner Customer Service sucks.

Further experiments will be necessary to determine the exact cause of that suckage, but these results indicate that the cause is terminal leadership arrogance and stupidity. Lying to customers, especially geeks, is a sure way to ruin any company's reputation. And, come the revolution (i.e., freedom of choice of Internet Service Providers) you will be punished for it.

Still Another Boomer Journey

Stuart Elliot reports on another fallen advertising taboo in his article about Estroven's new Menopauseland campaign.

It's only fair that all those ED commercials showing older men with younger women will now be countered by their mirror image. Some will find this in poor taste, but it's really just the next stop on a very long ride.

It's fascinating how my generation continues to change the meaning of every developmental, social, economic, medical milestone. From adolescence through senility, we're going to transform everything. Or, at least marketers are going to make it sound that way. And, as a generation, we love it.

What are we going to do when it becomes clear that we've already had our last boomer president, and that it was George W. Bush, to boot?

Zappos Zappy Hour

Lots of companies are blogging. But I haven't seen one like online shoe store, Zappos.com. 

Most corporate blogs are, well, boring. They're more like brochures than blogs.

Zappos is different. Theirs is a hoot.

Watch the first video and tell me that you wouldn't know immediately whether or not you'd want to work at Zappos, or, for that matter, buy shoes from them. It may not be your cup of tea but they're lettin' you know who they are and a lot about their approach to doin' business.

Then, watch the second and imagine your CEO as the video's star. Or, if you're the CEO, ask yourself whether yours is the kind of business that would benefit from you leading in this way? (Remember, these are people in a privately held footwear business. Fashion people. Merchants. Lot of logistics and  Web people. Young. Smart. Home office in metro Las Vegas. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Take a look.)

If anybody asks you about what "authenticity" means in business, refer them to the Zappos blog.

The Story's Story Thusfar

Everybody's talking about "the story." You can't throw a stone down Madison Avenue without hitting someone who's prattling on about "narratives" of one kind or another.

Brands don't have "value-propositions" anymore, they have stories. Their stories are their source of their "authenticity." Customers don't want products anymore, they want to become a part of the brand's "hi-story"; to have their own personal story merge with the brand's story.

So, how did this ancient social currency become so hot?

It's all about the meme, baby.

Almost a decade ago, Susan Blackmore wrote a dense little book called The Meme Machine. In it, she described a Richard Dawkins-inspired notion: cultural elements (e.g., ideas, theories, habits) propagate in a genetic manner. That is, memes spread in accordance with Darwinian laws. They replicate, morph and mutate in the service of continual propagation.

Successful memes swamp cultures.

So, here we have a story about the story meme becoming a major story as a result of  the successful meme propagating capacity of storytelling.

But, if storytelling meme carriers start getting thrown out of brand builders' offices, the brand story meme will cease to propagate as widely/quickly as they are today, and stories will once again go back to being the things that following those four little memetically magic words: "Once upon a time..."

Today's Problem: Create Relentlessly

Create, or die.

That's pretty much it today.

Now, I know that sounds dramatic. After all, there are plenty of sleepy businesses doing quite well, thank you very much, in tired markets. But, come the apocalypse, those businesses will be in a world of hurt.

Apocalypse?

Yeah, think about advertising. Was there a more established formula than advertising's? The past 50 years had taught everyone what ads were: messages beamed at eyeballs. Oh, sure, people complained, but we kept buying and buying and buying.

Then, the apocalypse.

The Internet showed advertisers that their customers were sick of being interrupted and spoken to like idiots. So sick, in fact, that we'd do anything in our power to shut off those interruptions.

But that didn't make us unwilling to buy, nor did it make us any less curious about what to buy. It just made us less willing to listen to those blaring, blinking irritants.

So...what's a marketer to do?

Well, how 'bout what Diesel's doing? How about not just affiliating your brand with all things hip, but actually doing hip things? Like sponsoring a competition amongst artists and designers to create something interesting, provocative, beautiful on a very large scale. That's what they did in Diesel Wall.

And then, just to be sure we all understand why they're doing this, they speak to us in a voice that very many of us find very familiar:

In any given moment in our daily lives we are bombarded by messages we didn't ask to see. A never ending stream of mass produced cerebral pollution offering at absolute best nothing more than needless want. Diesel Wall was born out of a need to salvage what precious public space is left and to fill it with something worth saying. We will take your powers of disuasion [sic]; your ability to disrupt; incite; excite; inspire and intrigue; to make comment; to make beautiful; to make real; to make people think again. The ultimate goal of Diesel Wall is to create a fusion between the private space of galleries/institutions and the open space of the city…to drive new direction in urban landscapes and recharge them with creativity.

"Cerebral pollution." Doesn't sound like the kind of thing a brand would want to be associated with today. Is your company, "message green"?

See? That's the difference relentless creativity makes.

Hat tip: The continually excellent IF! from PSFK

Measuring Skin Thickness

Yesterday, I vlogged about people needing a place to go to connect with others, relatively free of the assaults of mischief-making-miscreants.

Today, I make the opposite case for businesses.

Marketers have thrived on happy-talk, propagating freighter-loads of fertilizer in the process. Sealed behind the walls of their own fantasies, companies could maintain the illusion of connection with customers via focus groups and arms-length metrics. Now that a wide range of tools provide companies with the opportunity for something approaching actual communication with real-live people, most still choose to live beyond the moat.

Hey, it's scary out there!

Here's a cut from today's edition of the very worthwhile Jack Myers.com:

But it’s also a mistake to be overly skittish about negative comments online when there is no legal liability. "What we’ve found for most of these great brands is that when we give a hundred moms the chance to comment, 90 percent will say good things. If ten moms say something negative, that makes it more authentic," says Michael Sanchez, CEO of CafeMom.com.

[Snip]

"At the beginning (for marketers) it was ‘oh my God, what’s going to be said about my brand?’ Then they realized consumers and moms talk about their brands all the time, anyway," Sanchez says. "I don’t want to make a comparison with MySpace or anything else, but to reach moms it’s a place (advertisers) want to be."

Companies must interact with customers. It's their business. This means inviting civil but spirited opinions. Marketers have to help everyone understand the consequences of the new rules of market engagement. You can't say you're being "authentic" and interested in "listening" without opening yourself up to criticism.

So, toughen up that skin, guys and do something about the things you learn rather than encouraging your colleagues to stick their fingers in their ears and hum.

Comfortably Mediocre

After four-plus years of almost-daily blog reading, I can confidently say this: Seth Godin continues to be my single most thought-provoking blogger (with Grant McCracken a close second).

Today, Seth comments on Radiohead's recent announcement that it would release its next CD on the 'net on a pay-what-you-want basis. Seth then asks why it is that Radiohead was preceded by Prince and Madonna in using this new approach to music pricing. His answer is right on:

Most industries innovate from both ends:

• The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
• The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
• It's the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches.

Sharp insight. Of course the outsiders go first, as they are storming the walls of the citadel. The winners going next, however, is a bit counterintuitive, as, unlike outsiders, they have the most to lose. But, being winners, they have the resources to back up their guts.

Then we have the mediocre middle. Most business treatises denigrate the mediocre middle. It is the least sexy of all market positions and approaches. No striving, no disquiet; only watchful waiting.

The middle's mantra: When the market settles down and speaks, loudly and unambiguously, follow it.

This can be a highly seductive approach. After all, in these turbulent times, how many market innovators quickly surface and just as quickly disappear from view? Better to sit and wait while others sort out the risks, right? Think of the hundreds of businesses that live in that zone.

Seth's final word on this phenomenon is illustrative:

So, in every industry, the middle waits. And watches. And then, once they realize they can survive the switch (or once they're persuaded that their current model is truly fading away), they jump in.

The irony, of course, is that by jumping in last, they're condemning themselves to more mediocrity.

This, of course, is the voice of the innovator, looking at the mediocre middle-player as a lesser life form; a loser.

But, the fact is that many, many businesses love their mediocrity. It is their badge of honor; their central source of comfort. Living within the herd reduces the risk of being eaten by the predators, after all.

Once, while consulting with a firm that fit this description, I was pushing for an innovative approach. The client, an exasperated executive, said to me: "hey, that's what everybody in this industry does; so it can't be so bad."

To which I replied, "there's a great theme for an ad campaign: buy from us, we're no worse than the other guys!"

Years later, I see that this was exactly what this company was aiming for: the comfortably mediocre middle.

Why Do We Deny The Power of Ads?

It's almost a given that in the normal course of conversation about advertising, you'll invariably find someone who says something like the following

Oh, I don't pay any attention to ads. They don't have any affect on what I buy.

So, I made the following YouTube video to get your thoughts. Be sure to check out the comments the video elicited over on YouTube: