ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

Hi All,

First off I have now moved to a new host and have got through the various teething troubles, i’m happy to say that i’m now on diary of an emo girl, and is actually about a topic, it means that posts from 3 years ago are still relatively interesting, so a chronological archive is not as interesting as a topic based archive.

Anyway, i’ve been using a plugin called the Ultimate Tag Warrior and it is totally fucking amazing. The thing that is blowing my mind is that i’ve had it installed for a year or so, and have been using it to create ‘tags’ for my posts, simple, it basically added a form element on my “create new post page” and I add some tags, super simple.

That is the genius behind it, anyone can use it and get value out of it with out without doing anything more than installing and activating the plugin. Once you start getting under the covers it’s got some great features, and it’s own php calls so you can do all kinds of stuff with it (if your viewing this as an individual post you can see the top 25 tags on the right, all with a simple php call). The best thing though is the “manage tags” interface, because it allows you to rename tags, merge tags, and create synonyms. Need I say any more?

BTW let me know if i go too far with the features, I really don’t want to end up looking like a “chicklet orgy”, ooooh, i’m tagging that.

I thought I would bring up a post from the ExperienceCurve Vault, called Experience Vs. Expectation. The post is inspired by Don Norman polling a group of designers on what products and services they “loved”, and in 2003 Google was pretty much the most mentioned web site, and back then they were just a search engine. Here’s the post pretty much in it’s original form with some minor colorization:

I don’t believe that Experience Design or competing in the Experience Economy is necessarily about providing the best experience. I find that in the Experience Economy (Pine and Gilmore) focus too much on the theater and glamour of an experience and not so much on the satisfaction of a need or, the delivery of a promise. I don’t think you can talk about a satisfying experience unless you talk about expectation, a yugo might provide a vary satisfying experience if it manages to deliver beyond the level of expectation that has been built through communication, pricing, information, Word of Mouth etc.

Don Norman did a poll of some people on a user centered design list about products people “loved”, under the category of web sites many people professed there love for google. It exceeds peoples expectations with little fuss or muss.

I quote:

The new firm “Bond Art & Science“, a partnership with ex-Razorfish managers Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten, and Razorfish co-founder Jeffrey Dachis.

And the interesting quote

Cool, that sounds great!

Uh-oh, take foot and insert into mouth. “Deliver the experiences WE always wanted to deliver.”

Ok, well I’ll cut them some slack because they were razorfish when it was cool but if your going to talk about experience design, try and include the customer in the statement, seriously, good luck guys.

Tip of the hat

I recently had the distinct pleasure of being asked to speak to a group of industrial design students at the Art Institute in Fort Lauderdale. The class they were taking was an elective class and the topic was product branding. Anyway, the topic of branding is wide open and I guess I could have talked about anything, but I decided to talk about the origin of modern branding as a discipline.

My argument is that modern branding as a discipline is only 50+ years old, and that almost all the theories and methodologies regarding branding are derived from that period. This means that nothing is set in stone, and in fact it’s quite likely that branding as a discipline is still in the “flat earth” stage.

So what was my purpose? Well, I guess i just wanted these students to have enough context and ammunition to at least have the option to think critically about brands and branding.

BTW if you think I’m just being snarky to the old school branding folks, you should bare in mind that Wally Olins, who is somewhat a godfather of modern branding was my biggest influence here, and it’s his model of brand experience that I continue to use when thinking about customer experience.

Here’s the presentation in PDF format

Courtesy of Tcritic.com the T-shirt blog

Ok, I’ve been biting my tongue about the world cup and the advertising dollars that seem to be getting flushed down the drain (Budweiser? Sponsoring the World Cup? In Germany?) Vonage? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Then I see this headline : “World Cup Ratings Score: Up 50% Over 2002″

Uhhhh, let me see, in 2002 the World Cup was in Korea/Japan, and only a couple of nutjobs like me and my friend Jeff in Boston stayed up to watch many of the games. I think the US vs. Germany game started at 3 am EST. Wow, and ratings are up now that the games are on a lunchtime…imagine that.

Personally I think the most innovative bit of advertising in this world cup has come from Coke. Yes, Coke, and it’s not on Television, it’s called WeAllSpeaKFootball.com, and it’s a “group blog.”

Oh, and it’s not Coke trying to convince you that they give a crap about soccer, they are just providing a great place to talk about the cup and hear from people who are really passionate about it.

Many companies would have you believe that a “multi channel customer experience” means you make your “content” or “applications” available to all a customers devices, and making sure your “brand” or “message is consistent. So content for the phone should be the same, only smaller and more difficult to read?

But it’s not about your message, it’s not about your brand, its about the “experience” and guess what, “consistent experience” is not the very peak of any endeavor, it’s marginal at best.

Multi Channel Customer Experience is about “context”, “appropriateness”, “fulfillment”, and guess what, Microsoft is going to give you one of the best examples of multi-channel customer experience right here:

So in the Microsoft example here they are talking about an xbox360 racing game called Forza Motorsport 2 (which I am really looking forward to). Now Forza is a console game where you have lots of cars that you can race against other people online. All the cars are very customizable, and you can change their paint jobs, or do all kinds of real world tuning etc. Now, i’ve played the original game, and it’s a lot of fun, but when I’m sitting in front of my 42″ plasma with the xbox fired up the last thing I want to do is tune the suspension, which is essentially dialing numbers up and down on different aspects of the car. So the new version of Forza is going to enable you to access your cars from your cell phone, or your PC, or your xbox360, but in the example they show here, they’re adjusting the suspension from the mobile phone, changing the paint job on the PC, and finally playing the game on the Xbox360.

Now that’s thinking about the “experience”.

Another interesting blog that I have discovered from the For Immediate Release Podcast, namely Christopher Carfi of The Social Customer Manifesto, the tagline of which is “there are no spectators anymore, participate”. Amen to that Christopher, glad to find your blog.

I’m wondering if I need to come up with a manifesto, i could see a Customer Experience Manifest, or even a Co-Creation Manifesto for CustomersOnFire.com. Something to think about.

Cheers,

KK

making tshirts in Second Life
Originally uploaded by Glitch010101.

T-Shirts are can be a good promotional tool, but in a virtual world? But here it is, how to make a t-shirt in second life, rock on Look their pimping BarCamp, nerds are totally taking over the world. My question is how do you make a T-Shirt in WOW, c’mon guys, even Orcs need cool t-shirts

Originally published at: tcritic.com daily t-shirt blog another KK Long Joint

Lets face when us bloggers talk about “a-list” we’re still talking small fish in a small pond, when celebs get hold of a blog and start using it properly the results can be wonderful. I’ve always like Zach Braff’s work, and Garden State is one of my favorite movies and sound tracks. Anyway, he’s launched a new blog (his previous one was under the Fox umbrella, so I’m assuming he can be a bit more indie now), and I just happened across this little intro video on youtube. The reason I find this particularly interesting is that Zach’s pretty clear that he wants this to be a co-creative relationship with his fans:

“What’s this site going to be about? I don’t know, I don’t want it to be just about me, because that would get boring real fast, and lets be honest no-one is going to buy a Zach Braff calender”

Also, in this video clip he tells us that he wants to create a mini film festival where fans can send in short movies, and the winner will get to work with Zach when he directs his next music video, or scrubbs episode.

What I like about this is it’s genuine, heartfelt, and it’s clearly not the concoction of some PR or publicity person, it’s about Zach, opening a dialogue with his fans. Oh, and he’s got close to 300 comments on his first post, hmm, comments, interesting.

Now with all that praise, i’m afraid the one problem is the actual web site, the actual site is an overproduced flash monstrosity that get’s doesn’t do much but obstruct the actual interaction that Zach is clearly asking for. It seems that Zach has a bloggers mind and a flash centric creative director. My advice Zach, install wordpress, install the K2 template, and let your creative directer have at it on that infrastructure. Although with no trackback, it’s unlikely i’ll be a part of this conversation.

Big thumbs up for the attitude, but thumbs down for the flash orgy

http://zachbraff.com

BTW sorry if you’ve seen this post appear and disapear various times today, i’ve been in hosting hell trying to switch hosts, and in the end failed, and everything is back on the old server again. Oh will we ever be set free.

From: Indeed.com the job search aggrigator

Actually i’m totally serious, I will be starting a podcast in the next couple of weeks, i’ve been absolutely inspired by Jaffe’s across the sound podcast, and it gives me a perfect excuse to put the customersonfire.com domain to better use, rather than this sort of parallel blog.

I’ve been thinking about a topic, and initially though I would use the term “micromarketing” that i sort of coined for customersonfire.com, but another idea has been peculating, or simmering in the back of my mind:

“The co-creative business”

So instead of another marketing 2.0 web 2.0 etc, talk about the changing structure of businesses. How businesses are transforming from entities that create and distribute value to ones that co-create value with their customers. I mean, it gives a pretty broad base of things to talk about, from customer generated content, to blogs, podcasts, social media, all the way to the actual business models of upcoming companies like flickr, youtube, netflix, and even that old stick in the mud amazon.

I am really interested in comments on this idea, so please, have at it, feedback, if you want to be a guest host, get interviewed etc. Also any tips, ideas, software, technique that any grizzled podcasters want to send my way. I’ve been thinking that I can probably conduct much of it over skype and use audio hijack to do the recording, I’ve already done that to embaress my mother to great effect.

Cheers,

Karl