This video presentation by Jake McKee is a fantastic case study for anyone interested in trying to empower a company to participate in social media/web2.0. Jake lived and breathed it there, and now has his own social media consultancy called the Ants Eye View. Thanks for sharing this Jake. I’ve pulled out a couple of quotes that I think are key, but i also recommend watching the whole thing.
“Inside Fort Business”
A great picture and an important point to take on board, the concept of “fort business” is the antithesis of the Cluetrain and is going to really get in the way of any serious attempt to “participate” in social media. You have to trust and empower “everyone” in your company to participate in social media, and I mean everyone, not everyone is going to do it, but unless you allow self selection you will stifle the people who are already helping change your company.
“Lego had different level of customer, and in most cases customer meant big box store, wall-mart, toys R us K-Mart etc. and the end user was called the consumer. Lego would often ask the big box stores what they new about the consumer, and the big box stores would say they didn’t know anything about the consumer and why didn’t Lego know.”
Very interesting point, often big companies that use rely on distribution channels sometimes miss that direct connection to the consumer. In todays landscape companies can’t afford not to have this connection, and the good news is that social media allows these direct connections to the most passionate customer base.
“we effected change on a very large, very old, very conservative company, that was also Danish. If you know anything about the Danes they are a socialist country that have tall poppy syndrome that’s everybody’s the same, we’re just as good as everybody else etc.”
Another interesting point, it is very apparent if you have ever worked in European companies that national culture has an enormous effect on company culture. I find it really interesting that Jake would call the Danes socialist but certainly closer to socialist than America where there is certainly no “tall poppy syndrome”
These roles will work in the product management group and will work as a team helping design concepts, visual, and interactive prototypes prior to them going into the product management process. These are really fun roles because you will be working on concepts very early on in the process, essentially helping create artifacts so the hard core development can create these features to roll out globally with a high degree of fidelity to the original vision you will help create. You can read more about our games at N-Gage here and on our blog. These jobs are based in San Francisco and we have a great location in SOMA, feel free to ping me if you do apply and I’ll keep an eye out for your resume.
Just launched yesterday Vcwear.com is a site that not only sells very funny t-shirts targeted to VC’s for $100 you can also buy the company while your at it for $100,000, just add it to your shopping cart. I can’t think of a more perfect targeting strategy for selling a company than creating a line of goods specifically targeted to VC’s, genius.
I found some stunning figures on the Marketingcharts.com web site regarding Ecommerce, seriously, I always knew the internet was going to be big, but these numbers are mind-boggling.
More than 85% of the world’s online population has used the internet to make a purchase - increasing the market for online shopping by 40% in the past two years - according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on internet shopping habits.
Another significant point made in this study is that most consumers shop at the same site, in fact 60% of consumers said they tended to shop at the same site over and over. What this means is the first experience that shoppers have with your site matters, big time, you let them down the first time they will never be back. Nail the first experience, and loyalty seems to be almost built in.
This goes for any “first” on your web site, this goes for your registration pages, sign up forms etc. if you lose people their you have likely lost them. On a related note check out this article I wrote a while ago called What Is Your Sign Up Form Telling People, seriously they can even be fun
Even when a customer is canceling an account it is an opportunity to engage in a positive way, even if it is just making it easy for them to cancel. This is in stark contrast to a lot of “retention” strategies that are designed to keep you on the phone, and pressure you into renewing when it’s the last thing you want.
I’ve been a customer of SEOMoz.org for about 6 months and it was only on canceling my account that I felt compelled to give them a recommendation, mainly because canceling my subscription was such a pleasant experience. Basically their subscriptions are handled through paypal currently, which as any paypal customer will know is hellaciously difficult to manage for the customer and really only lets you know you have a subscription when it renews, so anyway I picked up the phone and chatted with Gillian and she took care of it and even let me know they are working on a new billing system as they are unhappy with paypal for the exact reason i stated.
Hallelujah, Tech Crunch just reported that Technorati has made some drastic design changes and is commiting to support their core customers, ie. the blogger themselves. For the moment I don’t see very much evidence of real tools or support for bloggers but it is early days.
Last week I saw a demo of the new products, which CEO Richard Jalichandra and VP Engineering Dorion Carroll say reflect the company’s re-dedication to their core audience: bloggers and advertisers.
Hmm, I don’t like the “and advertisers” caveat, but hey, at least they got they have figured out who their customers are.
I wrote an article back in August called “can blogger save Technorati” and here were my list of feature requests:
Merging domain names of claimed blogs, I’m sick of having two scores for experiencecurve.com and blog.experiencecurve.com and i’m sure any wordpress and typepad folks would appreciate that one
A more meaningful multi-metric “authority” measure, who cares how many linked in the last 6 months, all that measures is link baiting
I’d definitely still like to see some of these features, currently the only thing that I see being evidence of their commitment to bloggers is the “blogger central” area of the new technorati site, which is really a collection of articles of interest to bloggers.
Columnist Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you’re looking to avoid.
It may not happen today, it may not happen tomorrow, but inevitably Facebook will experience a great big sucking sound as everyone moves on to the next big thing, it happened to AOL, Tribes, Friendster, and even to Myspace. The point is yes develop strategies and tools for leveraging Facebook, but as the old saying goes “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and don’t stop scanning the horizon for new and interesting ways to connect and more importantly empower your customers.
I made an effort this weekend to sort out my apartment, reorganizing closets, going through paperwork etc. Then I came across a couple of unopened Amazon.com boxes which I new contained a couple of “productivity books”. The first book was Dave Allen’s book Getting Things Done and the other was The Now Habit. After opening the box I took a look at the receipt inside and discovered that I had ordered both these books in March, and it was now mid November. I feared I may disappear in an ironic singularity, but unfortunately I stayed around, put the books to one side and posted the story to twitter.
Well I just got back from a weekend in Las Vegas and after 4 days there I have a much deeper understanding of the fear and loathing aspect of it. Believe it or not one of the high points of the trip was the flight on Virgin America, who just blew away all my expectations of what a short haul domestic flight can actually be. I travel a lot and have the same opinion about domestic airlines as I do credit card companies, and cell phone carriers, they are a necessary evil and the company, its policies or its employees will ruin your day on a regular enough basis to keep you just on the edge of cutting them off but you stick around for the points or because you know no one else is any better.
Now first off, let me just say, they have a regular 110 three pronged outlet on every seat, I could actually just stop there, they already blew me away. I sat on the plane with my cell phone charging while watching Battlestar Gallactica on my nicely charging Mac Book Pro, Hallelujah, but it doesn’t stop there.
Virgin has implemented some pretty amazing technology in the computer that is in the back of every headrest, and yes, it is a computer. I know because mine crashed and the flight attendent had to restart it. As it bootstrapped I felt like the girl in Jurassic part who’s looking at the computer screen saying “I know this, this is UNIX”, well actually it was Linux, but each one is it’s own terminal I guess. Yes it crashed, yes it’s beta, but things are looking great.
There are tonnes of things to explore like maps, movies, tv shows, music to select from, and even a “login” option so your preferences and playlists will follow you from plane to plane. The thing that I thought was totally cool was a whole rake of chat options. You could IM seat to seat, you could go in a chatroom for the whole plane, or a chatroom that was along side a tv show, totally awesome. Kind of helps alleviate the classic “seat lottery” of it being dependent on you actually sitting next to someone interesting, or yes hawt, with the chat hope springs eternal that you can find someone else interesting to talk to.
So not only can you chat with hotties through the computer, you can also order drinks, I’ve always hated it since they started charging for a drink on the plane the whole rigmarole of digging through your pockets for the money for a beer, and the attendents never having any change, or not able to take your credit card. Through the screen you can pick your beverages or snacks any time, slide your credit card through and your icy cold beverage or snack is there in two minutes, sure you pay a bit more, but your not dependent on the dreaded cart coming by on one of its slow circuits.
Oh and don’t let me forget the safety video… yes, the safety video, ever hear peals of laughter burst out on a plane during the safety briefing? I thought not, I’ve done a thorough search and I could not find it on youtube but it will not be long. I don’t know how long it will be funny for, but for the first time i was again, blown away.
These are some of the technological highlights if you like, the shiny bits, but the thing above all that set the Virgin experience way above the rest was the people. Every interaction I had with every member of staff was excellent. Yes they are new, and the staff are keen, but it’s obvious they are hiring for personality above experience, you know staff are empowered when they put their own spin on each interaction. When we were boarding the plane in the usual groups, in between groups the attendant said the next person to guess his age could get on
Even more extraordinary, the person sitting in the seat in front of me and my buddy was a one of Virgin America’s pilots. We had a very good chat with him, talking about the planes and the business, and asked some questions about the reward program. I asked about signing up for the rewards program after the fact and how to get credit for this trip and he said we could just use our boarding cards, then he gave us his business card with his email “in case we had any problems”, wow.
Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path has just posted a presentation on the topic “The Experience Is The Product” on slideshare, even better he has synced the recording of him presenting this in the UK. In this presentation Peter does a great job of explaining that the experience is everything, it’s the branding, it’s the marketing, and how often our approaches to design screw this up.
Peter will hate me for doing it because he tried to do the whole presentation without mentioning the ipod, but of course he had to, because it’s the best example of experienced centered design out there.
One thing I’ll add is that when people say “experience design” or “experienced focused design” a lot of people think “sensory orgy” or the “wow”. But it’s not about the wow, it’s actually about focusing on the broader experience beyond the product, beyond the use of the product, the system if you like. The experience is the system is probably another way of saying it. Way back in 2003 I wrote a post that is somewhat related called “Thinking Outside the Product”
You might also find this presentation interesting from Marc Rettig on the history of interaction design which illustrates the transition from task focused design to design that takes into account the broader experience.
but certainly closer to socialist than America where there is certainly no “tall poppy syndrome”
