Pre-Customer Service

It’s one thing to take care of a customer. It’s a very different thing to take care of someone who might become one.  It makes me wonder if this might be a potential growth area for many businesses, when it comes to customer acquisition.

[There is a significant disclosure made at the bottom of this post, FYI]

Recently, I made a mistake that is unique to our era – I left my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S2) in a cab, accidentally.  To make matters worse, I don’t know which cab company is responsible for the cab I left it in, despite swearing up and down to six different representatives that I was SURE it was their fleet.

This presented a couple of problems for me. One: I was less than a week away from the end of my previous job, which meant I was less than a week away from the end of my corporate cell plan – I was also up in the air about what my options were going to be in the near future, and was kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place; it’s difficult to be a digital strategist, let alone an urbanite in his late 20s, without a mobile.

I did what I usually do, when I’m running out of options… I asked the internet, by which I mean Twitter.

There were a few people who I was hoping to come to my rescue, but I definitely wasn’t expecting @RogersMelanie to reach out, for a couple of reasons. For one, I wasn’t a Rogers customer – my cell provider at the time was Bell. For another reason, I wasn’t even using any of the other services provided by Rogers – my internet access is via 3web, I prefer Netflix over cable, and I don’t have a home phone.

But Melanie reached out, and we exchanged a few DMs.  When she realized I was still looking at my options for mobile providers, she asked me if I’d be interested in trying out a Rogers LTE device, and seeing if the service was what I was looking for. There was no hard sell, no expectation of any kind in return, and without extracting any kind of promise that I would sign up.

To be blunt, this is the kind of customer service that got me raving about how great being an Apple customer was; with the crucial difference that I hadn’t spent an extra $300 on a warranty.

I completely understand that it’s beneficial to reach out to influencers (and I hesitate to label myself one), but this wasn’t part of any outreach campaign that I’m aware of. This was an attempt to build a connection by helping me out when I really needed the assist. 

And while I know there are probably a lot of people in my life who’ve given Rogers a hard time at one point or another regarding their Mobile business, I’ve been impressed by the experience. If someone were to ask me which provider they should go with at this exact moment, I’d ask them a dozen questions about what device they want, what their needs are regarding their plan, and what offers they’ve gotten via phone, and in person, through representatives.

But then I’d tell them that I’d recently had a great customer service experience with Rogers, without being a customer. 

[DISCLOSURE: At the time this occurred, I had no connection to Rogers whatsoever. However, earlier this week, I found out that my new employer counts Rogers as a client, and I will likely be doing at least some work on some of their initiatives in the future. I can guarantee that neither myself, nor the Rogers representatives I spoke to, were aware of this when any of the events above occurred, but to avoid any impropriety, I wanted to call this out explicitly.]

Minimum Effective Dose

The only thing that stuck with me, from the 3/4 of The Four Hour Body that I read (other than the knowledge that beans and lentils are actually kinda awesome) was the concept of the minimum effective dose.

Rather than looking at this as a medical or physical term, I’ve been thinking about it in all aspects of my life. As in: what’s the minimum effective dose for communication between friends to continue feeling connected and close? What’s the minimum effective dose for mainstream media for me to maintain an understanding of popular culture necessary to do my job well? What’s the minimum effective dose of research to ensure that I understand this project or target?

Or: what’s the minimum effective dose of marketing to drive our target to this action?

I find that people in this industry don’t often think about how little they can do, or how little they should do, to get things done. But sometimes a small, insidious impact is more meaningful than a massive, off-putting one. As much as I’m not a huge fan of subtlety as a concept, there’s something to be said for minimalism.

After all, no one attempts to demolish a building by creating a bomb big enough to have it explode - something of massive scale is moved instead by carefully placed charges, in just the right area.

And yet, the average large campaign is based entirely on the opposite principle: doing something engaging and/or clever, and then making it as omnipresent as reality or budget allows.

The benefit of minimum effective dose thinking isn’t just that it inherently saves budget, but that getting it to work requires more integration, not just between elements, but into the existing behaviour patterns of your target. And when you’re trying to have an impact without flooding the system, you generally need more small pieces, not one large attention-grabbing broadcast explosion.

The Presentist Manifesto.

The secret to understanding things is not in the future. It is in different elements of the present.

Given the rising respect and reach of ‘futurism’ as an approach, and futurist as a title, I felt it was necessary to point out my general approach.

To paraphrase William Gibson: the future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed.

As such, my standard approach to predictive thinking and decision making is to look to elements of the present that are not yet widely distributed, and examine why. Is it cost? Culture? Infrastrucure? And more importantly, how much is this scarcity, usually either temporary or artificial, impacting our standard interpretation of what this element does, or means?

We aren’t ready to predict the future, except as a sloppy acceleration or extension of trends we can already measure. However, we do not yet spend enough time trying to understand the present, and see what we’ve missed about how it interacts, and what it means.

Don’t worry about what’s going to happen in ten or fifteen years, excepting the direct outcomes of your actions (like excessive CO2 emissions). Worry about what’s going to happen in the next 12 or 24 months. That’s where the magic is with most planning cycles - being able to predict the climate at which your product or project will see the light of day.

Live, and think, in today. It’ll reward you.

Social Media Marketing and Pick Up Artists.

I realized this morning that about 50% of the brands I follow online are essentially characters from The Game. 

To explain better, sketchy social marketing follows the same process that pick up artists do:

1. find a complex process that some people are naturally good at (in this case, both variations on the human function of socialization). 
2. research successful variations of this process ‘in the wild’ in an attempt to find common patterns and steps that can be tested.
3. take your learnings, and build a few algorithmic approaches, to be tested in real life situations.
4. once you nail down the most statistically successful of these approaches, refine it, apply it constantly, iterate to improve, and continue to plug new variables into your equation with each new situation you meet.

My problem with this approach is that algorithms cannot adequately model realistic human behaviour. We’re still in the uncanny valley for making proper social behaviours, online or otherwise, a regimented process. 

In other words, only people make good people.

The reason I compare this to the world of pick up artists is simple: just because it works doesn’t make it less sketchy. In the same way someone teaching romantically hopeless men a method for picking up women will argue they are ‘leveling the playing field’, agencies and social media practitioners will say that having a tightly designated, non-human-style method of formulating and sharing messages is about ‘finding efficiencies’ and/or ‘representing brands properly’.

My issue with this is that it never ‘levels the playing field’. Much like having a bunch of sketchy guys at a party desperately trying their new techniques to find someone to take home, their increased rate of success ruins the environment. Introducing sketchiness into an ecosystem damages the ability of that ecosystem to respond positively to authentic human behaviour.

Or, once bitten, twice shy.

The solution, of course, is to do the opposite of create an algorithm. Practice exclusionary definition, and develop an actual personality.

This is where I tell you this post is part one of two.

Edit: find part two here

The complexity of explaining the intuitive.

I’d like you to conduct a little thought experiment with me.

Assume you and I are standing 10 feet apart, and I’m holding a soft NERF ball, approximately 25 cm in diameter.

I toss the ball to you, underhand, in a soft, lazy arc.

You have two options: You can either eyeball it, and catch the thing; or you can attempt to calculate the speed, angle, impact of wind, and gravitational effects to predict both where the ball can be caught, and how much grasping force you’ll need to hold on to it.

Why yes, I was intending to be absurd. Glad to know I pulled that one off.

What I’m trying to say is, often proving that a thing can be done, is much more difficult than actually doing the thing.

This is only a problem because, and I’ve only realized this in the last couple of years, I’ve spent my entire life in pursuit of intuitive understanding of systems and effects. I can explain the rules in broad strokes, and point to research, but inevitably I solve problems by looking at as much data as I can that is directly or tangentially involved in the problem, and then I arrive at a solution.

The next step, irritatingly, is to back-rationalize the solution, picking out every assumption I’ve made along the way to the insight or approach I’m running with, and then looking for evidence or supporting theories that I can use to get other people on the train with me.

I find this frustrating for an obvious reason: it doubles the workload, without actually adding anything (of value comparable to the effort expended) to the outcome.

In Cory Doctorow’s book For the Win, he mentions a concept called fingerspitzengefuhl, or fingertip-feel. In literal terms, it’s the idea of having the world resting against the nerve-dense tissue at the end of a finger, and being able to sense every little tremor on that globe. It’s an artful word, and it’s a concept that I think, in part, pairs very well with that of systems thinking.

To understand something so well that you can LOOK at it and see the problem, that is magic to me, in large part because I’m an intuitive person. I do poorly with rules, but I do very well with perceiving flaws, and seeing where the potential for correction exists.

At the end of the day, it’s substantially simpler to understand something than it is to explain it.

Understanding can come simply from observation, immersion, experience. You need to delve into how something works, but you can use your unconscious mind to fill in some of the blanks.

Explanation requires breaking down your understanding into a digestible model, finding a way of explaining that digestible model, and then providing evidence for every non-obvious element of that digestible model.

You also generally need to explain things in a way that doesn’t require any pre-existing understanding of the subject matter. Which, when dealing with truly complex (rather than just complicated) issues, can be nearly impossible.

There are clear issues with what I’m saying here, foremost among them being the arrogance of stating that ‘just getting it’ should not be interrupted by a need to justify every decision, but it comes from the same central point as the defence of creative arts - some things are too complex to explain well consciously. And in the attempt to work in reverse (or in the accepted direction), to move from data to assumptions to justifications to an idea or plan, all true understanding and complexity is removed.

Ask someone to build an algorithm that will correctly intuit human emotion, or the details of a moving biological body, or even music, and they will be hard pressed to generate something that passes an initial inspection. But we ask that people develop plans and strategies to influence human behaviour on a mass scale, and we ask that they do it by trying to reduce their understanding of a system to a spreadsheet.

I understand the rationale, but I admit I also find it exhausting, at times. I’d rather pursue the ability to feel what is and isn’t working like it’s on the tip of my finger, than pursue an approximate, ever-more-obsolete, model of behaviour.

the (potential) tragedy of twitter.

In a recent post, I argued that Twitter wasn’t a social network; it is a communications platform. That the minds behind Twitter didn’t understand that their initial actions were moving them away from network or destination status, or didn’t care, is quickly becoming the tragedy.

Twitter is making a series of bold, not quite inspiring, not very noble-looking moves, to undo their own history.

The latest of these moves is the (as yet) unconfirmed acquisition of Tweetdeck. While some are calling a $40 million purchase price an indicator of a bubble, I’d argue it is something different. An indicator of desperation is more accurate… Because Twitter is one of the leading examples of a startup that didn’t need to have a plan to make money yet, because it was going go build a community.

Twitter seems to have realized that it’s not going to create a model that isn’t based on owning destinations.

Twitter’s main innovation in business model was inviting developers to help them define what the platform was, what the norms of the user experience were, and what the potential future of Twitter as an experience was. Twitter was rightly praised for this, it was gamechanging thinking, taking one of the most powerful parts of opensource and internalizing it.

And now that the platform, experience and future have been defined, Twitter has decided to renege on the deal, and try to take that control back, by complicating the developer experience, discouraging 3rd party clients, and buying the leading players in the space, those with the biggest installed user base.

Twitter became a platform, and invited people to create it. Twitter is attempting to become a series of destinations; a pro app (Tweetdeck), a consumer level app (formerly Tweetie) and a web app (Twitter.com). By limiting access as much as possible to those access points, it becomes a company that can sell reaching users as the point of contact.

The tragedy is that we’re losing the best example of an open social platform, rather than a closed social experience. And we should have seen it coming. We should have seen it coming because Twitter wanted to be a business, and didn’t know or care how to make money to support itself.

That, in an of itself, is the best indicator of ideals and behaviours earmarked for retraction.

It’s not about sharing, it’s about publishing.

Social media isn’t about sharing. It’s about publishing. Sharing is just the method of publishing that requires the least creativity, originality, time or effort.

And people confusing the incidence of sharing with the importance of publishing in regards to social media, are a large part of why so many of today’s campaigns completely miss the mark.

Publishing has become the predominant form of communication in our networked culture. Facebook is the best example of this: the service is as much about conducting your social life, as it is about recording your social life. By this I mean Facebook incorporates publishing into communication – this is what social media has shown us resonates with people; not sharing, but creating a durable record of a life as it is lived.

This model of behavior explains the major successes of social media: MySpace was a chance to build a record not only of your interests, but of your friends, social interactions, and exchanges. As much as blogging has caught on as a news / editorial format, it’s greatest participation has come from people treating it as an individual, and public journal – a record of a life as it is lived.

Twitter is a perfect example of this: while sharing links is popular, the majority of tweeting is conversational and observational – not ‘this is my lunch’ but ‘this is what I think, how I feel, who I talk to’.

Social media made conversation something indexable, rather than ephemeral. And you’re still talking about sharing.

Sharing is the lowest common denominator of publishing. It’s not creation, and it’s not (always) curation. Sharing is merely trying to build an association between yourself and a piece of found culture, within your audience / peer group. Sharing isn’t about the value of the content, it’s about the meaning the content bestows on the one sharing.

Building a social strategy around sharing, as opposed to around publishing, is limiting your success criteria to whether or not your brand is aspirational for your target. And while sharing can work fantastically if you can create brilliant content, or serve as cultural shorthand for a positive attribute, those are a lot of balls to keep in the air, rather than letting your brand facilitate and encourage the urge to publish.

This comes down to the core point: being shareable is about being interesting and dead easy to distribute. Being publishable is about being relevant to the point of inclusion in someone’s personal narrative, as they edit it.

Sharing is the weakest and least meaningful form of publishing as the concept applies to social media. Look past it.

Calling Bullshit on ‘Gamification’ as a Buzzword.

I resolve to stop being impressed by comments about gamification unless we all agree that games need more than points and a leader board and awards.

Points are great for tracking progress, but the number in the corner of my book goes up the closer I get to the end. A book isn’t a game, regardless of that rising number.

A leader board is a great way to tell who’s winning, but the NYT best seller list is a very well respected and highly monitored leader board - and a book STILL isn’t a game.

You get awards for doing things. You get rewards for doing hard things, or thankless things, or valuable things. I used ‘award’ because most gamification consists of stuff like badges (like foursquare), that acknowledge action, but not necessarily accomplishment.

People play games for the challenge, for the narrative, for the thrill of accomplishment, for entertainment, avoidance, escapism, and action.

Gluing points to a social network isn’t a game layer - competition is not inherently gaming.

I’d argue that gamification requires the introduction of (at least some) the following elements into something that doesn’t, by its nature, need to posess them: narrative*, skill development, challenges, a managed and intentional learning curve, fun, and a sense of interaction.

The last one requires some explanation: I don’t mean social interaction - games can be played alone. I don’t mean interactivity, a game need not react to you. But games need to ‘force’ you to react to what happens in them, whether by narrative, by emotional appeal, or by pure irritation. The elements that people call gamification, including awards, rankings, and points, are ways to encourage interaction, to keep you playing; they are the carrot and stick of a game, they are not the essence of a game itself.

*By narrative, I don’t mean a conscious story. But, for example, in a game of tic tac toe, there is two players, conflict, a goal, rising action, victory, and denouement. Same deal with solitaire, to a point. Special status for repeatedly using an application isn’t a narrative, it’s a trackable history. Narratives attach emotion to action. Games, in my estimation, always have the possibility of narrative.