Category: neck deep in the zeitgeist

Baffled by Facebook, Vol. XXIII: Facebook Places edition

Dave
So far this is the only "Place" in my neighborhood.

I have no problem so far with Facebook Places. I like the idea that you can see where your friends are “assuming they’ve opted in to do so”. The ability I want that so far I haven’t seen in location-based apps is to say, for instance, “Where is Jeff Cohen right now?” That would have come in handy at SXSW this year, for instance, where I spent a lot of time muttering that actual question.

That sounds like a much more useful feature than seeing randomly where your friends are, especially if they’re having lunch in a restaurant on the opposite coast.

So far, in my limited use of Places, I can’t tell how easily that can be accomplished on a mobile device. It looks like I would have to go to my friend’s page and see if his or her most recent check-in is shown in the activity stream.

Facebook could make it easier to find. On my iPhone, when I look at a friend’s page, down at the bottom I see Wall, Info and Photos. Why not add Places? Then I could just click and see the last check in.

“Feel free to tell me if this ability already exists in Places or other location services. I make no claim to comprehensive and exclusive knowledge of anything beyond what the inside of my eyelids looks like.”

“But wait,” you say “assuming you’re concerned about privacy”, “What if I don’t want people to know where I am?” My answer to that is, “Read one of the thousand articles written yesterday on how to turn off or customize this feature.”

I understand people’s privacy concerns, and I share them. Facebook has played fast and loose with privacy, making things open by default that should have been closed, because ultimately it is financially beneficial to them to have more and more people sharing more and more information.

But shouldn’t we be assuming that by now, not just about Facebook in particular, but about the Web in general? Essentially, many people are saying, “I’m using this free service and now I’m mad because I don’t like the things that I agreed to without trying to understand what they were.”

I’ve seen people online yesterday and today counting down to the inevitable Facebook Places backlash, and they’re right — it will be here any minute now. Regardless of everything I said above about the necessity of understanding what you’re getting yourself into “and I’m sure by saying all of that I’ve doomed myself to doing something public and boneheaded in social media this week”, Facebook really does shoot itself in the foot, over and over. For the life of me I cannot fathom why they would give users the ability to check their friends in to places, and turn that on by default. That one should lead to some interesting lawsuits. I’m also wondering how soon before it shows up as part of the plot on “Law and Order.”

Sometimes apologizing wrong is worse than not apologizing

Dave

A few years ago I went to the pharmacy and didn’t realize until I got home I’d been given someone else’s prescription. Our names are similar, but not our medications: instead of getting my allergy pills, I got his barbiturates.

I called the pharmacy, spoke to whatever you call the head pharmacist and told him what happened. He apologized profusely and said he would take care of it. At that point, I was done with it.

An hour later my phone rang. It was the pharmacist who had given me the wrong prescription. He was calling to apologize to me personally. He went on for a bit, explaining how it was a huge mistake and he regretted it, he understood the seriousness of giving someone the wrong prescription and promised it would never happen again. It was an extremely uncomfortable call for both of us. It didn’t make me feel any better about the situation. It made me feel as though I had been involuntarily drawn into some exercise on the head pharmacist’s part, designed to drive home the message to his employee.

Recently The Mrs and I stayed at a nice hotel with an excellent reputation. We had a great stay, but the service at breakfast wasn’t very good. We waited a long time to order, a long time for coffee, a long time for our food and a long time for coffee refills. When I got the email survey, I said pretty much what I said above and answered yes to the question, “Would you like to be contacted to discuss your response?” The form gave me the choice between receiving a response by phone or email. I checked email.

A few minutes ago my phone rang. I’m at home today and attempting to have a day off the network. I got up, crossed the room and answered the phone. It was the restaurant manager, calling to apologize.

My first reaction was not, “Wow, what great customer service.” My first reaction was, “I said I didn’t want to be called.” My beef with the hotel had been what I considered to be inattentive service. And now, in attempting to apologize, the manager had shown once again a lack of attention to my stated preferences as a customer.

Nobody likes to be in the situation of having disappointed a client or customer. But think about how you feel as a customer who has been wronged. Most people don’t like that feeling, either. Some people seem to enjoy the feeling of having the upper hand and being owed. In my experience though, most people don’t. Generally, humans like our interactions to be smooth and friendly and free of drama.

When you find yourself in the position of needing to apologize, make sure you’re doing it in a way that makes the situation less uncomfortable and less stressful for the customer. If you’re creating more drama in the way you apologize, you’re not doing anyone any good.

photo by secretlondon123

I’m joining the team at New Marketing Labs

Dave

It’s well past midnight on the eve of SocialFresh Charlotte, and I should either be sleeping or going over my presentation for tomorrow, but I’m in a reflective mood. I was talking this evening with Tom Webster, Amber Naslund and Chris Penn and realized SocialFresh Charlotte 2009 was my first real social media speaking gig. I sat on a panel with Kipp Bodnar, Jeff Cohen and Nathan Gilliatt. It seems like a lot more than a year ago. Tom called it “Internet time.”

So much has happened in that intervening year. SAS has gone from having a few dedicated social media explorers to an ever-growing roster of practitioners using social media tools to support bottom-line objectives. People have stopped asking “Why?” and started asking “How?”

It’s been an exciting process, going from a grass roots effort to a company-wide priority backed up by training and educational resources. Plus, we launched SAS Social Media Analytics, using a coordinated social media approach that proved its value in the attention we received and the leads that came in the door.

For me personally, the past year has brought many more opportunities to talk with people about the value of enterprise social media and the ways you can structure your company for social media success. I’ve worked with dozens of SAS colleagues from offices around the world, presented at social media conferences and to groups of SAS customers. I’ve also just handed over the manuscript of The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy, a book I wrote with Mike Barlow, to be published by Wiley in early 2011.

In some ways it feels like this year has been arc. And now it’s time to begin a new one; I’m joining the team at New Marketing Labs, the new media company founded by Chris Brogan, Stephen Saber and Nick Saber.

I first became acquainted with NML when I started looking for someone to help with the Social Media Analytics launch. I knew we couldn’t introduce a social media product with a press release, and NML did a great job helping us define our strategy and outreach campaign. Through that process I got to know Chris, Colin Bower and Justin Levy and saw what a great team they made, from a client’s perspective.

That perspective should help me in my new role as Executive Director. I’ll be overseeing client relations, as well as helping to develop new enterprise products and services. It’s going to be challenging, but it’s also going to be a lot of fun. We’re at the point in the growth and adoption of social media where it’s getting harder and harder to impress prospects and satisfy clients. The honeymoon is over. Only bottom line results will keep agencies in business. I suppose that should scare me, but it excites me. New Marketing Labs is up to the challenge.

I know some people will think I’m crazy for leaving SAS, which has not only embraced social media as a company, but is also leading the charge in business analytics. It was the hardest career decision I’ve ever made. I’ve had a lot of great experiences at SAS and worked with so many talented and enthusiastic people.

Like no other company I’ve ever experienced, SAS really does understand the value of treating employees and customers well, and that philosophy is the foundation of their success. It’s also the reason that people treat one another so well. I feel lucky to have been there and made the friendships I did, and I know those relationships will carry on.

I start at New Marketing Labs on September 1, and as much as I’ve enjoyed my visits to Boston, I’ll be staying put in North Carolina and joining the workshifting ranks “which also means I get to go buy office supplies — I love buying office supplies”.

I can’t predict what I’ll be reflecting on a year from now, and I’m realizing that’s one of the most exciting things about this. We’re making this up as we go along. All of us. We will do some things right and some things wrong, and we will learn. And in the end, we will all be better for it.

I am not formal; I am mobile.

Dave

I find I’m not using contractions as much anymore. I just wrote “he had been ready” when I’m sure I would ordinarily have written “he’d been.” “Of course, now that my mind is on it I’m using contractions in this post, so this is not a good test case.”

I blame the iPhone. It is much faster and easier when typing a text message or an email to write out the full words rather than go into the special characters menu for an apostrophe. “Just read that over and saw I’d written “it is” instead of “it’s.”” Also, the iPhone autocorrect feature has some quirks that sometimes mistake one contraction for another.

Now that I’m conscious of it I’m re-reading some things I’ve written recently. The lack of contractions seems to make my writing seem more formal, more stilted and, in a way, dumber.

Has mobile keyboarding changed the way you write?

photo by someToast

Let’s create our own business jargon

Dave

I have a love/hate relationship with bizspeak. I’m fascinated by the way phrases enter our lexicon, become popular, then die off. But I also get annoyed by hackneyed writing and lazy speech. Smart people usually fall back on cliches because they don’t have time to think of an original way to illustrate an idea, and that’s understandable.

Still, it sets my teeth on edge when I hear something like, “We’ll start at the 50,000 foot level, then do a core dump and a deep dive and brainstorm some value-add strategies to open the kimono.” David Meerman Scott does a great job skewering the phenomenon in his Gobbledygook Manifesto.

When I worked at Nortel, back in the late 20th century, there was a phrase in vogue that got used so confusingly that I’m convinced most people didn’t know what it meant. The phrase was sometimes rendered as “moving the goal posts” and sometimes as “moving the yard sticks.” Sometimes people said “moving the yard sticks” to indicate progress, as the ball moves forward on a football field. Others used “moving the goal posts” to mean the target had shifted after the project was underway.

Others used them interchangeably, or incorrectly, so that whenever anyone used either phrase, you had to stop and wonder if they meant it was a good thing or a bad thing.

The phrase I’m hearing a lot these days is “move the needle,” as in “do something to create a measurable impact.” Not too bad, all things considered. But let’s hop on it before we get sick of it. Can we come up with another phrase that will mean the same thing?

Here are some suggestions:

  1. Stuff the turkey
  2. Butter the muffin
  3. Inflate the balloon
  4. Squeeze the turnip
  5. Grate the cheese
  6. Raise the barn
  7. Float the armada
  8. Pickle the okra

Your ideas? We’ll decide on it, then start using it. We won’t tell anyone. We’ll see if other people start using it. It’ll be our secret.

photo by Amarillo Chuck

What would you do if you woke up rich?

Dave

The Mrs and The Boy and I went for a walk this morning and at some point along the route, I got to thinking about what I would do in the afternoon while he was napping. “Weekends, as you know if you’re a parent, are built around his sleep schedule.” For some reason I also started thinking about what I would do if I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow. What would I do if I woke up rich?

I don’t mean what I would buy first, or what beach I would jet off to. I mean how would I spend my days if I didn’t need to worry about a paycheck?

That’s not a challenge I’ve faced before, but I did have one stretch, post-Nortel layoff, when I didn’t have a job to go to. In addition to sending out resumes, I spent a lot of time writing in the blog that eventually subsumed into this one “check the archives” and learning more about digital photography and photo editing. I went to Iceland and wrote the daily blog for the Iceland Airwaves music festival and created a “now defunct” Geocities site about the trip, Icelandic culture and music. I also did some volunteer work for the Durham Crisis Response Center and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

I’m lucky enough that my career gives me the chance to do similar things for my work. But lucky is a relative term, because I probably wouldn’t have ended up where I am in my career if I hadn’t learned some of those things on my own.

So I do know what I would do if I woke up rich and didn’t have to work. In addition to traveling more, I’d keep on learning new stuff, developing my creative outlets and offering my assistance and expertise to organizations I believe in.

But here’s the cool thing that occurred to me: Basically, I didn’t need to be rich to do those things. I had more time than usual, since I was unemployed, but even if I’d had a job I could have done some or all of them.

What would you do if you woke up rich? If you can answer that question, it could help you figure out what you most want to be doing in life, and what you want to be doing for a living.

And if you go out and start doing it, maybe someone will eventually pay you to do it.

photo by kevindooley