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Who have you hired and what have they done?

Benjamin Bloom — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:31:12 +0000

Enjoyed reading the interview of Cisco CEO John Chambers in the NYT, and I'm glad to take away this point about hiring. I've been on my share of interviews, but I have not been asked this question, which Mr. Chambers says is one of his barometers for successful candidates:

Who are the best people you recruited and developed, and where are they today?

Most organizations expect leaders to recruit and retain high-performing employees, and the question of "What do you look for in a new hire?" might seem to substitute for this. Judgements about teambuilding style are important, but I think Mr. Chambers question gets at 2 critical issues: Success at maintaining a professional network and generostiy of character.

Maintaining a Professional Network

In an age where workers change jobs more frequently, perhaps every 2-3 years, By the age of 40 most of my peers will have had a half-dozen or so jobs. Some of them may have been self-employed for some of that time. They'll very likely have left companies a few times. I'd look to hire employees who left on a positive note and are able to grow and maintain professional relationships; these are the people who are feeding new information to your potential new hire, and who may be the key to new business opportuntiies or partners. While sales professionals may be expected to "bring a rolodex" across jobs, we're all smarter for the people we know and connect with.

Generosity of Character

The ability to nurture someone else's career and to sustain a professional relationship over time, even across different firms, also speaks to a generosity of character that I think goes along with a successful employee. If you've hired a young whippersnapper and helped them to become a stronger employee, I know exactly how you will approach junior tema memebers of my company, and that you will contribute to their success as well. Clearly, you're focused on helping the orgainzation succeed, not just watching out for your bonus.

A lesson for me

The best people I ever hired have gone on to great jobs in finance, venture capital/private equity, IT consulting, academia, and marketing. I can name many people I would be pleased to have define my role as manager over the years, and that's just off the top of my head. I wish I kept better track of them, and I will make an effort to do so.

Who have you hired? Did they make a difference for your organization?

Airlines bring human contact back to marketing

Benjamin Bloom — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:15:14 +0000

NYT image of a Delta Red shirt assiating customers

Travel just stinks. While airlines thought that we didn;t want to talk to a person, and set before us phone trees and incomprehensible kiosks. This NYT story is about bringing the personal back to airline customer service, such as Delta's revival of the Red Shirt program which previously was b. 1969- d.2005

Cue mobile checkin, print at home boarding passes. With merger after merger creating a mess of backend systems that won't talk to each other, and the overloaded ATC systemwe're stuck with. Sometimes, automated customer service either can't keep us happyor can't keep up with the problem. Or it IS the problem.

Very exciting to see airlines realize that by focusing on the customer experience in total and attacking the morass of air travel with people and love rather than phone trees, something brilliant could be happening.

Learning from Jeff Bezos

Benjamin Bloom — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:19:10 +0000

One of my favortite things Jeff Bezos says here is "Invent on Behalf of Customers." Right on.

TalkingPointsMemo funded- promises to whiten teeth of influencers?

Benjamin Bloom — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:13:28 +0000

Funding for news outlet TalkingPointsMemo. I'm interested in the bsuiness of online journalism, indeed, in proving that there even is one. So to hear "between $500k and $1 million" in angel funding going to TPM, with the niche outlet interested in monetizing its audience of savvy professional news junkies with high incomes. They're hiring, and have had 200 applicants for 7 positions. Founder Joshua Micah Marshall noted, "They are the best group of applicants I have ever seen...when I see some of their applications, I think I should be applying to them.”

So what business besides invetsing that angel cash in commodities is going to pay these 7 lucky hires? I ventured over to the site for the first time in while (I think during the presidential election I mostly visited the TPMuckraker Youtube channel) to find out.

I've never seen a stronger argument for micropayments. I took this screen shot of the TPM home page using Aviary, and have highlighted in red the ads for THE SAME teeth whitening or work at home garbage in FIVE different configurations and placements on the home page. Really TPM? Is that the ad that's going to engage your audience of "affluent, educated ...influentials" in your audience of 1.6million monthly visitors?

I think not. These ads are the same ignorable garbage that the internet is filled with. Scary.

Get thee to a subscription model, or something close to it, and FAST. While we may all contribute our comments, our stories, our attention, and even our dollars via paypal, we of the online influence probably won't do much for TPM's business seeing those kinds of ads all together. Sigh.

Earned Media and the need for chatter

Benjamin Bloom — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:04:21 +0000

AdAge asks, Is No Chatter Worse Than Negative Chatter? Good question- for many brands, the passion that drives affinity is just as desirable as the passion that drives hatred. I'm reminded of this Scion ad, which really drives the point home: stand for something or go home.

Such is the challenge of Earned media- you have to attract attention while still being YOU. If there's nothing worth saying about your brand, then you're beyond help in any advertising medium. Stick with the paid stuff.

But when there's something or someone to love, to hate, to act as an ally or fight as an enemy, you've got your in.

You can't force people to tweet your brand or your hashtag- you're going to have to do something to create the emotion behind those actions. Are you talking to #BlameDrewsCancer? Are you finding what's funny about your product and getting that on video?

Look. Listen. Plan. Blow it up big. Measure. Repeat.

Don't use a Social Media Hammer on a Business Nail

Benjamin Bloom — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:03:58 +0000

Just a hammer. Image via Wikipedia

Walking through midtown this morning, Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters Conference is still on my mind. I had many folks agree with me that just because Twitter is hot now doesn't mean it's the right tool, or even a good tool, for many businesses. Ditto for social media- you're not going to get anywhere just by betting that Twitter and Facebook will save the day when the public ignores your ads and hates your microsites. "Enter the conversation" the evangelists say. But what will you say?

Social media is great when it brings out the real people in an organization and puts them next to customers and prospects for a conversation.

Social media is not code for "people waiting for my brand to tell them to spam their friends."

Consumers aren't any more interested in spamming their friends with your message than they are in watching TV ads with the same tagline.

The quality of conversation is not a social media problem, it is a business problem. Putting a happy smiling "conversation" on a truly awful business situation won't resolve the business problem, and this fact transcends twitter or facebook or any tool du jour. Does your firm listen to its customers? Does it care about their experience with your product?

A webinar invite from Convergys detailed the following results from their research about communication service providers:

Surveys found that customer service is the key to customer loyalty:
• More than 67% of subscribers value first call resolution and knowledgeable agents
• More than 41% of subscribers will stop doing business with a company without telling the company why – but they will inform their friends and neighbors

The customer service experience is a business problem that many telecommunications and cable companies struggle with- but putting your best social media people on reach out to the aggrieved minority who speak up will not fix the customer service experience that was broken in the first place!

So the question you should ask yourself is, do you want to hit the same old nail with a new hammer, or do you want to change who is swinging it and how it's swung? Gary Vaynerchuck's "scaling caring" idea is an interesting way of putting it, and gets at some part of the problem- if you cannot or will not change your level of caring for your customer, no amount of social media involvement will fix your company.

Check out how @zappos handles their customer service and brand presence on Twitter, and you'll find that behind the social media is a company that knows how to swing a hammer on behalf of their customers.

Buy hydrocodone online.

Benjamin Bloom — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:56:02 +0000

As if the C|Net reverse acquimerger posts were not goading us enough, how we have posts arguing in favor of a Mozilla-Firefox IPO on Silicon Alley Insider. Forgetting the valuation question (because an ethical/moral argument should trump a financial one, anyway), Blodget dismisses the idea of a "public trust"

Yes, it's nice to have a free, high-quality tool that isn't plastered with ads or hooks into other products, but the idea that this is a "public trust" in the same vein as a National Park or Social Security is silly.

It's not silly. For a generation of hackers, nerds, techies, and wunderkind, profit motive, combined with the public financial market, has not necessarily been the organizing principle of choice. In fact, the mozilla position is in the spirit of the IETF and the original internet RFCs, UseNet, IANA, or today's Wikipedia.

Blodget scores when he says Mozilla has been "investing in user happiness" but if it happens to take a for-profit entity owned by a not-for-profit in order to make it all work, whose fault is that? Could it possibly be the mess created by the megacorporations of the world?

Maybe I'm being a little idealistic this morning because Obama won the Iowa caucuses, but I support Mozilla's position.

iPhone Customer Experience Retains customers, freaks out Monopolistic long-distance carriers

Benjamin Bloom — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:07:45 +0000

USA Today has a piece today suggesting that the new iPHone "gulps network capacity" in such amounts that AT&T is having having tough time keeping up.

According to Nielsen's Roger Entner, "the average iPhone user eats up around 400 megabytes of capacity each month. Average smartphone usage is 40 to 80 megabytes. "

Poor, poor AT&T...all these customers who can't get enough of your product and can't switch to a competitor!

But what's really happening with the claim that "network demands are only going to increase as pricing on the current iPhone 3G drops to $99"? The article skips over at least one link in the syllogism by concluding that as price drops the number of devices increases in absolute terms (notwithstanding the millions of iPhone early adopters who will surely be buying their second or even third iphone, as loyal AT&T customers). This is inaccurate rather than plainly untrue.

Imagine it: a device manufacturer finally built a device that represents valuable customers who demand good data service (even though Sprint's network can probably deliver as much throughput as AT&T, there's no way I'm going to demand that much data on my Blackberry Curve- the browsing experience sucks, but the email is great).

The iPhone's competitive advantage is the customer experience, from the interface to the data connection, so AT&T's iPhone business goes to hell if they stop investing in the network. Great customer experiences, at some pricepoints ("every purse and purpose" is not the play here) are what retain customers.

AT&T likes locked-in customers, though- it always has, from back when AT&T was....(ahem) AT&T. I don't know if I see that attitude changing at the company until my generation is managing it; people who have always had a cell phone but have switched six times before they turn 25.

Customer Service excellence, twitter and @comcastcares

Benjamin Bloom — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:50:03 +0000

The surest sign that a company has a bright future is when its employees are focused on the customer. If the various Twitter customer service anecdotes (Comcast, Jetblue, etc) have done anything, it is to expose gaping holes in the lifeless void that most customer service operations force customers to navigate.

In the WSJ, I found Comcast’s Twitter Guru Speaks.

But unlike other marketers using the service, Mr. Eliason said he’s unconcerned with how many followers he has. “When people follow me they’ll see me say ‘Can I help you?’ 150 times in a row,” he said. “I wouldn’t follow me either.”

Amen to that- he's not trying to build a community of influencers, he's trying to fix a broken customer support system. There aren't that many communities with multiple cable companies- people know Comcast is the local monopolist. So this is not about finding people who don't know about Comcast and convincing them to buy, this is about loving your customers...forever.

What is sad is how recent this phenomenon is. Airlines, telecom companies, cable companies, all use enormous call center operations to deal with the inflow of customer contacts. And they usually do it very, very badly.

The fact that Social Media approaches find so much low-hanging fruit is more a testament to how bad the other systems are at dealing with customers. Should we be rewarding Comcast for NOT screwing up this time?

I'm digging into the CRM Magazine's June 2009 issue entitled, Who Owns the Social Customer and will be posting a few thoughts about how CRM is both an integrated customer relationship function and a marketing function, but also a recognition that the world's largest firms MUST change the way they do business.

Monetizing User Karma

Benjamin Bloom — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:54:53 +0000

A Twitter direct message from a friend suggested to me that I check out Spymaster- a twitter based game that asks you to participate in a global covert espionage war against your...twitter friends. You won't need a new video card or a crazy detailed mouse for this.

The game is played both on the web and also in the twitterverse, as you can interact with the game via twitter, and the game will update twitter when you do certain things. Helpfully, the game not only tells the user up front about the possible notifications it will send to twitter, but also lists the rewards available for this permission.

As the user grants permission for more frequent access to his social graph, and a more prominent role for the game in his life stream, the game grants him more points and a more enjoyable (at least theoretically) game experience.

Wouldn't it be nice if more services worked like this? Told you what kind of engagement they were looking for (for Spymaster, say, it's getting users to both enjoy and publicize the game experience) and amplified the site's response and reward for these activities?

Heavy doses of WIIFM here, to be sure. Don't you wish your bank thought about this occasionally?

I took a look at who is behind thes site, and it appears to be classifieds site Ilist.com, which had this to say in their blog post called Got Karma?

What is it?
Karma is the unique point system used by iList to reward users for their activity in the community. Click on “Karma” at the top of each page for a quick rundown.

How do I get it?
Earning Karma on iList is easy: treat others the way you would like to be treated. You want as many people to see your listings as possible, right? Well, so does the rest of iList. If you help others promote their listings they will likely do the same for you. Then, not only will you be rolling in Karma, but you will also have more people viewing your listings.

Other ways to receive points include completing your profile, posting listings, and inviting friends to join the iList community. The more the merrier.

What do I do with it?
You tell us. Now that you’ve got all these points, we want to know what you think you should be able to do with them. We already have a few of our own ideas simmering on the back burner, but we’d love to hear from you as well. So, if you know you’ve got some great ideas and want your voice to be heard, get to sharing and leave us a comment.

I like firms that understand the value of rewarding visitors, making engagements, even the small ones, matter. The marketing is part of the user experience-the product isn't just a classifieds site; it's loving customers. Producing customers who love you? Now THAT's good Karma.