Customer Crossroads

What makes for compelling community sites? Air Miles has some good ideas.

Now that everyone's getting in on the community thing, it's certain that only the appealing will survive.

But which sites will be appealing enough to attract a crowd that comes back again and again?

Air Miles has now launched a community site. This seems like a potential winner, since some people are pretty passionate about points collecting.

Browsing the discussions, I learned that you can collect points simply by searching on Yahoo. Which is a fascinating concept all by itself... I presume this works for Air Miles because of data mining possibilities.  Which would turn some people off, but not dedicated collectors.

They have a place where you can post pictures of your trips taken on points, which is kind of a fun idea.

The home page has a scrolling list of things people have purchased with miles. Darren from Ontario just got an 8MB iPod Touch for 3150 miles. These items are clickable, and take you to the purchase page.

A lot of thought has gone into this site, to make it engaging. I bet it creates a stronger commitment to collecting and using miles among community members.

It's a good example of why you need a few things in place if you want a vibrant community:

[1] Understand your audience. You are probably not aiming to serve the average here, look first at your raving fans.
For example, one of the tips shared on the site is to have an extra Air Miles card in the glove compartment of the car as a back-up in case you forget the one you always have with you. Now that is a fan. That is the person you want to attract and keep happy.

[2] Set some objectives for the site. What value will it bring users? What value will it bring you? 
Air Miles says "Learn Tips and Tricks. Discuss Ideas. Share Memories." This is really well defined, and the site supports these promises.

[3] Add a number of ways to interact and engage users. If it's boring, no one will come back. In addition to the features noted, I saw instant polls, highlighted tips, and similar eye-candy here and there.

Getting a new community going is difficult. One of the problems is that members ask questions and no-one answers them. This is where a moderator can come in handy. For example, Monique is looking for a place to stay in New York near Rockefeller Plaza. She posted the question on March 19. No one has responded. But surely a moderator could have answered this question, and should have. Monique is probably already disappointed. And seeing this kind of dangling question may discourage others from posting.

So when you build your community site, have a real plan. Why would anyone want to spend time there when there are plenty of other places to go.

Improved local search is coming soon to a smart phone near you

 
I was looking for maps of local meeting places (aka Starbucks) one day recently, and found this great little tool called FindbyClick. It looked like something I could really use, and I was excited to see it had mobile download availability. Just not for my Blackberry. Darn.

This prompted a quick e-mail to the company, which resulted in a delightful conversation with Kevin MacDonald, head of the location-based product group at developer Pentura.

FindbyClick was a media darling for a brief period when it was first introduced, but is not the main line of business for this IT development company. Nevertheless, it has a place in the hearts of the team, and is still in line for some development.

"My dream is to tap into the community, to help take content that would be of interest to others, and to use this content to create a social network on a map," Mr. MacDonald says.

He observed that a challenge for all mapping services, whether Google Maps, MapQuest or TomTom, is that "they have a lot of stale data."  He had hoped to build enough of a community that people would go in and correct incorrect data. This did indeed happen in some instances. "We had one guy who had a Wal-Mart obsession," who did considerable work tagging and moving points around to their correct locations. Another individual provided many of the locations and tags for Starbucks in Hong Kong.

Mr. MacDonald believes that the launch of FindbyClick was "a little ahead of the curve." IPhone had not yet been released, and mobile device capability was constrained. At the time this service was built, only Nokia had the capacity to put such an application on their phones.

Subsequently the firm has worked with a number of major organizations on location-based applications, including Google.

Maps as information sources

You can learn a lot from mapping. For example, Mr. MacDonald notes that Manhatten is covered with Starbucks, but New Jersey has almost none. We speculated that perhaps New Jerseyites were more of a Dunkin Donuts crowd. Or perhaps they get their Starbucks at work, not in their home neighborhood. You can tell alot about the people in an area by the stores and services in the area.

The future of mapping is definitely bright

Mr. MacDonald agreed with me that push marketing to your mobile device is not likely to be appealing to many people -- the "turn around now for a great deal" kinds of applications that were forecast a decade ago.

Instead, what he sees is the potential for predictive functionality based on an individual's own tags. So my phone might tell me about things that are similar to what I have already expressed interest in. If I have tagged a lot of delicatessens on my maps, my phone might find additional delis for me from the lists of things others have tagged. This feels something like Del.icio.us functionality brought to a map, and that would be excellent.

Another limitation has been the lexicon of descriptions available to tag a given location, which Mr. MacDonald likens to working with a limited vocabulary. In the future we will have more free-form searching, instead of being limited to a specific set of tags.

FindbyClick will launch a new version in 2009, "with more data, more content, and content more personalized to you."

Experience design implications

So many of the things we want are local. And the web has not been very good at local search. When we are looking for a hair salon, we want one that's convenient. Even more for a drycleaner. Same thing for a daycare, a dentist, or a framing shop. Sometimes it's urgently local, as is the case with a gas station or a bank machine.

With local search and mapping getting better, and with smart mobile devices ready to help, we will all be able to get out from behind our desks more and find the places we need. If your company has any kind of physical presence, you will want to be considering how you will take your place in these interactive maps.

Resources:

Pentura Solutions Inc.-- an IT consulting firm that developed FindbyClick

Google Maps Mania --  a blog about Google Maps. Here's their story about FindbyClick

FindbyClick the blog -- Kevin MacDonald's blog

Predictable novelty keeps things appealing

I was reading in the paper that it has now been proven scientifically that a television program is more interesting if interrupted with commercials.

We adapt quickly to pleasurable experiences, according to Prof. Leif Nelson of UC San Diego, who conducted the study. So the brief interruption of the advertisement enhances the program. (Unless it has a fast-moving, complicated plot. Hello 24.)

In other research, Dr. Nelson has found that interruptions of an unpleasant experience similarly increase the unpleasantness. 

There are a couple of implications for experience designers. First, when you have something unpleasant, try to get it over with in one session. Example: returning goods for refund.

More generally, I think we need to bring some novelty into good experiences that are predictable, just to break them up a bit and reduce the adaptation. This is why seasonal specialties add so much to the experience in restaurants and coffee shops. We have the pleasure of anticipation of seasonal treats, but don't have them on the menu long enough to get fully adapted to them, and therefore bored.

I think of this as predictable novelty. We like novelty, but not too much. We like small surprises, small delights that exceed our expectations. But we do want to be able to rely on those expectations a bit, too -- things that are complete novelties are difficult to navigate, and generally not pleasurable at all.

For another example, consider artists that completely break with artistic traditions -- they often receive a cold welcome from the public and from art critics, who need time to understand the new thing in order to enjoy it.

The completely predictable is boring. But the completely novel is unsettling. Predictable novelty is pleasurable.

Dr. Nelson has a number of interesting papers on his web site at UC San Diego.

Can innovation be predictable and reliable or not?

I really enjoy James Gardner's posts on Bankervision. He recently posted about receiving a clever bit of marketing from Adobe, and threw out this remark at the end of the post:

"Here is a demonstration of the real power of innovation: it generates something unique that causes potential customers to change their behaviour.

The holy grail of innovation teams, of course, is to find a way of doing so reliably and predictably."

This remark created quite a stir among the readers and commenters. The commenters seemed to be of the view that "if it's innovative, it's not predictable."

It's a Myth!

I would argue that a good innovation process in an organization takes you to a place where the process and culture produces innovation in a predictable and replicable way. Any given concept or idea may or may not work, but the process over time does indeed work.

It's one of the myths of innovation that it has to rely on creative and unpredictable bursts from exceptional individuals, and that this is the price to be paid for innovation. 

I have tried to capture what I mean in the scribbles above. An innovation process needs to identify the challenge. And there are good processes to do that, even if your problem starts off poorly defined.

Your process then should generate ideas against that target. You don't expect every idea to hit the bulls eye. But you can quickly eliminate the stuff that is way off target.

As you move forward through a process of generating ideas and testing ideas, you bring in the body of knowledge from the organization and any experts you have found to help you. This might be operational information, risk analysis, or -- my personal favorite -- insights into your customers.

Drucker on innovation: it's hard work, not genius

Peter Drucker, who seems to have said it all first, said that most successful innovations arise from "a conscious, purposeful search for innovation opportunities, which are found only in a few situations."

Drucker identified seven situations that are ripe with opportunities for innovation:

[1] Unexpected occurrences

[2] Incongruity

[3] Process needs

[4] Industry and market changes

[5] Demographic changes

[6] Changes in perception

[7] New knowledge

Drucker takes the position that innovation based on new knowledge has the longest lead time and is the least predictable. The article cites numerous examples of innovation that are a refreshing change because they are older, but wonderful examples. He discusses the creation of the first commercial banks as an innovation, as well as the creation of the first computer.

"Above all, innovation is work rather than genius. It requires knowledge. It often requires ingenuity. And it requires focus. ... If diligence, persistence and commitment are lacking, talent, ingenuity and knowledge are of no avail."

I'm not that crazy about his seven categories, because they don't evoke the examples very well for me. But I don't have better ones.

Once we take this disciplined approach, certainly there will be failures. But they should not be random like shotgun blasts. If we take a disciplined approach to creativity and innovation, we stand a chance of managing the risks of failure. And in this way, I think there is replicability and predictability. But it's a statistical kind of thing, not a sure bet.

What do you think?

Resources:

The Discipline of Innovation, by Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review 1985. Republished August 2002 with the compilation, The Innovative Enterprise.

Yes, I forgot my password and my ID. Please don't punish me.

Just booked a flight on WestJet. Who is a pretty user-friendly company. But today it took me longer to update my profile than to select and buy the tickets. ARGGGH!

After booking the flights, when I said "yes, remember my information" for the next trip, I was sent to create a profile. It turns out there is already someone in the system with the same first name, last name and e-mail address. [Creepy. Wait, maybe it's actually me.]

Usually when you see something like this, you get a link that says, "Are you Susan Abbott?", and you can escape profile Hell. Not this time. Instead, I entered into a Kafkaesque process with multiple steps, each of which had to be confirmed by really complicated CAPTCHA words. I had to redo those a few times too.

Finally, my user ID is revealed!  So I try to finish updating the profile so I can save time in the future. [Wait, wasn't that why I did the first profile?]

Turns out they have no special question on file for me, so they can't validate who I am, and will not let me in. But they kindly offer to "Expire the Profile" for me. [I'm not kidding. This is enough of an issue for them that they have an option like this.] Killing off my former self also requires multiple steps, including an e-mail link and more confirmations.

After which, I can start all over to create a new profile and hopefully save time in the future.

They still don't want me to use my e-mail as an ID, because it is being used by another customer. Okay, that's just too bizarre. I thought we killed off that other person...

So now I can't link my recent ticket booking to the profile. And there's no way to correct this. I guess their CRM system is stuffed with this kind of noisy data. I imagine management team meetings where people wonder why x% of ticket bookers have no profile, and what this means. 

It occurs to me that the productivity problem we keep hearing about may actually be related to profile updating, lost IDs and passwords.

When this happens with a brand I have a weak relationship to, I just say forget it, and I bet you do too. However, I kind of like WestJet, and will probably travel with them again in the future.

Seriously, WestJet, you can do better than this.

**************************************************************************
Just check out this un-WestJet-like Expire notice. Who wrote this thing?

THIS IS AN AUTO GENERATED EMAIL.  PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.

 A request has been made to expire a westjet.com profile that is associated to this email address.  The information contained in or attached to this e-mail is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, or a person responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by replying to the message and delete the message from your computer.  Any  form of reproduction, dissemination, copying, disclosure, modification, distribution and/or publication of this message without our prior written consent is strictly prohibited.

 

Please click the link below to expire your profile with westjet.com.

***************************************************************************

How we present ourselves to the world: manage your wardrobe, manage your social media presence

Culture is so pervasive that you must respond to it in some fashion. You can't refuse to play, because refusal to play is a response.

Consider clothing and personal appearance. Regardless of what you do, you are making a statement. The statement might be investment banker, hip grandmother, organic farmer, or a thousand other statements with lots of nuance.

I was at a new millenium kind of event called Podcamp recently. Very cool free conference that was about things like podcasting, social media measurement, and building online communities. Here's a shot of the opening introduction to the conference.

I noticed a number of behaviors that really stood out in this subculture. For example, in every session there were people sitting on the floor with their Mac plugged in. The plug-in part may be incidental, I'm not sure. A lot of people were wearing t-shirts with provocative slogans. Even though it was sweltering, a number of people were wearing a toque, including one of the presenters. Then there were people like me who were clearly pretenders in geekdom. No toque. No Mac. No iPhone. No t-shirt slogan.

Many of these folks probably think they just don't care much about clothing. But they are wearing the identifying marks as surely as if they were wearing a pinstripe suit on Bay Street.

[Yes, yes, you are saying, but how does this connect with social media Susan? I'm getting to that right now.]

Social media has already become so pervasive that we now have to manage our social media presence just like we manage every other aspect of how we present ourselves to the world.

This trend is important enough that there are now tools being created to help you manage your multiple online profiles.Or search the profiles of others. Example: Profilefly and  Ex.plode.us.

Other tools help you stay on top of Twitter, such as Thwirl, or TweetDeck. But this is only the beginning.

Andrew Crighton posted about the challenge of having real friends versus Facebook friends. Some people are starting to maintain two profiles on sites such as Facebook, one for their personal friends, and one for the public world of acquaintances and business presence.

I see this as trying to keep the personal and private distinct from the public presence of your personal brand. 

You may have noticed a recent shift in the kind of activity you see on sites like LinkedIn, now that so many people are looking for work. A recent McKinsey Quarterly article, When Jobseekers Invade Facebook, asks what happens to the value of these social sites when they become "increasingly cluttered with self-promoters, career artists, and marketing entrepreneurs."

What is clear is that managing your personal brand image is becoming exceedingly complex as a result of social media. It's only a matter of time before you can hire a personal social networking advisor, just as you can hire a wardrobe consultant or a personal coach. [Any one know of any examples yet?]

Resources:

Good overview of current state of social media worldwide from Universal Mccann on slideshare