Spoonbuzz

To spread your message, differentiate or die trying

Look at the restaurant industry. You don’t recommend a new restaurant because it’s “just like that other one” unless you follow with “except cheaper.”

And people don’t build a restaurant just like a competitor unless they’re differentiating another way, like on price or location.

If you don’t differentiate, you’ll die anyway.

[photo via Shelley Panzarella]

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Thanks to Scott’s recommendation, I ordered a poster of Manhattan from Ork Posters on Monday. Yesterday, I got an email from their “customer service” (although I suspect they are too small-time an operation to have departments).

Ork received a ‘heavier than normal’ volume of orders on Monday, Dec. 10. We would like to assure you that we are working feverishly to get the posters into your hands. All orders will ship via USPS PRIORITY (2-3 day guaranteed delivery) mail BY Sunday, Dec. 16… at the latest.

We thoroughly appreciate your patience (we really do) and if you have any concerns, complaints, please let us know.

Thanks!

I can’t help but compare this to what I said after IKEA jerked me around:

“Lesson #6 - No one cares if you mess up, only how you fix it. Treat us like people.”

Well kudos to Ork Posters, they’re taking steps to make their customers happy. They also must have read another one of the lessons:

“Lesson #1 - Every customer interaction is a golden opportunity, including - no, especially - when the customer is pissed off. Any time you get his attention, make the best use of it. His attention isn’t free.”

Instead of calling them to complain, I’m telling everyone how competent they are.

And Ork Posters prints this poster on recycled paper with soy inks at a local, worker-owned press. Check them out.

Jeff has a great post called “Are You a Doer or a Talker?” Jeff’s blog, Coding Horror, is one of my favorite. His commentary is on software and programming, but his lessons are useful in any discipline.

In this case, the lesson is one I’ve talked about before.

It’s odd how we treat the goals we aren’t actively moving towards. You know, the ones we keep talking about, the ones we keep putting off until tomorrow. Why spend so much time planning and so little time doing?

Inertia. Self-deception. Fear.

At least, those are my reasons.

Planning is good, and not everything can happen at once. But if you aren’t working towards a goal, you’d be crazy to expect it to happen.

Start now and plan as you go.

Or if you’re feeling overwhelmed, just cut the number of things you’re planning to do. Do less better.

All too often, professionalism and personality seem like two competing traits.

I had a job where professionalism meant conforming. It lead to the office being a dreadfully boring place to work.

Go figure.

I’m lucky I figured this out, and today I’m in an environment that is anything but boring.

Go check out one of the job hunting websites: 9 out of 10 resumes (or is it 99 out of 100?) scream, “Look at me, I’m so boring. Hire me!”

Professionalism is about competency and responsibility. It’s necessary, but not sufficient.

Don’t hide your personality. It’s what makes you interesting, and makes you that 1 in 100.

(And never forget that your resume sucks.)

I’ve said before that everyone sells the same thing - positive experiences. But what does that mean, exactly?

The things we spend money and time on - be they services, products or activities - are all placeholders for positive experiences. We’re looking for positive experiences when we go to the dentist, buy a cell phone, or visit the park.

That’s why we’d rather go to a dentist who cracks funny jokes, buy from a cell phone company that donates to charity, and go to the park with a friend.

The context matters as much as the content.

There are peripheral components to those experiences. Hearing an interesting anecdote from your dentist improves your experience. Getting a free replacement when your phone breaks does the same, as does a rule at the park on cleaning up after your dog.

The better the experience you sell, the more people will buy. It doesn’t matter what business you are in.

It doesn’t even matter if you sell anything. Your boss doesn’t want you to finish that report, he wants you to give him a positive experience (success for the client, praise from his own boss, whatever).

That means you have to be smart and careful, because you’re selling more than you thought you were. The quality of an experience isn’t limited to the thing you thought you were doing.

An unfriendly receptionist negatively affects a dentist’s ability to sell his skills. A cellphone company with a nasty customer service rep will sell less phones. People won’t go to a park littered with broken glass.

Not everything is within your control. If you get stuck in traffic on the way to the dentist, you might find a new one.

But you do have more control than you think.

Step 1 - Identity the peripheral components to the experience you sell.

Step 2 - Improve them, whether it’s your job to or not.

John has a great line that fits with my IKEA debacle and my thoughts on embracing being small.

Fact is [big businesses] don’t really feel you, they can’t, it’s just a matter of physics. - John Jantsch

So true. Big business can’t help not caring about you (not to suggest we let them off the hook).

It helps to remember that big business is in the business of defending their profits.

It takes the little guy to go on the offensive.

An old programmer adage compares the creation of a piece of software to the birthing of a child. You can’t just throw more programmers at a piece of code to make it work sooner, just like you can’t have 9 women help to make a baby in 1 month.

This piece of wisdom applies beyond the world of software. Big companies don’t necessarily do things better and faster than small companies or individuals (they just scale better).

This can be an empowering realization for the small businessperson. You’re not “small time” just because you don’t have an accounting department or a secretary.

Sometimes more people just get in the way. Don’t fake being big when you’re not. Small is an advantage. Small is the new big.

My friend Marshall recently decided to focus his blog more closely on architecture and construction, because he knows these topics best. Great reason.

It’s also a smart move to increase his audience. There are a lot of blogs out there about stuff. There are less blogs about architecture and construction.

Getting noticed is easier in a smaller niche. You can target your audience more accurately (not “males age 19-35″ or the like), and what you say will apply directly to each reader more often.

The smaller your niche, the more expertise you can demonstrate in that narrow field, strengthening your voice to those who are interested.

Don’t worry about limiting how big you can get. On the web, your geographic reach is so wide that you can narrowly define your topic and still have a broad audience.

Marshall took a good first step, but there are a lot of blogs out there about architecture and construction. He could do even more to shrink his niche. Come to think of it, so could I.

I’ve always been leery of self-promotion. Whenever I have to talk about myself, I feel a little bit dirty.

Many people feel this way. It’s a part of our culture to discourage immodesty and applaud the humble.

Generally, this is a good thing. No one likes the jerk who talks himself up.

But there is a kind of self-promotion that shouldn’t receive this kind of reaction. If your self-promotion would be helpful to people, aren’t you doing them a disservice by being humble?

Sometimes this is obvious. When you’re pitching for a piece of business, you don’t want to half-describe your accomplishments and give an “aw shucks” when you receive a recommendation. Same thing for applying for a job, to an academic program, and so on.

But what about the regular folk you deal with? If you know about something great that has nothing to do with you, you’ll readily tell everyone you know. But when you’re involved with that something great, you feel like you have to be careful talking about it.

Social networking profiles are an awesome tool to get past this issue.

When you put together a profile, you’re supposed to be talking about yourself. You list your past work info, details about your college, even a list of your 10 favorite movies. Every piece of information on the web page is about you.

And people read that? Yes, and they love it.

Because the people in your network love to hear about you, and they love to know what’s going on in your life.

They just don’t want you to be the one to tell them.

Social networking profiles don’t trip those modesty emotion wires, because the whole point of the profile is to talk about yourself. They provide a conversational shortcut; people who want to know about you don’t have to bother to ask, they can just look it up.

Don’t occupy your face time with people telling them everything about you. Make it easy for them to find out for themselves.

DJ asked for me to elaborate on what I meant when I said Youtube isn’t just TV.

Television is a one-way broadcast. You sit in your own home, alone or with a small group, and passively consume the content.

Youtube doesn’t work like that. You sit at your computer, or stand with your phone, while doing other things (work, chat, play).

Consuming the content is only the first step. You can participate in a running commentary, rate videos, and send it to a friend.

Oh, and you can distribute your own content.

There isn’t a model for this. Saying “Youtube is like internet television” falls short.

Youtube is less than 3 years old. Wikipedia is 6. Google’s search turns 10 soon.

The internet is still new, and there is a world of opportunity. No one fully gets it, yet.

I’m a fan of Al Gore’s personal branding. I also applaud the work he’s done for public good while in the private sector.

Now he is taking the next step by getting into the venture capital world. My applause is turning into a standing ovation.

I’m a firm believer that to get something meaningful done, you usually have to create a market for it. Let the best and brightest make their livelihood helping your cause.

Mr. Gore has done an incredible job of getting eyeballs to look at the global warming crisis. Now, he’s going to bring the money.

Empower people to solve their own problems (making money in this case) while participating in your mission.

That’s the way to start a movement. Well done Mr. Gore.

[via John Battelle]

I’ve distilled some lessons from my IKEA story:

1 - Every customer interaction is a golden opportunity, including - no, especially - when the customer is pissed off. Any time you get his attention, make the best use of it. His attention isn’t free.

2 - Your reputation is at stake in every angle of communication with the customer. It doesn’t matter if it’s your CEO, your outsourced vendor, or your customer service rep that screws up. To the customer it all reflects on the company, because…

3 - Everyone sells the same thing - positive experiences.

4 - Almost everything we buy has some characteristics of a luxury good. To boldly make up terms, our demand elasticity of service (like price elasticity of demand) is extremely elastic. If someone else has better service, they will get all of the business.

5 - Incentivize every level of your organization to provide positive experiences, from the front line on up.

6 - No one cares if you mess up, only how you fix it. Treat us like people.

7 - The traditional cost-benefit analysis for pleasing unhappy customers is broken. If you could snub the nobodies and pamper the newspaper editors, you’d be fine. But you can’t tell the difference between customers who will go away and customers who will spread the word. Everyone has a megaphone.

Who owns attention? The viewer or the one viewed?

Jinal and Geeta wrote about the ban on outdoor advertising in São Paulo. They highlight it as an example of the struggle between natural and man-made art.

I think it’s also an interesting example of the struggle for who owns our attention. An advertiser clearly own a highway billboard, but does a driver own his view of the countryside?

My economist friends would tell me there is a market failure here. Beautiful views are a public good. That is, “consuming” a beautiful view doesn’t preclude anyone else from doing the same, and it’s not possible to exclude someone from appreciating it. This creates a free rider problem, and the beautiful view declines because it has no caretaker.

But banning billboards isn’t an efficient or appropriate solution. I’m a big 1st & 5th amendment advocate; don’t touch my freedom of speech, and don’t take my private property for public use.

Maybe, like for farmers, advertisers should be paid to let the billboards “lie fallow”. In naturally beautiful areas, property owners should receive a subsidy if they keep their land ad-free.

Thoughts?

Wow, IKEA really sucks.

In October, I ordered a bed for my new apartment. I already had an old hand-me-down from the family, but it was a little too big to fit in my new bedroom. I opted to go cheap and simple with a bed from IKEA.

$250 total for the bed, plus $100 for the shipping. I struggled with spending almost half of the cost of the bed in shipping, but figured that it would save me time and trouble. Being in Manhattan, I have no car, so getting anything delivered right to your door is a plus.

The bed was delivered this past Saturday by a service called Urban Express. Putting it together was simple - so simple that I drafted a blog post about IKEA as a model company for interaction design. Don’t expect that post anytime soon…

After finishing the bed frame, I put down the “slotted bed base” (the part that holds up the mattress), only to realize it covered half of the bed. The mattress sagged through the frame.

It turns out I needed 2 identical pieces, 1 of which was missing from the parts delivered.

OK, no problem. The first call goes to Urban Express. “I’m missing a piece. Please check if it’s in the delivery truck.”

It isn’t. “OK, please check if it’s in the warehouse.” It isn’t.

Urban Express says they never received it from IKEA. So I ask Urban Express to go get it.

I’m not worked up enough at this point to press the matter when they say it is out of their hands. Instead, they give me the information to contact IKEA.

I’m not an Urban Express customer, IKEA is. The only thing I can do is keep repeating the name Urban Express in this post along with my assessment of their service as “100% Mediocre”. Beware the Google Fu.

But I digress.

So I call IKEA, and get a customer service representative who tells me I need to get in touch with Urban Express. I explain that I don’t know or care if Urban Express screwed up. I paid IKEA to deliver it to me. If they chose a second rate vendor, that’s their problem.

The customer service rep tells me the only action he can take is to file a claim, and a claim representative will call me within 24 hours to settle the matter.

In the meantime, I no longer have floorspace for my mattress (the bed is in the way), so I’m going to be sleeping on the couch. But this is at 5pm Saturday, and I’m sick of talking to these people. I concede and go have a beer. Okay - many beers.

After 25 hours, at 6pm Sunday, I am fuming. I call IKEA again (1-800-434-4532). This time, I quickly get past the customer service rep. I’m being too difficult for the amount they pay him. He connects me to a “supervisor”.

Enter Syra (extension 1517), supposed call center manager, and the highest IKEA person in the building. You can try the extension, but it doesn’t exist.

She assures me that they will send out the missing part, which will arrive next Friday via UPS. Unacceptable, I say. I have nowhere to sleep until they send it, and I refuse to sleep on the couch another night. They need to overnight it.

Syra says that IKEA cannot overnight anything. Bullshit. Why can’t she walk down to the local FedEx herself and send it? I know someone at IKEA has sent something via FedEx at some point in history. No, she says, they have not.

DHL? UPS overnight? Where is the urgency?

As you can imagine, the conversation goes in a big circle from that point on. I won’t get off the phone, and the only thing Syra is empowered to do is talk to me.

I finally get Syra to give me the number for her direct supervisor (who she says is IKEA corporate). I have her process the missing part via regular UPS so that if I cannot get it overnighted, I’ll still get it at some point.

I haven’t had a chance to call corporate yet (I’d wanted to finish this post first so I can refer them here). You can try them at 1-610-834-0180. However, I did call for Syra again on Wednesday to see where my package was.

The customer service rep said he “did not have access” to give me tracking for my shipment, and could not confirm whether it was even processed! He also denied the existence of anyone at the call center named Syra, and would not connect me to extension 1517. I suspect the extension and person were bogus.

IKEA’s claim to fame is that they are simple and cheap.

But the time I’ve wasted dealing with IKEA has cost me more than the product itself. And there is also my loss of peace of mind from having such painful interactions with people whose job description undoubtedly says “pacify the customer” more often than it says “fix what we did wrong”.

What a backwards system. Less expensive doesn’t have to mean cheaper.

So other than my ranting and raving, what’s the point?

IKEA lost a golden opportunity to impress me. Instead of writing a post filled with glowing praise for their interactive design, I’ve written about their lackluster relationship with customers.

At this point, getting me my missing product does little to mitigate their screwup. At least I’ll finally get a good night’s sleep.

IKEA, like many large corporations, has a customer service center with the mandate of making me go away, not making me happy. This is what happens when you have a VP of Customer Service that has to worry about the bottom line of his unit.

He cares about customers staying off the line, not being happy. His job is to make it so painful to call that we just hang our heads and shuffle on. The system is all wrong.

IKEA is sending me the missing product in the hopes that I’m too busy to cry over spilt milk once I’ve been poured a fresh glass.

A better company would give me back my money for shipping. It’s a simple logical step; I paid a premium to not have to expend any effort to get my bed, but they made me expend three times the effort because of their idiocy.

But that still makes them a bad company that hurts people then hands out lollipops.

An even better company would go over the top. Comp the bed. Give me a gift voucher for more IKEA merchandise. But that’s just the same company with a tastier lollipop.

A great company would go over the top in a personal way. Write me a personal letter. Apologize on the phone. Comment on my blog. Fill in the holes in the story so I know why things didn’t work out correctly and what steps are being taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

They think the marginal cost is negligible. Their cost-benefit analysis says to them, “1 in N customers is unhappy. Screw ‘em.” But I have a megaphone, and more customers have megaphones every day. Their cost-benefit model is broken because they can’t tell the difference between the loud and quiet customers.

With more and more customers writing blogs, participating in stronger and broader social networks, and a market that is extremely competitive in the “make me happy” department, there is an opportunity for a smarter company.

Someone should tell IKEA that the new, louder customer is a golden opportunity. I could have written about IKEA like Zaz wrote about Zappos.

It’s not too late. Wow me.

No one expects things to go perfectly every time. But we do expect people to act concerned when they light our hair on fire.

Update: It sounds like Seth has a similar story about Paypal. 

I’m in a Facebook group called “My Name Is Josh Klein and I Kick Ass” with 20 other people named Josh Klein.

If you can find 20 people with the same name as you to join a Facebook group, you can create a community around any idea you want to spread.

Offline, we create geographically convenient communities. The communities we create online are all convenient.

Somebody is trying to discover your idea. Make yourself available.