Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

Archives for July 2009

Breaking Your Own Brand

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You ever want to break your own brand? Do what Horizon Realty in Chicago did and sue your customers.

According to the Chicago Sun Times, here, twitter user @abonnen (now offline) tweeted “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”
So, because they feel this is wrong, they’re suing her for $50,000 USD.

Let’s examine a few of the many reasons this is just flat out stupid.

The Streisand Effect: A few years ago, someone put an areal shot of Barbara Streisand’s house on their website. Streisand, citing privacy concerns, demanded at law-point it be removed. The result was not that the image disappeared, instead, so many people posted it on their own pages that the image will never disappear. Now, the Streisand effect is what we on the web call something that has the complete opposite of itself. This realty company hoped to prevent bad press. Now, it’s all they’re ever going to get.

Inappropriate Venue: Like it or not, the things you do in social media affect your real life. @abonnen voiced a concern about her building in the wrong place. What hasn’t come out is whether or not she went to her landlord with this concern first. If yes, and Horizon did nothing for her, then yeah, they deserve every ounce of bad press they get, because mold is a serious health concern. If she didn’t, then they deserve compensation because she’s bashed them (legitimately or not, I’m not arguing) publicly, without ever seeking a private solution to her problem.

Not an Appropriate Response: Does Horizon deserve $50k for a tweet that about 20 people would have read when it first came out? I don’t think so. Even less now that they’ve made a fool of themselves by suing @abonnen – at the end of the day, the press from their reaction will get them even more trouble than the original tweet will – and, according to the Sun Times, Horizon hasn’t even asked that the tweet be removed. @abonnen deleted her account, but the tweet was still in the public timeline when last I looked, and the blogosphere has exploded with reactions in every direction to this.

No-Win: Like it or not, @abonnen is going to have a hard time renting an apartment for a while, and Horizon Realty is going to have a very hard time finding new renters for their apartments as well. Horizon has broken their brand by sinking to incredible stupidity and letting their representative, Jeffrey Michal, be quoted as saying they’re a “sue first ask questions later” company in a now-national debate.

How can we prevent this in the future? Stop paying so much attention to bullwe find on the web. Recently people have been fired, have failed to be hired, marriages have ended, and eventually I’m sure wars will be started because of something someone said on social networking sites without paying attention. Who cares? Seriously. Thanks to this, businesses cannot operate efficiently, and your average person has to spend even more time censoring themselves needlessly instead of being productive and feeling good about using services like MySpace and Facebook. It’s hard enough already. This just makes it harder. You’re doing it wrong.

Handling the Impulse Shopping Urge

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One of the biggest problems lots of people have with getting new stuff is that it’s impulse purchasing. I try to avoid that whenever possible.

Most of the people I know have at least one story every six months or so about how they went out and got something they really didn’t need, or didn’t suit their actual purpose. There are tonnes of toys out there that, at first glance, appear to be really cool and really useful at the same time. Unfortunately, as things become more and more multipurpose, it’s easier for us to get sucked into believing an omnitasking toy will make our lives easier by collecting everything we need to do into one thing.

But what if we carry more than one thing? For the last year I’ve been carrying a BlackBerry Bold and an iPod Touch. I got the Touch first, and had a dumbphone. I needed a tasks list, and a calendar, and the Touch does both of these things. At the time, it also had enough room for my music collection.
But then I got the BlackBerry. Which was even better, because the calendar and tasks functions are much more robust. However, it left me with a multifunction iPod that has limited space and non-universal internet access (no way to use my BlackBerry as an adhoc WiFi source, either), and a very useful smartphone that does everything I want it to except have a physically large screenwith  touch capability and the insanely large resource that is the app store.

So now I’m shopping for new hardware, and I’d like to share what this experience has taught me, because making myself actively involved in the shopping process has been a learning experience.

First, make lists of things you want and need.

I don’t mean shopping lists. Lists of items you want, wish lists, are of no use when shopping with a practical frame of mind. Make a list of the tasks you complete in a day. Then use that list to inform the list of features you need out of whatever it is you’re looking to buy.
Do you need a music player? How much music do you have? If you’ve already got 5 gigabytes, look for a player that’s 8gb or more. Never undersell your needs, your collection is less likely to shrink than it is to grow.
Looking for a camera? What do you do with your pictures? Print them? How big? Are you likely to be taking action shots, or stills? Do you need macro features? Telephoto? Is it worth spending the money on professional accessories?

I’ll get more into this later, but it sums up easily as: there’s no way to tell what toys you need without knowing first what you need them to do for you.

Next, do some research.

What are your options? Once you know what kinds of things you need to do, it’s easier to find the products that suit those needs. Those “I’m a PC” commercials where people go shopping with needs and a budget in mind have a point – if you know what you’re looking for, products really do jump off the shelf at you. But you need to know what’s on the market first, before you can even go into a store.

Once you know what you want…

Shop! DO all the things you usually do. Go to a shop, talk to the salespeople. Compare prices (so much simpler now that you’ve got a list of products that may meet your needs). So go out, figure out exactly what you want, and where you’re going to get it.

Then wait two weeks.

Dude. Wait, what? Hang off on a purchase, after all that work? Why in the name of mind-rending awesomeness would you want to do that?
Simple. Remember all that impulse shopping you used to do before you became an imformed shopper? Well, while all that work, all that research can make you certain that you get what you want out of what you buy, you still need to be sure that it’s worth buying. I don’t mean is the product good, I mean can you afford to spend the money on this? Will it eat into plans for other purchases?
Adding two weeks pre-purchase to any large  buy gives you that much more time to avoid buyer’s remorse. Most stores have limited time periods, and in some cases limited usage rights, before products can be refunded without a penalty. Giving yourself time to make sure that the purchase is worth it for you, your budget and your lifestyle is a great way to extend that time period by getting over the shock of the purchase before it happens. It means you can get the most out of what you just got right from the moment you walk out of the store, rather than spending the first two weeks of ownership thinking it’s awesome and shiny. You’re now settled not just on the buying of your new toy, but your ownership of it.

And actually owning what you buy is worth the time and effort you’ll spend buying it.

Technical Support

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There are a lot of places where businesses can do better for their customers – and where customers can better support their providers. Here are a few examples.

When there’s something strange, going on under the hood. Who you gonna call? Helpdeskers!

But who wants to? Since the middle ages, people have been having issues with things they don’t make themselves. If you made it yourself, you know the ins and outs, but if someone else did, there are always things they forgot to tell you. Or didn’t tell you in words you understood.

Run for the hills! They’ve thrown the dictionary at us!

It doesn’t have to get this bad, EVER! But it does, doesn’t it? All the time. I can’t even count the number of calls I’ve made to some form of customer support where the terms they use haven’t been previously explained. After a while it begins to feel like every third word is martian, and this is where the first disconnect happens. Lots of folk just have no patience for learning new terms on the fly – and why should they? There are almost always easier words to use that don’t rely on industry jargon or obscure legalese, but for whatever reason, it seems like it’s almost impossible for many support calls to survive more than two minutes without one of these terms flying out of the phone line and turning most of us into “Uh-huh” zombies who can’t properly follow an instruction to save our lives – and the rest of us, who are either lucky enough to understand the terms, or unlucky enough to have learned them through repeated exposure, these sad few just get annoyed because we know there’s no good reason for this stuff.

There’s clarity, and there’s user-speak.

Techs just can’t translate, sometimes. ven putting aside the problem of jargon, if you’re not intimately involved with a system/product/service, it’s hard to understand people who are. Whether it’s computer support people talking just above the level of the average user, or credit employees railing on about their terms and numbers – very often, helpdesk can become two countries divided by a common language. Who needs to fix this? We, the users, are always able to say “Hang on, explain that a little more?” or flat out call bull on a helpdesker’s advice. But do we? Not often, because they’re the experts, right? And what about the helpdeskers? It’s fully in their power to offer more information, but knowing when’s a good time to give this detail, and which callers are actually going to benefit from the extra tidbits is often really hard. Over-sharing can apply to business transactions too.

How many people do I have to talk to?

Forget for a moment that you only understand a third of what comes across the phone line. Ever counted the number of techies you talk to in a given call? How about how long it takes before they call in the supervisor? I’m not sure whether this is out of some phantom need to make a caller feel that their call is actually important, or complicated, or if (and this is likely more true) the support people are rated on fast call turnover and passing a problem on to a higher tier actually gets them better stats and raises. The ratio of calls with in-call hold times while the support person is supposedly “talking to a more experienced tech” has got to be through the roof!

So what’s the bottom line?

Users owe it to themselves to learn a bit more about their products and services. I’ve found that the more information people gather for themselves – whether brochures, FAQ files, blogs like this one, or even post-it notes put in place after a useful helpdesk call, the better off they are in general. It not only means more confidence in their products, it usually means less calls to support at the end of the day anyway!
Users are certainly not the only ones who have space to improve. Helpdeskers NEED training. And I’m not talking technical or service-oriented training, either. Product knowledge is par for the course. What support people need is soft-skills. Give them some real sales training, get them face to face with people every so often. Make sure that there’s a feedback system that actually has bearing on their jobs. Coach them when they mistranslate. Penalize for passing on calls, just like you praise for short call times.
At the end of the day, it’s not the support person’s fault you don’t know what they’re talking about. But it’s certainly not your fault that they didn’t ask the right questions either.

Good Examples of Bad Behaviour.

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A lot of consumers feel they’re treated like dirt by salespeople, and for good reason. Lots of salespeople are only in it for themselves, with their highest priority being their paycheque. But some of us get that way because of how we’re treated by our customers. It’s no exaggeration that retail is one of the hardest industries to find fulfilment in, and after a while, many people-who-sell-things either turn into jaded jerks or cynical jokers, largely because even if they didn’t have that attitude before they went in, those two become the only options when dealing with some markets and groups of people.

If you ever want some good examples of how not to treat the people you rely on to sell you the stuff you want, head on over to (The Customer is) Not Always Right and read a few of the stories there. I’m not kidding when I say I shared this site with everyone in my house immediately on finding it, and I wish I had found it long ago. Technorati is a wonderful thing, some days.

The lesson to take from this? People behind the counter are human too. Sometimes they legitimately make mistakes. Sometimes they simply CAN NOT give you what you want – whether that’s because it’s totally insane of you to ask, or because it would cost them their jobs to comply is not something debatable. It just is what it is. The effort it takes to get worked up over most of this junk is seriously never, and I mean never, worth the payoff you might get from it. Chill out.

By the way, a bit of a caveat? I think the fact that someone not only made a site like Not Always Right, but has been running it for quite some time, is really just sad. This means the saturation of flat out jerks and ill-meaning idiots in the world has been pretty high for long enough that the internet took notice. When the internet notices you, you’re either doing something awesome, or something really really terrible. I’ll let you all decide which one this site represents.

Soapbox moment – Milk Muny

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I’ll try to keep advocacy on this site to a minimum in some cases, but this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in weeks.

This is Milk Muny.com, they’re doing something wonderful for community, for the planet, and for YOU, the consumer, by innovating recycling. Check them out. Give them business. Change the world.