Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

Archives for December 2009

The Internet as a Meritocracy

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One of the things I love about the internet is that it’s a total meritocracy. Even if people don’t really know what it is you’re good at, if you’re good enough, you’ll get recognition. You’ll get clients if you call for them in the right places, your business will grow if you husband it properly, your friends count will rise and –

Hell. You know this already. I’m not going to wax sociophilic.

Look at the net. Look at your behaviour on it, and what it brings to you. Want an example of merit? Wikipedia. It’s universally decried as a non-source by schools because of it’s group editing. Does this mean it’s failed to have impact? No; hell, Kids CBC references it at least once in one of their between-show skits.

There are some very simple reasons that the net is such a powerful societal force. For one, the net abhors middle-men; information is made available at its source, and is aggregated by the final receivers. This is not only true for information, but also for products. It’s why the ecosystem of business – an especially good example is the book business – is changing so thoroughly. Secondly, there’s the universal dream of acceptance and validation; this one’s a mixed blessing because, while we can all find niches that we fit, we can also all claim to be something we’re not. This is why I’ve resolved to never, ever, call myself any kind of expert until someone else does so first.

I look at a lot of people I follow closely and see a great leaning toward the incorporation of meritocratic ideals beyond what’s automatically assumed, and it actually brings me a little hope. There’s a movement toward good taste, treating people properly, and encouraging transparency that’s reassuring at its core.

The Worst Attitude For Customer Service

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“You can’t please everybody.”

While it is possible to commit no errors and still lose sometimes, believing any variant of “can’t please everybody” instantly ruins any customer interaction you’ll ever have, because you’re leaving room for the possibility of a less than perfect experience.

I say this is the worst for customer service, because it’s not specific to any given industry. No matter who you are, in what locale or business, you have customers. Sometimes it may not feel this way – especially if you’re behind the scenes, doing IT or intra-business support, but the only thing that changes here is the terminology, not the process. Sometimes your boss is your customer; this comes back to the difference between bringing a service to market or a product. Which you’re focused on determines the terminology, but the same remains, if you leave any room for less-than-awesome, you’re leaving room for failure.

I suspect this is an area where just about every business on the planet can use some improvement. And people as well; while we want to participate in our brands more than ever, compromise is a necessity. People are, in general, more tolerant than we give them credit for, if we give them the right, valid information in a timely manner.

It takes a little practice, but consider it this way: When someone says “Thank You,” how do you respond? Do you say “You’re Welcome” because you’re happy to have helped?
Or do you respond “No Problem” and run the risk of diminishing their experience because, in effect, you’re claiming it was worth so little of your time it’s had no effect on your day?

Employing the “Can’t please everybody” defence when you’ve failed may be strict truth, but it also removes the responsibility from your own shoulders. It means you’re unwilling to do the work and find the root of the problem.

And while walking away from the right wasting efforts is sometimes a good idea, the Walk Away Now philosophy is NOT (Say it with me, N O T) intended to be employed without any effort to learn why whatever it is you’re walking away from was a bad idea at the moment anyway.

What To Expect Of Me In The Coming Year

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I have this innate prejudice against best of lists. Somehow, rounding up the best of the previous year, decade, century, whatever – it seems a bit like planning for yesterday. Especially with the trouble we seem to be having moving with the pace of a technologically enabled culture, I’d prefer to break the old forms and do some declaration for the next cycle.

I’m not into making resolutions – they’ve never worked. Everything I’ve ever quit, I did as it was needed rather than at an arbitrary date. Every project I’ve ever started has begun when its time came, rather than at the beginning of a given quarter. So, with that aside, here are some things you can expect to see me look toward in 2010.

I’m going to be connecting with people. I spend a lot of time mentioning, linking, drawing riffs from others. If we’ve already got some kind of connection (even if it’s just trading blog comments) expect me to try to expand on that. If all I’ve done is retweet you, expect some comments and so on.

I’m launching a few new projects. In the beginning of February (the 2nd, to be specific) I’m launching an online novel called The Dowager Shadow. Its story has been a work in progress for almost six years, but the principal writing is still going on. It’l be an interesting journey. I also may be reworking and relaunching Why, Read The Manual! – but we’ll see about that one. Its final form has yet to be decided, and I may be asking for collaboration from some of the people I’ve been connecting with over the past year.

The focus of this blog will narrow. Like any good blogger, I’m eventually choosing my spin. I’m well aware I can get rather random sometimes – it’s not been the best for my traffic. I’ve been looking over the posts that have caused the most stir (cough-anonymity-cough) or illicited the highest number of comments (hack-twilight-hack). Naturally, I don’t want to be so easy to pigeon-hole as allowing myself to be defined as “the digital manners guy” but there are definitely benefits to picking your angle. I can’t say with finality what mine is. Nor do I want to make the decision final. But it’ll get easier to see what I’m writing about s the theme becomes visible.

In any case, the point of this exercise is to make sure you know I’m sticking around. I’ve a lot of work to do, and a lot of it relates directly to my continued work here. The blog itself is slated for a total redesign beginning in January, so expect some landscape changes unless you’re using Google Reader or some such. I promise; no Thesis. The new theme will be one hundred percent Unspeakable Media faire, I’m still too cheap to spend anything but my time on design.

The Mental Disadvantage of Intentional Deviance

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Boxing day was a bust. We spent much of the day trying to figure out why, and we came up with a few answers. It’s come down to either: (a) everyone knows Boxing Day sales are incredible, but also doesn’t want to be part of the crush; or (b) everyone went to the big box stores; or (c) everyone shopped online.

It’s perfectly possible Amazon and other e-tailers could have had awesome one-day-only deals. Even though there’s so much fuss over Cyber Monday, Boxing Day is a universally recognized deal-grab that any business dealing with the public would be stupid to not take advantage of.  This is altogether likely, and I don’t have the stats, but I don’t think I could be as frustrated with that; it’s not because online shopping is killing retail, it’s because ecommerce is an entirely different industry selling a similar product. It’s like comparing journalism to copywriting – same product, worlds apart.

Well, sure, lots of people go to big box stores for the great deals – doorcrashers have been a way of life for them for years, whereas my chain is only three years into the Great Door Crasher trend. But one of my colleagues figured that one box store has, maybe, 13 of a given TV which means a hundred people will go and 87% miss out. We, however, have four locations for each of their single monoliths, and if we have four TVs per location, it means there’s actually a much MUCH larger percentage chance you’ll get what you want from us. But if a TV goes Doorcrasher in a boutique, does it make a sale?

We ended up asking a couple of people, by the end of the day. And it turns out most people know – deeply believe – that boxing day in the malls will be idiotically busy, and try to avoid it unless absolutely necessary. One customer even called it Pugilist Day – needless to say, we lost our hats laughing.

But is this the case?

There’s a gap, where everyone avoids an action because “everyone else” will be doing it. People avoid entrepreneurship because it’s already done. Shoppers avoid the busy days, because they want to avoid the crowds more than they want to take advantage of the deals. As the actions and their consequences scale upwards, the result of this intentional deviance gets bigger, and eventually we see what we had yesterday: malls with no one in them on the biggest shopping day of the year.

I almost wish I was at the shop today to see if everyone who avoided coming in yesterday showed up today; that’s the other result. If everyone takes the road less travelled, you still end up in the middle of the pack. But of course, you can’t see this because the pack surrounds you, and for all you know the other road holds ten times the number of people.

Being different just like everyone else – isn’t always a good idea.

Personality Thieves – The War for the Identities of the Internet

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Big Ass Feed Icon
photo by Danny Sullivan

Robert Scoble posted an interesting discussion topic on his Facebook wall, asking the deceptively simple question: Who will win the Identity war in 2010?

The question was asked with specificity towards tech platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on, but it’s an important question to ask of ourselves: to whom are we giving the leverage of our primary identification on the web?

Like a lot of others who are best suited to interface, I’m an adaptable person. This is both a great help in my work, and a hindrance with my friends for one simple reason; when I spend time with you, I’m going to start to sound like you. If I spend an evening watching QI, I have a flare-up of British in my speech. If I spend too much time reading Justin Kownacki, I get ornery. Too much Seth Godin and I fall afoul of sweeping inspirational pessimism. I’ve been accused of having a weak identity, but I don’t think that’s it, primarily because I’m not alone in this behaviour; I just happen to display it as a very visible means of communication. I’m in the habit not only of speaking your language, but speaking your accent as well.

Identity is a touchy subject for a lot of people. We like to be ourselves, but easily fall afoul of pop culture epidemics. Every teenager falls into a category during high school – those who try not to get branded as “outsiders” by their peers, which makes demarcation an impossible process to avoid; it only goes away when everyone stops participating, and it’s not human nature to remain intentionally ambiguous. Social networks make this even more difficult to avoid – Twitter has lists, Facebook has the friend system, as do so many other networks. It’s not a bad thing, but as with so much else, awareness is the key to safe navigation.

The idea of identity, of finding peers to connect with, is so easy to reconcile with our daily lives that technology has adapted it as a mode of operation – we can’t ignore this. Peer to Peer filesharing. Friends lists. Contact lists, address books, RSS feeds, folders, libraries, right down to the DLLs that run your computer programs. Grouping is everywhere. And because it’s everywhere, it’s possible to manipulate.

I recently read an article on Brad J Ward’s blog from last year about “FacebookGate” where a group had severely infiltrated student-run graduation groups for various schools – for who knows what purpose. Perhaps data mining. Maybe stalking. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this event as a demonstration of the very demarcation we use to identify ourselves being used for purposes we did not choose when we claimed the label in the first place.

It gets worse: Over the last month I’ve seen both Chris Brogan and Amber Naslund suffer outright plagiarism. Brogan’s world saw a hack marketing an eBook made out of a collection of Chris’ blog posts. Naslund had a blog post ripped right from her site and posted, no claim of attribution whatsoever, on another site. This goes beyond casual emulation for the sake of communication; this is outright personality theft.

So how does this apply to technology as a communicative and cultural force? In practice. I make a habit of signing up for every social networking site I can lay my greedy hands on, whether I’m aiming to use it or not. I’ve been trying to snap up my own names as a username for the last three months as well, for branding purposes, it just makes sense. Now, think about that for a second. Think about what I just said.

Branding purposes.

Sounds funny, doesn’t it? We talk about personal branding all the time, but it’s always as an external force, information we’re carefully aligning outside ourselves on networks, website after website, trying to make a name for ourselves. We get annoyed if our names are already taken, but how do we fight back? Not by making a mass acceptance of the fact that our personal brands are facets of our identity – that would be silly, applying a business term to ourselves – but rather by setting up “Verified Accounts” and other measures to make sure the people represented by certain usernames really are themselves. It’s a good thing, but it’s still external.

Scoble’s question about who will win the identity war this year – and it will be this year, it has to be, or it will never come – is a big one. I answered by asserting that it won’t be the creation of utility that wins. If we’re looking for utility we already have a mesh of social networks for that. Facebook for friend gathering Twitter for grapeshot conversation, LiveFyre for in-depth enquiry. FourSquare and Gowalla for relational location. We build our online identities out of these things, among many others (personally branded websites, I’m aware, are a big deal as well. I’ve got mine, did you get yours?) and often forget that the idea of identity is more about accessibility than it is about utility. We use these networks to get our words out to others, to track interest in what we say based on how, when, and how loud we say it.

Whatever wins the identity war will provide the greatest power of accessibility and cross-feeding to the largest number of people with the least amount of hassle. Google’s profiles are a great start, but it’s not quite enough. If I know El Goog half as well as I hallucinate that I do, they’ll improve it; I can see the potential there for the perfect outward-facing home base meshed with the ultimate inward-facing dashboard. I wonder if they do, too.

Maybe it won’t be Google. Maybe it’ll be something, or someone else that brings up that killer app.

I just can’t wait to use it once it’s there.