Category Archives: crowdsourcing

How you benefit from customer comments you were pretty sure you didn’t want

Due to a misunderstanding, at the last minute before takeoff an airline refused to allow a pair of special-needs passengers to fly. This upset the passengers deeply and stranded them at an unfamiliar airport.

No one should have been surprised that intense criticism of the airline spread rapidly via social media, portraying them as bad-guys even though the incident was (arguably) a one-time mistake by an isolated group of employees.

This wound up being a good thing, because:

The airline discovered this issue, apologized to the would-be passengers and their families, refunded their money, offered them additional free flights, and came up with a new process to keep the problem from recurring. All-in-all, the airline—our hometown favorite here in Seattle, Alaska Airlines—took a regrettable mistake, and did everything possible (considering it was after the fact) to make it right with those affected. In this way Alaska Airlines also earned positive PR by showing they’re the kind of company that owns up to their mistakes and jumps on an opportunity to do the right thing when they can.

> Read more about the “special needs passengers stranded by Alaska Airlines” incident

> Another great PR turnaround story:  FedEx responds after delivery guy caught on video throwing computer equipment over a fence

This post isn’t about Alaska Airlines—it’s about the other guys

I’m pleased to see more and more stories about companies turning customer complaints into positive publicity. But this post is for the other guys, anyone who isn’t sure they have the right attitude, either individually or organizationally, to handle all customer criticism in a positive way.

Poster child for the other guys: the poor fellow in charge of PR for General Motor’s Chevy Volt product.

George Anders, a journalist and blogger for Forbes, took home a Chevy Volt to give it a try. When he asked online for help with a recharging problem he was having (the Volt is a plug-in hybrid) other Volt owners enthusiastically offered assistance. That was great news for George, and even better news for Chevy—vibrant customer communities, when they exist, are one of the best things about the social media era. Such communities can become huge, low-overhead “company assets”.

But Chevy’s official spokesperson apparently didn’t like George’s feedback and responded to George’s request for help in a way which George felt belittled both the Volt charging issue and the blogger himself.

My guess is that George had hit upon a known problem that the PR guy was frustrated by and he was peeved that George hadn’t let him dodge it.

Understandable. But it’s also understandable that George rewarded the PR guy in kind, with multiple posts on Forbes.com that featured both the charging problem and the PR guy’s unprofessional bed-side manner.

Oops. Not good for the brand. And pointless, to boot. The customer community had already taken care of the problem. All the PR guy had to do was lose the ‘tude.

> Read George Anders’ original post about his Chevy Volt PR experience

> Read about the trend toward “Unsourcing”—turning over customer support to other customers—in The Economist

In social media, indignation sells.

The Chevy Volt scenario isn’t unusual. Every day there seems to be a new story making the rounds on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter about companies generating unnecessary—and astonishingly bad—publicity about the way they mishandled a customer complaint.

Typically this happens when the customer service reps, PR people and/or executives who get a complaint thrust upon them take it personally instead of professionally. They may feel

  • frustrated because their time and talent is being wasted;
  • defensive, and afraid the blame will stick; or
  • outraged, because the issues seem to be trivial or the customer’s own fault.

By letting their personal emotional reactions get the better of them these company representatives fail to “get” that any disrespect, frustration, or defensiveness (fear) they respond with can boomerang back on the company via a social media feeding frenzy.

These reactions are understandable—we’ve all been there (well, perhaps not the Dalai Lama, but the rest of us have been there). For most of the people I consult with the hardest part about responding to unwanted criticism  is developing a mindset where unsolicited feedback, and frankly, unhelpful and negative feedback, is welcome.

Solution: Wrap your brain around a constructive mindset

Here are three reasons why getting plenty of comments you don’t want is a best case outcome, not a worst case outcome:

1. People who comment or complain are already engaged with your brand and want to be more engaged. Reward them with your respect. Commenters want a response, and hope for a solution—they’re invested. Your critics are often people who want to like you more than they do, people who want you to improve and succeed, and are willing to give you a chance. In their minds their comments or complaints are a valuable gift of their time and knowledge.

Consider this: The worst thing that could happen to you would be if people stopped giving you the benefit of their opinions.

Imagine what would happen if everyone ignored your brand completely. Only your enemies let you walk around with a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe without mentioning it. Your friends, and people who are open to becoming your friends, are the ones who point problems out to you so you have the choice of doing something about it or not. (I’m seldom so peeved as to not provide merchants with feedback about their failings…but it has happened once or twice. Call me spiteful.)

You want to encourage customer feedback, not discourage it. So be a grateful gift recipient if only because receiving customers’ gifts of feedback is a powerful—and inexpensive—way to reward them for their loyalty. Just by listening to customers you are giving them something of value! A person who gives a gift—here, the customer giving feedback—often benefits from the act of giving a gift as much as or even more than the recipient benefits from receiving it. But ingratitude on the part of the recipient robs the giver of the benefit of giving.

2. Listening is often all you need to do to satisfy many commenters. Frequently listening is enough to calm down complainers and, ironically, it can turn them into fans. People are less likely to discover they are mistaken, or that a thing they are upset about is trivial, while they’re angry. When they get their story out and feel heard, they can calm down. And when someone listens to them, and helps them calm down—closure and all—they are often more than calm, they’re grateful.

If find yourself getting stuck on the idea of “listening” to strangers who are annoying you, remember:

  • Listening to someone isn’t the same thing as agreeing with them.
  • Customers don’t have to be factually correct to deserve the respect your listening shows them.
  • Customers will expect you to treat them the way you treat others, even non-customers.

> Learn more about improving business listening skills

3. There will be wheat among the chaff. You can’t have it both ways. When the customers complaints are legitimate, hearing them (and sometimes, as with the Alaska Airlines incident above, discovering them) is essential for your business. There is no cheap, sure-fire way to screen out the good comments from the bad. Turn the filter up too high and you will screen out, and discourage, feedback you want.

Don’t be too quick to judge the value of comments and complaints. Sometimes just about everyone is terrible at articulating important ideas, and the meaning they try to convey is lost. Other times we are terrible listeners and we fail to grasp the importance of what is said. When you are tempted to get irritated by what seems to be an inappropriate comment, cut both yourself and the complainer some slack, instead. Count to 10. Or 100. Or pull in someone who isn’t taking it so personally to take over for you.

Keep the door open to feedback of all forms, if only to reap the benefits of reasons 1 and 2 above, then allow the cream rise to the top. Even if a majority of customer commentary is not particularly helpful to you, genuine customer service and/or policy issues will sometimes emerge which will give you opportunities to enrich your customer relationships and reputation.

Get listening. Or get trained.

For these three reasons your best across-the-board reaction when receiving feedback is to be grateful. You should be flattered by commenters’ interest and the fact that they made the effort to offer you a gift, so to speak. And you can treat their offering like a beauty contest or possibly a lottery ticket—sometimes good ideas come in, and both you and the commenter win! And those who don’t “win” may still give you credit for giving them their time on stage.

If you or someone on your team (including C-level executives) can’t do this, then get these people training or keep them away from customers. On second thought, we’ve arrived in the social business era; there’s nowhere to hide from customers any more. Get listening, or get trained. Or your business will suffer the consequences.

Making the Scene With SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Social Media Features

Social sharing - how is it different in the workplace?

I discovered an interesting video recently while helping a client demonstrate how users of a SharePoint document management system can share information about the documents they are managing. The video is by Michael Gannotti, a technology specialist at Microsoft, and it apparently shows how Microsoft uses SharePoint 2010′s social media features in-house. The video covers other SharePoint 2010 features as well, but I found 2 segments particularly relevant.

Social Media features in SharePoint (from timestamp 6 minutes 49 seconds to 15 minutes 50 seconds):

  • people search — users can find people who are experts on the subjects they’re researching;
  • publishing — via wikis, FAQS, and blogs;
  • user home pages — users can fill out their own profiles, add types of content, see their friend and group feeds;
  • viewing other users’ pages — users can find out more about co-workers and their work;
  • adding meta-information — tagging, liking, and adding notes or ratings to alert others about the relevance of content to oneself, to a project, or to a topic; and,
  • publishing (blogging) options — users can post to SharePoint either via a rich web-based text authoring environment or direct from a Word document.

Using One Note For Sharing (from timestamp 17 minutes 34 seconds to 18 minutes 34 seconds):

  • can create the equivalent of wikis and FAQs;
  • is web-editable;
  • may be better for printing; and
  • can also be used offline.

Here’s his video (hosted by Vimeo):

Other resources

Another useful resource concerning social media in SharePoint 2010 is this blog post by Microsoft Senior Technical Product Manager Dave Pae at TechEd earlier this month: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-2010/archive/2010/06/07/live-from-teched-overview-of-social-computing-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx. This also links to a post about social search which not only discusses the types of content (including meta-information) which can be searched, but also covers phonetic search capabilities: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-2010/archive/2010/06/07/live-from-teched-in-new-orleans-what-s-new-in-enterprise-search-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx.

Unwittingly funny GOP social media experiment failed by being generic

A recent US Republican Party social media experiment misfired not because of poor moderation, as some critics have assumed, but because site managers failed to recruit and motivate the right community. This post explores ways to create an open, uncensored forum that can more constructively represent both loyal followers and potential converts who were (presumably) the intended targets of the site.

Saying they want to “give the American people a megaphone to speak out,” last week GOP Congressional leaders announced a new web site, AmericaSpeakingOut.com, an open “town meeting” where everyone has an “[o]pportunity to change the way Congress works by proposing ideas for a new policy agenda.”

Despite an enthusiastic introduction by GOP leaders, wackiness ensued. Notable submissions on the site included unlikely suggestions, like:

  • “end child labor laws” (economic development);
  • “build a castle-style wall along the border, there is plenty of stone laying around about there” (immigration);
  • “employ some of those invincible black knights from Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (national security); and,
  • “repeal all the amendments to the Constitution” (legislative reform).

In one respect AmericaSpeakingOut.com is a masterpiece: arguably, at least, it demonstrates that the GOP is openly listening to everyone, including critics, satirists, and fringe viewpoints (assuming that at least some of the wacky-sounding comments are actual viewpoints, not simply attempts to bait the GOP).

But the net effect, evidenced both by the media reaction and comments from readers (as well as my own non-scientific sampling on the site), is that the majority of site contributors are merely mocking the GOP. Some would argue that this is a good thing because the GOP deserves ridicule. However, it seems unlikely that those who created and put their weight behind the site intended this result. And personally I feel the body politic lost an opportunity for constructive discourse.

For examples of negative press coverage see The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and Politico.

Between various critiques I’ve examined, the most common criticism is that the GOP failed to moderate the site. Unlikely. A simple lack of moderation would have rendered the site a playground for spam advertisers and foul language — which isn’t its problem.

Instead, we should ask why, despite ample moderation, the community that formed around the site failed to support the GOP’s stated goal of becoming a brainstorming session sponsored by the Republican party.

I’m guessing the answer is the site’s managers failed to establish a sustainable and productive community for the site before releasing it to the general public. Instead the tone for the community was set by early waves of curious people who visited the site – many of whom sought to mock the GOP and the political status quo. Once a tone of satire and hyperbole set in, the die was cast, and subsequent visitors quickly found themselves wondering if any of the posts were intended to be constructive — grounding the site securely in the realm of the ridiculous.

Under these circumstances more “moderation,” in the sense that moderators could have censored every submission they found unappealing, is impractical. It’s a little like sending gardeners into an untouched forest and telling them to cut down everything they find that’s wouldn’t be found in an idealized flower bed. It can also lead to damaging backlash from frustrated would-be contributors spilling over into popular web sites not under the GOP’s control.

Theirs was a failure to identify their customer and to target their customer’s needs via the forum. A generic online community concept, like any generic marketing campaign, suffers from limited appeal.

What could site managers have done differently?

1. Back to the gardening analogy: the most practical approach towards setting a tone for the site would have been to seed a freshly prepared site with the sort of content and community members they wanted to see there. To accomplish this they could have released the site in “beta” to a loyalist community who would have pre-populated the site with submissions and comments containing the right tone. And from among participants in this community, both selected and self-appointed community defenders would have emerged to help paid moderators keep the general tone more or less on-message. They would both supply fresh content and police others’ comments, for example by criticizing (or in extreme cases, deleting) crackpot or satirical posts. Once it opened to the general public, at minimum satirical posts would be called-out by community defenders, signaling both established members and visitors that satire wasn’t the de facto character of the site.

Of course, this would have prevented the site from becoming a true “state of nature” representation of the interests of the US voting public, which in one sense would be a shame. And among other side effects, a partisan community will usually discourage or even shout down viewpoints not already popular in that community, which can lead to an echo-chamber of pure doctrine. But while I commend the GOP for apparently attempting to provide perfect openness, the chances of it working were exactly zero. Trolls are a fact of life on the internet. Tilling fresh soil and inviting all comers is basically an invitation for opportunistic plants to co-opt the new ecosystem, and snarky satirical “weeds” can quickly become the dominant crop.

2. Going a degree further, the GOP could have solicited short posts from celebrity GOP members (politicians, bloggers, TV personalities) whose fans would have flocked to the site to support their favorites and assist with policing while generating fresh submissions in a similar vein.

3. An additional step — which would have had the undesirable side-effect of discouraging some number of participants — would have been to require everyone to publicly identify themselves, their party affiliation, and other data that would have discouraged satire by holding people accountable for the words.

4. An ambitious alternative approach — one which I’ve never heard of anyone trying before — would have been to have a contributor “lottery” of sorts, choosing a random sample of the voting public, then offering them the opportunity to have their views featured on this high-profile site in exchange for attributing their real names, localities, and possibly other demographic information to ensure a degree of honesty and accountability. Ideally this would have given the GOP the quality of honest input they were looking for, although it might or might not have generated ideas and discussions useful for their platform-building process, and might or might not have given rise to a community passionate enough to be self-sustaining.

In conclusion: AmericaSpeakingOut.com works as mold-breaking outreach by the GOP because it appears to be free, open, and civil, basically uncensored in a political dimension, but it fails in a platform-building dimension because the sincerity of participants is questionable, the true composition of the relatively small community participating in the site is a complete mystery, and the fit of most suggestions to any potential GOP platform is poor. Realistically, to serve the potential GOP voter some effort should have been made to welcome that specific community by rewarding that community, rather than simply throwing open the doors to a broad, unfocused community of opportunists.

Cloud-seeding: SaaS data classification via Panda Security’s new anti-virus offering

Panda Security recently released (in beta form) what it claims is the first cloud-based anti-virus / anti-malware solution for Windows PCs. Not only does it sound like a clever tool for data loss prevention, but it demonstrates another way in which information service providers can aggregate individual user data to develop classifications or benchmarks valuable to every user, a mechanism I’ve explored in previous blog posts.

In essence, every computer using Panda’s Cloud Antivirus is networked together through Panda’s server to form a “collective intelligence” for malware detection and prevention. Here’s how it works: users download and install Panda’s software – it’s a small application known as an “agent” because the heavy lifting is done on Panda’s server. These agents send reports back to the Panda server containing information about new files (and, I presume, related computer activity which might indicate the presence of malware). When the server receives reports about previously unknown files which resemble, according to the logic of the classification engine, files already known to be malware, these new files are classified as threats without waiting for manual review by human security experts.

Security Camera

Sampling at the right time and place allows proactive decision making.

For example, imagine a new virus is released onto the net by its creators. People surfing the net, opening emails, and inserting digital media start downloading this new file, which can’t be identified as a virus by traditional anti-virus software because it hasn’t been placed in any virus definitions list yet. Computers on which the Panda agent has been installed begin sending reports about the new file back to the Panda server. After some number of reports about the file are received by Panda’s server, the server is able to determine that the new file should be treated as a virus. At this point all computers in the Panda customer network are preemptively warned about the virus, even though it has only just appeared.

According to Panda’s April 29, 2009 press release:

Utilizing Panda’s proprietary cloud computing technology called Collective Intelligence, Panda Cloud Antivirus harnesses the knowledge of Panda’s global community of millions of users to automatically identify and classify new malware strains in almost real-time. Each new file received by Collective Intelligence is automatically classified in under six minutes. Collective Intelligence servers automatically receive and classify over 50,000 new samples every day. In addition, Panda’s Collective Intelligence system correlates malware information data collected from each PC to continually improve protection for the community of users.

Because Panda’s solution is cloud-based and free to consumers, it will reside on a large number of different computers and networks worldwide. This is how Panda’s cloud solution is able to fill a dual role as both sampling and classification engine for virus activity. On the one hand Panda serves as manager of a communal knowledge pool that benefits all consumers participating in the free service. On the other hand, Panda can sell the malware detection knowledge it gains to corporate customers – wherein lies the revenue model that pays for the free service.

I have friends working in two unrelated startups, one concerning business financial data and the other Enterprise application deployment ROI, that both work along similar lines (although neither are free to consumers). Both startups offer a combination of analytics for each customer’s data plus access to benchmarks established by anonymously aggregating data across customers.

Panda’s cloud analytics, aggregation and classification mechanism is also analogous to the non-boolean document categorization software for eDiscovery discussed in previous posts in this blog, whereby unreviewed documents can be automatically (and thus inexpensively) classified for responsiveness and privilege:

Deeper, even more powerful extensions of this principle are also possible. I anticipate that we will soon see software which will automatically classify all of an organization’s documents as they are created or received, including documents residing on employees laptop and mobile devices. Using Panda-like classification logic, new documents will be classified accurately whether or not they are of an exact match with anything previously known to the classification system. This will substantially improve implementation speed and accuracy for search, access control and collaboration, document deletion and preservation, end point protection, storage tiering, and all other IT, legal and business information management policies.