Yipes. Jeremy went to Disney on Ice last night. Disney is certainly not a member of the culture of generosity!
Pilgrim Notes
Reflections along the way.
Category: Customer Experience (page 2 of 3)
Micahel Calore, Wired News Online, recently asked readers for the best and worst of Web 2.0. Yesterday, he posted responses. Worst? MySpace. Sure it’s the most popular, but it’s also the ugliest and doesn’t want to play with other Web 2.0 apps. Here’s the rest of his list:
Best Top 5
Flickr (I likee.)
Odeo (I need to play around podcasting at some point.)
Writely (I personally like ThinkFree better)
del.icio.us (it is just me or is that hard to type?)
NetVibes (This is one of my faves!)
Worst
MySpace
Squidoo
Browzar
Fo.rtuito.us
Friendster
Trying to keep out open source invaders, MySpace has decided to erect walls around its interface, claiming YouTube, Flickr and others are simply leeches on the MySpace body. Or as Peter Chernin says,
“If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace.”
It appears MySpace is going to make their space less friendly to outside companies by blocking external links in flash widgets and more. They also plan to develop proprietary widgets for video and other services.
As TechCrunch says, “It sounds like MySpace’s owners may not want to play a game where everyone wins.”
Too bad. We’ll see what happens. Maybe MySpace won’t take their ball go home. And if they do, hopefully someone will come and play even better ball than before.
iVillage, once the very example of websites dedicated to women, is now a perfect example of Web 1.0 thinking. Originally built around message boards, the site limits the amount of user input and customization. While the technology can easily be modified, can the administrative thinking behind the site change? can it go from a site with highly managed content to a free-wheeling customer content driven site?
NBC bought iVillage in March, Bob Wright, NBC President, recently announced that they plan to make iVillage the foundational pattern for NBCs digital efforts. Bambi Francisco of MarketWatch offers a wonderful comparison and analysis of MySpace vs iVillage and the challenges ahead for NBC.
MySpace is as close to a democratic virtual world as you can get on the Web, as its own liberating culture and subcultures allow for new talent to rise from the virtual pool of wannabes. To wit: MySpace recently struck a deal with SNOCAP so that the 3 million bands on MySpace can sell their music to their fans directly.
Ten-year-old iVillage, on the other hand, is a first-generation Internet community site, built on an earlier top-down model of what community meant to those of us who were around back in the old days of the Web — message boards. IVillage has 1,000 message boards. But they are so limiting that the only way to demonstrate self-expression, besides writing in all caps and using expletives, is to upload a photo. Additionally, iVillage is a place where news is delivered to you; where editors rule the roost; where the audience learns and takes more than they give, and where the bulk of the content is polished and scrubbed. It’s almost too perfectly maintained compared to the anarchy, mess and grunge of MySpace.
The differences remind me of my walk through the Sausalito, Calif. Art Festival a couple weeks ago. As I made my way through the very clean, organized and civil art show, I couldn’t help but think of my friends who were — at that same time — attending the raucous, eclectic and countercultural art festival called Burning Man. The two environments couldn’t be more different. One liberates our individuality, like MySpace. The other quietly asks us to conform, like iVillage.
The list of social shopping sites is growing. New York Times ran a piece on the growth of this new phenomenon. In a way, its an expansion of the Amazon reviews. Anytime I buy I book, I almost always check out the Amazon reviews/debates. It is fascinating to see how these review pages often become an ongoing conversation or argument among Amazon reviewers. Take this to the next level, social shopping allows people to share their passion for a variety of products and to build a community of friends at the same time.
Check out some of these social shopping sites:
Wists
I am not a big coffee drinker but Joyce’s Java look appealing even to me. The Coloradoan tells the story of an offline social network where folks gathered to buy coffee, talk and forms relationships. Some folks even met and married! Joyce will be closing her doors this week.
Sadly the comments under the story suggest Joyce is closing her doors because she lost her lease due a large bookstore moving in with its own generic community coffee stand.
Yipes! As the power shifts to the people, brand owners are not the only ones generating mass messages about their brand. With the all the various social aggregators like YouTube, MySpace, blogs, and more, antibranding viral messages can travel faster than official brand messages through the culture.
New York Times (Agenda Inc. LiveFeed) presents an interesting story on the rise of semiotic disobedience. This is the act of subverting or reinventing a brand logo to give new meaning to the signifier. NYT introduces a cool game that makes light of the poor service at Kinkos. Disaffected is a downloadable “anti-advergame” that allows players to experience the incompetence of Kinkos staff firsthand.
Wow! This news from Captain’s Corner is a big disappointment in the “treating people like persons” department. Yesterday, ” RadioShack Corp. notified about 400 workers by e-mail that they were being dismissed immediately as part of planned job cuts” (from Globe and Mail). This is certainly one way to use technology to dehumanize people.
Captain’s Quarter wonders, “If this is how they treat their employees, imagine what Radio Shack thinks of their customers.”
For the last couple issues, Springwise has been talking about a trend to businesses building space in virtual worlds. SecondLife (a virtual community for 18-year-and above) has become a virtual home for Scion, Aloft Hotels, American Apparel, and
This is an interesting trend and business. Not sure how big it will be but it does open new questions about space, commerce and reality.
I came across another article on customer-centric thinking today on Click Z by Heidi Cohen. Cohen relates a story of planning her summer vacation online, making reservations, and then canceling after reading a bad review. She later received an email asking for more feedback about the cancellation. This causes Heidi to wax eloquent about how small hotel managers are very sensitive to online ratings and work hard to listen to customer needs so they can make sure their customers enjoy the service.
The rest of the article lays out a few tips for listening to customers, gathering information and applying it. I appreciate this current focus on customer centrism and usually try to follow what people are saying about it. The trend toward customers seems like a good thing.
Especially if is for real.
Listening is an art. If I listen to a customer just to figure out a plan for the best way to manipulate them to purchase my goods, I may not listen for long. Or they may not speak for long.
Granted most of us listen to other people for selfish reasons. It is hard to listen for the sake of listening. This is challenge of turning and facing another person in all their ambiguity; valuing them as unique person; and listening to what they say (without immediately figuring out how to use or retort it). Our culture has little time or capacity for really listening, but if we learned it, it might change our lives.
Can this kind of listening work in business? It depends on the business model. Does the business exist for pure profit? Or are there other reasons? Under some models, a company might be willing to lose some profit if it means listening and responding to some genuine customer concerns. Then this stuff becomes real.
Otherwise it is just a means to end. Another method to ultimately use another for our own ends. If we practice this in business, I’m not sure we can turn it off when we go home.
I have a silly idea (maybe its purely eschatalogical), but I believe there could be another kind of commerce. Commerce is good because it involves exchange, thus presupposing relationship at some level. So could there be a commerce of love? And could it happen on this planet in this age?
I guess this why I’m a bad blogger. Too much writing and not enough linking! So I’ll stop.
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