United Breaks Gui­tars: The inter­view from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Musi­cian Dave Carroll’s advice to com­pa­nies: Respect your customers

Asmart com­pany these days under­stands that every­body has a voice. So the best way to avoid a pub­lic rela­tions night­mare is to give great cus­tomer ser­vice right out of the gate. “It’s a bad day when a customer’s upset,” says Dave Car­roll, cre­ator of the viral three-part musi­cal tril­ogy United Breaks Gui­tars.

I met Car­roll just after his keynote at the annual con­fer­ence of the Soci­ety for New Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Research (I’m a senior fel­low). Car­roll gave a funny and wise blow-by-blow of the PR and cus­tomer sup­port blun­ders by United Air­lines after bag­gage car­ri­ers broke his Tay­lor guitar.

The inci­dent has gone down as per­haps the ulti­mate self-inflicted cus­tomer rela­tions screw-up by a major cor­po­ra­tion in the social media era of empow­ered cus­tomers. The orig­i­nal video has been seen 8.8 mil­lion times since it went live a year ago and is the 12th most-watched video in the his­tory of YouTube.

“Com­pa­nies pro­vid­ing poor cus­tomer ser­vice can’t ride out the sit­u­a­tion as in the past,” Car­roll says. United ran Car­roll through the bureau­cratic ringer for 9 months before giv­ing him a defin­i­tive answer about his com­pen­sa­tion claim: No.

“I was almost out of options but I wasn’t because social media allowed me to express myself in a cre­ative way,” he says.

Watch, down­load or embed the inter­view on Vimeo
Watch or embed the video on YouTube

In the inter­view, Car­roll dis­cusses his take on the idea of “a mar­ket of one” — the notion that today there are no sta­tis­ti­cally insignif­i­cant parts of the mar­ket­place. “The mar­ket of one is every­body,” he says. Incor­po­rat­ing good cus­tomer ser­vice should be part of a holis­tic approach to a company’s busi­ness processes — not because it’s right but because it makes sense from a com­pet­i­tive busi­ness standpoint.

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Change the world with social net­work­ing from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

 

A chat with Deanna Zandt, author of the new book ‘Share This!’

At Per­sonal Democ­racy Forum last month I got a chance to sit down for a few min­utes with Deanna Zandt, who spoke on the main stage min­utes before­hand. Her new book, Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Net­work­ing, just came out.

“Empa­thy is the build­ing block for any kind of social change,” she says in the inter­view. “It’s lead­ing us away from apa­thy and isolation.”

While the new social tools are empow­er­ing, she called on peo­ple to go fur­ther and to “rearrange power rela­tion­ships” and to “dis­man­tle hier­ar­chies.” That can be achieved, Zandt said, through “three easy tasks”:

1. to be authen­tic by shar­ing pieces of ourselves;
2. to diver­sify and cross-pollinate across bar­ri­ers. For instance, tech con­fer­ence speak­ers are gen­er­ally white and male. “I want to chal­lenge peo­ple to find peo­ple who don’t think like them or talk like them.”
3. to take that empa­thy and put your­self in oth­ers’ shoes.

Watch, embed or down­load the video on Vimeo

Alter­Net is host­ing a book launch party for Deanna tomor­row in San Fran­cisco. Details:

What: Book launch for Share This! See invi­ta­tion page on Face­book — 45 con­firmed atten­dees so far

When: July 20, 6–9 pm

Where: Bender’s Bar & Grill, 806 S Van Ness Ave., San Francisco

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One of my favorite Web 2.0 col­lab­o­rate pro­duc­tion sites of all time is dot­SUB — tagline: “Any video. Any lan­guage.” I’ve been bump­ing into Michael Smolens, CEO and founder of the inno­v­a­tive startup, for the past cou­ple of years at video and social media con­fer­ences on both coasts.

dot­SUB is a Web-based tool that enables the sub­ti­tling, or cap­tion­ing, of Web videos into other lan­guages using human trans­la­tors. The videos can be sub­ti­tled through vol­un­teer crowd­sourc­ing or restricted to pro­fes­sion­als hired to com­plete the task for a busi­ness or project.

The gen­e­sis for dot­SUB was Michael’s real­iza­tion that English-only inde­pen­dent and doc­u­men­tary films, TV pro­grams and videos could have a pow­er­ful, trans­for­ma­tive effect if made avail­able in dozens of other lan­guages – and the same could hold true of for­eign works shown in the U.S. with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles. The service’s early years relied on the Wikipedia model of crowd­sourced trans­la­tions: Any­one could begin sub­ti­tling a film into his or her own lan­guage, and oth­ers could come along after­ward to tidy up.

Apart from open, col­lab­o­ra­tive uses, dot­SUB more recently has been used as a closed plat­form where busi­nesses, media and enter­tain­ment com­pa­nies and other orga­ni­za­tions that don’t trust the open com­mu­nity could hire a team of pro­fes­sional trans­la­tors to pro­vide cap­tions of CEO speeches, cor­po­rate videos, train­ing videos and mar­ket­ing or adver­tis­ing mes­sages in mul­ti­ple lan­guages. And this, no doubt, is where dot­SUB gen­er­ates the bulk of its income, given that it can accom­plish this task at a price con­sid­er­ably below tra­di­tional methods.

One can eas­ily imag­ine multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions that use video as part of its mar­ket­ing, pub­lic out­reach or brand­ing strate­gies turn to dot­SUB as an end-to-end solu­tion for trans­la­tions into its non-English markets.

One can also imag­ine the edu­ca­tional uses of dot­SUB in the class­room from ele­men­tary school to high school, from uni­ver­si­ties to grad­u­ate level programs.

Watch, embed or down­load the video on Vimeo

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The home page of Intel­pe­dia, Intel’s cor­po­rate wiki.

Other com­pa­nies should take a page from Intel’s col­lab­o­ra­tive workspace

Wikis are the poor cousins of social media. Sel­dom loved, often feared, always unsexy, a wiki is sim­ply a col­lab­o­ra­tive web­site that can be directly edited by any­one with access to it. At its heart, a wiki is an online space for build­ing col­lec­tive info banks. (I’ve cre­ated more than a dozen wikis over the years, for Our­me­dia, the Trav­el­ing Geeks and other organizations.)

In recent years, wiki soft­ware has entered the work­place, with com­pa­nies like Social­text, Atlass­ian, Cus­tomerVi­sion, Mind­Touch and Trac­tion rolling out business-friendly ver­sions, and a good num­ber of For­tune 1000 com­pa­nies, includ­ing Microsoft, Dis­ney, Xerox and Sony, now using wikis. Wikipedia, natch, lists some of the fea­tures of enter­prise wikis.

But one early suc­cess story hasn’t received the atten­tion it deserves: Intel­pe­dia. I can’t link to it because it’s a pri­vate wiki, but I did spend an hour on the phone inter­view­ing its cre­ator, Intel engi­neer Josh Ban­croft. In Novem­ber 2005 Josh decided that his co-workers should have quick and easy access to a raft of com­pany infor­ma­tion, from inter­nal projects to his­tor­i­cal back­ground. (Dis­clo­sure: I am an advi­sor to Intel and a mem­ber of the Intel Insid­ers, and I met Josh at Gnomedex 2006.)

Like so many suc­cess­ful projects, this one bub­bled up from the bot­tom, and the idea quickly caught on inside the com­pany. By April 2008, the wiki had grown to about 25,000 pages and received 100 mil­lion page views. About 500 changes to the wiki take place each day, and more than 8,700 peo­ple have con­tributed to it.

“In the four-plus years that Intel­pe­dia has been up and run­ning, I have had exactly zero reported instances of an unwanted edit — of some­one spam­ming or van­dal­iz­ing or doing some­thing inap­pro­pri­ate,” Josh said. I’ve heard the same from other com­pa­nies, which should allay the fears that some cor­po­rate exec­u­tives still harbor.

What about the tra­di­tional cor­po­rate cul­ture of lock­ing up infor­ma­tion? “By neces­sity, a lot of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion needs to be con­trolled,” Josh said. Only infor­ma­tion that couldn’t hurt the com­pany if it leaked out to the pub­lic could be posted to the wiki.

“We haven’t had an exam­ple of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion being shared out­side the com­pany,” said Ken Kaplan of cor­po­rate communications.

At its out­set, there were hand­fuls of evan­ge­lists say­ing on an almost daily basis, “Hey, we should put this on Intel­pe­dia!” The wiki got cov­ered by Cir­cuit, Intel’s inter­nal online newslet­ter, which brought in a big influx of users. Josh and some of his col­leagues then formed a vol­un­tary group, the Intel­pe­dia Dis­trib­uted Edi­tors, to help steer the wiki with a mail­ing list, a weekly meet­ing and to by help­ing to “gar­den” con­tent con­tri­bu­tions by new­com­ers. “No fund­ing or resources from the com­pany has been needed, and it prob­a­bly never will be,” Josh said.

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Mil­lions of down­load­able app fans can’t be wrong

Since the explo­sion of Web 2.0, there’s been a sense in the indus­try that down­load­able appli­ca­tions for PCs and Macs are dead. Web 2.0 pro­gram­ming lan­guages turned sta­tic web pages into web appli­ca­tions. The advan­tage of this now-dubbed “web­ware” was that you didn’t have to go through the process of down­load­ing and installing an appli­ca­tion, often cited as a major hur­dle for usage. Web 2.0 appli­ca­tions could work in everyone’s browser (PC or Mac), no mat­ter the con­fig­u­ra­tion (usually).

If it’s true that “peo­ple won’t down­load and install appli­ca­tions,” how come all of us have down­loaded and installed appli­ca­tions run­ning on our com­put­ers right now? And how come mil­lions of peo­ple still down­load and install applications?

I wrote about the down­load­able appli­ca­tion issue (hot or not?) on my blog, Spark Minute. I looked at the three most suc­cess­ful cat­e­gories of down­load­able appli­ca­tions (com­mu­ni­ca­tions, mul­ti­me­dia, and mal­ware pro­tec­tion) and how they drive revenue.

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In Social Media, ROI = Return on Inter­ac­tion + Return on Influence

Guest post by Peter Bihr
The Wav­ing Cat

How to mea­sure the suc­cess of Social Media has been a huge prob­lem in this indus­try for quite a while. There is a con­sen­sus that the num­ber of fans/likes on Face­book or of fol­low­ers on Twit­ter is too weak an indi­ca­tor, but the alter­na­tive met­rics are still rare: No golden stan­dard has emerged yet.

This pre­sen­ta­tion by 22squared on Return on Invest­ment (ROI) in Social Media is the best I’ve seen in a long time. One of the few really good ones, really, as it backs up the main claims with data. Since you read this blog, the core find­ing won’t really be a sur­prise to you: Social Media engages cus­tomers and stake­hold­ers, leads to inter­ac­tions and even­tu­ally even to increased sales. (The lat­ter part being the least impor­tant here.) It’s cer­tainly good to have a decent study to back this up.

The key idea is to fac­tor in non-financial ben­e­fits of Social Media engage­ment, too: Return on Invest­ment = Return on inter­ac­tion + Return on influence.

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Where did June go already? Here’s our roundup of social media, tech and mar­ket­ing con­fer­ences and events sched­uled for the month of July. For the full year, see our Cal­en­dar of 2010 social media, tech and mar­ket­ing con­fer­ences.

Note that we’ve pub­lished a roundup of non­profit and social change con­fer­ences and events for July on our sis­ter site, Socialbrite.

We’ll pub­lish a list of note­wor­thy con­fer­ences and events on the first of each month dur­ing the year. Hope to see you at some of these! If you know of other must-attend events, please share by post­ing the info in the com­ments at the bottom.

Con­fer­ence	Date	Place
July
July 8	San Fran­cisco
The first in a series of social media and social mar­ket­ing events pro­duced by a UK team of con­sul­tants will fea­ture top-flight speakers.
Blue­Glass LA	July 19	Marina Del Rey, Calif.
Blue­Glass LA is an online mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence fea­tur­ing top-class speak­ers in search mar­ket­ing, social media and entre­pre­neur­ship that will pro­vide all you need to know on indus­try trends and strategies.
OSCON	July 19–23	Port­land, Ore.
In its 12th year, OSCON con­tin­ues to be the pre­mier meet­ing ground for every­one using open source. At OSCON, you’ll par­tic­i­pate in hun­dreds of ses­sions cov­er­ing open source lan­guages and plat­forms, prac­ti­cal tuto­ri­als, inspi­ra­tional keynotes, an Expo Hall and great net­work­ing events. Join over 2,500 peo­ple pas­sion­ate about open source.
Super Genius: How to Be Great at Word of Mouth Marketing	July 20	New York
GasPedal’s lat­est gath­er­ing pulls together 12 real-world case stud­ies of word of mouth suc­cess sto­ries from great com­pa­nies and six authors as well as a keynote from Tony Hsieh, author of “Deliv­er­ing Hap­pi­ness: A Path to Prof­its, Pas­sion, and Pur­pose” and CEO of Zappos.
For­tune Brain­storm: Tech	July 22–24	Aspen, Colo.
For­tune Brain­storm: Tech is a mar­ket­place of ideas that assem­bles some of the smartest peo­ple in tech and media — the thinkers, oper­a­tors, entre­pre­neurs, inno­va­tors and influ­encers — for dis­cus­sions about the chang­ing landscape.
Sum­mit at Stanford	July 27–29	Palo Alto, Calif.
This exec­u­tive gath­er­ing high­lights the sig­nif­i­cant eco­nomic, polit­i­cal and com­mer­cial trends affect­ing the global tech­nol­ogy indus­tries. The sum­mit fea­tures the most inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies, emi­nent tech­nol­o­gists, influ­en­tial investors and jour­nal­ists in keynote pre­sen­ta­tions, panel debates and pri­vate com­pany CEO showcases.
Super­nova	July 30	Philadel­phia
At Super­nova, CEOs and blog­gers, entre­pre­neurs and aca­d­e­mics, pol­icy experts and indus­try lead­ers share insights and build rela­tion­ships. It’s moved from San Fran­cisco to Philly for the first time.

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