five signs of fail: customer relations.

1. It takes more than ten minutes to speak to a human, and identify the problem.
2. Customers can google your flowchart, and  talk the CSR to the correct conclusion, more efficiently than they would actually be helped by the customer relations reps.
3. A customer needs to be escalated to a higher level representative more than twice.
4. There are more than five automated menus, in any circumstance, before speaking to a human.
5. There is no direct communication between the customer service department, and people who can 1) make decisions, or 2) authorize refunds, repairs or replacements.

Five signs of fail for Customer Relations.  It's worth noting that around 95% of customer relations departments have all five of these problems.

five signs of fail: ads.

1. The ad content and form is defined by the messaging of competitors, thereby validating their claims / insults.
2. The focus is a direct reaction to opposing messages, and the campaign would not exist if those messages hadn't provoked it.
3. The campaign intrigues without offering the audience anywhere to go for further information, even if they research independently.
4. The images / messages contradict either the reality of the product, the reality of the brand, or other elements of the same campaign.
5. The ad is based on an internet meme that is either lacking in mainstream appeal, or has already passed out of public consciousness.  Related: the ad directly copies an established meme, adding nothing original.

These are my five signs of fail for advertising.  Feel free to guess which specific campaigns inspired each point - I am giving away no-prizes.

the real (short) meaning of mobile's rise.

Most web applications are about fitting themselves into people's computer using routine.  Whether this is embodied by RSS feeds fitting blog reading around the workflow of other tasks, or about fitting social interaction into computer time at work and home through instant messaging or social networks, tying an application to a computer meant tying an action to a location or mindset.  I didn't think of it this way at the time, but IM probably helped me get more homework done in high school, because it added an incentive to sit in front of the computer and enough distraction that actually doing the work didn't seem arduous.

Mobile applications remove the location bias from these activities.  So, Facebook and IM and GReader, etc etc etc are now fitting into my actual living routine, and the adjustment is notable.  Email is not something I check when I get to work, when I get home, etc.  Email is a way of reaching me at any time, suitable not to a location or time, but to a type of message.  Same thing with Facebook and IM.

This isn't a huge difference to the people who are spending 8 hours a day in front of a monitor anyways, but I start to feel it when I spend more time out in the city, or on location for work.  The change is notable enough that even my laptop is starting to feel cumbersome, which I would have found absurd a year ago.  My social and work information flow / social actions are becoming tied only to the flow of information, and the way I choose to connect to people.

What does this mean?  It means that it's no longer enough to make something seamless in integration with the way people work, or the way people use a machine.  It's becoming necessary to make something that seamlessly integrates with the way people want to connect.  Tying your service to a work-station, or a single machine, isn't a good idea.

If I'm going to be mobile in terms of space, you need to be mobile in terms of platform.

ranking my screens.

Many communications and business blogs have talked at length about the importance of the 'Third Screen', the informational / communications / internet device that lives in your pocket.  Inherent in the title they've worked with is the question of ranking.  I'm realizing my third screen is quickly becoming my first screen, because it's where I do the majority of my hybrid (work and personal) communications.  And now it's actually dictating which platforms I use for my communications.

Blogger isn't cutting it.  The lack of actual iPhone compatibility has become a real deal breaker.  I've tried the options available, including emailing posts, but the formatting is broken, or the presentation is messy, or the experience is generally unfulfilling.  My options are basically to either give up using the iPhone to blog, or to change my blogging platform to something that lets me work with my third screen, which is quickly becoming my first screen.

I've been on blogger for far longer than the month and a half I've been an iPhone user.  And despite the long (long) list of complaints people have about blogger, I've generally not considered switching platforms.

But here we are, and now I'm thinking WordPress might be a rational option, considering they at least consider the idea of letting what I consider an important and influential market play too.

my life offline.

After a weekend without steady Internet access, I spent the majority
of the day offline, excepting my iphone, due to some networking
issues. This is not an ideal situation for me at any time, but at work
it has severely complicated my day.

This disruption led me to a realization; that previous generations
likely did less work, but more tasks - that is to say, instead of
spending the majority of the day on the key tasks of the job, that
time was spent on things like delivering messages, copying documents
by hand, retyping edited documents, travel time for research or
meetings, etc etc etc.

It would have been impossible to do as much actual work 75 years ago
as it is now. But because fewer jobs are based on manual labour, the
perception is opposite.

Increased efficiency inevitably leads to increased expectations. I'd
argue this is a good thing.

dear facebook, beacon is evil.

I know I've just recently berated anyone who whines about Facebook's new setup, but I've been seeing rumours here and there that the Beacon system might be coming back.  I hate Beacon, and I think my rage directed at it is more justified than those raging against the live feed option, or the new layout, or what have you, for one reason.

Facebook catalogues and organizes your social information.  It does this based on what you decide to tell the site about yourself, filtered through your privacy settings.  You might not like everyone you are friends with seeing what you do or say on Facebook, but you have decided to do and say those things, on the Facebook platform.

Beacon is problematic because it follows you around after you leave Facebook, and then tells everyone you have identified as a friend what you are up to outside of the Facebook platform.  To me, this breaks the implicit contract that Facebook users have - that Facebook stays confined to Facebook.  Telling people I'm said 'Happy Birthday' on a friend's wall is very different then telling them I googled the release dates of 35 mens fashion magazines, or watched several videos centred on the history of the bow tie.

What makes me odd, is that I don't have a problem with Facebook tracking this information, and using it to better target ads to me, assuming it is stored in a double-blind system, and kept for a limited amount of time.  What bothers me is that information, which I did not tell Facebook to collect, being distributed among individuals. 

Social networks are about projected identity, not actual identity.  If you remove the user control over the identity presented online, then yes, you are invading their privacy to an extent.  That, I have a problem with.

google valve rumours.

I don't normally obsess over rumour, but I have to say...

If Google buys Valve, it will make me happy only because it means a giant pile of money going into the development and expansion of Steam.

social media still needs the broadcast model.

It all comes from somewhere.  People want buzz in social media, and generally they think the obvious solution is to 'go Viral', as though this is something predictable or simple to replicate.  Social media is supposed to bread the broadcast model, but what we keep forgetting is that social media, in the large scale sense that communications pros and companies want, is based on the broadcast model.

The big blogs are either original works or commentary.  They disseminate to smaller blogs, and to sites like Digg and Reddit, generally the same way Newspapers would disseminate into real world conversations.  Many of the things that become comment peices are linkblogged from larger, more established sources.  Sure, the timing is faster, but it works the same as it always did - sources with the biggest audience generally trickle down into the sources with smaller audiences.

There are major differences and advantages in the results - blog and Digg coverage results in a fast online paper trail, google results, more impressions, etc.  For the reader, trickling down into blogs results in stories being approached from more varied and specific viewpoints.  But, if you want blog coverage, if you want social media relevance, the major ingredient beyond having a topic that is relevant to social media, is targeting and getting covered by the big boys.

This is what amuses me to no end about being told, constantly, that PR is dead, is useless, is irrelevant.  Half the time someone will say this, and within a week, link a story from the New York Times, or Marketing Magazine, or Fast Company, or a youtube clip from MSNBC.  Cognitive dissonance is an odd thing to watch writ large.

Social media has changed the game, certainly.  And approaching large entities online that operate on the broadcast model is not the same as contacting traditional media outlets.  But assuming that things that reach the largest number of people are less important at a time when things are breaking down into smaller, more specific conversations forgets the key element of having a topic.

And topics come from shared experience.

fatal flaw of tagging.

Tagging seems like a great idea - allowing individuals to create an adaptable sorting system for their information.  The main problem, and the thing that totally destroys the usability, is the existence of synonyms.

If every tagging system came with a number of pre-set tags, and then allowed the addition of tags that didn't fit into that system, there would be less of the 'tag-spread' that makes tagging useless.  Blogger has a version of this with their 'labels', a little 'show all' button that I use religiously.

I suppose I could go back through all 200 odd posts I've made here and fix the tagging, but going backwards seems against the logic of blogs.  This is a good, personalized system that would work a lot better with a bit of the limitation that the free software world is very often against.  I love crowdsourcing, but people need a path to show them where to go sometimes.

adding a social media layer.

I've had a very social media themed day.  I'm not going to go into the details, but I'm solidly in the headspace, so I'm going to talk about something cool I saw on PSFK recently - the addition of a social media layer, melded with competition, on top of vapid reality TV.  

I don't particularly like the Hills, but I'd be very happy to see this added to streaming TV online on a wider scale.  Lately I've taken to sitting in front of the TV with my iPhone, twittering, tumbling and IMing my way through whatever I happen to watch (normally about one show a week, considering bittorrent is my favourite station).  If I'm watching most things on my laptop screen, I'd like that comment layer.  More useful would be the ability to tie it into the social media services I already use - TV show based chats with my Facebook, MSN, Twitter, etc contacts would be interesting and beneficial.

The scoring part is something I find less useful.  I know many people are excited by the idea of getting voted up or down in a Digg comment thread, but I'd prefer to actually have a conversation.

That said, I'd love watching a deep-tagged episode of the Hills with the highest voted commentary popping up at the times it was made by each individual viewer.  Crowdsourced criticism is easy to see entertainment in.