My friend Ken wrote a nice piece a couple days ago about ROI and the role of the community manager. In particular, I liked this observation: … The community is not a structured presence. You cannot simply pen in the community as they’re a wild herd of virtual voices. The skill of the community manager…
Last week I attended the VRM West Coast Workshop and one of the many impressive folks I met there was Joe Andrieu of Switchbook. In a recent blog post, Joe describes the The Identity Quartet – the key services that allow user to express their identity in online services. It’s one of the most clear…
I’m not sure I like “4th party” as a description. We spent way too much time at the VRM West Coast Workshop wrangling over the naming of firs, second and third. But when you get past all that, this key idea is really something big: VRM is about enabling the first party. It is also…
Some things that seem to be good are actually failure. I’ll use an example tech support pros will all know: A customer calls, you know the answer, you give it to them and it works, and everyone is happy. Simple, straightforward, case closed. Right? No. This is a failure. Simply put, if you knew the…
This just cracked me up… Markets are Hanging Up On Customers I just recorded my call with Apple Support to improve customer service: [Click to listen] How to hang up on a Mobile Me customer. [From ProjectVRM Blog » Markets are Hanging Up On Customers] Follow the link and have a listen. Truly amazing.
A few days ago, someone walked up to Michael Arrington and spat on him. For those who missed this news, here is an excerpt and link from Michael’s own blog: Yesterday as I was leaving the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face. Before I…
When dealing with complex issues that spread across functional lines, a senior executive focusing on the issue can being important focus and coordination to the effort. But too often, people are paying more attention to the politics of Turf instead of the value of that cross-organization emphasis. I started thinking about this after reading a…
Robert Scoble posted details of this week’s blow-up over failing drives and censored forum posts: Seagate (maker of hard drives and storage devices) has been getting slammed on forums and blogs the past couple of days. Partly because they had a bad batch of hard drives and didn’t properly recognize or fix the problem quickly.…
This week, Ross Mayfield makes an interesting point about the level of service experience at the Apple Store. It’s a brilliant post and poses some great follow-on questions, but the thing I liked most was this point about support knowledge: But I think Apple gets something more than the value of customer experience. According to…
The May 30th Gillmor Gang is all about FriendFeed and it’s one of the best I’ve heard. http://gillmorgang.techcrunch.com/2008/05/31/gillmor-gang-053008/ Why FriendFeed Matters Bret Taylor of FriendFeed makes the point that different people use different tools, and that’s one of the reasons he created FriendFeed. He says: “The union of all of your friend’s one or two…