Category Archives: Huh?

March 11, 2019 · 2:08 pm

How Dumb Do You Think We Are?

We’ve all been lied to. It always feels bad when we discover the lie and we often get angry at the liar. A co-worker of mine had an expression that comes to mind all the time: “Forgive and remember.” It’s fine to “forget” in that holding a grudge is self-defeating. It’s better to remember (without anger if possible) so that you’re a lot warier the next time you hear something from that person.

It’s in that context that I shook my head when I read about Facebook pivoting to privacy. Now if there is one company that has violated user privacy more than Facebook I’m unaware of it. Frankly, I thought it was something that The Onion had written, but no, it was a blog post from Mark Zuckerberg.

“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever”

Seriously? This is the same guy who is literally at this minute lobbying against privacy laws everywhere. This is the same company that encouraged you to give them your telephone number to use for two-factor authentication (yay privacy) and then used the phone number to target ads. Oh, and there’s no way to delete or disable that.  Then there was that time that they used an app to steal everything you did on your phone. Suckers…

Fool you once? Um, no. Back in 2010, there was a piece in the NY Times that outlined just how hard it was to make your data private on Facebook. To truly opt out of sharing all your personal information, you had to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, and then choose between more than 170 total options. There were some options that you couldn’t even opt out of at all. How dumb does he think we are?

No business can afford to lie constantly to its customers, especially one that is almost completely reliant on those customers for every bit of content. If and when users wake up, as many under 21 users of the platform have, we won’t need regulatory intervention to “fix” Facebook or any other company that lies constantly. It will just die, buried in its own untruthfulness. We’re not that dumb after all, are we?

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March 6, 2019 · 12:38 pm

Servers And Small Customers

I wasted some money the other day. I thought I was being smart and using my knowledge of social media marketing to promote my franchise consulting business. I was looking to acquire some new candidates who are ready to change their lives so I created an audience of folks whose demography matched that of most of the candidates with whom I’ve been working. What I found weren’t leads but I did get a great deal of information and I want to share some of that with you today.

One truism I’ve always sworn by is that you can tell someone’s character by how they treat people who can do absolutely nothing for them. Servers, for example. Oh sure, they can bring you your order but they’re not going to help your career along. Receptionists are another example. When you treat people who you perceive to be in a subordinate role like dirt, it shows an awful lot about your personality and character.

The same holds true for how big companies treat little customers. The big guys get all the attention because they have all the dough. What’s forgotten is that the big guys were once little guys, either in sum or in their spending with you. To cultivate budget growth you need to treat every customer as if they are the most valuable.

So why the rant? My lead campaign generated several leads from Facebook. The cost per lead was substantially better than I usually have to pay to generate a lead. The problem is that when I went to download the information from Facebook I received a file that contained digital garbage. I don’t mean bad leads; I mean unreadable digital garbage. I sent a note to support to ask if I’d done something wrong. Crickets. A few days later, I sent another note which is still unanswered, not even with an autoreply letting me know that my message was received. I’m assuming that if I were one of their big customers (the Russian Internet Agency maybe?) I’d have a dedicated rep who would get back to me immediately. As a self-serve slob, I’m pretty much on my own.

Any business can learn from this. Sure, millions of small customers can’t each have a personal rep, but you’re a tech platform, dammit. Put some of those technical smarts to work and figure out how to support the little guys. If you’re not a tech platform, find one that can help you and use the reporting it will offer to make sure you’re treating the little guys the same. After all, you’re nice to the person who serves you your meal, aren’t you?

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February 25, 2019 · 11:24 am

By Any Standard

I have to admit it – I’m a sucker for the major award shows. Watching the Oscars last night made me think about some of the “awards” many companies give themselves. You can usually find them talking about them as they sell themselves. You know the drill:

    • We have world-class customer service
    • Our employee benefits are the best in our field
    • Our products are cutting-edge

And on and on. Now, having come from the sales world I’m not necessarily averse to a little hyperbole, but there is a line, one which is often crossed because there aren’t any standards. It’s an issue that affects businesses in a lot of ways, some small and some pretty egregious. It’s often the small ways – the little white lies we tell ourselves in planning or product meetings – that lead to the big ways – the hyperbole we broadcast in our marketing and set false expectations among customers, partners, vendors, and others.

Think about the differences between Consumer Reports and Amazon reviews. Consumer Reports has rigorous testing standards. It maintains editorial independence and accepts no advertising in the magazine. It buys the products it reviews and pays retail prices for them. While they’ve been sued over bad reviews they’ve never lost a case. Their reviews are objective and all products in a category are held to the same standards.

Compare that to Amazon or Yelp or Google reviews. The reviewer has no objective standards for the most part. They have no idea if common standards for a product category exist nor how to measure or apply them. The JD Power surveys try to aggregate the consumer point of view in a way that reduces personal bias which is better than pure subjective reviews. After all, who hasn’t felt like broadcasting a bad review of something to the world? Maybe the product was fine but you had a nasty experience with customer service so you trash the product as well on your review.

Many businesses do the same thing in their marketing. They don’t use objective standards and end up setting false expectations. I think many industries would do themselves a favor by objectively assessing how well individual brands meet reasonable performance expectations. I remember we used to take an annual survey of media buyers in the TV industry. On the face of it, we did a good job of assessing ourselves and our competitors objectively. The truth was many of the sales guys knew when the survey was being fielded and would wine and dine the buyers to make sure we got good reviews. Subjective standards don’t work.

How do you market yourself? Do you have enough information about your performance on an objective basis? Can you get some?

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