Category Archives: Huh?

December 2, 2014 · 11:20 am

An Extra Serving Of Data

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. While you were cooking or trying to fight the traffic and weather to get to Aunt Sally’s, Twitter was busy deciding to help themselves to your data. I kid you not. This was how they put it:

twitter fail image

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To help build a more personal Twitter experience for you, we are collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in. If you’re not interested in a tailored experience you can adjust your preferences at any time (read below). Additionally, if you have previously opted out of interest-based ads by turning on “Limit Ad Tracking” on your iOS device or by adjusting your Android device settings to “Opt out of interest-based ads,” we will not collect your apps unless you adjust your device settings.

Generally, Twitter has been pretty good about explaining how they invade your privacy.  When you think about it you probably realize that Twitter analyzes your tweets, retweets, location, and the people you follow to figure out which “Promoted Tweets” (a.k.a. ads) to show you.  Hopefully you know that all those little “tweet this” buttons around the web gather information about you as well.  OK, maybe it’s not exactly personally identifiable information, but I think we all know it’s not critically important for ad targeting to have your name.  Knowing that you are you (a unique identifier) across devices and services means someone knows a hell of a lot more about you than you might want them to know.  Adding one more bit of data – your name – is not difficult.

For example.  Do you want Twitter knowing you installed a dating app?  Do you want them serving ads on your timeline based on the dating app?  How about ads on your phone or computer outside of the Twitter environment?  It’s coming.  Just as Facebook, which gathers the same data (oh, you didn’t know?) is getting to the same place.

To Twitter’s credit, the page I linked above explains how to opt out of this data theft.  But why not make it opt-in?  I realize that a personalized web and mobile ad experience can be better for some folks and delivers much better results for the marketer, but someone needs to take a step back before they help themselves to another serving of my personal data.  It makes me sad and uncomfortable that we’re still having this discussion.  You?

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November 18, 2014 · 12:23 pm

What Business Hours?

I tried to pay my health insurance premium on Saturday. Even though I have a 31 day grace period, I’m always prompt about sending it in on the due date since I don’t want a sniffle to turn into pneumonia which rapidly becomes bankruptcy.

I’ve been paying the bill online for a year. It’s a pretty easy system. Input the account number, input the invoice number, tell them if you want the money taken from a bank or a credit card and you’re good to go. This time, not so much. With the invoice in my hand I was told the system could not find my information. Oh sure – they knew the group number existed, but not the invoice. Hmm. Maybe using the telephone payment system?

Same result. The automated system couldn’t find my invoice either. No problem. Heck, it’s late morning on a Saturday – let’s call customer service and speak with a human. Um – no. Not until 8am Monday. I guess it hasn’t dawned on this company that people who are at work during the week might like to have an opportunity to speak to customer service when they have an hour to wait on hold and do their business.

So promptly at 8 Monday morning I called. I got right through to an agent who found my invoice without an issue and took my payment. As it turned out their system had a database issue over the weekend which is why it couldn’t process any payments.  Which prompted a couple of thoughts.

If you have critical systems you need to have monitors in place which alert you to failure.  Any web-based client who owns servers has some sort of alert in place to tell them if something is down.  Even more have alerts in place to tell them if something is running slowly, if a DDoS attack is happening, or if any number of other events occur that affects site performance and, therefore, their business.  In this case, the company could not take in revenue.  That’s pretty important.

Doing business when YOU want and not when your customer is ready is so last century.  I realize that implementing automated systems to facilitate that during non-business hours is what the company was doing but failing to monitor and maintain those systems is the same as not having them.  Actually, it may be even worse since it frustrates your customers.

The concept of “business hours” is dead.  Your business is open 24/7.  Maybe it’s just your mind that’s closed?

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November 4, 2014 · 12:24 pm

Mine! Mine!

Two of my current clients are start-ups. They’re small but getting bigger. Although there are a number of challenges in this environment one big challenge that I used to see all the time in the “big” corporate world is missing and it’s a wonderful thing.

Big companies tend to breed silos and possessiveness. You don’t really get that in a start-up since everyone is overlapping and helping with almost everyone else. Those silos are a huge problem, as is the possessive nature of the executives involved since that fosters them. Want an example?

I saw an article yesterday which reported on a study conducted for Yes Lifestyle Marketing. This is some of what was in the study:

A sizable chunk of marketers are having trouble coordinating efforts between divisions, and well over half think their marketing departments don’t even share common goals. Generally, oversight under one group seems to be lacking at a lot of companies with 68% of respondents saying enterprise marketing executives lack central ownership of programs across channels.

According to the study, poor data practices appear to be one of the biggest reasons for the failure of multichannel marketing programs. Only 37 percent of enterprise organizations and 29 percent of mid-market companies have a central repository for customer data. Less than a third of marketing executives overall said their companies centralize customer data into a single record across channels.

That data division and lack of coordination seems not to be an oversight. In other words, turf wars are derailing marketing, and that is having a negative effect.  One could also look to the other types of conflicts (read turf battles) between sales and marketing, IT and marketing, and even business analysts (the dreaded “strat planning” department) and everyone else in some companies. How can we fix this?  In the words of my Mom: “Oh grow up.”

The start-up mentality of interdependence is visible every day when the entire company is in a small space.   Out of sight, out of mind might just hold in bigger companies.  Maybe it’s easier to vilify the group on the other floor.  There is no “mine” other than accountability for the goals the entire group is trying to achieve.  You can’t win if other members of the team lose, not in the long-term anyway.

Those are my thoughts.  Yours?

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