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 8, 2019 · 7:20 pm

Overdoing It

It’s Foodie Friday and I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve all lost our collective minds, at least with respect to some of the food trends I see out there. Everywhere one looks you see food that seems to echo one of the favorite phrases from my youth:

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

Let me give you a few examples. The dozens of flavors of Oreos, ranging from candy corn to Swedish fish to watermelon, and hot chicken wing and wasabi Oreos have hit stores in China. Buffalo Fried Cornish Hens. Kimchi Salsa. Jerk Chicken Pizza. All the different flavors of chips (because who doesn’t want a chip that tastes like a lobster roll?), and of course, Strawberry Lemonade Beer. Now I’ll admit that I actually liked a cucumber beer that I had last summer but at some point, don’t we need to draw a line? It’s bad enough that most people drink “coffee” that’s flavored with everything from hazelnuts to birthday cake. It may be a lovely morning pick me up but it’s not coffee.

This kind of thinking is how we got some of the great food fails. Bacon soda. Coca-Cola Blak. Orbitz Drink. It’s instructional no matter what business you’re in. Let’s say you make a pain-relieving cream and you say to yourself “Hey! We can fix the pain in other ways!” Voila! Ben-Gay Aspirin. Maybe you own the women’s magazine market and think “hmm…women eat yogurt, maybe while they’re reading. Let’s make yogurt!” Cosmopolitan Yogurt was off the shelves in 18 months. Coors Spring Water? No thanks. Each is an example of overdoing something that not only is worth doing but is something you’re doing quite well. Right up until you decided to do more.

There are some things you can’t overdo. Great customer service. Being grateful to customers, vendors, partners, and staff. Taking most good products and blurring that goodness with too many things that too few people want isn’t helping. Don’t overdo it!

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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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