Tag Archives: Reality checks

June 14, 2016 · 10:10 am

You Always Hurt The One You Love

There is an old song made famous by The Mills Brothers. The first two lines are:

You always hurt the one you love
The one you shouldn’t hurt at all

Today’s screed is the unbelievable tale of a media entity that is doing just that. Why unbelievable? Because if I asked you to tell me the absolute dumbest thing any company could do you just might respond with exactly what this company is doing. Let me explain.

The Walking Dead is AMC’s (and maybe TV‘s) biggest show. Not unexpectedly, there are many fan groups that interact via social media. One of the biggest – about 400,000 strong – is a Facebook group called “The Spoiling Dead Fans.” As you might guess from the name, part of what the group does is to make predictions about what will occur in upcoming episodes, and lately, it’s about who was killed by a barbed wire coated baseball bat (named Lucille). These fans, as you might guess, would be classified as “hard-core.” They watch the show, the discuss the show, they pick apart every episode for clues. In short – they’re what every media entity wants: engaged, excited consumers.

So how has AMC rewarded these loyal fans? In their words:

In the past two years, AMC has filed several wrongful DMCA notices against us with full knowledge that we could not file counter-notices, hired investigators to intimidate our members, and threatened our local members with arrest, among other questionable acts.

Yep. They’re threatening to sue them. AMC believes “the predictions on the board are based on copyright protected, trade secret information about the most critical plot information in the unreleased next season of The Walking Dead”. If you’re not shaking your head about now, you should be. It’s not as if the fans have released footage or are torrenting purloined episodes. All they’re doing is keeping the show top of mind while it’s off the air between seasons. Is suing them for that really the best response?

If you’re over the age of 30, you’re old enough to remember when the music industry spent a lot of time and money suing consumers rather than using those resources to come up with a better business model (Steve Jobs did that for them). I think that alienation persists to this day.

I can’t imagine any instance where suing your best customers – hurting the ones who you shouldn’t hurt at all – is the best solution to a problem. Frankly, I’m not even sure that in this case there even is a problem. You?

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May 31, 2016 · 11:10 am

GIGO

The Memorial Day weekend gave me a little time to get caught up on some reading. Some of what I was reading were analytics reports (I know – get a life) and while I very much appreciate the cycle of continual improvement Google fosters within their analytics product, that cycle yields a continuously growing amount of data. The problem that I have isn’t so much understanding what I’m reading but trying to figure out why any of it matters to my clients. I also spend time figuring out which of the numbers are lying to me. 

It’s no secret that there are an awful lot of bad actors in the digital world. Once it becomes clear how fraud is detected those bad actors move on to another form. If viewability is important, they create sites where there is 100% viewability but no content of any value. I had a client get all excited about an increase in referral traffic until I pointed out that most of that traffic was coming as a result of referrer spam. When we filtered it out, traffic was flat. Another prospect got excited by the large “stickiness” – time on site and pages viewed – that her site has. They were impressive until you filtered out the IP addresses of her employees, who spent hours a day on the site.

Silly things, I know, but it points to a common problem. An IDG study of a couple of years ago pointed out that nearly half of marketers said they struggle to make sense of the vast amount of data they get. The other half thinks they know what the numbers mean, yet many of their plans are built to achieve unrealistic metrics. The problem is compounded by what the paper identifies as the accuracy problem I mentioned above:

Why is data accuracy still such a big issue? One possible reason is a lack of investment in a defined data management process that includes ongoing, consistent data migration, data maintenance, quality control and governance. Too often data is held and managed in multiple organizational silos. This results in inconsistency, duplication, gaps and errors.

So while “garbage in, garbage out” isn’t a particular revelation, it does serve as an excellent reminder to take out the trash as best you can while compiling all of that data.  You with me?

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May 27, 2016 · 8:50 am

It’s Not Just The Burger

This Foodie Friday, the topic is Fast Food. Specifically, we’re going to see what we can learn from the rankings of fast food chains in the latest Temkin Ratings Report. What the heck are the Temkin Ratings?

English: McDonalds' sign in Harlem.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Temkin Experience Ratings are based on consumer feedback of their recent interactions with companies. We asked consumers to rate three components of the experience, Success, Effort, and Emotion, on a 7-point scale. For each component, we take the percentage of consumers that gave a rating of 6 or 7 and subtract the percentage that gave a rating of 1, 2, or 3. This results in a “net goodness” rating for each of the three components. The overall Temkin Experience Rating is an average of the three “net goodness” percentages.

In other words, they’re measuring if customers could do what they wanted to do, how easy it was to complete the interaction and their overall feelings about the interaction. In this case, it might be if the chain had the food item you wanted or prepared it the way you asked, was there a long wait or other impediment to you getting you food, and how pleasant the experience was.

Here is the business paradox and perhaps a learning. McDonald’s and Burger King didn’t do very well. In fact, as one site reported:

McDonald’s ranked dead-last among fast-food restaurants in the report, but there must be a masochistic streak among American consumers. Though the restaurant remains one of “the most commonly disliked fast-food establishments” in the U.S., last month Nation’s Restaurant News reported that McDonald’s is also the most-visited chain in the country.

So here is the question.  McDonald’s has placed a lot of emphasis on improving the menu – healthier items, more organic ingredients – and they now offer their popular breakfast items all day.  Sales are much better, and revenue and profits are two critical boxes on the scorecard in business.  I get that.  However, maybe they should have been spending more time improving the customer experience.  I can’t imagine that there is any sense of loyalty here.  The ratings seem to indicate that consumers go to McDonald’s either because it’s cheap or convenient and not out of any sense of enjoyment.  I don’t see that as a formula for long-term customer retention.

The thing for us to remember is that customers aren’t looking at your balance sheet.  They look at the product or service as well as the totality of their interaction with you.  If you’re not measuring and taking those things into account as you compile the financials, you’re probably missing a critical part as you analyze the health or your business.  Make sense?

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