Paul Jacobson

I recently published a post about what I regard as silly rules about not being able to take photographs in shopping malls/centres. I have been reprimanded for taking photos in Melrose Arch (a very photogenic centre/complex), Balfour Park and Killarney Mall. The response (or lack thereof) which I received to my posts/tweets has been an interesting case study in social media adoption locally.

While I am vain enough to believe, not so deep down, that these malls should pay attention to what I write about them and respond in a meaningful and constructive manner, this is perhaps wishful thinking and suggests that not everyone subscribes to my notion of effective use of social media. It also points to a limitation of social media: if the person in my position making comments about a product/service/organisation is not influential enough to have a real impact on that product/service/organisation, ignoring that person (in this case, me) is a pretty low risk exercise.

Sure there was a little buzz on Twitter when my post was published and Melrose Arch replied saying it would get back to me but there is no real incentive for them to actually reply to my questions about the policy on taking photographs in their centre. The controversy was a flash in the pan from their perspective. It barely occurred from other malls’ perspective. As much as we talk about social media’s power, it is an abstract for many companies who deploy a social media marketing campaign as yet another channel to push commercial messages to consumers rather than an opportunity to truly engage with us plebs.

The unfortunate reality is that unless you have significant, real-world impact on an organisation, it can ignore you online with little fear of any measurable consequence. Social media is a powerful force for change but it depends on numbers of people participating in that process. If you represent a small movement, the risk is minimal, academic even, and not worth responding too.

This is also where truly consumer-centric organisations will shine. They will listen to the little people because their business is based on one person at a time and an investment in each of those people is worth making. One company that is doing fairly well in this respect is First National Bank. The @rbjacobs persona may not be a real person within the bank but the person behind that persona seems to be making a sincere and effective effort to respond to the little people tweeting about FNB. It is the sort of attention that makes a world of difference to little people like me, even if my thoughts don’t have a material impact on the bank.

Companies that take social media seriously will shine in their customers’ eyes. One day that attention could pay off when some of those customers become truly influential. And if they don’t, they will still have a few more loyal and passionate customers and all it will have cost them is a message here and there which says that they are listening, they care and they are engaged.

I’ve been a Seattle Coffee Co. fan for years now. My favourite store is the Hyde Park Corner store followed by Rosebank, Nelson Mandela Square and Killarney Mall stores tied for 2nd. I’ve probably been a Seattle fan since the chain opened in Joburg and I have had pretty much the same thing for most of that time. I had an experience at the Killarney Mall store this afternoon that really pissed me off.

I popped into the Killarney Mall store for a tall, harmless, Sugar Mommy latte (my favourite drink) after a little shopping for supper tonight. My first shock was the price. I am used to paying around R25 for one of these latte’s and this one cost me R30 (R16 for the latte base and R14 for the two syrups that make it what it is). I mentioned that this was more expensive than I was accustomed to and the guys mumbled something about a price increase. That may well be true and I have suspected that the cashiers at other stores haven’t been too familiar with what goes into one of these lattes and may have been undercharging me. Anyway, I paid for the coffee and dropped a few bucks into the tip bowl like I usually do and sat down.

The barista brought me my latte in a takeaway cup and set it down on my table. I looked at it and thought it looked too small. I have ordered tall latte’s many times in the past and I almost have muscle memory in my right hand based on a tall takeaway cup. I asked the guy if that was supposed to be a tall latte and he looked me in the eyes and told me it was a tall and went back to his spot behind the counter. I picked it up and it definitely felt like a short cut, not a tall but instead of challenging them, I just had my drink, picked up my stuff and left. In retrospect I should have challenged the guy but I just wanted to have a quiet 10 minutes or so while I had my latte before returning home to continue working.

Barring me having a substantial change in how I perceive the sizes of things, this really pissed me off. Its one thing for a barista to make a mistake but to tell me that it is what it really doesn’t seem to be is just not cricket! Now that I am typing this I times when I get caffeine in my coffee when I specifically say I don’t want caffeine and I don’t get the lattes I order even though I seem to be paying for them. This is probably just about training and if it is, it needs to be sorted out. The Vida e Caffe guys certainly seem to be rocking when it comes to making their drinks. I’d probably defect to Vida except they don’t have the lattes I’m used to at Seattle (ok, I know that sounds a little camp but I do spend a fair amount of time in these coffee shops and I am a little averse to change).

Update (26 August 2009): I just received a call from Barry Parker at the Seattle Coffee Co. about this post. His comment is below and he has undertaken to look into this and make sure that no-one else has had a similar negative experience. Once again an example of social media helping businesses improve.

Image credit: “Look, Seattle Coffee Company in Pretoria!” by firesika licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 2.0 license.

Mike Stopforth has a different and more positive view of Microsoft to the common perception of Microsoft outside Microsoft fandom, especially in relation to Google:

Microsoft, on the other hand, has always represented that huge rich company that charged my family and then the businesses I worked for a lot of money for software. As I discovered the open source movement I grew more and more resentful and cynical toward Microsoft. It didn’t take much convincing to get me to switch to applications like Open Office and eventually Mac and OSX. However things have happened at Redmond headquarters in recent times are shifting the software giant in a very different direction. No longer is Microsoft perceived as the big scary monolithic grey monstrosity of the 90’s and early 200’s, and I daresay Google is losing it’s grip on the title of the funky ‘do no evil’ upstart.

If anything, my recent and limited experiences with corporate Microsoft have entrenched many of my views of Microsoft as a whole. Let me just say that it is really unfair to paint every Microsoft employee with the same brush I would use for what I have seen. There are many good people working at Microsoft who have a genuine desire to produce good products that make people’s lives better, just as there are at Google, Apple and elsewhere. That being said, there are some very disturbing things happening at a more strategic level and I don’t agree that the factors Mike has listed in his post are indicative of any fundamental change of heart back at Redmond.

I have been involved in the Office Open XML certification battle through a local process to assess the specification and determine whether it should be certified as a document standard (Note: these are my personal views and not representative of anyone else’s views). This has been a small part of a global effort by Microsoft to persuade national standards bodies to certify OOXML as a document standard alongside Open Document Format (the format that OpenOffice and other free office software suites use). Just reading reports about Microsoft’s campaign all over the world, it is apparent that Microsoft will do what it takes to incentivise, cajole or otherwise persuade countries to support its efforts despite the fact that the specification was, at best for Microsoft, submitted prematurely for certification and, at worst, so deeply flawed it should go back to the drawing board and start over with a new certification process.

I have also heard stories about free culture activists who have been offered “help” (nudge nudge, wink wink) by Microsoft execs on the implied assumption that these activists review their positions. Heck, even if these stories are exaggerations, I have found Microsoft executives (the few I have encountered) to be largely patronising and unwilling to consider alternative positions and options.

Of course Microsoft is not alone in this. We have all seen similar attitudes at Google, Apple and a host of other companies. Microsoft is ultimately doing what it can and must to protect its interests. OOXML certification is important because it basically confirms Microsoft Office document formats’ de facto status as document standards due to market share and gives Microsoft a very easy and clear doorway to countries that insist on only supporting international standards.

Mike talks about Microsoft’s new shift to standards-based processes like IE8, its commitment to social media and its desire to improve its search technology. Wow. What a change … and all this coming years after other players in the industry made more profound moves in those directions. Firefox has been a standards based option for many years now. IE8’s adoption of W3C standards is so long overdue, it is almost a joke that support for these standards is only now a mode built into IE8 alongside support for IE6.

Microsoft’s investment in Facebook is not an investment in social media for the benefit of all humanity. It is an opportunity to take a share of the advertising revenue a site like Facebook generates. If I could place an AdSense banner of my own on Facebook I would also make a lot of noise about my profound commitment to social media and helping my common man. And when it comes to Yahoo! and the shared view that Microsoft may very well prevail in its efforts to take over Yahoo!, this is not some altruistic effort to make the Web better for Microsoft’s customers. It is an effort to combat Google and present more substantial competition for Google in the search and advertising space.

Sure we hear all the warm fuzzy stuff rather than the cold commercial rationales for these moves but then the public expression of a company’s moves in this space (whether that company be Microsoft, Google, Apple or most other similarly placed companies) is going to be warm and fuzzy because it appeals to users. Google’s Douglas Merrill recently presented at a media event for Google SA alongside Google’s country manager, Stafford Masie. I was fortunate to have an invitation to attend so I did. There has been quite a bit of commentary about the media event and not much of it was overly positive. I was also disappointed mainly because there wasn’t any indication of real change for South African users. Talk about ads being better search results and helping small business get online really translated into a statement that Google SA’s mission is to improve AdSense penetration in South Africa for the time being. This doesn’t mean I am moving my default home page to Ask.com and uninstalling all the Google stuff I have on my Mac. They still make pretty good stuff. I just don’t buy the PR speak.

The point is all this warm fuzzy stuff is just that. It is helps you feel good about the company and is ultimately pretty vague and non-committal or just a load of fluff. What is really happening is a battle for a very lucrative market share and the power of social media means that these companies actually need to engage with their customers on one basis or another. This translates into bloggers being invited to media events and big, fancy conferences replete with talk about the big shift to open standards and suchlike. What we are not told is how those moves to open standards or to make our Web experience better are motivated by renewed strategies to make more money. But that is ok, that is what businesses do, they make money.

Technorati Tags:
google, microsoft, mike stopforth, open standards, pr speak, fluff, hype

Man I am pissed off this morning. I have been doing work for Acme client for almost a year now and have submitted my work every month expecting to be paid for that work. For the most part I have been paid for it although I noticed a couple months ago that my client had missed a couple invoices, at least that is what seems to have happened according to me reconciliation of my invoices and payments.

I sent my reconciliation through and initially didn’t receive a response. When I did receive feedback the information I received didn’t contradict the apparent shortfall. The person who I was liaising with (I’ll call this person “Frank”) was dealing with payroll and came back to me in January with news of some advance I apparently requested in December. This was completely bogus and seems to me to either be a clerical error or a fraud and yet there has been no comeback on that.

I terminated by contract with Acme at the beginning of February, submitted all the work that was due to the end of the month and asked that the shortfalls be reviewed and if my reconciliation is correct, that I be paid, in full, at the end of February. I checked my bank account this morning to find that I haven’t even been paid in full for February, nevermind the arrears.

I haven’t named Acme here because I have seen too many of these sorts of disputes aired on blogs and just poison the air but what do you do when you are dealing with a large company that simply doesn’t respond to anything you do. I could sue the company for the arrears in the Small Claims Court (the amount is so small that this is the appropriate court) but that would take months and enough of my time to make the whole exercise a waste of money in the end. The people who I reported to don’t seem too interested in helping me finalise this issue despite their initial eagerness to work with me. Frank has been hard at work trying to help me but he can’t make the decisions that need to be made so I am basically stuck and it pisses me off. This may be about a relatively small amount of money but that is money I worked for and if it is due, it should be paid.

This is just another example of how important it is to look at how companies treat their employees and contractors at the end of the day. Often these projects start with such promise and over time the companies forget that they are dealing with people who do this work for an income so they can pay bills, pay staff, develop their businesses further. I’d like to characterise the whole company as a collection of so and so’s but I know some of the people working there and I am friends with some of those people and they are great people.

So, I wind up here writing this post about some anonymous company that has stiffed me and gives rocks about it and with no satisfactory end in sight.

Technorati Tags:
stiffed, no pay, unscrupulous companies, pissed off

I think I may need to see this movie:

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mac osx, macbook, macbook air, macheads, cult of mac, mac cult, mac fans, movies

My wife and I had breakfast at the Mugg & Bean in Killarney on Sunday.  We overheard an anti-semitic comment from someone we thought was a Mugg & Bean person and I published a blog post about it on my personal blog which I have subsequently updated for reasons that will become clear when you read the post.  I am impressed with Mugg & Bean’s management and how they dealt with this complaint.  If anything, that is a good reason to visit not just this Mugg & Bean, but your local one too.

A couple people wanted to comment on the post but are not members of Vox so feel free to comment here.  As always, I recommend that you post something about this yourself.  We are so used to talking about companies that don’t even listen and this is a good example of a company that listens and does something about it.  That is something worth talking about.

Technorati Tags: customers, mugg & bean, listening to customers, customer service

I have been having crazy thoughts about employers (in the broad sense considering I am not employed by anyone – I am self-employed) lately. Many of these thoughts are similar to other crazy thoughts I have had about being a customer so maybe there are some parallels here …

Wouldn’t it be something if the company I did work for listened to me, let me know it was listening and then did something about what I was saying? I do work for a company and for the most part things have been going well. Lately we have been getting a little ratty at each other and this week I found out there may have been a little issue I am uncomfortable about. So I wrote a note to my notional boss/supervisor expressing my concerns. No response yet. I’m not sure if one will be forthcoming and all that is likely to happen is that I’ll be less and less enthusiastic about working for this company and that isn’t great.

I have a similar gripe with a company I buy techie stuff from. I have been waiting for some software for a month now and the only time I know there is a delay is when I phone after the latest promised deadline has passed. Ultimately not having the software doesn’t mean I can’t do what I need to do. It just means that my enthusiasm for the software has been waning to the point where my passion for the company itself has dimmed. It is just like any other company that couldn’t bother to drop me an email and let me know my order is still being monitored.

Why do companies do that? Is it a South African thing? Are South African companies just generally crappy when it comes to customer/hired gun service? Is it too much to ask for a company to communicate? This reminds me of a quote I heard in a Guns ‘n Roses song and which is from the movie Cool Hand Luke (never seen it):

What we’ve got here, is … failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week. Which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men.

If a company can’t be bothered to communicate with its customers/hired guns then all it can expect are diminished returns in terms of enthusiasm for the company and a desire to get back in the saddle and do more for/with the company.

(Image: “What does this picture mean to you?” by chema.foces licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)

Technorati Tags:
usual rant, employers, employees, customers, passion, enthusiasm, communication