In short, McDonald’s initiated a social media campaign on twitter. People were encouraged to share their stories about McDonald’s using hashtag #mcdstories.

I can just imagine the stories they thought they’d hear. All unicorns and rainbows.

Reality bit hard.

People shared stories that would freak you out if you even know someone who eats at McDonald’s, let alone eat there yourself.

Old school thinking would use this as a reason to avoid social media. This thinking is fear based, it works by ignoring problems and hoping people don’t notice. It’s very scary for these sorts of thinkers to let go of controlling the message and hearing bad stuff. (Me, I like to hear bad stuff, said nicely!, so I can improve.)

The new way of thinking, I pray, is to stop and say “shit, we better improve the eating experience at McDonald’s”. It’s not about “hoping no one notices” but rather about delivering excellence and continuous improvement.

It’s about building a process and a culture around doing what you, with all your experience know, to be right for your customer instead of being a slave to doing things well enough so no one screams (and then making it hard to scream).

Social media enables a peer-based connection between companies and customers that smart companies will use to deliver a better customer experience than their competitors.

Let me repeat that because it’s really important. Social media is not about Fan Pages, or hashtags, or blogs. It’s about connecting more authentically with your customers to meet their needs better than anyone else.

An authentic connection with your customers gives you better insight into their needs and helps you build a better execution strategy. A focus on Fan Pages and other nonsense us all about gimmicks and deals. Everyone loves a deal. You need them to love your brand. Big freaking difference.

A final note. You might say that Apple, the largest market cap company in the world doesn’t use social media and they’re doing just fine. My answer… When you’re hitting it out of the park like Apple, you can make your own rules too. More likely, you’re giving people a McDonald’s experience not an Apple one. Can you hear me now?

A generation ago, our employers provided a second home. A second family. A second school. We’d get a full time paycheck, with benefits. We’d have a choice of career development, and almost guaranteed employment. Our co-workers were our neighbors, and our friends. They were our extended family.

That’s changed. Many jobs go to freelancers. People who don’t get benefits. People who don’t cost the company much more than the hourly wage they’re being paid, unlike you and I who cost the company approximately twice what they pay us in salary.

While some companies offer career development opportunities, it’s not nearly what it needs to be. We, “the people”, need to be careful. Unlike in the past, career development has become our responsibility. It’s on us to go get training, to get further experience, and to network. And, not only is it our responsibility to make time, more and more often it’s our responsibility to bear the costs of our own career development.

Enter Apple’s new university / education push. They’re targeting traditional schools (K-12 today), but there’s a huge opportunity here. I can go to iTunes and take a class. May not seem like much. In fact, we’ve been able to do it for quite some time now. I believe that Apple will finally start to improve this platform for education. I hope that their passion around this topic infects some creative minds to start bringing some innovation around career development into the iTunes community.

There’s a lot happening here. MIT recently announced a whole lotta free online courses, but there are commercial and “open-source” opportunities too.

Don’t believe that Apple’s announcement yesterday was only relevant to people with children in school. This is another opportunity to get mind-share in the enterprise as even people with paychecks realize that we need to take responsibility for our own career development, and need a community to helps us do just that.

You see, I want to use my iCloud email address as my primary address in iCloud. However, I setup my original iTunes account using my gmail address, and there is apparently no way to remove the gmail address as primary in exchange for a me.com address.

Not a big deal — except that all my iTunes receipts and iCloud shared calendar notifications go to gmail.

I’ve been emailing back and with Apple support for over a month. Each exchange starts with the expected platitudes (my patience is important to them, thank you for being a customer, blah blah blah…).

What it’s come down to is this:

The iTunes support team says it’s not an iTunes problem but an iCloud problem.

The iCloud support team says it’s an iTunes problem, not an iCloud problem.

Ticket closed. Problem solved.

What’s there to complain about?

A quick summary: Thursday Verzon put a $2 fee on customers who pay their bills with a credit card one-bill-at-a-time. While this move targeted very specific customer behavior, there was a general outcry on social media. Between the outcry and an FCC investigation to the move, Verizon backed off the plan in just a day.

A New York Times article today wondered why they didn’t just “ask customers what they’d think”. Really? The author makes a good point though. What they should have done was explained more about what they were doing, why they were doing it, and who would be affected.

Transparency.

It’s affecting everything. A couple of years ago there was a big scandal in the UK because the government was (essentially) cheating on expense reports.

I’m off point. Maybe I’ll get back to that, as I think we assume companies have the transparency they need internally. (They don’t. In fact, most times they have the data but don’t/can’t use it the way they’d like, and we think they should. That’s fueling the trends around data analytics, master data management, and complex event processing.) Wouldn’t it be great if they simply sent a good explanation to all customers who would have been affected by this change based on their payments for the last 3 months, explaining the situation and helping them avoid any fee in the future? That’s too much effort. What I see in what happened is lazy business. Companies do something that’s relatively small in the big picture, and get away with it because it’s too hard to fight. This has been accepted because customers haven’t had a voice to wonder out loud.

Personally, and I have no special knowledge of the situation, I think some team in Verizon had an internal (performance/cost) number to meet, and thought this would be a good way to do it with minimal service disruption.

Is there so little slack in the system that Verizon needs the money from this fee?

Individual credit card payments are more expensive for them to process. If you spin this well, they were simply trying to ensure that customers who did not need the flexibility of paying month-by-month with a credit card, didn’t have to pay for the priveledge.

Isn’t that what the airlines said about paying for baggage? When the airlines started charging for bags, they didn’t lower fare prices. They said, to avoid a general fare increase, we’d rather that people who use a service pay for it. Therefore, if you don’t have bags to check you don’t pay for your bags to fly.

What’s the alternative for Verizon?

1. They can raise everyone’s prices, or
2. They can stop taking credit cards for individual payments

And, by the way Mr FCC, you do realize the IRS doesn’t take credit card payments for just this reason. It costs a lot to accept a credit card payment.

Why are these their options. Why can’t things just stay the way they are?

This, for me, is a burning question and something that fascinates me in the current business climate. (I probably shouldn’t have taken so long to get to this point; it’s the reason I’m writing this article.)

There has been so much cutting, in people, in service, I wonder how things don’t just collapse in on themselves. But, we’ve gotten so used to cutting, to squeezing. Last year’s “let’s just push a little harder” level of work, is this year’s standard. It’s like temporary cuts are all permanent, and companies are still looking for places to squeeze. Ask most white collar workers. We’re working more hours, under more demands, with less provided by the company to help us get our jobs done.

So why does Verizon need this fee?

Status quo isn’t good anymore. Companies are micro-managing their fiscal picture, and nit-picking the pleasure out of everything. The pleasure of being an employee, the pleasure of being a customer. All for what? Why? I don’t thing it’s an issue of greed. It’s an issue of priorities. Consumers want cheap, and vendors say yes because they feel that if they don’t someone else will. You can do cheap for a while, but it’s not sustainable. You can play the numbers, but if you’re not accepting reality the cliff you fall off is just higher when you do fall.

Prices are way up. Wages have been stagnant for years. Our businesses are unsustainable, and employees are unhealthily trapped in between it all — being the consumers whose consumption expectations are driving businesses, their employers, to keep cutting.

Verizon needs this fee because it’s one more place to squeeze, without accepting the unsustainable reality we’ve created with all the cutting that’s happened these past few years.

2012 is going to be very interesting, as I believe this is the year something significant breaks.

Happy new year.

I have opinions.

Imagine that you are responsible for your company’s telephone infrastructure and are tasked with buying a whole new system. You’re given just one criteria on which to evaluate your choices, cost.

What sort of telephone system do you buy?

I’ll get to the answer in a second (this is called “building anticipation”).

There are two characteristics of typical IT staff that really impact the perceptions we have of IT. Forgive the profiling; let me remind you not to hate the player, rather hate the game if you must hate something about what I’m saying.

1. The IT people that typically come into contact with people¹ in your company often lack communications skills. They often don’t know anything about the business, and may not even really care what company they work for. They view their job as distant to the company’s mission itself. I remember I was walking around the Port of Newark designing a Frame Relay network (have you ever needed a weather-proof computer rack/enclosure?) and I asked the guy how things worked at the port. He proudly replied that he had no idea, he just kept the network up and running.
2. Non-IT people don’t understand and are frustrated by technology. When IT people don’t communicate well, these non-IT people respond with frustration and fear, which leads to them fall-back to what they know, what comforts them. Cost/benefit. Accounting. Money. “I can’t judge the value of what you have given me, so I’m going to determine it’s value by how much you spent.”

In a conversation the other day, I showed a friend a new travel website that I think has a fabulous user interface. He took a look, said he couldn’t find a flight to Hong Kong. I told him to fly somewhere else, and then made a joke that I’d be a good IT person. He knew immediately what I was talking about. This is the sort of communication that happens all the time the contributes to the frustration.

And, the answer to the riddle? Which phone system would you buy if you were making the decision solely based on cost?

You’d buy none.

If the sole criteria for your decision is to minimize cost, minimize it by not buying a phone system. Your total cost: $0.00. Job well done. [snark]

Clearly there is an implied value to expect from a phone system, and most likely your directive is to get some amount of functionality for the best cost possible. Not to minimize cost absolutely.

We all want to reduce IT costs, but still want to keep the lights on and do business. How do we do a better job at using IT to do better business? We need to reevaluate how we understand and allocate IT costs.

And, here’s the original point of my post.

The difficulty with this situation is that, if viewed as a COST center IT only owns half the “situation”. The VALUE side of the situation is owned by someone else. In English, that means, IT bears the COST of the phone system while the business gets the VALUE of having a phone. If IT is judged purely on cost or cost management, it’s not necessarily in alignment with the business’ objectives of doing more/better business.

If you want to read more about this from an IT perspective, you must read this post about how IT costs are allocated at a big financial firm.

What can we do about this? Well, in my situation as someone who evangelizes the value of technology for solving problems it’s important to pitch the right value to the right person. And, to make sure the value and cost align with my audience. I build credibility by deeply understanding my customer’s challenges. Though that understanding I build credibility. That credibility bleeds over to the solutions I propose. I’m not going to sell better by explaining my products better. I’m going to sell better by being the person who best understands my customer’s needs.

As an IT person, I think a way to get started is to work more closely with business people to break down the communication barriers. Work your communications skills, and educate your counterparts. Not so much so that people can fix their own computers, but so that they trust that you understand their business. If you can articulate their story back to them and empathize with their IT experience, they’ll trust that that the solution you provide is one that’s going to meet their current needs and anticipate their future needs.

Imagine if IT valued communications training as much as technical certifications?

Imagine, instead of having 20% of your time to work on “new and innovative” projects, IT support individuals spent 2 hours a week with their company’s people, to see and listen to their experiences?

I’m going to break this into two posts. Next, we’ll talk about a backup solution as a practical application of the value of IT not being in alignment with the cost, and how it affects us all. We’ll also look at the IT process, and see how ignoring what I’m talking about is like pumping pollution into the Hudson River. Stay tuned.

1. I abhor the use of the word “users”

– Vanessa Romann

Looks like my wife’s not just eye candy after all.

This is very exciting, as I’ve been following these guys from a very early alpha stage. I’ve seen the site grow. Importantly, this isn’t just a “cool technology” (it’s based on WordPress, so super easy to use). PressBooks is an easy process for online e-book production.

Why is the process important? Because often we use technology to get something done. Many solutions focus on making it easy to do something, but don’t necessarily give you advice on what to do. Said another way, “it’s not about what you could do, it’s about what you should do.”

Based on my experience with PressBooks and the people at PressBooks, I’ll say one thing. If you’re looking to produce an e-book, you should check these guys out.

I’m working on a new project around regulatory compliance in the healthcare space. Just so happens the topic’s on the front page of the NY Times Business section today. Article titled “Conflicts on Heath Guideline Panels”.

Suffice it to say, the government is enforcing compliance with rules to prevent cronyism in the healthcare space. I applaud the attempt, it’s important.

However, as we were going over the processes and rules around the project, an interesting thing came up.

Let’s say you’re having a healthcare conference in San Diego and you want an industry expert to speak. You have an expert in NYC, and you fly them to San Diego for the conference. Part of the fee the healthcare expert receives includes travel arrangements. And, for argument’s sake, let’s say the conference is in February — a time when all NYers love to get somewhere warm like San Diego for a few days.

The government could find that company in breach of compliance for using an expert from NY if there is an “equivalent expert” located in San Diego.

How do they define “equivalent expert”? By resume. There are de facto standards around classification — including items like number of articles published, or education, or specialty, etc.

This idea that two people with similar qualifications are interchangeable pisses me off. People are not “resources”, people are people. I know I can be hard to work with sometimes. That said, I’ve developed some fantastic working relationships over the years. And, as a professional I cultivate relationships so that I can win business. So that I have a reputation that puts me in play for the best projects out there.

It’s the relationship that matters. It’s the person. Their personality, their context, their actual experience that’s often built up over time and represented as TRUST.

Sure, in my example it would be great if they had working relationships with two experts, who were both available, and both interested in the conference — and they picked the one that minimized travel costs for the event. However, sometimes it’s worth paying just a little more to continue to build a relationship.

What really burns me up about this, is that it’s so indicative of what’s going on in the corporate world too. The “company” used to provide a social infrastructure to connect people around a common purpose. We’d develop relationships within the organization that help us do our jobs better.

There doesn’t seem to be as much of this as their used to be. I’ll share a story to illustrate the point, just in case you’ve got your head in a hole and don’t see this. A friend used to be in management at UPS. Every year, management would run the Thanksgiving turkey give-away. Employees would stop by and pick up their holiday turkey. Management would chat with them, be able to put a face to the name, check in on how they’re doing.

To “save money” they don’t do that anymore. Now, people get a check in the mail. No more bonding. No more “feeling the pulse”. Same turkey. Less cost. Fewer connections being built within the organization.

This is what’s killing satisfaction at work. This is what’s killing the organization. We’ve turned people into resources, and totally devalued the “relationship”.

First rule of sales — “People buy from people”. OK, maybe not the first rule, but it’s a rule. People help people. Relationship building builds trust. Trust makes people go the extra mile. You never know when you’ll need it, but when you do, it sure is nice to have.

It’s important that the government regulate out cronyism. On the other hand, it’s not as easy as it seems. And, I suspect we’re going to go in the wrong direction for a bit, before we realize what we’ve lost. A shame really, because personally, I know I work much better when I like the people I’m working with and I work hard to get to know them to build fun-combined-with-professional relationships.

Relationships I have with people, not with resources.