1. Caffeine. Tiny (and free) program that sits in your menu bar to quickly let you prevent your computer from going to sleep or dimming the screen.
2. Camouflage. Another tiny program that sits in your menu bar to quickly hide all the icons on your desktop so you don’t need to actually keep your desktop clean, you can just “toss everything under the bed”. You can even set an alternative desktop picture that’s more professional than the one you like to have while you’re working.

And, in case you wonder if these little things matter… remember, every little thing matters.

Enjoy.

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?

To that, I have to just one observation to make:

As a culture, we don’t pick our mates by saying “Wow, doesn’t feel so good to the touch, but I really like the person inside”, so why would I pick a laptop that way?

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.

Makes me chuckle to see inbound emails from the site:

What do Sears, The Gap, and Friendly’s all have in common?

They’re sucking wind right now. All closing retail outlets. In fact, there were two articles on the front page of the NY Times Business Section today about this. It also listed a bunch of restaurant chains, including Friendly’s, that are in Chapter 11 (bankruptcy).

It got me thinking. Not too hard, mind you.

What they have in common is that their business model is around a homogenous product, efficiently mass produced, and sold to people who are trained to conform by marketing.

That’s so old school.

Today, the trend is about personalization. A personal connection. Perhaps social media has driven this, though I believe there’s more to it.

You know, I was in a coffee shop earlier this week and had a bit of a “conversation” with the barrista. If I wanted a to go cup (which I did), I couldn’t stay and drink my coffee. But, if I wanted to stay, I couldn’t have the to go cup. It had nothing to do with sales tax, which in NY is now different if it’s to stay or to go. I’m not sure what it was about. The shop was mostly empty, so I wasn’t going to be taking a seat someone else might use.

Last week, I walked into Edward’s. I’ve joked that I’ve outsourced my kitchen to Edward’s I eat there so often. In any case, I was in a rush. I walked in and ordered dinner and a drink before I even had my coat off and without looking at the menu. The bartender gets called into the kitchen by the cook, and when he comes out (he’s relatively new) he looks a bit confused. Tells me the cook won’t cook my burger until I confirm that I don’t want the special (shrimp tacos). He knows how much I like his shrimp tacos.

Old school service. New school service.

It’s no longer about mass marketing undifferentiated products (and by products, I mean item + service). It’s about a personalized experience and a personal connection. Sears, The Gap, and Friendly’s may not get it. I bet the companies that replace them will.

I have opinions.