Total customer experience

From Nicholas Bate’s acclaimed “Instant MBA (52 Brilliant Ideas)” , now free on Kindle in the UK (which means that Nicholas sees this as outreach, not product. One of his basic principles is to sell on value, not price.):

“Here’s the bottom line. To pull ahead in what’s known as the New World of Work, you must give your customers a powerful and positive and enlivening experience, one which is so good that they want to return.”

That experience doesn’t end when they walk out of your door. Here’s a harrowing example of how easy it is to turn a positive experience into a negative disaster.

Another of Bate’s principles is that sometimes, you should fire some of your customers.

Memories of the 70s

I’ve never seen a purple cow
I never hope to see one
But I can tell you anyhow
I’d rather see than be one

Thanks, Jacob!

Saturday? Sneezles

Spot o' culture:

Thanks, Becky (you may need a Google plus account for the link)

The cats looked around
and made never a sound
in their jerseys so wittily fée 

But their venomous glare
sent the message in clear
"We'll catch you and kill you some day"

With apologies to A.A.Milne - "Sneezles".

We study the Masters in our youth. Half a century later, they guide our palsied fingers.

Copywrong

I rather like these.

A clean, grown up response to the name calling between The Big Bad Buggy-Whip Cartels and the Freeloading Pirates Who Don't Care About the Struggling Artists.

Can Mark's one man campaign win the hearts and minds of the mass of consumers? Maybe. I think many of us are aware of the arguments and ready so support a clear, simple signal. This could be it.

There is another problem, though. Assuming that my heart and mind have been won, how do I know whether a file I find on the internet has been stolen?

If it's on one of the big sharing sites such as YouTube, I assume that any creator will be searching that periodically and taking down anything they don't want shared. So the old Monty Python clip seems to me to be fair game.

But what about this pretty Gif shared on Google+?

Alert reader Keiran Conlan commented:

Kieran Conlon  -  +Janet HAL I think that you really should be more careful about what images, gifs and clips that you are sharing. This gif is taken directly from a video clip produced by Lockheed Martin and the UK Ministry of Defence. I know for a fact that the original clip of this C-130 deploying flares was marked as "Crown Copyright", meaning that the image is owned by the UK Government. If you are going to share some body else's work you should give credit when you post.

Fair enough. But if I were in Janet's position, hoovering up pretty things on the interweb, giffing them and then gifting them (ba boom!) to her circles, how would I know whom to credit? If I make a video search for military planes dropping flares, I get a handful of similar videos, none with any attribution. Should I simply reward a potential pirate by attributing the site I got it from?

In this case, I wouldn't be too concerned: this clip or something very like it has been out on YouTube for two and a half years: ample time for Lockheed Martin to find it and have it taken down.

But in general, I am not aware of any practical way to check whether an image is made freely available by the creator. It would be nice to have a library of protected images (or other work) that you could check against. So serious artists and craftists could have somewhere to register that they need to be paid for that piece of work. (Possibly even a payment process.)

In the meantime, Mark, perhaps the Copylike team could give some thought to some simple guidelines for the responsible audience to which you are appealing? Perhaps another postcard for each medium?

What do you, dear reader, do to make sure you aren't exploiting the Struggling Artist?

Seeing Wrong

I had an interesting conversation with +Xabier Ostale, who was arguing from painful personal experience that all religions are both wrong and evil. Furthermore, that if we do not actively fight them, then we are complicit in their mass crimes against humanity.

My position is markedly different. I see the issue as the ghetto. As soon as we allow ourselves to think of a group as "them" rather than "us", we are at risk. I recommend writing a sentence or two on a particularly gruesome outrage in the first person plural. And then reflecting on how this feels. Why are we shooting rockets at our fellow inhabitants of Israel? How can we tolerate generations of our fellow Israelis living in the squalor of Gaza and the West Bank? How could we bomb a funeral of fellow Irishmen in Omagh? What drove us to blow up a plane-load of innocent civilians over Lockerbie? How could we allow tens of thousands to live and die in misery in the Concentration camps of South Africa in the Boer War? Or millions in the camps of Germany, Poland and the Ukraine later in that woeful, warful century? Or hack our neighbours to death in Rwanda?

Did you try it? How did it feel? Bit of an unreal twinge?

Of course, historically organised religion has often been a major force for setting up ghettos. But this extends to any system of morality and government. (Though some people extend "religion" to include a belief in Democracy, Communism or Capitalism.)

On the other hand, individuals need a strong ethical framework to see when the system is turning toward evil and to resist this. And this framework is transmitted by the very systems which present such a threat. So if you live in Europe or America, even if you are not a practicing Christian, you live in the context of the values transmitted by the Christian Church, and these values equip you to resist its excesses.

Philip Pullman believes that the evils of organised religion outweigh the value of its payload. Rowan Williams, perhaps unsurprisingly, feels otherwise.

Now, here's the mashup.

+Robert Scoble points out that the front line of the tech war for 2011 and the foreseeable future is the battle to capture users' identities so that the internet marketing operations (Google, Salesforce and Facebook - he calls them advertising, but it will be broader than that - this will be about identifying what the market wants as well as facilitating the sale of product) can tailor what each individual sees to what they are most interested in- in the broadest sense. He calls this the Game of all Gameshttp://scobleizer.com/2011/09/11/the-game-of-all-games-content-and-context-why-mark-zuckerberg-marc-benioff-and-larry-page-are-carving-up-the-social-world/ .

So we are all to be lovingly and securely wrapped in an opaque yet invisible bubble woven from our own needs, fears and desires. Let's take care that our new internet overlords are well aware of our need to understand people whose bubbles are very different.

Ladies, ladies

The excellent  Fairy Blogmother gave some simple hints on search engine optimisation recently. So on yesterday's post, I added some keywords and so on. More in hope than expectation, really.

Imagine my surprise and delight to see a comment this morning!

But it isn't just about quantity, sadly.

Whilst I'm sure that Candice is as charming and dynamic as all the other Rumanians I have ever met, something tells me that her blog might have some additional features that the Beloved might not approve of. Or worse.

Oh well: if you will shine a light in the darkness, you must expect to attract a few blood suckers, I suppose.

If I've jumped to the wrong conclusion about you, Candice, then I'm really, really sorry.

Think of the kittens!

A tweet:

doctorow Cory Doctorow Dear #BBC: Every time a newsreader says "Internet website," the #W3C kills a kitten. PLEASE THINK OF THE KITTENS!

I have a horrible suspicion that this is a serious point, despite the veneer of camouflage whimsy. 

What is the complaint here anyway?


Is it the tautology? The "web" in "website" nowadays is shorthand for "world wide web". And that web is only world wide because it uses the internet. Well, yes. I can see the point: it is a sort of laziness that does not belong in the BBC, but I would have thought that any kitten killing would have been done by the shade of Lord Reith rather than the W3C.


Or is he detecting a confusion between,  as it were, the wiring and the coding - the body and the soul - of the great enterprise that binds the global village together? That battle was lost as soon as the infant dubdubdub was released to the wild and captured the heart of the world. Even those of us who have struggled (vicariously) through GCSE ICT and understand the technical difference difference also know that in reality, "it's on the internet" and "it's on the web" mean exactly the same thing (even if the simplifications we choose to make in interpreting the words may be subtly different). Furthermore, I would hope that the W3C would take a quiet pride in it's role in building a system so frictionless that users need neither know nor care about the underlying concepts.


I have more sympathy with a concern over attribution. The Internet was the creation of the scary and faceless military-industrial complex (ARPANET, SKYNET, etc). Whereas the www was the creation of a comforting academic with a name, face and everything. 


Everything? Not quite. No patent. Foreseeing its impact, he was content to give it to the world. A stunning rebuke to the culture of ownership.


Thanks, Sir Tim.


And Happy 20th Birthday, WWW.