To: Customer Service Center, http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com/

If you want people to donate cell phones for our soldiers (and it sure looks like you do!) my suggestions for increased success are as follows:

1) Make it obvious and clear what the correct donation process is for a user up front – and walk them through it step by step through your website. Don’t leave it up to the user to decide whether to delete the info on the phone. This should be built into the process because it’s a best practice. Because this is true, building it in will boost your credibility as a legitimate charity immediately and make it more likely that people will follow through.

2) Re: Deleting the info from the phone to be donated, the current process breaks down impossibly when it comes time to input phone model. Most people aren’t going to remember whether their *old* phone is a Razr V3C or V1H or A2Q, for example. They may not have used the phone in question for years, and most (like me) probably never knew the exact model. You need to explain how people can find out what version they have and make that as easy as possible to figure out via your own website.

3) Note the above items are necessary if you want to maximize the number of phones you get, and by extention, the number of soldiers you help. Don’t go thinking that because most of your current donated phones don’t use the data deletion feature that it isn’t important: many more would use it if it was easy to do and you made it clear it is a part of the standard process, and more people overall would actually donate, because they would know it is safe to do so.

4) By the way, are you REALLY refurbishing and donating these phones to soldiers? How do I know this isn’t a scam? How about showing me real soldiers using your phones? How about some testimonials? Maybe some press coverage from a reputable source? Also, if this is a legitimate charity, can I deduct this on my taxes? I know some of this is on the site, but it’s buried. You have to convince me this is legit on the first screen view; orient the landing page strategy around this and conveying the impression that this site makes it straightforward and easy to donate, with a well-thought out process.

Please let me know when the above issues are addressed, and I will gladly donate my phone and encourage others to do so as well! Thanks.

Social Media is being eaten alive. The interactive marketing universe is slowly swallowing it like a python might swallow a deer.

BazaarVoice, Pluck, Gowalla, FourSquare, Groundtruth, Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Salesforce, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Covario, ExactTarget, CoTweet, Wordpress, Limelight, Meteor, Magnify, Radian6, Omniture, etc., etc. Are these marketing tech “nouns” and the functions they perform not all part and parcel of the same overall interactive marketing solution space? Can you possibly succeed as an interactive marketer and ignore – or being ignorant of – any of these?

Enterprise software solutions like Pluck and Salesforce and BazaarVoice promise to make connections with owned social media properties seamless. Geo-targeted marketing is not optional for business with physical storefronts anymore – in fact businesses that haven’t already experimented here are behind the curve. Want to succeed in online marketing? Kind of have to include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, and video elements to your plan these days.

Facebook, by the way, has become so enmeshed in peoples’ everyday lives that they are addicted. Facebook is the new “front end” of the user experience, partially displacing search. However, monopolies in tech are notoriously unstable.

Optimized SEO is not possible without use of social media. An effective web presence is not possible without use of social media and community. Direct marketing and CRM are not done well without use of social media. Even SEM is indirectly affected.

So there you go. Eaten alive.

If you Google Sears Sucks, you’ll get about 317,000 results. So I’m hardly breaking new ground here. What I’d like to do is tell you is provide an example as to why Sears sucks, give you an opportunity to vent your spleen about Sears, and hopefully convince a few executives to pay attention and/or a few people to give up on Sears and shop elsewhere.

Excerpted from the recent annals of Sears’ home service web chat exit survey, which I recently took time to complete:

OK, if high-quality, efficient customer service is the point of all this, I have to laugh. First thing I did was Google “Sears service” plus my Sears’ location, hoping to find a direct number to call. No service number. Only a general number for the location. So I called that number. I then waded through a preposterously poorly designed phone bank – Service, which I found out is only findable directly if you happen to know in advance it’s called “Parts, Service & Repair” – might want to make the voice-recognition system recognize parts of that compound name and or similar names; got news for you Sears, no one is likely to know your precious little term for this offhand. Then I’m in “Waitsville” for about 20 minutes. While waiting, I thought I’d try to find something online and discovered the home services site. But there’s nothing in the UX that tells me where to go to get status on a repair!! So after several fruitless clicks, a chat invite automatically pops up. Note any UX person worth their salt will tell you that auto-triggered chat popups are a last-ditch option for bad websites seeking not to fail users completely. Nevertheless, still on hold, figured I might as well give it a try. Lo and behold, though I had to give the chat person more information than he should have needed to find the status – location and last name should have been plenty, not that plus phone and home address which they ALREADY HAVE – collecting it again for “security reasons” for an appliance repair is preposterous) he DID get the status eventually; ironically, I got my answer literally at the same moment as someone finally took my phone call. I hung up when they said hello. Elapsed time: 33 minutes of my precious Saturday, just to find out if my vacuum was ready to pick up. Now, I ask you: is this good customer service?

More to the point, is that really the best a struggling American corporation can do for its’ customers??? What the heck going on over there??

I’ve found myself asked this a few times of late by divergent questioners, from a small business marketer to a marketing executive at one of the world’s largest global companies.

It occurs to me that SEO appears to many to be people a dark, murky, misty part of the online marketing world – something like that swampy area outside of Mordor in Lord Of The Rings which the protagonists had to slog through to get to their destination. People know it’s important they move in this territory but they don’t know what’s there, and aren’t sure they want to find out.

OK, so what is SEO? The definition is simple, actually. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the practice of improving the performance of web properties by crafting webpages (and their links) to “optimize” the chance that these pages will appear in the first few pages of a search engine’s results page (SERP) for a given keyword search.

There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Now for the inevitable wrinkles:

1. Back in the mid-90s when they really began to come into their own with the public, search engines used to only rank web pages for a given search based on eacg page’s content relevance to keywords users entered. Then SEO tacticians got good at fooling search engines into ranking their pages highly using what are called “Black Hat”- or illegitimate – tactics such as spamming. So in 1998, Google and their competitive ilk came up with a new way to rank pages that measured popularity in addition to relevance. Google calls their version of this methodology – one of the first of its kind and by far the most commercially successful – PageRank.
2. Lately (last 2-3 years) the focus in SEO has shifted from improving search engines’ popularity and relevance rankings for a given page by using link, title, meta, and keyword-rich content, to doing this PLUS adding Web 2.0 and Social Media platforms such as blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to improve popularity rankings and thus increase SERP rankings. These new tools and approaches work because popularity is (simply expressed) a function of how many visitors your site gets, how many sites linking to your site (and the popularity score of those sites, too), and in terms of relevance, how often your content is regularly refreshed (e.g., via blog posts or Twitter feeds).
3. Because 1 and 2 are not universally known, people hear bad things about SEO and believe them, which only increases the fear and loathing of SEO and fails to increase anyone’s knowledge or understanding. People hear bad things because there are still a lot of Black Hat practitioners out there, and SEO is also good fodder for pot-stirring online marketing bloggers who write provocative headlines like “All SEO practitioners are worthless” or “The only SEO you need is from developers” to get traffic and readers. Sad to say, such posts are generally successful at driving traffic because so many marketers are interested in SEO and so many of those are new to it and are highly impressionable.
4. Ethical SEO involves giving clients sound advice, such as the best way to display text and label pictures and tags. Ethical practioners also encourage clients to develop and maintain good web content (and show them how) and use back-linking techniques to increase the number of incoming links to a page, which in turn boost’s that page’s popularity score. Ethical SEOs also warn clients off from practices that might be seen by search engines as spamming. Ethical SEOs and search engines consider themselves partners who, by exchanging information and tips, together improve search quality. However, unethical SEOs and search engines are continually in a state of battle. Every time one side seems to have the upper hand, the other side comes up with a new way to regain an advantage. And although their relationship is adversarial, some believe they are an essential part of the web food chain, because they drive innovation and search R&D.

Simply referencing Jim Cuene’s recent post on how to create advocates for your business online. It’s so simple and intuitive, yet critical to operate from this starting point. And enough companies are unsure of how to approach ORM and brand advocacy online that it bears repeating. Enjoy.

OK, I see a recurring pattern with Google. It’s Microsoft circa 1995-7 all over again. Remember when there were browser wars that people really cared about? Gradually and as surely as the sun rises, Microsoft used its gigantic resources – development, market reach, war chest – to displace Netscape as the world’s #1 browser and render all challengers impotent.

Of course there are situational differences, but today’s Google seems to succeed by doing the same with all things search. As soon as any competitor gets a little traction with a new search wrinkle, Google either buys them out or co-opts the new approach, releasing the same or superior capabilities to their massive user base and integrating into their suite of functionality, thus ensuring their position as the first stop for information online is indefinitely retained.

Case in point: Google’s new Social Search. It competes directly or indirectly with a host of similar relatively new Social Media information aggregation ventures, including GetGlue, Bing Twitter Search, FriendFeed, Cliqset, and many, many others.

So what is Social Search?

Basically, Google figures out people you trust and then makes content from them show up in your search results:

It’s a simple idea. Companies have approached this in various ways (see Search 4.0: Social Search Engines & Putting Humans Back In Search). Typically, the social concepts for refining results have been to allow people to form social networks, then:

• Refine search results based on actual search activity within their network
• Share results with each other
• Define only certain sites that should be included in their results

The first two have privacy concerns, among other issues. The last two especially involved work on the part of users. Users have to actively choose to share results or actively define a set of sites they want to search against. Not many people would be likely to do this. And with Google Social Search, there’s still some work required, but  it’s minimal if you already use of Twitter, Flickr or an existing public social network. In fact, if you use Gmail or Google Reader, you may already be social-search ready.

What Social Search Means for Users and Marketers

Although it’s early, I believe this is mostly good for both users and marketers. Instead of having to worry about registering, interacting, etc. with dozens of functionally overlapping aggregators, users can have Google Social Search pull some this into the same search routine most people use most often today. For marketers, it means Social Media will be even harder to ignore in coming months, as more users use input from their social network to help them make purchasing decisions. For more on this aspect, please check out: The Rise Of Help Engines: Twitter & Aardvark.

How has the phenomenal growth of Minneapolis-based content strategy agency Brain Traffic come to pass? Serendipity? Hard work? Probably a bit of both?

Kristina hit on something that has been horribly askew with online marketing, and she’s been remarkably successful at evangelizing a better way. In building web-based marketing assets (websites, microsites, web-delivered applications, etc.) marketers have made great online content an exception, rather than the rule. Yet success still depends on creating great user experiences, and that means marketers must relearn the art of incorporating and managing great content. Good to see this trend happening, as it should improve the web for everyone:

Surprise, surprise: The problems in system design I wrote about in the financial system meltdown are also at play with the health care system, according to David Goldhill of The Atlantic. Please read his article. No time? Just read this paragraph:

“Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.”

If you want a better system, you have to incent people in the system to naturally behave the way you want them to. Any incongruency between system-mandated behaviors and system participants’ inherent self-interest will result in an imperfect system. The more incongruent these things are, the more perverse system outcomes will be. Simple. Why can’t governments and businesses do this better?

Recently, I helped a consulting client put together a new web-tech-based strategy for growth. We used a combination of tried-and-true innovation techniques and industry- and company-specific stuff that seems to have worked very well, so thought I’d quickly share what we did:

1. Define the problem(s) (Drucker Methodology: Define the Central Problem)
   Drucker makes a big point of isolating ONE problem. While I appreciate the reasons for doing this, in practice, making a point of stating the “one problem” to your client can be stating the obvious, and also is sometimes not the best starting point for solutioning. On the other hand, when a client hands you a set of challenges it is definitely helpful to assess whether there is an overarching theme that ties them all together. In this case, the “one problem” was that the industry’s value chain had evolved and was out of sync with company strategy. Stemming from this unstated “one problem” were a  set of problem statements involving various aspects of the company’s operations and marketing. So, whether one tells the client to start with the “one problem” or accepts their thematically-unified framing of the problem and just keeps the “one problem” in mind while in process, it is key to understand the problem(s) thoroughly and ensure all involved in brainstorming understand them as well. If there is more than one problem and there is no thematic linkage between them, they should be handled separately.
2. Develop a solution ideation plan
   Leadership already had a general idea of how they wanted to work on solutions, so the consulting challenge was to help flesh out a plan and it was executed efficiently. We gathered a diverse team of experts for a closed-door, one-day ideation session. Some participants had deep expertise in the company, others had expertise in potential markets and technologies that leadership identified as likely fertile ground for innovation and growth. Outside participants were to be compensated and non-disclosure agreements signed. As an outside consultant and a solution space expert, my role was to gather key information from internal and external sources, develop written guidance to prepare participants in advance of the meeting, moderate the meeting itself, and create final written recommendations including next steps and mid- and long-term goals.
3. Gather information and create a narrative for participants to absorb in advance
   I gathered background information to understand the problem/solution universe in a series of meetings with key management. Initially, I met with four of their management team; once I understood better the dynamics of the team, I homed in on one or two team members to get deeper-dive answers. I did this to minimize  involvement of team members and to encourage in-depth conversation, asking specific questions about market conditions, operations, marketing resources and capabilities, etc. In this case, that person was the Marketing lead, because marketing was the central to the challenges at hand. As I gathered information, I put together a narrative of the situation complete with supporting company and industry data. The final narrative was a combination of information authored by myself and management. I also included a description of the purpose of the session and the agenda. Overall, this document was critical: by developing a shareable narrative of the company and the relevant problem/solution space, I could be confident that all participants would start from a baseline understanding and that I could effectively guide the session, fading back or directing as needed.
4. Conduct the brainstorming session
   The session itself was comparatively easy and enjoyable. I emphasized informality but strove to enforce a policy of respect for everyone’s point of view (e.g., no squelching!). In this case, the group was comprised of respectful but strong-willed people, so there was little need to suppress dominant participants or encourage shy ones. While it can be a risk to use a group for ideation (groupthink, for example, is one cause for concern) I believe that the combination of independent preparation combined wit the group working session can be optimally effective. By engaging several well-prepared knowledge experts in a controlled working session, we were able to develop solutions on one day that might have taken weeks for a single consultant to identify and elaborate alone. With this approach, keeping the session on task and on-time was relatively easy. I took copious notes, both personal, in a notebook, and for the group on a whiteboard, and engaged a second note-taker as well to help ensure the outcome was balanced. This was also worth doing because, after all, note-taking had to take a back seat to mediation at times.
5. Summarize findings and make recommendations
   The big payoff! This task was time-consuming, yet pleasant. I gathered up all the notes, which I was careful to record in such a way as to make this part easier, and wrote the final document. The task involves: restating the problem(s); listing relevant decision factors; delineating the solutions (or ideas) developed; explicitly stating how they will address the problems; and finally, creating plans to pursue each solution, broken out into immediate, mid, and long term goals.

I think the above approach worked very well mostly for two reasons: First, I did enough research and shared it with participants to ensure everyone was empowered to provide maximum value in the session itself. Second, I kept the endgame – a series of actionable, rationalized recommendations – in mind both for myself and for all participants.

Have you attempted to use techniques like this to jump-start innovation? Let me know what worked (and didn’t!) for you.

Consider the plight of today’s economists. Only a few short years ago their profession was at new heights of respect and consensus. Now, “economist” is a curse word on the lips of every unemployed person in America.

Prior to the onset of the financial crisis and the “Great Recession” of today, Alan Greenspan once famously stated that he believed “systemic financial risk had largely been eliminated,” in part through the advent and spread of various new financial innovations. Most everyone who cares to has heard about this enough times to have this line practically memorized by now.

However, what isn’t heard very often is consideration of what Greenspan said shortly after the crisis had really set in. In October 2008 testimony to angry members of Congress, Greenspan testified that his prior assessments stemmed from an ideological belief that financial system participants would regulate their own activities out of a sense of professionalism and risk-aversion. In short, he failed to consider that actors in the financial and credit industries were motivated by other factors, such as a systemic preoccupation with short-term returns – e.g., participants taking a herd mentality toward activities that pushed to the very edge of legality and beyond, and with no consideration for risk – everyone was doing it, so how could it be risky? The irony of this seems to have been lost on the media, and maybe on us as well.

The significance of this is hard to overstate. The Fed Chairman – by way of providing an excuse to the American people – essentially blamed the people in the system for the financial meltdown we are still enduring today. I would’ve asked, but Mr. Chairman, hadn’t these people always acted in a quintessentially predictable way? E.g., in what they believed to be their own self-interest? What was hard to predict about that? Wasn’t it obvious by early 2008 that participants had, out of competitive necessity if not pure greed, stopped critically assessing risk in their decision-making out of self-interest?

As someone who has at times been tasked in the past to drive change in large organizations through introduction of new or redesigned systems, I am trying to take away a few key learnings from this collapse:

1. To build or manage a system well, the “people” variable must be understood. Strive to consistently understand motivations and create incentives to ensure desired behavior.
2. There’s no monopoly on poor judgment when building and managing systems in which people are a critical variable. It will surely continue to occur at the highest levels of politics, government, and business management.
3. Group-think kills. Taking conventional wisdom at face-value, being overconfident, over-focus on executives in attributing success or failure, etc. are lazy and dangerous modes of thinking. Constant critical assessment and independent thinking are still required.

What else? I’m sure there are other considerations. Let me know.