Most eCommerce sites are, by design, static product catalogs.  Sure there may be a place tacked on down at the bottom for customer reviews if you’re lucky, but for the most part the message is “here’s what we got, find what you want and hit ‘order now’”.  The expectation for interactive experience has been set so low that the concept of ‘customer service’ has been moved to a post-purchase point (problem with your order? click here!), rather than some version of people asking if they can help you find something. This has worked, for the most part, because people have expected their online shopping experience to be an analog (pardon the pun) for a paper catalog they might receive in the mail.

How could we have gotten 15 years into the development of the web and not addressed this fundamental disadvantage vs shopping in person?  Well, my thought is basically that this shortfall was not made apparet until the new surface area of business-with-consumer (not business-TO-consumer) communications were created via myspace/facebook/twitter/etc.

There is a huge opportunity to envelop customers tastes, contributions and personality into ecommerce sites rather than purely tacking them on at the end of the design/UX process.

As an example of a starting point, do you know those product registration cards included with electronics that sometimes you fill out and definitely never get any value from?   Maybe those could be revised to offer a unique ID that consumers could use to drive traffic to a specific site, a la a low-investment affiliate program. If I can send people to companyname.com/customer/jeremymeyers and also customize what people see (model numbers, reviews, links) once they get there, you’ve involved me as a customer and an advocate, created a new traffic stream to your site, and treated me special.

As usual, a leader in this particular concept is Threadless (my favorite ecommerce site on the web).  I have a page on Threadless thats all about me. Here, check it out.  It can pull in feeds from other sites, and i can post blogs about products I’ve purchased, which show up on the products page.  They also have a built-in affiliate program which they call “street team”. Referrals which lead to sales earn me $3 in store credit.

All of these are really simply implemented ideas that will create a much ROI and ROE.

In order not to be left in the dust by sites like Threadless, eCommerce sites (and consumer goods sites in general) would be very wise to reconceptualize their online presence to envelop their users and include them in the building of the site from the ground up, rather than allow them to comment on content generated internally.

Have you seen any other great examples of customer envelopment? Please share in the comments!

I’ve really had it up to here with Social Media Experts (including, and sometimes especially, those who go on rants about social media experts as if they aren’t ones themselves) going on and on and on about how twitter is a fundamental paradigm shift and how important it is that everyone learn how to do it the “right” way by listening to them.

Here are some things that really piss me off (not just me, either)

• If you’re at a conference that you paid to get into?  Be at the conference.  Don’t spend 90% of your time tweeting what the people on stage are saying.  You’re not a participant, you’re a court reporter.  And it annoys the HELL out of people who follow you because you’re making an assumption that they’re interested in whats going on at this conference enough to eat up some significant portion of their real estate.
• Here are some topics that you can just shut up about right now.
  • I’m interesting, so everyone must be interested in how I use twitter. (also known as ‘hey I joined a site,I must be an expert!) syndrome
  • Number of followers don’t matter even though I have thousands and that’s why I’m here attending/speaking at this conference
  • The shifting business paradigm making it so much easier to get paid to chat all day.
  • Listening is the new talking even though I’m talking about listening without actually listening
  • Posts entitled “What _____ can teach us about social media”? Shut up. Not everything is about Social Media. The world is bigger than that. Filtering everything through the SM lens narrows the ability of people to take larger messages, lessons and tools from the things going on around.  And isn’t that the point?
  • Just because a company has a PR mishap or doesn’t do something according to your own arbitrary rules of how companies should be run (whether or not you’ve ever worked in the industry in question, at a company of that size, or at a company at all), doesn’t mean they FAIL or that it’s a CATASTROPHE or and they’re OBVIOUSLY OUT OF TOUCH. Shut up. Nobody wants to read your blog posts about it except other people like you.

We get it. That’s why we’re using the site.

Also: DO something. If you can’t cite specific examples of ways you’ve used stuff you’re talking about to help a company you work for? Shut up.  You know what helps people to learn? Show, don’t tell.

It is your job to provide the maximum value per-interaction as possible, right? That’s what it says on your linkedin profiles? If your value proposition (I think I just threw up in my mouth a little) to people who pay attention to you (be it online or in person) is spouting confucian words of wisdom about marketing and being a stenographer in rooms full of people also being stenographers (especially if you complain about people getting information for free that you paid for), then maybe you shouldn’t be a Social Media rockstar in the first place.

How did a group of people that are supposed to be all about effective communication of ideas and authentic interpersonal relationships devolve into such self-congratulatory ego-fed bullshit?  As @davewiner has taken to saying: “Dude! No One Cares!”

STFU and GBTW.  And no, your job isn’t building your personal brand.

Rant over.

This post is inspired by the film “Seven Days in September,” available via Netflix or on YouTube in 10 minute chunks. It’s a very difficult but worthwhile watch.

On September 11th, I lived on Bond Street, which is a few miles from what later became known as Ground Zero.

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Needless to say, I was front-and-center for the raw emotion, shock and pain in the immediate aftermath. Plenty has been said on every scale about that part.

What was maybe a little less focused-on was New Yorkers immediate response to each other.

There has always been an underlying sense of camraderie between the people who manage to make it work living here, even through our brusqueness, seeming indifference and occasional shouting matches with cabbies.  I’ve always been proud to call myself a native New Yorker.  What came out in the weeks and months after the event was a bubbling to the surface of the connections that had previously been understood but not acted upon.  People everywhere were actively connecting with each other through this new ’safe space’ that made it okay.

While that safe space has receded somewhat in the months and years following, I think any New Yorker would agree the city has increased the conscious level of connection between its citizens, which is a positive effect of an otherwise horrendous event.

Watching this movie made me start to think about the safe space that was created, and the value that it brought to the community.  What can each of us do to create a shared experience and a safe space to connect?

One of the best micro-examples of what I’m talking about appears in a segment of the Jimmy Fallon show they call “Shared Experiences,” in which Jimmy, The Roots, the guests and the studio audience all share in something silly (like wearing Slankets, or crazy sunglasses).  It may seem like just a bit, but by including everyone in a single act, intimate connections are made, people are valued and we are all left with more of a sense of unity than we started out with.

One of the true tests of the net effects of so-called Social Media and new tools like Facebook, Twitter, and the internet as a whole will be when we create a measurable effect on the circumstances by which we all identify with each other as part of a community, a city, a country, a planet, a species.  That’s when we will truly be changing the world.

And thats when the terrorists lose.

1. Be yourself in all your awesomeness.

2. Give more than you get.

3.  …there is no step 3.

Anything else is BS designed to sell books and drive AdSense impressions.

Class dismissed.

The infrastructure for global communication has hit a tipping point in the last few years.  New technologies give each of us an exponentially louder voice with which to share stories of exceptional experiences with companies (both positive and negative).  In order to survive, companies must take a look at existing conflicts between end-users intents and their own, in a way that may initially seem quite counter-intuitive. The points where the brands intent and ours are most in conflict lead to the most negatively memorable experiences, which carry a lot of power.  Let me explain.

When interacting with a company, our intent as end-users is rarely, if ever, based on figuring out how to give them money.  Mostly, our interactions are based on getting a need or a want addressed as efficiently as possible.  This is, more often than not, in direct conflict with the implicit (if not explicit) intentions of the companies we are interacting with.  This conflict of intents, historically ‘part of the cost of doing business,’ has become much more of an active topic of conversation online and offline, which is having an ever-increasing impact on our overall perception of companies and our willingness to engage with them (e.g. spend our money with them)

An obvious example of a decision made in conflict is DRM.   The intent of the business (protecting their self-perceived ‘most important assets’ from their customers) was in direct conflict to the customers intent (purchasing music in a manner that gives them ownership of their copy).  Instead of being interested in interacting with their consumers, the entertainment industry defaulted to treating each and every one of us like potential criminals, and attempts to engage were ignored or met with legal action.  Choosing instead for your businesses intent to involve an active and genuine interest in people, communities and behavior, asking questions, and generally being interested leads to much longer term gains and sustainability (something companies that have embraced DRM are struggling with right now).

My friend Amber Naslund recounts a story about how the Jurys Boston Hotel picked up on something she said on twitter about her experience there and took the time to email to thank her for her mention and (something Amber glossed over a bit but I think is so important) took an interest in her as a person via email, followed up with her to learn more, and set her up to have an awesome experience the next time.  This resulted in the creation of a new and powerful customer evangelist.  In Amber’s words, posted to a block with :

I have a hotel in Boston that feels very much “mine”. Why would I stay somewhere else when I know the people, and feel like they’re genuinely happy when I come back again?

If Jury’s Boston had simply stuck to the ‘be a hotel where people give us money to have somewhere to sleep’ intent, she most likely would have had a perfectly fine time and probably not given it the thought to dedicate the home page of her site to the experience.  By taking the time to listen, learn and reorient their intentions to match (and exceed) hers,  Jury’s Boston created an experience for her that earned both her loyalty, trust and her voice to others.  For this interaction, the intent of the company was to create a great experience for Amber, and to fufill her needs.   Jury’s is, of course, a business, and would have been happy to take her money and move on.  They decided, for this interaction at least, that their intent was to make the interaction more personal.  Total cost to them: One phone call.  Total return:  A fan for life, with incentive to share the experience with her friends, followers, everyone who reads her blog, each of whom now have a hotel in mind to stay at when they’re in Boston.

Companies may look at this concept and respond with trepidation.  “The whole purpose of a company is to increase its own bottom line, otherwise it wouldn’t exist!” is a popular response.  While this underlying statement may be true, the intent of how one reaches profitability is something that is much more flexible than most companies think.  The challenge lies when they have been set up in a way that leaves no room for taking an interest when providing a service or bringing a product to market.  It is not a question of willingness, but actually deciding to take the time and effort to address a lack of room in the workflow for genuine human interest and curiosity.

So, take a look (and, more importantly, a listen) around where you work.  During the course of the day, how much time is spent in your company being interested in customers?  Pay attention to how interactions with end users are phrased.  Are people interested in connecting, or are they more interested in “identifying target audiences” and “demographics and psychographics” to the exclusion of other things.  I think you’ll find the vocabulary very telling.

What bit of information would you like to share with companies that could make for a more compelling engagement with you? Are they giving you a place to tell them?  Are they interested?