Tag: customer experience

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For decades, the overriding construct of good marketing and public relations was that you had to tightly control the message your company was broadcasting to the world. Commercials, press releases, and other materials were carefully meted, checked, and rechecked to make sure everything was “on message”.

In the 00’s (the “aughts,” if you’re wondering how to pronounce that), we like to call these things “talking points.” Even though we are still in an environment where the method by which we share information is changing on a frequent basis, companies still like to make sure that everyone is toeing the line. After all, you want to make sure that everything is portrayed in the most positive light possible, right?

The problem with this approach is that in this post-Cluetrain, post-information-revolution age, control is an illusion.

Companies don’t have control anymore.

The control has passed to the consumers. To the rank-and-file. Your company might try to stay on-message, but look at the statistics. People don’t trust “official” communication now. They see it as too closely managed, too dishonest and impersonal. They want to hear from someone they trust.

Your customers have already taken the conversation to places you possibly haven’t thought. Are they on Facebook? Twitter? A forum somewhere? Email lists of their colleagues? You’re not going to reach them by elbowing in on their turf with an impersonal, robotic corporate mouthpiece and a few posts somewhere. They don’t want subversion; they don’t want to be crushed. They might even be avoiding you.

They want you to participate. And they want you to participate—as in you, the person who is reading this. Not your company. Not some official place for them to gather information. They want to hear from people on the inside, from people very much like them. They want to “get to know you” and to build a relationship of trust.

Sometimes, they want to lavish praise on you. Sometimes, they want to dump on you. They want to share their opinions, and they want honest, personal responses and discussion. The reward for your participation in this conversation is that you earn a measure of trust and can then share with them things that interest you—and those are very likely the things you are working on. (At least, they should be, or you should find a different job.)

They’re in the driver’s seat now.

What are you going to do about it?

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I’ve recently been performing some research into so-called “social DRM” as it applies to digital files for my own knowledge bank. I’ve been very interested in the approaches to DRM shown by groups such as The Pragmatic Programmers and ebooks purchased from outlets like Lulu, where the name of the purchaser is automatically embedded within the purchased file in order to provide it with some measure of discouraging sharing/piracy.

iTunes has done this from the start, and even though they have dropped the traditional notion of DRM from their music files now, they still mark each and every file you download with the email address of the Apple ID used to purchase the song. It’s not used in any sort of enforcement application (that we know of to date), but knowing it’s there stops some people from posting the tracks publicly or sharing them with anyone who is not a close personal friend or relative (my conjecture).

In doing this research, I ran across a two year old blog post from Bill McCoy of Adobe. He has some words to say about the same, which is fascinating coming from the GM of their ePublishing department. His comments are in reaction to the Steve Jobs note from 2007 regarding music and DRM—something that ended up happening less than two years after the fact. I also ran into some more recent comments from McCoy, speaking to the establishment of a DRM standard that is cross-platform instead of complete advocacy for the removal of traditional DRM systems from ebook titles.

Let’s talk about why this isn’t feasible and how we can learn from the past.

Continue reading “Thoughts on Ebook DRM Standards”

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Mark Hurst, on Good Experience:

New technology + same old thinking = same old outcome with a buggy interface.

What we need is new thinking. We need some true believers to stand up and say: we’re going to serve the patient, serve the traveler, serve the student, serve the customer, rather than follow the script of the past. No longer will we make them pay, or wait, or suffer only because we can get away with it. Now we will work in their interest, because it’s the right thing to do for them, and it’s the right thing for us in the long run.

Read the whole thing.