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Joseph Pine
and James Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy 1999, was a harbinger
of the end of the services economy, which according to these authors peaked
some years ago. As observers of the rapidness of commoditization in nearly all
markets and business they were vaticinators of the experience economy we are
now realizing in social media. The social media tsunami is fueling the
experience economy as people, groups, customers, partners, companies, and
governments and many other organizations are interacting and forming
interrelationships via the social media peer groups in new and unforeseen Web
2.0 ways.
The societal
and anthropological aspects of social media peer groups are just now beginning
to be understood and the ramifications of these interrelationships are just
being felt. These new platforms are enabling communications that leads to
interrelationships between people, and groups that has never been seen before.
They now enable us to create, build, maintain and reestablish previous
relationships from other points and times in our lives, and are enabling new
relationships with our government, NGOs, and the companies we consume products
and services from.
Enter the social media
landscape: craigslist, facebook, youtube,
myspace, twitter, flickr, photobucket, linkedin, digg, ning, yelp, tagged,
squidoo, scribd, stumbleupon, hi5, bebo, reddit, myyearbook, technorati,
caboodle, Friendster, flixster, xanga, epinions, plaxo, mybloglog, yuku,
metafilter, blackplanet, care2, getsatisfaction, friendfeed, clipmarks,
cafemon, newwvine, omgili, gigya, ballhipe, current, revver, ping, tribe,
magnify, digo, dzone, xing, faves, tweetdeck, ecademy, twine.
(The Fifty Top Social Media Sites
from Website Magazine’s Feb 2010 issue, I added craiglist)
The Good, the Bad, the I don’t care and
now the Ugly
In the world
of Sociobiology our father E. O. Wilson taught us about societies and behavior
previously unknown to man, the hierarchy of termites, ants and other insects
that have one common trait, altruism. Each member of the community
communicates, interacts, behaves and performs a function that is predetermined
by the community hierarchy and all are in the best interest of the community,
harvesting, defending territory, nurturing eggs and gardens within. Humans don’t
act like this and when presented with a new community like social media they
will act in many ways that are often predictable and sometimes nefarious. What
we don’t know about Facebook and many of the other sites is how humans are
really acting and what the good, the bad, the I don’t care and the ugly
experiences are.
The Good
Two years
ago I found my long lost cousin in Australia on Facebook, wow we Skype nearly
every week now. This is a good interrelationship. I have found enormous
professional value in being a member of LinkedIn and my network has expanded to
several hundred colleagues and professional connections. My Facebook community
of friends and colleagues is mixed with both, but I would prefer that it be only
my friends and that is where the line blurs. I know that HR people can profile
me now on Facebook and even decide whether I am culturally fit for a potential
job, this is good and bad. I could be culturally unfit just because I am too
old or because of their perception of my sexual preference. This is good and
bad. Facebook in particular has now become a great tool for social media
marketing for small and large businesses alike in addition to non profits who
want to get closer to their customers.
The Bad
The
beginning of the bad is when relatives that did nothing for you suddenly appear
and want to be your friend. They are the relatives that you wanted to forget,
but they are still there back at you as if nothing really happened. It’s like
that Rodney Dangerfield joke, “would you
be friends with your relatives if you weren’t related to them?” It can get
really worse if you are stalked by a former girl friend or boy friend and
Facebook has many stalkers, I even had one person do what they thought was a
cute video of me during the last holiday season. There is a tremendous amount
of information out there on all us and it is growing every day, so be careful
when you share information about traveling and other personal issues. Remember
that according to statistics a high percentage of identity theft comes from
your own relatives that are jealous of you. There are also many stalkers that
use Facebook’s IM to get people’s attention to start a conversation; they may
come from your friends networks. For example some men will IM every women they
know to be single a happy mother’s day wish even if they don’t know if they are
mothers or not. This just happened to one of my friends.
I don’t care!
Then a
series of old friends from high school came back into the picture, and I
connected with them, but have found their world to be one that I don’t live in
anymore. They talk about the little insular and provincial New England town
that I was raised in and invite me to groups and events important to that town.
These events aren’t important to me, I don’t live there and to be quite honest
I really don’t care about them. Nor do I want to enter into relationships with
people that I really have nothing to share with anymore. I am not trying to be
snotty or uppity but I really don’t care about their home town lives. I don’t
live there.
The Ugly
The ugly
stories keep pouring in and with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and
within other social media peer groups, I bet there are hundreds if not
thousands of stories like the following happening all the time. Last weekend I
had lunch with a friend that hates Facebook. He claims it has wrecked his
brother’s and his best friend’s marriages. In the case of his brother, his wife
left a marriage of 23 years and a 14 year old daughter to be with another
woman. Unfortunately, she forgot to de-friend my friend and is flaunting her
new life on Facebook for all to see while abandoning her husband and daughter.
In the case
of his best friend his wife also left because she found her high school
sweetheart on Facebook and recently just up and left another 20 year marriage
with two children to be with him. I heard the same story from my hairdresser on
Monday of last week about how her sister just up and left her family. It would
be easy to dismiss these situations based on unhappy marriages and the times of
uncertainty that we live in today because of our broken government and
financial system, but I don’t think so. Facebook and the other SMPGs are
enabling communications that would have never happened before. What do you
think? How many stories like this have you heard?
The Personality of Cuttlefish
Cuttlefish (Sepia
sp.) are marine invertebrates and are actually are mollusks in a class called Cephalopoda
which is highly adapted for swimming. They are the fastest swimmers of all
marine invertebrates and employ a highly evolved jet propulsion system using
water. Some species can actually propel themselves out of the water and are
known as flying squids. There are only around 650 species in the class which
includes squid, octopods, and nautili, the largest are the giant squid. Giant
squids inhabit depths along the continental shelf to depths of 600 meters and
the most famous of them the Humboldt squid range in large schools up and down
the Pacific coast.
All
cephalopods are kings of camouflage and can change their color instantly and in
some cases their skin texture to match their immediate surroundings to hide
from predators or lie in wait for prey. Cuttlefish
are slower swimmers than streamlined squid and leverage their small shell for
bouncy along with fluid and the gas nitrogen. Light is a major factor for
Cuttlefish and it regulates its bouncy the more light the less buoyant. They
spend the day burrowed into the bottom and at night they become active gaining
more buoyancy to swim up into the water column to hunt. Cuttlefish and squids are
what is called highly adapted for raptorial feeding and carnivorous diet, they
have ten arms arranged in two arrays of five around the head. Eight are short
and heavy while the other two are twice as long and are called tentacles used
for seizing prey.
Some
Cuttlefish live at depths of more than 1200 meters and others live in shallow
tide pools in our warmer oceans. These animals have the highest degree of
nervous system development of all marine invertebrates which enable their mobility
and carnivorous nature. They are diecous (meaning there are males and females)
and they engage in copulation with normally the male seizing the female head
on. Cuttlefish can display complex color changes which are thought to be
directly related to behavior and most species change color when alarmed. I hope
you have enjoyed this blog post and good luck selling and marketing in the
millennium. And how will your behavior change the next time you log onto
Facebook, will you turn a different color?
Posted at 01:02 PM in business, Current Affairs, innovation, marketing communications, thought leadership, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: ballhipe, bebo, blackplanet, caboodle, cafemon, care2, clipmarks, craigslist, current, digg, digo, dzone, ecademy, epinions, facebook, faves, flickr, flixster, friendfeed, Friendster, getsatisfaction, gigya, hi5, linkedin, magnify, metafilter, mybloglog, myspace, myyearbook, newwvine, ning, omgili, photobucket, ping, plaxo, reddit, revver, scribd, squidoo, stumbleupon, tagged, technorati, tribe, tweetdeck, twine., twitter, xanga, xing, yelp, youtube, yuku
I am a
Starwood, Marriot, Hilton member but it gets me almost nothing to be honest, I
have been a United Mileage plus member twenty years, and I even have a frequent
parking account. But what really frustrates me about a lot of these programs is
that they don’t know who I am and many organizations are not leveraging them
for competitive advantage. When I arrive at hotels they never upgrade me, and for
the most part I never hear from these programs anymore. I remember a time when
we got monthly statements about our activity and then they were moved to
quarterly and then disappeared completely! Why because they forgot about us,
their most loyal customers.
I expect
more for my loyalty, don’t you? What many companies don’t understand is that
they no longer control their brand, the social customer does. All of us should
become social customers; this will enable us to drive up the overall quality of
products and services in many companies and industries globally. Most
importantly companies need to know who their social customers are; here is a
real world example of how social customers are impacting business today. I am a
social customer and now hundreds of people are reading my Trip Advisor hotel
reviews. Here is my most recent post read by 100 people in less than a week,
and so far the poor reaction to my comments about this hotel from its
management.
Sheraton
NYC Towers Trip Advisor Review
This was my second stay at this hotel in less
than a month and I have to say it needs a major overhaul, all the way from the
rooms down to the bell desk and into the club lounge. What was most scary about
this place was the overall lack of security especially at 1-2am when no
security people were at the elevator entry areas. I did really like the club
level and the breakfast is fun and coffee nice along with the overall
environment. The bar at the club was missing the martini stirrer and didn't
have absolute vodka, a woman next to said “it’s always like that here.”
But let’s start at the beginning, we arrive late
its 85 degrees and humid as we enter our stuffy room on the floor twenty and
the air conditioner doesn't work. I call down to the desk and they say they
will send up maintenance, thirty minutes passes no one arrives. We pack up our
stuff and head down to the front desk this time pissed off. We ask for another
room and I complain about the room assignment, the front desk attendant says
"what do you expect me to check out every room to see if the air
conditioner works?" I ask for a manager and he is even ruder, and guess
what? I am a ten year Starwood member and our company recommends this hotel, I
remind him of that, but he doesn’t care. They assign me a room above the club
level, make sense? I don't think so, the next day I ask for the day manager,
Zoe Cohen and she is nice and gives me 12,000 Starwood points.
Two days later it is raining and we attempt to
go out for dinner, the cab line is long and the bell captain is nowhere to be
found, so I jump the line and get my own cab. The next morning we leave at 5:45
am and guess what? There is no bell person to help with anything? What is up
with this? Overall a great location and it is unfortunate that all our European
visitors are treated to the same level of poor service. I noticed many Italians
during my two visits. The good news is our maid service was very good, but I
don't think I will stay here again, because as a Starwood member I expected my
room to be ready at 1AM. On my previous visit my colleague’s room wasn't ready
either and we checked at 6:30PM.
Sheraton’s
Response to my TripAdvisor Review
Dear Paul,
Thank you for taking the time to provide the
feedback and recap of your visit here in NYC.
The content, although some of it painful is
critical to our performance and garnering guest loyalty. I would like to
discuss your visit in more detail if you have the time. During this
conversation I will also update you on our direction for renovations that are
coming soon.
We look forward to hearing back from you on how to
connect.
Sincerely
Mark Sanders
Net/Net
Identifying and managing
your social customers is paramount in the social media landscape of today and
it can be a clear differentiator in many industries, in this case especially
hotels as they are very vulnerable. I think it is great that Sheraton at least
corresponded with me but the same lack of sincerity and thoroughness about
their product and services was reflected in their response. First of all they got my name wrong, they did
not address one of my issues and a security lapse in NYC is serious. They did
not recognize me as a Starwood member or even say we are making sure that the
club bar is stocked an appropriately appointed with martini stirrers. I pulled
the latest statistics off TripAdvisor and although the site says that 67% of
travelers recommend this hotel, the number is actually closer to 57%.
The general manager was
nice enough to offer the opportunity to talk with me, but to be honest; I am
not too interested in communicating with you if you can’t even get my name
correct. The power of social media today is the power of the community, not the
power of one. If I was the manager of a large iconic hotel in the most visited
city in the America I would be shocked that only 2/3rd s of the
visitors to my hotel could recommend it. TripAdisor, Yelp and many others are
now the voice of the people and their voice travels globally at Internet speed.
As a business, know these communities and leverage your customers loyalty in
new and exciting ways that can keep them loyal and provide you with the
opportunity to find new loyal customers that can enhance your brand.
Sheraton NYC Towers Reviews All (1,464)
67% of
travelers recommend this hotel
·
·
Very good 484
·
Average 275
·
Poor 222
·
Terrible 138
Posted at 12:59 PM in business, Current Affairs, marketing communications, thought leadership, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: brand, loyalty, membership programs, NYC, Sheraton, social customers , social media
We all need
and consume oil, and the myriad of products spawned from its ecosystem. We all
share in the risk of exploiting it, some more directly than others. And then
there are those neighborhoods (next to the refineries) that absorb more risk
than others. And then there are the oil companies that take on the risk of
exploitation, but in the case of BP we are learning about worst practices in
risk management, governance and compliance, not best practices.
British
Petroleum’s lack of governance and risk management combined with our own
government’s absence of regulatory compliance and oversight marks the beginning
of a new era. In this new era
governance, compliance and corporate social responsibility will be driven
primarily by non government organizations that are the voice of the people. It
has become brutally obvious that large trans-national corporations can’t govern
themselves, and more importantly the collaboration between them and
governments, (in this case the oil lobby) facilitates an environment of risk
and recklessness in the management of natural resources.
After
experiencing a near collapse of our financial system, we know now what a joke
Sarbanes Oxley has become and that the government regulatory apparatus
completely failed.
The hard
truth is that our government is challenged to:
·
Manage
our natural resources and fisheries
·
Manage
our financial system
·
Manage
our healthcare system
·
Manage
and/or regulate the safety of our food supply
·
Manage
or control our borders
British
Petroleum is a trans-national corporation active in thirty countries with more
than 22,000 service stations and sixteen refineries, and they upstream 2.3
million barrels of oil a day. BP reported 2009 revenues of $239 Billion, a
profit of $14B so why can’t they manage their risk and govern themselves, they
certainly have the resources?
BP’s Code of Conduct
“A fundamental BP commitment to comply with all applicable legal
requirements and with high ethical standards”
I copied the code of conduct from
their overly green and seemingly environment friendly website, but there is
something about this statement that says who they are. Compliance with all
legal requirements, hum what does that mean? Well it means that they will go
only as far as the law of any country requires and not further. This is in
essence is their problem; they need to go further than applicable legal
requirements in the high risk and “high profit” business they run. Compliance
with “high ethical standards” is about as vague as you can get and we know they
vary with culture, country and company. So what BP is really saying is that we
only go as far as we need to and we don’t go the extra mile because it might
affect profitability and this is further reinforced by the following quote from their CEO Tony Hayward.
“We are responsible for our
operations and we are accountable for setting and observing consistent and high
standards within them. Our code of conduct, for example, provides clear
expectations on behavior and compliance.”
I had a higher view of BP until
the disaster in the gulf exposed their lack of governance and risk management.
BP put up $500 million for a bio-fuels research center at the University of
California at Berkeley and that is great, but now they have a PR and brand
disaster of unprecedented magnitude on their hands. And in my view they have
fueled the fire so to speak by setting up a live feed of the well leaking for
weeks on end. Perhaps some good will emerge from this when all oil companies
take a call to action and re-examine their risk management and governance
across operations.
Enter the NGO
Non Government Organizations like
the World Wildlife Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council have now been
put in a position of power and truly have the opportunity to be the voice of the
people because government has failed. Those who oppose egalitarian groups and
view them as zealots and extremists in some ways will rethink their role in
world business. Like Exxon, BP will recover from this event and we can only
hope they will live up to their responsibility in this terrible environmental
disaster. NGOs now have the power of
social media at their disposal and we know that NGOs and many non- profit
organizations are harnessing that power to gain influence and audience.
As a student of at the University
of Massachusetts College of Food and Natural Resources I learned about the
management of our planet’s resources and was taught that there are three principal
approaches to managing natural resources:
·
Preservation
·
Conservation
·
Exploitation
In the beginning many egalitarian groups
advocated preservation of
natural resources which was and is in direct conflict with the exploitation of our resources,
the management approach still prevalent today driven by our capitalist system. This
put NGOs at great odds with government and industry and their radicalism
challenged many people including the scientific community. Times have certainly
changed as NGOs now are important players in the global economy and can
significantly impact brand reputation through their influence.
Conservation of natural
resources employs management practices that enable the resource to be
sustainably harvested and maintained for our children. This means that
resources are not irreversibly damaged like our fisheries populations, many of
which will never recover from over-harvesting and exploitation. In the case of
oil, it is not a sustainable resource; there is only so much of it on our
planet. That does not give license to energy harvesters to haphazardly manage operations
and put other natural resources and industries at risk, such as fisheries and
tourism. NGOs have a greater responsibility than ever in ensuring that large
multi-nationals and governments are looking out for the best interest of their
people. Join an NGO today and make your voice heard, your state senator, local
representative and/or government may not be looking out for your best interest,
unless of course you are in California where our governor Arnold “just said no” to just drill baby and off
shore drilling!
Further Reading: Why We Hate the
Oil Companies, by John Hofmeister
Posted at 10:32 AM in business, Current Affairs, Science, thought leadership | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: british petroleum, compliance, conservation, exploitation, governance, government, natural resources, NGOs, ocean, oil, preservation, risk management