matthewbuckland.com

Stopshop: A tale of exceptionally good service

matt — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:22:05 +0000

It’s an unfortunate fact that bloggers/consumers/people rarely write about their good experiences when it comes to service. Maybe it’s because we expect it should be the norm. Maybe it’s because we don’t get good service that often. Maybe it’s just that bad service motivates us to write in that single moment of frustration in the hope we’ll cause corrective action?

I’m no consumer activist by any stretch, but I still chuckle about an old ABSA bank charges post of mine which still continues to be the third Google search result after the bank’s own official site. To this day, it sends my blog quite a bit of traffic and I’m sure it’s played a small part in its own way in influencing public perception. Interestingly, no response from the bank has been forthcoming either publicly or privately over it (I’m still a client there).

But this isn’t a post about bad service. It’s about a great experience I had with a local online shop, Stop Shop. I recently bought an LCD/DVD panel for my car because I noticed they had some pretty good deals (and pretty good SEO too) and I needed to replace my old car radio. Isabel decided to use it as a piggy bank, inserting coins in the CD slot that blew all the circuits.

I was suspicious at first of Stopshop because their prices weren’t bad, I hadn’t heard of them, or heard of anyone that had used them. But the professional appearance of the site and presence of telephone and email contact details persuaded me otherwise.

The first unit I bought arrived promptly. I installed it. But I was disappointed at the quality of unit — more a manufacturing issue than an issue with the retailer. Contacting Stopshop I expected the usual adversarial attitude because these units are not cheap and have to be shipped. Instead the online shop’s response was to help me search for a another unit, addressing the concerns I had raised with the first. They then offered to send me the second unit minus the cost of the first, saying I should hold on to both until I was satisfied.

When the newer unit arrived shortly after — believe it or not I now had new reservations about it, specifically around its size (I should have checked this before they sent it to me). I contacted StopShop and complained again, feeling things could now get really bad and they would lose patience with me (these units are not cheap to buy and ship). Again I got into defensive mode, but after a couple of polite calls and a few emails, they said I should take some time over the decision and offered to take back both units and give me my money back, no questions asked.

In the end the second unit did fit perfectly, and it looks great in my car. I feel like KIT has nothing on me. It’s a geek car. My car now talks to me when I’m over the speed limit (not sure that’s entirely a good thing), it charges and plays my iPhone, plays hundreds of MP3s via one DVD, allows me to plug in my harddrive via mini USB, has an SD card — and just looks awesome. It goes on: When I thanked them for their service and asked them how I go about returning the first unit I rejected, they then offered to sell it and refund me the extra installation costs I incurred.

You just don’t get this every day. And it inspired me to write about it. From my own limited dealings with them, if this is their general modus operandi with all consumers that use them — they deserve every success they get.

Information hierarchy: The news pyramid in the social media age

matt — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:04:33 +0000

Credibility and trust are the key issues in today’s information(overload) age where news emanates from multiple sources, including sources other than journalists. More so than ever, news is also real-time and unrelenting: there’s lots of it.

Here, below, I created this pyramid which helps demonstrate news hierarchy and flow in the social media age. It proposes that journalists have an important role to play as interpreters, fact checkers and guardians of accuracy in this new paradigm of fast, unrelenting, real-time information. It suggests that media’s value lies decreasingly in being first with a story, because for breaking news stories they’ll mostly be beaten every time by their own readers: the millions of users out there.* These are users plugged into social networks, blogs and social media sites. These are users armed with cellphone cameras, laptops or computers.

Journalists are increasingly relying on social networks, blogs and myriad other web-based user-generated content sites as sources. While using these new real-time sources to enrich the reporting process, journalists should never forget their important role: the value of media, it seems, could lie in providing interpretation, context, analysis and understanding around a story — being that further stamp of credibility and mark of accuracy on raw, real-time news and information that often originates from untested or unknown sources.

Is this media’s role in the social media age?

[ Printable high-res image ]

With credit to: Mashable and Read Write Web.

Le Web 2009, Day 2: The good, the bad and the vacuous

matt — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:44:05 +0000

For day two of Le Web, this Travelling Geek went to one of the side rooms for the “deep discussion” session. There was the word “future” in quite a few of the session titles, which caught my attention.

Analyst Jeremiah Owyang gave an interesting talk, making provocative, juicy statements like the real-time seems “so yesterday” and “real time is not fast enough — you have to be faster than that”. His argument was that people are now looking into the future (as opposed to the now) with tools like 43 things and plancast. He provided a useful matrix on the web evolution that has gone from static -> social -> real-time -> future tools or asynchronis –> real time –> intention. It was insightful, but I felt that instead of developing this argument further, Owyang lapsed into a description of current trends on the web such as “social personalisation, recruiting an unpaid army and investing in management systems to cope with real time web”.

Sean Percival of MySpace and MobileRoadie gave an interesting, well structured presentation, using Prezi, noting that the term “social media” has grown to have a negative connotation — almost that of snake-oil salesmen. I don’t disagree, but what else do we call it? He spoke of the next phase of the web being the synaptic web, which you can read more about here.

In the fascinating Twitter Apps Panel, Tweetdeck CEO Iain Dodsworth admitted that he’d initially been worried about the introduction of Twitter lists, feeling that it could cause his application to “lose some advantage”, but that they had adopted a policy not to be too reactive. He also lamented the fact that he often hears criticism around the “fragility of Tweetdeck basing itself on another company” or that it is “a company with no business model based on a company with no business model”. He countered that Twitter is reliant on its ecosystem and is all about that ecosystem — and in fact “it’s the company to base your company on”. He also noted “he couldn’t care less” about this type of criticism.

It was great to see sociologist Dana Boyd speaking at Le Web. She’s brings an intellectual, academic edge to these types of conferences. Boyd is well-known for her stirring, intelligent TED talks and her long, insightful reports on the social networking world. The “rock star speaker” spoke about how the real-time web shows both the “best and the worst” in society. Technological evangelists, like most of us, tend to emphasise the latter — so it’s important that we’re cogniscent of both the good and bad ramifications of the web services we create. We often don’t talk about — or even worse, plan for — the bad such as: racist tweets, bullying, sexting etc.

Timothy Ferriss, Author of The 4 Hour Workweek, spoke about how he promoted his best-seller book, saying that his strategy was not to target the big blogs or big media, but rather the thought leader bloggers — as influencers.

The Andrew Keen panel on “Content vs Conversation: The Debate over Realtime Search” delivered quite nicely. You can’t help but feel though that Keen, author of “Cult of the Amateur”, is being contrarian for the sake of contrarian. What this means is that you tend to not take him seriously most of the time. He just becomes an actor, a clown, rather than someone who asks critical, important questions that test us and lead to insight. It’s a pity because it’s important to ask the difficult, unpopular questions — but not at the expense of being frivolous.

Things did heat up on the panel, with a bemused Keen questioning the point of real-time search, the very topic of Le Web. He also cheekily questioned if Tweetmeme was just a vehicle for spam, a quip which I thought TweetMeme CEO Nick Halstead took in good humour. Interestingly, there was broad criticism from everyone on the panel (Tweetmeme, Netvibes, Collecta, and OneRiot) of Google’s implementation of real-time search. (OneRiot CEO Tobias Peggs however sent me a friendly tweet after saying it wasn’t his intention to criticise the implementation).

Then it was the marketing/PR panel “How brands and marketing have to adapt to this new worldwide real time ‘word of mouth’” with Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital, Brian Solis, Founder & President, Future Works, Seth J. Sternberg, Co-Founder & CEO, Meebo and others. It was well moderated by the respected Chris Brogan, but ultimately disappointing. It was marked by vacuous buzzwords and statements, with little real argument, insight or practical examples. My feeling is that these types of talks were important five years ago when we needed evangelism for online marketing or social media (ie: to tell everyone its important and they must do it!). But we’ve passed that phase. We get it. Let’s delve deeper and have some original insights — at least for the savvy audience of Le Web. (To Chris’ credit he responded to the criticism here).

It was rather Twitter-centric too (Surely this discussion goes deeper than Twitter? Surely there are other examples too?) At one stage Sternberg suggested to his fellow panelists that they stop talking about Twitter). I enjoyed Steve Rubel’s comment that social media marketing is not about the CEOs, but about the “footsoldiers” in companies: Traditional top-down lines of communication have been smashed to pieces by the web.

I felt Matthias Luefkens of the World Economic Forum appeared a bit out of his depth. Richard Binhammer spoke about us going from the “static web” to the “interactive web” — a term that had resonance in the 90s. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to reactivate a retro term here. If that was the case, it didn’t really work.

Twitter investor and advisor Chris Sacca gave a brilliant, articulate and funny presentation where he reckons the “douchebags of the internet” will be on the decline in 2010. The douchebags are the spammers, the trolls, the types that don’t debate in a constructive way, causing conflict and getting in the way of real debate. He also spoke about the need to “lubricate the web”: making it easy for users to sign up (ie posterous) and transact (eg: iTunes).

Startups of Le Web 2009, Paris

matt — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:11:43 +0000

The winner of the Le Web Startup competition was announced as Stribe — it’s a plug & play application that turns your site into a social network (not too dissimilar from the Hub actually). The runners up were CloudSplit and Mendeley.

The other startups that entered the competition included:

• CloudSplit
• FitnessKeeper
• FriendBinder
• Kukunu
• Mendeley
• Shutl
• Siteheart Inc
• Sokoz
• Sports Predictions
• Storific
• Stribe
• Superfeedr
• task.ly
• the hyper words company
• Wordy
• Yeasty Mobs

Le Web: Chris Pirillo's pillars of community

matt — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:29:20 +0000

Chris Pirillo, founder of Lockergnome, is a philosophical and passionate person. He’s a humble guy and a funny, engaging speaker. He’s someone who loves technology, community and gadgets — and is a great speaker. At Le Web he gave us some original thoughts about “community”. It’s a bit fluffy (and if you’re a cynic, you may say “vacuous”), but if you think about every one of these points below carefully, there’s quite a bit of insight and deeper truth to them. It makes a difference from the many business-oriented slides we see that tend to be literal and practical.

So, what is the essence of community? Community…

…lives inside us. Where I go, community goes. We create it based on our preferences, like dislikes and the people we link up with.

…is becoming increasingly distributed, as we distribute our ideas and thoughts across social networks.

…requires tools that can’t be built (so don’t try), ie if its us, we can’t scale ourselves.

…is a commodity, but people aren’t. It’s easy to set up a website or blog, but the people and voices behind it are what makes it unique, special.

…cannot be controlled, but can be “guided”.

…is no longer defined by physical boundaries. You probably have more in common with a geek living on another continent than your next door neighbour.

…grows its own leaders. the best leaders come organically out of a community, and is not an appointed one. It’s crucial that communities grow it’s own leaders for credibility and respect reasons.

…is the antithesis of ego. Community is myself and everyone else, not just me or my Twitter stream.

… is everywhere, inside you. It’s what you share, your passions — and it’s this that will spell success.

Day one @ LeWeb Paris09

matt — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:12:49 +0000

Le Web. Day one. It started off slowly, but then got better. There was nothing terribly controversial or any ground-breaking announcements. The Twitter and Facebook talks were fairly staid, marked with meaningless platitudes like “our success depends on your success” or there’s a “shift is happening from the static web to the social web”: too much PR and not enough heart… made me want to flee the main conference for the startup sessions.

Later in the afternoon, it got better: Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome delivered a stirring, original and passionate presentation on “community” — and YouTube CEO and founder, Chad Hurley, gave the conference some down-to-earth and interesting insights.

Here are some snippets from day one:

Sketch Nation: an iPhone app, yet to be launched, that allows you to create your own shooting games (or “shmups”) using your own graphics.

Cookmate: iPhone app that suggests meal options, based on what’s available on your fridge. Genius — I’ll use this.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey spoke about Square — his new mobile payment system. He had a Bill Gates’ moment though as the demo didn’t work. More here on RRW about Dorsey’s talk.

Facebook’s Ethan Beard talking about the fact that 70% of Facebook’s 300m users are now outside the US, as opposed to the other way round when they started. For facebook, it’s not just about connecting people, it’s about connecting people to objects, ideas, companies… everything… to create a “connected lifestyle”. He says “the web is about people”, and we experience it through the lens of our friends. Nice to see him speak… but nothing we haven’t heard of before… felt like PR, not from the heart.

Ryan Sarver from Twitter announced that there are now more than 50 000 3rd party registered applications that plug into Twitter. This has grown outrageously from a figure of exactly “1″ two years ago. He spoke about Twitter’s philosophy of “radical openess” and about investing in the ecosystem built around it. The big news of course was Sarver announcing that Twitter is opening up its data stream of tweets/firehose to all developers (not just Bing and Google). This will apparently happen sometime in 2010: more here.

Michael Arrington, in his segment, immediately tried to stir it up, by (not unexpectedly) putting the boot into MySpace COO Mike Jones, noting that it’s really a two-horse race between Twitter and Facebook… where is Myspace? He also reckoned that Apple treats the development community “like shit” and this in contrast to Twitter, who really looks after the community. I think Apple can and do this because they’re holding all the cards at this stage. You wonder if it’s a good long term strategy though, and this obviously is an angle of attack for Apple competitors.

YouTube CEO Chad Hurley spoke tongue-and-cheek about the “downside” of being acquired by Google: he could not disclose his revenues (no matter how much Le Web host Loic Le Meur tried to fish it out of him). He says the big challenge for the future is “discovery”: how to assist users find relevant video content — a problem he says that “goes beyond search”.

Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead then had a little cameo towards the end with an interesting analysis of the conference zeitgeist by pulling out some funny and clever tweets — which I thought was quite a clever conference innovation.

Travelling Geeks in Paris: The pictures

matt — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:15:06 +0000

The Travelling Geeks are: Eliane Fiolet, Tom Foremski, Robin Wauters, Kim-Mai Cutle r, Frederic Lardinois, Matt Buckland, Sky Schuyler, Jerome Tranie, Ewan Spence, Olivier Ezratty, Cyrille de Lasteyrie, Renee Blodgett, Amanda Coolong, Beth Blecherman, Robert Scoble, and Phil Jeudy.

Traveling Geeks meet 11 Paris startups

matt — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:34:15 +0000

On day 2, we arrived at the Paris Developpement Incubateurs an incubator of French tech start-ups. The Travelling Geeks, now with one added Robert Scoble, saw a rapid-fire set of 11 presentations from some very interesting companies and people:

Int13: is a French developer of next-generation games for Smartphones (iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian S60, Linux…). They are experimenting with mobile augmented reality games.

CityZeum: provide travel guides for the web and mobile phones, mixing UGC, with expert content and content from journalists.

Scan & Target is a 1-million-euro-funded startup, providing solutions around real-time text mining for web and mobile content (email, SMS, IM, blogs, forums, Twitter).

Rue 89 is a pureplay news website, something between Slate.com and HuffingtonPost. They focus on creating news in a collaborative way via a mixture of journalists, experts and users.

Gostai: Focuses on building a common software platform for Robots, almost like a universal Robot operating system. These guys are way ahead of most mortals.

Zoomorama cares about the “art of information” and is focused on creating a new visual way of surfing the internet and creating presentations. Not too different from innovative Hungarian presentation company, Prezi. Check out more here

Stribe A b2b, Techcrunch50 canditate that’s a plug and play service, allowing a site to instantly create a social network on any website. Sounds quite similar to something else I’m doing actually…

Path Motion. A web 2.0 recruitment play that offers users “friendly questions” to identify their ideal career path, also providing jobs that match them.

MLstate think that web development is “broken” and they want to “rethink web development for the 21th century”. They’re developing One Pot Applications (OPA), a common platform enabling easy development of SaaS web applications.

Teacheo: Is an online tutoring community with virtual classrooms. They make money by linking tutors and students. Simple, but effective. They use 3D modelling to demo items between students and tutors and have good video chat.

Stupeflix: A web service that turns your pictures, videos, and text into professional videos on the fly, just like that!

Traveling geeks intro video (LOL)

matt — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:10:44 +0000

Visual social bookmarking: Innovative, but will it fly?

matt — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:35:53 +0000

Fresh off the plane, I’m on the road with the Travelling Geeks, and the first startup on our schedule is an innovative Paris-based social bookmarking operation, Pearl Trees. Their founder and CEO, Patrice Lamothe, says the site offers users a new way to “curate” or organise their lives on the web.

They’ve secured about US$3,5m in funding for what is essentially a type of visual social bookmarking site, offering a relatively unique drag-and-drop interface. The site, which has been in development for about 7-months, relies heavily on Flash. As far as I can see, it’s essentially a del.icio.us, but with a visual twist, offering a tree-like structure in which to categorise and store your bookmarks. It also offers a nifty, generously-sized real-time preview of the sites you have bookmarked.

The UI may appeal to some, but not to others. I’m in the camp of wanting simple UI and getting my bookmarks quickly (and del.icio.us and Google bookmarks does this very well for me). For me, social bookmarking sites are essentially utility sites, so its interesting that the creators of Pearl Trees went for this highly visual, more complex approach. In my opinion, simple interfaces and simple HTML sites may work better for utility sites such as these.

Pearl Trees is still in Alpha (0.4.1) and by Lamothe’s own admission it’s still early days. What they have achieved is impressive, considering its only been in development for 7 months.

I find it interesting that the site offers no way for a user to search through his or her bookmarks. Lamothe reckons users won’t need search as a result of the unique way they are categorising and storing information, although he later concedes its something they may look at. Search feels like a big omission: When my little Tree of Pearls gets busy, I’m going to need a way to access my bookmarks quickly via a search without excessive clicking. Also the heavy use of Flash seems like a barrier to entry to accessing the info quickly.

Pearl Trees also takes us back to a “real-world” hierarchical approach of organising information, which we know tends not to work on the web where information is endless, and you can’t predict what that information will be. So there are questions over how scalable their model is. In the future, as my Pearl Tree grows large — I may find myself constantly revisiting the hierarchy, trying to manage it, change it and remould it as new information pours in. (I don’t have the time to do this.)

Apart from Pearl Tree’s visual edge, which actually may be a inhibitor, I struggle to find how it differentiates itself from other social bookmarking sites? I guess it may boil down to what type of person you are: Someone who just wants the information or a visual person that enjoys bold UIs that may mirror a desktop experience of storing and filing data.

The genius of Pearl Trees may actually lie in the fact that it appeal to a broader type of user, and not the early adopter crowd. In many ways social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us haven’t really ventured very far outside the tech-savvy, early adopter markets. However lyrical I wax about them, my mother is unlikely to ever use these sites. However she may use something like Pearl Trees, because the UI will make sense to her: It looks and works like her desktop.

Pearl Trees is a good start, and I generally like their approach. I think they are on to something if their plan is to target a broader type of internet user, and I predict Pearl Trees will evolve quite radically (maybe into something else) as the founders continue to build, interrogate and innovate around their creation.