Pssst! Pass it on!

I wrote this piece on antisocial motorcycle riding after finding a particularly compelling Australian public service announcement on YouTube. This could have just as easily been posted here, so I thought I’d share. Please share it with your fellow riders.

Facebook teaches us how destroy trust and alienate customers

A while back, I wrote a rather long-winded piece on brand trust. I recently had an opportunity to reflect on that material when I couldn’t log into Facebook for an extended period of time. While I don’t spend hours and hours on the site, I do rely on it to stay connected with some people. With me, as with many users, Facebook is the sole means of contact between me and some of my peers (former coworkers, former classmates, etc.). I’m sure this is music to the ears of many Facebook executives, but my recent experience has left me feeling a little uneasy about the situation.

“One of the quickest ways to permanently destroy [users’] trust is to make [them] feel helpless: 1) deny them access to their critical data; 2) without warning or notice of why or for how long; and 3) make it impossible for them to find out.”

I should mention that I have spent about a decade in software development. I have worked on distributed systems involving millions of transactions per day for companies like Amazon.com and Yahoo! So I understand some of the complexities involved in implementing a platform like Facebook that can scale to hundreds of millions of users.

When I attempted to log into my Facebook account around noon on a Saturday, I was surprised by the message, “Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

As someone who has been around large scale systems for most of my career, I know it is extremely rare that scheduled or anticipated maintenance occurs during peak hours. However, I also know that well-implemented systems temporarily forbid access to parts of an application which experience unanticipated critical failures (e.g., widespread network or power outage, widespread data corruption, etc.). I know that reliably supporting millions of transactions per day is hard. Shit happens. Nascent applications (like Facebook) are bound to run into difficulties at some point. I’m certainly not going to bash Facebook engineers if it happens on their watch (glass houses and all).

But this instance doesn’t sit well with me for a few reasons. First, the outage ended up being quite long. It wasn’t until over a day later that I was able to log in again. Second, during the entire outage I had zero information on the nature of the problem and the estimated resolution time. These alone may be tolerable, but after Googling the issue, I found out I wasn’t alone. People have been experiencing issues like this for several years. Third, there is absolutely no way to gain more visibility. Facebook does not provide a means to contact it if this problem arises. This is probably for good reason in most cases (one doesn’t want several thousand affected users calling or e-mailing every time they forget their password), but it is very frustrating if you are among those who have been locked out for several weeks. While Facebook acknowledges the issue, it requires that you log in to alert them to a prolonged lock-out.

Yes, that’s right: if you can’t log in, then you must log in to let them know you can’t log in. I’m curious how many of Facebook’s 300+ million accounts were created just to log in to complain that the primary account was unavailable....

When one places critical data into the hands of another to manage, it requires a lot of trust. Most often, this trust is built up over a long time. Little by little, through repeated use, users trust Facebook to deliver access to the social circles they have created. Some, like me, end up trusting it so much that it becomes their exclusive means. One of the quickest ways to permanently destroy that trust is to make your users feel helpless: 1) deny them access to their critical data; 2) without warning or notice of why or for how long; and 3) make it impossible for them to find out.

You can be sure I am thinking twice about finding an alternative. This will likely mean that I spend less time on Facebook in the future, which will mean less exposure to the site’s ads, which will result in fewer clicks, which will mean less in advertising revenues. Don’t get me wrong, I am not so narcissistic as to think my reduction in use alone can affect Facebook’s bottom line, but if the company isn’t careful, on aggregate users whose trust has been breached can have a real effect. This might open the door for a competitor like Google to step in. Hopefully Facebook can work out its issues before this happens.

But hey, that’s just one guy’s opinion....

Time to stop wasting oil

Reducing my oil footprint has become of increasing importance to me as I’ve gotten older. One way that I’ve done that is to switch to long drain interval synthetics for all of my vehicles. Yes, I know that when compared to fuel use, engine oil makes up a relatively small percentage of oil consumption. But when you consider that 118 million oil changes are performed annually in the US alone (50-70% of which are probably unnecessary), the numbers start to add up.

I’m a little bit greener for having switched. What about you? Are you wasting oil?

Bullshitting me is not an effective way to build trust in your brand

One of the core tenets of brand marketing is trust. Some branding experts refer to “building trust.” I don’t like that phrase. I prefer brands that “earn” trust to those that “build” it. Nevertheless, oodles of experts have written on the topic.

“Any brand, no matter how memorable, will fail to achieve its goals if it does not gain the public’s trust. Given the skeptical nature of the public today, this is exceedingly difficult to come by.” (Brock Ray, “Building Trust Into Your Brand,” Oct 07 2009.)

Why is it then, that most advertising today seems desperate or manipulative?

“‘[T]elling the truth—authenticity—is one more requirement of effective branding....’ 75% of the American people don’t trust advertising or advertisers.” (Charles H. Green, “Is ‘Brand Trust’ An Oxymoron?,” May 09 2008.)

I suspect it is a result of dysfunctional organization, lack of corporate leadership or both. Often times, especially in large corporations (or at least in corporations with large marketing budgets), there is a tension between maintaining the integrity of a brand, and showing short-term positive results. While, I appreciate the temptation to mortgage the future to pay for the present is nothing new, I am suggesting that succumbing to that temptation is harmful. I have some advice to corporate leaders everywhere to attempt to resolve this tension and strengthen brands (and companies) in the process.

Do what you say you’d do

Reliability is one of the single most effective ways of eliciting trust. Necessary corollaries are, “Don’t promise what you can can’t deliver,” and, “When you screw up, take responsibility.” This may seem obvious, but one wouldn’t know that by examining modern corporate and social behaviors. We are constantly perpetuating half-truths designed to avoid confrontation and judgment. This happens in most of our relationships with the companies we patronize, the politicians we elect, even our friends and loved ones.

What most people fail to acknowledge is that eventually most of those half-truths are exposed, and they detract from the trust we have in those relationships. If someone promises to perform and fails two or three times, we learn that person is unreliable. If we find that someone misleads to avoid embarrassment, controversy or responsibility, we learn to expect that person’s statements to be self-serving and dishonest.

Thankfully there is a way to correct this behavior in your organization: make your mission simple and specific; make your mission part of your culture and make your brand synonymous with your mission; and identify and resolve competing interests.

Make the corporate mission simple and specific

A long time ago, in a marketing guru seminar far, far away, someone decided that a corporate mission statement should be a single, run-on sentence that is sufficiently vague so as to avoid accountability. I am calling for an end to that practice.

Yahoo!’s most recent mission statement reads: “Yahoo! powers and delights our communities of users, advertisers, and publishers - all of us united in creating indispensable experiences, and fueled by trust.”

Besides being grammatically awkward, I don’t get a clear sense of what it is that Yahoo! is trying to accomplish. If I were to attempt to rewrite it, I might suggest the following:

Yahoo!’s mission is to:

1. provide users with the most compelling content and most useful applications for their daily lives;
2. provide publishers the best way to reach their audiences; and
3. provide advertisers the most effective way to market their products and services.

Making the mission simple and specific is a way of making it understandable. This is key. Members of your organization cannot do what the company says it’s going to do if they don’t understand what was said in the first place.

Make the corporate mission part of the culture and make the brand synonymous with the mission

Making the mission a top priority for everyone is a lot harder than it sounds. It requires that everyone in the organization has some short-term periodic (e.g., daily or at-most weekly) gut-check about how their recent efforts further corporate goals.

Lazy managers rely exclusively on shortcuts like integrating certain phrases into call-center scripts (e.g., “How can I provide you with excellent service today?”) or distributing vision statements printed on company t-shirts, coffee mugs or squeeze toys. I’m not saying these things aren’t valuable, but they are insufficient on their own.

Good leaders will find effective ways to keep the corporate mission in their employees’ sights. This could be as simple as a weekly priorities meeting where the host holds up the company logo and mission statement and earnestly asks, “How do you think we helped or hindered this image last week?” Where appropriate, a good follow-up might be, “How would our customers agree or disagree with your assessment?” To be effective, these interactions have to be free from judgment or reprisal.

Identify and remove competing interests

In law school, one of my professors taught me that good legal writing goes beyond motions and briefs. Every memo, every e-mail, every communication is an opportunity to either strengthen or damage one’s reputation as an attorney.

This is particularly good advice for corporate content providers like public relations managers, advertising agents, copy writers, etc. They have to keep in mind at all times when designing content, it should not only accomplish short-term goals (e.g, reduce service calls, increase registrations, etc.), but shouldn’t harm the brand.

If there is a division in your company that is detracting from your brand, find out why. It may be lack of leadership (in which case the company mission isn’t part of that division’s culture), or it may be that there are competing priorities. If it is the latter, then one has to identify the conflict and determine if the cost to the brand is worth the return.

Fraud and theft prevention is an frequent area of tension. On the one hand, legitimate customers tend not to like to be treated as criminals. However, thieves often take advantage of this in order to disguise their thefts. This may be an area where mistakenly treating a few legitimate customers as suspects may be acceptable to avoid significant loss. But a company should not try to disguise this trade-off (see below).

Advertising is another frequent area of tension. If an advertising agent’s income is directly tied to short-term performance of specific advertising campaigns, then maintaining brand integrity will take second seat. Compensation methods may need to be reevaluated to achieve the appropriate priorities.

Some simple examples

Here are some common examples of how to erode consumers’ trust in your brand:

Example 1: dishonestly portraying a limitation as intended

This is one of my pet peeves whenever I call a bank. Often times, I speak to a general representative who asks me for my account number and some verifying information, and then that person transfers me to a specialist who asks me for similar information. When I indicate I’ve already given it, I’m often told that I have to give it again for security purposes.

This is infuriating. It suggests I’m too stupid to detect the lie. I would much rather hear, “I know, but unfortunately our system doesn’t transfer that information along with your call, so I need to ask you for it again.” Being honest in this scenario does two things. First it is instantly disarming, and actually builds trust by openly acknowledging the limitation. Second it keeps the representative out of an adversarial role as a conspirator in a lie.

Example 2: disguising advertising as something else

Product placement in the entertainment industry is a notorious example of this. Frequently-asked questions (FAQs) are a less obvious, but common target of abuse.

“Many FAQs pages don’t actually respond to frequently asked questions; instead, responses relate to questions businesses expect their customers to ask — or worse, simply answer questions they want customers to ask.” (Rick Allen, “FAQs Pages: Good Web Usability or Outdated Content Strategy?,” Aug 17 2009.)

Even some of the best-loved companies make this mistake. After years of complaints from a very vocal user base, Apple decided to remove the copy protection (DRM) from music sold through iTunes. Yet on its FAQ page, it listed the question, “Can I still buy music encoded at [an inferior bit rate] with Digital Rights Management (DRM)?”

I’m not sure what Apple was trying to accomplish with this question, but it seems like it would have been much better to answer, “Will any media available via iTunes be restricted?” or, “How can I tell if what I purchase on iTunes is restricted?”

Don’t attempt to mislead your consumers by disguising advertising as “help” or “important information.”

Example 3: spinning hostile behavior as advantageous

There are no shortage of examples of this behavior, but one ubiquitous abuse often occurs in “privacy” policies. These contain information which should educate a consumer how and when a company shares that consumer’s personal contact information, purchasing habits, etc. However, they are often designed specifically to mislead and confuse. For example, companies often use a heading similar to, “how [Company] protects your information,” before a paragraph with very small text describing how they do the exact opposite.

Anti-theft measures also frequently fall under this category. Consumer electronics stores, retailers, and even respected companies like Costco have receipt checks for people exiting their stores. Consumers are often told these checks are for their own protection (i.e., to make sure they have everything they paid for). They are not. They are designed to prevent theft, and have the unfortunate side-effect of treating each customer as a suspect.

Stores have a right to try to prevent theft. Companies can try to make money in a myriad of ways. But by misleading consumers about their reasons, they erode the trust those consumers have in the company. If a company is willing to lie about why it requires receipt checks, it may be willing to lie about quite a bit more.

Conclusion

If your brand is not important to you, or if your company mission is something like, “to provide as little value as possible for the most profit,” this article won’t be relevant for you. But if brand integrity is as important as marketing experts have claimed for decades, the above will help give it the priority it deserves. Incorporating it into your organization won’t be easy, but I suggest that if you are successful, the power of your brand—and your company—may very well become immeasurable.

But hey, that’s just one guy’s opinion....

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen fell and took its revenge on me.

I am no fanboy, but I did not have the heart to see either of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies in the theater. I had rented Transformers (2007) last year. This weekend, I finally got around to viewing the sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009).



As one who grew up with the animated television series, I was surprisingly satisfied with the 2007 film. The voices of Optimus Prime, Megatron and Starscream gave proper homage to the 1980s US animated cartoon. Even Jazz (my childhood favorite) had echos of his original character (although it understandably fell short without voice actor Scatman Crothers). One was pleasantly distracted from the film’s underdeveloped story and ubiquitous product placement by its nostalgic appeal.

“The enfeebled dialog grates on one’s skull and begs the question: with so many talented screenwriters in the world, how could none be available for consultation during the mere six hours it took to write this script?”

Revenge of the Fallen has none of that charm and is without a suitably redemptive substitute.

The voice actors for Megatron and Starscream sound nothing like their 2007 film or cartoon counterparts. Megatron is demoted to a generic megalomaniac villain and Starscream his typical sycophant sidekick. Even their robot forms were difficult to tell apart from each other.

For some reason, the film’s creators did not focus on easily recognizable robot characters, but rather felt compelled to engage in masturbatory displays of arbitrary complexity. Transformations between robot and alternate forms sometimes drone on with absurd results. (Where was Ironhide hiding all that bulky weaponry in that GM TopKick shell?) At the same time, some of the sequences feel uncharacteristically unpolished. (The brief scuffle between Megatron and Starscream on a New York building top seemed like a throwback to the mid-90s Beast Wars CGI television series compared other parts of the film.)

Despite being almost two-and-a-half hours long, we are left without any real insight into the Transformers’ existences. Almost every attempt at plot development feels like an annoyance to be disposed of before the next discordant special effect. The enfeebled dialog grates on one’s skull and begs the question: with so many talented screenwriters in the world, how could none be available for consultation during the mere six hours it took to write this script?

Given its rich history, the franchise deserves better. Yes, the premise of an ancient alien race of shape-changing robots in search of energy to fuel a civil war is ridiculous. But in the hands of a skilled artisan, this could have been a dark, dare I say intellectual, epic metaphor for the tensions between greed, guardianship, power, honor, corruption, and self-preservation. Instead, this film’s creators seem to have about as much respect for their audience as Ken Lewis has for the American taxpayer.

To (ironically) quote (a younger) George Lucas, “Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an end to themselves. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” (“From ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Jedi’: The Making of a Saga,” 1985.)

But hey, that’s just one guy’s opinion....



Update: It looks like I'm not the only one who hates this movie.