Gearheads: The Sterling Communications Blog

Why Ask Why?

Until tax returns can be filed on a postcard, I need a professional or professional tools. Rather than use an accountant, I decided to try Intuit's TurboTax and HR Block's TaxCut online services this weekend. I logged into each service and entered data for about 10 minutes or so. To me, TurboTax seemed to have a slightly smoother interface, offered explanations in clearer language, and saved time by automatically importing W-2 data from my employer. I also received a discount from my financial service institution, USAA, which BusinessWeek ranked as the world's Customer Service Champ again this year, beating Lexus, Nordstrom, and Ritz-Carlton Hotels. I've trusted them for years with my car insurance, home insurance, IRAs, brokerage account and credit cards, which Money magazine ranked number one as well.

So, I'm wrapping up my taxes, and near the bottom of the last screen, Intuit includes a one-question survey. I instantly recognized it as Fred Reichheld's "The Ultimate Question" -- "Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?" The answer enables companies to track promoters and detractors and produces a clear measure of an organization's performance through its customers' eyes. The survey, captured in the image above, missed an opportunity, by not asking a follow-up question: "Why?". Intuit was about to learn my likely recommendation of their service to a coworker this morning, but they wouldn't learn reasons behind my answer. Given Intuit's millions of customers, however, I can understand their reluctance to hire extra analysts to sift and sort through hand-typed answers to help understand their Net Promoter Score.

After all, the BusinessWeek article anointing USAA number one in customer service generated 58 pages of comments. How can companies keep up with all that reading, let alone organize and code it properly to integrate with structured data from surveys, sales and support sources? As it so happens, one of our clients created software that automates understanding the "Why" answers to Net Promoter surveys.

Attensity's on-demand version of their Voice of the Customer software identifies facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble areas from unstructured feedback found in surveys, service and call center notes, emails, Web forums, blogs and other forms of customer contact. The SaaS offering also provides "root-cause" analysis of promoter and detractor designations used in Net Promoter Scores to identify positive assets that drive purchases and liabilities caused by customer complaints. With Attensity, Intuit could have learned why I was promoting their service and how to improve it further. I was willing to take a couple extra minutes to explain my answer, but they didn't ask.

Obviating Email Overload

As clear: more people discuss the failures of email, and possible solutions, I found this comment from Andy Mitchell refreshing:

I think reducing the use of email to the bare minimum is crucial. RSS replaces email newsletters, Twitter replaces effective broadcasting; and the phone is still the ultimate tool for resolving the more complex discussion required in a disagreement (agreements are written, disagreements are spoken).

Of course, 95% of everyone online has no idea what an RSS feed is, and only 5% who do actually know what Twitter does. Still, I think we need the right tools for the right tasks. If only those tools worked together seamlessly to obviate the need for entering in data more than once. I'll be interested to see how Xobni, Google, Microsoft, FriendFeed, Socialthing and the rest tackle these problems for mainstream employees.

Motorola's PR Nightmare

A Motorola insider forwards a letter to TechCrunch, telling all about the fall of the wireless tech icon. Passages like this must be giving Moto's PR people, who declined to comment, fits:

Many close to Geoffrey believed Ed Zander worked him to death, putting the pressure of the fate of the company in his hands. [That was certainly the buzz around the industry at the time. -Ed.] I took his untimely death in 2005 very hard, and knew that the company would head downhill in the aftermath. On a personal note, Lynne, his wife blamed the company for his passing. She committed suicide soon after.

It cannot possibly help matters that the current CEO, Greg Brown, apparently doesn't use a computer and has his secretary print email to read and dictate responses.

Replacing Email: A TechCrunch Challenge

Michael Arrington has 2,433 unread emails and sees an opportunity for "something significantly more revolutionary than fixing email. Like a new way of communicating entirely." My crack at the challenge -- a multi-directional RSS reader/publisher that enables trackback-like comments, keyword tagging, social media posting, and privacy settings galore -- is comment number 95. The problem for PR pros is real: How do you craft messages that cut through the clutter and engage the recipient? Writing clear, concise and compelling messages is just the start. Learning the tools reporters, editors, analysts and influencers use outside of email and phones is critical -- as is building your own reputation, and that of your company, within the communities important to you and your clients. All of this may be common sense, but none of it is easy. Public relations these days is a lot more public and requires a lot more relating than ever before.

Hannaford Data Breach: Lessons in Crisis Management

Hindsight is always 20/20 -- a mistake gone public is an opportunity for the rest of us to discuss and learn from. Unfortunately, like Britney Spears, a mistake you wish would be swept under the rug can be publicized and blown out of proportion. In today’s social media environment, the need to be transparent and accountable is greater than ever.

Rapid7 provides security technology to the supermarket chain, Hannaford. It was reported this week that stolen data was accessed from Hannaford's computer systems during the card verification transmission process in transactions. Upon hearing of the breach, Rapid7 promptly removed all references to Hannaford from its Web site in an attempt to remove any links to the fact that its security technology failed to do its job (mistake #1). 
Good crisis management in the past has proven that facing issues head on, owning them and talking about what happened openly is the best course of action. What is there to discuss after owning up to a mistake?   

Hannaford reappeared on Rapid7’s Web site on Thursday with this response (mistake #2):

“While Hannaford Brothers have confirmed that a recent breach resulted in the theft of sensitive data, Hannaford has also confirmed that NeXpose continues to provide exceptional vulnerability management and outstanding remediation reporting and the no systems within the NeXpose scan network contributed to the loss of data. Visit www.rapid7.com today to understand how NeXpose can be used to provide advanced protection against unauthorized data access.”

This is definitely on the right track, however, I think Rapid7 committed another misstep. “Yes, there was a breach, but our technology is really good, we swear!”  Mmmm, I think better to report the mistake and talk about next steps in researching and finding ways to prevent this from happening again. Admitting a mistake and then following it with marketing speak?  Probably not a best practice.  As eWEEK Security Watch reported, "Instead of being honest about the realities, marketers offer silver bullets. We've all seen these ridiculous promises -- Total Protection (McAfee), Hacker Safe (McAfee, again), blocks all types of threats (Panda)." Businesses end up setting themselves up for failure each time with absolute statements such as this.

Network World continued posting updates to its story with trying to get answers to why information was taken off the site then put on again by Rapid7. Unfortunately, the reporter is receiving mixed responses and runaround from multiple people including the CEO (mistake #3).  It seems as though lessons are going unlearned!

Help A Reporter

Self-described "CEO, entrepreneur and adventurist" Peter Shankman has launched a new site called helpareporter.com. It's essentially a mailing list for forwarding media source requests to PR people and others. Here's why he did it:

I built this list because a lot of my friends are reporters, and they call me all the time for sources. Rather than go through my contact lists each time, I figured I could push the requests out to people who actually have something to say.

The rules:

Next: This is really the only thing I ask: By joining this list, just promise me and yourself that you'll ask yourself before you send a response: Is this response really on target? Is this response really going to help the journalist, or is this just a BS way for me to get my client in front of the reporter? If you have to think for more than three seconds, chances are, you shouldn't send the response.

I would really like to be an adventurist...

Starbucks' Suggestion Box

Smart decision by Starbucks to open a forum like Dell's Ideastorm. MyStarbucksIdea, powered by Force.com, offers customers a place to share, vote, discuss and see what other customers want from the chain. Jeff Jarvis claims "Starbucks, of all companies, with its loyal and opinionated customers, should have been doing this years ago. Every company should be doing it now." Well, they're doing it now, and the responses are coming in fast -- fast enough to take the site offline for a few moments. Anyone, especially competitors, can read what's been posted. Only members can post or vote, however. Again, smart decision.

So What?

A thousand years ago, I wrote a speech for a VP at Sun Microsystems. To focus my thoughts, I worked with an outline that has served me well ever since. Answer the following questions: (1) Now what? (2) So what? (3) Do what? The second question popped into my head when I found Jason Fried's SXSW presentation on how to do business. His company, 37signals, makes "sweet-and-simple" online collaboration software with a lot of devoted customers. Here's how Fried prefaced his description of the talk:

These are questions we ask each other before, during, and sometimes after we work on something. That something can be as small as a couple-hour project or as big as something that takes a few weeks or more. Either way, it’s important to ask questions like this in order to make sure you’re doing work that matters.

Lately, I've found myself asking the same questions Fried poses. Only I've been asking myself "So what?" And I keep trying to ask it until I'm satisfied that it can't be asked again. Then, I find, I can proceed (I hope) with clarity and conviction.

Branding Disaster

"9/11" is synonymous with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "Watergate" isn't a hotel in DC as much as the moniker for a host of illegal activities committed by Nixon's administration. Many smaller scandals have appended the suffix "gate" successfully. Other disasters, however, are still waiting for their names. "Gulf War II" never caught on like I thought it would. And now we have the current financial crisis, which Time's Justin Fox  wants to name. The guidelines: "The name that sticks is going to have to be straightforward, descriptive, and possibly even a little bit dowdy." Here's what I wrote on his blog, The Curious Capitalist:

Haven't seen "Credit Crunch" mentioned in the comments, though it pops up in headlines frequently. "Credit," I think, is a key word that binds several facets of the problem -- too much of it given unwisely, too little of it available now, not enough faith in borrowers' ability to use it intelligently. "jlb39" mentioned "The Credit Collapse," which reminds me that alliteration may help here. Also, as no one seems to have lit upon a good descriptor for this decade itself (the "aughts" never caught on), dating the event will be a bit harder. I suppose whoever ends up holding America's bank notes at the end may have the last word. Anyone know how to say "Credit Crunch" in Mandarin?

Most entries have tongues planted firmly in cheek, but a few are serious attempts at what I see as a type of branding exercise -- framing the debate around a point of view. I'll be interested to see where this leads.

The economy's woes and the tech sector

Wired compares the current economic crisis to the dot-com debacle of 2000. The conclusion: while the overall economy is in for a rough ride, this time the tech sector may not suffer as badly as other industries. And so far, despite the credit crunch, venture money continues to flow freely to new tech start-ups.