When Customers Don’t Matter

We see major media outlets in significant financial troubles these days.  And in political discussions all over the Web, you’ll hear talk of new paradigms, or political bias, or lack of journalistic integrity, or a host of other reasons given for those troubles.  Regardless of the cause(s), it seems to have become pretty clear that news sources of the past have not yet reconciled themselves to the way information flows across the Web.

One of the clear (though far from the largest) Illustrations to me is the guided search site About.com.  This site operates with a staff of designated topic experts, called Guides.  The Guide is responsible for content topical to the subject to which they’ve been designated.  They regularly update their sites, and run blogs, and basically any other on-topic content that About.com decides is consistent with their editorial philosophy.

Where we start to see cracks in the About.com operation, however, is in user interaction.  As a site that has managed to get itself listed as a search engine, users will find very few opportunities to contribute input to the site, unless the Guides themselves take on that initiative themselves.  In fact, About.com actively states that the Guides are the final arbiters of user interaction on their assigned sites and user forums.

Because About.com maintains such a hands-off approach to the activities of its Guides, the site is infested with inconsistency.  For example, the site includes user forums, and a page of Forum Guidelines, which include prohibitions against personal attacks and spam/commercial posts.  And yet, despite this posted set of rules, AND even though it includes in the registration process a step where users must agree to these rules, not everyone running the forums enforces those rules.  One of the most egregious examples is the US Liberal Politics user forum.  In that forum, user after user has pointed out repeated copyright violations, personal insults and attacks, and instead of the Guide there enforcing the published rules, one can look at thread after thread, just like this one, where the regulars who agree with her political persuasion have free reign to bypass the swear, to personally attack and insult others, and to display every vestige of hostility and hate.  Take this challenge: Sign up for a username with About.com, you’ll see an option to Register at the top of the thread page linked above.  Report the activities you see on that thread.  Within 24 hours, you will find yourself unable to access the forum, instead being redirected to the About.com generic homepage.

Now, go one step further: try reporting that, to About’s support team.  You’ll find they are nothing of the sort, because if you get any response AT ALL, it will defer to the Guide.  And Deborah White, the US Liberal Politics Guide, does not respond to questions.  Ever.  Despite a Forum Guidelines page that explicitly states:

Flames or rude / insensitive remarks will be removed.

She has NEVER removed an offensive or insulting remark.  Not once, and I’ve been a member of that site since 1999.  Nor has she ever made the least effort to explain her (lack of) actions.

This unwillingness on the part of About.com to hold its staff accountable for the unethical treatment of customers that even violates its own published policies is a clear illustration of the disconnect between the mainstream media (About.com is owned by the NY Times, and there is every reason to believe this disrespect for readers comes from that parent) and the readership it loses with every passing day.  In fact, one can browse the entire News and Issues “channel” at About.com, and you will find a wasteland of unused and inactive forums.  Primarily, in my opinion, because About.com refuses to acknowledge that the Web is not, and has not been for years now, a one-way channel.  About.com is not the least bit interested in hearing from its members.  It has posted a few weak efforts to get a user group for feedback, but it continues to ignore unethical and negligent behavior such as the above.  One former Guide, Kathy Gill, even went so far as to reveal that forum activity isn’t even a measure of a Guide’s performance.

So why bother to be a search site, About.com?  You’re not interested in the user experience, you refuse to address user complaints, and you permit unethical treatment of users by Guides, even when it violates your own published rules?

It’s no wonder that the news media are failing.  They’ve failed to see the Internet for what it is, even among efforts they’ve taken on that supposed to be central to interaction *with* the Internet.

-RØß V-

Sometimes, the Answer Come From The Wrong Question

The September 14th issue of InformationWeek magazine, their 21st annual "InformationWeek500" issue, arrived at my home a couple of days ago, and as I got around to reading it, I came across one of their "Quicktake" news items on Page 15. Entitled "The Web Has Ears," the news article points out that:

Customers are increasingly going to the Web to air gripes and get questions
answered, rather than call a customer support center.

The story, integrated into other items at this page, then talks about offerings from Salesforce.com and from another company, RightNow (using a service from another company it acquired, HighLive). These offerings provide, as the story puts it:

making it easier for companies to track chatter about their products on social networking sites and on their own sites, and offer to help frustrated customers

But I'm finding myself troubled by this story. Don't get me wrong. If companies adopt a more proactive approach to finding and resolving customer issues, that's a good thing.

But...

Well... to be blunt about it don't these products involve asking the WRONG questions? I mean, if customers are being driven away from your existing support model, isn't the *real* problem the support model, not the ability to sort of "chase" your customers around the Web to take in what they're saying? If you have to go "out there" to find these customers, what was it what made the customers go "out there" in the first place?

I'm really worried that businesses that turn to services like this are going to ignore the truly fundamental question that underlies the need for these services: a support system that is running these customers away. If a car is failing, do you think the answer is to enter it into the Daytona 500 auto race? Likewise, if your existing customer support system isn't meeting the needs of customers, the answer is NOT to expand its presence, but to fix the problems that drove your customers away in the first place.

I'm all in favor of companies embracing customer feedback, seeking it out. But only if those same companies actually use what they find to discover the real nature of the problems this brings to light. And I just don't see that happening. While RightNow and Salesforce may convince cellular carriers (for example) to "follow me" out to Howardforums, to CellPhoneForums, or to About.com, they also enable the very problems that send customers to third party sites to find answers and resolutions: the inability of the existing support structure to provide these resolutions.

These may be good services. But they're convincing support managers to ask the wrong questions. Extending bad support to third party sites isn't the answer that will really fix the problems that led to this customer migration in the first place.

-O/Siris-

Bozeman, MT Returns to Reality

Ars Technica earlier this week reported on the city council meeting in Bozeman, Montana.  Normally, a relatively minor city like Bozeman wouldn’t rate an article with such a revered site.  But Bozeman managed recently to make itself quite the laughingstock of The Web when it was discovered that application for employment with the city included a background check waiver that called for login account names *and* passwords to online sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and others.  The story took off across The Web, and Bozeman city officials were inundated by emails condemning the application.  Bureaucracy being what it is, nothing could be done until the next city council meeting, which took place on Monday, June 22.  As Ars Technica reports, they quickly removed this “little item” from the application process, and released a report saying, among other things:

…[I]t had suspended the practice as of Friday, June 19 and that it would update its hiring procedures within 30 days to determine a more appropriate level of screening for employees.

It’s certainly of no concern to me that city HR departments become aware of such accounts.  But they don’t need login access to see employees bad-mouthing their superiors.  Most that would use such public platforms to express their views wouldn’t take the time to make them private.  As far as I’m concerned, if you post something to your public Facebook page, Twitter account, etc, then you might as well grab a soapbox and scream it into your employer’s face.  You can and should be held accountable for public comments like that.

But, hopefully, Bozeman’s city antics in this regard can help other bureaucracies to see the idiocy of policies like this.

O/Siris

Sony vs The Internet. Who Will Win?

Techie Web site Ars Technica is having a good bit of fun with some of what’ managed to come from the mouth, and pen (so to speak) of Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton.  According to the story recently published by Ars, SonyPics’ CEO started the ball rolling with statements at a conference that Mr Lynton could not, “see anything good having come from the Internet."

Apparently, that made for uncomfortable weather for the CEO, because Mr Lynton appears to have “clarified” his statements in a submission to the blog site Huffington Post.

Ars Technica provides a pretty good rundown of the whole affair up to now, so I shan’t copy’n paste what Ars has already done.  Instead, I want to concentrate on what Mr Lynton claims is his real point: copyright.  From his submission at HuffPo:

In March, an unfinished copy of 20th Century Fox's film X-Men Origins: Wolverine was stolen from a film lab and uploaded to the Internet, more than a month before its theatrical release. The studio investigated the crime, and efforts were made to limit its availability online. Still, it was illegally downloaded more than four million times.

That kind of wide scale theft was very much on my mind when I was on a panel the other day which opened with a question about the impact of the Internet on the entertainment business, and I responded, "I'm a guy who sees nothing good having come from the Internet. Period."

He goes on at some length about copyright and how the Internet has damaged the creative industries.  Not just his own movie business, but books, newspapers, magazines, music.  And that is where Mr Lynton misses the point.

There is a very real conundrum throughout the Internet when it comes to copyright.  I support an artist’s right to profit from his own creative work, and even Sony Pictures’ right to profit from distributing it.  But from Day One of what I’ll loosely call “The Broadband Age” of the Internet, the selfsame creative sources that Mr Lynton tries to champion have been completely and utterly out of touch with the new opportunities and challenges of this medium.  It is a medium that doesn’t abide capricious and arbitrary release dates, or permit a few large houses to control what content reaches the customer.  And old-world (read: Pre-Internet) minds are not going to be able to successfully fight off the loss of control.  They don’t understand the thirst for content out in the Internet.  These people could probably spend 10% of what they spend now, publish webisodes, and be champions of that hungry public.  Instead, they meet in secret in Scandinavia, Paris, allowing no consumer-oriented repesentatives within, and even convincing President Obama in the USA to declare the content of those meetings to be a matter of national security, and therefore protected from Freedom of Information Act inquiries.  Copyright is a national secret?  Wow.  That alone should show you the disdain that the so-called “creative” industries have for the very consumers they claim to be serving.

Remember, too, that Sony was the company to bring “rootkits” into the mainstream.  Look at how well *that* turned out.

Three Strikes and the French Are Out

It’s no secret that RIAA, MPAA, and all the other media entertainment companies utterly hate any customer that doesn’t do what they tell the customer to do.  We are all to be presumed guilty of illegal filesharing and the only thing they want from us is our money.

Now, it seems, France has decided to play right into their hands.  The BBC yesterday announced that France’s lower house has passed a “Creation and Internet” bill that would see French Internet users disconnected if they are, according to the BBC:

disconnect people caught downloading content illegally three times has been given final approval.

Ah, but there’s a catch.  There’s always a catch.  This provision in the bill, obviously backed by both the film and music industries (including French President Sarkozy’s wife, something of a noted recording artist herself), does NOT include language for determining guilt.  One need only be accused three times for this to happen.  No trial, no investigation, no due process at all.  Three accusations, and a French citizen can find their Internet access cut off.  Stories elsewhere report that the citizen can also be compelled to continue paying for this now-disabled Internet access.

I support copyright in general, and I certainly want artists to profit from the fruits of their labor.  I don’t even begrudge media companies the money they make with their (sometimes predatory) ways of getting music to market.  But when they start assuming I’m a criminal, just because I partake of music online, they’re hoisting a petard, and my wallet will NOT go there.  They will.  Hopefully, watchdog groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and DRMWatch.com will continue the fight to make sure this doesn’t come to the USA.

Then again, with Obama declaring the secret ACTA talks a matter of national security, it may already be here.

O/Siris

Since When Is Copyright Law a Matter of National Security?

Some UN bigwigs sitting in Europe have been, for some time now, trying to write up a lovely little ditty about Copyright Law called "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement." I'd love to tell you what it will do. Except I can't. See, the Bush Administration refused to release the particulars of this agreement. So, of course, Barack Obama, with all his promises of greater transparency would correct that little error, right?

Nope. Instead, they took it one step further. When a FOIA Request was recently submitted by a privacy advocate, not only did the Obama Administration refuse the request, they then proceeded to declare that the details of this copyright treaty are a national security secret.

According to CNET News:

President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."
The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do "damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage."

What a very intriguing turn of events. This same document is being circulated openly to Entertainment Industry executives and lobbyists of all kinds, and it's a state secret? What, pray tell, is the damage that would be caused by revealing what's being done to subvert... excuse me... "adjust" Copyright Law? Could it be provisions that mirror the 3-strikes laws that were recently attempted in both New Zealand and France? This is lovely. All it takes is someone ACCUSING you of copyright violations 3 times, and you could lose all right to have an Internet connection at home. Just an accusation. No trial, no finding of guilt, no investigation of any kind. Just the accusation.

And that, apparently, needs to be protected as a national security secret? I really, really want to hear how Obama thinks this compares with his promises of government transparency. Because right now, all I see if toadying up with corporate bullies who love suing 90-year-old grandmas for multi-hundres-of-thousands of dollars for alleged (not even proven, just alleged) file sharing.

I can't wait to see where this is going. Or, then again, maybe I should.

The Trouble with Web 2.0

It’s nice to imagine a world joined in cyber friendliness and everyone getting along.  There’s a vision there that even I like, of borders fading and of people learning to accept diversity and other lifestyles.

But the recent hullaballoo with Twitter and Facebook… especially Facebook… should teach us that The Web isn’t altruistic.  It takes resources to operate a Web presence (I’m not so sure that Web “site” is a valid term with the way these things cross boundaries, but that’s subject matter for another post).  It’s not enough to have 10,000 followers on Twitter or 1,000 friends on Facebook.  Now you’ve got them.  Now what?

That’s not an easy question to answer, is it?  Twitter’s been offered money by people wanting to be listed on its homepage.  Facebook wants to use your profile information in its ads… even if you don’t want to be part of Facebook anymore.  It’s time to find the business model that makes these presences viable, for the long haul.  Unless we’re ready for a virtual bubble to burst.