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At the risk of ragging on the US Postal Service a bit, I’ll keep this really short.

The postal staff placed this letter in our PO Box today. At first, I thought it was one of those meaningless surveys where they keep asking how they are doing, like a yappy little puppy. I almost threw it away unopened, but then Twitter went down and I found myself with an extra few minutes to spare. So, I opened the letter.

It appeared they added more services to our PO box. I don’t know what that could possibly mean, but they gave a web address, so I went there.

Nothing new.

Here is what I think the US Post Office should provide to registered corporations. We would even be willing to pay extra for these services.

1) A giant shredder. We could start it up with our PO box key even so that only companies that are buying PO box services could use it. It would have to be strong enough to shred catalogs. Lots of catalogs.

2) A physical mailing address for UPS and FedEx deliveries. It never fails that the only time these outfits want to deliver something that requires a signature is when everyone is out of the office and the receptionist zips out across the street for a quick cup of coffee. I want to be able to have someone send something to 116 W National Rd, Suite 6, Englewood, OH 45322 without having to worry about hitting that three-second window the UPS gives you to race back across the street with three hot lattes and a sticky bun.

3) Email/SMS Text messaging when something is placed in the PO box. You could put a sensor in the bottom of the box that automatically sends out a text when something is delivered. And of course, text message/email for UPS/FedEx as well.

With a lot of companies downsizing their office space and many asking employees to work from home, these services sound like they make sense. The infrastructure (with the exception of the giant shredder) is already in place. The USPS just needs to relax some of their policies a bit. Any legitimate corporation would be able to provide all the documentation needed to control stuff for Homeland Security concerns.

Instead of trying to get us to stuff our business into standard-sized boxes, maybe the USPS needs to be thinking a little more outside theirs.

I have an iPhone and I frequently tweet from it. When I’m at @target or @oinkadoodlemoo or when I am drinking a @jonessodaco green apple soda, I’ll tweet using their twitter accounts because I know them. But when I am at #kroger or #acehardware, I am not really sure what their twitter accounts are, so I just hashtag them and move on. There is no elegant way to look up companies or brands using mobile apps, especially with the pokey AT&T 3G. So, I just don’t bother.

I saw this tweet from @alotofnothing come across in my twitter stream tonight:*

and it occurred to me that the test of true brand loyalty and awareness was if a user was able to type in the twitter account of a business or brand flawlessly on a mobile device as part of a natural conversation in twitter. (I would have struggled with @TijuanaFlats and even had I looked it up, they have a Flash site, so iPhone would not have been able to see it. Besides, they only show a Facebook Fan Page.)

Think about that for a moment and realize what awesome power that means for your company or brand, good and bad. Then think about how much you need to brand your twitter account.

*Used with permission.. Thank you Angie!

It’s Monday and my twitter stream is filing up with tweets from business people just getting into the office and tweeting out news and links that I’ve been seeing all weekend. These folks work for companies that shut down on Friday afternoon and come back into work on Monday. For most who are connected into twitter, these tweets are really, really, really old news.

Social media works 24/7/365. That means nights and weekends. And it is creating a donut hole for small to medium-sized business, making them seem out-of-touch instead of connected. Follow me on this.

For twitter to work well, someone has to be at the switch pretty much 24/7. The old adage, “A lie will make its way half way round the world before the truth even gets out of bed” is fairly accurate. Ask Dominos, Amazon, Target or any other brand that has suffered a twitterstorm (though less in vogue nowadays) if they wished they worked weekends. Amazon does, but their lawyers don’t, at least not for the normal day rate.

For one-man shows like most of the twitter and social media elite, social media is not an issue. They are on 24/7/365 anyway. The cost of their labor is cheap and they are able to monitor their brand whenever, wherever it is being discussed. They are also the ones quick to berate brands for not responding sooner, by not making their brand more human, etc, etc. For the very large brands who have money to staff up 24/7/365, the issue goes away just by making someone a Community Manager and staffing up a department.

But for small to medium-sized companies, we’re out here kinda screwed by the Social Media donut hole. Sure, you can hire someone to be “on call” and mandate they check the social media accounts regularly on evenings, weekends and early mornings and many will gladly do it, relishing their flexible work conditions. But, as anyone who has ever work “flexible hours” knows, it becomes apparent that the flex is all about the flexibility for the company, not the employee. If flex favored employees, then they would have the option of NOT being available to respond.

And resentment builds and somebody somewhere has enough of being taken advantage of and calls in a State labor board who has an entirely different view on what constitutes “working hours.” That flexible position that you created in response to the market need quickly becomes about the most expensive you’ve ever created with lawyer fees, labor board responses, unemployment hearing and eventual back taxes and overtime pay. What you see as flexibility, the State see as indentured servitude.

The current expectations of social media are unsustainable by small to medium-sized companies. In response, most just do nothing as the return is not worth even the labor investment. And labor laws are not flexible enough to make human 24/7/365 social media monitoring a viable option for many. Some resort to automated response which exacerbates the issue in the minds of the social media purists.

I’d love for some of our brands to be more real-time with social media, but until labor laws catches up with the real world realities of the modern workplace, those social media plans are on hold. Monday mornings will just be very busy here for a while.

NB: As I was writing this, a tweet came over from @JenKaneCo on twitter customer service. Thanks, Jennifer!

I had been eye-balling An Event Apart in Minneapolis for a few months as a cool conference to go to. It finally sold out, saving me from actually having to make a decision. But I still looked over the agenda.

And it suddenly occurred to me what really kept me from pulling the trigger. It wasn’t the price (over $1,000) or the travel costs, but the long speeches and the thought of sitting through Powerpoint presentations, knowing I would probably not learn anything new. No offense to Zeldman, he is one of my heros.

I think it may be time to start re-thinking conferences. Think about how we work every day. Most of us do in short bursts; twitter, email, multiple projects going on, snippets of information coming in through cable news. We can Google solutions to design or software problems on the fly from our desks. So, why are conferences structured as long keynote speeches and presentations? Why are they not bursty?

Here would be a cool thing. What if each presenter was tasked with giving a ten minute sales pitch for his/her content for the first half of the day. Then, they would retire into a group room where they could conduct a workshop Socrates style with more of a one-on-one with the attendees who were intrigued enough by the pitch to participate? Then, instead of giving a canned presentation, the “expert” could drop anything the ad hoc audience already knows and explore that which they don’t.

It would take more of an effort by speakers to be involved in the conference and some traditionalists may not want to participate to this level of personal engagement. For me, it would make that conference worthwhile.

Just thinking out loud.

PS I think I’ll go to 140conf in Detroit Oct 20, 2010. It appears this format is about as close as any get to different.

Seth Godin wrote a blog post today about being slick. He claims the way people judged high quality was the degree of “slickness” that was put into a piece, like a business card, website, brochure, etc. I think he is wrong.

I think it is and always will be about craftsmanship, i.e., how “tight” the piece is. Was the logo crafted or was it grabbed from a clip art book and had some extrusion slapped on it? Does the brochure tell a story or is it merely a collection of color photos with a bunch of words wrapped up in a glossy cover? Are the lyrics tight (American Pie) or are they sloppy and lazy (Tik Tok)? Do the blog posts contain typos, split infinitives, jargon, tense shifts, subject-verb disagreements, unnecessary words and half-developed ideas or are they edited and tight? Is the CEO always on time for meetings, does he always knows the numbers and can he clearly articulate the vision?

A good plumber will be proud of his solder joints. Rarely will you see uneven globs of solder or drips on the pipes. A painter will practice for years to be able to cut in on a corner and make a straight freehand edge. Mike Holmes is very proud of his ability to caulk even as he runs a contracting empire because he knows that a straight, even caulk line is the crafted touch that points to everything else he does as solid. I’m certain you can find all sorts of “caulk lines” in companies you’ve done business with. Most were probably uneven. Most were abutted to expensive slick tile or trim.

We’re not now seeking “transparency and reputation and guts” as a replacement cue for slick as we have always been seeking craftsmanship. Poor craftsmen will always wrap bad work up in slick packaging just as they will attempt to pervert and subvert “transparency, reputation and guts.”

But you can’t fake craftsmanship.

Dear Apple,

Congratulations on selling over 600,000 new iPhone4s! As an avid supporter and customer of Apple since 1984, I was always confident that I backed a winner and am happy that you are enjoying such prosperous returns on a vision so many predicted would have died off a long time ago.

Yesterday, in my exuberance, I attempted to upgrade my iPhone many times throughout the day. I was unsuccessful and notice now that you have suspended all pre-orders. This was probably a prudent thing to do given the volume of traffic that was hitting your servers.

In 1984, I found myself needing a personal computer. I was looking hard at the IBM PC-AT and was in the process of securing enough cash to buy one when I passed by a Macintosh running a demo program at the University of Minnesota. From that chance meeting, I realized I was seeing something special and several days later, I visited a store in the mall selling Macs and bought one. When you came out with the Macintosh Plus in 1986, I upgraded for $2,600.00. Shortly afterward, I upgraded to 1meg of RAM and a 20Meg external hard drive.

In the ensuring 24 years, I have purchased a Mac II, Mac IIvx, (2) Quadra 900s, (2) G3 towers, (3) iMacs in bondi blue, tangerine and grape, a Mac Mini and the latest iMac for the desktop. In addition, I have purchased a Powerbook 170 and 165c, Powerbook G3 (Pismo and Lombard) (4) Powerbook 15″, (2) Powerbook 17″, (2) MacBookPro 13″ and a MacBookPro 17″. I have also purchased (8) iPods, an iPad and (3) iPhones. I even bought a Newton and several Imagewriters.

On top of that, I have spent hundreds in the iTunes store and thousands in software and peripherals to support the Apple hardware, mostly at a premium. On top of the personal purchases I have made above, I was also a champion for outfitting my various departments with Mac video editing and desktop publishing equipment, mostly by convincing my superiors and the IT departments that the PC world had no such capability. I probably lied more than I should have, but you were the superior platform and I need to attract the best people. The best people at that time worked on Macs.

I have endured taunting and teasing from my peers in meetings for being a “Mac boy.” I have endured passive aggression from hotel meeting planner and engineers for having a Mac that needed “special plugs.” I have spent more money than I should have on peripherals that supported Macs. And since I live in Dayton, Ohio, I could not pop into the local Best Buy to purchase software or peripherals that worked with a Mac, though USB changed that.

And yesterday, I felt that I did not matter at all to you. Yesterday, I felt like just a battery to fuel your lust for profit. Yesterday, I did not feel at all like I was part of something special.

Perhaps I am just a bag of money to you after all. Perhaps I’m old enough to know that you are just a company looking to make a buck. Perhaps I should have been smarter all these years and realized that while I was taking part in a vision to change the world, you were just grifting on us poor, clueless bastards.

But your products worked well and they enriched the quality of my life by allowing me to create in ways that were not possible with a clunky PC.

If you could do one thing over again, I wish you would not have forgotten where you came from. I wish you would not have forgotten that each one of those iPhone sales yesterday was not only just a phone, but a piece of a vision that you begged us to trust so many years ago. I wish you would make us feel special once more.

Yours sincerely, though not as wholly as I once was,

G.

I had the opportunity to speak at the 15th annual NARMS Spring Conference last month. It was a workshop on using social media to leverage a membership with the association. Check out the agenda; my slides and workshop recording are linked up there. (Sunday, April 18 1:00pm)

Over a month has passed and I still have one question a participant asked, playing over and over in my head. It went something like;

I don’t have the time to wax philosophically about the retail marketing industry. Why do I need a blog?

I answered his question as I do anytime someone tells me they don’t need a blog or have time to write a blog. The short answer goes something like this: Your blog is your web site and your web site is your blog. Quit making the distinction.

Your primary audience is now a machine
It used to be you marketed your web site to customers and other human beings. Now, you market to search engines (SEM — Search Engine Marketing) as most searches now start on Google or Bing. Your primary audience in the search engine and your end audience is a C-Suite executive. In order to be a visible business, you have to show up first on the search engines and then punch your way out of that to a human being. If your website can’t do that, you just don’t make the short list of vendors.

It turns out that blogging software like WordPressor MovableType is set up to easily work with search engines by being SEO and SEM-friendly. It is also easy to quickly and prolifically add optimized content to your website. In fact, if you go out to the Internet right now, it is hard to tell a “blog” from a “web site” any more as many “blogs” function primarily as CMS (Content Management Systems) ICC/Decision Services (iccds.com) is one such site. My employer’s web site Rivershark Inc (rivershark.com) is another example.

It’s all about the keywords
How do potential clients describe what you do? In plain language, please. For example, a plumber does not “provide a comprehensive whole-house fluid distribution and waste removal solution.” He unclogs drains and toilets, installs faucets and fixes leaks. When determining keywords, think like a potential clients trying to find a solution to their problem in ways they identify the problem.

Everything you write for your website — from press releases to about pages to articles — focuses on those keywords.

Adding content rapidly and frequently is critical
A search engine indexes pages, not web sites. Once your services, about us and contact us page is indexed, that pretty much it. With nothing left to do with your site, the search engine indexing robot moves on to your competitors’ web sites. And the sites that keep adding content and keeping the search engine indexing robots busy by adding new stuff wins. The easiest way to jolt a search engine robot out of dormancy is to add new stuff.

And you don’t have to wax philosophically about your industry. You can share your opinion on a recent news story that affects you. Your can write a news release. You can welcome a new client. Whatever you do, focus on keywords and keep the content flowing. Building your web site on top of blogging software allows you to do that easily, all the while creating content that search engines know how to process quickly. 100-300 words is all you need for most articles.

But stepping away from the defining what is a web site and what is a blog is the first major step.

Name and product was removed to protect the guilty.

I think too many companies just walk away from a provider without giving them any real feedback as to why. It is really, really hard to lose me as a customer. Once a system is in place and working — unless there is a major feature shift somewhere else — it is always a hassle to change. Whether they want it or not, I tend to write a quick email, letting them know exactly why they lost me as a customer.

Here is my email. Is it too direct? I don’t think so, but weigh in if you disagree.

I tried to renew everything on Friday, but nobody was answering my live chat emails, your system was spitting back every other login as not being correct, you said my records did not match — even the previous one — and then I got to thinking:

We don’t really sell the type of product your service supports anymore. And, if we ever did in the future, there is so much more competition that is would not be that hard for some over-eager salesman to walk my paperwork through the system. Consumers aren’t as knowledgeable about privacy and security as they once were, so the bar is a whole lot lower than when we first starting using your company.

My corporation has not moved in the sixteen years we’ve been in business. If I was to define a corporation that is easy to find, easy to verify and easy to trust, it would be us. Yet, you have made the renewal process so egregiously cumbersome by asking us to verify everything again to a minute detail that it is just easier to do nothing.

You guys used to be great, but what the heck happened? You are just kinda average like everybody else.

So, not seeing any real competitive advantage, I just decided — after trying for about three hours to get this renewed — that I would just not.

Thank you for being there for our last six renewals over a span of twelve years. Good luck with everything you are doing in the future.

G.

PS Please don’t try to win me back. It is too late for that as I have already decided to move forward without you. Please take me off all your mailing lists and do not send me sales material.

Chris Brogan coined the phrase “grow bigger ears” and for the past two years or so, as brands got comfortable with social media, it was more important for them to listen more than it was to jump out and converse with us. For those brands that got social media early on, they are already listening in more places and with larger ears than their customers are probably comfortable with. For brands that are just starting out on the social media path, start running; you’re already behind.

But it might be time to stop growing bigger ears and start growing bigger hands. It might be time for brands to start integrating social media within their operations and not just their marketing or customer experience departments. We don’t really want brands to “converse” with us; just do for us.

What do I mean by this? A couple of examples.

CPG Brands at Retail
Many brands pay merchandising service organizations to go into retailers and perform audits, new product cut-in, restocking, point-of-purchase placement, etc. What if one of the point of purchase placards just had a @twitter address and said something like: “Tweet you are here, take a picture of the 8oz bottles of BrandX and get a coupon for a buy one/get one free.” How many time-stamped, geo-tagged photos and fan tweets do you think that CPG brand would get? Would this create more demand for at retail service due to an increased turn on the product? Maybe, but until someone tries it, we’ll never know.

Pizza
On Tuesday afternoon, about 4:00pm, Papa Johns sent out a tweet something like “Hungry? Order a Papa John’s pizza.” Oh, man was I ever. It was a long day and I did not have time to eat. So, I clicked on the link. Bang, right to the front page. So, from there, I had to log in.. can’t remember my password… looked it up.. got to the order page, had to decide… oh, y’know what, I’m just not that hungry.

What Papa John’s could be doing is give me the option to save a Twitter preference. Next time they send me a tweet, all I have to do is reply to it and my preferred pizza has been ordered, paid for with my save credit card, in the oven and on it’s way to my front door; all just by replying to the tweet. (I know, there are some issues with privacy/security and such, but maybe they could send me a DM or an email confirming I did indeed reply to and order a pizza.)

What’s missing in social media right now is that last ten yards of connection to the customer. Sure the smart brands are listening with big ears but until they start growing bigger hands and integrate social media into their operations, social media will be the stuff of late night jokes and CNN scare stories instead of Harvard Business School case studies.

I’ve never had a formal mentor arrangement with anyone. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but perhaps I’ve always associated with folks who weren’t closers. And when feeling closed upon by my “mentors,” I backed away. Perhaps that is the way these things are supposed to work; a support system of bumper rails without risk of co-dependency.

Looking back, when asked to be someone’s mentor, my first question was always, “What do you want?” It was almost always met with indecision. “I just want some help. My career seems to be stalled, I’m feeling frustrated and taken for granted. I want to be more like you” was a common reply. Little did any of these poor, hapless, rudderless folks know that I was just as lost. I guess I just hid it better.

But without a direction, without knowing what they wanted, I could not help. But I tried anyway, helping perhaps to define the direction, the needs and wants and winding the charge own the path. But because the direction did not come from the fire in the gut, it usually burned quickly, smoldered and finally died. Most drifted off, afraid somehow to tell me they no longer wanted to be mentored.

For myself, I’ve always wanted a mentor and have attracted a few. But what started out as a mentor relationship slowly evolved into someone older guiding me into a career they wished they had, not what I wanted. We usually parted without a goodbye.

And now blogging has replaced the need to mentor for me. If any of my ramblings are helpful in any way, take them, use them and make them your own. But don’t ask me for more than I am willing to give here; both of us will be disappointed and part strangers.

This mentor round-table challenge was thrown out by Holly Hoffman of WorkLoveLife.com