Blog Bites Man

I’m finding it painfully difficult to write an interesting blog about the Web 2.0 Expo that took place last week in SF. That’s because the show — at least from my vantage point on the expo floor — was painfully plain. Where were the coolest, latest, greatest Web 2.0 technologies? The Twitters, Facebooks, YouTubes? While I’m sure they were being used on people’s laptops and iPhones, they were otherwise invisible on the expo floor. Vassil Mladjov gets it right” “There was not clear innovation that I can see at the show, nothing to get me exiting.  There were a few clever tools in terms of clean UI and well execute ideas, but nothing of a WOW.“

Instead, the floor was dominated by B2B apps and infrastructure companies like F5 and Juniper networks, ie, companies that can make your Web 2.0 apps run faster. That’s not to say that there weren’t interesting and cool companies there like Atlassian (the company I work for ), Gomez, Sprout, and Automaticc, but they weren’t the ones that dominated the show floor.

To look at it another way… the companies that were exhibiting there were the ones that actually made money and a few VC backed startups. Of the ones I mentioned above:

Gomez is a great company that I had had experience with during the dot com era. They monitor website and network performance. I learned, too, that one of their developers, Patrick Lightbody, was an early contributor to Atlassian’s products.

Sprout had a very interesting Flash authoring tool that I could see us using some day for creating microsites.

Automaticc… needless to say, I’m a big fan of WordPress.

There were three themes that were reiterated again and again at the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference in SF today:

1. Open, transparent, and honest conversations are important
2. Empowering community is the best way to scale
3. Make a real big effort to help your customers; even if you don’t always succeed, people appreciate that you’re trying.

Keynote about culture

Probably the most riveting presentation was the keynote delivered by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. Tony kept reiterating the idea of creating a great culture of service. Zappos is not a company with a mission to sell merchandise, it’s a company built to offer great service. They just happen to sell shoes.

Now, that may appear obvious to people reading this. Of course you focus on providing great service. But that’s not what most companies do. Most companies focus on making the sale. Service is frequently usually an afterthought.

Most companies focus on new customers and lead generation, but here’s a case where service is the lead gen device. Good service means repeat customers and word of mouth. Zappos tries to get more repeat customers, not necessarily new customers. That’s a different lead gen strategy! In a commoditized world like shoes, service is the differentiator. Their sales and growth to-date would seem to support that focusing on service was a good choice.

How do you foster a culture of great customer service?

Creating the right culture is what keeps Tony up at night. Not sales, not merchandising, not operations… culture.

To address culture, everyone in the company — whether you’re in sales, service, or merchandising — everyone, gets 5-weeks of training. It includes immersion in the culture, core values, customer service, warehouse, and more.

What are those core values? He listed the company’s 10 core values. I jotted down about half of them, the ones that struck me as particularly innovative:

#1. Deliver “wow” through service
The word “wow” was borrowed from the things their customers tell them. Customers repeatedly begin their emails with the word. They’re amazed at how Zappos lives their promise of fast and no-questions-asked customer service. Zappos took this idea and built it into their core values.

Waitaminute. Zappos took what customers were saying and put it into their core values. That’s a powerful way to reinforce a cool thing and it makes a statement to employees how powerful their customers are. Wow.

#3. Create fun and a little weirdness
Being different makes them more memorable, a fun place to work. Maybe most importantly, it makes it easier to recruit the “right” people. More of the right people helps ensure the culture will thrive.

#6. Build open and honest relationships with communities
Honesty, transparency, openness was a theme throughout the day.

#10. Be humble
He’s the CEO? That’s exactly what I thought when Tony first took the stage. He was unassuming and a little bashful. Then he revealed this 10th core value and it made a lot of sense. He was so un-CEO-like (ie, humble) that I could see the company walked the talk, from the CEO on down.

Putting your money where your mouth is

The last thing I’ll mention about Zappos:

Most call centers train their employees to hang up the phone as fast as possible; answer the question, then hang up. Not so at Zappos. Zappos’ call-center reps are not measured on call time.

They don’t often like hiring people with call center experience, because it means they have to retrain them. They’d rather hire people that believe in providing excellent customer service. Because no one is measured on call time, Zappos is perfectly content to let a call center rep stay on the phone with the customer for over an hour… even if a sale doesn’t result from the call.

That’s smart.

Just got home after Part I of the Conversational Marketing summit, will be there all day tomorrow. Scott Cook, founder of Intuit spoke, er, conversed, with John Battelle on Intuit’s market-winning popularity. And kudos to Battelle for acknowledging the date of the event — a date we should not forget — and the difficulty that some attendees may have had in traveling to the conference. Interesting tidbits:

• Cook’s bad advice to Jeff Bezos: don’t include user reviews of products and books… who would be interested in reading those? As Scott said, it was a good thing Bezos didn’t take the advice
• The three most important tasks a company should undertake:
  • Deliver a delightful customer experience
  • If you accomplish that, drive people to the web to convey their experience
  • If you do that too, then it’s possible to create other rich experiences for customers, such as Intuit’s (free) Tax Almanac.

Ask a Ninja closed out Day 1. That was when attendees got to ask THE ninja. Frightening stuff. I hadn’t watched Ask a Ninja in a while, but after seeing their presentation (my God, the carnage, the blood, the blood!), I went to their site to watch a few episodes. What a great success story of two guys going for it and making it.

The “experiment” is on. They’re giving away free iPhones to attendees of Office 2.0 Conference. But does anybody care?

At last year’s Office 2.0 Conference, they gave out iPod Nanos to every attendee. What made it cool was that it was unexpected. It was a complete surprise. As people walked into the conference, they received a conference packet that included the iPods. Each iPod had been pre-programmed with the conference schedule, list of speakers, and sponsors’ literature. That was a great example of taking a risk, thinking differently, and creating buzz.

What I appreciated about the iPod giveaway, too, was that it was not a gimmick to get people to attend the conference. Instead, the pre-marketing for the event was entirely focused on the content and quality of the topic. I believe over 300 people had attended and they pulled a profit; not bad.

Shouldn’t the focus be on the product and customers first, with marketing being a distant second or third? If you build a great conference, customers will gladly pay to attend and then spread the word afterwards. And they’re more likely to pony up again next year, too.

So I wonder if the strategy at the 2007 Office 2.0 Conference — pre-announcing the iPhone and building all the marketing around it — is backwards? Are they spending too much time marketing iPhones to really focus on the product—the speakers, panels, topics, food, networking, and all the other detail that goes into building a successful event?

I had met Ismael at last year’s event. He’s passionate about the topic and technology, and he’s an exceptionally nice and courteous person. He also refers on his blog to the iPhone giveaway as an “experiment.” I hope to see the published results