When unicorns fight bears, we all win: Book(s) on Business of Awesome/Unawesome reviewed

Businesses and organizations have opportunities to be awesome and spread awesome in person and on the Internet every day. Businesses and organizations also have opportunities to be unawesome and spread unawesome in person and on the Internet every day. Fortunately, author/blogger/speaker Scott Stratten (aka Unmarketing) has these phenomena more than covered with his must-read two-headed book, The Business of Awesome/The Business of UnAwesome.

It’s two books in one, unflinchingly honest and unstoppably funny, but it makes one unifying point: How much you care about your customers says far more about your brand than anything else. We’ve all had good customer service and bad customer service, and these experiences linger with us long after we remember our purchase, our meal or our stay.

The Business of UnAwesome side chronicles the many awful things companies do in customer service, marketing and social media. The misguided case of the unfortunately named Boners BBQ, which assailed a customer via social media for her even-handed review (and incorrectly claimed she didn’t leave a tip). Using social media to blast information but never respond to questions. Unbelievably awful marketing gimmicks. Lavishing gifts on new customers while ignoring your loyal customers. Poor use of QR codes. So many truly terrible things somehow conveyed with great entertainment.

If that side says beware the trolls, the Business of Awesome side asks you to embrace the unicorns. Stratten repeats the beautiful story he told at #pseweb about how one man’s heartfelt apology saved his whole view of Hilton Hotels. Even awesome people and businesses make mistakes, but he shows how they make things right. Stratten lovingly details customer service that brings a smile instead of a frown, social brands that make loving them fun, small gestures that make huge impressions, companies that don’t take themselves too seriously but are very serious about pleasing their customers.

A unicorn boxing a bear, or why Chad Frierson from Austin’s Pizza is awesome.

He saves perhaps the greatest example for last: John, a customer who placed an online pizza order and added a small, silly request in the comment field, “Please draw a unicorn fighting a bear on the box.” Chad Frierson from Austin Pizza’s Call Center took the order and knew it wasn’t something the stores were equipped to do. So he drew a picture of a unicorn boxing a bear on a Post-It and sent along with a nice explanatory note ending with “I hope this suits your needs.”

“Needless to say this is the greatest thing of all time,” Stratten worte. “John uploaded the picture to display its awesomeness, which then went viral and was seen by millions of people. This story reigns supreme over all others, not just because it includes a unicorn, although that certainly helps. This was done by somebody in a frontline position with seemingly little autonomy, at no cost to the company, in an industry not known for being mind-blowing. It was done with immediacy and personality, without focus groups or a meeting beforehand. … He simply decided that unawesome is unacceptable, saw the window and acted on the awesome …”

If you’ve enjoyed perusing Stratten’s @unmarketing Twitter feed, checking out his blog or seeing him speak live, you’ll love this book. If you haven’t, yet you work in social media management and/or customer service, you really should catch up on his awesome work.

What higher ed can learn from an underdog wrestling promotion.

You may be rolling your eyes already. You’ve been subjected to hundreds of “what higher ed can learn from ________” posts by now, and here’s another asking what you can learn from a so-called “fake sport” usually playing out in front of a few hundred fans.

Turns out, we can learn quite a bit from anything … including organizations like 2CW wrestling, which touched down in Oswego last week.

That’s pro wrestling veteran Spike Deadly about to hit an opponent with a chair … in the crowd, a few feet from us.

Look, if you work in higher education, there’s a greater than 99 percent chance you don’t work at Harvard or Yale. Odds are you feel underfunded, understaffed and underappreciated. So you can pout about it or you can do what the wrestlers of 2CW do, which is go out and give 100 percent and always think about their audience.

To use a very strange simile, WWE is the Harvard of sports entertainment … the most prominent and known brand in its field. They are flush with success by many metrics, yet follow the #wwe tag during any major pay-per-view or read posts in a group like Anti-Cena Army and you’ll find many disappointed and disillusioned fans fed up with shows that are more talk than action, lazy performances by some superstars and the organization’s reluctance to push newer talent while propping up the same, usual celebrity wrestlers.

2CW knows they won’t topple WWE, but they know their scrappy performers can put on a better show. And that everyone in their organization can share the goal of being fan-friendly.

I attended because my graduate assistant for video, Kevin “The Man” Graham, is in a long-standing 2CW tag team with a gent named Punisher Van Slyke. While the event seemed potentially interesting going in, the level of skill, punishment the wrestlers took and the overall passion far exceeded what I imagined. For what some would term a “fake sport,” the wrestlers take a lot of bumps — we saw people thrown into barricades, body-slammed onto very thin mats atop a gym floor and fly through the air in death-defying maneuvers. One wrestler suffered what looked like a legit knee injury, wrestling through it before getting ring assistance that appeared quite real and concerned.

Unlike often-uninspired WWE blowout bouts meant to pump up a star, every 2CW match was evenly contested, full of two-counts and constant swings back and forth. When fans talk about “telling a story in the ring,” these entertainers had it down. Fans are encouraged to take and post videos of live shows. 2CW often will host a former superstar like Spike Dudley (in Oswego), Matt Hardy, Hacksaw Jim Duggan or John Morrison as a headliner to get extra notice. But most of its stable are hard-working independent wrestlers or people with day jobs … or, in Kevin’s case, completing his master’s in HCI in Oswego.

Wrestler Spike Dudley grabbed my friend Jason’s Coke can, smashed into an opponent’s head and signed it later. “The best $1.50 I ever spent,” Jason quipped.

And the crowd was really part of the show. During a falls-count anywhere bout, I found Dudley getting his face twisted by ”Juggernaut” Jason Axe right in front of me in the middle of the crowd. Dudley later hit him with a chair a couple feet to my right, then borrowed my friend Jason’s can of Coke to smash it on Axe’s forehead (Dudley signed it later). Face wrestlers (good guys) regularly high-fived and shook hands with the crowd going to or from the ring, while heels (bad guys) routinely argued with or exchanged insults with delighted fans. After their match, wrestlers went to the merch table to chat with fans and autograph anything. I don’t think The Rock does that at WWE live events.

In whatever we do in higher ed or business, do we offer that level of fan-friendliness? If not, why not? Some of these wrestlers traverse the highways and byways of America, town to town, hoping for their big break somewhere else, and may never see Oswego again … so why shouldn’t we prioritize pleasing students, faculty, staff, clients or customers who we want to come back happy again and again? We should think about giving our all the way these grapplers did … but how many people watch the clock and avoid doing anything meaningful on the job from time to time because they don’t feel like it? Everyone we serve deserves our best, any day and every day.

As for Kevin, it was a very good night. He and Punisher wound up with an unexpected shot at the 2CW tag-team titles. After a long, hard-fought match, Kevin hit a top-rope maneuver and scored the three count as the duo recaptured the gold! Since they weren’t billed as wrestling for the title in pre-promo materials, perhaps it was a hometown favor, showing the local boy made good. Whatever the motivation, the crowd loved it and the title change made the night more memorable for everyone in attendance … including Kevin’s mother! When you talk about making memories and pleasing people, hard to imagine doing it much better.

Kevin “The Man” Graham (known in some circles as my grad assistant) celebrates winning the 2CW tag team titles with a very special audience member … his mother. Just one more thing to make the night memorable.

vacuum company uses QR code. and it kind of sucks.

Amy and I were out shopping for vacuum cleaners on Friday night (such romantics we are) and came across what looked like a promising model. The box didn’t have a lot of info, but it did have a QR (quick response) code. So we scanned it.

How did the vacuum QR code work? From a customer-focused standpoint, it kind of sucked.

Instead of getting some kind of customized experience, the code sent us to the company’s … home page. Which had a bunch of unrelated information and, after scrolling, found a panel with a link to info on vacuums. I clicked on that, and came upon a list of products that I had to sift through. At Amy’s prompting, I finally ended the UX experiment and typed the model number into the search box and retrieved the information.

Here, once again, was a company that embraced the shiny technology of QR codes only to deliver a poor customer experience. Small wonder it’s so hard to find evidence of anyone scanning a QR code in the wild, let alone finding the technology useful.

I’ve said it before, and will say it again: If you must use a QR code, do it to meet a goal or provide a solution, not to be trendy. Many people are already sick of anything related to QR codes because marketers find so many dumb and impractical ways to use them. We ended up buying another model, and I’m not sure having a dedicated website would have sold us, but just taking a few minutes to produce a QR code that went straight to the product page would have spoken volumes about their understanding of technology and their customers.

Ultimately, think about what would help your customers and whether a QR code is a practical way to deliver it. It’s really that simple.

social media may be sexy, but email is still important.

As a profession, we seem to spend so much time concentrating on monitoring and responding via social media that we forget for much of our audience — especially our institution’s alumni — email is still a medium of choice. And that sometimes the informative, upbeat response with a smile can mean a lot.

Consider the following email from an alum, sparked by our Sesquicentennial history activities, that seems to come with a side of snark:

Industrial arts has long been one of our signature programs, but the alum did not know it is now known as technology education. So his very real concern about a program near and dear to his heart deserves an answer in a positive tone. Thus:

Succinct, smiling and with a link for more information. How did the alum like the response? Very well!

From worrying about the direction of his alma mater back to a proud alum just like that. Not the hardest thing I had to do that day, but still pretty important — because every person who has a valued connection with our institution is important.

I also want to address this topic because I’ve seen companies and colleges that throw a lot of their resources into social media but do a poor job of responding to email — which may not be as “sexy” as Facebook or Twitter but is still a very vital medium. Whether it’s not acknowledging an email at all, not replying in a timely manner, giving an insufficient answer or firing back something terse as if our email is a bother, many entities have room for improvement in the email department. And that’s too bad, because there are no character limits and an opportunity to craft something thoughtful.

is higher ed still a mouse-in-the-maze model?

I remember my first college orientation, where a comedian compared the now-antiquated model of registration (where we went from table to table to get classes) to a bunch of mice in a maze. Except now the cheese was old and stinky and everyone just wanted to get out of the maze. Oddly, that comment, coupled with a recent observation by Michael Fienen, rang very true on higher ed’s continuing challenge to do a better job in serving students.

Fienen’s observation, on a particularly ornery day for the knowledgeable Pittsburg State web guy, wondered why the term “request more information” appears so often on web pages. Does this infer we’re hiding information from visitors and there’s some veil we have to let them behind? Not necessarily. Generally, “request more information” means “join our database” by requesting some kind of print material. From the inside, this all has to do with justification of return on investment (the dreaded ROI) for everything from personnel to software packages, the ability to establish benchmarks and determine the inquiry-admissions-yield funnel.

And if you read that last sentence without falling asleep, you may have wondered: What is the least bit customer-friendly about treating students as bits of data to justify our existence? If so, you’re 100 percent right.

One advantage of social media — that it’s a third space where students can learn more about, and build an affinity with, institutions — could make old-school bean-counters bristle. Thus all the sabre-rattling about Establishing ROI of Social Media to Justify Its Existence. “How many Facebook questions did you answer last month?” “How many people follow us on Twitter?” “Do we know how many viewers of our YouTube videos were prospective students?”

This all ignores one very simple, very human thing: Social media customer service helps students with questions, information-gathering and decision-making in a way they find convenient. But it doesn’t create numbers of inquiries to the Admissions Office via email. It doesn’t fall into the neat funnel that says this student asked for a viewbook, called the college, applied, attended an open house and enrolled. And from the moment they requested more information for the first time, how many different forms did they have to fill out, approvals were required and parts of the bureaucratic maze did they have to run through for the “privilege” of attending the school?

Quite simply: This week, we had an interaction via social media that may keep a serious, motivated student from withdrawing from school. Some folks’ first reaction may be to wonder where to chart that datapoint or how to include this in the ROI of our social media plan. My main thought is that we may have helped improve someone’s life.

Don’t get me wrong: I know most people in higher education have the best intentions. But I worry that when we build a forest out of data, ROI and “best practices,” we forget how beautiful the trees are. And that, without each tree that really does require some kind of care, there is no forest.

fans pages: hands-off? hands-on?

A funny thing happened to the SUNY Oswego Fans page while I was out of town this weekend.

A few questions came in from students entering this fall, not unusual in itself. But all of those questions were answered by other fans — quickly and correctly.

I did answer the question I saw on Saturday morning, but I was pleasantly surprised when — after driving, attending a wedding, sleeping and driving some more — I arrived home Sunday afternoon to find all the new questions handled. A similar thing happened when I was on my first actual vacation in years earlier this summer and most page questions were answered by others.

When members of a community become involved in problem-solving, this is good on many levels. It shows they care enough about their community — virtual or physical — to take care of it. It means that conversations are more organic than if the institution (or other moderator) always jumps in. And it also means that genuine connections are forming between those who asked the questions and those who answered them. (Interesting that it was three people, not just one do-gooder, who responded to the questions. NOTE: It looks like one of the answers disappeared. Am I the only one noticing comments disappearing on Facebook lately?)

Thus I’m kind of torn. I prefer good customer service, which means checking the Fans page frequently to provide answers. An unanswered question, to me, looks as out of place as an undone zipper. Yet I know that if fans answer the questions instead of me, presuming those answers are accurate, it’s better for the sense of the community.

It’s a teaser. What do you think?

jetting into the blue.

I enjoy stumbling upon great brands, so I quite pleased to almost literally fall into the seat of JetBlue when flying to and from Seattle on vacation. I’d known it for its good prices, but never flown it … and I was particularly impressed with the brand’s emphasis on user experience.

The brand’s tagline of Happy Jetting! won’t win any awards for cleverness, and their advertising makes the point that you aren’t flying with them, you’re Jetting. Beyond playing on their name, the point of their branding is differentiating from the average flying experience. And in that they do succeed.

Like with 36 DirectTV channels, which allowed me to watch U.S. Open golf and the U.S. soccer team’s tough 3-2 loss to Brazil in the ConFed cup (the number of whoops and fists in the air when the U.S. scored its second goal showed how many on the flight were watching). Or 100 Sirius XM stations — the grunge-era rock of Lithium when I wanted to stay awake, and the mellow electronica of Chill when I wanted to relax. The headphone jack works with any iPod or similar earbuds, though if you don’t have headphones, they’ll sell you one for the high price of … $1. An airline not taking advantage of a captive audience! Inconceivable!

JetBlue doesn’t serve major meals, just snacks such as chips and cookies. Though not only are they good chips and cookies, but after meal service you can just walk back to the flight attendant ask for more. As many times as you like. Again, differentiation from the normal experience of getting a small meal and that’s it for the flight. Generous legroom and plush seats plus ample restrooms (three) also help with the comfort factor.

The attendants handled issues pretty well. One row had TV screens that didn’t work, just flickered annoyingly, but those passengers were given the opportunity to move (on a nearly full flight) if they wanted. Overall, there seemed to be a why not? attitude instead of the usual why? when they received a request. That’s a great customer-service ethos. And a day after the trip out to Seattle, an email asking for my feedback and opinions on the flight appeared in my inbox.

I’m not exactly sure how JetBlue, like fellow price-hawks Southwest, manages to deliver both low fares and a great user experience. But needless to say I’d happily fly with them again. Er, correction, I’d happily Jet with them again.

drake walks the walk, gets A+

Come college commencement season, you see a lot of status games: Who’s speaking? Who’s streaming it on the Web? Who’s live-tweeting it? But frankly, Drake University has us all beat, and it has nothing to do with VIP speakers or use of fancy technology.

Drake’s graduation day started with a nightmare scenario as Glenn Koenen, whose daughter Cassaundra was set to receive her sheepskin, suffered a heart attack while waiting for the ceremony. According to the Des Moines Register, an ER nurse attending to see her niece graduate, a doctor and two Drake staffers sprang into action and restarted Glenn’s heart with a defibrillator. And while that kind of life-saving heroism is commendable, what happened next is perhaps even more remarkable.

As Cassaundra sat beside his hospital bed, Glenn rued that he’d ruined her graduation day. A nurse contacted the college to see what they could do. What they did exceeded anyone’s expectations: Drake’s college president and other administrators came straight to the hospital room to present Cassaundra with her diploma in front of her dad.

Think about that: A college that cares enough that its president goes to the hospital on graduation day to present a diploma! If you are a student considering Drake, have a child attending the college or are an alum, you’ve got to feel really good about what this says about the institution.

As we all look at and discuss what social-media tools and other gadgets we use to promote our institutions, we can never forget the most important lesson: People matter. What any college does for one of its students in his or her hour of need is its greatest test. By that measure, Drake University scores an A+ and provides a lesson for us all.

bringing wow! back.

I was having a Viraligious© experience, reading a blog entry about Amazon exceeding customer expectations, when I thought of Tom Peters’ book The Pursuit of Wow!: Every Person’s Guide to Tupsy-Turvy Times, and why we’ve come expect poor service today. We endure long lines and disinterested big-box retail employees for perceived low prices. We become accustomed to long waits and indifferent operators in outsourced helplines. We anticipate our interactions to underscore our low view of customer service.

Why? We may as well champion mediocrity if we aren’t trying to achieve, or even inspire, excellence. If service is as poor as we perceive, shouldn’t we be all the more determined to provide exceptional service? Making customers happy represents a point of differentiation, a value-added that colors experiences in an all-too-grey time.

What about the world of higher education? When I do something nice for a student, they are sometimes shocked. Why? Are expectation-exceeding experiences really that rare for college students? Don’t we have the power to change that perception, to create Wow! on a regular basis?

Consider a prospective student who applies to several colleges, including yours. What if, in return for her considering your institution, you provide some kind of Wow! experience? Representatives of student clubs contacting her with the benefits of getting involved? A current student offering to be there, any time, to answer her questions? Some kind of premium, discount or opportunity (where legal) if she commits to your college by a certain date? If you exceed the expectations of prospective students, while other institutions treat them like American Gladiators contestants, what would that do to your conversion rate? Wouldn’t you love to have young brand evangelists before they’ve even enrolled in classes? There’s no better advertisement, after all, than a satisfied customer.

Is Wow! dead as a concept? Absolutely not. Whether you supported him or not, no campaign inspired more Wow! than Barack Obama. Gizmos like Apple’s iPhone and the Blackberry Storm provide sufficient Wow! that people want to pre-order the pricey products. Any Web surfer can stumble across a site, video or blog that injects a moment of Wow! into their day. Inspiring Wow! doesn’t have to be difficult nor expensive nor time-consuming … it just means thinking about what makes people happy.

So what have you done to make someone say Wow! lately?