Series of Tubes

Adventures In TV Buying

Or (referencing their horrible radio spots) "You don't go to B&H; you go through B&H."

Meaghan and I decided to gracefully retire my 19" CRT TV in favor of the latest and greatest, and today was the day to go get it. We are the proud new owners of a 32" Samsung Series 5 (LN32A550, see specs here ), but that's not the main focus. The focus is the store we used to acquire this lovely little gem.

New Yorkers, and in fact most A/V enthusiasts on the East Coast, are familiar with B&H. Originally a camera store, B&H has expanded its footprint to include TV and other home electronics. They often have the best prices, and (at least with cameras) highly knowledgeable staff. They are also possessed of some truly bad advertising, but that's another story. I'd never been to B&H, despite working a block away from it, so today was my first experience.

You know the famous scene in Chaplin's Modern Times, with the machines and the conveyor belts? Lucy's (Lucille Ball) experiences as a pastry factory worker? How about the recent commercials where everybody in a given commerce situation moves in perfect sync, paying with a tap of their credit card? If those three memes had a menage a trois and produced a child from that union, it would look a lot like the inside of B&H. Packed from the entrance to the (thankfully) separate exit, every movement except for consulting with the sales staff is orchestrated. There are queues that lead you to other queues, and New Yorkers aren't famous for their tolerance of line-standing. There are conveyor belts passing items overhead, and elevators bringing larger items up from the basement for handoff to patrons.

It was efficient, it was quick, but I don't think it was even remotely enjoyable. Granted, I was coughing up close to $1,000 for a TV, but that's to be expected, and I don't think that was the source of the unpleasantness. I felt like a cog in a wheel. My impression was that I was there to give money to B&H, with a lovely parting gift when it was over. Maybe if I'd needed more consultation with the salesperson it would have felt different; as it was, I walked in and selected my toy, then got processed out. The all-touchpoints customer experience, shall we say, was lacking.

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Mind you, we're happy with the new set. We calibrated it as well as we could, given that I had an old DVD copy of Avia Guide to Home Theater to work with, poor room lighting, and no way to properly analyze color balance, not had I done any serious HDTV work in close to a decade. The thing that's slowing us down is adjusting for the lag between the TV and the game consoles. (Now you know the real reason we got the new TV.)

Our current passion is Rock Band, a game that requires good timing. It's tough to achieve when there's a delay somewhere amongst the audio, the video, and what the Xbox360 thinks is correct. Just a few milliseconds makes a huge difference, and the calibration tool built in to the game is leaving us flustered. Meaghan just got done playing "Paranoid" (as made famous by Black Sabbath) multiple times, adjusting the lag slightly each time, until she found a setting we could work with.

We tried the Intertubez, and there was no helpful info. Samsung wouldn't have it, either, so we didn't even try them. Plus, it's the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, and nobody's  likely to be answering stupid questions today. We could have asked Microsoft for info, but that would be a similar situation -- compounded by the usual Microsoft consumer support "it's not a problem with our product" answer. The publisher's official site wasn't any more helpful, since its calibration tool is perfect. Yes, I know everybody's got a different TV and other peripherals to account for, but some acknowledgment of the issue beyond some unhelpful forum posts would have made me feel much less incompetent.

OK, I'm done bitching. Now it's time to play. Actually, it's time to eat, and then play. Happy Memorial Day y'all. Try to spare a thought for the dead and wounded of so many wars, whose sacrifices helped shape a world where it's possible for me to bitch about trivial matters. Or, as I put it this morning: "Remember the fallen, because they can't get up." ;-)

Remember me? I used to blog ...

As usual, I'm apologizing for not being more regular about keeping you folks engaged, so this is a thank-you to all 5 of my fans for not giving up on me. Remember that post I did in March about Microsoft Convergence? Well, I came back from that with flu and bronchitis, so I was pretty much out of action for a month, with my typically limited Internet access. After that, it was a matter of playing catchup to real life, so just getting through that ate up any time I might have devoted to writing for myself (again, with limited Internet).

All those problems are now fixed. I'm healthy (at least, as healthy as I'm likely to get until I get up off my butt and do some exercise), I'm mostly caught up to work and whatnot, and I have ditched my comically bad ISP for a new one. I could give you my impressions on everything that's happened in CRM world for the past 2 months, but that would be an unreasonable chunk of my time and yours. So I'm starting fresh, with recent events and thoughts, such as they are.

Sage's annual partner conference was this past week, and I was there along with the rest of the Gang of Four (or Fantastic Four, as Paul seems to prefer). Sage has had its ups and downs in the past couple of years, but it's really starting to get more right than wrong now.

• The Sage 2010 initiative includes a healthy dose of social media /Web 2.0 that doesn't feel bolted on. Check out their vendor-side blogs, for one, and  then know that they're paying attention to the customer-facing part as well.
• The company is slowly unifying its market presence, making sense out of the chaos caused by three CRM product lines (well , two and a  jumped-up contact manager that still does most of what most companies want CRM to do) and Mitra knows how many accounting and ERP lines -- and that's just in the U.S.
• The new CEO, Sue Swenson, seems to really want to reach the customer through the partners, not just reach the partners. This is important enough that it takes precedence over her lack of experience in the industry, being a former telecom big.

Sue was in something of a no-win situation with this conference. As a CEO who's only been there for 6 weeks, she couldn't sit this one out, but she couldn't have anything weighty to add to the discussion yet, either. She scored some points by being up-front about her lack of time on the job, lack of industry expertise, and by mentioning that she'd mostly been touring Sage sites and getting input from workers at all levels about what could be done better. She also lost some (with me, at least) by not venturing beyond those talking points and maybe energizing the crowd a bit. Again, there was no perfect solution and I think she handled it well.

Let me also say that sometimes I come off as overly critical of Sage, at least when Joe Bergera's in the same room with me. Joe is EVP and global GM of Sage CRM solutions, and a good guy. Very knowledgeable, as open as somebody with his title can be, and I can't seem to avoid putting my foot in my mouth when interviewing him. Thanks for indulging my shoe-leather addiction, Joe.

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On a related note, Salesforce.com is apparently buying up all the  Google AdWords that point to ACT!, Sage's contact manager-cum-CRM application. There's nice fat sponsored link to Salesforce.com with the headline "Grow Beyond ACT." Ouch, on one hand. On the other, SFDC shouldn't be going after ACT so much as it should SageCRM.com and/or SalesLogix. ACT users should already know they have other Sage products at hand when they want to migrate upwards in functionality, so it just feels to me like a cheap shot. Of course, this is why I'm not in advertising -- for all I know, this is a brilliant move.

The word from Microsoft Convergence

The good news: I got 30 minutes to interview Steve Ballmer about Microsoft's CRM strategy. The bad news: I can't talk about it here. I promised Kim Stocks (MSFT PR handler and all-around skilled woman) that the discussion would be used for an upcoming feature in CRM magazine, and I'm not the sort to break a promise if I can help it. I will say that I'm grateful for the opportunity, and that it's gratifying to know that the guy who runs things in Redmond is so interested in my little corner of the software world. The same is true regarding Brad Wilson, general manager of Dynamics CRM and a terrific guy to spend an hour with. He is the right man for the job, if knowledge and passion mean anything.

There were a lot of other good reasons to come here, almost all of them two-legged. I was able to renew my connections with a number of great people in the press and analyst community, to finally meet others I'd never shaken hands with before despite numerous calls and emails over the years, and to find some new faces. This goes for the Microsoft people and their Waggener-Edstrom PR buddies too, as well as some MSFT partners. There are good people in this business, and they care about what they're doing while still putting it in the proper perspective (which is that few outsiders know or care about what's happening here).

It's hard to overemphasize the value of personal relationships -- imagine that, coming from a guy who writes about CRM -- but that's a major part of what makes conventions and trade shows worthwhile. Without familiar faces and shared insights, the endless cycle of travel, hotels, briefings, and product demos would be unbearable. I don't even like to look at the booth babes (yes, we still have those), pleasing though they may be to the eye. Granted, there are a lot of men in the IT profession, the sort who only regularly see or touch the type of racks that hold servers. But CRM is not an IT issue; executives in sales, marketing, customer service, and the like come in all shapes, sizes, genders, and orientations. It's a little insulting that the exhibitors at Microsoft Convergence thought they needed such ... exhibitions to get our attention. (Save that stuff for the party after the show floor closes!)

There wasn't a whole lot of breaking news at Convergence, though several partners and their booth babes would say otherwise. (Thanks for the peek at your lovely cleavage, my dear, but I don't "do the CRMs," as you put it.) Even Microsoft's big announcement was an expansion of a partnership that's been in place for 20 years. Granted, the deal with EDS is big, and will probably go a long way toward establishing Microsoft as a serious CRM and business apps player, but it's not the sort of thing you hang a conference on. I guess Redmond and its supporters need to reconnect from time to time as well.

My personal reaction, though, is that while Microsoft is trying very hard to get to a place where one can say, "Those folks are CRM," the company isn't there yet. The software itself probably is -- its innate flexibility and depth of integration, combined with what the ISVs can add, make for a worthy entry on the short list of vendors to consider. But the general opinion among the pen-and-notebook set was that the passion for CRM isn't part of Microsoft culture yet. They're still coming at it as an adjunct to ERP (an idea expressed by Denis Pombriant better than I can, and I'd link you if he'd posted anything yet). The Microsoft user's customer seems like an afterthought, something outside the corporate consciousness that must be managed and handled, studied and recorded, but not let "inside." There's very little sense of connection to the customer, very little social connectivity, very little of that elusive 2.0 stuff.

Having said that, I want to make it clear that I'm not completely knocking Microsoft. The executives seem to get CRM, and the ones who don't quite get it at least want to. The tools are there for MSFT's customers, and the company has the resources to keep innovating. Dynamics is on the cusp of something big, and I genuinely want to see it make the turn.

Whatchamacallit

Permit me to indulge in a potential conflict of interest. I found this post the other day talking about how CRM is dying or dead as a buzzword. On the one hand, it probably hurts me to give the post any more publicity than it's already getting since CRM pays my bills—literally, due to my job at the magazine of the same name. On the other hand, the author (Geoffrey James) makes some valid points that I'd like to discuss, and it would be rude not to give credit where it's due. Hence the conflict.

To begin with, I contest Mr. James' statement that CRM is merely the new name for SFA. The former contains the latter, along with a lot more. I admit that the magazine I work for was born under the name Sales & Field Force Automation, but even then (to the best of my recollection) it included field service as well as sales.

Mr. James also writes "Today, about half the websites selling some kind of sales technology already avoid the 'CRM' moniker. Instead, they sport a variety of terms like 'Sales 2.0' or 'Sales Enhancement Technology' or 'Sales Productivity Improvement Tools.' That's because they''re sales tools, not CRM. If it's not tied into marketing, customer service, and probably some back-office disciplines as well, it's not doing all of CRM's job.

Beyond those two disagreements, though, I have to say that the spirit of the article is spot-on. There's a discussion on the CRM 2.0 Wiki about whether the new technologies and approaches being used merit dropping the term CRM (or CEM—customer experience management) in favor of something newer and possibly more descriptive.

Mr. James writes "Many CRM systems are implemented simply to supply management with data; very few systems actually help sales pros in the day-to-day task of selling. Many sales pros feel as if they’re being asked to be data entry clerks — and give away their contacts, simply to help their managers make fancy reports." This has been and continues to be a huge problem. We have a term for what he describes: failed CRM implementation. Improved reporting is an important part of any CRM project, yes. But if that's the only purpose, the money that went for the software would probably have been better spent on resume paper for all the employees, 'coz the company is in trouble. CRM contains tools to make users more effective at their jobs, and better able to focus on the customer; the more advanced your CRM, the more you are able to support real two-way conversations with them in the manner they prefer. The reporting should be a product of that work, not an added task for salespeople.

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On a related topic, I found this gem by Seth Godin (yeah, him) about the absurdity of motivating your skilled individuals by way of a department called Human Resources. (Thanks to Chris Carfi for reposting the link, or I'd never have seen it. I owe you a call, man.) The first thing I thought of, naturally, was one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons. I'd link to it, but either they've got that site locked down tighter than Joan Rivers' facial skin, or it's not in the archives. You can find it on p. 103 of Casual Day Has Gone Too Far, dated 9/22/1995. I won't describe it—few things are more lame than trying to explain a comic strip—but believe me when I say it's stuck with me all these years for a reason.

Taken together, these two discussions show the good and the bad of changing the name of something you already know. I'd also like to add that, at some level, this is missing the forest for the trees. The name of a thing should describe it accurately, but it's so much more important that it actually does what it's supposed to.

True story (seriously, not the "true story" you say when setting up a joke): One day in 3rd grade, one of my classmates kicked another in the groin. The substitute teacher we had that day didn't see it happen, so I informed her: "Alex just kick Mike in the balls!" Her reaction was to get that flustered, distracted, don't-know-what-to-do look on her face and say, "I really don't think you should say that," while taking a couple of baby steps toward the incident, probably 30 feet away, where the victim (who probably deserved it) was howling and writhing in pain. Precocious little shit that I was, I replied, "Fine. Alex's foot just impacted Michael's testicles. Are you going to do something?" The specific words are secondary to the information conveyed. If you can't cope, sooner or later there's a boot coming for your squishy bits.

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I'll end with another slight conflict of interest. I try to keep my day job as separate from my blog as possible, given that both tend to hit the same topics. However, my co-workers at Speech Technology have just started a blog for that publication, and it's pretty good so far. I'm adding it to the blogroll, and hoping they keep us amused. Lauren, Ryan, Len—I'm watching you.

The power of honesty, and a contest

This is an attempt to rewrite a long and insightful post from a week ago that was eaten by the Internet and my own stupidity. Chances are that it will be shorter and less insightful, but that's because I'm still kicking myself for losing the original post. I'm hoping it will be worth your time and mine. Special thanks this time to the people who maintain Wikipedia, without whom I'd have to do real research.

I spend a fair amount of time talking about the importance of honesty, transparency, and willingness to admit error as keys to maintaining a relationship with customers. The book "Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts" illustrates the mechanisms behind why those good qualities aren't more common in life and in business. The reason is self-justification. In brief, our brains edit our memories whether we want them to or not, in an effort to reduce cognitive dissonance between our self-image and the fact that we screwed up.

Self-justification is like the Dark Side of the Force: once you start down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny. It can be identified and controlled, but it's always something to watch out for. I've done it, you've done it, the person you admire most in the world has done it. It's like that old joke about masturbation -- "We know that 90% of men masturbate, and 60-75% of women do it...and the rest lie about it."

It's possible to get off the slippery slope (of self-justification, not masturbation ... that's a nasty image right there), but it takes courage. Again in brief, a great example of this is the incident involving Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of James Frey's fabricated autobiography "A Million Little Pieces." Yes, I know it's old news. It's still a fine illustration, and the authors of "Mistakes Were Made" use it.

When The Smoking Gun announced it had investigated Frey's story and found it to be crammed with falsehoods, Oprah initially backed Frey with strong statements about the emotional truth of the story and its value. As the truth became clear, Oprah could have done what most people would do, and stuck with her initial statements, justifying them as true as far as she knew when the book was presented to her, and the literal truth of it isn't an issue because it's such a strong story from which we can derive great lessons anyway. It would have ruined her reputation and destroyed her as a brand (yes, Oprah is a brand). Instead, she apologized, honestly and publicly, for her part in misleading the world and perpetuating a lie. It was a ballsy move, and it cemented her place of respect in American culture.

She brought Frey onto her show as part of her own apology, and took him to task for representing fiction as real life; even then, he weaseled around any admission of wrongdoing. Heard much from James Frey lately?

The last U.S. President to truly own up to the responsibility for a mistake was John F. Kennedy, regarding the Bay of Pigs invasion. When he admitted he screwed up, his approval ratings shot through the roof. Since then, we've had everything from "I am not a crook" to "it is best to defeat them there so we don't have to face them here"; from "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" to all the backtalk surrounding Iran-Contra. Is there any wonder why we don't trust government anymore?

Whether it's in business, politics, or personal life, please please PLEASE realize that if you might be wrong, it's better to admit it up front than to be found out, and have it dragged out of you later. Fight the urge to self-justify. Don't give in to the Dark Side.

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Now it's time for a contest. No matter how funny I find "Series of Tubes" to be as a title for a blog, I realize it doesn't really describe my subject matter. I'm opening it up to you, my handful of loyal readers: what should I call this thing, fer realz? The best suggestion (the sole criteria being my capricious nature and my twisted sense of humor) will get the job, as well as an outpouring of gratitude. Please note that I'm also incredibly lazy, so a sufficiently impassioned defense of the current title has as good a shot as something new.

IT Expo: At least the steak was good ...

People have referred jokingly to Florida as God's Waiting Room. I was just there, and I'm not convinced that the office visit we're waiting on is upstairs.

Miami was a humid, foggy swamp for my day's sojourn at IT Expo, but it's not the weather that had me down. It was my hotel room. It wasn't even the hotel room itself; it was the fact it was provided to me by another hotel, one that doesn't care what I think of it.

I had booked a room for one night at the Newport Beachside Hotel and Resort, a lovely little spot with parakeets and very nice ceiling fans in the lobby. Quite lovely, really; I felt as though I was in luxury's palm from the moment I arrived. Of course, it wasn't to last. They told me, upon my arrival, that "unforeseen difficulties" meant I couldn't have the room I booked, or indeed any room at the place whatsoever. The concierge was nice enough to provide a letter of introduction (and $10 car fare) to the Ramada Marco Polo, further down the road. I was already rather far from the Miami Beach Convention Center and the new hotel would be even farther, but I saw no point in arguing. After all, the guy said they had no room, and the Ramada was "very nice, just like this place" in his words.

Note to travelers: "very nice" means in hotel-speak just what it means in dating, dining, or any other human endeavor where you don't know what you're getting ahead of time. It means "I am lying to you; the (person, place, thing) sucks, but once you're gone it's no longer my problem."

The Ramada was to  Miami Beach resort hotels what boy bands are to modern music. While it qualified as such a place—it was in Miami Beach, within a reasonable distance of the ocean, and had rooms to stay in—it felt more like a retirement home. I always thought the elderly who lived in Miami owned homes there, but it seems I've been wrong all these years; they hang out in crappy hotels and play bridge. Yes, there was a bridge tournament being played in the basement when I arrived. The elevators had old-person smell.

(Please note that I have nothing against the elderly, and in fact I managed a few nice conversations while I was confined to this little corner of purgatory. It's just creepy when I go on a business trip and see, in great profusion, what time and gravity have in store for me.)

The hallways smelled less like old people, but only because they smelled more like an old dog that had been left outside in the rain. The room was clean, technically, but it felt old, used, second-hand. Kind of like me, actually. The air conditioner was largely non-functional (in Florida, yet) and thrummed like a farm tractor on idle. There was not enough light. There wasn't even a desk. The wireless Internet barely had enough signal to get me connected—and I couldn't without calling tech support. That was complicated by the fact that my phone couldn't call outside the building until I had it fixed. No room service. A view of the pool. Plumbing fixtures that were only minimally attached.

Now, everybody's had bad hotel experiences, myself included, so this wasn't actually the low point of my life or anything. And I know that not all accommodations are created equal (Ramada Inns being somewhat lower down in the rankings), so I can't say I resented what they provided me per se; if I'd booked the Ramada, I'd have expected less than the best. But I booked the Newport, and they smiled and apologized and sent me to the ass end of hotelry. I will not be angry with Ramada; I will save my ire for the Newport, because their backup option absolutely sucked and I have no way to set things right except by writing them this poison pen blog post.

That said, the food at the Ramada was surprisingly good, though I admit I only had one meal there. The menu was fairly limited, and the restaurant was more like a tremendous Elk Lodge with tables, but I had a perfectly-cooked 12-oz. sirloin strip, juicy, tender, lightly seasoned with cumin (possibly chili powder with an excess of cumin) and very well trimmed. It was better than some I've had at honest-to-goodness steak houses. The vegetable (broccoli, since they'd run out of mixed veg) was steamed perfectly and very tasty. That dinner surprised me so much that I regretted not being able to get my free breakfast the next morning. Alas.

IT Expo, or what I saw of it
My reason for being in Florida was to moderate a panel discussion at the aforementioned conference. I can't say for sure why I was chosen, since my topic—"Leveraging VoIP in the Contact Center"—is not one with which I have a lot of experience. Fortunately, I didn't have to have much beyond my normal level of business technology competence, as my panel was a gifted bunch. We had never laid eyes on one another until 10 minutes before the session (which was at 8 a.m., incidentally, further proof that the coordinators didn't know who they were dealing with), but the discussion went off smoothly. Thanks to panelists Brian Spraetz of NICE Systems, Rachel Wentink of Interactive Intelligence, and especially to Srinivas Mantripragada of RedShift Networks, whose slide deck got things off on the right foot and also ate up a good 15 minutes.

The big question seemed to be data security. While voice conversations have never been truly secure, what with the old-school Phone Phreaks and anybody who can get hold of a technician's butt set, they're even worse now that voice is just another kind of data. In the end, the consensus seemed to be that the war between hackers and security vendors will remain more or less at parity, and the most important places to tighten up gaps are in business processes and social exploits. Most security breaches are inside jobs, or are perpetrated by people who know how to take advantage of another person's natural inclination to be helpful.

I think I'm done venting for the moment, and I thank you for humoring me. My next post will probably back to the usual CRM goodness; I'm trying to work out a message on that topic that fits my outlook and isn't just repeating what other, smarter people have said before me, and you fine folks will be the first witnesses. My previous post was the start of that; now that this gripe-fest is out of the way, perhaps I can get back on track.

Consumer Apathy

I hope you haven't come here to gain insight into the problem of shopper malaise now that we've passed Black Friday. I can't do that, because early reports indicate that spending and absolute shopper volume are both up from last year. Things are looking positively rosy in the Land of the Midnight Capitalist.

No, the apathetic consumer is me.

I'd love to be buying stuff for myself, for my sweetie, for friends and family, whatever. I even have a wish list somewhere that I haven't updated (and no, I won't be linking it here). It's just that I don't want to think about making purchase decisions. I'm in a consumer funk that has no relation to religion, culture, finances, or other factors. As Johnny Rotten once sang, "I can't even be bovvered." I wonder:

• how many others there are in this condition;
• how it's going to impact the shopping turnout during the thrice-damned Holiday Season;
• how businesses will try to counter such apathy; and
• whether countering it is even possible.

The last bullet is the tricky one. Part of my apathy is actually antipathy—I don't want to see any more advertising, and any attempt to break through my disgust with the culture of conspicuous consumption is likely to push me further away. A reasonably wise man whom I recently interviewed said, "If you try to change customer behavior so that they come to you and remain loyal, you'll lose." Or something like that; like I said, there's apathy afoot.

There's definitely stuff I want to buy. Unreal Tournament III just came out for PC, and it's going to be mine someday. I like to play first-person shooters that have bots because I suck at shooters, and UT3 has some very good ones. I keep toying with the idea of picking up the much-hyped Nintendo Wii for Meaghan and myself. There are several metric tons of roleplaying-game manuals I'd like to have, even though my dice are currently gathering dust in the bottom of my closet.

We're glutted for choice. Having a few more tchotchkes won't make my life better, so why should I get them? The economy is finally catching up to my long-held belief that we've been living outside our means and it's gonna bite us in the ass. Even though acquiring crap has a momentary pleasure associated with it, in the long run it doesn't add happiness. There isn't a marketing campaign in the world that can break through that.

Plus, the one thing I really want to buy, the 3rd season of Battlestar Galactica DVDs, still hasn't been released and I'm going crazy not being able to discuss the events with Meaghan, who hasn't seen any of the episodes yet. Add to that the writers' strike putting production on hold for the 4th (and final) season, and you could say I'm right pissed. What's the point of life if I can't escape it with good science fiction?

On a side note, I'm making public my wishes for a speedy recovery for Paul Greenberg's mom, who is hospitalized with a painful but not necessarily dangerous medical condition. She's in her 9th decade though, so any hospitalization is big. Join me in sending good vibes.

A quickie about GameStop

I hadn't planned to post twice today, but I ran across this gem while reading Penny Arcade and just had to share it. "28 Confessions of a GameStop Shift Supervisor" will probably get its author fired if he/she is ever identified, but will hopefully either kill Electronics Boutique/GameStop dead or cause them to restructure their idiotic policies. Mad props to Gabe and Tycho (I can't believe I just wrote "mad props") for everything they do, even in when it's just pointing me toward some good reading.

Anybody who wants to see how frustrating it is to work for a company that just doesn't get that the customer is king should read this. This response sums it up perfectly: EB/GameStop think the customer should do business on the company's terms, not the other way around.

I used to love Electronics Boutique. When the company acquired GameStop (or was it the other way around?) I figured it meant that the mainstreaming of gaming was going to make my recreational pursuits easier to manage. I don't hate what they've become, certainly not like so many seem to, but I tend to feel a little dirty after shopping there. The policies that prompted the 28 Confessions are a big part of why.

Spam and Eggs

Originally, I was thinking of summing up my recent trip to Chicago for the Sage Summit (referenced in my last post). I'm not going to do that, except to say that Sage, like the Yankees, is in for a "rebuilding year," and they're being very open about the need to fix what's not working and to continue to have real conversations with partners and customers. Kudos for that—I'm a sucker for honesty. Also, there weren't a whole lot of announcements, so I have no material.

One other thing: Chris Gardner (the guy who wrote The Pursuit of Happyness, and was Sunday's guest address) is a highly engaging speaker, seems like a great guy with lots of wry humor, and had it even harder than it looked in the Will Smith movie. For starters, his son wasn't Jaden Smith's age at the time, but a toddler. Holy shit. There's more, but you should read the book instead of my blog. Wait. You should read the book after you read my blog.

What caught me as the kernel for today's topic was an email from Jason Brown, a business development executive from a company called Optinlists. I'll quote:

Hi Marshall !

I understand that you are the person responsible for prospecting initiatives and lead generation’s program? Optinlists provides online marketing solutions, which can aid you and your customers in their marketing initiatives. To discuss Mailing List Subscription service for the year 2007 -which can get you targeted mailing lists every quarter or every month.

I had a chance to look your website and I thought there might be a need for us to have a quick chat regarding your marketing initiatives and lead generation processes.

...

Please test our email append service by sending 100 sample records with contact name, company name, mailing address and telephone number. We will append missing email and or any other missing data at no cost. Test results will be sent within 48 hours with a match rate analysis report.

OK, it's clear that Jason (if there is such a person) has no idea who I am, is lying about having ever seen my Web site—actually, my employer's site, as this was sent to my destinationCRM address—and is tempting me with a baldfaced request to give him more poorly-qualified leads so he can do this to 100 more people. And these jokers want to have a chat with *me* about *my* lead generation and marketing?

Spam exists. Spam will always exist. But I'm feeling peevish. One of my new missions in life is to serve as an agent of corporate Darwinism. By sending crap like this to a business and social media journo, Jason and his company have demonstrated their unfitness to survive in business. So I will collect and publicize any such things that come my way in the hopes that I can hasten the corporate deaths of the senders.

Also, Time Warner Cable's RoadRunner service sucks. Its unreliability has made it nearly impossible to work from home, and I'm paying a lot of money for an Internet connection that doesn't work. I'll be looking to resolve this dispute, but I've got to say it really grinds my gears how Verizon and TWC slam each other in their ad campaigns when neither of them can get the job done. I'm tempted to go with dialup at this point.

Is Dialogue Overrated?

Sorry for the brief absence -- even young and enthusiastic bloggers need downtime for things that happen in the physical world. In short, I was busy.

Anyhow, one of the buzz words in CRM 2.0 is "dialogue," the concept of two-way conversation between customers and the companies that serve them, leading to stronger relationships and all the benefits that entails. I get it, I encourage it, but personally I'm not sure how comfortable I am with it.

Let me explain. When I think of customer relationships, my default mental picture is of the customer (me) interacting with local businesses. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a snob. I don't mind knowing their names, or making small talk, but I really don't want them knowing my business while I'm patronizing theirs. I get uncomfortable, feeling like I owe actual friendship to somebody I only deal with because they're selling something I need. Sometimes, that feeling drives me away.

It's fine for a hotel to know who I am when I make a return visit, or for an e-commerce site to make recommendations based on my activities. But depending on the nature of the interaction, anything more can feel a little creepy -- like a hooker asking about your family. (No, I don't actually know what that's like. Cut me some slack on the descriptive text, huh?)

On the other hand, some of the best business interactions occur when the vendor and the customer make a real connection -- common interests, similar experiences, a real simpatico moment. It can happen at the grocery store, at the electronics megamart, in a nail salon, or over a boardroom table when negotiating a contract. There's value to be had by relating to the customer (and for the customer by relating to the vendor).

The point here is that businesses should definitely attempt to have dialogue with their customers, but they should not force the issue -- and be prepared to back off when the customer is done engaging them. Not every customer is a snobbish prick like I am, but some are, and you need our business too.