Andy Boyer

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Category: Business (Page 19 of 24)

How Many Customer Service Opportunities Are Airlines Missing?

January 15, 2008 /

When you think of industries with technological tools at their disposal, but that go unused in the realms of customer service and consumer experience, the airline industry really does stand apart.

Think about this. These guys all know the exact number of people who will be getting on their planes. They know where everyone is sitting, and exactly what time the plane will sneak away from the gate and into a line ready for takeoff. Yet somehow, none of that knowledge makes it to the marketing or customer relations people.

Here are 3 things that I think would improve my personal flying experience.

1) Real Time Updates of Security Lines.

Every airline knows how many people are leaving on each plane, and they know which gate each plane is leaving from. Therefore, they know that within a 2 hour period, exactly how many people will need to go through a security checkpoint. They can also look back at past data and see how many people went through that checkpoint a day ago, a week ago, a month ago and a year ago. And they know how many people will be working. Based on this, they should have no problem giving you an estimate of how long it should take to get through security. They should be able to show averages over periods of time, as long as a fairly real time estimate of how the day is going in comparison to other days. This will give me a much better idea of what time I really need to be there.

2) Let Me Choose My Seat Based on Who’s on the Plane.

I’m sure this will get the privacy advocates in an uproar, but I’d love it if I could build a little public profile of myself inside the airline’s account system, or even just let it access my Facebook account. Then when I choose my seat, and I see all the seats available, I know not to choose the one next to the mom with the 2 little kids. Not only that, you can give the kids their own section, in the very back and behind a curtain.

On a different track, another 6 foot guy would know not to choose the seat next to me because we’ll inadvertently be playing footsie all flight long. Plus, if you got really imaginative, you could put in your profile if you are a chatter or a sleeper, so those who like to yak all flight long can be placed on the wing or in the baggage cargo area. If it’s all voluntary and optional, and the technology is there anyway, why not use it? Think about it – if there are 2 seats left to choose from, and one is between two 120 pound women from Thailand, and one is between two 320 pound brothers from Green Bay, I think I should get to make a wise decision on which one I sit in.

3) SMS Updates

I don’t see any reason that I can’t subscribe to SMS updates. Often, a bar or restaurant is far from my gate. Let’s say I’m a considerate flyer, and get there 90 minutes early thinking there’s going to be a security line. But, since there was no line, I slide right through and now have 85 minutes to kill. Well, when they decide the plane is going to leave 30 minutes later, I want to know via SMS while I’m sitting in the restaurant, not after I’ve given up one of 2 power outlets in the whole airport to shlep down to the gate.

I’m sure there are 100 ideas so I’m looking forward to hearing some of yours.

Is Google AdSense Too Scary For Me?

January 4, 2008 /

So, I want to be clear that I’m not bashing Google with this question I’m about to pose.  I’m trying to gauge if my reaction borders on paranoia, or if it’s justified.

Here’s the situation.  On Wednesday I was on GoogleChat with a friend who talked about watching the movie "The Big Lebowski" with friends that night.  The next day, Thursday, just about exactly 24 hours later, ads for Big Lebowski T-Shirts showed up in my Google Mail.

To be clear, I am not anti AdSense.  I think it’s great.  Contextual advertising is an amazing advancement.  And I am also not naive.  I know that IM’s do not dissolve into the vapor. I understand that anything I ever put in an IM (or SMS for that matter) is archived forever on someone’s server, poised and ready to ruin any chance I ever had at getting elected to public office.    

But here is my issue, and again, I am asking you if I am over-reacting.  If the ad for Big Lebowski T-Shirts had showed up while we were talking about Big Lebowski, I wouldn’t have blinked.  Even if it showed up in the next hour.  But a full day later hints to me that they have some sort of psychology behind these ads, that they are using some sort of AI to read and analyze everything I type in a day, run it through an algorithm, and shoot me marketing messages that will trigger some sort of recall mechanism from the day before.  I can’t explain why, but that weirds me out.

I know, it’s not enitirely rational.  But something about it doesn’t quite sit right with me.  I guess I feel it starts to open a Pandora’s box.  Sending me a Mariners Ticketmaster ad if I am reading an email about baseball from a Seattle IP Address is one thing.  But building a complete profile about me, keeping track of everything I google, everything I write, everything I receive, and every ad I click on, then throwing specific ads that attempt to predict my behavior or trigger responses….well that borders on invasive.  

Anyway, I’m looking forward to hearing your own thoughts on this.   

 

Spring Creek Group to Give Seminar on Social Media at School of Visual Concepts

December 22, 2007 /

We’re still nailing down the final date, but the Spring Creek Group will be giving a "Social Media 101" seminar in early March, as part of the curriculum at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle.

The presentation will have a lot of the same components as we’ve used as a social media agency in Seattle working with our own local and national clients, and will include some real hands-on lessons.  It’s likely to be ideally suited for the small business owner or professional who wants to learn what all the fuss is about blogging, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and other social media tools.  We’ll talk about some famous victories and mistakes, some basic do’s and don’ts as well as some "rules of the game."  Then we’ll help everyone get launched.  

More details to come from both this web site and www.SpringCreekGroup.com. 

If the University of Washington Was a Corporation

December 13, 2007 /

I hesitate to write this article because I am pressed for time and really want to do a good job on this one.  But the topic is starting to get stale, so I really need to bang it out.

uw2.jpgYou probably heard that the University of Washington fired Athletic Director Todd Turner this week.  It was a mutual decision, but one in which the school will pay him close to half a million dollars a year to NOT come to work anymore, before his contract runs out sometime in 2009. (Someone please tell me how I can get one of these gigs.)

I’m not a rabid Dawg fan or anything, but I do find the scenario fascinating.  Because two weeks ago, this same University made a somewhat controversial non-decision by not firing the football coach they already had.  Then a week later, out of the blue, his boss got the axe instead.  So I want to look at this from a pure business perspective, and analyze this as if the UW was a public corporation.

So, let’s call UW President Mark Emmert the corporation’s CEO. Let’s say the corporation has 3 major divisions – Athletics, Academics and Research.  Todd Turner is the Exec VP of Athletics.  Turner has a bunch of product groups under him, tasked with a number of brand categories.  The Director of Football is Tyrone Willingham.  Willingham has a bunch of Product Managers (his coaches) developing features (the players) for his overall product (the Football team).

Now for a few years now, the product has stunk.  And the main reason the overall product has stunk is that the features have not been all that great.  Willingham was brought in 3 years ago to improve the features and get a better product to market.

Now the shareholders (the alumni) have been getting restless.  They are tired of Oregon and WSU developing better products than them.  They are tired of their grandchildren wanting to buy WSU and Oregon products.  And a few key shareholders have been hinting at investing their money somewhere else.

So the CEO does what every CEO should do.  He asks his Exec VP – "What’s going wrong?"  Turner replies, "The current features are already built so you can’t change them.   The product managers are working hard, so they should keep their job.  And the Director of Football is a great guy who’s really trying hard, so we need to keep him as well." 

 Now the CEO has a problem.   His shareholders are revolting, and his Exec VP has just told him, "Hey man, everything is cool here. Everyone is really trying hard."

The CEO retreats into his office and thinks.  "Well, if this is them trying HARD, what happens if they stop trying?  And why doesn’t my Exec VP seem to care that we never hit our numbers?  Our biggest product in his department is continuing to underachieve, and he’s not mad – in fact he his proud of his guys for trying hard!"

uw1.jpgIn this scenario, the firing of Todd Turner makes perfect sense.  Really, CEO Emmert had no choice.  Underperforming product, no punishment of the low levels of management and no promises of improvement.  The axe had to fall at the top.

Now, college football has different timing than a corporation, but if you follow this analogy, I think it’s easy to imagine that the whole division is going to be "reorganized" sometime after the new boss gets in.

 

Where is news on the Google China Tax Evasion story?

November 25, 2007 /

So, here’s something that’s news because there’s no news about it.

On November 19, TechCrunch reported that Google was being investigated by the Chinese government for a number of tax issues, all of which were too difficult for me to understand or techCrunch to analyze or give perspective on.  My initial thought was that this was simply a follow up shot across Google’s bow.

If you remember a few months back, all the U.S. search engines in China had their traffic redirected to sina.com, in what many said was a response to President Bush meeting with the Dali Lama.  So now after a "tip" from someone, the Chinese government is going to fine and/or punish Google for some allegedly shaky financial bookkeeping.

Now if you ask me, when a company has more money than it knows what to do with, cheating a few bucks in taxes in a country it desperately wants to do business in would be downright foolish.  I simply can’t believe Google would purposely do anything improper in dealing with Byzantine Chinese tax laws when they desperately want to do business in this market.  It simply makes no sense for Google to try to cheat the Chinese government out of less than what one of their GM’s is worth in stock options.

But the bigger question for me is, why is TechCrunch the most respected news outlet covering this?  On a search on the terms – Google Tax China – there’s no WSJ, New York Times or even anything from the Bay Area papers.  Why isn’t anyone writing about the Chinese accusing Google of tax improprieties?   Is it part of some U.S. mandate that "We will not question the Chinese government?" 

 

Movaya Wants to Make It Easy to Sell Mobile Games From Your Web Site

November 15, 2007 /

movaya1.jpgNew product announcement from Movaya today, as they released version 2.0 of Plug N Play, which is a technology that makes it even easier for any online merchant (or even a blog) to sell mobile games from their web site, deliver them directly to the customer’s phone, and directly charge their cell phone bill. 

While the mobile game industry is still in its early stages, all signs point to an explosion in revenues of mobile games in the coming years. The new version of Movaya’s product comes after months of research and feedback from the several hundred web sites already implementing the platform.

The entire press release is available in a Social Media form at their blog.

A few notes

November 12, 2007 /

So now that the dust is settling from the BlogWorld / Vegas trip, I’ll sprinkle in a few little bits that I have highlighted here in notes.  One curious
company we ran across was the expo’s media sponosor, a magazine called Blogger and Podcasting.

If you recognize the same kind of ironies that roughly 98.6% of the conference attendees noticed, you will chuckle and say to yourself, "Interesting.  A print magazine dedicated to an industry whose sole purpose is to put print magazines out of business."  Or, you might be less generous and say something far more disparaging or mean.  Even the conference panelists on VC funding made special note, commenting on how they would pass on any deal that involved a magazine about blogging.

Is this newsworthy from a "Bubble Watch" standpoint? It certainly shows that there are market inconsistencies.  And it probably wouldn’t be too problematic, if it wasn’t coupled with the fact that Exhibitor booths at BlogWorld were peppered with Booth Babes.  I think this shocked me more than anything, because I can’t think of a group of people that would be less impressed, and dare I say possibly intimidated and annoyed, by scantily clad models who have no idea what they are talking about.  When BlogWorld starts taking on a Comdex feel, something seems off-base. 

 

Amateur Writers, Start Your Engines

November 5, 2007 /

For months, maybe years, it’s been increasingly difficult to determine the blurry line between "professional" and "amateur" when it comes to news reporting or developing entertaining videos.  Now that line seems to be simple enough – If you are developing content, you are an amateur, and if you are a professional, you are on strike.

What a perfect storm for the aspiring amateur writer who never had the stomach to quit their job, move to LA, and battle for seats on ‘Joey" or "The Danny Bonaduce Show."

With the writers on strike, and thousands of cable channels still running 24 hours a day, content will be in demand.  Now if I was running programming for a network, I’d probably look two places – International and the Internet.

With only so many countries that speak English, the International channel dries up pretty quickly.  So the next stop is YouTube and the Blogosphere.  How many ways are there to turn some sort of blog or YouTube channel into a hybrid Internet / TV program?   And if a kid is developing content for kicks and giggles, how much do they really need to pay him?

It’s a huge open window for aspiring writers.  During the last threat of a writer’s strike, the "reality show" was hatched by networks as a defense mechanism, and that genre ended up dominating TV for nearly a decade.  What genre will this strike launch?

Sonics 2.0

November 2, 2007 /

The NBA kicked off season #40 in Seattle last night, in a game notworthy for it’s few absolutes:

  • It wasn’t the actual first game of the year, as the team had played in Denver the night before
  • It may or may not have been the last home opener in team history.
  • They never looked like they would get killed, and never looked liek they would win.
  • The roster is stacked full of people you may have heard of, but wouldn’t recognize if they sat next to you.
  • The arena was almost full
  • The fans didn’t quite know how to root for the players and boo the owners

But that made for an interesting dynamic. Some of the recognizable attractions remain – like Squatch, the Boom Squad and Sonics Dance team. T-Mobile still has big ads and the Dunking Ushers still put on a cool show. But there were no more Starbucks ads, and unless I missed them, the Southwest Airlines promotion seemed to be gone. At least there was no ad for the Stillwater Savings and Loan or Petroleum Workers Union 476.

There were some very noticeable handmade signs that I’m surprised fans were allowed to bring into the arena, including, "Noklahoma" and "Trade Bennett." It certainly would not have been unreasonable for an ownership group to force security to remove signs that denigrade the team or execs.

The loudest roar of the night was not prompted by the scoreboard, Squatch or PA Announcer – it was started by the fans and was simply a cheer of, "Save Our Sonics" that reverberated through the stadium for a few minutes. KJR’s Softy Mahler could be seen in the corner of the stadium taking part, and maybe 10% of the stadium was standing for it. With a little more organization, this cheer could take on a bigger role in future games, much like the "Go" ‘Huskies" cheer at UW shifts from side to side.

And finally, here’s an angle people aren’t writing about. The sales, marketing, admin, HR and other folks who work for the Sonics today are all Seattleites. They don’t want to move to Oklahoma. So you have owners who want to go, fans who want them to stay, employees who want them to stay and players who don’t care.

But one thing that is absolute – Kevin Durant is going to be a stud.

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