Square: Mobile payment device for the iPhone

Why Twitter is great, reason #25

Michael Rheavume does not live here

Companies, take note: if I am a current subscriber, and you wish for me to renew my subscription, spelling my name correctly in your renewal letter is a good place to start.

Social Media ROI: Socialnomics video

Erik Qualman over at Socialnomics has created another excellent video in his Socialnomics series about social media and the impact it's having on marketing, customer interaction, and business. This . . . more

On Customer Surveys: A Case Study of The Economist

I've been a subscriber to The Economist, or as I like to call it, "the thinking man's newspaper,"* for the better part of a year now. It's a wonderful weekly packed with thoughtful pieces on global political news and excellent in-depth reports. These blandishments aside, I wanted to comment on their customer surveys.

Really?

Yes - the customer survey, an important tool for any organization interested in data on its customers but oh-so-annoying for customers to complete. Surveys are very interruptive: Why should I take 10 or 15 minutes out of my busy day to help this company - who I'm already paying for product/service X - find out how to be more profitable?

The key, assuming that a company has good relations with its customers already, is to make surveys short, convenient, and at least potentially rewarding. The Economist Insighters - info and opinions from its readers - has the best customer surveys I've ever seen, and I've completed my fair share.

1. They are short - no more than 10 minutes long
2. They have an attractive incentive (entered to win a $100-250 AmEx gift card)
3. They are interactive and very well-designed. Answering questions through an often graphical UI makes it far more palatable than, say, a Survey Monkey questionnaire.
4. They are fun. I almost look forward to filling out the next survey from The Economist Insighters. That right there is the holy grail of customer surveys, I imagine.
   

Gathering research from customers doesn't have to be a boring, painful process. Other companies should take note of The Economist's best practices in this area.

*Although it's a magazine, the blokes at The Economist always refer to the periodical as "this newspaper" so I have adopted this terminology. I'm not sure if this is a Briticism, intellectual snobbery, or both, but either way it works for me.

Perot Systems to be bought by Dell for $3.9 billion

Dell announced today that it will buy IT services provider Perot Systems for $3.9 billion. This is a significant acquisition . . . more

Work to Love, Wealth, and Words from Michael Scott

A few items of note. I recently read a couple excellent essays by Paul Graham, who is currently a partner in Y Combinator, among other impressive things on his CV.

In "How to Do What You Love," Graham talks about reconciling what we learn about the concept of "work" when we're children with what we learn as we get older. He talks about how it is difficult but ideal to find work that one truly loves doing (and what "loving work" really means) and two different paths that people follow to do so. It's insightful and humorous. "Always produce" is a great maxim to live by.

In "How to Make Wealth," Graham discusses why starting a business is the key to generating wealth. Several ideas in here to help one understand why startups have an extremely high upside (coupled of course with high risk and concurrent downside). I liked how he explains how startups are essentially time compression for the amount of work produced and how they are more efficient by several factors than large companies.

A couple excellent inspirational essays. I plan on reading more of Graham's stuff on his site.

---

A few words from Michael Scott in the penultimate episode of this season of The Office:

I look at somebody like Jim Halpert and I think, "That guy could do anything he wants to do." He could...do anything. And he chooses to work here, selling paper. Just like me.

Related, of course. Hits a bit close to home.

Toscanini's

This one's for Scottsundae and his out-of-season ice cream-eating ways:

A site to bring back Tosci's.

Verizon: A Study in the Art of Sucking

The saga ain't over quite yet.

• Phone lines being transferred to the new office tomorrow. Originally scheduled between 8:30-12:00. As of today, it's an "all-day job" between 8:00-5:00.
• Originally I was going to have any inbound calls to our office line forwarded to my cell phone. The customer service representative I spoke with assured me that this forwarding service would cover any down time during the line switching process. As of today I discovered that this forwarding "doesn't always work." How quaint! This forced us to send an apologetic warning in advance to our clients and a few partners and vendors, making what ideally should be a smooth process bumpy and uncomfortable, like that one shave where you realize you really need to buy a new set of Mach 3 razors for an exorbitant sum.
  
• Verizon shut off our DSL prematurely on 12/20. Despite all their claims of escalation, expediting, et cetera, their last communiqué said that they would be able to get our DSL back up this Friday. January 4th. More than two weeks after they shut it off! Simply incredible, made all the more so by the fact that we are moving into our new office this Saturday. Useless. But, the kicker:
• I received an email this afternoon from Verizon saying that they would be able to install DSL at our old office this Monday, 01/07. Something tells me we will be canceling that work order.

On a related note, I am not looking forward to finishing packing and the whole moving/unpacking process on Saturday morning. Ugh. But I am looking forward to:

• A beautiful, new, completely refurbished office.
• My own office complete with circa 1980 glass "ice" blocks,
  aka "the Igloo."
  
• Lunch in the North End.
  
• An around-the-corner commute. Literally.
• "Meetings" at Billy Tse's.
  

Now if I only liked my job and made money doing it...

Verizon Sucks II: The Internets in Jeopardy

Verizon's assault on webernetting continues with renewed intensity. After having spoken with no fewer than five representatives, including at least one manager, receiving responses varying from "It looks like it might be ready now" to "All I see here is that you are scheduled for service on January 4th," getting a different department each time I called and then getting rerouted to a "different" number (always the same as the one I just called), and repeating our business phone number and address many, many times, we washed our hands of the whole thing. We are moving on the 5th; getting DSL back up on the 4th would be the height of lunacy.

This is without a doubt the worst customer service I have experienced either personally or in business. Failure to follow up when they said they would, lack of response, different answers, false updates, and a complete lack of attempting to fix the problem that they caused, which will eventually have resulted in about two weeks of disruption and/or decreased productivity. If you are a business owner, seriously consider vendors aside from Verizon. As a Verizon customer myself (family phone plan) I have to say that I've found their cell service great, although I haven't had to deal with their customer service until now. This nightmare will seriously affect my decisions moving forward.

Of course the upshot of all of this is that I get to work from home today in my boxers. (Not literally; in the metaphorical sense of the phrase. I am currently wearing jeans.)

Verizon Sucks

My company is moving offices in early January. Not a major move - in fact the new office is literally in my block, right around the corner from my apartment. I didn't think my commute could get any shorter but there you have it.

I was on the phone with Verizon today to transfer our phone lines over to the new spot and to schedule a stop of our DSL service for January 5th. The woman on the phone said everything was all set. I hung up and a few minutes later noticed our internet wasn't working. After resetting the modem and router a few times I called Verizon back to discover that the woman I had spoken to was "enter-happy today" and shut off our service immediately. Now, one would think that this wasn't a big deal, right? Just restart the service? No. First she had to check to see if she could cancel the cancellation. That was impossible, so she had to submit a new work order to see if she could get a new DSL line in on one of our other lines (the old one still had a pending cancellation on it so she couldn't put it back on there, even though it had already been canceled). Of course, she said she would try to expedite this, but she couldn't give me any guarantee, and it might take up to five business days. Are you kidding me? How can it possibly take so long to turn it back on if some rube in customer service can flick off our internets two weeks ahead of time by pressing a key? Just incomprehensible. At least half a day of productivity shot and nothing but BS from the vendor. This is customer service at its worst, folks.

Needless to say we will be getting another vendor for phone and internet service for the new office.

Fan Identity

Dan Tobin has a nice post over at Bugs & Cranks discussing his identity as both a baseball fan in general and a Red Sox fan in particular, and how this relates to the rest of MLB fans. I think it does take a moment to sit back and try to gain a little perspective - Boston is no longer the upstart underdog (and hasn't been for some time even prior to 2004). It takes big money to compete in the AL East. This is unfortunate, but it's the reality. Also unfortunate is that this makes us a hated organization along with the likes of the MFNYY. A shame to some degree, but that's professional sports, with MLB being a particular standout in this regard.