Ok…maybe not.  But as a distraction, I picked up the latest National Geographic (July2007) and sat back for a read and behold, the article that jumps out at me is "The Genius of Swarms:  Ants, bees, and birds teach us how to cope with a complex world." 

Wow…what a great alternative way to describe the value of mass collaboration.

One method of describing community never works for everyone, so whenever I can add to my portfolio some great new examples that tell the story, I take note.  In fact, it’s not unusual for part of the resistance to this emerging trend to be some form of "it’s not natural."  It’s not hierarchical like a normal businesses, so how can these apparently leaderless communities accomplish anything, much less do so efficiently.

Well, thank you National Geographic.  The article explores how collective behaviors in nature have enabled many species to survive, thrive and solve seemingly impossible problems.  For years, scientists have been mapping, studying and simulating these swarm tactics in an effort to both understand it and to apply it to business problems.  Overall, the article asks a very important question…THE question: "How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group?"

A few of my favorite parts of the article:

Deborah Gordon (Stanford biologist):  "If you watch an ant try to accomplish something, you’ll be impressed with how inept it is.  Ants aren’t smart.  Ant colonies are."  …as colonies they respond quickly and efficiently to their environment.  (swarm intelligence).

I love this term…"Swarm intelligence" -  Though I think it would be a mistake to assume "swarm idiocy" also doesn’t exist - though this may be unique to human swarms:)

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one’s in charge.  No generals command ant warriors.  No managers boss ant workers.  The queen plays no role but to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all - at least none that we would recognize.  It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb.  Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

I describe such a system as an online community. Simple rules of thumb are the code of conduct (written or unwritten norms) in a community.  Yes, ok, many communities benefit from some moderation/leadership in some form, but these are not leaders in a hierarchical sense - in fact, they are able to lead precisely because it is not a hierarchy, and if they leave others fill the space.

The bees rules for decision-making - seek a diversity of options, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices.

Nice job Dell…lovin’ Ideastorm.

That’s the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence.  Whether we’re talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or caribou, the ingredients of smart group behavior - decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb - add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

…an important truth about collective intelligence.  Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions.  A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do.  When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys it relies on its members to do their own part.  For those of us who sometimes wonder if it’s really worth recycling that extra bottle to lighten our impact on the planet, the bottom line is that our actions matter, even if we don’t see how.

Beyond the obvious intersection with communities, there’s a broader message here I like as well about the additive impact of individual actions…There’s plenty more to love about this article including a couple of great business examples and input from James Surowiecki.

Hope you love the story as much as I do!  What do you think?

Sean

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Well, I’ve blown the relevance of the web metrics on my blog for the foreseeable future.   I thought I’d share a few observations from this weeks T-mobile blog post gone wild.

In no particular order:

• Page views vs comments:  Less than .05% of all readers (I should say pageviews) commented on the blog post.  This seems pretty typical for blog posts (communities) in general, but it was interesting to see it applied to a post that had over 20K pageviews. 
• The Digg Effect: About 1 in 20 viewers, "Dugg" it - this became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  It became clear very quickly that users who use Digg, Digg.  It’s difficult from the metrics I have to peel this back further, but my rough estimate would be that Digg readers Digg with 4-5 times the promiscuity of other readers.  This makes sense, but is an odd sort of swarming.
• Digg’s impact on traffic:  Digg is largely a non-issue in terms of views until you’ve crossed 50 or so Diggs, from there it curved quickly.  This post took about 14 hrs to get to that point….14 hrs after that, it was at 1000 Diggs.
• Good news vs Bad news:  Like regular news, everyone cares about bad news, no one cares about the follow-up (follow up post closing the loop is tracking to about 1/50 the Pageviews of the original).
• Digg is a social network.  I never really thought of Digg as a social network, but it seems clear to me that there are prolific Diggers/commenter’s who have loose tie connections.  If you follow the comments, many commenter’s "know" each other and frequently swarm together.  I’m not sure what this says about Digg as a news source, but this changed how I think about Digg.  If I was a PR agency, I’d crawl Digg on behalf of my clients and look for opportunities for response (for good or bad stories). 
• Thick/Thin community contributors:  I once blogged here about thick vs thin community contributors.  Digg proved their example from the previous post.  Prolific "Diggers" are the kind of "thin" contributors I wrote about.  It takes little effort to Digg, but the effort can drive dramatic influence on the visibility of a topic.
• Tone & manner.  This might be the most important lesson.  Most blogs start with readers who actually know you on some level and blog traffic grows gradually, not exponentially.  Those who know you (follow you), know your writing style and generally know something about your personality.  With gradual growth to your blog, this stays normalized.  When you suddenly introduce large volumes of new users who don’t know you or your writing style, the reactions can be very different.  The example in this case were a handful of commenter’s (and maybe other readers) who thought, based on my post, that I was "yelling" at the CS agent at T-Mobile.  Re-reading my post with this in mind, I guess I can understand the misconception, but those who know me probably can’t remember me raising my voice about anything (except maybe trying to get my Dog not to run in our creek).  It simply isn’t in my character to yell at anyone about anything.
• Comments moderation:  I have never turned on comment moderation on my blog.  At about comment 125 on the thread I did as I started getting some comments that were truly inappropriate.  In general, I don’t think moderation is good, but you’ve got to have your own standard for this.  I approved all comments except those with really outrageous profanity. 

Overall, the influence and reach of the citizen blogger was amazing, even disturbing.  I’ve read stories and followed other events, but this one was closer to home.  It certainly has me thinking through the importance of using brand management tools/services for trending community conversations on the web as a part of a customer listening system.  The problem isn’t that customers will complain about you (that’s ok and likely they have good reasons), the issue is how quickly you see it and how effective you are at engaging in and responding to the complaint.  I hope I can influence this in my own company.

Sean

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I wanted to follow-up on the complaint I raised here regarding a recent support experience with T-Mobile.  First off, hats off to T-Mobile, they have indeed fixed the issue I was experiencing.  A few folks who commented here on the original post experienced the same issue in recent weeks.  Here’s what happened according to the contacts at T-Mobile I worked with the last 24 hrs (in both Customer Service and Advanced Tech Support). 

• A large # of customers with T-Mobile Data packages were getting unlimited data when the system was intended to gate at some level - this creates an understandable service offering (revenue) problem for T-Mobile.
• T-Mobile Engineering made a network change that “fixed” this issue for T-Mobile.
• The fix disabled MANY data subscribers (myself included).  Note, the fix did NOT limit data to some gated amount, it shut it off completely.
• T-Mobile did not notify customers of this change.
• T-Mobile engineering did not notify T-Mobile support/customer service of this change.

In the end, once this issue got to the right place, the fix was changing a setting on the T-Mobile network (not on my local device) and then waiting “48-72 hours for the network to accept the changes.”  In fairness, it took only about 2-3 hours before things were working again - under promise, over deliver - goodness.  Solving the problem on the phone took no more than 3 minutes - all of which was done by looking at existing case information - no new info provided.

All of this could have been avoided had any of the following occurred:

1. Customer notification of the change.
2. T-Mobile Customer service/support notification by T-Mobile engineering.
3. Advanced tech support accepting a call without excessive repetition of troubleshooting - given problem definition/symptoms, the root cause would likely have been obvious had #2 been done.
4. Had I been more patient in the process and jumped through another few hoops.  A handful of readers thought this the best approach.  I don’t agree given where I was at in the process, but it’s a valid choice to put on the list.

At any rate, I wanted to publicly thank T-Mobile for stepping up and solving the problem.  They informed me that my phone calls had been pulled to be reviewed and confirmed that their agents were following a policy/standard procedure that needed to be reviewed and changed.  I’m a fan of the Dash and I’m pleased to have it fully functioning again. 

I was a little surprised at the attention the original post gathered, so closing this loop was important.  In the future I’ll post here a few lessons learned from “posts gone wild.”

Especially if you feel good about the resolution from T-Mobile, you should Digg this to give them the visibility. ( Thanks Josh for the suggestion).

[digg=http://digg.com/tech_news/Closing_the_loop_on_T_Mobile_Support_issue]

sean

del.icio.us tags: tmobile, dash

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Couple a cool guys from my team (Ed Hickey and Brian Boston) Podcasting on the MVP Program.  While I get to run the program, these guys work hand in hand with our community every day!

Give it a listen:  http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=317571

 

Sean

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Tons of attention on this post…more than I can read.  No common themes about who would be great to switch to, but lots of related stories.  Several of you are even convinced this was all my fault somehow.  Ok, that’s the point of public debate, you get to have your opinion.  I’ve always been more of the “get more bees with honey type” in every engagement, but this got beyond that - though for the record, while I thought many loud thoughts in the call, I never raised my voice in the call…we came to the end at an impasse and I said goodbye.  As many commented here, the agents are doing what they are trained to do, they are not the issue.

At any rate, the issue is not that a support issue went bad…every company will have those events - the test is how they respond in that moment.  I don’t mean to a random blog post like mine, but what is the agent on the phone able to do to make the situation right. 

sean

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Ok, timing of this is not their fault, but amazing none the less.  The sad thing (for me) is while I was on hold yesterday (before things got ugly, I actually paid my bill online.  Even after the calls I had up until then, I was ok - still a forgiving customer (I’ve been with them for MANY years - in fact, they are the only mobile carrier I’ve ever had) - sometimes issues are hard to solve.  Had yesterday’s call solved my problem, I would have never said a word about this… In the end, while the support wasn’t good, it was the powerlessness of the employees that really bothered me. 

Several commented here regarding outsourcing.  I’m reasonably certain (though I did not ask) that this was a call center in the US.  Not that it should matter.  Great support is not about the provider, it’s about process and agent empowerment - both things that were broken here.  I saw a few comments on other sites that said I should have described my problem better here…sorry.  In my mind, I’m a consumer and this is a consumer product.  I don’t know what the problem is and really shouldn’t need to - I just need to give the symptoms.  Admittedly, I did not post here to get tech support help on my problem at this point, I posted here to share a story.  I’m confident (I hope) that someone at a senior level at T-Mobile will take some action.  I’m reasonable sure (I hope) that this is not by-design.  Somewhere in the middle, bad measurement/process is driving the wrong behavior and someone at T-Mobile will want to fix this…(I hope).

Note:  I did get a vmail from T-Mobile customer care asking for a call back.  Called and left them a message back.  Ironically, based on the vmail, I’m pretty sure I got the call because I entered a complaint here:  .  If that is really the source, amazing that it worked faster than the agent on the phone (or anything else) to escalate to higher level customer care. 

sean

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   “Stick Together” - The Irony is coming - read on!!

I can’t believe it!!!  Over the past few months I’ve launched a blog all about the power and value of the customer voice in the web 2.0 world.  I’ve blogged about and read dozens of stories from “Dell Hell” to the more recent Digg / HD DVD controversy which tell powerful stories of customer “web-swarming” on bad service experiences.  I’ve been reading Word of Mouth Marketing, Citizen Marketers, and The Influentials.  Suffice it to say, I’m alert to the issues.  Even still, I never dreamed I’d have my own experience that so infuriated me that I’d be compelled to write the story…so here goes.  This is a little long…but please read it!!

A quick search online tells me I’m hardly alone in my frustration with T-Mobile, but I simply have to tell this story.  A few weeks ago my phone (T-Mobile Dash pictured below) developed a problem.  I’ve had this phone for several months, and was quickly a big fan of the features, form factor, even the battery life I thought was good.  I’ve always been pretty neutral on the carrier - in the end, as long as I have quality coverage at a reasonable price, I don’t really care.  T-Mobile changed that for me today…

So, here is the back story.  I fully use the functions of this phone (calling, texting, web, calendar/email/contact synchronization).  To be honest, calendar & contact sync are the most critical functions after just dialing the darn thing.  (Ok, yes…I have synchronized my phone from a bathroom - I admit it!!)  Well, a few weeks ago, my connection to the net failed.  Now, I still had full functions of calling/texting - but anything else through the network failed.  ACK!!  I’m lucky enough to have some mobile device experts around who tried to solve - no luck.  What follows is the basic course of events, emotions and details leading up to today’s call.  This history is not exact as I never dreamed I’d try to recall it all later for my blog - but it is darn close!

Call #1: 

Dial Customer service, machine asks me to enter my mobile #, ok.  Machine asks me what I’m calling about?  “Support.”  Ok.  Machine will transfer me to an agent.  Please verify who I am with last 4 digits of your social.  Ok.  Ring.  “Hello” - I’m at the agent.  I start to explain my problem.  Agent asks me for my mobile #.  (What? I just gave that).  Ok.  Agent asks me for the last 4 #’s of my social.  (What? I just gave that).  Ok, whatever, fine.  I explain my problem (after also verifying my name…yes, you can call me “Sean.”  A little light trouble shooting, some info gathering.  No good.  Then:  “Oh, you are trying to synchronize your email.  You should call your IT dept.”  NO.  I know that is not the issue, if I can’t get to the web, my IT dept is not the issue - don’t refer me somewhere else.  “Oh, ok.  Let me put you through to our support dept.”  My first reminder that I’m not there already - I should know better.  Hold.  Hold.  Hold.  Warm transfer to another person.  “Hi Sean, can I call you Sean?”  Yes.  “Sean, can you verify with me your mobile #?”  (WHAT!!).  Fine.  Troubleshooting starts.  Lots of this, then that.  No solution, but good effort.  Problem…over an hour has passed.  I say I must go (appointment) and will call back.  Ok, here’s the ticket #.  (Damn - what a waste of my time!)

Call #2 (a few days later - like you, I have other responsibilities other than chasing stuff like this)

Dial Customer service, machine asks me to enter my mobile #, ok.  Machine asks me what I’m calling about?  “Support.”  Ok.  Machine will transfer me to an agent.  Please verify who I am with last 4 digits of your social.  Ok, but frustration starting.  Ring.  “Hello” - I’m at the agent.  I say “hi, I have a trouble ticket I’m following up on.”  Agent: “Ok, let me get a little information first.”  Agent asks me for my mobile #.  (What? Here we go again!).  Ok.  Agent asks me for the last 4 #’s of my social.  (AHHHHHHHH!).  Ok, whatever, fine.  Agent verifies my name…yes, you can call me “Sean.”  15-20 minutes has passed and NO VALUE ADDED!  Ok, let me get you to the support dept.  Hold.  Hold.  Hold.  Warm transfer to another person.  “Hi Sean, can I call you Sean?”  (Guess what I’m thinking here!).  And then it happens…yup, you guessed it: “Sean, can you verify with me your mobile #?” (I’m now officially very mad - but calm).  Troubleshoot starts.  I explain we did that before, yes, that too, yes, that too.  On hold.  Hold.  Hold.  “Ok, Sean.  It looks like your SIM card has failed.  You’ll need to go into a T-Mobile store and have it replaced.  Damn. OK …bye. (Damn - what a waste of my time!)

T-Mobile store (a few days later - like you I have….)

This was easy (process wise, but took more that 2 hrs away from office time).  Last word at the store: “You’ll need to give the network a few hours to reset (or something) and then it should work fine.  I wait a few hours.  No good.  I wait a day.  No good.  I wait 2 days.  No good.  At this point, I almost prefer the problem to facing another support call…wait another few days. (Damn - what a waste of my time!)

Call #3 (this is at least 7-10 days after the problem starts - you know, like you I have other responsibilities too)

Dial Customer service.  Guess what…EVERYTHING I did in call #2 happens again.  EVERYTHING!  Finally, I’m put through to “Advanced Tech Support.”  Ok, now I’m getting somewhere: “Advanced!”.  Troubleshooting starts.  Try this…try that.  No good.  Sean, we are going to have to have someone else work on this, the issue is clearly somewhere in the network.  We will have someone call you back on this case.  WHAT??  Ok, fine.  I’m worn out…they’ve beat the life and fight out of me.  (Damn - what a waste of my time!)

Phone messages:  (like you, I have other responsibilities too….get my theme)

At least 3-4 days pass and I get a voicemail from T-Mobile advanced support.  A few instructions and please call us back.  I have no time and honestly no energy to deal.  I have a business trip I take.  I note a few more messages from them.  Ok, props for chasing me a bit - I’m glad they did that.

Call #4:  (I finally had a ”free” hour in my schedule to call support.  Reminder T-Mobile:  Every hour I spend with you is an hour away from either my job or my family - I am not available at all times - oh, and by the way, I am the customer). 

Here we go again…Everything in call #2 happens…again…everything…everything…ahhhhhhhhhh….please kill me.  Fine, I was ready for this waste of time.  Finally: “Ok, Sean, let me put you on hold and transfer you to “advanced tech support.”  Ok.  Agent comes back.  I’m sorry Sean, they closed the case as resolved because you didn’t call back.  “RESOLVED?”  I said.  Yes, I understand Sean. Are you still having the problem?  (Uh, no, I just called to share my mobile # and social 4 more times!)  “Yes, I still need help.”  Ok, let me try them again.  Hold.  Agent comes back.  I’m sorry Sean, it seems they won’t take the call until I create a new Ticket #.  “Whatever, ok.”  # created.  Ok, please hold again and I will get them on the line.  Hold.  Agent comes back.  Sean, “I’m sorry, they won’t take the call unless I perform troubleshooting again, I know this is not a good situation.”  Me:  “I won’t do that.”  Agent: “I understand, let me try again and I will add my supervisor to the call if I get stuck with them (note this word).  Hold.  Agent comes back.  “I’m sorry Sean, they will not take the call without trouble shooting.  What is the # I can call you on in 15minutes?  She then makes it clear that we are just going to “fake” the troubleshooting, but I must be on the phone in another call to verify we did it.  Me: “NO, I will not do that.  Please let me talk to your supervisor.”  Supervisor: “Yes, Sean, this is just what we have to do.”  Same “fake-it” routine.  Me: “I cannot believe this?  Why are you so disempowered?”  Supervisor:  “I’m sorry sir, this is just the best way to deal with them.” Me: “I can’t believe you are so powerless in this to solve the problem.  Who is your supervisor? ” (She says Robert Dotson: the CEO).  Me: “That’s just not true, your boss is not the CEO.”  Awkward silence.  She shares her frustration.  I say: “If it’s that bad, you should quit!  How can you work in a place like that??”  She says: “sometimes I think about quitting.”  Then, back to the task, “sean, can I just have the agent call you back so we can handle this?  Me: “NO!  I won’t do that.  This is not my problem, this is your problem.  Now you want to take time from my family on another call.  NO.”  Supervisor: “I understand, what do you want me to do?  You don’t really have any other option here.”  Me: “Don’t have an option?  Hah.  I can drop you as a service provider.”  Supervisor: “Yes, you could do that.”  This was maybe the most depressing part of the call.  She really didn’t care.  And it was clearly not because she’s a bad person but because she has given up on her own employer.  I actually felt sorry for her.  I couldn’t yell at her.  I said goodbye. 

“Stick Together” - These poor employees aren’t even stuck to their company/service - and they are the face of the company.  Why should customer stick?  Goodbye T-Mobile.  Now I write to cleanse…I’ll leave it at that.  I was stunned.

Who would like to add to this?  Does this story feel familiar?  Please DIGG this story.  Please link this story.
[digg=http://digg.com/tech_news/Customer_Service_Hell_T_Mobile_Hot_Spot_NOT]

One more comment on the inner workings of a “citizen marketer.”  I hated wasting all my personal time on the phone.  I have passionately enjoyed spending the last hour or more writing this to publish.  Look at all the energy going to the negative.

 ADDED 6/20:  For the record, I’ve been a CS agent in the past, I know what it’s like.  While at the end I spoke very directly to the supervisor, I never raised my voice.  Was never confrontational.  I certainly never uttered a single expletive (unlike some of the clever responses here from a few of you passionate readers).  Yes, I drew a line at the end on where I was done jumping through hoops and was clear about that.  I certainly regret if anyone here has the impression from my post that I was irate to the agent who was following policy.  I was certainly upset with TMobile - but I can distinguish the company from the people involved.  The problem with my phone “appears” to now be solved.  I have a followup call with TMobile scheduled to validate a few things.  Once complete, I will post back here what the problem was and what the resolution was.  I certainly credit TMobile for taking responsibility for solving the problem, sharing openly with me what the process issue (break) was on their end and their intent to address it.  In the end, all I want is for the device to work (no refund, no credit, don’t care…just make it work).

Sean

del.icio.us tags: Tmobile, support, nightmares, casestudy

Popularity: 75% [?]

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A former Dell employee posted an article June 14th that got a lot of play:  22 confessions of a former Dell Sales Manager.  Lots of traffic and 1500+ votes on Digg.  In the article, the author goes on to expose a lot of "tricks" on how to work the online system at .  Nothing in this post was particularly anti-Dell, but there are a number of items that it’s obvious if you were Dell you might prefer weren’t posted.

June 15th, the same author/site posted again:  Dell Demands Takedown of our "22 confessions of a former Dell Sales Manager".  This posting racked up 3500 Diggs!!  In it, the Consumerist posts the text of a communication (a few back and forth conversations) from a Dell Attorney requesting that the post be removed.

Ugh…Not a good scene.  Big companies have challenges in working through response management in the web 2.0 world - where you pretty much have to assume transparency.

June 16th, the Dell Community team (responsible for Direct2Dell) steps up with a direct response:  Dell’s 23 Confessions.

Let me say, good recovery Dell.  Yes, it would have been better for this not to happen at all, but in reality, it does. The judge of your commitment to community is in the quality of your response.  Here’s what I liked:

• The opener:  "Now’s not the time to mince words, so let me just say it… we blew it."
• Acknowledging other bloggers posts on the topic (Jeff Jarvis) - this says they did some homework.
• It’s personal, I don’t know who Lionel is, but the post is an "I" post vs "we" - good tone.
• Tied in a relevant discussion happening in Ideastorm.  More homework here and including real customers in the discussion.
• Point to point discussion - not negating the feedback or challenging it, just presenting their point of view and links to help.

Sean

Popularity: 37% [?]

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Over the last several weeks, average daily page views to this blog have increased about 30%…along with it, a number of new subscribers to my .  So, to my new readers…WELCOME and thanks for checking out this site.  I sincerely hope you find valuable things here to read.  For those who have stuck with me the last few months since I launched, a hearty thank you to you as well.  There’s no compliment like a bit of readership:)

As this site has grown, I’ve come to the conclusion it will soon need a re-design with a focus on findability of the "best" content.  But, that is still work for another day.  Given the arrival of more recent readers, I decided to post here a quick guide to the most frequently read content from the first ~120 days of this blog…as well as a few calls to action.

Quick links:

Why this blog started in the first place:  A Logical Beginning.

Convincing the unconverted on Communities:  The 5 part (to date) series!

Part 1: The Analogy

Part 2: Fear by Example

Part 3: The Data/Evidence Approach

Part 4: The Assumptive Close

Part 5: Is your baby ugly?

Business Case for Community topics:

• Where for Art Thou Community ROI
• Your Community Already Exists
• Online Discussions:  Insights you can use!
• Enhancing Online and Community Support Models: Speech abstract

Community Management topics:

• Community Segmentation model
• The Trouble with Trolls
• Does your company support Employee Blogging?
• A little Discussion on corporate transparency
• Time to Consider the Pareto Principle

Technology:

• Are you "Tag Drafting"
• Visualization of Tag Drafting

Podcasts on communities I’ve done:

#1:  Mobile Tech in TAFE

#2: 

#3:  Solshare interview

Calls to action:

• Grab my if you enjoyed reading anything here.
• Are you ??  Get with it and add me .
• ?  Add me .
• Delicious?  "Draft" me here.
• Check out my day job here. 
• Add me in Linkedin .
• REALLY like this page?  Favorite me in Technorati  (shameless promotion…)
• And Finally:  If you find things here you like and you blog…have you linked to me?  Thanks!!

 

Sean

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