One hell of a ride.

That’s the only way I can describe the last 6 years. It was about that long ago that I decided it was time for me to leave LEGO and strike out on my own. It was one of the hardest, and one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. LEGO was (and still is) an amazing company to work for, but my entire career I’ve been on the forefront of the “next big thing”. I helped build the Web in the 90s, I was at the forefront of the social media revolution, and I’ve been part of driving the social business philosophies for the last 5 years.

And now it’s time to change once again. I’m proud to announce that Ant’s Eye View has joined PwC’s US Advisory practice!

I’m incredibly humbled at the Ant’s Eye View journey that Sean and I (and the entire anthill) have been on for the last 3.5 years. We’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with an amazingly talented team of Ants and flat out awesome clients. Our clients and our team have given us their faith and trust and support as we’ve bounced through this journey. Our relatively small, but extremely talented team has helped create real, lasting impact at major brands. Our work is some of the best I’ve had the privilege of being part of.

So then… why now? Sean says it best today:

Well, it goes back to Sean McDonald’s kitchen table (and rather meager white board). Our ambition was BIG – To fundamentally change the way organizations thought and behaved around employee and customer engagement. This was a BHAG – a big, hairy audacious goal in its truest sense. Our goal wasn’t just to tell organizations how to execute on social, but to actually lock arms with them and work together to achieve their desired business outcomes. Our challenge, we needed A LOT more arms and a broader set of capabilities to achieve our dream.

We are particularly excited about joining the PwC team because of the amazing platform they offer to help push our (and their) vision for how organizations can change the way they engage with customers and their own employees. The culture, the new colleagues, and their deep bench of experience will help us truly realize our visions of the Social Engagement Journey. Big? We couldn’t have imagined this kind of BIG!

In the coming days and weeks, we’ll be sharing a lot more about where we’re going and what we’re doing. But first and foremost, I have to say thank you.

Thank you to the entire Ant’s Eye View team. Y’all are amazing and make me proud every day.

Thank you to our amazing clients. Your trust, your challenges, and your vision gave us an opportunity to be where we are today.

Thank you to the many, many industries peers who cheered, supported, and applauded our efforts.

Thank you Dustin Johnson, Sean McDonald, and Todd Shimizu for building and leading amazing teams. Thank you for the long hours, countless road miles, and amazing work that has built one of the best teams in the world.

Thank you to PwC for placing their trust in our small, yet awesome team. We’ll make you proud!

Thank you Sean O’Driscoll for embarking on this journey with me. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for your leadership of our team.

And of course, thank you to my lovely wife who has done more than can be imagined to support me during this journey.

I may be sad to see Ant’s Eye View ride off into the sunset, but I’m ecstatic to be witnessing the dawn of a new era and the beginning of the next Next Big Thing!

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(Click to zoom in)

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Humans do something really odd; we form emotional bonds with physical objects. The coffee mug we use every morning gives us a sense of comfort as we start our days. That t-shirt from the Pearl Jam concert 20 years ago makes us smile when we wear it. The keyboard we are used to makes it easier to slide into our daily work. As photographers, I know this emotional bond all too well. I love my gear and the more I learn how to use it properly, and more importantly, the more great results I get with it, the gear becomes more than just a hunk of plastic and metal. It becomes an extension of me.

So when something goes wrong with my gear, I feel it more than a broken water pipe at home or a printer at work on the fritz. (If you think I’m just weird, pick a photographer, any photographer, and ask them about this issue) When gear breaks, I want to fix it. But more importantly, I want to know what was wrong, what was done, and if I should be on the look out for similar problems in the future. Basically, I want to be involved in the process of bring life back to our gear.

Rather than trying to avoid this emotional connection, you’d think a company like Nikon would be trying to stoke that feeling. After all, the more emotionally connected to your gear you are, the more likely you’re going to do all the things Nikon wants you to do: stay with their system, buy new gear, upgrade existing gear, and talk about how you could have only captured those images on Nikon. As my recent experience with Nikon Repair reminded me (I’ve been through this process before), Nikon doesn’t seem to have the slightest desire for anything but getting my money and closing my ticket.

A few weeks back, I sent in my Nikon SB-800 flash to get repaired. I’d bought it for a good price off a seller on Craigslist, and while it worked, it had always fired a bit strangely. I’d never been able to put my finger on a specific pattern for the problem, but there was a number of occasions where it just behaved incorrectly. After a recent shoot where I couldn’t seem to get the unit to respond like it was supposed to and narrowing the issue to the SB-800, I sent it to Nikon repair. It was out of warranty, so I expected to pay some money for the repair.

A few days after Nikon Service received it, I got physical letter stating that I needed to call and give authorization for the repair. (Note: they had my email address too, but chose to send only a physical letter) So I picked up the phone and was soon talking to a customer service rep who needed a credit card number to charge me a repair fee. I asked her, “Oh, so that must mean you found something wrong”. Nope, they just wanted to get my credit card first before they went digging around. Fair enough; I could see how Nikon wouldn’t want to do the repairs before they ensured themselves payment. About 7 days after this call, my SB-800 arrived home with the invoice shown below.

I’m pretty sure that they didn’t, in fact, repair anything. But I have no clue.  The line “No problem found”, I assume refers to the entire process, not the “CKD IMAGE TEST” line that appears before it. Take a look at this invoice. This is the only contact Nikon made with me (and it was only included in the box when they sent my flash head back). No follow-up questions, no desire to ensure they’d fully heard my concerns. And more importantly, no support of the fact that there is no support for the emotional bond that I have with my gear.

Imagine going to a hospital with your child who needs surgery. After the doctor performs the surgery, he comes out and says to you “Insurance claim KRD filed. Surgery complete. Surgery level RX1. Total cost: $5326.23″. You’d be furious and confused, wouldn’t you?

As companies grow in size, they necessarily grow in complexity. And as complexity and scale are increased, an almost certain casualty is empathy for the customer. It’s easy to lose track of what a customer wants or needs, or even how they feel when you have more pressing concerns like how you need to adjust your call center to meet increasing demand while continuing to push for lower costs per call. I fully understand the desire and the need to focus on quality vs. time spent ratios as a core customer care metric.

It makes sense that a goal of the service process should be to reduce the amount of time needed to provide a quality response. But customer care teams also need to be considering the impact of their process on the emotional bonds of a customer too. I’m happy to spend the necessary money (whether or not there was a problem to fix or if I was just covering Nikon’s time to deal with something that wasn’t faulty), but I want to be part of the process too. I don’t want to hear that it was in a “Service Repair Rank 1″. I have no idea what that means, and it’s ridiculous to think I should be expected to.

At this point, Nikon is just a cold corporate entity to me. It’d be easy to switch to another camera maker (and I already have with the Olympus E-P3). I don’t feel any particular allegiance to Nikon, and after this repair process (the third time I’ve gone through this), I realize that if they don’t care about me, I don’t need to care about them.

But fixing this broken emotional bond isn’t rocket science.Here’s 7 ways Nikon (or your company) could better support the emotional bond:

1. Change the language of these invoices and status tracking tools to be understandable by customers, not service techs. “Service Repair Rank B1″ means nothing to me. I’d be surprised if it really means much to Nikon employees.
2. Give customer care reps the room and the requirement to spend a few minutes recapping the problem with the customer before a repair and/or after a lack of problems is found.
3. Build service processes (or really any kind of customer care processes) that are specifically charged with more than just repairs. Is your customer care team being assessed on criteria like positive word of mouth?
4. Personalize the Nikon experience. Who worked on my repair? What is their name or location or interest in photography? Sure some of this might be more theater than reality, but even a name of who conducted the repair would be better than “Service Repair Rank B1″…whatever that means.
5. Find better ways of engaging and/or advising customers if there’s no problem found. You make me feel like an idiot when you send me back my flash without telling me what’s wrong. Perhaps you could include some info or a URL that describes common misunderstandings or FAQs about that product. Maybe something is still broken, but maybe I’m just not using it right. Helping me solve my problems, rather than solely thinking about closing your ticket and charging my card makes me feel like you’re here for me, not for you.
6. Find ways to bring the voice of the customer inside the organization. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to only have access to a limited amount of equipment. It’s easy to forget that customers aren’t spending 8+ hours a day repair your product. There’s still magic in it for them.
7. Rethink the packaging and printed materials. Shipping me a plain cardboard box with my gear wrapped in nothing but bubble wrap is boring. It’s an exciting day when my long-lost gear returns home. Make me excited for the unboxing. I know this seems to be a hard concept for any technology company to grasp, other than Apple, but seriously, beautiful packaging is an emotional driver and easy to do.

And yes, I’m sure there are many reasons why some of the things above won’t work at Nikon (or another big company). I’m sure there was a natural evolution of internal need that yield the results we see today. So what? When you aren’t supporting an emotional bond to your product/service, you’re asking for customers to leave you for someone who will.

And what about you? Have you had to experience service like this and been left feeling similarly wanting? How could Nikon (or other companies) better appeal to your emotional connection to their products?

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Our office neighbors, Paloma, recently went through the Groupon experience to promote their spa business. I asked one of the owners, Levi Dugat, to answer a few questions about their experience, and he was nice enough to oblige.

How would you rate your Groupon experience overall?
 We were perfectly pleased with our experience and honestly prepared not to be. We’d heard some horror stories and some positive ones and spent time doing some research, weighing our options and went for it anyway.

We heard lots of stories about the Groupon clients tending not to re-book, being somewhat abrasive to deal with, not tipping the service providers, and so on. We developed a strategy to try to weed out the one-time bargain shopper clients by creating packages for our Groupon deals that were priced a little higher, so we might aim for customers who were willing to pay for a service package closer to the prices of our actual, full-price services. I think this made a HUGE difference for us with who the Groupon deals brought in.

Did you notice any trends in the buyers?
 I would estimate that well over half the spa Groupon clients pre-booked for their next service and told us they were happy to have found their new spa, and the majority of them bought product as well. Another unexpected trend was that a significant number of the Groupon buyers added full-priced services to their appointments and many of them pre-booked for their next appointment as well.

We are very pleased with the amount of business Groupon brought in because it seems so far to have significantly bolstered our regular/pre-booked client base. We also had a VERY significant boost in calls and bookings for 2 or 3 weeks after our Groupon deal hit from new + established client who did NOT purchase our Groupon but only saw it advertised. So it clearly served to bring in new full-paying clients and reminded our existing client that we’re here. We also had tons of folks reference that they’d “seen the Groupon” even though they didn’t purchase it or book for a full-price service afterwards so I think it’s safe to say Groupon broadened our presence and range of exposure in Austin.

What do you think was the biggest reason(s) for the success?
We were very realistic about the cap number we should put on the number of Groupons that we would allow to be sold. This eliminated the possibility for our books to be so bogged down with Groupon clients that our regular clients felt neglected.

We also talked with our staff about the number of Groupon services they’d be comfortable with taking on. Our staff received the full profit from their Groupon transactions since they have not been completely booked anyway. This steered us away from the issue of disgruntled staff feeling pressured into performing a massive amount of services that wouldn’t show them much return as far as their client base was concerned. We’d heard horror stories about disgruntled staff resenting the Groupon clients because they were suddenly working 14 hour days for less pay knowing a small percent of these clients wouldn’t return or tip. In other words, we avoided the horror story of sub-par service for the Groupon clients .

Would you do it again? If so/if not, why?
 I think we would do it again if we needed another immediate push for one of our stylists, because it served the exact purpose we intended it to. Groupon was amazing in terms of advertising for us. We’ve actually already gotten set up for Groupon Now with one of our new stylists who came onboard after most of the Groupon clients were booked with our exisiting stylist.

What was the biggest problem and/or disappointment?
 I think we were prepared enough and had done our research in such a way that allowed us to avoid any major problems that could’ve arose. We asked people we knew in various industries who had used Groupon about their experiences with it and tried to prepare ourselves based on their responses/advice/warnings. There really weren’t any I can think of and the staff didn’t have complaints either. The only disappointment I can think of is that we didn’t sell all the way up to our cap. We were hoping to sell more than we did and were prepared to accommodate that total of services needing to be booked.

If you had it to do over again, would you change anything? If so, what?
Hmmm, tough one. Not sure what we could’ve changed. We probably would just spend time trying to figure out how to design the packages to appeal to a broader range of folks so we could sell more of them. Other than that, we were happy with how it all turned out.

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2011

2010

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I’m proud to report that Ant’s Eye View has launched a new product that we’re really excited about: FanAuction™.

Simply put, FanAuction™ solves two of the biggest problems in social media today:

1. How to quickly acquire new fans to prove social media ROI
2. Eliminating ongoing spend to support fan activity you no longer need

Here’s the official description:

Put simply, FanAuction™ is the ultimate destination for buying and selling social media fans and followers.

Building a word of mouth network of fans, evangelists and advocates takes time. For some brands, it may take years of dedicated, resource-intensive work. But not anymore. With Ant’s Eye View’s FanAuction™, the system to help you Get Fans Now™, you won’t have to invest any more time or money to create relationships with customers!

After hearing from our clients, industry colleagues, and famous circuit speakers about the needs of big businesses within social media, we had to put the work in on this project. And as projects go, this one took more manhours than I’ve ever imagined possible. But it’s ready, we’re unveiling it today, and we’re excited to see how it fares in the marketplace. As a former community manager, I know personally how hard it is to generate and manage fan enthusiasm. FanAuction™ is a major push forward in eliminating that hard work.

If you have questions, head over to antseyeview.com/fanauction or drop me an email. For more information, see our official press release

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Over the weekend, I had several people from big brands ask me what I thought about the Chrysler tweet debacle, and whether I thought the right actions were taken. If you haven’t heard, an employee from the agency that ghostwrites the @ChryslerAutos twitter handle accidently posted a tweet to that handle rather than their personal account, as intended. A virtual s$%tstorm was brought down on Chrysler, who in turn fired their agency, who in turned fired the employee.

The reality is that this is not an uncommon occurrence, nor will there be a time when such things don’t happen. Raise your hand if you’ve never mistakenly sent an internal email to a customer. Looking…. yep, no hands raised. We’ve all done it, or something similar.

I feel bad for the employee, and I have no idea of what the circumstances are behind the scenes. But if I were the point of contact at Chrysler, I certainly would have strongly considered firing them [the agency], if not actually doing it. This isn’t because I expect agencies to be perfect or that mistakes are the end of the world. (In fact, mistakes – or the positive recovery from them – are sometimes the best way to build your proof points of authenticity)

Rather, it is because the fact that an employee could accidently tweet anything to the client’s stream rather than their personal stream tells me two things:

• There was/is very little process in place at the agency that ensures such mistakes can’t happen. This process would come in two forms: ensuring that the employee is well trained in specific best practices, dictated and/or signed off on by the brand, and that workflow for how tweets are created includes a buddy system or other forms of human and technological verification before publishing takes place.
• There is no audit of these best practices to ensure that a new employee who is given the keys to the kingdom isn’t, for instance, using a single Twitter app to setup both @funkyfreshagencyguy and @ChryslerAutos. (I don’t know if that’s what happened here, but that’s my guess)

Here’s what I told these contacts when they asked how they could avoid a similar debacle:

• If you’re going to outsource your brand personality (which I’m not passing judgement on), then ensure that you’re taking an active role in the process development and the on-going auditing of said process.
• It’s up to you (the brand) to be responsible for anyone and everyone working on your project. Turning things over to your agency and trusting them to avoid disaster is, in fact, a recipe for disaster. This is your brand, not theirs. Ultimately, you’re the one getting judged on success of the programs, activities, and outputs and as such, you have to be involved in the details.
• Ask to see the process with your own eyes. Watching your agency contacts struggle to show you how things work behind the scenes or watching them quickly and efficiently post content will tell you more than you’d ever get in writing. Documenting process is easy, sticking to it in real life is really hard.
• Ask your account director for bios or resumes on the folks pushing the publish button. Agencies, more often than not, push the task of publishing to very junior employees (It’s easy, after all… why does a senior person need to be doing it? Right??) whose judgement or experience might not be where you’re happy with. Push back if you don’t feel comfortable with their staffing. Anyone who pushes a publish button on your behalf is inherently a spokesperson for your company. There’s a reason the White House Press Secretary is a senior position. There’s a reason why your company’s lead PR spokesperson isn’t an intern. If you’re going to outsource, make sure you have the right person in the hot seat.
• Demand updates on staff changes. Agencies churn people at a regular clip; it’s the reality of the business, and it’s neither good or bad, it’s just how things work. Require your agency to update you if the person pushing the button or anyone on the content flow team changes. Then repeat the vetting process steps above for their replacements. Just because your account director is awesome doesn’t mean that his/her staff isn’t problematic.
• And lastly, regularly reassess whether you’re truly getting your money’s worth by having someone else push the publish button. In the case of Chrysler, because this mistake happened with a layer of removal between the brand and the content, it was harder for the Chrysler folks to apologize in a way that had any personality to it. It wasn’t an Chrysler employee working on a brand many love and many will defend. Instead, it was from a person who was dissociated from the love, so activating an audience of fans to step in and defend Chrysler is nearly impossible.

(Thanks to Armano for the graphic up top)

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