Back (way back) in high school, my friends and I engaged in a deep philosophical discussion about cafeteria fare. Mainly, is it ‘MACARONI salad’ or ‘macaroni SALAD’?  A consensus was never reached, and the mystery of macaroni remains to this day … until I went to lunch a few years back.  I ordered a chicken salad.  The server, more aware of the choices on the menu, asked “you mean the salad with chicken on it, or the stuff with mayonnaise?”.  Hmmm.  This, of course, begged the question “what IS chicken salad?” What do you think of when you think of chicken salad?  Well, then I got to thinking – is there a difference between chicken SALAD and CHICKEN salad?

Now the macaroni mystery was back with full force.  Of course, this time around, there were two versions of salad (whereas with macaroni salad, it’s simply macaroni salad, though some may argue whether it should include hard boiled eggs or not).  I had my theories on the subject, but to confirm my suspicions, I asked around.  Aside from people thinking I was crazy, they also differed on the matter. To some, CHICKEN salad was the salad with chicken on it (grilled or fried) -the emphasis on the adjective ‘chicken’ describing the salad. Chicken SALAD had the emphasis on the adjective ‘salad’ to describe how the chicken was prepared.  For others, the noun was the emphasis (chicken being the main ingredient in the stuff with mayo, therefore deserving of more attention).

I still don’t know which is which. Or, for that matter, if it’s MACARONI salad or macaroni SALAD, but it brings up a good point.  People often perceive things in different ways without even thinking about it.  Sometimes it takes silly people like me to point it out and totally confuse and confound everyone.  In this case, if we all agree to call CHICKEN salad the salad with chicken on it, then the servers will never have to ask.  Or, we can think of another name for one of them to avoid confusion.  We all need to keep that in mind when we name things or communicate with people.  Sometimes context is key and a little extra verbiage describing the subject at hand is necessary. 

The other night, my wife was inquiring about making an appointment somewhere and went online to find a location. I’m being vague about what type of appointment this is because I don’t want to call out the specific website that she encountered, because it had an incredibly horrid usability error. And when I say horrid, I mean it was so bad that it actually prevented a conversion from occurring. Was it a technical error? One would think so, but the error message it gave made it seem intentional.

I took a slice of a screen shot so you could see the error first hand. Check it out…

“Please check spelling of your last name” ????

What? Are you serious? Now this isn’t a login page where it’s possible she was entering an incorrect user name. This is the page you get to after clicking through from a PAID search ad on Google. Above the form it provides an offer and says “Register Now for a Free Consultation”. Clearly the purpose of this website and form is to convert visitors into customers. If this was a technical error, wouldn’t it have said something different like, “Please make sure all fields are completed”? Plus, how are they to know if we had spelled our last name incorrectly or not? Our last name could be Kashingtoniktoriley. Would that be spelled wrong? Oh, okay. Maybe they don’t think we spelled it wrong. So what do they want us to “check the spelling” for? It’s not like we are even using illegal characters. Even if we were, the error message doesn’t say that. It just asks us to “check” it.

Okay, rant over. But this is just a really funny case where had someone checked the site, not to optimize the usability, but at least make sure it was simply usable, the business could be cashing in on many more conversions.

As we get ready to embark on our annual company trip - this one is a cruise to the Bahamas - I thought I’d recap a few of our recent trips with some photos. I’ve been told before that what happens on a cruise stays on a cruise…but I found a few photos that weren’t too incriminating.

See you when we get back on the 27th…

2006 Cruise:

2005 Cruise:

2004 Ski Trip:

2003 Cruise:

Ten years ago, I discovered a new food at an Icelandic breakfast table, Vla — a kind of yogurt you can drink. Packaged in a boxed milk container, Vla was a smooth yogurt that came in several flavors. I loved Vla. It was so unique. I had never tasted anything like it before. Invented by the Dutch, the Icelandic people had been drinking Vla for years… it just hadn’t quite reached the US markets. Several years after tasting Vla, I stumbled upon a similar product in an Israeli convenience store. It was designed to give you a cool boost in the desert heat. Unlike Vla, this product was packaged in individual plastic containers — perfect for any desert traveler on the go. Years after that, I found a similar product called Dannon Light and Fit in an American grocery store. Packaged in a small bottle, shaped like an hourglass, Light and Fit was a smooth yogurt drink designed for athletic people who wanted a fast and healthy snack.

Sometimes the greatest new things aren’t new at all — they’re just reincarnations of old things in new places. I think of that often as I watch our fascination with User Generated Content grow. People love to talk about User Generated Content like it’s a new thing in media — a phenomenon that shocked our industry, becoming an overnight success. But here lately, I’m starting to wonder whether it’s really new at all.

Consider reality TV shows like American Idol. On Idol, everyday people get to compete for fame. Everyday people create most of the shows’ content. And even if they aren’t brave enough to get in front of the cameras, everyday people decide on what they see by casting votes. There’s a TON of participation on Idol — more votes were cast for that show last year than any presidential election.  And there are so many other shows like it. Survivor, The Real World and even Jerry Springer are no exception. In each, most of the content is generated by the user. Radio talk shows like Howard Stern work the same way. People love to call in and give their perspectives. And that’s the show — real people giving real perspectives. One time, I was listening to an Atlanta radio station where some guy in his mid 20’s was planning a special date… with his step sister. They’d been separated before college but were recently reunited. The guy thought it might be wrong to date his stepsister… but in his words, “She’s smokin’ hot!” You can’t imagine how many people called in with their two cents on that. That show was so funny I missed my exit on the way to work.

User Generated Content is a new phenomenon for the Internet, but is it really new to media? Or is it just a reincarnation of a very old concept – one that has been successful in so many other media forms? Some would say that Reality TV and radio talk show participants have less control over content when compared to Internet contributors. After all, producers can modify tapes and recordings to give shows their own spin. But ultimately, don’t web administrators sensor online contributions in basically the same way?

Every time a new and successful idea is introduced online, I ask myself whether it’s new at all. It’s usually not. A single good concept can be reborn in so many new places — becoming an overnight success time and time again. I’m not a fortune teller, but I believe I’ve got the power predict the next big thing in any new media form. The past and the present are my crystal ball. 

You can direct a user experience with your vanilla left nav menu and breadcrumb trail, but are you ballsy enough to manipulate the user experience web 2.0 style?  Enter Etsy.com, an unlikely frontrunner in the cojones contest of innovative ecommerce and navigation.  The site is “your place to buy and sell things handmade”, a marketplace for the “You” generation of the web.  Fueled by the DIY craft movement, Etsy has become a quick success story as an ecommerce portal because of two things:  (1) focus on relationships and social networking, and (2) the user experience. 

Unlike many other “social” sites, the experience for the user is painless – sublime even.  Apps with names like the “time machine” and “geolocator”, well, you know you’re in for something different.  Based on seller profiles and time stamp information in Etsy’s database, they have made creative visual navigation based on the ways that people sort data. 

What does this mean for your site?  Depending on your average user persona, it may not mean much.  (I don’t expect to see walmart.com implementing this style of navigation anytime soon.)  But for larger sites, like the Amazons or eBays of the world, it could mean rethinking how people interact with the site altogether.  When you get right down to it, it’s just all about what makes sense for your user.  If that’s breadcrumbs, good for you.

Last week the top internet retailers in the country convened at eTail 2007 to learn what their peers are doing, listen to vendor’s pitches of new products and services, and to commiserate about the state of their industry. In my post from the conference last week I had commented on the recent lack of innovation in online shopping. Over the last three years merchants have moved progressively towards what has become a fairly homogenous online user experience that caters to the same mode of browsing and transacting as each other’s websites. Imitation may be a form of flattery, but if form follows function, then in the case of online shopping, banality follows form.

Online shopping has in reality been reduced to online transacting. Seek this one thing, find that one thing, maybe compare prices, then check out. 1 + 1 = 1.1 = something less than the whole. The building of desire? The premise that shopping should be engaging? Maybe at next year’s eTail. Or the year after that. Or never. Maybe it’s time to accept the fact that this is the business of ONLINE shopping, and not online SHOPPING. Maybe it’s about the medium and not the act?

That’s what it seems like today. The onerous burdens of the internet retailer to streamline technology and operations, to market the site in search engines, to keep their heads above the latest calendar-driven buying surge have driven innovation to the back of the “to-do queue”. Innovation - isn’t that the job of the next technology vendor? A slightly faster search tool, a multivariate test platform, a 0.05% improvement guaranteed or your money back technology elixir. All fine and well. But what if the industry could look out further than this month’s results? What if they could rise above the day to day grind? What is missing? I say at a high level it’s a sense of fun.

Fun? Yes, Fun! Not laugh out loud entertainment, at least not for most types of products. But how about at least a sense of discovery, of desire, of something a level above the pablum of the competition? If there are three basic pillars of online retailing, they would be operational efficiency, marketing efficiency, and conversions. A few retailers have achieved an operational advantage over their competitors via technology, fulfillment processes, and scale. Some have achieved an advantage of driving qualified traffic to their websites through search engines and affiliates. But who has led in conversions? Ask most industry experts and they will point to conversion ratios in order to rate the winners. Click to Product to Cart to Checkout. Mission accomplished in their book. They will pepper that user with some email campaigns, a discount here and there and wait for them to come back. Maybe they will type in the URL this time and save the retailer $1.50 charge from Google.

But what if shoppers came to your site because they really wanted to? What if they experienced something unique, engaging, even dare we say it: fun? There are several ways to express this concept in different terms. What if shopping online was more social, more collaborative, more educational, more engaging? What if ONLINE shopping became online SHOPPING. Or what if someone threw caution, and e.e. cummings, to the wind and capitalized both words, “ONLINE SHOPPING”, and created something worth seeing, doing, and doing again?

I think something is coming to help make online shopping fun. It just isn’t coming from retailers. It’s coming from outsiders like social networks where products can be promoted by buyers’ peers. Its coming from magazine publishers who are going to attack with a vengence. They will not bog themselves down with operational concerns, they will not seek to compete in the traditional online marketing channels as internet retailers, they already have traffic, and they will build more through word of mouth and the nework affect. The good ones will get stronger and more powerful at a very quick pace. These sites will not hold inventory, they will not plow money into google keywords, they will send their qualified, engaged traffic to the online shopping sites, for a fee. Their margins will be in the mid double digits rather than the high single digits of transactional websites.

So when People Magazine realizes that their InStyle website should not look like this but should look like this then users will flock to the site. The magazine will be useful online. It’s already engaging to users offline. Conde Nast is beginning to get it and they have a bevy of content to expand this vision. Scripps gets it and has a powerful stable of multimedia content plays to bring to bear.

These are the companies that help build desire, that help create buzz, that engage their customers through their multiple channels of content. While online retailers are homogenizing their shopping experiences the here-to-fore dormant giants that help build desire, and the new age social networks that have created communities that spread desire are preparing to close in and take the high ground. The high ground of traffic and lead generation. And retail shops will pay, a lot, for that traffic and for those leads, and thereby label themselves as low margin impediments to purchases rather than the high ground of creating desire and providing true value.

It might take a couple of years for this to play out. But I see this as something that will play out. And major retailers with a sense of initiative (and budgets) have a tight window to decide on whether they will invest in content, features and partnerships to bring the “fun” back to shopping. Or resign themselves to being transaction vehicles with an ongoing operational focus.

Do you remember playing the telephone game when you were a kid? I don’t remember it being called the telephone game, but we used to play it around the camp fire. (It’s also called Chinese Whispers.) You’d start by thinking of a phrase, like “Bobby went to the store to get cheese.” Then you would whisper that into the ear of the person next to you, and they would do the same thing until the message got all the way around the campfire, and the last person whispered the message to you. Without exception, the message you would hear was something like “Mommy don’t want to sneeze!” Then everyone would laugh when you told them the original message, and everyone would remember hearing something slightly different.

Why is that?

Ever feel like a software or website project you’ve worked on is like that?

How about pulling your hair out after delivering a product just to hear your customer say “This is not what I asked for!” When you know you sat in that big conference room with 20 other witnesses that heard that client ask for the very thing you delivered! Outrageous. The nerve of some clients. How dare they describe what they want in a way that could possibly lead to you misinterpreting what they thought they said.

What is the deal?

Why have so many of us gone through the exact same experience?

Some popular answers:
“The requirements must have been terrible.”
“The developers didn’t read the documentation right”
“The client doesn’t know what they want.”

In truth, these all have some merit. However, no matter how much documentation, how good the developers and how articulate the client, we still go through it. I would like to propose that the real culprit is a concept that one of my favorite doctors told me about: the distortion of information. Sounds simple right? It is. This concept is defined by Wiio’s Laws of Communication, which you should check out, they are actually pretty funny. This concept is actually what makes the telephone game I described at the beginning so much fun.

The basic concept at play is that information is bound to get distorted when one person passes it to another person, and it gets exponentially worse the more people that message is passed between. If you want to experience this, play the telephone game, or get paid to experience it and get involved in software development.

What do you do to fix this problem?

There is no absolute fix. It’s a lot like LT on the football field: you can’t stop it, you can only hope to contain it, and if you don’t find a way to contain it, you will lose.

When I meet someone who defines superior customer service, I never forget them. And I’ll never forget Mr. Hutchens. Mr. Hutchens is a real estate agent working in the Atlanta area. There are dozens of reasons why I believe he delivers perhaps the highest quality customer service in real estate that Atlanta can offer. Since we’re all in the business of customer service, I thought I’d mention a few.  

1. He LOVED his job and it showed: There’s nothing more infectious than working with someone who absolutely loves what they’re doing. Mr. Hutchins was made for real estate. He cherished every minute of it — from meeting his customers for the first time to finding them their dream home and beyond.

2. He worked as hard for us as he would for a close friend or family member: There’s nothing better than getting VIP treatment. But my husband and I were not VIPs — we were average home buyers buying in an average Atlanta price range. Mr. Hutchins gave us special treatment anyway. He made us feel like important clients.

3. He took ownership of problems: During our purchase, we experienced a few problems that were not caused by, and could not have been prevented by Mr. Hutchins. Often, these problems were caused by other vendors. Mr. Hutchins was willing to address those problems – even though they were not his responsibility. He treated the home buying process holistically, rather than treating himself as one module in a series of modules that may or may not get it together.

4. He maintained professionalism in times of crisis:  Sometimes you can’t see quality customer service until you’re in a crisis. At that point, you’ve usually bought into the product or service to some extent so you’re stuck. Mr. Hutchins remained professional when problems arose. When his limits were tested, he exceeded our expectations.  

5. He frequently gave us feedback: There are a lot of steps to home buying. Mr. Hutchins gave us feedback upon completion of each step. This gave us confidence knowing that we were on track and that the deal was moving forward. 

6. He never told us how hard his job was: Mr. Hutchins didn’t get too personal. Sometimes, people in customer service like to tell you about their problems. They think that it will make you understand where they are coming from or make you more tolerant when things go wrong. But the truth is, it just makes you feel uncomfortable. Mr. Hutchins never put us in this position. 

7. He listened to us: Some real estate agents have a vision of where they think you need to be in the housing market. Not Mr. Hutchins. He listened carefully to find out what we were looking for – a house priced significantly under value in a neighborhood that was rapidly appreciating. He found us just that.  

8. He continues to follow up, to this day: Mr. Hutchins is monitoring our neighborhood closely. He sends us updates on appreciation of land value and nice notes to make sure we are still happy. 

I think we can learn a lot from Mr. Hutchins. We have so many customers. We serve our clients. We serve the vendors that our clients ask us to work with. Internally, we also serve each other. Delivery of superior customer service to all parties is vital to our success. According to Fred Reicheld, there’s only one question to ask when you want to identify superior customer service. That is…

Would you recommend this person to a friend or colleague?

Mr. Hutchins, if you ever read this post, you should know that my answer is absolutely.

I am attending the eTail 2007 conference this week. The first session of the day just wrapped and as I take a chance to go to the Starbucks in the lobby and hop online I have a chance to see the battle weary but happy faces of the ecommerce merchants around me. It’s Valentine’s day and for several of these merchants its the first chance to rest after the back to back to back holiday build up from Thanksgiving, to Christmas through today. Talking this morning with Mrs. Fields Cookies I see first hand the work that ecommerce merchants put in to fulfill their customers requests. Their busiest days were over this past weekend, both Friday and Monday in particular. Last minute shopping has always been popular, toss in shipping constraints and the fact most people shop on workdays from the office computer and an internet retailer can generally map out their busy days in advance. The cookie impresarios at Mrs. Fields mentioned that they see their peak volume generally between 11am and 2pm. The times around lunch makes the cookie hearts grow fonder it seems. Valentines day represents their second busiest time of year and today they can finally sit back and see how their cookies translated into dough.

As per the conference itself: The kickoff speech to this year’s conference was particularly relevent. I say that partly because it was a great presentation and partly because it echoed a recent post in our blog. Chris Anderson, the Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine explained that niches are the new mainstream and that retailers needed to adjust. I couldn’t agree more. Richer and more engaging content presented in new and compelling formats is vital for ecommerce merchants who want to seperate from the pack and get results. Stephanie Acker-Moy from Hewlett Packard followed that speech up with one about using content development to enhance the brand experience. By blending rich content and feeds together to present customers with fresh and compelling content a retailer, or any website for that matter, can stay relevent while also being able manage the new level of content effectively.

One overriding subtheme to this event, echoed in several conversations I had with other merchants is that the operational requirements of ecommerce are still overwhelming. There is the feeling that the day to day issues of updating content, dealing with logistical issues, taxes, returns, inventory, merchandising etc has sapped a lot of the creativity and joy from the long time ecommerce vendors. This has perhaps been the reason that ecommerce sites have mostly evolved to look the same, with little innovation the past few years. Its lulls like these - where innovation gets curtailed to deal with operational issues - that present opportunities and rewards to those who do something different. I think the ecommerce space has been in their current innovation lull for too long. I have some sense of where things are going next. For that you will have to wait for my eTail wrapup post but I would like to hear your thoughts on whether there has been a lull in innovation in ecommerce and what will shake things up in the coming year.

I was passed this link recently to a site with a list of the top 25 Web 2.0 applications. There are some really good ones here, a few of which I learned about at the recent SoCon07 conference this past weekend.

One that’s not mentioned is MyBlogLog which I recently signed up for (see my so far unimpressive profile). It’s a great site that essentially lets people see who is reading which blogs…well, I’ll spare you my version of what they do and share the opening paragraph in the About Us section of their site:

“You probably know a ton about your favorite bloggers - what they think about the subjects they write about, maybe some of their work and life history… you may even know what toothpaste they use. But how much do you know about all the other people who read their blogs? And how much do they know about you?”

Sites like this will at least help us with the problem that continues to grow daily faster than we can make progress against it, namely that there is so much content online these days that its next to impossible to keep up with it all or determine which content should rise to the top of our list of things to get to when we find that free time that never seems to come.

Ok, I really only brought up MyBlogLog so that I could mention a hilarious bit from the greatest show of all time, Arrested Development. Sure it was canceled but let’s face it, genius is very rarely appreciated in its own time.

(watch the video)