Author: jakehaws

Comcast has notoriously bad customer service. I’ve experienced it myself when I prepared to moved into a new house. I was told we were “all set” with our internet, since the previous owners had used Comcast. When we moved in and couldn’t get the internet to work, it took two weeks for them to come fix it and several phone calls to get a refund for the two weeks we didn’t have service. I think we actually got off easy compared to some of the stories I’ve heard.

Recently, one customer recorded the phone call from when he calmly tried to cancel his service and encountered resistance on the other end from a Comcast rep who basically wouldn’t let the customer cancel his service without a reason. He said phrases like “I’m just trying to understand why you wouldn’t want the #1 internet service in the country.” After several minutes of conversation, the rep finally gave in and canceled the service. The conversation was posted online on soundcloud, which you can listen to here:

After the story went viral, Comcast publicly issued an apology:

“We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.”

The customer who recorded the call, Ryan Block, has stated that he hopes that the recording does not result in a termination but rather a closer look at Comcast’s customer service training and policies to ensure better service.

This is a good example of the public relations challenges that happen in the digital age. Companies cannot afford to have anything less than amazing customer service in this era.

Read more about the story at Mashable.

This has gotten a lot of attention lately for not portraying the Dad figure as an idiot. I think it’s a fun and fast paced ad. I can’t help but be reminded of the Phil Dumphy character from Modern Family (who is often actually portrayed as a doufus but also a super great dad). In fact, they even have a similar home. Perhaps it was inspiration? The product is thrown in last minute and the tie is a little weak (“Being a dad is awesome…. Just like Peanut Butter Cheerios are awesome”) but I think the tradeoff of making this a memorable and spreadable message is probably worth it.

I came across this the other day on Fail Blog. The gist of it is that in ten years time, a restaurant went from an 1 hour customer visit on average (in and out the door) to a 2 hour average visit, due to their patrons constant use of cell phones throughout their visit. It’s a great minder of some the challenges we face as business owners and marketers in the digital age.

This bookstore is opening up in a long vacate and run down building in downtown Provo (just a few blocks from my old business). It’s great to see some creativity bringing to life these old, run down buildings.

AMA Utah Chapter Meeting

Dave Hunter (Halestorm) – evolved into a marketing company that happens to make films- Hallmark

Adam Able (Go Films) – Saints and Soldiers

Marshall Moore

Brandon

Utah Film Commision – encourages outside companies to come in. Offers tax incentives – 20-25 back for every dollar spent on set. resource directory – crew, location database. 39 million in incentives. Geographically diverse – snow, moutains, dessert.

How rich is Utah’s Talent Base? world class production, but not saleable talent (name recognition). Only exists in LA.

Reverse Engineers films – start with who is the audience? What do they want? identify elements that sell (topic, theme, actors, etc)

Built for marketing – star meter on IMDB, financing MATRIX – plug in actors names, topic, etc., assesses risk and determines how much funding.. sometimes actors bail and funding gets reduced or dropped because film is less profitable.

Get a distributor involved early – make posters sooner (and onset) rather than after the fact. Start Facebook and twitter posts, photos and videos on set. audience feels ownership.

Saratov Approach – nervious about topic (with families of missionaires), testimontials why they would feel safe, clips of mission moms reactions. Edgey poster (gun to hear) but safe values.

Channels – TV (local news times), billboard.

social media – mission driven “If you care about this, help spread the word and keep it in the theater longer.”

Wednesday opening: PR, top per screen – made easier to role out nationally.

 

 

I recently came across this awesome cooler, which has some amazing features: a built in blender, bluetooth speakers, built in set of plates, USB charger, LED lights and several other convenient things. The creator put a lot of thought into what people want out of their camping experience and put it into this product. Check it out:

This cooler hasn’t quite gone into production yet. Luckily, the creator has launched a Kickstarter campaign which has already raised over 4 million dollars! I’m excited to see this thing go to market.

In Drive, Daniel Pink discusses what motivates us to perform our best. In the early days of being hunters and gatherers, we were motivated simply by survival (what Pink calls “Motivation 1.0”). As societies developed, we began to operate by motivating people with rewards for performance – the carrot and stick (“Motivation 2.0” or extrinsic motivation).

While not entirely a bad thing, Pink argues that this type of motivation can at times be counter-productive and that we are ready to move on to what he calls “Motivation 3.0” – intrinsic motivation or enjoying work for the sake of work. A prime example of an organization where people are intrinsically motivated is Wikipedia. Thousands of people throughout the world write articles without pay, out of a sense of contributing to the general knowledge of the public. As managers, we need to make adjustments with how we motivate our employees to harness this sense of intrinsic motivation.

To move Motivation 3.0 forward, Pink outlines three things individuals and organizations should focus on:

• Autonomy – The most innovative companies today are more flexible with letting employees control their own projects and workflow. Google is famous for implementing a policy where the employees are able to work on side projects for 20% of their work time. These self driven projects have yield many of Google’s top products including Gmail, Google News and Google Translator.
• Mastery – When we are engaged with what we are doing, we strive to be better and better at it. This requires us to be in the “flow,” which is to say we need to adjust our workload and challenges to match our capabilities. We need to supplement the more mundane aspects of our jobs with a variety of tasks to give context and purpose to what we do.
• Purpose – Many companies are moving towards business models where a purpose is what drives the company and not necessarily profits. One example is TOMs shoes, which, for every pair purchased, donates a pair of shoes to a third world country. This doesn’t mean they are a non-profit; they still make money. It’s just that they have a central purpose that drives what they do, beyond profits. Work becomes more meaningful to employees when they can see a purpose for what they do every day.

Drive was a really fascinating book. I read it none stop over the weekend and quickly finished it. I highly recommend it.

Check out this RSA whiteboard animation of a speech from Daniel Pink:

Also check out Daniel Pink’s TED Talk.

With the World Cup happening, there have been a lot of great new ads. This one is one of my favorites:

Southwest Airlines is known for being a little quirky. One of the things they do is encourage their flight attendants to inject personality into their pre-flight announcements. Recently, a handful of these announcements have gone viral.

This first one is so funny she could be a standup comedian:

This flight attendant got the passengers to stomp/clap a beat while he rapped the pre-flight announcements:

It’s great when employees can take things that are mundane and boring and actually make them interesting. It makes for a happy customer.

How do you deal with negative press? Walmart could have written a response to the New York Times (which no one would have cared about) but instead, they did a fun, clever “edit” of the article the way a school teacher would edit an essay. To some it may seem defensive. It may have even drawn more attention than necessary to the original article. I think it’s brilliant and shows confidence.

Read more at Walmart’s Blog.