Meanwhile Back at the Ranch

Been meaning to get around to an item from last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal on marketing in cyberspace, which contained a pearl of wisdom that makes most CEOs very, very nervous—allowing your company to be publicly criticized on your own Website.

Columnists Tom Hayes (a former VP at HP and Applied Materials) and ABCNews.com Contributor Michael S. Malone refer to the concept of “clouds,” defined as “organic, self-forming and often self-governing communities of interest [on the Internet]. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Frito-Lay and Harley-Davidson use their clouds as feedback loops to get better faster by obtaining good, timely, often brutally honest customer insights.”

Hayes and Malone correctly point out that most companies are simply not ready to place themselves in the clouds, because they provide your most dissatisfied customers with megaphones for the airing of grievances.

“In the old model,” write Hayes and Malone, “customer-service departments aimed to placate or jettison disgruntled customers. In the cloud model, the idea is to cultivate and reward them. That’s not an easy transition.”

Amen.

But there’s an important point here, best summarized by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, who said, “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

The cyber-curmudgeons who take the time to gripe about your company on the Web do so not because they have lots of spare time and no friends but BECAUSE THEY CARE.

Listening to criticism is difficult. Listening to criticism in a global forum can be excruciating. Especially when you have fowled up. A single transgression becomes a public flogging. Not fun.

Criticism, in most cases however, is not punishment. It’s advice that you can and should use to improve your products and services.

Most critics (read: your customers) just want to be heard and would be over the moon if you actually took steps to solve the problem. Embrace their input, acknowledge their value to your business and do your best to fix whatever is broken.

And after you’ve fixed the problem, tell them (and everyone else reading your message board, blog or other online forum) that you’ve made things right and encourage them to re-experience your (improved) products and services for themselves.

The upside, (enhanced perceptions of your company’s concern for customer service, resulting in greater customer loyalty) far outweighs the (temporary) pain of a good flaming.

Or to pull a quote from the movie Drugstore Cowboy (and I’m paraphrasing), “there’s nothing more life-affirming than having the crap beat out of you.”

Great post from Seth Godin today on how The New York Times has really blown it.

Although most of us are geniuses after the fact, I can say with certaintly that Seth is a genius every day.

I recommend reading the post, the basic gist of which is that The Times had an opportunity to leverage its brand to take advantage of new technologies and generate new revenue streams, but instead chose to defend their traditional business model and focus on printing ink on dead trees.

Aside from the tragedy of Jennifer Aniston appearing on the cover of the Sunday Magazine, the real tragedy for all of us is that we’ve lost The Times as a unifying cultural beacon in the Web 2.0 world.

It’s bad for PR and advertising types who make their living by placing meaningful content in highly-read (or watched), highly credible media outlets where we have the ability to influence great numbers of suspects and prospects.

And while many marketers do their best to defend and protect the old ways of doing business, the smart ones will seek ways to leverage not only those influential media outlets that have exteneded their influence to the Internet, but also find ways to directly engage and interact with prospects and customers in a manner that not only drives sales, but also facilitates a higher level of customer service and engenders long-term loyalty.

I have to admit that I’m an analog guy in a digital world. I own an eight track tape player and still read my newspapers printed on dead trees instead of online.

So it’s been quite a blessing for me to embrace the brave new world of Web 2.0 through the eyes of my esteemed colleague and friend, Tobin Truog, who gave me some love in his blog last week.

Toby’s been helping me figure out how to leverage LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other sites to gather and disseminate information that will help me help my clients better.

Which brings me around to why I got into this line of work in the first place.

All of us, to one degree or another, are trying to understand the world around us and to be understood. That’s sort of the central theme of my life.

At Nation Ranch, our purpose is to help our clients better understand what their customers want and need, so that they in turn can provide higher quality products and services.

Once they have this understanding, promoting their brands (and making themselves understood) becomes much easier.

We’re all up to our eyeballs in new technologies. And just because you can update the world on the minituae of your life does not mean that you’re marketing effectively.

Which is why we still use the coffee cup as our logo and why we still focus on the old-fashioned way of doing business. Whether you’re sitting down face-to-face or responding to a comment on your message board, if you’re not talking TO someone—truly understanding and being understood—it’s all just a bunch of noise.

In 1992, I moved into a funky little neighborhood in Chicago called the Ukranian Village. Mostly Polish, with a nice mix of Latinos and everyone else (read: me). It was a great neighborhood, and I had the perfect little apartment upstairs from a woman named Anya, who owned the building and would sometimes give me a ride down to the Loop where I worked.

I really loved that little apartment on Hoyne Avenue. There were three or four great townie bars not too far from my place, I had my own little neighborhood grocery store and the people were a funky mix of working class ethnics, artists looking for cheaper rents than what they could get in Old Town or Wicker Park, and up-and-coming PR execs making not much money.

I hadn’t thought about that place until today after I’d moved the last of Nation Ranch’s belongings into our new space at 505 Walnut in the River Market.

Maybe it’s the unseasonably warm fall weather, or the numbers of cool-looking people walking around, but I felt that I was home again.

Give us some time to settle in and we’ll be having a little open house to unveil the new world headquarters of Nation Ranch.

In the end, he died in his sleep curled up inside his mother with a crooked smile on his face.

We should all be so lucky.

He was five weeks short of his due date, and even if he’d been born his chances were not good.

Our son, James Henry, was Trisomy 18 and living with this knowledge has been a heavy burden to bear these past several months.

We’ll deliver him tomorrow, have him cremated and bury his remains in the garden at our church.

Thanks to all for your support during this difficult time and the difficult times that have preceded it.

BP