BrandingFire Blog

In the July/August 2008 issue of Fast Company is a good article on the new visitor’s center at the Gettysburg National Military Park. Setting aside personal feelings you may have about the new center (some I know don’t like it), the article does a great job of explaining why designers of the center went with the choices they did.

• Basically, the goals were to:
• Increase tourism revenue for the town
• Increase average trouist stay in town
• Engage younger visitors
• Better inform visitors about the battle and the soldiers who fought it
• Increase revenues

The article correctly states that historic sites are having an increasingly difficult time vying for the attention of our increasingly attention-deficit citizens. Americans are used to microwave cooking, fast food, 30 minute entertainment shows and 5 minute thrill rides. Taking day-long tours of sites where something happened decades or even centuries before they were born is almost too much to bear.

“While a movie studio can roll out Indiana Jones sequels, there will never be a Gettysburg 2: Robert E. Lee’s Revenge. The best they (historic sites) can do is to modernize their presentations.” (from the article)

“Most people aren’t visiting to learn. They want to have an experience, to be immersed in something.” Elliott Gruber, vice president, Gettysburg Foundation

You can read the full article here.

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Image via Wikipedia

Over the past two weeks I’ve witnessed two product rollouts (from the consumer side) and learned a lot from them - especially how many things can go wrong. The most unfortunate part of it is that a lot, if not most, of the problems could have been avoided… or at least contained. You may be wondering what this has to do with history. Every day, across the globe, people are rolling out new history books, movies, music and artwork. Historic houses, museum and organizations are rolling out plans for events and products. Maybe these experiences will help you prepare for a more successful rollout.

Firefox is a popular web browser and users across the globe have been anticipating the release of version 3 of the software. Someone came up with the great idea of feeding & building that passionate community. They set a goal to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. They declared June 17th as Download Day. A nice website was built that hosted community forums, featured event promoters who were the most active, collected commitments for downloads from hundreds of thousands of people and featured a world map that showed how many people had committed to the download from each country. People around the world were planning download parties and the Spread Firefox site was the central planning place. This was great work on their part and when midnight came and June 16th slid into June 17th, the Firefox world was full of… really ticked off people. And lots of them.

You see, the globe has time zones and while the Download Day folks did announce the time it would start (10am Pacific Time), they didn’t do it very prominently. Most people just saw the date, June 17th, which was featured and promoted heavily. And June 17th in Tokyo, Japan and June 17th in Mountain View, California, USA are not the same. Potential downloaders stayed up till all hours of the night and early morning waiting for the promised Download Day and then trying to figure out what went wrong when it didn’t materialize. To make matters worse, when 10am Central time came, the Firefox download page changed to “Download Firefox 3 Now” buttons. But when you clicked the button, it took you to a page to download the old version of Firefox 2. In fact, this error wasn’t corrected for at least a couple of hours. Downloaders were mad all over again. At last, the problems were ironed out, download links were corrected and more than 8 million downloads of Firefox took place in that 24 hour period. But how many angry people just decided to download the software another day?

The second rollout was Verizon’s introduction of the new LG Dare. It’s a strong contender against Apple’s iPHone (Verizon’s strongest yet) and Verizon customers were already excited about it, even though Verizon didn’t appear to be and kept it hush-hush. In my opinion, Verizon had already made a mistake by not organizing and feeding the growing community of people looking forward to the phone. Despite LG and Verizon being very mum on the subject, photos and reports on the Dare leaked out and each lead ratcheted up the excitement. Verizon could have done a lot to really build this excitement, but they pretty much ignored it, only releasing (as far as I could find) one vague press release about the phone. In fact, it’s on sale date wasn’t even announced until June 25th, the day before the phone went on sale in Verizon’s online store. It won’t be in physical stores until early July. To complicate things, Verizon didn’t even inform their own staff very well about the phone. The answers customers got on when the phone would be released and the price varied wildly from Verizon employee to Verizon employee.

Figuring the online store would add the phone around 12:01 am on June 26th, hundreds, if not thousands, of Verizon customers stayed up hitting refresh on their computers to make sure they got their order in. I was one of those people. 11:30 - refresh (just in case they were early). 12:00 - refresh. 12:01 - refresh. 12:05 - refresh. 12:10 - Refresh! 12:15 - REFRESH!! 12:30 - Argh! It still wasn’t showing up in my phone upgrade options online. I went to a forum dedicated to the LG Dare and, to my horror, I was a post that said the Dare was available online… and had been for nearly an hour! What?!?! I completely logged otu and then back into the store. There it was. I went to the upgrade page and… no Dare. I attempted to call customer service, but they had closed an hour before the phone went online and wouldn’t open again until 6am. (Note that the website doesn’t tell you what time zone. And they have offices across the US.) I tried the online sales consultant, only to receive a terse stock notice that said the live online sales area had closed for the day and I would need to try back tomorrow. About 1:30 am I finally gave up and resolved to call customer service the next day.

The next morning, too early and grumpy from the lack of sleep, I called customer service only to be told that their system hadn’t updated yet and the phone wasn’t actually for sale yet online (despite my having seen it). They told me I would have to try again later or go to a store. (Huh?! A store? This customer service rep told me the phones woud be in store this same day.) Eureka! I decided to just go to my local Verizon store and buy one. Too bad that info was wrong. Good thing I checked before hopping in the car and wasting my lunch hour chasing down the phone. I called customer service again and was told that they were updating their system now and I should be able to buy the phone soon. This was crazy. I then contacted their online live customer service. They told me that they were having technical problems that were preventing exisitng Verizon customers from buying this phone and they hoped to have them resolved soon. How soon? We don’t know. I was so frustrated. This had now been going on for more than 12 hours. As a last desperate attempt, I connected with the online customer service again and got someone else. I asked if they were having technical difficulty with people upgrading their phone online. (I wasn’t sure I believed the story.) I finally got someone with a brain who said, yes, there was a problem. But if I would call telesales, they would process my upgrade order right away, with full online discounts. Thank goodness. Someone was finally implementing a work around solution! I finally got my phone ordered, but I know from online communities that many others were still stymied throughout the day.

So, what is there to learn?

1. Plan for things to go wrong. They will.
2. Pay attention to the details, like time and date. They matter.
3. Communicate with your audience! A lot of the frustration and anger experienced by Firefox and Verizon customers could have been alleviated by posting simple situational updates and solutions.
4. Make sure a problem-solver is around. Verizon closing customer service an hour before the rollout was a really, REALLY bad idea.
5. Find a solution or workaround for the problem as quickly as possible. Verizon should have had the alternative ordering method going within an hour, if not minutes, of the problem coming up. It was a simple workaround until the problem was resolved. If you have a problem, fix it. If you customer has a problem, fix it FAST!

“A person is smart. People are stupid.”
- Agent K, Men in Black

Several years ago, the “wisdom of crowds” became a popular concept. The theory follows the old adage that “two heads are better than one”. Today, the phrase “wisdom of crowds” has fallen out of favor with many people, but the theory is still sound when implemented in the right circumstances and manner. For instance, it works well with reader ratings and reviews on Amazon.com or Travelocity.com. It works well because the feedback informs a user and then they make a final decision themselves.

Where “wisdom of crowds” fails is when it’s utilized as a decision-making tool. Essentially, it was seen as an inclusive way of making decisions. One of the ways it was instituted was to let everyone air their opinions on the matter at hand and then a decision was made in a way that incorporated those opinions and “validated” everyone’s input. The trouble with this “decision by committee” is that it’s a breeding ground for a virus known as Groupthink. Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During Groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking.

There is validation in seeking other opinions, from both people experienced in your subject and those who aren’t. Fresh outlooks are great to solicit. But eventually, someONE must make a decision for the process to move forward. Decisions made by multiple people tend to be muddy and lackluster.

A creative director I know recently went through this “design by committee” purgatory. She needed to get a new company logo, business papers and website designed and approved in 8 weeks. A daunting task under any circumstances. But in this case she had to run EVERYTHING through a committee of company executives and every one of them had to have a say about every little item and every change thereafter. The continual nitpicky changes back and forth and lack of a leadership decision frustrated the creative team and nearly broke their relationship with an outside agency they were using. After nearly ending up with ugly, in-distinctive art the creative director finally pushed through something decent by sheer force of will and a bit of subterfuge. However, the silliness of the decision process took seven weeks and obliterated the roll out time line. Everything had to be rescheduled and the executives grumbled that they couldn’t figure out what the delay was.

Decision by committee is a terrible way to get things done. Take other people’s opinions into account, but then task someone with being the decision-maker and get it done. Besides, everyone’s got better things to do with their time than to site in committee meetings.

Do you have an opinion on this? Share it and leave me a comment!

Growing up I remember my father telling me that it was OK to make mistakes as long as I learned from them. But in the process of growing up I learned to be risk averse. It was easier to do what I knew was safe than to take a chance on failing. Failure is at best embarrassing and at worst painful.

Luckily, a few years ago a mentor drove it into my head that failure is not just an option, it is required to work for him (which I did). We’re human and we’re going to make mistakes if we’re doing anything at all. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not really doing anything. And if you try things that are out of the ordinary or push the edges, you’re going to fail…big time. The key, as both this mentor and my father taught me, is for your failures to be non-fatal and that you learn from them so you don’t repeat them.

Just remember, you’re more likely to stumble and fall if you’re running toward something than if you’re sitting in one spot. You’re also more likely to actually get somewhere.

Do you encourage your team (or yourself) to accept failure?