So…in case you missed it, I’m breaking up with Delta Airlines:

For many years, I have been struggling with ’settling down’ with an airline that would treat me with the same love I give to it. I would marry Virgin America tomorrow if it would only fly out of Montreal (or even Toronto, because I also love Porter). There really is no other airline that has consistently made me feel like I matter…even when I’m flying cattle class (aka Economy). And to note, this experience with Delta wasn’t the first let down. I had a series of snafus from them (lost luggage that didn’t show up for 1.5 days, multiple missed connections with odd and stressful re-routes, longest lineups I’ve ever experienced even when I checked in at home ahead of time, etc.). I understand weather issues, but it’s how a company responds that matters. And not just how they respond to their business class flyers…their economy fliers may be like me and courting an airline to see if that is where they want to camp out permanently.

All in all, I calculate that I travel between 60,000 and 80,000 miles per year (sorry planet!). Tripit, which I’ve been a part of since mid-2006, says that I’ve traveled 274,469 miles since I’ve been part of the site. That’s about 78,419 or so miles per year. For any airline, I’d think that I’m the kind of customer they’d want to have around. Not to mention that I have a pretty strong following of friends around the globe who look to me for recommendations for travel (restaurants, hotels, flights, etc) because they know that I spend a good amount of time in that area. So besides my own $$ spend (according to my Wells Fargo account breakdown, I spent about $10-15k/month in 2007 on travel expenses – now I usually get it covered), I have a bit of influence over the $$ spend of others who tend to travel.

But here is the thing…I have air miles here and there and everywhere (too many airlines have lost my business) and I really don’t relish the thought of starting all over again. Is there a way to leverage my own portfolio and get an airline (hello Continental? Air Canada?) to start me out with an equivalent amount of miles to my abandoned choices? Or at least ramp me up partway there? I don’t need to be a platinum member to start, but I don’t want to start from nil.

And besides me, I’m sure such a program would be a super enticing switcher for multiple travelers! Imagine this…if you are the airline to come forth with a, “You’ve been mistreated too often at the other airlines. We want to rectify that AND entice you to at least see if we are true to our word by offering you equivalent status/miles from wherever you feel stuck now,” I’d bet you would totally kick ass.

In fact, much like the personal data play that the Project VRM community talks about, why DON’T we have the ability to take our miles with us in general? It seems like another unfortunate silo that locks customers in and disempowers us to switch when we are dissatisfied with the service (which should be how you ‘lock’ us in – great experience!).

So…

1. Any airlines that want to be a taker for my nearly 80,000 miles of travel per year? Caveat: must fly out of Montreal.
2. Anyone want to create a mechanism for customers to leverage this type of data in order to have the freedom to move between airlines when they have been wronged?

I think this could be really powerful.

One of the messages I’ve been lucky enough to be spreading lately is that of questioning the gap between business and human values. I started thinking about this issue almost two years ago, but wasn’t able to quite shape it into the message I needed to get across until earlier this year when I was preparing to give a workshop at Best Buy HQ for the Social Media Club Reality Check Series in January.

It occurred to me as I finished up The Whuffie Factor and was traveling around talking about it, there were parts of my message that were valued by business leaders and other parts that were glossed over. Those that seemed to make people squirm were the touchy-feely ones like Embrace the Chaos and Find Your Higher Purpose, which IMO are the most advanced ones. They require a major shift in thinking from being very traditional business thinking to being very human-centric. For me, this is a no-brainer. It’s key. Businesses sell to humans, why shouldn’t they align with human needs. But what I discovered as I delivered my message is that I seemed to be speaking a foreign language. And not only was it foreign, but it was undervalued. “Where is the 101? Should we have a Facebook page or a Twitter account or both?” “How do we measure ROI?” was thrown back at me like nothing I said had sunk in. I was told by colleagues that my message was too basic. Huh?

That’s when I began to realize that there is a deeper misunderstanding here than the economics of social currency – which is what TWF is all about and I started preaching in 2006. But as I heard more and more social media types describe these social economics (whether they used Whuffie or Social Currency or Social Capital or…), something wasn’t changing: the business approach to online communities. Social capital wasn’t being described as a currency that works differently, but in tandem with market capital, it was being described as a thing to be mined…a justification for a social media strategy. “Look at all of the social capital we can leverage to make more money!” This was so not my intention.

And then the lightbulb went on! I realized that what was wrong with the whole picture was the gap between the underlying values of business:

• Profit
• Process
• Efficiency
• Return on Investment
• Risk Management & Planning
• Maximize Resources, Minimize Waste
• Reliability
• Accountability
• Growth
• Hierarchy
• Competitiveness & Winning
• Dedication & Loyalty
• Control
• Etc.

…and the underlying human values that drive community:

• Compassion
• Generosity
• Connectedness
• Freedom
• Love
• Truth & Authenticity
• Courage & Fidelity
• Charity
• Wisdom
• Stories
• Openness
• Personal Growth
• Beauty
• Etc.

Certainly, there is reason to some of these value-gaps. As business has grown and the ability to reach wider, global audiences has increased, efficiency and process help drive the planning for expansion. And with profitability at the core of all these values, that is necessary. But as businesses started to move into a very sacred space (and I like to compare our online communities to that of the forests of Pandora on Avatar in my presentation), these values begin to poison the very human interactions we have there. All of a sudden, things shift and the things we hold so dear are being ignored (or de-valued “tweeting about what you are having for lunch is so inane!”), co-opted (community members, themselves, becoming ‘personal brands’ or what I call roboticized) or exploited (community sourcing is the process of exploiting generosity). And this is not the direction we need to go in IMO. I believe strongly that, rather than business injecting business values onto our communities to business ends, we really need to turn the tides and teach business how to espouse human values again…or as Gary Hamel writes in his excellent column, put soul back into business. It is human beings, after all, that are necessary to the success of any business (whether employees or customers).

Which is why I DO mind the gap between business values and human values and why this has become the focus of my most recent work and presentations:

As the presentation states, we humans are growing less and less trusting of where we are spending our money and our time (working), but we still desire that connection. No, we don’t want to be chummy with companies, but we are seeking out those brands that espouse human values to spend our time and money with. And that is the key here. It’s not just a nice thing to do, although I believe that without this shift, the world is going to get a whole lot scarier – think the current economic crisis but worse. It’s also a smart business move. There is much more business can learn from the values driving the growth of online communities than where to target the next generation of buyers. Call it a revolution or a paradigm shift or what you will, but it is happening and it needs to be said over and over until the shift is made universally. This doesn’t just make for a better future for humans, but for business as well. Like it or not, we are living in a consumer society and we may as well make it a harmonious relationship.

So, yes, I DO mind the gap and so should everyone else. We spend a great amount of time on connecting, sharing, being generous and creating beauty. This is incredibly valuable and IS making the world a better place. Let’s keep it move in that direction.

[photos by: shutterstock]

Most all of us, whether we notice it or not, spend a good part of our lives in some form of consumer-company interaction. Whether we are shopping for groceries, banking, paying rent, shopping for clothes, picking a movie, buying a book, selling our services, working for a company whose services we are performing for customers or eating at a restaurant. I’m not sure what percentage of our lives are spent on one side of the equation or the other, but I’d guess that a good majority of our time is spent consuming or selling.

And though I dislike the term ‘consumer’, the truth is that in today’s world, that’s what it resembles. It’s transactional, impersonal and more often than not marginalizing. It’s as if it is in the DNA of business to push the limits on how badly it can treat the customer to maximize revenue. And over the years, it seems, that limit has been creeping further down the rabbit hole of customer hell. Pain limits are pushed to a level where the customer *almost* decides the transaction isn’t worth making with the business, but when the customer gets used to that pain level, the business pushes the pain further. And so on until we are so used to poor treatment, the simplest gesture that makes us feel empowered again feels like a win.

With online soapboxes like Twitter, blogs and Facebook, though, the individual has the ability to connect with other individuals to get a better deal, and the bigger the soapbox, the more we are empowered. The only problem is that business has got wind of this soapbox and works strategically on shutting it down.

I was working away at my computer today when my phone rang. I picked it up to hear the friendly voice of a representative from CIBC, the bank I deal with in Canada. “How are you today, Miss Hunt? I’m calling to see if I can help you with the issue you were having with CIBC the other day.” I paused to wait for it, “You know, the one you posted about online?”

Bingo. CIBC is using some tracking software to pick up mentions on Twitter and the blogs (most likely will reply to this post, too) and then saw that I have over 30k followers and that particular rant started a rather large conversation. Because of this, my ‘issue’ was escalated to a personal service department where I now have a personal service agent who I may call at any point with issues. Awwww. Isn’t that nice?

No. It’s strategic. And it’s a lovely and nice way to try to silence me. Like attracting more bees with honey. Or being the sun in the parable about the wind and sun in competition to remove the coat from the man. And the gentleman I chatted with at CIBC was awesome and said he’d relay all of my suggestions to the proper decision makers and gave me his personal number and released some money from the hold, but I’m still not satisfied.

Because, well, I don’t take bribes (#12) even when they don’t look like one. I want change. I don’t want to see change for me, I want to see change for everyone. I want banks to stop experimenting with how far they can push us before we cry ‘uncle’ on their policies and start thinking about how they can help us achieve our dreams with customer-empowering policies. I want business to invest in technology that streamlines and helps the customer experience, not technology that spies on us. I would even go as far as sitting down with executives at CIBC for FREE to understand what the hold up is and to consult with them on improving their system for customers. I’d even connect them to the right talent to implement the system. Hell, I want this so badly I’d even pay for this to happen.

Every business starts facing a decision to make: are we here to serve customers or are we here to get rich? Conventional wisdom, set by standards that are unproven and short-sighted, leads most businesses to pick the latter. But picking customer happiness as the core driver to your business is actually the better way. It leads to satisfaction, loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, efficiency and, ultimately, riches for the business. Happy customers means you spend less on customer acquisition and retention, employee retention and recruitment, innovation (you are more innovative, but use less resources), and operations (happy customers lead to more efficient operations as you, by definition, become more efficient). You’ll beat the competition every time because they can’t figure out why customers flock to you while they have rock bottom prices.

As I‘ve been quoted saying, ‘Designing your product for monetization first, and people second will probably leave you with neither.’ As the market tips more and more towards the whims of the customer, this will ring more and more true. Now is the time for us to use all of the power we have to move business in the direction of customer-centric thinking. It’s good for everyone.

[photo credit: JLMaral on Flickr]

I love disruption, especially when one is disrupting towards a positive end. When there is the ability to disrupt a dominant system that discriminates against people or favors those already in power – such as well, North America – I love it even more. So firstly, to outline what I propose to disrupt:

1. Stereotyping – somehow, even though we examined stereotypes eons ago, the attitudes seem to persist. The problem is that now they persist in more subtle ways. Not so easy to put our finger on it and call it out, which is an issue.
2. Individuality over community – this one is easy to spot and many will tell me it’s a good thing. I don’t think it is. There should be a balance, but if anything, I believe the balance should tip in the favour of community. Many studies have shown that putting community interests first actually benefits the individual more in the long-run. See: Non-Zero and The Origins of Virtue.
3. No-Choice Consumerism – I’m not referring to monopolies as much as I am referring to the lack of choice we actually have in choosing to opt-in or opt-out. I love to shop. Anyone who knows me knows I have a bit of a passion for it. But when I do, I struggle to keep in charge of my own experience and outcome. There are too many situations where pressure, scare tactics, smoke and mirrors and general exploitation come into play while I’m trying to make a decision.
4. Life Inc. – Also the name of an awesome book by Douglas Rushkoff, it’s also the reality of a world of people emulating corporations. I see this all of the time: people concerned about their personal brand, creating an elevator pitch for their lives, choosing friends based on ability to connect to powerful people, creating an image they can never live up to and when it falls apart, they try to sweep under the carpet. It’s emotionless, inauthentic and getting really boring if you ask me. I wrote about it a little here.

There are a few other themes, but I want to move along to the disruptions. Disruptions are unlike movements or protests or even flashmobs. They don’t require a great deal of organizing and you can’t really plan when you are going to perform them. The one thing they DO require is courage because they are about being hyper aware of the moment in which you see one of the above themes playing out and then questioning the theme openly – at the expense of being called a party pooper. But the awesome part of disruptions is that they are extremely powerful. When someone tells a racist joke and, instead of laughing, you say, “That’s not funny,” they will think twice about telling that joke again. So…here are 15 easy everyday ways to disrupt a system:

1. Flip around your pronouns when storytelling, especially where they have been heavily gendered. Refer to a man caring for the kids/doing housework, refer to a woman as the CEO, etc. Not only are you breaking the cycle of bias in the brains of your listeners, you will get their attention. Like Chip and Dan Heath say in Made to Stick, the #2 way to make your idea stick is through unexpectedness.
2. When talking to someone who uses gendered pronouns (or having someone tweet or blog gendered pronouns), gently suggest they read the previous suggestion. OR you can answer back flipping the pronoun if you want to be more subtle. It will make them think about it from that point forward.
3. Look people in the eye and smile at them as you walk by them. Add a nod or ‘good day’ once you get the hang of it. This one is super simple and incredibly catchy. Research has shown that smiles spread.
4. Diversify your examples. Find out what is happening beyond the whositwhatsits in your professional world and educate yourself on the people doing great work at the edges. In technology, it’s me looking at what’s happening in India, Europe, China, etc. as well as what’s happening in Silicon Valley. Bring up these examples in conversations that highlight the whositwhatsits over and over again until people spread it onwards.
5. Call out sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic or any other ‘minority group as stereotype’ jokes, references, slurs or language. This sounds like a d’uh thing, but it’s really hard. Doing so makes you look like a party pooper. But really, the person making those comments should know that they look like an arse. You are doing everyone a favour.
6. Don’t buy products from companies that offend you or treat you badly. Most of us do this already, but sometimes it’s really really convenient. Hell, I have a plan with AT&T. I need to not do that anymore. And I buy from American Apparel, even though their ads make me really angry. I need to stop that, too. It’s inconvenient, but important to send the message through not spending our money to support bad companies.
7. Take the time to talk with people with vastly different opinions. This is really hard. I usually get about 5 minutes into these conversations and want to scream and run away, but persistence (and patience) pays off. The first step is to stop trying to get them to listen to you and listen to them. Find a point of connection. There is usually more than one of those. Hear them out. Understand where they come from. Believe it or not, we usually want the same things, we just disagree on how we get there. Once the defenses are down, you’ll find great solutions together and inform your own opinion.
8. Take the time to get to know people with vastly different experiences of the world. This always blows my mind. I learn WAY more from having conversations with people who don’t fit the ‘mainstream’ experience of the world than I do from bestsellers.
9. Start taking people to task who talk about new media marketing in the same way Mad Men used old media marketing. If I see another new media guru use Don Draper’s creative style as the ideal to uphold in marketing, I’ll scream. No, that ‘carousel’ episode is still the epitome of how things ‘were’ (creating some sort of illusion to sell a product) and does not represent really connecting to one’s customer. The real power in online communities comes from the ability to connect with new friends and old on a human level. Emotional. Real. It’s less about how a company can co-opt and exploit that and more about what companies can learn from this. (more about this at a later date)
10. Admit to your mistakes. Openly. Brutally honestly. And take responsibility for them. Then learn from them.
11. Get to know your neighbours. Even the crab apples upstairs who tell you to turn down your bass. Spend time getting involved with your neighbourhood associations, events, etc. Reach out and create a supportive community. This is something else I need to do. I find this really scary. I don’t know why. The benefits outweigh the potential rejection.
12. Don’t take bribes. What I mean by this is don’t take a free voucher or delivery or whatever a company offers to you alleviate the pain they caused you with your transaction with them. Instead, ask for them to fix the problem. Take them to task and offer to give suggestions that may help them improve their service. For instance, I ordered a microwave from Future Shop and then got totally dicked around by their awful call in center. When they figured out I had >25,000 twitter followers, they contacted me offering all sorts of things, but I refused. I said, “I don’t want you to fix this issue for me, I want you to fix this issue for everyone.” Who knows if it’ll be effective. I haven’t shopped there since. I told them to call me when the call center is fixed and I’ll try them again.
13. Leave product reviews. There is a reason why sites like Yelp, Chowhound and Amazon are so popular. It’s because of people like you and I leaving product reviews. I rarely buy anything – even offline – without checking the Amazon reviews. Yelp and Chowhounds are my personal foodie guides wherever I go. And in Montreal, I found this amazing list of restaurant reviews. Generous people sharing their knowledge everyday makes the world an easier place to navigate.
14. Demand your data. Why? Because if this awesome group has their way, the future will be driven by the customer and then you’ll want all of the content and reputation and identity and history you’ve been depositing around the internet for years. It will be valuable for your experience and for YOU to leverage your own power. So, click on that little ’suggestion’ tab or ‘feedback’ button and say to the networks you are making more interesting with your contributions: “Hey, have you thought about giving me the opportunity to export my reviews/tweets/photos/connections/shopping history/preferences/etc to use elsewhere?” The more requests they get, the more they’ll be pressured to do this.
15. Use all the tools available to you to call out injustices and bad experiences. The beauty of the web is that there are literally hundreds and even thousands of others who have experienced similar situations. If you get pissed enough and have enough momentum, you can even start to do something about it. The United Breaks Guitars videos did an amazing job of getting dozens of people to share their experiences (and also refused to take a bribe by asking United to make a donation). And as I wrote here, even spreading the word through blogs and tweets makes a difference.

Of course, these small steps are only icebreakers to apathy, but we all get so busy that starting somewhere that fits in our schedules yet is bigger than a tweet is a good start. And each of these small disruptions packs a big punch. Good disrupting!

It must suck to be the middle-man today. Everywhere they turn, it’s bad news. Democratization this. Circumventing that. There was a point not that long ago that the middle-man provided great value. The record companies brought music to the masses. The media created channels for the news to get through. The Blockbusters of the world housed thousands of movies for people to rent. Telephone companies laid the lines for us to connect with one another around the world.

But now these middle-men are our modern villains – using every desperate trick in the book to hold onto customers while we find creative ways to go around them, go straight to the source and sometimes just do it ourselves. There is a mass disintermediation going on and every company that occupies the mediator position is at risk. Now it’s the media, the labels and the distributors of what has become digital content, but I doubt this will be the last frontier of democratization. I’m sorry to say it, but they are bringing it on themselves.

Why?

1. They forgot that the point of being the middle-man is, well, to be the middle-man. They made it about themselves. The musicians and the audience were forgotten in the shuffle. The news and the readers stopped mattering. The fact that people just wanted to connect via phone ceased to be part of any business plan. Profits became bigger than the people they needed to connect.
2. Convenience, which was once the advantage of using a middle-man, turned to inconvenience. Frustration set in when the middle-men became gatekeepers and ‘deciders’. They became greedy. Power hungry. And they reminded everyone that they were going to play by the rules that they set. Period.
3. They misread the early signs of democratization as a threat rather than an opportunity. All could have been forgotten if they had just realized that their impetuous children were neither impetuous nor children, but instead were giving really great cues on how they wanted things to work.
4. A false sense of scarcity is not a scarcity at all. Creating a business model on charging premiums for something in abundance (or potentially readily available) is bound to crater.
5. They seriously underestimated the intelligence of the public. Maybe they believed their own lies or maybe they just thought we couldn’t think for ourselves. We may be lazy from time to time, but we aren’t stupid. And we don’t like being belittled.

And so the scare tactics have been amplified, the sob stories are rampant and the battle has turned to an all out war. People getting sued at $16,000 per song for illegal downloads and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) are some of the obvious examples, but everytime I look at my phonebill and see the newly minted extra charges, I can’t help but feel like my phone company is punishing me. I don’t want to see journalists out of work. I don’t think it’s their doing that the media companies are in trouble. But the layoffs are breaking my heart.

And it’s only really beginning. We are at a turn. A shifting of an era. Entirely new business models were created during the Industrial era. These business models were created to help manage, distribute and promote to the masses. When everything was local, we did this through relationships. It was easy to manage on our own. But the internet allowed for inexpensive and simplified management, distribution and promotion for all. Farming these things out only makes sense if it truly brings value such as: convenience, money saving and peace of mind.

I can only imagine where it goes from here. What else is going to be disintermediated as we gain more tools of control and simplification? Banking? Law? Public services? We’ve pretty much lost the travel agencies. Authors are self-publishing and more tools are available for distribution. Amateur movies are cheaper and simpler to make and are getting more attention. People are finding ways to go direct to farmers for their food.

It’s nothing to be mourned, but it is something to be heeded. Eras come and go and change happens. I read somewhere that only 1 of the original Dow Jones companies still exists and I’ll bet it exists because it looks nothing like it did back when the Dow Jones was born. (That would be General Electric – thanks David Damore!)

There is new intermediation needed. It has to do with helping us cut through the noise and get to the signals and it needs to be individual-driven. Things like Project VRM should be at the top of everyone’s radar. Finding new business models to further democratize badly managed industries is also a good bet. Either way, I’m looking forward to the changes and I’m open and ready for them.