I just read Gavin's post on using tootsie rolls to bribe upset customers. Completely ignoring the humor behind Gavin at an Amscot, that has to be the most brilliantly laid plan I've ever heard. Follow that up with Marc Andreessen's reposting of a woot.com customer service letter, and well.. I guess I'm just in the mood to wax on the subject some.

Humor is a double edged sword. Too many people think that they are funny who aren't, and when they try to mix in their cheesy jokes in a presentation or an email, the whole thing can fall apart. In the case of customer service, I'd suspect thats especially true. Fortunately for woot.com, they totally pull it off. They know their audience, they know the demographic and they write to it. Simply reading the letter makes me excited to see what the next woot off is, and I don't even know the context in which it was written.

I'm probably not likely to find my self in an amscot (a check cashing type place) anytime soon, but it is an interesting case study. The jest of it is, for those who didn't see the post, is that whenever a customer is made to wait or is otherwised bothered, they slide them a free tootsie roll. I'd love to see the data for before and after implementing that. We Americans love our candy, and it's just enough of a gesture to give us pause. It might cost them ten cents a customer, but how much does it end up saving them? Hell.. marketing wise, here I am writing about it on the internet.

In the case of Emurse, we do our best to hand reply to everything that comes our way. At first, I was super snappy in getting back to folks. 4am and they'd have a response in 30 seconds. When that happens, there is a huge chance that they'll upgrade to a premium membership. There's most certainly a direct correlation. Unfortunately, as we've grown, it becomes much harder to get back to folks as quickly as I'd like. All the sudden, things like standard replies for certain issues and FAQ type answers seem logical. We haven't made the move to that yet, but it may sadly be inevitable. I can't keep spending my weekends on gmail, ya know? The question then is whether or not such a change would affect conversions. Would they be higher, would they be lower? I don't know. If they're lower, would it justify hiring someone to do nothing but respond to emails and blog posts? Maybe.

There's some sort of old fashioned attraction that I think most people share. Something that responds positively to a high level of service. It's a simple acknowledgment that you, as a customer, are an actual person living an actual life. The anonymity of business, especially online, makes transactions all too often boring and stale.

Chris Heuer gave a presentation at blogOrlando where he talked about business becoming personal again. In context, it was specifically about real life social networks and how we're all more tied. Individuals have been impowered through social media kind of stuff. I wonder though, if that mindset, that personal feeling towards business, will gravitate to other aspects of the market? I'd love to see less cost cutting on customer service, and a more human voice out of companies instead.

This was waiting for me in my bloglines this afternoon, I thought it appropriate ;)

Helped Launch Netscape.com

It was June 15th that we put the beta Netscape online. Love it or hate it, we certainly made waves ;)

It was a project I wasn't initially supposed to be involved with, at least, not to the extent that I was. When Jason and Brian took over the netscape.com domain, I was offered the opportunity to go to AOL sort of as a netscape/weblogs, inc contact for Blogsmith. Gavin, Mike and I had been working on Blogsmith for a few months and Blogsmith was a small indie startup still. Moving one of us to the "inside" made sense.

At some point last March, the three of us flew out to meet the Netscape team at the Viceroy in Santa Monica. One thing led to another, and I was asked to be the lead developer for the project through the product launch. The next couple of months were absolutely insane. Kathryn was out in California so I was left on my own in DC and pretty much worked around the clock. We launched the beta on June 15, 2006 and then spent the next month or two cleaning things up. We overloaded the servers, we got hacked, we had less functionality than we initially anticipated, we had scope creep into areas we didn't plan for -- you name it, and we dealt with it, all in a very short amount of time for a project of that size.

My reason for joining Netscape was to tackle the challenge of launching under such a tight deadline. Once things calmed down and things were humming along, Blogsmith happened to be purchased by AOL. I was able to slowly (perhaps without his full knowing/understanding) delegate most everything to Tom (suckah!), and transfer back to rejoin Gavin, Mike and by then, Celly on the Blogsmith project.

I was the first to drop off Netscape I guess, soon followed by Jason and then C.K.. The current team though is absolutely incredible and firing on all cylinders. The developers over there are top notch and working on some amazing technology that will certainly shake things up when its released.

It's been a hell of a year and a half personally, and Netscape is a big part of the story. I'll never forget someone ease dropping on our conversations out in LA, seeing it posted in the Digg comments and then everyone successfully burying it before it gained any strength. Riding segways around Venice with groups of people yelling "Freaks!!" at us and Jason, for some reason, acting like a Robot the whole time. Or discussing the merits of the Viceroy's amazingly delicious bacon with Wil Wheaton. Of course, using the then newly launched Emurse.com to staff up was enjoyable as well ;) (nod to Finke) (yea, I know, a plug.. I couldn't help myself)

I think the biggest lessons I learned was to sleep when I'm tired (oops), how to work with a boss like Jason (notoriously demanding) , script kiddies will always find a way, script kiddies don't like being called script kiddies, when talking to the press you're always on record and most importantly, anything in any amount of time is possible if you have a dedicated and focused enough team. Distance be damned.

Congrats on a successful first year for Netscape.com (the social edition). I absolutely can not wait to see the things planned for the next year. Trey and his team are men amongst men, and Tom's dedication and leadership holds great promise for the entire Netscape brand. Keep it up guys -- NETSCAPE FTW!

UPDATE: I've been quoted in the Netscape article on the same topic, "Happy Birthday, Netscape"

It's one thing when we all take to IM'ing each other while we're in the same room... It's another when we decide we need to have a conference ichat...

If you look closely, Gavin's in all three.



We've been working out of my home office the last few days.. Lots of neat stuff coming on all of our projects. Stay tuned..

Pursuing my traffic logs yesterday, I noticed that someone visited my site from http://www.gavinhall.org/tag/dating/. Once on my blog, they viewed four pages and clicked off on a link to Celly's blog.

From this we can deduct a few things. Whoever it was probably knows that we are all members of an Orlando street gang. We can also assume that they were prompted, most likely out of interest, to click on the "dating" tag on Gavin's blog. And seriously, why not? He might have a goofy cheerful scoobie doo like laugh and suffer from a severe nervous twitch in his leg, but damn it, he's tall.

Anyway, whoever you are Mystery woman, I see your stalking, and raise you technology. My friend needs a lady, and well, I'm a better geek than I am a wing man. So.. here we go.

I started poking around their hostname. Coming from a Sprint DSL connection, it's safe to geolocate the IP address and get the Latitude/Longitude (cable modems are pretty much impossible). Armed with the coordinates 28.5037, -81.3306, we can see that the building is off of S. Conway in Orlando. Looks to be between the Roy and Harmony cross streets. Searching random businesses in that area identifies a few addresses, but nothing great.

Mapping addresses to coordinates is pretty easy to do, but the other way isn't something I know a free resource for. I pulled up Zillow and searched for the area and pulled up a bunch of home addresses. If Google is right in its placement, the building resides next to 4421 Harmony Lane. Google could be off, and that could be the actual address, especially since the visitor came in at approximately 7:30am. Either it's an early morning at the office (what's open early in a building like that? coffee shop, dentist office, all hours b.y.o.b. club), or they woke up from a dream and ran to gavin's blog. A tad bit creepy, but.. at this point, who the hell am I to talk?

Armed with an solid address, even if approximate, I went to the Orange County Appraisers office site and ran a search. From there, manually selecting the parcel next door shows an address of 3221 S CONWAY RD. Searching google maps for businesses located at that address shows.... a bunch of dentist offices.. hah!

Interesting, indeed. Gavin does have amazing teeth, as I'm sure you know, mystery woman. I am prepared to offer a trade -- one date with Gavin for a free dental cleaning for me and my street gang, Gavin included.

E-mail me to arrange the drop off. I'll put him in a potato sack... Make that, two potato sacks.

One year ago today, after speaking briefly with Brian twice on the phone, I quit my job as a contractor on a military project to join my business partner on a little startup project called Blogsmith. I left the office and went straight to the airport to board a plane for NYC. We were up all night coding the parts of the CMS that were slated to be demoed the next day at Winstock 2005. The next day, we streamed the UCF game in the 75 Rock boardroom while Mike passed out on the floor. I went from a government mandated 40 hour work week, to working a 30 hour day. There was no contract, no written agreements and I wasn't even sure there was going to be a paycheck. Gavin and I figured, at best, we had food on the table until February.

The past year has been a great one professionally. First Blogsmith as an independent company, then AOL for the Netscape re-launch, then back to Blogsmith as an AOL property. We wrote Emurse the July before all this started, which admittedly we had to shelve for a bit, but it too found traction. We juggled 3 major projects this year and I've spent more than 75% of the year living out of a suitcase (I just added it up...). I feel as if I haven't stopped since I boarded that plane to New York. It's been a heck of a trip.

Me, Mike, Gavin, and Celly at the bar outside of the Portofino. Missing from the picture is Brian Alvey, Puggles, Christoph, and all of our new AOL friends.

The world is an office. Or at least.. The bar is.