Category: Business

Surprise and Delight

“Surprise and Delight” was one of the mantras we got trained on at Starbucks. The way Starbucks sees the concept, it was about doing what you needed to in order to exceed customer expectations — remaking drinks to make sure customers were happy, handing out samples, etc. When it’s done right, it’s a great way of building customer loyalty.

Someone over at wine.woot must have been paying attention, because today I checked my mailbox and found an envelope containing a bumper sticker and a little card that invited me to send them a photo of the bumper sticker in use to get even more “cool stuff”.

I’m at best a casual wine.woot customer. I’ve only bought from them twice. So I was definitely surprised to find a gift from wine.woot in my mail. And you know what? It worked. I certainly would have bought from them again, but I’m definitely going to be more diligent about checking the site regularly for their latest offering. I’ll probably put the sticker up somewhere; maybe on my car, maybe even on my laptop. And I’m blogging about the whole thing to boot.

Multiply that out by all the other customers woot sent this to, and for the price of a run of bumper stickers and some postage, that’s pretty good marketing. And good for customer loyalty too.

Bravo, wine.woot. Well played.

In The Spotlight

So today, some news broke about a big disconnect between the organizers of the Palm PreDevCamp and Palm.

I have no idea what really happened and I don’t want to speculate. I’m more interested in what can be learned here.

As someone who spends her time working with passionate user communities, I’ve been wondering tonight, what would we have done? If it had been our team, would we have made the same mistakes, different ones, or would we have gotten it right?

You like to think that when push comes to shove you’ll do the right thing. Still, anything involving humans and communication has a chance of going off the rails. Even with the best people and the best intentions you can still end up with a bad outcome.

There’s no way to know until you get there. The best you can do is prepare as much as possible and hope that when it’s your turn under the spotlight, you’ll rise to meet the challenge.

UPDATE 5/23: Looks like Palm is responding well. Kudos all around.

One Year Later

One year ago today I started working at Adobe and my life completely changed.

I have 100+ pieces of e-mail backlogged in my in-box, and more projects to work on than hours in the day. There’s a user group meeting tonight, which means a 12+ hour work day today, and my dinner is likely to be cold pizza, consumed while sitting on the floor of a conference room.

You might think I’d be hating my life right now. You’d be wrong. I’ve never been happier.

It’s a good thing that I had no real clue what I was in for when I walked in my first day. If I’d known, I think I would have been too scared to move. With no expectations, I could just stand under the firehose and take it all in without anything getting in the way.

And what a ride it’s been.

I can’t find the scene on YouTube & don’t have time to rip it from my DVD, but there’s a snippet from early in Season One of “The West Wing” where new White House employee Charlie Young is watching his first Presidential TV taping from the back of the Oval Office:

Charlie: I’ve never felt like this before.
Josh: It doesn’t go away.

I know the feeling. 🙂

Time has never flown faster than it has this year, and if I’ve ever worked harder I’ve blocked the memory out. (Actually, that’s not true. The summers I worked 1-week summer stock theater, I worked harder, but that was only for 3 months at most.)

I’ve also had the privilege to work with a team of intelligent, funny, hardworking colleagues both inside and outside Adobe. A better or more passionate community you cannot find. I’ve found a home here, I think, and I hope it continues for a long time to come.

I know that some day I may look back at this blog entry through the eyes of an older, more burned-out self and feel sad, disillusioned, or cynical. It could happen. But after a full year of full-throttle, it’s not even close to going away.

I am a lucky, lucky girl.

Thanks to all of you who’ve been along for the ride and made it so worthwhile.

Social Media Food for Thought

Matt Haughey’s recent observations on Social Media marketing:

… instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products …

Exactly how often the world will beat a path to your door without at least some marketing is open for debate, but it’s absolutely true that there’s only so much marketing can do if your product is not making people happy.