All posts by Evan Hamilton

Banning Madonna from your business? THAT’S community.

Community

After Madonna recently texted throughout an indie film screening, the famous Alamo Drafthouse made an announcement.

Alamo, a fantastic theater chain (Which I’ve been to!) that serves food and beer during movies (much like Oakland’s Parkway Theater), is well known for it’s strict values about not about disrupting movies. Founded by and patronized by film lovers, the Alamo has famously kicked people out for texting during movies (warning: mature language):

Why? Because this is a value their community cares deeply about. Their extreme adherence to this rule builds a much stronger emotional connection with their customers than anything else they could do.

But banning Madonna? Especially the Madonna who just released an indie film? Isn’t that a bit extreme? Won’t that hurt business?

Absolutely not. This is community-building.

Alamo is sticking to their values – taking them to an extreme, even – and it’s going to make their fans love them even more. For every hardcore Madonna fan who might swear off Alamo there’s going to be 3 passionate filmgoers who will make the extra effort to patronize Alamo.

Is this PR? Sure. Madonna wasn’t in an Alamo Drafthouse; they didn’t have to comment on this story. But it’s community-driven PR. It’s building a story not around whatever’s hip, but around what really, emotionally, honestly resonates with your community. As others have said, community is the new PR.

Don’t go middle of the road to avoid insulting people. Stick to your community’s values and back them up, even if it means doing something extreme like pissing off a major celebrity. It’ll make your fans love you (and bring you return business) even more.

Setting expectations can literally change attitudes

Customer Service, ,

“There were plenty of complaints regarding baggage claim time [at the] Houston Airport. They reduced the average wait time to 8 minutes, well within industry standards. But the complaints persisted.

So the airport decided on a new approach: they moved the arrival gates away from the baggage claim area. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. It resulted in complaints reducing to almost zero.”

Via FlightComputer

This is the same thing I wrote about for UserVoice regarding listing response times. People expect speed. Sometimes unreasonable speed. You can try to hit expectations, or you can set entirely realistic external expectations and then outperform them…which will utterly delight your customers.

Fall in love with the journey, not the destination

Life, ,

illustrationThis article rings so true. Falling in love with the journey is the right way to reach success.

“If you look at the people who are consistently achieving their goals, you start to realize that it’s not the events or the results that make them different. It’s their commitment to the process. They fall in love with the daily practice, not the individual event.”

I’m good at half of this. I like inventing things and making them work and figuring out how to optimize them.

Where I fall down is the follow-through. I’m stoked about inventing something but once it’s reasonably established I’m not as interested in following through with the minutia that makes it a long-term success.

I attribute this to two things:

1) Weakness of character. Honestly, I just need to get better at following through.

2) Delegation. Previously I had very few resources in terms of delegation, so any detail-oriented follow-through fell on me. I’m happy to do anything, but trying to balance company-wide strategy and editing HTML emails is hard.

I need to fall in love with making the minutia happen. I hope with a fresh attitude and a passionate team I can do this.

Start a dialog before you NEED to

Community

This is a fantastic article on why the lost art of schmoozing led to the government shutdown.

The key lesson: if you start a dialog with key parties before you need to, you’ll be able to deal with the rough patches better.

This is why we build customer communities instead of just having faceless users. This is why we build company culture instead of just a business. This is why lunches and coffees are not a waste of time.

5-star rating systems are useless

Community

Randall Farmer was one of the first community managers, before it was even a “thing” and long before it was a “hot job”. This experience, along with his intense interest in furthering our craft, means he has a lot of great knowledge to share.

One of the most fascinating things I’ve ever learned from Randall was about 5-star rating systems and the J-curve. When he worked at Yahoo! (back when working there was a “hot job”) they implemented 5-star ratings systems for Yahoo! Sites. They hoped this would help users identify the best sites and avoid the low-quality sites. Instead, this is what they saw:

j-curve

With one exception, the average rating was 4.5 out of 5 stars. Wow, that’s great content, right? Nope. That’s the J-curve.

There are some major problems with 5-star ratings systems:

  • Generally people only rate things if they love them or hate them.  If you love the dustpan you bought you might bother to go online & give it a 5-star rating. If it broke immediately you’ll angrily seek out the ratings system to punish it with a single star. But if it was just ok? You’re not going to bother adding a 3-star rating.
  • People are lazy. If you’re highlighting the top-rated items on your site, you’re unlikely to ever get ratings on the other items. Most folks aren’t going to take the time to go rate items on page 2.

(The exception in the above graphs is Yahoo! Autos, because users were rating each other’s work. They knew these ratings would have an effect and keep the quality of the Autos community high, so they took the time to give accurate ratings. Yelp would be another good example of this.)

Takeaways:

1) Don’t use a 5-star rating system to try to determine quality of commodities. Try simpler systems, like thumbs up/thumbs down or positive-neutral-negative.

2) Try to find a way to get users invested in giving multiple, accurate ratings.