(Un)Common acts of kindness

I cut an old lady off this afternoon on my way to lunch.

And by cut off, I mean merged into her lane with 200 feet of space between the two of us and 200 more feet before the left turn lane I planned on using to get into Starbucks.

It definitely wasn’t the most death-defying act of my horseless carriage operating career, but it was enough to draw a 17 second horn blast from the lady as she joined me in the turn lane. It was 17 seconds. I counted, inserting “Mississippi” between each number.

I nearly laughed out loud when I saw this full grown women, properly dressed, dramatically flail her arms in the air and scrunch her face in a manner my eight month old niece would have a tough time mimicking.

That changed when I realized I was being followed. What scared me most was that I really believed she could kick my ass. (Hey, you weren’t there!)

I went about my business, parking the car in the nearest space, walking into Starbucks, and ordering my usual drink. I even took the time to reload my gift card for the next month. Bea Arthur (oops, I mean the woman), was noticeably determined to pack a punch as she curtly spit out fighting words right at the front counter.

I turned toward her.

I looked at her.

And with all the sincerity of heart, I apologized and let her know I was truly sorry for upsetting her. There was no need to save face in front of an elderly woman and it meant enough to her to follow me into a store.

I figured that would be the end of the matter and I could let you off with a short blog entry, but she went on. And on. (And on.) Getting near to retracting my apology altogether, I cut her off again (verbally) and abruptly reminded her I had apologized, had nothing left to offer, and asked her kindly to drop the matter unless there was anything else I could do for her today.

She blushed a bit, slightly bowed her head and could only come up with, “Thank you.”

I sometimes wonder if apologies mean anything to anyone. Oftentimes, we call other people out on the things we feel most hurtful to us with the hope that the other will concede and say you’re right. What do you do, then, when you get what you want right away? Do you accept your gift as graciously as it was given or do you go right on proving your point (ignoring you are already preaching to the choir)? As people, it seems we put so much effort into getting what we want that when we actually receive the very thing we are seeking, we almost fail to realize it.

Give it a try. Kill someone with kindness and see if it is taken away.

Get what you pay for

There was a line at Starbucks this afternoon.

No news here. A good guess is that there are long lines at many Starbucks locations at any given moment.

The difference today was how long it took to make my way up to the front. I waited for awhile, checking my invisible watch often and tapping my foot anxiously. I was just about to cry “Party Foul!” on the baristas for dragging their feet when it hit me: the delay was coming from my side of the counter.

Of the five people standing in front of me, three had cell phones glued to their ears. (Four if you count Blue Tooth dude, complete with Wild West cell phone hip holster. These holsters, by the way, are the New Millennium version of a fanny pack; but I digress.) Prior to greeting each customer, the barista had to either wait patiently for the phone call to end or try to translate awkward hand movements in an even more awkward game of retail charades.

This may say something about the use of cell phones in general, but I think it says more about what customers have come to expect from the service industry. I think what it says becomes even more apparent when you see one of those callers berating the barista for making the wrong drink.

As customers, we’ve grown up in an environment that has always touted us for being right—-even in spite our shortcomings. “The customer is always right” is undoubtedly retail’s Golden Rule. And to a degree, it’s also perfectly right. Building brand loyalty is paramount to all small misgivings and giving customers what they want in so-called “non-situations” makes both parties feel good in the long run.

But where do we draw the line? (I use the universal “we” to refer to all us consumers.)

We all desire to be treated well for patronizing brands. After all, our cash is helping to line their pockets and receiving it is their privilege—-not their right. Excellent customer service has become a natural extension of any excellent product. You almost cannot separate the two.

When our behavior as customers becomes anything less than courteous, however, and starts to resemble blatant rudeness and whining, we have definitely crossed the line. Before we can cry “Party Foul!” on the poor service we may or may not have received, we have to acknowledge whether or not we ever gave the chance to receive excellent service.

Maybe it’s time to hang up the phones and engage in real conversations.

Bloom where you’re planted

I got the chance to sit down with my friend Brent the other night. Our one-on-one visits are very few and very far between, but my brain would explode with all the magnificent goodies and knowledge I get from them if they were any more frequent.

Last Thursday was no exception. In fact, about halfway through our chat at Starbucks I realized I could (and should) have filled an entire notebook with the things we covered in just a couple of hours. Since I didn’t bother to even bring a pen, I promised myself to at least blog about one major take away from the time.

So here it is: Bloom where you are planted.

At first, I wasn’t sure where Brent was going with this. I mean, up until that point we had been talking mostly about our thoughts on Donald Miller’s (fantastic) new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and how we appreciated Miller’s focus to live life through the lens of a story that’s being told. We’re all characters, Miller explains, and the story of a good character involves something he wants but must overcome something else in order to get it.

What Brent was trying to get at was something we had casually discussed before about my career path and where I was headed. I had mentioned being interested in going back to school thinking it would be a good thing to accomplish.

“Man, that’s a staller,” said Brent.

“A staller? Since when is school a staller? It’s something that helps people move forward, not backward.”

Brent continued to make his case though the lens of story. A good story, he reminded me, is one that cuts out all the boring crap that has nothing to do with advancing the plot. So unless I plan on making a career out of my current position going back to school plays not part in my story and is uninteresting to anyone who reads it.

There’s a constant struggle between the person I am and the person I want to be. The person I am has certain strengths and talents that I just can’t help having and that just can’t help excelling in the places where they excel. The person I want to be, however, can change from week to week as I fall in love with and discover new things, whether it’s music, photography, architecture, activism, politics, or anything else my heart fancies. The problem is that our nature is already in the process of writing the story we’re living, even if we take lots of tangents to get there. Think about the career path and you’ll see a linear progression whether you like it or not—and how you thought it would be or not.

“So just bloom where you’re planted,” Brent continued. “Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, you’ve to shine then and there.”

How much more sense could that make? As long as we plant ourselves into a good storyline and try to bloom in all the places where the plot takes us, we’ll be living a good story.

And that was just a sidebar to the conversation.

Time for yourself

If one thing has become abundantly clear to me over the past few months, it’s that taking time for yourself isn’t just a good idea; it’s necessary. My infrequent blogging during that span is proof in itself.

I just haven’t been giving myself enough time to live life the way I was meant to live it.

And that’s not entirely my fault. Life does happen and sometimes we have to react to the things happening around us. So I do as I do and that’s just how I roll, right?

Well, no. There is something to be said for living flexibly and being able to adapt and react to things on a whim, though I don’t believe that’s the recipe for the good life. Life has to be lived intentionally in order to maximize our time, energy and talents.

Part of living intentionally requires that we occasionally withdraw from the things that put our minds and hands to work. Said more plainly, we gotta take time off for ourselves in order to recharge ourselves.

Sure, go ahead and tape the “Hypocrite” sign to my back. I haven’t been very good at giving myself the luxury of time. I could talk about the new house, how we’ve spent more weekends hosting people in it that living in it, the amount of stuff that has to get done at work, the after-work meetings that seem to come in droves or anything else that seems to take up my time to make excuses for how short on time I’ve been lately.

Yes, we really have had guests stay at our new place more than we have on the weekends since we bought the place in October. My wife and I just looked at the calendar and gawked that we’re booked for the last three weeks in December and the first two weeks in January. I’m definitely not popular, but it sure does feel like it this holiday season.

I normally use this blog to talk about work and internet topics (and the occasional riff on Starbucks) so I promise to tie all that in. Besides, staying on topic is one of the strategies for a successful blog—or unsuccessful in my case.

Creating time for yourself is just as effective in your work like as it is in your personal life. We can easily get caught up with any task that is thrown our way or jump at the opportunity to own a project. Just ask anyone with Responsibility as their number one strength. I don’t have it, but my wife suffers with that curse, err blessing.

So with that, here are a few ways to know if you are not taking enough time for yourself:

1) You think about work at home

This is a no-brainer. If you’re away from work, you should be able to take it off your mind for a while. Yes, we all love what we do but you’d even have to take a break from relaxing in Hawaii in order to spend some quality time with the wife and kids. Since my wife and I work together, this is really hard for us, but we’re working on it.

2) Everyday things start to annoy you

Does going to the gym, taking a shower, shaving heading to church or grocery shopping sound like a drag? These should be as easy as breathing and you’re in a bad place if they stress you out.

3) Your fingernails are too long

This is something I’ve noticed in my own life. If I was to make a list of most important things to do an any given day, clipping my nails would have to be last on the list at all times. It’s unimportant. But if you never get to it and start to walk around like Edward Scissorhands, you’ve got a problem.

4) You hold off going to the bathroom

We’ve all been guilty of trying to finish just one more thing before we make a BM. Then we look up at the clock and see you’ve been holding it for two hours and have to run like a mad man to the bathroom. Nothing pretty about that. If you don’t have enough time to drop a deuce, you’re not giving yourself enough liberty.

5) Your RSS reader has accumulated 300 or more unread items.

Give yourself some time to catch up on your blogs. For some of us, it’s the only continuing education we get so taking time to read them should be top on your list.

6) You can’t remember the last walk you took around the block.

Not sure what your neighborhood looks like anymore? You guessed it, that’s a problem. Get out and be at one with your community.

How Starbucks gave iPhone a mullet

The iPhone has been drifting more and more into the business world since it was first released as the “cool kid’s phone” complete with slick features but no real substance. Where the first generation phone sported no teeth in the way of actually being useful to the corporate world, today’s third generation is a much matured model with Exchange, over-air sync, push notifications and, yes, copy and paste. Finally, BlackBerry users are beginning to find real reasons to make the switch aside from just looking cool.

But now Starbucks is taking the iPhone to a new business level: e-commerce. Yesterday, the coffee giant released its first two second and third apps for the iPhone, including one that allows Starbucks gift card users to track and reload their cards on the go. The other allows users to locate a nearby Starbucks location and create custom drinks for themselves or assign them to contacts stored in their phone. The app will also make recommendations based on flavor preferences.

These might not sound like big deals, but that’s not what’s motivating me to write. Amazon, Chipotle and Target are among a slew of companies who have already made significant e-commerce apps for the iPhone, so this sounds like nothing new.

What’s exciting to me is a new feature Starbucks is testing that allows users to create their drink, which pulls up a bar code that can be scanned right at the register.

That’s right. No more repeating your crazy concoction and strange preferences. No longer will black coffee-drinking guys have to awkwardly call out their wife’s girly beverage. It’s your way, right away but silently.

The new feature is being tested in 16 stores up and down the West Coast, but Starbucks hopes to roll it out nationwide in the future. If it works out, this could be an exciting new way for consumers to shop, bridging online purchases in a brick and mortar environment.This is a boost for Starbucks, but also a major lift for Apple whether they know it or not.

The only problem iPhone faces now is what to do with its new haircut. The phone’s always had a party-boy’s long hair style, but now it’s trimming the front as it matures into a useful, business friendly tool for businesses and consumers alike.

That’s a mullet if I’ve ever seen one.

It’s Starbucks, but not Starbucks

It’s already been reported in blogs and newspapers in the last week, but I find it really interesting that Starbucks is experimenting with localizing their stores. In fact, these new test locations are so immersed in culture of the local community that Starbucks dropped its ubiquity (and brand equity) by ditching its own name and logo.

New menu.

New drinks.

New products.

I, for one, am torn between the move toward a more personalized experience and the seemingly inauthentic masked parade of being something that they aren’t. Frappucinos and mild coffee are as polarizing as they are popular and Starbucks knows they can’t diversify every one of their existing stores to cater to the needs of every local culture.

My hunch is that Starbucks wants to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to playing a specialty coffee house and Wall Street sweetheart. It’s the game of catering to the lowest common denoninator while claiing to be what made you great in the first place.

Either way, the move toward localization is telling of Starbucks’ forecast on the economic future: there’s still plenty of room in the premium market and people are still willing to trade up for a personalized experience.

However, in addition to national adversiaries like McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks has a new serious competitor in the coffee market: the independent cafe. It takes 100 percent all-beef authenticity to win that game and Starbucks has a major uphill battle to convince people that a Starbucks without the name Starbucks really is not a Starbucks.

Did you follow that?

Networking social networks

I’ve noticed lately that many organizations are still treating social networks as separate worlds.

Facebook activity stays on Facebook.

Twitter updates stay on Twitter.

Flickr photos stay put in Flickr.

YouTube and Vimeo videos stay in their profile pages.

And the list goes on.

Last week, I noted the successful campaign I recently put together for Foursquare Connection 2009, but I think it deserves another callout for doing what social networks were meant to do: provide a platform to help people interact when and wherever they happen to be.

The deal is, most people have accounts to two or more social networks. That’s why we see companies like Starbucks with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Be everything to everyone, right?

No. And yes.

No, because just having an online presence isn’t the same as interacting. Opening accounts and posting infrequent updates, photos and videos is simple but hardly passes for an internet marketing strategy.

Yes, because this is where your audience lives online. You could spend a pretty dime creating and maintaing your own social network—but why when there are plenty of free options available that are constantly improving themselves for you?

The trick is to not treat all your accounts as separate entities, but as a single platform. Facebook allows you to updatet your status through Twitter. Flickr feeds photos perfectly into Facebook and Vimeo. Vimeo and YouTube give you the embed codes to every video you upload to publish them on other sites. The number of third party Twitter applications to feed your tweets to any website is ridiculously ubiquitous.

An open API is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?

I’m happy to see mega-brands like Starbucks investing in people to manage their presence in online social networks. However, watching them treat their accounts as individual platforms with different people managing each site makes me think they are missing a bigger opportunity to interact with people on different levels. Each social network is like a different sense (taste, look, sound, smell, feel) and bridging them together is the best way to interact with an audience on every level.

On that note, not all flavors will taste good to your audience. So when your team is sitting down to plan a strategy for social networking (yes, it does require an intentional plan), consider the following:

• Where is our audience hanging out online? Are they even online?
• What kind of content do we have to share?
• What social networks are already available to us?
• How do we plan to add value to the conversations happening in these networks?
• How can these networks work together?
• Can we connect users of one network to users in another?
• Who do we want to assign to keep our networks current? (No, your boss’s 15-year old nephew does not count.)
• Can any of our networks be plugged into our current website?

This is just a start, but answering these questions will open up a huge conversation.

Playing center field

I was having a great conversation with my brother the other day about Starbucks while sitting in a Starbucks.

The problem with Starbucks is not so much the quality of their coffee, their commitment to ethically produced and traded beans, their level of customer service, or even their rate of growth—all of which are actually sound for such a bohemeth of a company. The problem is actually their commitment—or lack thereof—to a position in the marketplace.

Once a single store dedicated to selling the highest quality whole bean coffee by catalog, Starbucks has become the Frappacino blending, caramel drizzling, instant coffee manufacturing, automatic espresso brewing mega-chain that is a lot less focused on the handcrafted quality it once preached. And all for a premium, handcrafted quality price.

By playing to the lowest common denominator, Starbucks works harder to satisfy a mass market than the die-hard coffee connoisseurs that drove the business to the success it enjoys today. Well, at least the success they enjoyed before today. After closing 600 stores in 2008 and 300 more expected to close this year, the company is losing momentum for the first time in its fabled history.

Blame it on the economy if you want or call it a loss of soul, but the real issue has to do with the Starbucks’ refusal to decide whether it is more focused on quality or quantity. By trying to have it both ways, they blatantly snub the people who are truly passionate about coffee and set their prices so high that the fickle mass market can easily squeeze it out of their spending when economic times get tough.

In other words, they’re playing center field when playing left or right will produce more returns.

My unqualified advice? Ditch the bottles, cans, caramel drizzle, fruit juices, instant coffee, powders, food, discount combos and anything else the real coffee lover cares nothing about. Sure, this will tick off a huge number of people who come in every now and then in the summers for their favorite ice-blended drink. But they’re fickle in the first place, remember? The worst thing a company like Starbucks can do is try to commit to a customer base who has no interest in returning that same level of commtment to them—especially when there is a huge audience already crying for their attention.

Doing so is a strategy that only pays off and makes investors happy in the short-run. If Starbucks has a commitment to long-term growth they have to get there by making a commitment to playing the right position—not loitering in the middle.

We (Don’t) Care

One of the many mistakes organizations make is the decision to utilize Web 2.0. The mistake is not necessarily the idea, but rather, in the process.

Take Baja Fresh for example. There is nothing wrong with the idea to attempt a meaningful interaction with customers using a virtual forum; in fact it’s a great idea. But going through the trouble of creating one and not maintaining it is almost as great a slap in the face of your customers than not have a forum at all. The “We Care” message that is intended quickly becomes, “We Don’t Care.” 

 The opposite can also be true. Extending an invitation for feedback can also explode and become more maintenance than you are able to handle. Starbucks recently launched My Starbucks Idea as a virtual comment box. The idea is to create a level of transparency between the customer and a mammoth company that is trying to re-establish itself as warm and friendly. The problem here is not so much the forum maintenance as it is implementing all the ideas that come through — and there are a lot! What happens to bad ideas are even good ideas when they are rejected or just too major to realistically do? Maybe the solution is a free drink coupon or some other “thank you” consolation, though that still does not heal the rejection.

Everyone wants what’s hot at the moment. The real question is whether or not it’s right and relevant for you.