“The nerd ego is a dangerous thing”

It’s not all that surprising that Stack Exchange founder Joel Spolsky felt compelled to take to the company’s blog last week to ask people to make the site a “welcoming, friendly place.” It’s not going to happen, but it’s not a shock that he would write it.

In his post, he decries the misbehavior of “old-timers” who denigrate “newbies”, but still says that despite half the questions at SE being closed with snarky comments, it’s a “remarkably friendly place.” I guess when your office is in a Manhattan high rise, every other person being nice is the norm.

There are a couple of reasons why Stack is getting the reputation it has for being a site for “smug jerks” (Spolsky’s term). The first is that the doors are open to anyone without any requirement that an individual be responsible for what he posts. As our colleague, Mark Barbir, wrote last week, it’s the difference between the public pool and the country club. Registration keeps the anonymous trolls at bay, at least a little. Anonymity breeds smug, snarky jerks.

More important, though, is that the Stack Exchange sites are exactly what Mr Spolsky and his partner, Jeff Atwood, said they were going to build (even though they might not have foreseen some of the consequences). Before they wrote any code at all, they did their best to damn the state of Q&A sites, one in particular. We can’t complain; it’s a tried and true marketing strategy to create pain points where they don’t exist, and then create a product to mitigate them, and to a certain degree, we deserved it. If those pain points include required registration, a paywall, and ten years worth of success, it’s going to take some barely accurate vitriol and a well-read blog to be successful.

The flip side to doing all of that is that when they then created their sites, the sites reflect the personalities and sensibilities (such as they are) of their creators. Stack has their prejudices, and as staff was added, that became the culture of the site. It’s also the culture of the company; developers make decisions to set a default based on what they think management wants (for example), and those settings will influence user behavior. The systems they created promote the people who agree with them, and the rules they wrote and enforce, both verbal and programmed, are what they want. The people who use the site may have their own ideas, but what they do and how they do it is all dependent on the infrastructure Messrs Spolsky and Atwood conceived and built. It’s the site’s DNA.

And that’s why Mr Spolsky’s initiative is going to fail. He may, in his heart of hearts and soul of souls, firmly believe that by telling everyont to be nice they will join him in lockstep fashion — but in the comments, he can’t even get Mr Atwood to join him in trying to stem the tide:

To be 100% crystal clear:

Total civility is required on Stack Exchange, one hundred percent of the time. It is not optional. Ever. EVER!

If you are rude to other users, the offending content will be removed. Do it enough and YOU will be removed. With extreme prejudice. We’ve done it before and we will do it again.

Are we clear on that? Yes?

Stack isn’t really a Q&A site; it’s more like an A&Q site, which, perhaps, is why there are a quarter of a million questions that aren’t answered. There’s no attempt, nor even an intent, to help people arrive at an understanding; it’s all about getting the perfect answer to the question someone might have — even if that person doesn’t really know what the problem is, or if that person thinks his problem might differ slightly from the one posed. The natural give and take of a conversation among teacher(s) and student is verboten, “moderated” into the ether by the “smartest guy in the room”, more interested in adhering to a set of arbitrary rules than in building the relationships necessary to nurturing a community.

There’s certainly a market for that; anyone who has been to a big box store anywhere has been cut off by someone who is solely interested in getting in, getting his/her stuff and getting out — a trait endemic to a society with roots in the sanctity of the individual. The community exists only when the individual needs it, and exists only to serve the individual.

Frankly, Mr Spolsky and Mr Atwood can have it. The people who want to use Stack all the time are their kind of people anyway.

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Community management matters because it’s the most reliable way for customers to tell a company what they think. Surveys would be fine if the people writing them didn’t have a bias toward the company (as opposed to the customers) and its goals. Companies invest in it for that reason alone, though; having a clear path to providing feedback is a lot more reliable than waiting for the end of Q3 to find out that the product you released in Q1 stinks.

In my experience, though, most companies who employ “community managers” screw the pooch, for several reasons:

1. There isn’t really a community to begin with. Communities are complex and dynamic; their needs change and mature over time. A company’s focus is strictly on its mission and its relationship with its customers within the context of that mission; simply put, it’s not likely that Ford gives a whit about what brand of coffee its customers buy or whether the local college basketball team won last week. They may have a whole bunch of people who pay attention to what their customers say wherever they say it, but that’s not a community; it’s a forum.
2. Anyone who manages a city of any size will tell you that you might be able to manage the governmental bureaucracy to a large extent, but you can’t manage the community; it’s going to think and do what it does whether the “manager” likes it or not. Online communities are no different; community management in the best sense is the practices of keeping the discord to a level that is tolerable, and determining what’s important to the whole community as opposed to the noisy rabble that shows up to complain — without making things worse.
3. Most people who do “community management” are really people who know something (maybe even a lot) about social networking; they’re adept at using Twitter and Facebook and can probably come up with a few blog posts every week. They make sure to say “thanks” when someone says something nice about the company (even if it’s not terribly relevant to the company’s mission) and make sure the company line is out there when someone complains. They’re usually hired for a set of skills that is easily defined, but the ability to be an evangelist for the customer(s) isn’t one of them, frequently because it’s a job they’re promoted into, and again, they have a vested interest in keeping their jobs. No company’s upper management wants to hear that the company is perceived to be a necessary evil (even the people from Microsoft and Google, at some level, collectively cringe when they see some of the vitriol to which they’re subjected).

The best community managers — strictly my opinion, mind you — are from the community. They know the product or service the company sells inside out; they know its great features and its FUBARs. They have an empathy with customers because they are customers themselves. They know who the people in the community are, and why their voices are important. At the same time, they have enough information from the company to be able to explain and diffuse complaints.

And there’s the rub. Usually, a community manager doesn’t know what the bosses are thinking. They have no idea why — because no one wants to tell them — you have to reach all the way behind the screen to find the on/off button from XYZ’s laptop — so when eighty people post in a discussion thread that it’s the stupidest design ever, all they can do is wonder. Companies don’t make it easy for someone to deal with that stuff, let alone exploding batteries or transmissions that die 150 miles after the warranty expires or software that won’t work if your computer has virus protection. And if the community manager does know the bosses’ thinking, it’s because he’s a shill for them, and not an advocate for customers’ needs.

How to define and measure? Good luck. If the company makes bad decisions — the Apple Newton, for example — then nothing any community manager says or does will stem the tide of discord. Junk is junk; the best a company can do is hope that it is prepared to deal with making mistakes quickly and appropriately, as opposed to making excuses.

Ideally, a community manager comes from the community — meaning that there has to be a real community there in the first place, and that s/he has the respect of the company to the extent that s/he can influence decision making on behalf of the community, and that s/he has the respect of the community to the extent that they trust him to be an evangelist on its behalf.

You won’t have to take your shoes off to be able to count the number of online communities that have managers worthy of the name.

This article originally appeared as an answer on Quora.

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Such is Klint Finley’s piece the other day at Wired.com on Jeff Atwood, who resigned earlier this year from his position as the CTO of Stack Overflow. When we read it, we thought there were enough inaccuracies that it warranted a response, so we dutifully logged in (using our real name and noting our relationship to Experts Exchange) and posted the response below. Jason cordially offered a bet that Wired wouldn’t allow it to become visible (he won), which in and of itself says something about a magazine/website that wants to be as respected as some of the others in the Condé Nast stable; perhaps the comment below wasn’t as insightful or profound as those Wired did approve. We know we didn’t violate their comments policy, at least as it appeared the day after we posted.

So we’ve decided to help Wired out; we’re even going to use the tags they did, along with a couple of others, just to make sure they know we’re thinking of them.

Mr Finley,

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/roundup.html

You’ll notice two things:

1. That the sites that took VC money (including Experts Exchange) and then expected eyeballs to translate into sufficient advertising revenue to pay the bills all failed. Paying those who answer questions failed. The only business model that has been successful until now is the subscription model.

2. That despite the best efforts of Messrs Atwood and Spolsky, Experts Exchange remains profitable, let alone merely viable; as a volunteer, I appreciate Mr Atwood’s drawing attention to us, and affording me and my colleagues the opportunity to correct some of his and Mr Spolsky’s misconceptions and errors in their vitriol about EE, since neither has ever taken the opportunity to actually participate at EE to any degree.

To offer some corrections to and comments on this article:

1. Experts Exchange is not behind a paywall for the casual visitor coming from an external link like a search engine. EE does require that people asking questions pay, but they’re the ones who need the answers, so that doesn’t seem unreasonable; after all, Wired wants people to pay to read its columns too. EE also allows people to answer a couple of questions a month and receive their full subscription at no charge; I’ve been a member since the last century, and have never paid a cent to use EE.

2. Free will always trump paid, and there will certainly be people who are truly appreciative of the solutions they get without having to pay for them. We’ve found that people are a lot more interested in actually solving their problems when they have a vested interest; a small subscription fee seems to do that. At EE, if the asker doesn’t get responses, we have systems to help him; at StackOverflow, the question winds up in the dustbin (currently sitting about 260,000+ questions with no answers). So it begs the question: is Mr Atwood’s site about helping people? Or is it just about being free for anyone to use?

3. New and shiny always trumps established and working. The most frequently asked question following Steve Jobs’ death was “how will Apple keep coming up with new stuff without their visionary leader?” To be honest, we’d have been disappointed had a site developed by people with the stature of Mr Spolsky and Mr Atwood didn’t “zoom past” Experts Exchange. It certainly wouldn’t have done a lot for their credibility if it hadn’t.

4. One of Mr Atwood’s selling points, when starting his site, was to feed off the “people create content and don’t get paid for it” smoke screen. According to Mr Rackis, he had to actually pay to get the t-shirt from StackOverflow; Experts Exchange sends them out for participating.

5. The big to-do about the Creative Commons license is disingenuous at best. Experts Exchange’s terms of use grant EE a license to use the content, but ownership still remains with the person who posts. Further, Experts Exchange is aggressive about pursuing those who would copy a member’s content for use elsewhere as a protection for our Experts; since when is protecting the original work of one’s members a bad thing?

6. There’s a difference in philosophy, but making a game of answering questions was new in 1996, when EE’s founders built it; it wasn’t new in 2006. Mr Atwood’s game is different; his site is Arena Football compared to the Premier League. His site is about The Perfect Solution; ours is about helping people get to the best solution for them. He hates duplicate questions and conversation; we embrace both, because there are rarely simple answers to problems someone doesn’t understand. His sun rises and sets on programmers (or sys admins or whatever), who are unfailingly correct; ours is on the processes of discovery and education. His site is about programmers feeding each other’s egos by pumping up each other’s answers; ours is about pumping up Experts’ egos by having people say “thank you”. Diff’rent strokes.

Finally, we truly do appreciate Mr Atwood’s efforts. Building up SE from nothing to where it is now is a great achievement, and we wish him well in his new ventures.

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The second camp is the techie types who seem more interested in how it was developed, how it works (as opposed to the results of what can do), and what it’s going to take to stop it. That’s a two-edged sword; it’s a set of very short steps from finding and describing the flaws in (for example) an operating system or a browser, to exploiting those flaws for less-than-savory purposes, to implementing them as policy against other peoples perceived as threats (and sometimes, considered allies). Pick a technology; if it wasn’t developed with the goal of using it militarily, it didn’t take long for those who assign military budgets to pour gazillions of dollars into it.

Technology goes through stages: discovery/invention, implementation and refinement, and mastery. At that point, the question goes from being “how can we use it?” to “how can we use it to our advantage?” to “how can we use it against enemies?”.

The third type is all for it. Certainly among western tech writers, one can read the wink-wink approval (if not outright endorsement) between the lines describing the sophistication of the programming. What’s a little unnerving about all this support is the preponderence of evidence that political leaders are frequently mesmerized by the apparent mysticism of technology; simply put, it’s so far over their heads it might as well be magic (and the fact that there are ungodly sums of money in the industry has to get their attention too). It’s not so much that the US can’t win a cyberwar; it’s that they don’t know where to start thinking about preventing or defending against one. And of course, there’s the whole security bureaucracy in Washington.

Nobody wants to say it (except Eugene Kapersky, that is), but it was predictable that eventually, the people who are supposedly the good guys would start employing the same tools and tactics as some of the bad guys to do bad things in the name of being the good guys. It is the nature of nations, and the nature of leaders of nations. Our species’ history is the tale of wreaking havoc on our neighbors, and the only part that has changed is that instead of throwing rocks or wielding swords or firebombing cities we’re now on the verge of causing nuclear power plants to melt down — or worse.

It’s not even all that hard. Consider which is going to bother you more if you live in, say, central Texas: that there’s a virus in the computer network at Fort Hood, or ongoing problems with the traffic signal control system in Dallas? It’s a pretty good bet that Fort Hood’s systems are pretty well isolated; a virus in the systems used to manage the base’s finances would be a problem, but uncontrolled roads in the Dallas metro area for anything more than a few minutes would have people in an uproar the size of … well, Texas.

What’s really scary is that highly destructive technology has always been very expensive; despite what we’ve all seen in movies, it takes a lot of effort and resources to develop weapons-grade plutonium, intercontinental missles or even a moderately effective air force. But with time, research and a device that cost whatever you spent for the device you’re reading this on, someone out there has already figured out the mechanics of wreaking havoc on major systems in major metropolitan areas. Stuxnet showed just how easy it is to disrupt a nuclear plant; it’s going to be a lot easier to mess with New York City’s wastewater treatment plants.

And after that, it’s only a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.

This article first appeared in the Experts Exchange newsletter.

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We wrote, in our last issue, about why we thought Facebook’s IPO was going to turn out to be a pig in a poke, and after it was summarily hammered by the market — and followed with the predictable filing of a lawsuit by people who thought they’d buy something for $38 or so and sell it a few days later for twice that (see: LinkedIn, among others) — we were initially chuckling at the comeuppance received by some pretty greedy people. (Hats off to our friend Vic, who told us first thing Tuesday morning that he had shorted the stock and made “beer money” by doing so.)

But upon reflection — and about the fourth review of Facebook’s “roadshow presentation” — we have to admit that we have a newfound respect and admiration for young Mr Zuckerberg, who, we think, has pulled off a practical joke the likes of which his former classmates at the Harvard Lampoon would never have dreamed. He suckered everyone — and didn’t even have to try very hard to do it. All he had to do was tell the truth — most of it anyway — and let a lot of people with a lot of money hand it over to him like he was an only child at Christmas who happens to have a dozen childless aunts and uncles.

Mr Zuckerberg’s most memorable bits in the roadshow piece are twofold. First, he talks about being a college student building his little website on a rented server that cost him $80 a month, and how, when he needed to rent another server, he went out and hustled a little more advertising. Second, he describes his vision of what Facebook is all about: connecting the world and making it more open. Now, we can argue until you-know-where freezes over about the relative nobility of that goal, but there’s no denying that building one site that exists solely to give people a place to share their lives with X thousand of their closest friends is going to be technologically difficult and expensive — and since Facebook has all these members providing all this data, it’s pretty reasonable that being the guy who sells them advertising is the quickest and easiest way to make a few [billion] bucks.

Facebook is also quite famous for two things: its aggressive acquisitiveness (though they are generally thought to buy companies for the purpose of getting the engineering talent and not, necessarily, the products the company produces) and its rather cavalier attitude towards privacy. Indeed, if there’s something that could derail Mr Zuckerberg’s bullet train, it will be that; all it will take is one episode where the wrong people’s private information becomes public (or a successful class action lawsuit), and the wheels could come off — but that’s the hazard of the game.

Mr Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is noted for lots of things, but two stand out. First, there’s the hoodie and its symbolism as a disdain for the trappings of extreme financial resources. Neither he nor anyone in his inner circle seems to really give a hoot about the fact that they’re all extremely wealthy (and have been for a while); they’re all about just building their site. Second, he celebrates the hacker (in the best sense of the term) mentality of Facebook. Someone has an idea, and they crank it out without really thinking too much about whether or not it’s going to make money; they just want to see if they can do it.

His ambivalence toward the whole money thing has been evident to anyone paying attention for the last few months. He ducked, for as long as he could, even admitting that Facebook had a target date for its IPO. For one thing, the business is making some money, and he really didn’t owe anyone anything (he could probably have come to some kind of repayment agreement with all the people whose venture capital he’d taken), so there was no compelling need to do an IPO except that the number of people who had received stock (or had bought it through capital infusions) was pushing the limit allowed by law. And let’s not be coy: if you’re building huge data centers all over the world (we’ve been in Luleå in winter and it gets damn cold there) it goes a lot quicker if you have cash reserves of $16,000,000,000 as opposed to trying to build them with current profits of about 1/16th of that per year.

And this is where the fun starts. In the roadshow video, Facebook CFO David Ebersman says flat out that while it’s been very profitable, there is no question that Facebook is going to use the capital it got from the IPO to expand its infrastructure and acquire more talent. In other words, just because Facebook made a net profit of 27 per cent last year doesn’t mean it will make the same this year (remember, the boss just shelled out a billion for Instagram — that’s 2010′s profit right there). Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg spent a good amount of time talking about the number of users Facebook has, and how often they use Facebook, and threw in a couple of nice stories about a few people who had done well by running ads on Facebook.

But at no time did anyone say anything about two important issues: what Facebook’s projections for being able to keep selling at the rate they have been (and at the profit margin they have been), and what kinds of successes the large number of advertisers have had (remember, GM just bailed on Facebook, and it’s a good bet that money will wind up going to Google and Microsoft). It’s all well and good to sell advertising, but if it doesn’t show results, eventually that well will run dry.

That doesn’t mean the people who watched the roadshow video didn’t hear the Facebook honchos say things that weren’t said. The buyers saw all of the banks and brokers telling all of the media how huge the Facebook IPO was going to be, and the Facebook folks didn’t have to do a thing; there were so many stories (the Internet has done some remarkably perverse things to the nature of news reporting, but that’s another article) about how big it would be that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy to which Mr Zuckerberg and Company contributed almost nothing; in some ways, they did almost everything they could legally do to diffuse the hype.

And nobody paid attention. You can make the case that it was up to Facebook to disclose fully (and you would think, given the Facebook mantra of “open and connected” that indeed, they should have) — but what’s “fully”? Does that include what Mr Zuckerberg ate for lunch the day before the IPO occurred? How about the price he paid for gasoline a week ago Tuesday? Facebook gave out all the information required by law; if investors just bought the hype created, not by Facebook, but by media folks itching for a story and investment banks and brokers staring at a big payday, and fueled it with their own demand for more of the stock, then they really did get what they asked for.

Law schools will be stepping up donation requests.

* Headline, part A courtesy of younghv.
** Headline, part B courtesy of our longtime friend, Ward, said in reference to some elderly women from whom he was attempting to get campaign contributions.

Footnote: if you want to read some really good articles by some very smart people about why Experts Exchange has a pay-for-services system and doesn’t much think about advertising, see:

Doc Searls: After Facebook fails
Mark Cuban: Facebook IPO Post Mortem — Killer — but not for the reasons you think!
Terry Heaton: Facebook’s fail? No, Madison Avenue’s!

This article first appeared in the Experts Exchange newsletter.

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At least, that’s what the numbers say. The New York Times Dealbook says that investors are paying about seven times too much for Facebook. Revenues equal out to about $1.20 or so a quarter per user; profits are about a fifth of that, so if you bought your thin little slice of the pie last week, it’s going to take you about 40 years to break even. One of Slate’s writers went so far as to say that in order to justify its valuation, Facebook needs to increase revenues by tenfold. Indeed, the market seemed to agree; the stock went up about ten percent — well below the increases seen by LinkedIn, GroupOn and Zynga — before giving it all back, and while it never fell below its opening price, it closed at a meagre 23 cents up, and wouldn’t have been that high had not its underwriters propped it up.

We did take the time to watch Facebook’s roadshow video (no longer available at its original location at facebook.retailroadshow.com/show/retail.html, but Technology Review has a nice summary if you’re not into watching a half hour of Mark Zuckerberg and friends), and gleaned some interesting information from it — a good portion of which seems to be fantasy created for the benefit of the people who think they’re going to get rich by acquiring stock in what is quite possibly the next Yahoo, if not the next AOL or MySpace. If those names don’t remind you how incredibly fickle Internet users are, then consider this: There may be over a billion Internet people in China and nearly another billion in India, but most of them can’t afford what people are using Facebook to sell, and a lot of them can’t afford to buy what Facebook is selling.

Some people are suggesting that Facebook is one big Ponzi scheme, which tells more about the people doing the suggesting than it does Facebook; a Ponzi scheme is robbing Peter to pay Paul writ large, and Facebook isn’t doing that. The Wall St. Journal compared it to a shell game — and the only people who aren’t shying away from their interest are the true believers who appear in the roadshow video.

We grant that people connect with each other; that people want to share more than one aspect of their lives is also reasonable, and using technology to enable those interactions is certainly convenient. It’s not the perfect medium by any means, as anyone who has written something that was met with disdain or outrage can attest, but something is better than nothing — but that also doesn’t mean they want to share it with Facebook. We greatly appreciate that Facebook recognizes its role as the enabler; it builds a simple, easy to use platform — a “social graph”, to use its term — that makes it possible for people and groups of people to connect. When you apply that to hundreds of millions of users, it’s going to get expensive to maintain in terms of reliability, and getting $16 billion from investors is a lot easier than trying to do it with current revenues.

And that’s where Facebook is going to start running into issues. It’s one thing to load 72kb photos, or even 4 mb photos; it’s another entirely to load an animated advertisement that’s designed for a specific browser with all kinds of tracking attached. Games loaded from within Facebook are fine when someone’s paying to play just the game; they’re another thing entirely when Facebook is collecting money from a developer that is going to have to eke out another few square inches to push his business into the black. It’s great that people can play Farmville together; it’s not so great when their computers bog down from all the information being sent and stored in the local memory of the computer.

The secondary issue with advertising is the nature of groups of people; we have to be a little suspicious of the numbers. For example, GM is one member, and it has more than the average of 140 or so “Friends” that the average account has. Last year, GM spent $10 million on the 300,000 or so friends it has (and presumably, all of their friends), but didn’t see a return on its investment (spammers do a lot better). The essential thesis behind Facebook’s advertising program is that if I like something and tell my friends, they’re more likely to try it — but that falls apart when it’s some company telling my friends that I liked one of their posts (sure, I like the looks of a Cadillac Escalade, but that doesn’t mean I’m ever going to buy one). Word of mouth isn’t social; it’s personal.

Word of mouth is also generally the result of a perceived negative experience. Think about it; how many times have you called 140 people to tell them what a great pizza you had last night? But it’s a good bet that if the server brought it to you with a cigarette hanging out of his/her lip, you’ve told everyone you know — and the tale of that one experience will cause more damage than any ten people who think that company’s pizza was the greatest thing since… well… pizza. Facebook’s sales pitch is based on the presumption that people tell the truth every time; Dr House will tell you differently — and most advertising is at best a glossed-over, one-sided version of reality anyway; George Orwell called it the “rattling of swill in a bucket.”

But mostly, for advertising to be social (in Facebook’s terms), it has to engage; it has to be a two-way street, and that’s not something either advertisers or Facebook is prepared to handle (there’s evidence that Facebook doesn’t engage its own customers very well). The people we know halfway decently could loosely be called “friends” because we have something in common, but that might not have anything to do with anything any advertiser might want to pitch to us. It might not cost the advertiser money (in terms of payments to Facebook) for an ad that’s ignored — but it does cost to produce it and get it into the queue. If it isn’t clicked, the advertiser hasn’t engaged; if it is clicked, the advertiser had better be ready with some kind of response that’s more than a pretty website — and that gets expensive too. One cannot imagine anyone trying to either create ads that will prompt a response from us and our 140 friends, any more than we can imagine anyone creating an ad that would enable “social engagement” from 300,000 friends and their 140 friends each, not to mention any of our 140 friends actually paying to tell us what they’re doing.

The third issue with advertising is the one that has vexed Facebook for quite a while now: mobile. If, in fact, more and more people are using their iPhones and Droids to stay connected to each other, then what happens when the conversations (on Facebook or elsewhere) begin to get interrupted every fourth or tenth post by a “sponsored story”? We joined Experts Exchange a very long time ago, and the incentives to answer questions were twofold: to be able to ask questions, and to be able to avoid the ads. It’s been a very long time since we saw an ad online that made us want to click on it.

Of course, all of that may be a moot point; it’s not inconceivable that Mr Zuckerberg and his colleagues have done a great job of getting a lot of cash to do what they’re going to do, while still retaining control of their project, if only because he has been pretty ambivalent about the whole money thing all the way along. He says, in the video, that he used advertising to rent more servers; the Facebook IPO could well be the logical conclusion. Given that a lot of early adopters are jumping ship and everyone else is finding [comparative] bargains, one has to wonder if maybe that was the plan all along.

This article first appeared in the Experts Exchange newsletter.

Footnote: Proving once and for all that there’s a sucker born every minute, on Monday, investors were looking for someone to blame — but didn’t look in the mirror.

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Image via CrunchBase

There was a lot of hue and cry out there a month or so ago about the guy whose daughter cried when Google figured out she was underage and shut down her account. Most of the noise is appreciative of Rich Warren’s plight and we get it; a young girl has had her lifeline to her grandparents (and friends) ripped asunder by a big faceless company with no notice, right before she gets out of school for Christmas break. It was the first act of a perfect holiday made-for-TV movie — except this time, the Grinch won’t have a change of heart, and Ebenezer Scrooge woke up on December 25 colder than a brass toilet seat.

Let’s all ignore the borderline hypocrisy of suggesting the need for under-aged people to have accounts created for them in the first place. Terms of service exist to protect sites like Google from a sympathetic jury with a passionate and articulate lawyer under circumstances that may not be of its making. Despite what we know about a lot of adults over the age of 12 and what we know about dozens of youngsters who are only 13, California law (which governs Google’s terms of use) does not allow persons under the age of 18 to sign a binding contract, and that clause — that you must be “of legal age to form a binding contract with Google” — is right there up front in Section 2.3(a). No legalese — just a simple declarative sentence.

Mr Warren actively chose to ignore that; he freely admits that he knew he was in violation of the terms of use when he set up the account for his daughter to write to her grandparents. He knows that Google is bound by federal laws written to protect his daughter from all the rotten, evil things that Google does to the rest of us; like most sites that collect lots of data on its users, Google gets pretty uptight when it finds out one of them is too young to be called a teenager.

But Google, as is pretty much the modus operandi for companies that get really big and have lots of money, didn’t give any warning. It didn’t offer any way to assist Mr Warren in fixing his own mistake. It offered no alternative. It just slammed the door, locked it, and threw away the key. So much for “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” And there’s the rub. Google did just that: it focused on the fact that the user probably doesn’t have a lot of disposable income and isn’t likely to be a target for the advertising shoved at her through her Gmail account. And since Google reads her email — you didn’t know that? — it didn’t take them that long to figure out that she’s underage. Given enough data, it’s not that hard, and Google is very good at it.

But offer someone a day or two to download some photos, or archive some emails? Not in the cards. Sending an email — even an automated nasty one — that says “you have XX hours before your entire account is completely locked forever” (no, I don’t believe they’d get rid of it, because eventually, she will be old enough to have her own account)? Ain’t gonna happen. Try to find something in their help page that will assist you in leaving Google once you’ve been bounced? Maybe the moon will fall out of the sky.

The people I worked with in my college days had a joke about a competing restaurant company: you can’t complain about the service because there isn’t any. That, in a nutshell, is Google. Its culture isn’t focused on the user as a user; it’s focused on the user as a source of information with which to make money. Try to find a phone number or email address for anything related to “service” on their website; you’ll have better luck finding an honest politician. Some of Google’s executives famously use Twitter regularly — but don’t try to get an answer to a question about how your business has been poorly treated by Google’s systems, because they’ll ignore you, almost pointedly.

And yet most of us continue to use their services. We use their email accounts and search system. We buy devices that use their operating system. We have granted them the same status in our linguistic consciousness we granted Kleenex and Xerox and Coke. And they continue to treat all of us like … something else flushed, filtered and sent out to sea, while they laugh all the way to the bank, courtesy of eight jets for three executives.

That means it’s not going to change, either. After all, when you’re making money hand over fist by providing exceedingly bad or no service, why would you want to start?

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Greed: Zynga’s management, which has done a PR job for its IPO unlike any we have seen since Google’s run-up, decided in its early days to make a bunch of promises to developers and other employees as a way to keep from having to pay them real money (you know — the kind that pays rent and buys groceries). Now, Zynga’s management has decided, with the prospect of a huge payday only weeks away, that maybe those people aren’t worth what they’re going to get and wants it back — or lose their jobs. At PincusVille, there’s room for only one billionaire.

Pride: We’re not sure who should be outted for this one: The guy who, years ago, recorded the words and sentences that were eventually used in the British version of Siri or the company that wanted him to keep his mouth shut about it.

Envy: Google’s not trying to copy Facebook. Nope. They’ve had this planned all along. Maybe the moon will fall out of the sky, too.

Wrath: Did we mention that Steve Jobs wasn’t fond of Android?

Gluttony: Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, is now saying that Google thought about building Android phones before the iPhone hit shelves. And just what does creating phones and tablets have to do with “organizing the world’s information”, exactly? Oh, that’s right; the people who use them can be sold as advertising viewers.

Lust: According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google and Microsoft want to play Peeping Tom with your personal data — as opposed to broadcasting it all over the place and watching your users scramble to figure out how to hide it again.

Sloth: Even though it’s trying to go on a diet, Google is still gaining weight.

We’re actually pretty sure we could do this every day.

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I’ve never met Steve Jobs nor am I important enough for anyone in the media to seek a quote from on his passing. But I have as long of a history as anyone with Apple products.  My first computer was an Apple II followed by the IIe, the IIc, then back to a IIe with a toaster sized 10mb external hard drive.  I switched over to PCs in college and missed out on the iMac revolution but I was first in line for the iPod and iPod Touch.  Never felt the need for an iPhone (I hate smart phones, ammo for a post down the line) but the iPad was a game-changer and the slavish copies are a tribute to Mr. Job’s almost unerring sense of what the market wants.

I’ve derived uncounted hours of entertainment, productivity, and profit from things that Mr. Jobs invented or inspired others to invent.  His untimely passing leaves a hole in tech leadership that I doubt will be filled.

There are many quotes I could end with, but one of his older ones has always resonated with me.

It’s as true today as it was 17 years ago.  The message (and implicit challenge) in his words are something that every company, not just tech companies, should bear in mind. It’s not enough to merely put out a product.  That is why Apple has been successful where others have not.

Thank you, Steve. You will be missed.

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The other day, I wrote down a couple of words whose use has reached the point where they really do need consideration for inclusion on Lake Superior State University’s list of banned words. One of them — pivot — is especially grating in its current use, if only because I’ve played, refereed and coached basketball for half a century; a pivot is when you keep one foot in place and turn, so if you keep doing it in the same direction you wind up going in a circle, getting nowhere.

Then again, given the frequency with which marketing and PR types types (and the semi-literate executives who pay rapt attention to them) use the word, perhaps a redefinition is in order. I had seriously considered compiling a list of words whose over- or misuse is getting to be annoying, but given that the good folks at LSSU do such a great job one hesitates to steal their thunder.

However, when I came across a couple of items, I had to wonder who the people are that come up with this stuff — and more to the point, who let them anywhere near anything that could be used for writing that’s more complex than a crayon.

In fairness, Mr Erle’s presentation was all in good fun; or rather, if he wasn’t trying to be funny, then his new career as a marketing executive is going to be short-lived, because nothing he said in his presentation was anything more than a bunch of one-liners. I get the joke; the problem is that if you’re giving a presentation that’s trying to poke fun at something, you should make a point. Mr Erle’s talk doesn’t do that; it seems that if you’re going to take someone’s money for a conference, or if you’re going to take someone’s money to give a talk at one, then the least you can do is give them something memorable to take away from the event.

Other phrases he used included “best-of-breed”, “industry standard”, “enterprise ready”, “scalable”, “in the cloud”, “investor ask” and “geospatial”. I would certainly like to know what percentage of the population — or even those of us who could be considered marginally geeky — could give concise definitions of all of those terms in fifteen words or less. Each.

The press release, on the other hand, is downright scary; some company actually paid people to write that, and nobody read it and said “WTF?!?”

Never mind that no self-respecting high school freshman would write a single sentence with the word “retail” or a derivative thereof five times. The part that got to me was “drive transaction efficiencies”. What the hell is that? Does it mean “make it so you don’t have to hire more clerks”? It’s not even really much in the way of news. So they’ve built a plug-in for people too damn cheap to upgrade; does that really warrant a press release?

For the sake of discussion, let’s say it does. Since there isn’t much evidence that marketing and PR people are evaluated on any metric that is reasonable (like whether their efforts actually result in increased sales), let’s also assume that “success” is measured in “how many media outlets actually published our story.” We checked; Google says there are 794 instances of the press release on the Internet, but only shows about 50 because “in order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 50 already displayed.”

Of the fifty:
PR feed sites (includes different URLs from same site) 15
Content farms 12
News feeds on sites unrelated to marketing/PR on which the “content is no longer available” 8
News feeds on sites that have no navigation: 4
News feeds on “portal sites” (content may or may not be there, but usually isn’t since it’s now a few days old) 3
Bloggers who wonder pretty much the same thing we do 3 (one site listed twice)
The companies’ websites (includes Facebook) 2
What appears to be paid placement of the press release (the word “account” in the URL is a giveaway) 2
Sites related to the subject matter 1

Rafe Needleman, who writes a terribly under-read blog called Pro PR Tips, wrote in Tip 182, “If it can be said in five words, might I suggest that using 87 is overkill?”

Ben Parfitt was a little more circumspect: “Sometimes you spend too long with the wrong people. In the wrong job. Thinking about the wrong things. Losing perspective on what it is to be human. Then you write something like this from a September 7th 2011 press release entitled “Global Bay and Epicor Partner to Offer Comprehensive In-Store Mobile Retail Applications Suite”.” He then lists the introductory paragraph and follows with two short declarative sentences: “Die. I want to die.”

I fully “get it” that PR and marketing types want to “tell the story” — but I’m also reasonably confident that even if one of my newspaper advertisers used Epicor’s and Global Bay’s equipment, they wouldn’t expect me to print that information, and certainly wouldn’t expect me to print the information that their equipment was of the “heritage” variety — especially since the press release wasn’t sent with any local context at all — making it pretty much irrelevant.

I actually spent a summer as an intern in a major university’s “University Relations” department; one of my first assignments was to write a feature on a student project that was unique, at least to a school located near the ocean in California. I wrote the story and turned it in, and my boss proceeded to hand it back to me telling me it didn’t read like a press release. I pointed out that it read like a feature, and that it read like something a newspaper might print, which didn’t stop her from making me rewrite it (several times).

I don’t claim to be one of the world’s best writers, or even one of the world’s best copy editors. But I know what I had thrown away for six or seven years of working as a reporter for weekly newspapers: that if it’s not interesting and not relevant, it’s going in the garbage can, and the fact that no newspaper used the story — not even the student’s local paper — tells me that’s where the story went, photograph and all.

The trick to telling a story is to make the reader want to read, the listener to listen. It’s not necessarily that the precise definition of the words used or the structural integrity of the sentences is sound, or even that one spells a word correctly every time (sorry about that, Spelling Police). It’s that the story means something — that it draws the reader/listener/viewer into the universe being described. A halfway decent storyteller can make the list of ingredients on a cereal box interesting.

And if that press release is closer to what your writing looks like, please do the rest of us a favor: stores should be hiring for the holidays in the next couple of weeks. Then you might find out what using latest mobile devices to drive transaction efficiencies, improve operational visibility and in-store customer engagement is all about.

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