800 LB Gorilla Misses the Mark with Apology

Unless you have been under a rock, at the Beijing Olympics, or on a remote island vacation, you have probably heard about the Gmail outage at Google yesterday.

Last night Google updated its blog regarding the outage, and apologized for the incident. While I commend Google for the apology, it left much to be answered, and lacked in nearly all areas of communication.

I am not a PR expert, I am a simple person who expects companies to step up, take ownership and explain things to me--- from my perspective. Google had a grand opportunity, and squandered it with their less than appealing explanation. Here is my $.02 debrief.

Google has always claimed to be open- Where is the transparency?

• What really happened and why?
• Why was the communication not until ‘everything will be back to normal by the time you read this’?
• Why did I have to learn about this through Twitter and follow updates there rather than direct through Google?

Google built its search engine on being simple and clear- Where is that clarity?

• OK, so you fixed ‘it’. What is ‘it’?
• You are ‘updating internal systems and procedures accordingly’. What are those ‘systems and procedures’?

Google raves about its infrastructure and stability- Where is the restoration of that confidence:

• Where any explaination of a root cause analysis?
• What are the steps being taken to ensure that this a) does not repeat itself, and/or b) minimizes the chance of it happening again?

Google does not exist without their customer- Why is this from the Google perspective and not the customer?

• The ‘temporary outage’ seemed to last at least 1 hour, that is an eternity to users
• Why would you get on a blog and apologize and communicate and then go on to say, don’t expect to see that here again?

As my 5th grade teacher used to tell me, ‘A’ for effort, ‘C’ for performance. Too bad we do not get measured on effort.

Are You Externally Focused?

Recently I have been catching back up on some old standby ‘life lesson’ nuggets. The ones I have been staring at recently share a common thread: the importance of being externally focused. This is one theme that is essential to being successful- both personally and professionally.

I wanted to share three quotes that help capture the essence:

“The tougher the negotiation, the more critical it is to understand that if
someone in the room has to feel okay, it is not you. If someone has to
feel not-okay, that is you.” - Jim Camp

“People listen to you for their reasons, not yours.” - Peter Drucker

“Great leaders understand the important role servant leadership plays in
helping others realize their potential.” – Dan Sanders

These can apply across all aspects of life. Your colleagues, your family, your customers, your partners, even your competitors.

Ask yourself:

1. Do you make others feel important?
2. Do you build their vision, their self esteem?
3. Do you treat others with respect?
4. Do you practice sound principles- return e-mail or phone messages, follow up on requests?

You can make the impact today. You can build customers for life. You can build enduring relationships. You can build a network of raving fans.

The rewards are great.

Web 2.1- Right idea, wrong direction

So I blogged a couple days ago about Web 2.1. We are making progress in certain areas. I see others continuing to struggle to get it.

Let’s start with a couple that I am afraid do not get it. I read about the following in MediaPost this morning:

• Twing, a search site for forums
• Yidio, a search site for videos

Right idea, create micro-communities. Wrong direction, creating community around platform verticals (forums, video, whatever…) fails to focus on the customer. I may be very wrong, but is there a large enough micro-community looking for forums on any/all topics?

Instead, think verticals (or horizontals if you are visual and need to see another direction) based on micro-community by interests and affiliations.

Here are two examples of sites where I think they have it right:

• Spiceworks, a free IT tool for small and medium businesses
• Tennis.com, the online site for Tennis Magazine

Spiceworks’ micro-community is a collection of IT professionals with similar challenges, experiences, work flows, configurations, etc. Tennis.com has provided their micro-community a site with news, video, blogs, etc for the tennis enthusiast.

In each of these latter cases, the companies put a customer at the center of their micro-community strategy. The former two put a technology platform.

In the end, the customer will win.