Ask.com says they didn’t “sanitize” the list—as evidenced by including #3:

1. MySpace
2. Dictionary
3. Google
4. Themes
5. Area Codes
6. Cars
7. Weather
8. Games
9. Song Lyrics
10. Movies

And when they say they don’t sanitize it, they mean they didn’t take out porn terms, either. Odd . . . I could’ve sworn that the premise behind their big ad push this year was that Ask was a good way to find porn. . . .

Does it seem a little strange to anyone else how extremely generic these searches are? Other than MySpace and Google, what are these people looking for? “Themes”? The weather all over the entire world? Every movie ever made? Come on.

A few other interesting gems from their many lists: Ron Paul is the seventh most popular presidential candidate after Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Fred Thompson, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and John McCain—but don’t worry, Paulites. He’s still beating Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich.

Also interesting? No mention of Britney Spears anywhere. For once.

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 So far the best estimate for having a landline for internet access provided by the Polish national carrier is 10 months, so I am using a GSM solution which in my remote part of Poland seems to clock in slightly faster than what I would expect from UMTS so might be giving me a slow HSDPA signal.

I really wish I had been able to respond sooner, because I am actually quite disappointed in the way "facts" were portrayed, and because from what I can see no SEOs actually did any in depth research of what Matt was presenting.

I Did Some Homework

Two weeks ago, I think on the Sunday after Matt posted I read the post and the first 400 or so comments, plus all the stories related to it that appeared on Sphinn. I am going to try to cover a few different angles that I haven’t seen elsewhere, though that doesn’t mean these opinions haven’t been already been voiced by someone. There is only so much catching up you can do after 2 weeks out of the trenches.

Was This Really Cleared By Legal?

Maybe Google have run out of PHDs to hire in the legal department, but it seems there is a real grammatical clanger here.

Now I’m going to ask you to put on your regular user hat. If you’ve just learned that you or a family member have a tumor, would you prefer that radiosurgery overview article from the Mayo Clinic, or from a site which appears to be promoting a specific manufacturer of medical equipment via paid posts? My guess is that you’d prefer the Mayo Clinic.

The site in Matt’s screenshot isn’t the one that might appear in the search results as a result of the "paid" links. The site that would appear is the one being linked to. This one which has been around just as long as the paid reviews when checking on archive.org

The oldest version of the site even seems to have a link to investor information, though that is not in the archive, so it seems very strongly to suggest that the domain was intended for use by the manufacturers of the Gamma Knife in some way.

I notice Matt didn’t link through to the final site so people could do a fair evaluation. Matt was certainly suggesting Google’s line was that the site in some way was junk that didn’t deserve to be in the search results and that the other sites linked to had more reason to appear.

Another site that also seems to be by the manufacturer is this one on GammaKnife.org

It seems to me the manufacturer, Elekta, the registered trademark and patent holder were trying to do some understandable reputation management and SEO work, or someone was doing it on their behalf, because at least from my location if you search in Google for "Gamma Knife" Elekta’s corporate website doesn’t appear.

That is about the same as John Chow not ranking for John Chow.

Maybe they have some problems with their website design they might want to fix first, and maybe they should have done that before thinking about paid reviews, but to suggest any of their sites don’t deserve some kind of placement is misleading.

They are not "just one manufacturer" – they hold the trademark for what they wanted a satellite site to rank for.

Language

Lets face it, the people who generally need money enough to write reviews for $10 are not normally PHDs, though many people who write for PayPerPost are highly qualified, certainly more than I am.

Then again my wife just finished her Masters, and though in Europe it is not looked on as politically correct to brag about how well you pass a masters, she averages over 4.5/5 so walked away with an A or 5/5 overall grade.

Most people look on her being fluent in English, though she doesn’t write English as much as she should and thus makes stupid mistakes.

If she was under pressure to write 200 words in 15 minutes she would struggle without my help to write flawless English.

Payment

There is no way to prove whether the person writing the paid posts actually received payment. The posts might have been rejected for all kinds of reasons, such as the number of reviews that seem to be paid posted one after the other, and the general low quality.

Disclosure

I checked 2 of the posts depicted in Matt’s screenshots. The first had a very clear disclosure in the sidebar, and the 4th had a disclosure policy badge that links to a clear disclosure policy.

As far as humans are concerned I would class that as better disclosure than Matt personally uses for posts such as his recent recap of everything Google and how often do you see Matt openly criticize his employer.

There are lots of posts on Matt’s blog, if you were wearing a "regular user hat" and just appeared on a permalink page from a search result, where you wouldn’t realise that Matt is writing as an employee and shareholder.

In fact, if you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts.

Matt has a disclaimer, but it is not in the content of every post (yes I am also guilty that my disclosure policy plugin is currently switched off due to a bug I haven’t had time to fix, but I have in post disclosure of some kind regardless for every paid post/review)

A Blacker Than Black Example Flawed, How About Grey?

I might be biased, but I think the gamma knife example whilst at first glance was a travesty, when you delve into it a little you realise that Google’s argument in that particular case was just as equally flawed.

What would happen if they tried to explain the links their own media buyers bought from the recent Leweb3 site, or various SEO conferences without nofollow.

Those are clearly advertising links, and if you take either the spirit or the letter of "Google’s Paid Links Law", they are guilty. If Google doesn’t set a good clear example, how can they expect the rest of the internet to understand what exactly is or isn’t allowed?

I do agree in the case of the gamma knife that the posts were most likely ordered for SEO reasons, just like many press releases about mundane events get published, or junk articles get syndicated.

The saddest thing is that none of the trusted resources Matt listed actually link through to the manufacturer of Gamma Knife, Elekta other than Wikipedia… with a nofollow link.

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*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

Amid Drama, Blognation Is Kaput

In short, it’s a total mess.

Sam Sethi, CEO and founder of Blognation blames TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. Arrington, and lots of other people, blame Sam Sethi.

Bad Blood

Sethi worked for Arrington as editor of TechCrunch UK until December of last year. Sethi left TechCrunch on bad terms after he posted a negative review of LeWeb, a French conference. Arrington denies he fired Sethi, but had asked him to delete the review because of a conflict of interest involving a competing TechCrunch conference.

The founding of Blognation was to follow, and so was more bad blood between Sethi and Lee Wilkins, whom many credit with developing the idea for the company. Arrington says Sethi "booted" Wilkins, who lives in Romania, from the project, and that at one point the conversations got so heated between them that Sethi threatened to fly to Romania to "rip [Wilkins'] head off."

Wilkins went on to set up a similar blog network called MyKinda, which launched last month.

Show Me the Money

Earlier this month, Blognation editor Oliver Starr dropped a bombshell full of dirty laundry about his experience with Sethi and Blognation. In a post published both on his personal blog, and at the Blognation site (subsequently deleted), entitled "An Open Letter to Sam Sethi," Starr reports that he and other Blognation writers had not been paid since launch.

Also in the post, which spans 3,000 words and gets more emotional as it goes, Starr alleges Sethi repeatedly lied about forthcoming payment as well as venture capitalist funding. Starr describes Sethi’s behavior as fraudulent, criminal, and even psychotic.

"You made promises that people took to the bank and then you defaulted on them leaving everyone that trusted you to face the consequences," writes Starr. "I am not kidding when I say that there are people on Blognation that probably won’t have a Christmas thanks to believing in you.

"There are people that are going to be late on car payments and there are people that are going to have to think twice before they go to the dentist because they are out some $10, $20 or even $30,000 dollars of income that they were expecting, for which they HAVE A CONTRACT and for which you have an obligation because you told us that you had the money when in fact you never really did!"

A Blognation Editor Dies

Sethi responded in the comments section of a TechCrunch article that Starr had been asked to leave Blognation in November, implying the post was in response to that. Sethi also stated that a round of funding was about to be closed and that everyone would be paid:

"Marc Ochant [sic] and I spoke on Sunday when he blogged about Facebook. Marc along with the other editors are aware of the situation regarding the delays we have had in funding as they are in direct contact with the VC on our “private” backchannel.

"Just for the record EVERY editor has a contract and will be paid in full prior to Christmas."

That post was made on the morning of December 5th. Marc Orchant, whom Sethi says he spoke with Sunday, had a massive heart attack that same morning, and was reportedly unconscious through at least the 5th. Orchant died December 9th.

Though he’d be hard pressed to prove a correlation, Arrington suggests the stresses of nonpayment contributed to Orchant’s heart attack.

Sabotage or Royal Screwup?

Yesterday, Sethi announced that Blognation was kaput and that he would put the network up for auction, but not before accusing Arrington of sabotaging the company for fear of competition. Sethi blames Arrington for scaring off investors by publishing confidential emails and a "leaked" terms sheet from British investment firm Secora three days before signing.

While Sethi admits in the post that he’d lied to Blognation editors, he claims he was forced to because of Arrington’s FUD campaign to keep him from securing funding. The leaked terms sheet, he says, came from his email account and that Scotland Yard would be investigating who accessed it.

At this point, though, it’s rather difficult (nigh impossible) to determine what’s true and what isn’t from Sam Sethi. The Mobile Jones blog, which reported the Blognation shut-down a day before Sethi posted it on his blog, also reported on December 9th, that Sethi had apologized to Oliver Starr, admitted that he hadn’t fired Starr, and that he impersonated one of his blog editors to leave a comment on TechCrunch.

At stake here now would be sheer credibility, and at this point, Sethi’s credit has run out.

Just three months after they started the experiment, Radiohead is going back to the traditional way of selling albums – in stores. The band let their fans decide what to pay for their new album. Some fans thought free was a great price. Radiohead didn’t give out numbers, though comScore took a stab at it. They estimated that 62 percent of those who downloaded In Rainbows didn’t pay for it.

It seems like they could sell the album on the site (which could use a redesign of the shopping process) and create a model where you had to pay a set price. But for now there are no downloads.

The music industry keeps taking one punch after another as they try to figure out something that works. Free downloads are plentiful and just like Web 2.0 business models, ad-supported seems to be the buzz. But is it sustainable?

Too bad they skipped Christmas for in-store sales. The CD/vinyl and download won’t be at stores until December 31st. No official word on if they’ll be back on iTunes. You can buy the Discbox online.

What is known (according to Wikipedia) is that they aren’t signing back on with EMI. They will go with indie labels XL Recordings in the UK and TBD Records in North America.

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Krazit observed the same thing with one of his articles…

Nothing in the article suggested that Mac users are revolting against Leopard, or that serious Leopard glitches have knocked the Mac user base offline, or anything even close to that effect. The majority of the discussion in the Talkback section, however, descended into the usual Mac vs. PC flame war. In addition to attacking each other, several people took me to task, saying that since they had never had a problem with their Mac or with their Leopard installation, I was clearly manufacturing problems as part of a sinister plan to either attack the Mac and put Apple out of business at the bidding of Microsoft, or through some naked self-interest of both myself and CNET to generate page views.

Does that sound familiar? If you’ve ever authored, or read, an article that has even a hint that Steve Jobs is not some kind of omnipotent being or Apple is less than perfect, you would have seen the ensuing attack by Apple’s “fanboys.”

As Krazit points out, this is a small hardcore group, created by Apple itself…

On his Web site, [Guy] Kawasaki describes his role at Apple in the mid-1990s by saying, “My job on this tour of duty was to maintain and rejuvenate the Macintosh cult.” There was a dedicated group out there who still believed in the Mac and its promise as an alternative to Windows, but they weren’t organized, and their morale was low.

In an inteview this week, Kawasaki recalled signing up 44,000 hardcore Mac users in 1995 on a listserv named, quite appropriately, “EvangeList.” “All I would do is disseminate good news,” Kawasaki said.

Sounds just like a summer blockbuster movie that turns up every few years. The government creates a group of super-soldiers who then go crazy and become uncontrollable.

Of course, most Apple fans are friendly, balanced in their opinions, and not insane (and have likely read this far, before deciding to leave an abusive comment). They’re still passionate about Apple and they’re ready to tell others how much they love their MacBook Pro–this is where I’d place myself. However, their voice is often drowned-out by those that accuse others of FUD, assume you work for Microsoft, and won’t hear a bad word said against Apple.

(As a side note, in my last post, the very people that attacked me included Apple employees. They tried to mask their identity, but didn’t do a very good job. Want to spot them in future blog comments? They’re usually simply “Steve” or “David” – no last name, no URL left.)

So, after “burying my headline” deep in this commentary, here’s my thought for Apple. Passionate customers is one thing–every company dreams of having customers that will defend its reputation–but don’t you think its getting out of control? Take a look around the web. It seems that the number of people discussing your rabid “EvangeLists” is growing. What persona is being conveyed to outside observers when they read comments and forum replies from a minority group with a megaphone and a penchant for abusive rhetoric?

I’ll leave you with this, Apple’s positive sentiment–as measured by customer satisfaction–slipped nearly 5% this year, and is now only 3 points higher than HP. Apple’s hype may well be in top gear, but as it grows and reaches the masses, it’s going to need more than just a hard core team of advocates.

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Through the efforts of Brett Tabke and the community, it has grown into one of the finest search marketing conferences with thousands of attendees, major corporate sponsors, top notch speakers and a spirit like no other event. There’s a real sense of community and “co-opetition” amongst participants that makes it a great place to learn and network.

Here are my final favorite photos from Las Vegas Pubcon and a few with friends from iEntry afterwards.

Wynn Las Vegas

Sport coating the BOTW colors

Danny Sullivan and Melanie Mitchell

Greg Boser and friends

Search Engine Land on Mike’s dome

Rich, Tiffany and Mike from iEntry

Ceiling at Blush

Shadow Bar

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The technology was developed for renowned fashion designer Nanette Lepore and was tested at Bloomingdale’s early this year. Aimed at young women, they can get other’s opinions on what clothes look good and what their peers are buying. They can also text message, IM and email each other about their shopping choices. Live video feeds show what they try on, send a video of an outfit, and get friends feedback. They can also try on outfits virtually. Retailers get something out of the experience too – real time feedback on inventory, buying habits, and preferences for a pretty fickle group of shoppers.

So I guess this means never shopping alone. Or viewing a sports event or anything. We can interact all the time! I find it fascinating how at the same time these technologies bring us together they decrease face time. Everyone is a text message away so why should you actually need to see one another.

Both on and offline socializing and forming communities around music, shopping, and other activities is hot. I found some data from SellPoint through a study conducted by Coremetrics that talked about how online conversions are affected by audio/video tours of products (and I think that’s what stores need – tours of products and outfit suggestions from designers – for all ages).

My friends at HookSell are doing audio tours of more complicated products and seeing a big impact on conversion rates. Even the homemade version that Dan at DVO does have increased sales on his kitchen gear. The study showed a 35% increase in sales when a video/audio tour is viewed – plus it kept shoppers online longer. Not long ago social media was seen as interesting or fun, but it can also drive business.

When you see Time Magazine recognizing a social media tactic meant to drive sales to stores, you know it’s hit the mainstream.

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Visual success and it will be yours. But the fundamental principles of visualization bear up, in some very practical and surprising examples. And the neurological science behind visualization is sound.

Visualization allows us to sense a scene in our minds when we read a passage. Actually, the word visualization is a little misleading, because it only refers to the sense of sight. Visualizations can engage all the senses. For example, we took our two daughters to Manhattan last summer, landed at 11 pm, and because we weren’t tired, walked through Times Square at midnight. New York was in the middle of a heat wave and the temperature was still 98. The combination of heat and humidity added a particular edge to the smell of garbage in the streets, that sickly sweet/sour odor that punctuates the more appetizing smells wafting from restaurants and street vendors. Times Square was still going at full tilt (this was a Saturday) so the din of taxi horns was deafening. At every corner, we still had to elbow past street vendors and crowds jaywalking through the intersections. For my daughters, it was a rude sensory awakening to the Big Apple.

As I was writing that, feelings, sights, sounds and smells were being activated in my mind. I was recalling the images, and could, in my mind, feel the humid heat, smell the odors, hear the horns and see the crowds. If any of you reading this had been to Times Square on a hot summer night, you probably have your own scenes, from your own experiences, replaying in your mind. But the amazing thing is, if I say falafel stand, you can see, smell and perhaps even hear it. That’s because the same parts of your brain are firing that would actually be activated if you were physically there. Imagination is the next best thing to being there.

Athletes have long known this. Visualization starts building the same neural pathways that actual physical action does. A golfer struggling with his swing can visualize it and improve it, without a club in his hands, because he’s giving his brain a trial run. The same is true with a gymnast learning a new move. Studies have shown that imagining a 5 finger piano exercise results in a significant improvement in performance.

But perhaps the most startling evidence comes from a study done by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio. Here, from About.com, is the summary of the study:

They split 30 healthy young adults into 3 groups.

For 15 minutes a day, five days a week for 12 week, Group #1 imagined exercising their little finger muscle. Group #2 imagined exercising their biceps muscle and Group #3 acted as a control group and did no imaginary exercise. Those in the first two groups were asked to think as strongly as they could about moving the muscle being tested, to make the imaginary movement as real as possible. The researchers measured muscle strength before, during and after the training sessions.

Group #1 (the finger exercisers) increased their strength 53 percent, and Group #2 (the biceps group) increased strength by 13.4 percent.

These results are somewhat unbelievable. Simply imagining exercise can make you stronger! Literally without lifting a finger. That’s the power of visualization.

So what does this mean for marketing? Visualization plays a part here as well. We often visualize our way through a purchase. If we’re looking at buying a car, we visualize ourselves driving it. If my wife is determined to buy a dress, she visualizes herself wearing it. Even if you are suddenly craving something from Starbucks, you can see, smell and taste the coffee before you ever get it in your hands. Visualization is a powerful part of purchasing, and once we build these neural pathways, it takes us much closer to the actual purchase. Smart marketers start building the pathways before you ever set foot in the store. That’s why personalized products can be so powerful. Personalization forces visualization.

Of course, visualization of product usage is nothing cutting edge. Most marketers do this instinctively. But what about visualization of the actual purchase itself? How can you start building the neural pathway required to ensure the transaction is completed? This is particularly important in more involved purchases, such as trips, cars, houses or more involved B2B purchases. In each of these cases, the very act of buying can act as an obstacle to a sale. It requires time, commitment and knowledge. For all these reasons, a little mental practice could improve the odds for success. Let me share another example.

In the 1960’s, social psychologist Howard Leventhal wanted to persuade a group of college seniors at Yale to get a tetanus shot. What he wanted to test was whether fear would be a more powerful influencer. So several information booklets were produced. Some were “high fear” with graphic pictures and descriptions. Some were “low fear”, with a more toned down, informational approach. The booklets were distributed and, somewhat predictably, the high fear booklets seemed to be more persuasive. The groups that received these booklets were more convinced about the importance of shots and more of them indicated that they intended to get inoculated. But one month later, almost none of the participants from any of the groups, high fear or low fear, had actually gone for an inoculation. A mere 3 percent had actually been inoculated. This was an unforeseen glitch in the experiment.

So Leventhal redid the experiment, but this time with one small change. This time, in all the booklets, he included a map showing where the clinic was and the hours it was open. This time, the inoculation rate went up to 28%.

If we look at the power of visualization, the thing that surprised Leventhal really isn’t that surprising at all. The first round of the experiment did a good job of inducing the visualization of consequences, in this case, negative consequences. The high fear booklet let the students visualize what might happen if they didn’t get a tetanus shot, and so it was persuasive. But it didn’t close the loop. It wasn’t that the message wasn’t persuasive. It was just that it left the door open for life to get in the way.

But the second version allowed the student to visualize the path required to actually get the inoculation. I’m sure most of them probably knew where the clinic was, but the inclusion of the map prompted them to visualize actually going there, and the hours allowed them to visualize where in their schedule they could fit in the visit. Once the students went through the mental process of visualizing action, there was a much higher probability that the action would take place.

What are the takeaways? If your purchase process requires a commitment on the part of the buyer, let them visualize the path required to get to the end. Use your website to build the path required to navigate through things like financing, negotiation, customer service, delivery and selection of products and options. Don’t just stop at visualization of ownership. Think about the visualization of the act of buying as well.

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Personally, I think both blog searches need some work. If I had to commit myself to using one and only one, I’d probably go with Ask, but I’m not exactly jumping up and down on the couch over how fabulous they are.
..
Google is top dog when it comes to indexing speed but their index is chock full of spam. Ask takes a little longer to get things appearing in the index, but when the content is there, it’s relevant and better and smelling like roses.

She apparently still uses both. I used to be one of the strongest proponents for Google Blogsearch. However for some time I have been despairing of its quality. As she said it’s ‘chock full of spam’. In addition whatever algorithm it is using does not produce relevant blog posts for the searches I do.

It is not difficult to produce examples to show how broken it is. I wrote a blog post three days ago where relevant keywords were Customer Service, Bell, Rogers, Telus. Given the frustration that many feel over customer service from the telecoms, it’s a topic that is often discussed on the blogosphere. As of today, the Ask Blog Search has the blog post at #1 for that keyword search. Even IceRocket, another blogsearch engine that sometimes works at glacial speed, has the post at #3.

The surprise is that Google Blogsearch does not include the post in the top 100. That top 100 includes quite a slug of the spam posts that Lisa referred to. However the blog itself for a regular Google keyword Web search appears at #20 for these key words. Google has been boasting that it now includes blogs within the regular web search. That’s an improvement. Yet at the same time such posts no longer appear in the Google Blogsearch. That’s not at all logical.

I am not the only one to suggest that Google Blogsearch is broken. Philipp Lenssen raised this although for different reasons. It’s beginning to look as though it’s dropped off the Google corporate radar. That’s a pity. It used to be so impressive.

Related:

Google BlogSearch for Hot News Items

Google BlogSearch, The Neglected Orphan

Google Blog Search Doesn’t Find Many Links

How can I help you? Is that Bell, Rogers or Telus?

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The more I dig, the more I’m convinced that a big part of a brand’s success is the quality of its customer touch points, specifically, the face to face ones. Consider this overwhelming evidence:

The more emotion there is in an experience, the more vividly we remember it. It’s known as imprinting. So if we have very positive or very negative experiences, we remember them longer and more completely.

Let’s say we visit a restaurant. If we have a terrible experience, we’ll remember it forever. If it was an amazing experience, again, we’ll remember it forever. If it’s mediocre and falls in the middle, it will tend to fade away.

Our memories are altered by the context in which we remember them. Let’s go back to our restaurant example. Whatever our experience, we will tend to alter it if we’re talking to a person who also had an experience with the same restaurant. If they had a great experience, but ours was negative, we’ll tend to alter our memory to make it more positive.

Alternatively, if we had a positive experience, but someone else’s was terrible, suddenly we’ll alter our memory to make it less positive. This doesn’t tend to swing memories all the way from good to bad, but it alters and reshapes memories to better fit the context of recall. And over time, it can erode a once very good memory, or build up a rather negative one. Memory is not an accurate snapshot of an event, it’s a malleable story. So consistency of experience is important.

We get a much richer channel of communication when we’re face to face with a person. Studies have shown that receive only 7% of our communication from the words that are used. The other 93% is a combination of body language and tone of voice. So no matter how carefully you script your frontline customer encounters, the success will depend on the person delivering the message. We have very finely attuned credibility detectors.

The quality of the face to face interaction is the biggest factor in how satisfied we are in a product experience. Malcolm Gladwell used the example of doctors being sued for malpractice.

"Believe it or not, the risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes…. Patients don’t file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care. Patients file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care and something else happens to them.

"What is that something else? It’s how they were treated, on a personal level, by their doctor. What comes up again and again in malpractice cases is that patients say they were rushed or ignored or treated poorly. ‘People just don’t sue doctors they like,’ is how Alice Burkin, a leading medical malpractice lawyer, puts it. ‘In all the years I’ve been in business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, "I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him."

Medical researcher Wendy Levinson found that doctors that weren’t sued spent 3 minutes more with patients than those that were (18.3 minutes versus 15). But it wasn’t just time, it was the quality of time. More simply, it was the tone of the doctor’s voice.

Recordings of interactions with doctors were recorded and then were played back for study participants, who then put the doctors into two groups, those that would be sued and those that wouldn’t be. The recordings were altered so participants couldn’t hear what was said, all they could judge was the tone of the voice.

And even with this, they were able to judge with amazing accuracy which doctors would be sued. It wasn’t what was said, it was how it was said.

When you look at corporate examples, the power of person to person connections are clear in cases like JetBlue and Saturn. In both cases, the extraordinarily high level of customer satisfaction was due primarily to the quality of the face to face encounters. JD Powers rated the Saturn among the highest vehicles in terms of satisfaction not because it was a better car.

It was because their dealer network didn’t follow the typical industry model, which was more like a school of piranhas. JetBlue’s employees had a mandate: make flying coach suck less.

Why is this important to remember? Because of the coming workforce crisis. The baby boom is shifting the majority of our workforce to the end of their working lives, and there’s a severe shortage at the entry level, typically the recruitment bed for service based businesses. This means good people are going to get tougher and tougher to find.

Also, there’s a move to cut costs by streamlining and outsourcing those vital customer touch points. Self serve customer service models are becoming more common, and in many cases, they’re backed up by a customer help line that’s been outsourced to an overseas call center.

The call center has been provided the appropriate scripts, and, in most cases, adequate training on how to field a complaint. But, as we’ve seen, that’s really only 7% of the problem. The other 93% is connecting with a person who really cares about your problem and is trying to help you. That’s something you can’t script.

Let me give you an example. My wife and I recently flew to Lisbon on British Airways. We had to connect through Heathrow. I booked my flight directly through BA, but my wife flew on points, so that flight was booked through a partner airline. Both flights had less than an hour layover in Heathrow, and we had to change terminals.

I didn’t really notice this at the time of booking, but soon, my partner airline notified us that they had moved my wife back to a later flight to allow her to make the connection. As anyone who has connected through Heathrow will tell you, the odds of making a connection with less than one hour is slim to nil.

I called British Airways to get my flight pushed back and was connected to what was obviously an overseas call center. The person on the other end, if they were considering a medical career, would be a sure bet to be nailed with a malpractice suit. The manner was brusque and indifferent.

He informed me that they could change the flight, but there would be a $200 change fee, about 1/3 of the total cost of the flight. Plus, I would have to pay any difference in fares. I tried to explain to the person that the layover time wasn’t adequate and that BA screwed up with the initial booking, but to no avail. Finally, I hung up in frustration, to allow myself to cool down a little.

I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to cough up the extra $200, and phoned back a week later to make the change. This time, I got a much friendlier person who looked up my reservation and informed me that my flight had automatically been pushed back because an hour wasn’t an adequate connection time.

I asked when this had happened and what had triggered the change. They said it was a flag that was automatically put up in the system so many days prior to a flight and had nothing to do with my previous call. It was the system correcting itself.

Everything worked out okay with BA, and the flight was actually one of the best transatlantic flights I had. But the poor quality of one encounter left an overall negative impression rather than a positive one. And, as reinforcement of it, when I was talking to a friend who had recently flown to Spain on British Airways, they had had exactly the same problem. Our respective memory retrievals quickly turned into a BA-bashing spree.

Realize the importance of person to person, and if you have to short cut anywhere, don’t short cut here. It’s the most important part of your business.

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