June 29, 2006 @ 3:47 PM
To me, Jeffrey Zeldman is the King of Cool. It feels like he’s always 1 1/2 steps ahead of whatever’s going on. With a savant-like mastery of design and web standards, he still manages to exude incredible humanity.
So not for a second does anyone believe he’s the wandering noob he appears to be during his recent challenges with an expiring domain, and his flickr Pro account. One important lesson companies can learn from him is “don’t bury your mistakes”. Without malice for the companies that failed to watch his back, Zeldman shares his mistakes, and offers advice for preventing these situations in the future. A genius, a visionary and a guru - but human like the rest of us. It’s his brand.
Many businesses go to great lengths to hide their flaws, mistakes or even simple lapses in attention. They feel it would hurt their credibility if anyone were ever to find out they’d fallen asleep at the wheel, even for a moment. What would happen if you removed the marketing filter? What if customers could see your company’s inner workings, its drama, its ability to change course when something’s just not working, its humanity, its failures and most importantly the lessons learned from its mistakes. Do honest companies feel less credible to you?
For some companies, it’s a very mechanical and often painful process bringing transparency to their communications strategy. Here’s Ford’s promising, albeit ridiculous, attempt to embrace transparency. I just love what an epiphany (and potential challenge) telling the truth is for their executives. “We will be innovative. We will be cutting edge. We will do this by not lying. Now, it won’t be easy...”
Oh, and the result of Zeldman’s net-confessions? Of course I first went and checked the expirations on all my domains. Then, I popped over to Amazon to see if he’d written anything new lately, and pre-ordered Designing with Web Standards - 2nd Edition, since I don’t yet have the first.
Honesty seems to be working for him.
Comments
So true and so rare.I often think honesty is closely tied to the person's / company's confidence and trust in their activity.
*sigh*
Wow...it's almost as if it actually mattered. I mean, here's the big Z being totally honest about some trouble he had with his personal photos. If he had covered it up? woah, man. That would have been deceptive, right? But he totally shared it with everybody. All I can say is, Lord love a duck.
Joel, my point (to businesses) is that it doesn't make him look weak or incompetent to say "I let a very important domain name expire." Sharing these experiences humanizes him, and companies can learn from that.Many of my clients have fear over what their employees might publish on a corporate blog. I'm simply highlighting one instance where honesty didn't hurt. Thanks for the sarcasm though.
Well, sorry for being snarky. I just think it's all very silly. Jeff is an individual, and when people read zeldman.com they are reading essentially a personal blog. If you're going to start handing out awards for personal things being shared on a personal blog, it could be a long night.Corporations of course are different than individuals, one reason being that there is even less public interest in corporate blogs than in personal ones. So your clients have nothing to worry about. I don't know of anybody who is remotely interested in seeing the "inner workings," the "drama," humanity/failures, etc., of the companies they do business with. Informational articles, maybe; dramatic internal corporate struggles, no.
Where real honesty shows up is in product quality and customer care. That's all customers have ever or will ever care about. Customers generally don't read corporate blogs and don't much care what companies put on them.
Yes Joel, you've established that you think the point is silly. You should feel good about having gotten that off your chest.And yes, you've got it precisely. I used something Jefferey Zeldman (a person) said to illustrate how a Company (not a person) can connect with their customers in an honest way, and maybe not worry so much if in the process, an imperfection were to be made public. I don't remember handing out any awards. I need to start doing that.
"I don't know of anybody who is remotely interested in seeing the "inner workings," the "drama," humanity/failures, etc., of the companies they do business with."
Here are just a few blogs - published by companies, and read by their most enthusiastic and passionate customers:
Channel 9
Coudal Partners
37 Signals
GM
Boeing
"Where real honesty shows up is in product quality and customer care. That's all customers have ever or will ever care about. Customers generally don't read corporate blogs and don't much care what companies put on them."Joel, do you seriously believe what you're saying? In a sense you're, right, the majority of Microsoft users have never heard of Channel 9 or Robert Scoble. If that meant anything, then how could you explain the hundreds of thousands of people who read those blogs? Part of what Microsoft and others are doing by blogging is what I would call "customer care" (see your above statement about customer care). They care enough about their passionate users to give them a peek inside the company and be candid with them. The bonus here is that they get to up their quality. If they illicit feedback and talk openly about their products, they get a good shot at improving their product, right? Not to mention that the most passionate users are the ones who evangelize your product for free.
Sure, the majority of your customers may never hear of your blog, but your most passionate users aren't the majority, that's what makes them different. And that's what makes them so important to care for.
I took care to qualify that statement with the word "generally." A couple of companies like flickr and coudal have widely-read blogs, and these are the natural exceptions to the rule since they are internet-based companies. Even most MS-centric IT professionals do not read Scoble. GM had people "evangelizing their products for free" long before the internet was even in common use; in fact the people who are most likely to be "passionate" GM customers are also the ones most unlikely to spend time reading the blogs of their favorite companies.
I could go out on the streets of Minneapolis or NYC during the lunch hour and ask five hundred people whether they even know GM or Boeing has a blog and probably not get a single positive response. If I conduct the same survey in five years the answer is likely to be the same.
Anyhow, I'm not trying to say that corporate blogs are useless in all cases, only that for the most part the "blogging" universe is actually still a very small, irrelevant box and is not likely to grow all that much in the real business world. The vast majority of businesses will continue to do just fine without them and so will their customers who (unlike web designers and a-list bloggers that make up .001% of the population) have better things to do then read the blogs of their favorite companies. So when you talk about honesty in terms of whether a company has a blog and what they put on it, that's pulling a very new, arbitrary and irrelevant standard of honesty out of thin air. It has nothing to do with product quality or customer care or even customer interest in most cases. No matter how you slice it, when taken in context with the things that really matter in business, it's just posturing.
Online posturing might be absolutely essential for Flickr and Coudal because they've built their businesses on it; but for SuperValu and Bill's Gun Shop and JCPenny's and Zimmerman Auto and Target and Caribou Coffee and Business Card Solutions and Royal 20 Theatre and Del's Firehouse Music and Volvo and Cisco and Kraus-Anderson Construction, etc...it is mostly irrelevant. Yes, even GM and Boeing and GoDaddy could close up their blogs tomorrow morning and it wouldn't affect their businesses in the least.
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