Archives / March 2005

Today, Thursday, March 31, is the last day for regular price tickets to Mark Hurst's Gel conference.

If you like reading this blog, you deserve to see the good experiences that are being created in technology, business, science, and art.

Take a look at the speaker list. And sign up today for the last chance at regular-priced tickets.

Interview with Charlie Todd, urban prankster; founder, Improv Everywhere.

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In honor of April Fool's Day coming up on Friday, an interview with Charlie Todd, an urban prankster who is out to create good experiences at unexpected times and places in the city.

Charlie will speak at the Gel 2005 conference one month from today. (Note that the price for tickets jumps Thursday night, so you have less than THREE days left to buy at regular price...)

Q - You're a prankster.

My goal is to perform pranks that are positive and uplifting, and about making someone's day, rather than humiliating someone. The prank shows on TV throughout history, and especially now, are really focused on embarrassing someone, or making them angry. What I seek to do is alter someone's reality in a positive way, or at least in an interesting way, that's not overtly about drawing out negative emotions.

A lot of my pranks are overtly positive, like "let's make a rock band's day by packing the house for their crappy gig," or "let's have two people propose marriage on the subway and create this beautiful thing for everyone who sees it." Others are less overtly about making people happy, and more just enabling people to experience something different and weird, typically in a mundane environment - like "let's get people to take their pants off in the subway." Just the experience, more than anything, gives the witnesses a story they can tell for the rest of their lives.

One thing I don't do: there's no "reveal" moment, which is a staple of what we've come to know as a prank on TV. At the end of a prank, we don't tell everyone, "It's a trick, it's all been organized, ha ha ha." We just walk away. People might figure it out on their own, or maybe they won't ever figure it out.

What's been interesting recently is that, with the improvement of search engines, people who witness them are much more likely to figure it out and then contact me. Like the rock band found out 24 hours after it was posted on the Internet. I've had three different people contact me about No Pants this year. This one girl saw it, went home, typed in "no pants subway nyc" into google, found me on the first page, blogged it, and then a few weeks later I'm searching for the same thing to see if anything wrote about it, and sure enough I found her blog.

Q - Google as intermediary.

Yes, definitely. And I think blogs have changed things, too. My popularity online has definitely risen with the rise of the blogosphere, because a lot of these things are the types of things people like to write about. Someone sees my site and they blog about it.

Q - Will more exposure risk people recognizing you and ruining the prank?

New York is so enormous, it would take a lot more exposure to risk that. But I don't always take the lead in these pranks. I'm the organizer, but in some pranks - like getting someone to play Anton Chekov, or the rock band prank, I keep a low profile.

Q - How old were you when you pulled your first prank?

I've been pulling April Fool's pranks since I was five. My father and his father were known to prank. April 1 was actually my grandfather's birthday.

Q - Who's the role model.. is there a superstar prankster?

Andy Kaufman. He opened my eyes to possibilities of pranks. I read bob Zmuda's book "Andy Kaufman Revealed!" in college, about the crazy things they did in public, most of which were mean and cruel, but just amazing, so ballsy. I'm in awe of a lot of the things he pulled off.

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Read about Charlie's most recent mission Look Up More.

It's very New York, and I happen to like it, that the Times covers the quiet addition of serial drawings in the pages of the New Yorker - something the New Yorker never even mentioned.

Read Talk of the Town (Make That Whisper) (New York Times, March 23, 2005).

One of the most common questions I get about customer experience is how to see its results within the organization. Sure, the stakeholders have bought into the concept - focus on the customer! But how will the team know when it's succeeding?

Fortunately, customer experience is achieving some visibility in the mainstream business press. I refer you to two articles (thanks to my business partner Phil Terry for pointing them out) that have some ideas.

First, a recent MIT Technology Review article on "multi-channeling" [1] is worth a look. Consider this quote:

    "...for every $1 consumers spend online, they spend $6 dollars
    offline as a result of research conducted on the Internet."

Notice the "multiplier effect" - the leverage that a good online customer experience has on the offline business. One obvious conclusion to draw is that it's more important than ever to make sure the website is fast, easy, clear, and a great experience overall.

More importantly, though, consider the broader conclusion: it's no longer effective to run the organization as a collection of separate silos. Customers don't care that their research and eventual transaction cut across all kinds of silos and channels - they just want to get their work done!

So, think: is there a multiplier effect in your business? If so, how could the silos be organized (or trained) differently to make the most of that leverage?

Now, the second item.

In this week's Business Week, there's an article [2] about GE and CEO Immelt's decision to link bonuses to new ideas and - get this - customer satisfaction.

    "20% of 2005 bonuses will come from meeting pre-established
    measures of how well a business is improving its ability to meet
    customer needs."

Did you get that? GE links executive compensation to the customer experience. Does your company? Should it?

The article explains why GE is making this move:

    "With a slower-growing domestic economy, less tolerance among
    investors for buying your way to growth, and more global
    competitors, Immelt, like many of his peers, has been forced to
    shift the emphasis from deals and cost-cutting to new products,
    services, and markets."

Consider our provocative hypothesis: long-term investments in the customer experience will be to business in the 21st century what short-term thinking (much advertising, M&A, etc.) was in the 20th. And kudos to GE for taking some leadership.

[1] E-Commerce Gets Smarter, by Robert Buderi. Technology Review, April 2005.

[2] The Immelt Revolution: He's turning GE's culture upside down, demanding far more risk and innovation. Business Week, March 28, 2005:
http://tinyurl.com/65cgw (premium subscription req'd)

Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.org and director of the Wikimedia Foundation. I've admired his work for years. He's also speaking at Gel 2005.

(Update: See full-length video of Jimmy Wales speaking at Gel 2005.)

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia whose entries are written by a worldwide community of users. Constantly adding and refining entries, this community has created an encyclopedia that rivals any other ever written. Take a look, if you haven't already.

Now, the interview:

Q - What's one aspect of Wikipedia that excites you?

The Wikipedia community. Our big-picture vision is to share knowledge with all of humanity. That was the original dream of the Internet before the era of pop-ups and spam, and it's now being realized. It's exciting. We're learning huge lessons about harnessing community, treating communities well, and seeing the results.

Q - How does Wikipedia stack up to Britannica?

By number of entries, we're about six times as large, but that's an unfair comparison, since we slice up entries differently. The fairest comparison is by number of words, and we're twice the size of Britannica by that count.

An interesting comparison, not to Britannica but to other top sites, is traffic. We now have more traffic than Paypal, more than USAToday.com, and we're close to NYTimes.com. We're doing this all with volunteers who are managing the servers and doing everything themselves, and that's pretty astonishing.

I was recently on a panel with the head of USAToday.com. He said they have 300 million pageviews a month. I said that's good; we have 400 million. Then he said he had 180 people on staff. I said I have one part-time person who helps me with the servers. There's something new going on here. It's not about broadcast, it's about interaction.

Q - What about Wikipedia's error correction? It needs to be good, since any user out there can make a change to any page on the site.

My answer to that criticism is that the average quality of entries is high, but any given page could be broken at any moment. IBM did some research on Wikipedia, and it found that for certain types of vandalism, the median time to correction is under five minutes. That's for the typical type of change, when someone blanks out a page or puts in a curse word.

Q - Five minutes is pretty quick for such a huge site. How is that possible?

A lot of people, when they learn about Wikipedia, have this very attractive idea that it's an emergent phenomenon - the sort of thing where a million people add one sentence each to build the site.

But really, the vast majority of changes on Wikipedia are made from a hard-core group of users. It's not a Darwinian phenomenon of millions of people, but rather a community of people. That core group is in constant communication, via IRC, and on the Web itself - they're always talking, in 40 languages, about the articles. That's how the site gets corrected so fast. People notice the change and very quickly communicate it through the community. The tight-knit group of users makes all the difference.

Q - How does one join that tight-knit group?

Hopefully it's not too closed to participation. You get on the wiki and start editing, and people start noticing. People can also come to IRC. That's a hurdle for newcomers, since you have to download a chat client. There's also a mailing list. We try to be friendly and welcoming, like good neighbors, in terms of getting people involved.

Q - Do you have any plans to sell Wikipedia or make money from it?

Not Wikipedia. I do have Wikicities, a for-profit venture, on the side. But I'm pretty firm about the big-picture mission about Wikipedia: it's a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet. That's what drives my entire life. I have enough money that I don't need money. I mean, I have a Ferrari. OK, now what? Let's do something cool. It's more cool to think about totally changing the landscape - for example, by radically undercutting the market for proprietary textbooks.

Q - Textbooks?

On Wikibooks, there's a growing community of people working on textbooks: a complete K through 12 curriculum, and on through university level, for all subjects. It's just getting started, and it's a long-term project. But how cool is that?

Q - Very cool.

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This is the first of several interviews I published of Gel 2005 speakers. (See other Good Experience interviews)

See also: full-length video of Jimmy Wales speaking at Gel 2005

While waiting at the bank the other day I noticed a sign posted behind the bank teller. The text was gray and shabby from the several generations of tellers who had photocopied the sign over the years. It read:

    The best months of the year to invest are September, February,
    May, March, January, November, August, December, July, April,
    October, and June.

I'm thinking of posting a similar sign above my desk, to hang under its own thumbtack for the ages. I'll just edit it a bit: "The best months of the year to invest in customer experience are September, February..."

Or maybe I'll rewrite it entirely - something like this:

    The best times in a project to focus on the customer experience
    are the beginning, the middle, and the end.

There's no right time to focus on the customer experience. Certainly not at the end of the project, when some companies suddenly decide to evaluate the user experience, or run customer research. Instead, customer experience should be an all-the-time activity: a constant commitment, from this day forward. For the best companies, it's a way of life.

I remember, growing up in New Orleans, there was a phrase on Election Day: Vote Early, Vote Often! (If you're into American history, don't skip Louisiana.)

Early and often - that's when you should work on the customer experience:

- EARLY: The best time to get started is ASAP. Remember that the earlier in the project, the more you're able to think strategically... and make changes to strategy. Customer experience is strategic, and the kickoff meeting is a good time to establish the customer-centric stance that will frame and guide the project.

The very worst thing a company can do - and unfortunately is done commonly - is to go through the entire development process, and then, just before launch, put it in front of the customer. At best this is an empty exercise for management to convince itself that it made all the right decisions; at worst it can confuse the developers and delay the launch date.

- OFTEN: Don't read me wrong. I'm not suggesting constant, iterative research where customer tests are run every two weeks throughout the project. Instead, I'm advocating a focus on the customer experience in each natural phase of the project - from problem assessment, through customer research, and on into initial prototyping and development.

(For a description of the phases of a customer experience project, which can run yourself within your own company, see our Customer Experience Method whitepaper.)

At its heart this is a very different development process from what has been practiced in industry for the last 50 years. Traditionally, customers are simply the last phase of the supply chain - the "consumers" - who must be convinced, via ads and marketing, to buy the product. Why bother with the customer experience at all in that process, since the ads will do the selling?

To truly focus on the customer experience, early and often, is to do something very different. Customers aren't just "consumers" but participants in the strategic process; they aren't bit players but the protagonist, the lead actor.

An awareness of customers and their goals and desires should be baked into the very DNA of the company. It must affect how every employee acts and works, and permeate the company as a whole. After all, the organization is the only entity that can create and improve the product.

As the female lead sings in "Spamalot," Monty Python's new Broadway musical, "I've been offstage for far too long." How long will it take your company to involve customers? Will the customer be on stage early and often?