Tom Hapgood

Social Networking as Business Watchdog

Eureka Pizza will continue to get my business. Vistaprint will not. Off The Press Printing won’t either. Cox Communications will. [Yikes. Sorry for the length of this.]

How many times have we been lured into buying a product or service that turned into a disaster, or just simply didn’t pan out? Were we persuaded by the promise of good “support” in case something goes wrong? It seems that the bigger and, perhaps, more geographically distant the business, the worse the experience can be. It can be incredibly frustrating to feel that you’re being taken advantage of and have lost money.

In the past, when we had poor results from a business we were only able to moan to a few friends at the party, or threaten to “call the CEO” or in worst-case scenarios sue the company, which very few people ever did.

I had a less-than-positive experience with the businesses listed above. In each case, a combination of promised services, ensuing frustration, an iPhone, Twitter feeding into Facebook, and the entitled modern consumer, led directly to a discussion with a representative of the business itself. A smart business today employs tactics to instantly head off any negative feedback by following Twitter’s trending topics or any reference to their business. The important factor is what the business does with any negative tweets.

Lately, I’ve been debating the relevance of social networking tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, as a “watchdog” of business performance. This hive-mind collective system we have of “friends” and “followers” who can receive instant positive or negative reviews to their phones and computers within seconds of the “broadcast” really changes the whole system of user and customer reviews. When the Web itself became a massive conduit of the judging of business performance on Web sites such as Epinions.com and on the retailer’s own site, the game of purchasing changed completely. I NEVER shop for something online without reading the customer comments/reviews and almost always base my final decision on the reviews of a product or service. Only problem was, these are random people with all kinds of taste, from even possibly a few years in the past, in various parts of the world, with possibly nothing in common to us. If they’re even real or sincere.

Enter social media: Our hundreds of friends, family and work acquaintances instantly receive our review. They know us. We know them. We undoubtedly share certain likes, disklikes, tastes. They sympathize directly with us. They believe us and there’s a good chance they’ll take our purchasing advice. Just think of the “stick-it-to-the-man” potential. If businesses promise results or good service, we should expect it and demand it. It seems that social media channels could be the tool that ensures good quality business.

At Eureka Pizza, a local, really good pizza place here in the area, I recently had, in the end, a good experience. It was three times the combination of an extremely busy week and a matter of minutes to pick up a dinner with the promise of “Hot and Ready” pizzas. The idea, as I understand it, is that you swoop in and buy a pizza that is sitting, waiting for you. For a good price. However, the last three times I went in, there were none ready and I had to wait, one time for 10 minutes. It feels ridiculous typing it, because it’s really not a long time. However, when you’ve got every minute planned with several kids at activities, someone usually sick, places to be, it turns out to be a long time. I was comparing it to the Little Caesar’s “Hot and Ready” pizza in Tucson, which had a stack of pizzas always ready and it took about a minute to go in, get the pizza, pay and leave, even at the rush of dinner time. The crucial part of the discussion is that the pizza is less expensive this way, and you know it’s been sitting there for awhile, it’s not fresh, and that’s OK. It’s cheap and quick and you agree to lose a little quality. For the record, Eureka is way better than Little Caesar’s, even in the “Hot and Ready” scenario, and when we order pizza we usually order from them. (I had a competing, delivery style pizza a few days ago and it was bad bad.)

It was only because of social networking that my “case” reached the owner of Eureka, a discussion came around and I continue to like Eureka Pizza. The owner, Rolf Wilkin, saw my tweet, contacted me, apologized, asked me for more details, and offered to refund my money. Amazing! That’s a great business owner. To do my part, I went in and deleted those tweets and will soon tweet about my continued pizza purchasing from them.

On the opposing front, I ordered a large banner for a one-time event from Vistaprint, along with some flyers and t-shirts. The flyers and t-shirt came, but the banner did not and wasn’t going to. It was massively disappointing and we were furious. I called, quoted the “satisfaction” language from their site. I sent out a tweet about never using them again, detailing my experience in opposition to their Web site’s claim of “Guarantee of Satisfaction” with all the normal “commitment to satisfaction if you’re not 100% satisfied” and all that rubbish. Someone from that company saw my tweet and asked me how they could “help,” and I eventually talked to some deadpan person on the phone in India who just basically said there’s nothing they could [would] do, there was a problem in prodution (not my fault they admitted) and there was no way they could have it to me. They wouldn’t even refund the shipping to make me happy or even talk about quickly printing the banner, Fed-Exing it to me for my one-time event. I could go on, but I won’t. I now use Print Place for everything else and they’ve been great.

A local print shop, Off The Press, treated me rudely. The owner disparaged the quality of my work, my students, and ignored requests for a press check. It was bizarre. I tweeted/facebook-ed it and several friends and acquaintances agreed to not use them. They lost not only my future work but others.

Cox was to show up one morning to install high-speed internet. Their service is way faster than AT&T’s DSL and seems low-cost for the fast service. However, they didn’t show up. I tweeted/facebooked about the classic case of “waiting for the cable guy” who never came… Someone at Cox in Missouri Direct Messaged me with “How can I help?” and she meant it. She took care of it (they had it scheduled wrong on their end) and got me a quick install for the next day. Day of, she followed up. All able to happen because of these social networking tools.

So, to recap (anyone still there?):

Reasons I’ll keep going to Eureka Pizza

• Good pizza
• Good price
• Local business
• Conscientious and respectable owner

Reasons I’ll never use Vistaprint again

• Remote, faceless owners
• Indian tech support. I’m not sure what it is about the combination and our system of corporate capitalism and something over there, but the near-universal bad experience with Indian tech support is infinitely more frustrating than the malfunctioning product itself. The sly using of some American-sounding name. The attempt to speak with an American accent. The experience is riddled with deceit from the start! (Indian people? Always have loved all the Indian people and students I’ve met and worked with. And the food!)
• Unsatisfactory compensation when they screwed up

Reasons I’ll keep using Cox internet

• A nice, semi-local contact
• I have to — it’s the best provider of high-speed internet
• Good price for high-speed

Personal Goals Based on the above experiences:

• Continue to send out more and more tweets when I’ve had a positive experience with a business, such as the service, food and atmosphere that we’ve gotten at Geraldi’s restaurant. Every time I go, I’m practically sloshing red sauce into my phone “keys” as I can’t wait to spread the wonder of the food to my friends and “followers.” Many of my friends have gone to that restaurant based on my recommendations and have also loved it. Same with Petra Cafe.
• Try to keep perspective before I tweet
• Tweet ever more about positive local business experiences

Anchor Links Bug in Internet Explorer 7

Recently, I had to make a big decision: to have a web page validate or to function correctly.

We had just launched the University of Arkansas Community Design Center project and began receiving messages that some in-page anchor links weren’t working correctly only in IE 7. If the user was viewing a project page and clicked on the “Project Awards and Publications” link (or the list of awards links below the big image) more than two times it stopped functioning. What’s supposed to happen is that when one of those links is clicked (all links going to the same place), the viewer should be brought to a specific point on the awards page. Well, on the third time clicking one of those links, IE would just send the user to the top of the awards page, or in essence, the wrong place. After much troubleshooting and research on the web, I eventually tried a deprecated (discontinued) anchor format and it worked! So, instead of sending the link on the project page to (basically) awards.php#projectname, which was an id attribute of the h4 tag on the awards page, we added an older style a name tag/attribute combination to the awards page, just below the h4 tag. Therefore, we’ve got a lot of id designations duplicated on the page, while each id should be used uniquely. But it works for all the browsers now.

Thanks to Cathy Haring with her Internet Explorer testing lab and Cynthia Barlow for the expert programming.

Weather widgets

I’m a weather afficionado. I actually sit and watch the weather channel. I watch the local weather during the local news broadcast on tv. I check various weather web sites to keep updated. I check the accuweather mobile web page on my phone. I look at the newspaper charts and maps. I look out the window continually to see what’s going on with the cloud patterns and precipitation chances and will sit and watch the rain or snow come down as if I’ve never seen it before.

One method that I’ve really come to enjoy and rely on is hitting the F12 key on my Mac and watching my weather widgets come open in Dashboard. As you can see from the thumbnails, I have about nine that I watch. These widgets come from mostly differing organizations and individuals, from what I can tell. Many of the widgets are well-designed and work otherwise very well. Most include nice design elements such as “shininess,” elegant transparency and a straightforward layout, using the normal css, html and javascript. Most of the time I have them set to the same location: Fayetteville, AR, where I live. Other times, when weather around here is “slow,” I’ll set them to various locations where I’ve lived or spent time, such as Framingham, Massachusetts, Tucson, Arizona, Karlsruhe, Germany, Naples, Italy and London, England.

The widgets usually include the following: static and animated maps imagery (radar, satellite, infrared and combinations), daily or hourly forecast graphics and temperatures, a large real-time temperature display and atmospheric icon, interface animation, webcams and weather photos.

One problem is that none of the widgets seems to work perfectly. It’s a fun time trying to sort out the truth from all the widgets when they don’t match up in many ways, such as on the radar map. For instance, the AccuWeather.com widget tends to always display a very outdated doppler image when compared to the weather.com, WeatherBug or the others (see my screen grab). It could even be considered dangerous when you see that we’re under a tornado watch box in most of the maps except for the AccuWeather one. I have reported this a few times but it doesn’t seem to be fixed yet.

Another annoyance, which one eventually gets used to, is deciphering which links/buttons on the widget will affect another state or section of the widget versus links/buttons that just jump out to the browser. As far as i can tell, the widget makers don’t consistently distinguish, with the sometimes exception of Weatherbug. Their “tabs” open sections in the lower pane, while their links in the lower pane tend to look like standard underlined hyper links.  Even their consistency has a limit, though, with the upper pane “More Observations” and “Alerts” buttons, which open the browser. Point being, when I’m in widget world I’d like to stay in widget world, or know exactly when I’m going to be thrust back into browser world. They could probably solve the problem by throwing an underline on the “More Observations” link and somehow on the ALERTS. The constantly moving wind speed and direction indicator on the WeatherBug widget is nice. They could probably lose the red mercury thermometer at the left as it amounts to clutter for me.

Many of the widgets have animated interface elements with click-inspired drawers that open and close, or collapsing/simplifying looks (default Apple weather widget), or an expanding weather map. The animation “award” probably goes to the NOAA round widget for having animation happen at just about every click. Click one of the four tabs and they circle around and disappear behind the round body of the widget, then animate out to reappear when the reset button is clicked. A nice touch, which shows they’ve done their interface/usability testing, is that when I click the Radar tab, it shows me the radar from a high altitude, then automatically zooms down closer to my actual location for a few seconds before slowly zooming back out to a regional view. Very slick.

The “Cams” or webcams features are pretty OK, but I don’t use the “Photos” much as they seem to be random photos of flowers and bugs.

The “Aviation Weather” widget I include just because I am also an aircraft freak and like to pretend that all of the data on that widget makes complete sense to me. The major problem with that widget is that it won’t remember my location and defaults constantly back to Switzerland. The developer Pascal Dreer seems to have made available an update that I’ll install, which might take care of that problem. I include the BBC’s widget because I like the economical design and pretending I “might be going” to London soon. (It has only settings for England.)

One of the reasons we moved out of southern Arizona was to live among seasons, green, water, weather and Arkansas has proven to be just the place for all of it. Here we have, as they say, four distinct seasons, which has made it a very fulfilling place for a weather-phile like me.

Where to get the widgets:
Aviation Weather Widget
NOAA Weather Widget
Weather Channel widget (and gadgets)
Weather Underground Widget
WeatherBug Widget
AccuWeather Weather Widget
BBC Weather Widget

Word Processing: an update

A few months ago I created a post about how, when I purchased my new MacBook Pro, I didn’t have a need for Microsoft Office. I had always had Office (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) running on a computer for standard document-creation tasks. As you can imagine, as a university faculty member and even a modern human being, I still needed the functionality of writing and sharing documents, creating presentations and calculating budgets. The alternatives to Microsoft Office, as I saw it waaaaay back in March of this year, included basically four non-Microsoft options: Writeboard, by 37 Signals, Google Docs, NeoOffice and Apple’s Pages. Two of those apps are Web-based/online and two are traditional desktop apps.

Buzzword, the lastest and Flash-based online application from Adobe, which could easily take over all the other forms, seems to combine the benefits of the online functionality with the benefits of the desktop app. It solves the interface and workflow problems and limitations of the Ajax-based online word processors like Google Docs and Writeboard, and provides the functionality of the desktop-based document-creation apps like Pages, Word and NeoOffice. In fact, it provides a much better functionality in many ways than the traditional-style desktop apps in the way it allows document sorting and viewing, the way it facilitates handling of those pesky nested lists, table creation and some other cool features. At the same time it offers extremely intuitive and powerful methods for sharing and collaborating of documents in real time, keeping track of versions and changes, an inline commenting feature, assigning roles and level of access to other people, etc.

As a creative person, this type of application really stands out as something that can enhance and foster creativity, as I’m not forced to struggle with the word processor and be inundated with functionality that gets in the way. Here’s a so-so little video demo:

BlueInGreen technical animation

This is a client-driven technical animation I completed recently in Flash, uploaded to blip.tv as a swf to see what blip.tv could do with a swf. Apparently, it can’t convert swfs to flvs, as it gave me an error. It’s running realllly slooowwwly right now and doesn’t give any sort of download progress.

Click To Play

Coolness Discussed at NMC

Always a lot of discussion of new tools and techniques at the New Media Consortium Summer Conference, and here are a few.

• Scott Pagano’s reel is sick and his presentation was fascinating.
• Soundslides is an awesome little tool for making simple web-based slideshows with audio.
• Universal Everything
• W+K Tokyo Lab Studio new music label concept
• Reline 2 DVD collection of 18 progressive audiovisual works by international artists
• The “Design Remixed” hands-on tutorial by Apple staff was great and renewed my interest in Motion.
• The Nancybelle Project, Kim Pearson’s research project in multi-threaded storytelling for journalism dealing with Nancybelle Valentine.

Coda Needs list

I’ve been trying out the new product by Panic, Coda. In my attempt to switch over to it from Dreamweaver, I’ve run up against some issues that I think need addressing, or I’d be happy to be clued-in.

When changing file type from php to html midstream, so that i didn’t have to wait to preview on a slow server, it lost track of my changes and knocked my files back about three hours

Aren’t there any keyboard shortcuts, even for the much-used br and p tags?

When I upload a file, Coda decides not to maintain the path within the folder structure. If I upload a graphic from the images directory, I have to then go into the Remote tab and manually move it from the root to the images folder.

When I go from Edit to Preview, it doesn’t show me the right file. Working on the sub-page “Editorial,” I hit Preview (or Command-3) and it shows me the home page, “index.php” one directory up. Scary.

I’m happy to be wrong on any of these, but so far the coding has been slower than using Dreamweaver.

[ update: received a response to my inquiry at Coda from Tim Coulter that they'd look into the .ste file import for setting up sites in Coda ]

Coda: One-Window Web Development

Wow wow wow. If you hand-code Web sites, you must download the Coda trial and be amazed. As it makes something like Dreamweaver seem a bit old-skool (haven’t seen CS3 yet though), this might be the thing that gets me to switch. I used to use Panic’s Transmit with BBEdit, but like the all-in-one site management of something like DW. Coda is extremely slick…

Microsoft Office? Don’t need it.

How can one get along today without Word, Excel and PowerPoint? You need the functionality that these programs offer if you’re going to share documents with co-workers and clients, plain and simple. I have been using various Web-based [free] alternatives and one [Apple] alternative that have proved to work extremely well on my new computer (MacBook Pro). I didn’t want to install my really old version of Office on the new computer. I just didn’t seem right, and I didn’t want to buy a new version of Microsoft Office. So I downloaded and installed NeoOffice, built on top of OpenOffice, which offers all of the main functionality of Microsoft’s office suite and seems to be compatible, with spreadsheets, documents, presentations/slide-shows, databases, etc. It’s great if you like the feel of a OS-platform-based client suite and find yourself without an internet connection, not to mention keeping your files secure on your own computer if needed.

The other, more modern and sleak, way is to just use the Web as your platform and utilize Word and Excel-style tools right in the browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.). The beauty of this is the sharing potential. Instead of E-mailing out-of-synch versions of a document around to other people, everyone collaborates on the single version of the document in one spot. The downsides are that your file lives on “someone else’s” server and you must have an internet connection. Some of these tools are from Google or 37 signals.

I’ve been known to use Apple’s iWork stuff, too, mostly Keynote, because it’s an amazing alternative to PowerPoint, with much greater usability and interface. Same with their Pages.