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Disappointment of a Foursquare Fanatic

April 26, 2010 in Advertising/Marketing Business | No comments

Since my blog is titled “Managing Expectations”, I thought I’d share a perfect example of mis-managing expectations by Foursquare, a favorite brand of mine. First of all, some context; I’ve been a Foursquare fanatic (though I use Gowalla too) since October 2009. For proof of my fanaticism:

  • I’ve done enough additions, updates, etc. to be a Superuser Level 1
  • I’ve used that privilege to make sure every Lowe’s, Home Depot, Sonic and Ford dealer in the Kansas City metro is listed perfectly.
  • Anytime I see someone enter a venue’s name incorrectly (using lower case letters, put a location descriptor in the name of the venue (i.e. Home Depot – Gladstone), etc., I fix it.
  • I’ve talked to countless people about the service and know that a minimum of 10 have signed up soon after talking with me about it.

I would venture to say I’m in their top 5% of users, in terms of active engagement with the brand. ad2 Kansas City (part of AAF-Kansas City) is hosting its 12th annual Ad Wars event on May 6th at The Cashew. It’s an advertising trivia contest attended by 150 or so members and other professionals.  Tons of fun and a great opportunity for Foursquare to gain more highly-influential users, since most of us are talking to clients every day that could potentially be part of the service.

Using Foursquare’s official support function, I sent the following message on March 25:

Hi Foursquare,

Like what’s happened in most cities, I bet, the creative/advertising community have been the early adopters and driven lots of growth for Foursquare. I’m a member of the American Advertising Federation – Kansas City (AAF-KC), and we’re one of the bigger chapters of AAF. Within our AAF chapter of about 600 members, we have a group called ad2 for members under age 32. Every spring, we put on an event called Ad Wars, which is an advertising trivia contest for teams of up to 10 people. Total event attendance is about 150-200 people. The event will be on May 6th and take place at the Cashew (http://foursquare.com/venue/209819).

I’m telling you this because this year’s Ad Wars will be the 12th annual and we want to get Foursquare involved. I’m thinking it’d be awesome to get a custom badge made and available only to people that check in at the Cashew during our event. We’ll be tweeting, Facebook-messaging/posting, emailing, etc. about the event and this would be a fun added reward for coming. Plus, I don’t think anyone has organized a Swarm event in KC and this is our chance for that too.

So can we make this happen? I hope so – it’d be a fun way to reward users in KC and get even more signed up. Thanks in advance for your help!

It’s now been over 30 days and this is the status update I get on the support page:

I gave it some time, knowing how busy they must be with SXSW, app updates, etc. and posted follow-up messages on April 1 and April 14…nothing.  I posted a message on Foursquare’s Facebook wall and have been posting Twitter messages @foursquare on a regular basis…nothing.

Let’s sum this up – I’m one of their best customers and I had a simple idea to help them generate more business at little to no cost to them.  I used their official support system to contact them, as well as their two prominent social media methods.  It’s been over 30 days since I initiated contact. And I’ve got NOTHING.  Talk about your mis-managed expectations.

I was going to ask Gowalla for the same type of thing…then they added that exact functionality available to everyone – check that out here so I guess Ad Wars 2010 will be featured on Gowalla and not Foursquare.  Highly disappointing for this Foursquare fanatic.

Parallels of Arrogance

March 20, 2010 in Advertising/Marketing Business, Automotive Industry | No comments

Watching the University of Kansas Jayhawks (my alma mater) lose to the Northern Iowa Panthers in the second round of the NCAA Tournament today got me thinking about arrogance and how it can get you in trouble. KU was ranked #1 in the pre-season and they stayed there throughout most of the season.  They played unbelievably well a few times, but many other times, got by on their talent and the expectation that because they’re KU (a top-five all-time basketball program), winning was a given.

If you step back and apply those same lessons to business, countless examples certainly exist, and here’s a couple that I thought of immediately:

The Big Three (Ford, GM and Chrysler): in the 1960′s, those three companies had 87.6% market share in the United States; GM alone had 48.3%. Imagine that, almost one out of two cars was a GM brand. In August of 2009, the Big Three’s share stood at about 41.7%. What caused that massive decline in just about 40 years?

Well, when Honda, Toyota and other imports started entering the market in the 1970′s, the Big Three didn’t take them serious enough. The Arab oil embargo caught them with lines of big, gas-guzzling cars and thus began the rise of the import. Even after the embargo ceased, the Big Three didn’t change their ways and as the 80′s began, the quality of American cars continued to decline as more and more people began buying their cars from Japan.

However, there were moments of glory for the Big Three.  Inventing the minivan in 1984 was a huge win for Chrysler, and even through decades of turmoil, they’ve continued to be a force in that market segment; unfortunately, they didn’t adapt as the segment declined from its heyday in the 90′s. Ford had two massive success stories too. In 1986, they introduced the first Taurus and, hard as it is to believe, it was a groundbreaking design at the time and for the next six years, it was at the top of the sales charts, or very near it. But they let the innovation and quality slide until the car’s 21st century death and rebirth in 2009. Ford followed that up by producing the first SUV to really go mainstream, with the Explorer in 1991. Again, Ford was happy to bring in big profits instead of continuing to innovate and the Explorer went from the best-selling non-pickup truck in the US to barely a blip on the radar today.

It wasn’t until the hiring of Alan Mulally that Ford really woke up from its long slumber of arrogance. It remains to be seen if GM or Chrysler has done the same.

The events of the past few months have shown us again the cost of arrogance; Toyota’s arrogance and desire for market share made them abandon their core principles and damage their painstakingly-built brand heavily.

Microsoft: the company at the center of the computer revolution for over twenty years has never ceased to be a powerful force, yet I can’t help but think about the opportunities they’ve blown over the years. Think of the areas of technology where they surely could have innovated, yet sat back and let other companies become the dominant force:

  • Portable Music Players: in less than ten years, the iPod has revolutionized music distribution, saved a company on the verge of bankruptcy and left Microsoft scrambling to catch up (Zune) and now they’ve seemingly given up the fight.
  • Video Games: Sony came out of nowhere in the 1994, catching market leaders Nintendo and Sega off-guard, and Microsoft was nowhere to be seen. For seven years, Sony made huge profits with the Playstation console and subsequent Playstation2 and 3. It took Microsoft until 2001 to get their own contender on the market and many more years to pass Sony.
  • Search: back in the days of WebCrawler, Lycos, AskJeeves, Yahoo and MSN, there were a ton of choices and no dominant force. Then, here comes Google and the rest is history.

So many opportunities to continue their dominance, and instead Microsoft was happy to keep cashing in on profits of Windows and Office, rather than finding the next big thing.

So what am I trying to say here?  In business, just as in sports, you’ve got to act like you’re never the best, compete and innovate like you’re still the little guy and maintain a culture built on ideas. You’ve got to prepare better and smarter than your competitors. And never, ever rest on your laurels. It’s the culture Avis built in an industry dominated by others – “We’re #2 – we try harder.”

That’s the culture Apple, McDonald’s and Google have, what Honda and Toyota had, what Ford has again, and what the Northern Iowa Panthers had today.

Sources:

http://www.carofthecentury.com/answer_to_gm%27s_market_share_plunge.htm

http://www.automotivedigest.com/content/displayArticle.aspx?a=61337

http://www.tgdaily.com/trendwatch-features/43289-nintendo-wii-surrenders-market-share-in-weak-game-console-market

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Weirdness from the Fiesta Movement

February 24, 2010 in Advertising/Marketing Business, Automotive Industry | 10 comments

Well, it’s now been 17 days since Clifton and I submitted our application and video for the Fiesta Movement 2 (if you want to check it out, go back to this post).  That was a Sunday, and the very next afternoon, I had a 30-40 minute phone interview with a guy from one of the agencies partnering with Ford on the project. The phone call covered a wide range of topics, from my background to the creative people I associate with here in KC, to why Clifton and I would make great candidates for the project.  It ended with me being told we’d have background check forms to fill out the next day and a statement that Ford would be making decisions late that week or early the week of the 15th. Chosen pairs would be going to Detroit for training that weekend (Feb 20-21).

Clifton and I got our form in and waited with baited breath for the rest of the week, visiting www.fiestamovement.com over and over, refreshing my TweetDeck search for #fiestamovement and grabbing my phone every time it vibrated, hoping for a call.  And it never came but we did see a few different agents post that they’d been chosen and on their way to Detroit. We were disappointed but figured it was over.

Well, after a few searches and tweets, I discovered that there was a bunch of people who’d had the exact same experience.  That is, until @FordFiesta posted this:

The last info we've gotten from Ford...

Since then, myself and the other applicants have all been contacting Ford, trying to find out what’s going on.  I’ve left two voicemails with the guy who interviewed me, DM’d Sam De La Garza and tweeted once or twice a day.  All that sort of culminated in this chain of Tweets today:

There's some confusion happening...

@fordfiesta is not tweeting anywhere near its normal volume and nobody seems to be responding.  So I guess we’ll continue to wait, but it’s highly disappointing to see Ford handling it this way. It certainly doesn’t reflect the reputation and work that they’ve put into their social media efforts over the past couple years.  They’re late on their own self-imposed deadline – see the screenshot from fiestamovement.com taken tonight at 11:10 CST.

Feb 22? Didn't happen...

I hope we get some kind of explanation from Ford at least; I don’t expect the world but after all the work we put in and them taking the time to interview me and conduct a background check, the promised follow-up would be nice. Guess I’ll start working on my video for the Mustang Movement – how about it Ford?  All I want is a new GT convertible with the all-new 412 HP 5.0.

EDIT 2/25 around 10:30 AM: it appears the mini-firestorm this started prompted a response this morning.  I’ve exchanged three DM’s this morning with Sam De La Garza, which you can see below.  My response to his first DM was “Thanks Sam – not a big deal in the end just surprising not to get more comm. from you guys. Hope my team still has a chance!”  And my response to his second DM was “Figured that was part of it – would love to tell u all why KC is a strong creative market if it’s in question. Mind if I share these DM’s?.”

A much-appreciated response

So I’m glad I have an update now; it’s still a bit odd that they’ve chosen not to simply post via @fordfiesta and let us all know these same things.  Soon after Sam’s DMs, I also got a call from the agency partner to give me some more insight/details, which I won’t share here.  This is the kind of response I expected from Ford from the beginning.

Thanks Sam…now choose Team KC and everything will be good!

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