My Collection of Nothing

Lessons Learned Courtesy of the Flip Mino HD

I have been through a wide range of emotion related to my Flip Mino HD video camera over the past month. Initially, I was excited about the low cost - mine was $179 after a $20 instant rebate from Costco. The package contained a small tripod and carrying pouch, but did not include the wall charger. The form factor is brilliant; it allows me to carry a 720p HD video camera in my pocket. The camera weighs very little and I forget it’s in my pocket after the first few minutes.

My first videos were beautiful and the overall experience with the Flip was exactly what I had hoped it would be. I recorded about 25 minutes of video at a pool party and BBQ at a gorgeous house on the water in Ft. Lauderdale. The quality of the video was impressive, especially when viewed on my 52″ LCD TV. I was able to overlook the absence of in-camera image stabilization, and the lack of an optical zoom simply wasn’t a problem. Everything worked exactly as I had hoped.

Flash forward about 2 weeks. I took my Flip to San Francisco to document Cisco Live 2009, with plans to video blog during the event. I intended to shoot videos during each of my sessions and share them with the world. I created a WordPress blog at contactcenterenterprise.com, got my company to endorse the creation and use of a corporate Twitter account (our first corporate foray into both blogging and social media), set up an internal SharePoint site for the bits that I couldn’t post publicly, and set off for SF with high hopes. In the process I created a YouTube account, a private FlipShare channel, linked the contactcenterenterprise blog to Twitter via TwitterFeed.com, found the right hashtag for the event (#clsf), and engaged in “the conversation” on Twitter in the run-up to the event. I read everything I could about social media, video blogging and Twitter for corporate marketing. I followed the big names in social media, engaged in their conversations, and was even asked to guest blog for workshifting.com in the process. Everything went to plan. I had built my personal Twitter following to more than 100 and our corporate following to 80 by the time Cisco Live began. In the process, I encouraged many of my coworkers to join Twitter and generated enthusiasm about how we can collectively use social media in ways that are meaningful. And so begins the lesson:

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Comcast and the Case of the Mysterious Repair

Somehow Comcast seems to have fixed my cable internet service once again without entering my home. The only correlation I can find is that whenever we have a really hard rain or a lightning storm (both fairly common in South Florida in the Summer) my internet connection goes to hell. Within several days of the outage, the service is back up and faster than ever. Here are my speed test results from DSLReports.com for this morning, which I ran while I was on the phone with Comcast customer service cancelling the appointment that I obviously no longer need.

Another Internet Outage

My cable Internet service at home is down again today. I contacted Comcast via phone first this time. My wait time was very short, but after quite awhile talking with the support agent, nothing was resolved. I also Tweeted my frustration to @ComcastCares, but the response was not nearly as fast as last time. In fact, at the time of this writing, I had not received a response.

I’ll be off momentarily to a local Internet cafe, Starbucks or FedEx office to finish some high priority tasks which require Internet connectivity.

Added reCAPTCHA for comments and registration

Due to an overwhelming amount of comment spam, I have added reCAPTCHA to the comments and registration process. I was dealing with 50+ spam comments for moderation per week, which is more than I am willing to deal with. Sorry for any inconvenience you may experience as a result. Once you are registered and logged in you will no longer need to submit the re-captcha for each comment, so it should be a one-time thing.

Attending CiscoLive in San Francisco

I am attending CiscoLive in San Francisco this week. In an attempt to keep my co-workers and others who could not attend the conference this year “in the know,” I have created a blog to record the event. The blog contains video that I have shot using both my Flip Mino HD and my new iPhone 3G S.

Please check it out at contactcenterenterprise.com.

Guest post on workshifting.com

Head over to workshifting.com to read my guest blog post, which attempts to answer the question “How do you ask your boss for a raise?”

I’m really proud of this post, because it is my first guest blog post on another site. Thanks to Justin Levy and the workshifting.com team for the opportunity.

A day (two actually) without the intarweb

Tuesday, May 26th was one of those really frustrating days where nothing seemed to go my way. This badness started in the morning when I figured out that something had gone horribly wrong with my high-speed internet connection. I could connect to the internet and every now and then I could open a web page, but I could not send email and most of my IM’s wouldn’t go through. Worse was the fact that my home phone didn’t work, since it is a Vonage phone and depends on my cable modem from Comcast to function.

This is not a situation that I have had to deal with extensively in the past, with only 2-3 days without a network connection in the past 5 years (barring hurricanes where there was no power for multiple days). That’s a pretty good track record and a testament to the general reliability of the cable service in my neighborhood. I am also quite meticulous about having every piece of electronic equipment in my home on either a UPS or a quality surge protector. That includes all of the networking gear, so that I don’t lose network connectivity if the power goes out briefly. In South Florida, a good rain storm will cause brown-outs and brief power outages, and I hear the alarms on my various UPS’s go off about 3 times a week.

What was interesting about this experience (besides scouring Google Maps on my iPhone for a Fedex Office or Starbucks location with Wi-Fi nearby) is that I actually had an opportunity to test out Comcast’s customer service and tech support for myself, after reading about their recent surge in CSAT scores and focus on Twitter as a service channel.

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Comment: “RightNow, Salesforce Offer Services To Track Customer Complaints On Twitter, YouTube”

Comment on this article by Mary Hayes Weier on InformationWeek’s Cloud Computing blogs, found via @D_Hong on Twitter.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is a step in the right direction for the enterprise adoption of social media. Web 2.0 companies like RightNow and Salesforce that are already experts in cloud-based computing and CRM have found a way to use social media to enhance their existing offerings in a way that is both meaningful and quantifiable for companies. I have not seen a demonstration of this technology yet, but the article mentions that several of the oft-referenced Twitter-darlings, like Comcast and Dell are already using the technology. From the article:

Here’s how it works: You set RightNow Cloud Monitor to search for key words, in 33 languages, in Twitter and YouTube, such as, “XYZ Corp.,” “phone,” “junk,” “crap,” “mad,” “angry,” and the ever-popular “sucks.” After retrieving the tweets or videos, an XYZ customer agent can respond to the individual or create an incident report and put it into the RightNow workflow (RightNow, by the way, is offered in the software-as-a-service model.) Then a statistically based natural-language processing system applies a scale for how positive or negative the emotion is in each incident, which lets XYZ rank the priority in which it deals with each incident.

RightNow is planning future support for Facebook and LinkedIn, and is looking at how it can apply the service even more broadly, such as chat rooms. RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte tells me that some customers have been using the product for nine months, and it’s ready for use by the company’s full customer base.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com will offer a similar application for its CRM service this summer that monitors Twitter. Comcast, Cable, Dell, and European telecom company Orange are among the customers that have signed up for it.

The integration of Twitter in a meaningful way with Salesforce.com is of particular interest to me, because the computer telephony integration (CTI) products for Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) have a Salesforce.com CRM connector. This means that when Salesforce begins offering the service later this summer, existing contact centers running UCCE can begin to leverage Twitter (and hopefully other social media) without having to develop their Twitter strategy from scratch. They can simply manage and track the Twitter cloud as an extension of the Salesforce CRM product. The extent to which the Twitter integration is able to be leveraged by customer service agents using the CRM connector and how it will impact contact center reporting is my first and most pressing question.

This is a HUGE first step, and I look forward to learning more about the offerings from both RightNow and Salesforce.

One additional comment on this passage from the article:

So let’s get back to the aforementioned creepy aspect of all this. If a company contacted me on Twitter following a post, I think, initially, I might be taken back a bit. But really, this is in no way a violation of privacy. When you tweet, you’re tweeting to anyone and everyone. That’s the nature of Twitter. There is no privacy there. Same with YouTube. You don’t get to choose who responds to what you have to tell the world.

I find this particularly interesting because it so directly contradicts the expectations and disappointment expressed by Catherine Ventura from The Huffington Post, in an article that I commented on recently. On one hand we have a blogger for The Huffington Post getting, well, huffy about not getting a response to her Twitter post about a “horror story” with AT&T. On the other hand we have a blogger from InformationWeek discussing how scary it would be to have her Tweets tracked and analyzed by large corporations with whom she does business - but ultimately she admits that the prospect seems inevitable if you use a social media service.

Two very different views of the same subject. I think it illustrates an even larger challenge that is yet to come for enterprises hoping to leverage social media. How much is “too much”when it comes to monitoring and tracking your clients and customers?

I am a Sr. Principal at eLoyalty (a Cisco Partner). The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent eLoyalty’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Comment: “The ROI from Twitter: Don’t bother telling your CFO”

This is a comment on a article on blogs.ZDNet.com by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld.

I think this article’s title is dead on, at least for now, about the ROI that one might expect from Twitter in the enterprise. From the article:

In the question and answer period, after Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein delivered their tips, one of the questions was: “How do you quantify the benefit of Twitter to a CFO?”

O’Reilly’s response: “I wouldn’t bother.”

As I have mentioned in previous posts on this blog and on my Twitter feed, the metrics and tools of measurement for customer service (or any enterprise interaction) via Twitter still remain to be seen. These tools, methods and metrics may be under development in some code bunker somewhere or secured within the walls of a Fortune 500 company with time and money to invest in such matters. They certainly have not become mainstream.   Read the rest of this entry »

Comment: Sprint Links Up with the Enterprise

My comment on this article by Eric Krapf, Editor on NoJitter.com.

One of the last barriers to enterprise Unified Communications (UC) appears to finally be coming down. Sprint has announced that they will support presence status for mobile phones on the Sprint wireless network. Sprint Mobile Integration will allow companies to extend their Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Avaya Communication Manager out to enterprise mobile users with support for presence. From the article:

Sprint is touting the service’s ability to avoid desk phone deployment for highly mobile workers, who can use their mobiles and stay on-net; Dan Jacobson told me an enterprise could even consider the Mobile Integration service as a way to avoid deploying a PBX or any other premises system at small offices–you just give everyone a mobile and they hang off the Sprint network that’s tied to the main enterprise system.

This has two significant effects from my point of view.

1. This represents a huge potential shift in the designs for branch PBX deployments for large distributed enterprise PBX systems. Currently these branch deployments require locally based routers (voice gateways) in case the WAN fails and someone needs to place an emergency call, as well as adequate WAN bandwidth to support the voice calls that will terminate to or be generated from each branch location. There is a potential savings in hardware (phones, routers, switches, etc.) and deployment time for large branch deployments.
2. This capability may the first part of the “missing link” that enterprises are waiting to see in the UC market. There is so much talk of “federation” and platform integrations, as well as B2B presence sharing. With the increase in mobile users, work-at-home users and outsource relationships it will be critical that carriers step in to fill the gap between enterprises.

The next major step will be to support additional presence states, beyond just “Available” and “On The Phone” at the carrier level, and across carriers. Imagine if you never had to dial someone again, just to hear a voicemail message and wait for them to call you back. Comprehensive, universal presence would allow you to see when people in your contact list are available, busy or out of range and plan your contact with them accordingly.

Skype does this today, and is one of the fastest growing telephony services in the world - all on the carrier’s own networks. It only makes sense for Sprint and others to offer the same flexibility to their customers. It will be interesting to see if the other carriers offer competing products and whether Sprint will secure new business as a result of this offering.

A question to my readers: Will presence be the death of voicemail? I’ll have to cover that in a future blog post. Feel free to comment.