I'm Providing Better Customer Service

It's interesting approaching similar topics from different professional vantage points.

Marketer Vicky Tamaru writes how Conversational Marketing via social media requires systematic business change. Design Professor Victor Lombardi recently asked Who is Advising Executives on Customer Experience? (Cliff Notes version: No one).

Customer service is vital to success. Businesses possess an array of tools with which to interact with consumers. The greater number of interactions with which they allow social media to improve such activity, the better.

I took my stab at better customer service last night. I've implemented a new disqus.com commenting system. Hopefully disqus will provide you with more tools (I know you've been dieing to share my posts on twitter). And it lets me track any and all interactions with my posts across multiple sites (like my tumblr blog). Let me know what you think.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd

A group of determined people can accomplish great feats together, but lets draw a line in the sand between collaboration or harnessing collective understanding, and exploitation.

Recent attempts to create so-called crowd-sourced visual design are nothing short of unethical; degrade the work that is produced, and create an abundance of visual trash.

Does anyone Who will get paid for their recipe on crowdspring.com?

AIGA, the professional association for design, encouraged its members to avoid contests and spec work, long before the internet made such practices commonplace. They assert:

Clients risk compromised quality as little time, energy and thought can go into speculative work, which precludes the most important element of most design projects—the research, thoughtful consideration of alternatives, and development and testing of prototype designs.

Designers risk being taken advantage of as some clients may see this as a way to get free work; it also diminishes the true economic value of the contribution designers make toward client’s objectives.

There are legal risks for both parties should aspects of intellectual property, trademark and trade-dress infringements become a factor.

Rafe Needleman called this weasel economics in a 2008 cnet.com article. Designer Andrew Hyde clearly articulates the unique nature of visual design and why seemingly similar creative producers (like T-shirt maker threadless.com) are actually quite different in his post, Spec Work Is Evil / Why I Hate Crowdspring.

I'm sure business models will continue to emerge that exploit the masses for short-term gain. Hopefully businesses that instead place true value in the crowds they attract, find greater success.

Much Ado

Organizing information is no small task. When a bureaucracy the size of the U.S. government starts churning it out, just sifting through their data-points can prove a full time job.

In a March 2009 note to site-users Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced new tools with which, "…governments and other organizations—will share more information about what is happening with them."

In the wake of the 2008 election, the degree to which he was successful could be debated. Undeniably, websites like Facebook and Twitter afforded young, tech-savy voters access to politicians, and engagement in the process. Yet, I would debate if sites like Zuckerberg's help cut through an increasing glut of information or merely add to such digital noise in the name of transparency. Is the citizenry more connected and knowledgeable as to their governments actions? Or does social media afford another platform on which politicians can peddle talking points and share only the most beneficial information.

If then, social media is merely for sharing information, it should be no surprise that when creative individuals, like Andrew Odewahn, make sense of thousands of data points, such creations are shared widely (over 2,000 views on YouTube).

Andrew is fascinated by supposed coalitions that have developed in the Senate. He shows us how he used available govenment data from 1991-present to build his own data model.

His 2009 comparison of U.S. Senators' voting records vividly debunk mainstream media's oft-propigated idea that the Senate is uniquely polarized at this point in history. See for yourself:



Odewahn is one of numerous designers and artists making sense of government data. GOOD.is (a self proclaimed "collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward," who operate an engaging blog and regular print magazine) publish a Transperency series. The regular illustrations make sense of vasts amount of (often government) data.

Designers and illustrators like, Serifcan, Design Language, Lamosca, NazSahin shed light on topics ranging from the relationship of education spending to graduation rates to the distance produce travels, and the effectiveness of NASA flights to the cleanliness of water.

These fun and engaging diagrams provide users with, as the series suggests, a transparent look at otherwise meaningless mounds of government data. If information continues current trends, we will place increasing value on the likes of GOOD, Andrew Odewahn and other creative individuals. It follows that our society will grow equally reliant on platforms like Facebook to deliver such work.

Hello.

I created this bit of the world wide interweb to post contributions and musings for American University Kogod School of Business, Itec 656 class (Social Networking, Social Media, and Web 2.0). I'm not promising much at this point, however, "On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own."