PC World customer service stinks

I just wanted to buy a Flip Ultra video camera. All someone had to do was open the locked cupboard and hand me one. I didn't need a demo. I didn't need to look at it. I didn't need to spend hours discussing it. In fact the time it took the sales 'assistant' to tell me I'd have to wait at least half an hour before he could serve me was less than the time it would have taken him to hand me the camera. None of the other people standing around chatting could help me either. Extraordinary!

So, out of ten, PC World, Sevenoaks Way, Orpington, Kent gets zero points and I'll be buying the camera elsewhere.

On track at Brands Hatch

A lucky escape

I was out riding on my road bike the other day. It's an Orbea bike - a replica of those used by the Euskaltel Euskadi team from the Basque country - so it's pretty good quality. However, close to the end of a 80km ride on Saturday one side of the handle bars sheered off completely just as I was pulling away from the lights. Unfortunately it went through the front fork and buckled the wheel, but luckily I managed to stay on and not fall off (I was in traffic). A very lucky escape! It had felt as though that side of the handlebars had 'gone soft' for about an hour, so I guess the lesson I learned is that if it feels like there's something wrong, there probably is!

Pointless signs

Following on from my post a couple of months ago about the number of lines we have on our roads, my eye was drawn to this road sign warning me that there were traffic lights 11 yards ahead. In fact the sign was so big it almost blocked the view of the lights it was telling me about. Somebody in that council has too much time on their hands!

Voices

In a world where everybody has a voice, those people working in corporate and employee communications face challenging times as they struggle to get their voices, or the voices of the people they write for, heard above the hub-hub. This is being brought into sharp focus on intranet news sites. More progressive organisations already allow comment on stories, or for people to submit their own stories. Up to now this ‘user generated content’ has generally been kept separate from the corporately provided news. And where an external view of company news is brought into the site, this is also kept separate.

I think this will have to change. Commenting on corporate stories; external views on the same stories; even the ordinary people providing their own interpretation of a news story are all going to be legitimate content on internal company news sites. All of that content will need to be aggregated around the story itself, not be consigned to a series of contributor-based ghettos, as it forms the context for the conversations which are so important. Conversations are a component of engagement. Corporate voices are not.

Great Capital Run

Last Sunday I lined up – along with my wife, my teenage children, and a couple of friends – ready to take part in the Great Capital Run. None of the others had ever done anything like this before. We were helping to raise money for Capital Radio’s Help A London Child appeal. The weather was fine, the crowd enthusiastic and the event well organised. I managed an uneventful time of 52 minutes – not great, but not bad considering the large number of runners (12,000) trying to negotiate the fairly narrow roads and paths around Hyde Park. A very worthwhile event, and a good day out.

The Participation Gap

I’ve been persisting with Facebook, and my initial scepticism is beginning to fade as my network has grown. I’ve also noticed I’m using it differently than I initially set out to do. I started off by trying to connect with all the people I’ve ever known, focussing predominantly on those from the more distant past. And I did connect with them. However, those connections have faded (probably for the same reasons we’re not real life friends anymore) and the day to day value I derive comes from interactions with people I still have a relationship with and who I see on a reasonably regular basis.

A couple of observations though. Firstly, despite living a highly ‘blended’ life, I use Facebook almost exclusively for non-work related things. I think that’s been driven by a couple of factors – the fact that any work-related stuff would be open to my entire network, which would be inappropriate, and secondly that very few of my work colleagues have connected with me on Facebook, possibly because they themselves only use it for personal things. Clearly this is (potentially) a flaw in my blending theory which I need to think about some more. My second observation, is that not all my friends and contacts use Facebook, or any other kind of social networking site for that matter. Which means my Facebook activity only represents part of my life network. Some of those missing are from a different generation, but many are not. They simply have different priorities and a different mindset. Whatever the reason, they are missing. This is the participation gap.

As with many technologies, there’ll always be some ‘never adopters’, or ULAs - ‘ultra late adopters’, or those excluded for other social reasons – and this inevitably means the value I get from the network will not reach full potential. Will this gap eventually close, as it did with TV? Or will the network keep migrating to new platforms before the ULAs have a chance to catch up? Does it even matter? I guess we need to wait and see.