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In this week’s installment of his ‘Circuits’ column, David Pogue asks, “Are you taking advantage of Web 2.0?” By ‘you’ he means your company, and he describes the response this question got from the attendees at a recent PR conference:

“…within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. ‘Not enough money.’ ‘Don’t understand it.’ ‘No technical resources.’ ‘Not enough manpower.’ ‘No visible return on investment.’ ‘Fear of ridicule.’ ‘Fear of slander.’ ‘Fear of permanence.’ ‘Fear of the public running amok.’”

There are lots of common fears in there, and they’re all reasonable at first glance. Companies are understandably afraid of opening themselves up to ridicule and slander from a public running amok, knowing that all the messy results will live forever, just a Google search away. And they’ve seen some embarrassing failures from companies who’ve tried to embrace the new paradigm — like the Chevy Tahoe debacle, and Wal-Mart’s fake blog (or flog) scandal, to name just two incidents. So the safest bet is to simply stay away from all things Web 2.0.

The problem with this approach, obviously, is that the public is already running amok. That’s what the public does. If they want to slander you, they have YouTube and MySpace and a million other places to do it. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t make all this stuff go away. It just makes your company look silly — or worse, aloof, uncaring and behind the times — and ultimately more vulnerable to whatever mud they might be slinging.

So if it’s unwise — or unrealistic — to stay out of the fray, then what’s the best strategy for jumping in? The other questions from the PR conference attendees fall into this category. More and more companies have recognized the need to participate, but they don’t know where to focus or how much to invest.

There are lots of success stories. Big companies like Dell and Mariott have generated good will and good press through their forays into Web 2.0, and this has surely translated into dollars. But it still comes down to the question of ROI. If one of the ultimate goals of embracing Web 2.0 is to engender good will, then how do you quantify it? How do you measure success?

Does anyone out there have a story that starts to quantify the actual value of good will?

A few years ago, a friend of mine, Michael, who comes from an upscale family and who was studying the romance literature of Latin America, conducted a unique social experiment. He dressed in simple clothes and set out to panhandle in downtown San Francisco to see how much money he could raise in one day. It took him several hours just to find a free corner that no one kicked him off of (come to find out, most corners in big cities are already “taken” by local panhandlers). But then he began: “Can you spare some change?” People averted their eyes. They looked down. They looked at the sky. They squinted and leaned into their open books as if trying to make out a foreign word. Very few would acknowledge his existence. And because his early actions did not provoke reactions, Michael started to feel like he didn’t exist. He soon found himself lunging toward people, yelling, using profanity. And this was only after about 6 hours on the streets.

I thought of Michael last week when I read BusinessWeek’s article “Consumer Vigilantes”. In it, we hear from some ultra-disgruntled customers who are bashing companies everywhere they can—on existing sites (amazon.com), specially created new sites (comcastmustdie.com) and through more “direct” channels, like 76-year old Mona Shaw who smashed keyboards and phones with a hammer at the Comcast headquarters yelling, “HAVE i GOT YOU ATTENTION NOW?!”

These customers desperately need to be noticed. Their efforts to gain the attention of the companies they seek to connect with have produced no reaction. They’ve tried the phone tree. They’ve tried email. They’ve tried letters to management. They’ve waited patiently (for hours) at headquarters waiting for a manager to appear. All to no avail. And, like Michael during his panhandling experiment, their voices and actions become ever more extreme.

Run away?
In the face of such aggressive consumer vigilante-ism, it’s tempting for us marketers to be afraid — very afraid — and remain safely hidden behind our one-way mirrors. But if we acknowledge that our very own corporate “mass” practices (mass marketing, mass communications, mass-ive cost-cutting) have actually caused much of the anger, then the way forward should feel less scary. We created this problem and we can make it better.

In fact, what struck me in the BusinessWeek article, and in my own life experiences, is how easily people can turn from foe to friend. They rant and kick and scream, “but then someone reached out to me from the company, and now I’m very happy.” Or, “… but then they fixed it, and now my loyalty is very high.”

How could such a small gesture — a simple call or email from a company representative, an inexpensive new part sent out in the mail — result in such a radical about-face? The reason is because it’s SO RARE. It is rare that a customer ever talks to a real person at any of the product companies they give their money to. Think about all the products and you buy and use — your deodorant, your sofa, your cereal, your jacket—how many people have you talked to from these companies?

Go on, engage—it’s OK
It’s time for companies to start talking to customers again, to start building real relationships again, on a mass scale, with help from technology. Customers are out there, on their “corner”, talking away, hoping for some attention, hoping someone will notice. They’re endlessly discussing the products and features they care about, praising and complaining, panning some brands and applauding others (yes, they do this too). It’s OK to jump in to those conversations. Scout Labs conducted a survey (posted out across the blogosphere) and asked the following question:

Do you like it when…you are involved in a conversation with other consumers about a product or service (on a blog or in a forum) and a representative from that company joins in online?

The responses we got:

That’s 70% who say you are welcome, even encouraged, to jump in. But there’s a clear caveat: only real efforts to connect allowed. No spinning.

How to do it well
Marketers are going to have to practice a bit. Many of us are out of touch with real customers in the real world. At some point in our careers we mutated, and now speak marketing-ese, which doesn’t play where we’re going. In this new world, using your real name is essential (gasp!). Typos are just fine (double gasp!). In fact typos get you subliminal brownie points, because it signals to customers that your response was not pre-filtered or canned. Note: those of you who wrote down, “Include a typo” in your notebook page titled, “How to talk to customers”, keep practicing, ‘cause you still don’t quite get it ;-) Your customer communication goals should be to educate, explain, connect, ask, listen, and be yourself. If you strive to do these things in your direct communications with customers, you can’t go (far) wrong.

Google does a good job at having conversations. eBay, where I received a crash course in keeping it real, is a pioneer in interacting with its community. Dell’s getting really good. DirecTV does a great job of participating in its influential communities in a very real way, in both official and unofficial capacities. Here’s an older but illuminating exchange between a DirecTV employee and semi-hostile hockey fans complaining about the DirecTV options. In the thread, you see the hardest-core complainers turn into fans, responding to the employee’s openness and candor with statements like, “… thank you so very much for your post clearing up some of the many questions that us hockey fans have. It is great to know that DirecTV cares about us and is trying to improve its Center Ice package.” And of course, myriad startups and small companies are gaining on the big guys thanks to smart products and masterful participation in influential communities online.

You can’t afford not to
Customers just want to be heard. Don’t wait until they work themselves into a frenzy. The line between brand-basher and fanboy may be closer than you think. Look up, make eye contact and jump on in.

March Madness has arrived, and my workplace productivity is already suffering a little (sorry Jenny — I promise I’ll get all my stuff done). I’ve started working on my bracket and looking around the Internetz for a little help. I don’t know whether to trust the wisdom of crowds, the experts or my own careful analysis. There are resources on the web to support each of these strategies, and I thought I’d write up a quick survey…

Crowdsourcing your picks

Yahoo Sports has a new application called the “Team Ranker” that’s sort of like a Hot-or-Not for evaluating possible matchups. The theory is that the masses will collectively gravitate toward the most likely outcome. The obvious risk is that the Team Ranker application might be dominated by people who know nothing about college basketball and make their picks more or less at random. Fanboys might be a problem too. Duke, for example, has a lot of haters, so no matter how viable a contender they might be, I would worry about people expressing their desires (e.g. for Duke to lose) instead of their predictions. Finally, the official tournament seeds and rankings are themselves driven - in a way and in part - by a collection of opinions, so even if Yahoo’s Team Ranker is dominated by true college basketball aficionados, I would expect the results to follow the seeds.

Turning to the Experts

I’ve done well with this strategy in past tournaments, but it’s not a sure bet. Ttaken as a whole, the experts tend to follow the seedings, and they inevitably split on all the toss-up games, so you still have to use your gut to a certain extent. The other challenge is that the expert commentary you can find is pretty disjointed. There are a lot of bits and pieces out there - separate breakdowns by region and conference, lots of hypothetical head-to-head matchups and riffs on narrow subjects like “injuries to watch - so it’s difficult to synthesize it into any kind of cohesive set of picks. That said, the free resources I tend to look at are the obvious ones:

• CBS Sportsline
• ESPN
• Sports Illustrated
• The Sporting News
• College Hoops Net

Each of these sites has its stable of pundits who crank out a furious stream of blog posts and articles between the time the field of 64 is announced and the first tip-off. The trick is to sift through the noise and spot the nuggets that can help you. Most of all, I look for predictions - especially whole brackets.

DIY Analysis

This is an especially rich area this year, and I found a number of nifty online tools. One called Bracket Brains lets you dive deep into individual matchups. If you pay them $15, you can save your work, and you get a bunch of other features, but the free version gives you a taste. Matchup by matchup, it provides a whole range of parameters you can tinker with to help you make your picks.

You can adjust how you think various slices of things like recent performance, strength of schedule and Vegas spread will factor in to each matchup. You can look at similar matchups from past tournaments (based on the parameters you set). You can even view a map showing the distance each team will travel to the game venue. As you tinker with all these parameters, the projected outcome of the matchup in question changes in real time.

Another tool called Bracket Caster runs simulations based on each team’s past performance and calculated chances of winning against any other team. According to the description, every possible tournament game has been simulated one play at a time and repeated 10,000 times. Using this data, you can run your own simulations of the regional brackets, or look at a high-level analysis of any individual matchup.

Finally, March Madness is fertile territory for stat-obsessed geeks. One category of basketball statistics - efficiency - has become especially popular as a way to measure any team’s true merit and predict its performance in future games.

A team’s offensive efficiency is defined simply as points scored per 100 possessions. Defensive efficiency is points allowed per 100 possessions. Defining a “possession” is somewhat more complicated, and I’ll spare you the details (go here if you’re interested). A Sports Illustrated blogger named Luke Winn has produced a compelling examination of just how good a predictor efficiency is, which is nicely summed up as follows: “From 2004-07, only two teams outside the top 49 in defensive efficiency made the Elite Eight, and zero teams outside the top 25 made the Final Four.”

OK, back to work now.

I received an email today from a friend at a large, publicly held company, begging for access to Scout Labs. His story was so “typical” that I just had to, with his permission, comment on it. It seems the company in question just launched a version of its web-based software that just didn’t work very well and broke a bunch of things that used to work. A scathing article about the flubbed launch was written on an influential blog in their space. The post was seen by a partner to the company and was forwarded to a channel manager which finally made it to the executive team. The last few days have been hectic for the team — the post has been circulating around the company via email, the marketing team is trying to put a response together, they hastily hired a guy to be responsible for managing a “blog strategy”, and so on. Days later, and the company still hasn’t jumped in to the conversation.

This series of events is all too common. Some lessons that this real-life parable suggests:

• Obviously — don’t launch broken stuff. But even if there is a reason that you need to get something into the market that is not quite baked, be ready for it. Make sure your whole team is ready for it. Be prepared to explain why things are the way they are and what will come next. And ideally, be the first to state the obvious — don’t let customers “reveal” something, as if you had no idea it would be an issue. If there’s a problem, they will find it. Deal with it early. Get your team, tools, processes and policies in place now - don’t wait for a crisis.
• Listen regularly, and be prepared to do something about it. Don’t think about customers as people to deal with after your products are in market. They should be involved every step of the way, on an ongoing basis. Many of the complaints aired in this specific negative blog post were not just related to the recent launch, but were nagging issues that this influential customer had endured for months (years?). He would have liked to have been listened to all along.
• Be part of the conversation when times are good, and things will be easier to manage when times are bad. When you are an engaged part of your own community, customers get to know you. If you do it right, you become a trusted resource and you are seen as a real person trying his best. When things go bad, you will have “social capital” to draw on and get you through.
• Know your influencers and what they are saying about you at all times. Make sure you don’t hear this stuff, after the fact, from a customer or partner. And fighting fires days after the event makes a tough situation even worse.

If you have any additional lessons for my friend at this unnamed big company or to share your own painful experiences and lessons, please jump in and comment.

The guys at 37 Signals have a list of what they call “red flag” words that often come up in business communications and can get teams into trouble. Words like “only” and “can’t” (as in, it should only take you a day to add this feature, and we can’t ship the product without it) lead down rat holes of feature creep and finger pointing.

For me, one of those red flags is “what if…”

What ifs are the sparks that ultimately generate every interesting, fresh, unconventional idea. They are the stuff of all the brainstorm sessions and experiments that characterize the really exciting parts of the product development process. What ifs produce ideas, and ideas are easy, so when a team is in the slog of getting things done, it’s hard not to get way ahead of them with lots of big and interesting ideas. You start to anticipate every possible scenario and edge case. You think about ways your product might tap into new markets before you’ve even addressed its core market.

Ideas are also impatient. They pile up behind the older ideas, and they push and they push until a few get through. And then a few more, and a few more, and while you may have started with something simple, you now risk ending up with this (click image to enlarge):

You know you’re in trouble when your light switch requires written instructions (photo courtesy John Maeda).

On the other hand, what ifs can be part of a sanity check. Asking “what if…” can be like hitting the pause button, allowing you to step back, size things up and gauge whether they’re on track. What ifs can also help you subtract and simplify. It’s a great exercise to look at your ideas and ask, “what if we got rid of…” and “what if it just…”

I think the “It’s about time” clock is a great example of this kind of thinking:

These guys asked themselves how many people really need precision around what time it is and effectively said, “what if clocks only told you what you need to know - in plain English?”

This isn’t to say that thinking small is always better than thinking big. Each has its place, but either way, “what if…” is a phrase to look out for in business communications. When you hear it, make sure it’s leading you in the right direction.