But I’m still talking about the trip too. What an amazing “product”.

1. Brilliant vision. Walt Disney had a vision for a family entertainment park that was so extensive and so complete, that even 50 years later, nothing has even come close to it in the world. Like Steve Jobs – or Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr., for that matter – Walt Disney was “all in”. He wasn’t doing a job. He found his “calling” and his work was an unconditional commitment. He worked tirelessly – obsessively – to bring his vision to life.

2. A complete experience. Disney has thought of everything. For example, when you order you tickets in advance, you receive a “welcome packet” for the family to open together around the dinner table. Pins, pictures, magical coins, an array of gleaming, beautifully-designed credit-card-like tickets, each one with a different character on them, plus a hand-written note from the person who prepared the packet for us: “I sprinkled extra fairy dust on this packet so that your trip will be the happiest of all. Jesse”. OK, if you don’t have kids that will sound incredibly corny, but to the rest of you – you know. They make it easy and fun to buy the product (Disney Vacation packages), they build excitement before you even get access to the product, and deliver an experience which is really beyond your family’s wildest dreams.

3. Execution with excruciating attention to detail. When we entered the park on the first day, we used our gleaming, credit-card-like tickets to enter the Main Gate. You scan your ticket under a barcode reader, but instead of hearing “BEEP” or “EH!!!”, we heard “Tinkle tinkle ting!!!” – the sound of Tinkerbell’s magic wand. How cool is that? The next day, we eager ly pushed though the Main Gate for day 2, and when we scanned our tickets this time we heard Jimeney Cricket’s laugh. OK, so Disney called the barcode scanner vendor and said, “I don’t want a beep sound. I want a catalog of sounds that we can upload and cycle through at different times on different days”. How much did that add to the cost of their entry system? Which brings me to…

4. An obsessive focus on product, not profitability. After exploring caves on Tom Sawyer’s island one afternoon, we headed back via raft to the dock at New Orleans Square. As we came off the raft, I noticed a man, dressed in swarthy coats leaning against a fence, playing a penny whistle. He wasn’t talking to anyone or doing much. But his presence – the lonely sound of his instrument and his old tarnished, (Disney) pocketwatch – transformed the place. In fact, Walt even invested in details that very few people ever even noticed. “Hidden Mickeys” are everywhere in Disneyland and their spotters form an elite community of fanatics. . A cost-cutting consultant would show up at Disneyland and have a field day. But they don’t show up at Disneyland, which is the point.

5. Operational excellence. Disneyland hosts 14.7 million guests per year. It is open every day of the year, some nights closing at midnight and opening at 8am. And at 8am, every morning, the place is immaculate. Everything is where it should be. Every piece of trash is picked up (I checked one day – that little ice cream wrapper in the corner of the castle moat was indeed gone at 8am the next morning). No paint is ever faded. And every cast member is “on”. Who cleans the moat at 2am? And when does Tinkerbell practice her zip-line “flight” from Matterhorn to castle? There must be a fake Disneyland / training ground somewhere where she can train? The scale, scope and level of quality is inspiring.

6. A team of people who live the vision every day. “Ahoy sailors! Looks like good weather for our voyage!” We are genuinely, honestly greeted this way by cast member Paul as we weave our way closer to the Finding Nemo Submarine Adventure. He is not tired, but downright jolly – not the way most people look at 3pm on a work day. This is the result of rigorous hiring and training practices as well as creative scheduling and staffing – cast members do only short shifts on any given ride to prevent monotony from setting in.

Obviously, modern Disneyland is the way it is because of the efforts of thousands of people, but Walt Disney started it all and grew a team with a similar quest for perfection. The following quotes from Walt Disney sum up his leadership style and approach to “product development”.

“Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.”

“When we consider a project, we really study it–not just the surface idea, but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.”

“Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.”

“I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.”

“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”

Kids or no kids, I think it’s time to plan a trip to Disneyland…

While it’s true that Starbucks promotes angel behavior by encouraging “cheer chains” during the holiday season, Arthur Rosenfeld said that he had never heard of such a promotion. He said he did it to steady himself – to quell his own anger. But it was the unexpectedness and the stark contrast of his action that moved the honker, and the car after and the car after and the car after…

The story made me think on the random acts of kindness that I have encountered, personally. Thank you to the “trail angels” who have left snacks and water out along hiking trails for me to find. Thank you to the man in the green shirt at the airport this weekend who bought us a bottle of water after overhearing my daughter complaining of thirst and me explaining we couldn’t get out of the boarding queue. And on and on…

But Arthur Rosenfeld’s story also made me think about the marketing world, in which we often face angry customers, ranting on their blogs or in emails to customer support. Instead of yelling back, or issuing a cease and desist, or even ignoring the whiners, what if the company did the unexpected? Invite a particularly angry customer to the company headquarters to meet with the product team so that they can properly express their frustrations. Even a personal note sent from a person who matters at the company is unexpected enough (in this day and age) as to potentially turn the angry tide.

That’s what Dell did. It asked the angry Jeff Jarvis to the Dell headquarters to meet with the CEO. And while it wasn’t the meeting by itself that turned Jeff around, but the series of proactive changes that Dell put in place afterward, Jeff Jarvis ended up pretty happy. So tell the lawyers to step down. Tell your own employees to step up and to connect. You never know what might come of it.

Yesterday I wrote about how companies should give things away in order to attract customers and build relationships.

Well, I was looking around for good examples, and today I thought of Nike’s training tools. As an example, Nike got a lot of positive attention a while back for the Nike+ program, where a little sensor you put in your shoe tracks how many miles you run. You can sync your runs with a training program that you put together online. Even without buying the sensor or Nike shoes, however, the site lets you design a training program for yourself with the goal of completing a particular event (5k, 10k, marathon, etc.) or just getting in shape. There’s also Nike SPARQ training, a program to help you “be a better athlete” by improving the “five basic elements of your athleticism.”

All of these incorporate social and community elements. Nike+ for example suggests some playful running challenges like “Democrats vs. Republicans,” and Nike+ and SPARQ can both connect you to groups and events in your area.

Most recently, Nike launched something called the “Breakfast Club” to promote its Jordan line. You start with a self-assessment - or an assessment done by any friends you enlist, and then based on that, you create a workout program for yourself.

Here’s a great interview with Emmanuel Brown of Nike Jordan, talking with social media blogger and podcaster, Jennifer Jones.

• Create a MySpace profile
• Enlist the Black Eyed Peas (they were especially hot at that time)
• Put some videos on YouTube

Then… POOF! it spreads like wildfire.

Even now, reading the latest online pitches from the current lot of would-be gurus, it seems things haven’t changed very much.

The basic pieces of a social marketing campaign today seem to be…

• Create a profile/group on MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/Jaiku
• Launch a blog advertising campaign
• Create a contest that has some viral hooks

This formula is attractive because none of these things necessarily requires much effort on the part of your company. You might get kudos from the Madison Avenue crowd and a few marketing pundits, impressed by your “revolutionary” foray into social media, but the long term rewards from real people will be thin and fleeting unless you do a little more.

Too many social media marketing strategies are still about pushing your brand or your message out to people. The channels are new, but the philosophy is same-old advertising.

I’m personally tired of the whole contest thing. It’s become de rigueur in the web 2.0 world to launch some kind of cheesy campaign where, for example, companies invite people to make their own commercials or slog through a ridiculous scavenger hunt for the chance at a big prize. This doesn’t count as a giveaway because contests like this demand payment (manual labor and/or creativity) in exchange for nothing but a chance at personal glory or tangible rewards.

As the adage goes, you reap what you sow. If you want something from the digital crowd, then think about what you can give them upfront.

What I’m talking about is not all that different from the old concept of a loss-leader. You give away or deeply discount something that will attract people to you, and then you try to deepen the relationship with those people and persuade them to buy more stuff - or simply hope they will. What if Microsoft simply gave away the Xbox for free, knowing that such a move would propel their console market share way past PlayStation? Could the resulting increase in game sales make up for the cost of such a move?

I’m sure Microsoft has already run the numbers on this, so I won’t fantasize about getting a free Xbox, but there are plenty of giveaway ideas that cost almost nothing.

A lot of companies have quite a bit of capital in the form of knowledge. Why not give this away?

Become the expert in your industry. Make your company’s blog the go-to source. Tell secrets. Teach people something cool or valuable. Enable. Entertain.

A while ago, I wrote about Rancho Gordo - a small specialty foods company with a great blog, sharing recipes, gardening advice and commentary on the agriculture industry. There’s also English Cut, the blog of a bespoke saville row tailor. I couldn’t care less about hand-tailored suits, but his blog is wonderfully written and hard to beat for passion and subject-matter expertise.

Some bigger companies get this too. Williams-Sonoma recently launched a redesigned website, and it prominently features their vast archive of recipes. Out of curiosity I checked Geek Squad and found a few self-service resources on their website, but imagine all the things they could give away. Same goes for banks and financial services firms - think of the tools and resources they could offer for free.

So, what could you give away?

Jennifer R. Ferris from Virginia Tech defines it as “a psychophysiological disorder involving tolerance; withdrawal symptoms; affective disturbances; and interruption of social relationships”. Hmmm. Better look at the symptoms to see how I fare.

To be diagnosed as having Internet Addiction Disorder, a person must meet certain criteria as prescribed by the American Psychiatric Association. Three or more of these criteria must be present at any time during a twelve month period:

1. Tolerance: This refers to the need for increasing amounts of time on the Internet to achieve satisfaction and/or significantly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of time on the Internet.

In college I used to only email some things here and there, and now (as CEO of an Internet company) I am connected all day long! So, strike one against me.

2. Two or more withdrawal symptoms developing within days to one month after reduction of Internet use or cessation of Internet use (i.e., quitting cold turkey) , and these must cause distress or impair social, personal or occupational functioning. These include:

• psychomotor agitation, i.e. trembling, tremors; anxiety;
• obsessive thinking about what is happening on the Internet;
• fantasies or dreams about the Internet;
• voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers.

This is getting eerie. For our family vacation this summer, we will be staying in a house in Bali that has ONLY DIAL-UP CONNECTION. I am already waking up in cold sweats about it. And I was wondering what that uncontrollable finger-twitching-in-the-air thing was about…

3. The Internet is often accessed more often, or for longer periods of time than was intended.

I cannot tell a lie. Once I get to CuteOverload, time seems to stand still and I can be there for hours. Gulp.

4. A significant amount of time is spent in activities related to Internet use ( e.g., Internet books, trying out new World Wide Web browsers, researching Internet vendors, etc.).

Great…our whole company hath been stricken!

5. The individual risks the loss of a significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of excessive use of the Internet.

I thought everyone’s spouse yelled at them for playing Facebook games while watching the Daily Show together! Well, signing off now - looks like my case is pretty serious. Please do not let your symptoms go unchecked! Here are some additional resources for your self-assessment:

Belluck, Pam. “Net Addiction: True Disorder or Just a Cyber-Psycho-Fad?” , New York Times 1 Dec. 1996.

Egger, O., Rauterberg, M., (1996) “Internet Behavior and Addiction.”, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich

And a great Internet Addiction Recovery site.

Hello, it’s Mathieu here, from France. I’ve been doing an internship with Scout Labs since January, and it’s exciting to be contributing to this very cool application. I’ve taken advantage of my time here by attending all sorts of hi-tech and entrepreneurship events happening here in sunny California.

I attended Startup School 2008 at Stanford University this past weekend. Startup school is an annual free conference organized by Y Combinator and BASES for hackers interested in creating their own startups. One of the most interesting and entertaining talks of the day was from David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby On Rails and founder of 37signals.

The most interesting advice he gave us was about how to make money online: Have a great product and define the right price for it. It’s interesting because it can be very hard to define the price of your great product, especially when it is sold as a service like a lot of software now (and like Scout Labs). You can fail at pricing your product correctly, and this is what happened to 37signals.

David told us that Backpack, one their applications, has been really successful (they doubled their revenues) in the last 2 months after they re-launched the application. They basically raised the price and changed their marketing message to target the long tail of businesses, what he calls the Fortune 5,000,000. You don’t have to aim at the Fortune 500, you don’t have to aim at the general consumer. There is a large and profitable market in the often-neglected long-tail, and software-as-a-service companies like Scout Labs are poised to capitalize on that opportunity.

You can find David’s talk below. All the videos from Startup School 08 are available on Omnisio.

“…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?

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 your 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.

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.

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.