By Francis Moran
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I spent four childhood Christmases in Lesotho, the tiny mountain kingdom in southern Africa where my father worked for the country’s newly independent government. I have vivid memories of our very first Christmas there, which came scant weeks after we first landed in this strange new land. So I know first-hand that several things we take for granted at this time of year simply don’t happen in Lesotho, a country that struggled with poverty and chronic drought when we lived there and whose problems have been endlessly compounded since then by the ravages of HIV and AIDS.
The most obvious difference at Christmas time is that it is hot and sunny in Lesotho, not cold and snowy. Contrary to many people’s imagined vision of Africa, however, it does get extremely cold and snowy in Lesotho during its winter since the country lies at 5,000 feet above sea level and higher. Being in the southern hemisphere, Lesotho’s winter corresponds with our summer, and vice versa.
The next most obvious difference is that very few families in Lesotho will be tucking in to a feast of good food following a frenzied burst of present openings this, or any, Christmas morning. Many families will be led by the oldest child, or a surviving grandparent as AIDS has cut a swath through a generation of parents and wage-earners. And while most will take time to celebrate with joyous song and dance the religious aspects of Christmas in this deeply devout nation of church-goers, very few will be able to join in the secular aspects that, for most of us, now take precedence.
This childhood connection to Lesotho and an awareness that this tiny nation of incredibly resilient and warmhearted people was bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of HIV and AIDS led me a few years ago to look into a unique Canadian charity, Help Lesotho. We have supported Help Lesotho and its unstoppable dynamo of a founder and director, Peg Hebert, ever since. Through the year, we use our media relations skills and do what we can to help Peg spread her message of hope, and at Christmas we forego sending cards and gift baskets to our clients and colleagues in favour of giving the money to Help Lesotho. We will do so again this year.
But I also want to draw the attention of our Ottawa readers to a fundraising sale of Christmas gift items that Help Lesotho will be holding at its offices over the next couple of weeks. Here you can buy one-of-a-kind gifts that will not only delight their recipients but will also help Peg and her team continue their work. You can see a full catalogue of the items on offer here, and the sale itself will be held at Help Lesotho’s offices at the Keller Williams Building, 610 Bronson Avenue (just north of the Queensway) from 4 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, December 4; Friday, December 5 and Friday December 12; and from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, December 6.
For those of you not in Ottawa, the same gifts can be bought and the same contribution made to Help Lesotho by clicking on the link in the previous paragraph and shopping online.
By Francis Moran
An application that allows users to create their grocery-shopping lists online and then see which of their local stores has the lowest total or individual prices for the items on the list was the debut project to be presented at the first-ever exhibition Monday of projects developed by students at the unique VeloCity incubator-residence at the University of Waterloo. With an objective no less ambitious than to “organize the world’s food information,” Grocerus is a nifty app that, covering a limited array of foodstuffs and listing stores only in the immediate Waterloo area, still has a distance to travel before it meets that ambition.
Indeed, the same could be said for virtually all the projects exhibited, where ambition outstripped — sometimes vastly outstripped — their implementation to date. But considering that these are student project teams that have been working just scant weeks, the dozen and a half ideas on display were an impressive array of creativity, imagination and, for at least a handful of standouts, well-engineered product development.
Some, like Grocerus, were strictly local in their initial iteration. For example, Find It Off Campus, which matches available student housing with students looking for accommodations, and Class Album, which helps students coordinate their schedules, both focused exclusively on the University of Waterloo for starters, but their founders expressed every intention of broadening their horizons once proof of concept was established.
Some of the applications are trying to dig value out of social networking trends. Gruup aims to use Facebook and other sites to bring consumers together for group discounts on products while Emoshion wants to lever social networks to help people uncover rare or hard-to-find fashion items such as limited-edition sneakers. Giftah, whose site is not yet live, wants to capitalize on the 15 to 20 per cent of gift cards that never get used by making a convenient marketplace where they can be bought and sold.
One of the more polished presentations was InPulse, a so-called “smart watch” that will use Bluetooh connectivity to convey key information about incoming emails, SMS messages and calls from your mobile phone to your watch. “Send me an email directly to my watch,” founder Eric Migicovsky said in what had to be the most original line of the day.
The judges bestowed their blessing and $1,000 on Sparknav, which will allow users to download to their phones content about their surroundings, such as directions, tour information or even exhibit details at museums, art galleries or zoos.
Two other good reports on the day’s activities at GlobalNerdy and StartUpNorth provide excellent analyses of how the students’ shortcomings in terms of effective business models and presentation skills can be addressed by getting executives and technology professionals more involved in VeloCity, something to which inmedia is committed as a partner of this fascinating endeavour.
I don’t know if it’s because we have a client whose software helps companies vastly improve their customer service, or whether we, like most others on this planet, rage against lousy customer service when we are victims of it, but it simply defies comprehension that companies would willingly lose business because they can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that effective customer service is the most potent — indeed, maybe the only — sustainable competitive differentiation in an environment where price advantage will evaporate thanks to offshoring and technological advantage will be leaped over by another’s innovation.
Just this past week, I had a couple of truly outstanding examples of mind-numbingly poor customer service. The first was the Chapters cashier who blithely dismissed my bringing to her attention a major flaw in the company’s online search engine. One of my sons needed a replacement copy of a book he was studying for school and had lost. I went online to make sure the book would be available at the store before I actually went. Chapters’ computer system told me there were no copies anywhere in the city. When I mentioned this to my son, he said the computer had told him the same thing when he had looked for the book a week or so earlier, only to find at least a dozen copies on the shelves. So I ignored the computer system, went to the store and found many, many copies were, indeed, available.
When I mentioned this to the cashier and suggested she might like to bring it to someone’s attention, she brushed me off, saying the shipment of books probably just came in and that it took their computers a few days to catch up. When I said my son had experienced the same thing a good week or more earlier, suggesting it was a more persistent issue than her first glib response would suggest, it was as though she wasn’t even listening; she simply repeated the same pat answer.
Now, I wasn’t complaining. I wasn’t bitching. I was helpfully bringing to the store’s attention the fact that there might be a serious problem with their online system that, had my son not let me know differently, would have cost them this sale as I went elsewhere to get the book. And she simply couldn’t care less. Either through deliberate training or a complete lack of interest, she had a stock answer that allowed her to avoid any meaningful attempt at genuine customer engagement.
For what it’s worth, five days later, the book is still showing completely out of stock all over the city. The kicker is, it’s Orwell’s 1984; at least the concept of doublespeak is alive and well and living at Chapters!
The second unbelievable episode happened yesterday when our phone system went down. We couldn’t get an outside dial tone. Our landline provider is Rogers, so we called them. It took fully 45 minutes — yup, you read that right! — for them to find our account, even though we gave them the phone number in question, the account number at the top of their invoices, every phone number on the account, the name of the company and the name of the key contact on the account! Turns out, Rogers has yet to integrate into their main system the operations of Group Telecom they acquired several years ago when they bought up Sprint Canada. So although everything about our phone service is striped Rogers, we actually had to call a completely separate customer service number, where we told there was a system-wide failure.
But neither of these meets the standard for wretched customer service set by the first-ever winner of the Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service. The award is named for Air Canada’s baggage-handling chief at San Francisco Airport who said to me, when I started telling him why my bag had failed to arrive with me on a flight from Calgary, “Keep talking sir, it’s going in one ear and out the other.”
Now, Air Canada is truly a leader in finding new ways to treat its customers like crap. But even by the high standards for low service set every day by the legions of couldn’t-care-less agents of this near-monopoly carrier, Harold’s performance was a jaw-dropping standout. With my journalist’s training, I immediately wrote his statement down on the back of my boarding pass, along with his name. I carry it around with me to show people who, like everyone at the baggage counter who heard Harold that night, simply can’t believe anyone in a customer-facing position would ever say such a thing.
And in his memory, I inaugurated the Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service. The key criterion that must be met goes beyond mere incompetence or indifference; to win the award, an individual or company must essentially invite me to take my business elsewhere.
And so the first ever Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service goes to — drum roll, please! — Petra, of Zip.ca Member Services, who last week explicitly invited me to cancel my subscription to this online DVDs-by-mail since she and Zip had no intention of ever addressing the increasingly poor customer service I had been experiencing for some time. Without going into extensive detail, what had started as a marvelous experience, degraded over the past year to the point where Zip was unable for more than a week to ship me even one of the 15 titles I had on my list. And all Petra and others at Zip could say was that I should add more titles, and maybe pick less desirable movies or settle for standard-format versions instead of the Blu-Ray titles I was seeking. In short, please don’t ask us to improve our service so it meets what we advertise; restrict your use of us so it falls within our limited ability to meet the promises we made you.
Congratulations, Petra, you’ve won the award and lost my business.
By Francis Moran
More words will be written today, perhaps, about yesterday’s presidential election in the United States than have ever been written about a single event in living memory, but I feel compelled to add my own few since rarely in my life have I seen something transpire that I frankly never expected to witness.
U.S. president-elect Barack Obama will enter the White House in January arguably the least experienced person that office has ever seen. He will take up power atop a nation that has been wounded, perhaps irreparably, by grave errors of judgment and downright malicious intent at almost every level. He has ridden a wave of expectation, entirely of his own deliberate manufacture, that no human could ever fulfill, and this may eventually be his undoing.
But this morning, as the world awoke to a tectonic shift in the geology of human endeavour that few thought possible, Obama must be recognized for achieving the unimaginable, for forging a campaign and a connection with millions of Americans that overturned our every expectation about race and its supposed immutable place in the politics of that amazing, capricious, expansive and divisive country.
I lived in southern Africa for many years as a child and never thought I would witness the emancipation of South Africa this side of a bloody and protracted uprising. My parents are Irish, and I went to school in Ireland for two years, and never thought I’d witness the laying down of arms and the embracing of democratic means in Northern Ireland by men wedded to the gun and the laws of violence. And I never, ever thought I’d see a black man in the Oval Office.
The audacity of the human spirit, a force that Obama harnessed to his own equally outrageous personal ambition and rode to the most powerful job in the world, is boundless. Whatever he manages to do with the power he now has, this one man has demonstrated that anything we dream, we can accomplish.
By Francis Moran
Although it had its genesis in a consulting practice that was already several years old, and its first employee had been in place for several months, inmedia Public Relations Inc. was legally incorporated on November 5, 1998, and so today is our tenth birthday.
I would be less than forthright if I said that 10 years after launching a technology focused PR firm that I had accomplished what I thought would be in place a decade out. The tech meltdown damn near put us under and the continued severe contraction of Ottawa’s tech sector means we have slim pickings here at home. And my initial business proposition, that we could create an agency of excellence and extract a premium from the marketplace for that excellence, has proven to be a tough pitch in a market that too often has yet to be weaned off mediocrity.
But we survived the meltdown, the only exclusively B2B technology PR practice in the city to do so. Today, we get very well paid for our excellence from clients who have come to understand the difference. And our deliberate business development strategy over the past three or four years has been to embrace Ottawa clients certainly, but also to aggressively pursue business anywhere and everywhere we see a good opportunity.
My excellent colleague Danny Sullivan’s self-repatriation to his native Scotland a few years back opened a whole new front for us, and our far-reaching Google Adwords campaigns and this blog have brought us amazing opportunities from many other corners. With Ottawa accounting for about 35% of our revenues, we have embraced clients and projects in Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Fredericton, Moncton and St. John’s; in Boston, Jersey City, San Jose and Chicago; and in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Farnborough and London.
If the business outcome has not been everything I hoped for 10 years ago, the experience has been nonetheless incredible. Most noteworthy has been the extraordinary people who have come to work with me here at inmedia. In an industry where average employee tenure has been pegged at less than a year, inmedianauts tend to hang around for much longer, with the average tenure here topping three years and some having spent five, six and even seven years on board. The consultants who work here are the real product that we sell, and I have had the unmitigated pleasure of consistently being able to bring to market the very best product in the PR industry, period.
Similarly, we have worked on some amazing projects with some of the brightest minds in technology, business and marketing. Our web site lists nearly 90 clients with whom we have worked over the past 10 years, and each and every one of them has represented a unique story, a unique set of market dynamics and a unique set of media and analyst targets to whom that story needed to be told. It is this ever-changing nature of the business that makes PR consulting so fascinating to me.
It has been rewarding, challenging and frustrating, as most any worthwhile venture inevitably is. It has also been a period of considerable personal and professional growth, and I look forward to learning even more as this little PR company continues.
