October 20th, 2008, 6 Comments »
To his office mates’ potential dismay, Travis recently set off on a search for the best burrito in Vancouver. He wrote four blog posts on the subject.
I’ve been told by more than one Latin American (or, uh, Latin American-Canadian) that Vancouver has a shameful paucity of good Mexican food. I’m ambivalent about food of all ethnicities, but I applaud Travis’s efforts nonetheless. Here’s an excerpt:
Well, like La Casita, they don’t do pork burritos hereâ€â€which I found all the more irritating because they did pork tacos. Just scoop it into a different tortilla, would you? No, they would not deviate from the menuâ€â€though I don’t dock them friendliness points, because they were wonderful throughout the meal.
I should mention that Travis lived in Los Angeles for a while, so he might know more about Mexican food than the average Canadian.
6 Comments »
July 13th, 2008, 13 Comments »
First, read about Travis’s odyssey to get an iPhone on Friday. He was tenacious, and it took most of the day, but (despite Rogers’ best efforts) he took one home. Travis cites ten problems with the iPhone launch in Canada:
So yeah, basically, from the biggest, most important factors, to the smallest details, they were simply unpreparedâ€â€which is bad enoughâ€â€but they were also dumb about process and shoddy and careless.
Next, read Seth’s post about scarcity and how to handle high demand and low supply:
Imagine what the Apple and AT&T stores would have been like this weekend if they were filled with happy customers who had pre-paid, pre-registered and were just dropping in for three minutes to pick up their (very coveted) phones, walking up the VIP line, past all the others just waiting for a chance to buy one…
Both posts have lots of lessons about how Apple, Rogers, Fido et al could have better managed their iPhone campaign. There’s enough material in the last six months for an MBA thesis.
You know the story–they really dropped the ball from day one. They pretty much made every error possible, from exorbitant initial pricing to promising breakfast to the early birds. Travis reports (at one of Rogers’ six national flagship stores) that “The only food was granola bars at about 10 or 11 a.m., but only enough for about one bar for every three people.” Now that’s some sweet customer service.
Come Back on Monday or Tuesday
As both Travis and Seth more or less point out, why didn’t Rogers just hand out tickets to those in line, like wristbands for a concert? They could easily have predicted excessive demand, and they knew how many phones each store was getting. I can guess why: nobody who works at a Rogers store wants to get up early to go meet and greet the alpha fans that have queued up half the night.
I went into a Fido store in Victoria yesterday, and asked about the ratio of supply to demand. They said they had 26 iPhones, and easily had 100 enquiries on the first day. Then I asked how I could buy one, and they told me to “come back on Monday or Tuesday”. No waiting list, no deposit, no nothing. They genuinely didn’t want to take my money.
If I was Bell Canada or another mobility provider, I’d be offering killer deals over the next few weeks, to try to entice iPhone enthusiasts away. You wouldn’t get the hardcore fanboys, but there would probably be some low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking.
13 Comments »
March 19th, 2008, 3 Comments »
Travis recently became an unintentional pitchman on Facebook:
But that behavior, becoming fans of a company, exposed an interesting problem recently. I became a fan of Kinzinâ€â€for no real reason, other than that I liked their design and the way they solved a problem of online communities: namely, privacy controls for family, especially kids.
So imagine my irony-laced surprise when a friend sent me this screenshot, of an ad she said she clicked on because she thought I was explicitly messaging it to her…
I’m going to remove myself as a fan for Kinzin. I don’t dislike their service, but I don’t want to be an inadvertent (and uncompensated) shill for them.
Here’s the screenshot. It’s unrelated, but apparently somebody took Travis’s photo just as he was passing between dimensions:
He makes a good point about the ‘uncompensated’ part. Obviously his ‘endorsement’ has value but (besides free use of Facebook, for which he already looks at ads) nobody’s paying him for it. Robert Scoble has 4923 friends on Facebook–how much is his endorsement worth?
Travis explains that there’s no way to turn off this functionality on an individual company (or ‘page’, in the parlance of Facebook) basis. To do so for your entire profile, click privacy in the menu bar at the top of your profile. Then click News Feed and Mini-Feed and choose the Social Ads tab. Finally, choose “No one” in the dropdown box and click Save Changes.
I don’t want to impugn Kinzin here. I don’t have an opinion of their service (it’s not really targeted at the likes of me), and their only gaffe was in picking a potentially-unpopular advertising strategy.
Michael from Kinzin left a comment on Travis’s blog. He didn’t apologize per se, but he did say that they’d turn off the ‘social actions’ (goofy name, that) for their Facebook ads.
What’s the lesson here? We don’t know very much about social advertising, or how it’s going to be perceived. So, proceed with caution.
UPDATE: Michael from Kinzin has written two relevant posts about Facebook, privacy and advertising.
3 Comments »
April 18th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Internet access permitting, the next post will be from Dublin:
9 Comments »
April 4th, 2007, 2 Comments »
His site is down at the moment, but last month Doc Searls pointed out that nearly every newspaper site looks really, really awful. I agree, and so it was with interest that I read Travis’s article re-imagining a newspaper story for a social media future:
We see that Flickr isn’t itself perfect, and certain acknowledge that it has been imperfectly adapted in this exercise for a second life as an online news site. However, we feel that there’s much to be learned, and frankly, improved, in traditional media sites, and you could do worse than to copy one of the most successful sites to appear in recent years.
Newspaper editors of the world, pay attention.
2 Comments »