I drive a Chevrolet Volt. Today I received an email from Chevrolet inviting me to download a new app that will “track, maximize and compare my Chevy Volt performance within the Volt owner community.”

Here’s a screengrab from their email promo:

At first blush, being a tech geek/early adopter, I almost jumped at the chance to download the app. “Woo hoo! A new gadget!” However, when I stopped myself from getting distracted by the Big Shiny Object, I realized something: What will this app actually do for me?

It’s quickly obvious what Chevy’s play is here:

1. Get people to participate and promote their activities through the Volt online communities, and also within their own personal social networks;

2. Collect more data about Volt drivers’ habits (although I’d contend Chevy already has enough data—they sends Volt owners a monthly summary of miles driven, gas vs electric, etc… not to mention the fact, as a Volt owner, we have iPhone apps that can basically tell us all the same data, real-time and on demand, that this new app purports to convey).

What’s not so obvious here—and what I see as a flaw in Chevy’s new app strategy—is the WIIFM dynamic. In other words, Chevy failed to clearly tell me the value I’m going to receive as a result of downloading and using this new app.

I actually applaud Chevy for continuously trying to move the needle—and for making a truly terrific car (the Volt is awesome)—but this new initiative just feels half-baked to me.

At the end of the day, this served as a strong reminder:

Let’s not get so caught up in our own excitement for things that we lose sight of others’ WIIFM. Otherwise, we’re just spinning our wheels.

We do a lot of banking with AMEX, so I called them to learn about our options; after speaking with a helpful rep, I realized a prepaid AMEX card would meet our criteria.

I immediately and successfully opened a prepaid card account and loaded cash funds onto the card. Funds available. Done. Relatively easy peasy. Or so I thought.

One week later, I receive an email from AMEX telling me my prepaid account has been suspended, asking me to call AMEX customer service. No explanation whatsoever. “Your prepaid card account has been suspended. Call us.” Um, okay…

Meanwhile, by the way, we have a large sum of money sitting idly—and now seemingly inaccessible—in our prepaid cash account.

So I take time out of my day to call AMEX to find out why they’ve made our cash, that’s already been successfully transferred and loaded onto the prepaid card (just ask Wells Fargo), inaccessible.

The rep explains that despite my successful cash transfer, they now need to “confirm my Wells Fargo account.” Until my Wells Fargo account is confirmed, my account is suspended.

Worth noting: The account from which the prepaid card funds was transferred is the exact same Wells Fargo account that AMEX effortlessly accepts money from us every month. Exact. Same. Account.

The AMEX rep offers to put me on hold while she calls Wells Fargo to confirm my account. I wait five minutes.

She comes back on the line and informs me Wells Fargo will not confirm my account to her. My only option is to fax my Wells Fargo bank statement to AMEX. I asked if we could do a conference call between AMEX, myself and Wells Fargo, and she said Wells Fargo declined that option.

Okay, let’s pause for a moment to consider a few things:

First, you want me to fax a bank statement. Can I email it to you? “No sir, bank statement by fax is the only way we can verify the account. We don’t have access to outside email.” Really? You’re AMEX, for God’s sake. But good thing you have fax machines. That makes me feel confident about banking with you. By the way, someone please call 1989—it’s missing its only remaining fax machine on the planet.

Second, I haven’t used a fax machine since, well, I can’t remember. And even if I did remember how to use one, I don’t even know where or how to access one. (Let’s pause for a moment to imagine and pay tribute to the wonderful fax machine sound… beeep… chirrrpppp… ah yes, lovely. Next.)

Third, using a fax machine would require me to print my bank statement (waste of paper) and stand next to a fax machine, waiting for a confirmation, thus wasting more of my time. (Yes, I know there are online fax services that would make this process easier… but I’d still need to create an account, verify my account… you get the picture. More time wasted.)

Even if this whole situation is ultimately a process issue on Wells Fargo’s end, I’m AMEX’s customer here—there must be a way to make this effective for me.

Hey AMEX, here’s a really good, free idea—seriously, it’s all yours, you don’t even need to thank me:

Why don’t you do like Dropbox did a few years ago—you know, the guys who likely bootstrapped their startup with $100K in seed money from grandma and grandpa, and now have a trillion users—and create a sort of secure customer ‘Dropbox’ in your customer’s online accounts. That way, we don’t need to email. Or fax. Heck, we don’t even need to talk. We can just get along digitally. Splendidly.

So, after all this, I’m left with our only option—if we want to use our widely accepted, transaction-free and hassle-free prepaid AMEX card, we need to fax AMEX our Wells Fargo bank statement.

Next month, I’m asking AMEX to fax us our monthly statement. Or perhaps there’s a horse-drawn courier available.

UPDATE 9/7/12: Two more important things to know about using the AMEX prepaid card:

1. There’s a deposit limit of $2500 per month on the card.

2. If you’re using the card to withdraw money from an ATM, the first withdrawal of the month is fee-free; after that, there’s an AMEX transaction fee for each withdrawal during that same month. Also, third-party ATM fees, as usual, apply—get a list from AMEX on third-party partners who won’t charge a fee for using their ATM.

Take for example: CNN.com videos. They want viewers to watch a 30-second advertisement before “ungating” the video you want to watch. In theory, this makes sense—give a little, take a little. It’s a traditional TV advertising paradigm. However, let’s have a closer look at some of the issues here…

Length of commercials isn’t congruent with the content you want to watch. CNN wants you to watch a 30-second commercial just to wait to see the content you’re really interested in, no matter the length of your desired content. For example, you might only want to watch a 15-second snippet, but CNN preempts that with a 30-second commercial. Is it really fair to ask someone to watch a commercial that’s longer than the content we desire to see?

You have to watch commercials every time you switch to see a different video. This is a pretty irritating concept. Once I’m finished watching one video, and desire to watch another, I’m presented with another commercial; often, it’s the same commercial I just watched previously. *YAWN* Retention and repetition in marketing is key, but not like this. At the very least, show me a different commercial (see next point about relevancy); ideally, only show me a commercial for every, for example, five videos I watch, and not every single one.

Commercials aren’t relevant to the content. Don’t show me a commercial about herpes medication when I’m trying to watch a bear fall out of a tree. How’s that relevant? At least show me a commercial featuring Smokey the Bear and U.S. Forestry… or a ‘Save the Bears’ ad. But herpes meds? Really? Not only am I now irritated (pun intended), but I’m also now cerebrally confused because I was prepared to watch a bear fall from a tree… and now I’m accidentally thinking about something entirely different… thereby devaluing the experience I was trying to have. In other words, I might not revisit CNN.com in the future because I was promised one thing, and got something very different. We’re creatures of expectations: you’re better off underpromising and overdelivering.

(By the way, this whole concept goes for non-video advertising, too. And while we’re at it, I hate those special ads that take over a whole webpage, while also making the little ‘X’ box to close the ad as difficult to find as possible. Yeah, I’m definitely going to buy your product now. Thanks for playing. You fail.)

Advertisers and content-distributors—basically everyone—need to wear their ‘customer lens‘ as often as possible to create consistent, valuable, relevant experiences.

Big thanks to the gents with Phone Doctors—they make the process about as painless as it can get. If you break your iPhone screen, here’s what to do.

Step 1: Immediately put your cracked iPhone in a Ziploc bag. Seriously. That glass will start to chip and get everywhere. The touch interface still works in the Ziploc. You might look like an idiot, but you’ll be an idiot sans stitches.

Step 2: Visit Phone Doctors and buy yourself the appropriate DIY Kit, e.g., if you need to fix a white iPhone 4S screen, then buy that kit. It’ll set you back $87, but that includes everything you need: tools, magnetic mat for screws (a Godsend!), and a replacement screen. Easy peasy. (Note: Make sure you buy the right color kit—I almost bought a black screen, when I really needed a white one.)

Step 3: Wait for your kit to be delivered. I had mine within two days. Free shipping. Boom.

Step 4: Back up your iPhone. (With iCloud and iOS5, backups should be happening daily and automagically anyway.)

Step 5: Plan to dedicate two hours of time to fix your screen. What Phone Doctors makes look incredibly easy, and achieves in their ‘how-to’ YouTube video in less than 30 minutes, in reality will take you about two hours, start to finish. Also, make sure you dedicate a specific workspace for your work here—bonus: do everything on a white bath towel, as it’s soft and helps capture any renegade screws.

Step 6: Replace the screen, following Phone Doctors’ awesome step-by-step, detailed video. Be prepared: Some of the screws can be a little difficult to screw back into the phone, but as with most anything, patience is your friend.

Step 7: Sit back, grab yourself a Coke and smile—you just took apart an entire iPhone, put it back together, and didn’t need to deal with AppleCare, shipping your phone anywhere, being without it for days at a time, etc. Nicely done.

Cheers!

I was an early adopter of DTV. Been a customer for 10 years. And the level of service—customer and product—has been precipitously declining ever since.

I’m not going to sit here and pontificate all the ways DTV has started losing me over the years; in fact, I’ve already done that. Let’s just say, over time DTV has been producing a lot of little irritating pebbles in my shoes, and this latest pebble, well, it’s become more like a rock.

So, DirecTV recently announces this new iPad app feature, where DTV customers can stream video from their DTV set-top box to their iPad. Great, right? Not so fast.

First, thanks in large part to the myriad morons throughout the media business, DTV can’t stream all the channels you pay for to the iPad, I’m sure because of various—and again, moronic—licensing agreements. Pebble #1.

(And for the record, I’m going to be the first to stand up and cheer—quite loudly—when someone steps up to reinvent the customer TV experience, likely Apple, by simply taking advantage of the greed and stubbornness of the media business morons that arrogantly juxtaposed themselves into a corner and allowed someone (see: Apple) to completely take the table from which they have been eating their lavish meals right out from underneath them. To all you morons I will happily proclaim: “Good riddance! You saw the table crumbling, but your arrogance prevented you from fixing it. Enjoy eating your meals from your TV table trays… watching Apple eat what used to be your lunch.”)

Second, DTV’s competitors (e.g., Comcast) have been doing the iPad streaming thing for awhile now, leaving DTV customers wondering… and wondering… and wondering when such a functionality would come to us. Do you think we don’t see that other TV providers are offering better features? Silly folks. Pebble #2.

Finally (though I’m sure if time allowed we could come up with other salient points of conflict), our friends at DTV decided to render useless the new iPad streaming feature for anyone with a jailbroken iPad (read: me—and a million other customers… I often hear approximately 10-30% of iOS devices are jailbroken, so, you do the math). Pebble Rock #3.

Here’s an email I received from DTV announcing the new iPad feature—slightly edited by yours truly.

“Here you go! Great new feature! (But it won’t work for you. Sorry.)”

I don’t know or care why DTV decided to render the new feature useless to customers with jailbroken iPads, and it really doesn’t matter for the purposes of this conversation; I’m sure they believe there to be a few good reasons. What I do know is this: DTV purposefully alienated who are likely their most profitable, passionate and technologically-savvy customers.

As soon as I have the time, I’ll be permanently cutting the cord on DirecTV.

I’m confident when I call DTV to cancel, they’ll send me to their “Retention Department” in a last ditch attempt to try to keep my business. And they’ll throw out a bunch of wonderfully enticing offers. But that’ll just pour salt in what’s been a gaping wound for awhile—instead of showering me with offers that are irrelevant to me (I don’t care about the “Six Free Months of HBO!” you’re going to offer me, otherwise I would’ve called to threaten to cancel a long time ago), why don’t you sincerely ask me why I’m breaking up with you. And when I respond by telling you the truth (i.e., your crippled feature releases pushed me over the edge), transfer me to someone who can actually take my feedback and make a difference in your organization. It won’t save me from leaving you—that ship has sailed—but maybe, just maybe it’ll keep you from creating any additional pebbles rocks you’re pouring directly into your customers’ shoes.

UPDATE (12/15/11): I figured out how to circumvent DirecTV’s stupid little jailbreak block, thanks to a helpful Cydia plugin called XCon.

UPDATE (1/11/12): Awesome WSJ article about cutting the cord. Thanks to Patrick for pointing this out!

UPDATE (5/3/12): It’s official—as of April 1, 2012, I am no longer a DirecTV subscriber. Five weeks now… and not at all missing traditional, paid TV.

May I present to you: Pandabar.

Pandabar is a simple Mac menu bar app ($4.99 in Mac App Store) that provides your Pandora listening experience right from the menu bar. No browser needed, no standalone apps (I was previously running Pandora One, their upgrade desktop app, as a standalone app)—just pure and simple musical goodness represented as a drop-down from the Mac’s menu bar.

You login to Pandabar using your Pandora credentials; then, Pandabar does the rest. And you still have many of the features that makes Pandora terrific: thumbs-up/thumbs-down, stations, volume, pause, etc. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out how to do is add a new station, but perhaps that’s coming in a future version. And the scrolling within the station list seems to sometimes be wonky (i.e., slow).

Here are a few screenshots of Pandabar in action.

Pandabar Player

Pandabar Station List

Get Pandabar today from the Mac App Store for $4.99 (on sale right now for $2.99).

Now, when I next see you sitting at your computer, watching you bob your head in musical delight, I’ll high-five you and rest assured you’re enjoying a facilitated musical experience, thanks in large part to Pandabar.

Enjoy!

More often than not—and I’m guilty of this, too (though it’s less and less often)—when we as business leaders hear the word “segmentation,” we immediately think of job titles, industries, customer/client budgets, etc. This may have been an effective way to segment in the past, but today—facilitated by the exponential growth in technology—we as business leaders are empowered to do a lot more with our so-called “segmentation.”

I submit to you that instead of segmenting using only historical variables like job title and industry, what if we instead use our brains (and available technologies) to come up with more meaningful segmentation criteria?

Here’s a tangible example.

Let’s say your business was responsible for selling a technology solution to business clients (i.e., “B2B”); in this case, let’s specifically say you are responsible for selling the “Speedpass” gas station mobile payment technology to gas stations, a way for gas station customers to magically wave a special widget in front of the pump to pay for their gas—no credit card needed.

Wouldn’t it be highly effective for you if you could initially determine whether or not the gas station(s) you’re targeting for your sales team actually have upgraded their gas pump system to an electronic payment system (i.e., they at least allow credit card swiping at the pump)? The assumption is if a station hasn’t yet made that technological infrastructure upgrade, it would likely be senseless for you to waste your sales and/or marketing dollars trying to help them buy your solution—before they can even consider buying from you, they need to overhaul their gas pump infrastructure to allow for electronic payments.

(Of course, if you were really smart, you would have strategic business partnerships with companies who offer this service, so you could “bolt on”/”package” both new technologies together in a sales opportunity. But I digress.)

That was a basic example. Let’s consider a more sophisticated example.

Let’s assume you’re selling a suite of software solutions to help HR people recruit more effectively, and that you have many different products to sell, depending on the HR team’s needs. Accordingly, the more sophisticated the need, the higher the price.

In this case, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could identify what the HR team’s needs might be—and more importantly, their level of business “maturity”/”sophistication” (i.e., how advanced they are)—prior to really engaging them in a profound sales and/or marketing activity?

Think about it: If you were able to segment your prospects based on their business sophistication level much earlier in the consideration/buying lifecycle, you could be much more effective at communicating and creating a dialogue with prospective customers. Gone would be the days of… emails promoting solutions for which people aren’t yet ready… or wasted calls from sales asking people to return a call about a product they’re ten years away from being ready to implement, thus wasting everyones’ time.

How do you accomplish this “Segmentation Utopia?” Well, that’s the hard part—that’s where making your brain sweat is critically important.

Today’s technologies are allowing sales and marketing leaders to understand more and more about what, how and when prospective customers are interacting with companies, e.g., they know if someone clicked an email, which webinar they attended, what whitepapers they’ve downloaded, when they registered for a website account, etc.

Unfortunately, however, we as business leaders haven’t really leveraged all this behavioral (implicit) data in a way that could really change the way we segment our audiences in the future.

Yes, many companies are using implicit (and explicit) data to help score and qualify leads for sales. But that’s almost always where the analytical activities end—there’s no further analysis to leverage all the captured information to more effectively segment the market in the future. Rarely are organizations taking a look at all the data and reapplying it to go-forward segmentation opportunities.

Who should do this? Well, it should likely be the people in your organization who love to get dirty with data, e.g., marketing database analysts. I also firmly believe marketers themselves should be intimately involved in analytical processes, as they’re most closely aligned with the strategies of the market. (Important note: Don’t include people in these types of activities who clearly don’t have the skill set and/or aren’t interested in this type of activity; otherwise, you’ll be doing them—and your efforts—a disservice. I find it amazing how often group dynamics and politics cause us to feel like everyone should be involved in every project.)

I’ll leave you with this: Imagine the next time you’re getting ready to initiate a sales and marketing campaign to help prospective customers buy a new product, and you can segment your activities based on not just on peoples’ job titles and industries, but you can also overlay a filter that identifies their business sophistication level? Messaging would be more effective… aligned sales resources would be more effective… prospective customers’ interest level would be higher… etc. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but it’ll be worth the effort—I can almost smell the extra greenbacks now.

How are you thinking about evolving your segmentation efforts? What’s keeping you from doing so? Be honest: Is it the lack of time? Is there a lack of sophisticated minds in your organization to tackle the opportunities (trust me, I’ve been there)?

For the purposes of this post, I’d like to pick on QR (Quick Response) codes, those little black and white and square barcode thingies you’re beginning to see everywhere (ads, storefronts, cars, product pages, etc.). For example, scanning this code with your smartphone will bring you to my personalized website landing page.

The QR concept is supposed to be drop-dead simple: Grab your smartphone, scan the QR code, and arrive on a customized landing page so you can learn/interact/whatever you’re supposed to do. It’s a seemingly terrific, new, simple technology (though I’ve anecdotally heard the QR concept has been around for awhile). Point, click, interact. Bam, done, next.

But, there’s an issue.

Fortunately, the issue isn’t with folks’ desire to interact with QR codes: we live in a world where adoption of new things is happening at breakneck speed. People love tech, and they’re willing to experiment. That’s the good news.

However, the operational ability for people to tactically and effectively engage in QR codes is the prime factor holding back greater QR code adoption. In other words, the ‘Process to Adopt’ is broken.

The crux of the issue? The QR code scan-click-interact process isn’t (yet) standardized.

Organizations either forgot to consider or simply didn’t care to really put themselves in the shoes of their customers (i.e., build the customer lens). Specifically, organizations didn’t think through the “Okay, so what happens when someone wants to scan this?” part of the equation. They only considered the “We need to make our landing page and its offer as reedonkulously compelling as possible.” (And for the most part, to their credit, they have.)

No one really thought about how people would scan the codes. No one built a standardized app to facilitate the transaction; even worse, no one taught people how to use it (even though the QR code concept seems to be intuitively simple, people still need at least a little explanation).

Takeaway: Today’s marketers need to consider all the touchpoints of an activity, not just the part that’s sexiest to them— in this case, that “sexy” part would be the landing page, the conversion, the tracking, etc. It’s not just enough to build a cool widget. You also need to put on your customer lens and consider how people are going to use your cool widget, both before and after that anticipated moment of zen. In fact, I’d contend it’s the before- and after-zen moments that provide true value/differentiation for organizations, particularly in today’s commoditized world.

And here’s an important irony: If you as a marketer promise a positive experience—which you’re essentially doing by providing a QR code (“There’s something cool for you at the end of this rainbow”)—and you actually fail to deliver that experience (e.g., the recipient can’t access the end of your “rainbow” because their app scanner isn’t working properly), you’re actually hurting yourself more than helping yourself. It would have been better for you to have done nothing. Think about that for a moment. (Trust me, there are many studies that prove this theory.)

Lastly… If you think this ‘Process to Adopt’ challenge is specific to the non-techies of the world, think again: I’m a fairly big geek myself, but I still can’t figure out (and more appropriately, don’t have the time to figure out) the best app to use for QR codes. I haven’t checked in awhile, but I’m thinking I have at least three different “scanner” apps on my iPhone. And not one of them works very effectively. Fail.

Frankly, you’d think someone would’ve already fixed this—i.e., that someone would’ve come out with a standardized QR code scanner (Apple and Google, are you listening?)—but alas, it still seems to be an issue. I haven’t yet seen an organization step up to say, “Hey, you know those QR codes? Use our app and you’ll always get what you need. It’s as simple as Grab, Scan, Interact.”

Until a standardization of QR scanner apps happens, and someone takes the time to market it effectively and provide seamlessly simple instruction to use it, QR codes will continue to struggle for mass adoption.

What are your own ‘Process to Adopt’ gaps? What cool widgets have you built that are struggling for adoption, not because they aren’t awesome, but because you failed to put on your customer lens?

In short, the research from Marketing Sherpa - which I can’t yet locate digitally (sorry!) – shared something really interesting: The value of content is often perceived very differently between marketers and prospects.

A few interesting, tangible highlights from the research:

• Marketers won’t typically require a prospect to “register” (i.e., provide contact information) to view a case study; however, more than 60% of prospects would typically be okay with registering to access one.

• Less than 20% of marketers deem product literature (e.g., brochure) worthy of registration, yet nearly 50% of prospects would be willing to register for it.

• Nearly 65% of marketers will typically require a prospect to register for a demo, but less than 40% of prospects actually register for one.

• And one of my faves… Close to 80% of marketers require registration for a webinar, yet only 31% of prospects see reason to do so.

WHOA. I find this last statistic surprisingly interesting, especially because we as marketers use webinars as a prominent tool in today’s world. Frankly, this data point begs the question: Are we as marketers using webinars as value-add/lead gen tools (as they’re intended), or are they really wasting prospects’ time? I’d actually be interested to see how this figure changes over time; my guess is that it will continue to decline… which, if you think about it, actually serves as an opportunity/competitive advantage for those marketers who actually use webinars in the right ways!

What’s particularly interesting about all this research is that a lot of the results contradict what actually happens in the market – in other words, the results seem flipped: In many cases, prospects would be willing to give more (in this case, their contact info) for things on which marketers don’t typically place a lot of value, and vice versa.

Where are you requiring your prospects to register for your marketing assets? When’s the last time you tested which marketing assets should be gated vs ungated?

Definitely something interesting to be considering.

(Disclosure: I love Werging—i.e., the art of merging words.)

If you really think about it, there are ultimately two audiences with whom Marketing needs to establish strong relationships and assist in their activities in today’s business world: Salespeople and Customers (future, current and previous).

As such, at least in this context, the word “marketing” no longer really appropriately defines the marketing role.

Today’s most effective marketers are doing two critically important things:

1. They’re enabling salespeople to do their jobs more effectively. 

With Marketing appropriately educating the right people (prospects) at the right times about the right things, Sales can get involved in the dialogue at the right times and provide value to the consideration process (i.e., the buying cycle), instead of just trying to meet a sales quota… which provides nothing positive for anyone involved. Sales 101: People don’t want to be sold to; they want help buying.

 2. They’re empowering customers (future, current and previous) to more effectively consider and interact with the organization. 

With Marketing increasing attention to what customers truly need, and reducing/eliminating the things they don’t, customers can engage more quickly and more effectively with the brands they’re considering.

Marketing as a function has evolved. Significantly. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people—many marketers included—who still view the function of marketing as pure-play advertising and media and a one-way company-to-market monologue.

Today’s (and tomorrow’s) most effective marketers will do a lot of things never considered even just a few years years ago. To be a successful marketer, I believe, you need to be an “athlete.”

How are you evolving? Are you an Empabler? Do you know any Empablers?