Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

For the past 3 years or so I’ve become something of an Apple fanboy. It started with making a switch about 3 years ago from being a 15 year PC user to my first MacBook Pro as my primary computer.

Then I drank the kool-aid and waited in line overnight at the Palo Alto store for the very first iPhone (that was fun). Then I bought the second iPhone right away.

Then I waited in line again for over 6 hours to buy the third iPhone 3GS. Then I bought a new MacBook Pro spending over $3,000. Then I bought my daughter an iPod mini. Then I bought a Mac Mini for the kitchen at home. Etc. etc. You get the idea.

All along the way Apple products have slowly been replacing competitor’s products in my house and in my life.

One of the things that I’ve always liked about Apple is that they have physical stores where when things go wrong I can go deal with them.

Back in the olden days I bought a Dell PC once. It had problems and I literally had to pack the thing all up, deal with the hassle of shipping it, send it back to Texas, had to wait for a few weeks and finally got my fixed PC back. So a big appeal to me with Apple products is that they have stores where I can go to deal with issues if they pop up (and issues *always* pop up with technology).

But lately I’ve been feeling like the service that you get at the Apple stores is complete crap and that they treat their customers (many loyal users who spend thousands of dollars per year with them) very poorly.

A few examples.

1. A few months back my MacBook Pro wouldn’t boot. I was bummed. I use this computer every day. I hate not having it. It was 6pm or so on a Friday night. I drove down to the Emeryville Apple store. I got there and the store asked me the dreaded question of whether or not I had an appointment or not. I said no and so they said no dice. I said I could wait, 30 minutes, an hour 2 hours, 5 hours. No luck. They simply refused to see me.

They were willing to make me an appointment for later that night at the San Francisco store, so I took that and had to drive across a traffic infested Bay Bridge, pay to park at Union Square, etc. in order to get over there.

Once I was there and got to see a guy, he tried to boot up my computer and no luck. He tried 3 or 4 different things and then sort of gave up. He hooked something up to my Mac and said my hard drive was dead. I told him that everything was working flawlessly before and I was surprised that this would be the problem etc. etc. But rather than really digging into it and trying more things he simply dismissed it as hard drive failure.

Of course Apple didn’t have the hard drive and so they’d need to order it (on a Mac less than a year old). I’d have to make another appointment to bring it back once the hard drive came in etc. etc.

To make a long story short, while waiting to get the hard drive in at the Apple store, I was able to work on it more at home myself and finally got it back operational, reinstalled the system software and got my Mac back.

I’ve been using this same hard drive for the past few months with zero problems. I felt like I was told that my problem was a hard drive failure because it was the fastest easiest way to deal with me, even if it meant I’d possibly lose data and be inconvenienced with the repair.

2. A few weeks back I decided that I needed a car battery charger for my iPhone. So I stopped off at the Apple store at Walnut Creek. It was 9:45 a.m. and super cold outside. The front door to the store was unlocked. There were people back at the genius bar working with customers. And there were about 10 Apple store employees just standing around with their hands in their pockets.

I was greeted by a woman at the door who again asked me if I had an appointment. I said, no that I just wanted to quickly purchase a cigarette lighter power adapter for my iPhone. She told me that they couldn’t sell me one until 10a.m.

So I said ok, I’ll wait then. To which the woman replied, I’m not going to be able to let you wait in the store (even though there were plenty of other customers with “appointments” I guess already in the store and the front doors were unlocked).

Now it was really cold outside that morning and to make matters worse I had two little girls (my daughters) age 5 and 7 with me. So this Apple employee literally boots me out of the store and so there I am sitting on the cold concrete outside the store for 15 minutes with two little girs who are complaining about being cold. Because the Apple employees (all sitting around doing nothing) can’t take 2 minutes to sell me a simple accessory and to make matters worse, won’t even let me wait in the warm store with a heater on and instead put a dad and his two little girls outside in the cold on the sidewalk.

By the way Apple, that photo up above is of one of my little girls, one of the little girls that you made sit outside in the cold in Walnut Creek on the sidewalk using your iPhone.

3. The headphones on my iPhone went out. This is the 3Gs iPhone that I bought less than a year ago (it hasn’t been out a year yet) and is still under warranty. So yesterday I went up to the Apple store on Union Square and waited in line to see a cashier and explained my problem and asked if I could swap them out for a working pair. The cashier said they couldn’t help me. That I could only swap my headphones out with an appointment from the genius bar (WTF?).

So I went upstairs and of course there were no appointments. I was also told again that I couldn’t wait that there was nobody period to see me. That I would need to make an appointment. To do a 2 minute swap out of my headphones I asked incredulously? Yes, I was told. I explained that I was leaving today (which I am) for a trip to Miami and had really hoped to be able to listen to my iPhone.

So the person suggested that I buy a new pair of headphones. Come back and return them within 14 days, make an appointment to have my headphones replaced under warranty, and go that route. Which sounded just stupid to me (all for a 2 minute procedure) so I complained one last time and the person at the genius bar had another person take me back downstairs to the same cashier line I’d been it at the very beginning and swap out my headphones for me (which I really appreciated, but it probably shouldn’t have taken 40 minutes to get this done).

So these are my three of my four most recent experiences at the Apple store. The fourth one was a no brainer. I wanted to buy a MacMini. They sold that to me in about 5 minutes all lickety split like no trouble indeed there. Sure were happy to take my money.

I’ll probably continue buying Apple’s overpriced hyped products because I love them and they make great products (or maybe I won’t). Am I a sucker? Maybe. But I sure wish they didn’t treat their customers like such crap. Maybe it’s stupid of me to feel like after spending thousands of dollars every year with a company that I ought to get treated a little bit better, but I do feel that way.

And I sure wish Apple would require their employees to go through Nordstrom’s customer service training or something. Because while they may get away with treating me like crap for now because they have great products, eventually somebody else will have a better product and the way I’ve been treated will make it that much easier to switch.

I’ll tell you one thing though. I sure as hell didn’t pre-order an iPad. At least that makes me feel a little better.

Chris Myles, an active Buzz user, albeit a critical one, has a buzz post out suggesting that Google Buzz needs a “Customer Advocate,” to do “community management” for Buzz. I suspect that as Buzz grows over time, that community management types might begin being added to the product team. Having been very involved in web communities over the course of the past seven years or so, I thought I’d post some of my own thoughts on this subject matter.

So far to date, I think Google has been doing a *very* good job with community management on Buzz without having any specific individual as a formal “community manager.” Overall it seems that many on the team, from product managers to engineers, are simply informally doing a lot of good community management directly themselves.

Engineer DeWitt Clinton has perhaps been the most vocal Google engineer interacting with Buzz’s users, but his voice is far from a solo one from the team. Bradley Horowitz, who describes himself as a “Product Dude” at Google, is a significant Google executive voice who is providing community management. So is Todd Jackson, Buzz’s Product Manager. Josh Willis has been vocal. And many, many others on the team have consistently dropped into conversations providing sort of unofficial community management.

Even more impressive, many Google employees who are *not* on the Buzz team, still are actively participating in Buzz and directing threads to the team or helping out in other ways whenever they can. I’m talking about you Erica Baker. It is obvious to me that the spirit of good community management is highly valued by the team and it’s leadership. I’m impressed.

So, does Buzz *need* an official community manager? I suspect that they *might* at some point. Buzz is still early and the hand holding that the team is providing likely can’t scale with millions of users in the long run. But before we just assume that they need to start hiring managers, let’s keep in mind that community managers aren’t always necessarily good for communities. In fact community mismangers can sometimes actually be poisonous for a community. That said I think that great care should be used in the selection of the right community managers for any community and whenever possible non-interventionist tools should be considered before community management intervention.

Principles of good community management:

1. Whenever possible, empower your users to deal with internal community problems *themselves* directly. Empower them with the technological tools to self manage community conflict.

One of the problems on Flickr is that over the years there have been some powerfully and negatively hostile community interactions. Malicious anonymous harassing trolls have invaded groups and people’s photostreams and other public areas of the site and posted the most hateful and objectionable material. The first line of defense against these sorts of negative elements is to empower your users to deal directly, immediately and decisively with these sorts of situations.

Trolls, spammers, racists, hate mongers, etc. will invade any community. It is only a matter of time. But the first line of defense against dealing with these individuals should be a robust “block” feature. One of the things that FriendFeed did right from the get go was their “Block this user” function. Basically using the block this user function on Friendfeed wipes that user off the face of FriendFeed for you. They are gone. Entirely invisible. This is a powerful tool. It’s powerful because it *immediately* removes personally objectionable content from before a users’ eyes (by choice). Rather than reporting bad behavior (which still ought to be able to be done) this immediately addresses the negative situation and empowers the offended party by feeling that they have power and control over the negative situation that they are dealing with.

Further, a robust block command actually *discourages* trolling, spamming, racism, hate speech, etc. Because these people are quickly minimized and end up talking to themselves and unable to get a reaction grow tired and move on.

If you can solve a problem with technology, that’s superior to solving it with community management.

2. Be very, very, very, careful with censorship. Censorship should *not* be an everyday hammer that a community manager uses to solve every potential problem. The censorship on Flickr as applied by community managers is really bad. I’ve had literally hundreds of hours of my own work permanently deleted there. This pisses me off as a user to no end. If feels personal and spiteful and petty and creates an enormous amount of ill will. A good community manager should resist the urge to simply censor someone they disagree with, or who is reported, or who they don’t like personally.

There will be times when censorship is necessary. Illegal content for example. If a company gets a DMCA notice, they will likely have to deal with copyrighted material in their network. But even here, the *greatest* of care should be taken to censor as little as humanly possible. A few years back I posted a screenshot of a known griefer’s television appearance on Fox news. This individual filed a false DMCA request to have the image removed with Flickr. The EFF later pursued this individual and as part of a settlement against him made him publicly apologize for illegally abusing the DMCA. But the way that Flickr handled this was not by simply doing the legal minimum of removing the image, they actually nuked hundreds of comments that went along with the image unnecessarily.

If there is some thread that must removed. Kill the absolute bear minimum. Be strategic. Take out a single line, not an entire thread, and certainly not thousands of other completely non-offensive threads, simply because they are tied to a user that you’ve found offensive in one instance.

3. Hire someone who lives, eats, sleeps, breathes, your community. Consider hiring from within. Good community management is not a 9 to 5 job. It doesn’t go on vacation. Hire someone who is emotionally invested and involved in your community and who has a deep seated passion and love for the product you are creating and for the difference that it is making in the world.

4. Hire someone who can get out on the road. There is nothing like face time. You cannot underestimate the enormous amount of positive energy that can be generated for any community when real life social interaction begins to take place. Recently I had an opportunity to spend some time photographing music service Pandora. I met their founder Tim Westergren. When I met Tim, one of the things that he was most proud of was of a map pinned up outside his office which documented all of the cities that he’d visited going around the entire U.S. holding meet ups with their users. Set a budget and get your community manager out on the road. Set public events where the most active emotionally invested users can personally get to know this individual face to face.

Town hall meetings are great. Use your corporate offices all over the world as much as possible to host get togethers, etc. People that work for your company will be encouraged to attend because it’s easy for them (at their office already) and people that love your product will consider it a wonderful experience to get to see your offices first hand. It’s also easier to get management to stop by for an hour for a meet and greet if they don’t have to drive somewhere specifically.

5. Authorize transparency. You will never be able to please everyone in your community. You will always have people who hate things that you do. Don’t shy away from these problems and issues. Keep the lawyers as far away from the community managers as possible. Be open and comunicative even if it means telling people something that they don’t want to hear. Err on the side of being too transparent over withholding information. If there is some reason why information can’t be shared, explain the reasoning behind that.

6. Acknowledge your critics. Critics of a service should never be marginalized or dismissed or certainly locked out of help forums or censored. Critics can be a pain in the ass, they can create discord in your community, they can hurt esprit de corps. But… oftentimes their points are valid. They document real problems and bugs. They challenge your service or product to be the most excellent that it possibly can be. One of the highest ambitions a good community manager should have is to turn a critic into an evangelist. There is no greater accomplishment in my mind or measure of the success of a community manager.

7. Act immediately. Nothing creates a worse problem than letting an issue fester over time. And internet time moves fast. In 24 hours a community problem can easily move outside of your community and be significantly amplified across the web. Digg, reddit, Slashdot, Twitter, blogs, etc. are very quick to latch on to community problems. Nip your community problems in the bud. Immediately address them, even if the address is simply that you need more time.

Recently Starbucks decided to launch a social media beachhead on Flickr. This was probably not the best idea as Starbucks historically has had a less than good reputation for prohibiting photography in their stores. But rather than deal with this conflict immediately, Starbucks let this issue fester on and on and on for months. Users in their Flickr group got so upset about Starbuck’s inability to address this problem over the months that almost every thread kept bringing this failure up over and over and over again. Finally Starbuck’s was forced to lock down the entire group. Effectively censoring all who had participated. Had Starbucks come up with a faster solution to this problem this failure could have been avoided.

8. Monitor all channels for your product. Recently when I updated my CoolIris/Firefox I found that cmd-click would no longer open a new background tab. This was frustrating to me as a user because it was a change that I wasn’t used to and made it much harder for me to use that product. So I tweeted out that I disliked this. Within hours someone from Cool Iris tweeted back an easy solution to my problem and I tweeted back that they were the Bestest after that. They turned a very negative feeling I had about their product into a very positive feeling. Good community managers should not just monitor their own community. They should monitor what is being said about their community outside their community. Twitter, facebook, FriendFeed, etc. And while the eyes of a community manager cannot be everywhere at all times, all employees of a company should be empowered to forward things that they find out there to the community manager.

9. Promote, promote, promote, promote. A good community manager’s fingers should be blistered by the end of the day from hitting the like button over and over and over and over again. Give praise to the most prominent members of your community religiously. Acknowledge them even in the smallest of ways. Build them up. These are your evangelists. These are your ambassadors. These users provide you a tool to leverage good vibrations. They broadcast and spread your message of product excellence. Let them feel the love.

Barbie turns 51 today. Happy Birthday Barbie.

My Barbie set on Flickr here.

From wikipedia: Barbie doll’s full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts. In a series of novels published by Random House in the 1960s, her parents’ names are given as George and Margaret Roberts from the fictional town of Willows, Wisconsin.[9] In the Random House novels, Barbie attended Willows High School, while in in the Generation Girl books published by Golden Books in 1999 she attended the fictional Manhattan International High School in New York City (based on the real-life Stuyvesant High School[10]).

She has an on-off romantic relationship with her boyfriend Ken (Ken Carson), who first appeared in 1961. A news release from Mattel in February 2004 announced that Barbie and Ken had decided to split up, but in February 2009 they were back together again.[11][12]

Barbie has had over 40 pets including cats and dogs, horses, a panda, a lion cub, and a zebra. She has owned a wide range of vehicles, including pink Corvette convertibles, trailers and jeeps. She also holds a pilot’s license, and operates commercial airliners in addition to serving as a flight attendant. Barbie’s careers are designed to show that women can take on a variety of roles in life, and the doll has been sold with a wide range of titles including Miss Astronaut Barbie (1965), Doctor Barbie (1988) and Nascar Barbie (1998). As you can see Barbie has made it big in the world, hundreds being sold everyday.

Mattel has created a range of companions for Barbie, including Hispanic Teresa, Midge, African American Christie and Steven (Christie’s boyfriend). Barbie’s siblings and cousins were also created including Skipper, Todd (Stacie’s twin brother), Stacie (Todd’s twin sister), Kelly, Krissy, and Francie. Barbie was friendly with Blaine, an Australian surfer, during her split with Ken in 2004.[13]

Earlier today Rebekah Json on Google Buzz asked me what I do when I’m “uninspired” to inspire my photography. I started thinking about it and realized that the answer was actually longer than a few sentences and so I decided to publish a post on five places that I personally go to find photographic inspiration. Inspiration is a huge part of producing creatively and something that I think about alot. That said, here are five of the primary places I go to find inspiration.

1. The photography of others on the web. I am a voracious consumer of other people’s photography. The internet, and photo sharing more specifically, have opened up vast libraries of images that simply were not accessible 10 years ago. I look at photos on the web every single day. I make friends and contacts on photosharing sites like Flickr with people’s whose work I admire and I’m constantly reviewing what other people are doing. Earlier today I posted a buzz about my friend Marc Evans and his work. The perfection of his neon imagery is hugely inspiring to me. It makes me want to spend more time and care on my own neon images. His work is an inspiration to me. But Marc is just one of many.

I’ve added a bunch of photographers as contacts on Buzz. There too, every day I see wonderful images. A few months ago I started seeing some of the first iPhone hipstamatic images show up on Flickr. I first noticed that by following the work of Anthony Valley.

I’m constantly inspired looking at the big beautiful images of Boston.com’s Big Picture blog. If you want to be inspired, follow other photographers and photography around the web, there is no shortage of talent out there from both pros and amateurs alike.

2. From photography books and museum or gallery exhibits. The web is great, but there is something about the printed page that just makes photographs look 1000% better. I spend a lot of time browsing and buying photography books. Sit down for an hour with William Eggleston’s Democratic Camera or any of Garry Winogrand’s street photography or Lee Friedlander’s self titled book Lee Friedlander or Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places. Carefully studying what some of the world’s greatest fine art photographers produce is hugely inspiring. And you don’t necessarily even have to buy the books always. Do you have an extra hour this afternoon? Consider going into Borders and seeing the great works of others. Powell’s in Portland has one of the best photography sections of any bookstore I’ve ever visited.

Likewise, keep an eye out for museum or gallery exhibits. I remember the first time I saw Richard Misrach’s gignormous photos at a gallery in San Francisco. Seeing Robert Frank’s “The Americans” at the SFMOMA (for free) was one of the most inspirational exhibits I’ve ever seen.

3. From documentaries on photographers. You may not realize this, but Netflix is *chock full* of *great* documentaries on photographers. I’ve seen tons of these now. I’ve been publishing a profile a day on a different photographer on Buzz. Why? Because I learned about the importance of curating from a documentary I rented on Netflix about one of the world’s greatest curators (and photographers) Alfred Steiglitz. I’d also highly recommend “In the Real World” about William Eggleston or “The True Meaning of Pictures” about Shelby Lee Adams. But just do a search for photography on Netflix and you’ll find a treasure trove of great documentaries worth watching.

4. From other big thinkers. This may sound odd, but frequently I find inspiration from people who are not primarily photographers. Just watching people who live their life with excellence. Andy Warhol’s work ethic was phenomenal. Man that Jack Kerouac could type. But frequently this is closer to home. Maybe this is watching the personal excellence of a blogger/social media expert (and also photographer) like my friend Robert Scoble. Or watching the many many paintings by my friend tobakhopper and his zest for life that comes along with it. Recently I discovered Chris Guillebeau. He’s trying to visit every country in the world by April 7, 2013. He’s already visited 122 of the 192 total! Read his manifesto here. I love reading positive thinking bloggers like Seth Godin. Surround yourself with big thinkers, powerful generous people who are willing to share and people from the past who have achieved great things.

And also avoid the naysayers. Try to keep away the haters and assholes who only want to tear you down. Little thinking small minded mostly jealous individuals. Recently I found this song by Slim Thug “Dedicated to my haters.” As crazy as it sounds I can find inspiration from listening to a rapper prove his critics wrong by becoming even more successful.

5. From inside yourself. Ultimately you can find inspiration in many, many places in the world around you, but at some point you have to simply fall back on self-discipline. There are *definitely* times that I feel totally uninspired and do not want to go out and shoot. Maybe it’s raining, or maybe I’m tired, or maybe I’m just sick and tired of shooting San Francisco over and over and over again (as lucky as I am to live here in such a beautiful place). But sometimes you just have to accept uninspiration… AND GO SHOOT ANYWAYS. And you know what? You’ll find sometimes that the times when you were least inspired are when you capture some of your finest photographs. F8 and be there. Being there the optimal part.

There are lucky shots and situations around us every single day. Unless you are actually putting yourself out there to stumble across them you will miss them. So if you can’t inspire yourself, fake it, force it. Get out there anyways and you just might find that you stumble upon greatness. Afterall, the best photographs in the world have yet to be taken.

So there are five places that I go to find inspiration. How about you? Where do you go to find *your* photographic inspiration?