Of the five most profitable quarters in the world history of corporations, four have been ExxonMobil’s. ExxonMobil holds the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th places on the list. The number three spot goes to Royal Dutch Shell, another oil company.
And how much did you pay to fill up your tank this week?
On the same day I wrote about how a certain electronics company actually threw away the money I already spent with them, I got a mailing from Verizon–a glitzy thing, custom paper size, elegantly designed, a self-mailer with two folds.
This mailing was properly targeted: the right issue, the right offer, to the right audience. It discusses changes in the way secure URLs are handled on the Web, and I (as the owner of several e-commerce websites) am exactly the person who should be receiving this. There’s an offer of a free White Paper, very good–and even a sweetener with some urgency: a free MP3 player for the first 100 respondents. That actually got it out of the low priority, do whenever pile and into the do right now, since I must be the last person in Massachusetts without an iPod.
So what’s the problem? This company spent some substantial chunk of money to bring me to the site, actually overcame my substantial sales resistance–and what happened when I got there? I entered the URL–and what did I get?
We’re sorry….
We are not able to process your request. To continue, please select
one of the following options:* Return to the previous page.
* View the verizon.com site map.
* Go to the verizon.com home page
Sure am glad it’s not my money being squandered!
Yesterday, I went to the store and bought a new Internet router. And then I tried to set it up.
It said on the software CD that if you run a non-Windows computer (I use a Mac), double-click on a certain file. The file opened in my Internet (but from the CD). However, I tried three different browsers. All I got was a blank colored panel in Firefox, a complete blank in Internet Explorer, and a small question mark in the middle of my Safari page.
So off I went to the website to see if I could download the driver. I identified the product I’d bought and hunted unsuccessfully for the Mac driver. I did find a note that the Mac operating system is in fact supported, so that’s good.
Since I couldn’t find it, I tried to contact support. the contact page had no phone number or e-address, only a webform. So I filled in all my requested information, laboriously typed in the serial number, and tried to register–and got told to enter a valid serial number.
Worse, the page had reverted to blank; I was able to retrieve my filled out form only by hitting the Back button several times. Otherwise, I would have had to select the product and add all the data again.
My number had characters that could have been either zero or the letter O, so I tried switching one of the Os to a zero. No dice.
Guess what product I’ll be returning on my next trip to town. And guess what company has been permanently crossed off my vendor list (OK, so I’m not naming them here.)
Keep in mind, this was a completed sale. They had my money. All they had to do was make themselves available to give me a two minute explanation of how to set up the product and they’d have had a very happy customer. Instead, they’re toast in my mind.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: user experience counts far more toward the customer’s perception of the brand than all the logos, ads, and slogans in the world.
Want examples of companies that do it right? My book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, offers several chapters that explore this idea.
1. My friend and colleague Denise O’Berry, down in Floria, was born to blog. She’s a natural-born connector and networker. I stopped counting the times I got mentioned in some relatively obscure publication and got a clip of the article postally mailed to me with a personal note and Denise’s business card–and this was loooong before I met her in person two years ago. So it shouldn’t surprise me that Denise has put together a wonderful directory of business blogs. Now I just need her to set up an ethics category so I don’t have to try to shoehorn my own blog into one of the existing categories, none of which are quite right for this hybrid beast I’ve created.
2. More and more bloggers are functioning as journalists–but unlike professional journos, we are self-directed, in most cases have no direct supervision (e.g., a boss), and aren’t necessarily schooled in getting the story behind the story, knowing what’s true and what’s rumor, and how to behave responsibly. (Of course many bloggers do have journalism training and experience, including me–but many do not, and there have been consequences).
Cyberjournalist.net has jumped into the breach with a Blogger’s Code of Ethics. I quote it in full here:
Be Honest and Fair
Bloggers should be honest and fair in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
Bloggers should:
• Never plagiarize.
• Identify and link to sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.
• Make certain that Weblog entries, quotations, headlines, photos and all other content do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.
• Never distort the content of photos without disclosing what has been changed. Image enhancement is only acceptable for for technical clarity. Label montages and photo illustrations.
• Never publish information they know is inaccurate — and if publishing questionable information, make it clear it’s in doubt.
• Distinguish between advocacy, commentary and factual information. Even advocacy writing and commentary should not misrepresent fact or context.
• Distinguish factual information and commentary from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two.Minimize Harm
Ethical bloggers treat sources and subjects as human beings deserving of respect.
Bloggers should:
• Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by Weblog content. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
• Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
• Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of information is not a license for arrogance.
• Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
• Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects, victims of sex crimes and criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.Be Accountable
Bloggers should:
• Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
• Explain each Weblog’s mission and invite dialogue with the public over its content and the bloggers’ conduct.
• Disclose conflicts of interest, affiliations, activities and personal agendas.
• Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence content. When exceptions are made, disclose them fully to readers.
• Be wary of sources offering information for favors. When accepting such information, disclose the favors.
• Expose unethical practices of other bloggers.
• Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.
As the moving force behind the Business Ethics Pledge, I welcome this, of course. Maybe some of the ethical bloggers will find their way to the Pledge.
A few quotes from Robert J. Shillman, Chairman and CEO of a phenomenally successful company, Cognex Corp. of Natick, Massachusetts–as interviewed in the April 10 Wall Street Journal by Joann S. Lublin.
We never paid starting bonuses. It’s morally corrupt.
The most important thing the package includes is a great place to work. [And] I am going to give you a bonus and options package that will hopefully make you a multimillionaire someday. If you are coming for the short term, I don’t want you here.
The 15-year perseverance award is a trip for you and your spouse to one of the wonders of the world, like the Great Wall of China. All you do is show up. You get $1,000 in spending money and an extra week vacation.
For 25 years’ service, we set up a charitable-gift account and make the employee the trustee. We put $25,000 in, and they can contribute it to any IRS-approved charity anytime in any amount. I want them to feel the joy of giving…How many people get to be a philanthropist? Most people never give away $25,000 in a lifetime. I care more about morale below the top.
Remarkable from anyone. Particularly remarkable from the CEO of a very profitable technology company. The whole article is full of wonderful stuff about his attitude toward employee and executive compensation, and how his goal in starting the company was to make a difference in the world. It’s not just rhetoric, either. When he felt he had enough “toys” in his life–“So I’ve been able to go out and buy a big house, fast cars and some pieces of art. I also have donated more than $17.5 million worth of shares to charitable causes”–he stopped taking compensation and has his substantial package donated to charity.
All I can say is “Wow!” and “Bravo!” Somehow I don’t think we’ll see him in court facing ethics violations changes any time soon.
How much more evidence to we need? Every time I turn around, it seems there’s another revelation about lies told to the American public by this corrupt and incompetent administration. Now, the Washington Post reports that the government knew all along that those two trailers it found in Iraq, and used to belatedly justify the invasion, had nothing to do with biological weapons production.
If ever there was an argument to be made for a parliamentary style of government, where a crisis forces new elections, it would be this administration. With its lies, its finger pointing, its illegal and thuggish tactics (can you say “Valerie Plame”? It seems that GWB can and did when he gave the authorization to blow her cover, according to Scooter Libby), and its very scary politics, this administration has been an ethical and moral disgrace from the get-go.
What kind of scary politics?
And we won’t even discuss the whole passel of personal enrichment scandals that taint so many Bush allies
Enough is enough, already. We don’t have a parliamentary democracy here–but we do have an impeachment process. It is time to impeach both GWB and Cheney.
I went to a bookstore the other day and noticed two books prominently displayed on the same front table:
Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, by none other than former President Jimmy Carter, and a Beacon Press anthology, Global Values 101, featuring such well-known progressive thinkers as Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman, Robert Reich, and Lani Guinier, among many others.
For more than two decades, the ultra-right has staked a claim around “values.” Unfortunately, the values they claim are not my values or the values of most people I know. Just as one example among many, the term “family values” has been far too often used to create a climate of acute homophobia–of bigotry. These people claim they’re in favor of family values, but their definition of family only includes one among various possible models: a dominant husband, a stay-home wife (or one focused far more on home than career, if she does work outside the home), and zero tolerance for divergence from the model.
Well, I see a whole lot of families that don’t look like that, but that are loving, secure places for the partners and their children. And I see plenty that do fit the “traditional family values” model where abuse, infidelity, and/or alcoholism seem to rule the day.
Let me be clear: there are, of course, plenty of loving, supportive families with a husband and wife in a heterosexual marriage; I am blessed to live in one. But our family is founded on tolerance, on freedom of self-exploration, and on the firm value of making the world a better place than we found it by helping to break down barriers of bigotry.
So I find it very refreshing, as the author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, a book with a strong values message within a progressive context, to see major publishing houses beginning to publish books like these.
​​​​This blog was launched on December 29, 2004, which means it just
turned one year old. So allow me to wallow in a bit of reflection,
please.
I’d delayed blogging for a long time, because I’d
thought that to be taken seriously, a blogger needed to post daily. I
even tried to organize a group of non-blogging marketing pundits to
each take a day of the week in a communal blog. That effort went
nowhere, but I think at least three of us now blog regularly. Once I
realized that many bloggers post once a week or less, I knew I could
handle it.
I started the blog with a few agendas. I wanted to:
And
in fact, in the spring, I went through my blog entries, selected seven
or so, polished them, and submitted them to four different newspaper
syndicates–all of whom turned me down. But I’ll keep trying.
The
blog has veered away more often than I’d have expected from what I’d
originally thought of as its core topic: business ethics. But I already
have a platform to talk about that: my newsletter, Positive Power of Principled Profit.
It’s
also hard to tell what impact it has, or where people are learning
about it. I get very few comments, and many of them are from people
I’ve steered to the blog via a post to a discussion list or one of my
newsletters.
So, this year, one of my goals is to build more traffic to the blog, which will be mirrored both at blogger.com and on my own PrincipledProfit.com site.
There
have been a few signers of the Pledge that I believe found me via the
blog, and a few useful contacts. Hopefully, over the next 12 months,
I’ll be able to know for certain that the blog is helping to shape the
discourse.
And meanwhile, there’s revamping the PrinProfit site,
hosting my radio show (which I hope to syndicate as well), getting
publicity for the Pledge, selling more foreign rights, and tons of
other stuff. somehow, I find time to do at least some of it, between
client copywriting and consulting projects.
Another must-read speech by Bill Moyers, one journalist who is not afraid to tell the truth and doesn’t try to hide it under “nice.”
Moyers
notes that, like the run-up to Iraq, intelligence leading to the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution (that opened the way to massive escalation of the
Vietnam war) was faked–but not, he said, with LBJ’s knowledge. Moyers
was working in the White House at the time.
But then he looks at
the Bush II administration’s penchant for secrecy, for deception, for
rewarding its corporate cronies–and for interfering with the few
remaining institutions in journalism that have any backbone left–and
the results aren’t pretty.
Ethics in both business and government is crucial–and achievable. Visit Shel’s site, https://www.principledprofit.com, to learn more.
If I’m a tad schizophrenic in my feelings toward search engine
giant Google, it’s because the company sometimes seems like a
many-headed hydra whose various heads have no clue what the others are
up to.
On the positive side: Google last October announced a wonderful plan
to donate one percent of its stock value–just a whisker under a cool
billion at the time of the announcement–to various change-the-world
charities–and to donate various other streams that push the total value well above that amazing $1 billion mark.
This
is wonderful! It makes sense both to advance founders Larry Page and
Sergey Brin’s vision of the kind of world they want to live in, and to
advance Google’s corporate goals of continued market dominance. (One of
the initiatives, for example, is to help MIT develop $100 computers.
Guess how they’ll link to the world?).
Also on the positive side
is Google’s ability to create a powerfully positive user experience.
How did I find the above article? I received a Google News alert by
e-mail for ethical business, that linked to a blog post by Joseph Newhard.
After reading the article, which was more commentary than news, I
wanted a more authoritative source to quote from, so I typed the
following string into Google
google “$1 billion” healthcare
About three seconds later, I had the San Francisco Chronicle article I referenced earlier.
Oh
yes, and I’m typing this on a Blogger blog, owned by Google. If you’re
reading it on my own site, I use Word Press for the mirror blog. And I
switched my site-specific search engines to Google a couple of years
ago, because it didn’t need me to tell it each time I added content.
Though I’d love to see them add the feature of searching a few sites at
once under common ownership that my old, clunky search engine offered.
And
I think it’s fabulous that Google now has a share value of $100 billion
and profits of $968 million–because those profits are built on doing a
lot of things right–first of all, creating a search engine that gives
the right results if you know what to ask for, and gives them
instantly. Second, not bothering with a revenue model until “usership”
had built up. And thirdly, introducing its primary revenue model–a
modification of the old failed model of web ads–as the brilliantly
successful low-key, non-intrusive contextual advertising, with millions
of partner websites who are benefiting from Google’ success. Obviously,
it works.
But then there are those other heads: Google
Book, for instance, *almost* works. The ability to search books’
complete text is great. The it’s-a-big-pie model that shares revenue
with publishers by directing purchasers to publisher websites to buy
the book is great. But what’s not great–and the Authors Guild is suing
over it–i that Google insists it has the right to take books into the
program without consent of the copyright holder.
If there is
any justice in the courts, Google will lose this case–and it will be a
big, expensive mess. Just as an example–I’m delighted to have the text
of my most recent book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People
First, in the program; I think that can only help sales. But I have
deliberately refused to put in my older e-book, The Penny-Pinching
Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant’s Pocketbook–because
with that book, appealing to a self-defined frugal audience, it’s much
more likely that a searcher would find the specific piece of
information wanted and feel no need to then spend $8.50 to own the
content. For authors of cookbooks, reference manuals, travel
guidebooks, etc., involuntary participation in the program could be a
disaster. Google could, I think, easily develop a form to submit to
publishers enabling them to quickly import their entire catalog and
check yes or no for the program. By saying “we have the right unless
you opt out,” they’re acting like spammers, violating copyrights
unnecessarily, and depriving publishers of the right to make decisions
about how their copyright-protected material is used.
And then there are some serious concerns about privacy. See for instance “Google as Big Brother” on the Google-watch site (scroll down to “Google’s immortal cookie”). If you want to find more, here’s Google’s own results page on a search for google privacy. Stories on Wired and elsewhere raise cause for alarm.
Of
course, Google isn’t the only company to be a bit erratic in its
ethics. I could have easily written a similar article about Microsoft,
or Ford, for instance.
But Google does so much that’s right–I
just have to wonder about their blinders on the copyright fronts, and
take a watch-and-wait attitude on the privacy front.
Shel Horowitz’s Business Ethics Pledge campaign
seeks to create a climate where future Enron/WorldCom scandals will be
impossible. He’s the author of the Apex Award winner, Principled
Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books.