I’ve written before about the danger of becoming a helicopter brand. The way to avoid this of course is to constantly deliver on your brand promise and then over deliver when you don’t.

Case in point:
This week I’m in Atlanta chaperoning my daughter and one of her friends at the Us Fencing Summer Nationals. They are performing well, but I cannot say as much for the hotel where we are staying.

Before my trip I was told that the hotel had been overbooked for the first night and that they were moving us to a different hotel for that night at no cost, plus an additional free night at the correct hotel as well as covering the necessary taxi rides and free breakfast for all. Yes, an inconvenience, but they made good. They wanted to put us in a hotel at the airport, but we negotiated for a room in town.

Unfortunately when we arrived at the hotel that we agreed upon we were told that they had no rooms and that we were supposed to be at the airport hotel. When we got there our rooms we were told that our rooms had been canceled. Some negotiations and phone calls and we weren’t sleeping on the streets of Atlanta.

Once we got to our hotel the next day we found out that the refrigerator that we requested was not available and that the rollaway bed that we reserved would not fit in the room, which resulted in needing a second room though they knocked one night off our stay in that second room. They then delivered breakfast vouchers that they promised only they left 1 out meaning another trip to the lobby to ask for what we were promised.

Checking out of that room and into another one I happened to leave stuff behind, which turned up in their lost and found and retrieving it was perhaps the most pleasant experience I’ve had resolving a situation with my stay.

Now here is what could have happened: I could have been inconvenienced on the first night of my stay, but raved about how well they took care of me. I could be writing about how the Omni does a great job of not nickeling and dimming it’s guests for wifi and just asking for some contact information, rather than complaining that their IT support staff couldn’t get my laptop online. I could be telling the story of a hotel that found the stuff that I stupidly left in my room. I could be raving about how clean the hotel is or how close it is to the venue, but instead I’ll pass on that the smell of the cleanser was over powering and that bad layout of the elevators and floor levels confused everyone. I could have had a great experience with the Omni hotel, but they did everything that they could to avoid that.

So, a few lessons from this fiasco.

1. Keep your promises.
2. Screwing up is ok as long as you make good.
3. Make sure that you do not screw up a second time when making good.
4. If you screw up a second time you need to doubly make good.
5. Do not make people ask for you to deliver on a promise to make good on a previous screw up.
6. There are many opportunities to make people happy, don’t blind your customers to those moments because you dropped the ball too many times before.

Update:
This blog post and a tweet about my wifi connection issues got a response from the Omni, first via Twitter and then a call offering additional IT support. By that time I’d worked around things with my BlackBerry and iPad and preferred to watch my daughter compete than be on the phone with the hotel IT department. Then when I returned to my hotel room at 11PM on the last night of my stay there was a table laden with snacks and drinks as well as an apology note. I appreciate the thought from Omni, though we ended up rolling the table to a friend’s room since there was no possible way that we could consume all of the drinks and snacks ourselves nor in the 7 hours we had left in the room. The sentiment was right, but the delivery a little off.

Screwing Up The Brand Experience is a post from: Trumblog

A couple weeks ago I wrote about coffee enhanced with the essence of bacon. Then I found this new blend of coffee that can deliver an enhancement that that is even more compelling than the flavor of bacon. What could that be you ask? Why sex of course.

Yes, Magic Power Coffee is a special blend that awakens both your mind and body. Not only does it taste great, but will also “increase the romance, passion and satisfaction in your love-life” for both men and women. Of course this isn’t just your basic cup of Joe, it’s a “combination of natural herbs, vitamins and minerals” including goji berry, American ginseng and of course “horny goat weed.”

No, I’m not making that last part up.

Coffee AND Sex is a post from: Trumblog

The belief that one’s own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.
- Paul Watzlawick

Not a week goes by when I’m not talking with someone who makes a sweeping generalization about how people act based solely on their own personal experience.  I know that I get caught up believing that the world is made of urban, middle class, college educated, liberal 40 year olds who are fluent in online social media and have 2 bilingual teen daughters. As easy as it is to believe that the rest of the world spends evenings eating milanesas con papas before settling down to watch Dr Who reruns on Netflix through their Wii while updating Facebook and Twitter from their laptops  it turns out that my family is pretty unique, as are those of my neighbors, friends and co-workers.

It is known as the “focus group of one” and it’s hard to avoid.  Do your parents in their 60s not use the internet, email or Facebook?  Then all people over 60 must not (despite the fact that this segment of the population has the highest rate of internet adoption I still get this a lot).  Do your kids live online, are digital natives and run the technology in your house? Then all kids must be like that (though I have one teen daughter who can barely figure out the remote control to our TV and I was on Faceboook before any of them).

It’s critical to remind yourself that there is no normal, there is no everyman, and you are certainly not them.  Assuming that that the way you act and how you do things or want things to be is a good guide to how others will want it is a viewpoint that leads to failure in strategy. Here are some ways that I avoid it and maybe they will work for you.

1. Identify the other – My father used the internet for business, as a government contractor, before I did.  My mother just got a home computer a couple years ago.  These are two opposing lifestyles, but both are valid.  Identify a friend or relative with an opposing world view from yours and use them as a persona when considering strategy.
2. Follow the 5% not the 80% – When looking at data the  majority is seductive.  What are most people doing, let’s cater to them.  But how about the outliers?  The 5% of people.  Are they the trailing edge or the early adopters.  Why are the doing what they are doing rather than going with the herd?  People do things for a reason; take the time to understand theirs.
3. Acknowledge that people do things for a reason – Remember that day when you realized that people aren’t just evil to be evil and that they wrongly thought that they are doing the right thing?  I know that it was a whole new way of thinking about Darth Vader.  Anyway people typically don’t do things for no reason.  They do things because of some benefit, no matter how small.  They do things because they are a little easier than doing something else.  They do things because it is a habit.  Find those reasons and walk a mile in those shoes for a new experience.

Give those a shot and see if they don’t help you avoid the most dangerous of delusions and in the comments let me know if you have other ways of avoiding the “focus group of one.”

The Most Dangerous Of All Delusions is a post from: Trumblog

Amongst the many things that I love, two that I love the best are coffee and bacon.

Now like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup you got your peanut butter in my chocolate ads, here are two great tastes that taste great together in one steaming hot mug.  At $7.49 for an 8oz bag Maple Bacon Morning is an expensive cup of joe, but can you really put a price on the genius of merging smoked salted pork with caffeine?

Coffee AND Bacon is a post from: Trumblog

Remember when you were a kid with a few coins, not enough to go see Star Wars again or the latest knock off that was trying to fleece you of your hard earned lawn mowing or car washing bucks?  So you schlep down to the corner store or 7-11 looking for some way to satisfy the hole being burned in your pocket by those quarters and dimes.  Gum or candy might do it, but comic books were better.  You could re-read them (Bazooka Joe is the only gum that came with reading material and even at 7 I knew those jokes were tired and old), you could share them so that for the price of one you got access to hundreds from your friends Michael Specter, Michael Sharkey and Judd Young (I know you weren’t friends with them, but I’m sure that you had friends of your own back then and can insert their names).  Then there was the post reading analysis and fantasy play and finally there was swapping (2 Scooby Doos for a Swamp Thing?).  Now the same can all be said about Star Wars trading cards, which I was really into and still have a pretty good size collection of, but I was also game for a Star Wars comic book to see what Han Solo was up to between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Personally I wasn’t into the super hero’s so much.  I liked the super natural tales and teams like the Avengers, the Defenders, and the X-Men.

I write all this because today, May 1, 2010 is Free Comic Book Day, an event held every year to celebrate comic books and drive Gen X’ers like me who have drifted away from comic books, aside from re-reading Watchmen and watching just about every Marvel-derived film in the last 10 years, back to the comic book shop dragging our bewildered sons and daughters with us.

Go, support your local comic book shop (finding a participating store is easy), check out the merchandise, get a hit of the sense memory from the smell of the news print, pick up your free book and buy a second or third so that you can do some swapping and maybe even a pack of Star Wars trading cards if they still make them.  I hope that they do and that they haven’t gotten rid of the bad gum that came with them like Topps did with the baseball cards.  Talk about a sense memory.

Free Comic Book Day 2010 is a post from: Trumblog

It is really spring in New England. Not the dark, rainy, miserable season where blossoms and crocuses are beaten by cold, heavy rain till they are quickly lost and then rapidly followed by 80 degree full on summer. This year it is like the springs of my youth in Washington, DC where buds and tulips last. Where there is sun and days in the 50s and 60s and you can feel the promise of warmer weather on the way. This year it’s a real payback for those months of winter that we suffer through in Cambridge.

For the last two weeks I’ve endured a little IT winter of my own (not caused by our IT crew who have been patient and very helpful during my double crisis). Due to a virus on my laptop and a loose plug on my BlackBerry I’ve lost over 50 tabs in Firefox and more than 100 bookmarked stories in Viigo (as IT crises go pretty minor, but hear me out).

Those 50 tabs and 100 bookmarks, they represent 150 actions that I meant to take “someday.” Websites I meant to read. Ideas I meant to blog about Links I meant to share. But honestly would I have done that or was I just waiting for something like this to come along and clear my plate? Based on the age of some of those bookmarks and my past history, I suspect the latter.

So I’m not mourning those lost links. I now have a lighter browser full of opportunity.  Those bookmarks? Most were too outdated for blogging, if they were really necessary then I will search out the information when the need arises and I now have a lot of freed up memory on my smartphone.  Those digital losses are like last fall’s dead leaves that no longer clutter my yard so that the new spring grass looks inviting.

Loss is a part of life in the real world and online.  And so is spring.

Digital Spring is a post from: Trumblog

Tagxedo is an amazingly easy and flexible tag cloud creator that was just launched.  It allows you to upload text, point it to a url  or even use data (though I’m not sure how that is achieved, in order to generate a tag cloud that you can then customize the color, font, text direction, shape or select one of their existing themes.  The pro version will even allow you to shape the words into an image rather than a simple shape.  There are plenty of examples of this on their gallery, but below is a tag cloud of TTrumble.com.  Clearly I blog about Twitter a bit too much.

Tagxedo: Outstanding Tag Cloud Creator is a post from: Trumblog

Early in his career, Hyman Bloom was known as one of the “bad boys of Boston.” A contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning who called him “the first abstract artist in America,” he was one of 18 artists from around the country chosen for MOMAs prestigious 1942 exhibit, one of only seven artists to represent the United States in the 1950 Venice Biennial, and was profiled in Time magazine. For a few years he taught painting at Harvard University and later moved to a studio above the original Legal Sea Foods in Inman Square. While his work is in prominent collections and museums around the country, including the Fogg Museum, he is little known in the mainstream.

Mislabeled as a recluse and hermit, Bloom’s habitual disdain for the art world and preference for his studio over the limelight is often blamed for his fall from prominence. Others pin his decent on his decision to continue exploring figurative work and when abstract work became the rage. Revered by painters who knew him, Bloom inspires artists not only through his compositions and color, but also through his studious work ethic.

Seven months after his passing Angelica Allende Brisk’s documentary on Hyman Bloom has it’s Boston premier at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  The film is fantastic and I urge you to see it today, Saturday March 27th, 2010.  Tickets are available online or at the door. To whet your appetite and entice you to come to the premier here is the trailer and a preview of the film.   See you there.

Hyman Bloom Documentary Film Premier At The Museum of Fine Art, Boston is a post from: Trumblog

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, the day to celebrate the contributions of women toward technology and named in the honor of Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace who wrote the first computer program, a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers using Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

I knew who Ada Lovelace was, but had never seen her picture until this year when doing research for this post.  Somehow I had a more steam punk image of her looking somewhat like Amelia Erhard in jodhpurs and a leather jacket maybe even fighting a Cthulhu, not the Jane Austin type in her portrait. But as a regular of the court, Lorn Byron’s daughter, the wife of William King, 1st Earl of Lovelace and officially “The Right Honourable the Countess of Lovelace” she undoubtedly was more the Victorian lady than early 20th century aviatrix.

There is no reason for me to butch up the Countess of Lovelace in order for her to be a hero for programmers and women in tech.  I have 2 daughters both of whom excel at math and have also been known to sport a pink tutu on occasion.  Ada Lovelace is the perfect role model for the modern woman, as well as for  for every geek who needs to clean up nice once in a while.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day is a post from: Trumblog

With the start of a new year last month we all talked a lot about making changes.  A simple one that we discussed was to make small adjustments to our habits as a way of keeping the brain fresh and avoiding things like Alzheimer’s Disease.

I’m in favor of that so since the start of the year I started mixing up how I walk to work in the morning.  I have 2 choices of routes from my house to the subway in Cambridge and only 1 route on the subway, but when I get off the green line at Arlington Station my options for diversity in paths to the office unfold before me.  If I take into account different sides of the street  and 2 routes through buildings (which are handy on days like last week’s gales) I see about 21 routes from the subway to the office.  I don’t make any decisions about my route and let the traffic signals lead my way.  I follow walk signs or empty streets until I can’t keep going straight then turn at the signal.  Yes it’s a little bit OCD, but it works.

Now I’ve started to worry about this rule being too strict and that rather than it being a tool helping me to stay fresh it actually has become an impediment to that end.  Clearly I think too much.  But I can’t wait until Spring when the weather is better and the Public Garden and Boston Common beckon with even more options for routes to and from work and staying fresh.

What are you doing to mix it up? Let me know in the comments.

Staying Fresh By Mixing It Up is a post from: Trumblog