Just a reminder that I have not dropped off the face of the blogging earth, but in fact am blogging more often here: Adventures in Social Media. I’m also writing even more often in my company’s internal online community, but I’m afraid I can’t point you to that (see, internal).

Feeling guilty that I never blog in here any more, but I blog so much in other places now that I simply don’t come back here often. But today I have a reason.

I wrote last year about the little bird family outside my back patio doors, and the sad demise of the chicks at the claws of a cat. I meant to cover that hole up so no bird would be foolish enough to use it for nesting again, but I never got around to that.

A couple of days ago, I noticed avian activity on the back deck again. A wren couple is building a nest in the same hole in the wall. They are awfully cute as they earnestly land with twigs and other bits before popping up and into the hole.

One of the barn cats is no longer with us, but one is, and he’s certainly a hunter. I have a bad feeling about how this is going to play out.

And in front, mockingbirds have made a nest in a bush that climbs up the wall. Pumpkin, the cat, has been watching them for a couple of weeks now.

OK, that’s the quick update from the cottage on the farm. Back to work!

Plenty of Fish

Well, that’s a pretty blunt headline, isn’t it? This is one of the reasons I like having a blog: I have a platform to complain LOUDLY about companies that do wrong. This is what my old colleague, Keith Dawson, calls the “Super Empowered Angry Customer.” And that’s who I am today.

There’s a free online dating website called Plenty of Fish, at plentyoffish.com or pof.com, and for reasons that should be obvious, I decided to create a profile there. The site is fairly lame, frankly, but it’s free so I figured I would try it, anyway. Much to my surprise, within a few days I received the following “friendly” email with this Subject Line: Your Only Warning!

You have received this email because one or more of our rules have been violated.

If any of these rules are violated again, your account(s) will be removed from our website permanently.

1. Harassment – harassing or offending other users will result in your account being deleted

2. Nude/Inappropriate images – if you upload nude or inappropriate images, your account will be deleted

3. Duplicate/Fake Accounts – if you created more than one account for yourself or create a fake account, all of your accounts will be removed from our website

4. SPAM

5. Age – if we have reasons to believe you are under 18 years of age, your account will be deleted.

http://www.plentyoffish.com/terms.aspx

You’ll just have to trust me on this, but I did nothing offensive, harrassed no one, uploaded fully-clothed normal-looking pics of me and friends, did not spam anyone, and I sure as heck am older than 18.  I also only created one account, but the crummy website interface gave me a cryptic error message while I was creating the account and then it forced me to change from the username I had originally selected. I complied with the inane request and finished setting up my one and only account.

So, why did I get that email? I have no idea, unless the glitch when I signed up caused their system to create two accounts for me. More to the customer service point, what is any customer supposed to do when they get this email?

The fatal flaw that lands Plenty of Fish in the “sucks at customer service” column is their clear assumption that their users are bad people. The email they sent could only be effective when received by people who knowingly did one of those forbidden things. Plenty of Fish appears to hope that by acting like a stern and angry parent they will get creeps to stop acting like creeps. I really wonder how well that works.

My guess is that a very high percentage of people who get that warning email subsequently get banned from the site, as I did. Yes, I tried to log in a few days later and could not. Whatever sin Plenty of Fish thought I had committed, they must have thought I did it again, so they kicked me out.

Since I’d already decided after being treated like a criminal that I’d prefer to use another site, this did not bother me, but it sure did amaze me. See, when I got that threatening email from Plenty of Fish, I replied and asked what had triggered it, explaining that I was not aware of violating any of their policies.

Guess what the reply from Markus, the guy who runs Plenty of Fish, said? That’s right, nothing, since he did not reply. But that’s okay, Markus, you don’t have to answer email from me, since I have a blog and can tell you right here what I think of the way you treated me. And can at the same time tell my friends and anyone on the Internet who wants to search for Plenty of Fish, plentyoffish.com or pof.com and customer service. I’m happy to let you know right here what a lousy job you do with customer service.

You see, I’m not a criminal, I don’t intentionally violate terms of service, and I sure don’t act like a jerk on a dating website. So Markus’ “Your Only Warning!” email both insulted me and failed to give me any avenue for correcting whatever issue had caused my account to be flagged. If you’re interested in losing customers and visitors, Plenty of Fish sets a great example:

• assume your customers are out to get you
• threaten them the first chance you get
• refuse to tell them exactly what it is you think they did wrong
• ignore their responses and questions when they offer to make it right
• kick them out with no further explanation soon after.

We all could learn a great lesson in how NOT to treat customers from Plenty of Fish. That’s plentyoffish.com or pof.com, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention. After all, there are plenty of dating websites, too.

My daughter has some degree of ADD, but I think I have whatever the opposite is. Not that I am a fan in the slightest of naming every personality trait with a disorder diagnosis, though. But I find myself zoning in on things lately to such an intense degree that I look around after more time than I thought has passed and wonder why the heck I let myself do that.

Guess it’s a phase I’m going through. Now that I think about it, I’ve done this before. Kind of how I built an entire website when I first got the hang of using Dreamweaver. And how I started this blog about a year ago. Compared to those examples, I am currently a model of balance and self-discipline!

Well, it’s been a long time since I posted here. I’ve been blogging, but in other places. I never did think I would do well at keeping up with multiple blogs, and that’s proving to be the case. I blog more and more for work, on our internal Clearspace platform. Then I have the Our Social Media Cultural Evolution blog, which I’m terribly delinquent on (luckily my co-author there has largely taken up the slack — thanks, Matt!).

But I’ve also expanded my use of social media, so I spend more time in other places besides here. I actually go on Facebook fairly often now, much to my own surprise. I still think it’s 90% a silly waste of time, but I can’t deny the other 10% has value. And I’ve been posting to Digg and Delicious when I find things of interest, or tweeting them in Twitter or using FriendFeed or Feedly. In addition to blogging internally for work, I’ve been reading and contributing to forums about social media, such as Clearstep, particularly on topics related to Enterprise 2.0 (using Web 2.0 applications inside an organization).

I think I’d need to have ADD to keep up with all of those platforms, actually. Instead, I just let some go dormant for a while. Sorry if you were one of my readers here! I’ve ignored you for so long… and this isn’t a promise that I’m coming back, either. I’m still playing the social media field, and the new toys are shinier than this one

But you know what they say: you never forget your first. And this is my first real blog, so I won’t abandon it. Like a true friend, I’ll trust it to be here when I get a chance to come visit and catch up. Like today.

You know what I take away from the parade of Obama cabinet nominees who are confessing to tax errors? It strikes me as a loud and clear message that our tax code is too complicated. If these people can’t get their taxes right, how many of the rest of us are making errors, too?

I don’t think the answer is to beef up IRS enforcement, either. It’s simplification we need. I’m not advocating a flat tax or 3×5 card tax form, but c’mon! It sure looks like we could streamline the tax code and increase compliance as a result.

Like many people, I’ve been somewhat unclear exactly how we ended up with such a mess in the mortgage and housing market. I certainly grasped the broad outlines — people got greedy and made loans to people who never should have gotten them because those loaning the money knew they were going to sell those risky mortgages to others. But why did this happen now, and just how in the world did all the pieces fall in place to create this disaster?

Well, good old NPR has explained it all, clearly and simply. Take an hour to listen to this episode of This American Life and you’ll understand it, too: The Giant Pool of Money. It’s not only educational, it’s entertaining, too, as they have interviewed the people who actually made the loans and bundled the  mortgages into securities. They’ve asked the questions we all want to ask, such as “What were you thinking?!”

I really liked Digg’s feature that let me Digg an article and then post it to my blog. It was the fastest, simplest way to quickly add articles of interest to this blog. However, Digg changed to a Flash version of this feature, and since then I have gotten it to work only a couple of times. Most frustrating. C’mon, Digg, don’t roll out features that don’t work!

The next administration will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduated first in their high school class. If an enemy attacks United States during a Harvard-Yale game, we’re in trouble.

read more | digg story

A former colleague, Keith Dawson, was the editor at Call Center Magazine for years. Sadly, Call Center Magazine fell victim to digital fever and died, but I still remember the phrase Keith coined: Super Empowered Angry Customers.

Super Empowered Angry Customers describes the shift in power that has taken place with the popularity of blogs, video sites such as YouTube, and websites such as “______CompanySucks.com” Companies have always claimed to listen to customers, but in practice many companies have routinely ignored many customers — and when this happened customers had little option beyond taking their business elsewhere.

Now they can take their business elsewhere AND cause a public relations disaster for the company that disappointed them. This has completely changed the dynamic between customers and companies, shifting the balance of power toward the customer to a never-before-seen degree.

So how shall we use our power, people? Will we use it for good or for evil? Every customer is not always right, and not every complaint is justified. It can be a very good thing to have more power, yet history is full of lessons about power being abused. Let’s try to use our power for good.