Amy Middleton Loves New York

Dear Time Warner Cable,

I’m sure you consider “customer loyalty” to be an oxymoron at the TWC headquarters. Not only do you basically have a monopoly (at least in NYC) of internet service, but the quality of your service is–shall we say–lacking, causing many of us to shake our fists at you.

Naturally, you get your share of complaints and rude remarks. I’m pretty sure you don’t listen to any of it. The fact that you have a twitter account with hundreds of followers and no updates is another good indication that you sometimes pretend to care but aren’t really interested in helping people. However, even if you were to tap into all the “time warner sucks!” and “#twcfail” comments and conversations, you may be left just as clueless as how to improve. So please read and learn from the source of my frustration today when I tried to cancel my account.

I’ve canceled an account before with you, so I know that I need to return some equipment to 23rd street. But I remember it being a big process, and waiting in that giant line without a required item would be terribly inconvenient for me. Plus I didn’t remember if an appointment was required. So I decided to look up this basic, general information. Here was my process

1. I pulled up my last email statement, in which you advised me: “You can access your statement, change your payment options, add services, and more at http://www.timewarnercable.com/nynj/services/default.html“
2. On website, there are about 50 things I can do. Cancelling is not one of them.
3. I used the Search function to run a query on “cancel.” There are several results, most dealing with cancelling a TWC Navigator program. I don’t even know what that means, but I know it’s not what I’m looking for.
4. I logged into my account, which required a new password to be generated. Not your fault that I forgot it, just an extra step here.
5. From my Online Account Manager, I’m told I can View, pay, and manage my account. I would think managing would include cancelling the service if I choose. I can update my payment options very easily (thanks, giant orange button) but I can’t change my services.
6. A visit to the FAQ section tells me how to transfer my service if I’m moving, or transfer the account holder to a roommate. Am I really supposed to believe that no one has ever asked how to simply cancel the service? How on earth is that not an FAQ?

Now I’m frustrated. It didn’t have to be like this. You could have made it easy, but you obviously VERY INTENTIONALLY made it difficult to cancel, perhaps hoping that inertia and lack of info will lead to customers keeping their service a few months longer. Of course, this means that probably everyone who calls you will already be angry before they even speak to anyone. Is that really what you’d like to use your customer service department for? Handling irate customers who, as a direct and intentional result of the online experience you’ve crafted, already feel frustrated and powerless?

7. In order to remain a bit more neutral (phones are not my preferred communication method), I try to chat with an online rep. This requires not only my full address, phone number, and account number (even though I’m already logged in), but my social security number and a PIN.
8. I resort to the phone.
9. The menu offers “downgrade or discontinue service” as an option. Nice job guys!
10. I talked to a VERY nice customer service rep who provided me with this VERY BASIC information I was looking for without too much problem. When I asked her how to find that information online, she put me on hold, and confirmed that there is no explanation of how to disconnect on the website. She pointed out that the “contact us” section should help resolve that.

So, Time Warner Cable, all I need to do is bring my modem and its power cable to your location (the first date for a technician to come pick it up is after I’ll have moved). If that is seriously the entire process, WHY did you choose to make it so difficult? Do you really make so much money from people not getting around to returning your equipment that it is worth having everyone hate you? I guess if you’re a monopoly, it might be. Might as well ride that wave until you get beat out by smaller, better, customer-centric service providers. Maybe if you refuse to adapt you’ll even get a bailout. Or maybe, just maybe, you could improve your service, respond to feedback, and not have to deal with your entire customer base hating you.

In 2002 I took a few web classes at a community college in the bay area. I dropped the design class, being too busy to handle everything, and knowing enough of standards to realize what we were being taught violated the way the web was meant to be used. I later dropped the flash course, convinced I would never learn such a complicated and technical program, and having a new scheduling conflict that kept me from regularly attending the weekly class.

The courses I didn’t drop were online classes dealing with HTML and JavaScript, back when JavaScript (as I understood it) was superfluous trickery. HTML, though, was solid. I was just cleaning out some files, and I found the assignment timeline for the course. Here are some highlights:

Assignment Description
During the next 8 weeks you will create your own “Web Site” by creating a number of pages, linked together to a “Home Page”…

Week 3: Tables
Start a new homepage called “altindex.htm” that uses a table to align the title, graphic, text, and menu…

Week 5: Images Maps
Use Paintbrush to create a simple site map graphic. Use the graphic to create an image on a new page…

Week 6: Frames
(Do I even need a follow up to this one?)

Week 7: Forms
…Your form should ask for things like name, address, interests, comments…

Given that this is the most successful academic experience I’ve had with the world wide web, is it any wonder that I’ve since shied away from pursuing formal web design education?

But here we are seven glorious years later, and web design has advanced at a much more maddening pace than my skills have. I feel like an SVA billboard, which I hate on so many levels, and salivating over brilliant web design while occasionally dipping a toe into css doesn’t narrow the gap between current ability and mastery. I need to take a class. Perhaps several. And they need to not cover frames.

I tried writing the title as <media>ting, but it’s hard to tell what that word is, right? Anyway, I don’t know how this existed for so long and it’s the first time I’ve seen it, but here is Michael Wesch’s amazing, visual, engaging explanation of Web2.0: (”The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)”)

Armed with a list of recommendations, I went to New Jersey today to meet with the marketing director of the companies where I’m freelancing. The list came as the result of working in their campaigns for a few weeks, updating URLs of poorly structured Ad Group after poorly structured Ad Group.

I expected my list to get shot down. It’s my experience that there’s a “it’s not ideal, but here’s why we do it like that” for every problem. And there was some of that, but the director was able to see the value in the solutions I was presenting. He agreed that what I had thought of was better, and I got to spend the entire day building out well-structured campaigns.

Today was a good day.

Last night after an inspiring evening of peace and music, I launched twitter to catch the tail end of Jared Spool’s twitstorm on the implications of low-cost design. Intrigued, I went to his profile page where I then was able to trace the discussion. Twitter’s new handling of @replies has been generating some controversy, and naturally the inaccessibility of the exchange was bemoaned a few times. Leave it to a 1am idea, but I thought, “tracing the exchange was easy, and documenting it might be of value for those who didn’t follow it.” I copied and pasted blocks of tweets into excel, then thought my solution was probably too obvious or useless, and went to bed.

Through the night I had nightmares that publishing this twitstorm was a race, with new entries pouring into twitter as I rushed to finish my simple table. When I woke up and checked into it, I saw nothing of the sort, and decided that if I had the idea in the first place, I needed to do something about it.

Here is the ungraceful, aesthetically awkward chart I sent to to Jared Spool and Jon Whipple:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rlKehAIuxxERtYY7niedeew

If you’re interested in design value and cost, it’s a good discussion.

I have a hard time with break ups, even when they aren’t mine. A journal entry marks the first day I *didn’t* dream about Tom and Nicole after they announced their split.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to reconcile the separation of Douglas Bowman and Google. I admire both, and I’m satisfied that Mr. Bowman will do amazing things as Twitter’s Creative Director. To a large extent I get why he needed to leave (see: my employment history). What bothers me is the irreconcilable differences he cites. Frustrated with Google’s reliance on data, he says:

Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” …Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board.

THAT is the Google way, and that’s why I love Google. The worst part of my job is working with clients who have too much conviction and not enough respect for data. Data isn’t an engineering crutch, it is a collection of voices. Data is user experience. It’s your community telling you “we’re with you on this,” or, “what’s clear to you still isn’t clear to us.”

The brilliance of the web is that it’s interactive; we don’t just speak, we also are privileged to listen. Yet so often, web design has only one charge: make it look awesome. Other concerns (Is it effective? Does it accomplish its objective?) are secondary, often relegated to a different department, divorcing “communication” from “art.”

Data doesn’t prevent daring design; it rewards success. In fact, how can design be “daring” if the designer insists on being sheltered from feedback that could suggest failure? That accountability is still so often forsaken and dismissed is, I believe, a disservice to the design community. I’m surprised at how many Art and Creative Directors require portfolios that showcase fluency in typography or web app development, and entirely overlook their results. If designers aren’t interested in optimizing their own work, looking beyond their own convictions, or responding to user voice, what kind of experience are they designing?

Search Engine Optimization is a complicated process; algorithms are constantly changing, and there are very few universally accepted rules. Those employed in the industry use nebulous terms and concepts when they are talking with clients to try to add credibility to their work (because if I don’t understand you, I’m left to conclude that you are smarter than me). Meanwhile, clients want to buy into the hype and insist that they get “first page results” because someone told them that if you are on page 2, you are invisible to your customers.

A few years ago we had a client trying to break into online. They manufactured disinfectant and cleaning products which they sold to hospitals. They had a bad website, no way to order online, and they wanted to rank #1 in organic searches for words like “HIV” and “clean.” Setting expectations becomes a big part of client relations in situations like this, and there are some consultants out there who would “guarantee” they can do it. Others would cite the “google sandbox” and say that results won’t be seen for about six months, that anyone who says otherwise is lying and just wants your money, and that you just need to trust and be patient and you’ll start climbing the ranks eventually as they slowly and organically “tweak” your site.

“The Long Tail” has become one of the favorite buzzwords in the industry because it captures the benefits of being specific. To quote Wikipedia, ‘the Long Tail is a potential market and.. the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market successfully.’ There are all sorts of tools to help you “discover” this potential market by using KEI and various link packages so you can “dominate” the results pages. The process is boxed up and sold as technology, which is again the essence of the problem.

What does it mean to dominate a results page? Wouldn’t it be that if people run a query for your product, they will find you towards the top of the list (maybe even in the coveted #1 spot)? Natural search is not the place for you to be #1 on the term “amazing,” unless you sell amazing as a noun, or you blog about “amazing” things. Businesses wanting to tap into the powers of the internet don’t think about this though (‘yes, but, if someone searches for amazing and sees us in the first position, that is incredible branding!’). They define the audience they want to reach as anyone who types a term loosely related to their company, and then they try to find ways to beat the “competition.”

I want to take a very simple, real life illustration to explain what happens in natural search, and what most people aren’t thinking about in their clamor to get all that web traffic. My example is the very site you are reading. The term is Margaret Merrill Toscano. Now, two things to note here.

1. My blog is not very popular as far as search engines are concerned. Even if I had hundreds of friends who daily checked my site, that would be a drop in the bucket compared to thousands of commercial and personal sites out there attracting a much larger audience.

2. My blog is not about Margaret Merrill Toscano. I mentioned her name last week- once- in a post about a PBS documentary. As far as I know, there are no inbound links to this site using her name. There are certainly no page titles, headings, or even <strong>’ed terms that include her name.

Given these two facts, I was surprised last week to look at my site stats and discover that three people had arrived at this site through a search engine query for Ms. Toscano. As of this posting, Google returns 29,700 results for Margaret Merrill Toscano. Crankybabicult.com is result #8.

If I sold articles by Ms. Toscano, I would be pretty pleased. People looking to find her articles would see my site, and I would work to optimize so that I came up even higher in the rankings by expanding my library and possibly writing more about her. It wouldn’t matter that my site is not ranked among the top 100,000 on the internet or that it has a low page rank. I would be effectively reaching the people who were looking for the products I sold.

What if I didn’t understand SEO though? Here’s what would happen. I would say, “so few people have heard of Margaret Merrill Toscano. We get such little traffic on that term. We need to increase our online exposure. Let’s optimize, instead, for the word ‘person,’ because she is a person, and that is a much broader term that probably gets a lot more searches. It is bad for business if we are satisfied with only appearing when someone is actively seeking our niche market. We need to advertise, and we’ll start with anyone who is looking for a person!”

Now, arguably my site is sometimes about various persons. But optimizing for that term would be such a bad idea. I would need to go back and rewrite all my posts to say “person” when I mean “Jordan” or “Jo” or “David.” That would make my site much less relevant than it already is. And people who are trying to find information on any of these persons would never find my site in their searches. Not to mention I would then need to try to “beat out” every other site that talks about a person.

I talk to people a lot about matters of the search engine, and I do my best to explain the importance of being specific and relevant. Of course searchers sometimes don’t know how to identify what they are looking for, and the very process of search has its flaws. I love it anyway. I love the potential the internet has to connect seekers with what they are seeking. In my opinion, the only role optimization should have in this process is to make it easier to find what is being sought. That doesn’t take six months, link packages, boxes, or bags. It takes clear, specific writing above anything else.

If you are a business, write about what you sell. If no one wants what you sell, that’s a problem that optimization won’t help you with. If people are looking for what you sell but don’t realize it (your product is the solution to their problem), then make sure you are writing about the problem as well. Contrary to the claims of certain direct marketing testimonials, the internet is not a cash machine that awards millions of dollars to whoever is in the top position for any given keyword. Most likely, you make money when consumers buy your products. Your goal in search engines is just to help them find you so they can buy from you. If you understand that and are okay with that, you and anyone who is working with you to accomplish that will do very well.

(Note: upon reading this over, I can hear in my head valid criticism insisting that location is key, that there is a reason companies are named AAAA, and that the difference between position #2 and #5 can be hundreds of thousands of dollars in some markets. To which I say: absolutely. If you are #5 for a highly-competitive keyword and know that sales would be improved by moving up three spots, you should definitely optimize on that keyword. That is a clear, quantifiable, (hopefully) achievable goal. But arbitrarily choosing popular keywords to optimize on for the sake of traffic, even if this worked, would not generate more sales.)