02:28 pm | 0 recommendations | 5 comments

What Do You Want From A Magazine Website?

Interesting article today in today's Wall Street Journal about Time Inc. and its latest attempt at a coherent Web strategy. The piece raises some important issues about what we want from our print media's online forays. Perhaps the most telling paragraph is this one, highlighting what Time Inc has planned for some of its flagship titles:

Time Inc. plans to invest millions of dollars in coming months to build up its biggest sites. The enhancements will include more professional video and portfolio tools for investors at CNNMoney. The company is considering making acquisitions to expand SI.com into social networking and user-generated content. And at People.com, the publisher plans to invest in blogs, video and other features.

Do you want more video from your print titles? Do you want more tools or an opportunity to hang out? Or do you do those things elsewhere? It's a good story to read after this month's Fast Company feature on the digital newspaper guru Rob Curley.

So what do you want from the Web version of your favorite magazines (yes, including Fast Company)?

12:05 am | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

What We Want From Movies

The number-one movie in the country this week is Martin Scorsese's The Departed, which is based on a 2002 movie from Hong Kong called Internal Affairs. For a remake--and of such a recent movie--the public and critical response could not be more exuberant, for the actors and Mr. Scorsese. The buzz is that Scorsese may finally win the Best Director Oscar, the prize that's eluded him in his illustrious career. And it's really all because of the devious original script from Felix Chong and Siu Fai Mak.

Meanwhile, if you follow Oscar buzz, Scorsese's prime competition is already shaping up to be Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers. What's most interesting about this project, which tells a story of heroism at Iwo Jima, is that Eastwood also filmed Letters From Iwo Jima, a Japanese-language exploration of the same battle from the Japanese perspective. It comes out in February. This is a big step beyond shooting a film series simultaneously, as Peter Jackson did with Lord of the Rings, or doing two sequels back-to-back, as Pirates of the Caribbean did, because it's more efficient.

Intricate layered stories, multiple perspectives--these projects (neither of which I've seen yet) seem to represent the ideal storytelling for our times. Top screenwriters, directors, and performers are stepping up to give us entertainment that challenges us in our multitasking, overstimulated lives. We live in a lean-forward world now, and these are lean-forward movies.

Do you embrace these new storytelling styles? Do you think they're an evolution of what we want from movies? Are you attracted to movies that you know offer novel storytelling techniques?

11:57 pm | 0 recommendations | 4 comments

Is Peer-To-Peer Irrelevant?

Sorry for the lateness of picking this up, but last week, Amanda Marks, EVP of Universal Music’s eLabs, stated at the Digital Music West Forum that P2P is now irrelevant in the music business. As you might imagine, others disagreed.

What do you think? Is P2P dead in the music world? Where is a P2P network best implemented?

05:53 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Customers First: Welcome Guest Blogger Jim Gilmore

I'm extremely pleased to welcome the dean of customer experience, Jim Gilmore, to this forum this week. Gilmore and his business partner Joe Pine co-wrote The Experience Economy in 1999 (!) and its ideas continue to ripple through the business landscape. I remember seeing Mr. Pine speak at a web personalization conference not long after the book's release and reading the book soon thereafter and being captivated by the audacity of their ideas. Gilmore has been extremely generous with his time with me and my staff as we thought about this year's Customers First package, and his ideas are no less audacious and thought-provoking today. In fact, if anything, consumers are starting to close the gap with Gilmore and are demanding better experiences from the most everyday transactions. Now if we can just get more companies to think these thoughts more meaningfully. I look forward to Jim's contribution to our month-long conversation. He's batting cleanup, as he should be.

11:35 am | 0 recommendations | 7 comments

Customers First: Welcome Guest Blogger Kate Newlin

When we talk about customer experience, most experts come at the topic from a similar angle. What I like about Kate Newlin is that even though she works closely with corporate clients as the principal of Kate Newlin Consulting, she hasn't forgotten about us, suffering at the checkout aisle in the grocery store or trying to find something nice at a clothing store. Newlin, the former president of Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve, has written a book, out tomorrow, called Shopportunity! How to Be a Retail Revolutionary. What's notable about this book is how personal it is, as Kate takes us on a journey through the kind of shopping experiences we do all the time and take for granted how bad they've become. And she has a rationale for why they're bad: Because we're generally not paying enough for them to be good. We're so addicted to a culture of cheapness that we've lost the joy of shopping that we once may have had.

I think Kate will add an interesting element to our conversation this month. Please welcome her and let's have a lively discussion about what we, as shoppers, can do to help improve our experiences.

10:26 am | 0 recommendations | 8 comments

Customers First: Welcome Guest Blogger Lewis Carbone

Lewis Carbone and I are having a heated debate. This is what happened when I called him for an interview for the essay I wrote as part of this year's Customers First package. Carbone has a strong vision for the future of customer experience and how we need to get there, and he made that clear to me from the outset of our conversation. We had a lot of fun discussing the issues, and I thought Carbone would spark a lively debate with our readers, as he did with me. He's a smart, passionate guy, with, as I said, a clear vision of the future. He's the CEO of Experience Engineering, where he consults with companies to help them get to that future. And he's the author of Clued In: How To Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again, where he fully articulates his thinking about customer experience. I'm thrilled to have him here this week to be part of the conversation. I know he'll bring some surprises. And I look forward to mixing it up with him again.

07:25 am | 0 recommendations | 3 comments

Customers First: Introducing Guest Blogger Jeanne Bliss

Jeanne Bliss sent me an email about her book, Chief Customer Officer, just as we were getting ramped up in earnest on this year's Customers First package, and one look at her resume told me that I had to speak with her. She's spent 25 years inside name-brand corporations helping to architect great customer experiences. She's seen, from the inside, just how hard it can be to reorient a company to a Customers First agenda. She got her start at Lands’ End, Inc., which is just about the best place one can think of to ground yourself in customer-centric principles. She then took that education and has plied it at Coldwell Banker Corporation, Allstate Corporation, Microsoft, and Mazda Motor of America. She's now the managing partner of Customer Bliss, a strategic consultancy that helps leaders push that customer rock up the hill, as she says.

When I spoke with Jeanne not long after getting her note, her passion, intelligence, and just plain common sense wisdom immediately impressed me. And I think she'll add an important voice this week to the conversation of why great customer experiences are in such short supply and what we can do about it as leaders and as customers.

03:01 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

It's Customers First Month At FastCompany.com

Hi and welcome to Customers First month at FastCompany.com. It seems like topic A around the watercooler these days has been how poorly we're being treated as customers lately. The irony, of course, is that companies talk more than ever about how to better serve us.

Well, the fact is that some do treat us really well. In fact, some companies go so far as to take an everyday transaction and turn it into an entertaining experience. That idea drove us this year in putting together the Customers First package you may have already seen in print, and in particular the expanded Web package we've built around it that we hope you enjoy on the site.

Follow the jump for a full explanation of what we have in store for you this month.

• Listen to our podcast interviews with executives from the winners discussing how they create singular experiences
• Nominate your own Customers First companies for readers to vote on and vote and comment on our winners, runners-up, and local and regional standouts
• See how you rate against the rest of the country's customer rage
• Find the best local and regional experiences where you live with our interactive map mashup
• View our slideshows devoted to past winners discussing the companies they admire for the way they treat their customers--and read their stories
• Read our personal experiences with this year's Customers First winners and runners-up

And, interact with our expert guest bloggers. Here's the lineup:

September 4-8: Jeanne Bliss, managing partner, Customer Bliss, and author of Chief Customer Officer (Jossey-Bass, 2006).

September 11-15: Lewis Carbone, CEO, Experience Engineering, and author of Clued In (Prentice Hall, 2004).

September 18-22: Kate Newlin, principal, Kate Newlin Consulting, and the author of Shopportunity! (Collins, 2006).

September 25-29: James Gilmore, principal, Strategic Horizons, and co-author of The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1999).

We hope you enjoy all that we've put together surrounding this topic and this issue. We're passionate about it, and obviously, we'd love your feedback. Let's have a fun month talking about what we can do better to serve customers and what we as customers are demanding of the companies we do business with.

David Lidsky
Senior Editor

12:56 pm | 0 recommendations | 10 comments

Farewell, Esther Snyder, Founder Of In-N-Out Burger

Esther Snyder, the founder of In-N-Out Burger, passed away Friday. She was 86. In-N-Out Burger, as many of you likely know, is the cult burger chain on the West coast that was born in the same cradle of post-WWII America's love affair with the road as many of our most familiar U.S. brands. But In-N-Out always did things a little differently, focusing ruthlessly on the customer and adopting a slow-growth strategy that's the very antithesis of McDonald's and virtually all the other burger chains that came of age alongside the interstate highway system.

In-N-Out's vice president of operations, Mark Taylor, will take the helm as president. Companies often lose their way when the founder's no longer there to guide the company. That relentless focus on customers gets lip service while growth is pursued. Here's hoping that Taylor doesn't lose sight of the value of In-N-Out's mystery and its devotion to customers. This is especially true for those of us who don't live out West. How many burger chains are destinations outside of their region to tourists? In-N-Out doesn't really talk to the press, has kept the chain manageable in size, and it's worked. So keep Esther Snyder in your thoughts, both the next time you go to In-N-Out and while you're running your business.