Monthly Archives: May 2014

Ryanair is failing, and I couldn’t be happier

Community, Customer Service, Marketing, Tech

Ryanair CEOThe problem with the balance between marketing and caring for customers is that marketing is often immediate. You can put an ad out and immediately see people visiting and signing up and spending money. You put effort into customer service, community building, or just basic user experience and you don’t see an immediate result. But us community professionals swear that you will see a long-term benefit.

That’s why I’m so pleased to note that Ryanair is seeing its worst annual revenues in five years. I’ve been saying for years that Ryanair’s tactics were going to explode in their face, but people kept saying “they’re selling tickets, so apparently is not an issue”. To me, this is fantastic validation that caring for your customers does make a difference and treating them badly does affect the bottom line.

But really, what would you do if there was no email? Thomas Knoll’s drastic experiment

Tech

We’re building the next generation of companies, and they look nothing like the previous ones. Right? Email is dead? Meetings are stupid? Companies should be flat?

I hear a lot of people talking about these subjects and some trying to implement them, but nobody as drastically and definitively as Thomas Knoll. His writeup on the email-less culture at Primeloop is both terrifying and exciting. Definitely worth a read!

Research and the Minimum Viable Community

Community

Ever start a Facebook group where no one participated? Ever craft an ambassador program that no one applied for? Ever spend hours coordinating an event and only have a few people show up? I have.

Communities, like products, fail when we don’t develop and understand the members first. We go heads down building and when we pick our heads up for air, we realize no one needs what we’ve built.

Customer Development is about checking our theories against reality to make sure what we plan to build is actually valuable. And it matters just as much for communities as it does for products.

Danya Cheskis-Gold on CMX Hub

Love love love love love this. It’s so true, and so hard to do. It’s much easier to sit at your desk and write up plans and create Facebook groups and do things nobody actually cares about.

I probably spent 1/8th of my time at UserVoice talking to customers & community in person, and another huge chunk of time looking at forum data, survey data, visitor data, etc. And I probably should have spent even more time doing it.

UserConfCustomer Service Breakfast Happy Hour was our MVC, and after it was clear it was valuable to people, my boss Richard White pushed me to do something bigger. I’m extremely grateful for that…it can be easy to fail in the opposite direction, where you don’t scale the things that are going well because it’s SCARY.

The result was UserConf, which is now approaching its 5th event and just had its first that was fully sold out. I no longer work at UserVoice, but I already have my tickets for the next one.

As we mentor and support each other, let’s keep ourselves honest: do the interviews, do the research, do the diligence before you start solidifying any plans.