Students, alumni and others have adopted a full-court press fueled by social media to express their disapproval, often in creative, thoughtful and sometimes hilarious fashion. This grassroots effort includes:

• A rapidly growing Facebook group with membership exceeding 8,000 as of this writing .
• A frequently-used twitter hashtag (#UWLogo)
• Online petitions
• A mock logo generator site called the ‘University of Waterpew’

Incidentally, the ‘pew’ motif refers to the multi-coloured lines within the ‘W’, which are thought to closely resemble lasers. This would explain some of the art that involve ‘Dr. Evil’s sharks with laser beams attached to their heads’.

The Facebook group contains a good summary of events to date, including replies from the school (who had to say something given the amount of feedback). Worth checking out is the mashed up fan art involving the logo under ‘Photos’ and…[abridged list] Tron, Richard Simmons, Dr. Evil, Cookie Monster, Captain Picard, Xzibit, Rick Astley and more.

My hat is off to the folks at Best Buy for their gumption and audacious embrace of social media. Case in point, this week saw the launch of twelpforce, a twitter-based service where anyone can tweet customer service-related questions to @twelpforce that are then answered by any of the hundreds of Best Buy store employees who have signed up to be part of the ‘force’. As well, some online marketing/ promotional tweets are posted for all to see.

Below is a twelpforce commercial that summarizes the idea nicely:

This innovative offering reinforces the company’s focus on service, which I think is an astute strategy given the competitive pressures that they are facing from all sides. One way to keep your customers happy is to deal with them on their own terms, and opening up another channel / option for customer communication is to be commended.

Of course, when you’re breaking new ground, it’s impossible to launch without a couple of kinks. After observing the first few days of furious twelpforce activity, I have a couple of quick question marks and suggestions.

1. Are 140 characters enough to convey enough detail about my question?
   The answer is ‘it depends’. In some cases, the question requires just a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, e.g. @TWELPFORCE do you guys sell macs? However, the limitations of the medium become apparent when the customer needs to provide some more detail in order to get a tailored product recommendation. See below for a dialog with a customer who is looking for a laptop (Note: I’ve disguised the customer`s twitter ID):

@twelpforce; what is the best laptop from $600-$800
@[BestBuyCustomer] There are so many choices! What are you looking to do? You a gamer? Student? You have a lot of music and pict… via @agent15616
@TWELPFORCE student /play games
@[BestBuyCustomer] Depending on what type of games, you may need to spend a little more to get a decent graphics card. via @agent15616

I’m left wondering how many meandering threads of tweets will be required to answer a question that could be taken care of more quickly via other channels.  I’ve visited various tech forums in the past, and below is a more typical information-rich post from one of the users of Best Buy’s own community forum site:

I am looking for a nice computer for a laptop that would be good for running Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Movies, and music. It needs to be under $1200.

I want it to have at least:

4gb memory

Graphics card with 1gb memory dedicated

250gb Harddrive

Large screen

I prefer Hp but i am willing to look at other brands as well.

Do you have any recomendations?

Thank you.

I hope that as twelpforce users grow accustomed to this new tool, they begin to understand what sorts of questions are twitter-appropriate. Perhaps Best Buy could provide some suggested guidelines for inquiry types as well. In many cases, a directional answer from an expert would suffice.

2.   Promotional messages are getting buried in the support conversations.
In addition to the customer service / guidance tweets, @twelpforce also offers up some promotional content. Below are some examples:

Trouble with your iPod or MP3 Player? Bring it into Geek Squad / Best Buy for us to take a look at it for you! (via @… via @BBYAppleValley

Geek Squad Virtual Agents are ready to take the hassle out of computer repair. Help is just a click away. http://bit.ly/vV3… via @BestBuy687.

However, the vast majority fall into the customer service category. If you look at the stream of tweets on the @twelpforce page, you’ll feel like you’ve placed a bug in the middle of their call center, viewing myriad snippets of many support requests. Absent any voyeuristic tendencies, odds are that you won’t be reading through them all, and so I fear that most users won’t ever see the promotional messages. Perhaps the promotional tweets should be taken care of via another distinct ID to preserve the focus on service that the twelpforce name suggests.

3.   Is there a way that can we all benefit from this collective knowledge?
Twelpforce works very well on a one-on-one basis, i.e. when a customer tweets a question and gets a response. From what I’ve seen, it’s clear that many Best Buy employees are both knowledgeable and eager to help and voice their opinions. However, I’m wondering whether there is a way that we can all benefit from this collective wisdom that is being amassed. When you think about it, a potential knowledgebase is growing before our eyes.

If you are not the initiator of the question/topic, then it’s difficult to glean anything useful from the stream of tweets. With only half of the conversation on display on the twitter page, you would need to check out the asker’s page and seek the tweets to try and piece together the conversation. Unlikely.

Something I’d love to see is some sort of organization and curation of this content so that it can help others. Maybe a ‘best of’ or ‘most frequently asked’ page that is categorized and searchable…something in the spirit of Yahoo! Answers perhaps?

4.   Transparency is refreshing…up to a point.
I love some of the moves toward transparency that Best Buy is making with this initiative. A shining example is that the Tips & Expectations page providing twittering guidelines for employees is publicly available.

However, there are some limits that I would set. For instance, there have been several tweets from employees asking other employees whether they could respond to the customer’s question (customer user name disguised):

Anyone who can help @[BestBuyCustomer] with a suggestion on the best software and backup method for a PC? http://bit.ly/… via @Coral_BestBuy

Having worked in a call center during my college days, this reminded me of a familiar scene – putting the caller on hold , setting down my headset and asking fellow agents on my team whether someone knew the answer to a customer query that I couldn’t answer. The only difference is that with twelpforce, the ‘caller’ is not on hold…they can hear the agent asking their colleagues for help (and adding one more tweet to your stream).

The positive here is that team spirit is on full display. However, this is a level of transparency that we don’t necessarily need as customers seeking counsel.

5.   Gut check for twelpforce agents: Before you hit ‘send’, think about what your tweet is contributing.
It’s heartening to see that the majority of tweets solve customer problems and…well…add real value to the conversation. Others – not so much. I attribute this to the novelty of the medium, but there are some earnest twelpforce employees who should maybe think twice before adding to the conversation.

There are two types of examples that come to mind:

a)   The ‘Hello world’ tweets from new employees who announce that they have joined twelpforce and are there to help.

b)   The ‘I don’t know’ tweets from employees who don’t know the answer to the question, and decide to jump in and say so (Note: IDs disguised), e.g. @[BestBuyCustomer]  Sorry, I do not have any expertise in that field, I’m a GS employee, can anyone help him out via @[BestBuyEmployee]

Some additional coaching may be required to ensure that when a customer takes the time to write in, the reply tweets that they received productively advance the conversation.

To reiterate, I see tremendous potential in twelpforce and kudos to Best Buy for being so responsive to its customers. To paraphrase the in-flight scripts from the airlines, they know we have a choice in ever-growing marketplace for electronics, and a fearless dedication to service is a differentiator that would sway my purchase decisions.

Call me old school, but I have remained skeptical, and a non-tragedy yesterday reminded me why – Jeff Goldblum is still alive, well and delivering lines somewhere in his trademark style (I’m a fan).

As many of you know, some questionable individuals chose to exploit yesterday’s high-profile tragedies to exercise their brand of decidedly unfunny humor. Given Michael Jackson’s impact on pop culture, yesterday was another rare instance of a ‘Where were you when you heard…’ moment, and for many it was a ‘Where were you when you read the tweet about…’ moment.  The blinding speed of social media on full display.

However, many of us also received tweets about the tragic passing of Mr. Goldblum (along with Harrison Ford and others), sparking a torrent of questions and disbelief. I can only imagine the temporary (but utterly unnecessary) horror that was maliciously perpetrated against the friends and family of the very-much-alive Mr. Goldblum et al. The ‘news’ became so widespread that Goldblum’s publicist was compelled to release a statement. Granted, the invisible hand eventually cleared up the confusion, but it took time and many, many requests to re-tweet the ‘Goldblum is not dead’ voices of reason messages.

What a mess.

In my mind, it conjured the growing tide of arguments that ‘Twitter is the new CNN’. Hmm…maybe not so much just yet. If yesterday is an indication, we might be over-estimating our current collective intelligence.

I don’t know about you, but I’d sacrifice a bit of immediacy in exchange for some good old-fashioned fact-checking with my serving of news (dead vs. alive…that sort of thing). Things may get better in the future, but there was a culture of ‘(re-)tweet first, ask questions never’ that was displayed in high definition yesterday.

Quite frankly, it made me appreciate the fact that we still have professional journalists left in the world. Thanks.

(By the way…loved him as Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park).

To many, the phrase ‘thinking outside the box’ has become an example of banal business-speak that gives management advisers the counter-intuitive reputation of NOT being imaginative in their thinking (don’t get me started on ‘adding value by leveraging synergies’). When executed well however, it’s one of the most invaluable services that advisers can lend to their clients, and one of the key ingredients is the elimination of false constraints.

Much has been written about how today’s manager is deluged with more information than ever before. Dealing with a steady torrent of daily demands and decisions, it almost becomes a necessity to employ the most convenient and conventional solutions to business problems – ones that are perceived to result in the least friction with the myriad constraints facing the manager. Very often, however, these solutions prove to be short-term patches. I’ve heard many managers lament that there simply ‘isn’t enough time for stepping back to do any deep thinking’ that would result in more creative and effective solutions.

Here’s where the value of the fresh perspective comes in.

We’re often engaged to solve long-festering business problems, and a key element of any engagement is a collaborative workshop with a diverse cross-section of participants from the client organization. Going into the workshop, we often uncover deep-seated mental blocks in response to constraints of the business and industry (both real and perceived). For example, a potential solution involving a relatively minor change to a technology system may never surface because ‘all I.T. requests take forever and are not worth the trouble’.

Freeing oneself from these paper chains is necessary to ideate the most creative and effective solutions. Often, these self-inflicted constraints are taken as a given (like wallpaper on the walls), and so no one even addresses them. So one of the most useful exercises that we’ve done at the outset of these ideation workshops is to have everyone anonymously jot down the constraints (chains) that they feel are exacerbating their business problem. Each one is then read out to the group and is given the second-guessing that is long overdue.

What then unfolds is the realization that many of these constraints are indeed artificial and eminently surmountable. This adds a multitude of arrows to the manager’s quiver and allows us to collaborate on creative, previously unexplored solutions that were artificially kept off the table in the past.

I counsel my clients to always re-examine the long-standing constraints that have stood in the way of the solution that your issue deserves. You may have more options than you think.

P.S. (After you’ve eliminated the false constraints, EMBRACE the real ones…that’s a post for another time).

Image Source: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/218058 Credit: Dani Simmonds