We make brands more human.

Everything is changing. As it turns out, brands don't "own" market segments. They are simply nodes in complicated human networks. And they're either influential in their networks, or they're not. To have influence, brands must become knowledge brokers. And they need to learn how from the ultimate brokers: humans. Your brand needs to learn to be more human.

Sprint Customer Service Strikes Again

I ranted earlier today about Sprint’s customer service dystopia. It got worse. I decided waiting another 2 to 4 days for a phone was untenable. I called customer service again. Here’s how it went down:

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Sprint Customer Service Sucks

I have phone service through Sprint; if you want to call it service. I drop calls constantly and everywhere. Out of probably 30 customer service experiences with them, perhaps only once did I not feel latent hostility from the representative. The Sprint stores themselves are like something dreamt by Dante. But that’s not what has me so frustrated at the moment. You see, I’ve been a Sprint customer for about 5 years now. I have always carried their insurance for my phone on the plan. Heretofore, I’ve at least had no problems getting phones replaced when they weren’t working. This time it has been a fiasco.

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Customer Service is Marketing

The Consumerist has a post about some excellent customer service from SmartBargains.com.
Every ad agency should be making every attempt to sell some kind of customer service initiative with every campaign. An authentic interaction. If the marketing is going to tell a compelling story, it had better be congruent with the customer’s experience when something inevitably goes wrong.

Obama Been Bloggin

Taking a HEEEEEYYYYAAAAARGH from Howard Dean, the Barak Obamaniacs have woven themselves a tapestry of MyBarakObama microsites to motivate, connect, and empower a formidable cluster of web-savvy politiquitos. While every viable candidate in the slim pickin pile is using blogs, Flickr, and YouTube to some degree, Obama’s advisors force the question: can they harness enough online energy to offset the disadvantage of a political underdog (whoever that may be)? Will online word-of-mouth supplant the legacy of ever-mounting political contributions?
Regardless of political leanings, it’s worth investigating the emergence of online social networking as the new political networking.
It’s too early yet to get my vote, but they’ve definitely earned a link.

2000 Bloggers

The clever Tino Buntic has created a link explosion called 2000 Bloggers. You can easily waste an entire day purusing the links. Who knew this blogging thing was so popular?
Really big montage of blog author photos after the jump.

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