The idea’s straightforward: Eberhard had founded a mobile content company and sold it in 2004, and thought if ringtones could be bought and paid for via premium SMS, why not charitable donations, too? Of course, one major issue with PSMS is the cut the operator takes out, but James has reached agreements with US operators for them to waive their revenue share, meaning all of the $5 or $10 donation gets passed through to the participating non-profits.

Today, mGive works with over 200 charities, enabling mobile users to donate money quickly and easily via shortcode. And it’s been successful: one campaign, featuring Alicia Keys and conducted during the American Idol TV show saw 90,000 donors raise $450,000 in just minutes. Donors have given about $1.5 million via mobile so far in the US; this exceeds the first year of online donations, and those now amount to some $18 billion per year.

If you’re in the US and want to try mGive out — and help support a worthwhile cause — you can head over to Facebook and see a complete list of the charities it works with. Or, you can send a text to 90999 to participate in one of their featured holiday campaigns:
- Feeding America – text 1IN8 to 90999 to give $5
- Wounded Warrior Project – text WWP to 90999 to give $5
- City of Hope – text GIVEHOPE to 90999 to give $5
- Mothers Against Drunk Driving – text MADD to 90999 to give $5

mGive is also deploying something called SnapTags to make donations even simpler. Users snap a picture of one of the tags (like the one seen here), then send it via MMS to a certain number, triggering the text donation sequence. This is pretty cool — groups like the Salvation Army could simply post one of the tags on their kettles and enable easy mobile giving!

Why so few women speakers, panellists or moderators?

And don’t tell me this is representative of the industry because I know it isn’t – we have good female representation at Mobile Mondays, more women come to Swedish Beers now (and growing) and the women in the Women in Mobile Data Association are plentiful! I even hear along the grapevine that the MMA has a strong female contingent.

And yes, this is a particular bugbear of mine. But with good reason. So bear with me.

I’m fed up to the back teeth of conference organisers and their sponsors ignoring women in the mobile industry (Informa being a recent obvious culprit, but they are certainly not alone) and coming up with lame excuses as to why women aren’t involved. And many of these events are actually organised by women which makes it even worse. Do women still defer to men? Do women need a license to speak up?

Underrepresentation of women is a big issue across all of business. I was surprised to find six women out of 21 students in my MBA cohort, given their underrepresentation in business schools nation (and I presume world-) wide. Here’s the thing, though, you don’t have to be a woman, or a “bra-burning feminist,” as Helen says, to take issue with this. The lack of diversity at these events, across the mobile industry, and across business in general isn’t a feminist issue, it’s a business one. Given that roughly half of the market is women, doesn’t it behoove us to, you know, have them around? Same with other subsets of the overall population/market. How can we expect to answer their needs if we don’t seek out and welcome their input. Is that smart?

Helen hit the nail on the head for me in an email she sent:

I’m bored of seeing a sea of men in grey suits and hearing the sound of my own voice at events. We desperately need some diversity in order to attend to the needs of the whole industry and the whole of our customer base. I’m looking for ways forward, some things to try, some benchmarks to set. Maybe we can *actually* do something about it? And in doing so, make better business decisions, provide products and services that appeal to all members of the community and become a more vibrant, healthy industry as a result. Well, I hope so at least.

I think we can all identify with going to events and seeing the same people, or same groups of people, speaking and rehashing the same points of view. If they’re representative of the industry as a whole, perhaps it helps explain why things take so long to progress — and why we keep facing the same problems over and over.

This isn’t an issue of appeasing women to make them happy; it’s an issue of embracing diversity and differing viewpoints to improve our industry and our businesses. We can all agree that if a lack of opportunities is borne out of sexism, it’s stupid. But if it’s borne out of anything else, is it any less ignorant?

Helen’s looking for feedback and suggestions on ways to improve the situation, so head over to her blog and weigh in on this issue.

So, accordingly, I suggest we give Viacom what they want. Watch videos like the one I made and embedded below. Make your own, and upload them to YouTube, use the tag “screwyouviacom” — and be sure to upload an extra copy and mark it Private, since Viacom also wants every private video users have uploaded. Spread them around, make them show up in these logs and maybe Viacom will notice that they’re not helping their business, they’re alienating their audience by trampling all over its privacy.

1. I start following the CEO of big US online shoe retailer Zappos.com on Twitter.

2. He tweets: “Weird, just found out through a PRESS RELEASE that DSW [a bricks-and-mortar shoe retailer that just happens to have launched an online store)] filed a lawsuit against Zappos. Maybe phone call, letter, or email more productive??” followed later by “Just checked with Zappos legal team and haven’t received any communication (phone call, letter, email) from DSW, just press release. Weird.” (Here’s the release about the suit.),

3. I tweet that it sounds like marketing-via-lawsuit, and later that I imagine it has to do with third-party sites not owned or controlled by Zappos, but are in its affiliates program.

4. I get a pro-DSW Twitter reply from one “SEOColumbus”. I check out his Twitter page and there are more of the same, as well as others talking up DSW’s newly launched site and talking smack about Zappos.

5. My shill radar starts going off, so I Google “SEOColumbus” and “DSW”. I find a LinkedIn profile for a guy, listing one of his current jobs as “Manager – E-Commerce Operations at DSW”. (Update: One Manny Ramon, an SEO Columbus employee, stops by in the comments below to clarify things. He says that he is “SEOColumbus” on Twitter, and that the person in the LinkedIn profile is somebody else unrelated to this episode.)

6. This starts bouncing around Zappos’ well-developed community of Twitter users. SEOColumbus says he used to contract at DSW, but the profile is “outdated”. (Update: Again, Manny Ramon/SEOColumbus on Twitter says in the comments that the LinkedIn profile belongs to somebody else unrelated to this episode, and that he mistakenly thought the link was to his own LinkedIn profile.)

7. LinkedIn profile disappears. Thanks to the magic of Google’s cache (hat tip to The Stalwart) and screenshots), you can still see it. (Update: Again, Manny Ramon/SEOColumbus on Twitter says in the comments that the LinkedIn profile belongs to somebody else unrelated to this episode.)

8. Another Zappos community member passes along a blog post from March (hat tip Julie), from the person, which references “the new gig at DSW where you will soon be able to buy shoes online”. (Update: Just another reminder that Manny Ramon says this blog — the link to which I removed — belongs to this other person.)

9. Zappos, which has done an awesome job of building its business through social media, smart marketing, and great customer service, looks like they’re getting attacked — on Twitter and with a lawsuit-cum-marketing vehicle — by a rival who was terribly late to the online game. This person on Twitter says he doesn’t work for DSW any more, but that’s not really relevant. By not disclosing his connection to the company (previous or current), DSW looks bad. Zappos has cultivated a strong online community of passionate customers; now they’re not just pro-Zappos, they’re anti-DSW. How does that help DSW’s business? Oh yeah, it doesn’t.

So the moral of the story: people expect and demand transparency and truthfulness in social media. If you can’t give it to them, you’re better off just staying out of the conversation.

This is depressingly stupid. As a customer, I’m frustrated as hell that they’d do something like this. I’m hard pressed to think of any good reason why they’d block it, since they get paid for every inbound and outbound SMS their users send and receive from the short code. Maybe too many people ran up large bills and complained (but then why only block outbound messages, and not inbound ones?); maybe they saw a lot of traffic going to Twitter’s short code and decided there needed to be a “deal” in place where Twitter paid them for access to “their” customers. It’s not yet clear what the thinking is, but I’ve got a message into their PR folks asking what’s going on, and why.

Perhaps even more galling is the response some people who have complained about this have received from T-Mobile’s Executive Customer Relations department:

In your email, you express concerns, as you are not able to use your service for Twitter. As you have been advised, Twitter is not an authorized third-party service provider, and therefore you are not able to utilize service from this provide any longer. You indicate your feeling that this is a violation of the Net Neutrality.

T-Mobile would like to bring to your attention that the Terms and Conditions of service, to which you agreed at activation, indicate “… some Services are not available on third-party networks or while roaming. We may impose credit, usage, or other limits to Service, cancel or suspend Service, or block certain types of calls, messages, or sessions (such as international, 900, or 976 calls) at our discretion.” Therefore, T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation.

Wow. That’s almost as nice as the way messages I send to 40404 get the response “Service is temporarily down. Please, try again later.” — which make it look like there’s a problem with Twitter, rather than the reality that T-Mobile’s intercepting the messages and not delivering them. You know what’s even better? I get charged for that bounceback message:

I’m pretty disappointed in T-Mobile at this point. Other people are getting all up in arms about net neutrality, but I see this more as net stupidity — after all, what good can come of this for T-Mobile? None, none at all.

Update: Things appear to be fixed, and Twitter says it was due to an issue between T-Mobile and Twitter’s SMS vendor. Well played to Twitter for portraying it as a bug (regardless of whether it was or not), but T-Mobile hasn’t done much to help themselves here. While it’s understandable that their CSRs may not have heard of Twitter, for their “Executive Customer Relations department” to pop off with the response they did is still incredibly lame. Not to mention stupid, if this was actually just a technical glitch, and not a matter of policy.

Another update: I got a reply from T-Mobile’s PR folks:

Carlo,

Twitter users are welcome to stay connected through T-Mobile service.
Rumors that T-Mobile blocks the service are false. T-Mobile confirmed
with Twitter that there was a technical issue between the two companies’
systems that temporarily prevented some customers from utilizing the
service this past weekend. That issue has since been resolved and the
companies are working to prevent such incidents from re-occurring.

Regards,
T-Mobile USA, Inc.
Manager, Public Relations

Again, I’m glad to hear that it was a technical issue and nothing nefarious. But this reiterates just how lame the CSR’s response to the person who wrote in to complain was.

Far from being a fad that died out quickly, it’s now gone mainstream, with these attacks being filmed and uploaded on sites like Google’s YouTube.

The BBC’s veteran investigative reporting programme, Panorama, tackled the subject last night with their Children’s Fight Club episode, including showing very disturbing footage of some attacks, interviews with kids who film the fights and the victims themselves. Probably most upsetting for the victims is that it’s humiliating enough to be beaten up, but really horrid to know that your peers and perfect strangers alike can see the evidence for themselves again and again.

Most horrid of all though (Google generally takes down films when they get complaints) are sites like Live Leak (no link as I don’t want them to get the Google Juice), which specialise in these types of video, along with other cool stuff like violence in the news and soldiers getting blown up. All accompanied by semi-literate and mainly racist comments from site visitors – it’s amazing that most of them have the intelligence to get out of bed in the morning, let alone navigate a browser. Maybe the nurses help them.

The founder of Live Leak is a tubby gent by the name of Hayden Hewitt, whose defence is a kind of free speech riff along the lines of “”Look all this is happening, this is real life, this is going on, we’re going to show it”. I bet his Mum’s proud of how he makes his living, or maybe he lies and pretends he’s a pedophile, to save her the embarrassment.

Of course, sites like Live Link and low life like Hayden wouldn’t survive without advertising revenues and hopefully one result of the programme will mean that this dries up for them.

So, happy slapping – or really the bastard second cousin of the original idea – is alive and well and unlikely to go away soon. Of course, sites like Live Link aren’t the cause of this phenomenon, merely unpleasant parasites living on others, much like a tape worm living in the belly of society.

The real problem – and one that the programme really didn’t get to grips with at all – is why kids are behaving like this in the first place. Take away the sites and they’ll go underground or swap videos via Bluetooth, which is how it all started. But the motivation for making these videos is much more scary than the simple fact that they’re available online.

“It would be so easy to become victims of a very nasty hate campaign if they screw with people‚Äôs photos and memories.”

As I predicted, that campaign erupted, both directly and indirectly as a result of my piece. And TA executed a startling handbrake turn, that would have had Bo and Luke Duke gasping in admiration, and announced a plan for free “lifetime membership” for old customers.

If I can predict this kind of thing, why on earth coundn’t they and save themselves a whole bunch of hassle? You’d have thought that their role is to be close to their customers and this was patently obviously going to upset their oldest advocates, who incidentially, had been largely responsible to building up the service in the first place.

But even in doing the right thing (under immense pressure) they did it wrong, trying to dress it up and spin the change of heart as a result of some kind of “outpour of positive support” whatever that is. It would have been far more graceful, honest and authentic (all important characteristics for today’s brands)¬†to admit “Hey, sorry, we screwed up. But we listened to you and here’s what we’re gonna do…”

Because if I had a free account with TextAmerica, this mean-spirited concession would have made me lose faith in them altogether and I’d be wondering when they’re going to pull this kind of stunt again, or just lose my precious digital memories “by accident”.

Far better to change to a responsible curator like MoblogUK, who offer and will continue to offer, a free curating service and who drew the story to my attention in the first place.

UPDATE: Very funny video on the same lines here. Thanks, Mark.

Please forgive this slightly off-topic post, but I think it has important lessons for any organisation with customers, and is therefore worthy of consideration.

I came back from a week in Silicon Valley on Saturday morning, flying with Delta via Atlanta to Munich. A 5 hour delay at San Francisco caused me to miss my connection and forced a 24 delay in Atlanta – not to mention another 3 hours delay on that leg too.

Now, shit happens in any organisation. In this case, the first delay was caused by mechanical problems which I’m sure everyone did their best to resolve. The flight crew were charming, helpful and apologetic and the passengers, from what I saw, were resigned and understanding.

We were also told that a massive operation was underway as soon as our plane did take off (and therefore they knew what time we would arrive) to rebook us all on new flights.

When I landed in Atlanta there were a whole bunch of Delta ground crew there to meet us, who had been mobilised in the last 5 hours. They smilingly apologised, gave us new tickets and for those who had spend the night, arranged a hotel and vouchers to get a decent meal. Oops – sorry – that is what SHOULD have happened at an absolute minimum if Delta were serious about wanting my business in the future. Let alone wanted to turn me into any kind of brand advocate.

What actually happened was that we were directed to another terminal in a peremptory way – the one actually the furthest we could possibly go and thus the most inconvenient for us, the already inconvenienced passengers. There, we had to queue for at least an hour as a clearly understaffed bunch of agents worked to rebook us.

Clearly, absolutely no attempt had been made to pre-empt this situation by trying to rebook in advance, so each passenger had to wait at least 15 minutes while the agents searched for new routes and flights.

This was interspersed by completely uncalled-for and regular lectures by militant and aggressive ground staff about how “we were all facing the same problem” and we must be patient. This was in spite of the absence of complaints from passengers, who by that time had already been travelling for 12 hours and more, not counting travel to the airport in San Francisco. Some of these people were also elderly and infirm.

When we finally got sorted out, we were given hotel vouchers and left to make our own way to the courtesy shuttle. This meant retracing our steps to the original terminal we landed at. And we were also given a voucher for a meal of $7 – whoopdeedoop. Out of interest, I tried to find anything on the menu at the hotel for that price and failed miserably.

And the next day, another militant ground crew operative started making snide jokes about the new delay we were facing and stroppily demanded 5 times over the tannoy that we mustn’t hold boarding up by forgetting to keep our passports open at the picture page. WE mustn’t hold up baording, please note.

Delta’s service is (as Tom Peter’s says) ho-f***ing-hum at best, a kind of Greyhound bus of the skies, making BA or Virgin look truly luxurious, even in the back of the plane. Even little things like the veggie meal that I’d ordered proved to be beyond their ability to organise.

But when they squander an opportunity like this, you wonder if they wouldn’t be better shutting down. ANY customer interaction is an opportunity to impress and turn that customer into an advocate. And this applies as much – if not more – to a complaint resolution process. Take note, our friends, the mobile operators.

But it’s even more important that this, as if you fail to satisfy a customer, they become the opposite of an advocate. In this case, some 30,000 people will read quite what a shitty experience flying Delta is.

The final lesson is that a company like this must pull together – everyone must shine when dealing with customers as it only takes one part of an organisation to fail, to bring down the whole damn thing. The flight crew were badly let down by the ground crew, management and workers alike, undoing all the excellent and committed work that had happened earlier to keep the passengers understanding and forgiving.

I’ve going the The Valley again in August and guess which airline won’t even be on the short list? And the sad thing is that it wouldn’t have been hard to get me to at least consider them again.

[tags] Delta airlines, tom peters, customer service, community [/tags]

Has he really changed?

I asked Hoyt an aching question. One that no amount of public humiliation or court-ordered therapy seems to have wrested from his mind: Did your victim secretly want it?

“She may hate me. She may like me and want to go home with me,” Hoyt said, to my amazement.

This comes despite his lawyer insisting that “therapy is removing these kinds of thoughts from Hoyt’s mind,” and Hoyt helpfully pointing out to the judge in the case that it’s illegal to take pictures in the subway. Yeah, because that’s so much more offensive than what you like to do, buddy.

[tags]mobile, sousveillance, dan hoyt[/tags]