Connecting the Dots

Happy Holidays

 

Taking some time off to be with family and friends. Whatever your tradition at this holiday time, hope you're already having a great time.

DirecTV Will Get Their $280

Though I haven't changed my position that Cancellation Fees Must Die, it was interesting to discover that DirecTV was/is monitoring social media for brand mentions, since someone from the DirecTV Office of the President left me a voicemail this morning due to yesterday's post (and my Twitter mention).  I called "Veronica" back when I got back to my office 45 minutes ago.

It's clear to me that I didn't "follow their rules" and shame on me. Perhaps you think that I'm not justified in raining-on-DirecTV's-parade with my rants -- and I could probably get in to the inferior quality of their supplied DVR as another justification for my buying a DVR replacement at Best Buy -- but suffice to say that due to a broken DirecTV DVR I had a choice: go to Best Buy and have DirecTV service back up-n-running within two hours, or what I now know "their rules" required. Those rules dictated that I contact them for a replacement DVR (and $5.99 per month in a service contract to "protect" their inferior product) while waiting what....3 days for the replacement to arrive by courier and thus be without service?

Since you and I "agree" to allow our conversations to be recorded (you'll hear that boilerplate mention by DirecTV's voice response system at the beginning of the recording below), so legally I can record it too and have done so in order to post it so you can hear the reason for their call (I edited out my phone/account number, the music, and got right to the interaction with Veronica).

The punchline? They've got me and one could argue that I don't have a leg to stand on and -- having run strategic alliances with a major software company where contracts are at the core and I read and understand every nuance -- I should know better. You'd be right, but I'll wager you don't read Terms & Conditions of your satellite, cable, Google apps, Twitter and the hundreds of other Web apps you've signed up for, have you?

I'll give them their $280 cancellation fee. But if the more than 40,000 views and pages of comments on this Target Trutech post (or searching on "Trutech" showing it as the #2 link in Google) is any indication of the attention this and yesterday's post will surely receive, I'm going to guess DirecTV will find that being just a touch more reasonable with someone who'd been a customer for nine years might've been a wiser investment than a phone call of no value to either side, and the nickels-n-dimes they'll get with their cancellation fee.

Cancellation Fees Must Die

After more than nine years and nearly $6,000 spent with DirecTV, I cancelled the service today since I've chosen another route for obtaining HD programming.

The problem is that more and more companies are making it very difficult to cancel (AOL and now Vonage are the best examples of creating barriers to cancellation by not answering the phone, putting you on hold forever, and other such goofy practices), and DirecTV has proven to be no exception.

One barrier to switching to a competitor is a practice, which I view as unethical and bordering on criminal, of putting in onerous terms and conditions that make it very difficult to cancel or make a switch by taking any change made during a contract, extending the term automatically, and applying cancellation fees if you choose to cancel. Most people make a change at some point during their time with a company and thus the unethical company can keep stringing people along indefinitely.

In addition to that, you and I have almost no recourse if we want to alter the contract before signing, negotiate or simply not pay these draconian fees. If we choose to tell them to go pound sand and withhold payment, they systemically say "F" you and turn you in for collection, eroding your credit rating.

Today's DirecTV example is illustrative of this practice. Back in February, my DirecTV DVR went on the fritz and I went to Best Buy to replace it. Activating it at home later that evening, I was told that I'd wasted my money since they would've shipped out a replacement unit at no cost! We went ahead with setup, I returned the defective unit anyway and continued with service until today.

Turns out that the Best Buy receipt for that DVR had an agreement on it that said I was 'leasing' the DVR and was therefore signing up for a new two year agreement! Yeah I know, I should've just returned the one I bought after discovering they would've sent a free one or found another way, but I've got better things to do with my time than dot every 'i' and cross every 't' with all of the crappy terms and conditions we're all supposed to adhere to with services like this one (and T's and C's that say right in them that the company can change them without necessarily even notifying us! How's THAT for a blank check?).

The DirecTV cancellation fee? $280. Think I'll fight it? You bet your ass I will, and if things don't work out with my other option, DirecTV will never, ever be considered as an option again and I would strongly caution you to take great care if you opt to use them.

UPDATE 12/17/08: Received call from DirecTV Office of the President. Post here.

Puzzling 'PR': At least tell me a story, willya?

Just now I received a "press release" of sorts from the author of an ebook. Ironically he's getting the buzz he wanted (me to post about him), but it's worth it so you can learn something like I just did.

Upon receiving this email, I instantly trashed it. Opening up a second email from someone in the PR game, and I thought she might appreciate knowing why I took that instant trashing action. As I wrote her an email, it made me think a bit more deeply about what was wrong about what he did and his approach.

The "self-PR'ed" author of the ebook just blasted out this 'press release' with zero personalization -- which I usually receive so it at least appears the PR person has some awareness of my blog and its thrust. Not even a paragraph of introduction on why a blogger like me would have ANY interest in what he's offering which would've been trivial to do.

Here's the kicker:  If he had started off telling me a story about why he wrote this, maybe that he had a full-time job so couldn't afford to take the time to personalize the email (and say "sorry about that" or something to that effect), nor that he was in no position to retain a PR agency adept in social media to help him get the word out, I might've looked at this email and thought, "Hmmm....I'd like to help this guy out" and did a mention on my blog. He made a fundamental error in not finding some way to connect with me, and telling me his backstory on why he wrote it, what drove him to offer it, and so forth. (Note: and it goes without saying that the story better be true).

So it got trashed instead, until I decided to send her an email and then realized it would make a good post. The so-called press release is after the jump for your consideration.

Twitter GMail Gadget Useful Elsewhere

The Twittersphere is all atwitter about a new Twitter gadget that can be added to Gmail. I put it in to my Gmail, but it was so squished I found it unusable.

Then I thought, "Hey! Wonder if I could use this link they offered on that page above to use the gadget, but instead insert it into a NetVibes widget on my startpage?"

So that's what I did and you can see a screenshot to the left. I then added it to NetVibes using the blank any webpage widget (you just put in a miscellaneous URL into the widget in order to have a webpage then appear inside this widget). Worked great, is the perfect size, and quite useful.

Since I'd been trying to find a widget or gadget that I could use that still gave me ALL of the Twitter functionality within one, small space, I hadn't found anything until today. This is perfect and is helping me on my quest to create a workflow of social media access for a client team who needs everything at their fingertips, and this way works well.

A Connected World Growing Closer

If you spend any time online participating, you undoubtedly use the same username on most services you sign up for on the Web (mine is "sborsch"). Because I do participate heavily, I've often had people reach out for a dizzying array of reasons.

One young man in the Ukraine touched base as we share the surname Borsch, and we've interacted on several occasions through a variety of ways (he comments here; we email; we've talked on Skype) and he recently sent me the video below.

Turns out he asked me if I knew that one form of Russian hip-hop was called "Borsch" (which, of course, is also the name of a Russian beet soup which I hate). I hadn't so he sent me a link to one group, TEMNIY_PEREULOK, rapping on YouTube. Besides being really funny to hear these guys rapping in Russian, it has raised my curiosity on why this form is called Borsch and what the hell they're saying!  ;-)

The point about this post isn't the video or that they're humorously rapping in another language, but rather how simple it is to connect with people anywhere there's also an internet connection and both people are participants online in a meaningful way. Yes, language is a barrier and my hope is translators will continue to get better, but in the meantime I'll just continue to connect like this in a serendipitous way.

How can you, for instance, use this to your advantage in your business? By participating, being in-the-game and building relationships online, it's amazing how easy it is to have someone connect you with someone else (I get incredible access to thought leaders and experts this way) and how people connect with you in ways you won't expect, perhaps taking you down a path you hadn't intended (which has also happened to me, though I control myself on path-taking).

Memories in Your Browser: Southdale Center, Edina MN

Southdale Center, 1956. Edina, Minnesota. "Interior Garden Court with stairway to upper
level in Southdale Regional Shopping Center, the first enclosed shopping mall."
Color transparency by Grey Villet, Life magazine photo archive

One of the fun sites I follow in my RSS reader is Shorpy's Historical Photographs. Several images come through each day, and I often click "full size" to view ones that intrigue me. When I saw this one above, a flood of memories came back and this is one reason why I'm increasingly loving how more and more of our books, videos, and other content is being digitized, indexed and available to us at-our-fingertips.

These memories are bitter-sweet right now as we find ourselves in a time of economic meltdown. The optimism of the 1950's, and the emergence of more efficient capitalism (e.g., advertising mediums, rating systems like Nielsen, national retail chains), helped create a time when building an enclosed, climate controlled shopping mall made it much more pleasant in harsh climates like those here in Minnesota, and obviously created a more efficient and often used place to buy goods.

Though this photo was taken before I was a year old, Southdale shopping mall has played an integral part in my life. Dozens of trips each year were made to shop and buy (though often we had to shop in less expensive stores elsewhere) and I have so many recollections both good and bad that I had to do this post.