A Personal First

Before today I had not understood the need to openly criticise bad business practice by naming names. I have felt that the best way to approach it is to deal with the people you have cause for complaint with directly - and leave it at that. We all make mistakes, we're here to learn and grow.

I now realise that the reason I held this view was possibly because I had not been sufficiently affected. There must be something hard wired in my head - because I'm still not going to do it - it just doesn't feel right. But I want to describe the surprisingly (to me) powerful effect that a disappointed potential supplier's email had on me today. And how I now get why people do name names.

The company I work for needs a new website, so we asked 3 agencies to respond to a fairly modest RFP - 1 French, 1 UK, 1 US.

The French agency submitted a proposal that was 4 times higher than the mid priced bid. I was reminded of a tweet from an acknowledged digital expert @joshr a few weeks previously where he commented on Twitter that 'web "design" and mobile industries are stuck in the past, profiteering'. It's possible that this empowered me. There's a temptation to think that the highest bidder with the biggest name clients is going to do the best job. Fortunately they included some design examples which were so far off the mark from the light directions towards style that I gave in the brief that the price issue became immediately irrelevant.

So today, having had a genuinely tough time selecting one agency from the other two - because they were so similar in approach and price and both charming people - I wrote to the French agency explaining our decision and on the advice of French colleagues, included the reasons (design fit and price) which I expressed in polite and friendly business terms.

In return I received a ranting email with shouty exclamation marks, copying in a more senior colleague, who has had not been involved in this process at all (although people in his department have). His response questioned my ability to make an accurate decision, implicitly by copying in someone's "boss" and explicitly in the text, stating that I did not understand the relevance of pricing. Even if I were a novice and had not done this sort of thing before, there is no way on earth that I would change my mind and warm to someone who sent me an email like that. Bonkers. There is no other term that fits this behaviour better. Their "win back this piece of business" strategy was a disaster.

And the worst thing is, I felt unhappy, properly upset by it, like I had been bullied. When you're working from home on your own it's not a nice feeling.

I took me ages to summon up the courage to contact the next potential supplier and I included no reasons this time. Fortunately he was charming and asked for some insight as to the reasoning in a very sensitive way and I gave him a call - because it seemed like the right thing to do and a better way of giving feedback. And I am glad that I did; if it doesn't work out with the agency we selected, he is most definitely my plan B.

Interestingly the agency we did select said to me that they don't include design examples in their responses because they don't have enough information usually at that stage. He explained that the client plays the biggest part in terms of directing the look and feel.

I feel like something has been resolved by writing this down. And rather than naming names I am more likely now to have the courage to explain to them the consequences of their type of response to losing business.

Is It Going to Get Messy?

"It's going to get messy" are the closing words of a possibly prophetic blog post. Writing about the success of a Facebook initiated campaign, to prevent another predictable Christmas No 1 from the X Factor factory, John Walker makes an interesting point when he wonders what might happen if the power of the internet was directed at something more meaningful and vaguely important. An election - say.

Online voting seems the perfect antidote to voter apathy. You don't have to leave your house, or remember to register for a postal vote if you're going to be away. Martini voting - anytime, anyplace, anywhere. But I find this whole concept really worrying. If getting to a polling station (for able bodied people of course) is really an effective barrier, then should we be removing it? Shouldn't you care enough and be interested enough to expend a little effort? And doesn't the momentum and pace of the internet exacerbate the whole bandwagon effect? There's something very sobering about standing in a polling booth with your pencil and paper, in near silence, in a neutral environment with your thoughts, detached for a moment from the hubbub. And of course there's the whole coercion thing too; if the pervasive internet messages didn't persuade me one way or another, someone hostile in my living room most certainly would.

So I don't share John Walker's worry. Because I just can't see that governments will allow it. Maybe the technology will change and pencil and paper and counters will be replaced by a keyboard, PC, internet and databases but I don't think the social element will be allowed in. We'll be directed to an electronic booth in a controlled environment and we'll still have to make the physical and mental effort to get there. The internet will most certainly make loads of things messy but I don't think that voting for political parties will be one of them.

What would a village elder have done?

I read a bit of a rant on line on Friday. My husband retweeted a link to the post - so I had a look. Quick summary below:

Someone in a digital media agency had their time wasted by a would be competitor who used a lame old trick to get the media agency chap to talk about his business. He rang up posing as a potential customer and wasted a couple of hours of this chap's time. It was a very clumsy and lazy approach to doing a bit of competitor analysis, made considerably worse by the fact that the misguided "analyst" lied about where he worked. The first time he lied, it was part of his disguise and the second time through fear, no doubt realising that he had been found out.

Not a hugely interesting story - but it was retweeted by someone else I follow on Twitter and who knows a hell of a lot more about how these things work than I do. So I had another look at the story and all the comments it had attracted. And the thing that struck me is just how powerful social media is and in return for having a couple of hours wasted, this understandably annoyed person has effectively ruined the career of some silly newbie idiot who didn't understand what he was doing. The blog post in which his annoyance is vented links to the "analysts" deleted linked in page. That's going to take a lot of explaining at the next job interview.

One of the comments reads "kudos to you for outing him without resorting to ranting and name-calling". But surely this was the digital equivalent of ranting and name calling? The author of the post ends by wishing the "analyst" and the company he works for the very best of luck - which sounds a bit disingenuous - really. If he had genuinely wished him luck, he could have called him up and explained that all he would have to do was write a blog post on the incident and the "analyst" would never work in socal media again.

I don't work in this industry. Perhaps I would feel differently if I did. It certainly appears to be an industry that champions openness and honesty and I can see how this would be upsetting to people involved. You believe that you are successfully creating a new way of doing something, then someone comes along who doesn't know how it works and gets it wrong. But does it really justify throwing the full power of what you're working with at him in order to teach him? Granted - I'm a bit of a hippy - but still - it just seems a bit too unkind.

For me, the problem lies in the distinction between dealing with people and organisations. Maybe name calling is okay if it's an organisation but not if its an individual. People make mistakes - it's how we learn. Organisations make mistakes - which are the collective mistake of a group of individuals. Organisations have strategies for recovery and brand protection etc.... I'm not sure the average individual does. In this particular case, the individual was rapidly disowned by the organisation he represented.

So what would a village elder have done? Pulled the new guy aside and said - that's not how we do it - here's how it works - try again. It's more graceful and more mature that way.