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Clearly, I’m not the only one who is hoping to start a bandwagon about the need (and the good business sense) for keeping customers satisfied.

Kathy Sierra, who writes the blog “Creating Passionate Users” has a wonderful post called “What tail is wagging the “user happiness” dog?“

She’s writing about the problems that arise when the needs of the company overrule the needs of the customer.

You can’t swing a poodle in business without hitting a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario, where some process, policy, procedure, or program controls user happiness. Where we become slaves to the needs and demands of the IT department, efficiency, accounting, PR, legal, marketing, next-quarter’s results, Upper Management, etc.

She’s got a great idea for anyone who needs to keep things in perspective. Just put a picture of a dog up on the wall, to keep everyone thinking about who’s tail is doing the wagging.

Kathy also points to a really well-written post by Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software in New York.

He writes about his small company’s methods for making sure that they respond to the needs of their customers and how much they’ve benefitted by doing so. It’s a great story and one that I recommend highly.

As a bootstrapped software company, Fog Creek couldn’t afford to hire customer service people for the first couple of years, so Michael and I did it ourselves. The time we spent helping customers took away from improving our software, but we learned a lot and now we have a much better customer service operation.

Here are seven things we learned about providing remarkable customer service. I’m using the word remarkable literally—the goal is to provide customer service so good that people remark.

The seven items he lists are:

1. Fix everything two ways

2. Suggest blowing out the dust

3. Make customers into fans

4. Take the blame

5. Memorize awkward phrases

6. Practice puppetry

7. Greed will get you nowhere

Of course, he’s got a lot more detail and some great stories behind those seven points. But I’m sure that if more companies thought along the same lines and truly put the needs of their customers’ first, the benefits for everyone would be astounding.

It’s a simple idea – and perhaps that’s the problem. We’ve allowed our companies to become so complex that we can’t believe that so many problems can be alleviated by making sure that we practice good manners and be polite to people. It just seems so obvious we can’t believe it could work.

Sad but true, apparently, as Air Canada exhibits so regularly.

Customer service (or the lack of it) has been a hot topic in our family for awhile.

This past summer, we had a run-in with Air Canada, when my nephew’s hockey equipment went missing on it’s way to Toronto from Norway. It’s a long, sad story that I’ve heard way too often recently.

It’s always frustrating when the service levels you get are way, way below what they should be. Air Canada always springs to mind when I think of bad customer service, despite their fancy TV ads.

So I was intrigued by this recent post from Seth Godin. (It’s actually been around awhile, but I’m still catching up on my reading.)

He introduces us to his latest creation — sheepwalking:

I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line.

You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking.

The TSA ‘screener’ who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A ‘customer service’ rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars of TV time even though she knows it’s not working–she does it because her boss told her to.

It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff.

We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish.

His argument strikes a chord with me. Especially his summing up:

Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themself in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

The biggest step, though, comes from anyone who teaches or hires. And that’s to embrace non-sheep behavior, to reward it and cherish it. As we’ve seen just about everywhere there’s been growth lately, that’s where the good stuff happens.

You should read the whole post.

I’m off to a blogger’s conference this weekend in Vancouver, called Northern Voice. I’m very excited about it, because I know that I’m going to meet a lot of passionate people. Passion is critical for bloggers and podcasters. This isn’t just a job. It’s got to be something we care about.

I care about this blog, even if there are times when I fall behind on the “daily” part of it. But I’ve been blogging for nearly three years now and it’s become something that’s pretty important for me.

We need to put passion back into our workplaces. It’s important. I think I’ll add it to my mission statement right now.

An interesting item appeared on the Apple website today.

It’s a piece written (supposedly) by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, called simply “Thoughts on Music.”

In it, Jobs responds to recent suggestions, primarily from some European countries, notably Norway, that Apple needs to get rid of the DRM (digital rights management) software that it puts on all the music you buy through Apple’s on-line ITunes store. The DRM means that purchased music can only be played on Apple’s Ipod music players.

This post today is an interesting way for Jobs to get his message out, without any media filters. He doesn’t do a lot of interviews and Apple is notorious for clamping down on any unauthorized messages. And since the company doesn’t have any official blogs, their website is their chosen medium.

What’s especially interesting is that Jobs says that Apple will sell DRM-free music immediately, if the record companies will agree to it.

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

We’ll need to watch this one develop. Somehow I doubt the record companies will accept his offer.

So have you heard about the bride who cut off her hair on her wedding day, freaked out, then posted the whole episode to YouTube?

Or what about the Boston bomb scare that resulted from a failed (?) attempt at guerilla marketing for a TV cartoon? (Some argue that paying a $2 million fine for that kind of publicity is cheap!)

These stories have been all over the media in the past week, so I’m assuming that you know the background. If you don’t, you can follow the links above or do a Google search to find out more.

What’s interesting to me is the way the stories have played out in the mass media.

Journalists seem to be falling over themselves to cast the “perpetrators” as the bad guys and are suggesting that what they are doing is a bad thing, or at least something that we should be wary of.

But are they? And should we be? Wary of them, I mean?

It seems to me that most marketing campaigns (and here I’m using “Marketing” as opposed to “PR”, although I’m not sure that the distinction means much to anyone) are built around the idea of trying to get us to accept some premise which might be doubtful, at best, or an outright lie (at worst) and then adjust our behaviour accordingly.

For example, if I see a bunch of young, dynamic people having fun while drinking beer, I’ll naturally want to buy and drink the same brand of beer to have the same experience.

Or if a well-known actor tells me that her skin stays soft because she’s using a particular face cream, shouldn’t I believe her? After all, why would she lie? Just because she’s paid money to do so? Is she lying?

Last weekend, we went through the annual spectacle of the Super Bowl ads, where people willingly sat down and watched some very creative visions of reality which are trying to influence their buying decisions. Companies spent millions of dollars to get their ads in front of as many people as possible.

But I didn’t hear anyone complaining about a company pretending that apes can talk and plot to ambush a Bud Lite delivery guy. So how come people are so upset at a video that purports to portray a bride that cuts her hair off?

I wonder if people are more offended by the fact that a company pulled off a stunt like that, or by the fact that they were taken in?

Marketing hoaxes are certainly nothing new.

Consider the “Paul is dead” affair from 1969, when Paul McArtney supposedly died, and the album Abbey Road became a roadmap to his death. It’s quite a tale, (here’s a link to a Wikipedia article about it) and some suggest it was an elaborate hoax perpetrated to sell more records.

Or, more recently, there’s the tale of Platinum Weird, a real music group but with a fictional prior existence that’s been documented in print and a television documentary. It’s an interesting story and also involved “taking in” the mass media.

More sinister examples of hoaxes (and the outcry that surrounds them when they’re exposed) include The Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had plenty of WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and that Saddam Hussein was planning to buy uranium from Niger.

When I look at the stuff that fills the airwaves and newspapers these days (and is considered legitimate) I can’t get excited when someone manages to sneak something by us. It’s kind of cool, actually.

OK, I admit that the problems in Boston were unfortunate, but isn’t it interesting to consider that in the other nine or 10 cities that the same gag was done, it passed without incident? Perhaps it’s not the marketing people that should be investigated, but the ones who are supposed to be protecting us.

YouTube was created to help liberate messages and ideas. Ordinary people can post their videos and people all over the world can see them instantly – without filters or payment or censors.

If the price of that freedom is the occasional campaign that isn’t actually what it appears to be, that’s OK with me. They’re often the most interesting.

I think we need to get a grip.