Recently, two ridiculous, antiquated requests have been made of me in order to verify my identity to two companies that I like: Twitter and Target. I somewhat understand the fax requirement for a Twitter impersonation report so I’ll focus on Target. (FYI I’m the real @emilybinder and @adoreajabakery and @thedigitaldive_. If any other handle claims to be me, it’s not me: I wouldn’t set up a handle that required a number on the end because my desired name was taken. I would find another handle. I don’t do numbers on the end.)
A couple weeks ago, I signed up for a Target RedCard in-store. I applaud Target on the convenient offering of quick sign-up with the cashier by providing a blank check and a driver’s license: no forms or visiting guest services.
Annoyance #1: Lack of Internal System Network Cohesion
The RedCard account must be set up with the address on the customer’s driver’s license. Mine happens to be my old address. The cashier couldn’t enter another address or update it after setup. She instructed me to call the RedCard 800 number immediately afterward and request an address change so that Target wouldn’t mail my new card to my old address. My blank check — tied to a bank account with what is necessarily a more reliable current address than the one on a driver’s license which doesn’t expire for years — should have sufficed for proof of address.
Annoyance #2: Human Error Followed by Outsourced Customer Service Giving Dangerous Instructions
I called the RedCard 800 number and asked to change my address. The lady in India asked for my driver’s license number, which I read aloud. It did not match my account: the cashier had mistyped my DL number. The lady said that since she could not verify that I was the account holder, she could not change my address. For that to happen, I would need to send a letter in the paper mail to Target headquarters including:
- name
- old address
- current address
- driver’s license number
- social security number
- last four digits of new Target RedCard
She did not instruct me to explain the situation – just to list these things.
A of all, that is a joke if you think I’m sending my social through the paper mail to your PO box.
B of all, I told her that, and she said, “Okay, you can exclude it.”
Identity Theft
But her protocol was to tell the customer to send the above and nothing else. That would be a great formula for
1) no action due to lack of context
2) identity theft with that piece of paper floating around Minneapolis
Some customers are ignorant though, and would have followed those instructions. NEVER GIVE YOUR FULL SOCIAL unless you truly need to and you’re dealing with a trusted government entity or a bank, for example. Every single time a company or office has requested my social, I’ve refused and they’ve said it wasn’t necessary after all. Comforting. Keep it secret keep it safe. -My high school
I couldn’t print that day. So I, Emily Binder, hand wrote the letter. To make a petulant point about how ludicrous this was. After filling two sides of a page (many details to cover by this point) I finished with, “Please call or email me to confirm your receipt and processing of my request.” (That never happened.)
The Outcome
Two weeks after sending the letter, no card. I called the main Target customer service number. The system required entry of the last four of my RedCard and social. The lady who answered sounded like she was in Minneapolis. Great, maybe she will actually be able to update her own company’s system that she is staring at right now. She said the account showed my current address and that my card was just mailed. So my handwritten letter worked, which blows my mind. (I hand wrote it because I expected my request to fall into the void and I planned to later complain that I was merely providing information in the 1800s format they requested.)
Why couldn’t the outsourced RedCard 800 number customer service rep use the same credentials to verify me and change my address on that first day?
My letter provided no new (or verified) information that I wasn’t telling her over the phone or that I couldn’t email. At least with an email, the sender’s identity is somewhat traceable. USPS does not require a return address. Anyone could have sent Target a letter from “Emily Binder” and given any address where my card would then be sent to a scam artist. Note: Target still sent a RedCard to my old address.
The Customer
Do not burden the customer. If an onerous hard copy type of action is needed, there better be a good reason why electronic submission would not suffice. It’s ludicrous for anyone to think that fraud is any less likely by requiring a customer to print and put a stamp on the same letter they would otherwise email. Even if it includes a scan of a photo ID. It’s a scan. This mailing a letter ballyhoo is simply a waste of paper, time, and resources and in fact creates a greater chance of identity theft because there is a paper trail. Or, for the unfortunate ignorant or trusting customers in my position, it creates paper floating around with the customer’s full social security number on it. This 5% off all purchases better be worth it.
“We should stop asking, ‘how do we make people pay for music?’ and start asking, ‘how do we let people pay for music?‘” -Amanda Palmer, TED Talk: The art of asking (February 2013). I don’t want to discuss Palmer’s controversial, record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, which asked for $100,000 and ended up generating $1.2M from 25,000 fans. What’s more interesting is the paradigm shift in the music industry that most markedly began with Radiohead’s 2007 free digital release of their newest album. Artists are asking and fans are giving. Sometimes.
Palmer’s opposite of Metallica M.O. is more salient to the reality of music consumption today than the traditional pricing, touring, and record label model. In a vacuum of capitalism where the Internet didn’t allow such easy piracy, standard pricing and control over content would make sense like it used to. But we don’t have a vacuum, and smart artists adapt.
Radiohead Let Us Pay
Public Enemy (1999 – paid download), Smashing Pumpkins (2000 – free download), Radiohead (2007 – free download), Trent Reznor (2008), Amanda Palmer and others have released their music first online with varying price structures before iTunes Store opened on April 28, 2003. But in 2007, iTunes had just become the third largest music retailer in the U.S. and online music was exploding. Radiohead blazed the trail on October 10, 2007 in the first major album release in which consumers could name their own price. Radiohead’s contract with their label EMI ended after 2003′s Hail to the Thief. After four years of turning down offers from other labels, in October 2007 Radiohead took a bold step in releasing their next album independently and digitally with a pay-what-you-want model.
Thom Yorke told Time,
“I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say ‘F*** you’ to this decaying business model.”
Radiohead beat the album leakers to the punch by basically leaking their own album. Fans went to the band’s website inrainbows.com to download the 15-song MP3s. Big Radiohead fans, my college roommate and I were blown away and totally impressed when we clicked the download button and saw the prompt “It’s Up To You.” Click again and it refreshed with, “It’s Really Up To You.”
“People made their choice to actually pay money,” [Radiohead manager Chris] Hufford said. “It’s people saying, ‘We want to be part of this thing.’ If it’s good enough, people will put a penny in the pot.”
The CD release followed at the end of 2007. A year later, In Rainbows had sold more than 300 million copies worldwide in digital and physical formats.
Creative musicians will continue to find ways to circumvent the technology that has made it irresistably easy to pirate their music. But Amanda Palmer’s asking/giving/taking and Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want models aren’t new; they are a return to the organic way street musicians and entertainers exchanged their art with others, as Palmer points out in her TED Talk.
Now We Expect Free Music
Following In Rainbows, in November 2008 Trent Reznor took a shot at a different online release model when he co-wrote and produced Saul Williams’s album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust. Fans could download it for free or pay $5 for a higher quality version. The results were disappointing. As of January 2, 2008, 154,449 people had downloaded NiggyTardust and 28,322 of them paid the $5.
… the way things are, I think music should be looked at as free. It basically is. The toothpaste is out of the tube and a whole generation of people is accustomed to music being that way. There’s a perception that you don’t pay for music when you hear it on the radio or MySpace. -Trent Reznor, cnet.com
Radiohead’s free offering compelled us to pay a $2.26 average, but Reznor’s tiered free/premium model had less lucrative results at first.
For artists to follow Radiohead’s model en masse with success, our entire culture of music consumption would need to resemble the one Amanda Palmer champions. Unlikely for now, and unfathomable for less famous bands without dedicated followings and years of successful marketing and albums behind them.
I haven’t bought a hard copy album in years. The last I can remember was Tool’s 10,000 Days in 2007. The unique hardcover album case with stereoscopic glasses and Alex Grey’s art was simply incredible (and it won the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package). I have dabbled in iTunes and Amazon MP3 purchases but the closed environment and lack of ownership always bothered me. You’re leasing, not buying. I have no need to illegally download music now. Spotify is revolutionary. And mind-bogglingly cheap for the universal multi-device access you get to nearly all recorded music. Spotify hardly pays the artists, but overall it’s a more reasonable solution to the problem at hand than expecting consumers who won’t pony up $5 for an album to keep paying 99 cents a song. Maybe the Spotify model will make fans more willing to pay in other ways. It’s certainly the most convenient and instant access I’ve ever had to music, especially brand new music. Plus, with the Copyright Alert System, who wants to risk illegal downloads anyway? Instead, I’ll attend concerts and — after our Digital Dive Podcast interview with Zoroaster’s Dan Scanlan — I’ll buy plenty of merch.
Sources
Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want. Time, 10/1/2007
Public Enemy Makes Friends Online. EW, 5/14/1999
Pay What You Want for this Article. NY Times, 12/9/2007
Obviously social media opens new doors for marketers, but it also provides us with new sociological survey data. Only the subjects aren’t aware they’re being studied. It’s like that valid research method, natural observation. If inherently subjective ethnographies based on very small sample sizes are valid in anthropology and I am a technological anthropologist (Angela Natividad’s wonderful term) then surely I can liken all U.S. or global Twitter users to a tribe. I can measure their operationally defined behaviors in their natural habitat, the Twitterverse. This is the new anthro.
This stems from reading a recent study by the Vermont Complex Systems Center, who created a “hedonometer” for 10 million geotagged tweets:
The Geography of Happiness According to 10 Million Tweets - TheAtlantic.com, 2/19/13
(First I must note the correlation between religiosity in the Bible Belt and lack of happiness.)
Second, this is not the first study to link Twitter sentiment to mood:
Traders seem convinced that social chatter from a specific group or about a specific event (like a new Apple product or changing Netflix service) can be a predictor of where stocks are headed. Yet it was more than a year ago when Indiana University’s Johan Bollen found that his team’s Twitter sentiment analysis predicts changes in the market with 87.6 percent accuracy…. his work suggests that collective social mood leads the DJIA closing values by a few days’ time.
Bollen’s findings suggest that mass Twitter sentiment can predict the economy. There is validity to such studies despite the inherent sample bias.
What should be explored is that with Twitter, we can endeavor to gauge sentiment for groups on such a larger scale than is possible with typical surveys and limited sample size. This is what Bollen is doing with computational social sciences – and this is so important for marketers. Think neuromarketing. Granted, you’re only getting subjects who use Twitter – huge caveat. In certain states, depending on culture, it’s possible that Twitter tends to be used by people who are happier, sadder, or who tweet certain trigger words more often.
Mississippi is one of if not the nation’s poorest state. That must contribute to it being the #2 saddest. But the economically depressed state of my alma mater, Michigan, may be even sadder and they don’t have Southern cooking to eat their feelings. You are what you eat…
If I were a food marketer, I would go to town over this kind of data. Market your product as a solution to three struggling economic problems to start:
1. Lack of happy sentiment in the aggregate
2. Loss of community pride
3. Need for grocery value in communities with high unemployment rates
And as one might predict,
…happiness data correlates with income and the prevalence of obesity in an area.
Not hard to figure out those relationships: less education –> lower income and less knowledge and culturally sanctioned attention paid to nutrition
Lower income –> likely to only afford less nutritious food
Eat too much unhealthy food –> gain weight, have more (expensive) health problems, feel depressed emotionally, physically, and economically.
All –> tweet sadder.
On with the social-as-qualified-sociology:
- Financial difficulties do not preclude Twitter use as many might guess – look at the rise of mobile-only households in lower income brackets. It’s also possible that even if mostly middle to upper class residents use Twitter, the general morale of an economically depressed state would make even those who are financially stable tweet more sadly.
- Also, marketers who target angry and/or crass customers (with something like anger-management products): play up the offensive in your ad copy, you’ll be speaking your customers’ language and mirroring is effective:
For individual cities, the Vermont researchers note, the amount of swearing contributed substantially to their final scores. They think it’s worth investigating this phenomenon, which they call “geoprofanity.”
In Jill Noble’s 2011 interview with Johan Bollen, he explains the unique opportunity that Twitter offers as a glimpse into immediate, focused, raw emotional output. With limited characters and the immediacy of tweeting (especially on mobile) it offers a more targeted and insightful view into millions of everyday moods as they change around the globe.
Podcast: Play in new window
Topics – The Digital Dive PodcastTM Episode 4:
iOS6 update
- Do Not Disturb feature
- Improved Calendar and Contacts privacy settings
- Facebook integration, now native:
- How to turn off syncing your Facebook friends contact info and birthdays into your iPhone
- The shift toward native iOS control over user data sent to apps
- Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
- Passbook and mobile payments
- iPhone 5
- Lightning dock connector
Big Data and Future Hiring Practices:
- Talent based hiring allows employee screening, questionable?*
- Psychographic profiling
Ask forgiveness, not permission app developer culture
- LinkedIn iPhone app privacy issues
Random: Emily’s continued “In the Future” theories: inter-vehicle communication
The Sass: Who would seriously put their mobile phone number on Facebook?
Tips on Tap:
1. Windows: How to rename a batch of IMG_xyz photos with a category name such as Beach_Day_043
2. Employee online monitoring at work: packet sniffers and how to hide your activity using a VPN. (Or just don’t do anything you know you shouldn’t do.)
3. iconfinder.com is a free graphics website with royalty free .png images useful for infographics, chiclets, and blog images*
*Show Notes – Links
Your iPhone calendar isn’t private—at least if you use the LinkedIn app | The app scrapes subject lines, meeting times, participants, notes, and more. 6/6/12 (Note: the app has since been updated, but for context see article)
Meet the New Boss: Big Data | Companies Trade In Hunch-Based Hiring for Computer Modeling. 9/20/12
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You can download or stream The Digital Dive at thedigitaldivepodcast.com or search for us in the iTunes Podcast Directory–> If you like the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
The Digital Dive Podcast is on Stitcher, the best free podcast streaming smartphone app. If you’re a new subscriber, please sign up with our link below.
Follow us on Twitter @thedigitaldive_ and Like us on Facebook
The Digital Dive PodcastTM: Get the most out of technology… without ever fully giving in
Some Native Americans believe that humans store pain in our bones, that we carry the physical toll of our memories with us for life. I believe we store our entire lives and memories in our iPhones. The pain-body must live there, too.
My iPhone 4 is getting old, slowing down, it can’t handle everything I do fast enough. Thus, a fresh new phone is a fresh slate. Really, I am upgrading because I’m eligible and ready for a better, faster phone. But my soul will feel refreshed.
I don’t mind the new Lightning connector. The incompatibility with old models is a bit annoying, but I always bring my own charger anyway. Sure, Apple may have had this master plan all along so they could sell adapter cords and accessories, but at some point, all tech upgrades make old models obsolete. Plus, at least a year ago I spilled wine or pop in both of my Bose and iHome products. It is probably time to upgrade those so that I will no longer have to rubber band my iPhone to the dock at a certain angle to make it charge and play.
Am I on the upgrade treadmill? No: I use a five-year old MacBook Pro. And I waited patiently for the 5, skipping over the 4S. I deserve a fresh new phone and I got the 32GB version so I can continue to dangerously multitask and text-walk into fountains without sacrificing speed. And you can’t deny these improvements:
image credit: phonearena.com
Highlights from CNET iPhone 5 review:
“Taller, thinner, and a metal back
As expected, the new iPhone is 18 percent thinner (0.30 inch vs. 0.37 inch thick) than the iPhone 4S. Apple says it’s the thinnest handset around, but that’s a race that changes often. That means it’s also 20 percent lighter for a total of 3.95 ounces. The Retina Display expands from 3.5 inches (its size since the original iPhone) to 4 inches. The total resolution remains the same, though, at 326 pixels per inch. The total pixel count is 1,136×640, and we now have a 16:9 aspect ratio.
Faster chip
The iPhone 5 will offer an A6 chip, which is two times faster than the current A5 chip. Graphics will get faster speeds… users will see Web pages load 2.1 times faster, and the Music app with songs will load 1.9 times faster.
4G LTE enabled
The iPhone 5 also fixes a design flaw that we first saw in the iPhone 4. Apple replaced the glass back with one that’s mostly metal. Too many people [Emily Binder] cracked an iPhone 4 or 4S after dropping it accidentally.”
(Here’s where I will recommend Bob Knows Phones in Atlanta for smartphone repairs. They fixed my cracked iPhone 4 screen in June in less than an hour for $100 with good customer service. Support local small business.)
“Smaller dock connector, smaller SIM card
On the bottom of the iPhone 5, there’s that new and long-anticipated smaller dock connector. [Called "Lightning," it's 80% smaller and reversible.]”
Read Part 1 of this post, focusing on ordering the iPhone 5 from AT&T.
R.I.P. Steve Jobs. Apple releases just aren’t the same without you.
iPhone 5 pre-orders set a sales record last week, selling out in less than one hour following the smartphone’s September 12, 2012 debut. I ordered mine from AT&T. This two-part post will cover 1) my AT&T customer service experience and 2) why I upgraded to the iPhone 5.
AT&T iPhone Orders
How do I change my shipping address from my billing address? Many AT&T customers have been searching for answers about why you can’t ship your att.com or apple.com iPhone 5 order wherever you want. These sites offer free shipping to your account billing address only. This is supposedly to prevent fraud. (Oh how easily I could have committed fraud on my eventual call center order.) Online, the only way to request a shipping address different from your billing address is to actually change the billing address on your AT&T account. Not ideal. And if you can trick the system that easily, not sure how they are preventing fraud. Your other option (what I did) is to order by phone from AT&T. Shipping then goes up to $9.95.
Calling AT&T
Ambience: The call center on-hold song is a muzak version of “Fidelity” by Regina Spektor. The lyrics could be interpreted as reflecting on not taking risks in new relationships for fear of getting hurt, then wondering what could have been. This amused me; start playing the song as you read on so you can join me on the call.
Senseless upgrade fee: AT&T’s reasoning for a $36 upgrade fee on my contract eligible upgrade from iPhone4 to iPhone5 (while maintaining my same unlimited data plan) is that “they have to charge a fee in order to provide the phone discount.” Please. At least give me an excuse such as, “it covers the cost of internal processing for updating your line’s new capabilities such as 4G.”
Customer recognition and retention: The least the call center agent could do was to greet me with, “Hello Ms. Binder, thank you for being an AT&T customer since 2005, we appreciate your business” like my credit card company does. But the seven years of our relationship was unrecognized. Successful customer rewards clubs and frequent traveler programs and any company trying to engender loyalty through suggested exclusivity or recognition recognizes length of patronage as a basic given. (The best custsvc companies have a purple goldfish.) The loyalty years thank you is one sentence an agent can read from a prompt that can change the entire tone of the conversation for the better. Especially as a wireless provider, you better be thanking a customer who’s stuck with you for seven years, especially considering that you’re the main print yellow pages robber barons company.
This is why I keep one foot on the ground in our contracted affair; I hear Verizon’s voice in my head, I hear Sprint’s music serenading me, but still, AT&T, I pay you an extra $45.95 so you can “prevent fraud” and ship the phone to my office…
I never loved nobody fully
Always one foot on the ground
And by protecting my heart truly
I got lost in the sounds
I hear in my mind
All these voices
I hear in my mind all these words
I hear in my mind all this music
And it breaks my heart…
Fidelity – Regina Spektor (AT&T’s call center hold music)
Check back for Part 2 of this post on Thursday 9/20/12.
Podcast: Play in new window
In Episode 2 of The Digital Dive Podcast my co-host Melanie Touchstone of missmelt.com (@MisssMelt) and I discuss the 8/16/12 Instagram update, pros and cons of Instagram Photo Maps, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, and Facebook’s iOS app update. Listen for the frightening third Tip on Tap at the end. Facebook and Instagram …. become Facestagram?
We promise this will be the last episode for a long time in which we focus on Instagram. We do know about other topics. Thanks for listening. Episode 3 will be posted between Monday 9/10/12 – Tuesday 9/11/12.
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You can download or stream The Digital Dive at thedigitaldivepodcast.com or search for us in the iTunes Podcast Directory–> If you like the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
The Digital Dive Podcast is on Stitcher, the best free podcast streaming smartphone app. If you’re a new subscriber, please sign up with our link below.
Follow us on Twitter @thedigitaldive_ and Like us on Facebook
The Digital Dive PodcastTM: Get the most out of technology… without ever fully giving in
Podcast: Play in new window
The long awaited first episode of The Digital Dive Podcast: My co-host Melanie Touchstone of missmelt.com (@MisssMelt) and I discuss a smattering of digital topics from social marketing to search, Facebook, Pinterest, Google, and Instagram, to user psychology and more (in less than 23 minutes!)
The Digital Dive Podcast – Episode 1 from Digital Dive on Vimeo
This twenty minute bi-weekly podcast quickly hashes out and ties together what’s happening in digital that matters: social media, marketing, emerging technology, and guilty tech/app/ego pleasures.
Subscribe in iTunes
In this episode we discuss:
- Sense of entitlement and privacy demands
- Like button / +1 button
- Google. Social search.
- Social bookmarking. Twitter – favorite tweets.
- Tips on Tap – 3 Things to Know This Week
Bear with us as we get this thing rolling. Questions or comments? Write below or tweet us @thedigitaldive_
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You can download or stream The Digital Dive at thedigitaldivepodcast.com or search for us in the iTunes Podcast Directory–> If you like the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
The Digital Dive Podcast is on Stitcher, the best free podcast streaming smartphone app. If you’re a new subscriber, please sign up with our link below.
You can download or stream The Digital Dive Podcast at thedigitaldivepodcast.com or search for us in the iTunes Podcast Directory. Stream The Digital Dive Podcast on Vimeo.
