Here are some things I heard and learned at yesterday’s “Customer Service Is the New Marketing” conference, which was quite good:

(1) My anecdotal experience of great service and a generally great experience shopping online for shoes at Zappo’s — your order seems to show up at your door before you’ve even finished deciding what to buy — turns out to be the product of a fanatically service-oriented corporate culture. Zappo’s CEO Tony Hsieh presented the evidence. Early on the company learned that offline advertising was mostly not paying off, so it focused on growing its repeat-customer business. The results are evident in the chart of year-to-year sales increases, which are headed toward $1 billion this year. Interestingly, the Zappo’s trend is linear — there’s none of the hockey-stick-shaped mega-growth that Web companies often shoot for. On the other hand, something tells me that Zappo’s is unlikely to suffer as much as other online companies in the next downturn.

(2) Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad (now a part of Best Buy), described how he built his company’s brand identity — they’re the guys in black-and-white cars who do tech-support housecalls — by borrowing bits and pieces of pop culture (old gas station logos, old photos of NASA scientists in black ties and white shirts) to invent a persona for his “agents” that’s some sort of cross between the FBI, Ghostbusters and the Matrix. Stephens is an art-school dropout (”everybody’s creative in art — nobody’s creative in computer support”) and takes a certain flip, almost Situationist pleasure in inverting business norms. (Or maybe he just never outgrew adolescence.) I’ve never imagined I’d never be a Geek Squad customer — I’m pretty much the resident, if uncredentialed, geek squad in my home. But it seems that I’ve been missing a great theater-of-capitalism show.

(3) Marc Hedlund, founder of personal-finance site Wesabe, talked about the company’s decision to provide its CEO’s personal contact information right on the home page. Since they’re asking people to upload financial information, they figured it would help build trust. Turns out that most of the calls the CEO gets are people just checking it out to see if it’s really him at the other end.

(4) Heather Champ of Flickr showed a chart of the site’s “oh crap” moment: in June 2007, when Yahoo shut down Yahoo Photos and moved everyone over to Flickr, the site’s growth chart took a sharp upward shift — it’s now approaching two billion photos, with 3-5,000 uploaded per minute.

(5) Hedlund also talked about finding blogposts about his service and responding to questions or complaints as he finds them on the Web. Of course, he admitted, he’s running a startup with 12 employees and a relatively small customer base today. How do you handle this when you get big?

One thing I’ve seen over and over is that, if you do this sort of job right in the early stage of a service, and you establish a level of openness and responsiveness in the formative weeks and months of your site’s community, you put yourself on a sort of “virtuous cycle” or beneficial trajectory: over time, as you grow and responding to everyone becomes less realistic, other people — your enthusiastic users — pick up the slack for you. Whereas if you screw up the early stage — if you establish a sense that your company or site is unresponsive or inattentive — it’s extremely hard to change that later. So the argument that “being responsive doesn’t scale” is an unhealthy one: Be as responsive as you can for as long as you can!

(6) In the final panel on “customer service as community,” I heard the presenters agree on two different points that struck me as contradictory.

Gina Bianchini of Ning declared that too many people today think that, when they’re posting as employees, they have to “write professional business-speak that makes them sound like an asshole.” People should feel free to express their passions and be genuine — otherwise they sound like corporate tools.

That’s true enough. But only a few minutes before, Patti Roll of Timbuk2 (they make shoulder bags beloved by bike messengers and others) told an anecdote of how easy it is to get agitated and confrontational when people attack your product in an online forum. That doesn’t help your company; you just have to learn to, well, be professional.

Hmmm. The “professional” demeanor in speech (and online speech) — however impersonal, and depersonalizing, it can often be — exists precisely to help people who represent a brand avoid the temptation to scream at jerks (who may well deserve it). So really the challenge in navigating these waters is to find a voice that is personal enough to not sound fake but professional enough to help you avoid getting into a flame fest.

Which is all somewhat more complex, and harder to pull off, than I think the discussion allowed.

Tomorrow I plan to attend the “Customer Service is the New Marketing” conference that the folks from Get Satisfaction are holding at the Presidio. This doesn’t sound like my normal field but it’s actually a topic close to my heart.

At Salon I was a big believer in customer support as an ambassadorial function for the company. At the site’s launch in 1995, I manned the e-mail barricades, responding personally to most of what came in. (In those days, getting a few hundred messages for a Web site launch was a sign of runaway success.) When we launched Salon Premium in 2001, I handled the customer support myself for the first two weeks. If you’re an executive in charge of a Web launch, there is no better way to get a handle on what’s working and what’s not. And while it’s good to keep developers in the feedback loop as well, you can’t expect them to handle all the response — they’re likely to be busy fixing any of the problems users are uncovering.

Way back in the Pleistocene Andrew Leonard wrote a piece for Salon that I edited, describing a future in which more and more tech support problems could and would be solved by a quick Web search. Today, I don’t even bother attempting to communicate directly with most companies; who wants to navigate phone-tree hell? If I have a problem, I poke around on the Web until I find an answer. If I don’t, I’ll post a question on the likeliest Web forum.

So there’s interesting stuff happening in this area. I’ll see what’s worth reporting on tomorrow.

There’s a debate going on about Gnomedex: Dave Winer posted a critique, Chris Pirillo responded.

My thoughts (I originally posted on the conference here): I don’t mind that Gnomedex mixed up politics and technology. Heck, I’ve been doing that for a couple of decades now. That’s good. By assuming that this is the root of people’s beef, Pirillo lets himself off the hook a little too easily: “We were just taking risks, don’t you want that?”

My problem with Robert Steele’s keynote (and some of the other presentations) was a different one: I’ve got no issue with the extremity or outrageousness of Steele’s positions and statements. Bring on the controversy! I just thought he was disrespectful of the crowd.

In my years as a theater critic, covering night after night of often under-funded and under-attended underground and avant-garde performances, I was always ready to give anyone a break as a long as it was clear that they’d had something they were trying to express, and they’d put an effort into trying to express it. What got my dander up was watching shows where the creators had plainly failed to try — they hadn’t worked at it, they’d just thrown something together.

When you get on stage, you’re commanding some public time. It’s a precious and valuable resource. You owe it to the people who come to try to use it well. I’ve begun some regular public speaking this year — once or twice a month, I come to some group or company and talk about the topic of my book — and invariably, I spend a day or two in advance reviewing my talk, customizing it for the particular crowd, updating it with new material. I owe that to the people who are giving me their time.

Steele? He raced through his slide deck like someone with an ADD seizure, flipping forward and back through dense, unreadable slides like someone whose keyboard was gummed up with ketchup. At first I thought it was a comedy routine. Then I got it: he hadn’t prepared. He was doing his preparation live, in front of us, deciding what he was going to talk about, and in what order. So instead of provoking us with his ideas we ended up exasperated by his incoherence. If he’d taken his hour to explore, in depth, any one of the stream of controversial pronouncements he was spewing, it might have been fascinating. Instead, it was a bit of an insult.

As for Michael Linton, another controversial speaker who drew criticism with his introduction to “open money,” I felt he had more substance than Steele. But he, too, failed to introduce his material in an accessible way, and missed an opportunity to win support from a crowd of unconventional and open-minded tech enthusiasts because he couldn’t even begin to communicate his idea clearly. Linton needs to become as effective an evangelist for open money as Guy Kawasaki (who also spoke at Gnomedex) is for…Guy Kawasaki. Then maybe we’ll have a chance to figure out whether we like his ideas or not.

I haven’t been to previous Gnomedexes so I can’t compare this one to its predecessors. Overall I still thought it was better than many other conferences I’ve been to, but maybe it was a let-down to some alumni. Either way, Gnomedex is no more exempt from the laws of public speaking than any other conference: If a keynote speaker can’t be bothered to prepare a cogent talk, the audience has a right to its disgruntlement.

BarCamp Block was extraordinary — I spent Saturday morning and afternoon there. (Family commitments kept me from the Saturday evening and Sunday events or I’d have stayed all the way through.) This “unconference” was a free event, with “programming” supplied ad hoc by the attendees themselves, and a schedule devised on the fly at the start of the weekend.

Sounds like chaos? “Cult of the Amateur” mediocrity? No way. Think instead of the energy, ideas and conviviality that can flow from a crowd of smart people when they’re given a chance to make things up as they go along.

The event was huge — hundreds of people gathered primarily around one block in downtown Palo Alto centered on the SocialText offices. No one could possibly have attended more than a fraction of the sessions. Three highlights for me were:

• A discussion among about a dozen people at the Institute for the Future office about coping with RSS overload. This was started by someone who works at a company that’s producing a sort of personal (or collaborative) filter for your RSS feeds (so you can train your feed reader to only show you posts on a set of topics that you’re interested in). I have no use for such a product; when I subscribe to a feed I’m happy if the blogger surprises me with interesting stuff that I didn’t know I was interested in (and that I’d never see with a feed filtered by preset criteria). But the idea led to a good exchange in the room, and helped crystallize my thinking on a feed-reader feature that would make a big difference (for me, anyway!). I’ll post separately on that.

• Tantek Celik led an open discussion about the state of microformats, a subject I’m increasingly interested in. This is one of those Web-technology phenomena that at the moment is intelligible almost exclusively to geeks, but I think that — like blogs or RSS — it will become much more widely useful and adopted in the next few years. I’ll also be writing more on the subject later.

• Finally, Brad Fitzpatrick, David Recordon and Joseph Smarr led a session on “Opening the Social Graph.” They were talking about a pragmatic, we-could-build-it-now solution to the much-discussed problem on the “social web” of proliferating networks. Who wants to join another social networking site when, each time you do that, you have to painstakingly rebuild your list of “friends” or relationships? Isn’t there a way to make this information portable? LiveJournal founder Fitzpatrick’s recent paper on this subject proposed one approach. At BarCamp Fitzpatrick and his collaborators talked about setting up a nonprofit organization that would serve as the hub for the backend data services his solution would require. Another fascinating subject worth more future in-depth posting. (No one seems to have posted notes on the session, so I’ll try to add mine to the conference wiki soon.)

So there you have it: I spent less than a full day and came away with my head buzzing and three major areas of material to pursue more deeply. I don’t think any of the old-fashioned, CEOs-on-stage conferences I’ve been to match that record.

I have been hunkered down getting my life (and a mountain of notes and research) in order. Here’s a grab-bag of items:

• On Wednesday I spent the afternoon at UC/Berkeley at the kind invitation of Bill Allison, and talked with a thoughtful, interested group of faculty, administrators and IT people about Dreaming in Code and the wider topic of software’s innate difficulties. Berkeley, along with a number of other institutions, is about to kick off an ambitious project to build a new platform for much of its underlying digital infrastructure. Chandler, whose slow progress Dreaming in Code chronicled, has a university tie-in as well, and these folks are smart and foresightful enough to want to try to understand what pitfalls they might be facing.

  Too often, groups embark on big new software ventures as if they are the first pioneers ever to walk down their particular path, when in fact most of the field is full of well-worn roads (and the roads usually lead into one or another ditch). So hats off to my Berkeley neighbors for wanting to study an at least partial map of the terrain.

• Speaking of Chandler, the folks at OSAF are closing in on a major release, called Preview, later this month. I’ll be writing more about it here as it unfolds.

• Barcamp Block: This marks the second anniversary of Barcamp, a self-organizing conference for geeks, startup companies and related phenomena. It’s down in Palo Alto this coming weekend, it looks like great fun and interesting people, and I’m planning to be there, at least for the first day.

• Also here in Berkeley, my friend Josh Kornbluth’s great show “Citizen Josh” (I wrote about it when it opened) is settling in for a three-week run over at Berkeley Rep. Worth seeing if you missed it across the Bay when it played the Magic Theater earlier this year.

Before Gnomedex recedes too far, I wanted to post about what was by far the standout experience of the conference for me and, I imagine, many others present.

Derek K. Miller is a longtime Canadian blogger who lives in Vancouver. I encountered his writing at Penmachine several years ago the way bloggers often discover one another — he’d linked to a post of mine, I saw the referrer, I checked his site out and liked it. I’ve followed Miller’s blog sporadically over the years but hadn’t read it in a good while, and so I missed his news earlier this year: he’d been diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Since then he has written with honesty and openness about his ordeal. He’s using his blog at once to keep his community of friends and relatives up to date and to give a wider audience a little window onto the nature of this experience, which in our culture frequently gets hidden from view.

Apparently he’d been slated to give a talk at Gnomedex, but he’s still recovering from an operation, so making the trip to Seattle wasn’t in the cards. Instead, he spoke to the conference from his bed via a video link, and talked about what it’s been like to tell the story of his cancer experience in public and in real time. Despite the usual video-conferencing hiccups (a few stuttering images and such), it was an electrifying talk.

This wasn’t about peddling a new product or handicapping startups or any of the usual conference fodder. It was a moment for everyone present to think about mortality, strength in the face of adversity, and the ways that resourceful people find to forge strong human connections with our little technological tools.

(I haven’t been able to find a posted video of the event, but if I do, or if someone posts a link in comments, I’ll add it!)

Gnomedex is a friendly, human-scale conference of early-adopter geeks. When Jason Calacanis asked the crowd how many people were on the Web back in 1994 or 1995, four out of five hands went up. The event’s marketing tagline is “The Blogosphere’s Conference,” but of course this is only one slice of one blogosphere (there was, for instance, almost no overlap with this other blogosphere).

The sessions have been a wildly mixed bag. Things got off to a rocky start with the keynote by Robert Steele, a former intelligence officer turned crackpot libertarian who delivered a scattershot rant whose agenda was so vast that it was no agenda at all. For instance, Steele simultaneously advocated the “restoration” of the U.S. constitution (through, among other things, the impeachment of Dick Cheney) and the abolition of the U.S. constitution (via a new constitutional convention).

Steele believes that “central banking is an evil cancer,” but he could not make the effort to explain why. He raced flippantly through his own slides, showing a complete disrespect for the crowd (if he couldn’t take the time to prepare a presentation, why should we take the time to listen?). Among Steele’s positions: Henry Kissinger is a war criminal; the federal government is “going away”; wikipedia is for “morons” but Amazon.com will become the hub for a new global mind; we can attain world peace through “open everything” — including “open carry” of guns. There was something here for anyone to agree with, something else for anyone to disagree with, and in the end nothing of substance.

Far more valuable were Darren Barefoot’s exploration of the relative value of different forms of digital do-good-ism and Ronni Bennett’s presentation on aging and the Web (sites need to do a better job of making themselves accessible to the elderly). Vanessa Fox led a thoughtful discussion about the line between public and private information in a blog-based universe.

The day closed with Calacanis. His title slide read, “The Internet’s environmental crisis: How the Internet is being destroyed by selfish polluters — and how we can stop them.” Calacanis pines for the early days of the Web, before the SEO spammers got involved. But the talk was really a pitch for his new “human-powered” search company, Mahalo (which I wrote about here). Dave Winer called him out from the back row, declaring that the talk itself was “conference spam.”

I just thought there was something naive and/or disingenuous about the idea that Mahalo is a blow against spam. There are many classes of spam-related pollution of today’s Net — e-mail spam, comment spam, spam blogs — and of them all, actual spamming of search results is probably the least pressing. Google still does a pretty good job. The day that Google’s results look like the flow of spam into your e-mail inbox is the day that people will start clamoring for something like Mahalo. But unless Google slips up badly, that looks unlikely.

Mahalo is ad-free today, but sooner or later it will begin running search advertising. already runs Google text link ads, and one imagines it will push that more aggressively over time. (If the service succeeds in drawing big numbers, the pressure will be on to “monetize” the traffic; somebody has to pay all those “humans.”) Calacanis has an editorial background and promises clear labeling of all ads. That’s great. But Google’s ads are clearly labeled and separated from the search results, too. Having editors is a fine thing but it is no more a guarantee of incorruptibility than a good algorithm.

UPDATE: Darren Barefoot posted the full text of his talk. It’s an entertaining and enlightening walk through the comparative social value of many of the different kinds of volunteer activities and contributions people make on the Net to try to improve the world.

I took a quick trip to the DC area at the end of last week to talk about Dreaming in Code to the folks at The Motley Fool. It was a blast. The Fool, as it’s known, has been around online from the earliest days of the Web; like Salon, it’s had its ups and downs, weathered many storms, and is now in a growth phase again.

The engagement happened because a developer who worked for the company happened to read the book, liked it, and thought it would be a good topic for the rest of the company to learn more about it. What I heard from the “Fools”, as they call themselves, is the same thing I’ve heard from lots of other software developers: they feel that the book captures the elusive nature of their work, and they want their colleagues to read it to learn, in greater depth, about the difficulties of creating software.

I’m home for a few days, then heading up to Seattle for Gnomedex. It’s an event I’ve heard about for years, but never made it up there before. If you’re going too, let me know!

I spent much of this past beautiful weekend at Wordcamp, an informal, vibrant conclave of Wordpress users and developers held in the funky wood-panelled confines of the Swedish American Hall on Upper Market in San Francisco.

One of the highlights of the program was John Dvorak and Om Malik bantering on Saturday morning about the weblogs/journalism conundrum — about as well as one could, given how many times this block has been circled. It’s hard to believe that it was 2002 when I wrote the following, and I thought the discussion was old and tired then:

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

Jay Rosen tried to end the debate in 2005. In 2006, Steven Johnson wrote a definitive argument-closer. But this is one of the great undead Internet debates; it simply won’t die, and we will probably still be hearing it long after both blogging and journalism have been superseded by Vulcan mind-melds via Bluetooth cerebral implant.

Malik suggested that professional media companies would have a difficult time competing with super-specialized blogs powered by passionate proprietors willing to post around the clock on their niche topic. Dvorak argued that bloggers looking to be taken seriously by readers should design sites that don’t look like standard blogs: “You lose credibility when people hit the blog and say, ‘Oh, it’s a blog.’ ”

I argued that, in fact — for some significant and perhaps growing portion of the public who feel their newspapers and broadcasters failed them in the leadup to the Iraq war — the inverse is true: The formal look-and-feel of “pro” media is a turn-off, it screams “this is the official story,” whereas the rough-hewn blog format holds forth at least the possibility (though no guarantee) of unfiltered authenticity. Dvorak responded by saying this argument only reinforced his point that there really is a difference in how people perceive the “newspaper or magazine” site format and the blog format.

Lorelle VanFossen, proprietor of the phenomenally popular Lorelle on Wordpress blog, wandered the auditorium like some sassy cross between a talk-show host and a revival preacher, offering tips on how to create good blog content. When she declared that, if you want to get people’s attention, you should “show them something they’ve never seen before, or show them something in a way they’ve never seen before,” my first reaction was, “Well, duh.” Then I realized that I’ve been a journalist all my life and this principle is etched into my brainpan (”burned into ROM,” as they say in the Valley), but might actually bear repeating for the new hordes of self-publishers that blogging has created. So if this stuff is new to you, I imagine VanFossen’s book “Blogging Tips” would be a pretty good investment. (Haven’t seen it — there were supposed to be copies at the conference, but the shipment got derailed, perhaps by the global Harry Potter delivery madness.)

What made Wordcamp fun was the sense of a dynamic, two-way exchange between the active, committed users of a piece of software and the developers who created it. It was closer in spirit to the user-group meetings that propelled the personal-computing revolution than to the dollar-fixated industry conferences of more recent vintage. The Wordcamp Report blog offered good summaries of the sessions. (At some point in future I think there may be audio or video of the proceedings, too.)

In my next post: Dave Winer’s talk on blogging, and a discussion of open-identity systems.

I spent a few hours on Wednesday at Mashup Camp — I think this was the 4th event, the second I’ve attended. As previously I found most value in the “speed geeking” portion: an hour or two spent moving from table to table in a big room hearing a succession of five-minute demos by developers showing off some cool trick or application mashup. Last year I wrote about what it all means:

…you got a window onto a simpler, faster, and perhaps smarter approach to software product development — one that trades in the virtue of from-the-ground-up consistency and thoroughness for the even more compelling virtue of “getting something working fast.” It’s software development as a Darwinian ocean in which large numbers of small projects are launched into the water. Only a handful will make it to land. But most of them required so little investment that the casualty rate is nothing to lose sleep over.

This time I’ll just mention a few demos that I thought stood out:

• Chime.tv: This is essentially a kind of Del.icio.us for videos, with a smart built-in video player and some basic tools for building and sharing channels. Nothing revolutionary here, except that (a) it lets you aggregate videos you find all over the Web (not just one provider like YouTube) into your own playlist/channel; and (b) it happens to be remarkably well-designed. I expect to be using it for a while as a video-viewing manager. We’ll see how it holds up.
• Myk O’Leary’s twitterlicious serves as a simple hookup between Twitter and Del.icio.us (or Ma.gnolia.com). In other words: If you’re reading Twitter messages (”Tweets”) on a mobile device and they contain URLs that are inconvenient to save and that you can’t properly visit at the moment, Twitterlicious sends the “tweet” to your Del.icio.us account as a private bookmark with a special tag. You can review these at your desktop leisure.
• Lignup showed a cool little application that lets you use your cellphone as a mobile input device to add voice annotation to a Web page or object (like, for instance, a Flickr photo). (This press release tells a little more.)

This Mashup Camp was a little less mobbed than the last one I went to, but there still seemed to be plenty of good ideas. And I even bumped into a few people who’d read Dreaming in Code, which always puts me in a good mood.

This weekend I’m going to try to go to at least some of Wordpress Camp. Then next week my family will be doing some actual camping — like, in a tent. I think we’ll call it Camp Camp.