The human face of technology Part 2 transcript

By David Eedle |  Email This Post

Yesterday we ran ‘The Human Face of Technology Part One” the transcription of a speech given by David Eedle at the 2010 NARPACA Ticketing Professionals Conference in Sydney in February. Today’s post is the second part to that speech. If you would like to hear the original talk, click here.

David: I actually remember the first time I travelled overseas with a mobile phone, a work phone, and I was sitting in Dubai airport or something on the way to London, and pulled my phone out of my pocket, turned it on and rang home. And I still – despite the fact I’m a complete geek, I was still sitting there in amazement looking at this little black box and you’re in Dubai and you turn it on and it works. And it mysteriously works. You just dial and you ring home. In fact the biggest obstacle was trying to figure out the dialling code, in Dubai, you know, double-oh, double-one, to try to get an international, to be able to make an international call home.

The picture on your screen at the moment is a machine called the Turk. It was a chess playing machine, it was constructed in the late 18^th century, it was created for a Tsar or an Empress or something like that, mostly as a novelty, and it actually travelled around the world for many many years. It played a chess game, it was a machine, people could take on the chess machine and the chess machine almost always won. Notable people who played and lost include Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. And of course finally it was revealed…

Audience: Laughter.

David: …it was finally revealed (to be a hoax) – but do you know it took them 80 years to work that one out? There were research projects and treatises written. And if you actually, if you hunt around online, especially amongst the chess club websites, this machine is extremely famous. Because it essentially hoodwinked everybody for eighty years. It was indistinguishable from magic. People couldn’t understand how it could work, they didn’t quite believe that it could work. But until someone was able to prove otherwise, they stuck with the concept.

Alright. So I wanted to make sure I’d try and give you something to take away. And I love an acronym. Given that you’re NARPACA and there’s APACA and there’s VAPAC, I’d thought I’d have my own. So I’ve decided you all need to be PIRT. And all it is, is I’m just trying to condense my thinking into a set of ideas. And I actually think there are four concepts that I want to try and talk to you about and describe and give you to take away today. Personal, interactive, responsive and my absolute favourite, transparent. So we’ll take a look at what I mean by each one of those…my little Apple thingy…OK.

We’ve all merged letters, we’ve all gone, “Dear David, we’ve got a great show and it’s on Thursday, and because you came to that other show, you’re really going to like this show”. Being personal is all about saying, we understand who you are, we’re going to show that we understand who you are, we remember what you like, we’re going to tailor the conversation to you and we’re going to tailor it based on the preferences you’ve actually described to us. That is, we’re not going to force you into our way of thinking, we’re going to force ourselves into your way of thinking. So you’re genuinely calling, genuinely treating somebody like and individual and not a number. And one of the joys of technology is it gives us the capacity to actually do that. But by injecting a bit of the magic, they don’t actually realise it’s happening.

Ian English was talking about access control yesterday, and the hand scanners and being able to use that to alert people to special offers and all of those sorts of things…it’s magic. The customer doesn’t need to know there’s a hundred thousand dollars worth of server architecture and hardware and all of that data behind the scenes, but if the usher says, hi, welcome back, by the way, catch me on the way out because I’ve got a discount coupon for you or whatever it is, that’s a little bit of magic that the customer might appreciate.

There’s the basic stuff, we always call people by name…if I get a “Dear Sir/Madam” letter from a theatre company I throw it out. I do the same with job applications. We’re about being personal and describing, displaying information that you actually might want. And if you’ve got a concern we’re going to listen, and we don’t blame, and we don’t pass the buck. Does anybody remember Optus when they first launched? Optus who has the Yes campaign? Does anybody remember why it’s the Yes campaign? It was because they said, when Optus first launched in Australia, their marketing campaign was built around the notion that if you rang Optus for service, the person who answered the phone would be able to help you 90% of the time. That was where the Yes campaign came from. And they’ve forgotten now, and now they just use cute animals and talking elephants and wombats and things like that. But that’s where Yes came from. When you ring, the person who answers the phone will be able to help you with your query almost all of the time. Other than the really complex ones that have to be bumped up.

So my second point: Interactive. And this is about dialogue, and this is again where technology is just marvellous. That is, you can use the technology to interact, to have a conversation, a two way conversation where we can listen to you, you can listen to us. There’s a musician in the U.S. called Dave Carroll, he plays in a band you will never have heard of, but they tour regularly around the U.S.  A year or so ago he climbed onto a United Airlines flight and they were looking out the window and watching the bags being loaded onto the plane, and after a little while started to get a bit concerned because they could see the baggage handlers with all their gear cases, the guitar cases and so on, and they were lobbing them around, they were throwing them around, and they were sat for the rest of the flight and they were going, oh, no, a bit worried about this, and, yup, got off the flight at the other end and Dave’s three and a half thousand dollar acoustic guitar was in several pieces inside its case. He brought this to the attention of the United Airlines staff at the airport who basically told him that they didn’t care and that they weren’t interested. He then embarked on a year long battle to get United Airlines to actually pay attention. And this is how he did it.  Plays video clip for United Breaks Guitars.

David: That video went on to YouTube the day Michael Jackson died, the Monday. By Thursday, Oprah’s producers had called. His band cancelled their tour and now Dave spends his entire time doing media appearances around the U.S. The United Airlines bought the video and Dave’s services to remake their staff training programmes.

David: What’s interesting is how it actually turned into a dialogue. You’ll notice he’s talking about his Taylor guitar there, it’s a Canadian acoustic guitar manufacturer. I wish I could show you all of the videos that go with this. There’s actually two songs, he made two. Taylor created their own video response and posted it on to YouTube and – of course – offered to fix his guitar for free and supply new ones and endorse him and all of those sorts of things. United’s biggest problem was they did absolutely nothing when the first enquiry was made at the airport. And then it all just went downhill from then on because they essentially ignored him for nine months. And so he released a song about it on MySpace, but it didn’t really get traction, and then he got a few mates together, and they made that video, released it, as I say, on the day that Michael Jackson died, had about a million viewings of the video by the Thursday. I think I’ve put there three million views in ten days, and nowadays if you go search on YouTube, you’ll discover that it’s been seen something like ten million times.

What’s really interesting is that United has actually listened. I flew United back from San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. The video screens in our area, some of them didn’t work, which, when you’re facing fourteen hours over the Pacific, you really want your video screen to work. Mine was fine, actually, but the bloke sitting next to me, his wasn’t. And they rebooted the system several times and eventually it all started to work. So in fact the video screens worked for the majority of the trip. But interestingly, just before we landed the cabin crew came around and distributed these little cards. And that’s my card. I think you can probably read it, it says, “please accept our apology, we’re saying that the experience wasn’t up to scratch and we’d like to make up to you, and you can go and claim a free reward“. The reward turned out to be a two hundred dollar discount voucher for my next flight. Now, two hundred bucks is two hundred bucks. Oh – or you could take it as airmiles, as I did, because airmiles are more useful to me for upgrades and so on. United has changed, so when Dave’s guitar was broken it took them nine months even to acknowledge. When a video screen was broken they gave me a card before I got off the plane to try and make up for it. So it looks like Dave’s experience and his video about it has had an effect.

David Eedle presents "The Human Face of Technology" at the 2010 NARPACA Ticketing Professionals Conference in Sydney.

The third thing I want to talk to you about is being responsive, which looking at the way in which United Airlines behaved to Dave  Carroll, you could say that they weren’t responsive. But it’s saying that we’ll give you what you want and we’ll do it in a way that’s intuitive, it doesn’t require a degree in rocket science, again there’s lots of conversations going on about websites and usability and all of those sorts of things. I was in the States, I wanted to check my Vodafone bill, I kept logging into Vodafone’s website to try and check my bill. I was a bit concerned because I had my iPhone set to global roaming for data, and that can get really expensive when you’re away and I was away for three weeks and I was worried about the bill running up. Anyway I kept trying to log in to Vodafone’s website and every time for about three days it kept coming up with error messages like, oh, “can’t complete this request“, “communications problem, try again later“. And so I wrote them probably a slightly cheesy email, just saying, well, saying I was getting pretty cheesed off, what I was trying to say was, there’s absolutely no point having an option on your website that says, “view my bill“, if it doesn’t ever work. I got this fabulous email back from them.

“Dear David,

Please note that your use of Vodafone mobile service is governed by a standard form of agreement. The terms and the conditions of the agreement govern the provision and the use of My Vodafone. The terms and conditions state that Vodafone make no warranty that My Vodafone will be available at all times or that the service will be fault-free. These terms and conditions can be viewed online.”

Audience: Laughter.

David: “Regards, Kat, Correspondence team.”

I swear, that is the entire email text that I got back. Now I’m beginning to regret signing up with Vodafone because that’s absolutely and obviously not the response that I want to get. If I was a more assiduous user of Twitter I would have complained on Twitter. And I know that works because I once complained about Telstra on Twitter and five minutes later I got a Tweet from a Telstra team member – because Telstra monitors Twitter – looking for the word Telstra. And I was having a problem trying to pay a bill, because I didn’t have the bill in my hand and with Telstra you need to know the bill number to pay your bill but if you don’t have the bill with you, you can’t pay it. And the Telstra team member said, did you sort out the problem? At least they were trying. Vodafone, perhaps not.

And the fourth thing to take away is about being Transparent. In theatre we’re really good at wrapping up all the things we do in terminology and language and mystery to make sure that nobody else understands what it is that we do. I actually wrote a book once, years and years ago, in the eighties, it was actually a compendium of theatre technical terms. Sold a hundred copies, self published.

David: And a couple of the people around me said, made the point, well you techies, you just disguise and hide everything you do by wrapping it up, it’s like you’ve got 32 names for a light bulb, envelopes, bubbles, you name it. But do you know none of that matters, it’s just you protecting your turf. Maybe you need to – you’re just scared, you’re scared of letting the light in and being a bit more transparent. What technology does is actually put you on show to the world. And the world is watching. So you need to make sure that you have your clean underwear on, as your mother used to say when you went out in the morning, but more importantly, you’re actually going to deal with people ethically and honestly and if something goes wrong it’s about owning up to it, and ensuring that you understand the steps that you take to avoid a recurrence.

Today’s technology achieves a remarkable transparency for businesses and organisations. There’s a guy in the States called Michael Margolis, he’s a New York consultant and he writes a blog called Get Storied, as in stories, and he explored the idea of the story, or the narrative and its impact on branding, innovation and cultural change in an organisation. I’ll just read you something that Michael wrote on his blog that kind of struck a chord for me. He says, “The greatest freedom in this era is the ability to construct and shape our personal narratives. Look at the explosion of social media, blogging, the Twitterverse. As much as technology is an enabler, at the end of the day it’s our human ability to weave stories that bring meaning to our lives. The brands that put the customer at the centre of the universe are increasingly the winners. If you go the step further and invite your customers to actually narrate the story through customisation, co-creation, user generated content and so on, customers tend to identify with those brands as enablers that they can’t live with out. Imagine…” he says “…imagine for a moment life without Google“.

I actually saw this bit, this next piece, in a little online forum somewhere, and it was from a small theatre company in the U.S. and they said, they actually tried something new recently, on their Facebook page – you know how we all have Facebook pages – they actually put the number of tickets remaining. They actually owned up how many tickets they had left for a show. And they decreased, decremented – that’s the right word, isn’t it? Each time they sold a ticket. They sold out. Because they said people can actually see a concrete number, and they can see it dwindling, and it moves them to action. They can actually see the state of play at that moment. As opposed to where they’re just blindly online buying a ticket and they have absolutely no idea how many are there or how many are left or how it’s going or anything like that, so it was actually inviting customers to buy into the story and into the narrative.

OK. The young lady on the left hand side of the screen is a 13 year old. Her name is Tavi Gevinson. She’s an American fashion blogger. She began her blog, Style Rookie, in March 2008 when she was 11 years old. Her parents had absolutely no idea what she was doing until she asked them one day whether it would be alright if she was featured in a New York Times magazine story.

Audience: Laughter

David: She’s been referred to as the front line of fashion. She’s a regular guest at fashion shows, she’s flown to Tokyo to act as a muse for designers. According to a report in The Age newspaper last week, about four million people have read her blog and about fifty thousand read it every day. The second photo on the right hand side is Tavi – that’s the back of her head. She’s in the front row of a fashion parade in Paris. Sitting behind her is the global fashion editor for Grazia magazine…

Audience: Laughter

David: …who was extremely put out at the notion that she was sitting behind a thirteen year old blogger from New York, and that she couldn’t see through the girl’s hat. And the little comment down here, which I’ve just realised you can’t read, but she tweeted, this fashion editor tweeted, this photo live from Paris, from the catwalk. And it says, “Dior, through Tavi’s pesky hat”.

Audience: Laughter

David: Tavi represents, obviously, a whole new generation. She’s managed to find a voice, she uses technology to express that voice. She does it extraordinarily effectively. She’s regarded as a barometer and as a touchpaper for what’s happening in fashion. And given that, in another few years – well, she now has the capacity to buy fashion, thanks to all this, but, you know, in a few years time, she’s the one who’s going to be buying the fashion. So whilst the Grazia magazine editor got some sympathy, a lot of people said, get used to it. This is the way the world is going to work. So I guess the message I’d like you to take away finally is this idea of venturing a little way past the possible, into the impossible. Back to my notes about the music industry, the hardest decision you’ll make is to do absolutely nothing.

Thank you for this morning. Tim Roberts, standing quietly at the back, thank you for the opportunity to talk about the human face of technology, and I appreciate your time and listening to me this morning.

Questions

Compère: Thank you David. Just wondering, before we leave, and I can see the people who are going to run the next session are making their way out to get wired up, are there some questions, because we do have a couple of minutes for questions for David?

Lyndon: Lyndon from the Theatre Royal in Hobart. I’m just wondering if you’ve got your eye on what you think the next big thing might be. I guess our industry is still catching up with social networking sites and capacities, so I’m wondering if you’ve got your eye on a future trend.

David: Other than an iPad? Can’t get it out of my mind.

Audience: Laughter

David: I dream about that thing, it’s really sad. I think it’s actually – I hope – and actually think it’s actually some of the things I’ve been talking about today. I think transparency, this whole thing of, we’re going to show you what’s going on, we’re going to show you how many seats, we’re going to show you about the show. We actually have that conversation and we actually open up the doors. I mean, theatre for so many years was this kind of black box that we invited people into, and there’s a fair amount of tradition around that. You know, I grew up, I got into theatre in the full traditional phase of, you know, if you say the Scottish play name then you have to go outside, turn around three times,  all of that sort of stuff. And that’s – I love that stuff, too, because it’s all the culture of what we do. But there’s a whole other culture that we need to adopt, which is where we actually invite our audiences in to be a participant, to be a part of that narration of the experience and so on.

The tools that we have now allow us to do that. I’m only half joking when I say, do we have a problem with people tweeting from, you know, from the auditorium. I’m only half tweeting. If nothing else, I hope they go home and tweet about it or write a blog post and then send it to us. I’d love to think that we’re moving into that. I watch, I know lots of us have children. I have a 12 year old who’s – funnily enough – extremely IT literate, she writes stuff online, her entire world revolves around Facebook, instant messenger and so on, and she’s got that on her phone as well as her computer. I don’t have conversations with her, she SMSs me. I’m not allowed to be her Facebook friend, every time I ask, she says “No, Dad,” and, “You wouldn’t understand, Dad”. They’ve grown up where this is just their natural form of communication.

The Grade Sixes – well, she’s in Seven, this year. The hundred and forty of them come home and within five minutes messenger’s pinging. And by the way they’re doing their homework as well, and updating their blog, chatting on Facebook, and they’re probably on the phone too, because they just naturally accept multiple inputs and outputs…and in five years time they’re going to be standing at your box office, or on your website, more importantly, buying a ticket.

I was in San Fran a couple of weeks ago, and I’m chatting to my daughter, Skype video, back at home and it’s two o’clock in the afternoon in Melbourne or whatever, and she says, oh, Dad, a couple of us were thinking about going to the movies, can we have a ticket, can we get some tickets and I said, oh yeah, no worries and I went on the website for our local cinema. I bought the tickets, I emailed her the PDF, the print at home ticket, she printed it out at home and went to the movies. I love that stuff, isn’t that cool? I bought her – and sent her – movie tickets from San Francisco. We need to get our heads around that, the world moving in that way.

Compère : Probably just got time for one more.

Josh: Hey, er, my name’s Josh Gipp, I’m from a ticketing company call Moshtix…

Josh: Yup, some people know who we are. Mine’s not really a question, more of a comment on the technology side. We are very heavily invested in the technology side, and, one of the things that we launched was a MySpace and Facebook application, last year. And we’ve seen that skyrocket. With the Facebook one in particular, our venues or clients can list all of their events and people can actually add that app to their own Facebook, and you know, we started with minimal people, we didn’t tell anyone about it, we just sort of launched it, now some of our venues have two or three hundred people doing it, have that app. So it really does work, and it’s something that everyone should really start investing in.

David: It’s actually really interesting, because a couple of years ago it didn’t work on Facebook. I actually wrote a ticketing application for Facebook with a mate of mine who does ticketing for clubs and raves and dances and that in Melbourne, complete and utter – oh, look, it’s still there and we sell a few, but complete and utter flop. Because at the time the audience on Facebook wasn’t ready for a transaction. They were too busy playing Farmville, or games, or whatever. Or finding their stripper name, or whatever it was you could do on Facebook there for quite a while. I actually met the bloke who wrote that, he’s a really nice arts guy from Perth, wrote the What’s Your Stripper Name application, it’s one of the most successful things he’s ever done.

Audience: Laughter

David: His second most successful. His first most successful application on Facebook was, like, a Scrabble puzzle game, the second was the application installed a big button on your page that said click here, and you did, and that was it. And that was his second most downloaded application. But it’s really interesting hearing that the world’s moving, and that people have found that the natural order is being established, like all things and all worlds have changed, the natural order is being established. Facebook is a premium place to organise parties, events, social outings, gatherings and so on, it’s natural that you then integrate the ticketing, so it’s really great to hear a positive story like that.

Compère: OK…please, once again, thank David Eedle.

Photo: Tim Roberts

David Eedle is available for talks and speeches on online technology, social media, online communities and online publishing. He co-founded the successful online community for artsworkers Arts Hub in 2000, which was sold to a consortium of investors led by Simon Baker in 2006 and has co-founded and sold several other online businesses. David currently does technology consulting for companies in the social and new media space and is working with Fiona Boyd on two new online initiatives.

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