I’m probably a bit late to the party on this one, but I flew Southwest up to & back from the MD/VA area this past week. It was unlike any prior flying experiences, and as far as I can tell, they know they’re doing it. It’s intentional. The staff are happy and conversational with passengers. They joke with you, they aren’t afraid to laugh. Probably the best customer experience out there as far as feeling like a person, rather than cash-dispensing cattle.
Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Southwest Understands Conversation
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
Marketing’s Bad Name
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009I’d like to share an experience I had a few years ago: I was at the supermarket, making smalltalk with the cashier, and she asked what I do for a living. I answered truthfully: “I work in marketing.” (which is just a broad brush for “i’m a web developer & designer, as well as graphic artist and designer, and I create all advertising and promotional materials for X company”)
I’ve never seen someone go from friendly and cheerful to all business so quickly. From the reaction, you’d think I’d said “I vivisect puppies.” I haven’t told someone “I work in marketing” since – at least not out of context.
Virtual Currency and Freemium Services
Sunday, April 19th, 2009Here’s a monetization idea I’ve been playing with since participating in post-GDC “Idea Exchange: Emerging Trends in Game Development,” a sort of virtual conference that was held in both Metaplace and Second Life via a chat bridge between the two (pretty cool in itself). You can see a side-by-side screen comparison here.
During that chat, a lot of ideas were covered, and Raph briefly touched on how he thought offer-based marketing was a big new trend at GDC. Here’s the chat log, edited for relevance:
A Few Software Recommendations
Friday, March 13th, 2009So, I’m now self employed. That means I need software, and I need it to be either free or inexpensive. Since my business is web applications, I put a little research into a cheap software kit for getting started on this kind of thing. Dreamweaver’s nice, but it’s pricey, and has less-than-awesome support for full-on software development. I’ll spare you the comparisons (for the most part) and just get right down to the results. These are all for Windows…
[edit: Added note to NetBeans bit to reflect irritation at them for republishing without permission.]
What’s in a Verb? “Meep” vs “Nudge”
Friday, February 27th, 2009Metaplace, a project lead by Raph Koster of Ultima Online & Star Wars Galaxies fame, is an open-ended platform that allows anyone to create their own virtual world. You want a room for people to play chess? Cool, code up a chess game, board, design and decorate the room, and you’re on. Want a role-playing experience that teaches people about history? You can do it.
Something unique to Metaplace is the idea of the Meep. It’s a small dustbunny like critter that rolls or jumps around. It’s kind of the unofficial MP mascot, and the testing community loves them. So much so, that they created a world purely to protest the potential change of the verb “Meep” to “Nudge.”
Meep, as a verb, was (as I understand it) an idea of Cuppycake, community manager of Metaplace, that got put into the game on their free time. It was intended to be like a Facebook “poke.” There’s a context menu option when you click other players to Meep them.
The problem that prompted the suggested change from Meep to Nudge, and the backlash that ensued, was that new users just didn’t get it. I even suggested myself that people don’t really know what Meep is, and might not feel comfortable doing something they don’t really understand. I suppose I never fully explained my concern there: My problem was that users didn’t understand the idea right away, it wasn’t with the idea of Meeping people.
