29 July 2009
I wake up when I dream of smelling coffee
Some jobs and industries come bundled with coffee addiction. Mine started with the time I worked on the gas pumps at Iceland’s only propane gas plant (a place where I worked part time and during summers throughout, and to pay for, Junior College) where, as with most Icelandic blue-collar jobs, the coffee staple was ‘molakaffi’, where you stick a sugar-cube into your mouth and suck your strong, black coffee through the cube.
My addiction was solidified by my stint as a night watchman (and often bartender) at one of Iceland’s seedier hotels. But the absolute clincher was working as a part of the production team (as a vision mixer) in the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service’s TV newsroom. There aren’t many people on the planet that drink as much, coffee or booze, as news reporters.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that coffee doesn’t run out in any household where I live, if the coffee tin is empty, I go out, come rain or snow, to buy some more. One of the habits I’ve developed since I moved to Southville, Bristol (UK) is to buy my coffee at the local deli. The coffee’s good and the people are nice.
The first time I went there to buy coffee, I walked into an empty store and only after a few moments’ wander around did I meet the bright-eyed and chirpy clerk. After a quick conversation, an exchange of laughs about lives being busy as the coffee was ground, the clerk began frantically to look for a marker. The pack of coffee was one of unmarked brown paper and the thing a clerk is supposed to do in these situations, obviously, is to write the name of the coffee on the pack.
“No worries” I said and smiled, the job of a store clerk can be pretty frantic, “I’m sure I’ll remember.”
All our commercial interactions in our offline lives are filled with moments like these. The business of sales and purchases is filled with conversations, simple and complex, short and long, even in the cases where every commercial step of the interaction is automated and computerised, there are still other customers. The only way to avoid words, glances, smiles or frowns is to be dead. Alive, we interact, always with emotion, whether it is joy, anger, curiosity or frustration.
One of the first uses of the net was to transplant these interactions, largely without context, onto dial-up bulletinboard systems. It’s been one of the foundations of the web since inception, anything that is placed on the web will be enveloped by communication. These communications systems take on many forms: Forums on subjects, hobbies, products and companies. Blogs, single or multi-user, with or without comments. Facebook. Twitter. E-mail. These are largely free, for a variety of economic and social reason, but they are plentiful, often easily replaced and addictive, through the intentional integration of operant conditioning into the services’ basic designs.
The business models of these systems are often just plain loss, someone runs and pays for a small forum on a subject they care about, sometimes it is bundling as it is with some e-mail systems, sometimes they are just a cost of doing business as it is with work e-mail. But some of these can and will make money by indirectly competing with advertising. Not through the idiotic health ads such as those you see on Facebook but through offering free communications services to your average user and then selling data and management services to businesses that need to communicate with a large number of people.
These businesses are those that are trying to sell you something. By codifying and commodifying communications, companies hope to measure and manage the basic human interactions that take place in the context of their business, and then to use it to sell us more stuff. My conversation and laugh with the deli clerk becomes and exchange of @replies on twitter, where my response, conversion, traffic and business will be measured and calculated through my replies and clicks on links.
This is why I’m not worried about twitter’s or facebook’s long-term business model. Any sort of collection of user data is a point of value: Measure traffic and replies to the business’s twitter account. Or use url shortening services to mark a particular individual communication and follow the path of the user from first interaction to sale, communications systems. Rampant collection of user data has countless possibilities for premium business services, all at the cost of the customer’s privacy and the basic humanity of the communication itself.
The appeal of these sort of services to businesses when compared to the lousy and risky online ad market is clear. You let your staff interact with the customers as peers, you leverage that interaction, both as increased customer support and as a subtle and non-threatening marketing venue, often without either the employee or the customer realising it.
The online marketing tactics of most businesses will, over time, be largely two-pronged. One part will emphasise search engines, both through search engine optimisation and through search engine advertising. Another will measure and leverage peer-level interactions between the employees and customers to drive brand awareness and sales. Sometimes the two will go hand in hand, as with corporate blogs, and the marketing department will be very, very happy.
Online advertising has problems to begin with, from lousy overall quality to ruthless competition, but its final and decisive adversary is measured human interaction which seamlessly scale from free services to very involved and expensive operations.
Over time, businesses will find that some online writing and communications styles have a higher ‘return on investment’, that some types of interactions will be more ‘valuable’ than others and they will invest in preparation and training to make their employees more effective. But that won’t be much of a loss from our perspective as customers because they do this already with our off-line commercial communications. We will have lost or gained nothing except that when we attempt to interact with the scripted lines of a minimum wage worker online, all of it will be analysed, broken apart and measured in ways not possible with the ‘real-world’ equivalent.
The coffee I bought that first day I walked into the Southville Deli was wonderful. It was strong without being bitter or overwhelming and rich without reducing the fundamental ‘coffeeness’ of the taste.
Of course, I can’t for the life of me remember its name, but despite that I manage to buy it every time I’ve gone to the deli since then.
“400 grams of that Fairtrade coffee you’ve got, please. The one from somewhere in Asia, I think. … Yeah, that’s the one … Ground, please—for a cafetière.”
