TOUCH and the Swarm Methodology - Preview of @todmaffin Keynote

And that's what we're talking about with our next speaker today. He wants to make the digital world human again, which makes a lot of sense. He is the country's go-to commentator on the impact of accelerated technological change and sort of innovation in business. He's president of EngageQ Digital, which is one of Canada's podcasting pioneers. He reports on technology trends on CBC Radio. He's the author of the highly anticipated book Touch: 5 Factors to Growing and Leading a Human Organization. And this book has already been named by Apple as one of the biggest books for fall, and it doesn't even come out until October, unless you're here at Engage 2014, in which case we have advance copies for you. So make sure you check those out. That's, uh, that is NBD, no big deal, as the internet says. He also was one of the internet's first webmasters, beating out heavyweights like Sony and AT&T It's such an honor to welcome Tod Maffin! Thank you.

No— sorry. Thank you. Good morning, actually. Haha.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Good morning. Boy oh boy. I have a confession to make there. The 8th best website in the world award that you heard? That is true. I won that in 1998. When there were in fact only 9 websites in the world, so reasonably easy target to hit. Yeah, this is the first time I've seen my book this morning. Like, we've been working on it, my co-author and friend Mark Blevis and I have been working on it for 18 months, and we physically, I physically saw it today for the first time, which is weird, you know, because it's all just been PDF documents. And so I called him, I took a picture of it, and I called him, and I'm like, hey, I can, I've got the book right in my hand. You know what he says? Honest to goodness truth, this happened an hour ago. "Hey, what does it smell like?" What is wrong with you? Anyway, he wanted to know if it smelled like a Gestetner machine. Anyone remember Gestetner machines? And remember, you know, you get those like the purple colored thing and you print it out and what's the first thing you would do? Smell it. People under 30 will have to have that explained, I'm sure. What is he talking about? Anyway, I've already uploaded the slides that you're going to see and if you want to go to this address, it works on your smartphone right now. Bit.ly/NSBest14, and in a couple of days I will send you a recording of everything that you see here that I'm presenting. But let's first talk a bit about technology in the business world. How many of you, just for a show of hands, have ever had this happen? So you call your cell phone company or your cable provider, right? And so you get on the phone, and now the robot answers first, right? You don't get to talk to a human. The robot answers. The robot says, Punch in your phone number to look up your account. So you punch in your phone number and then it repeats it. "Is this your phone number?" You say, "Yes, for one." Then you get placed on hold. No, not hold. Priority sequence. Whatever that lie is. And then you're on there for about 5 minutes and then you get another robot voice comes on and tells you how important your call is to them and then you're on hold for another 5 minutes and then the CSR, the customer service rep, comes back. What is the first thing they ask you? Your phone number! Like, what is wrong with us today? Here is the problem, right? Businesses jump on technology because we think that it will improve business for us, and it doesn't. Well, it kind of does, but the problem with it— and you think about all the different aspects of business technology, you know, whether it's templated responses over email. You ever been in one of these web chats with like a, like, I don't know, Microsoft or Apple or one of these things? Instead of like calling, it says use our web chat system. Amtrak has one of these. You know, so you're like, "I have this specific problem," and then you wait, and you wait, and you wait. And I'm kind of a prick, so I'll go, "Hello?" Well, what's happening is that they're on a conversation with 20 other people. They've got 20 windows. You know, or HR, if you're in HR, you know, we've got all these systems that will help us analyze the keywords in people's resumes, as opposed to just picking up the phone and calling them, which is completely bizarre. And here is the problem, right? Every layer of business technology that we add removes a layer of humanity. And I believe, as does my co-author Mark, that that needs to change. The business should be about humanity. So what I wanted to talk to you about this morning is just a couple of examples from the book. The way we've kind of outlined it, we talk about what those 5 factors are. By the way, it's Technology, Outcomes, Uniqueness, Clarity, and Humanity. Acronyms are really important. You know, when I first got started speaking like 15, 16 years ago, there's a fellow who's been at it for a long time. He says acronyms are really important. Like, then you can say you've got a system or a method, you know. So I used to own the trademark Assured ROI, and I had to do this presentation of viral marketing. And so I was trying to make it like, say, assured, like all the, you know, and I got all of them except the letter U. I couldn't figure it out, so my acronym is just ASSRED. And, and if you actually go to assred.com, that's actually where the thing is, sadly. We've got a touch self-assessment tool, which is not dirty, even though it sounds like it is. And then every chapter— but let me tell you a bit about one of the things that came out of it. It's what we call the Swarm Method. So years ago, I used to have a podcast, back when podcasting was very, very first invented, right? Back in whenever the heck it was, 2004, 2005 or something. It was called the How to Do Stuff podcast. And all it was was I would interview a bunch of friends of mine about things that they were interested in and things that they did, you know, for a living. I went onto a jet aircraft with the permission, obviously, of the pilot, like one of these big 777s, 'cause I wanted to know, I did a podcast on how do you start a jet aircraft. Do you know how this is done, by the way? There's a button that says start. And I'm like, that's it? That's all it is? For the nerds in the audience, where are my nerd friends, geeks? Come on, geeks! Yay! So when iTunes 4.7, I know it's really hard to see, but trust me, it's there. I was number 11. But of course there were only 12, just like the other— there weren't that many. So I had this podcast called the How to Do Stuff podcast, and the idea was that I would interview all these people, as I said. And I did this one podcast called How to Get Upgraded on Air Canada for Free. And those of you who do a lot of flying will know that, at least in the olden days, you know, like last year, they used to have these certificates, and they were different colors, right? And if you got like the orange-red color, like Like, you, you, like, you, that stuff was gold, you know. So all these certificates is the way the system used to work. I'm going to tell you how this system works of how to get upgraded for free without a certificate because it doesn't work anymore. And you're going to think I'm a horribly unethical person because it requires two lies. But here's how it worked, and this is what I did the podcast on. So first of all, this only worked on full flights, right? So you call them up and you call them ahead of time and you say, I'd like to upgrade my flight. And they say, do you have a certificate? This is where you lie. You say, yes, I do. So now think about what's happening in their computer, right? They pull you out of— this is a full flight. They pull you out of your seat in economy in the computer, put you in business class. This frees up a seat in economy. What do they do with that seat? They sell it, right? Plane full again. Now, so the day of the flight comes, and you go to the gate, and you sit there, and they do the now boarding Star Alliance Gold, blah, blah, blah. And you stay there. You don't move. And they say, "Now we're gonna board from the back of the plane in the rows whatever to whatever," and you don't move. And they say, "Now we're gonna board the rest of the seats and standbys," and you stay. And then they say, "Last call. Last call for flight 33, service to Vancouver," and you still, you do not move. This requires nerves of steel to pull off, but it worked every time, okay? And then, because those of you who do a lot of flying will know there's actually two last calls. There's that one and then there's the one with your name. Mr. Maffin. Maffin, Mr. Maffin, right? And you still don't move. You stay in the gate area, okay? And then, like, you need an enormous amount of caffeine or drinking to pull this off. And only when they walk to the door, you know, of the ramp— because when that door's shut, that door is shut— and then what you do is you run up like this and you're like, oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, and, and here's my boarding pass. And they say "Uh, do you have your certificate?" Here's line number 2. This is what you do. You go, "Oh, shit. Sorry. I know it's, uh, um, I'm just— I'm so sorry. Uh, hold on. I've got— I know I've got it in here somewhere. I've just— Oh my God. I'm so sorry. I—" Right? And you do this. And now think about what's happening to them, right? Is they've got a completely full flight. There's one seat left on the plane. It's in business class. It has your name on it. What do they do? They let you on. So this was my secret. And so I did a podcast about this, and no big deal, you know, like Jesse said, NBD, as they say on the internet. There was no— and then about 3 weeks later, I started getting all this hate mail on my website. Like, I'm talking 50 or 60 people with all sorts of hate mail. And it was like a swarm of bees. And one of the things with a swarm of bees is all swarms have a hive, right? They all start somewhere. So if you're in digital marketing or just in communications or you run any sort of thing with your organization and you get attacked in social media or the digital sphere, which will happen to you, it's not if, it's when, it happens to everyone, you need to know how to respond. So I asked this group of people where their hive was. I'm like, where are all you people coming? 'Cause it was like, And all of a sudden, within an hour, 40, 50, "I can't believe you're doing this, da da da da da." So as it turns out, they were all on a website called Flyertalk, which is like a— and some guy had written this up there. Now at the time that I was doing this podcast, I was working for CBC. They started me in television because they're idiots. I didn't do very well. And I said the word syphilis on air once. I started my career in radio that day. Apparently the red light on the camera means that it's on. So I was at CBC at the time, and this was going up, except this is not exactly what the article said. What the article actually said was, "The CBC's Tod Maffin." Oh shit. And this had nothing to do with the CBC, right? And I was getting comments like this on them. You know, "Oh, someone at the CBC is telling us how to lie and steal." "Everyone knows everyone at the CBC flies in business class." "I just emailed this to the National Post." "Oh my God!" So how I chose to respond eventually formed what we use at my company and what we talk about in the book as the SWARM methodology. It's 5 steps. Sometimes it's easy as 5 simple sentences, and I'm going to walk you through it really quickly. The first is the S, right? It's talking about speaking like a human, right? The tone is so critically important. Avoid we statements, use I, take personal responsibility, sign with your first name. People want to deal with people. This is why on Twitter all these organizations, these companies, they try to inject themselves into the conversation. Like September 11th, every time it comes around, you know, there's some stupid company, it's like Oreo celebrates our veterans by— if you buy 30 Oreo packages, it's like, what are you people doing? Companies don't have conversations. People have conversations. Now you might be a person at a company, that's okay, but it's the tone that you use is so critically important. Second, the W stands for win-win. You have to give them a win, right? If you get attacked in social media, you need to give them something back. You need to make them feel like they've won. They want vindictive justice, right? They get their torches out and their pitchforks. You have to give them something that Beyond just thank you, we won't be taking this into consideration. Have you ever got one of these emails? Avoid a public battle. So move it offline. As soon as you have the discussion, as soon as you identify that there's a problem, ask them to DM you. I just got a Twitter, like one of these iPhone locks, not Twitter, iPhone locks on my door and it didn't work. And so I eventually just called them and they said no problem, we'll deal with it in email as opposed to Twitter, which I did at first. You know, if there are errors, Correct the mistakes. It's okay to do that. And then make friends. So invite them to join an advisory panel. In the end, this is how I responded. I'm not gonna read all of it to you, but you can get, you know, the tone is really important. And I gave them a win. I pulled the podcast from my website. Who cares? It was just a podcast. Then I corrected all of the mistakes, which is okay to do, and then ended with some human language, right? This looks like a great board, and I'm looking forward to participating once this well-deserved lashing is over. As soon as I posted this, as soon as I did these 5 steps, the hate mail dropped off instantly. There were only 4 more posts on that podcast. There was this one, classy: Welcome, Tod, and thanks. Your first post is a harbinger of great things to come. My favorite was the guy who said, you know, for all those people who are complaining about you scamming Air Canada out of an upgrade, those same people are over on the Hilton board Teaching people how to scam Hilton out of a gold card, which I thought was great. That's the right way to do it. Let me show you the wrong way to do it. This is a burger joint in New York called Joe's. Nice burger joint. They had a— this poor person who moved to New York recently had a burger. They posted it on Yelp. They said the burger tasted like propane. My 2 years of living in New York City, this is awful. To his credit, to his credit, The owner replied. Unfortunately, here is what he said: "Julia, it has been said that an educated consumer is our best customer. Clearly you do not fall into this category. You are an idiot." And then he goes on to say, "There's an Applebee's in Times Square, maybe you should go there." And then my favorite line, "Welcome to New York, now please go back to where you came from." Oh my God! This was so bad the media started picking up on it. Although I have to say, talking about taking a negative to a positive, my absolute favorite response to a negative Yelp review is this coffee shop in Chicago. Come in and try the worst Thai tea that one guy on Yelp ever had in his life. Can you imagine? I bet your sales quadrupled as soon as they did that. But see, this is the problem, right? We take business technology, we try to apply technology to it, and really what you should be doing is applying humanity to it, applying the basics of it. Humans are collecting data points about themselves all the time. All of this will follow not just into retail, but all into the— you know, I mean, think about all the gadgets that are out there. This is the— my scale looks like this. These are my— this is what my feet look like. Tells you what you weigh, tells your body fat, and then it transmits it via Wi-Fi to your iPhone so you can keep track, if you're a data nerd like I am, of all your— you know, keeps track of your BMI. You can look at a chart to find out what your weight was like. I don't know what happened on February 1st. I just noticed that. Oh, that was "pie for dinner day," that's right. And then there's these devices, right? You know, like these little watches that— and all these are trying to be human, they're trying to assist us. They're technology to assist us as human beings, and sometimes it can be used against you in the course of an organization. If you haven't seen one of these, These are great. They track how much sleep you have, you know. The higher the bars indicate how much sleep you get. This is a sort of a chart over the course of the day. I mean, it's really— it's actually quite amazing. You put into it everything that you eat. So if it's like a packaged food, you just scan the barcode. So it tracks for you everything you eat, everything you drink, everything— oh, sorry. Shit. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Slides. That was for the Vancouver crowd, sorry. My wife, Jocelyn, you know, I can keep track of her moods. Actually, you can connect this with— although I did find out that it'll— you can connect it right to your email. So if you don't get enough sleep, it'll email your spouse for you and apologize. It'll vibrate after 60 minutes if you haven't gotten enough, you know, if you don't get up and move around. Although I found out that the way to do it is just keep typing with one hand and then just shake your hand in the air. Like, it doesn't know. It thinks you've gone for this incredible jog. So how will technology sort of move into that with these devices? It's not just going to be on our, you know, these sort of things for capturing data. It will affect you and your organization. Not, as I mentioned, not just in the retail sector, although that's where they're going to be doing it even more, where it's even more dangerous. This is an app called the Amazon Price Checker. This is going to destroy retail. This is going to destroy retail. So let's imagine that I go to, say, London Drugs or Costco, and I stand in front of, on the shelf, the box, one of these mix— what are these called? Mixers? Stirrers? Mix soap? I don't know. I don't cook. As long as the recipe says remove film before microwaving, I'm really good at cooking. So let's say you stand in front of one of these, you know, Stir-O-Matic 2000 machines, and you're wondering if you can get it cheaper. Well, now all you do is you pull out your cell phone, right? And you scan the barcode symbol and it will tell you where you can buy this product cheaper within a 4-minute walk. This takes 6.8 seconds to do. Even Forbes, right, the conservative magazine Forbes, calls it evil. So where will this play out? This will play out, I suspect, in a number of ways. One, is the idea of a loyalty concierge. Think about, think about if you've ever been to Las Vegas or Reno or any of the sort of gambling places where there's a huge casino. You know, they've got the cameras up in the ceiling, right? And one of the things that people always think is they think that there's a bunch of people that are looking at these cameras. And there kind of are, but mostly it's software that are watching this, right? It's pattern recognition. Millions and millions of dollars have been invested in this. So it's not just a dark room full of people that you're expecting watching the cameras. It's really the software. And one of the things that this pattern recognition software does is it tries to figure out what your intention is based on how you walk and how you move around. So if you're a normal player like me, like roulette is my vice, you know, I might walk over to a roulette table. I walk in, you know, normal pace. I sit down. I play 5 or 6 rounds. I lose $20. I go drown my sorrows in chow mein, right? That is a recognized pattern. They might call it Pattern 212. Now they also know about deceptive patterns. One thing that they've learned about people walking into a casino is that people who are intending to do the casino harm walk 25% faster than the rest of us. They're a little bit more focused. And what do they do? Well, the camera watches and figures out based on their heat mapping, right? Based on their body, their thermal imaging, it figures out, well, this person didn't just go to the first table. They kind of stood around. They went to a bunch of different tables, right? And maybe they had a glass in their hand that they kept picking up and putting down. The camera recognizes this. And says, "This is a deceptive pattern." And so it alerts a human being. That's how these things work now. And they might say, "Can I tap your chips for good luck?" This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. If you got someone with a stack of chips beside you and you say, "Can I tap your chips for good luck?" And you've got a piece of duct tape, double-sided duct tape on the bottom of your glass, you're like, "Tap, tap," and now you've got a $100 chip. Please don't do this. You will get in trouble. So I suspect what we'll begin to see is this concept of a loyalty concierge. You know, just like casinos now are looking for people who are walking fast and going through different patterns. People who we used to call loss prevention officers, who we'll probably call loyalty concierges now, are looking for patterns, maybe even based on these camera pattern recognition software. And what is the pattern they're looking for? Someone walking up to a product with an iPhone and holding it up like they're scanning it. And if this retail pattern recognition detects that, you send one of your formerly loss prevention officers, currently loyalty concierges, you race them over to that person. And what do you do? Whatever you can. Because they've got a list of places they can buy it cheaper within a 4-minute walk, or just order it right online, right? Hey, we'll help you, we'll take it out to your car, we'll set it up for you for free, our, you know, extended warranty is much, much better than theirs. You know, and it gets worse, it's not just these devices, right? Think about what Google has been working on for the longest time. Google Glass, you won't even— You don't even need to hold up your phone anymore. 'Cause it'll just be, I swear this is true, Google is working on digital contact lenses. Contact lenses. Now it's measuring glucose and things, but I mean, one of these days we'll all have microchips in our eyes. Apple's Watch, which finally got released, you won't even have to pull out a phone. It's incredible how these things move. I loved the way that these, the prototypes, people who didn't look, who didn't know what the Apple Watch was gonna look like, so the different prototypes. I like this one. In addition to the book being available today, I'm pleased to announce I have actually designed my own digital watch. It's going up on Kickstarter, and you are the first group to see it. Now, there are some design issues with it. I have not yet worked out some of the aesthetics, but, but, but I think we're getting there. So, you know, really what it comes down to though is across all aspects of business, whether it's in communications or legal or HR, we have all this technology at our fingertips. But what we do is we use it against ourselves, right? We have templated responses instead of human responses. We have, like I said, you know, HR machines reading resumes instead of actually, you know, what I, what I love to do is try to help people and organizations bring more humanity into the business, which I think is is what we should be doing anyway. Anyway, that's it for me, and that is the address where you can download this presentation. Thanks for your time. Have a great day.