March 2007

In mid-February, I went to a two-day conference in San Francisco called Managing Experience Through Creative Leadership.   You would be hard-pressed to find a tonier, more hip, we-are-not-the-target-audience, Internet group than at this soiree.  Did your Six Sigma project go Blue Sky?  Basecamp is our collaborative project management tool. Are you on Twitter?

Huh?

Representation at the conference included the likes of powerhouses Google, Mapquest and Flickr.  Heck, even someone representing the United Nations was there.  Let’s just say that this Sacramento country mouse felt a little out of her element.  But.  Carry on I did, even finding a new signature for my email correspondence—Onward!

San Francisco is such a cosmopolitan city that I simply had to wear my jet-black platform power boots, transforming myself from an ordinary working gal to a techno-saavy bitchin’ chick.  The fatal flaw in the transformation plan was the ten blocks I had to walk from Sutter and Hyde Streets to the City Club at Sansome Street.  Let’s just say the blisters were abscessing before I even reached my final destination near Market Street.  Oy vay.  Onward!

Peter Merholz, a conference host, summarized the event as follows: By achieving empathy we realize an experience strategy that gets us to design beyond products (and maintain focus when making mistakes). This requires systems thinking (which in return requires tearing down walls) that produces transformation for your matrixed adaptive organization.

Say what? Is this guy talkin’ English or some Internet diatribe meant to create inferiority and contempt for the common folk?  Oh.  Okay.  I get it.  What Peter means is this: it’s an allaboutme.com world.  After all, didn’t Time Magazine name you and I as the Person of the Year?  For this reason, the phrase “human experience” enters the lexicon of Internet-speak. 

No one unraveled the riddle of the human experience better than keynote speaker Lou Carbone.  Lou’s company, Experience Engineering, represents clients such as Blockbuster, Avis and Taco Bell.  An affable fellow with an every man demeanor, Lou talked about his experience trying to pump life into the now-defunct Howard Johnson’s chain.  He told a story about how the Ho Jo chain tried to cut corners to save cost in the most unholy of places like eliminating the rum raisin ice cream because it gunked up the machines and so it was too expensive to clean—even though it was a favorite item of the older crowd.  Where’s my rum raisin ice cream?  I ain’t never comin’ back here again! 

Lou then contrasted that human experience with the climate-controlled world of Disney.  He shared the extra steps executives at Disney take in creating the emotional connection required for an optimum, magical experience.  Disney secrets like pumping the scent of cookies through the Main Street vents to stimulate feelings of home; and the exact measurement of the wind’s velocity as a park visitor soars over California on a free flight ride.   Lou’s advice to our group is to consider each person as an individual—not as a faceless, nameless consumer. 

My intention is to take Lou’s advice to heart.  So often I take for granted that I am working on a mass communication project.  These projects can take the form of a website, a marketing campaign, or a simple brochure.  I will now consider interpersonal communication as my point of connection.  On my client’s behalf, I will try to deliver a heartfelt touchstone that offers an individual the opportunity to resonate with the communication channel.  In short, I will remember that there is a live human being on the other end of delivery—flesh and bone.   I know my work is cut out for me.  But. Carry on I will.  Onward!