I generally assume no one’s paying much attention to what I post on Twitter, so I was surprised and challenged when a friend asked me to post my results last week. Calling my bluff, in a sense.
Humblebrag: singing in public doesn’t freak me out too much. I’ve won two singing contests on two different cruise ships and I’m comfortable doing karaoke with friends, but posting this is different than belting “Luck Be a Lady” with a boozy crowd on a Saturday at The Mint. What we post online lasts forever. (cheesy echo)Forever…forever…forever…
Now that I know most common chords on the baritone ukelele, it’s time to start working on my technique. It’s a peculiar instrument, so finding an instructor has been a challenge. If you know someone who teaches baritone uke in San Francisco, let me know.
This post isn’t about Rush Limbaugh. It’s about how companies react to a crisis.
Several days ago, out of professional curiosity (and a wee bit of schadenfreude), I visited Twitter and Facebook accounts belonging to several of Limbaugh’s sponsors.
Most circled the wagons while they settled on a strategy. (Five will get you ten that no Community Managers participated in these conversations.) While the suits crafted a corporate response, their social media drones flew in tight formation, awaiting instructions.
One of my guiding principles (at work and in life) is that at any given moment, we’re all doing the best we can. So when I saw this, I was surprised and a little sad (click to enlarge):
ProFlowers.com social media team: if this is the best you can do, I respectfully suggest that you find a new line of work. Preferably one where you don’t interact with the public.
Consider how much white-hot outrage it takes the average American to write an angry letter, then ask yourself whether CTRL + C and CTRL + V is appropriate crisis management.
When people still sent letters of complaint, marketers could get away with cookie cutter, Mail Merge responses like these. Using social media as a rubber stamp isn’t just lazy, it’s disrespectful; you’re telling customers (and your competitors) that contacting you was a complete waste of their time. For some ProFlowers.com female clients, I imagine it added insult to injury.
ProFlowers might have alienated fewer people if they’d simply posted an opaque response to buy some time and went dark until they had a real announcement to make.
Put another way: a florist in a small town sponsors a local bowling team. After the team loses a tournament, several keglers start a brawl that results in injuries, arrests and very unflattering local news coverage. Because the team was sponsored by Roger’s Florists, a group of concerned citizens visits the proprietor to find out if he’ll continue supporting the team.
Each time a customer asks Roger whether he’ll keep buying bowling shirts and shoes for the team and letting them use his van for road trips, he extracts a 3 X 5 card and clears his throat before reciting:
“Your concerns affect how we manage our dealings with local sports teams. Thank you again for your feedback.”
or:
“I understand your concerns and I will ensure that your feedback is communicated to the manager of the bowling team.”
Even after Roger washes his hands of the bowling team, how many customers will keep him at the top of their list the next time they have a need for a florist? There’s a lot of competition out there.
My friend Cynthia recently introduced me to Amelia Ceja, the president and owner of Ceja Vineyards.
We ran into Amelia at the opening of Tarla Grill in Napa; after dinner, she generously opened up the Ceja tasting room two blocks away so we could continue our conversation and sample some of her personal favorites. On the drive home to San Francisco, I started planning a meal that would be worthy of the wine gently clinking in the back seat.
(video by Cynthia)
A few days later, I was standing in line at Drewes Brothers Meats. After a few minutes, a burly, well-inked guy working the counter asked what he could do me for.
I nodded at a large mound of pink, radial slices. “I’d like four — no, make it five pounds of oxtails, please.”
He grinned and went to work.
I don’t eat much beef, but one of the benefits of going to Drewes Bros. is that you know exactly where your food comes from. The cuts I asked for were Niman Ranch oxtails, which meant that until very recently, they were attached to creatures fed a vegetarian, antibiotic-free diet who’d wandered freely under the California sun.
These cows had had a wonderful life; consuming them would surely make my life incrementally more wonderful.
The other attraction to preparing oxtails is that they’re not really on our food radar. High-end restaurants may have it on the menu occasionally, but you won’t find it at most supermarkets or butchers. Because it’s so far outside the everyday, it’s an exciting challenge. At the same time, preparing perfectly braised oxtails is fairly easy. (Full disclosure: I’d made them once before, about 10 years ago.)
There is a lot of prep work required, so if you can draft someone else into helping out as your sous chef, the work will go faster. If you’re unsure of your knife skills, buy pre-chopped veggies in the produce section and you might shave 15 minutes off your prep time. I did the prep work myself, but I’m lucky enough to own a paring knife and an 8-inch chopper from New West Knifeworks that have high-quality blades.
Ingredients:
4 to 5 lbs oxtails
4 tablespoons butter
2 onions
3 carrots
4 celery stalks
6-8 cloves garlic
4 shallots
rosemary
thyme
Italian parsley
1 tbsp freshly ground black pepper
2 tsp sea salt
1 tbsp onion powder
2 cups flour
2 bottles Pepperwood Grove Pinot Noir
Instructions:
Set oven to 300.
Pour both bottles of Pinot Noir into a large stockpot over medium-low heat. Use a wooden spoon to measure the depth; when the wine has reduced by about half, turn off the heat.
Dice the onions, celery, shallots and combine them in a large bowl.
Mince the Italian parsley, rosemary and thyme, then add half to the diced vegetables.
Use this trick to peel the garlic in a few seconds. Toss the skins, trim the end from each clove and mince finely before adding to the bowl of chopped veggies. If you have a mortar and pestle, you can save a lot of time on this step.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, chopped herbs, sea salt, black pepper and onion powder. Use tongs to dredge the oxtails in the seasoned flour; make sure that each piece is well-coated, then set them aside on a cookie sheet.
Melt a tablespoon of butter in a large cast-iron skillet on medium-high heat, then add the chopped vegetables. Stir for a few minutes until soft and translucent, then put them back in a separate bowl.
Add another tablespoon of butter to the skillet; use tongs to brown the oxtails evenly (2-3 minutes). Add more butter as needed; when the meat has a golden-brown crust, move it to a large roasting pan.
Add the chopped vegetables to the reduced wine and set the flame for a low simmer. When the veggies are soft and the pot is aromatic, turn off the heat and use a slotted spoon to layer the vegetables over the oxtails. Pour the remaining liquid into a corner of the roasting pan; the oxtails should be nearly submerged. If you need more liquid, use a bit of beef broth.
Slide the roasting pan into the back of your oven; when the oxtails have browned a bit further, use 3 – 4 sheets of foil to make a tight seal, then put it back in the oven so you can work on your side dishes. As accompaniments, I made basil dumplings and roasted Brussels sprouts.
After about 2 ½ hours, peel back the foil carefully. By this point, the meat should fall off the bone if you give it a stern look, but try it with a fork.
We enjoyed the oxtails with a Ceja 2008 Rosé, and I can honestly say that it was one of the best, most memorable meals I’ve ever prepared. Everything was perfect, and it each dish complemented the other in terms of flavor and texture. The next time I do oxtails, I’ll probably use a Ceja Cabernet Sauvignon in place of the Rosé, but I have absolutely no complaints about this meal.
It’s not often that cooking feels like a form of creative expression, but this was definitely one of those occasions. I used my imagination and hands to create something original. After the food was plated, I nearly didn’t recognize it, which freed me up to be an enthusiastic and receptive audience — as much as if I’d been handed the plate by a waiter in a restaurant.
I keep meaning to post music here more frequently.
Tweeting is easy, since anything stupid I express there is lost in a rushing torrent. Eveny though every public Tweet is archived by the Library of Congress, I can’t see a sociology student in 2212 making too much out of me snarking about Madonna’s Super Bowl appearance.
These ukulele posts are another thing entirely. Posting something I’ve played invites judgment and scrutiny, but I’m discovering that I care less and less about what others think of my creative output. If it’s an authentic expression of where I am creatively at any given moment, I’m less reluctant to share than I used to be.
I recorded this with a gently-used Yeti Stereo Mic that works fairly well; it’s a lot easier than trying to lean into my Mac Book Pro’s condenser mike for the length of a song.
Scalpers 1, me, zero. (click through for the larger version.)
Well, it was like, this, see:
Dave Chappelle performs standup only intermittently since he retired from his breakout TV series. As a result, if you want to see him live, you need to be very lucky, or you have to know someone. Or, you’ll go to a scalper.
Tickets for all three nights sold out in less than half an hour, so a friend posted an ad on Craigslist seeking 2 tix for last night’s show, and a guy responded. I met him at Powell BART on Tuesday night and he showed me his printed StubHub receipts for the tickets.
The paperwork looked legit, so I gave him $150, much less than what he paid for them via StubHub and just a little over face value. He bought them as a New Year’s gift for his girl, but she had to do inventory at Nordstrom last night, so he decided to unload them. I overlooked this giant red flag because I really wanted to see Dave Chappelle.
Nothing to see here.
The line at the venue was the longest I’ve ever seen at The Independent, so it took a long time for us to actually get in even after doors were opened. And then we got the bad news from the guy reading barcodes at the door; he’d scanned these tickets 40 minutes ago when the doors first opened.
I was pleased to find out that today is David Bowie’s birthday. In honor of his 65th, here’s my second uke release; a cover of his glam hit, “Starman.”
I have a little trouble switching from Bb to Bbm, but it still worked out. If it entertained you, let me know.
In part 1, I wrote about how community management contributed to tribe.net’s success and how traditional marketing played a key role in the company’s downfall, but those are small aspects of a larger story.
I put a call out to some former co-workers to get their input; the folks who responded were both early Engineering hires, and they each affirmed that my input into the product development process added value. If I get more feedback from other teammates, I’ll share it here. (And folks, if you don’t mind me sharing your names, let me know so I can edit this post.)
The reply I received from Engineer 1 suggested that I was was an effective proxy for our members, but that our overall progress toward creating a highy functional, user-friendly product was spoiled by “too many cooks.” As a result, he said that our service became less successful over time, even though we had direct and actionable feedback from end-users telling us exactly what they needed and wanted.
I agree with his assessment that what we were creating was “truly revolutionary.” We didn’t rely on the cold calculations of the social graph “to provide advertisers with a better view into what to try to sell me.” At times, our social network was “maddeningly hard to use, stupidly fragile and yet, it serves the needs admirably.” He also wrote;
“Who you report to is immaterial if leadership is dedicated to providing utility, usefulness or entertainment, or, as seems to be the vast majority case, not dedicated to such.”
In part 1, I suggested that Community Management might have been more effective if it’d been run out of Operations. My reasoning was facile; Ops generally gets the resources it needs, because when it doesn’t, things break down. This was a pretty simple reading of Operations teams, and I’ve got some second thoughts about that.
Engineer 2 praised me as “the ultimate user advocate … and therefore should have been a part of the Product organization with significant upstream input on features and priorities.”
In hindsight, I agree with him completely. The person writing/reviewing Product Requirement Documents has a permanent seat at the table, even if they attend more meetings than they care to. However, I never really felt that my CM input was embraced by the entire product team. I got along well with our PMs, but I’ll never forget the afternoon I turned to one in frustration and asked if we could prioritize the development of some admin tools that would reduce the amount of manual work I had to do.
I’ll never forget his response:
“It’s not my job to make your job easier.”
I was a little floored by such a baldly disinterested response. Instead of interpreting it as rudeness, I decided to assume that this was the way all product managers operated and that I must have crossed a line.
Several years later, a talented product manager (and several former co-workers) set me straight, and I’m deeply appreciative.
Another reason I’m certain tribe.net thrived early on is because everyone owned their role. I recently heard someone say that working in an immature startup is like little-league soccer; regardless of their respective positions, everyone swarms the ball if it rolls their way.
I’ve seen that problem writ large at many firms, but not at tribe.net. In terms of mutual respect and teamwork, I’ll be lucky if I ever find an culture/environment like that again.
The taxi dispatcher called me "chief" four times as he took my reservation, and I liked it. 23 hours ago
Having a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that these animals were born in the wild, a mile from my house: sfist.com/2012/05/29/loo…1 day ago
