Product innovation is expensive. Too expensive to be mishandled by a careless handoff to your marketing and sales departments at precisely the moment when you could convert interest in your shiny new product into coveted cash generating sales.

I’m amazed – no, actually appalled – at the number of companies who spend tens of thousands of dollars developing a new product, take it to a trade show, gain press recognition and even Best of Show awards and then do absolutely nothing to capitalize on the interest generated or monetize their efforts with a thoughtful sales strategy.

Two recent examples stand out for me:

At last month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Griffin introduced an iPad mount that screws onto the end of a microphone stand. It’s the perfect solution for me since I like to use my iPad as a teleprompter for online videos that I post to assorted blogs, and the mic stand holder would let me position the iPad directly above the tripod holding my camera.

Apparently I’m not the only one who sees the appeal of  this innovation, since Griffin generated a lot of media mentions including major technology blogs like Gizmodo and tuaw.

Glad You Like Us. Now Go Away.
But heading over to the Griffin website, I discovered that despite its announcement, the product wasn’t available for sale but was Coming Soon. What does that mean? It means that if I want the mic stand mount I have to keep checking back every few days until it actually becomes available. Griffin took no steps to capture my identity to inform me when it becomes available, didn’t ask me for an email address to keep in touch, didn’t  take a pre-order (which I would have paid for) and, in general, did absolutely nothing to connect with me and potentially sell me on this or other Griffin iPad related products.

They wasted an ideal opportunity to convert innovation into sales.

Based on the size of their booth at CES, I’d bet that Griffin spent more than $100,000 to attend the CES and showcase their products, not including the cost of developing the products themselves, yet their  efforts resulted in annoyance and alienation because they failed to implement any method to satisfy customer interest or plan to get their new products out of their development lab and into our hands.

It Gets Worse
As badly as Griffin handled the handoff from innovation to sales, they’re all-stars compared to MacWorld Best of Show Winner Scosche.

At this month’s Macworld Expo, the device manufacturer introduced a terrific innovation that iPod and iPhone users have been clamoring for: a Bluetooth connected pulse monitoring strap that will track your pulse and calories burned throughout your workout.

The product was so innovative that Macworld name the myTrek one of the Best in Show winners and published a lengthy article detailing the product’s features.

Result: Nothing
Who could ask for more? Well, I could. Because I actually tried to visit their website to buy the product. I’ve been waiting months for someone to introduce this precise product to track my workouts so I clicked over to their website and found…nothing.

That’s right. Nothing. Not a product page, not a press release, not a blog post, not a single mention. Confused, I turned to their Search utility and entered myTrek. Again, nothing.

Innovation FAIL
So Scosche invested thousands to develop a highly sought after product integrated with the single most popular mobile phone in the world, they introduced it at the biggest Apple show in the country and gained Best in Show honors yet they failed not only to promote the product on their corporate home page, but failed to create a web page for the product at all.

And the only thing truly surprising is that they’re not the only innovation-focused company that treats its products with such disregard.

Corporate innovation is intended to produce results. Results that can be measured in dollars collected. There’s simply no excuse for any company to invest in innovation projects yet ignore the revenue  producing potential of those projects by failing to integrate sales and marketing functions from the  start so that the company can maximize the return on their investment and realize the full potential of their innovation.

When most people think of innovation and innovative companies, they mistakenly envision creative geniuses holed up in research labs pursuing that Eureka moment when they miraculously discover The Idea.

You know The Idea. The one truly transformative, groundbreaking and revolutionary business concept that will change not just a company, but an entire industry. That’s The Idea.

The problem is, The Idea really isn’t about innovation at all. In fact, ideas are actually pretty easy to come by. Spend some time at an entrepreneurs conference and you’ll hear at least a dozen ideas that you’re convinced can be the next Google, or Groupon, or whatever tomorrow’s raging hot company is.

Talk to any company that set up an idea forum for their employees to contribute to. They’ll they’ll you that they have so many great ideas that it’s damaging their capacity for innovation. With so many ideas – including those that are genuinely brilliant – to sift through, analyze, prioritize and assess, actual innovation bogs down.

Ideas are a Commodity
Ideas aren’t the problem. Execution is.

Those companies that you envision as innovation leaders aren’t brilliant because of The Idea, they’re brilliant because they had the nerve, the talent and the resilience to actually develop, refine and launch The Idea. They took The Idea from boardroom to showroom.

The Life and Death of an Idea
Several years ago, I witnessed both the inception of The Idea and its ultimate demise while running a company in the packaging industry.

As the manufacturer of label applicators (the machines that apply labels to products), I worked with companies that had special material handling issues that we were uniquely positioned to solve. While working with a major memory card manufacturer in San Diego, we were confronted with a production bottleneck that centered around label application.

The manufacturer was set up for short runs of memory cards with different memory capacities and needed to run 500 16GB cards, then run 1000 8GB cards, then run 300 32GB cards. The problem was that automatic labeling systems took over 20 minutes to changeover from one roll of labels to the next and was killing their productivity, forcing them to resort to hand applying labels to each tiny card.

Ask Why Not?
While brainstorming with my engineers, we asked a question that had never been asked before: what if we changed out the entire labeling head instead of the roll of labels? What if the labeling head itself were made as an interchangeable component instead of a fixed component?

This was The Idea. There was nothing like it in the industry and we had the engineering ability to rapidly prototype, gain proof of concept and ultimately execute The Idea.

And it worked. Product changeover time was reduced from 20 minutes to as little as 40 seconds. The client was so eager to get several machines that they paid the initial development costs in exchange for exclusive rights to the system for one year.

Death Was Swift
Then I sold the company and witnessed how The Idea can meet a swift and brutal demise, despite its promise and potential.

As novel as The Idea was, its brilliance would lay in its execution. The interchangeable labeling heads weren’t enough to guarantee success. The Idea’s success lay in its ability to handle and present the memory cards to the labeling head, to apply the labels with 1/32″ precision and to collect the labeled cards at the end of the process. Nothing that devoted engineers couldn’t resolve.

However, as most companies find out, conceiving The Idea is the sexy, fun and exciting part, but execution determines The Idea’s ultimate success and requires months of boring and tedious work to perfect in the real world. Ultimately, The Idea died when the new business owners declared that they were in the production business, not the innovation business and abandoned The Idea’s refinement process.

And now The Idea awaits another company to discover its potential and put it into production. Or maybe we weren’t as innovative as we thought, and we were just creative thinkers with an idea, not The Idea.

Update:

I found this raw footage of the labeling system on an archived hard disk. Note that even with my clumsiness in loading the labeling head, I still get it locked on in about 20 seconds.

Examining Sony’s abject failure to make any impact in the personal MP3 player market, noted author and blogger David Akers concluded that Sony’s failure was largely due to unfortunate bad timing, not Sony’s strategic decisions or lack of innovative thinking.

Having examined Sony’s repeated failures to exploit their overwhelming market positions and brand magic to gain traction and market share in personal MP3 players, notebook computers, e-books, digital cameras and flat screen tvs, I believe that Sony’s failures can be attributed almost exclusively to their inability to incorporate design thinking into their product conception, development and execution and a singular reliance upon hardware appearance and technical distinction to define themselves with consumers.

That previous sentence was personally painful to write. I’ve been a Sony devotee since the early 1980′s. I’ve owned virtually every type of media device that they’ve ever created, starting with the cassette playing Walkman, the CD playing Walkman, the mini-Disc playing and recording Walkman, digital cameras, digital video cameras, ebooks and VAIO notebooks. I was a Sony fanboy before the term was even coined.

And I was perpetually disappointed.

Not by the quality of their products, which was uniformly excellent, but by their perpetual embrace of proprietary standards and refusal to open their technology ecosystem to their industrial compatriots. They did not play well with others.

Sony cameras worked only with the Sony MemoryStick, a media format adopted by exactly zero electronics manufacturers. So, while other PC users could slip their SD memory cards directly into a slot in the side of their PC, Sony users had to perform an intermediary step and find a USB dongle with a Memory Stick slot. But, since the quality of the pictures was great, I put up with the inconvenience.

Engaging with the Sony video cam was significantly worse. The camera would only connect to a PC with a FireWire port, not the universally available USB port. But, since I had a FireWire enabled VAIO, I was OK. Until I imported the video and discovered that Sony would only import the video in a proprietary Sony file format that could not be edited in any third party movie editing software program.

Their VAIO notebook introduced similar user frustrations. Although my VAIO was a gorgeously designed unit encased in a distinctive metallic purple, Sony simply refused to play well with third party accessories and ultimately had to be retired in favor of an HP tablet computer that promised to behave better.

And Sony’s recent foray into the ebook market did nothing to reclaim their previously held mantle as developers of the best designed electronics in the world. Although their ebook was visually distinctive, solidly manufactured and a pleasure to read, it enraged its users with its needlessly complex steps necessary to load content onto the ebook. Relying, as always, on a proprietary PC -based software platform to display and deliver ebook content, Sony infuriated Mac users who had no ability to load content on the Sony ebook. And even when I did load the proprietary Sony software on a Windows partition on my Mac, the software was so poorly designed, buggy and difficult to use that the entire experience of using their ebook was irreparably diminished.

It’s my decades of experience with Sony’s failure to deliver a single consumer focused, delightfully engaging and thoughtfully designed user experience that convinces me that Mr. Akers’ conclusion is dead wrong and will only provide another excuse for Sony to hide behind.

Sony’s problems with the MP3 players wasn’t that they mistimed the market. It’s that they never conceived the market that Apple imagined and created. It never occurred to them to create an absolutely delightful device AND a surrounding user environment that included finding music, listening to music, buying music, sharing music and syncing music. Apple didn’t win the MP3 player war because they timed the market better. They invented an entirely new immersive mobile music experience that just happened to rely on the iPod as the handheld component necessary to provide mobile music.

For Apple, it wasn’t about the hardware. For Sony, it’s always about nothing but the hardware.

For proof, simply look at the litany of missed opportunities that should have been directly in Sony’s sweet spot: game players as mobile phones (Sony missed it entirely, while the Apple iPhone is now the world’s largest selling portable gaming platform, eclipsing the multi-year headstart of Sony’s PSP), notebook computers (Sony’s insistence on incorporating proprietary components relegated them to single digit market share), MP3 players ( a market that Sony owned and surrendered entirely), digital cameras (again, an insistence on proprietary components limited their appeal, and they’re now an also ran), ebooks (they had the early lead with a gorgeous product that made the Kindle look like a cheap plastic toy, but again Sony’s insistence on proprietary software and file formats allowed Amazon’s Kindle to grab a dominant position they will not relinquish) digital music sales (Sony has an enormous catalog, but their feeble attempts to sell digitally were hampered by proprietary software and file formats, fanatical concern for piracy and a miserable user experience in finding, buying and syncing music.)

Every failure in every major segment can be attributed to the same institutional arrogance, intransigence and strategic ineptitude that has defined Sony for over 30 years. They believe they are wonderful technology designers because they produce visually distinctive products. But physical design simply isn’t sufficient to create an entirely new market and deliver an exceptional user experience.

Sony didn’t fail to extend their domination from portable cassette and CD players to MP3 players because of timing. They failed because they lacked vision. They perceived the market for mobile music as just another pretty device. Apple proved that the market actually wanted a thoughtful and delightful music experience. The difference between the two is software, not hardware. And Sony has never demonstrated nor developed the capacity to envision and create a software experience that delivered more than frustration, confusion and exasperation.

In the technology arena, there are several competitors who strike fear into the hearts of their competitors: Apple, Microsoft, and Google so dominate their technology sectors, that entrepreneurs and investors will intentionally avoid any attempt at direct competition with these behemoths.

But, as evidenced by last week’s Fortune list of the 20 dumbest business moments of 2010, being big doesn’t guarantee market success.

While Apple had a banner year and generated an entire new computing segment with its iPad tablet, Google had three major failures with their Buzz service, Nexus One mobile phone and GoogleTV, and Microsoft killed their Kin mobile phones just over a month after their widely hailed, billion dollar launch.

What each of these product disasters had in common wasn’t a necessarily a lack of innovation, but an absence of design appreciation and the essential need to delight and amaze their users with a products simplicity and utility.

Size Doesn’t Guarantee Success
In fact, I believe that many large companies believe that they can compel the success of their new ideas through the application of brute marketing force. After all, who is going to tell Microsoft that their social media friendly phones will fail if Microsoft is willing to commit $1 billion to their launch? Did I mention that they’re social media friendly? How could they fail in a Facebook world?

Easy.

Just like Google’s Buzz and GoogleTV, Microsoft’s Kin phones delivered miserable user experiences. They were too complex. Too difficult to use. They violated users’ assumptions about how things should work without offering a better alternative, just a different alternative.

Ideas Are Easy
What these failures demonstrate is that coming up with a creative idea for a product is actually the easy part. The hard part is selecting the right idea and implementing it exquisitely.

As a design company whose culture is rooted in delivering exceptional user experiences, Apple hit another home run not just with its conception of a touch-controlled tablet computer, but with its execution of a thoroughly delightful and intuitively simple device that resonated with virtually every user who picked it up.

Apple relied not only on its genius for creative concepts, but on its organization, its internal processes and its metrics in determining what products to pursue and when they’re ready for release.

It’s not their size (which recently surpassed a $300 billion market cap) that fuels their success, but their innovative business model.

Culture Trumps Strategy
Microsoft and Google may rival Apple in size, but what they lack is the design culture that infuses Apple. Microsoft may try to copy specific Apple successes (see their attempt to replicate Apple retail outlets) but without the corporate DNA that fuels innovation and insists on delivering memorable user experiences, their duplicative efforts are nearly guaranteed to disappoint.

Google has fallen into the same trap, believing that their dominant success in the search engine market will transfer just as easily into any technology venture they elect to pursue. But, despite being named one of the most innovative companies in the country by both Fast Company and Business Week, their inclusion seems reliant upon their intentions to enter new markets, not their ability to actually succeed in any new venture. At some point, the magic of their search engine prowess will fade and their perception as an innovative company will become dependent upon delivering memorable, exciting and successful new products and services.

Will this be the year?

I’m flying west this morning, heading to Madison, Wisconsin for the biannual Transplant Games (I was the recipient of a kidney transplant nearly 20 years ago). Above me, in a luggage bin apparently designed to hold no more than a laptop and a magazine sit my tennis racquets, freshly strung for the singles and doubles events that I’m scheduled to compete in.

As a competitive tennis player, my racquets are the most important tools I carry so there’s no way I’d entrust them to any airline’s baggage handlers. In pursuit of the perfect racquet I’ve tested an assortment of frames and experimented with strings at a range of tensions until I found the right combination that provides the responsiveness, feel and power that I rely upon every single shot. And when I break a string, I have complete confidence that the next racquet I pull out of my bag will perform precisely the same way. Every time. Without fail.

How do I know that I can rely upon each racquet’s precision and performance? Because each racquet is prepared by a local entrepreneur, Paul Schambs, whose racquet stringing skills have attained artisan status.

For those who don’t play tennis, or play it casually, the importance of consistency in racquet preparation may seem obsessive, but the deviation of just a few pounds in the string tension can dramatically affect the playability of a racquet. And having pulled a racquet out of my bag that was strung by another, less talented stringer I can attest that the difference in power and feel can throw off your game and affect you mentally.

Which is why so many highly skilled players and even tennis professionals rely upon Paul’s expertise and allow only Paul to string their racquets. He is the tennis equivalent of Stradivarius, carefully crafting each racquet to the specific needs of his stable of players and taking pride in the consistency and exceptional quality of his work.

All of which led me to wonder why so few entrepreneurs and businesspeople are recognized as artisans in their own fields of expertise. Artisans are pursued. They’re highly valued. They can charge a premium.  They’re the recipients of referral business. And they don’t have to produce expensive works of art like Stradivarius. They can make pizzas, fix cars, paint houses, or provide marketing guidance. As long as they do it with deep personal commitment, pride and unmatched expertise, they become irreplaceable artisans.

If you’re not perceived as an artisan in your particular field, what are you doing to change your perception and deliver consistently expert work that separates you from the rest of the pack?

What defines your Microsoft experience?

Frustration?… Confusion?… Anger?

My personal list of Microsoft-inspired adjectives is lengthy, and nowhere on that list appears the word delight.

Frustrated with their perennial regard as the ugly and undesirable stepsister to Apple’s beloved fair maiden Microsoft decided to take action to reclaim their throne and assert their benevolent rule in the technology kingdom.

So, what does Microsoft, in all their imperial wisdom do to stand apart and reassert the provenance of their brand? Why they copy Apple’s retail store, of course. Right down to the fixtures.

Gizmodo acquired a leaked PowerPoint presentation detailing the design of the planned Microsoft retail stores, and after reviewing their plans one thought springs instantly to mind: plagiarism. Seriously, if a college architecture or design student submitted this presentation as a class project to create a new retail design, their professor would be entirely justified in red stamping “PLAGIARISM” across the cover page and charging the student with academic fraud.

When will companies learn that copying innovation and clever design does not bestow those qualities upon your organization?

I predict that within 24 months, Microsoft will realize the futility of copying Apple’s retail efforts and shutter their retail stores. The reasons why:

1. Apple delivers a unique Apple Experience that Microsoft cannot emulate, no matter how hard they try. Apple is a design company that expresses their design innovation through technology. Microsoft is a technology company that attempts to apply design elements to their technology after it’s created. Apple delivers an experience. Microsoft delivers a product. Delivering an exceptional user experience is in Apple’s corporate DNA. It is absent in Microsoft’s corporate DNA. And it’s not about to change.
2. Apple has total control over all of their hardware and software products, Microsoft simply licenses their technology to third parties. Apple maintains its near total control over its user experience by designing, developing and manufacturing every device themselves. This maniacal level of control ensures that there are no missteps in delivering a memorable and delightful user experience. But Microsoft adopted a dramatically different business model, licensing their technologies to thousands of companies to integrate into third party computers and devices. Microsoft’s licensing model expands Microsoft’s market but eliminates their ability to control how the software and hardware components interact with the user.
3. Apple focuses on simplicity while the Microsoft universe is inherently complex. Compared to the thousands of different products that integrate Microsoft technology, Apple offers only a handful of computers, tablets, phones and devices. Their limited product offerings allow Apple to retain control while the millions of iterations of Microsoft products expand the PC universe but add technical complexity and near infinite opportunities for user frustration.
4. It’s the culture, stupid. Steve Jobs instilled an innovation centered culture in Apple that has allowed them to create entirely new segments of technology. Microsoft is not known for their innovation and has not fostered a corporate culture that celebrates innovation and understands how to generate new ideas and new markets. And they apparently never will.
5. Microsoft can’t compete on price with their retail competitors. Apple maintains rigorous control over its distribution channel. They do not allow their products to be discounted, so the price you pay at the Apple store is the same that you pay at Best Buy. However, Microsoft will not be able to discount their offerings or offer the same number of configurations as their larger retail competitors. So why would anyone pay more to buy at Microsoft?
6. Renting your store out for birthday parties does not qualify as a brand differentiator. Nuff said.
7. Opening your stores next to existing Apple stores magnifies your lameness. We all know who was first. We all know who copied whom. Opening your store adjacent to an Apple store reinforces the perception that you have no original ideas.
8. Microsoft’s not cool. Apple is. Do you know anyone who camped out overnight to be the first to get the new Zune? Of course you don’t. No one does. Because Microsoft products are cool anti-matter.

The clock is ticking. When the last door shuts I’ll let you know.

A terrific article in today’s New York Times by Edward Niedermeyer prompted me to document my own belief, from the day I heard of GM’s announcement of their eco-friendly Volt hybrid that it would be a massive and historic commercial failure.

There may be no single automobile ever made that has garnered as much positive press and unfettered support from the press, the green lobby and the government. They desperately want the Volt not only to succeed but to be a game changer, a tipping point in the auto industry.

And I’m here to tell you it won’t be a game changer. It will tip no points, and it will end up losing massive sums of money.

It would be hard for any product to live up to the anticipation and hype that’s surrounded the Volt. The Volt’s  been assigned messianic status in the auto industry, preordained to be the savior of GM, the transformer of all transportation and the harbinger of an entirely new way of thinking in the auto industry.

But the Volt has been destined to fail from day one. Rather than asking their designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, GM should have asked them to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value.

Their objective from the start shouldn’t have been limited to the objective of building a new hybrid car, but to create new interactions, entertainments, immersive, emotional activities that are embodied in an entirely new way to travel.

But GM is not a strategic, design-centered company. They’re a tactical company that has never demonstrated a capacity for design brilliance or its commensurate risk taking.

Want proof? Take a look at the actual Volt that they’ll be attempting to sell this fall for $41,000. It’s nothing more than a Toyota Prius with a $15,000 Chevy bowtie on its grille.

Contrast this bland design with the original concept car. It was bold, it was edgy, it stood out and made a statement. So, of course, GM had to assign some internal committee to tone it down a little. After all, they want it to appeal to the largest audience possible.

Their design killing efforts proved Mark Twains adage that “I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.”

I believe that brands are the promise of an experience. Great brands can project our hopes and dreams and aspirations. They broadcast who we are and what we believe.

So what is it that GM wants to convey with this rolling testament to corporate mediocrity that hasn’t already been captured and owned by the Prius?

Beyond the branding and design failures, GM has to overcome enormous financial, technical and practical hurdles that all conspire to doom the volt.

It’s expensive at $41,000 – which doesn’t include the price of the $2000 charger you’ll need in your garage.

Its electric motor range of 40 miles is virtually guaranteed never to be met in real world conditions. Subtract mileage when it’s cold or when you’re operating the AC or the radio.

And, when its battery needs to be replaced, get ready for the $8000 sticker shock.

The Volt is a corporate response to political pressures. It validates the contention that great design and revolutionary concepts don’t emerge from corporate boardrooms and government bureaucracies. The Volt is exactly what we would expect from Government Motors, and that’s the tragedy.

Imagine what could have been produced if Apple were to design a car from scratch. Or if Google teamed with Ideo to create a new commuter vehicle. I don’t know what they would conceive, but I do know one thing for certain: it wouldn’t be the Volt. And it wouldn’t require hundreds of millions in subsidies to attract buyers, and it wouldn’t be conceived without considering alternative green technologies that could be integrated into its design.

If the Volt symbolizes the new GM and the new Michigan, as Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm claims, pray for GM and Michigan.

Alec Brownstein decided he wanted a job with one of NYC’s top creative directors, and wasn’t going to wait around for a job opening to apply. In a bold and impossibly creative move, he spent six dollars and came up with this:

Alec’s approach was so simple and so direct, that it will undoubtedly be copied frequently by other job seekers. And why not? It was imaginative, it was unique and it worked. No reason others shouldn’t push the same envelopes in their job search endeavors as well and take full ownership of their personal brand and determine precisely how it’s presented.

For those imaginative small business owners, you can do the exact same thing when preparing to meet with a client who needs SEO or social media services. Buy the Google adwords for their company name a few days ahead of your meeting. Then, during your pitch, ask them to Google themselves and see your pitch for their precise needs at the top of the page. They’ll wonder how you got the top position, they’ll be impressed that you know how to manipulate the page rankings and you’ll have demonstrated your capacity to outimagine your competitors.

Bottom line, for a few dollars and a few minutes of your time, you and your firm can appear distinctive and memorable. And that’s always a good thing.

I’ve been approached at several recent speaking events by businesspeople eager to become engaged with social media but afraid of the repercussions of negative comments or complaints. It’s not unusual for executives to see the negative potential of any new technology or initiative before considering its vast potential, so I thought I’d clarify what I told them.

If your business engages in unethical or inappropriate behavior, then you have legitimate reasons to worry about the potential negative impact of social media since social media doesn’t camouflage your true identity, it reveals it.

However, if your concern centers around the potential reaction to typical business slip-ups and oversights, then you really have nothing to worry about as long as you demonstrate immediate empathy and care for your clients. And when you make a mistake, as everyone does, follow these simple, proven rules:

1. Apologize. If you screwed up, simply acknowledge your mistake and say you’re sorry. We all  make mistakes every day. And we deal with companies that make mistakes every day. We understand that mistakes are inevitable. However, we expect that if you make a mistake that you will acknowledge it and proffer a sincere apology. Your apology isn’t an invitation to sue you or embarrass you, it’s simply an acknowledgement of societal norms that require the acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions.
2. Resolve to fix the mistake. The apology is a great start, but the problem still remains. You screwed up. You sent the wrong product. You didn’t deliver your proposal on time. You overcharged on your invoice. Whatever you did (or failed to do) still needs to be corrected. So, step up and tell them how you intend to fix the problem and ask them if that effort is satisfactory.
   One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is offering a solution that benefits them, but not the client. If you failed to deliver your product on time, it’s your responsibility to overnight the product, to get it there as fast as you can. I don’t care if you have to eat the extra shipping costs. I expect you to do the right thing, even if it’s inconvenient or expensive. That’s how you show you really care about fixing your failure.
   If you offer to fix the problem, and your client says “that’s not good enough,” then you’ve got to work with the client to determine exactly how you can make things right.
3. Fix it. Steps 1 and 2 are actually pretty easy. You say you’re sorry and offer to fix the problem. The tough part is actually fixing the problem since this is your final chance to ensure that your relationship isn’t significantly harmed. If you promise to overnight a spare part, you’d better make sure that the part is put in a box, is properly labeled and is handed off to FedEx. Don’t delegate, do it yourself.
4. BONUS STEP: Follow up. Once you’re sure that the problem has been resolved exactly how you promised, make a follow up call (not a tweet or email) to let your client know how important they are and to demonstrate your care and concern. I know that your first reaction will be to ignore the problem rather than revisit it, but you’ll actually enhance your reputation by confronting it, ensuring that it’s resolved and proving your value as a reliable and caring business partner. Pick up the phone.

Typically, it’s best to take the conversation off-line while you’re addressing a client’s problems. After you reach out to them online to let them know that you heard their complaint and that you want to take care of the problem, suggest that they contact you through a Twitter direct message, an email or a phone call so your conversations and ultimate problem resolution remain private.

I never thought I’d have to write the following sentence, but a recent event demonstrated otherwise:

Never combine a condolence letter with a blatant, self-serving sales pitch.

The backstory:

Yesterday I received a message through LinkedIn from the CEO of a local firm that specializes in social media marketing. Yep, one of our own. The message’s subject line read: We heard through the grapevine about your loss, referring to the sudden and tragic death of one of my colleagues last week.

I was taken aback by the message since I did not personally know the CEO and had never conducted any type of business with his firm. However, I read on, expecting a standard note of condolence. Holy cow, was I wrong. The message read:

All of us here at Company X are very sorry for your loss. If there is anything we can to to help keep everyone’s chins up, just let us know.

The Technic on July 24th might be a great outing to start looking forward to – we are expecting over 300 and Microsoft has joined the sponsors list.

All the best,

I was stunned. Did he really just suggest that in the aftermath of a shocking personal loss I should start looking forward to a summer picnic he was sponsoring? And then wish me all the best?

This was exploitation of social media at its most crass and tasteless. Apparently, the sender was looking for a way to connect with me to promote his event and decided to use LinkedIn to find me and employ tragedy as his hook. Brilliant marketing strategy.

I did some investigation and found that this CEO actually teaches classes on how to establish strategic business relationships using LinkedIn. Personally, I’d challenge his qualifications.

UPDATE:  The author of the message called me this afternoon to express his regret that his message was interpreted as an insensitive and clumsy attempt at promotion. He explained to me his true intentions which I believe were sincere and supportive. I expressed my appreciation for his reaching out to me personally to clarify his intentions and informed him that I would immediately update my post to reflect his sentiments.

This messaging confusion illustrates one of the biggest drawbacks of communications that take place solely through social media channels: the total absence of non-verbal cues. I’ve been embroiled in SM controversy myself after posting sarcastic comments that were interpreted literally. Attempts at humor have fallen completely flat. In the real world, the recipient of these messages would also receive the verbal intonations, the smile on your face and the suppressed chuckle in your delivery and would understand your actual meaning. In the online world, those cues are missing and can lead to serious misinterpretation.

In this instance, since I did not know the author of the message, I had no emotional connection to him and interpreted his succinct expression of condolence and suggestion that we look forward to this summer’s summer Technic as a tactless attempt at promotion rather than a genuine expression of support and assistance.

Written communications, especially those that deal with sensitive topics, have to be written very carefully and thoughtfully to avoid any chance that your intentions could be misconstrued.