In our line of work - designing and building web applications - we don’t deal with consumer experiences as much as I’d like to, but we often take inspiration from the retail world. I have just finished reading a couple of articles about Zappos that I wanted to share with you guys.

The first article from Harvard Business Publishing, talks about how Zappos bribes potential employees into quitting in order to gauge their interest and commitment to the company’s values. Here’s a piece from the article:

This is a company that’s bursting with personality (…) So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit! Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.

The second bit of inspiration I want to leave you with is this presentation from Underground 4 in Los Angeles by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. It talks about how Zappos became a 1 billion dollar business by caring about their customer experience:

What to take away

WOWing someone is a powerful thing. When you care deeply enough about someone - a customer, partner or employee - you are more likely to engage them in a way that makes them reciprocate the good will. Naturally, I’m stating the obvious when I say you should aim to please your customers, but when was the last time you heard people recommending a brand because they were just so nice to you?

What can we, as designers, developers and entrepreneurs, do for our audience that we haven’t yet? How can we WOW them? There’s a few lessons to take away from the Zappos story. I know I have, and I hope you do too.

I was just done reading Alexander Muse’s post about Microblogging being a mess and just as I was going to twit about it, Twitter was (you guessed it) down with a link to this thread at Get Satisfaction. I happened to read through it only to find people saying downtime is “fine” because the product “is free”. Actually, downtime is not fine, even if the product is free - free shouldn’t mean that failure is acceptable.

Just because it’s free, it doesn’t mean it has no value

Let me put it this way. Gmail is free and yet I’d personally panic if it suddenly went away. Google is free too, and we use it all the time. Free doesn’t mean “allowed to suck”, or stand for “acceptable downtime”. Free products like Gmail, Google, Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed still have a value. What you’re not giving away in dollars (or in our case here, Euros), you’re giving away in data and attention.

Sure, I’d be bitching often if Twitter was down and I had paid money for it. But even if I haven’t, they have my data, their service still is the vehicle through which people hear from me at a more personal level. I have invested in this service with my own attention. I don’t have a particular number for how much that’s worth, but it’s definitely not a zero.

It’s about you, the user

This isn’t a rant against Twitter. They’re not the ones saying we should accept their downtime because they provide their service for free. Real people are saying this. Personally, I don’t think these people understand the value of their own presence and data. Don’t want to be frustrated because a service is down? It’s definitely your right not to be (and I’m glad - we as a species are already way too stressed out as we are). But don’t underestimate your own value, or think that just because something doesn’t have a price tag, it should be allowed to fail.

Two years ago, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel documented in “Naked conversations” how blogs where changing businesses and their engagement with consumers. 2006 was in fact what you might call the year of the company blog. Companies left and right, big and small, opened blogs to engage in conversations with their costumers and fans. This brough the barrier of communication - previously assumed huge and unbreakable - down to waist height. Anyone with a little interest could get in touch with the real people behind companies, the decision makers, and make themselves - and their ideas - heard.

New ways of engaging with people

We’re seeing something similar now but at a hyper-level, through different, specialized channels. Companies are now engaging with their costumers through micro-blogging systems such as Twitter - in fact, just a few hours ago, Peachpit Press started following me on there. We have twitter accounts for our projects like Goplan and Totspot, and always recommend our clients and partners to do the same, because we know our audience of early adopters cares that we’re close.

Being on Twitter allows companies to engage in short (but sweet) conversations about their products. To provide instant notifications when something is wrong, or - much better -, when something exciting just happened. A feature or product launch, maybe. The possibilities are endless when companies start seeing customers as friends. A subtle term change, yes, but it has quite the impact.

Not all about Twitter

It’s not all about Twitter, though. We’re seeing social networking profiles being opened on Facebook and Myspace for companies - and people actually befriending these and becoming fans. You become a fan of something when you really actually care, so you can imagine the value of having people who care about you and your products, that you can talk to and get opinions and ideas from.

If two years ago we were having “naked conversations”, I can’t imagine where we’re going with this. These are exciting times. Want to talk to us? Both me and webreakstuff (the whole company) are on twitter.

A few years ago, not a lot of people used RSS, and those that did, didn’t really subscribe to that many feeds. We limited ourselves to a small set of sites and sources to keep up with because of the limited nature of the tools we used (browser bookmarks, and our memory for remembering URLs). We’re now at a time when the tools exist to help us not have to remember.

This could be you, right?

My RSS reader keeps track of hundreds of feeds for me, and I’ve grown used to the fact that I’ll keep around 500 unread items there at all times (or I’d likely make no use of all that information because I’d just be skipping through it). My inbox is a constant source of distraction, with emails coming in at a crazy rate. Twitteriffic (when I dare to run it) notifies me every 3 minutes of the thoughts of around 200 people (I can’t follow more because I’d get absolutely nothing done, and I wouldn’t really be paying attention anyway).

Social networks keep letting me know that people want to get in touch: it’s either friend requests on Facebook, event updates, or new connections on LinkedIn. Last.fm keeps smacking me in the face whenever people I know recommend new music. Growl on my mac pops a notification several times a minute when any of these events takes place. The Adium duck keeps jumping on my dock because people come online, or go offline, or message me, or, I don’t know, some other apparently important thing happens in the never actually paused instant messaging world.

How do we make sense of it?

We take the next step - we create tools to clean up the mess that our current set of tools is building up. We create filters, that deliver only the information we care about, when we care about it, to our screens or phones or whatever we’re connected to the web through (our chumbys and ambient devices, our nabaztags and iphones, our buglabs or our fridges).

Our work as entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, craftsmen is to keep evolving a set of tools to relieve our brains from this huge mess. Lifestreaming, friend-feeding, micro-blogging, content-chunking, micro-formating is here to stay, but our brains can’t handle it alone.

Now do excuse me while I go clean-up my inbox, update my twitter and read up on some feeds. I think I’m still up for some information overload tonight.