Corvus Consulting

A couple weeks ago I was ready to write a short reflection on customer relations gone super-sour, featuring Airbnb. Luckily, I have a black belt in procrastination, which gives these situations time to spin out some more and to make a more interesting story.

The background: a few weeks ago a woman named Emily in San Francisco rented her place through Airbnb and had it thoroughly trashed by a renter in what seems to be a fit of gleeful nihilism by a person bent on bringing as much destruction and pain into a home as possible. The victim had been working things through with Airbnb and decided to blog about her experience, cautioning others and, I think, just venting.

In the days that followed, Airbnb’s actions and lack of actions painted a picture of a company caught in a vortex of legal paranoia and public relations handling from the 6th circle of hell. Fast forward ten days and we find they’ve managed to really turn it around. The missteps as well as the fixes make a fantastic case study in how to do wrong, and then right, by your customers.
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Keeping true to my word, more on how Menuito came into being. In this post I’ll share the vision that set the course and informed the design decisions along the way.

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By way of Matthew Frederick’s excellent 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (Amazon), I came across a Virginia Woolf quote that captures a kind of elemental truth about why some brands and products soar while others flop, despite having comparable or even better features.

The success of the masterpieces seems not to lie in their freedom from faults – indeed we accept the grossest faults in them all – but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind that has completely mastered it’s perspective.

When you look at which products are doing well and which are flailing, ask whether the people behind them have a sense of a mastered perspective. Look for it in marketing and political campaigns, in individual products and in brands. I suspect the answer will jump out clearly.

Last week an independent developer brought a storm of attention on the process of starting to make apps for RIM’s upcoming Playbook tablet. Over the weekend a RIM representative posted an open answer to the open letter on the Inside Blackberry Developer’s Blog, trying to do the right thing. The response, unfortunately, falls short and provides a good lesson for product managers and anyone else tasked with community relations.

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Newly-launched Fflick taps into Twitter to get opinions on movies, most notably from your friends. It’s a neat idea and a good-looking build that advances the idea of Twitter as a platform. It also makes one big mistake by co-opting people’s identities and using them as shills to grow the perceived community size.

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If you’ve been in software and website development long enough to see a few releases, this scenario is likely familiar:

It’s a few days from launch, or just around sign-off on a major design component. Someone on the project has an itch and reaches for external feedback, putting part or all of the design in front of new eyes. Then they ask, innocently enough, “What do you think of this?”

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Like many, I watched the iPad announcement on Wednesday and then went straight to discussion forums to see what people were saying. As with any disruptive product, there’s a mix of reactions ranging from lust to uncertainty to outrage. What gets missed in the excitement for or against is the comprehensive and disciplined innovation strategy that Apple has used three times now, most recently in the iPad.
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