This is a video response from Qik, which I filmed – naturally – in Starbucks. Unfortunately it goes a bit funny at the end because someone called me, but, you get the point Also, shoutouts to @banksy6  for perpetuating the myth that I live there!

[flash width="425" height="335" flashvars="rssURL=http://qik.com/video/caf83005349245f8b075a04029c8a382.rss&autoPlay=false&polling=false"]http://qik.com/swfs/qikPlayer4.swf[/flash]

My points are thus:

1. Starbucks pioneered western coffee culture as we know it and are leaders in the area. If you go to Italy, they don’t have to-go cups and Café Latte – these things are mostly a construction. Update: Italians do coffee the authentic, pure way which is the way I like it.
2. Starbucks excel at transactional experience, which is why they have been cloned. They experientialised coffee. Admittedly, the situational experience of Starbucks does leave much to be desired.
3. Starbucks personalise coffee. This is a hallmark of the experience economy, which according to the history of economic progression, is a customisation of the service industry. They sell at an experience markup – more expensive then any other high street coffee house.
4. The personalisation is integral to the experience. Drinks are called ‘Hand Crafted Beverages’. The markings of your personalisation are on your to-go cup, making it memorabilia.

Now I will make it clear that I quite readily appreciate the situational experience is lacking, and that the transactional customisation is lacking against most artisan coffee houses – but then those coffee houses are not the world’s number one coffee chain that has been the model for others to follow, are they?

Or, am I just going waaaay over the top here?

UPDATE: I am not being vindictive against Italians here, as someone has suggested. Let me stress the fact that I love Italy and honeymooned there. I studied the language for a year. I plan to live there. I love the way they do coffee and far, far prefer authentic, artisan coffee as it is prepared in Italy. I am simply saying that in the same way ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’ is a constructed curry that isn’t an authentic Indian dish, Café Latte and Starbucks’ ‘Caramel Macchiato’ and Frappucinos, etc, are mostly constructed drinks for our western market that do not actually exist in Italy.

UPDATE: The Qik above was the featured ‘Hot Video’ on the Qik.com homepage today (Friday 24th July). Yes – that’s my ugly mug taking up the whole screen. Insults can be made at my Posterous.com account.

Women In Touch did a conference last week (my client and church initiative), which I was heavily involved in. The thing that I always hear people repeat about WIT, believe it or not, does not major on the two ‘selling points’ of most Christian conferences which are the teaching and the music.

What I hear people saying about WIT and the Touch Conference is this: ”it’s just the whole experience.”

A compelling experience is the original word of mouth. Go back 6,000 years of documented human history, and you’ll find that what we’ve been recording ever since isn’t the boring stuff. It’s the compelling stuff.

Everything about this conference – from the little touches of décor, to the excellent teaching, and from the rebranding of the cafe to the ‘pitstop’, to the photos that were taken and then given away – everything was carefully building the overall experience. This is important. Because if experience is the eye of the beholder, and you are banking on the décor to provide the experience, then what about the non-visual person who doesn’t even notice the décor?

Therefore “it’s just the whole experience” is a better compliment than “the décor was great” because you know that you have hit multiple senses. A multi-sensory experience therefore gives your advocate multiple words for mouth. When they are talking to one friend, it is the teaching. To their musician friend, it’s the music. To their hurting friend, it’s the emotional benefit they received. To the lonely friend, it’s the friendliness.

Now I’ve just rememberd that my friend Olivier Blanchard actually wrote about word of mouth yesterday, so I’m not going to go on and on – just pop to his site and read up there.

But before you go, let’s just note a few things about the nature of compelling:

1. Compelling is never mediocre, unless something was so mediocre it got you determined to do better.
2. Compelling means the experiences induces a decision, which rouses that most precious human resource.
3. Compelling inspires you to action, and your first action is to talk about it.

I had a good read and discovered that they were researching social media. They mistakenly called us humans Digi’s, and accordingly they observed 4 different social media users:

Firstly, the Digitalls. I am, and some of you are, in the Digitall tribe. We use technology for everything. We use multiple social media sites, experiment continually, have lifestreams, and are on FriendFeed. Trouble is, most of the Digitalls – who are early adopters of technology – are trying to imitate the elite group of innovators. They copy their blogging habits, produce more and more content for other early adopters, and create plenty of noise. Thus, the gap between early adopters and the early majority is increasing in size because it is getting harder and harder for the average Digi (the ones with the money) to understand what the Digitalls are talking about.

Watch this video, made by the Aliens, which interviews the Digi on the street. I don’t just like it because the interviewer is called Scott, honest.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

Cue the Digicool. They are some of these people. They don’t know what a ‘browser’ is and they don’t care – but they do know that Google is not synomous with Internet Explorer. They have Facebook. And they have it because it’s cool. My wife has an iPhone, because it’s cool. They might have a Twitter account, and probably only make use of it if they can link it to their Facebook status – why? – because it’s cool.

Digicools are an a giant untapped resource. As the early majority, they appear smart to most people (largely, to parents), but appear slow and sluggish to the Digitalls. They would use services like Flickr for their personal photos if they knew about it – but, they don’t. Everyone is up in arms because a 15 year old Digi researched 200 friends and discovered that teens don’t user Twitter. But the reality is there is a huge gap between the Digitall and the Digicools, and only the daring few are stepping beyond Facebook or Bebo into these new waters.

The iPhone app Shazaam is a great Digicool product. As a party piece, my wife loves to use it. But unfortunately for Shazaam, she’s never bought anything through it, because once it’s told her the track, it’s no longer cool. She hasn’t parted with any money for a digital service. And Digicools seldom do.

The Gap Widens

In the late adopters crowd we have the Digitools. My father-in-law is a Digitool who uses Skype purely for the utility of speaking to his daughter in Australia. When he isn’t calling his daughter on VOIP, Skype is switched off. It’s a tool for a job. My mother-in-law uses Facebook to keep in touch with friends. If she isn’t thinking of that friend in Canada though, weeks go by without her status changing.

Digitools aren’t bound to generation. One of my brothers, a 23 year old in Australia, will also use Skype and Facebook when he needs to communicate, but no more. And this it he hallmark of the Digitools – need to. The aliens did observe that this need does change according to what the Digitalls did five years ago and the Digicool did two years ago – so it’s not absolute need. But the strange thing is there are few from the Digitalls who try to empower this majority – they are content to rather ramble with other Digitalls than engage with these slow, but faithful late adopters.

This group is confused over what a browser, Google, the internet and search is. The mixing of an address bar and  a search bar also confuses them, and accordingly, they are subject to phishing from time to time.

Finally, it is the Diginots – not the ‘Digifools’, through it rhymed – who hear about everything all the other Digi’s are doing, and decidedly don’t understand it. They are not social media users, in the modern sense. A computer,  Microsoft Word and the internet are all the same thing in their mind. And every time they sit down at a PC, it is the computer that does something wrong; not the user.

They peaked at DVD, and occasionally, with assistance, can navigate the website of their favourite sports team. But when finished, they call their teenager child technical advisor to close everything down for them.

In Conclusion

So that’s the report I found. I hope it’s been enlightening for you as it has been for me. The one thing I am convinced of, though, is I must start looking more at the Digicools and their market share, than pandering to the fickle nature of the Digitalls. Because if I start talking to them, I have plenty of opportunity to be the one who bridges the gap – because few others are.

So when I went to sign up for a beta invite, and I was wondering what quirky thing to write to heighten my chances of getting an invite sooner, I saw that “Haikus, sonnets and ASCII art all accepted”… “Wonderful!” Thought I, and after 5 minutes of creativity I had crafted my first piece of internet poetry.

So, here is my sonnet for Google Wave. Note that 1. I am indeed quite sad, and 2. if you watch the (excellent) developer preview video, you’ll actually understand what my sonnet is talking about, otherwise, it really does make no sense at all.

So without further a do, may I introduce you to…

“The Wave”, by Scott Gould.

Shall I compare thee to nineties email?
Thou flows more smoothly and far more pleasant.
What was yesterday, today is a fail,
And bean soup is easier than pheasant.
Some time too light my quick fingers do type,
And often are my words and sites unlinked,
Messy doc revisions, I do not like,
And too many tabs is too much to think.
But thy Yes/No saves a thousand replies,
Where Facebook would save me from none of them,
It’s not an app, it’s HTML 5,
Desktops are drowning cos you’ve out done them.
Now in real time with spellies and linkies,
Wave Dance into the two-thousand-teenies.

Can I get a beta invite now?