Interesting article at Nixon Peabody about TEKsystems Inc. v. Hammernick et al.

This is a new lawsuit in Minnesota which says 3 former employees violated the terms of their non-compete, non-solicitation & non-disclosure agreement because they ‘connected’ with previous clients via Linkedin.

There is more than just ‘connecting’ as the article prints an email the former employee sent via Linkedin but I want to concentrate on the ‘connecting’.

It’s now pretty standard to connect online with your co-workers. And if it’s not via Linkedin then there’s connection on Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare or Flickr or Dopplr or whatever other sites will be launching in the future. Is connecting the equivilent to bumping into someone on the street? Is it the same as picking up the phone? Is it a public advertising message? Or an email?

I’m not sure how the act of connecting would equal solicitation but it seems that’s what’s being argued.

More fascinating is… what does this mean if you’re already connected (prior to leaving the company)? Do you need to un-follow? Or rather do you need to tell the person to stop following you (as you don’t always control who follows you)? Will we see new blocking tools? Should you de-friend the folks you worked with or came in contact with during that employment? Is this a new product opportunity for Linkedin (tick the boxes to select which of your contacts are affected and enter the length of your agreement here. We’ll prevent you from talking until then!)

And if you do need to de-friend… what’s that do for your mental state? What happens when the people you’ve become friends with, seen every day, gone to parties with, read tweets & status & look at pix online are suddenly unavailable due to an employment contract. Has anyone seen research in this area? A quick search didn’t find anything. Somehow I suspect (or hope) this would be considered an unfair hardship well beyond the corporation’s rights.

I can only hope the judge & other people involved in deciding cases like these understand social media, are active participants on these sites or have the foresight to bring in their own experts to explain the situation.

BTW, I’m obviously not an employment lawyer so don’t take any of this as advice or a comment on this particular case… it’s a musing on where things could be going.

There was a great post last week which combined 2 of my favourite topics (community & product management) – The Power of Community Support: How Forums Helped Us Manage Customer Conversations on the Pricing Changes.

It’s a fantastic mini case study of a company screwing up in the eyes of their customers, working through the problem via their own forums and making adjustments (see Sorry. We Messed Up). The situation was picked up by TechCrunch (Zendesk Raises Prices, Pisses Off Customers), apparently it was a hot topic on Twitter & I’m sure anyone who decided to evaluate help desk software that day wasn’t putting Zendesk at the top of their list.

(btw, I don’t use the product or have any info on this situation except for reading the online news)

With my product management hat on, Zendesk obviously felt the time was right for a price increase. I hope their product managers talked with existing customers (newbies & old timers, light & heavy users, people paying the bills & the actual users, whatever personas they track) and potential customers (win/loss analysis anyone?) about the changes. And I hope mgmt listened to what their product folks told them.

Talking with your customers to help make your decisions is an essential part of product management (IMO). Questions could have been along the lines of:

• What made sense for the packages – not just the price, but what about invoicing/payment schedule?
• How did it fit the customer’s budget & workflow?
• What sort of reaction did they have to different price points?
• What functionality w/in the packages are they using?
• etc.

That sort of information could have shaped the packages & pricing plus shaped the communication of the changes. It could have prevented this customer revolt which caused them to move from ‘point A to point B’ (quote below from their posting).

But one thing we realized while reflecting on it this week was how integral the forums were in getting us from point A. (introducing the price increase) to point B. (grandfathering all existing customers).

It would be great to have a complete case study on this situation & know how they got to point A in the first place. Was point B was ever discussed? Why wasn’t it part of the new packages? If point B was decided against originally, how did they reconcile moving to it? How much has this customer revolt cost in cancelled contracts & losing new business?

I’m not going to get into the right/wrong of the way the packages changed because I don’t know the market. From a community perspective, the company seems to have been surprised by the reaction they got to the announcement. Or surprised by the passion of the reaction. Or surprised by the level of venom. Or all of the above.

To Zendesk’s credit, they let the venom flow. The (approx 400) comments aren’t nice – people felt betrayed, anger, fearful of telling their management about large $ increases. There’s a facebook group setup to vent, list of competitor products are there, competitor recommendations are made and so on. From the messages I’ve read, it looks like there was no editing, no trying to sweep the problem under the carpet & there was the occasional comment from the CEO to clarify & answer some questions. It looks like they handled this well & that could save some customer relationships.

This is one story I don’t think we’ve heard the end of.

Amy Jo Kim has put together a fantastic slideshare about metagame design.

If you work with social media, online commuities or anything where you’re bringing people together, do an exercise & think about your space in terms of points, feedback/rewards & viral (all described in the deck). You don’t need to be building a game to apply these principals.

dave and his guitar have been getting press. lots of it.

if you don’t know the story, dave is in a band and united didn’t take very good care of the equipment he checked during a flight. after 9 months of trying to get united to pay for the damages and united refusing, dave is serenading them with what can’t be called a love song. check out the dave’s video called ‘united breaks guitars‘ on youtube.

as i write this, the video has almost 3 million views. it seems CNN, NPR and CBS have run stories. he’s being interviewed for rolling stone. the viral started by dave sending an email to his friends.

everyone has gotten the message by now – it might even be sinking in at united considering their tweets over the last couple days state they have donated money as per dave’s request. they claim they will use the video in training and they have learned from their mistake. but it doesn’t feel very sincere, does it?

i don’t see anything on the united.com website. there doesn’t seem to be a response on youtube. no post on twitter directing you to a page which explains exactly what they did, how they messed up and what this training and learning impact will be.

i fly united a bit. have a lot of freq flyer miles with them. i know they’re not an amazing airline but in my experience they’re not any worse than other airlines (i know, such an endorsement!). dave’s treatment doesn’t make me want to fly with them and i wonder if they recognise that damage is occurring.

oh! one other thing united (if you’re listening), the promotion you’re running… of getting 50,000 number of twitter followers by july 17 to give x% discount is sending a bad message. it tells me you only want masses of numbers and you will treat me as such (just like you treated dave). perhaps this is why you haven’t hit the follower targets? (currently at 16,854 on july 15).