#fixyourhead The existing customer is often wrong

Over the last few days, I've read a couple of items that challenge some of our most cherished principles. However, considering the battering that baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet have received over the years, perhaps it's time to re-examine such so-called truisms as "the customer is always right."

The first item that I read was a BusinessWeek article entitled When Customer Loyalty is a Bad Thing. I shared this in my Empoprise-BI FriendFeed room, but if you didn't see it there, here are some excerpts from the article:

No firm can survive for long without loyal customers. The problem, however, is that success through loyalty isn't nearly so simple. Like most "big" ideas, there are conditions where it is unarguably correct and less popular but equally true conditions where it is wrong....

[T]ypically only 20% of a firm's customers are actually profitable. And many—often most—of a company's profitable customers are not loyal.

This presents managers with a loyalty problem, although not one that they expect. If typically most loyal customers in a firm aren't profitable, how exactly does a customer loyalty strategy ever generate a positive return on investment? Instead asking whether you have enough loyal customers in your customer base, you need to ask yourself three more complex questions: 1) which loyal customers are good for the business, 2) how do we hang onto them, and 3) how do we get more customers like them.

Before I share the second item that I read, let me talk about what happened last night. Late at night, I'll occasionally take out my 8 bit rotary phone and check the activity on fftogo and slandr. And last night there was a lot of activity, all of which was prompted by a frequently-edited post from the Twitter team. I believe that this was part of the original post as it went out Tuesday afternoon:

Small Settings Update

We've updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we've learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it's a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today's update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

If you thought that people reacted negatively to Facebook or FriendFeed changes, you should see how they react when you mess with their Twitter. Just search for the hashtag #fixreplies.

But Biz's post wasn't the second major item that I read. The second item was a post by Rob Diana entitled Twitter Needs To Ignore The User. Excerpt:

Twitter has been doing more user interface work...presumably to try and make their web interface nicer for new users. I know the idea is to grow the user base and increase user retention, but what if they let their application ecosystem do that?...

Ensure that you can continue to scale. Ensure that the API works well and maybe add some interesting features to that. Improve the search API as well, that way people can create interesting search applications on top of Twitter....

By ignoring the user, they will not be tempting fate by implementing something that one of the third party applications has already built.

Incidentally, in the comments I noted a major issue with the proposal:

[I]f Twitter wants to become an infrastructure provider, it needs to communicate with its developers better, and give them advance warning of API and other changes that will affect them. I’ve been following Jesse Stay’s posts regarding this issue for over a year now, and it doesn’t appear that things have improved.

But let's assume for a moment that Twitter concentrated on providing a full-featured and flexible API, communicated with its developers, and let the third-party developers decide what's right and wrong. Then someone could develop a Scoble Twitter client, someone else could develop an Oprah Twitter client, and so forth. As it is now, Twitter is unilaterally making UI decisions that not only adversely affect a minority of users, but also a majority of developers.

However, let's take a step back and look at Twitter's original statement.

Based on usage patterns and feedback, we've learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it's a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable.

There was a lot of quibbling over Biz's statement. I don't think one-sided fragments are undesirable. Rob Diana doesn't think one-sided fragments are undesirable. You could name a ton of other people - Louis Gray, Anika Malone, Robert Scoble, Jesse Stay - who like the flexibility of controlling whether or not these conversations can be seen.

But I'd be willing to bet that there weren't 7 million people applying #fixreplies hashtags to their tweets last night and this morning.

You see, when it comes down to it, Rob and myself and Louis and Anika and Robert and Jesse could all quit Twitter and the world would not end. In fact, even Oprah could quit Twitter and the world would not end. But if a million people quit using Twitter after a month because the @replies to unknown people are too danged confusing - THAT could hurt Twitter. And if Twitter truly believed that this change was needed to attract 100 million new people to the service, then I can understand why they did it.