I recently read The Long Tail by Wired editor Chris Anderson.  It’s a good book, though not a lot that I hadn’t heard before.  It is presented in a very accessible way, and so I bought the audiobook version to send with my mom and grandmother on vacation this summer.  A lot of the issues brought up in The Long Tail are the things I’m working with on Manfred Macx, and I thought the book would help them to better understand what I wanted to do.

At that, it succeeded.  Now, when I talk to them about what I’m doing, they no longer look at me like I have two heads.

My mom even bought two subscriptions to the print edition of Wired – one for herself, and one for my brother-in-law.  The more interesting one is for my brother-in-law.  Here’s a little timeline.

• 9/2/07 – Purchased a gift subscription for two years
• 7/21/08 – Received an email from Wired, breathlessly stating that the subscription was about to run out!
• 8/14/08 – Another email, another urgent reminder to renew!
• 9/X/08 – Renewed for a year (until 9/2010), thinking the subscription was about to expire
• 6/17/09 – Another email from Wired – your gift subscription is expiring!
• 7/15/09 – Yet another email
• 9/16/09 – Finally, a letter urging her not to “disappoint a friend who’s looking forward to staying on top of our technological future”, once again making it as hard to figure out as possible that the subscription still has a year to go before it expires.

Now, I understand that the magazine industry is struggling.  There is so much competition for our time and attention.  Honestly, when was the last time you read a magazine when you weren’t on an airplane or in a waiting room?

But you would think that the magazine that employs the guy who wrote The Long Tail would maybe have a clue.  Deceiving your customers is no way to keep them.  Wired tried to walk a fine line between aggressively pursuing subscriptions and outright lying to customers, and then crossed right over.  It’s possible that the software people who wrote their email reminder system forgot to look at the year the subscription expired, only focusing on the month.  As a software person myself, I’d be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.  But when my mom emailed Wired to complain, she got a form letter that totally ignored her question and suggested that it was her responsibility to keep track of her subscription, not theirs, and that she should just ignore their urgent emails if she had already renewed.

It’s sad – I think the magazine industry fills a good niche.  They’re more specialized than the newspapers, though not as timely.  But they’re more succinct and faster than books.  There is clearly a spot for something resembling a magazine in the future of media.  But when the pursuit of another year of subscription fees becomes more important than how you treat your customers, you’re waving a white flag.  You’re telling the world that you are unable to compete, unable to adapt to a changing world, and you’re clinging to deceptive marketing to prop up the status quo.

I feel like I repeat the same thing, over and over, but too many people don’t seem to get it.  There will always be a place in the world for talented people.  But when those talented people refuse to acknowledge that some of the ways they used to make money might not work anymore, and start demanding that the world change back to the way it was, they lose their relevancy.  You can’t try to limit technological advances to save you from having to redefine the way you do business.  You have to look at what the technology enables, and how it can help you.

You’d think a technology magazine would get that.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Abusing your customers, failure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.