LinkedIn and Freemium: Why Overselling a Premium Trial Is Bad For Brand

It's the dirty little secret that many online subscription services want to hide -- if they can get your credit card number and commitment to a 'membership', they can leech off of your bank account, probably for longer / significantly more cost than the amount you might have been willing to spend on the service. My most recent reminder of the audacity of this scam practice, was with LinkedIn and their 'premium' membership.

I mention LinkedIn in the title of this post, not because I consider them the worst offender. I think that the worst of the worst are pretty solidly in the neighborhood of scams that cloak the subscription commitment process (see the Scamville posts). In this case, LinkedIn is up front in informing you of the subscription, but it's the what you get for the price that got them this post.

LinkedIn initially got their hooks in through a free 30-day trial. Initially, the promotional email pitched it as a different version than their normal premium package. I remember reading it and getting the impression that this was a new program that they had started that would cost less and add some unique features that I might use. Considering that I had been active on LinkedIn for over three years before they targeted me with this program, there is an implied notion that this program was different than the premium package that I had already chosen not to pay for.

And so, for 30 days, I got the opportunity to see who had looked at my profile, the chance to send 10 introductory emails through LinkedIn -- something that I hadn't used any of the default five of -- and LinkedIn's tribute to virtual goods, a badge on any resume submissions that I sent out. And, while it's pretty cool being able to see who has viewed your profile, the package is certainly not something that I would run down to Fry's and buy for $30 if it were in a box. In fact, at $30, I would never buy these features -- but I might 'forget to cancel' a trial of the service. Thirty days out, I might even have forgotten what the price was that you initially quoted. And so, hooks in my wallet, LinkedIn proceeded to suck money and destroy any brand equity that they had built with me.

LinkedIn Premium ran in the background for over a year. I didn't really think about the cost until the other day when I happened to be looking at my bank statement and saw the LinkedIn charge. A sense of outrage came over me. They sucked $360 out of my account over the course of a year for a 'product' that I wouldn't have spent $30 on. $360 for a stream of trivia about who viewed my profile.

Ethical Business Practices Don't Operate This Way
Contrast this practice with Basecamp. Several years ago, I first signed up with Basecamp to share files and collaborate on projects. At the time, there wasn't really anything quite like it. Since then, competitive solutions for aspects of the service have come online. Sometimes, I'll go through a month or three where I don't use the service. But I still maintain a subscription.

Each month, 37Signals emails me a receipt for the charge. Each time I receive it, I ask myself whether it's worth continuing the service. It's been over five years. This is what an ethical business practice looks like. This is one reason why I have a tremendous respect for the team at 37Signals.

Subscription Pricing
Nobody ever forgets the cost of their Salesforce.com subscription. At $60 per month or more, depending upon the edition, it's not something that you forget. Even within the corporate budget, the question repeatedly comes up, "What about Salesforce.com? Do we need to keep paying for it? Are we really using it?"

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the subscriptions that try to disappear and hide invisibly. Remember when AOL moved from being your go-to dial-up ISP to an afterthought in the broadband world. They dropped their subscription pricing to $10 per month -- keep access to your email and use dial-up if you need it was the pitch. Eventually, they dropped the cost of maintaining an email account to free, but they made you jump through hoops to get them to stop charging. Think about all of those people who sat there -- and for how long -- with AOL leeching $10 or more a month.

Now look at some of LinkedIn's premium pricing options. At $30 per month (or $20 per month for the Salesforce.com-to-LinkedIn API connection), it's high, but not necessarily reaching the level of a something that you question the cost every month -- particularly if you're not being reminded of it. It's the cost of buying lunch for your colleagues. And yet, it's also almost a "how much can we get away with" price. And when you consider what you get, I don't think it's something that every user would benefit from -- more likely applicable to a select set. So, basically, you're dumping these crap features on me, leeching from my bank account, and testing the threshold of what I might tolerate? Congrats. You crossed that line.

Golf and Positive Perception

I heard this story on NPR the other day talking about a study where they looked at golfers and found that golfers who were playing better perceived the hole to be larger, and those that did were not playing as well saw the hole as smaller. By creating an optical illusion and altering their perception of the hole, the researchers were able to change a golfer's putting.

It's good food for thought, not only about golf, but for marketing as well. Here's a link to the story.

Can You Think Your Way To That Hole-In-One? by Joe Palca.

Dear Salesforce.com: Web-to-Lead/Case Spam Sucks

Dear Salesforce.com:
Recently I contacted customer support about problems with Spam getting loaded into my Salesforce instance through web-to-lead forms. While I've enjoyed discussing this problem with your customer service team, please take note of a couple of important points that you may want to add to your solutions when discussing this issue.

Captcha? Really?
Please remove the word 'captcha' from your customer service rep's vocabulary. While I'm sure that there are some web novices out there that are managing sites, most of us with this issue understand the dynamics of web forms and are fully aware of captcha. Many of us also know that captchas can be beaten, and that the people who we are likely to filter out are not spammers -- they are potential customers who don't want to be bothered with additional validation layers.

And for those Salesforce customer service reps who want to help me manage my demand generation programs, I just want to say thank you for your insightful recommendations.

You Are Not Alone
I am not the only customer with a form-based Spam issue. Here's an idea that's been posted on success.salesforce site over a year ago. Any thoughts on when we might be addressing this issue? I realize that hiding the OID will not stop bots from automated submissions that use the actual form, but it's a start. And for those of us that have been customers for a long time (i.e. prior to when this was a problem), even masking the OID doesn't fix the issue. Remember how, when stuff is published on the web it never truly goes away? Making this the key to a gateway that enable the unwanted stuffing of data into your account IS a problem.

Frankly, if I were you, I would consider this unrelenting spam problem to be an assault on your, not just me. When Google started doing email, they used their resources and the power of the cloud to help reduce spam that users experienced. Then, for fun, they bought Postini. Is this really just 'my problem' or is it 'our problem'. 

When You Recommend Solutions That Cost More, I'm Probably Not Going to Be Happy
I know you like your partners. Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot -- they all offer good solutions for aspects of lead filtering and validation. But seriously, do I really need to pay these guys just so that my sales guys to don't have to click on Viagra spam? If the spammer community has essentially broken a feature of your platform, should I be the one who has to pay for the patch?

Sincerely Yours,
Yet Another 'One-captcha-recommendation-away-from--really-angry' Customer

Creativity and Design Stuff on My Mind

Recently, I've run into a number of blog posts and other items that have had me thinking a lot about creativity. Rather than apply too much structure to them, I'm just going to send them out your way for you to use as you see fit.

Here's a link to a post I came across on PandoDaily the other day. The Illusion of Imagination (And How It Drives Silicon Valley) by Francisco Dao is a great example of how one nugget, one kernel of thought, can change your perspective on things. Here's a sample:

Instead of actually considering odds, we tend to calculate probability based on the ease with which we can imagine something. And whether or not we can imagine something is often determined by specific details that create subsets, thereby lowering the actual probability of it occurring. I know that’s a bit confusing so let me give you an example.

When people were asked how likely they were to die in a plane crash caused by a terrorist attack, compared to people who were asked how likely they were to die in an unspecified plane crash, significantly more people believed the odds were higher in the terrorist attack scenario. This, despite the fact that an airplane crash caused by terrorism is a small subset of all total crashes.

This is truly an interesting read and totally in line with some of the other creativity things I've been seeing recently.


Here are a couple of posts by Hamish McKenzie for PandoDaily. These are interview segments from his conversation with Jonah Lehrer on his book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. There’s No Such Thing as Individual Genius in Silicon Valley and Steve Jobs Was Right to ‘Steal,’ and Beer is Inspiring give you a nice window into the ideas in the book.

Here's another one that we came across recently. How to hire a product manager by Ken Norton is an interesting look into one guy's idea of what makes a good product manager. There are some amusing elements here (like big company specialization versus start-up flexibility), but there are also a few points that he makes that seem internally contradictory. This piece is yet another reminder of the philosophical battle between "need to be technical and have an engineering background" versus "need to have a broader, more creative background with an ability to comprehend complex technology".  For me, I find the default to an engineering background to be a mindset that is hamstrung by conventional wisdom that forms an funny contrast to the idolization of Steve Jobs -- not that Norton covers that here, but it's another topic that I've seen a lot about since Jobs' biography was published.

Would You Give Your Facebook Login for a Job?

One story making the rounds recently was about employers asking prospective job candidates for information needed to access their Facebook profile. Of course, employers crawling Facebook isn't new, but the idea that an employer would ask a potential hire for login credentials seems a bit over the top. But in many ways, this kind of scrutiny is not new.

While today's Facebook generation may not remember it, once upon a time there was an era when employers might ask a job candidate to take a polygraph as a condition of being hired. Thankfully, there was enough of an outrage over that practice that it was made illegal.

Similarly, some companies ask applicants to take drug tests. However, historically drug testing has been easier to pass through the legislature and the courts. After all, even if you have a reasonable argument to counter "you don't want your fill-in-the-blank to be on drugs," opposing drug testing is like endorsing an ad campaign against yourself in the next election.

At the heart of this debate, there's this stew of issues cooking with issues of personal behavior and privacy being positioned against an employer's freedom to set screening criteria for hiring, "safety", and a host of other "interests". If I sound less than balanced when characterizing the interests of employers in this issue, it's because I'm skeptical of most arguments in favor of this type of employer behavior.

Earlier this week on NPR's Talk of the Nation, they had a segment about teachers, their behavior outside of work and social media. In the segment, one caller referenced a teacher in Georgia who was fired for posting a picture on Facebook -- a picture of herself, on vacation in Europe with a glass of wine in her hand. A contingent in the local community raised enough of a fuss that the local school board ran her out. While one of the guests on the show argued that "teachers are the symbolic and moral leaders of our children and they need to be conscientious of local morality," constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley, who authored this piece for the LA Times, notes that the problem goes beyond your own participation and could cause you problems if someone at a party posts a picture of you.

Employers claim that this kind of scrutiny is an acceptable part of their screening process and that they have a right to set the criteria for the people that they employ. Somewhere, within the process of deciding to adopt these practices, they have espoused an idea that this will bring them better employees; more honest, more reliable, more moral, safer, perhaps even more harmonious. They take the position that since you have a choice of working there or somewhere else, that these processes and requirements are not an unreasonable cost of screening.

Employment law has all sorts of rules designed to prevent some level of discrimination and unfair treatment. In practice however, this doesn't prevent businesses from hiring the pretty one, the tall one, the guy from my church, or that nut with the funny beard and his own iOS app that I met at the coffee shop last night. And when you consider all of the 'importance of establishing a corporate culture' discussions that float around, who's to say that these examples aren't important indicators of a good fit? And yet, what about the ones that were skipped over -- the ugly one, the one that was too old, or even that guy that voted for Obama.

Years ago living in the Bible-belt South, I worked for a music store that essentially had a religious test for hiring. The business was owned by born-again religious types that became more devout as the business climate grew worse. Perhaps the only reason that I was hired there was because my friend who already worked there gave me a heads-up on how to answer some of the interview questions. Sometime after I left, they began holding all-employee prayer meetings. Realistically, you probably couldn't find a more clear-cut case of behavior that employers should not do and laws on the books designed to prevent; and yet, within the local community, I doubt that anyone would give it a second thought.

Laws to Prevent Employers from Asking for Facebook Login Credentials
Lately, when Apple, Google or Facebook find themselves in the news, somebody wants to codify some aspect of their behavior with a law. Here's an example of what's started happening around login credentials, Maryland passes law prohibiting employers from asking for social network passwords. To me, the amazing aspect of the case that helped fuel this law is that the guy already worked at the place, but in order to get re-certified, his employer wanted his login credentials.

While we can always hope that laws like this will work like the polygraph laws and prevent employers from requiring prospective employees from taking a polygraph, I doubt that it will have the same success. Instead, I suspect that the end result will be more akin to my experience at the music store. After all, a polygraph test requires an overt process that should be easier to prove if the employer was called out. Probably the most damning thing about the polygraph wasn't the idea of testing prospective employees, but rather the accuracy of the test.

Fundamentally, the problem is much broader and the battleground has been fought over for much longer. On the one hand, you have challenges going back to the early civil rights movement trying to force disclosure of Arkansas teachers that were members of the NAACP. On the other hand, you have modern Libertarian politicians who want to kill the fourteenth amendment because it prevents businesses from selling to a customer who is black, Jewish, or comes from India.

It's one thing to "want to pick your team", but what if the criteria you're using isn't connected to job performance. Were the people who worked at the music store better employees because they espoused a religious view? Were they more honest? Did they sell more instruments? I once worked with a start-up where the CTO was a cross-dresser. Would he have made it through some Facebook-based screening process? As the guy driving that company's technology, did it really matter what he did in his personal life? Or for those drug screening advocates, what about Steve Jobs whose recent biography included reference to his noteworthy experience of taking LSD? Assuming that you had the opportunity, would you hire Steve Jobs?

Would You Undergo a Strip Search to work for Google?
Often, when we hear stories about amazing work environments, Google comes up as a great example, so much so that they receive thousands of resumes per day. But what if their employment screening process went beyond five rounds of IQ tests and the need for a Masters degree or a PhD from a top tier school? What if they strip searched prospective employees? What if they required employees to be searched when the arrived and when they left like in the diamond mines in Africa, searching for nuggets of data? How many Google employees would be headed for Facebook?

The simple truth is that most of these aggressive screening techniques are implemented and applied to the desperate -- the people with limited alternatives. If your work environment sucks, you can always work somewhere else -- unless you can't because there are no other jobs, no other opportunities, no other environments. In that same way, these screening methods are not used to identify noteworthy attributes; rather, they are used for subjugation and control.

Forget about the cost to a collaborative, happy work culture, what this type of monitoring and scrutiny also do is diminish the creative diversity of an organization. Take the teacher from the earlier example; by 'cracking down' on her 'immoral' behavior, you also spread a chill across the rest of the community of teachers and prospective teachers. Now teachers with different points of view are afraid to speak out, to be 'caught' behaving in ways that might not meet 'community standards'. One voice equals no new ideas. If your business values innovation, you have squashed it.

Years ago, back in the days of the polygraph test, I had an opportunity to get a job at a record store that required the test. At the time, I had come to a constitutional and ethical decision not to work at any business that required a polygraph. I sometimes wonder how things might have been different if I had taken that job. Eventually, another job came along. It probably wasn't as cool as the job at the record store, but I'm happier for it.

Advertising: In-game Product Placement

Here's an interesting piece I came across yesterday talking with EA about in-game product placement advertising.

Four Types of Advertising Are Emerging in Social Games, EA Says, by Tricia Duryee at All Things D.

What I think is particularly noteworthy is not the in-game aspect, but the "how you structure the ad" aspect. It's definitely an interesting read and worth reflecting on.

Is Politics Driving Idiotic Self-Checkout Laws?

As I have posted before over on the SV Foodies blog, I like self checkout. I'm one of those customers who really doesn't want to chat in line. I find the self checkout UI interesting. And most of the time, I can get in and through the line faster in self checkout. But as of January 1, some new laws took effect that have handicapped the convenience of self checkout, made me question the logic of the law's sponsors, and also sparked this post.

Perhaps, like me, you only learned about the law banning the sale of alcohol at self-checkouts right before it went into effect around the beginning of the year. At the time, I remember thinking to myself that this is one of the dumbest laws that I've seen. Mind you, back in the Bible-belt South, it's not unusual for the 'morally minded' to use stupid laws to drive their cultural agenda, but few California residents can probably image a state with 'dry counties' or limiting alcoholic beverage sales on Sunday. So when I was signs announcing that this new restriction was taking effect, I assumed that it was legislation crafted by some misdirected, morally minded, overprotective technophobe. It turns out I was wrong.

Unexpected Item In Bagging Area
Anyone who has struggled with a self checkout system knows that the experience has the potential to be extremely frustrating. Self checkout systems freak out all of the time. Anyone who has used one of the systems is probably familiar with the "unexpected item" siren. Self checkout systems don't allow you to ignore store rules; instead, they get caught up on more exceptions than any human checker. If a price doesn't scan, human staff often simply key the item in as a generic grocery item and move forward. Self check out triggers the alert sirens and leaves you standing around waiting for a clerk to reset the system while you fidget about with people thinking that you were trying to steal from the store. Or that you just suck at using simple electronics.

This is why most of us who have used self checkout know that "the purpose of this law is to block an access point for underage drinkers to alcohol" is complete and utter bullshit.

I have three rules which I followed (prior to this law):

1. Avoid purchasing alcohol unless there is a clerk nearby and I am don't mind waiting
2. Avoid purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables and particularly things that might require the clerk
3. Avoid using self checkout on the weekends when families with kids or inexperienced users decide to 'try the system out'

The Engine Behind This BS
As I noted earlier, this legislation went complete under the radar for me as I imagine that it did for most of us. In the past, you might have expected this type of law to be the result of a real life incident -- people dying from taking an over-the-counter 'weight loss substance' or something -- so when I did some research and turned over the rock on the self checkout law, I was surprised when I didn't find something like that. Instead, this one seems like another example of lobbying interests driving legislation for special interests with little regard for the society at large.

First a couple of links so that you can see the history:

• California bill banning alcohol sales at self-checkout stands advances from the LA Times
• Gov. Signs AB 183: End of Self-Service Checkout Only in California For Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market if Stores to Still Sell Alcohol is an interesting one from the Fresh & Easy Buzz blog which claims to be unaffiliated with the Fresh & Easy stores.

Some noteworthy aspects that I learned from these pieces:

• This wasn't the first attempt to push this legislation through. There were also attempts in 2008 and 2010.
• It appears that the bill was driven largely by the United Food and Commercial Workers.
• Fresh and Easy is all self checkout and often targets food deserts -- I may have to check one out
• As governor, Schwarzenegger shot this bill down saying, "It is unclear what problem this bill seeks to address." That means that Brown signed off on this, and I really would have expected better from him. While I don't think that this would be a deal breaker in terms of me voting for him, given the opportunity to confront him on the issue, I would ask for an explanation. 
• California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, the Democrats in the Assembly that voted for this law, and Governor Brown all get nominated for my anti-innovation award for the year. What next? Do I need to card everyone that I charge on Square because it might be an alcohol purchase? Do I need to have a UFCW cashier ring up the transaction?

While the anti-innovation forces want to stifle self-checkout, What they overlook is that consumers like using these systems. Sure, sometimes it's slower, but it eliminates other potential frustrations in the transaction process, frustrations often created by poor customer service models. When a checker at Safeway asks about my day, am I really supposed to believe that they have any more interest in my day than the other ten people in line behind me? And if I'm number eight in line, do I really benefit from the "personalized" service that that person is receiving? For that matter, at Walmart or Target where they collect a ton of personal data and probably could access all of your personal transaction records in order to change your 'checkout' experience, would 'personalizing' it make you feel more connected to the big box store -- or just creeped out?

Piling On: How San Jose's Bag Ordinance Is Impacting Self Checkout
While San Jose probably was more focused on the environmental impact of plastic bags, the no bag ordinance is a blow to self checkout systems. Similar to the system's inability to correctly handle paper bags, the delicate scales on these systems aren't designed to calibrate to a customer-supplied bag. This means stacking and bagging after the transaction and, in most cases, an overall slow-down in processing a self checkout transaction. It will be interesting to see how stores handle no bags and the self checkout systems going forward as San Jose is probably not the last city to push a no bags ordinance through.