Which is Worse?

For years now, single people from all over the world have suspected that the online dating sites were using ringers – very attractive people employed by the company to make their service look valuable – and leaving old profiles up long after their owners had quit paying for membership in order to make their pool of potential dates look larger. Everyone knows that there are going to be cheaters on such sites – people who will send you a headshot of a breathtaking (but obscure) actress and claim it’s their own picture, or cut out a picture of a rugged pro athlete (like in the Simpsons episode) and represent that as their true image – but that sort of thing went on before there were dating sites or an Internet to put them on. Everyone also knows that membership in online dating sites is going to skew heavily toward males, just as video dating and matchmaking services did; women are much more worried about the consequences of meeting a total stranger over the Internet, and rightly so. But given the class action lawsuit that has been filed against Match.com this week, I have to wonder what they thought they were doing – and what they were actually charging for…

You can pick up the Yahoo News story about it if you want to, but the gist of it is that the plaintiffs are claiming that as many as 60% of all Match profiles were either inactive or populated by scammers attempting to get money out of them; they also claim that they were initially contacted in order to get them to sign up for the service, but that once they did all of the profiles that had contacted them suddenly disappeared. If these allegations are proven in court the plaintiffs should be able to recover every dollar they spent and punitive damages besides; the practices described are clearly fraudulent, and there is no way the owners of the company could possible defend their actions as legitimate parts of such a business. The real question, at least to my mind, is what they thought they were going to accomplish in the first place…

Running such an enterprise on the basis of matching subscribers according to a simple personality test (of which dozens are available at reasonable cost) would allow the operators of such a site to actually provide contacts to anyone in their system who could reasonably be paired off; they could tell anyone left over (as some people inevitably would be) that there was no match for them in the system at this time, and to keep checking back. If your customers cancel the service and leave after a month or two (or whatever you want the minimum subscription to be) don’t worry about it; the supply of lonely Internet users is not likely to decrease anytime soon, and your only variable cost is whatever the personality test license cost you (assuming you paid for it fair and square, like you should have); a profile in a database doesn’t cost anything to maintain. You’ll need a few hours of programmer time each week (to send out the contact or lack-of-contact emails), but that’s only a few hours of employee time for thousands or millions of messages…

The key to a high-turnover business model (which this would be, if the company was dealing honestly with its customers) is to keep bringing in enough new subscribers each month that you don’t have to worry about the ones who keep leaving. If your price is affordable, your advertising is convincing, and you do occasionally pair somebody off, this should not prove difficult. Conning people with fake messages (if they really were) won’t improve your retention rate that much, since people will get wind of it and there are lots of alternative sites – and other online resources used to meet people. And even if it does work for you, there is still the unpleasant possibility of civil lawsuits, criminal charges, and hundreds of scruffy bloggers mocking you all over the Internet…

I can’t decide which is worse – if these people were criminals all along, or if they’re just too stupid and/or greedy to see that this type of business can be sustained indefinitely (albeit possibly at a less lucrative level) without defrauding anyone or breaking any civil or criminal statute. I’ll keep you posted on how the trial goes…

After-market Onstar

You may already have ignored the announcements, but at a news conference this week General Motors announced that they are expanding their highly successful Onstar service by making an after-market version of the hands-free system available to buyers at Best Buy and eventually other retailers. I thought it was an interesting strategy and a good example of both partially repurposing something and expanding your existing customer base, which makes it worth taking a closer look…

For those of you who have never owned a GM vehicle, Onstar is less hype than it is a cell phone system built into your review mirror. It makes use of GPS technology to pinpoint your car’s location, and can be used to summon assistance from emergency services, get turn-by-turn navigation, diagnose engine issues, unlock your doors (if you lock yourself out of the car), track the people who have stolen your car (if it gets stolen), and in newer models even deactivate the engine so the police can arrest whoever has stolen your car. The hardware is built into most GM products, and the support service is usually free for the first year and then a moderate monthly fee from then on. Just exactly how much safer this makes any given car remains somewhat in dispute; it’s easy to believe that having a system that alerts Onstar operators (and eventually emergency response services) whenever one of your airbags deploys could be useful, and there have certainly been cases where the system enabled police to apprehend car thieves. But since most of these same functions can be obtained through other products, up to this point the Onstar system has served mostly as a selling point for GM vehicles…

What struck me about this new offering is that for all practical purposes, GM is making money without spending any. They already have the three Onstar monitoring centers set up, and even if these new customers start producing a heavy increase in calls it shouldn’t be that hard to increase the capacity of the system. Meanwhile, every Onstar user represents a regular monthly income, and if you want the really snazzy services like turn-by-turn navigation there’s a small additional fee each month. You can also use the Onstar system like a cell phone, assuming you’re willing to purchase the minutes. None of these are particularly big-ticket purchases, but with over 5 million active Onstar subscribers it does add up (somewhere on the order of $95 million per month at the base package price alone, and somewhere around $140 million per month if they all bought the expanded service). Now imagine if you doubled those numbers…

Even before the financial panic and bailout a few years back there were already stories about General Motors making more on car loans through its GMAC subsidiary and licensing the rights to various designs, logos and brands than it did from selling cars. With the company now planning on expansion into new markets in Asia and expanding Onstar coverage to anyone who wants it, it seems entirely possible that the service might become the next major profit center for the company. Making additional profit from sales of the equipment needed to use Onstar would just be a nice bonus; the real goldmine would be in convincing millions of people to sign up for extended service each month…

It’s not a bad showing for something that was originally created just to provide value added for people buying GM vehicles, and it leads me to wonder how many other companies could repurpose some of their value-added services to a wider market. Is there something your company does that people who aren’t even your customers might be willing to pay for on a regular basis? You might want to look into it…

The Horror, The Horror…

I was very amused to read the story online this week about the new Oprah Winfrey network, and the minor storm of protest brewing about it because a number of cable systems are planning to carry it as part of their premium package – which is to say, viewers who want it will have to pay more than the cost of their basic cable package. It’s always hard to say how many of the people spewing about this sort of topic are really that upset, and how many are trolls having a good time at the expense of people who don’t really understand economics or cable television operations, but as I was enjoying a quiet chuckle over the issue it occurred to me that MOST people don’t really understand how cable works, and we should probably take a closer look…

To begin with, it’s important to understand that most cable systems have a hardware limit on the number of channels they can bring you, whether it’s the amount of copper wire they have buried under your street or the amount of fiber-optic cable they’ve been able to install or the bandwidth their satellites can beam down to your DSS dish. Back when your only cable option was the local cable company this didn’t matter so much, but most major population centers now offer at least two or three options for getting your television content, and that means that every channel a given provider is offering is a selling point that they can use to attract your business. On the other hand, your cable provider also has to pay a certain amount (it ranges anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars) for each customer who receives each channel. These factors combine to make the provider want to bring you any channels that they think might make you more likely to engage their services, but want to avoid any channels that most people wouldn’t care about…

Tiers of cable channels work like any other bundled product – you are offered a group of products for a single price, partly because the product you actually want is going to vary a bit from one customer to the next, and partly because that way you’re paying extra for products you don’t really want and will never use in order to get the one you do want. So putting the new OWN network on a higher tier means that, in theory, the people who want it can pay a small additional monthly charge to get it, while the people who don’t want it do not have to pay a higher cable bill. Cable companies often claim that they can’t add or delete a single channel from your cable service because of hardware limitations – and a decade or so ago this was frequently true – but these days it’s more often because the effort of keeping track of millions of individual cable bills, all for differing amounts, would require a lot more effort (and drive their costs up)…

In the case of the OWN network, the channel they’re taking over in most cable systems was previously held by the Discovery Health Network, which was generally a premium service already. The real problem would appear to be that Oprah’s show was broadcast over the air for twenty-five years, and even people who have been paying to receive it (on basic cable) seem to be convinced that it was free the whole time. Asking that your cable company provide you with something they have to pay for at no additional cost to you is just as asinine as asking any other business to give you products or services for free, and even asking that they create a new tier (the “Oprah” tier, presumably) which will drive up their expenses and raise everyone’s cable bill isn’t much better. The bottom line is that your cable company is in business to make a living, and if you want to watch the OWN network programming you should expect to pay for it…

Although I can’t help adding that, to paraphrase the late Sam Kinnison, if this is the biggest issue that is disturbing you, you, my friend, do not yet have a problem…

Of Trademarks and Charities

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the non-profit sector (including some time as the in-house grant writer for a non-profit and a lot of consulting work in the early 2000s), and I’ve also got what you might consider a personal stake in the search for a cure for cancer – I’m the son of a three-time cancer survivor (it got her on the fourth try) and I carry the genes that will give any female offspring I ever have a dramatically increased risk for the disease. So I was a bit taken aback this week when I saw an article on Huffington Post ranting and raving about The Susan G. Komen Foundation entering into legal action over the use of the word “cure” by other non-profit organizations. Certainly, the idea of one of the nation’s leading fundraisers squandering funds on legal actions is not a pleasant one. But, as usual, when you actually read the article, the scenario is a bit murkier than you might expect from the headline…

To begin with, the language in the article is intentionally inflammatory, stating that the Foundation “patrols the waters” looking for agencies using the word “cure” so that it can sue them; it then goes on to indicate that the Komen Foundation has already filed more than a hundred of these allegedly cruel and heartless legal actions, presumably just to eliminate the competition and retain its position of importance, or some such thing. Certainly, the people who are commenting on the original story seem to think so, carrying on at great length about how this allegedly wealthy and powerful organization is more concerned with crushing the competition than it is with doing its job. All of which sounds very nefarious indeed, until you consider what is actually at stake in these proceedings…

First, consider that the Komen Foundation has, in fact, spent a great deal of money and effort establishing its “brand” – which, in the case of a non-profit, means establishing that it is an efficient and effective way for you to contribute towards a cause you believe in. Like all non-profit corporations, you can read the Komen Foundation’s Annual Report and decide for yourself if they are spending money in ways and proportions of which you approve, and if you don’t approve of them, you can always give money to the American Cancer Society , or the Concern Foundation , or any number of other groups that raise money for cancer research. Now consider that not all of the agencies out there using the phrase “for the cure” are actually raising money for cancer research, or indeed actually raising money for any charitable cause. If people start getting the idea that anyone who says they are doing something “for the cure” is a scam artist, this will cut into the Komen Foundation’s support, lower their effectiveness, and work against their actual cause (which as noted above, I’m actually in favor of). But that isn’t even the worst of it…

The other fact that is being overlooked here is that the Komen Foundation isn’t suing any of these “mom and pop” charities for money; they’re simply telling them to stop using the phrase “for the cure” in their fundraising. The author (and many of the people interviewed for the article) makes a big deal about these small agencies being “forced” to spend money on lawyers to defend themselves, but the truth is they don’t have to spend anything; they just need to call their fundraising programs something else. And the argument that the Komen Foundation could just ignore these little charity groups is even more ridiculous; as noted in other posts, if you don’t defend a trademark even one time you probably can’t ever defend it again, and as noted above here, if the Foundation loses this trademark there will be genuine consequences, not only for them but for anyone who currently has or ever will have cancer…

I haven’t audited the Komen Foundation’s spending profile, so I can’t actually tell you if the amount they are spending on legal fees is appropriate in percentage terms. But if the amount offends you in absolute terms, you have the same recourse you have with any other non-profit: write to them and ask them to return your donation, and they will. Just as the American Red Cross did after 9/11, and just as any other non-profit group is obliged to do if you ask…

The Astroturf Rebellion

Over the past few weeks I’ve been wondering about counters, online reviews, and cheating – which is to say, I’ve been wondering how many bloggers click on their own blog multiple times each day in order to make their counters rise, how many teachers (and other professionals) go onto online rating sites to improve their general rating, how many people leave positive reviews about books they’ve written or restaurants they own, or other businesses they have an interest in, and whether or not this is gaming the system. Certainly there’s no law against such tactics, anymore than there would be for getting all of your friends and relatives to send in letters of support for you on a job or praise for your performance in a play, for example. But it’s hard to deny that this is using a comments system (or even an entire feedback and rating site) for your own purposes; it’s even harder to deny that people are already doing this…

Some years ago word leaked out that the Chinese national government was making use of paid Internet operatives to sing the praises of its agencies and policies – and shout down anyone who was in any way critical of their government. The story goes that the People’s Ministry of Culture was paying a small sum for each review, comment or blog post that served one of these two purposes; it was nicknamed the “Fifty-Cent Party” because the fee for doing so was said to be 50 Mao, or half a Yuan (the standard unit of Chinese currency). The question of just how many such operatives actually exist remains in dispute, but interestingly enough, so does the question of just how aggressive these people actually are, and just how wrong such a campaign would actually be. On one level, this tactic isn’t that different from communities in the US employing boosters to promote their civic virtues; it’s only if they’re trying to mislead people about true conditions or drown out voices of dissent that things get ugly. And before you tell me that such things could never happen in a culture with freedom of speech and freedom of the press, I regret to inform you that apparently they already are…

A story reported last week in The Daily Kos claims that some of our home-grown Tea Party groups have been recruiting teams of “activists” to go onto Amazon and other sites and issue hundreds of negative reviews of books they consider to be excessively “Liberal” (whatever that might mean nowadays), regardless of whether said volunteers had actually read the books or not. The same article claims that this tactic is being used to promote anything by any of the Tea Party’s favorite commentators, regardless of quality (or indeed, sanity) – which may explain why certain right-wing authors have been selling so well over the past few years. The Daily Kos may not be the most moderate (or Moderate) news source going, but their information appears to check out; a much bigger question from where I’m sitting is whether this really compares to the Chinese example – and if such tactics are or should be illegal in the first place…

This isn’t an ethics post, mostly because there’s no real grey area here to discuss. Issuing fraudulent reviews (of anything, for any reason) is morally indefensible, and if this is true it plays up the moral bankruptcy of people who would claim to be social conservatives in order to further their own wealth and power. From a business standpoint, however, I have to wonder if a retailer like Amazon should attempt to restrict such reviews, or how they could possibly do so if they wanted to. How to you prove which reviews are fraudulent (such as ones where the “reviewer” has never read the book and is only criticizing it to forward a political agenda), and how do you prevent users from making reviews of this type? Can you even try to do so without violating your customers’ right to free speech? How about if you’re the publisher or publicity agent of one of the authors being slandered in this fashion? Do you have a responsibility to help them fight off such attacks, or would you be better off staying out of it?

The practice is called “astroturfing” in reference to the artificial grass used for some sports stadia; the fake reviews and so on are said to be “artificial grass roots” movements, created for the occasion. The degree to which such things are really happening, in the US or overseas, will probably always remain in dispute, but it’s worth remembering the next time you check out the online ratings of a product, person, movement, event or idea: you can’t believe everything you read – especially on the Internet…

The Ethics of Playoffs

By this point it seems clear that everyone in America - and probably most of the rest of the civilized world, or at least those parts that are tired of hearing us whine about it - is in favor of a playoff system in college football. Naturally, there are those who do not watch college sports or sports in general (a friend out in Los Angeles claims to have difficulty remembering which sport uses the oblong ball with the pointy ends on it), but even the majority of those people would probably agree that a system which allows the two teams which are actually the best to meet head-to-head to determine the national championship is more in keeping with our stated national preference for truth, justice and fair play. Unfortunately, there is a very simple and incredibly powerful force that is preventing such a system from being implemented, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future; I refer, of course, to money. As long as it remains more profitable to maintain out current plethora of bowl games and opaque system of selecting the two teams for the "championship" game, nothing is likely to change. The question we need to consider is whether or not this is actually a bad thing...

First off, all of the arguments about bowl games, television revenues and profits made by the sports programs of NCAA schools improving the quality of education at those schools are completely specious - the money generated by the athletic programs is almost universally retained by the athletic department for its own use. The rest of this point is a bit murkier, however. Participation in any nationally televised event usually comes with the opportunity for the school to broadcast its promotional video during the event, and will always create mentions of the school's name in publications and newscasts where it would not normally appear. It seems clear that this will increase the school's exposure and prestige; the degree to which this improves matters for the institution remains in dispute. Still, a national playoff system would concentrate media and public attention on the seven games involved (assuming a field of eight seeds; a field of 16 would involve 15 games, and so on) and draw it away from the 28 other bowl games being televised each year. This would be even better for the eight teams selected, but would undoubtedly harm the other 56 to some degree...

Second, there's the business picture to consider. Bowl games, as is often alleged, generally do benefit the television networks and venue owners more than anyone else, but as a business blogger I feel it is my duty to point out that these are public-owned companies (in the case of the networks) and public municipalities (in the case of many of the actual stadia) all of which benefit the economy and the public in general by earning money, employing people and paying taxes. The residual benefit realized by the communities in which bowl games take place (especially hotel and restaurant receipts from visiting fans) may be smaller, but is certainly not a bad thing, especially because these businesses also contribute to the economy as a whole. And even if the secondary benefits realized by related businesses (transportation companies, tour companies, apparel and souvenir manufacturers, publishers and the like) are small, they're certainly better than nothing, which is what we're likely to see from a bowl that is eliminated as no longer relevant or simply driven into complete obscurity...

Finally, there's the effect such a system would have on the game itself. As frustrating as it is to have the same record as another team in your conference (and actually beat that team head-to-head during the regular season!) and still end up below them in the standings and bowl precedence for the post-season, as is the case with Michigan State this year, it would be even worse if no one ended up watching your bowl appearance because it wasn't one of the 7 National Playoff games, and worse still if your team was denied a post-season game after finishing their best season in a generation just because there wasn't enough of a television audience to bother staging the game...

In the long run, I can't (as a fan) say that the current bowl system is really a good thing. But by the same token (as a business teacher) I can't really say it's entirely without its up side, either. As long as there is money to be made, there will probable always be dozens of obscure but colorful football games played in the last weeks of December, and the first weeks of the new year...

GO GREEN! GO WHITE!

The Grad School Diaries: A Long December

Regular visitors of this space will recall the set of 30 short essays chronicling the first year of my time at Michigan State, which I called the Graduate School Diaries; astute readers may have noticed that the collection ended abruptly just before the start of my second year in the program and has been on hiatus since last May. It’s not that I’ve gone off of the project – obviously, since I’ve continued writing these slice-of-life moments during the period that hasn’t made it onto the blog yet. It’s that the sixteen months just concluded have been so difficult that I can’t even come up with a bad metaphor for how difficult they have been, or figure out how to write about them in some way that isn’t just a meaningless recitation of doom and woe – which is kind of the point of this entry, in fact. The truth is that everyone – and every family – will experience what are, by their lights, difficult times; to the truly fortunate this may be limited problems that you or I would consider trivial inconveniences, while some people in this world are experiencing torments that anyone who actually has a computer and an Internet connection probably can’t even imagine…


One of the reasons I started writing this autobiographic sub-series was to try to gain some perspective on the very strange landscape I find myself navigating. Because the fact is, things that are considered deadly serious in Academia might be considered trivia anywhere else (and vice versa, if we’re honest with ourselves) and writing everything down and sharing it with the world makes it more concrete, not just for me but for most people. Some of what has happened to me in the past sixteen months is good and some is bad; some is life-changing serious, and some of it is jumped-up trivia; some of it is beautiful and life-affirming, and some of it is simply absurd. I don’t claim to know much about anything, and the more I learn, it seems, the more I realize that I don’t understand, but the one thing I know for sure is that I was meant to tell stories; to bring the world to life in words and phrases, to make sense out of the chaos with my (extremely modest) art. There’s even Management theory (well, Organizational Theory, anyway) to support the idea. So here we go again…


In the words of the song, it has been a long December, but there is reason to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last. The last sixteen months have taken me and every other member of my household to our limits (and occasionally beyond), but this bright and beautiful New Year’s Day finds all of us alive and well, and living together in Michigan. I don’t know what this year will bring; not what I will be doing for a living, or who my fellow voyagers will be, or even where the next cycle of months with take me, but I feel curiously at peace. It might just be true that the point of life is the journey, and not the destination; and if that is true, then it has been an interesting trip recently – and I get the feeling it’s about to get even weirder…


Want to come along? It might be fun…