Emmy results and a "naked conversation" with the Emperor

So in between watching the cheating Patriots thrash the Chargers and an E! special on the top 25 most memorable swimsuit moments, I watched the 59th Prime-time Emmy Awards on Fox.

The Sopranos of course snagged a medley of awards including the one for Outstanding Drama series, which beat out one of my favorite show, Heroes. Heroes' Hiro (Masi Oka) also didn't win his supporting actor nomination, which was a bummer, but I was more upset at how incompetent John Madden was as a commentator when Masi was losing. However one of the thing that did catch my attention during the award show was Al Gore's CurrentTv.com's Emmy win for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Television.

Now I'm only a semi-Al Gore supporter, which pretty much means I voted for him in the last election, thought the Inconvenient Truth was a pretty good documentary, think it'll be nice if my car was a hybrid, and recycle when it's convenient. But that's not why his win caught my attention. It caught my attention because of how much CurrentTv reminded me of what Robert Scoble and Shel Israel was talking about in their book, naked conversation, which I'm currently reading for class.

Anyway, I never even heard of CurrentTv.com till I watched the Emmy tonight, so I googled it and found this article by Ellen McGirt of FastCompany.com that quickly updated me. CurrentTv is pretty much a cable TV network that lets the viewers pick or create what they want to watch on the network. A Youtubian TV network to put it simply. This expands the TV experience from the one-way exchange of information that it has always been, to direct interactions between network and customers that has never been done before in that medium. CurrentTv's manifest mirrors the current emerging corporate blogging scene talked about in naked conversation, where corporate bloggers and consumer bloggers can "interrupt each other to ask questions, make suggestions, [and] challenge arguments." It gives the big corporations a friendly, understanding face that is sorely absent in today's consumer market.

However imho, these big company need to realize that while these new means of interactions with the consumer is certainly good for business, they need to make sure that this new face they're projecting does not become a façade that does more harm then good. Case in point, I was surfing Hewlett Packward's website the other day, while checking for new ways I can contact HP customer service (read my previous post for reason), I found my way to HP's corporate blogs.

It's nice to see ethusiastic HP employees blogging about work and even what they do in their spare time, but many of the bloggers missed the whole point of actual dialoguing with the customers. If they said they won't dialogue, it would have been alright, but it clearly states in their Blogging Code of Conduct that they will. Now I'm not saying they have to respond to everyone and everything, but when there's a fair amount of comments on a blog that talked about HP inventing customer experiences, and almost all of those comments are challenging what it says, you would think that warrant some "dialoguing." But nope, no response. So rather than being a human face for the company, the blogs instead patronizes.

Alright, my head been hurting all day and I still haven't done my Japanese homework and it's due at 8:30 in the morning, I think I'm gonna go past out.

*edit

Oh...and I finally got hold of a case manager from HP the other day (Thank you God of Luck, Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Buddha!), apparently calling at 12:07pm (EST) on a friday is the best time. My laptop is gonna be replaced by a brand spanking new upgraded one, a compensation from HP for it being so lousy, however I'll need to wait 2-3 weeks for it to be build. So if anyone out there want a sweet laptop and you don't want to pay as much, all you have to do is buy a lower end laptop from HP, wait till it breaks down, be frustrated and aggravated for 3 months and BANG, voila, a new sweetass laptop! Oh...and that's only if you get through to someone important from HP customer service by the second month! Good luck, and good night.

Theories For Dummies: Things everyone know, but apparently there's a need for doctors to explain it to you.

I'm usually a very patient and calm person, but there are moment of late that I haven't been. These moments usually start with a phone call to Hewlett-Packard's customer service line, ending a hour later with me cussing at the dead phone like it just insulted my entire family including my dog and my hamster.

Why?

It's a long story, but the gist of it is that my laptop has been in service for 2 months and I still haven't gotten it back. Plus it would seem all the case managers in HP seem to be too busy to deal with me, despite me calling in the morning, the evening, the afternoon, the beginning of their shift, the middle or the end. They're so diligent in fact, that of the 8 times their technicians say they'll call me back, they have called me zero times.

I was reading the other day about network theories and I was thinking why are there even a field of study there? It seems like things everyone should know, things like how people connect to each another and how to make that connection better comes naturally. You don't need lines and diagrams to tell you why A and B connects and why C is left out, its human nature to know how social network works. Even a socially inept person knows the rules of social network, they're just people that aren't motivated or is afraid to change what's making them inept.

However after speaking (or not speaking) to HP customer service, I understand why there's a need for network theories. Because BIG COMPANIES apparently loses sight of how to maintain good relationships with their customers. If they can't even do that, how do they manage their own employees?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this but I'm gonna be back later and elaborate after I marinate on this thought a little.