Failing Enterprise Blog 2005-07

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The Admin talks about our online community

Saturday, July 30th, 2005

I'm currently reading "The Tipping Point:  How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", by Malcom Gladwell.  One of the ways this book is described is "The Tipping Point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire."  He talks about the necessary and sufficient forces to convert a small idea or behavior into an epidemic.  Since traffic at Failing Enterprise seems to be growing at an accelerating exponential rate, at some point I might be tempted to call the Failing Enterprise phenomenon an epidemic.

I need to learn more about his theories and ideas.  I'm only on the first chapter, but it looks interesting.

I want Failing Enterprise to explode into a world-wide epidemic because the managers at Enterprise Rent-A-Car seem bound and determined to ignore their customers at all costs.  We're already the web's most popular company-specific complaint site, but now we're preparing content and infrastructure to handle a 100x increase in traffic.  Right now we get 2,100 visits per day and it's growing at 32% per month.  We're still in the very early stages of this epidemic...

Friday, July 22nd, 2005

I've updated the traffic report this morning.  Not only is our traffic large, it's growing.  Not only is it growing, it's growing at an exponential rate.  Not only is it growing at an exponential rate, it's growing at an accelerating exponential rate.

For the past week, we've served an average of 10,200 pages to 1,900 visitors per day.  At this rate, the number of daily pages will double in less than six months and the number of daily visitors will double in less than three months.

All I ask is for Enterprise to change their behavior and stop these unethical and possibly illegal practices and rejoin the mainstream American business community.  When they do make these changes, I'll be glad to boast of them here on Failing Enterprise.  Until then, I'm going to publicly call them out and shame them.  With the rise of the Internet, hiding from their customers simply won't work any longer.

I have no doubt the CEO is going to hold off as long as possible and pretend he's not aware of Failing Enterprise, hoping it will just go away.  (Their lawyers, of course, have already made it clear they're aware of the site.)  We know it's coming, though.  While it might take a long time to turn a battleship, or rouse a sleeping dinosaur, sooner or later they're going to see the light (sorry, three metaphors in a row); it's only a matter of how much damage they're willing to cause their reputation until they decide to make the necessary changes.

I'm sure at this point there's some grumbling in the marketing and human resources departments about how the presence of Failing Enterprise is negating their very expensive marketing campaigns and making it difficult to hire internet-savvy job candidates.  Here's our response to this grumbling:  it's only going to get worse.

I again invite Enterprise CEO Andy Taylor to make the necessary changes and bring Enterprise around to modern ethical standards, leaving behind the vaporous "reservation", the "phantom upsell", what appears to be routine lying to customers, all of it.  We want a good, strong economy here in the U.S., based upon square deals and honest talk.  Won't you show some patriotic spirit and join us?

Friday, July 15th, 2005

Enterprise is trying to grow their operations in Germany, so it's only natural that we at Failing Enterprise are also trying to grow our operations in Germany.  We've now translated the core of the site into German.

We're always looking for ways to take better care of our customers here at Failing Enterprise; if you'd like to translate these six pages into another language, please e-mail me at comments2 ((at)) failingenterprise ((dot)) com.  Most any language will do.  I'm a bit of a language maven, so I'd be particularly delighted if we could serve our customers in Farsi, Dari, Pashto, Mohawk, Latin, Bella Coola, or Linear B.  I'd settle for Brazilian Portuguese in the short run, though.

This morning's traffic data showing the numbers from yesterday reveals we're still on track.  We served over 10,000 pages to over 2,000 visitors yesterday (and we also served over 10,000 pages the day before).  All I've ever asked for is for Enterprise to stop their unethical and possibly illegal practices and to rejoin the mainstream American business community.  We're just going to keep growing Failing Enterprise until they figure out the Internet won't let them keep pulling the wool over their customers' eyes.  Like stock option grants, Internet traffic is measured on a logarithmic scale.  We may have to grow by another order of magnitude before they wake up in St. Louis.

Thursday, July 14th, 2005

I can't help myself.  I really am a natural scientist and explainer.  I'm always looking for ways to understand things better and present ideas more clearly.  Take our traffic report, for example.

I was looking at the upwardly-sloping graphs for our five major web site metrics and I was wondering whether it was better to try to fit the data to a linear growth model or an exponential growth model.

Linear might be best if traffic to our site grows due to some linear process, say, due to a steady stream of infuriated customers, frustrated employees and horrified job applicants finding us through search engines.  If this is the best model, we could expect traffic to grow by some fixed amount per month.

An exponential growth model would be more accurate, however, if our growth came from "viral marketing", or word of mouth, and the best predictor of next month's traffic was multiplying this month's traffic by some constant larger than one.  Also, the more messages posted to our discussion board, (over 11,000 at this point, and climbing), the more visitors tend to linger and read more of them.

Forgive me for delving into the minutiae of basic statistics, but the best way to figure out which model fits best is to calculate an R-squared value for each and see which is larger.  It took some rooting around in Excel to figure out how to get these values (indexing into an array of returned values from the LINEST and LOGEST functions), but the results are conclusive.  The exponential model fits better than the linear model, which is what I was expecting.

Therefore, not only is traffic at Failing Enterprise large, but it's growing, and not only is it growing, but it's growing at an exponential rate!  It feels like a dot-com startup around here!

I'm sure somebody over in St. Louis keeps thinking that if they ignore Failing Enterprise long enough, it's going to go away.  Today's junior varsity statistical analysis shows that not only are their problems large and growing, but they're growing at an exponential rate.

So take a look at our traffic report.  I've replaced the linear trend lines with exponential trend lines, and I've extended them out to predict values for the next 30 days.  The charts are also now too large to fit into a standard web page, so I've reconfigured them to be separate links.

We receive about 1,700 visitors per day, and with the new statistical model, the best estimate of the monthly growth rate is now 27%, instead of 24%.

I love statistics.  I love Microsoft Excel.  I love the Internet.  I love the First Amendment.  What a great country!

Tuesday, July 12th, 2005

I had the most amazing experience today with the other national rental car chain that I use here in San Francisco while I wait for Enterprise to get their act together.  I just found out I needed a car tomorrow afternoon and I got on their web site and tried to make a reservation.

I entered in the date and time and I saw a message which I'm sure isn't even possible for the Enterprise web site to show:  "No cars available at that time."  I was so impressed that they were actually willing to do the right thing and simply tell the truth when they were sold out so as not to have me lured to the counter when they knew they had nothing in stock.  By refusing to reserve a non-existent car they knew that I'd be frustrated in the short run but they'd earn my respect in the long run.

This is, of course, in stark contrast to the way things work at Enterprise.com, where it appears that every request for a reservation is met with a cheerful acceptance and confirmation, even if the branches are completely sold out.

The policy at Enterprise seems to be one of maximizing today's profit, regardless of the reputation they earn, while the policy at their competitor seems to be one of delighting their customers over the long term.

And with this whole new-fangled Internet thing, Enterprise's reputation is spreading faster and further than ever before.  Over the past seven days, we've averaged over 1,700 visitors per day here at Failing Enterprise, a new record.  Will they learn in time?

Saturday, July 9th, 2005

13% of Americans are Hispanic, and while Enterprise doesn't currently operate in any Spanish-speaking countries (although you could make a good argument that much of the U.S. is a Spanish-speaking country), I wanted to make the site as accommodating as possible to everyone.  Therefore, I'm expanding the site to go partially bilingual.  Click on the "En Español" on the top of any page and you'll go to the Spanish version of our site.  For now, we're just offering the five main "reason" pages in Spanish, but we can add more if the demand is sufficient.

This is in addition to our experiment with the German forum on our discussion board.  If Enterprise wants to serve customers who speak German and Spanish, then Failing Enterprise can warn their customers in both German and Spanish.

If you speak Spanish, please review our pages in Spanish and point out any spelling, grammar or other issues that we need to correct.

Friday, July 8th, 2005

I've updated the traffic reports today and they clearly show how our daily traffic in sites, visits, pages, hits and posts just keeps increasing.  We've averaging about 1,500 visits per day now, and this number is increasing by about 23% per month.

Not only are we the Internet's most popular company-specific complaint site but out of some 8,000,000,000 web pages, we're ranked about 36,000.  So far, so good!

We've also got something in the works for our Spanish speaking friends...

More on Enterprise car rental at the Failing Enterprise home page.