Failing Enterprise Blog 2005-10

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The Admin talks about our online community

Saturday, October 29th

Here's the opening paragraph in an article in a recent issue (2005-10-08) of The Economist titled "The life and soul of the internet party":

"DAVID SIFRY'S epiphany occurred when he read “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, a book published in 2000 that quickly became a bible in certain Silicon Valley subcultures. Its main thesis is that “markets are conversations” among humans who use language that is “natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking” and above all “unmistakably genuine”, whereas companies and governments are stuck in “the humourless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal.” But liberation is at hand. The internet, by amplifying the genuine conversations, will make a laughing stock of all those using the monotone."

This really resonated with me, as I think this describes Failing Enterprise fairly well.  Enterprise is a company that has banned its 60,000 employees from speaking publicly about their jobs or customer service issues without having a Public Relations minder present, but then here on our discussion board we now have over 19,000 messages that are clearly “natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking” and above all “unmistakably genuine”.

Enterprise still doesn't "get it".  They're still a command-and-control 45-year-old dinosaur that doesn't understand the Internet and that thinks they can control the communications between their widely dispersed employees and their millions of customers.

Our traffic just keeps growing.  Earlier this month, for reasons still unknown to me, the number of daily postings on our discussion board seemingly doubled overnight, from about 50 to about 100, and has stayed high ever since.  A week or so after this sudden doubling, I  partitioned out many of the regional Groups into their own forums on the discussion board, and perhaps this is helping to sustain and encourage these conversations.  Of course, discussion board postings are the fundamental driver of the snowball effect of increasing traffic here.  We're due to have more than 1.4 million hits this month.

The mystery of the thread printing continues.  So far this month the thread printing routine has been called an average of 195 times per day, and given that most threads are multiple pages, this means somebody's burning up over a ream of paper per day printing out threads from our discussion board.

Sure, it might be Enterprise lawyers and paralegals monitoring and documenting the site, but it might also be management preparing evidence to bring to employees, or employees printing out the daily highlights for friends and colleagues.  If you have any ideas, let me know.

Saturday, October 15th

Until now I've been recommending people visit us at http://www.failingenterprise.com, and all internal links pointed to that domain.  Now I've decided to be hip and cool and modern and start trying to get everything to happen at http://failingenterprise.com only.  They both work fine, and will continue to do so, but if I can steer most traffic into the newer domain, then certain things when logging referring pages will work better and I'll get more accurate information about how people are using our site.

Therefore, I've converted over all internal links and referrers, and I'm working with my virtual web server ISP to configure Apache to do this conversion automatically for any stragglers still using the old domain.

If you've got us bookmarked, change your bookmark to http://failingenterprise.com.

If you notice any problems, please let me know.  The only hiccup might be that you'll need to log in again to generate a cookie for the new domain.

Friday, October 14th

The previous record for the greatest number of posts on our discussion board in a single day was 150, on 2005-08-19.  The posting count has been going crazy the past few days, and yesterday it smashed the record by going to 250!  The average for the past seven days is now 135, also a new record.

On days like this, the board reaches a new critical mass, in which you can reply to a post and before you're done reading all the other "unread" posts, someone has replied to your post and then you're back at it again.  When the traffic gets high enough, it just gets addictive and I find it hard to pull myself away from it.

I don't know what's going on, but when it comes to Enterprise Rent-A-Car, people need to talk.  CEO Andy Taylor hasn't posted yet, so we're still waiting to hear from him.  The site's been up for 22 months now and he still won't jump in on the discussion board and tell his side of the story.  In fact, we have no evidence he even knows how to use a web browser or is even aware of Failing Enterprise.  I guess our 15,000+ page views per day aren't enough to warrant bothering the boss with the bad news that his company has now earned the most popular company complaint site on the Internet.

Thursday, October 13th

I've updated our traffic reports today, mostly because it's been a while and I don't have an automated script that does it for me.  You'll see that traffic continues to grow, despite an obvious dip around the time of Hurricane Katrina.  For the last seven days, we've averaged 48,000 hits a day, and 118 new posts per day on the discussion board, both new records.

I consider page views to be probably our most representative metric, and I'm pleased to see that since we migrated to our own in-house discussion board in March (just seven months ago), the daily page views have tripled from 5,000 to 15,000 and are still increasing by 12% per month.  Having Enterprise frighten our spineless outsourced discussion board host into dropping us and forcing us to create our own discussion board in-house is the best thing that could have happened!

I created Failing Enterprise less than two years ago and we're already getting well over one million hits per month.

My server logs are showing another amazing statistic: users print out threads (presumably to show to friends and colleagues) an average of 175 times per day!

Tuesday, October 11th

Traffic to the site seems to be growing fairly steadily the past couple of weeks, especially now that the whole Hurricane Katrina story seems to have settled down a bit.  As of yesterday, we set a new record with the seven-day average count of new posts on the discussion board exceeding 100 for the first time.  In the long run, it's discussion board posts that are going to drive traffic growth, as the vast majority of visitors go straight to the board to see what's new and to read through previous posts, which now total over 17,000. 

With our high signal-to-noise ratio (a high proportion of interesting and well-written posts) and now even higher daily post count, people seem to be coming back daily or even several times per day.  The seven day average for visits per day is now 2,054.

Saturday, October 8th

A while back I decided to try an experiment to see if identifying Enterprise Rent-A-Car here at least part of the time as "Enterprise Rent A Car" rather than the more formal and correct "Enterprise Rent-A-Car" (with the hyphens) might help catch more search engine referrals.  The results are inconclusive and I've decided to go back to essentially always referring to them by their formal name.  Surprisingly, Yahoo consistently sends more referrals than Google, and I don't know why.

I changed the names back today and also cleaned up some things on the site and tried to focus the names even more strongly for search engine inclusion.  Everything on the site should now be a bright shining beacon to search engines for "Enterprise Rent-A-Car" and related terms.

Thursday, October 6th

Discussion Board regular Caloomba posted this wonderful link to a KPIX WB11 investigative reporter's videotaping of his interaction with an Enterprise manager in New Jersey.  The manager (John Piccinich) really comes across as a guy who doesn't know what his branch is up to and has something to hide, but that seems to be a recurring theme at Enterprise.

Maybe he should spend less time contributing to the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Political Action Committee (search for "Piccinich" on that page) and a little more time curious about where his fleet is.  It seems to me that if he really wanted to improve his business, he'd stop losing his vehicles rather than trying to help Enterprise purchase political favors from politicians.  Everybody forgets where they've parked their car every once in a while, but to lose one for a month and not even check the parking lot at your own satellite office is just astonishing.

He had an opportunity to make this right.  He could have said to this customer "We screwed up.  It's our mistake and we're going to make it right.".  If he had done this, I'd be singing his praises right here in the blog.  Instead, he stonewalls, dodges the camera, and demands the customer go back, yet again, to the dealership.

Part of the enjoyment of this story comes from the fact that this customer rented the car for a single day and a full month later Enterprise still hasn't even called the customer.  They just billed him for the whole time it's been missing.  Nicely done, Enterprise.  Is there anyone left who still wonders why Failing Enterprise exists?

John Piccinich, feel free to post your resume on the "Positions Wanted" section of our Discussion Board.  You might be looking for a new job soon.

Enjoy the video.

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