Creating Passionate Users

Passion is blind

Forgiveness is relative. We diss Windows with impunity, but when our Mac does the same thing, well, geeez nobody's perfect. When Clinton lied, US conservatives were morally outraged. When one of their own lies, "This is just a partisan stunt... perjury is a technicality." When Office crashes, I swear at it. When InDesign crashes, I empathize with it.

Having passionate users is almost like a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I say almost, because if you abuse your position as the object of someone's passion, they'll eventually figure it out, and the sense of betrayal will make them angrier about your transgression (crashing, lying, running slow, being incomplete, etc.) than if they'd never loved you at all.

But there's no getting around it--we all have double standards. We are all cutting one side some slack while holding the other to our ruthless, concrete expectations. And of course we will all screw up. We aren't perfect. Neither is our software, our hardware, our service, our support, our employees, our policies, our products and services and ideas. But that's the beauty of passion--if you can inspire it, by helping your user kick ass--they WILL cut you some slack. They'll forgive you when you screw up.

And even their very definition of "screw up" is fluid. Like I said, when I reboot my Mac, it isn't Apple that screwed up. It's either me (what did I expect trying to hook those three things up together?) or just the nature of doing anything so sophisticated, superior, and cutting edge. A small, small price to pay. When I have to reboot my Windows machine, come on... rebooting is such a perfect metaphor for everything that's just so wrong with Microsoft.

True Apple fans know that the Nano screen only appears to have a problem with scratches because:

A) The screen scratches... DUH! The new users are just too stupid to take proper care of it.

and

B) The normal to-be-expected scratches are simply more noticeable now because of the increased screen resolution. The perceived "scratch problem" is actually an artifact of the Nano's superiority. A feature, not a bug.

Most of us stroll happily along never acknowledging the double standards we apply. We don't recognize that our specific level of forgiveness (and indeed, what we even decide needs forgiveness) is based almost entirely on whether we love something (we'll forgive almost anything), hate something (we'll forgive nothing), or don't care about it at all (we'll forgive based on whatever seems "reasonable").

But sometimes our double-standards bite us in the ass and we're forced to face it, as Phil Ringnalda did a few months back. When O'Reilly appeared to have search-engine-gaming ads, Phil slammed him in this blog entry. But when his friend Shelley Powers does it, the conversation got very interesting. It was fun (and impressive) to see Phil acknowledge and wrestle with the ambiguity of it all. A couple quotes from the comments:
"Unfortunately, I can’t extend that absolution to you, and deny it to Tim O’Reilly...I don’t like this answer either. Isn’t there one where I can get back up on my high horse, and take a nice absolute moral position?"

I love the discussions that force us into grey, fuzzy, squirming positions where we must "hold two opposing thoughts simultaneously." But the point of my post is this -- wouldn't you rather be the one most likely to be forgiven than the one who can never "catch a break"? And again, I'm not talking about areas where you really do have serious problems that you'd rather sweet-talk your way out of than fix. I'm talking about the inevitable problems you just can't avoid. The "stuff just happens" events.

So, we have to ask ourselves... what can we do to put ourselves on the side of forgiveness? What can we do to help protect us from the times when we will screw up? What would it take in our product, company, service, whatever -- to get users to have a glass-half-full attitude about whatever it is we do? If "rebooting" is a metaphor, I'd rather be Apple than Microsoft.

(And that's another question to ponder... why are we so willing to diss Microsoft yet give Apple a break for some of the same things? More importantly, what--if anything--could Microsoft do to turn that around?)