I saw the new tagline for Jenny Craig and I’d like to comment. I joined Jenny Craig for the 3rd time in 2000. I worked for Disney World at the time, and was looking for an assist on changing my life. I think I weighed around 360 lbs. when I signed up, and I paid a registration fee of about $300 if I recall correctly.

I followed the Jenny Craig plan for two months, eating their terrible tasting prepackaged food for nearly every meal. I lost 30 lbs. during that span, and I was feeling pretty good. One week, I went to Jenny for my consultation and did not buy a full allotment of food. The lady who ran the store, Mary I believe, was very surprised. I explained that I try to eat Jenny Craig meals all the time, but there are work events and breakfasts where it just doesn’t happen.

She encouraged me to buy all of the meals even though I had some at home already. I told her that it didn’t make sense for me to do so, and she gave me an ultimatum to buy all of the meals or not return for the next week’s consultation. I left after some heated words and did not return. I wrote a letter to Jenny Craig’s corporate office which was ignored. I gained the weight back over time, plus a whole lot more.

“We change lives.” Yeah, thanks for that.

I weighed over 480 pounds when my brother said, “I don’t want you to die.” My story is quite similar to those told by Richard Simmons, recovered drug addicts, and ex-smokers, but I’ll try to convey the impact of hearing these words when you’re at rock bottom. At the time, I lived in total isolation and had given up on my life. It seemed that nothing short of divine intervention could save me from myself.

I was committing a slow suicide by sandwich, not to suggest that I hadn’t considered more expedient ends. I spent more time crying than exercising. More time dreaming about death than dreaming of the future. It’s quite possible that I wouldn’t be here today if my brother hadn’t said those words. Hearing the fear in his voice and reading the sincerity on his face affected me more deeply than I’m able to explain.

“I don’t want you to die,” must have taken so much courage for him to say given how taboo talking about obesity was with me. Even implying a problem was grounds for months of animosity. I hope that I’ll be strong enough to someday help someone as he helped me. Hearing that someone gives a damn means everything when you feel like the world would be better off without you. The day after my brother left town, I called the Weight Management Center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and started on my road to recovery.

Three years removed from gastric bypass surgery, I weigh just over 200 pounds and still battle old demons daily. Writing about and reflecting on the past is a useful exercise for me, so I’ll be posting entries like this one fairly often.

At my peak weight in 2006, I rented a small house in rural Pennsylvania. My nearest friend was a 30 minute drive west, and I telecommuted for work. My friend visited sometimes, once commenting that the house smelled like a hamster cage. His observation wasn’t surprising since I rarely left the recliner for over an hour and I never cleaned. I’d toss dozens of empty pizza boxes and other binge eating evidence down the basement steps before he arrived.

I played a lot of stupid games with food service employees during that time. Attributing part or all of my orders to fictional people was part of my routine. I now realize that my stealth ordering likely wasn’t fooling anyone into thinking my 500-lb. frame was the result of bad luck.

The Penn Hills drive-thru tour was my favorite part of the day. Convinced that Wendy’s caught onto my ruse of ordering 3 value meals with varied drinks and burger toppings, I started hitting 3-4 restaurants per trip. Arby’s, Wendy’s, KFC, Long John Silver’s/A&W. One giant meal per day that usually culminated in sickness and 12 hours of sleep. I’d wake up with intense cravings; mouth watering, sweating, heart racing, constantly thinking about the next big feed.

Fast food employees would banter with me as might be expected with a very recognizable, daily visitor. I’d tell stories about how my grandmother wanted to try the new chicken sandwich or my brother asked me to pick up some extra sauce packets. At KFC once, the cashier asked, “Where’s the party?” The party was in my Jeep in an abandoned parking lot, but the mood was more like a funeral after her question.

Boston Market was my absolute favorite place to eat, but it was pretty far from home and my leg got tired from pressing the accelerator. I could order a Family Feast and 2-liter of Sprite without much elaboration and then dispose of the whole meal alone in the car. One night, I was startled by the lights from a police cruiser behind me. The officer came to the window to see why I was parked in front of Sears after hours. I’ll never forget how disgusted he looked when I explained that I was having dinner. A 2/3 eaten tin of meatloaf and several empty side dish tubs sat in the passenger’s seat. It scares me that I’m actually craving Boston Market as I type this.

I eventually got tired of going out into the world and turned to Papa John’s Pizza. I normally ordered 2 or 3 large pies and a dessert pizza, yelling during the phone order to imaginary people in the background. “Keep it down, I’m on the phone! Hey, do you want extra pepperoni?” Online ordering made this process even easier. Still, I’d answer the door announcing, “Yeah, I got it!” to the same fake housemates.

These stories are artifacts of a bizarre, dangerous, frightening lifestyle, but I’m not the only one. The following account from Michael Prager’s Fat Boy Thin Man reveals similar behavior:

“Foot-long roast beef with onions and mayo, please.” I always got that one; that one was “mine.” … The other sub’s ingredients were optional. If it was the tuna, I’d go for everything except olives… I might even add the repartee: “I hate olives, man, but my friend wants them.” The friend of course didn’t exist.

The magnitude of consumption still amazes me. I accumulated considerable debt by spending a couple thousand bucks each month on food. I’m better now, but by no means am I fixed. I know that I have to avoid fast food and eating in the car. I have to.

I approach many aspects of life as all or nothing propositions. I’m working my ass off or wasting the whole day. I’m eating the entire pizza or not having one bite. I’m playing online poker for 18 hours a day or not playing a single hand. I lack balance. It’s as though I was born with a switch when most people get a dimmer. There are a few benefits worth noting. I am a beast when deadlines are tight and pressure is high. Under sustained pressure I can be quite productive for long periods of time. But this is generally a crazy way to live, and is particularly destructive to healthy living.

This New Year’s Eve, I resolved to fit into my nice suits by the end of the year. It was a modest resolution, requiring a 30 lb. weight loss. By March, I was wearing the suits again after dropping about 35 pounds. I don’t recall deviating from my diet once, and every bite got tracked in the MyFitnessPal app. I lost weight at a good clip, maintained a regular exercise regimen, and felt fantastic. Then, I had a McDonald’s ice cream cone and it was over.

It sounds ridiculous, right? I ate a 150 calorie ice cream cone which didn’t even put me over my daily calorie allowance. This was, in my mind, a deviation from my diet which started a total downward spiral. Sneak eating began. Tracking ended. A normal person might eat that ice cream cone and think it’s no big deal, because it isn’t. For me, the switch was flipped and it takes monumental effort to flip it back. There were conditions surrounding that ice cream purchase that made the switch flip.

1. It was stress-induced. Something was weighing on me at school and I bought that cone to feel better.
2. I was alone.
3. It was fast food.
4. I did not track it. This was a secret transaction between me and the drive-thru worker.
5. I felt extremely guilty after eating the cone.
6. I immediately started thinking about whether I’d buy another cone tomorrow. I did.

There’s another problem that I feel is worth mentioning now. I view dieting in the frame of a day when I should focus on a meal or even a bite. One bad bite justifies a whole bad day for me which leads to the “get back on it tomorrow” mindset. I can tell you that this is the worst possible approach. Usually it results in making up for transgressions by skipping meals which leads to hunger which leads to severe overeating by dinner time. It’s either perfectly strict or totally out of control, and I need to change. No diet is sustainable for the rest of my life without any grey area. I need to learn to control the switch quickly or get a dimmer installed before my suits stop fitting again.

This post just scratches the surface of my inner workings. Hopefully this post will help me flip the switch. One day after I’ve done a better job figuring things out, I’ll write a book that might help someone like me. Until then, if you can relate or have any insights, sound off.

You can’t truly appreciate the monotony of grading until you’ve read the same essay 80 times. Here’s some quick advice for making your paper more interesting than the episode of Don’t Forget the Lyrics I’m missing.

1. Differentiate yourself. Use Rolling Stones song titles for section headings. Write about companies not named Walmart, Amazon, and Zappos. Take an unexpected stance and defend it like hell. Be funny. Tell a story.
2. Stop being redundant. Don’t be repetitive. Redundancy is something to avoid.
3. Don’t emphasize course concepts with italic and bold formatting. I plan to read your whole paper instead of counting the number of times you mention relationship marketing.
4. Use your own words. I am a plagiarism detective and Google is my Doctor Watson.
5. Use your own voice. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to write polished, politically correct memos after you graduate.
6. Conclude with purpose. Don’t go Sopranos finale on me and leave me flipping the page to see if it’s continued on the back. Synthesize instead of just summarizing. Put things in context for me.
7. Proofread. Read your paper aloud. The third time I see “manger” instead of “manager,” I’m going to start deducting points.

I’d just finished professing my newfound love for 18 Rabbits; ranking cleverly named flavors like Haute Diggity Date and Belle Bananas Foster, recounting playful Twitter conversations with @18rabbits, and telling the brand name story, when my classmate scrunched her face and said, “You don’t strike me as an organic granola person.”

In fact, I wasn’t an organic granola person and my granola universe was comprised solely of Quaker Oats Chocolate Chip bars prior to a free sample of 18 Rabbits at Whole Foods. I’m an avid sampler, but rarely buy what I try. I picked up a bag of Gracious Granola because I knew the light, buttery addition to my smoothies would make me a true smoothie master. Later that week, my wife recognized 18 Rabbits at an airport coffee shop and I tweeted “Found @18rabbits granola at Houston Hobby airport! #winning”

I don’t have a huge following on Twitter, so I was really excited when @18rabbits retweeted my post and replied with, “That is AWESOME! We will be in Texas next week too :) Happy St. Patty’s day!” Since then, I’ve tweeted about 18 Rabbits 18 times (coincidence?). My enchantment has extended beyond Twitter. I’ve bought bars for classmates and panhandlers. I spouted the wonders of 18 Rabbits to my parents, friends, personal trainer, and professors. I introduced my interactions with 18 Rabbits as an example of brand advocacy in a Marketing seminar. How did I, not an organic granola person, become an unapologetic 18 Rabbits evangelist? It’s more than great taste.

@18rabbits replies every time I mention them in a tweet. If I don’t mention them for a while, they’ll ask if I’m having 18 Rabbits for breakfast. You may have figured out that I feel really to connected to this brand. As a shopper, I’m equally loyal to Uncle Matt’s Organics orange juice. I buy a bottle every time I go to the store, but haven’t mentioned that brand to anyone until now with the exception of a couple of unrequited tweets about @UncleMatts. There are plenty of companies ignoring me on Twitter, and I’ll just allocate their share of my volunteer marketing efforts to 18 Rabbits.

Disney’s reputation for legendary guest service is driven by seven simple guidelines. Cast Members (that’s Disney-speak for employees) internalize the guidelines by associating them with each of the seven dwarfs. I thought it might be an interesting exercise to make similar associations for service on the social web.

Be Happy… Show some personality and play nice in your online interactions. Be careful not to come off like an adbot for your marketing department or random output from a re-tweeting script.

Be like Sneezy… Get viral to make your posts contagious. People need to be sharing your message across channels and offline.

Don’t be Bashful… Seek out your customers and jump into conversations about your brand, especially if you’ve created space to do so like a Facebook Fan page.

Be like Doc… Use all of the tools at your disposal to provide immediate service recovery, from major crisis communication all the way down to individual consumer complaints.

Don’t be Grumpy… Don’t get quickly discouraged if you’re having trouble translating your efforts into ROI. If your strategy (you do have one, right?) aligns with your company’s overall communication goals, you’ll come out ahead.

Be like Sleepy… Carrying out the tactics that support your strategy is going to require non-trivial effort. Be prepared to put in the long hours and dedicate appropriate resources. Grab some coffee and get to it.

Don’t be Dopey… Become the smartest one in your focused area. You want to be the influencer who people look to for expertise.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Disney and they do not endorse this post. The guidelines I’ve written are much less magical than Disney’s real ones.

updated 5/6/2011

This concept can be easily observed as such companies usually fail miserably while trying to discover their inner Zappos. I’m defining an anti-social company as one that doesn’t include customer service as a serious component of its value proposition. A company that didn’t engage customers in 2004 probably isn’t going to be the social media poster child of 2010. These companies fail for reasons that are analogous to an anti-social person at a party.

They don’t spend much time getting ready. They’d rather blend in than stand out. They don’t really know who else is going to be there and don’t know what they want to get out of it.

Companies aren’t doing proper due diligence before implementing a social media strategy. Researching, setting measurable goals, finding customers, developing relationships, and integrating the overall business strategy are essential prerequisites.

They show up late. The ones that show up early have to help set up and that can be a lot of work. The whole thing might be a bust, so sitting back until everyone else is there seems safer.

Early adopters aren’t the only ones that succeed in social spaces, but stragglers can be pathetic when they show up just because everyone else is doing it. It’s better to show up before the channel peaks.

They don’t bring anything. It’s easier and cheaper to mooch off of what’s already there. Besides, others might not like what they bring. If they do bring something, it’s usually self-serving.

Companies are imitating everyone else’s ideas instead of doing something novel.

They stay in their comfort zone. If things are clicking with this small group in the corner, there’s no reason to branch out.

Once these companies find a bubble in the social media universe where they can do something, they stay put and don’t take any risks. They don’t maximize all of the available channels.

They don’t mingle. People might not like what they have to say, and it could even get them in trouble. They don’t really know how to start a conversation.

Companies are observing and listening but not participating or taking action. They’re not building relationships. When they do participate, they only talk about themselves. They come off as inauthentic and awkward.

These failures can be traced to corporate cultures that are incompatible with new media. The exceptions, companies that don’t fit the mold of a social company but execute a successful social strategy, are successful because of major cultural shifts (see Comcast). Think of a company that lacks innovation, suffers from managerial hubris, or neglects customer service. Did you think of Wal-mart? Sprint? Bank of America? AOL? They have all been involved in social media, but how well are they doing and how painful was it to get there?

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” This old proverb reminds consumers to protest loudly when they are wronged and signals companies to work harder at soliciting complaints from the less obnoxious subset of customers. And as wheels evolved from oxcarts to automobiles, so too has the proverbial squeaky wheel changed with the advent of social media.

The proliferation of sites like Facebook and Twitter has created new audiences for commercial grievances. I should know since a quick scroll through my recent tweets includes 140-character-or-fewer outbursts toward Orkin Pest Control, DirecTV, and Best Buy. I never received any responses from these mini rants, but sometimes it just feels good to share consumer strife with my 53 followers.

I feel like firms cannot and probably should not aspire to respond to every disgruntled tweep since grease is a scarce resource. This realization got me thinking about how and when companies do respond and the fairness of prevailing approaches.

The wheel with more spokes is far more likely to get a dollop of that service recovery grease. That is, the size and composition of the tweep’s network seem important. My followers aren’t likely to generate negative buzz of any noticeable magnitude even when my complaints are valid. Now take a peek at Ashton Kutcher’s (@aplusk) followers. He is the wheel with 40-inch chrome spinners in the Twitter universe. Kutcher’s 5.5 million+ followers, presumably made up of 20- and 30-somethings, would catch a company’s attention if they started spreading negative buzz.

Of course, followers have to read and retweet the message for it to have any impact, so us non-actor types can start by making our complaints novel and interesting. Saying “United Airlines sucks >:( !!!!” on Twitter is not going to be as effective as writing a catchy song about the bad experience and posting it on YouTube (United Breaks Guitars, 9 million+ views). Oh, we’re not musically inclined either? Then we’ll probably get better results by writing a letter to the corporate office like they did back in the days of the oxcart.