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You’re Doing It Right – vol. 2

Back in April, I posted volume 1 of this series – which I hope will be an ongoing one.  While there have been some folks I could (and should!) definitely add to this list since then, I have to admit that I’ve been a bit lax on my end.  Until today, that is.

Yesterday, a 3 day experience in customer service ended up in such a positive way that I have to admit I’m a little stunned.

Let me rewind just a bit to explain.

The Backstory

I’ve been a pretty devoted fan of Frontier Airlines for a long time now.  A decade (and more) ago, it was our airline of choice prior to becoming parents because of their customer service.  The “little guy” airline with Denver as its main hub was competing with behemoths like United Airlines after rising like a phoenix from the ashes from an earlier incarnation.  They made it on low-prices and sheer hustle.

If you grew up in Denver like my husband & I did – you knew you were in United country – but you also knew the name Frontier.  The only airline to hire one of the Tuskegee Airmen as a commercial pilot.  The first commercial airline to hire a female pilot.  It was a name, that despite bankruptcy inspired trust.

Then along came our daughter.  Suddenly those televisions in the back of the headrests at every seat on the plane that offered LiveTV – an inflight satellite TV service?  They became gold.  We didn’t have to bring entertainment along on the flights for our kidlet, just swipe a credit card and she could watch Disney Channel, Cartoon Network… you name it.  And still, the customer service & can-do attitude made us check Frontier before any other airline – and choose them whenever we could.

Their clever animals-on-the-tail-of-every-plane marketing causes our daughter to ask “what animal is on the plane?” every time we fly.  Apparently the case for many parents who fly frequently out of DIA as the “A Whole Different Animal” campaign has been overwhelmingly successful for 7 years now.

What Does Loyalty Program Really Mean?

So it should be no surprise if you’ve read this far to find out that Frontier’s frequent flier program EarlyReturns® was the first one I actually had an active account with.

Over the years, they’ve consistently had better terms than any other carrier when I compared them – plus since they were our ‘go to airline’ we tended to get more miles on them than any other.

When Midwest Airlines bought out Frontier last year and decided to merge the two under the Frontier name, I knew there’d be some changes (and there were) but they stayed our “check it first” airline.

The Catalyst

I know I should’ve had my ducks in a row earlier.  Heck, if I’d booked my tickets before June 17th, like I should’ve – I would’ve had enough miles to redeem for a round-trip flight to NYC next month for BlogHer.  But best laid plans.  Turns out I needed about 2,000 more.

Yes, I blame myself on that one.

That’s why I didn’t have a problem when their site said I needed 2,000 more miles and that if I wanted to purchase them? It would cost me $50 when I was trying to book the flights.  So I re-read all of the FAQs and terms.  Winced because I had missed the date – but sucked it up and bought the miles because $50 wasn’t too bad of a penalty and the only blackout dates I could find were around Christmas & New Years.  Besides, I was booking the flight through their system – so when it said “you don’t have enough miles for that – would you like to purchase more?”  I pulled out the Visa and clicked yes.

Imagine my surprise when I had enough miles – but now the system told me that the itinerary I had just bought the extra miles for was not available.  Not only that, but there were NO flights that were available for those dates.  Unless I wanted to pay for them instead of using my miles.

I checked arrival the day before – nope.  I checked departure the day after – nope.  I started swearing at my computer.

Why?! Why couldn’t the system have told me that those dates were ineligible before I spent $50 to buy those extra miles?  I felt tricked.  Duped.  Annoyed that somehow I would end up having to pay the penalty I had agreed to and still end up having to pay for a ticket!

Now, in the big picture, fifty dollars isn’t a huge amount of money when it comes to airfare.  It’s often the difference between one departure time and another fare-wise.  I’ve paid more than $50 in the past to take a flight on Frontier when a competitor’s fare was less simply because I knew I’d have a better flight experience.

What Next?

Well I didn’t book the ticket.  In fact, I started comparison shopping.  Determined that if a competitor was running a similar flight for the same amount? I’d book that instead.  Yeah, one customer booking a different carrier… who cares, right?

Apparently, Frontier Airlines cares.

I know because I twittered my frustration“Dear @flyfrontier – the time to tell me I can’t get tickets for the flights I need is *before* I purchase more miles, not after. #annoyed”

I didn’t really expect a response.  At best, I expected maybe a token response of  ‘so sorry – we’ll pass along your feedback.’

Using the Tools for Action

I guess I should’ve read @flyfrontier‘s twitterstream a little more carefully.  Or maybe I should’ve trusted that the company that I had known for great customer service for so many years would live up to their reputation.

But I guess I’m a little too used to companies that “listen” using social media tools – but don’t really act on what they hear unless it’s a ‘high profile incident.’ (note: I alone am never a ‘high profile incident’ – although I have occasionally been part of some group that is.)

I didn’t count on folks who would go above and beyond over the course of the next 3 days to “fix” my problem.  Through a series of tweets and DMs – I was given the choice of either having the miles purchase refunded or having an itinerary that was one of my alternates booked for me with my miles.  I opted for the latter.

One quick phone call to pay the fees I would’ve had to pay later and to confirm & ticket the itinerary? And I’m one happy camper.

The Extraordinary Bit

Thing is? I know I’m not getting ‘special’ treatment here.  How do I know?  Because I’ve been watching the tweetstream for @flyfrontier for the past few days.  And they are really listening (not just to people @’ing that account – also listening for MidWest Airlines and Frontier and variants) and are trying to remedy things.

Yes – there are big companies that pioneered this technique.

But I have to say, it’s nice to see ‘one of the little guys’ putting it into practice effectively. 

It’s even nicer to know that their “Customer Loyalty Program” isn’t just about having loyal customers – it’s about being loyal to their customers as well.

So Colette at Frontier Airlines and @flyfrontier? Thanks. You’re doing it right.

E arlyReturns®

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Oversharing? Undersharing? What Are You Doing?

Awhile back, I was at a blogging conference and went to dinner with a small group of people as usual before heading to the more crowded (and always noisier) evening events.  The dinner party I was fortunate to be a part of included some very prominent bloggers & speakers – most of whom make their livings in the Social Media arena.

I can’t remember the prompt, but someone in the group said something that I responded to with “well, we’re all oversharers, so it’s to be expected.”

That statement was met by shock and denial by one of the women in the group in particular.

“I am most definitely NOT an oversharer!” she said firmly.

I replied with something I had believed, up to that point, to be a truism: “Come on, all bloggers are oversharers by definition.  You kind of have to be in order to want to write about the details of your life for anyone and everyone on the internet to see.”

She shot me a look (one that I have come to understand means ‘you’re out of your mind, but I’m not going to belabor the point’) and maintained her stance that she was anything but an oversharer.

About now, you’re wondering who this was – but I’m just going to call her Jane Doe – because it’s important to where I am going with this post that it not be about Jane specifically, so much as it is about people like Jane.  If she chooses to out herself at some point? Well, that’s her call.

You see, I’ve been thinking about that night and those few moments we shared.  Processing what I said, in light of Jane and what she said, and what I know about Jane.

My statement about oversharing comes from years of both writing and reading blogs.  The average blogger doesn’t start out writing a business blog, but instead s/he writes things of a more personal nature.  We call them lifestyle blogs.  Sometimes they’re about hobbies, or parenting, or technology, or whatever the author is passionate enough about to consistently post on.

However, I realized that my friend Jane? She’s not the typical blogger.  The personal things I know about Jane come from knowing her – not because she writes about them.  Her online presence has always been warm & welcoming, but professional.  If you Googled her history, you’d find that she’s pretty much always blogged on the topic she’s considered an expert in.  You won’t find blogs about her personal life, bad hair days, or relationships.

Realization #1 – I was wrong.  Not everyone at that table was an oversharer.

In fact, pretty much everyone at that table was someone who lives a very public career life, but tends to keep their personal details out of their work-related content.  The range was from “not at all sharing personal details publicly” to “shares some things about personal life on particular social networks, but not on others.”

So where did my logic go wrong?

Well, when I started blogging, I had several ‘personal’ blogs myself.  For years, I wrote about anything and everything that came to mind.  Politics, relationships, beliefs, positions, theories, heck – even random dinner parties.  But I did all of those under pseudonyms.  Having once taught University, I was well aware that one of the first things computer-savvy college students do is Google their instructors.  Everything I wrote back then had to be unfindable by your overly-curious student trying to avoid working on his/her assignment.

Something I learned the first semester I taught – when I found my online resume being copied and pasted “for the good bits” by one of my less-ethical students.

When you are writing ‘anonymously’ – there is a strange sense of security that even though you might have shown your best friend and your cousin your blog – certainly you won’t have to worry about anyone else figuring it out.  It wasn’t until 2002 that the term “dooced” came into common online vernacular thanks to Heather Armstrong losing her job over things she had said on her blog.

But some of us transitioned from “lifestyle blogger” to “blogging as part of our business” without much thought about the transition.  I know of more than one person who simply ditched their old pseudonymous blogs as they chose to become professional bloggers with their content attached to their names and reputations.

Realization #2: Just because I used to overshare doesn’t mean I do now.

Those who criticize platforms like Twitter & Facebook often focus on the usage habits of Socializers when they say ‘I don’t care what you ate for breakfast or that your Farmville chicken is producing eggs.‘   They are often looking for a business case for Social Media not to be found in the habits of Socializers, who use it to keep in touch with their friends and families only.

The comfort threshold is different for everyone as to how much personal information they share online with friends, with family, or with absolute strangers.  But if the recent brouhaha over Facebook’s privacy settings tells us nothing else, it certainly states that most of their users aren’t comfortable with the thought of “everybody on the internet” knowing things about their personal life.

Realization #3:  Bloggers have different levels of comfort with sharing personal details.

When I went back to thinking about the case of Jane, and the other bloggers that were at dinner, I realized that most of the details of their lives that I knew, I knew from private social interaction with them.  Even though I wouldn’t say I’m particularly close friends with most of the people I was at dinner with, our social circles are overlapping.  We are not strangers to each other.

Those at dinner? Were bloggers who tend not to write about the details of their personal lives, so much as they write with a personal voice when they do.

So I started thinking about other prominent bloggers I “knew of” but didn’t really “know” in the sense that we have similar social circles.  Some of them? I can think of details of their lives that I don’t know about my best friend.  Others? I don’t even know if they’re married, have kids, or if there’s anything they are passionate about outside of whatever subject they blog on.

Then I thought about which ones are the blogs I tend to read with frequency…

Realization #4: People have different levels of comfort with reading personal information.

I had a totally different experience at another semi-recent blogging conference – when someone I knew peripherally said “you mean you don’t know about my hysterectomy? Don’t you read my blog?

Actually, no… I had to admit that I only read most blogs when someone puts a link on twitter that I notice, or when someone I’m close to brings a particular post to my attention.  Because the number of people I know with blogs is literally in the thousands., I could read 50 posts a day and still get behind unbelievably fast.

So back to Jane Doe & oversharing…

Jane’s blog is one of the very few that I have an RSS subscription to.  Because every post Jane writes applies to the business I’m passionate about – and if she writes warmly and in a personable voice? She doesn’t add in a bunch of stuff I don’t need.  Jane doesn’t overshare – she shares information that she has that may be useful to others.

It’s something I’m examining for myself.  Do I spend too much time sharing information that is unimportant to the point of a given blog post?  I’m going to go with yes, for now. I mean – I look over this post your reading and think: Well, is it important that I went to dinner? No.  But am I going to cut that out? Um, no.

Apparently I’m still working on my personal information/sharing balance.

What do you think? How much personal detail does a blog that you read regularly ideally have?  Should I have named Jane? Or is she irrelevant to the story except as an example?

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Social Media Marketing’s Dirty Little Secret

For the past couple of years people have been telling you “it’s all about the relationships” and “it’s all about the conversation” whenever you’ve brought up the phrase social media.  It’s almost like a Pavlovian response.

Say “social media” and see if you can go 2 minutes without someone bringing up the word “relationship.”

The thing is, there are so many different arenas people talk about using the catchall term “social media” these days.  For some, using the 21st century tools is all about connecting with old friends and making new ones.  They’re what I call Socializers.  They log on to their computers and go to Facebook, Twitter, and the blogs they frequent in order to connect to other people.  They actually use social media to be – ready for it? Social.  Socializers seldom see themselves as getting on the computer to be sold to.

Then there’s the business people.

There are marketers, advertisers, PR, researchers, and content producers.  There are small business people and representatives of huge, multinational corporations.  There are consumer-packaged goods suppliers, service people, agencies, internet businesses… a veritable host of business people who are here with the Socializers on the Internet because it’s part of their plan to make money for their business or their clients.

That’s right.  They’re here to make money.

Let’s get down to brass tacks here, shall we?  As a consumer, customer, or user of a service – we’d all like to think that the companies we’re doing business with value us.  And by value us? I don’t mean value our wallets and bank accounts… we want them to think our opinion is important.  We want them to tell us that we are not merely potential profits – but that we are valued as individuals.  And that they are listening and care what we have to say.

Only let’s rewind a bit, shall we – so I can help you to understand where I’m going with this.

Let’s go back to the days when the guy trying to make the big sale – be it the marketer trying to land the big account or the lawyer trying to land the big client – was often found out on the golf course.  Playing eighteen holes (and probably losing convincingly) with the guy who can ‘pull the trigger.’

Why did that guy go out on the links with Mr. Potential-Client? Not because he was sitting around thinking “you know, I’m bored here in the office… I think I’ll call John Doe and see if he wants to go play golf with me and work on my ability to slice when I’m ahead in the game.“  But because he hoped to get Mr. Potential-Client out there away from it all and to corner him into saying “yep… the account is all yours.

I mentioned this to my husband (yes, I mention pretty much everything to my husband… he’s one of the smartest guys I know – that’s one of the reasons I married him.)  His immediate response?  “Yeah, it’s not like some guy over at -Big Computer Hardware Supplier- said to the VP of Marketing ‘Hey, if we’re not using those seats in the luxury box at Sunday’s game? I know an IT manager and some of his engineers who are a blast to hang out with – we should invite them!’ because honestly? No one is clamouring to hang out with engineers at a football game.”

The marketing guys? They’re being social because it’s part of their job.  It helps them make sales.

photo by Photo by Frank Ockenfels 3 - Property of AMC

Right about now you’re thinking to yourself “well yeah, of course.”  Because if this was an episode of AMC’s Mad Men? You wouldn’t blink at Don Draper and his coworkers taking clients out for a good time in order to keep the account.  There’s no disconnect there.

So back to the 21st century.

You’ve logged on to your favorite social network.  And there’s a guy there trying to sell you something.  “SPAM!!” You cry… “Don’t try to sell me anything unless you have already built a relationship with me!” you angrily blog.  And somewhere a marketer rolls his/her eyes and thinks ‘are you crazy? Unless you’re a potential customer, I’m not wasting my time on you.’ But Heaven forbid she should admit that.  Because then “they just don’t get it.

Now put yourself on the other side of the table for a minute, will you?

If you went to your boss and said “We don’t think this lady is ever going to buy anything from us – but she’s got a blog – so I think we should give her tickets to the luxury box for Sunday’s game.  I mean, maybe she has friends who will buy something from us.“  Well, let’s just say that it sounds as ridiculous when I type it as it does when you read it.

If you’re wearing your Socializer shoes?  You probably don’t want to be marketed to.  But try to bear in mind that someone is paying for all of this and if it’s not you? Then it’s someone who is hoping to profit off of access to you.  Either they want you as a) a customer, b) a source of data, or c) someone who connects them to either A or B.

I know.  It’s not what we as Socializers want to hear.  We want to come on the Internet and hang out with our friends.  But face it – if you went to meet your friends at the local coffee shop, you’d have to buy something at some point.  The business owner can’t afford for you to be taking up space without contributing to the bottom line somehow.

Sure – even in the non-virtual world – customer feedback is important.  But feedback is only useful if it helps the business to increase their profitability.

So that’s the secret.

Everyone but your Farmville friends? Is here to do business with you.  Because no matter how fascinating your blog or your Flickr stream is? Those box seats for Sunday’s game are going to someone who is likely to spend money with the company.  If the company wants to stay in business that is.

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The Power of Speech gives way to the Art of Conversation

The past two days have given me a very interesting viewpoint on the difference between speaking and conversing.

My 7-year old daughter has took it upon herself to audition for a local theater’s summer production.  After a couple of years of “summer theater camp” which she excels in , the opportunity presented itself for her to audition for a real production.

So, with little notice, we signed her up for an audition spot.  We acquired a decent 1 minute monologue to fit the audition and the child.  In less than 24 hours, she memorized it spot on  – and began working on pacing, breathing, word choice and transitions.

She got the concept of progression right down when we stood her in the upstairs hallway and told her to talk to us downstairs without yelling.

The audition went swell.  The director laughed at the right part in her joke.

In the long run, she got called back, and eventually got cast as one of the two young ladies playing “Fudge” – the 3 1/2 year old brother in Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing.  A surprisingly large role for someone her age.

On Monday of this week, we started rehearsals.

Rehearsals for her consist of 2 hours a night, Monday thru Friday and 3 hours on Saturdays spent learning lines, blocking, stagecraft… and for Mom & Dad they consist mostly of spending time in the back of Fluffy the Minivan of Doom playing on our laptops thanks to a tethered Android phone and internet connectivity.

But we do catch part of the rehearsals on either end – and it made me think a lot about “speaking” versus “conversing”.

Young actors have a habit of “over emoting” when they are first getting the swing of it.  I think maybe it has something to do with their internal sense that a ‘real’ conversation isn’t rehearsed.  Despite the fact that playwrites try their best to write dialog as if it were natural, it’s still a rehearsed dialog.

There’s something unnatural about a rehearsed conversation to the ear.

Real conversation isn’t planned.  It occurs spontaneously.  Those taking part haven’t rehearsed their lines nor are they waiting for their cue to speak.  They interrupt.  They repeat themselves.  Sometimes, they go off down rambling or tangential paths.

Part of where conversations fall apart between companies and customers is that altogether too often, the company has a message they are trying to get across and they have rehearsed their side.  They have ‘talking points‘ and try to stay ‘on message’.  They give their customer facing employees canned responses that they are supposed to reply with. These kinds of companies don’t respond to what the customer is saying so much as they wait for their turn and then blurt out exactly what they think is important – whether or not it’s relevant to what was just said.

Conversations aren’t predictable.

Sure, you can stand talking to yourself in a mirror, planning out what will happen before hand (yeah, I’ve done it too) and hope that you are a little more prepared for whatever will happen – but you can’t really predict what the other person will say.  That’s the difference.

As I watch the young actors in this play try to learn the art of making lines sound as if they were spontaneous conversation – I wonder why it is that so few brands and companies have figured out that there is no such thing as a ‘scripted conversation’?

Have you come across one of those situations? Where no matter what you say as a customer you get back a response that seems scripted rather than actually having something to do with what you said?

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Photo by Baslow - http://www.flickr.com/photos/baslow/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Circling the Wagons Won’t Protect Your Brand

If you’ve ever watched a movie that takes place in space (say, Star Wars or any of that ilk) you’ve experienced 2 things that make absolutely no sense in real Outer Space – but probably didn’t register as wrong with you at the time.

The first is sound. Every time there’s a battle between spaceships you hear lasers firing, explosions blasting, and engines booming.  But sound requires a medium to travel through.  Space is a vacuum.  There would be no ‘pew pew pew! ka-booooom!‘ if it were a real space battle and not on film.

The second is a sense of  there being a “down.”

When airplane battles first started being commonplace in wartime (WWI) it added a new dimension to the battle.  Suddenly your opponent could be above, below, behind or anywhere else in relation to you.  Pilots had to find new ways to battle effectively because the previous methods of warfare didn’t really allow your opponent to be *anywhere* in relation to you.

But there was one constant – down.  The earth is always down.  And that’s a pretty big constant.  If you are in an airplane battle you have to know 2 things at all times: where the enemy is, and which way is down.

Fast forward to 20th century movie making.  Time for the space battles.  What did they use for the model?  World War II battle footage.  (It looks real to us because we, the audience, put a ‘down’ in the picture too.  Bottom of the screen.)

To most of us here on Earth, it never really occurs to us that these films orient their ships, actors, and battles with a down.  Unless of course one of them doesn’t – and then we notice.  (The scene with the stewardess in 2001 walking up the wall comes to mind. It’s at 1:32 if you watch.)

So how does all this space talk relate to your brand?  And what does this have to do with circling wagons?

It’s about assumptions.

The reason we have the metaphor of circling the wagons comes from a time when the only real attack could come from the same plane you were on.  When westward-headed wagon trains in the middle of nowhere had no choice but to create a circle of the wagons and thereby create an artificial fort to defend themselves from attacks by Native Americans, robbers, brigands, and sometimes even just wildlife.

At that time? Danger just didn’t come from above.  Sure, the occasional arrow made it over the top, but your main concern was keeping the guys on your level out.

But somehow that metaphor didn’t die out like it should’ve when warfare changed to include men in flying vehicles.  Nor did it when it turned out that when you’re out in space there is no “down” just a 360° sphere of possible attack vectors.

It should’ve.  There really should’ve been a new metaphor for each one of those realizations.  But there weren’t.

Why?

Because businesses still weren’t acknowledging that serious attacks could come from any direction.  There’s still a persistent mindset that your biggest threat is the guy on your level.  That one guy with a blog? What can he do? And why should you be worried about Google – they’re huge, why would they want to steal your idea?

Look up, look down, look out, and look inward – the next big threat to your brand can be anywhere.

You have two good defenses: 1) Speed of response to the threat, and 2) tailoring a response to effectively combat the nature of your threat.

Speed is critical.

For some bizarre reason, we’re still pretending that there’s a “work week” that generally kludges around Monday-to-Friday, from 8 am to 5 pm.   Sure no one actually works those hours.  But there’s a pretense that says that “traditional business hours are these.”  Only we now live in a 24-7-365 world.  The only people who keep bankers hours? are bankers.  And even they don’t.  Because there’s financial exchanges that take place on the banks computers late at night that shift money from one continent to another.

Gone are the days where you gave up at night and went home and hit it hard the next day.  Now we live in the world where there’s a team working on it round-the-clock and everyone is getting updates on their cellphones and getting on crisis calls at 2 am if that’s what it takes.  Weekends are simply the days that public schools aren’t open.

So who in their right mind would think that the next attack on their brand will be scheduled at 9:30 am on Monday, and will arrive in the form of a polite glove-slap from a rival company?  The next attack on your brand will occur Saturday at 11 pm – because that’s when people are hanging out on the Internet.  That’s when they find something to be upset about.  That’s when they share it like wildfire.  Saturday.  11 pm.  Never mind with time zone – it’s whichever one is least convenient for you.

If you are waiting until Monday morning at 8 a.m. to find out about it and to start to address it? You’re already too late.

Responses have to be tailored to the threat.

That just makes so much sense, doesn’t it? I mean, you want to have the response that will do the most to offset the damage and defuse the situation.

So, it takes some analysis: where’s the attack coming from? Is it one guy with a blog? Or is it a huge company coming after you?  What is the nature of the attack? quality? reliability? character?  First you have to figure out which direction it’s coming from, what’s being attacked and what an appropriate response is.

Does this mean you need some spin doctor sitting around waiting for an 11th hour text alerting him to spring into action and mobilize the legal department?

Hardly.

It does mean that you have to have at least one person who owns “social media crisis response.”  That person has to be empowered to analyze the response as it comes it (this should more likely than not be coming in because you have a good listening/monitoring system set up) and make decisions on how to respond to it in the initial phases.

If you’re still back there living in “circle the wagons” mode – I guess you could call this your wagon master.  But if you are? You’re going to need to know that s/he is way more than a wagonmaster.  More like your battlemaster.

And if your battlemaster tells you that s/he’s missing your 9a status meeting because s/he was up all weekend trying to keep your brand from doing a nose-dive?  Just go with it and be thankful that there’s someone out there who is willing to be awakened at 2 a.m. and not call you and everyone of your c-level execs into a crisis call.  It’s better to have you represent him/her at the 9a status meeting with: “the attack came from this vector, it was of X nature, it was dealt with by A, B, and C.  At this point, it’s no longer a story of interest to anyone in mainstream media or most of the internet media sources.”

Trust me, it’s much more fun when you handle it that way.

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