“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.”
— William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
Take a special care of your email customer support service
You have a company that give customer support by email? Take care of your service or it could be worse for your company than not giving the service at all. You have to take care of these points; otherwise you will probably alienate your customers:
- You need to answer really fast to your customers’ requests. It needs to be a question of some hours maximum.
- You always need to send the last email.
- You need to answer to every question, no matter what it is, silly or not.
I talk with my experience of the last weeks. I am currently searching for place where to host my next domain name and blog. I need really specific features so I asked many, many questions to many, many hosting companies. For some of them I never received any email. From others it took days before having an answer. Finally everything goes fine for some of them except that my last question is still unanswered. The result? I never found the company I will do business with to host my blog.
I think that it is a paradox, I mean, I contacted many companies specialized in blog hosting and they virtually had all bad virtual (mail, forum, etc) customer service. How could blog hosting businesses survive on the market if their customer support is as bad? A possible answer could be that no good web hosting service exist, I mean, for an acceptable monthly price (under 15$/month).
The result of this inability to answer to my questions is deep. It alienated me to their services and it is sure that I will never ever try to do business with them again. No one of these companies will have my money.
So the conclusion is simple: if you are not willing to put the time in a service you give, do not give it at all, otherwise it could be worse for your business. Internet is young; it takes time to business to adapt their strategies to it. However, you have to know that customers are already adapted to this new way to buy goods and services. They now have expectations, so you have to answer them.
Technorati: [blogs] [hosting] [business] [marketing] [support]
Replace a generalist by a group of specialists.
Why communication is becoming more and more important in today’s world?
In the last centuries, scientist/philosophers had all their time to discuss, understand and observe their world. In the last 40 or 50 years, we explored space, created artificial life, developed planetary communication systems, discovered the power of the nuclear, etc.
In the past they had hundreds of years to muse on their discoveries and their impacts on their world. Today we only have 1, 2, 3 or 10 years if we are lucky. Our world has changed. This new complexity brings an astronomical quantity of information to analyze and to understand. The era of generalists is finished. The thing is that we also need to muse and think about these new discoveries, has our ancestors were doing.
The generalist that thought about every aspect and impacts of a problem will be replaced by a group of specialists, communicating and cooperating, asking themselves the same questions has the old generalist. The only difference is the quantity of information to analyze and the complexity of the problems. We do not have the choice; we are becoming scientific ants, helping each other to try to reach a specific goal: understanding our new world.
It is why communication is and will be so important. We will need to change our mentality toward our peers. We will need to develop new ways to see things. We will need to continue to develop new communication and information systems to help us in to reach our goal.
Technoratie: [communication] [cooperation] [new] [world]
Inspiration is a bitch
It comes and goes. I cannot grab it: it is like a ghost. My mind is like a haunted house where ghost of inspiration lives. Sometime you see it, but when you hunt it you never found it.
The last time I had such a lack of inspiration it was when I got sick. Last week-end I had a total lack of inspiration because all my time had been invested in a single project last week. It drained all my inspiration… and my will.
You are thinking: yeah, but he blogged a lot last week, did not he? Yeah, I do, but I emptied my ideas sheet. There is the problem. I grabbed and stroke all the ideas on it without adding new ones. It is why I say that the ghost is currently hiding somewhere. I need to stimulate my inspiration; I need to hunt and find that ghost. I am a ghost buster, am I not?
It is what I am doing with now; I hunt it by writing these sentences. It is a trick. Sometimes it works, other times it do not… any idea of how I could re-populate that sheet?
PS: I also had a lack of inspiration for my title: is it appropriate? I mean, I took the first thing that comes up in my mind and I wrote it… it was that one.
Technorati: [inspiration] [writing] [ideas] [blogging]
Why do people read A-List bloggers?
Adam came up with a really interesting post about some A-List bloggers (Robert Scoble / Scobleizer, Dave Winer / Scripting.com and Steve Rubel / Micro Persuasion). He analyzed the content of their publications and tried to understand why people are reading them. This is not the first analyze done on the subject but it is an interesting one.
The main question is: “Why do people read these guys?”
“In fact I’d say they’re acting more like radio DJ’s (playing attractive mixes of someone else’s original content), rather than artists.”
“but for the most part, the A-listers in my industry are simple, useful link brokers”
If you take a look at his graphs, you can say that he could is right. However, I think that their success is a little more than this.
Why these guys become influent on the Blogsphere? I think that they are much more than just link brokers. I will give you a clue on why they are a little more than DJ’s with something that Adam said in his post:
“I do check in with these rockstar blogs occasionally and have even met several of them in person”
They are social; they easily connect with people; they have a whole lot of contacts. The result is that they have daily breaking news to broadcast and they take the time to comment and describe how they view them. Another factor is that when they write their comments on something, they do it in few lines: it gives the time to people to read them.
Adam pointed out another factor that I think is really important: they are passionate. This passion is transmitted by their writings. This passion is contagious and it is a factor why they easily connect with other people.
In conclusion, they are passionate people that master the art of socialization. I think that it is enough to try to explain why they can influence the way people see the Blogsphere and the Internet. I do not think that this is a question of blogging, but much more a question of social and human skills.