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| Monday, July 9, 2007 |
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A two-fer: saving lives and doing good radio 
| | Lighting a fire for public radio in Santa Barbara is a call for action as we face the most threatening fire season in many moons. It begins, Where are you going to go for live information when a life-threatening wildfire bears down on your town? |
Meetings of minds
| | In the early days of webloging, enthusiastic bloggers sometimes exclaimed that weblogs would soon replace newspagers — but most blogs are one-person affairs without the funding or staff or business models to sustain news gathering or investigative reporting. As a result, blogging has emerged more as a vehicle for opinion and comment. At first, the tone was intentionally brash and self-promoting, not unlike the Lower Manhattan model of discourse described above. As time goes on and the numbers of blogs grow into the tens of millions, the blogosphere brings with it the possibility of being a cyberspace-wide virtual equivalent of a Quaker meeting that in its silences and testimonies reveals patterns of commonalities and generates consensuses that can unite people into actions worthy of their beliefs and needs. |
| | In a perhaps related way, my old pal Chris Harvey — a customer service veteran of long standing — asks some questions that might suggest another higher purpose for blogging: |
| | So I'm curious... is blogging the suggestion box of 2007 only with blogging someone actually cares enough to read them? Hmm. What do you guys think? Ya know, I ran a nameless electronics Service call center and we conducted 7,000 customer satsifaction surveys every month and of all the "suggestions" I gathered, reported 38 different ways...after 3 years I still was asking my COO..."when are we gonna act on some of the suggestions"? Then when I moved to the next company I found no suggestion box, no surveys just one COO who said- "I don't need a report to tell me what they want. I don't need to spend money on asking them, that's the store's job. I don't care what they want. I just care that they get what they want without saying a word. Just give um whatever they ask for". Those were my guidelines and the easiest thing for customers and amazingly, a very difficult thing for CSR's to absorb because they too have always been trained to say "no". |
| | Anyway, I'm learning about blogging (I know, way late) but wondered about this group's out of the box suggestions on the best way to get across to customers what the "suggestion box" intended but never really did. |
Quotes du jour
| | When something that was originally scarce starts becoming abundant, something strange happens. You find that you start making money because of that thing rather than with that thing. That¹s the Because Effect. |
| | ...Prince understands how he makes money, what¹s scarce and what¹s abundant about it. Digital downloads are abundant. Concert appearances are scarce. He makes money because of his CDs and not with them. |
| | ...You cannot bundle abundance with scarcity, it¹s like trying to implement region coding of the air that you breathe. But then some people will try anything. |
| | all the SEO tricks in the world can't help you if your content sucks |
| | Pirates and piracy are immensely popular among kids and youngsters and were another defining chromatic feature of Rostock's protests. As the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise scores high at the box office, Pirate Bay is bankrupting Hollywood with its free p2p filesharing service. Pirates have traditionally been about challenging state sovereignty (see Marcus Reddiker and Hakim Bey) in order to build post-sovereign forms of self-government based on horizontal networking and mulatto camaraderie: Tortuga as the first modern autonomous zone. True to form, the Jolly Roger was waving on many tents and in all the actions, often either black-on-pink or pink-on-black. And Sankt Pauli soccer supporters with their black and jolly-rogered sweatshirts descended en masse to Rostock from Hamburg to join the fray. |
| | It's all about "building rapport" with American callers, they tell me. The key to the sell is not just the product, but the personal connection. So they always ask first how their potential customer is doing and "how the weather is," as they¹re taught in a week of "U.S. Culture Training." Vimesh is so successful at this that some elderly people tell him they wait for his calls. He wishes he could call them more often, but their phones are run by a machine that automates whose number gets dialed and when. On top of this, they aren't supposed to be on any one call for more than 5 minutes. They have to make their friends fast. Via Sheila Lennon. |
| | Yes, folks, it¹s true!!! For as little as $19.99 you, too, can be a spammer to targeted blogs!!! |
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