Getting it Right by Doing it Wrong

 

There has been a lot of coverage regarding successful companies like Google and Apple who have climbed the ladder of success using business models contrary to the traditionally proven models. Now that these companies are becoming more successful, other companies are beginning to emulate them, or are in the process of investigating how to become like them. A main component of this recent recognition stage is the documentation of these companies. Wired published an article on how Apple made it’s way to the top by breaking every rule. Siva Vaidhyanathan , media scholar at the Univeristy of Virginia, is in the process of writing a book called The Googlization of Everything. Also, Jeff Jarvis has recently been contracted to write a book about Google’s business strategy relating it to other businesses and industries, aptly named: WWGD – What Would Google Do? It is expected to be published next spring.

Love your worst possible customer!!!

I was reading Jeff Jarvis blog and came across with this article “lover your customer”. Customers are the livelihood of every business. Every business must have to spend a significant amount of time and effort maintaining customer satisfaction. Surveys suggest that service-driven companies are able to charge up to 9% more for the goods and services they offer and grow twice as fast as the average. These are powerful incentives for becoming the best customer-service company in any industry.

A customer doesn’t care about you they just want to get best product and services because of they are paying for it. The only thing that customers know is that when you walk through their door, they want to be taken care of. So if you don’t take care of that customer, even though he/she isn’t buying anything from you, he/she will never get to the point of being a major customer. You have to treat everyone equally. So your objective must be to provide the highest standard of Customer Care possible for both good and worst customer.

Jeff Jarvis had a column in Business Week’s customer-service issue arguing that customers who complain about you are doing you a great favor.

Here’s some free advice: Go to Google, enter any of your company’s brands followed by the word “sucks,” and you will see the true consumers’ reports. Brace yourself, for it won’t be pretty. Wal-Mart’s unofficial Google Sucks Index turns up 165,000 results; Disney 530,000; Google 767,000. What’s yours?

There are many reason customer can leave you such as:

• They felt your pricing was too high or unfair.
• They had an unresolved complaint.
• They took a competitors offer.
• Most importantly they left because they felt you didn’t care.

So, the bottom line is that one of the key components in marketing and business growth is to spend the majority of your time and effort development customer relationships, so that you can increase your business from existing customers. This is a strategy that will move you forward in increasing your sales and business.

–Romiz

 

Livemocha “the social way to learn a language”.

While reading a post by Jeff Jarvis, my interest took to how he and his daughter are using a site called Livemocha.  Livemocha is an online language-learning community. It works by allowing people to learn a certain language (or languages) such as English, French, Spanish, German, Hindi and Mandarin Chinese..with more to come! Not only does it give people the advantage of working and learning on their own, people volunteer their time to instruct and tutor other people with their native language. For example, I could instruct or tutor someone who would like to learn english as it is my native language. You can take a look at the link right here. Livemocha

Not only do they have tutors and intructors who speak the native language that you are trying to learn, they also have online communities from around the world so you can practice your new language. There are a lot of other neat things that you can do with this website. I think it’s a great way for people such as myself who don’t have the extra $500 to spend on a course they don’t need at Univeristy but would still like to learn a new language. This site would have been excellent to use before my trip to Peurto Plata, Dominican as a lot of the employees there understand very little english or french.

Although I don’t have time to use this site during school, I think it would be facinating to try during the summer months when time isn’t an issue. The language that I would love to learn would be Spanish as it is the United States second language. I think it could (and would in the futue) be very useful around the workplace.

The 10 Rules to Blog By:

Whether you are a blogger, facebook member or involved in any social networks legal issues apply to you and should always be on you mind. As long as you are publishing any sort of writing on the web it is important to know what is right and wrong. How can you protect yourself against legal risk? Jeff Jarvis mentions ten rules to limiting legal risks on his buzz machine. These simple and well put ten rules will not only help you stay out of court and deal with legal issues but also help you do your task better. The more we know about the rule the easier it would be to get around it and make our job easy.

The 10 rules to blog by:

1.       Check your facts.

2.       Avoid virtual vendettas.

3.       Obey the law.

4.       Weigh promises.

5.       Reveal secrets selectively.

6.       Consider what you copy.

7.       Learn recording limits.

8.       Don’t abuse anonymity.

9.       Shun conflicts of the interest.

10.    Seek legal advice.

Technology makes it incredibly easy to produce and share content nowadays. The result is that information is spreading like fire through social networks, bookmarking sites and blogs. Unfortunately we are talking about both correct and incorrect information. Make sure to check your facts before publishing posts or articles, else you might not only look dumb and misinform and damage other people but also end up in legal crisis

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Sofonyas,

Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine and How personal should a blog be?

Here is a good post by Jeff Jarvis asking How personal should a blog be? This will give you some sense of why people blog and some of the issues related to that question.

Jeff’s blog is another good one that deals a lot with the culture of blogging. Please add it to the required reading list.