DISQUS

This was a great lens through which to view our business blog. We have four regular contributors, myself included, and although we have a few regular features, I have to admit there's not much more to our plan other than blogging our fancy that day provided it's topical or timely. Looking critically, we really could be doing better. This gives us a great roadmap to make sure we're making the best use of our time and going with what works rather than occassional good content and a whole lot of filler.

Cheers!
-Amie
http://blog.ebsqart.com

@tomob: that's an excellent point. BK & McD fill two very different niches within their market. And I agree that one can go too far in the direction of anything for anyone, particularly in a business where a need for speed is part of the equation. People like me who want custom typically slow down an otherwise streamlined system.

And yet, it's their not caring about what I think/want that has led me to boycott them for the past 32 years (mind you, I'm not yet 38). As a child, I asked for a plain cheeseburger and they refused to give me one, claiming they don't make them that way. Even when I cried. Even when I pointed out that they *were* plain until they put all the fixings on. Even when my mom got a manager. I'll never eat there again, nor will my children if I can help it. This is how Burger King got their foot in the door back in the late 70's/ early 80's. One size fits all is a myth.

I have to say, this video actually makes me feel guilty for no longer drinking Bigelow Tea (I get loose-leaf stuff from Adagio.com). That said, if I did have a need to grab a brand of bagged tea, I would be more likely to grab theirs. It's good to know it's still a family company, and she's someone I'd personally like to see stay in business for the long haul.

This post is totally made of win. What a fantastic anaology. Thanks, Other Chris!

First--so glad you finally found Mad Men! It's such a fantastic show on dozens and dozens of levels.

Secondly, YouTube is fantastic for media producers. You can share bits and pieces that inspire you with people who trust your authority. It's viral marketing at its best. I know from personal experience that even when I find something I like online and watch it for free on my computer, when it's something I care about, I also buy the real deal. I do this with music, with tv shows, with movies. I know I'm not the only one. Granted the generation that came after us might not feel the same way and seems to have this sense of entitlement that things ought to be free, period. But ultimately, this sharing of things we've seen and like is nothing but good for the creator when credit is given to the source.

I had considered BOA a few times in the past because our primary billing agent for our business is PayPal, which I hate like nobody's business, but they've been until this point, a necessary evil. BOA is supposed to have fantastic e-commerce/subscription solutions, ideal for our company. So their website's invasive "do you want to chat? someone is standing by" dohickey put me in touch with someone who talked to me for an hour, knew they had my serious interest, promised me a ton of answers to my questions, and never ever got back to me. I wrote to the contact address they gave me. I checked the spam filter for weeks before I gave up on it. Yeah. They *really* want my business. I came them on a day when I was the most disgusted with PayPal and I was ready to make the leap. They blew it.

Between that experience, your post, and ~50 comments above mine? No thank you.

Our community is having a similar conversation here:

http://blog.ebsqart.com/2008/09/29/open-thread-...

One recurrent theme I'm seeing in comments is that people are looking to expand their knowledge and looking for better practices rather than cutting back on quality to keep costs down. I do very much think we'll see a lot of ingenuity and success stories from people who push harder rather than scaling back right now.

Any invites available?

The next time my husband nags me that we should move our company email handling over to Gmail instead of using Outlook, I will point him to this post.

Oy, what a gaffe. Please keep us posted on what happens to Nick!

Snort. I am one of those people who re-tried to sell you on plurk since I was one of those who hated it first, but it seriously grew on me once my network was in place and we found our rhythm. I doubt I would have stuck with it had Twitter been up and running at any point in June (or July). But yup, I hear you. Do what works for you.

This is totally FTW!

(might I add that Plurk was also having issues yday?)

This seems to be the month for Street Art. Apparently the gent in the video above is going to be part of a big street art exhibit opening at the Tate Modern this weekend. Also, I just received an early preview copy of "Bomb It" which is a documentary on the global street art and graffiti movement, which is going to be released on the 27th. According to the press release, they have a myspace page for the film: http://www.myspace.com/bombitthemovie.com Haven't had a chance to view it yet, but it includes interviews with roughly 200 artists and should be pretty cool!

Our art community was actually just having a conversation in our forums about Steet Art when this video came up. Good stuff!

Technically, my first forays into social media would be the newsgroups at Carnegie Mellon University in the early '90's and later the user groups at AOL the year they started up. I started blogging at Live Journal in 2002 (still there) and started with Flickr in 2005 although I didn't get involved in the social aspects of Flickr until 2007. And I've been running my own online artist community first as a free bboard, and later as a business in which forums still play a large part, since 2001.

As to my foray into the tech blogosphere, it was all thanks to a book by Amy Jo Kim that I read around 2005. Through her I found Kathy Sierra, and through Kathy Sierra I found Tara Hunt, and through Tara Hunt I found the rest of my online world.

While I'd like nothing more than to do a purely web-based customer service presence (and our company answers all of our emails personally, chats with our customers directly via our site forums, our blog, our twitter presence, and as individuals keeping an eyeball on the blogosphere) I find there are customers who actually want the phone experience regardless of every other option given to them to communicate with us. In fact, I just got off the phone with a new member who wanted a clarification of something that was sent to her via email. As in, she needed to hear a live person restate (in exactly the same words, no less) what was written on the page to *get it.* So while we're actively listening and involved online (which makes sense; we're a totally virtual web company) our customer base is very often older, not terribly tech savvy, and wants a friendly phone voice to hand-hold, something we're not really set up for but will do if we have to. So really, the approach greatly depends on your customers.

While I don't know the answer, I totally agree. Email notification of new comments is waaaay too much bacn on a hot topic, and rss feeds for comments just kind of lose something in translation. When a good kerfuffle gets brewing on Tech Crunch, for example, pretty much the only way to stay in that state of flow is to keep refreshing the post page. And who has time for that?

I've been enjoying it, although you've been reiterating a lot of stuff that I generally know.

I know what would be useful for me personally is a discussion on how to build social networking tools that are equally useful for people with no clue about social networking (but want/NEED to learn if they want to get their art/message out there) and people who are already clueful and want something that's useful to them without being overly dumbed down, without over-taxing an engineering team (ok, in our case, engineering person) with writing custom tools for each user subset.

Another great use for those holiday photos is to combine them with family and do a book using a service like blurb or lulu.

You're a bad bad man, Mr. Brogan. And while I am most definitely NOT an idiot and I'd love to be in Vegas with the rest of y'all, my sister finally getting married to her guy 12 years (and a 4-year-old) later pwns all. A girl's gotta have priorities!

Have fun and BE GOOD!

Dave LaMorte said:

"5 years from now I would like to have a job."

So say we all!

I do think the future is going to be about people untethering with their media consumption, the same way we've moved away from rotary phones with the ubiqitous curly chords.

Last week we had to deal with a depressed older member who was cavalierly talking about her plan to off herself on our forums. And while we took steps and feel confident she isn't an immeadiate danger to herself, we're left trying to formulate some kind of policy regarding how to handle this kind of talk either in our forums or chat rooms. This was not something for which we (or our wonderful volunteer moderators) were prepared. Since our legal brain is out of town, we've been left to debate about liability vs compassion on our own.

I bring this up because this is an issue that may face others in the social media sphere as well. Our current ad-hoc policy is to deal with this on a case-by-case basis, but that's not going to work forever, nor will it work for a larger community than ours. Thoughts?

done!

For the most part, I've fired "they" and I think the biggest thing holding me back is ME. At the risk of sounding like a bigger geek than most folks already assume, I'm like Luke Skywalker in "Empire Stikes Back." I've empowered myself to do little things, but not the big things because they seem too big, not realizing it's all part of the same process. And to appropriate Yoda, "That is why [I] fail." I've been consciously been working to get past my "safe" vision of the future and push through to do the riskier, bigger thing that is probably going to be better in the long run than thinking small and playing it safe.