DISQUS

Great list Victorino. One thing I learned from a highly successful Australian restaurant owner was the value of a complimentary glass of port at the end of the meal. This you could call the surprise bonus treat. I observed over a period of time that people I lunched with there thought it was a treat just for them, because of me: they did not notice that other tables were getting the same special treat, so that raised my stocks as well as those of the restaurant, in the eyes of the people I was with.

Yesterday we tried a local Chinese restaurant for the first time. The service was very slow and basically incompetent, the food was overall great and we were given a complimentary port (as were, I observed, others). One dish was not well cooked and as soon as we told the owner she instantly offered another dish and whisked away the one that was not well done. Her pleasant manner in the midst of a very busy lunch hour, together with her willingness to solve the problem of the one dish that was not up to par, and the complimentary port on top of an excellent meal made us happy and willing to go back, even though some of her staff did not seem to know which way was up and thought it was ok to promise to bring water, glasses etc and then not do it.

One trick to the complimentary port treat is to train staff to say "with the compliments of the manager/owner" - so that you embed the idea of "something for free", which we all like.

I don't know whether a port would work in the Philippines, but I imagine you could come up with a suitable refreshment, mentioning, as I say, that this is with the compliments etc. Chinese restaurants in Sydney, when I was younger, used to bring cut up oranges as a nice palate refresher.

And then train staff to keep their promises to patrons. :)

@SydneyPRGal: Roger Christie at sefiani.com.au in Sydney is worth talking to 02 8920 0700 or if he's not there (on leave this week) talk to Hugo. Tell 'em I sent you - no, I'm not on a commission :). For other companies/names, leave a note via contact at my site linked from my name here.

Des Walsh's last blog post..links for 2008-08-27

Andy - that's certainly worth bearing in mind and I appreciate your making the point: I guess I was thinking not so much of the building of online reputation as of the prophylactic aspect - a lot of job seekers, for instance, probably don't know about it so they don't know what recruiters are finding about them and don't know that they can fix much of the potential confusion.

Des Walsh's last blog post..VisualCV a Smarter Way to Present Your Resume

Amazingly helpful, Andy. Must hire someone to do it all! :) One site I don't see mentioned here and which I know to be used by a lot of recruiters, for instance, is Zoominfo. It collates web references and builds "identities". I think I had about five when I first visited. I use it to show people how robots can construct your online identity just from various items, such as that you were once on a committee which had that info online, previous employment etc. Good news is you can open a free account there and sort it out pretty well, consolidating the multiples, separating out anything that belongs to a namesake, adding info to your profile. zoominfo.com

Des Walsh's last blog post..VisualCV a Smarter Way to Present Your Resume

This was a good find in the process of searching for the top commenters plugin! I'd already worked through the logic of taking a blogroll out of the sidebar but had not connected that logic to the top commenters feature, until reading this. And anyway, I'm more interested in people commenting in order to contribute something useful or interesting, rather than so as to be in some sort of commenters' steeplechase. Thank you.

Thanks for the list and for sharing. Thanks for your willingness to try new things while others are standing back saying 'it won't work' (until it does and they quietly switch). Thanks for encouraging the risk-takers like Loic. Thanks for having opinions and being willing to be wrong. Thanks for following folks like me who aren't A-listers :)

With the benefit of only 2 weeks in China, including 2 days at ad:tech Beijing, I'd have to say it would be interesting to discuss the term "great blog" in the Chinese context. There are plenty of English-speaking bloggers who could explicate that - Jeremy Goldkorn at danwei.org, Dan Harris at chinalawblog.com Sam Flemming at http://www.seeisee.com/index.php/sam/ and a new one David Wolf at Silicon Hutong http://siliconhutong.typepad.com/silicon_hutong/
What I got is that the sheer numbers of people blogging is huge. I was also told that bulletin boards are huge. Censorship is a serious issue and companies are very wary, to say the least, about corporate blogging, especially because of the speed and volume of comments that get generated and the perceived risk in that.

So, Doug, once you've got to be in the top 5 of Technorati, what's next, world domination? :)

And here was I thinking the top 10,000 would be a good goal :(