On Words and Business

Ahh, customer service. A recurring theme among all businesses. Flying Solo hopped on its soapbox to explain what customers really hate.

And it’s pretty simple. Customers hate it when you say one thing and do another. When you over-promise and under-deliver. When you set expectations and then come nowhere near meeting them.

Some do’s and dont’s from my own experience:

• Don’t answer the phone when you’re on the subway if you can’t actually help your customers from there. I always let it go to voicemail and return the call when I’m in a reasonably quiet spot and can address the needs of my customer.
• Don’t answer the phone at 9:30 on a Friday night, unless you want your customers to expect that you’ll always available at that time. I return calls within one business day, so Monday is fine to return a Friday night call. Unless you’re a 911 operators, your job is to save lives in some other capacity, or you’re the media consultant for a major player with a tendency to get caught with her or her pants down, most things really can wait until the next business day.
• Return calls and emails promptly, but not instantaneously. Unless you can sustain it (and are never away from your desk or email device), it’s best not to set up the expectation that emailing you is like IMing you.

Recently I’ve been contemplating the notion of blogs, and paths of communciation. As a writer, I’m used to writing things and not knowing who (other than by general description) is reading my work. But a blog is a great two way communication device.

It’s a way for you to get to know me. For the most part, though, other than family, friends, and a few colleagues who’ve told me they read the blog, I don’t know who you are.

It’s cool that a lot of people I don’t know are reading this. (I’ve seen the stats, so I know you’re out there!) Now I’m just curious to find out who you are, why you read the blog, how I can make it better (or if you think it’s perfect and useful as it is), and what I can do to help you.

My clients are a diverse group of people, and I admit I’ve been struggling a bit to find my blogging voice or the “right” content. So if you’ve got any thoughts…please share.

As information consumers, it used to be fairly easy to identify authoritative resources. If it was printed in the New York Times or Encyclopedia Britannica, we could trust the information. We counted on the publishers who, by reputation, delivered accurate and authoritative content.

These days, the internet, as with all things open to everyone and without oversight, is filled with much content of questionable quality. And, like with most things human, we seek ways to categorize and to trust. Sites like Technorati allow users to categorize content and provide authority by dint of a large number of people agreeing that a site is worthwhile. Bloggers like Seth Godin and Michael Stelzner are trusted because of the expertise and reputution of the bloggers themselves. And groups like the open-source Trusted Travel Blogs Network are created as a way to provide industry specific, independent validation.

Of course, this primarily deals with sites that are free and open to everyone. Traditional publishers who’ve adapted to the new media model are still out there, and still authoritative. And like before, still not free.

What do you think about all this validation and classification? Does it help you understand more about the information you get from a site?

If you want to write more, get more of your work done, or actually work on that project you’ve been ignoring, here’s a great trick– how to finish a project in ten minutes.

Or, at least, it sounds like a great idea to me. I haven’t implemented it yet, but I’m going to try. There are so many projects on my list–some with externally imposed deadlines and others with my own, flexible deadlines. And it’s the latter projects that most suffer when I’m making my daily to-do list.

How do you deal with projects that you never seem to get around to? Do you think there’s a reason, other than a tendency to procrastinate, that you don’t get to them?

Online business networking at it’s finest. If you haven’t checked out LinkedIn yet, and you’re serious about networking with professionals and business owners, this is the place to be.

It’s a networking tool, so the most benefit comes when users share their connections. You never know who the people you know know.

I use LinkedIn to identify and connect with people in organizations I’m trying to target. I just took a class in how to best use LinkedIn as a networking tool (this probably gives you a hint about which generation I am not part of!). It really opened my eyes to how online networking can be successful, and how it supplements networking in person.

See if we are connected:

As it happens, I’ve always been a pretty good speller, it just came naturally. So when word processing programs with spell checkers came along, I remember thinking I wouldn’t need such technology. But thankfully it would help those who do have trouble. Because I’m also the kind of person who immediately recognizes a misspelled word and gets annoyed by it–I’ve seen it happen on televised newscasts, in advertisements, and in national magazines and newspapers, let alone e-mail messages and blogs.

So imagine my horror when someone alerted me to a misspelled word in one of my blog posts (I’ve changed it, so if you missed it the first time, you’re out of luck). It was one of those mistakes I make all the time typing–inverting two of the letters–but catch in my reread or the spell check. But because I’m so sensitive to finding misspelled words in others’ work, it makes me crazy to find one in mine. I didn’t run the spell checker that day, either. I remember thinking–oh this is so short, why bother. Ha!

Add in that these days, with instant messaging and email messages sent from tiny Blackberry or cell phone keyboards, abbreviations and new spellings are the norm, and I’m finding it hard to adjust.

Does it bother you to find misspelled or, shall I say, newly spelled words out there? Does it make you crazy to find a mistake like that in your own work? And does it make someone less professional, or less seemingly intelligent, to occasionally mistype a word or spell it the way the works best for them, even if that doesn’t jive with Webster?