Ok! I made that up. But if you were serious about blogging, one thing you would do is “think”. That process can sometimes turn out to be quite useful over a period of time.
Web Worker Daily has an article on “Ten ways to be productive with your blog“. Good read.
On Saturday evening, I made 19 blog posts in the span of 3 hours from my Nokia N73 and wow! it was exciting. I was covering a christian concert and wanted to try out live blogging. I have to admit it was exciting. Accepted that I don’t have a great following, I still saw a good spike in simplyHim.com visitors.
I also tried out Twitter and that was exciting too. I used Twitter’s web interface directly from my phone. It was actually easier than using the Mail-to-Blogger feature at simply Him that is hosted on Blogger.com.
I even took photos on the same N73 and uploaded them to my Flickr account from the venue. But I could give a link to the live blog because Flickr kept giving me a mobile address (m.flickr.com) and I had not set up a Flickr badge yet on simply Him. All that has been fixed now and I have also written my review on the event.
It was a lot of learning for me and I enjoyed it. Ten or fifteen years back, who would have thought of something like this?!
The “Seven” concert is about to start in another 2 hours. And I have been testing on how to use my phone and get some posts and pics up during the concert. I will be live blogging at my simplyHim.com. So if you are interested in what happens in a live Christian concert in India, come on over at simplyHim.com
My home connection is still not ready. My phone was connected today but by the time the broadband connection comes alive, I am told will take 4 days.
Anyways I was impressed by the response time from the BSNL guys today. Will let you know about it soon. I need to go home now. I am looking at new ways to update this blog. Lot of exciting opportunities out there.
You have a great weekend! (I am hoping to attend the Seven program conducted by my church here in Chennai tomorrow.)
Could there actually be a better way to email? Or maybe even a replacement? Om Malik seems to need one very badly. His article in Business 2.0 proposes a “smart inbox that will catch spam in junk filters, display the wine reminder in an IM, move company news to an RSS feed, and intelligently negotiate appointment requests with your calendar in the background, all in one interface”.
But can this problem be solved this way? I don’t think so. Cause as long we have spam control systems, there will always be spammers who find new ways to beat the system. It is either got to be a self-taught spam defense system or the whole concept of web communication needs to redefined. Social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook can work but have limitations that you can communicate with only people who are already on those networks. Not everyone you know are on these networks. These networks could work great for people within a single group like a class or college or organization. I have my doubts.
And as most of the comments in Om’s post suggest, not everyone has an email problem. True, 80% of my daily mails are pure spam. But I am able to wade through it in the first 20 minutes I enter office. I have just learnt how to use both my hands in the process.
Google has made the premium features of FeedBurner available for free. MyBrand and Stats Pro.
FeedBurner MyBrand allows you to have your feed at your own domain. That means – complete ownership is with you. Of course, it also means that your blog must be published on your own domain and space. If you want to activate the MyBrand service, click on My Account link at the top of the page after logging into your FeedBurner account. The My Brand option is available on the left side of the page.
FeedBurner StatsPro gives you detailed stats of who is accessing your blog and feed. Quite nifty! These can be accessed from within your account – My Feeds > “Your Feed” > Analyze tab and it is on the left side under Services.
Even though these services are free now, you will need to activate them in your FeedBurner account. If you have already activated them, you will not be billed from the month of June.
Unfortunately, I cannot use both here cause my blog is hosted at WordPress.com and ashed.com is already taken(sob!).
For most businesses, the first mindset is ‘how do I make money out of this?’. It is never – ‘What can I provide to the customer?’ ‘What is the value add that the customer gets?’ I am not saying that we should not look at the viability of our business models but in the process of doing this, we often lose focus of the important – the customer.
When we design the UI or create a website or train the customer support team, do we really do it keeping the customer in mind? ‘How is the user going to interact with my website?’ ‘How should my support team interact with my customers?’ If you believe in processes, are those actually helping your customers or are they just helping you track what your employees are doing?
Seth Godin has a post about how retail stores arrange first by brand, then type, then style and then size. It would be so much easier if they would arrange by type first and then by brand or even type and size first and then by brand. It is quite an obvious way of doing it but I have never seen any retail store do it, except for bookstores. It would be a disaster if they had put all the McGrawHill books together and then separated them by topic.
It is so sad to see stores display the sign “Customers are our greatest asset” but don’t have a system in place to take care of that asset.
You can have the best product or service in your category and suck on service and destroy the whole customer experience and tarnish the brand. I have a BSNL (largest Indian telecom provider – government owned) landline and broadband connection. What I love about their service is the 2Mbps connection. No other provider has been able to beat that in India. I was also able to get the connection very fast. (Earlier, there used to be a lot of paper work and waiting periods.) Their fault response time is very good. The two times I called them, they got back to me before 24 hours.
But my connection kept having trouble. It was a line fault and my broadband connection would keep dropping. The first time, they found that the cable guy pulled his cable over my telephone line and it snapped.
Today I went to the nearest exchange and submitted my request for shifting my connection to the new house. But I was told to submit the application to another telephone exchange (that is 7kms from here). The distance between the two houses would be around a kilometer.
All that BSNL needs to do is accept my application in the nearest exchange and send it to the corresponding exchange for processing. Is that too much to ask? As marketeers, we may be able to create the best offering combined with good marcom but if support fails or if the system is wired wrong, then all our efforts go flat.
We need to look at the system and make sure that customers have a similar or better experience than what they expected from our marketing message. It is afterall the secret of repeat purchases and up & cross selling.
The weekend was filled with packing and shifting. We had to shift because our house owner figured his house was worth more than what we were paying him. More because the real-estate market in Chennai gave him that impression! Anyways…we found a place nearer to office. So thats neat. It took us 7.5 minutes to walk to office today. Yipee! (0.5 minutes was spent waiting to cross the Velachery (Chennai, India) roundabout. If you ever come to that junction, make sure you believe in God!)
After shifting, it was not all bliss. Our new landlord actually told us, “As you use the bathrooms, it will get cleaned automatically.” In all my years in this world and using bathrooms, I have never seen a bathroom get cleaner as I use it. If that was the case, we would never need Harpic and Clorox.
Anyways, we shifted in. Cleaned the bathrooms. It still needs more. Puff! We are kinda settled down. We need to get some electrical fittings and call a carpenter and electrician. I also need to get my broadband connection transferred to the new home. I may not be able to blog frequently till that is done.
