My friend Danielle sent me this video FOREVER ago and only tonight I was able to watch it. Here’s Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library with some pretty good and down-to-earth thoughts on Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape.
I learned about it on this post.
Obviously, the blogger is upset but unfortunately this is not only the result of the current economic situation: newspapers have been seeing changes coming for a very long time and now many of them are facing reality… sadly a rough one because it is exploding on the faces of journalists during these tough times.
So a person contacts you to tell you that they are interested in having you present your work at their conference. They leave you their name and a number. You call back and leave a message with your email. They send you details.
You go to their web site and they happen to charge $1,500 for the chance to be considered to present to a group of people who MAY consider funding your project… what is wrong with this picture?
Does it remind you of the guy that speaks on the TV infommercial? The one that says: “Send me $100 and I will send you a book and two DVDs explaining how you too can become a millionaire.”
Fast forward in time, your book and the DVDs come in the mail: you open them and the advice is plain and simple: “Get yourself enough people willing to pay you $100 so you can tell them how they too can become a millionaire… and YOU will become a millionaire.”
It’s pretty amazing how there are still outfits that conduct “business” this way… and by the way: heck no, I am not paying $1,5000 to talk! 
After a whole month of not having T-Mobile @ Home service and going back through layers and layers of customer service and technical support, THEY FINALLY got the service to work again. Once I was done with speaking with the highest layer of Tech support, I asked her what would they do to compensate the month that I had no service for and the time I spent on the phone with them. She said Customer Service would have to help me with it, so I called them.
I spoke with a rep and then with a supervisor, after it became obvious that the best she would be able to do is give me a whopping $10 credit (one month of no service) in my case. I spoke with the supervisor and he clearly said “we do not credit you for your time.”
That is completely unacceptable: I have spent more than 8 hours in the course of the past month, on hold and troubleshooting their service. This was time that I was not productive and time that I would have not had to spend doing this if their service had worked so it is disappointing that they are missing this… and sticking to a policy that clearly disrespects customers and disregards that negative impact they can have on customers’ lives when they don’t deliver.
I ended up canceling the service and biting the $200 early cancellation fee: I would have paid more than that between now and the end of the contract. And the supervisor didn’t seem concerned about losing a customer, when he could have easily retained me by at least asking what did I want as credit. I would have probably settled for $40-$50.
One thing I know for sure: I will think twice to extend the rest of my contract for our cell phones when they come to an end.
And if you ask me about T-Mobile @ Home, it’s not worth your time as cheap as $10 for home phone service may sound. If you don’t believe me, read the experience of other people here.
I was contacted by IKEA about the complaint I posted here a few days ago.
First, a person from corporate wrote to me saying that he had passed the information about my case to the store manager in East Palo Alto. Then I heard from the Services Manager at the store. She gave me her contact information and finally today I spoke with her.
She was very apologetic and respectful, explaining that the judgement about whether my complaint was indeed quality related or not should have not been made on the basis of a photo. I should have been told to bring in the bed, which she invited me to do.
She said IKEA stood by their products and cared deeply about their customers, so she told me they would give me a store credit if I brought them the bed.
I was very impressed with the professional and customer service-oriented that this person exhibited, so I decided to share this experience here, in the same way that I shared my earlier disappointment.
I guess we will be visiting IKEA again. Thanks for not disappointing, guys!
I just upgraded to the latest version of iTunes today. In recent times it hadn’t been too exciting to do this, since most of the upgrading had had to do with support for iPhone, etc.
But today, I was gladly surprised to find a very nice new feature, called Genius:
The premise is simple yet powerful. You pick a song in your library and (after iTunes has indexed your library) click on the Genius button in the bottom right corner. What results is a very effective playlist that starts with the song you picked, followed by recommended songs based on that song and your past listening habits.
Though it hasn’t been too well received by some iTunes users, to the right of the new playlist is a sidebar with a list of tracks from the iTunes store that you can click on (so they are focusing the experience down to the track level with this, more than they were with the Mini Store that stayed at the album level).
One thing still missing from the whole equation is discussed in this post in Wired, where one of the co-founders of Last.FM points out how there is no connection to friends and others, like they or LaLa.com enable through their platform.
Although they are a bit late to the game, nevertheless it is nice and VERY smart move by Apple. It should be interesting to see how this plays out in the midterm, specially for other companies in this space.
Today I’ve had it with IKEA. We used to be fans of their furniture, loved their lines: we even were sad to learn they were about to open a store in Tempe, AZ shortly after we moved out of there, and became happy again when they opened a store in Orlando, where we moved to next.
Upon settling in Palo Alto, it was obviously a cause of joy to see an IKEA store close to home. So most of the things we needed to furnish our new place (since we sold a lot of them before moving) we got there… little did we know how “cheap” some of these things would be.
Enter the ÅNES bed frame. A couple of months after we got it, the headrest started showing signs that it wasn’t in good shape: we should have payed attention to the signs.
Less than three weeks ago, I was sitting on the side of the bed… to my susprise the feet-side of the frame collapsed, as you can see in the pic in here and these others. I was, like… WHAT?
So, today we were finally able to go to IKEA in East Palo Alto. After waiting for an answer to an email I sent to IKEA’s “Customer Service” department, we took some pictures and printed them to show them at the returns desk.
First, we found to our surprise that the ÅNES bed frame was no longer being offered in the store (it still is, as of the day of this post, available online -though I HIGHLY recommend you do NOT get it).
So we headed to the returns desk and talked to no avail to one of the customer service people. We ended up talking to Carsjanae (Cust. Service Supervisor #347 -I think this number corresponds to the store) who explained to us that without the receipt and after 90 days there was nothing she could do. Plus the case of the headrest seemed to her like wear and tear.
It was ironic how little she seemed to care about the whole situation as she kept talking about “they” and “their” policies, as if she weren’t an IKEA employee but a person talking on behalf of another company she had nothing to do with. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to convey to her (nor would she care about it) that their policies, even if they exist, are really not acceptable and have little consideration for cases like this, where it is obvious that the piece of furniture was not properly assembled.
Questions:
1) How could I reasonably expect to have a piece of furniture like a bed to go kaputt in six months?
2) They put it on the customer to hold on to a receipt, when we all know that they can easily look up the purchase if we hand them the credit card. They do that at Target and Costco.
3) So much “green” bluff in IKEA and the furniture they are putting out is utter waste that THEY know will not last long enough.
Well, I guess this post is my way to say: I give up… I will write to the a series of IKEA execs (without much hope for a response, I have to say).
For what it’s worth: we won’t be shopping in IKEA any more… and I am writing this to you, to warn you in case you haven’t been burned by this lame return (“warranty”) policy…
Since we created a non-profit in California, I have lost track of the number of time we’ve received the SAME letter from the “Corporate Compliance Center”.
Although the envelope states “This is not a government document” the letter comes across as one, set up in a way that took us a while to really tell apart from something we needed to be paying attention to. The bottom line is they are offering to do your corporate minutes so that you can comply with CA corp. law. The thing is… this is something YOU are a corporation are supposed to do. However, they will kindly help if you pay them $120.
I wonder how many people fall for this… My only advice is to simply read about them if you ever get one of these letters (chances are if you are not in Cali, you will not). It has become one of my junk mail items that I periodically expect in the mail by now.
Since John Battelle’s “The Search,” I haven’t had such a good read about people that make web technologies happen. But his book was very focused on a single technology, while Sarah Lacy has chosen to deal with a whole period in Silicon Valley’s history: the emergence and glory days of Web 2.0 (arguably those days are not over yet).
Sarah has a provocative style, she knows what she is talking about and she knows the folks that play the game. Her writing flows like the words in her columns, which she has been writing for nearly ten years now. In the course of the book, she carefully weaves a tale that lets the reader see where all the pieces fall: where each Web 2.0 entrepreneur (or “nontrepreneur” as she refers to Blogger’s and Twitter’s Evan Williams) connects with the next one and where did he get the inspiration (or the funding) from to pursue the next big thing.
Throughout the book’s eleven chapters, I found myself referring back to a very useful diagram that she included in the beginning, which shows at a very top level companies and people, showing who was founder, investor and employee of which.
You do not need to be a geek to enjoy the book, but you will if you are. You certainly do not have to live in Silicon Valley to know what she is talking about, but you will get a kick out of local references if you live or work in the stretch of 101 between San Francisco and San Jose. You do not need to be a web entrepreneur to want to devour the book, but if you are, you will find yourself flipping through the pages in search of yet more interesting and passionate anecdotes from the people that made Web 2.0 what it is today.
Sarah Lacy’s book is a must read for anyone using the social web today: in case you didn’t realize it, that means every one of us! Get your copy of “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” quick.
Fascinating! I thought it was particularly interesting how the Spanish-speaking folks in the video referred to LinkedIn calling it differently that it is called in English, basically pronouncing the brand name in Spanish. You will notice…
These guys GET it!
