Since friday the 30. of January the place where I have choosen to store all my bookmarks has been down. According to their Twitter account, ma.gnolia.com had severe failure. Which was okay for a day or two, but by now Im kinda wondering if I will ever see what I think is about 3 years of bookmarks again. Im pretty pissed about that to say the least. I have even wondered to myself "why oh why I have ever putted my bookmarks on the internet" - and "why oh why I didn't stay on del.icio.us".
Ma.gnolia had a lot of charm for me, and where a really interesting tool to use for open knowledge sharing within a company.
I am using my bookmarks everyday for research and benchmarking and best casestudies. I don't know if I will be able to access my "knowledge bank of expertise goods" which used to be my magnolia account.
They lost it - or so it seems.
I trusted their service so much - and I also thought that they had really great backup of our data, but I guess not.
Now in my current mood of "pissed off ness" I am sure that they have brought miscredit to all of the internet - from my point of view because I don't believe I will be able to trust an online service again - not without having it all backed up at home.
If I face it, there's a lot of those bookmarks that are not that important (a lot of them are - but probably 70 % I could live without).
But I would never be able to use ma.gnolia again - also because of their way of communicating to their users - which has almost non-existent. The value in my bookmarks is extremely high. I wanted to know the day after the failure that I would probably not see my bookmarks again.
Bottomline is: I wont be able to trust the internet with my data without having most of it backup at home. I can't believe that they could loose my data. I don't think my trust in social network and services will ever be regained. At least not in services where I store data that is actually that valuable to my work and my daily life.
[magnolia, ma.gnolia.com, bookmarks, data, trust, security, communication, badwill]
[6 comments]
There needs to be a fair amount of well lets call it "selfinsight" in a company. But when you do something like, let's say, send out an extraordinary newsletter with the only purpose of announcing stuff about yourself ( aka. giving no value to the readers) - I just think you are wasting my time.
I want to talk about value here. I want to have value from receiving your newsletter, personal or professional - it has to give something to me. Otherwise I probably won't let myself have your news and sign up for a mailinglist if I thought that all I would get from it was noise.
I mean - if you send out a newsletter out, talking about the value of yourself instead of giving value to your readers, there's a fair ammount of chance that the newsletter will end up as badwill instead of goodwill.
so newsletters doesn't necessarily have to evolve news about yourself, it could evolve news about - lets say, your area of experience?
[business, communication, newsletter, badwill, value]
[114 comments]
So in reflection from Fuel (
and inspired by Dave's blogpost about the incident) comes one of my horses that I always ALWAYS talk to people about , especially in marketing.
for everything it's worth you have to remember that your
salespitch is not the same as my buying pitch. Or putted into other words... the reason your selling is not the reason I am buying. In most cases, these two pitches lies miles and miles apart.
An example was Microsofts completely awkward salespitch at the
fuel conference. They turned their 10 mins of speech into badwill for themselves. How ? by having some poor consultant ( and I really hope they payed him a fortune) to talk about their .net products on stage. Just the thought of hiring someone to do a salespitch for you (gggrrr) leaves my mouth dry... poor buggar...
Sometimes it leaves me thinking that if those salespitches-y people want to continue to act like clowns... so be it... it's not my company they're ruining. - it's their own. If microsoft can't understand why they have such a hard time selling their product to firstmovers ( and snort.. geeks) you should have seen them on stage..they literally created 10 mins of badwill for their brand at a conference.
So because microsofts salespitch came on so strong... my buying pitch was non-existant. everytime companies/people talk to me as if I am a novice - my buying pitch disappears. it disappears in with stupid marketing, stalking and wrong business ideas... it disappears when creativity disappears.
as I sat in the conference room, I felt like a sheep. Baaah. But then I thought about that if this is the normal approach that microsoft has towards their customers, no wonder that people wont buy their products.. I for sure, wont.
So Microsoft - when my community marketing book comes out - i will send you a free copy - and I hope you will all read it... so you can stop tormenting geeks and sheep... baah.
[fuelconference, microsoft, salespitch, buyingpitch, badwill]
[1 comment]