A few snippets from this morning’s chauffeur-driven limo trip to town:
- Donna Tocci shows how clueless and insensitive some petrol companies can be (“oh, really?” I hear you exclaim). In her post ‘Mobil on the Run? Not So Much‘ Donna tells of a less-than exemplary customer service attitude displayed not only by an employee, but also the company itself. Surely its communications department could have got this one better?
As Donna says, “It also made me think that their marketing department doesn’t have a clue that ‘on the run’ doesn’t mean much to those that are expected to implement the slogan.”
- My old colleague-in-arms Trevor Cook takes a clueless journo (the high-profile Kohler) to task for his comments that “Blogging is where armies of unpaid non-journalists publish stuff just because they can, a sort of massive boom in vanity publishing.” Quite rightly Trevor scoffs. I’m just starting reading Hugh Hewitt’s ‘Blog: the Information Reformation’ and in the first couple of chapters he neatly dissects how this army of unpaid non-journalists now act as the guardians of truth for journalists who are either too lazy or too under-resourced to do their fact-checking homework.
- Trevor also points out why companies who fail to pay attention to their website are deserving of all the acrimony from disgruntled customers and social commentators that they will inevitably get. Serves them right, I say; but then again I’m in a bad mood after a night of distracted sleep thanks to Neville Hobson.
- Virginia Postrel (recommended to me by the wise and sagacious Allan Jenkins) points off to a startup that has a new way with bags, blogs and mass customisation. I just wish she’d publish the ‘full’ feed rather than just snippets for everyone’s feed reader.
- The Freakonomics guys provide a snippet of information about a hotel in Chicago (The Sheraton Chicago, in fact) that offers to confiscate one’s crackberry upon arrival and return it upon departure. Seeing as how I have had my nose permanently buried in my noisy notebook for over two months now, Mrs BetterComms has decreed that, with the handing in of this semester’s assignments tomorrow, the weekend will be a ‘computer free weekend’. This is my equivalent of cold turkey and already neighbours have been warned. If you read about random wanton and grizzly murders occurring in the Adelaide Hills over the next four days, please don’t tell the police about your suspicions, okay?
Ahh, the chauffeur has arrived at my destination. Enough blogging for one morning. Have a great day!
