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{ Category Archives } Social Marketing

Making old news viral today? What’s up with Google Alerts?

I’m about ready to shut down my use of the google alerts feature.  When it first came out it was wonderful.   It’s a great way to get competitive & industry news as it happens.   Over the past year however, much of the news is old news — sometimes really old news.   circa 2001, 2, 3, 4 …

This phenomenon was noticed and blogged about last year.   I bet a little digging will show quite a few others complaining about this useful service gone bad.

Last month panic selling of United Airlines stock was attributed to google alerts.

A number of times I was ready to pass along old news as new news.  Lucky, each time as I was about to hit send  I caught the old-date and saved myself the embarrassment.   With the huge deluge of information out there, a service like google alerts is truly useful, but if and only if, the news is actually new news.

Google,  how hard it is to write a simple filter to kick out the news that is obviously back-dated by years?   How many other services are leveraging yours?   Seems like a lot.   Everytime I get old news — as emailed to me by google alerts — it shows up in my twitter stream, in my friend feed, and in …  Well you get the picture.

Google is a great brand – why tarnish it up by constantly sending out untrustworthy information?

2008 10 13 Steven Miller Comments (0)

What is Office Depot Thinking?

I am a big fan of making purchases online for in-store pickup.  This is especially true for buying office supplies.  I find office supply stores nearly impossible to shop.  A short list of 5 things takes 20-30 minutes to track down searching aisle after poorly marked aisle.  I dread shopping at any of the Office Supply Megastores.

Shopping online is a dream.   With just a few keystrokes I can find what I’m looking for,  load my cart and buy. I drive right by an office depot to and from work. It’s not even 1/2 block out of the way — it’s right on my route. For the past couple of years whenever I’ve needed ink, paper, pens you name it I buy online and make the 3 minute stop at office depot to pickup my order.

At least it USED to be 3 minutes. My order used to be waiting for me up front, fully processed, just waiting to verify my identify and out the door I go.  Couldn’t be easier.

Office Depot has since completely revised their procedures. I arrived at the store this morning while running errands and there’s my order waiting for me.  But,  the order hasn’t been processed its only been “picked”.   The clerk has to call up a manager to process the order.  The manager starts processing the order, and training the clerk at the same time (telling him he’s teaching him to fish).   Meanwhile, the computer system hangs and it takes quite a bit of time to get my order scanned in and processed.   Then the manager tells me he needs to print out my receipt but he can’t do it here — he heads off to another part of the store.

Click to continue reading “What is Office Depot Thinking?”

2008 06 29 Steven Miller Life
Technology Comments (0)

Help me deal with the glut of social communities

I want a portable universal profile — that I can edit once — for every community I care to join.   Keeping track of all of them is a full time job.    Frankly, I already have one of those.   Anyone working on a profile widget?   I’d pay for the service.

At first there seemed to be a good reason to belong to a lot of these — but so far just 2 web 2.0 communities get my regular attention — linkedin and twitter.    I’m rapidly losing interest in facebook.   I get great utility out of del.icio.us though I rarely use it as a community site.   I just don’t get brightkite.   I’ll check back in with it in 6 months or so.

My short term preoccupation with Facebook has stolen time that I would rather be spending with my favorite communities – Flyertalk and Mark Squires.  Granted these aren’t new fangled web 2.0 communities, but I’ve made more friends there than I ever expect to make on these newer social sites that aren’t laser focused on my personal interests.

Which sites will be winners?  Which sites will disappear after a brief glint in the sun?

communities that could be around for a long time

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • del.icio.us
  • Flickr

flash in the plan sites:

  • Facebook -> Widget Quality Control might bring me back.  Then again maybe not.
  • Classmates -> Put a fork in it.
  • Bright kite -> Yet to prove that there is even a flash
  • Plaxo -> who has time for Plaxo ?

Back to my original question — anyone working on a universal profile?   Let me get my checkbook.

Steve

p.s. this was just too funny. Stephan Pastis is hilarious. he’s made me forget about the loss of the Far Side.  Check out Pearls Before Swine at comics.com.

2008 05 13 Steven Miller Comments (0)