I Think, Therefore I Rant!

Time Warner cable may not be available in your neighborhood so you may not have a dog in this hunt. To catch you up, TWC offers a free iPad app that allows you to stream live video TV feed to your device. You would think that the networks would have no problem with this. Let’s list the reasons:  

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• You must be a Time Warner customer to use the service.
• You must be a RoadRunner customer to use the service (RoadRunner is the brand name for TWC’s cable modem service).
• You can only use this service at the specific IP address of your RoadRunner account.  You cannot be at the Starbuck’s down the street. You cannot be at your neighbors house that also has TWC and RoadRunner but a different IP address.  You cannot be traveling to a hotel in a far off city.

I just read a great article over at The Marketing Tech Blog that I think anyone in sales or marketing should read. In fact, I think everyone in business should pay attention to number 3!  I am not going to quote the entire article on this site but I will give the 5 bullet points. You can jump over to the original site and enjoy the full article.

1. The generic private message
2. Preemptive Disclaimers
3. Abuse of carbon copy
4. The Soft Opt-In
5. The Random Cause Invitation

Number 3 is most interesting as so many people violate the simple rule:

Only use carbon-copy if you are 100% sure that 100% of the people on the list know each other well AND would appreciate the chance to immediately Reply-All AND would immediately appreciate any Reply-Alls.  

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Mastering Technical Sales has a great article on their site explaining how to handle 200 emails a day. It is purposely written for suggestions to their target audience which is the pre-sales technical folks that are the brains in the IT sales world.

I pulled out a few of the more relevant paragraphs that were relevant to all regarding of profession but I suggest that you read the entire article.

I will start this suggestion list by sharing one of my habits. “Don’t file – SEARCH”.  Install one of the several desktop search indexing tools such as Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search, or Copernic Desktop Search. Then, when you have read and are finished with an email, move it to a “Done” folder and forget about it.  Don’t try to figure out if you should file the email in the customer folder, the folder of the person that sent you the email, the folder for product problems or whatever.  Most people end up spending way to much time worrying about their filing system or trying to find an email in the file system.  Don’t worry about it – just search for the email in one of the above systems let the engine do the heavy lifting for you.  

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I received this as a “joke” email today from a friend that is quite conservative in his political beliefs.  I thought it was a unique commentary on the state of our nation.  I find it refreshing that this email doesn’t blame President Obama for the solid state of the economy but instead is complaining about him adding to the problem.

Dear Employee: 

As the CEO of this organization, I have resigned myself to the fact that Barrack Obama is our President and that our taxes and government fees will increase in a BIG way. To compensate for these increases, our prices  would have to increase by about 10%. But since we cannot increase our prices right now due to the dismal state of the economy caused by banks that can’t run an effective business, we will have to lay off sixty of our employees instead.  

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