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The fast-approaching holiday season is a great time to update your IT systems while everything's quiet. I got to have a chat with Stilgherrian in this week's Patch Monday. This podcast has some nifty suggestions from Harold Melnick, who's Microsoft's senior product
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I've been thinking about my recent American Express experience - outlined in AMEX discovers new depths to customer service. It is clear to me that companies have the right to choose which customers they deal with. But it seems that how they remove those customers from the books
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I've been an American Express customer for a long time. But recently they made it apparent that they do not want my custom so I'm in the process of closing my accounts. Unless their customer service tactics are treat 'em mean and keep 'em
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Startup Barcamp Sydney was on yesterday and I managed to drop in. It was held at one of my favourite venues for unconferences - ATP Innovations- and it might possibly be the first barcamp to feature fresh coconut juice in the shell. This event was part of Global Entrepreneurship Week
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Here's a little quote from one of my Gen Y friends on my Facebook wall today: "I won't ever pay for normal news content ever again full stop. If i wanted to subscribe to something niche likes financial markets pieces etc, then potentially yes, but
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Really looking forward to speaking at the SME Technology Summit by The Insight Exchange on 1 December 2009. There's lots of interesting speakers: * Tim Pethick - Entrepreneur & Founder, Nudie * Mark Pesce - Inventor, Writer, Educator, Futurist * WilliePang - Managing Director, Search Marketing, Yahoo! Australia * Suzi Dafnis -
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I went for a cheese & wine dinner at Bells at Killcare on Friday night with @frombecca and @JohannaBD. The food - by Stefano Manfredi (a.k.a. @manfredistefano) - was wonderful as usual. The wines selected by Michael Trembath were lovely, the cheeses selected by Will Studd were a
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Joel Postman argues that A Blog is a Better Social Media Hub Than Twitter. I tend to agree, especially from a business perspective. His post got me thinking about the critical elements for a business social media toolkit. 1) A Blog or a Website (it's the same thing
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A recent study in Scientific American about How the Brain Reveals Why We Buy discusses advances in neuroscience that are giving rise to a new field of neuromarketing. The article cites the famous example of Coke v. Pepsi - where blind taste tests showed a preference for Pepsi, whereas visible
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In recent times I had parallel customer service experiences with two different universities: Queensland University of Technology and Charles Sturt University. It was very strange to hang up from one phone call only to have a diametrically different conversation on the next call with the other university. Also, it seemed
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An email for a conference arrived the other day, and it enticed me with the tag line: Learning how to leverage Web 2.0 and Social Media sites to market your brand and control your message This got me wondering can brands really control their message using social media? One
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As a humble member of various social networks including Twitter it never fails to amaze me how lame some businesses are in their approach. I don't know what is happening inside the brains of the people behind this behaviour on behalf of companies. But it is like they&