Business Blogging

I have the same conversation pretty much every day now:

Enthusiastic Cold Caller: “Hi, I’m calling from a company called Social Bongo and we’ve developed a cutting edge social media metrics workflow sentiment SEO influence monitoring solution. I see from your website that you’re involved in social media, and I think this system would be perfect for you – would you like me to set up a demonstration?”

Me: “I’ve already looked at your service (because everybody feels compelled to email me every single half-baked web site that features the phrase ‘social media’ regardless of how irrelevant it is to my job) and when you strip away all of the nonsensical social-media mumbo-jumbo and the pretty but clunky interface, the system just seems to be a spam-blog aggregator.”

Enthusiastic Cold Caller: “Uh yes… but we only charge eleventy billion dollars per keyword, which is pretty competitive, right?”

Me: “To be honest, your service seems to be designed to fleece old school PR and marketing people who don’t really understand any of this stuff but need to show their boss that they’re doing something about social media. We do understand this stuff, and I don’t think your service would be much use to us.”

Enthusiastic Cold Caller: “I see. Well we’re still developing the service, so would you mind providing us some feedback on how you think it could be improved?”

Me: “Sure, I love doing free product development work for every social media snake-oil merchant who calls me out of the blue…”