Best

A Place Called Perfect – Walgreens

Coca Cola “Teach the World to Sing” Christmas

You Belong – Sheraton

Farfegnugen – Volkswagon

Worst

The Money You Could be Saving with Geico
King in Mask – Burger King

Block your number or make it private.

That’s it! Easy and extremely effective.

I don’t answer calls that show as “Blocked” or “Private”. I never will. Here’s why. If you have the need to block your call, then I expect it to be for one of two reasons.

1) You know I don’t want to talk to you and feel like blocking your identity will “trick” me into picking up. You’d be better off just letting me know it’s you from the start. I don’t duck calls from anyone, whether I’m looking forward to talking to them or not. The only call I’m sure not to answer is the blocked or private one. Even if you’re selling something, I’ll hear you out and give you a yes or no based on what I hear. But blocking your number is like trying to elbow into my office without an appointment or invitation. It’s disrespectful and I don’t want to do business with you.

2) You feel that your worth and stature are so high that you need to move incognito like a secret agent of the cold war. If people were to learn your number and identity the result would be swooning and pandemonium that could cause both physical and social injury. I, acknowledging that you are one of the dark, nameless elite whose identity must be protected, recognize that I am far too lowly to waste your time by answering.

So, if you’re in the number 1 category, just tell me who you are and we can talk. If you’re number 2, find a little reality and I’ll be happy to speak with you.

Some people have told me that I’m being silly. They say “What if that’s a potential client wanting to do business with you?” First, it’s probably not. Most business people are better grounded than that. Secondly, if they’re trying to hide now, imagine how hard they’ll be to find when billing time comes.

Whether tactless salesman or dark agent of the underworld, I respect you both, but I will not answer your call.

You would be right.

The truth is that these sites are losing money at an astonishing rate. So why such a bad business model? How does a company with the marketing expertise to turn a website name into a verb in the English language fail to realize that the plan is a financial loser?

Possibly, it could be the mistake of thinking that people (consumers) come to the web with the same mentality they carry into a brick and mortar business.  Stores have carried loss leaders forever. Lose money on one thing because that will bring masses of people to buy it. While they’re there they will buy your profit items as well. It works.

But people don’t approach the web that way. There’s an attitude of entitlement to free services that permeates the entire thing. Of course, the companies themselves carry part of the blame for creating this mentality, but I don’t believe that was the intention. I’m sure that idea was to make it free enough to bring in hoards of people and build a loyalty base. The company could then use methods to monetize that loyalty while still providing a great service.

The most obvious method is to incorporate advertising into the system. “We’re offering a free service that you clearly love and get lots of use from, so please click an ad”. Not only do people not click the ads, but they become annoyed that the ad is intruding on their space. There is constant development of the “better ad blocker” to keep you from even having to see these blights on your computer screen as you enjoy the free service. Ad clicks on Facebook are at or less than 1 for every 1000 users, but listen to them howl when the service isn’t working perfectly every second of every day.

You see, the vast majority of regular users of Youtube and Facebook don’t run businesses. They see what’s in it for them, but fail to realize that it takes around 700 workers to keep Facebook running on a daily basis, or that Youtube spends an amount approaching $1,000,000 per day to keep streaming those free videos. Users expect it free, they expect it to work, and they expect you to keep your annoying revenue generators out of their face….and don’t you DARE suggest that you may charge them a small fee for the enjoyment they receive from your labor.

Isn’t this the same entitlement mentality that got us into the presidential disaster we’re going through right now?

This rant comes because I saw a Facebook group today entitled “We Will Not Pay To Use Facebook”. As I’m writing this the group has nearly 700,000 members. As members, these are people who obviously enjoy the services that Facebook provides, but would rather see it die than support it with even a small fee. The name of the group implies that they would not even consider it and they don’t even know or care how small the fee might be. Knowing that mentality, these are likely the same ones who grumble about the presence of ads on the page.

So just like the last online bubble to pop, I’m looking for free service pages to slowly go away. One of the internet’s oldest “build your own space online for free” services was Yahoo’s Geocities. It shut all services down this year. So people will learn that they will have to pay to receive quality services, or at least work with the provider by using their advertisers.

Tests like this are bound to happen. The internet is an amazingly powerful thing and people are still learning how to harness that power. The only super stable parts of the internet now (as I see it) are websites of real businesses, offering real products or services, based on traditional business models. It works best at this point to support a standing business rather than testing unknown concepts.

Just like in the real world, businesses offering quality products or services at a fair but profitable price will always succeed if they are marketed well. But in business, just as in politics, you’ll never stand providing free to the masses that which is paid for by the very few.

Took a wrong turn heading to Waycross and found this.