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You probably think of “tech support” as the bottom of the food chain. “Shit flows downhill” and all that. After all:

Tech support deals with insane customers. Tech support answers the phone; a job even salesmen don’t want. Tech support keeps angry customers at bay while having no power to effect change.

Yep, that sounds lowly. Dismal too — how would you like to deal with an irate voice screaming at you when you know how to fix the problem but lack the authority to do it? This is a masochistic job for a poor slob with no other job prospects, right?

If this is your ..read more

It’s time to retire the following phrases. They should no longer be used, ever, in any context except derisive mocking:

Fast and easy Putting customers first The Holy Grail of The leading provider of Legendary customer support

Also eschew these words, as devoid of meaning as a yogi’s mantra and as useless as a simile that doesn’t contribute new information:

Authentic Solution Genuine Powerful Secure Simple Innovative Insight Disruptive

These words have been corrupted by those who claim to honor their meaning but do not act accordingly.

When a company claims to “put customers first” but then uses “Level 1 support” as a shield to prevent customers from intruding on ..read more

It’s my goal to write more often. I’ll try posting every two days for a while.

Wish me luck in stepping up the pace.

Why do it?

– I want you to find more fresh content when you drop by.

– I want to share the interesting and thought-provoking emails I get from Star readers.

– I want you to enjoy these stories and provide your own views of the topics in question.

This blog has an average 2,216 visits a day and 11,747 daily hits — up from 1,365 visits and 6,869 hits a day a year ago. It’s nice to see the growth.

There’s lots to read here already, but now you’ll find more new stuff on the home page.

So, let’s get started. Check the stories ..read more

In the last post I beat you to death about ditching your business plan but failed to provide an alternative.

Okay okay, “Planning == Bad,” but the supposed benefits of planning are still important: designing for profitability, understanding your customers and competitors, focusing your attention, deciding what’s worth doing next, changing directions, and ensuring the founders agree on important issues.

To help you, I’m stealing a trick from therapists.

Cartoon by Andertoons

Therapists don’t tell you what to do. Rather, they ask probing questions that get you to discover for yourself what is true for you, your situation, and what you want.

You’re smart. You’ll make good decisions. But you also get bogged down in daily minutiae and putting ..read more

Strategies for social media and SEO are so… squishy.

You know what I mean. You can’t measure “authenticity.” You can’t measure “relationships.” You can measure “subscribers” and “followers” and “uniques” but that doesn’t tell you anything about influence or reach or effect. You can measure “page rank” and “search engine position” but those algorithms are shifting and unknowable.

Without units of measurement it’s hard to experiment, and without experiments it’s hard to have data to drive conclusions. This is a sucky situation for the scientist in me.

Recently, however, I’ve come across several sources of empirical, experimentally-sound data sources that do tell us how to be awesome at both SEO and social media.

So on behalf of ..read more