Ads in feeds and feedback to customers
June 28th, 2004Jenny says:
“Most people won’t take the time to provide the kind of feedback Debra did, so value it when they do. And keep the number of ads down or else we’ll unsubscribe. That is, after all, the beauty of RSS.”
This came after a long post about companies not replying from comments from their users. There are two issues here:
1) Companies that do not talk to their customers are doomed to fail. While this does not work in the search engine world (when was the last time you heard back from Google r Yahoo), it will in other aspects of the online world. Case in point: I once e-mailed Cnet about an RSS issue and heard back from them the next day. And it wasn’t a generic response. It was from a real person. An important real person. My dad has a word for that: Class.
Correlating this to library vendors (a theme these days on LS), if you are lucky enough to receive an e-mail back from one of these companies, cherish it and save the name of the person you corresponded with. If you speak to someone at a conference exhibit, get their business card and e-mail them when you get home to follow up on the conversation. Sometimes they need a reminder. These people want to sell you their products. They should talk to you.
2) About ads in RSS Feeds, I will only keep my subscription active in a feed if the quality of the content outweighs the number of ads. This is not a scientific calculation. It’s a feeling. That said, to this date, I do not subscribe to any feeds that have ads, so that must say something. If Library Journal or Information Today came out with feeds that linked me to full text articles already found on their website and had ads mixed in, then I would probably subscribe. Actually, I would definitely subscribe.