Canadians blogging about business, non-profits, public life and work in general – you can find them all here at Canada 9-5.
A warm welcome to the August 2008 edition! As I look back, I see that we’ve been doing this for a whole year now. It’s one of our proudest accomplishments; there’s really no site that gathers these types of Canadian blogs all in one place.
Today we have a blog by a sales professional, a jazz music site, a blog written by the owner of an online dating community, a blog by a librarian and an online community site for seniors.
Sales: The Perfect Customer Service Experience
Let’s start with an excerpt from one of Shane Gibson’s Blogathon articles. Shane is a sales professional. Other than these blog entries, he also has quite a collection of podcasts. Here he features a guest blogger, Neil Godin, sharing his thoughts on a perfect customer service experience. In my opinion, that’s a perfect example of using a blog – for telling a professional story:
The Situation
New York Times business writer Joe Nocera was at the receiving end of a mind blowing customer experience—and wrote to tell about it. Four days before Christmas, he realized that a $500 PlayStation gift for his son had not arrived. He tracked the shipment from Amazon and learned that it had been delivered and signed for—but not by him. Ouch!The Idea
If you want customers to become your brand ambassadors, you’ve got to go “way” overboard on satisfaction. Amazon did. Satisfied that he did not receive the package, they sent a replacement immediately, and it arrived on Christmas Eve. Naturally, Nocera has been talking, and writing, about the experience ever since.The Risk
The risk here is perceived, not real. Even if one or two customers went to great lengths to rip you off, you’d be ahead in terms of your investment in customer loyalty.
Jazz!
All About Jazz is an absolutely fabulous site which, I believe, originates in Canada; at any rate, it has an enormous amount of information on Canadian jazz. This intro to their site shows the fantastic rage of information to be had:
We strive to serve both the jazz newbie as well as the jazz aficionado. Listeners who are new to jazz may profit from visiting our Building a Jazz Library section; those with more of an established interest will find our extensive archives of reviews and interviews helpful. And everyone should get a chuckle out of our humor section.
The internet is a great place to find information, and we maintain stacks and stacks of it: about jazz festivals, radio stations, upcoming releases, and much more (just look under the “guides” section of the menu bar).
Throughout the site, we have emphasized an interactive approach. The jazz timeline and “This Day in Jazz History,” for example, allow readers to check out the major developments in a year, month & day of their choosing. We organize our reviews so that you can home in on a particular style that you prefer (or wish to investigate). We provide multiple forums for you to express and exchange opinions on all sorts of issues relating to the music and the musicians.
Finally, we make an ongoing effort to stay current. We constantly update our news section, and we offer cutting-edge interviews among over 40 featured columns. Each month we review 150-200 new and reissued CD’s, giving you advance notice so you’ll know where to look when you visit the record shop. For the latest happenings at the site, visit our monthly greeting page.
In addition to this, you can, of course, also listen to music. Today’s offering is Chasm’s Blue Bamboo, which you can listen to for free just by signing up with the site.
Online Dating
This innocent-looking blog, Paradigm Shift, is the blog by Marcus Frind, owner of Plenty of Fish, the largest dating site in the English speaking world and the largest community site in the US not owned by an American company. Most of his posts are about internet and social media news directly related to dating sites. At the beginning of the year, Marcus got philosophic and shared his technological predictions:
[In the next 100 years] In the scientific world I could see computers creating a virtual world for you that looks like a dream. Other people can then enter the dream and change things at will.
Think of hundreds of people working together to design something, but instead of using tools like Autocad its done with your mind connected to others as well as computers.
I wonder if i’ll live to see any of that… In the next 5 years I think the next major thing on the internet will be a site that helps convey emotions in some way.
Canuck Librarian
A site with a nice, fresh voice, like in this review here of Michael Pollan’s much discussed book In Defence Of Food:
I think this book is another case of common sense that just ain’t so common anymore. Like he writes, his book really boils down to seven words “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”. If you truly understand that then you probably don’t need to read his book. But if you’re like me you may be wondering what he means by those few words, and that is what he explains.
Communities: Seniors
Finally, over on the other side of the country, The Grey Zone, a site for seniors, is one of the two dozen community blogs at myConnect.ca, a community place hosted by The Halifax Herald. The blog is written by Alex Handyside CSA (that’s “Certified Senior Advisor” – just found out about that designation). He says that seniors
often feel that they no longer have a voice, or that their voice no longer counts as much as it once did. And that’s what this blog is for. To get the word out about elder issues, and to get the discussion flowing.
I liked the title of this post, We celebrate Elder Abuse Awareness Day?? No…we educate! I’ve often wondered about events like “Cancer Awareness Month” – what are you supposed to say, “Happy Cancer Awareness Month”? That sounds a little strange. But phrasing it in terms of education rather than celebration – yes, that makes sense to me.
Gathering all these blogs together is a lot of fun. It’s interesting to see how slowly, slowly, Canadians are starting to see blogging as a valuable an important part of their communications strategy.
As always, if you know of a Canadian blog that fits what we’re doing here (and we’re looking particularly for non-IT bloggers; IT blogs are already getting a lot of exposure) please let us know by using this submission form. The next edition will be out on September 18, 2008.