Customer Service:Web 2.0 Style

It’s fascinating how the internet is slowly becoming a catalyst that causes a paradigm shift in even the most stubborn, most stodgy company’s way of doing business. This is most noticeable in the banking industry–Typically, banks rely on transactions being inconvenient and time consuming to consequently be able to charge fees that make up a sizable chunk of their revenue. I mean, how many times have you been slapped with additional charges on your loan or bill payment because you were too lazy to go to the bank the day your payment was due?

The proliferation of online bill payment and other services such as fund transfer and balance checking is testament to how the internet could take a company by the balls, flip its model and make it web-enabled willingly or in most cases, unwillingly.

With the highly touted community-based and collaborative features of Web 2.0 and with traditional companies realizing the potential of how the internet can improve their business more and more, I think there’s no better time for startup internet companies to take advantage of the virtually untapped market that are the late adopters.

Sadly, more often than not, most startups are in a seemingly ‘monkey see, monkey do‘ model. Seriously, if I fucked a hooker for every time a startup company comes up with a digg, MySpace, Linked In, Face Book or YouTube rip-off, I’d be a ho-man petri dish of STD’s already.

Enter, Satisfaction: one of the few products nowadays where I see a lot of promise in. In a nutshell, Satisfaction is People-powered Customer Service for Absolutely Everything.

Led by a team composed of some of the people responsible for what is now Google Analytics, is an advanced forum of sorts with topics categorized by companies up for discussion.

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Love is a pair of sneakers

Originally written for The Man Blog

Choosing the person to spend the rest of your life with is like choosing a pair of sneakers. Initially, when you first lay your longing eyes on the pair in the store, something inside you tells you that you have to have them and so, acting on impulse alone, you purchase them without any hesitation. Sure, it takes a while for you to feel comfortable in them but in a span of mere days, you’re walking the streets with a proud, arrogant, and conceited gait only a pair of stylish, comfortable pair of sneakers can afford.Your new sneakers become your best accessory, people compliment you and your sneakers all the time and slowly, you become one with them.

However, time passes and what was once your new sneakers begin to show signs of wear–the laces get frayed at the ends, the soles start to give and the canvas may have a tear or two in them. This doesn’t faze you as you continue to wear them, mostly because of the comfort they provide you and you, however much you deny it, are attached to them. I mean hey, after all, it took you quite some time to break these pair in and you doubt that you still have the patience to break in another pair, which is most likely, never going to be as comfortable as this one anyway. So yes, you vow to continue wearing them until they simply become unusable.

In a lot of ways, love is like a pair of sneakers.

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FOBCast Episode 3 - Blogarchy and Beatboxing

In this episode we talk about:

Our App Picks for the week:

Supplemental Links:

 
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On Globe Telecom’s re-branding

One of the more specialized areas of interest my career has led me to study would be corporate branding and positioning. I’ve done a lot of in-depth branding proposals for both foreign and local companies in the telecommunications and internet verticals.

The most critical part of any branding or repositioning campaign would have to be the conceptualization of the company’s or brand’s new logo. The logo is the central element of a company or a brand’s image and must be easily identified with the industry/product/service and must be able to give a clear picture of what is being marketed.

For this reason, the conceptualization of the logo is often where a disconnect between marketing people like myself and design people like FOBCast Co-conspirator Site guy Marco occurs.

Anyway, you may or may not have noticed Globe Telecom’s recent re-branding efforts. Now Globe, being one of the few players in the country’s telecommunication industry, I doubt that the aforementioned re-branding would have any significant or even noticeable impact on the company’s bottom line. Here are, however, a few of my observations as far as their re-branding efforts would go:

Overall Design:

The trend I notice with telecommunications, internet or any company that markets bleeding edge technology for that matter is that their logos are generally chiseled in the sense that designs usually have clean and precise outlines as if cut along the edges. They are also, more often than not angular and avoid any elements that are supple. This way, a perception of being innovative or being at the forefront of innovation is achieved.

This can be observed through the logos of other full-service telecommunication companies like Verizon:

or Sprint:
Or even local competitor, SMART telecommunications:
Looking at Globe’s new logo, It looks as if they’re going for the “everything within your reach (data, voice, video and music on demand, etc.)” feel or something to that effect. It’s hard to say though since the logo itself looks like it was crammed shitfull of icons and has this uncanny resemblance to a shape-o toy.
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My blogging routine. Also, beers.

Something you should know about me: I really cannot write shit in the morning or the afternoon. I write mostly at night and in fact, I as I write this, it’s 7:08pm on a Sunday. I find it nearly impossible if not totally impossible to get any sort of work involving my brain done during work days, what with all the Flash games I play and personal phone calls I make using the phone in the HR department at work. Besides, I usually process all the masturbatory fodder I absorb from prime time TV during the day so I pretty much just feverishly masturbate from the time I wake up until the time I have to drive to work and at work (10 minute “quickies” every other hour at the office john) up until I get off. And when I do get home and finish making love to myself a few more times, I try to work on my blogging projects.

This would’ve all been fine if only my small alcohol problem doesn’t rear its ugly head every fucking time. I mean although it has always been my contention that a writer cannot be called a real writer unless he has some sort of fucked up dependency(Shakespeare was rumored to have done Opium while working on his chef-d’oeuvres and Oscar Wilde was paederastic and was into age-structured homosexuality); I’ve never quite hit the delicate balance between “being drunk enough to write in an inspired manner” and “Too hammered to even hit the right keys and JESUS CHRIST, I JUST SPILLED RHUM COLA ON MY FUCKING MACBOOK!” spot on. I know that it’s all just a matter of moderation (yes, I’m a genius) as the right amount of alcohol could practically make you better at everything–writing, talking, bowling, sex (?) but if you end up with too much in your system, you’ll end up throwing a bowling ball down some other group’s lane, you’ll end up trying to stick your bird up your girlfriend’s other hole and writing shit that more or less reads like:

I really had an awsozme day! I sasw this guy who plays Lupin and he laooked totally fcukcing gay! What a gay that richarad cguttierez guy! I mean wThat the fuck!aa!

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