At my last company ( MyPublisher ), I became very interested in what people were saying about our products and services. In order to research what was being said along with who was saying it, I started to collect a list of sites where people commonly posted about products in our category and searching for posts there etc. Every time someone linked to an external blog I would bookmark that so that I could check on it periodically. Finally, I used Google to search for a few key terms, including the company name, and would browse through the results. The issue with all of this was that there was no way to immediately tell if I had visited a link or not. Nor could I tell that I had forgotten to check one of my sources. I spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing old information only to realize 100 words in, that I had read it already.
Enter Google Alerts.
One day, I was clicking around in my Gmail account and I ran across the my services link. Right at the top of the list was the mysterious Google Alerts feature. Google describes them as:
… email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
The configuration only requires you to plug in a search term and select how often you want Google to tell you about new things that it has found that match. It literally saved me a couple of hours a month. Not a lot of time in abstract, but keep in mind that those hours were previously completely wasted and totally annoying. Now I use it to keep track of a bunch of companies and people who I like to keep tabs on.
Every once in a while, it really helps me at work by letting me know about something really good ( or really bad ) that is going on with our customers. By getting and staying informed, I am armed in the battle for excellent customer service with the weapon that is timely relevant information.
For example, I have a Google Alert configured to tell me once a day about anything new that references Fog Creek Software. Recently, it informed me of a blog post (one that I would very likely have never seen otherwise) which detailed the poor experience of one of our Copilot users. I used this information to reach out to a customer who rightfully complained about a bad experience that was the result of a bug in our software. He not only responded positively to my effort to apologize but also made himself available to troubleshoot the problem he experienced. I helped him by recognizing the issue and compensating him for the trouble. He is helping us by providing us with a source of information, should we need it, about a bug in our software. In addition, I would hope that it may lead to some repeat business for us in the future. In my opinion, it represents a small but important victory in an effort to ensure a truly enjoyable customer experience.
I have had several blogs now, and they have fallen by the wayside or disappeared completely. I think the reason was that I tried very hard to write within a theme or with no theme at all. I wanted to make reading them enjoyable for people who were interested in my topic of choice, or I wanted to make them personally relevant.
Both of these approaches have failed to a certain degree. In the interest of a fresh start, I have decided to use a different format and just start recording ideas that could belong to both classifications. I have recently started work at Fog Creek Software and am, for the first time in a long while, being asked to think critically about ‘stuff’. Some topics and thoughts seem important at the time, and some things don’t seem significant at all, and still others don’t seem salient until much later when I have my “Oh shit, I wish I could remember what we said…” moment. I hope that this will be a place for me, initially, and others, later, to collect and respond to ideas.
