I love spam

“There are people I know who won't hurt me. I call them corpses.” Randy K. Milholland

No, not that kind of Spam (more on that at the end)

I just received an email telling me I was the Grand Prize Winner and had won a new “Peugoet” car. Now, two things: first its spelled P-E-U-G-E-O-T and second even if it was true I would suppose 2nd prize would be two cars. Frankly, Peugeots have all the bad French qualities (small, slow, noisy and smoky) without any of their redeeming qualities (i.e., they don’t come with a lady from Bois de Boulogne Park carrying a case of Bordeaux).

Spam is today what snake oil salesmen were in 1800’s, part fact, part fiction, part entertainment, part annoyance, and totally for the naïve.

I feel bad for the naïve. Often times they are more desperate than dumb, more out of step than out of mind. And some of these offers just seem SO…DAMNED…GOOD. You want to believe. I want to believe. We all want to believe. But alas, the old adage “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is” usually wins out.

So, once you get over your outrage and annoyance of spam you can see it for what it is….pure entertainment. I mean, come on, you absolutely have to find great entertainment in the offers: ED remedies, free computers, discount drugs, discount girls, the list is endless. My absolute favorite is the letter asking you to act as a financial conduit for their foreign company. That for simply funneling these foreign funds into the U.S. for them you’ll receive a large sum of money. And all you have to do is email them your bank account information. Now really, what could be more harmless than that?

One of the biggest problems of spam, of course, is the occasional legitimate email of some importance that gets trapped in the myriad filters used to combat these pests. Deals get lost, opportunities get missed and relationships get postponed, much like lost mail but at cyber speed.

If you rely on email – as we all do – for your business communications you must fight the battle when a client or prospect doesn’t respond to an email as to whether they’re purposely not responding, have poor communication protocol or never received the message. If your email signature is getting trapped in a spam filter then sending more emails won’t solve the problem.

So, pick up the phone. If they’re purposely ignoring your email they’ll ignore your call THEN you’ll have something to fret about.

By the way, click here for the famous Monty Python skit about Spam. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

Service vs. Product

“At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.” Emo Phillips

My wife and I got into an interesting discussion this evening. The theme, Service vs. Product, came about because of the restaurant where we had dinner. This restaurant is her absolute favorite. Me, on the other hand, could never go there again and be very happy. So, naturally we go there a lot. And by a lot I mean on average twice a week.

Here’s the debate point. The food is quite good. Good standard fare, good specials that change monthly, interesting special events. What’s not to like? Well for me it’s this; the prices are premium and the service is spotty. The wait staff can be mediocre and they tend to be inflexible. There’s also this, after 5 years and thousands of dollars spent the owner still acts as if he’s never seen me before. Now, I’m truly not vain enough to expect a “Well, hello Mr. Strouse, I have your favorite table waiting” every time I walk in but a simple “Hi, it’s good to see you again” would be really nice.

In contrast there’s a restaurant I go to maybe a half dozen times a year. Yet when I walk in whichever of the two owners who happen to be working will see me act as if I’m the proverbial long, lost cousin. Now, they don’t know my name from Adam, but they at least recognize me.

So, what’s more important, Product or Service?

The answer is of course both. If you have both great product and great service you’ve unlocked the keys to the kingdom, and doing everything to provide this should be your obsession every waking minute.

But, if you can’t yet pull off having a great product, you’d damn sure better have great service. Because if having both is nirvana then having neither makes you a Detroit car company, a major airline carrier, a cable company, or the NBA.

Here’s my question. If you’ve achieved the hard part of creating a great product why oh why, outside of stupidity or greed, wouldn’t you surround it with good service?