Todd Lyden

I wasn't going to do this, but as a learning experience on blogging, commenting and just communicating in general, I thought this might be constructive and educational. I've had one dust up with a blogger over on his website(The original comments are now off when the blog was switched, I guess.) My gist of the article and I think the original discussion in that case is that sarcasm and satire online are HARD. Very hard to understand. I think it hurts REAL communication.  Does it stop people from trying? No. But does it mean things get taken wrong, YES. Now, I've had another dust up where I took umbrage with the way a government agency's twitter and blog were portrayed and was able to illustrate so.  I was contacted directly after ending the commentary on the blog post and told that arguing in that forum doesn't make anyone look good.  I'd post comments over there, but after being painted as a nasty troll, a-hole, bully, and someone who pisses all ov...

I focused much on customer service two weeks ago and I really can't escape it. I was on a call yesterday making a large order for lunch coming up. The woman on the other end was insanely pleasant as she tried to walk me through a new menu and my inability to be more quickly decisive. She did have to put me on hold an inordinate amount of times and each time was PROFUSELY apologetic. I was prepared and thankfully not in a hurry. I can quickly imagine someone else taking conversation and turning it into a complaint (unjustified, but I can see it). Amber Naslund has a related piece back last month that I liked discussing our aptitude to taking complaints online. I agree with Amber that #FAIL is overused, but also we need to be aware that failure or BAD customer service is in the eye of the beholder. For companies, SMALL mistakes can be huge to a customer. Like I said with my example, I could easily see someone taking it out of hand and quickly getting annoyed. I knew ...