Gevalia has a practically irresistible deal. For just a few dollars, they’ll send you a quite nice electric coffee maker, and some coffee. They also enroll you in their automatic coffee delivery program, but you can opt out any time.

So, we didn’t resist. The coffeemaker is fine. The coffees that we’ve tried are mediocre and over-priced, imo. So, after three shipments, trying different flavors — I’m too old to do take the come-on and run, which, by the way, is how I got my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1971, and I still feel bad about it — I decided to cancel. The Gevalia Web site lets you manage your account. You can select coffees, change the delivery schedule, suspend service … but not cancel.

So, I wrote an email to the support address they list. I got a robo-reply saying they’d get back to me in 12 hours. They didn’t. Two more messages later, and they still never acknowledged my email. So, I gave in and used that thing with the buttons and the speaker that you hold up to your face. What do you call those things? I got through quickly and was told that my account had already been cancelled.

Two lessons for retailers on the Web: 1. Acknowledge your flipping emails, or else we’ll eat up your time, money, and good will sending the same email over and over again. 2. Always always always give us a button to allow us to do the worst thing you can imagine. The alternative is that we’ll end the relationship and then blog our complaints about you out loud, no matter how petty it makes us look. [Tags: marketing retail gevalia ]

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Angry Chinese Blogger maintains that US companies share the blame for the dangerous goods manufactured for them in China:

…much of the blame for unsafe or low quality products lies squarely with the purchasing policies put in place by Western companies. Policies under which companies sign short term “easy in, easy out” contracts with multiple factories. Allowing them to use the threat of moving to another manufacturer in order demand the lowest possible per unit price, and to chop and change factories at will if one proves unable to meet requirements for unit price and quantity. Thus creating a low security, high competition, environment in which factory owners must compete with each other for thin margin contracts, and in which they feel forced to cut corners, or to infringing regulations, as a way of staying in businesses.

It depends on your concept of responsibility, of course. If you think your responsibility ends with your signature at the bottom of a contract that includes quality standards, then the US firms are relatively blameless. If you think you are responsible for the conditions and temptations your greed — um, competitiveness — predictably establish, then the US firms bear some of the blame. The second point of view is, arguably, the realistic one, especially if the widespread nature of the violations indicate a systemic problem. (Thanks to GlobalVoices for the link.) [Tags: china responsibility globalism realism ]

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Terry Heaton explains and evaluates in some depth the Yahoo! Consortium deal that has them partnering with 400 local newspapers:

I come away with the conclusion that the newspaper companies get something, but Yahoo! gets more. The gamble that the industry is making is that their piece will be sufficient to justify what they’re giving to Yahoo!, and on that question may rest the future of the industry as a whole. It’s a gamble, because Yahoo! is actually a competitor, so it is a very big question indeed.

That’s just the overall conclusion. Terry makes the details lucid.[Tags: yahoo newspapers terry+heaton media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Jeneane wonders how online and real world retailing are linking our desires across the realms.

Watching tweens on Webkinz and Bella Sara, I started wondering how smart companies will find that same sweet spot with adult consumers—a place where real-world point-of-sale drives the online experience.

This sort of borderless transaction is one-way when it comes to information — the article you read in the paper leads you online, but once online you’re unlikely to have to resort back to the real world. Retailers clearly would like two-way relationships. And, as Jeneane says, they’re going to come up with every reason they can to get us get our passports stamped. [Tags: jeneane_sessum marketing retailing business ]

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I’ve posted a long piece at Huffington Post that tries to put together the strongest, most coherent version of Andew “Cult of the Amateur” Keen’s argument against the Web…and then critiques it. Tags: andrew_keen web_2.0 everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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My friend David Sifry has resigned as Technorati‘s CEO because it’s grown to the point where it needs a person with strengths other than the founder’s. He’ll stay on as chairman of the board. The company is looking for a replacement. In the meantime, a triumvirate will act as an Office of the President.

Technorati also announced it’s laid off eight employees in order to “focus” and “adjust our expense structure,” according to Dave’s email. That’s painful. I wish them well.

Dave, too. Dave is one of the people who keep contributing and giving. I can’t wait to see what he does next. (Disclosure: I am on Technorati’s board of advisors.) [Tags: dave_sifry technorati]

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John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain, of the Berkman Center, have an article at C-NET on the ethical difficulties of doing business in tyrannical countries.

The more promising route is for one or more groups of industry members to come up with a common, voluntary code of conduct to guide the activities of individual firms in regimes that carry out online censorship and surveillance. Such a process has begun. Google, Microsoft, Vodafone, Yahoo and TeliaSonera are actively working together on a code. This process includes nongovernment organizations (NGOs)&mdashincluding Business for Social Responsibility and the Center for Democracy and Technology…

As JP and Jonathan say, “The development of a code of conduct itself solves only a small part of the problem.” But it’s a key part. I’m proud to say that the Berkman Center is one of the NGOs working on this project. [Tags: berkman john_palfrey jonathan_zittrain corporate_responsibility ethics google microsoft yahoo ]

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Although I disagree with Chris Heuer‘s overall conclusion that the phrase “conversational marketing” debases conversations, I think he puts well the concerns we should have about how marketers are going to respond to the growing recognition that markets have indeed become conversations. Here’s what I said in my comment on his post:

Marketing has to change. It has to recognize that market conversations are now the best source of information about companies and their products and services. It has to recognize that those conversations are not themselves marketing — you and me talking about whether we like our new digital cameras is not you and me marketing to each another. Neither is our conversation a “marketing opportunity.” But the temptation to see it as such is well nigh impossible for most marketers to resist.

Fortunately, the people leading the thinking about this generally do honor the conversation as the thing that must be preserved. How the meme gets taken up, however, should worry us. We need to help marketers resist their deeply bred urges. We need to make preserving the integrity of the conversation as central a marketing tenet as is not lying about product specs or prices. [Tags: chris_heuer marketing conversational_marketing cluetrain business ]

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Just in the nick of time for moi, Google has decided to let us pay it money to increase the storage space on our gmail accounts. If you want to go from 2.8G to 9G, go here and pay $20. You can use the extra 6G for any Google service you want.

I am at 97% of capacity at gmail. So, a few days ago I began the ridiculously contorted dance required to boost your gmail storage. I paid Google $50 for a Google Apps account, which gives me 10G. But, at least as of a couple of days ago, you couldn’t apply that gigabytage anywhere except within your new gApps account. No problem, I thought. I’ll just move my 82,000 messages from my old gmail account to my new gApps mail account; I use gmail primarily as a pop server anyway, so there’d be no visible change in my email address. Besides, you can always forward your mail.

Amazingly, Google does not provide a way to transfer mail content from one account to another. (It also provides virtually no tools for managing large volumes of mail — just try deleting all your attachments from before, say, 1996, if you have a couple of thousand qualifying attachments.) So, I downloaded gxfer, a free software tool that does the deed. It’s simple and it works, but it’s sloooow…at 200 messages per hour, the transfer time is often measured in weeks. (The folks at LimitNone who make for this freeware were really helpful when I had questions. The throttle is not their software but the fact that Google doesn’t provide an API for doing the transfer. They stepped into the breach. Thank you, LimitNone!)

Then, yesterday I woke up to discover that gmail said I had 9GB available to me. Was Google starting to upgrade everyone, starting with the maxed out users? Did Google just like me for who I am? Nah. It turns out that I had bought an upgrade for my free Picasa account about a year ago because we were storing our extended family’s photos, and Google had made that extended disk space available to gmail as well.

Yay for Google. At last they figured out that the only thing keeping us from paying them money was them. Heck, I would have been willing to pay them money to let me pay them money to get the disk space. [Tags: google gmail ]

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Ethan Zuckerman has a terrific piece in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section on “incremental infrastructure” as a hope for Africa. Incremental infrastructure comes about when someone starts a project that can grow in atomic increments, that’s financed in part by its customers, and that provides a new service. For example, Vodacom Congo now has a market valuation of $1.6B and 3 million mobile phone users. This, Ethan argues, can revolutionize Africa. [Tags: africa economics ethan_zuckerman ]

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