Barking

At Senokian we use the excellent Asterisk to manage our telephony, provided by an ISDN30 circuit from BT. Over the past year since we move to this solution we have a number of random calls were people have miss dialed the number that they are actually trying to reach.

No this will have something to do with the fact that we have 80 DDI numbers, the majority of which are not used and directed to the main switch board, but here are a few of the recent calls we have had. Does anyone else have a similar situation:

• National Insurance department of the UK tax office
• Transport department of the hospital trying to book an ambulance to pick somebody up
• Trying to rearrange a doctor’s appointment
• Trying to reach a beauticians
• and the obvious misdialled numbers too

I just hope that they person trying to book an ambulance got one in the end!

We ordered a laptop from Dell for a client last week and still haven’t received it, even though it was dispatched from their Coventry depot 3 days ago.

It is just annoying and rude, that we have to chase them up to find out what is going on with the package. The original delay was due to their delivery van breaking down - I found this out from their online system, which isn’t updated in real time, the following day after we had waited all day for the package. All it would have taken is a phone call to us to let us know about the delay - thats we did with our client and they were OK with this.

The problem then got worse by the fact that the driver forgot to load the package the following day for redelivery. Yet again they didn’t inform us of this and their web system didn’t update with this info until the following day and I had to spend 25 minutes on hold to find this out.

The laptop is due to turn up in the next hour so fingers crossed they can deliver it on the third attempt. It is so frustrating when large companies like this mess you around - there is very little that we can do as they have the product that we ordered and there is no way that we can take out business elsewhere. All in all I am completely unhappy with the service, and the £25 we have to pay Dell for the shipping.

Last July we opened up an on-line forum called ‘Open Rebrand’ where we encouraged Senokian clients to give their thoughts on the current Senokian and EGS brands and make suggestions for the new ones. Already understanding how difficult it is to build an on-line community, I was a little anxious that we would get no comments…But after sending out a mail shot and spreading the word we began to get a steady stream of well thought out comments - We had some really useful suggestions, particularly about the trademarking of EGS.

At the time I was referring to this as ‘Open Source Marketing’, the idea being that we and our clients co-create the new brands. Today the technology news site, Wired is doing something similar but on a much larger scale called, Assignment Zero where they are calling for journalists / marketers / designers / industry experts etc to pull their stories together and co-create a Citizenship Newspaper…

In their words the project is “Inspired by the open-source movement, this is an attempt to bring journalists together with people in the public who can help cover a story. It’s a collaboration among NewAssignment.Net, Wired, and those who choose to participate.”

I think this is a pretty cool way of experimenting with the philosophy of collaboration and many-to-many communication channels. A blog post I submitted back in July of last year explores this idea a little further.

As part of our re-brand we are rebuilding the Senokian website and I am currently re-writing the content to bring it up to date and in keeping with our new marketing strategy; as part of this marketing effort we are very much trying to refocus our efforts on EGS and the associated services which we offer, and it this area of the site which is going to be updated the most.

Before going off and updating all the content on the website we decided to check out our web stats (currently provided by Google Analytics) and it is clear that there is a huge amount of content on the current site that we currently have to maintain, but only a small amount has a reasonable number of hits. At the last check, there are over 80 pages being visited on the Senokian site, but only 10 of them get a reasonable number of hits.

As a result we have analysed the current content and reduced the site content. A New Site Map (produced with the excellent OmniGraffle) shows how we have cut down the unused content on the site to the pages most visited.

The new site design allows us to effectively link to other sites that provide more comprehensive content (the majority of this content is regarding Open Source, and there is a huge amount of excellent content on more popular sites available), in a portal like manner - of course we will now have to manage our links to this content and make sure that we don’t have any dead links.

We will let you know when the new site goes live and will value the comments and feedback that everyone sends us. In short, it is worth reviewing your web content on a regular basis to see which areas are popular and in our case, as an upside we have been able to simplify our site navigation.

So I have visited a couple of interesting web pages this weekend. This first has to be the most pointless waste of money ever for a Star Wars accessory/item - an interesting concept for a project/DVD player, but I think separates would be a far better purchase, although I suppose it depends what floats your boat!

The second was an interesting post about 37 Signals’ Basecamp product. I have to admit that I sit on the fence with this one - creating simple products is a great concept and will obviously only be applicable to a subset of users, but isn’t this the same as the larger products that aim themselves at large enterprise users? You will not always be able to cater to the whole market so target yourself at one you are comfortable working in and have a level of ‘expertise’ in and make a great product.

It’s worth reading the article to see the comments at the bottom - particularly some of the responses from the guys at 37 Signals.

The 1st of April is upon us again and there are plenty of April Fools’ pranks around. Some of the largest organisations from the BBC and Google to smaller organisations such as Ryan Air and IWantOneOfThose have got in on the act to fool people before the midday cut off.

To help save you time in your busy schedules, Senokian have trawled the net and picked our top 5 April Fools pranks for you:

• Gmail Paper
• Free Google wireless broadband
• Grow your own Viagra
• Tony Blair to become actor
• Wii Helmet