Anyone have any ideas for this newspaper publisher? He runs a state-wide newspaper for a religious denomination, and every two weeks they mail about 16,000 32-page newspapers out to subscribers. Paid advertising makes up about 10% to 15% of these pages. They have a modest e-zine as well, and they have all their news on their Web site, too. Every state has a similar church-denomination newspaper, and he has teamed up with the editors in two other states, with whom he shares news tips and stories. There is no central newspaper organization for the whole country, however. A typical story in his newspaper might be one that covers a controversial resignation or organizational dispute occurring in one of the state or national religious organizations, or maybe a report on missionary work, and so forth. But this newspaper editor's question to me was, what more should he be doing, given the dramatic new technologies available?

Continue reading "What should newspapers be doing?" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (3)

Should you or shouldn't you let your own customers review your products and services on your own website? Only about 50% of online retailers currently do. This is the question we'll explore in this post.

In Part One of this story, we pointed out how deceitful Nero Software is in the way it cons money out of unsuspecting customers. My feeling is that making money off of customer mistakes or customer naivete is never a very good business strategy, in terms of creating long-term shareholder value, and I predict that as long as Nero follows this strategy, we'll never see it amount to much more than a non-US-based peripheral player in this category.

Continue reading "Trustability and its Opposite - Part Two" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been experimenting seriously with Twitter now for about two months. Truth is, I was highly skeptical of its benefits at first, partly because everyone seemed so irrationally ga-ga over it (I am inherently suspicious of fads). But also, puh-lease: 140 characters per tweet? To someone who's made a decent career out of writing 75,000-word books, and who has already written hundreds of articles and blog posts ranging from 300 to 3,000 words each, a 140-character tweet smacks of attention deficit disorder, pure and simple. Also, I've never been big on text messaging, which is where the 140-character limit comes from in the first place. Nevertheless, despite these reservations, I took a Twitter tutorial from one of our Peppers & Rogers Group consultants (thanks to @bcarroll7), I installed Tweetdeck on my laptop, and then I plodded awkwardly off into Twitterland, vowing to dedicate at least a few minutes each morning and evening to monitoring, reacting, and tweeting.

Continue reading "My Adventures in Twitterland: A Two-Month Status Report" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (6)