Rock and a Hard Place

I do a lot of webcasts -mostly as the point of contact for content, logos, slide format, bios, photos, etc ...  In the past almost three years, I've worked on about 30 of these - each with 3 or more panelists - adding more than 100 new points of contact for me in the publishing/education/library world. A vast majority of these people get it. I provide them with a clear plan with deadlines and details, and know that by hitting the mark, they will get the best quality webcast and promotion possible. But then there is the very occasional 'special' client - no deadlines for them, no respect for anyone's time, no clear direction to speakers or moderator. And you know who is running those imminent disasters?

CEOs. Control freaks. That can't live without their suffering assistant who apologizes for the prince's behavior and tries to make everything right. Oy. Tomorrow's webcast is supposed to be 50 minutes of presentation with 15 minutes of Q&A - my bet? 65 minutes of presentation, 5 minutes of Q&A. A bunch of drop-off at 61 minutes.

This is not good customer service. In fact, it exhibits a kind of arrogance that I detest.

Another Good Reason to Love Gmail

How many times have you done the Homer Simpson 'doh!' after hitting Send before realizing that the very important attachment was not attached at all?

Guess what gmail does for you now?

Your email text is scanned and if words like 'attached' are found, and you don't have an attachment, a dialog box pops up that says "Did you mean to attach files? You wrote "Find attached" in your message, but there are no files attached. Send anyway? OK or Cancel' - is that genius?! To me it is. Thank you Google.