Sprint Telemarketing To Mobile Phones May Be Doing More Harm Than Good

Just wanted to point you to the comments within the Sprint Still Sucks thread. It seems that Sprint is continuing to solicit customers on their mobile phones, and that they're hanging up on a lot of people. Instead of calling the number back, many folks are Googling it instead. Some are finding this blog. And the past few comments indicate that Sprint's mobile spam is turning people off and making them want to avoid signing with Sprint. My guess is that Sprint will continue their campaign, though. Marketing data tends to accentuate the positive, and I'm sure there are marketing VPs looking at spreadsheets right now, seeing a trickle of new customers come in from the outbound telemarketing efforts. Since I'll bet they're probably not asking themselves how many customers they're losing due to the effort, it will likely continue.

This is a great example of why the Ethic of Reciprocity rules supreme in marketing, even over fancy spreadsheets that show positive customer growth numbers. If it seems like it's disrespectful, it is disrespectful, regardless of what a spreadsheet tells you.

Go See Jersey Boys

I went to go see Jersey Boys last night with Lauren and her parents. Very cool show with very cool music. The audience was completely energized - more like at a rock concert than at a Broadway show. I don't know how one trains to pull off a falsetto like Frankie Valli's but somehow John Lloyd Young made it work. Lauren's Dad asked us in the car on the way back from the train station whether we enjoyed it despite our not having grown up "in that era," as he termed it. I replied that my Dad played so much music from The Four Seasons in the house when I was growing up that I DID feel like I grew up in that era. ;-)

Lauren's Mom bought us a soundtrack album, which I'm looking forward to getting on my iPod later today.

Get Your Credit Reports - No Scams

You're entitled to request your credit report from the big three (Experian, TRW, Equifax) for free every year. Annual Credit Report facilitates that process, so go check it out. Along the way, the three companies will try to upsell you on getting your credit score, or on getting notifications of changes to your credit report. Ignore them. Just request the free stuff. It's good to check your report from time to time so that you know if there are any errors. Give yourself plenty of time to correct them. (In other words, don't request your report the day before you apply for a mortgage and expect to be able to do anything about any inaccurate information.) Do it now. You'll be glad you did.

A Reminder - DNFTT

Just a quick reminder - Do Not Feed The Trolls. Fellow liberals: Ann Coulter is a troll. In both senses, but mostly in the Internet sense of someone who is deliberately confrontational so they can get a rise out of you. In other words, Coulter deliberately went after 9-11 widows to sell more books. The more outrage you express, the more letters you write to the papers, the more attention you give her, the more books she sells and the more difficult she is to get out of the spotlight. This page on Newsmax should make it more than evident that the radical right is using the hype machine to distract folks and line Ann Coulter's pockets with the money spent by people who can't resist a good train wreck. Don't try to smear the rest of the right wingers by invoking Coulter. Even the dumbest of us knows she's lunatic fringe material.

So just stop it already.