On Sun, 4 May 1997 18:31:20 -0400 Seth Dotterer <[log in to unmask]> said: >Some of us use listserv as a marketing tool, where swallowing your ego >and making the customer happy is the prime goal. Indeed, but if you send an announcement to (say) 500,000 people, I can guarantee that 500 are going to be so upset with the contents of your announcement, the fact that they received it at all, the (totally unrelated) problem that happened at their ISP at exactly the same time and that thus can only have been caused by your posting, or just the phase of the moon that they will swear never to do business with your company again. That's the rule of the game and you can still build up customer fidelity among the remaining 499,500. However, I doubt you'll find even 5 people who write back to complain that the name of the list was in caps and consequently they will never buy from your company again, and if you did and you changed it, you'd find a similar number of people to complain that the name of the list should have been in caps. People just like the things they are used to. People who are used to Majordomo will expect lowercase list names and people who are used to LISTSERV will expect upper-case list names, the only question is whom you want to annoy. Similarly, most people find numeric time zones counter-intuitive and some find them downright offensive, although most techies swear by them. I mean, can you tell me which major cities -0800 corresponds to, without looking it up in a document? I can't either. Oh, and many Americans have actually complained to me over the years that the time in the date field was offensive and should be written down as am/pm, which of course the standards do not allow, so it is a non-issue, but anyway, 24h time appears to upset people in the US because it is used only/mostly in the military (in Europe it is used by everyone and thus a non-issue). Me, I find mm/dd/yy dates bordering on insult, because I have to figure out if it is mm/dd/yy, dd/mm/yy or yy/mm/dd (all formats which are in use in countries that I do business with on a daily basis), and I simply *can't* believe that people are planning to continue using this ridiculous format past 1999 when I am never going to be able to figure out 02/03/01 from 01/03/02. I have complained about this on a few occasions, but the world does not seem to have changed to please me, even though I actually have a sound, practical, $$$-saving, mistake avoiding, non-emotional reason for wanting to see ISO date format take over. Anyway, in the end, when a customer writes back to complain about the case of your list name or your offensive usage of military time in the mail header, he is really telling you that the announcement you posted missed its target by a mile and simply did not manage to grab his attention, which instead drifted to little details which were not supposed to be part of the message at all but had to be included for technical reasons. In my experience, the vast majority of negative replies come from people who either did not expect to receive this kind of announcement when they signed up (or forgot that they signed up a year ago, and that is how long it took the company to make the first mailing, so the user completely forgot about it), or are due to the fact that the person who wrote the announcement came up with a piece which sounds very much like a $19.95 motorized dog leash spam, and was treated accordingly. Regretfully, the latter is VERY common. Most traditional marketing people simply have no idea how to write an announcement for an Internet audience, which is not really their fault but unfortunately most do NOT want to receive advice in the matter from people who do not even have an MBA. They view constructive criticism as an insult rather than as the free, valuable advice that it is. We recently made a pair of announcements for a customer using the same list, one of which was written by one of their contractors, who as it turned out was interested in what we thought about the wording. There was a factor of about 100 in the number of complaints between the two, yet they said pretty much the same kind of thing, just in a different way. Eric