On Mon, 17 Jun 1996 00:32:26 -0500 Winship <[log in to unmask]> said:
>Yes, folks, you too can help to promote LSOFT ! ;-)
All right Doug, I'm obviously not in sales and it looks like I didn't do
a very good job here. I guess I'm just going to have to try harder :-)
The stories that will promote *L-Soft* are the *organization* stories. I
don't need to tell you that they work both ways.
The *personal* stories are not about promoting L-Soft, they're about
giving LISTSERV a *human face*. With all due respect, no manager is going
to send us a check because Douglas Winship mumbled something on our web
site about having a such great time running the AUTOCAT list in his spare
time. They'll send us a check because they read the story by XYZ Inc.
that said LISTSERV helped them save time and money. I'm painting this in
black and white when in reality there are shades of grey in the picture,
but the personals aren't meant to be advertising material. They're here
to tell other people, who may never have heard of mailing lists, that the
Internet isn't just the web and you can do all sorts of wonderful things
using this old fashioned medium that may not pop up k00l 3D grafx on your
PC after 5 minutes of download time but does convey in-depth, meaningful
information suitable for consumption by people who have realized that the
power switch on their brain also has an ON setting and who have been
desperately looking for the corresponding setting on their web browser.
Call it promotion if you must, but it's long term promotion through
social change and information, not glossyware. Myself I call it making it
easier for newbies to relate to a techno-buzzword by putting a human face
on the buzzword. And, of course, being listed on our web site also
promotes your list and your efforts (which may or may not be desirable,
depending on the list :-) ).
Perhaps the free shirt business was misunderstood. You couldn't have
known of course, but there will be plenty of free shirts given out over
the summer. The idea wasn't to bribe people for a nice quote, it was more
of a "welcome to the club" type of thing, plus the beneficiaries will get
their shirts before others and be able to talk about them on the list
while everyone wonders what they look like :-) Disclaimer: we don't have
the shirts yet :-( Anyway, I would be highly surprised if anyone on this
list made up a nice story in order to get a free shirt. Now I can think
of a number of people who would do that for a bounce processing AI, but
not for a shirt ;-)
Finally, I forgot to mention that we need these stories fairly soon, 1-2
weeks at the most. Since the stories are meant to be short and include a
link to (presumably) existing home pages, I don't feel that this is
unrealistic.
Eric
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