Your response would be totally appropriate, except for the fact that we
don't use it for announcements, we use it to allow customers to talk to
each other, and thus build a loyal customer base.  The customer wasn't
complaining about some announcement that I had written incorrectly, but
rather that the posts from his fellow users were annoying him.

In any case, this has gone way, WAY, beyond the scope of my original post.
I wanted to know if I could change from all caps to lower-upper, the answer
is I can't, so it's a moot point.

Seth

*************************************************
J. Seth Dotterer           [log in to unmask]
Marketing Manager          [log in to unmask]
Turtle Beach Systems / Voyetra Technologies
www.tbeach.com              www.voyetra.com
**************************************************

----------
> From: Eric Thomas <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Capitalization of Server Information
> Date: Sunday, May 04, 1997 6:52 PM
>
> 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