Here is a new section on my blog where I share links that I found particular useful, amusing or just cool in a past week.

Top 10 Jobs for Class of 2009 -interesting to see if your job is in the list

Google Profiles Give You Control Over What Google Says About You – bottom line is that you get Googled all the time, you should control your personal brand. You can check out my profile at www.google.com/profiles/zelvensky

Tourism Montreal is Now Using 100% Web-Based Advertising -  that is pretty significant shift from a government supported office. That is a great opportunity for people in media business like myself. Got to figure out who is taking care of their media buying. I think toronto4couples.com would be a great fit for them.

Blog Promotion Using Yahoo Buzz – seem like a nice tip, I am yet to try it myself

Ashton Kutcher on Larry King after winner the battle over 1 million followers - I think this is amazing that he rubbed it into CNN arrogant faces.

I read today an article by The Star: Shift to smartphones clips carriers’ margins . The gist of is that, because carriers like Rogers have to push smartphones and subsidize them their APRU is falling. They also mention that Telus’ profits went down by 5.6 per cent which is largely atributed to its Koodo brand – surprise, surprise!

What can I say to the carriers? boo hoo your APRU was so high historically that you have a lot of place on where to fall. I mean only in Canada we get charged: system access fee, we pay separately for voicemail, caller ID and received SMS messages from online. Even just writting about it makes me mad for the amount of money I pay to Rogers every month and how they still treat me like a second class citizen, because they couldn’t care less.

I guess the honemoon period is soon will be over: you can’t be ripping off Canadian customers forever!

As many of you know my cell phone service provider is Rogers Wireless.  The reason I chose Rogers is not because they are the best, or have any sort of acceptable customer service – the reason is that they are the ONLY GSM company in Canada. I travel a lot overseas and need to be able to use the same phone with different sim cards – that’s why I need GSM phone.

Today I learned that they increased a time between upgrading your phone from 12 to 24 months only for smartphone. My questions is Why???

As a blackberry bold user (that I bought on craigslist, since Rogers didn’t let me upgrade even though my monthly bills are around $400) I spend more money with you than your average voice only customer.  Furthermore, I am a business user so I will have roaming charges, long distance charges and higher voice usage. Overall I would consider myself a pretty good customer in terms of revenue.

My question is then why shouldn’t you take care of me even more than you do of a low paying customer? Have you ever heard of parreto principle? I want to see my cellphone company as my business partner, you don’t look like one right now! It looks like that because you know I can pay more – you charge me way more not giving anything in return.

Shame, shame, shame.

We say in Russia the world is round and we will meet in the corner. I hope that one day your monopoly is over – and you will suffer or even go bankrupt from years of abusing your customers.

Sites that I’ve checked out recently and thought that they have some applicable information:

-MarketingSherpa: have great free newsletters with case studies. I like the report you get “Marketing Wisdom for 2006″

-Podcast from Steve Gershik with Brian Carroll who is the author of new book “Lead Generation for Complex Sale” you can check out his blog here

-Interview with Seth Godin by Aaron Wall

-”Best Practices in Demand Generation” a webcast at B2B Lead Generation

-”7 Strategies to Generate Leads from big companies” webcast by Jill Konrath who is an author of “Selling to Big Companies”

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“To achieve greatness you have to make some people mad”
Jeffrey Pfeffer

“If people like you too much, it’s probably because they’re beating you”
Steve Spurrier

UPDATE 05.14.06

“Being responsible means occasionaly pissing people off. You can’t avoid it. Live with it.”
Richard Armitage – was shared by Becky McCray

Very interesting interview by Guy Kawasaki with Bob Sutton, it fits well in the topic of keeping it real. Bob supports my idea from business book junkie post – “90% of everything is crap.” It is interesting to check if you also considered people who he referenced gurus. Well I told you that I will follow up my post with suggested reading, so after that short interview I am going to buy Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. From a guy like that it should be good. If you actually read this blog, let me know if you read it and you think. Also let me know about any business book you consider good.

Jonathan Kranz at MarketingProfs has an excellent post about Business Books junkies – people who keep reading business books, visit seminars, and never implement anything they’ve learned.

To add a little bit to his post I would say that one of the problems is business books themselves. There are a lot of books that are just general blah blah, and author’s themselves don’t know how to implement their ideas. Therefore, before you choose that next bestseller I would suggest following:

• Author’s credentials - did he or she actually did what are they writhing about, or the author is just another homemaker trying to make money on marketing?
• Check the table of contents – see if chapters sound too general, or they go in depth
• Read a couple of pages – again see if the text is clear, and the author doesn’t repeat the same thought over and over again
• Check the ratings – I personally read reviews on the book before I even decide to buy one. One good place is BusinessWeek top business books rating.

This is it, remember that even the best strategy without the implementation is worthless.

I am going to follow up this post with books I found to be worth while to read.

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