A few comments for GoTo Meeting...

I warned 'em. I gave them plenty of time to respond!

What follows are my comments to GoTo Meeting regarding their pathetic customer service and inferior product.

We've been customers for several years and normally I would never think of doing such things but, I get held to a higher standard every day. So shall they:

A couple things:

1) Your customers service is pathetic. If you're going to continue to compete in the highly contested web-conferencing space, you'd better bring it up several notches.

2) The first person I encountered was not able to answer my question. Then, I was sent to a general voicemail queue after being told that I would be transferred to someone who could help me with my question.

3) I've been down this road before, "all representatives are currently busy..." Yeah, I've been there & done that! I have "never" been able to get through.

4) My question; "When are you guys going to offer full motion webcasting?" This, is a NEED! Don't kid yourselves.

5) I like your tool...but not that much. You now have beaucoup competitors, or should I say that "we" have many, many options available to us now.

6) Did I mention that I'm the CEO and we have a corporate account with you?

7) I'm waiting... Let's see how long it takes for you to respond, if at all.

8) Tick tock...

9) Next stop the blogsphere! Then, you can deal with it there.

Twitter Worthy...or is it Tworthy?

Well, I did it. I crossed over. Over 1,000 that is… 1,000 followers on Twitter. I’m not going to go into a lengthy dissertation here about what Twitter is. Simply this, if you’re not twittering (verb), you should be. Do a search on Google for Twitter and I’m sure you will find ample results to help you educate yourself. Furthermore, if you’re reading this blog and you are out in the Social-sphere, or whatever we’re calling this stage of Internet interconnectivity these days, and you haven't heard of Twitter, you must be blind, deaf & dumb (or ignorant :)

When I started twittering a couple months ago as @ChazAtCaz, I was truly curious about just how quickly I could and would amass a following of any significance. I wondered, “was this going to be some hokey MySpace sort of thing or what?” Well, that certainly is not the case. Twitter is proving to be a valuable communications tool for me with people within my inner circle as well as people on the outer fringes.

I have a running dialogue of 140 characters or less per tweet (noun) with my local (upstate NY) colleagues as-well-as people as far away as Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia, Sweden, Holland, Peru… you get the point.

And a crowning achievement in the determination of my Tworthy-ness, I am now being followed by Robert Scoble - @Scobleizer, author, self proclaimed tech geek, blogger and social media marketing phenom, who has swelled his following to over 50,000. So, that should put into perspective my achievement. By the way 50,000 is way, way up there. I think that’s probably as many as I have ever seen.

It will be interesting to see where Twitter goes. As with all things truly social, Twitter is free. That can’t last though. They have to monetize it somehow. I’ve heard several suggestions and I’d be shocked if there weren’t a contingent of people working on that very thing.

One novel suggestion that I heard was to charge people extra for more than 140 characters. They could use 140 as a multiple. Free account = 140, then there’s the next level at 280 and then 420, etc. My sense is that it won’t work because of its limited revenue potential. More likely will be the ad frenzy that struck the blog-sphere in response to bloggers desire to monetize their blogs. We’ll see.

At any rate, I like Twitter. So much so that I recently set up a stream for Cazbah too, which you can find at @cazbah_net. I’m still curious to see how this new form of communication, known as Micro-blogging, will affect our business. I will definitely keep you posted – no pun intended.

A Quick Update

It’s been a while since I’ve posted and there are some very good reasons for that. We (Cazbah) closed the books on 2008 and we finished out the year quite strong actually. In what I would consider to be a relatively flat year, with all of the things we had going on, we still grew by double digits.

I have completely retooled our sales process which allows me to spend a considerable amount more time marketing the business, one of my goals for 2009. I now conduct 2 webinars daily at 10am and 2pm (EST). My sales team is responsible for generating the leads and developing relationships with prospective customers. We have also instituted a process whereby we provide our potential Cazbah customers with a comprehensive analysis of their business online prior to attending the webinar. This is very helpful in understanding the true potential that any business may have on the web and puts things into very clear perspective.

We promoted 3 people internally to Director level positions and we now have a senior staff. I hired 2 new sales people and trained them both. We completely redesigned the Cazbah website and we launched the company blog. Needless to say, I’ve been pretty active in other areas and haven’t given my blog much attention. So, let’s get back to it.

More to come shortly.