It’s Friday afternoon, it’s the end of the financial year, so a little irreverence is acceptable — if not compulsory. So here’s a link to story about a ship with an unfortunate name.
MYOB, you’re dumped! Hello NetAccounts
Marc Lehmann, you just scored your business Saasu a new customer because you commented on my gripes about MYOB. We’ve just made the decision to run my business with NetAccounts.
Marc, there was a steady flow of “Gee, wow!” moments as we looked at how NetAccounts might work for us — I’ll come back to that. But what really made the difference was how your company communicates. Especially when compared with MYOB…
- MYOB only ever communicate with me to ask for money. Once, they were quite aggressive about it.
- MYOB don’t reply to emails.
- You have to wade through so much clutter to find what you want on their website.
Imagine MYOB were a person. You’d say something to them, but they’d never respond. Instead, they’d just be talking at you — either asking for money or telling you how good they were. Constantly.
You, on the other hand, joined a conversation about MYOB by talking about your product — but you added another insight and kept the conversation alive. “Well,” I thought, “if they’ve won an award and they’re clueful about blogs, maybe I should look at their product.” So I did.
And while NetAccounts certainly looked capable of doing what we needed — gawd, our accounting needs aren’t rocket science! — it was the quality and sincerity of your communication which persuaded me to take a proper look.
- Your online demos are voiced by you, not some slick presenterdroid. This is reassuring.
- Your website won’t win a design award, but there’s no clutter and so far I’ve quickly found everything I’ve looked for.
- Saasu speaks in simple, direct language. You don’t shout about “Your business will be transformed”, you show me how I use your tool to do everyday things.
Imagine Saasu were a person. They’d be conversational, straightforward, to-the-point. All elements which build trust. All characteristics of someone you’d actually want to be involved with your business.
I’ll certainly have more to say about NetAccounts while I set it up over the weekend. But for now, my office manager Virginia Bridger had this to say after an hour or so poking around:
It’s a program that’s obviously been built knowing that human beings are going to be using it.
Oh, and Marc? I’ve just used your logo without asking first. I’m guessing that you won’t mind, given the context. 😉
Explain the rules, plainly
It may seem obvious, but if you want your clients to behave in a certain way, why not just tell them? Open honest communication really is the way to go.
That’s why I was thrilled to see the following message in a newsletter from my chiropractor:
Missed appointments and late cancellations — our solution
Missed appointments and late cancellations are an inconvenience not only for us, but also for other clients who may have wanted your appointment time and miss out. So in future missed appointments and cancellations on the same day will be handled as follows:
1st missed appt: We understand, anyone can forget once.
2nd missed appt: We’re not very happy — a gift (wine or flowers etc) is required to appease us. Or we will donate your “Missed appointment fee” to charity.
3rd missed appt: Our regular fee will apply.
4th missed appt: Our regular fee will apply and we won’t make any more appointments for you.
What a superb piece of writing, too. It’s friendly and conversational, but it’s also laying down the law.
Crikey editorial slams Howard, Rudd over Aboriginal intervention
The best summary of the cynicism and nastiness of John Howard’s War on Indigenous Unpleasantness I’ve seen so far is the Crikey editorial today, written by Sydney journalist Alex Mitchell:
This is the last throw of the dice for John Howard. He is doing one big favour for the mining industry which he has faithfully served in public life for the past 30 years by rolling back Aboriginal ownership of their tribal lands. Cynically, cruelly but utterly predictably, he’s doing it under the hypocritical colours of humanitarianism. (Very similar to the invasion and occupation of Iraq sold as “spreading democracy”)… He is being aided and abetted by Kevin Rudd’s craven behaviour… Rudd has vacated leadership on the tragic issue of rescuing Aboriginal communities and given Howard the opportunity to play his sickening Father of the Nation role. Paul Keating, you were right about the Rudd team of fixers, hucksters, flyweights and spineless opportunists.
That’s just a taste. The full version is well worth it.
Condoleezza plays mum
It’s nice to see gender roles reinforced, isn’t it? Even though Condoleezza Rice is arguably the most powerful woman in the world, she’s still picking fluff off George W’s jacket.
Human Rights: a reminder
I’ve had this sitting on the back burner for a while but I think it’s worth publishing today — given John Howard’s outrageous War on Indigenous Unpleasantness. Please read (or at least skim) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the newly-formed United Nations in 1948. After the bloodshed of the Second World War, virtually every nation on the planet understood that these values were What It Was All About.
To emphasize the key themes, I’ve used TagCrowd to make a tag cloud of the Declaration. Note, Gentle Reader, the most-repeated word of all: everyone.
acts alone assembly association belief common community conscience country determined development dignity discrimination distinction education enjoy entitled equal everyone family free freedom full fundamental general human interference international law life limitation marriage member nations necessary observance offence others penal peoples person political property protection public recognition religion respect rights security social society standard state status subjected territories united universal work
created at TagCrowd.com
Now you can perhaps argue about the details. P J O’Rourke, for example, reckons:
All men are created equal. We hold this truth to the self-evident, which on the face of it is so wildly untrue. Equality is the foundation of liberal democracy, rule of law, a free society, and everything that the reader, if he or she is sane, cherishes. But are we all equal because we all showed up? It does not work that way at weddings or funerals. Are we all equal because it says so in the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Each of these documents contains plenty of half-truths and nontruths as well. The UN proclaims, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours.” I’ll have my wife inform the baby.
High-minded screeds cobbled together by unrepresentative and, in some cases, slightly deranged members of the intelligentsia are not scripture. Anyway, to see what a scripture-based polity gets for a social system we have only to look at the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Puritans in Massachusetts.
But the core words stand out so brightly in that TagCloud. And those core words are being ignored by John Howard’s cynical intervention.
Perhaps you should ask your local MP why so few of them have been enshrined in Australian law and what they, personally, have done about that.
If they’re a Coalition MP, perhaps you should ask them why they’re being party to such a disgusting, heavy-handed approach to what is, yes, a major problem — but a problem which has been sitting there for the entire time they’ve been in government.
Production Note
TagCrowd has already removed common stop words like “the” and “of”. I’ve added a few more so the focus is on the content not the structure: “against”, “article”, “declaration”, “forth”, “held”, “including”, “nor”, “proclaimed”, “promote”, “shall” and “whereas”.
I’ve added a bunch of words to that list to remove things which are about the structure of the Declaration rather than the content, such as “whereas”.