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Thank God it's Friday! I have been hanging out for this Friday since I woke up on Wednesday morning thinking it was Friday. It's just been one of those weeks where every day has brought a completely different challenge to deal with.

Reputation management
This week we got our first taste of reputation management and what a contrast there is in how you go about it in mainstream compared to adult. Here in adult if someone wants challenge your ability or integrity and attack you there seems to be only one way to manage your reputation and that's to go for the jugular.

You can yell and scream, question the other person's parentage, suggest that they're wanted criminals and do anything else you can to destroy the person in the eyes of everyone else in the industry. For some crazy reason it seems to work too ... at least some people seem impressed by that response level ... but I wonder how much damage you're really doing to yourself if you respond like that.

Over in mainstream you can do some incredible damage to your reputation if you approach a situation like that. Instead you need to be very conciliatory and look for a win/win outcome rather than looking to have the body of your antagonist lying at your feet in a pool of blood.

Even though whoever is making life hard for you over in mainstream might be using some very dirty tricks your response has to be very subdued. It was interesting to sit down and put together a plan to turn an attack on our client's reputation into a positive outcome. We think we've achieved that but I guess only time will tell.

The Global Village
If you hang around online for long enough ... and it really doesn't take very long ... you will sooner or later hear the term global village. People use it to describe the way the Internet has brought people together and enabled them to talk to each other.

In chat rooms, on message boards and blogs, via email groups and lots of other places too people are talking. Businesses are being reminded that these talking people are often talking about the businesses that provide poor service or a poor experience and that's a very valid point. Businesses need to be aware of what's going on out there in the parts of the market place that they may not be able to see very clearly.

In lots of ways the fact that the Internet has given people a chance to come together is a very good thing. The idea of a global village offers a lot of hope for the world but of course there is a downside to all this sweetness and light. Every village has its idiot and the global village has ... well ... lots of idiots ... and they're online ... and they're causing problems because they seem to be attracted to places where they can be the biggest nuisance.

But then we here in adult knew all about that before the rest of the world even began to consider the problem. Just look at some of the top adult message boards and you'll see plenty of village idiots hanging out doing what they do best.

Automated customer service
If you run a business online - whether it's mainstream or adult - and you need to have some clearly defined customer service here are some things you should consider. When people call customer service they do so because they have a problem and the simplest way to get rid of them is to fix the problem.

If you want to cut down on the cost of your customer service clearly identify the problem that the caller is having and then make sure that your product - whatever it might be - won't cause that problem for any future customers. I was reading recently of a small software business in New York who makes sure that every problem a customer has with their software is fixed for that customer and then fixed in the code so it never happens again.

When people have a problem they need to speak to a person and not a machine. Automated customer service, where the person has to press a gazillion buttons, and talk to a machine, will only piss the customer off more. The end result will be a very dissatisfied customer who will tell 10 of his or her friends about their bad experience.

If you're going to use a human to man your customer service line don't outsource it to India or any other Asian country. It's a bit like trying to talk to a machine - they don't understand you, you don't understand them, and the problem rarely gets fixed. More and more businesses are finding that outsourcing their customer service has been a major blunder because it hasn't really saved money at all.

And that's it for this week. I'm off to plan a great weekend away from the computer. I know it will never happen but it's good to pretend that, one day, I might be able to last a whole 48 hours without touching the keyboard.