I’m having a (civilised) argument with someone running an on line business promoting Irish ‘art’ (i.e. stuff you must buy) in America. They organise chats with Irish musicians on Yahoo, trying to direct traffic to his site. After the chat, the transcripts are posted to the site. In the case I’m speaking of, we were repeatedly promised the transcript would be up a certain day, but it took weeks. We complained about the state of the transcript, because it was (and still is) incomplete with many typos. We were told there was no money to ‘hire a professional typists’ and that they ‘prefer to publish the transcripts as they happened’. (It took me about 15 minutes to clean the transcript up, correct typos, add missing info that I’d jotted down during the chat, and then post it to the artist’s website How difficult is that?)
Anyone who has been to a chat with an artist they admire will understand the importance of a correct transcript. If half the answer to one of your questions is missing it’s very frustrating. I also think it is a lack of respect towards the artists involved.
I’ve tried to explain to them that having all these crappy transcripts on the site actually reflects badly on the company but I was told: The first priority is making sure customers are happy. Second, is raising capital, third, is driving traffic to the site, fourth is adding new products and it’s only 5th, that maintaining and improving the site comes in. Remember… they are trying to run a *on line* business. How short sighted is that?
All you can do is laugh, I guess. Maybe I’ll send them a copy of Siegel’s Futurize your Enterprise.