During this adventure, I found author Justine Lee Musk.

Maybe it’s just me, but more than once I’ve found articles from totally separate worlds that seem to talk to each other.  Recently, Justine wrote about the concept of using Facebook or Twitter to get up close and personal with her audience.

As soon as I read this, Seth Godin’s Tribes sprang to mind.  I’ve joined a few networks and found them to be fantastic.

I think Justine is trying to get a balance of accessibility vs friction.  Facebook / Twitter have a low barrier to entry, but (as was suggested in the comments) has far too much noise.

Brilliant cartoonist Scott Meyer recently had a “ask me anything” Q & A on Reddit.

So there are multiple ways of connecting with your audience.

Personally, I prefer the Networks (or Tribes!) over Facebook or Twitter specifically because they have a higher amount of friction for entry.

The one question Justine didn’t answer was why?  Are you looking for a forum to push more product? To connect with your audience?  To better understand who out there is paying you attention?

One of the interesting things I’ve learnt from reading blogs, is how the right person can easily influenced what I buy.  It doesn’t take much for me to buy Seth’s next book, or to try out a new razor.

If someone at work suggested either, I would tell them to bugger off and stop wasting my time.

Who do you trust?

Some book publishers don’t like the Kindle. Either they’re afraid of it or they’ve crunched the numbers and they don’t like what they see.

Worried about the medium, they hold back, delay or even refuse to support it.

Which is fine if you have market power, but you likely don’t. No publisher does, certainly. The Beatles couldn’t stop iTunes from changing the record business by sitting out the platform, and there’s no book publisher who can stop the Kindle alone.

I like the idea of even  The Beatles can’t stop iTunes from changing the way we purchase music.  But I think Seth is being a little short sighted.  The Kindle isn’t available (yet) in Australia – actually it is only available in the US.  Compare this to another product that has international reach (iPhone!)

I think the Kindle is a game changer, but I can understand if Publishers haven’t jumped in just yet…

Background:  I’ve moved to Kensington, in Sydney Australia.  My ISP is TPG and Tesltra is my telephone provider.

On the TPG portal page, I logged onto “Your Account” and went through the Change of Location process. Every day I checked the ADSL Installation Statusand nothing changed.

After 7 days, I got nervous and rang TPG Customer Support. I was told that there was a mismatch between the address I supplied and what Telstra is showing. I should ring Telstra and just ask them to update their Flexstream Database. “Jay” said that TPG had tried to contact me several times but there was no answer.

I asked him what number TPG tried to contact me on, and he obviously realised it was different to my home number.  I asked him since he also had my mobile number and TPG email address why that wasn’t used. He had no response.

I went back and forth between Telstra and TPG. Telstra saying the details were correct, TPG said they weren’t.

I rang again and spoke with Jay. I asked who I should speak with at Telstra, what number I should call, what department I should ring. He said he didn’t know and to check the white pages.

Since I have no way of independently verifying what the status is, I was still not sure who is at fault: TPG or Telstra?

Finally I said to Jay that I should just go to another ISP. He said that he would be more than happy to accommodate this???

Lessons learnt:
1. I had the best result ringing Telstra on 13 22 00 and asking for Connections. I was on hold for around 20 – 30 seconds. When I rang Faults or other 1300 / 1800 numbers I was on hold for well over 5 minutes and got no progress.

2. TPG, I don’t care if it is Telstra’s fault. Half the people I spoke with at Telstra hadn’t heard of Flexstream. They did not know or understand what it means to update the database. Those that did, said it was an old system no longer in use.

3. Since it wasn’t obvious to me how I should check the status of this with TPG, next time I will ring each day to check on the progress.

4. It wasn’t until I told Telstra to forget about it, don’t worry. Send the bill to the wrong address and we will see what happens. It was at this point Telstra knew something wasn’t right.

5. I found the best way to get a response from TPG, was to put up a post on the Whirlpool Forums.  Frustrating?  Yes!  But that seems to be the way it is.

Here’s hoping you have better luck than me!