There are some professions that get a free pass from the whole “Word of Mouth” phenomenon.
For example, urologists. It’s pretty unlikely that I’m going to go asking a wide circle of friends about a urologist they like. Most people are unlikely to spontaneously start praising or denigrating their own urologist*.
*Yes, I realize I’m doing that, but one should never mistake one’s own behavior for the default behavior of a rational human. Besides, I need something to blog about.
It’s not even likely that if you do ask someone, they’ll have an opinion about one. Unlike, say, a dentist, many people might never have visited one. And frankly, I bet you don’t want to know much about urologists unless you happened to need to choose one at that exact moment.
All this, then, is to say that if you need a Vancouver urologist (that word now sounds really funny to me), don’t go to Dr. Howard Fenster at the VGH - Gordon and Leslie Diamond Health Care Centre. I don’t like his bedside manner, nor his treatment methods.
(Of course, the other important fact about professions that don’t get much word of mouth… is that when someone decides to blog about one person in particular, that opinion makes a difference.)
“I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so. ... She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”
After over a decade of user testing, it is clear that the way we search the web is similar to the way we would search our home for valuables as it was burning to the ground. Frantically.
“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value ... The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”
You can scroll right easily by holding down the SHIFT key and using your scroll wheel. (Firefox users trying this will end up jumping to old Web pages until a) Firefox releases a fix, b) they change their settings like so.)