Alexander Chalkidis

Month: October 2010

  • A practical way to sell services

    I realized that the way I chose to help publicize a service is a rather good model to follow in many cases.   www.qualia.gr is a company that does reputation monitoring.   It is a great service, heck, it is the only service that works in Greek really!  (Best voice recognition in this language matched with good interface and intelligence.)

    You can try and buy some Google Adwords around the topic.  So, assuming someone searches for you via Google, they will find your website.   Which may, or may not be the best sales pitch.   That seems a rather small and ineffective net to throw into the ocean of potential customers to me.

    So instead, I am using the technology to do something you couldn’t do without it.   Case in point a blog about media coverage of the local elections in Greece.   More particularly Thessaloníki.   Because if it was too broad a topic you couldn’t explore the depth of the interactions between TV, radio, blogs, social media and the web.   Is this the best way to find customers?  I think so.   I will be most impressed if at the end of the two month project most major and minor league politicians haven’t heard of reputation monitoring.   Better still they will have understood many of it’s elements.   And even better they will be familiar with the particular product and predisposed to assume that the particular company is a market leader.

    We can do another project after this for marketing executives, though many have already figured out that politicians are simply products with unusual parameters most of the time.   Maybe another one for an international audience.   It works with Google too of course because it produces a cluster of knowledge around a particular topic.   No SEO required!   (Though I do optimize the content sometimes or pay attention to cross referencing from other sources to help this along.)

    Good, relevant content, provided for free to a particular audience.  State of the art return to simple principles!

  • Last night a dj saved my life with her soup

    “Mageiritsa” is a traditional Greek soup, usually served on the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday.   The idea is that after fourty days of fasting, you break yourself in gently before the monster feast the next day.   My mother, being English, does a version of this dish which in many ways is better than the original.   Like with her mousaka, it is less spicy and not so heavy on your system.   Like with her dolmades she takes all the shortcuts in order to get the job done faster.   And more importantly – she doesn’t wait for Easter to make it.   The slaughter of two goats provided the reason this time.   While visiting them on Sunday I had heard about that.   I just hadn’t made the connection.

    Thursday.   It was a typical meal, the sort you try to get used to when you have three very young children.   One was climbing a cupboard in order to get to something he shouldn’t be.   Another was falling to the floor.   The third was loudly objecting to something. For some stupid reason the radio was also blasting at us.   Enough to drive my wife to a screaming fit, thought it didn’t seem to be helping much as the chaos continued.  The flu had finally caught up with me with gusto, blocked nose, sore throat and all.  It had taken all my strength to go out shopping and I was ready to collapse.

    But not now, I was mesmerised.   Everything else faded in the background, the way the background fades when you photograph a flower with a macro lens, the way everything goes quiet before your ears pop on a flight.

    She must have brought it around while I was out.  The dish was full to the brim.   The lemon juice I squeezed on could barely fit.   No bread, no salad, no nothing.   Just me and my mageiritsa.   I think I offered the kids a taste but I didn’t insist.   The commotion was still at a high but the bond between me and the food was unshakeable.   A river runs through it.   Meanderings of soup like cosmic string theory connecting me to my mum and probably to her mum ad infinitum.

    Life tastes good.

    I love you mum.