It’s been sixty-nine days since my first blog post in the beginning of the year and I feel like a lot has changed since then. Looking back, I see that in this period, many assignments have been turned in, even more midterms have been written, and most importantly, lasting friendships have been made. On this day, I’m writing my tenth blog post (milestone!) and I think it would be fitting for my tenth blog post to be about another blog. Looking online, one blog site that particularly captivated me belonged to a man named Chris Brogan, professional speaker and CEO of Owner Media Group. The first thing I noticed in his site is how clean and professional his blog looked. When reading his articles, I was impressed in how not all of his articles talked about only business, but about his life philosophies. One article that particularly impressed me talked about inbound marketing- the promotion of a company through blogs, social media, and other forms of content marketing.  Reflecting on his blog, I realized he was doing the same thing; throughout all his articles, he was always subtly putting in links that led to registering for his webinars. While normally I wouldn’t sign up for these kind of things, I now considered doing it as Chris had given me so much goodwill over all the free insightful articles he had posted. Even though I haven’t tried to sell anything on my blog (yet), Chris’s opened my eyes to one of the core essences of marketing: if someone likes you, they will usually buy what you’re selling.

Disclaimer time: this blog post might be a bit more biased than usual as it has afflicted a member of my family. You see, a few days ago my mom flew back from Greece and had to use Air Canada instead of our usual plane company, Lufthansa. To summarize in as few words as possible, let’s just say that her experience didn’t inspire her to switch companies in the future. After her laments, I did some research and was not particularly surprised to see an article from Canada.com that said Air Canada gets the most formal complaints from any airline in Canada. According to the article, what Air Canada is mainly missing, which I believe a lot of companies are, is the ability to give competent or decent customer service. For most people, the solution would be simple: just have Air Canada give better service. To those people, I raise an important question- HOW will Air Canada give better service? Having learned about Zappos in class, I am confident that to give better service Air Canada has to not only improve its work conditions, but also cultivate fierce loyalty to the company. To do this, Air Canada would have to give intense employee training with the promise of a fun, relaxed working environment as the reward. By building a fun “culture” around its company, employees would be happier and in turn be more productive and give better service. With better service, Air Canada could really take off (I just kill it with the jokes) as a company.

For the last 6 days, I have been looking at people’s blogs (finally figured out how to do it) and been greatly impressed with some of the quality posts I’ve read. If you’re reading this and are a blogger, give yourself a tap on the shoulder; many of the posts feel like they were done by professionals. One such article was written by my classmate Taha Bhopalwala, who said that Best Buy is currently going downhill due to poor inventory management, sales forecasting, and inability to evolve with the industry. Having learned many things from our class on performance management and BTM, I personally believe Best Buy is deteriorating because the company is rewarding performance that goes against its own goals. This is due to the fact that Best Buy is not paying its workers by commission and is instead paying them a flat rate. In my eyes, this results in a loss of incentive for the worker as they would lose the urge to make that extra sale. After all, why would anyone go the extra mile if they will be paid the same fixed rate regardless of how great a job they are doing? To get out of their rut, I believe that Best Buy should give its employees commission-based salaries which would in turn lead to better customer service and more profit.