Surveys or sneaky ways of trying to sell you something

I am absolutely certain that I am not alone when it comes to hating the phone calls that try to sell me something or are “simply doing a survey”.

Have you ever noticed how they perform according to a script?

It’s usually “Good Mr./Ms how are you?”

To which of course you are supposed to respond with something like “I’m fine thank you, can I help you?"

Instead of what you really want to say which is more likely to be along the lines of: "Who wants to know? Who the hell are you and what do you want? I am just about to “

At this point the caller—who could be someone from a call centre in India or somewhere else in the world will then proceed with the real purpose of the call which is to tell you the wonderful news about whatever product their company happens to be
marketing at that point in time.

By allowing the call to proceed to this point you have just confirmed to the caller that you are normal, polite, and somewhat tolerant and you have also provided some really meaningful information. You have told the caller and his/her company that you
are who they think you are, and you have confirmed that you are of a particular gender, that your phone number is correct and that you are at home doing something at this time of the day.

Now ALL of this is more information about you than you may wish the caller to know.

So what can you do to prevent yourself from giving away all of this information?

The most useful tip that I have for people is that they should recognise that the other party is following a script and simply interfere with it.

For example, when the first part of the script is stated respond with something completely unexpected like:

“Do you have $1,000 handy?”

The person at the other end will in all likelihood look at the possible answers
to his or her question and be totally bamboozled about how to respond.

Press your advantage at this point and say something like, “If you would care to let me have your bank account details so that I can debit your account to the value of $1,000 I will be happy to continue this call.”

At this point even the most persistent caller will hang up AND with any luck will place a big black mark against your name on the list he/she has been provided noting that you are a waste of time and space to call again.

At the end of the day, their job is to try and get your attention about whatever it is they are selling and YOUR job is to protect your privacy, ensure that you do NOT get called again and where possible, let people know that your time and your intellectual property are valuable commodities. Provided that they are willing to pay, you might be persuaded to part with some, for a fee.

The psychology of interfering with scripts is really simple. Most people perform tasks in a way that becomes routine over time. Thus how you respond to greetings, how you do things is usually conditioned over time by repetition until it becomes so well learned that you have virtually automatic responses. People who call you to try and sell you something rely on this training. They create a script that stimulates the normal auto responses and before you know it they have obtained details about you and your habits. Even if they do not make a sale at that point they have obtained information about you that they can then on-sell to others and take advantage of when they call again. Similarly if you allow web sites to control your browsing by permitting cookies you will be sending information back to the source that can identify your browsing habits and hence provide valuable information that the site can then use to target further information to you and at the same time, if they are really clever, use data mining techniques to aggregate the information that they obtain and so develop a data base over time that they can use for their own marketing purposes or to on sell to others who may wish to market something that happens to be suitable for people with your profile.

There is not much you can do about modern technology so as it becomes more intrusive in your life you can at least start thinking of ways to control and benefit from the intrusion that is inevitable.

Your information and your privacy is valuable charge for it or protect it but do NOT give it away.

Clinton as President? or Two for the price of one!

The latest headline is that Clinton has triumphed over Obama in the Nevada primaries.

I guess the American public will be getting an interesting choice when the elections really start if Clinton is the candidate for the Democrats. Not only would Americans for the first time be able to elect a female to be the President of the United States, if they did so they would also be getting what amounts to a "two for the price of one" Presidency.

This would surely be a most interesting outcome for the most capitalist of economies.

In one hit the American public would be able to get both a current and former president to reside in the White House.

It simply boggles the mind what this could mean.

Can you imagine the bedside conversations?

No, not about that woman!

How about national and international policy?

The former President was cleared for even the most top secret information as will be the new President. Does this mean that they will be able to have meaningful dialogue in the privacy of the Oval Office or will Bill simply be relegated to hosting tea parties for his wife?

Like I said - it boggles the mind!

"Customer" or what's in a name?

One of the largest government agencies in Australia is called "Centrelink" which seems to be a great name for an organisation that (according to it's own propaganda) offers "a range of services delivered on behalf of ten government policy departments and a number of other agencies."

Specifically:

1. Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.
2. Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.
3. Department of Transport and Regional Services.
4. Department of Veterans' Affairs.
5. Department of Health and Ageing.
6. Department of Education, Science and Training.
7. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.
8. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
9. Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
10. Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

As part of this same propaganda, Centrelink also manages to add to the confusing double speak of governmental language by its use of the term "customer"

One would imagine that in normal parlance, a customer is someone who actually pays to receive a service or a product from someone else. Thus, you would imagine that Centrelink's customers are actually the so called policy departments and agencies that commission it to deliver certain services on their behalf.

However if you have a chance to look at Centrelink's Customer Charter, a 2o page PDF document you will discover to your surprise (and hopefully delight) that the word "customer" actually refers to both those organisations that pay for work to be done for them and also those people who are required to come to Centrelink to obtain the services that are being provided.

It's a fascinating use of the word.

In many instances it could be argued that as each individual who receives a service is a tax payer of some sort, thus he or she is actually (if indirectly) paying for the services that are received by means of their contribution to consolidated revenue.

Accordingly, it is merely right and appropriate that they are considered not only to be consumers of these services, but in a particularly funny and convoluted way because they are actually paying for them, should be called "customers".

In the dim and distant past people who received services from government departments were called 'clients,' but in this more modern and upbeat society that we live in, I guess it's no longer fashionable to use such terms - it's far more appropriate to use the terms that refer to all of us these days, consumers and customers and of course manufacturers, distributors, sales persons and marketers.

The world seems to have been overtaken by fiscal attributes and much like the old saying - "they who live by the sword shall die by the sword" perhaps we should now re-frame the saying into a more explanatory option that uses fiscal terminology.

That would certainly make sense of the billions that are being made through "virtual" businesses like PayPal, Facebook etc.

For those of us who used to work in the new business of "knowledge management" we are likely to reap the whirlwind of what we have sown.

The CIA infiltrates Facebook through a financial stake in its operations, (see the Canberra Times article "Facebook's faceless men" Sat. January 19 2008), companies pay billions to gain access to our personal preferences in the data bases of the so called 'free services' that abound on the Internet so that they can target their advertising to those preferences and so reduce our ability to resist their blandishments, our banking systems rely on our greed to have what others have and then suffer the loss of all our investments because they are virtual and not real, these are the risks.

If the world markets do result in a global meltdown following the so called Sub-Prime lending that went on in the USA we have only ourselves to blame.

Investing in rhetoric and double speak and virtual reality is merely a great way to play some games with each other. Life is not a virtual game as some people are realising for the first time - for most of us it's reality.

When you take games theory and practice and actually introduce it into the real world the characters that in a game might die horribly when you (the person playing) makes a mistake, in real life the character cannot spring back to life in the next round of the game, he/she just dies.

Are we all just customers or consumers in someones mad idea of a reality game or are we finally going to grow up and realise that we do NOT live in a virtual world and that our actions in the world in which we live have real consequences that do NOT lend themselves to a quick press of the 'reset' button.

It's a dog's world or is the world just going to the dogs?

It's not often that I manage to find anything of interest coming out of Hungary.

Today is an exception.

According to the news media there are some Hungarian scientists, who are being paid to work on computer software which aims to analyse dog barks and which could, as a result, allow people to better recognise dogs' basic emotions.

Dr Molnar and his colleagues at Budapest's ELTE University have tested software which distinguishes the emotional reaction of 14 dogs of the Hungarian mudi herding breed to six situations:

1. when the dog is alone,
   
2. when it sees a ball,
   
3. it fights,
   
4. it plays,
   
5. it encounters a stranger or
   
6. it goes for a walk.

"A possible commercial application could be a device for dog-human communication," he said.

The computer correctly recognised the emotional reaction of the dogs based on their barks and yelps in 43 per cent of the cases.

People had judged correctly in 40 percent of cases.

Scientists said the software could be improved.

Dr Molnar said the Hungarian scientists' research provided further proof that different types of dog barks convey messages humans can understand, even if they had no experience with dogs.

Given that humans seem to be almost as successful as the current software, I think that the only market for this development would be for humans who are totally insensitive - in which case they would probably be better off not owning a pooch.

Of course I could be wrong.

What's next I wonder?

Will there be someone out there who wants to find out if the bark of dog species that are NOT Hungarian herding animals speak a different dialect to express their emotions?

Perhaps we will be treated to a new set of languages that are taught at schools of the future.

I can see it now - advanced courses on Labrador speak - especially useful for the duck hunter and the blind person who uses a seeing eye dog.

I am sure that the French would want to explore being able to communicate with their Poodles and of course the Germans would want to be able to teach German Shepherd speak to those upstart Alsatians! Even the English may wish to get into the act, eventually, just to make their fox hunting so much more enjoyable if you can understand what your dogs are trying to say to you.

Of course the mind reels at other possibilities like being able to communicate with your pit bull about it's emotional state or with your Rottweiler to ensure that it does NOT think your children are pet food!

Yes folks - it's a dog's world - or perhaps more accurately the world is going to the dogs!