HIPS-meister Posted April 6, 2005 Share Posted April 6, 2005 (edited) Interesting. A thread pops up on this forum where "other geocaching sites" are discussed, and ka-boom! Jeremy, the sysop and the owner/operator of geocaching.com, steps in with godly privileges and slams the topic shut! "Because it annoys me." Uh huh. Bad move, pardner. The Internet is a competitive place. No matter if you were "first to find" your-spot on the web, there is nothing that you can do to prevent someone from trying to do better. There is also nothing you can do to prevent those competitors from being talked-about by your customers. And, nothing you can do to prevent them from defecting, except... do a better job than they do. And how do you do that? By listening. Carefully. Customers will tell you what you're doing wrong and what you're doing wrong, if you let them. And if they don't... they just go away and don't come back. The sport of geocaching is at a crossroads. It's getting public press. It's getting exposure to thousands of new-customers who have not been customers before. I fully expect that it will soon have commercial competition in the form of outdoor tour-guide operators who will sell, but also support and guarantee, excursions based in part on the use of GPS. Since there are no "barriers to entry" to setting up a caching site in direct competition to "the first one," there is nothing to say that geocaching.com, although it was first, will ultimately "win." They could listen better, respond better, let word-of-mouth lead your customers to their doors, and... buh-bye! Being exclusionary with regard to conversations, Jeremy ... even if you regard them as "annoying" or "negative" ... might well be the worst thing that you could possibly do right now. 'Nuff said. Gentlebeings (hurry before our dear sysop deletes or locks this "annoying to him" thread)... what's Your opinion? Edited April 6, 2005 by HIPS-meister Link to comment
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