Stuff like this never gets old.

… they can make you look foolish, or they can suggest that problems exist where they really don’t.

For example, I ordered a book from Barnes & Noble yesterday. Here’s the timeline of communications:

2:38 p.m. — Received email from PayPal confirming the order was submitted.

2:49 p.m. — Received email from B&N confirming that the order was ready to ship.

3:47 p.m. — Received email from B&N confirming that the order was received.

So wait a second: The order was received an hour after it’s ready to ship? Was a second order erroneously placed? Is there something else happening here that I need to be aware of?

Something in the B&N system is sending emails out of sequence, or perhaps in proper sequence with erroneous content. The result, though, suggests the existence of problems where they probably don’t exist.

Given the volume of email I would expect B&N to be dealing with on a daily basis, those non-existent problems are undoubtedly creating calls to customer service, which incurs very real costs to address very avoidable non-issues.

Takeaway for marketers: It’s always a good idea to audit your customer communications so that you know how your messaging is being perceived at every point in the transaction flow. This is messaging that occurs on the front lines of customer-company relations; don’t take it for granted.

To me the creepiest part of this article on Social Beat isn’t that marketers need to be reminded not to be creepy on social media, but that this article is being published in 2011. Any marketer who hasn’t internalized these rules as instinct by now needs to think about finding another line of work.

Bilal Jaffrey makes my teeth grind with his use of the phrase “in the online space” in his opening sentence, but his heart is in the right place in this Social Media Today post.

In the mad rush to be on Facebook, to leverage the latest Facebook enhancements, to get more people to like your Facebook page, to implement all the Facebook tips for small business that can be found … in all of that, marketers and businesses are forgetting that they’re building on someone else’s platform, not their own.

When all is said and done, don’t you want your online traffic coming to you, not to them?

Because as much as the web isn’t about control, you can nevertheless control the platforms on which your content is disseminated.

Then, when Facebook does something that messes up your communications strategy — like yesterday’s announcement that Facebook pages can no longer send updates — you won’t be as affected by the news.

And let’s face it — especially with something of a social media features war taking place between Facebook and Google+, this won’t be the last major feature overhaul that takes place on Facebook. The last thing you want is for your online communications strategy to get chewed up by all the shrapnel.

(Hat tip to Barbara for bringing the SMT post to my attention.)

With Borders bookstores closing, everything that’s left is being liquidated for 70 to 90 percent off. It’s a great deal if you’re looking for Twilight books or anything by or about Sarah Palin, but with the stores pretty well picked over you’ll have to sift through the rubble with a fine-toothed comb to find anything worthwhile.

One of my finds this past weekend was James P. Othmer’s Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet. Othmer writes about his big-agency experiences with honesty and humor.

I’m only about halfway through the book as I write this, but this bit is well worth sharing. It stems from a conversation Othmer has with Rick Webb and Benjamin Palmer, founders of The Barbarian Group, creators of the legendary subservient chicken. Webb is talking about branding and online gaming and Zipcar and such, and Othmer reports Webb saying this:

“When I think of ‘engagement’ and when I hear a CMO use it, I generally hear it in terms of time someone is thinking about my brand. I don’t hear it in the context of dialogue. We’re going to have to accept that this dialogue is more important than anything else. The dialogue is, in fact, the new brand. The way you converse and communicate with your consumers is your brand positioning.”

That last sentence may go a bit too far (there’s still a place for the product or service itself), but it’s also a fundamental truth about business today that speaks precisely to the pithy core of The Cluetrain Manifesto: markets are conversations.

How many companies pay close attention to every tiny aspect of their advertising … then virtually ignore the content of the email responses that customer service (or autoresponders) is sending out?

Companies are getting smarter about social media, but is that intelligence about using social media platforms as a broadcast channel or as a way to facilitate conversation?

Takeaway for marketers: We can never remind ourselves often enough that we’re not living in a broadcast economy anymore, we’re living in a conversation economy. Don’t stop listening.