I’m glad you found the article on customer service interesting.  Feel free to leave comments on it, or here.

Note to usual blog readers: Neat New Things is a newsletter sent around by a librarian named Marylaine Block who runs a little side business on the Internet.  I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say you probably haven’t heard of it.  My site was listed for the customer service article from a while back, with the comment “Both the initial article and the comments provide valuable ideas and perspective.”, in the middle of about a dozen links about various topics.  Now, personally, if I wrote a post with about twelve links in a row like this one I would guess perhaps 1% of the readership would visit a link in the middle.  Given that literally one thousand readers (!) have come to take a gander at that post over the last 24 hours, most attributable to that email newsletter, I would estimate that librarian’s reach at probably in the high five to low six digits worth of extraordinarily dedicated readers.

Ponder that for a moment.

I’m going to take a wild shot in the dark and say that my post probably caught Ms. Block’s attention after it was mentioned on Librarian in Black, a high traffic librarian weblog.

Librarians, like school teachers, are quite smart folks who are not typically described as being on the leading edge of the technology curve.  However, apparently there are an awful lot of them out there, and they have their own little pocket of cyberspace which is actually not little at all.  They are an addressable audience on the Internet (or somebody wouldn’t have a mailing list of five or six digits worth of them, least of all one which is read actively), they read blogs at least part of the time, and they almost certainly have problems which can be solved by software.

Two takeways from this:

  • Do you have a blog that 1,000 potential customers of your software could be reading tomorrow?  If not, what exactly is keeping you from writing one?
  • Would you have written librarians off as a potential niche for a uISV, because they probably don’t buy software anyhow?   Often uISVs have a mindset which is overly informed by being quite techy people, and they forget that the rest of the world uses computers, too.