Know-How Exchange : Our Forum

Can you give us some examples of your allegations?

I believe this is an amazing community and I am on every day, but not like at the beginning. Simply because I don't have enough time. I usually answer when I'm sure that I can add some value.

I don't think that the answers have been ignorant of late. I agree that spelling and grammar do detract from the expert's "image", but unfortunately we're not all copywriters. I personally do not care if someone spells "definitely" with an a (definately) or similar common mistakes. If I don't understand what the asker is asking or what the expert is saying (for many reasons . . . sometimes I don't read answers because they're simply too verbose) I just skip it.

I believe formality should be overlooked here. After all, this is a spontaneous forum for ideas and direction.

Michael, be realistic! The KHE forum is a free service offered to MarketingProfs members and visitors. It's open 24 hours a day to all citizens of the world. The quality and volume of questions and answers will ALWAYS vary, but I must say that the management team and the community of experts have taken extraordinary steps to make improvements over the last three months. And there are more improvements on the way.

The best way to keep the forum from "deteriorating" is to encourage people to use it well, not to slam them over the head verbally when they first participate. If you see a question you don't like, you can simply choose not to respond.

We've all been frustrated here at times. I'm still here because I learn a lot, even when people post imperfect, clumsy, or indulgent questions or answers.

Shelley ;]

- Extremely ignorant question posts with poor English...

We must keep in mind that many people here are not native English speakers. MarketingProfs is an international site, so its members and users are from all over the world.

I believe we need to be more lenient towards those whose English is not of a native level. They are already doing us the favor of trying to use a language which we can understand.

I thinks you just post question in the very category in which you is complaining for.

Waht ar YOUR solutions?

So, are your question the types of thing the KHE needed?

You has a lot of nurve to chastize people for beings arrogant and not speak English good. In me eyes, you question are pretentious and harmsful.

Also, I am ready for hire if you need professionals. We are the bestest in the world!! You should hire me so you can learned.

Thanks you!

P.S. How you "kill" a post?

Blaine, I am to be laughing off the floor. Thanks many for lightning my Friday.

- Shelley

Yah SRyan, me also laff wi my belly.

Anyhow, t'aint no thang. S'all kewl.

You is many welcome!!

Want to hire me? I does good job and are #1 here at website!!

What you thinks of new ad:

I am smartest and is for hiring!!

Is good?

Also, pleaz explain marketing mix with examples?

#1 Jett, that indulgence bounces to make my head off-kilter.

For marketing mix, see:

www.AreYouTooDumbToSearch.com

Please describe "off-kilter" with examples.

Need answer quick. Homework due tomorrow.

I thought KHE stood for Know-How Exchange.

Anthony, should it be Kill the Humorless Experts??

All in fun, Michael. Glad you posted this question, partly because it's created a nice point for ventilation.

Shelley ;]

Virago,

I am simply poking fun at the ludacrous nature of this post.

Sorry I hurt your feelings, Virago. I'll send you a card or something.

Now, you have yourself a Great Day!!!

Hey Virago,

What do you think I should have said? I need help "readdressing". Since you made the suggestion, what are your recommendations on how to proceed.

I want to change...but I need your help.

Thank you SOOO much for opening my eyes to such a HORRIBLE demeanor! I have to go cry for awhile and watch my Dr. Phil tapes..but I'll be back to see what you think I should do.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!!

Oh, Well Cool, Virago! LOL !!!!

I was laughing the whole time too.

Man..you are drier than I. My humor can be pretty indecipherable, but you really got me!

I suppose I am used to SOMEONE getting mad at me.LOL!!

No Worries! Glad to hear you are having fun.

P.S. Do you still want the card?

hi mjk,

well there is not much we can do about the English on the site. the internet is mostly English but with countries like china stating to take it up there are a lot more people who don’t speck English on the net. 1 in 3 people is Chinese!!!!! the amount of non specking English people using the internet is set to explode in the next year or two. (it has already started)

now about the early question closings. we could have a notice at the start of a question ON the page that tells people to check past question BEFORE posting and tell them to wait a minimum of 24 hours to close the question.

we need to improve the search questions engine
or find a way to just select the forum on google's advanced search.

i personally believe that the amount of questions has been growing with the occasional off day, but the amount of time people expert put into answering questions is wonderful.

i agree there have been one or to arrogant question askers but they probably using bablefish( a free translation engine) to translate the question in to English. bablefish is bad at the syntax of translating English but is really good because it can translate into many languages.

i think i might be part of the problem you are talking about but i TRY NOT TO BE RUDE i only would like some people to do a little RESEARCH before asking the question. they need a bit of tough love to make them use there brains.

shameless self promotion!!!!! we are MARKETERS it is OUR JOB TO MARKET products and services. we dont get paid to do this we are using our valuable time. i think a little bit of promotion is ok, because we work hard to give good responses we should get something in return. it might be a new client or a thank you note or a little bit of business or what ever, but what goes around comes around, we are just speeding up the process a bit.

the ways in which i think we could improve the site are:

make the search questions link MORE OBOUIS,

remind people WHEN THEY are posting to check the past questions

take time to THINK ABOUT THE WORLD AROUND AS.

this site is great and i would like to thank all the people who take time from there day to help other people how do know as much about the marketing world.

hope this helps

Carl Crawford

---

Thanks for your post.

1) Less question responses - we need to leave questions open longer. I do not believe you should be able to close a question before 7 or 10 days, to give busy people a chance to have input. I need to work during the day, I'm just not sitting around waiting for a question from MarketingProfs.

2) Less quality responses - Quality responses come from quality people, we need to attract more top quality posters to the site. And, if it were me, I'd have the "main page" with recent questions have two columns (one sorted chronologically, one decending ranked by number of points) so that if you posted a 1,000 to 2,000 point question, it would stay near the top for a while. I'd also display more than ten in each column. If folks see that they get something for their 2,000 points - more folks will buy points, and the folks who run this wonderful site will have more resources to improve it.

3) Extremely ignorant question posts with poor English, and not enough detail - This is a tricky one. I think we have to overlook the poor english. I'm more concerned with the students asking us to do their homework, with folks too lazy to do their own Google searches, with repetative posts from the same people using multiple email addresses, with questions which have been asked and asked and asked again. I believe the moderators should reduce the point value of these posts (e.g. to 10 or at most 25 points) and invite them to fill out thieir profile, and to research and re-post if they like. This way, folks who want to maintain their ranking don't have to waste their time with these posts.

4) - Shameless self promotion in every response - I've been guilty of this on a couple occasions... we need a carrot and stick here. Some consultants post here looking for work - and I very much enjoy and benefit from the quality of their responses. On the "carrot" side what if we had a short "tag line" after our nickname, e.g. "TeleMoxie - contract telemarketer". This way, folks would know the type of work we do, and we would not need to remind them in the text. On the "stick" side, if we want to stop this, let's fine people 1,000 points or 25% of their balance or something for "shameless self promotion" after a warning.

5 - Needless killing of posts - I do not know what this means.

By the way, I had thought there was some sort of discussion group on how to improve MarketingProfs. I'm sorry I didn't have much time (this was a few months ago) but I'm glad to have this opportunity to comment.

Where are you mjklanac? Why have you deserted your question?

What say you?

Oh yeah, and please address your response to Rachel. She doesn't understand English very well and apparently, you don't like that. Rachel deserves an answer from you after bravely responding to a post that publicly bashed her attempts at English.

WE are waiting.........

mjklanac,

although I have not been present to participate as much as I would love to I can tell you what the problem is if I only knew what the problem was. I think we must be prepared for expecting things to change.

WHAT IS UP?! In other peoples neighborhoods kids say
WHATZ UP?

- Less question responses (I've been promoting JETT!!!) You might call this "Shameless peer promotion in every response". If you can't beat em you might as well join em. (Oh sorry!... my spell check is'nt working. That stinks)

- Less quality responses (That's going to happen sometimes we must brace ourselves for change.)

- Extremely ignorant question posts with poor English, and not enough detail

( How a person might judge this depends on where that person grew up. If you have grown up around those who speak poor English you might feel the English is great. I have seen worse. But imagine if someone dropped you off in an unfamiliar part of the world and asked you to speak their language perfectly how would you feel? )

- Shameless self promotion in every response.

(A few questions here... "SHAMELESS self promotion"...Now have you really ever seen people "promote themselves" and then be ashamed? (LOL)

Now which of these bothers you more... the fact that the person promoting themselves are not ashamed? or Does it bother you that the person promotes themselves in ever response?)

- Needless killing of posts ( I've never seen a post murdered...Somebody call Johnnie Cochran )

Is it just me who thinks this? (No I don't think you are the only one who feels this way. I think we all have had this experience but we LOVE KHE so much we just keep on pushing...I would advise you to do the same. As we say in Chicago about the weather... "Wait a few minutes it's bound to change" :-)

This site is too valid a resource to allow it to deteriorate.
(I agree with you... so what can YOU do to help it? You've just got to have some great solutions. That's a part of the criteria of being critical on KHE. If you don't believe me read some of our Hot post. You don't remember reading this in the KHE bylaws?)

Well I hope I have helped you to join the ranks of the
"Die Harder KHE (FAN CLUB)" Welcome aboard!

As I often say..."Life is too short to Die Dissappointed" & who would care if you failed to "Die Happy". Most people don't care and they tell me according to the 80/20 RULE...20% of the people don't care and 80% are glad it's you (and that's because most people are just glad it didn't happen "to them"). Is there anything else I can do for you?

Your Servant, Deremiah, *CPE (Customer Passion Evangelist)

As a born again KHE author, I think that this forum has actually become more sophisticated, and matured nicely.
When it started, most of the questions could have been answered straight from a textbook or after a quick scan of your fave search engine.

I don't think that this is now the case, with many real life marketing problems and great answers based on experience, and not just what Kotler suggests.

The lack of responses may be either people generally not knwoing how to answer or deciding its been answered sufficiently (and want wanting to just grab points).

As for the poor english (sorry for any typos!), but I find too many words have Z's in them, but maybe thats just because I'm a Brit!

Keep up the good work all.

I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned the low points level on this one.

Then again, response levels seem to have an inverse bell-curve relationship with points-numbers offered. No, I don't have the metrics to back that up, it just seems like that.

You're right, the self promotion is absolutely unashamed these days. We should all stop promoting ourselves and start promoting othes.

And as for Rachel's English, which seems fine, I shall only feel empowered to criticise when my Cantonese AND Mandarin, which I like to learn while relaxing over a tasty stir-fry at Choi's on Riversdale Road, are as good as her English.

BTW I can speak five languages courtesy of Berltitz, with varying levels of fluency but English is the only one I would be game to use on a forum like this while wearing my Abercrombie and Fitch needle-point Oxford shirt, two for $49.95, blue, white or pink).

Non-English first language speakers, all kudos to you all for the courage to post in a second language!

Just thinking after AndrewS' post - maybe some of the spelling "errors" are, in fact regional variations. Microsoft(TM) should never have called it "US English" - every Englishman knows there ain't no such animal! (If there was we would probably have found a way to hunt it down in some bloodthirsty sport).

I'm surprised the question author did not also complain about the length of time some questions take to get answered. This very question, zum bespiel, received not one single reply for a whole twenty minutes (Seiko timing) after posting. And on a Sunday (US Republical Party time) too!

Is this a sign of a decaying forum? If so, why not compost it using a Norseman Earth Machine!

Need more info - try www.amazon.com.au.

Excuse me, I must join my family at our breakfast table (Sears, $399) for a bowl of delicious, and nutritious Kelloggs carbo-flecks and a cup of Blue Mountain brew.

See youse later, y'all.

ChrisB

Chris, now I've seen it all! You're the master of product placement in an online forum.

And all this time I thought it was a big trend only in movies, sitcoms, and reality TV shows!

I'm so grateful that we don't take everything too seriously here. With all of its quirks and growing pains, I think that KHE is an incredible tool+community. If we didn't change a thing, would I still visit? You betcha.

- Shelley

Gee, I noticed things were slow and concluded it was because folks were on their August/September vacations. Thanks for a fun post Michael.

P.S. now can I please have my one point reward. :-)