I was doing some research on commenting systems for blogs, after temporarily not finding the correct way to turn my new hand coded website design into a WordPress theme.

UPDATE Monday September 23rd: Successfully installed WordPress. Post continues from original date…

I’ve been putting thought into that one off and on for a few days and get error after error.

Well, to console myself I entered a few search strings into Google. I read about the different problems people have with comment databases using software hosted on their own servers.

I was reading one post by Loren at Incremental Blogger, a business tech blog. Loren’s comments stopped working in July of ’06. When I tried to leave a comment today, they’re still broken — over one year later!

The reason I wanted to comment and ended up sending Loren an email instead is because I came across this gem:

Would you convince a friend to buy a computer that’s cool but not what they really need?

“There are some good suggestions in the currently posted 243 comments in the thread, however, a vast majority of them are posted more to advocate a particular product that respond to what the original poster is looking for. Come on folks. Is this really the way to do things?”

Read the whole article.

Loren makes a fantastic point.

In the entire thread, very few comments are addressed to what is in the best interests of the student who needs a computer to do certain specific tasks related to his education.

Instead, people chime in with all sorts of software and hardware solutions that have worked for them, but don’t take into consideration the fact the student does different types of work.

So they end up being confusing rather than persuasive.

Yet these same people, trying to be helpful, would be offended if they went into a computer or furniture store with a picture in their mind of what they wanted and were instead giving reams of data about the salesperson’s preference.

But this is exactly what happens all too often, isn’t it?

However, a few questions in that thread… good questions… about the student’s experiences with owning a computer, plans, and desires would have narrowed choices down. This would have left the commentator in a position to make a persuasive recommendation.

This recommendation, based on knowledge of the customer, would have given the commentator leverage to explain why the student should expand their budget if necessary to get the right solution.

By Christoph Dollis at 10:43 PM on Monday September 3rd, 2007, and filed under Blogging, Questions, Sales Techniques, Sales Theory.

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