You can’t just lower all the prices in your operation. There are two reasons this doesn’t work. First, you no longer communicate the story of ‘special deal’, instead you communicate ‘we’re in trouble.’ Second, you end up charging everyone a lower price, even the people who were happy to pay more–who wanted to pay more, in fact. ^{link »}

So, empower your staff, all of them, to take 10% off the price of anything if someone asks or seems concerned. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll just take $20 off the price of the room if you can book it now.” For retailers or personal selling situations, you can give your staff a pile of “manager’s coupons” that they can just whip out… peel one off and quietly hand it to the waffling customer. It needs to have a date on it, probably hand written. Even better, let them write in the discount (up to x%, and of course they’ll always write x, which is fine, because that’s what you planned on.) ^{link »}

– from Seth’s Blog: Creating a clearance sale culture via sharedcopy.com

Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Kevin Werbach, a former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual tech conference Supernova , and a Wharton professor, will lead the Obama-Biden transition team’s review of the FCC. Both are highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy, and they’ve both been pretty harsh critics of the Bush administration’s telecom policies in the past year. ^{link »}

“I think it’s magical thinking to imagine that we’re somehow doing fine here, and I just want to make sure that we recognize that even the [International Telecommunications Union] says that between 1999 and 2006 we skipped form third to 20th place in penetration,” she noted acidly at the annual Tech Policy Summit , a gathering of top officials in the world of tech policy (of which Wired.com was a participant and sponsor.) ^{link »}

– from Net Neutrality Advocates In Charge Of Obama Team Review of FCC | Threat Level from Wired.com via sharedcopy.com