digital marketing

Top user award: There is such a thing as a Yahoo! free lunch

Two days ago, when opening my browser, the homepage of which is my Yahoo! mailbox, I got a message warning me that I had been granted top user status. The reward was to follow.

Top user award: There is such a thing as a Yahoo! free lunch

Top user award: There is such a thing as a Yahoo! free lunch
Top user award: There is such a thing as a Yahoo! free lunch

I have had a Yahoo! mailbox since times immemorial. More than 10 years for sure. Now I understand why so-called “digital natives” are said to hate e-mail. It is a generational issue. We sort of grew up with it in our professional lives. Youngsters on the contrary favour instant and text messaging; to them, email is what is being used to send messages to your friends’ parents.

As a result, despite my reluctance regarding the excessive usage of e-mail messaging (re. my article on the subject here) I realise now that I was granted that award that I am therefore a heavy user of this stuff. The sheer amount of time I must have spent on the Yahoo! e-mail system is just staggering. But this event also triggered the following thoughts:

  1. it means that my e-mail usage has been tracked and traced by Yahoo! I don’t really have an issue with this personally, I’ve got nothing to hide. But yet, when did I last agreed to this and where?
  2. (more positively) the new Yahoo! interface, all Ajax-based, is responsive, user-friendly and is a good substitute to “fat client” messaging clients like the antiquated Outlook Express or Eudora. In fact, I merged all my e-mail address into that one as soon as the new Yahoo! interface was made available. Besides, additional Yahoo! Go 3.0 and the mobile Internet version (http://m.yahoo.com) makes it possible to answer e-mail on the go.
  3. it doesn’t take much to please a free customer. For one, I was happy as can be as soon as I read that I was granted the reward. Secondly, the award in question was mostly made of being granted larger e-mail sizes (20 MB) which isn’t much use to me, however. Thirdly I’m writing about it on his blog which means that I must be very happy about it. Lastly, I haven’t had any more details about this so-called reward. A more specific e-mail was to be sent to me but I haven’t received anything yet.

Having said that, receiving rewards for your loyalty for a free service is not bad after all, and possibly better than what you get for paid subscription services. What did I ever get from my cable TV operator
for instance except for shaky service and technical problems?

At the end of the day, we were wrong to badmouth the late ‘new’ economy. It certainly went bust, but who can tell that today’s financial crisis isn’t going to end up any worse? Eventually, Yahoo! is still here to grant kudos to its nonpaying users. Lehman Brothers aren’t. A free – even frugal – lunch is always a good thing as long as it lasts.

Yann Gourvennec
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Yann Gourvennec

Yann Gourvennec created visionarymarketing.com in 1996. He is a speaker and author of 6 books. In 2014 he went from intrapreneur to entrepreneur, when he created his digital marketing agency. ———————————————————— Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique. More »
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