Customer Engagement And Free Cocktails

Went to a great party last night. It was the one I was talking about to launch a website, but I was wrong. It was to launch a survey about customer engagement and the "significant gap between what organisations aspire to in order to engage their customers and deliver an optimal customer experience". It is the whole Web 2.0 thing, and how websites need to engage individuals and make them feel wanted and needed and loved and listened to, so that we can sell them stuff - well something like that. (Anyone from my stag night reading this survey will recognise the photo on page three of my mate who 'lost' the front door to his hotel btw. ["The significant gap between where you think your hotel is and where it actually is after an optimal stag night."])

Anyway, it was a cool party and mrs househusbandnot and I had a fun time talking away to a load of web developers - who, it turns out, are actually quite normal people. Some of them even tell jokes and laugh and stuff. And I met some uber blogger who is doing some interesting stuff with NGOs and digital communications , which is kind of what I think I want to do next.

Actually, joking aside, there was a real buzz at this party. I may be completely wrong, and all of the guests were really just interested in the free cocktails and selling stuff under a new guise, but some of the people we talked to seemed genuinely interested in using what technology we do have to improve the communications that we don't have.

Speaking of good communication, I have this list of people in my head that I have been rude to or treated badly, and when I can't sleep I mull over this list and how I should contact them and apologise for my behaviour. And one of these people is a woman who asked me to join her book club ages ago, just after I met mrs househusbandnot. And at the time I spent a lot of time telling mrs househusbandnot that I was joining this book club so she would think I was normal. And I spent an equally long time trudging through that Philip Roth book about if the Nazis has won WW 2. And I went along to the book club, and made a bit of a tit of myself trying to be clever and or...no I was just trying to be clever. And I decided not to go back to the book club, and never contacted this woman to say I was not coming back because the other people in the book club were too clever. Anyway, completely by chance I saw her at the party last night, and really apologised. So one person off the can't sleep/I am a bad person list. Only another 179 to go.

So all in all a pretty cool Thursday evening out on the town. mrs househusbandnot and I ended up going for a Chinese at my current favourite restaurant. And we wandered home, and watched two episodes of This Life. It was like being young again: new ideas; free cocktails; prawn toast; crap TV. Excellent. And mrs househusbandnot aka Obe Wan Kenobi taught me a cool new trick about firing bolts of good energy at people. I'm off to Oxford Street to try it out.