By Bert Zethof

We dealt with the topic of customer service at our last two High Voltage breakfast discussion groups in Victoria, BC. An issue that generated a lot of energy and debate was "permission marketing: What is it? How do you do it? What's acceptable and unacceptable."

I see that businesses are at varying stages of awareness and sophistication about how to do it well. Some get it and some don't. This afternoon, I got a call from Ross MacFarlane of www.wealthinitiatives.com to ask for my permission to send me his newsletter - in my opinion, he gets it.

As the Internet continues to permeate the way we work, live and play, we are going through a fundamental transformation in how to communicate with customers. We are going through swirls of change and are still some time away from universal consensus and deployment of permission marketing. Here is a link to an excellent blog on http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/permission-mark.html by Seth Godin.