Terms of Use

CustomerThink is a global community of business professionals. The information on this site, and interaction with other members, can help you create a successful customer-centric business.

Please keep in mind that when you contribute content to CustomerThink, it affects our community. By adding content of any kind, you are agreeing to these Terms of Use.

Always be meaningful and professional in your interactions on this site. Personal attacks, inappropriate language and commercial promotions are not permitted. News items may be posted regarding announcements for a company or its products and services, provided such news is relevant to our site mission and audience.

Don't post content that is the copyright property of others unless you have their written permission. If copyright infringement is reported to CustomerThink, the alleged infringement will be promptly removed pending resolution per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

CustomerThink respects the intellectual property rights of others. Accordingly, we have a policy of removing user submissions that violate copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property law, suspending access to all or any portion of CustomerThink.com and our community sites (collectively the “Sites”) to any user who uses the Sites in violation of any such law, and/or terminating in appropriate circumstances the account (if any) of any user who uses the Sites in violation of any such law. Pursuant to Title 17 of the United States Code, Section 512, we have implemented procedures for receiving written notification of claimed copyright infringement and for processing such claims in accordance with such law. If you believe your copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right is being infringed by a user of the Sites, please provide written notice to the following agent for notice of claims of infringement:

Robert Thompson
CustomerThink Corp.
1226 El Camino Real, #303
Burlingame, CA 94010
Tel: 650-343-8529
Fax: 650-240-3819
Email: bob@customerthink.com

Your written notice must: (i) contain your physical or electronic signature; (ii) identify the copyrighted work, trademark, or other intellectual property alleged to have been infringed; (iii) identify the allegedly infringing material in a sufficiently precise manner to allow us to locate that material; (iv) contain adequate information by which we can contact you (including postal address, telephone number, and e-mail address); (v) contain a statement that you have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted material, trademark, or other intellectual property is not authorized by the owner, the owner's agent, or the law; (vi) contain a statement that the information in the written notice is accurate; and (vii) contain a statement, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right owner.

The CustomerThink editorial staff reserves the right to delete contributed content that violates our Terms of Use. Repeated offenses of Terms of Use may lead to suspension of posting privileges, blocking account or other actions deemed necessary by CustomerThink management to maintain the culture, quality and integrity of the site.

PUBLISHING GUIDELINES FOR BLOG POSTS

CustomerThink has over 500 active bloggers and publishes several thousand blog posts each year. Some bloggers are syndicated, which means posts are originally published on the blogger's personal or company blog, then republished with the author's permission on CustomerThink.com.

CustomerThink worked with community leadership councils to clarify guidelines for qualifying posts, especially with respect to whether posts are too "promotional." As a result, the following guidelines are effective for posts published July 5, 2010 and later. Posts published prior to this date that don't meet these guidelines may be deleted at CustomerThink's discretion.

General Policy

Blog posts on CustomerThink should be:

1. relevant to CustomerThink's mission and its community of business managers.
2. educational, and not contain excessive promotional content, inappropriate language or personal attacks.

"Relevant" means appropriate for a business audience and can be categorized on the site in one of our key topics.

"Excessive promotional content" means the blog post content is primarily intended to:

• directly market products, services, programs, etc. for the author's company or an affiliated business partner, or
• redirect the user to another site to access content, without providing substantial educational content within the body of the post.

Moderation Process

All blog posts, regardless of whether directly posted by the author or syndicated, are "moderated"—held in an unpublished status for review by the CustomerThink community moderator or manager. Each post is first reviewed for compliance with our publishing standards. Then qualifying posts are categorized and formatted if needed to remove extraneous header/footer information (e.g. share links), and resize or reposition graphics to fit our site design. Images will be removed if they appear to come from stock image collections and the image creator has not been given explicit credit in the blog post content.

Posts will not be published if they:

• are off-topic (don't fit site topics or categories)
• are very short and mainly serve to promote other web resources
• do not provide substantial educational content within the post
• are highly technical (not suitable for a business audience)
• use marketing language like "best," "leading," etc.
• use graphics or illustrations to promote or position the blogger's company or its products/services
• compares the author's products or services to competitors
• include prominent promotional banners or graphics primarily intended to advertise a product or service.
• are designed to manipulate search engines by keyword stuffing, excessive backlinks, etc.
• otherwise violate CustomerThink minimum terms of use (e.g. personal attacks, bad language)
• are posted by a group or company account; each post must be published for a individual author.

Minor promotional content (such as a "call to action") is allowed provided it is related to the post and is a relatively small portion (lesser of 50 words or 10% of post) of the post content which otherwise qualifies. Posts may include a reasonable number of:

• objective references to the author's company, products, services, methodologies, etc. (text, links or graphics)
• links to other web resources for additional information (including free, paid or registration-required resources)

User Feedback

Contact Bob Thompson, CustomerThink's Founder and Community Manager, if you have questions about Terms of Use, blog post guidelines or concerns about a specific post or blogger. Please do not contact authors directly or add public comments to the site.