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Take a trip down the wilder side of memory lane on the History Channel this January
Hearst Networks Africa 19 Jan 2026
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Active and passive CRM
There is a big difference between active and passive customer communities. For an example of a passive community, take a look at Starbucks' new MyStarbucksIdea.com community site. These sites are useful ways to gather customer input, and I have referred to them as automating the suggestion box. There's nothing wrong with that, but a suggestion box is not a community.
Passive voice takes perfectly good sentences and turns them into gobbledygook. For example, the actively voiced, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" becomes the slightly unintelligible, "Why was the road crossed by the chicken?" in the passive voice. As you can see, in this case the main actor in the first sentence, and its subject, becomes the object of a preposition in the next, greatly degrading its meaning. It sounds like something from another country -- Washington, DC, maybe.
