This afternoon I stepped in to an outlet of the SCS sofa retail chain. Several things made me chose not to buy a thing.

• I sat on a recliner sofa and as I went back in to a lounge position the store light blinded me, shining directly in my eyes. Not a comfortable experience.
• This is the main problem: the sales assistant followed us all over the shop. The sofas are arranged to look like living rooms, so you can feel at home. She would sit down with you on the sofas. If I’m meant to be imagining this is my living room, I don’t want her sitting down imposing on our shopping experience, just as I’d be annoyed if she walked in to my home uninvited and sat down.
• I felt insulted when we were told there was a sale on, knowing that the sale is always on. Even after she asked what I did.

At the end of the day, I got out of there as quickly as I could.

I’ve said many times that the relationship between vendor and customer is almost unidentifiable from that of a personal friendship, or even relationship (if you’re an Apple customer). That is why one of the biggest mistakes I personally see companies make time after time is building up a false image of themselves as caring and sharing, and their actions then going totally against this philosophy.

Twitter did it recently.

Telling your customers that you love them, and then proving that you lied, is worse than not telling them anything in the first place. And, in this context, “telling your customers” can be something like using cosy language (”We be IBM. Who you be? :-)”) or it can be a blog post where the CEO is dreaming of you.

My main point: Don’t pretend to be hip, cool, with it, or new media, if you are just doing it for appearances. You will be caught out. And it will be the death of any PR strategy you have or will have.

A quick round-up of my favourite trends across the web-o-cube this week is part useful list, part excuse to post. So, without further ado…

Powerset Kind-of Launches

Powerset, a “semantic, natural-language search engine” loudly launched an Alpha this week, covering Wikipedia and Freebase content. Some were unimpressed, some have covered the entire hoo-haa in gigantic, but brilliant, blog posts.

Faviki Steals My Heart With Bookmarks

After reading a post on Y Combinator, I found Faviki, and fell in love. Everything is simple, but effective and efficient. I can post a bookmark through the bookmarklet, tag it with semantic tags, and add a comment. The system then knows the topics that I bookmark, and in the sidebar gives a good rundown of the tags. But they don’t feel like tags, more organised catagories. The site is based on DBpedia. Heres my profile!

And, of course, HP buying EDS seemed ridiculously odd. I cancelled my Plaxo account, too. Oh, and before I forget, I love friendfeed - love it with me!.

Quick tip for the next week: avoid, at all costs, referring to business relationships as “dealing with customers”, or “managing my staff”. It sounds like a job you don’t want to be doing.

I try and be someone that enjoys business relationships, because there isn’t much difference between them and personal relationships. The same rules apply.

I have just launched an online bookstore (through Amazon) perfectly filled with titles relating to life working on the web. From new marketing ideas, to working with the Facebook (or Flickr, or…) API - I have it covered.

The Matt Harwood Web Worker’s Bookshelf will have its own nice pretty link on the right, so you can always take a look. I will also post any additional items on this blog as the store grows..

If you have any ideas for books to include in the bookshelf, please do let me know..