I was a dedicated Flickr Pro. I paid annual dues since 2007, most recently at $24.95 a year, for the privilege of uploading an unlimited quantity of photos and viewing zero ads on the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site. I uploaded 2,030 photos.

The bulk of my photos are from the first year under an older account. My newer uploads — over the past 12 months, anyway — are predominantly copies of photos that began on Foursquare or Instagram.

My sister remembers when the “fancy” mall opened in our hometown. She and my mom would dress up to go. By the time I was ready to hang out at the mall, I trudged from one store to the next in jeans or even (oh goodness) sweat pants. After the novelty wore off, customers came as they were – on their own terms. No amount of well-polished marble could compensate for the need to rush into the mall to grab something on the way home from a babysitting gig. My “customer buying behavior” was far from fancy, even though the mall wanted me to believe otherwise.

class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 94px"> href="http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Question_mark.jpg"> class="zemanta-img-inserted zemanta-img-configured" title="Question mark" alt="Question mark" src="http://sazbean.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Question_mark.jpg" width="84" height="137" />

class="wp-caption-text">Question mark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s a guest post Greg Meyer, a member of the Customer WOW team at Desk.com, wrote for our WordofMouth.org project. Check it out for more great word of mouth marketing tips like this every day.

“The Thank You Effect” is an example of a small action that prompts meaningful next steps to measurably improve service in any company. In my experience, there are a number of these small actions that, when evangelized through a support team or through the larger company, can really make a difference on the customer experience.