Alles Normales

I had a bunch of pretty rare Progressive Rock (a.k.a Prog Rock) CDs and I wanted to sell it to peoples in the know - that is, to connoisseurs, to be able to get real good price for real rare stuff.

I already knew how to reach American musicheads, but I also knew that Prog Rock fanbase in Europe was (and still is) MUCH larger than in US, so I wanted to find Prog Rock fanatics in Netherlands, France, Germany and Italy - that is in countries with limited English speakign abilities. I’ll share a fragment of my endevour on contacting French proggers.

I know that the French generally speak no good English and just prefer to communicate in French. I speak no French, but I can figure out that certain word means just guessing upon (after all, common roots in European languages help a lot) or just look up meaning in my favorite online translator, Systranbox.

This endevour of mine took place back in 2002, by that time I still believed that considerable part of like-minded people communicate via mailing lists - or groups in terms of Yahoo. So I went to Yahoo Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com/) As it often happens, this site, being aimed at English speaking people, does not contain apparent links to Yahoo servers in other languages. So first I tried to located French communities of proggers via Browse Groups option…

I was to Top > Regional > Countries > France > Music> - it sucks, and it’s almost empty.
I was to Top > Cultures & Community > By Language > French - it sucks big time and is almost totally clattered with spam.

So I decided to go the other way and again tried to go to national subdomain of popular Yahoo service by guessign upon combination of words Groups, Yahoo and country domain (.FR) - I succeeded with http://fr.groups.yahoo.com and it was exactly I wanted to find.

At the main page I saw a familiar search form with title I was able to figure out meaning of - Trouver un groupe - I guess it’s something like “Find a group“, so I typed in “prog rock” and hit “Rechercher” button (even if you dont know meanig of this French word - what is rather strange by itself - this is the only button by the apparently search form, there is nothing else to hit, ok?) Voila - I got a list of 10 music mailing lists (”groups“) devoted to (sometimes among other genres) to Prog Rock.

Query “progressive rock” brought in another 3 groups and knowledge that “Progressive rock” among the French is also known as “Rock Progressif” - so I ran yet another query - naturally, “Rock Progressif“, and got list of another 18 groups, so 10 + 3 + 18 was pretty good result, in my humble opinion.

OK, so I clicked thru to the first group - it happened to be “rockprog70“.
As with all other Yahoo groups, the “rockprog70″ index page contained Description, number of recent posts, messages history and subscription information. But here came a suprise - I tried the subscription address listed on the page -
rockprog70-subscribe@yahoogroupes.fr - but it didnt appear to work, my subscription requests were totally lost, I never received a response.

OK, so maybe I just could write directly to the group then? I tried to send my initial post to rockprog70@yahoogroupes.fr
- it failed to get thru to the group, BUT! from automatically generated “failure to post” message I fished out a REAL address there one shall send subscription requests to - “Envoyez un e-mail а rockprog70-abonnement@yahoogroupes.fr” - and that address was NOT listed on the group main page. I sent there my request and was subsribed within a minute!

So I applied this freshly acquired technique of mine to get subscribed to ALL french groups (which also IGNORED my usual subscription request I was sending to official addresses posted on all groups main pages).

My next step was to lurk for a while and see how people advertise on these groups - because people who participate in such mailing lists are quite negative to any kind of advertising, but - as I learned over a course of years - “any kind” might be rather flexible if you behave a)politely and b)to the point of group members interest.

So I learned that then group members wanted to sell something (that is, CDs from their collection) they would form a subject line of a message as “V: Ikarus CD 8 Eur” (V stands for VEND = to SELL, Want To Sell)

I formed my messages respectively, in pure French - you could do that, too, here is an example - feel free to use it!

——
Subject: V: Prog Rock CDs, 10 Eur

Body:

Ikarus “Ikarus” 1972 10 Eur
The Nice “The Nice” 1969 10 Eur
Krokodil “Krokodil II” 1973 10 Eur

Envoyez un e-mail а allesnormales@yahoo.fr
—–

You see, the only phrase in French here is “Envoyez un e-mail а“, and I picked it up from that “failure to post” message I described above - so believe me, communicating in French is easy Because when you receive an email from interested party you can always machine translate it via that Systransoftbox to English (or your language of choice), understand it and write back in ENGLISH (possibly providing a machine translated copy of your message in French) - cause you already established contact and people interested in something common would always find a common ground.

That’s all - I sold my 150 CDs for a good price to French Prog rock lovers, then some CDs to Italian prog lovers, then to Indonesian prog rock lovers, then to Brazilian prog rock lovers - the list goes on, and it always was fun - I enjoyed the research part of my endevour not less than profitable part of it :), I even kept participating in one Brazilian group for a while being the only member there who posted in English - folks would often ridicule me but I never received a hostile response - cause my postings were always right to the point, I shed some light on rare prog rock albums details

If I’ll be in a mood for more ramblings I will tell ya how I managed to greet my pal in Cardiff, UK, in Welsh - he later confessed that it was THE ONLY greeting card in Welsh he EVER received from somebody outside the Wales. Stay tuned.

Filed under: Success stories - Offline meets Online