Archive for March, 2006

Microsoft’s new Live Local Preview lets you drive around downtown Seattle in a virtual race car looking at buildings, businesses and more. Check it out.

Using digital photographs of the area, combined with Areal views, you can look at building fronts. Right down to the signs on their doors.

Ok, this shouldn’t have suprised me. Plenty of people call me telling me how Verizon superpages.com are wasting their money, so what’s a few fire-and-forget Adwords campaigns?

Clickz reports that Superpages salespeople will begin selling Adwords based on a new agreement signed this week.

C’mon folks, there’s so much more to building a profitable Adwords program than just making a buy of keywords and a monthly budget. To just say I want to spend $100 on Adwords, so please, Mr. Yellow Pages salesperson, make that happen for me, is ridiculous.

One caveat here is that I have actually talked to Superpages reps at various events. I was not impressed. I have heard customers’ stories about how they’ve never received one inquiry through their superpages website in 2 years of existence. SEO and SEM are hard - they take a lot of work to do well.

Update: Apparantly they’re going after the low-end market. “Also, regarding the original topic of SuperPages distributing AdWords, our goal isn’t to submit low quality feeds at a premium. Many of the Search Engine Marketing companies will not take on advertising contracts for small businesses below a certain dollar threshold. Also, many small businesses don’t have the acumen to set up and manage their own PPC purchases, and Google and others don’t have the direct sales force necessary to work with these people. So, our company makes a natural fit for helping small businessmen get distribution in these SE networks.” …says one “unofficial post” But why would one wish to take the money of small businesspersons and burn it? If anyone needs smart management of their PPC campaigns its those folks. I guess I’ll wait and see.

As an Adwords consultant, it’s obvious I’m a believer in the system. I just want to see advertisers who combine their hard-earned advertising spending with clear cut analytics and split-testing so they can know what is truly working versus what is robbing them blind. We want to drill down to a solution that squeezes every dime out of the money you are putting out there.

One of the most important priorities in my life is to, um, have a life.

As far as I can tell, most entrepreneurs also have this on their goal-sheet, possibly as their top goal for going into business on their own. So why is it that even the simplest technologies don’t support this?

Take soho office phones, for example. In order to get a basic “after hours” switch, I have to spend $600 on a Talkswitch24 (highly recommended.) Every other phone system requires that you remember to flip a switch at night. I don’t even know of cell phones that have after hours modes despite their full-featured OSs.

So now, I’m a heavy Skype user. More and more of my clients are using it, and for good reason. It’s cheap, it’s crystal clear, and the chat mode on it is fully encrypted. End of those praises, leave it at that.

Skype is really light on features (just look at Pamela’s offering and you get a feeling for what’s missing… VOIP voice mail, call recording, and voice memos are some incredibly useful things that Pamela allows.) But neither allow you to set your business hours and have Skype adjust your phone modes based on them.

I know, give and take, features are risk, etc. Few people probably want it. So what I propose to the Ebay-Skype empire is that you add several simple command line options. I will use Windows scheduler to send the right commands to Skype’s command line This should require almost ZERO code change for Skype Engineers.

Current Skype Command Line Options

/nosplash - do not display splash screen when Skype starts
/minimized - Skype is minimized to system tray when it starts
/callto:nameornumber - call the specified Skype Name or SkypeOut number
/shutdown - close Skype
….that’s it?

Command Line Wishlist Options To Support “having a life”

/mode=m - set running Skype into mode m
/forward=number - forward my Skype calls to this number
/forwardstop=number - stop forwarding my Skype calls to this number

with the “mode” command, I’d set up a scheduled windows event that would change it to “do not disturb mode” after 7:00 PM, and then turn it back to “available” at 7:30 AM. It would be unavailable Sat and Sunday.

With forward modes, I’d set up a shortcut on my start menu that would turn forwarding to my cell phone on or off. One click and it’s forwarded, one click and it’s not.

I really don’t want to add-on anything. Pamela gives me enough headaches with Skype. But if you know of something please speak up.

When McLatchy plunked down $6.5b for Knight Ridder a week or so ago, I started thinking about the future of kentucky.com, the website operated by Knight Ridder and associated with the Lexington Herald Leader.

You see, Kentucky.com has never felt, er, Kentucky-ish. It felt Knight-Ridder-ish. You could visit any Kight Ridder site and they all looked the same. Same Content Management System in place, similar layout, and very little by way of variety. There was very little local flavor demonstrated on these pages other than a photo or two. They were flat. It felt like a national portal with the words “Kentucky” pasted in during a search/replace. To be honest, I never visited this site or even considered it as an advertising property.

So when McClatchy bought the Herald-Leader and kentucky.com site in its deal, I started wondering if this meant a change for kentucky.com. Will it become a true Lexington-area website? Will it now reflect the unique and beautiful place that I call home? I’m not talking about posting more horse clip art. I’m talking about digging deeper. McLatchy folks, if you’re listening…. the site needs to have an honesty about it. The politics, art, business, beauty, and people of Lexington are out here.

I wish I could give presentations about stuff like you find in this blog. I love it. I’m passionate about my work, and love to share it. It’s great to get people laughing and to make folks think a bit.

But I had quite possibly my worst presentation ever a few weeks back. The room was boiling, I felt horrible, my slides worked great on my computer, but were misaligned once transferred to the room PC, there was no way to advance slides without standing behind the podium. And worst of all, I didn’t know my audience. The hosts were super nice, and treated me to lunch, but it was a warm day, I was overdressed, and carrying (foolishly) a 30lb bag with my presentation materials and laptop through it all. By the fourth slide, I was a train wreck.

We all have these days. I just hope the attendees will forgive the quality of the whole thing. It seems they have, as the comments were all positive. So, I made a few notes and thought it worth sharing those with my readership about being comfortable for a presentation when it’s impossible for you to visit the space ahead of time:

• If you plan to tour the campus, have lunch or otherwise embark in the environment, find out what kind of walk it will be. Hilly, long, short, outside or in. If you’re visiting a college campus and the tour is being conducted by students, remember they may be 20-30 years your junior, wearing tennis shoes, and so on. If it is going to be hot outside, you may want to excuse yourself from the tour or bring a second shirt and t-shirt in the car.
• Check the weather. A lightweight umbrella is always a good thing. They are not for daily use, but I’ve seen them so small they’d fit in just about anything.
• Ask the host how close the presentation area is to where you’ll be parking. Find out if you can leave your materials in the car until just before the talk, or if there is a secured area you can put them.
• Find out how the computer is set up. How does one advance slides - is it wireless?
• Ask the host if they might send you a digital photo from the room. A cell phone photo is fine. Some places do not allow this, and let them know that’s ok if it’s not.
• Bring your presentation on a USB flash drive and a CDROM. If it’s DVD based, ask for the PC to be tested ahead of time. Make sure you save your presentation with the viewer, not just as a stand-alone PPT file. See Powerpoint help.
• Make sure the tour doesn’t run right up against your time to present. It invariably does, and you’ll sometimes enter the room for your presentation tired, hot, sweaty or all of the above. It’s better to linger for half an hour nearby, cool and confident than to pant through the door.
• Use the restroom just before the presentation. I’ve sat through presentations where the presenter left the room and lost half the crowd.
• Bring your own drink. The host may not think about it.
• Turn off your cell phone. You may want to ask others to do the same.

Seth Godin - The Best Presentation
Overcoming Stage Freight
Speaking Ezine
Learn to get Paid To Speak (a bit of fantasy, perhaps, but fun read)
Sound Effects

Obsession to detail will save your neck 

Neil Patel’s 10 tips for a Killer Presentation (New Addition)

Go visit a few sites. When you enter those sites, do you know what in the heck they want you to do? Or is is a gray fog of intent - where they expect you to be so compelled by your experience that you start sending them checks. I’ve been guilty of it too. I’m getting better, and so are my clients’ sites.

It’s not always easy. You must get out of your box and look around at the general public. Why in the world do they care about your company? Why would they want to spend their hard-earned money and their rarified minutes of free time looking at your website?

You must write it down. It usually seems ridiculously simple once you do. If your website is meant to get customers to buy a widget, then you must ruthlessly remove steps and distractions to do just that. If you are looking to get leads for your law firm, you must precisely focus on moving the potential client through the path to submit their information. You can get details later… As long as you’ve qualified the lead, you’re done. Get the info and do business.

None of this “they might want to do x while they’re getting closer to your goal page” crap. You, as the website owner need to re-focus on the intent of your website. Ok, you know what, they must might want to learn more about your company as they move through your leads funnel. But is that going to cause them to move forward in the process? Until you get that lead, or that customer, everything you do on your website is costing money. This is especially true if you just entertained a pay-per-click visitor. Your sales funnel must be clean and shiny, like the inside of a polished titanium pipe.

Oh, and if your web consultant isn’t giving you this kind of advice, fire them. Soft and fluffy web business consultants do nothing but create vapor-businesses that run at 1/10th of their potential. If your consultant doesn’t push back on items like adding little notes in your checkout process or creating sparse landing pages, show them the door! If you don’t have someone ready to tell it to you like it is, then you’re cheating yourself and your business.

Scott
Troublemaker

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