Archive for October, 2006

What would be the worst day in the year to send a toilet tissue campaign? I mean, when would you NOT send 100,000 rolls of free toilet tissue to the doorsteps of homes nationwide for rotton little ones to wrap ’round trees.

But I kids you not. Today, October 31st, in the mail comes a Charmin Ultra sampler. ULTRA STRONG, Procter and Gamble say. So I guess it’ll be harder to clean off of the trees and cars.

The Moral of this story? Well, let’s skip the PR lesson and just don’t be a dirty butthole this holiday. Have a safe and happy Halloween.

If you want to check out how well your anger-management therapy is working, sign up for Microsoft’s bCentral listbuilder program. And then try to get support for it. I have tens of thousands of subscribers on the system and it’s going to be huge pain to move but they’re not getting another dime from me. This is freaking nuts.

If you submit their support form, you’ll get a cut/paste support response in a few days. This will be the stuff you already know. You will then have to reply to them saying that they didn’t answer your question, and then you will get a response asking for something like your username and password, or something that you’ve already provided.

Should you want to cancel, the fact that you’re logged in wiht your “highly secure system developed to the highest standards for privacy and security” Microsoft Passport to the account isn’t enough. You’ll need to call them on the phone… per this email:

“Thank you for writing to Microsoft Small Business Center Customer Support regarding your cancellation request. In order to protect the privacy and security of our customers, we require that all cancellations be handled over the phone in order to verify and validate account ownership.-your Microsoft Small Business Center Windows Live ID log in
-your telephone number
-and the full name of your Microsoft Small Business Center service for verification purposes

Thank you for understanding the concern we have regarding t he security of our customers. “

C’mon people, give me a big-assed cancel button and get out of my way. It’s too late for you to stick me on hold and talk me into something. I’m running a busy company.

But, alas, there is no choice. If I don’t do this, they’ll charge my client’s credit card AUTOMATICALLY and there is no way to opt-out. This whole system sucks. I cannot wait to get everyone onto verticalresponse.com

UPDATE: 10/27/06: The Final Chapter….

After successfully canceling the account, the agent told me, unprompted, that I was violating their terms of service by reselling the service. Huh? I had told him that my client was being billed directly (e.g. no markup) and that I was just helping her with the setup. I explained the concept of reselling to him. What in the world are they thinking to accuse me like that. I had told him I had (at one time) 15 clients on Listbuilder - wouldn’t that make me like a Gold-card customer or something?

So, rather than construct a good reseller program (like verticalresponse.com seems to have, according to the call I received after my first post) they decided to accuse me of being some sort of renegade.

Update: Posted on the bCentral Site:

As of November 15, 2006 Microsoft will no longer accept new sign-ups for select Microsoft Online Small Business Services.

… that kinda explains it.

bluppet [bluhp-it]
-noun

1. a person, goup, government, etc. whose blog, wiki, forum or website whose postings are encourage, prompted or controlled by a commercial or political interest without making said sponsorship immediately clear.

Use:
“Wal-Mart hired a bluppet for their Public Relations campaign.”
“I unsubscribed from his blog, he’s just a Bluppet for that candidate.”

Allume System gets It - When you want off of an email list, you just want the he** off. Allume makes great software but I’m getting too much email. So I decided to unsubscribe from their announcements. To my delight, they didn’t require me to do much.

They just gave me a button. Click. I’m off. Nice.

AND NOW…. The WRONG way, brought to you by DMXZone.com.

“If you plan to unsubscribe, we’re going to punish you GOOD!!!!”

1. Log in.
2. Try to remember my password
3. Send myself a password reminder
4. Check my email again
5. Log in
6. Open my profile
7. Unsubscribe
8. Enter a number to verify I’m real

Are you tired of all of those little blue flashing lights on headsets hanging on the ears of everyone you try to talk with? Are you tired of wondering if they are suffering from schizophrenia or on the phone?

No more mucking about. When I’m on the phone in my car or in a meeting, you’re going to damn well know it.

Pictured… my new bluetooth handset connected to my cell phone. No kidding. It stops meetings cold when I pull it out. Great fun.

You can get one here:

As you can see (blogroll below) I’ve added a rare entry to the Sweet Spot blogroll for the new Yahoo Search Marketing blog. Steve Mitgang - Senior VP at Yahoo is apparantly going to steer the gig. Steve is a frequent speaker and drives Yahoo’s advertising products, and has been involved in many top brands around the US.

I’m especially glad he’s doing the work because he cut his teeth on small business working on Sitematic - CRM software and services, and also NetObjects. And just to prove the diversity of the Search Marketing crowd, his degree is in architecture from Berkeley.

It sounds like Jen Slegg will be interviewing Steve on WebmasterRadio.fm soon.

If you received SPAM postal mail from listingcorp.com, please don’t send a check unless you contacted them first. They are contacting clients with invoices for “Website Listing Service” invoices of $65.00. Yeah Right. Please hire a reputable SEO/SEM firm for your business by checking in one of the SEO/SEM directories on-line. Naturally I’d like you to hire me, but here are some other great places to check.

• http://www.seoconsultants.com/ Find people by region
• Yahoo Web Directory for SEO Over 300 listings for USA.

Consider the members of the Google Adwords Professionals program and Yahoo Ambassador program for Pay Per Click. Make sure to check on their status.

While few agreed-on certification programs exist yet for SEO, some are emerging. The difficulty is that the industry changes so fast that most education programs are out-of-date within months of inception.

Wal-Mart has began to phase out its smiley face on walmart.com in order to become more Trendy. Perhaps they’re grumpy because many say they got caught red-handed sponsoring bloggers who (true or not) weren’t believed to be real people (I call them bluppets.) The word “flog” is now becoming a household phrase for the practice. That could make anyone frown.

Related: Last Year Kentucky dumped the smiley face license plate (praise the Lord). I donated Pay-Per-Click and organic marketing consultation to sharetheroadky.com (site did its duty, now off-line) to help get their awesome new plate on our two cars (but the ones who really did the work was Allison Smith listen to interview here from last Summer - to get double the number of applications needed and now there are over 3500 plates on the road. Those of us with it never have to see that stupid smiley face on our cars again, and hopefully more bike and running trails will open.

Hard not to smile over that one.

Adwords and other Pay per click ads make a promise that the landing page needs to keep. We all see the ads for spammy sites on a regular basis. We know how to skip them. Google’s system just raises their minimum bids until they go away. Others have found many more examples.

But the type you see here is worse than the usual “free ipod” listing. On those, the landing page usually gives you enough information that your spam-radar moves your left finger towards the back-button of your browser for a quick get-away. Bam you’re out… you may grumble a bit, but you take a sort of perverse satisfaction in knowing you just cost them PPC money on a no-sale.

Furthermore… the ‘rapid-back-button’ action will queue Google to raise minimum bids for this advertiser as a part of their quality index system, making it harder and harder for them to do business in adwords with such a lousy offer/landing page.

No this Amazon example is worse because:

• You don’t realize they are going to dupe you until much later in the process (check out)
• You’re unlikely to “back out” - so they don’t get the quality-index penalty.
• You shop the entire site (e.g. spent valuable time) with the promise in your head… I’m going to get free shipping and no tax… as you make mental comparisons with products you’ve seen on other sites… and the let-down when tax shows up is all-the-more damaging to the brand.

So, intentional or not, it ticked me off, and I will scrutinize future Amazon adwords ads with a new level of distrust from here on.

I have to admit, even as a Gen-X’r I love 50’s diners. I grew up in a small town where I caught the “tail end” of the diner era, just before fast food killed them. We used to have one on Richmond Road called Rockabilly Cafe and were regulars. It’s a simpler food, and, the retro theme breaks us out of the hotspot-entrenched digital world that we work in each day. But Rockabilly closed and the much more hip and modern Panera Bread Co. took over. Ah progress.

I always thought Rockabilly was busy, but their managers had accounting backgrounds and must have seen something different in the monthly receipts - after all, it’s very hard to run an independent restaurant. I would have paid more for my meal to keep the place going but I know most wouldn’t. I also like their other gig, the Common Grounds coffee shop, but that’s another post.

Lexington has the Parkette Drive-in, which maintains some of that flavor - but we also try to break out of the car culture a little when dining as a family, and frankly eating in the car ain’t quite the thrill when you’re in a mini-van. To sit around a chrome-edged table with a juke box playing, sipping milk shakes straight from the blender cup is much more fun.

Johnny Rockets seems to be a well-honed system that is typical of a mature franchise. The closest are in the Cincinnatti area and now there’s one at Newport on the Levee near the Aquarium. I am hoping that one will soon be in Lexington - perhaps downtown or near campus. There’s nothing like it now. All I know is that we’ll be there.