I ordered a battery for my Plantronics headset from Headsets Plus last week.  It’s about the size of a SD Card.  And it was the only thing I ordered.

Their site, order process, and other parts of the process was okay.  The packaging… not so much.

I’ve been hearing of stories of retailers starting to adjust how they package items, and have seen other examples of wasteful packaging online, but I think this one is among the worst I’ve seen.

When I placed the order, I even included this in the comments during check-out.

This thing is tiny - if you can ship it cheaper than $6.94 via another method please do so and credit my card.

At least most of it was recyclable.

I’m not a huge tree-hugger or anything, but damn, people.  Have you not heard of padded envelopes?

I have enjoyed being a member of Triibes, a community set up by Seth Godin after the release of his book of the same name.

The ebook was set up by volunteers in the community - and was really well done. Highly recommended.

[ Triiibes EBook] - PDF file

Google posted today that 20% of the queries they receive have not been seen in the past 90 days, and this is a reason to utilize broad match. I agree, but with a severe caveat. Your broad match keywords need to have bouncers, or fences built around it. Think of an ideal setup like a game of Skeeball where the query is the bowl itself.

Google Adwords always goes with the most restrictive match. If you have multiple keywords in your list, and include all the match types, you can be sure to cover all the bases, in sequence. The ideal match-type setup does all of the following well

• Catches unpredictable keyword searches
• Allows dynamic keyword insertion or headline tweaking
• Allows custom text presentation on landing pages.

So, if you use this as your keyword setup, you get the benefits of broad match as your fall through, the tight control of exact match, and the medium ground of phrase match

Keyword examples:

[lexington convention space] (exact match)
….Dynamic Keyword Insertion Heaven -> Tight Landing Page
“lexington convention space” (phrase match)
… Adgroup-controlled ad text -> Moderately Tight Landing Page
lexington convention space (broad match)
… No Dynamic Keyword Insertion -> Basic Landing page

-Massachusetts (negative broad)
-”Lexington MA” (negative phrase)
-[Lexington MA Convention Space] (negative exact)

Of course negative keywords are critical for each type, as well

If you let Google use broad or automatic match, you give up two big layers of control. Yes, it’s a hassle to create the campaigns and adgroups with so much in them, but it’s a big savings down the line. This is why when we are in the advanced Adwords sessions at conference and someone asks how many keywords people have in a given campaign, you’ll hear numbers well into the thousands.

What about discovering new keywords?

Google broad/automatic match have some interesting discovery capabilities especially if you are able to write very specific exclusionary ad text headlines as well as stuff your negative keywords list to the hilt. I think that you should isolate your automatic match campaigns in your account and just keep using them as disposable “research” type expenses. But there seems to me plenty of ways to discover keywords you should have in your account.

Skeeball Pic by Benny Mazur and Used Under Creative Commons Licens

One particular pet-peeve of mine is the forced gratuity added to meals at tourist destinations and tawny restaurants - for small parties and large ones - and the shrug of “what can I do?” the waiters/waitresses offer while pointing to the “mandated by management” disclaimer. This is taking restaurants directly into a headwind of the Groundswell of well-connected clients. “This experience was remarkable - because the management says it was.”

“Your brand is what your customers say it is” - Groundswell, by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

Lest you think I’m a cheapskate, I tip generously for great service - but it’s meant to be a reward for what I saw as remarkable effort and a pleasant experience. If I’m forced to wait at my favorite Indian Restaurant, mouth on fire, for 10 minutes while the waiter refreshes my beer (bar usually 15 feet a way) - there will be a price to pay.

I recognize that the gratuity being entirely connected to “table service” may unfairly discriminate against the kitchen staff… so I would love the ability to tip the food and service separately or at least see how it was divided.

I do not run a restaurant but know people who do, and realize that it’s a hugely difficult financial challenge. Just watching restaurants come and go here in Lexington is evidence enough of the perils they endure. Family-oriented restaurants without high-profit alcohol sales to lean on have it even tougher.

But forcing consumers to pay a mandatory gratuity for a burger and fries is stretching things a bit far - and someday may face a legal challenge. One silver lining that may keep the practice intact is that automatic gratuity has a paper trail, and thus using it as a tax shelter is far more difficult.

Johny Rockets’ Mandatory Tip

I love 50’s diner-retro experiences and Johny Rockets has always been a favorite - each time we’re passing through Newport KY or the Montgomery Road area of Cincinnati we stop in. I walked 2 miles to eat at one in Long Beach CA once. My kids love it, and despite the $50+ cost of a meal, I was a fan and I’ve even blogged about it . The restaurant is owned by Daniel Snyder and led by president Lee Sanders and they plan an extensive expansion to 1000 locations - so I might get my wish for one in Lexington metro.

No doubt, I had always thought I’d be a dedicated customer, but now I’m not as sure. Forcing a mandatory tip (no matter what the service level) has given me reason to raise eyebrows. I would have left a tip of roughly the same amount as the forced one, by the way, and left far happier knowing I had sent a message of my satisfaction.

So I was much more likely to go online to voice my opinion.

Consumer Ratings Online Are Moving to Mobile Devices

“Tipping is a deeply personal practice” says Henry Harteveldt - Travel Analyst with Forrester Research, and if restaurants remove the ability for us to take a stand against crappy service or food, what are we to do? Well, I have one idea of what’s going to happen in this Groundswell. The funnel is going to get flipped and the mobile device becomes the megaphone via ratings of these businesses.

Enter mobile restaurant rating and local search. Our voices are about to get quite a bit louder.

Restaurant ratings guides (such as Urbanspoon, pictured right) are now getting tied to GPS locators, local directories, and social networks.  Combining that with the amazon iPhone interface makes it a pleasure to use. A bad experience will be read about by hundreds of other people - at the moment they are out looking for a place to eat.

GPS-enabled phones will allow patrons to find “well-rated” restaurants near their location and rate them on the spot. They allow us to send restaurant information to our phone with a click on our desktop computer, too - in case we found one we wanted to try from a social networking friend.

Smart Restaurants Will Leverage The Trend

For good restaurants with happy customers, this is a huge advantage.

If I had a successful restaurant in a foot-traffic area, I’d put a 24″ monitor in the window rotating my review listings for all to see.

I’d hand out small “rate-us” cards to customers after setting up a simple URL (e.g. restaurant.com/rate-us) that made the ratings on sites such as Yelp a one-click proposition.

I’d position a netbook-type computer dedicated to ratings where people could voice their opinions online instead of a tip and kicking in a bonus to the staff myself when great service is reported, and having heart-to-heart talks with staff when it didn’t.

“Some business owners will post their reviews on their door, or on the counter, to show them off, and that’s a subtle way of asking customers to write about them”
- Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman

The ultimate remarkable service idea might be to combine the above and a “pay what you think it was worth” model - to get people talking to friends.

Restaurants that stand out win.

I realize how hard it is to run a restaurant - and in no way do I wish to belittle that effort or the entrepreneurial risk it requires. But with these challenges you must remember that customers are everything - and they can be your ambassador on the connected web every day if you engage them. The “quiet middle” of the satisfaction bell curve gets you nowhere - you must look to amplify the fans and listen to the critics to stand out.

PS: See “Flipping the Funnel” - a nice little 18 page e-book by Seth Godin. [pdf]

I’ve posted the audio, slides and handouts from the recent Lexington Ad Club Event.

It is a great primer for those at the starting level in Social Media - businesses that just want to hear that it’s real. There are case studies, exceptional Q&A, and a really strong fundamental explanation of Social Networks, Online Authority, and more. The panel discussion includes Nick Huhn, Jason Falls, and Scott Clark and is moderated by Bill Dotson and was sponsored by the Lexington Advertising Club.

Audio Playback (or, download the MP3 file here to import into iTunes or your MP3 player)

Full Length Video (audio is a bit quiet.  The audio on the MP3 file above is far clearer.)

Want to import it into iTunes? Download MP3 file here (right click and save)

Printer Friendly Version of Handouts also here (PDF file)

Smart businesses recognize economic slowdowns as opportunity to move forward relative to competition. As any house painter will tell you, rainy weather is the time to clean brushes, repair ladders and secure the shop. The same is true for your use of web tools. So here are 20 web-oriented ideas to make your business run more smoothly when things get busy again.

[originally appeared in Business Lexington]

Install Offsite Backups. Losing critical files from your computer can seriously damage your business and your customers’ confidence – and can even lead to lawsuits. When things are busy again, backups may get a lower priority so automating it now is a great idea.

Set up Local Business Profiles. Yahoo and Google Local profiles are used for their regional search engines. If you want to be able to show up properly next to competition on maps and city-wide searches, setting up your profile is critical.

Reserve Social Media Profiles. Sites like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Stumbleupon offer ways to grow online authority. But if your profile has been taken by someone else, it can be a big hassle.

Monitor Your Industry. Free tools such as Google Alerts and RSS make it incredibly easy to listen to the community and competition at a glance. If your industry has bloggers (most do) subscribe to the best and skim them daily.

Set Up Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) Software. Customers love consistent service, but when things are busy, that can be a challenge. Web-based CRM tools are an affordable, simple way to organize requests, proposals, support calls and follow ups.

Create Reusable Templates For Customer Messages. If you send similar notes often, learn to use the template feature of most email programs. This lets you cut down the accumulation of time spent typing the same information again and again.  Setting

Update Your Website. Outdated corporate websites look unprofessional and often rate poorly in search engines. Check your site for correct content, broken links, and appearance on web browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Adding a FAQ can reduce service/support calls, and a map can help people find you without calling.  It could be that now’s the time to invest more time and energy into this critical part of your business.

Check Your Media Licenses. Stock photo companies use sophisticated image scanning to seek out unlicensed images on the web, filing immediate infringement often over $5000 per image. Take the time to locate licenses for each image used, even if someone else did the website.

Start A Blog. These widely misunderstood publishing platform that forms the foundation for social media involvement. Unfortunately, they are frequently set up and used incorrectly – so now is a great time to do it right.

Get Involved in Social Media. Authentic and unselfish participation in discussions on social networks has a magical effect on reputation, especially keeping in mind that hundreds may review what you’ve posted. There’s no faster way to grow trust and authority in your market in front of people who matter.

Master Wide Area Access. I’ve been surprised how few businesses are able to connect while out with customers. Now’s a great time to master this.

Participate in Q&A Sites and Forums. Taking the time to answer a couple of questions a week in your industry can grow online authority and trust in a way that costs very little. Examples include LinkedIn Answers and Yahoo! Answers.

Install Website Analytics. It usually takes an hour to set up Google Analytics and start getting insights into a web site visitors’ behavior as well as which marketing mechanisms are working.

Set Up Remote Access. If you travel, having the ability to remotely access your office computers can save a meeting or hours of driving.

Read These New Media Books Groundswell by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, and Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae are examples that can transform thinking and get you ready for the future.

Get SPAM Under Control. A hosted solution such as spamstopshere can save a business thousands of dollars a year in lost productivity for just a few dollars per user per month, and takes just a few hours to set up.

Secure Laptops and Portable Drives. Lost or stolen laptops and “thumbdrives” represent a huge risk that can open your business to huge and even litigation. Securing these data for transport is relatively easy and affordable.

Shore Up Your Content Filtering. Studies show that 25-30% of work computers have illegal or inappropriate files such as pornographic images stored on them, exposing business to potentially disastrous litigation and embarrassment.

Update Your Wireless Network. These are huge productivity helpers but most are set up improperly or use old security standards. This can expose a business invasion by opportunistic hackers or simple bandwidth leeches.  When you’re done securing it, consider providing Wi-Fi access to your customers.  I mean, even McDonalds is doing it.

Solicit Customer Ratings. Many regional search engines and city-wide websites have the ability for customers to rate your company. While you never want to “buy” ratings or rate yourself, asking your best customers to give their thoughts can give you a competitive advantage in those searches.

Bonus Tips:

Research Lower Cost Healthcare Programs for Employees.  I do not want to advocate reducing the quality of the program, but choosing one that offers higher levels of automation, web-access, and still maintains the care for your employees may be available

Consider Outsourcing. Tim Ferris brought this idea to the general public by quoting A. J. Jacobs’ Esquire article “My outsourced life” in his best-selling book “The Four Hour Workweek“.  Things just keep getting better and in a few days of note-taking, I’m betting you could create a list of outsourcable tasks.

Saw Image by Chrissy W used under Creative Commons Image