If you want to see a company who knows how to work the blogosphere, it doesn’t get any better than what I’ve been seeing over here at Vinny Carpenter’s blog.

David Friend, CEO of Carbonite is all over the blog post answering questions and solving problems for people - and impressing the hell out of me.

I can’t use his products so I cannot say much about them… Why? I used external fixed disk drives and Carbonite doesn’t support right now.

I use Mozy - but now have a far better opinion of Carbonite since watching this guy and if they ever add the support I need, I’ll be in the right mindset to give it a try. It looks to me like they are taking care of consumers and that is terrific to see.

But I now have a new example of doing this right.

My email to the client representative for a $10k portal software said:

“The edit RSS page for the portal is giving a page not found error for [I entered url] - what do you think would cause that? Thanks, Scott”

The reply from their customer service email:

“We don’t answer questions like that here, and don’t forward things to the support team as a policy. You need to fill in a support ticket for this. [link]”

The link was to a form that had 54 fields. I felt compelled to let them know who the customer was and went on with my day, pissed. It was all I could think of when we had a budget meeting about whether we should continue using the portal.  We didn’t renew.

Was this kind of behavior the reason we cancelled a $12k/year support arrangement? Not sure, but I certainly wasn’t in the best mood when it came time for me to voice my recommendation for the renewal.

I know support ticket systems pretty well in the small-enterprise variety. I have had a few when I was doing hosting and have interacted with probably 20 different ones. My company has since moved to basecamp to give things a more human touch, and basecamp has recently followed some of the advice in this post. I am guilty of the things in the past. But to you, beloved reader, I will say I see the errors of my ways.

Let me be the first to say that if you have 100s of clients, selling a commodity item such as hosting, I recognize the workflow issues you’re facing. We all need to move support issues through the system as fast as possible when margins are razor thin. But if the support systems creators were a little more aware of the non-tech and/or busy customer community, perhaps things could improve.

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At Great Wolf Lodge today with the kids. A nice place to get away, close to home, and I’ve no complaints about the room or the waterpark.

By the time we got into the restaurant we were starving, and noticed that they were carrying around Thrasher’s-style buckets of french fries. We thought we’d get a couple buckets to share with our burgers, sandwiches and such. It would be fun to eat fries from a bucket, kind of like it’s fun to drink tea from a mason jar.

But as in many things today, all is not what it seems. Our buckets arrived, and before we could get two people set with fries, we hit bottom - a false bottom lined with bowls. We can’t complain about the price of the fries - but they were deliberately deceptive.

It was a lie. It made us think about what other corners they were cutting just beyond the kitchen door. The burgers were fine and the waitress did a good job, but this silly little lie stuck with me. The labor is the major cost of any restaurant and it would have cost very little to fill the bucket and keep the promise. Perhaps they’ve determined there was much waste? But in that case, they should just stop using the buckets completely and just put the fries in a standard container. Then they would have kept the promise for a little container of fries.

Everything you do is part of your marketing.  Even tiny promises can’t be broken.

As much as the decor, logo design, uniforms, and clean tables contribute to it, so does your little lie that saved $0.20 worth of french fries.

Ok, folks - I pose a challenge to the geekdom out there. How to disable, permanently, these obnoxious speaker boxes that are attached to every friggin’ gas pump I’ve been to in the last 6 months. The MUTE buttons are worn out (”dimple collapse”) so you gotta sit there and listen to the bloody things go on, incomprehensively, about worthless crap inside the stores. It was some brilliant marketer’s idea - I can hear it now “We need to bring people into the store from the pump, ’cause that’s where the profits are. ” I know a few out there think it’s a great idea. Muzak was bad enough, but, it was in the distance, and didn’t drown out your cell phone or NPR on the car radio. And next it will be video, where we’ll need a different solution (I am so absolutely sick of TV everywhere I go - yes I own a universal TV-off keychain. ) And finally, Google Gas Pumps will surely be next.

How about an opt-out feature where I can pay you five freakin’ bucks for a year of peace and quiet? It’s unlikely. Nielsen media reports a 70% brand recall for gas station TV. Damn, that’s good. But I wonder how many are remembering the brand so they can avoid any product annoying them at the gas pump. “Never, ever buy friggin’ Dr. Pepper again.”

So I call out to you, the Hardware Gods of the Interweb….

I figure if we can mess with the electronic voting systems, we should be able to fk with these things a bit.

So, electronics wizards, how do you disable them without opening them or beating them with an object or getting electrocuted (and starting a large fire.)

Electronic pulse?
Handheld High Output Laser?
Freon-freeze+ gentle tap?
Secret series of keypresses? (that would be ideal!)

All ideas welcome.

Required Disclaimer, Of COURSE I am not condoning vandalism in any shape or form. This is just an academic discussion.

Lighting Store in the Dark About True Cost of Arcane Policies

I recently went to get my hair cut at one of the most Mayberry-like barber shops you’ve ever seen. It’s the Facebook of the 1950s, stuck in time, the chairs are original. The smiles are authentic. Conversations filled the air. It was a pretty day, and the place was busy.

A person I know well was there with her child, and was talking about how she recently bought a lighting fixture . Once it was up, she didn’t like it. It just didn’t look right when they held it up in it’s proposed location. She it back to the store in original condition. That’s when the trouble started. (more…)

When the going gets tough, do the tough go online?

Last year, according to the Interactive Avertising Bureau, Online advertising in the US grew 25% (17% not including search) during Q1-Q3 of last year over 2006. Currently the web accounts for less than 10% of all advertising spend but nearly a quarter of the time Americans spend consuming media (higher in some surveys.) Those numbers are full of potential growth for online, possibly accelerated by a softening economy. 26% of households are using DVRs, like TiVo, to skip television advertising, up from just 19% only a year ago. At the same time, 35% of households actively use portable media players, avoiding radio advertising, while 52% of households are using broadband internet at home during typical television viewing hours, according to Forrester.

If we enter an economic downturn, advertisers will want to look at measurable returns and strong ROI - and web marketing, seo (such as link building) and paid search advertising with testing can be tracked far better than most other types if done well. Even if the number of advertisers goes down or advertisers spend less, they are not going to reduce their online spends much… or possibly increase them as they shift money from TV and newspaper ads.

“In rich countries the internet is claiming a growing share of advertising—at the expense of traditional media, such as TV and print. There is still a gap between the time people spend online as a fraction of their media consumption (about a fifth) and the fraction of marketing budgets spent on the internet (about 7.5%). Many companies are trying to narrow the gap, which will sustain internet advertising during a downturn. Search advertising, the most effective kind of all, should be safest.” The chart to the right shows a terrific correlation between GDP and advertising.

Recently I did a survey of a client’s paid search campaigns and found that on a monthly basis, every 1% in improvement in conversion equaled $5000 in leads. The smart money for them would be on paying for continued development of high quality content, testing, and smart tactical adjustments and build those numbers as high as possible. But it’s scary - not knowing. I try to get analytics in place and teach the basics, but it’s hard to punk down $20 large on a campaign when you’re not sure what’s going to happen. Then again, you could guess. Or you could watch competitors take a bite. It may be smart to pull back but I find that unlikely.

Seth Godin says that marketing is all about promises.  Brutal honesty, authenticity and ethics are critical as well.

“If you must overpomise to get the sale, don’t do it.” says Godin. 

I have turned down four requests for new work today.  They were all “meatballs.” I could not keep the promises that the requesters wanted because the ideas were horrible or there was a swarm of well-funded competition all over them.   If I would have started these projects, I would have been lying.  I would have been breaking a promise (implied) that I could make it work.

A great website cannot save a poor/ordinary/boring product or idea.
And great SEO/SEM cannot save a poorly done website.

You cannot thrive online imitating an entrenched, well-done competitor.  You must be different and tell a better story about better stuff.  You must introduce scarcity and value.  If you can’t, you’re in the wrong business.

Admit it.  Quit, Fail, whatever… and move on to a new idea.  They are out there - millions of them. 

It appears that the Microsoft Content Ads are now generally available to everyone.

For Advertisers
Unlike search ads that are triggered by keywords a potential customer enters, content ads are triggered by certain words in articles or Web content. If you are bidding on those words, your ad might be displayed somewhere on the page.

And for Publishers
If you are interested in learning more about Microsoft’s publisher program, just complete their form to keep informed about new developments, invitations to participate in focus groups or feedback sessions.

First introduced in August to beta testers, the content network gives people more reach on the MSN family of networks.

To learn more, check out:

• Content Ads product info
• Content Ads FAQ
• Content Ads webinar

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