We felt aftershocks in the office at around 10:15 this morning. The search term “chicago earthquake” is “spicy hot” right now according to Google Trends. Search activity peaked about 6 hours ago … what’s interesting (and note that the timescale is P.S.T. and we are in C.S.T.) is that search activity picks up immediately after the earthquake occurred. I experienced an earthquake in 1988 while living in upstate NY and we had to wait an hour, glued to the radio, to learn whether or not I was hallucinating. I’m not sure how quickly official news of the quake was posted, but many turned to Google for information as soon as the event occurred.
Surfing around I found this great USGS user contributed data earthquake experience map. If you felt the quake post your experience.
Robert Cringely has a great post this week, “The Truth About IT Consultants”. He talks about the general state of IT consulting, but I think it applies nicely to the web content management system world. As I read the article I grew concerned that this was just another trash the IT consultants rant until I came to this paragraph:
“The best consultants are the ones who come with a portfolio of products and tools. Their trick is to have a really good portfolio of stuff that really works, is really good, and can be sold and implemented quickly in a very cost-effective way. So it isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all when a consultant offers to sell you tools, as long as they are the right tools and the consultant really knows how to use them.”
Exactly what we are all about!
Now and then companies feel compelled to send a blanket untargeted email to everyone whose email address they have ever acquired. Well, control that urge. But if you’re going to do that, here’s a hint: Don’t share your email list with all of your recipients. If you put everyone’s address in the “To:” line, you’ve just given your list away – and possibly worse!
I received an email from a Chicago public relations firm announcing their office move. In this email, they gifted me with over 130 email addresses of clients, prospects and friends. Thank you. Pretty stupid I thought. And from a PR firm yet. Wow.
Not more than 2 hours passed on the same day when I received an email from Lewis Lin at Google. Lewis addressed his email to me and over 300 of my Google marketing peers. This time, war broke out as opportunists among the 300 began to solicit the list they’d just received. Aside from the emails going back to Lewis telling him what an idiot he is, this one message among the skirmishers captured the general sentiment: “Contact me again and I will make sure that our lawyers contact you…Failing this … will result in me adding your domain to black lists.”
The best practice, of course, is to send targeted emails to opt-in subscribers who both expect and value your email. Preferably, you will send these emails using an email service provider that provides the technology to properly deliver and track the delivery results. But if you feel the need to blast your trusted business partners with an email, do yourself a favor and conceal the recipients. To do otherwise puts your organization, its reputation and your proprietary client email list in peril.
Years ago Paul Simon sang of “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” And there are probably as many ways for an email newsletter publisher to offer its subscribers a way to leave – or unsubscribe from – future mailings. Until today, my favorite bad email unsubscribe practice has been “Guess my email address.” This bad practice requires that I tell the email publisher what my email address is. Then they tell me whether I guessed right in telling them which of several addresses that float into my Outlook client is the one to which they mailed. Chances are you have your own favorite but un-amusing bad email unsubscribe practice.
But I submit there is a new and undisputed king of bad email unsubscribe practices held by a leader in the technology field. In an email from Adobe System Incorporated came the following option:
"This is an advertising message from Adobe Systems Incorporated, its affiliates and agents ("Adobe"), 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA 95110 USA. If you’d prefer not to receive e-mail like this from Adobe in the future, please mail your unsubscribe request to:
UNSUBSCRIBE
Adobe Systems Incorporated
P.O. Box 2205
Beaverton, OR 97075 USA"
There it is, the winner and king of bad email unsubscribe practices. If you want to get off this email list, send them a letter. Can anything compete with this?
You may have caught the incredible PR coup that Amazon enjoyed a couple weeks ago when New York Times columnist Joe Nocera shared a first-hand account of his experience with a company completely focused on client delight.
Unlike a lot of these testimonial stories, this one wasn’t placed by a well-connected PR firm. Rather, it was actually misplaced. That is, it was a misplaced delivery and a leap to save the day (and forestall the Christmas Grinch) by Amazon that won them this priceless ink.
I was humbled by this story. Every day we work to find ways to deliver delightful client service. It is easy to mouth the words, “client focused” or “customer-centric” or any number of phrases that, at worst, become clichés or company kitchen poster slogans. The truth is, clients are a tough and demanding crowd. So achieving this outcome doesn’t just happen with a smile, a thank you and an annual holiday card.
Customer satisfaction is not enough. Fred Reichheld in his book, The Ultimate Question asks “Would you recommend us to a friend?” Only a 9 or 10 on a 10 point scale is considered a positive score. And the value of this personal referral is the path to sustainable growth. Having a national columnist make your business the object lesson of client love is certainly remarkable. But the same activity happens daily among millions of businesses, and I hope Duo is one of them.
At Duo we are focused on client satisfaction. We hope to understand our clients’ needs and goals, and respect their knowledge of their business. We are committed to setting achievable customer expectations, and ensuring that commitments to customers are met. If you are a client – let me know if we delivered on this expectation. If you’re not yet a client and want to put us to the test, please give me a call.
It’s the weekend (almost) and my inbox contained a cheery personal greeting from Blockbuster, “Hi, Sonny”, in their email reminding me that it is January 17 (The email was sent at 7:44AM on the 18th). What intrigued me was their offer to “Customize your Newsletter.” I’m completely invested in the “me in consuMEr.
Clicking the link, signing into the site, I was warmly embraced by Blockbuster with a personalized set of recommendations that read, “Based on the 0 (note: that would be zero) movies you’ve rated, we think you’ll like these titles.” This was followed by a list of titles that I might never rent.
Here’s the deal. Personalization through automation is tricky. If you can’t do it right, don’t do it. And don’t trip over the details. There is no need to tell me the date on an email that is date stamped. But if you do, get it right.
And, oh by the way, I never could figure out how to customize my newsletter. Blockbuster stock hovers at its all time low. Don’t follow their example, just learn from it.
If a website could make New Year’s Resolutions, what would they be? We’ve tried to imagine ourselves as if we were a website and taken a crack at this annual tradition. Maybe you want to suggest some of your own. Here’s ours:
1. Be a better listener - Hear my visitors
- My website presence is a dialogue, not a speech. This year I’m going to pause, take a breath and offer my visitors more opportunity to tell me what’s on their mind by offering response forms, newsletter signups, interactive polls and anything else I can think of.
2. Make more friends & get some (link) love
- The more websites who link to me, the more popular I’ll be. When I’m well linked, search engines will believe that my content is relevant and send me visitors. Visitors will follow links to me from sources they trust.
3. Get trim; slim down
- What? Not everyone visits me through a zippy high speed broadband connection? I will check my PDF documents, page file sizes and everything else to make sure that my website loads rapidly and completely.
4. Accommodate the disabled
- Over 50 million Americans have disabilities of one sort or another. I’m going work harder to insure that none of them have difficulty gaining access to my resources. I will explore how I can become compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act as a matter of best practice and good world-wide netizenship.
5. Tell the story my visitors want; not just what I want to say
- I’m great & wonderful & handsome & talented, yada, yada, yada. But my site visitors don’t care. They believe in WIIFM – What’s In It For Me. So I’m going to fix my content to talk about what my visitors want to know and not about my spectacular self.
6. Be graceful with Browsers
- Internet Explorer may still be King. But Firefox is Queen and Safari is a well known Knight. My web metrics tell me that plenty of my visitors view me through Firefox and Safari. I’m going to test to make sure that everyone can visit my site without having all my graphic design work look corrupted on regularly used but less popular website browsers.
7. Add more and better images
- Those side burns and bell bottoms are so, uh…. Time for some updated pictures. And surely I can find something better than that clichéd image of 2 anonymous people shaking hands.
8. Participate in a social network
- OK, this isn’t so much about me as a website. But I do get out of the house once in a while. And these Internet social networks seem Web2point0h! So I’ll load up my website address on a few virtual business cards and circulate among others with similar interests.
9. Update my copyright
- My 2007 (or older) copyright notice is last year’s news. Before the New Year is a day old, I’ll make sure it reads copyright 2008
10. Try new things (blogs, podcasts, RSS, email newsletters, Google Analytics and make old things better.
- As a website, I’m a work in progress. My public launch was just the end of my gestation. I am still developing. That means trying new tools to grow the relationship between me and my site visitors or improving the one’s I have. I’ll use my web analytics to get a handle on what works, establish baselines and drive improvement.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
Cheap Uncle is a shopping website that merges online couponing and comparison shopping into one, easy-to-use site. By taking coupons from its sister site, CouponCabin, and combining them with product price comparisons, CheapUncle uses unique patent-pending technology to provide its customers with a money-saving experience.
All shoppers need to do is log on to Cheap Uncle and plug the item they want into the search engine. Within seconds, the virtual "cheap uncle" will search coupons, deals and pricing information of more than 14,000 online retailers to find the best possible price. A link is then provided to the merchant’s site for easy shopping.
The magic behind this consumer shopping experience is Yahoo’s application programming interface (API) that enables the mashup of Yahoo Store retailers and product coupons housed in Coupon Cabin’s database. Additional sleight of hand is provided by Amazon’s EC2/S3 virtual server and storage system which permits Cheap Uncle to dynamically scale their server power and storage capacity to meet the demands of online shoppers.
Cheap Uncle is the first business model of its type using the online tools from Yahoo and Amazon. Originally planned as a massive hardware implementation requiring the purchase of multiple servers and the provisioning of substantial bandwidth, Duo engineered a composite Web 2.0 application that permits Cheap Uncle to pay only for the capacity that it needs. As a result, this Cheap Uncle has a deal for you.
Take online business networking seriously. Facebook the mega-social networking website is making headlines. People over 30 are first hearing the name and some even getting a Facebook account. But pundits are deriding the business person’s appeal of a social environment, such as Facebook, whose forms of making contact include head butts, licks & slaps (virtually, of course). This is not an auspicious beginning for online business networking.
But it is a beginning. Under the very big shadow of Facebook, among the top ten most visited locations on the web, a myriad of online business networking enterprises and experiments are taking shape. Among these, LinkedIn has clearly gained momentum. Although, if Facebook is an all night party, LinkedIn has the sobriety of a Sunday sermon. The great news, however, is the choice of online business networks is growing. “Tipping point” momentum will separate winners from losers as each network strives for a sufficient level of participation.
One proof of the rabid competition to achieve viability in this evolving business space are those sites paying for prominence (pay per click) in search engine results for phrases like “online business networking.” No recommendation intended, but pay attention to the concept behind one advertiser, RedCarpet Monday, which bills itself as “an invitation-only social business network, featuring Central Florida’s most successful business owners…” This site leverages exclusivity and geography to build its network. Or, more generally, CollectiveX, offers an environment of groups to join - or the ability to customize your own. For example, included here is the UrbanPhilly.com group, primarily targeted to urban professionals between the ages 25 to 44 in the Greater Philadelphia tri-state area (PA, NJ and DE).
With networking environments bringing groups together based on affinity and mutual interests, online business networking sites are now offering an equivalent experience in the professional world. I recommend you get online. Washing your pajamas and brushing your hair is optional. There is a lot happening here and you should begin to learn it from the ground up. I keep scanning the space for a better internet perch, but for now you can find me here on LinkedIn.
Senior Application Architect Adam Howitt will present "How Amazon S3 and EC2 Saved My Marriage" at CFUnited Express on September 30th, here in Chicago. Adam’s presentation explains how hosting a popular website, http://www.walkjogrun.net, from a guest bedroom closet takes up space, squeals too much and causes marital disagreements before elaborating on his Amazon solution.
Amazon S3 (simple storage service) is a flexible, cheap way to host files on Amazon’s infrastructure to speed up the delivery of the static elements of your web pages. Amazon EC2 (elastic compute cloud) is a beta service offered to allow you to boot virtual servers on Amazon’s infrastructure to handle surges in traffic or provide extra processing power on demand.
Visit the CFUnited website: http://express.cfunited.com/go/chicago/2007/
