Archive for the 'Internet Marketing' category
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
I was getting very tired of some rather obtuse discussions in the LinkedIn groups and in particular WordPress.
I decided to change my primary address in LinkedIn so this nonsense would end up in my secondary email account (non-time critical items and newsletters).
Still getting endless groups updates on my main email address.
So I decide to remove my main address altogether from LinkedIn.
Still getting endless emails from LinkedIn.
I submit a support ticket.
Member Comment: Alec Kinnear
06/20/2011 05:41
Hi,
I've removed from my account as I couldn't stand the incessant emails from groups anymore.
I'm still getting notifications to this address despite being my primary address now.
Please help stop the emails to
Making the web work for you, Alec
A nice enough support person by the name of Darci offers a polite but vague reply:
LinkedIn Response
06/20/2011 14:53
Hi Alec,
Thank you for contacting us.
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.
Please know that we are fully aware of this issue and have a team of dedicated, highly qualified individuals who are working diligently to resolve this.
I appreciate your patience and support as we attempt to resolve this matter.
Regards,
Darci
LinkedIn Customer Service
When I start to hear about dedicated, highly qualified individuals, I start to get nervous. It makes me think about McDonalds dedicated restaurant crews. So I ask Darcie for a bit more precision:
Member Comment: Alec Kinnear
06/21/2011 08:40
Hello Darci,
Thanks for your email.
When do you expect this issue to be resolved?
I do not have hooked up to LinkedIn in any way now, so effectively you are spamming me.
Making the web work for you, Alec
Apparently vague promises are fine but resolution is not.
LinkedIn Response
06/21/2011 10:23
Hi Alec,
I'm sorry but I do not have a time frame that I can give out. We are working on the issue, and will contact you as soon as we know anything further. I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.
Regards,
Darci
LinkedIn Customer Service
No time frame is really not okay. LinkedIn has hijacked my primary email address and won't let go:
Member Comment: Alec Kinnear
06/21/2011 11:33
Hi Darci!
No time frame is not acceptable.
Please remove from your servers completely. I do not want any LinkedIn messages to that address at all.
Thanks.
Making the web work for you, Alec
The situation is worse than I thought. LinkedIn will really spam me until the ISP's block their pipes:
On 21 Jun 2011, at 17:23, LinkedIn Customer Support wrote:
Subject: Still receiving LinkedIn emails on after removing it from account
Hi Alec,
I'm sorry but we have a bug in our system at this time that is not releasing email addresses that were entered into it at one time and now removed. We have a team working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. I'm sorry for the inconvenience this is causing, but there is nothing further I can do at this time. We will contact you as soon as the issue has been resolved.
Regards,
Darci
LinkedIn Customer Service
I'm not happy about sitting around, waiting for LinkedIn to stop spamming me.
Moral of the story
I'm very sorry to have given LinkedIn a primary address in the first place. I recommend you don't.
Where LinkedIn get marks is for having a customer service department who respond to emails at all. That's a big improvement over Google or Facebook.
Now I really know why I'm not on Facebook. I'm sure it's far worse over there if you want to stop the deluge.
Practical Advice Before You Close Your Account
Several readers have written to complain that closing your account doesn't stop the LinkedIn Spam:
I am so upset I put my primary email address on Linkedin (which I didn’t do on Facebook). I joined both of these social websites to keep in touch with actual groups I am an active member of but LI quickly wore out my welcome mat. I’ve tried to remove my welcome mat but LI ignores my closed account still to this day. Hopefully anyone reading this is smarter than I was and takes these warnings to heart and uses a throwaway email account to subscribe if at all. WARNING: You will not be able to unsubscribe no matter what their website states!!!!!
Here's what you must do first, before you close your account.
Be sure to change your email address to one which you can verify and then turn off. Give it a week or two for the new email address to take before cancelliing your account.
Be sure to unsubscribe to email updates from every group you've ever joined. While I know unsubscribing to email updates works, I'm not sure that unsubscribing to an active group before unsubscribing to email updates actually works.
Further Practical Advice on how to get LinkedIn Shut Down as Spammers
There's a service called SpamCop.net. Sign up and report your LinkedIn messages there. If you use Google, Hotmail, MSN, AOL or Yahoo there are huge spam buttons there.
Report every LinkedIn email. While LinkedIn has some corporate protection (as one of the big boys club), if even half the people getting their unwanted emails complain about it, LinkedIn emails will be reclassified as spam and forced to change their policies.
LinkedIn Management and Reid Hoffman
It's a pity LinkedIn management are such wankers. The service would be valuable if they had any respect for users/clients. I don't know if Reid Hoffman has any idea about how much hatred his lazy/deliberate spamming policies would generate on the net. Hoffman was a founding director at Paypal (perhaps the web's most hated company, although Paypal appear to be trying to clean up their act somewhat now, before regulators do it for them), so perhaps no surprise Hoffman has no respect for users.
Hoffman is also responsible for setting up the first round of angel investment in Facebook. Again no surprise about the lack of respect for users. Hoffman again was a first round investor and director at Zynga, well known for spamming Facebook and other users and for scam ads.
Generally Hoffman is a fat rude prick with no respect for users. He has a consistent background of involvement with the net's worst spammers. This is the man who has rough ridden users to $3 billion net worth. Report his spam mercilessly and shut him down.
Who says crime doesn't pay? Unfortunately, crime often leaves its traces on your body and your face.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
wordpress 312 wp ecommerce 383
This week I had an interesting conversation with Dan Milward, the marketing guy and co-founder of the WP e-Commerce WordPress shopping cart plugin.
Let's start with the facts. WP eComm is now on version 3.8.4. Currently, the reports in from front line users are: 4 say it works, 12 say it's broken.
Why People Hate WP eCommerce so much
Dan told me that sources inside Automattic had revealed to him that in the past as soon as Instinct Entertainment publish a new version there are five reports of the plugin being broken on current WordPress. His sources then erased that feedback.
This is a very bad sign: when you need insider help to erase negative feedback. Not the first time I've seen this happen at Automattic: Mark Jacquith has had to warn plugin database maintainers off deleting plugins which compete with their friends plugins. Second bad sign: people who hate your plugins enough to wait for a new version to mark it as broken.
Dan manages it. There are three strategies he uses which bring Instinct Entertainment to such grief.
Keep reading WP e-Commerce 3.8 Review: Why WP eComm code is still broken
By Alec
Internet Marketing, WordPress |
Friday, November 5th, 2010
If you are purchasing online advertising you really have to watch your media partners like a hawk. Who could imagine that a respected mainstream publication like ZDnet would be ripping off all their advertisers?
Here's what happens if you visit a ZDnet page...if you click on anywhere except in the article you get taken to the advertisers ad (today it's SAP getting the shaft: target is http://www28.sap.com/mk/get/comcrmlp ).
In my case I was just reading about Microsoft paying off the Department of the Interior to issue a security warning on Google Apps and approve the Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) for internal use. I did not and do not have the slightest interest in SAP, except as a large competitor whose offerings we can outdo with micro business streamlining solutions (we recently built an end to end online rental store with inventory for a client for less than the cost of SAP training for three employees: our client is delighted and she owns her software outright now and can scale up to twenty locations in different cities all run out of a single database).
Imagine my surprise when I ended up on the SAP ad five times while just scrolling around. It turns out the page background on both sides will create a click. When you put a ZDnet page in the background, just clicking on the window to bring it forward will generate an ad click. Not cool ZDnet.
Keep reading How ZDnet is ripping off advertisers like SAP via click fraud
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Great first day at the ProSEO 2010 Seminar in London with SEOmoz and Distilled. Wonderful to see old friends again. Here are just a few pictures from the day and some more of the superb night which Lynsey Little organised for us at the opening night party.
These are just a few selects, uncorrected and uncropped. Distilled will have many more photos of the speakers in their own coverage of the seminar.
Click on any picture to enlarge with Lightbox.
The Day
Rand Fishkin
Caitlin Krumdieck
Keep reading First Day at ProSEO seminar with Distilled and SEOmoz
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO |
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
Recently we've done a couple of Typepad to WordPress conversions for a very nice Austrian PR and marketing expert by the name of Karin Schmollgruber. Karin's very up-to-date on social media and Facebook.
While we are quite active on LinkedIn and Twitter and various other social sites, we avoid Facebook like leprosy. Mark Zuckerberg has shown time and time again that he is not someone to be trusted with your data. In fact, the origins of Facebook themselves are dubious, he hijacked someone else's code and project.
Our fundamental objections to Facebook go even deeper and affect our relationship with Google as well (I won't use Gmail, although we do use Gcal and some Google docs at work and of course I use the webmaster tools as well). Basically, in the Soviet Union, the government spent a huge part of GDP on its security apparatus of KGB gumshoes and their paid and unpaid informants, maintaining huge filing cabinet in the Lubyanka on people of interest. In the US, the FBI did similar surveillance of Black Panthers, human rights and Indian groups, although these activities represented a much smaller part of US GDP.
Keep reading How to Get Facebook Fans in German (and Why You Might Not Want Them)
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
I should preface this article by saying that of the social networks, we like LinkedIn best. They don't try to get ahold of information about you they shouldn't have and they give the account owner very good granular control of what appears in his or her account. On the other hand, sometimes one wants to close an account. And it should be easy.
How can one quickly and easily delete one's LinkedIn account? It turns out nohow.
First, it’s almost impossible to do it without seeking out very detailed documentation. Fortunately you have arrived at the right place.
The received wisdom is that you have to open up a customer support ticket to close your LinkedIn account. That’s no longer the case. Possibly thanks to the direct pressure that celebrity programmer (can a programmer be a celebrity?) David Heinemeier Hansson brought to bear.
In the second round of Heinemeier Hansson’s LinkedIn let me go hell, Heinemeier Hansson wrote:
But two people from LinkedIn has now been in touch and hopefully we can work this out. I’ll try my best to get the quit-account operation to be automatic, not manual. That’s the big problem.
But it’s still not easy.
Keep reading LinkedIn: How to Delete your Account
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Friday, March 19th, 2010
We use a WordPress plugin called Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin to put books from Amazon on some of our client's sites. Well, we used to, until recently.
This plugin produces ridiculously long Amazon links for Amazon Affiliate Program (which let's you make money advertising Amazon products):
http://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Over-Artist-Fiction-Thomas-Beller/dp/0393321711%3FSubscriptionId%3D(Access-Key-ID-here)%26tag%3Dfoliovision-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0393321711
There are parts of this long URL which seem to be pretty easy to understand and they seem important and there are some part which seem to be redundant.
After reading some articles on this topic we decided to create a quick tool to generating these Amazon Affiliate Links. The basic idea comes from this nice article from 2008 and even nicer from 2009.
Check out our tool here:
http://foliovision.com/seo-tools/marketing/amazon-affiliate-link-generator
Other thing which bugs us about the Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin is that it's not caching the images. The images are always loading from Amazon servers - slowing down your page load.
That's why we are working on our own Amazon plugin which we may release on wordpress.com when it's ready (it will have nice URLs and will store the images locally, among other cool features).
By Martin
Internet Marketing, WordPress |
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
The argument against the cloud succinctly made:
Cloud computing will not achieve measured penetration because data is the penultimate when it comes to IP and what drives value for corporations going forward. Look no further than Toys R' Us and Target as two recent examples. Once they realized that they had allowed the fox [Amazon] to guard their hen houses [i.e., their online stores], they immediately withdrew from Amazon's cloud.
When a competitor [or potential competitor] knows where your customer is located, what your customer purchases, how much they pay, etc., then you have given your business away -- pure and simple.
Do you think that Amazon, EBay and Google are not data-mining every transaction that occurs for every online store that they host ? The minute that they see a trend in a new product selling in quantity, etc., they will use the data to their advantage, which usually disadvantages the owner of the data.
Putting your data in the cloud is a sucker's bet.
via Sky's the Limit - Barrons.com.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Microsoft adCenter is Microsoft's answer to Google's AdWords. It's the main search engine business for Microsoft.
Imagine you are a simple businessman, who has his own website and you want to bring more traffic on your site. As you are familiar with Microsoft software for decades now, naturally you'll want to check out their online advertising system.
Here are some basic guidelines to make the experience less painful:
First pitfall - Don't even consider using Safari or any other browser except IE and Mozilla, adCenter website does not support other browsers. Their help center states that also Mac and Virtual machines are not supported.
microsoft adCenter Safari
Before he found out that all Mac browsers are banned, Alec, our creative director, spent several hours trying to get Microsoft adCenter to work with all of the browsers under Mac OS, including spoofing the user-agent. Futile, he assures me. You can't even view the System requirements page!
Keep reading Microsoft AdCenter Setup for Mac Users
By Peter
Internet Marketing, WordPress |
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Gary Vaynerchuk success - photo vinama
Online wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk is really getting around. I've seen him collaborating with internet marketers in the last few months on some relatively dodgy campaigns.
Lately I caught him in somewhat better company. Vaynerchuk was recently interviewed over at e-consultancy and he let fly what I think is the key to his success.
Who should be in charge of this sort of participation [in social media]? Do any rules of engagement need to be established?
It's really like the person who is wearing the underwear... who is controlling the game? That person needs to establish the rules for how you approach it and ultimately rules are hard to control in social media. You are better off letting the world run wild. You cannot completely control your message any more. Be as authentic and awesome as possible or you will fall like the Berlin Wall.
Vaynerchuk's absolutely right. For two years, one of my clients was always very uptight about stating his real opinion. The website languished. Since the last six months, he's been more and more willing to go out on a (at least partway) limb. And since he turned the page so to speak on his corporate persona his website and his sales are going through the roof.
What people are seeking on the internet is authenticity.
How to do change your corporate voice for a real voice?
- Sit down and think about what's special about you.
- Ask your friends about what they love about you.
- Put that personality into your marketing.
If after careful reflection you don't think your personality will bear marketing - some don't, some people are just not cut out to expose themselves in any way - find someone else to be the front person for your organization. And support them fully in their endeavours.
Who would you rather buy from? A person you like or faceless corporation hiding behind marketingspeak and safe publicity material? Makes it pretty clear doesn't it?
Otherwise, go for it. Jump right in. The water's perfect!
By Alec
Business, Internet Marketing |
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
I received yet another fake domain renewal notice, this time from Domain Submission Center. This one was from the city in which I went to university, Toronto.
What was new about this scam is that it used the search engine submission scam, within the domain renewal.
Go and learn more about the Domain Submission Center.
In line with this article, we've finally started our new tool, a directory of internet marketing scams to help people avoid getting ripped off.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Monday, April 28th, 2008
For years, I've been on the Site Build It list. SBI is the creation of the rather annoyingly gushy Ken Evoy who never stops his carnival barker cries about his one-stop-site-creation tool.
Ken Evoy Pumping Site Sell
Evoy's been at it since the bad old days when the internet was a mess and Site Built It! did have the advantage of actually getting a website up in some form - easier than coding html from scratch for the neophyte.
Throughout SBI's history, Evoy has shrieked about his process and his proprietary tools. On the surface, a clear process and proprietary tools are a good idea. Probably worth the price of admission (or so I thought at the time). The issue with the proprietary tools (which otherwise might be a good deal) is that you can only use them a little bit. Come and play for one hour per week, see you next week. Not exactly inviting brainstorming or creativity.
In contrast, the indepdendent expensive (many of which are free) tools Evoy condemns let you use them as much as you like once you find them.
Keep reading SBI (Site Build It) versus WordPress: How to Structure a Website
By Alec
Internet Marketing, WordPress |
Monday, December 31st, 2007
I was looking up information on Canadian accounting software (or more particularly looking for a Mac OS X offline tool for Freshbooks, the amazing online accounting system with which I run Foliovision.com.
I couldn't find a Mac OS X tool for Freshbooks but I did run across a great website which typifies to me many of the things which a weblog should be:
- Personal
- Illustrative (very nice and simple photos on most posts)
- Simple (no annoying javascripts or frilly designs that get in the way of reading and enjoying)
- Helpful (the articles may not be all that frequent but they are all have some thought or use to someone, this is not posting for posting's sake)
duomo milan from ruk.ca
Here is a sample of Peter Rukavina's writing about the dangers of online social networking - a virtual world where only like will meet like:
Keep reading What should a weblog be?
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
There are a few weblogs where the comments are better than the article.
That's the case with Mike Industries. Mike often writes the most lackadaisical posts (a recent one about lobsters) - generating fantastic comments.
Of more substantial interest was his recent thin recommendation of a financial site.
I liked Brett's succinct version of investment information:
I look forward to following The Kirk Report, because I find the markets entertaining. But, like just about every individual investor, I would very likely be better off financially if I limited myself to other forms of entertainment.
If you really want to get the most out of your personal finances, in terms of investment returns and time spent allocating resources, limit your reading to Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letter, William Bernstein’s quarterly Efficient Frontier, and each new edition of Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street and Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need (not that Malkiel or Tobias change their books all that much from edition to edition, but that’s the point).
This is better advice than you might get spending a week online searching for investment information.
Juan Cole's Middle East weblog, while very good, often has comments that are still more incisive than his own commentary.
To get to this point, many of the articles have to be very good to build up a readership capable of creating collective intelligence.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Monday, November 5th, 2007
Switch to Phrase and Exact Match and Bring Down Your Cost Per Click and Cost Per Sale
Yesterday, I got an email from my acquaintance Andrew Goodman over at PageZero (author of the excellent 
Winning Results with Google AdWords) discussing issues with broad match in Google PPC management.
In August one of my clients had a horrible surprise (well we both did) where PPC costs skyrocketed - almost tripling for one week, with only about a 25% improvement in leads.
I got on it right away and called Google. The Google AdWords representative told me that thanks to our great quality score we'd qualified for "expanded broad match". Although Google says that they are against get rich quick schemes and fake sweepstakes in AdWords, this move is straight out of that shady playbook.
Sure, we'd "qualified". Qualified to pay three times as much for just a fraction more business.
"So how do we turn it off?" I asked.
"You can't," she answered.
Keep reading AdWords Expanded Broad Match: How to Combat Google's Cash Grab
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
