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.
Google and even more so Facebook is us doing totalitarian surveillance work on ourselves for free. Basically every time you add data to Facebook or use Gmail you are turning unpaid informant on yourself and your family. In the US the boundaries between the state security organs and your private data are so emaciated that there is no difference between the data lying in US database at Facebook or Gmail or on a government server. In December 2009 on CNBC, Eric Schmidt Google CEO came right out and said it:
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Imagine our amusement when Karin made Foliovision an ideal example of how to find fans on Facebook. Karin's video is in German but basically she got a package in the mail from us and was very happy. She'd like to friend us in Facebook but we don't have a fan page.
If you are a Foliovision client or friend after you pay for our work, we will send you a really nice polo shirt along with a thank you note. We spent a lot time of time choosing really good shirts and getting first class printing and we mean the thank you that we send. The thank you gift should reflect the same high quality standards we set in our work.
Austrian PR and social media Expert Karin Schmollgruber show off her Foliovision polo shirt
It's probably a great marketing gesture but what is not accounted for in terms of its effectiveness, is that it is sincere. We really appreciate our T2WP clients from Microsoft to ZenDesk and the Hollywood Reporter to solo weblogs like Karin, Richard Nikoley and Scott McLeod at CASTLE trusting us to take good care of their websites and to do really great work for them.
So if there was some way to get a company fan page without having a personal Facebook account we'll probably do it. In the meantime, thanks Karin for the shout out and we'd recommend marketing via Twitter and LinkedIn. We've also heard that Xing is very big in the German speaking world and more similar to LinkedIn than Facebook.
At this point, Facebook is an attempt to privatise the web inside of a closed ecosphere so we really want to keep our distance.
We'll keep supporting the EFF, doing great work for our clients and sending out polo shirts. And staying clear of Facebook.
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.
You have to search for the cancel function deep in the help profiles. What brings it up is “delete profile” here – http://linkedin.custhelp.com/
Once you are there here are the instructions:
Close an account and remove your profile from LinkedIn by completing the following steps:
Log into the account you wish to close.
Click on ‘Account & Settings’ found at the top of the home page.
Click on ‘Close Your Account’ under Personal Information.
Select a reason for closing your account.
Click on ‘Continue’.
Members should only have one LinkedIn account. Multiple accounts can prevent the ability to accept an Invitation. Closing additional accounts should resolve this dilemma. Prior to closing any secondary accounts:
Inventory all connections and identify any that may be missing from the primary account you wish to keep.
Send Invitations to those connections missing from the primary account.
Update any profile information that maybe on other account profiles.
Note: Once the account is closed, a user will no longer have access to the account or the contact information. If an account is closed in error, it can be reopened by contacting Customer Service. LinkedIn will be happy to re-open your account if you can provide a confirmed primary or secondary email address tied to that account. However, LinkedIn does not have the ability to restore any pending invitations or sent recommendations on a re-opened account.
Not so easy. If you are managing any groups you have to delete those too.
You have to go through about six screens to get this done.
One of my clients has multiple profiles. The emails that those profiles were created under are long gone. Let’s see how long it takes LinkedIn to actually respond.
Update: out of three duplicate profiles:
I found the email and removed the account
Wonder of wonders LinkedIn removed this one based on my ticket (logged in as my client from his main account)
This one (a Private profile but certainly my client) is still there.
God help you if you actually sign up for their paid service. Apparently they will not allow you allow to terminate at all in that case. One poor sod had to cancel his credit card to get off paid LinkedIn:
I tried to cancel my $20/month subscription with LinkedIn. They never responded to emails and charged me for months until I finally found a way to stop the billing. Seriously this worked.
Cancel or report your credit card lost or stolen with the number you used for LinkedIn. no new charges occurred after that. And my account was finally set back to the basic status no more $20 fees.
What’s worse, for a business which takes money for its services, LinkedIn does not answer its telephone. Here’s the number in case you need it: if anyone comes across an extension which actually works you can post it and I will send anyone who subscribes here that info. Posting it on the open web would probably lead to the extension being disabled within a few weeks.
Speaking of which, LinkedIn’s pricing is absurd – $400/year for an address book. That’s one pricey piece of software. We pay $100/month for our online accounting package and something similar for project management but there are ten to forty users using those services day in and day out.
Epilogue
With the help of a senior customer service manager (I think the head of the whole shooting works) we were finally able to get some duplicate accounts deleted/merged. It was far too painful and took a matter of weeks. It necessitated giving false information to LinkedIn (if we didn't give false information they wouldn't help us), even though they knew the information was false.
In fairness to LinkedIn, there are people manning support and in extreme cases they are reachable. Which is better than Google (only place you can contact is AdWords, as they are taking your money) and probably Facebook (Facebook is so invasive we won't use it at all).
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):
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
Over the years, I've learned not to expect much from Evoy's newsletters (sometimes for six months at a time, they get relegated to the read later bin). Still it's worth sometimes checking in on somebody who's multiyear obsession has been selling ecommerce sites. Another perspective.
In the last couple of years the internet has changed and it's actually quite easy to put a website up. Just buy a hosting account (a single domain account is $3 to $7 Ken, not the $10 to $15 you cite), click the one step install button and you have vanilla Wordpress (or Mambo or Joomla or whatever else catches your fancy). Or pay nothing and sign up at Wordpress.com and have a better than vanilla Wordpress install with lots of attractive themes ready and waiting for you and an active forum.
The ease of putting up a high quality website - almost all of which look better than Site Build It websites and are easier to post to - is naturally a huge threat to the SBI business. Why pay Ken Evoy $300 per year per website for hosting which should cost $50?
Writing a weblog is not a massive mistake. Handled properly, a weblog does wonders for your website traffic and search engine standing. But taking away the hype, this time Evoy does have a worthwhile point about weblog type sites (Wordpress in particular) - i.e. they date like stale newspaper. I can confirm the tendency from my own sites.
By publishing a weblog, you are effectively creating just a daily news source.
What happens if you publish a very good article which has value as a permanent reference? It stands alone in your weblog. People come, read the single article and leave. There may be other interesting content on your weblog for them to read but the visitor can't be bothered to ferrret it out. If your writing or content is extremely compelling, perhaps some visitors will read a certain amount of your content. But then they will leave. Which quite frankly for an online journal is fine. You're not selling anything.
But for a business, this isn't so good. What you want is to create an information resource for people in your business, which will bring them back again and again. An information structure which invites them to find immediately the other relevant areas of interest.
And Evoy quite correctly points out that this is the built-in model for Site Build It:
Blog posts are created and stored in chronological order. A good blogger will produce a post that is useful today, but who will read it in three months? Even when bloggers go to the extra effort of archiving their posts by "keyword categories," the articles are dated and not rewritten into coherent definitive articles. Usefulness plummets with time.
How does a Theme-Based Content Site differ? Instead of a stack of old newspapers, each resembles a good resource book about its theme, composed of useful, original articles ("Web pages") that cover related topics in some depth. Written in each small-business owners's unique voice, and based upon that person's experience in the field, they are useful resources that visitors return to over and over.
Evoy correctly points out that a photography weblog would just be one in a million, posting the nattering about the latest cameras and software:
How would a blog be presented? A stream of disjointed photography tips would be organized by "date of post." And posts on any given topic (ex., "portrait lighting") would be separated by time (weeks or months apart), each covering only a certain aspect of the topic. On the other hand...
Definitely not the right one to pull someone into your website. Evoy contrasts the above weblog site with this siloed sitemap for a static site:
site build it silo site
This time Evoy's absolutely right. Someone looking for information on photography lighting would gradually be led through the whole of your website, would bookmark it and come back as a reference. All of this assumes of course that your content is top-notch (and Ken, let's be frank, there's not too many people capable of creating top-notch content, on or off the SBI rolls). But with a static site structure at least you stand a fighting chance of retaining your visitor and becoming a reference.
In any case this is a huge insight. Pages instead of posts something I've been playing around with in the static pages section in Foliovision. Our client sites are also largely hierarchical with the weblog performing weblog functions (added value).
What I've been doing is making a static page instead of a post and then publishing a small announcement on the weblog section.
Unfortunately some of the news outlets which republish my content will not link to static pages or to articles which are more than 24 hours old (a pain in the neck, as after publishing a major article I like to come back to it 12 hours later to proof it and add or correct illustrations).
Going forward, I am going to build up the static pages sections very actively. When I first publish a post, it will go into the weblog, but within a few days. There is one small issue which is comments. We enable comments on pages so visitors will still be able to comment on the static page. But often some of the comments come in right away (on the weblog version).
Do I leave the comments on the weblog post or move them to the static page?
If I choose to move the comments to the static page, there is no mechanism to do so inside Wordpress. We'd have to build a plugin.
BTW, this sort of question is what you are paying Evoy to solve for you with either no solution (in this case) or his solution. For an inside the box thinker (or someone with very little design sensibility and/or minimal interest in technology), SBI solves a lot of problems. For an existing six-figure business, there are better ways to bring your business online than SBI DIYism. I do agree with Ken that business owners should have better things to do with their time than spend it troubleshooting websites or optimising their sites for Google.
If you're interested in having a closer look at the Site Build It system and way of thinking, Ken Evoy offers a number of free ebooks on writing for the web, selling services and montization. SBI's claim ithat the free ebooks are better than a lot of the pay ebooks out on internet marketing is more or less true. Given the rubbish sold as ebooks that's not necessarily saying a whole lot. The link above bundles several of them into a single zip file for your convenience.
Personally, Ken's writing style drives me up the wall (he's been described as rah-rah), but the bulk of the information is good. I just can't read past his marketing speech. The formatting is bizarre as well. I wish the guy would hire a graphic designer at some point. Why does he write Sidebar and then not make the sidebar a sidebar but whack it right into the middle of the text?
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:
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.
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.
So what did I do? My clients had been making money on this campaign and they wanted to go back to doing so. So I eliminated all broad match phrases from all our campaigns. That left some holes in the campaigns so I added some additional phrase matches to compensate, i.e.
broad match: French DVD films
became phrase match:
"French DVD films"
"DVD French films"
"films French DVD"
"DVD films French"
"French films DVD"
As you can see it takes six phrase matches to cover a single three word broad match. With longer phrases, there are clearly phrases which are more likely than others so it's not all that intimidating.
A bit of a pain in the neck, but eminently doable (Splutweb's keyword permutation tool (broken link - http://www.splutweb.com/Tools/PermutationTool.asp) is free and speeds the process).
The result was worth it. Our advertising costs dropped in half (about one quarter or one fifth of what Google was serving us with expanded broad match).
With expanded broad match our CTR went way down. So not only were we getting lots more lousy clicks, we were now paying far more per click. When that CTR went down, advertising costs soared.
How about the sales? Well, they are down about 20% from what we had pre-expanded broad match. They are down about a third from what we had with expanded broad match.
Here's what those numbers might look like with and without expanded broad match.
Match Type
Cost
Sales
CPS (cost per sale)
original Broad Match
$4600
480
$9.58
with Expanded Broad Match
$8400
600
$14.00
Phrase/Exact Match only
$3500
680
$5.47
So in the end, Google did us a favour by penalising us for one week with expanded broad match. They weaned us off of broad match altogether.
If you want to make money with AdWords, just don't use broad match.
The two interesting forms are phrase match which is created by putting quotation marks around your phrase "french DVD films" or exact match which is created by putting square brackets on your term [french DVD films].
Anything other kind of match and you are taking money out of your children's education fund and subsidising Google's purchase of YouTube.
Aquisio Aquisio PPC management solution is touted by my friends over at SEOMoz as a recommended vendor. Unfortunately there is no pricing listed.
I had to spend twenty five minutes hunting around their website, waiting for business hours to come up in North America and running around their voice mail system before I could get a live quote. One of my pet peeves is websites which promote their product but won't post their prices.
To save you the trouble, the starting price is $1000/month for a 5 account package. Each client is allowed $1000-$3000 month spend. After that you are looking at a $250 bump per client who goes over $3000.
Not expensive in comparison to some of the other high end competitors, but out of budget for my projects.
There's space here for some invention - a consolidated administrative panel for Google AdWords, Yahoo PPC and MSN with client reports would be most welcome. Aquisio does not include MSN for the moment, although they promise it within a month of today.
In a mastermind group to which I belong someone asked whether it would be a good idea to use Paypal as a merchant service for e-commerce.
The gentleman wanted to sell touchscreen monitors at $1000 to $2000.
One thing I will say for Paypal, using their system for merchant payments is extremely easy. You just set up your buttons and your links and you can be taking donations in minutes.
For physical goods, Paypal is extremely buyer friendly, i.e. it would be difficult to prevent a customer from abusing a return policy. On the other hand for digital goods, Paypal is extremely seller (i.e. con artist) friendly. I recently made the mistake of purchasing some expensive marketing materials from a dubious seller. In the end, the product was never delivered.
With Paypal's system, there was no recourse. You fill in the complaint procedure (you have 45 days maximum) and then when you are done, they close the case.
Digital goods are not subject to Paypal guarantees.
But for physical goods, they are always on the side of the buyer (i.e. someone can order something and claim that it didn't arrive and all the burden of proof is on you). On expensive items like yours, I would be wary.
If Paypal for some reason decides they don't like your account activity, they freeze your account (no more incoming money, no access to the money on file).
That said, I have put $25,000 through Paypal with little incident (mainly international money transfer for services). That seller probably does close to $1m/year through PayPal and is still using PayPal for about half of their business.
Still with physical goods, you might think long and hard about putting all your eggs in this basket. I suggested the original poster take a look at Google checkout.
Which help desk to Use to automatically build a knowledge base up over time as you answer customers incoming requests?
This is another question I've answered lately privately.
A lot of smart people are using Kayako for help desks. One of my hosting providers started to use Kayako about a year ago and Kayako made my help requests (all too frequent so I'm not recommending them here) there a whole lot easier.
Kayako have a free month long trial and after that you can pay monthly ($40 for the full package) for a hosted version or buy outright at $500 (you probably have to pay for upgrades after awhile so I'm not sure the cost of ownership is any less).
Another help desk I've looked at which is much less expensive is Will Barden's Three Pillars Help Desk. There is a version at $47 and $77. If you join Will Barden's email lists he sometimes even makes a special offer of Pro for Basic cost to his list.
What's great about Three Pillars is that it is a one time fee with source code and hosted on your own servers. So if you have inhouse programmers, you can customise Three Pillars Help Desk as you go.
What we are using right now for support at Foliovision is Basecamp - as we are already deep in there and our clients all know how to use it - and have experimented with the help desk in Freshbooks which we are using for accounting. Basecamp is not public facing (you need to be a registered use to log in) nor does it allow redistribution of tickets to team members which is why we are still looking at other solutions.
If you are using WordPress on your main site, there is a very simple solution (as we build bigger and bigger sites, simple solutions have more and more appeal), it's WordPress plugin called Ask Me. Ask Me lets you get questions and answers up on your site in a hurry. A larger Ask Me database would benefit from a simple category system. There is nothing to prevent Sara (the creator of Ask Me) or your programmer from adding that feature.
My advice - pick any one system get to know it well and use it to the maximum. We and our clients get huge value out of WordPress as we know WordPress so well. There are better tools for many of the things we do with WordPress. But the time we would lose getting to know each of them would be far more costly than the time we spend writing plugins and adapting WordPress to our purposes.
Last minute bid sniping (been on both the giving and taking ends: frankly, there's no point in bidding until the last two minutes talk about interrupting one's day)
Fraudulent sellers given nearly free rein (i.e. Apple computer, Canon cameras)
I am not surprised to hear about Amazon. I work with retailers who used to be 100% eBay.
A year ago, when someone sold on eBay and Amazon, they did about 70% eBay vs. Amazon in volume. About 6 months ago, it was 50/50. Today, they are selling more on Amazon - at much higher prices and margins.
eBay's bad reputation is turning it into a lemon market, if you remember from an economics class.
This evidence is anecdotal but supports my experience. In difference to eBay, my experiences with the Amazon marketplace have been very positive. When I've found a fraudulent seller, they've been policed out very quickly (overnight).
I'm glad to see good businesses on the web are at last reaping the rewards for the safer and more pleasant environment they provide.
They justify their indignation with a chorus of "the others are doing it, the others are doing it".
In the words of Andy Hagans:
Nearly every story that makes it to upcoming/most - whether it makes it to the homepage, or gets buried -has a 'gaming' group that votes together. Like I said even top users without site affiliations will plug stories to friend, and nevermind the 'fanboys' that vote together.
It's rather amusing if it weren't so sad. These SEMs support their position with convenient libertarianism:, accusing Google or Digg or hypocrisy for trying to keep them out:
