Shiver me timbers, matey! Tis ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day.
I love to be a writin’ about made up holidays and how ye can be promoting your business with ‘em. It’s just so much fun, arrrrrrrgh!! It really be catchin’ on.
Avast, swabees Blockbuster be promotin’ films by some of the blackest hearts to ever sail.
LucasArts will be giving away booty. Tales of Monkey Island, Episode One for free all day Saturday, September 19, from sun up to sun down
Google talk like a pirate day promotion for yourself, matey and you’ll be a seein’ many more.
My question is, What be ye doing, arrrrrrrgh?
My friend Sue has (had) a Char-Broil gas grill for a little over a year when it malfunctioned and could have easily burned down her house. When she called the company instead of trying to defuse and solve a bad situation the company apparently tried to blame her for what clearly seems to me to be a defective product.
How do I know this? Well, Sue has a blog and wrote about it. I had never heard of this problem before so I did a quick generic search (Char-Broil Gas Grill) and found lots of examples of this happening. The first one I found was on the second page of Google, but I believe it’s probably moving up fast and soon may be found right up there with the companies own site on the first page. Imagine that! A potential customer searches for your name and right below your site they see complaints about shoddy products and poor customer service. In my mind that’s no way to build any business.
I have written before about the problem of ignoring or blaming others for your problems and the proper way to handle problems. This situation is yet another lesson in how not to behave. You may say it’s not really the companies problem, but I say that even if it only looks like they’re at fault, in today’s era of social networking and commentary, in the end the company will always lose this fight and maybe big time.
Yesterday I wrote about how Google properly handled what could have been a terrible PR situation.
Here’s what happens far too often. The company denies that there’s anything wrong then stonewalls. Case in point Diebold who makes an e-voting machine that’s horribly insecure. They have been trying to sell off the division for quite a while now.
Yesterday gmail went out for about an hour and a half. Not terribly bad for any Internet application, but I don’t recommend gmail for my clients. Not for that reason, but if you are in business, with the low price of a domain name and small hosting hosting account there is no reason to have an email account with someone else’s name on it. So MyName@MyBusiness.com is always better than AnyName@gmail.com (or Yahoo.com, Verizon.com, Comcast.com, etc.)
Despite what I say many people will still use gmail and the others for business email. What I learned from this is that while their web interface went down folks that had POP or IMAP access to gmail still were able to use it. So if you don’t know what IMAP or POP email access is, you should learn and if you don’t have it you should add it.
The reason that I’m writing this post today is not because of what happened, we all know shit happens, but because of the way Google handled the situation. As you probably know the social world was buzzing with all kind of Tweets, facebook, LinkedIn posts and news stories about the outage. People were already asking “what’s the best service to switch to?” I’ll admit it’s more than a bit extreme, but still it’s a situation that’s needs dealing with quickly and decisively. Google did just that.
- First they admitted there was a problem and apologized right away. You might say that’s a given, but it amazes me how many companies miss or ignore that step.
- Second they explained exactly what went wrong. This was an issue that was fairly technical and they explained it in a simple and clear way that almost anyone could understand.
- Third they let their customers know what they would be doing to ensure that this won’t happen again.
All in all it’s the right way to diffuse a bad situation before it gets ugly.
My friend from way back in High School, Barb Gerson has a site that she started when she recently went into business for herself called “My Sales Tactics“.
We sometimes write back and forth about some crazy things like the Ohiopyle “Over The Falls Race“, but it’s usually business. She recently asked me to comment on her blog about what, if anything, that I was planning to do to get some free promotion for my business. I think that she wanted ideas on how to get free public relations for the fall season, but I wrote about how I’m increasing my networking activities and using that to promote my business.
I would love to be mentioned in my local newspaper or be interviewed by a radio or TV station, but I really haven’t spent much of my time working on that. I did have a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette call me about the post I wrote to get Pittsburgh to the top of Google for the Best City In The World, but they didn’t mention my name in the article. It is number 2, by the way, and has been for quite a while now which is quite a success, but I don’t know if it will ever make number 1.
While getting mentioned in the mass media would surely increase my site visitors I don’t know if it would help my business as much as having people that know me tell others about my skills. So I prefer to concentrate on networking.
I have noticed since the middle of July that my business seems to be picking up and hopefully the economy is really turning around, but most businesses are still a bit slow and if you have any great (or even not-so-great) ideas about how someone can promote their business I would appreciate you adding a comment and telling us all about it.
Most of the time I don’t get any reply from Craigslist ads that I respond to. Occasionally they will hire me or say “thank you, we’re going with someone else”, but usually nothing. This weekend I got a reply from one of the CL ads that said they weren’t going to use me because “I didn’t charge enough so I couldn’t be any good”.
I know people who know for certain that if something is more expensive it has to be better. I have never understood that thinking because I believe that price and quality are two separate things. They can be related or not so this reply really made me scratch my head. I sent back a reply that said OK, but it’s your loss.
The person sent me a venomous reply calling me names, telling me how much they hated my website and how unprofessional that I was. I knew right away it was a good thing that I didn’t have the “privilege” of working with someone who spoke to someone they didn’t even know that way. I’m sure that in the end he’ll get (and pay for) the website he truly deserves.
His email did get me thinking about my site. I have always believed that how elegant a site looks is far less important than how well it functions and how easy it is for the average visitor to find and use what they’re looking for. It’s nice to be pretty, but there are many sites that are plain and are incredibly functional (can you say Google). My site has brought me quite a bit of business over the years and I have had several non-customers tell me how much they’ve gotten out of my site, but I’m always wondering what else I can do to make it more functional and useful.
Last week Amy Africa wrote about almost this same thing. How you have to take a step back and view your site through your customers eyes. The most important thing by far is not how it looks, but how well it makes your visitor take the action that you want them to. It’s a good read.
One of the big problems with putting music on your website or video is that unless you own the song and performance you could run into trouble keeping it online.
Techdirt tells the story of man who found a song in public domain to use in the video to promote his charity. It turns out that even though the song was in public domain the performance wasn’t. So it looks like you are probably only safe if you preform the music yourself and have written the songs or are preforming music in the public domain.
Fortunately, as pointed out in the article, there is another more practical solution. It is Creative Commons-licensed music. Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. Creative Commons is growing slowly, but may just catch on as more performers get fed up with their record companies heavy handed tactics, like as suing their own fans.
So if you are thinking of adding music to your site, blog or video I highly recommend searching for “Creative Commons” and if you would like more information on the Techdirt story that inspired this post.
Here’s something new from Google Checkout. It’s called the Google Checkout store gadget.
It’s still in Beta and is called experimental by Google so there are a few bugs, but the ones they listed seem pretty minor and I can’t believe Google would release something like this unless it was about finished. Judging from their past history with important new applications I believe the bugs will be exterminated quickly.
I haven’t tried the store out yet, but I will soon and report back to you when I do. According to Google here’s all you have to do to have a store on your site.
- Set up your Google Checkout merchant account
- Define your products in a Google spreadsheet
- Set up and embed your gadget
You can embed these gadgets in almost any web page, blog post or the sidebar of your blog.
Before this PayPal seemed to be the only good option for a shopping system that’s easy to embed in a static page, but this could challenge them. At first glance I see some things that even seem easier to use than PayPal’s cart, their sandbox (testing) section for one. PayPal does have quite a big lead in this area, but these gadgets could give Google Checkout quite a boost.
Iron City Beer has long been a symbol of the City of Pittsburgh. It’s no secret that they and many other local brewers have struggled mightily to save their brands in recent years.
Several years ago Rolling Rock Beer was purchased by Anheuser Busch. They moved them out of their mountain home (Latrobe PA) and spend a gazillion dollars to promote the brand nationally. Rolling Rock is now for sale so I guess the experiment failed.
Iron City recently moved out of the city and into Rolling Rock’s old brewery. It’s much more modern and Iron City is planning to make and sell much more beer to stay alive. One of the things that they are counting on to sell more beer is social media. If you have ever seen a Pittsburgh Steeler road game you’ve probably seen thousands of towel waving fans. Many of them have moved from The ‘Burgh over the years, but still possess their hometown loyalty. Iron City is counting on that loyalty and social media to spread the word instead of a huge advertising campaign.
So far all that I’ve seen is a “coming soon” website OneCityOneNation.com and a pretty good slogan -”One City. One Nation. One Beer.” This should be an interesting one to watch. Successful social media campaigns are very hard to manufacture, but Pittsburgh fans in far away lands are a different breed as well.
Whenever I go somewhere and talk about my work the question that gets asked first and most often is “how do I get to the top of the Google search results page?” Many times I’ll foolishly attempt a quick answer, which almost always leads to many more questions.
Well, who better to ask these questions to than Google? On their blog last fall Google published an SEO Started Guide. It covers pretty much every question that a newbie as well as veteran web promoter will ask regarding promoting their site on Google.
Lately I’ve been passing this link on to everyone who’s interested.
