I was using a product the other day and it was a real disaster. It prompted me to think that somewhere, someone was showing up to an office where their task was to market this peice of crap. From that thought, this list: If your product stinks, If your product stinks, you won’t engage customers, you’ll stalk them. If your product stinks, the only thing your customers will engage in with you is arguments. If your product stinks, customers won’t…
I’m so busy I forgot to book my summer vacation until yesterday. Apparently the kids go back to school a week earlier than I thought so I will be off the week of the 17th. Which I hadn’t planned…so let me know if you have some cool, cheap, ideas for New England summer fun with kids. Even with baseball, I’m gonna admit, it hasn’t felt like summer to me. Where has that skin scorching heat been? Some times those…
I’ve been a huge fan of vBulletin forum software since I first installed it on Reel-Time.com in 2001. In the intervening years, I’ve seen software come and software go, but vBulletin continues to chug along. Over the past 10 months, I’ve spent a lot of time working on a massive vBulletin site, http://www.splitcoaststampers.com and I’ve got to admit, I’m finding the vBulletin experience somewhat lacking. Perhaps it’s just that so many of the same old foibles remain in the core…
I’m feeling my oats today…and that’s all I’ll say. Wrap your head around this little bit…
Welcome to our brave new world…it is a place in which style triumphs substance, and appearance supercedes truth. A place where the personal myths we create become truth, and are rechristened as “personal branding.” We are in the age of the micro-celebrity. The era in which we don’t need to be fully rounded individuals, where simply being the “thought leader”, guru or expert in a certain online niche is enough. Warhol was right, we indeed will all have our 15…
I read an interesting post this morning by Michael Hickins on The Faster Times that posit that “Internet Isn’t Killing Papers, We Are“. His basic premise: that the tech industry, and the web in particular with with the dotbomb era and sky high salaries and insane stock packages, inflated journalist salaries well beyond their regular levels. Why? Because salaries had to be adjusted for the stock options that artificially inflated the potential compensation packages offered by the dot-com start-ups. How…
Jim Louderback of Revision3.com has a great article up at JackMyers.com entitled “Murphy-Goode Wines Social Media Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong” about the companies recent trip to the Internet woodshed over their handling of I-celeb Martin Sargent during a recent online spokesperson ballot. While the specifics are generally quite funny…Jim gives us an excellent list of 5 takeaways that any of us who might consider a Social Media campaign ought to commit to heart: Respect the Wisdom of the Crowds: If…
One of the things that is most missed in the Social Media rush to “join the conversation” is that in many cases, by offering a plethora of places to get our content, we’ve turned the tables. Our readers who used to find us now expect us to find them. Even though I write on my blog, I’ll often get the comments for that post on my Facebook page, or via FriendFeed or Twitter, or on some other blog somewhere that…
I’m at the point that I can barely watch the news anymore. Almost a month in and they are still talking round the clock about the death of the mono-gloved King of Schlock…as though we should really care. What I do care about is that we stop looking at drug-addled sequin-encrusted performers as heros. They aren’t. Real heros are the folks that do the right thing when it’s too easy to do the wrong thing. They’re the people that take…
I picked up a great explanation of the great divide between business speak and tech speak at Rands In Repose today entitled “The Words You Wear.” The engineering burden is that when it comes to the product, we know how it works. Everyone else outside of engineering has vastly less working knowledge of the product; they don’t need that depth for their job. The engineers know the intricate details of the system, the people who built it, and what it…