I Want a Cookie
Posted on | February 28, 2011 | 1 Comment
There was a story going around at Syracuse University in the 1980′s about how a student had reprogrammed the mainframe computer to block all access. Whenever someone tried to log in, it would simply return a screen that said “I want a cookie”. This frustrated the faculty and nobody would confess as to who hacked the system. The problem was only resolved when someone who knew very little about computers sat down at the keyboard and typed “a cookie”.
Our web browsers consume massive amounts of cookies, fed to them by websites who want to keep track of where we’ve been, when we arrived, and how long we stayed. Cookies store information about your web visits that help sites make your stay more pleasant by remembering who you are. They also help advertising networks keep track of you and which sites you visit.
Cookie tracking enables web advertisements to be served up to you based upon the sites you visit and your apparent preferences. Of course, this kind of service comes at a price. Nobody is going to serve targeted ads unless they are getting paid for it. It turns out that many online advertisers are willing to pay the premium for targeted advertising based on your site visits.
I few weeks ago I needed a web host for a new service I was launching. I have hosting accounts with three different data centers, and I was adding a fourth because of some particular requirements, and I wanted to shop around. I made a quick visit to all of the usual suspects, including MediaTemple, SiteGround HostGator, One and One, and Liquid Web. I quickly made up my mind and chose a hosting solution. The process took less than an hour.
But ever since that night, a certain young, smart-looking woman in glasses and a look that says “I’m hot and I’m a computer geek” has been following me around the web. I see her on many of the pages I visit, sometimes peering above a headline, or standing nearby while a browse an article. She’s hard to miss, and it’s getting creepy. She’s the spokesmodel for Liquid Web, one of the hosting companies I visited. For a while, I ignored her, smiled to myself because I knew exactly what was going on, and wondered just how often I would see this ad.
I’m not smiling anymore. It’s been a month, and there is no sign that these ads will stop. Tonight I am going to delete the double-click and liquid web cookies in my browser cache, so that any more encounters with my stalker will be purely incidental. I’m tired of seeing the ads. And do you know what? I have also decided that I want nothing to do with Liquid Web. They have over-promoted to me. There is a reason I do not watch television or listen to commercial radio, and it generally has to do with commercials that are repeated ad nauseum. Perhaps others are more tolerant, but I am easily offended by being delivered the same pitch as if I had forgotten it in the 60 seconds since the last esposure.
Targeted advertising is potent. It’s powerful. And just because you can target someone, it doesn’t mean you should. Or at least, you should understand when enough is plenty. This is true of any targeted message, including those delivered through email, text messaging, or social media. A little goes a long way, and a little too much will cause your customers to tune you out, or turn you off. In any campaign, less than 50% of your messages should be purely promotional. The other 50% needs to be something that your customers value. That might mean that 50% of your message is just to make them laugh and smile or it might mean that half the time you send a message, it has nothing to do with promoting your product and everything to do with giving your customers something they appreciate.
Whatever you do, don’t make the same mistake that Liquid Web made with their targeted campaign. I would have tolerated seeing their banner once a week or so. It would have kept them top of mind, and I might not have even noticed I was being targeted. But don’t chase me around the web without giving me something of value. At least offer me a discount, a month of free service, or even a cookie.
Do You Know Your Copyrights?
Posted on | January 27, 2011 | No Comments
Copyright law existed as an obscure and abstract issues for all but content creators and publishers for most of its existence dating back to 1709 when book publishers in Great Britain petitioned Queen Anne for the privilege of a monopoly on the work they published.
But today copyright law touches each of us every single day. Turn on your television, plug in your headset or type on your computer, and your experience is shaped and influenced by someone’s copyright. In essence, copyright law gives content publishers the ability to say who can and cannot use and distribute the work they control.
I will happily argue the merits of copyright down at the local pub, as almost no one will agree completely on what the law should cover and to what extent. If you publish a blog or a business website, you do need to understand what is protected by copyright and what justifies fair use. There are no hard and fast rules, so it is better to be cautious.
If you need images for your website, use a paid service. You will get images from professional photographers, and it will raise the quality of your site. If you don’t have money, look for images filed under the Creative Commons license. Avoid using audio in any form that isn’t your own. Performing rights organizations (PRO) as well as record labels are heavy-handed in dealing with infringement. And when it comes to writing, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery, it’s plagiarism.
Large corporations like Apple have trouble knowing when enough is enough. When you purchase a tune through iTunes, it’s okay to download that song to more than one computer, but there is a limit. Apple determined that 5 computers was plenty to cover you and your family’s needs, but more than 5 would tempt you to start hooking up friends. It’s a balance between generous for most and completely frustrating for a few. If you are one of the few, I sympathize, with a dash of jealousy.
Your own work might be copyrighted on your website, but what is in place to stop someone from stealing it and claiming it as their own? The idea of protecting a blog post might seem ludicrous, but content theft is rampant among online marketers who build websites for the sole purpose of making money from Google Adwords. They’re too busy to create content, so they just take what they can find by scouring the web. You can get their internet host involved by filing a DMCA takedown notice. This places them in the position of helping you resolve the dispute or being placed in position of liability for the infringement.
Even modified work can be subject to legal action. Tony Stone Images successfully sued a graphic designer who had entered into a contest with a drawing based on one of their photographs. The graphic designer won the contest and a $25,000 prize, but lost the suit with $400,000 in damages claimed. Corel Corporation, who hosted the contest, was not liable because every contestant included a statement that their submission was original.
Originality is the name of the game. Your organization owns the rights to the original work produced by your employees in the context of performing their job. When you hire outsiders, a work-for-hire agreement will establish your exclusive right to use what they create for you. A statement of originality from your vendors will, in most cases, show your good faith effort to avoid copyright infringement. Copyright law is in effect for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. That’s a long time to be looking over your shoulder.
Tim Talks at Barcamp Nashville 2010
Posted on | October 25, 2010 | No Comments
I had the extreme pleasure of driving down to Nashville last week to deliver a presentation on “Making the Jump from WordPress to Joomla. The gist of my talk is that WordPress is a great blogging platform, and many times it’s the perfect platform for a tightly focused web publishing project. But when it comes to business sites that involve hundreds or thousands of content pages, there is simply no way that WordPress can handle things on the back-end. The very features that make it great for blogs and smaller projects are the limitations that prevent it from being a robust content management system.
The folks at Barcamp Nashville recorded the audio, and they’re going to synch it up to my slides, but for now, you can enjoy the pictures and imaging what the heck I was saying as I rocketed through 100 slides in thirty minutes.
I want to thank everyone at Barcamp Nashville for welcoming me. It was really a blast, and I wish I could have stayed for the after-parties.
Exploit the Restrictions of News Writing to Create Link Bait
Posted on | October 6, 2010 | No Comments
Monday’s news brought the world an evocative story about a painting by 19th Century Italian artist Giovanni Boldini discovered in the Paris flat of a woman who locked the door in the late 1930′s and never returned. The painting went undiscovered for more than 70 years until her death at the age of 91. Do you hear that buzz? It’s the sound of Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere echoing the original story, posted on the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph website.
But all I hear are echoes. No one is adding to the story, no one is seizing opportunity. The original story makes for great link-bait, which is a good reason that it propagated so quickly. It is the modern day equivalent to discovering a Pharoah’s tomb. People are suddenly curious about the story behind the apartment, and why it was left untouched, with rent paid for more than 70 years.
This is an opportunity to drive more traffic to your website through cleverly crafted link-bait. Add to the conversation and provide your own highly interesting story by looking a little deeper into the unanswered questions. Newspaper articles always leave questions, it’s inherent in their brief and to-the-point expository style.
By now, you should have read the original story in the Telegraph. If you haven’t, hit the link and then come back. You’ll be glad you did. In the original story, the former owner of the apartment, Mrs. de Florian, was referred to as a “demimondaine”. This is the name given to a highly-paid prostitute in the early 20th century and a rather contentious claim about a woman who left Paris for the USA at the age of nineteen or twenty years. Was this a snide comment by the paper’s editor, or is there something more that we are not being told? Some investigation could provide even more revealing details, making for an interesting blog post that builds on the original story.
Then there is the painting itself. The original article supplied some wonderful photographs of the apartment as it was discovered untouched since the 1930′s, but none of the paintings in those photographs were of the discovered masterpiece, which has never been publicly shown and recently sold at auction for nearly $3,000,000. Yet if the painting was auctioned, shouldn’t there be a photograph? As it turns out, Olivier Choppin-Janvry, the discoverer of Boldini’s painting, is an auctioneer who was hired to dispose of the late Mrs. de Florian’s property in Paris. His auction house published a photo of the painting, that the original author missed or chose not to publish.
There are so many juicy details to discover in a simple news story, so why would you settle for simply reposting something that has already been done? Thirty minutes of research can provide an entirely new angle, and one that is tailored to your site, your message, and your audience.
I’ve given you a start, so have at it, and please share with me the results of your original take on this fascinating story by posting a link in the comments section of this blog. I look forward to it!
Business Branding on Facebook-The Right Way
Posted on | August 18, 2010 | 1 Comment
Today’s most popular social networking site has been suffering from growing pains, mostly surrounding the idea of how to monetize their audience of one half billion members. That’s about 5,000 times the number of people who watch the Superbowl, so you would think that capitalizing on that audience share through advertising would work, but it doesn’t–at least not for the kind of ads Facebook displays and the kind of money advertisers are willing to pay.
Instead, Facebook hopes to build the same sort of success with businesses that they have had with people’s personal pages. They want to be the one place where people go to look for, learn about, and engage with businesses. To accomplish this goal they need to encourage businesses to join Facebook, and that is why they created the Fan Page.
Facebook doesn’t even call them Fan Pages anymore. Instead, they are simply called Pages. Your page lets you build a presence on Facebook, engage with your audience, spread your message, connect with Facebook users on your website, and encourage conversations. Custom tabs can be created to feature coupons, promote specials, share videos, and set up events. It’s a full palette of features, and it’s just for businesses, brands, and non-profit agencies.
The dangerous side of your business presence comes in the way customers perceive your presence. When they are connecting with your business, they may think they are connecting with you. If they have a bad experience with one of your representatives, they may take their complaints to your Facebook Page because they expect this to be the online equivalent of asking to speak to the owner.
To add another complication, what if the person they are complaining about also happens to be one of your Facebook page administrators? That complaint could be deleted and you wouldn’t know about it unless there was an even bigger backlash because of it. Large businesses have marketing, public relations, or customer care groups to handle these situations. But for smaller businesses, there are only two courses I see to this situation. You either need to be your own Facebook Page administrator, or you need to bring in help from outside. This is where the social marketing experts come in.
Social marketing experts can set up your page for you, develop guidelines for Facebook engagement, monitor your presence, promote your brand, and provide a direct channel of communication to the top when there is a problem that needs your attention. This service isn’t free, but in the context of a marketing budget, you should be able to identify a level of service that suits any business.
How is Facebook going to make money with Pages? Nobody knows at this point, but you can be certain that once businesses are engaging with their customers on Facebook, they will not want to stop. In the future, a Facebook Page will likely come with a price tag. But for now, the time is right to add your business to the mix and start connecting with your customers.
Tags: brand ambassadors > Facebook > social marketing > social media
How Low Does the Bar Go?
Posted on | February 15, 2010 | No Comments
I was browsing my Facebook account on my iPhone over my morning espresso and spotted a video that a friend had linked to. My thought was “wow, this is really viral worthy”. I’m sure you’ve done that, too. You see something and it hits that sweet spot between amazing and delightful.
I switched over to the laptop and checked GoDaddy for viralworthy.com and it was available. I grabbed it. I mean, why not? If I could easily post the stuff that I think is really worthy of attention, I become a filter for others. If people happen to like the way I filter, maybe they’ll pay attention to my website.
A few weeks ago I had stumbled upon a site called waxinandmilkin.com that was very simple, just great pictures and comments. It was elegant, simple, and engaging. I liked their taste. I liked it so much that I poked into their source code and saw they used a site called Tumblr to create their blog. I made a mental note–must do something with Tumblr.
You see where this is going, right? In less than 1 hour, http://viralworthy.com went live. I plugged in a few quick favorite videos, a quote about advertising, and set up my Twitter, Gmail, Disqus, and Facebook feeds. I downloaded the Tumblr iPhone app, scheduled a few posts for later release, and I’m rolling. Easy Peasy. Too easy.
The experience has left me with a number of unanswerable questions that can be distilled to this: When creating a web destination is so easy, does it diminish value or enhance value of the web community? I’m glad it’s easy. But I’m also glad that I don’t make my living designing web pages anymore. Both web design and programming have become a commodity. And when the bar is lowered, the noise floor rises exponentially. It becomes increasingly more difficult to find the quality among the rubbish.
The more the bar is lowered, the more filtering we need. The best filters will always be people that you trust and respect. Brands who engage in social media should take notice. The more noise in your channel, the more people will tune you out. Understand what your social media priorities are and keep them in focus. Be dynamic, be personal, but don’t make noise for its own sake. We have enough of that already, thank you.
Google Gone Viral
Posted on | February 12, 2010 | No Comments
Google spent in the neighborhood of $2.5 million to run a commercial during this year’s Super Bowl. Google doesn’t need to advertise, despite the marketing dollars being spent on Microsoft’s Bing. Google gets more brand impressions than anyone. Their logo turns up every single time a Google ad is viewed on a website. Why then, did Google run a Super Bowl ad?
The answer is simple. They knew it would be a touchdown. It had already run on YouTube for months prior to the Super Bowl, and garnered more than 1 million views. People liked it, and shared their feedback. Smart advertisers test before they spend their budget on placement. One million voices said “run it”.
The real genius behind Google’s Parisian Love commercial is that it’s incredibly easy to riff on. By this time next year, Parisian Love may prove to be the most parodied and imitated commercial of all time. You don’t need actors, animation chops, or even Photoshop. With a few basic software tools, wit, humor, and a tendency toward the subversive, you can create your own version of Parisian Love in an afternoon. And when you do, it will most likely end up on YouTube, another Google property. They really can’t lose.
Let’s see what delightfully deviant ideas spring out of Parisian Love, and see if we can measure the “viral-ness” of Google’s Super Bowl investment.
Texting Acronym Glossary
Posted on | February 2, 2010 | No Comments
Online chat has been around for a long time, even longer than you might think. Chat was popular on BBS systems and online services that pre-date the web by as much as a decade, and many shorthand acronyms came from that time. ROFL was one of those puzzling responses a “newbie” might come across. It made no sense if you didn’t see it in context. But if it immediately followed something outrageously funny that someone posted, you might figure out that it was shorthand for “rolling on the floor, laughing”.
With Facebook, massively multiplayer online games, Twitter and Skype, chat remains a popular means of communication, though it’s usually referred to as “texting” now. If you’re new to text messaging, you might be confused by some of the acronyms you encounter. Here’s a glossary that will get you started on the right foot. Read more
Apple's Next Big Thing
Posted on | January 24, 2010 | No Comments
The rumor mill is churning about an impending tablet computer from Apple. Referred to as the iSlate by those who like to step out on a limb, the device is supposed to have many iPhone-like features including gesture navigation and a touch-sensitive screen. If you have faith in Apple as a technology innovator, you may think it’s going to be the greatest gadget of 2010, or you might think that it will be just another tablet-PC flop. I think the former is true, and here’s why. Read more
Is a Content Management System in Your Future?
Posted on | September 30, 2009 | No Comments
Websites are going through a transition, but when haven’t they? Sites used to be coded in HTML, then evolved through Flash applications, style sheet layouts, and Javascript interactivity. The best way to build changes almost as quickly as popular fashion. If your site is at least three years old, there’s a good chance that it’s out of fashion. Read more
