Monthly Archives: August 2011

Don’t make the geeks mad!

Arizona, Bootstrap, Business, Computers, Entrepreneurship, How To, Internet, Marketing, , ,

The world is moving to the internet, and more and more people research things before they plan to spend money. The smart company manages their online presence with a good website, SEO, and they ask clients who are happy to leave positive feedback for them on one of the many sites that have been created to rate companies.

Most of these sites really use this as a way to find companies to sell advertising to but that is a whole different blog. I have been helping a few companies get online recently. Last month I helped a company with a fairly negative review history to create a new blog, website and then create profiles on many of these pages. I then created a page that he can send happy clients to so that they can review him. It makes the world better, he will feel more responsible to make people happy, and these happy clients will send more clients to him to make him more successful. Everyone is happy. He now gets a client or so per week from the web.

The odd thing is that many of these businesses have little or no knowledge of these online boards, that vast majority of business owners are oblivious, and sometimes it is really to their determent. I have seen time and time again companies that have a large number of negative reviews, often right on Google maps (The number one way people find you). A business may see 100 clients in a day but many of them won’t even receive 10 reviews in a year, and when 8 of them come from ANGRY and RANTING clients, that business will see very little traffic from people who research online.

Being a geek and knowing the power of this, I know that you NEVER want to make a geek mad at your business. One good geek can really hurt your online presence, a few and you are dead online. Geeks know this, and sometimes they even use to to hurt your business if you are their competition.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9mCS9H9Lo
This computer repair guy really must have made someone mad, he has pages full of bad reviews about his company. Click HERE to see for yourself.

Also see MY PAGE.  I had one fake, negative review, so I asked my Facebook friends who were clients in the past to post an honest review for my company.  Look at the results.

 

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold – Wow that was cool.

Business, concepts, Marketing, The World,

I really like the way that Morgan Spurlock thinks. He has created a movie about advertising and product placement, and pays for the movie by going out and getting more product placements than any movie in history. He gets free drinks, free cars, free shoes, free flights, free hotel rooms and millions of dollars given to him to make this movie. It is really awesome as he debates if he really is a sell out, and decided that he is, then he embraces it. If you have not seen this movie, and you are at all interested in advertising or business I would suggest it.

Here is the trailer. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Ng2P3zxfM

One very interesting concept that I liked from the movie is the idea that Fame and Credibility are linked. “In the world we live in you can not be credible unless you are visible.” This is a very interesting concept. This is why people tout how many followers they have, or max out their friends on facebook.

How to communicate in this modern age.

Business, Computers, concepts, How To, Internet,

There is one major thing that I see so many businesses doing wrong, and that is their failure to communicate correctly. So many companies send out a message but they never ensure that it is received. Then they flip out when you are not aware of their message that they did not properly communicate. When I was in college I learned that communication is defined as this…

Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender’s intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space. Communication requires that the communicating parties share an area of communicative commonality. The communication process is complete once the receiver has understood the message of the sender.

The last part is the most important. First you need to make sure that the receiver has received the message and understood it. The problem is that people are flooded with messages. Over 100 billion emails are sent world wide each day. I get 100’s of texts per day, I get a pile of snail mail every day except sunday. Email is the worst though, I get over 1000 per day, but and those are sorted to over 50 different folders, and about 800 or so of them are detected as spam and sent to a spam folder. What makes me really unhappy is when someone emails me once or twice, and then a day or two later calls me and is totally mad me because of their lack of communication. When a message is urgent it is the responsibility of the SENDER and not the RECEIVER to make sure that message is delivered.

Businesses send out urgent notices, bills and much more over email, and they assume they are delivered. My web-host is really bad at this…when they see a problem with my account they email me and then disconnect my account like 10 minutes later, usually because some database locked up or something stupid like that, they don’t bother calling or texting or anything like that. They wait for me to have a customer call me and tell me that it is down, usually after I have lost 100’s of hits and client confidence. It really urks me. Because of facebook and texting many people are using email less for important things and they check it less often. So if you are waiting for an important message to be received please simply pick up the phone and tell them that you sent an important message and if they received it and never assume that they received it until you hear a reply. BTW if you are still in the stone age and use faxes this applies even more to you.