Quick e-mail CRM thought...

Just stumbled across another (reasonable) e-mail CRM vendor called MailChimp.

They also had a pretty interesting December 1st, 2008 report of e-mail open rate statistics.

They seem a bit costly, but I don't know what you get and what their forte is. They've got this cool functionality which lets you see your e-mail in "the major e-mail client's" inboxes called the "Inbox Inspector".

Might be worth checking out.

Returning to Roots...

I believe frame of reference is critical to all people.  It gives them a simile by which to make sense of the world.  It helps them cram an infinite amount of data and combinations into a comprehensible set of information.

As such, I seem to always return my my roots -  IT and Marketing.

This has proved to be problematic for one of my partner agencies who pulls me in on work, regularly (O'Keeffe Communications)...  He asks, "Ray, what can you do that's Web 2.0'ish to advance the PR efforts on this business?"

And Ray returns a bunch of (really good but really inappropriate) MARKETING ideas.

Today, over breakfast, he clarified it for me.  He said PR was:

"The generation of awareness through 3rd-party resources."

Wow.  That's clear and clarifying... He continued by saying, 

"Some of the true magic comes from what I'm sure your mom used to tell you.  It's way better when others toot your horn than when you toot your own...  Leveraging the 'resources' (i.e., media, bandwidth, opinion, expert-status) of others lends way more credibility to your efforts than anything you can do yourself."

That makes sense.  That's something I can dig my teeth into.

Now it's time for me to wander off to my happy place and think about how my efforts can be used to affect change with this endpoint in mind.

- Ray

aWeber: Quick note...

Just found this out...

Love aWeber.com's deliverability...

But they got that at the expense of their ease of use.

For example, try to send to a list. It's a pain in the arse. Not only that, if that list happens to be some one like, teachers, and you do figure out how to send to them, they better not all be at the same IP address (like teachers in a close geographical area) because aWeber.com will only allow 10 form registrations from the same IP/day.

What a P.I.T.A.

There will be more to come on this.

A 64-bit FYI...

If, like me, you got duped into buying a 64-bit Vista box, know that it can be used as a reasonable development box.

One thing I stumbled on was setting up Apache as a service. I had to use a precompiled version. Hopefully this will allow for module updates. Nonetheless, here's how you make it a service under Vista:

cd \
cd Apache2
cd bin
httpd -k install

If you suffer the same plight as me, let me know your experiences. As an FYI, ApacheLounge.com was an indispensable resource in getting this box set up.

- Ray

What people will do to try and scam...

I find this both sad and amazing...

So one of my clients was giving away something free. It was for a coupon for an item which was only good for like a week and it was for a $2.99 food item.

The anti-fraud mechanisms were okay (within the client's tolerance levels and, believe you me, this was discussed at great lengths...) and we were doing just fine.

Then, as I previously mentioned, we got picked up by SlickDeals.net and a bunch of other freebie sites. Overnight, our list just from just above 1,000 subscribers to right under 10,000 subscribers.

Wow...

Well, today, I was putting together an exclusion list from the database to use for a localized AWeber.com e-mail (kinda a pain due to shortcomings of their platform) and I noticed a ton of beautiful "ASCII art" in the e-mail address extract.

As it turns out, 54 people tried exploiting the fact that GMail does not reconize periods to get a free $2.99 item...

2500 times.

It doesn't matter... I think AWeber was smart enough to catch this and, based upon the necessary redemption mechanisms and the relatively low value of the item, no harm was done. It just sorta disturbed me that some one went to such great efforts to break my toy...

If anyone would like to dump these addresses (and any other permutations thereof) in your block list, feel free. I've put them in a (long since past on order to get it off my front page) blog post here.

And, as you're putting together that freebie offer, remember to parse the periods out of the GMail addresses before you do your uniqueness lookup...

- Ray

An interesting tool...

Just a quick miscellaneous post...

I found this "tool" in my iStockPhoto contact sheet newsletter. It's called "Moodstream". It's an interesting interface and seems to be a good way to burn a bit of bandwidth, but I don't know that it will prove to be useful.

Worth blowing a few moments on. Let me know if you find it useful.

http://moodstream.gettyimages.com/

- Ray

Watch what you say on the Internet...

Because the world really is watching.

This became evident today.

One of my clients, CincyDomino's, has a coupon for a free 10" pizza for signing up for their weekly deals alerts... We have had the coupon up for a while and the list has been growing modestly.

This week, I had a friend of mine put a cute little Flash ad on his site, GarageSaleCow. It went up about Monday. Well, it turns out that he has the most traffic on Thursdays and Fridays (as people start searching for garage sales). It turns out that some one from Kenwood found it... And then the crazy ride began.

The person from Kenwood posted it on FatWallet.com. From there it was picked up on the following sites:
SlickDeals.net
DealsOfAmerica.com
DealsPl.us
DealsList.com
Orkut.com (I don't know where the hits from this came from)

From there, we added about 7x the number of subscribers we started out with and got a ton of e-mails.

So, you might ask, "where's the problem in this"? Well, it's simple. CincyDomino's is a coalition of the 49 local Domino's Pizza restaurants. The coupon is regional. There is no value to them elsewhere in the US.

But over half of our current registrants are outside of the Greater Cincinnati Area. Opps. We definitely put up a ton of disclaimers since then and the e-mails have slowed down.

The moral of the story is, watch what you ask for and know that the whole world is watching when you put something out on the web. Today was a painful, but exciting, example of that.

As an FYI, only SlickDeals and FatWallet allow sweepstakes/contests to be posted.

Do you know of any great deals sites which can help to cause a tipping point? Post a comment and let us know!

- Ray

E-mail CRM vendor review

This is the first post in a series of posts I am going to do on various e-mail CRM vendors.

As of right now, I use aWeber.com for myself and my clients, but they have very restrictive signup processes which make it difficult to expand lists. Outside of that problem, their platform is great and their customer service rocks. However, this one point does not make me happy.

So, I started looking for a review of e-mail CRM and bulk e-mail vendors. Believe it or not, their aren't any good ones out there. As such, I'm going to set off to compile some stuff about the various ones so you and I, both, can learn which ones to use in what situations.

If you use a particular one and either advocate it or if you could offer feedback for them, let me know. The more we have here, the better resource it is for us all!

Stay tuned!

Hirin' Up

Several years ago, I heard about a Google challenge. The first part of it was posted on a billboard... You can find information about that one by searching "Google interview tests" or looking here. At the time, and even to this day, I think that is an ingenious way to find the right talent (assuming you pick tests that are relevant to your field...).

Recently, I stumbled across Dot Spots (found a job posting on Craig's List). There's mission is something completely obscure...

Our mission is to increase awareness of people by allowing the wisdom of crowds to be applied to every piece of information in the world. Cryptic? Yes, but then again, we're still in stealth mode.... ;)

What the hell does that mean?

Anyway, they've got some interesting challenges that you have to solve to get an interview...

• You've got to code up a crossword puzzle in Java (in the public domain already)
• You've got to code up a app which can describe some switch logic in plain English (logic is in the public domain so a decent Java programmer (i.e., not me) could probably code it up in an evening
• Finally, you have to send your resume to Y2hhbGxlbmdlQGRvdHNwb3RzLmNvbQo=

Now, I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I found examples of both the problems and the answer to the e-mail address in under 2 hours but yet there are people out there who have coded up the two problems, but can't figure out the e-mail address (Google it here)..

I find that kind of comical. I just knew I'd seen that kind of encoding before some where and within about 20 minutes of hacking at it, it dawned on me... Once I figured out what it was, I reversed it in under 5 minutes with one line of PERL code.

Think I'm going to spill the beans? Hell no. Figure it out yourself or come groveling!!! :)

Anyway, I really think tests like these are great. They test competence, but they also test initiative. You have to want a job there (or be insanely challenge driven like me) to even bother.

Good employees who are passionate about the work and motivated. Hmm. Sounds like a good combo to me!

Let me know your thoughts and experiences. Have you ever had an employeer ask you to do anything more than pass a personality test (to make sure you're not an ax murder), a whizz quiz (to make sure your not a doper) and ask you to add 2+2 (to make sure your not a complete idiot)?

I have, sorta, but I want to hear your experiences.

Make some great experiences and enjoy the ride!

- Ray



Back up and running, despite no backups...

Well, we're back up and running today after a week of limping along.

Last week, our firewall were we had our staging env melted down (literally). Fortunately, none of the drives fried. That said, there's nothing like a bit of a crash to make you dust the cobwebs off of old file archives... :)

Despite the fact that we don't do actual "backups", we are pretty well squared away no matter what the compu-gremlins throw at us. This is because of the disaster recovery process we have in place for our customers (and ourselves).

In house, we leverage SVN for a variety of reasons:
Disaster recovery
Source code management/version management
It's just a really easy way to progress specific files and updates from development and production

If you're a development house/web shop, I'd HIGHLY recommend using it. If you want to know how we leverage it, give me a call.

If you're a client, you should ask your "agency" what they are doing to protect your assets and to make sure that they can come back if something goes bump in the night. If you're involved in the medical field or a publically traded company, this takes on a whole additional level because, without tools like these, you can't prove what was on your site on a specific day at a specific time. This is CRITICAL if you get involved in litigation over claims, statements or financially relevant events and news releases.

If you want to know more, just ask!

Mounting a Linux Logical Volume

As it turns out, it is not exactly straight forward to mount a Linux logical volume on a new machine. I've found that this is a problem whether the drive is in the box or attached via USB.

The error I kept getting was unknown fs type when I would try and mount it (I'll try it again later and get the exact error code in here).

After a little research, I found you need the following commands to do discovery on the drive so that Linux can figure out what's on it. Here's the commands necessary to make this work for a drive with a volume called LogicalVolume00 that we want to mount to /misc2:

/sbin/pvscan
/sbin/vgcfgrestore VolGroup00
vgscan -v
/sbin/vgchange -ay -v
/sbin/vgdisplay -v
mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /misc2

I'm not really sure what each of these commands does. If you understand how this works, please e-mail me or post a comment and I'll update this listing to make it more thorough.

So, I'm a Greedy Consumer

So, I got a call today from a credit card processing company (to remain nameless...).

They said they had a "representative" in the area who could come by and talk to me about accepting credit cards.

As it turns out, I am in need of such services... On my sites, and those of my clients. Truth be told, I'm already considering some one who has a stellar offering but I was willing to consider some one else. However, coming from a cold call situation, I didn't want "Lamar" coming by my office and blowing an hour or two of my time on a completely quantitative decision.

So, I ask them for a sales sheet.

Pretty simple, right? Wrong. The young lady who had me on the phone, said Lamar had all of those materials although he'd be happy to come by.

Nope. Send them to me. They couldn't.

They didn't want to feed the "Greedy Consumer".

The "Greedy Consumer" is easy to satiate with a good interactive program. Despite the ease, most companies refuse to quell the beast. The rules are simple. The "Greedy Consumer" says, "Give me what I want, how I want it and when I want it.

In later posts, I'll talk about how this is very easy to do.

Dumb programmers

Okay, it's time for a really geeky post, and a bit of a rant to boot.

So, for those of you who don't know me, I'm an Outlook contact list whore. I have over 1,000 contacts in my contact list, the vast majority of whom are not just people I threw in there.

For example, you could pick just about any name in there and there's about a 90% certainty that I could tell you who the person is, where they worked and what their specialty is. With about 40 - 50% certainty I could tell you I've touched base with them in the last 6 - 10 months.

Needless to say, I live and die by my contact list. Therefore, by proxy, I live and die by the mobile version of that on my Blackberry Pearl.

Well, today, I apparently hit a stupid-programmer limit. I exceeded 1024 contacts in my contact list and the Blackberry Device Desktop Software blew chunks.

WHAT????

Some one actually coded in a memory limit in a modern version of a software package? They did this on a business-related platform where people might have thousands of contacts, tasks or appointments that they want to store?

I want that person's head on a platter! I mean, what were they thinking? Memory and processor time is soooo cheap that it's costs is approaching zero yet some one codes in a artificial barrier like that?

Anyway, I was on version 4.2.0.14 of the Blackberry desktop. I just downloaded version 4.3 which was release the end of last year. I got that package from here (for those of you who might be heading down a similar path): https://www.blackberry.com/Downloads/browseSoftware.do. The current one is a sizable download (~ 80MB) and does not include a media manager which is fine by me -- my battery life on my phone is far too important to waste it streaming MP3's from my phone. And, besides, that's why I bought my coolest new toy, the Sansa View... Love it!

I'll get to installing this new package and let you know if it solved the problem in case you encounter it, too.

- Ray

Update: This upgrade did fix the problem.

Scary Topic, Interesting Site...

So, I heard about the King Corn movie that just came out. It's a documentary about that vegetable that's in absolutely everything in the supermarket -- Corn.

When you think of the dietary impacts, it is pretty mind blowing.

Enough on that, here I want to mention their site, http://www.kingcorn.net.

While the artistry of the corn is pretty simple, I think the Flash execution is pretty nice and seemingly on equity.

From a usability standpoint, I've just got two concerns. First and foremost, damn that type is small. I could barely read it.

Second, it opens other portions of their site (i.e., the blog and the newsletter sign up) in separate windows without any obvious reason why and without warning.

Beyond these two things, I think their site is rather nice.

- Ray

How to effectively QA a web site...

So, the question is, when there are so many different browsers out there that behave differently on so many different platforms (i.e., IE6 on PC vs. IE6 on mac), how do you effectively test the site you just created for a client?

Well, I look at it two ways. First, I create a document saying what browsers I will guarantee a site to work on. If it turns out that something happens to the site on that browser, on that platform, I make it right for free. There's no sense in my clients buying a site from me that doesn't work, now does it?

Even when that's the case (and in my case, I usually guarantee at least 4 browsers which cover over 95% of the marketplace at the present time... and I always include whatever browser combination my client uses at work and at home. There's nothing like getting that call from the client saying the site is all screwed up so I try to avoid that problem any way I can...), you still need to test the site to make sure it works where you say it will.

With that in mind, say you promise visual and functional accuracy in IE 7 and Safari. Well, right there, you've got to have at least two boxes running at any time. What if you just do IE6 and IE7 on PC? Well, since you can't install those on the same box, again, you've got multiple machines just for QA.

This is a P.I.T.A. any way you look at it.

It's for this very reason that I LOVE BrowserCam.com. They have this rock-star product called remote access which allows you to test your site on 20+ platforms each of which are packed with browsers.

They really do have almost any reasonably popular configuration.

So, there's the solution. You can act like you've got an army of QA people and a whole server room of boxes with this little tiny service.

If you're interested in finding out more, the ClassicPlus service is $800 / year. Check out there web site at http://www.browsercam.com.

If you do decide to go with this solution, consider my fundable collection. With the year long subscription, you get 10 accounts. I've split these up at fundable so that you get all of this power for roughly $80/year.

Check out BrowserCam's product and check out my fundable and let me know what you think. If you've used it before, be sure to leave a comment reflecting your thoughts.

Until Later!!!
- Ray.

Browser Statistics

Just in case you were wondering, you can find browser statistics here at the W3C. Here is the latest data for November of 2007:

2007	IE7	IE6	IE5	Fx	Moz	S	O
November	21.0%	33.6%	1.6%	36.3%	1.2%	1.8%	1.8%

As you can see from this chart, IE7, IE6 and Firefox make up 90% of the market (I wish they broke down FF a little bit further).

This is why we program for these three platforms with respect to functionality and visual accuracy. The way we program is fairly platform independent so it is pretty well guaranteed to be functional in all platforms, but we only, specifically, test for these three.

So, with all of the differences in CSS standards adoption, you might wonder how we make the site visually accurate on all three of these platforms. Well, we use a bit a User Agent (browser) sensitive PHP code to deliver User Agent specific tweaks to a master CSS file. This, combined with the sensibly hybrid CSS/tables layout makes sure the sites we make are visually accurate on all three platforms.

For more info, please feel free to contact us.