How NOT to advertise your services part 2

 

I was so taken with my focus on the fact the 1800 Got-Junk junk guys were now resorting to stapling thier signs to lamp posts and lowering they're brand to the level of the yard sale guy. That I failed to focus on the other, even more glaring error in brand development.

This would be the web design guy's well crafted marketing campaign.

So.... Besides the fact that you're not exactly laser targeting your target market demographic by posting your sign on the side of the road.

You furthermore are a web designer...
(that is clearly color blind)
but ...

wait for it...

you put your PHONE NUMBER on the sign.

Not your WEBSITE?

... again...

You're a web designer, but you don't show me your website address, you give me your phone number.

'nuf said.

Information Management

On a daily basis, the number of decisions, emails and communications that we make is increasing, I sometimes feel like this video. Come have a look at our new information management system it can help ease some of the pain you get from dealing with this type of information flow.

How NOT to advertise your services

 

I have to say that I'm particularly disapointed to see the 1-800-GOT-JUNK guys doing this.

As a company that I've always had a lot of respect for, it really depressed me to see this last night.

For a few years now we've all seen those damn "ebosa dot com" (I don't even want them to get a plug or link out of this post) signs posted to our lamp posts all around the lower mainland.

I'm not sure why the city doesn't fine these people, but of course, since it doesn't, I see that it has encouraged other unthinking small business owners into this ugly and intrusive form of advertising.

Stapling your crappy sign to every lamp post at every major intersection may in fact give you more visibility, but is it the right kind of visibility?

I can assure you that I go out of my way NOT to patron business that do this as I find it intrusive and offensive. Using a city lamp post to run renegade ads on is like visual spam, it's not effective and if anything creates a negative image about your business.

While I'll grant you that the got junk sign is a nicer vinyl cut, they're not placing themselves in the same category as yardsale guy with the magic marker. Not how I saw them 'till now.

I hope that the city starts to crack down on this, otherwise everything from plumbers to lawncare guys will be poluting the landscape with their crappy 4 x 9 vinyl cut signs (or worse, magic marker guy on the bottom).

If it's in front of a house where there is work being done, fine, I understand that, with the permission of the owner, your roofing company stuck up a sign for a couple of weeks... OK... but hanging out on the corner by the gas station has a whole other conotation to it.

Google Docs Rocks

I love these guys videos, they get down to the basics and really know how to simplify things.

This is a very good explanation of the benefits of using google docs.

IBM releases mashup wiki

I guess this is IBM's answer to Yahoo Pipes

The Impact of Social Media on Search Rankings - Search Engine Guide Blog

This sums it up nicely I think.

The Impact of Social Media on Search Rankings - Search Engine Guide Blog: "Optimizing Google Base Data Feeds Google Base is a database where you can upload all kinds of online and offline content for sale. Your items will include labels and attributes to help describe the content you are uploading, making it searchable for users. Attributes are the words that describe the characteristics of your items. You can enter multiple values separated by commas for any given attribute. Labels are keywords that can be used to classify or describe your item, such as products, services, and even a house for sale. The items you submit to Google Base will go in the Base directory, and some items, depending on relevance, might also go into the Google SERPs, Froogle or Google Maps. So the quality of your data is important if you want it to be found far and wide. Use Google Base custom attributes to optimize your feeds. Google Base allows you to specify your own custom attributes, which means you can include additional information about your items. Unlimited custom attributes can be included in your tab-delimited bulk upload file. Detailed descriptions can make your items more relevant, getting them into the Google index and other vertical databases, providing more opportunity for them to be found. Since many of those uploading their data feeds to Google Base don't know"

This is why I believe it's so important to tie our product and listings catalogs into Google Base with detailed data in the feeds.

New XLsuite UI and Features

I've created a video which looked a lot better on my screen than it does once it's been uploaded to google video. Regardless, I'm sharing it here and will work on getting the quality of these screen casts to go up.

The code for XLsuite is available here: http://xlsuite.org although the modifications you see here are not yet deployed as they are still internal code.

New Release of Ubuntu looks promissing

Along with a host of other goodies, this is the one that stood out the most for me.

Graphical configuration tool for X
You can now configure what driver you want to use for your graphic card, change the default resolution for all users or change your monitor's refresh rate without having to turn to the terminal. A new GUI has been added making it easy to adjust your video and monitor settings. This tool can also set up dual screen capabilities for cards that use the Xinerama mode.

Besides the fact that my first try with Ubuntu fried my hard drive and required a full rebuilding of the NTFS file system (which also enjoys native support in the new version which is nice), this new version of Ubuntu has a lot of good looking features and brings it one step closer to a mature OS worthy of consideration when selecting your operating system.

The fact that it's being shipped on Dell's now is also a very interesting move for long time hardware swashbuckler and trend breaker, Michael Dell. Just another example of a visionary company not affraid to knock over a few apple carts.

Despite my normal "white box" metality about new hardware, I'll probably give serious consideration to a Dell next time I'm in the market.

How to connect to Google Mail POP3 using XLsuite's servers

Configure XLsuite's POP3 reader to read from 127.0.0.1 port 5995, like this:

After that, it's the same thing as usual.