when it’s okay to lie

I just lied to someone, I stand to benefit if they believe me, and I am not sorry.

One company I know has a web address that is a .org. The .com would of course be better- I still accidentally type in .com half the time.

The .com site is owned by someone else and is just a placeholder, making money (don’t know how much) through ads.

The aboveboard way to go about this would be to have me in my official capacity or the firm that wants the domain to contact whoever currently owns the name, and ask the price. The results would be in the many thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars, because the seller would be able to determine (correctly) that we could afford that kind of price if we wanted to.

Instead, I pretended to still be in college and working on a class project. To hopefully get a price that is less than $1k.

There is no question that, applied to daily business, this is totally unethical. Lying to get a good deal is wrong, wrong, wrong.

So why do I feel so differently about this that I am posting it, opening myself up for criticism?

In short, I believe there is some kind of property right in domain names. The courts agree- we could force the current owner to give up the domain to us, unless it happened to be their name or their business name, both very unlikely. So instead of the direct, confrontational approach, I opt for the quick and dirty approach, that gets us what we want, which we would have gotten through a legal challenge anyways, but still gives the current owner something.

Note that they would not get anything if we were able to get it through a legal challenge.

So, I am basically trading a lot of time and psychic energy, and my ability to say that I never lie in business, in order to get the domain to the people who have a right to it, while rewarding those who were smart enough to claim it in the first place.

Discuss.

Also, what if it was your domain, you could make a legal challenge for $3k and get it because it is your name, but you can misrepresent yourself (lie) and get it for $500 and far less time. Or you could buy it outright for $10k (this is not a made up number- if the seller knows who you are, and you have cash, this could be a reasonable price). What would you do?

writing news

Search Google for “100 fastest growing companies puget sound business journal,” or click here and let me do it for you. Notice #5?

Yeah, that’s me. On a very rare, but very relevant search, I am above the fold.

So- publish news on your blog, that is relevant to your readers.

technorati: getting started

Technorati is a great tool for: understanding what people are saying about you and your business, searching the blogosphere, finding out what matters in the world at any given time, and plenty of other things.

By the end of this intro, you will be able to do the basic functions of finding a blog, finding out how important it is, and who is linking to it.

First go to the Technorati home page. To the right of the search box, you can choose “in blog posts,” “in tags,” or “in blog directory”- leave it on the first one.

Below that, keep it on All Blogs, any authority, and in English. We will play with these later.

Now search for “UW federalist society” without quotes. The top results may not be that relevant- look down till you find the blog “Federalist Society University of Washington Chapter.” This will show up underneath the title of the blog post. To the right, you can see how recent the post is, and also how many blogs link to it.

Click on the name of the blog, and you should end up at the Technorati info page for the UW Federalist Society blog. Here you can see URL info and a variety of other information. Click on the URL you see and you will be taken to the UW Federalist Society homepage.

So now go back to the info page for the blog on Technorati. Click on where it says, underneath the blog title, what rank the blog is, with how many links from how many blogs. As of this writing, the blog is about #400,000, with 29 links from 7 blogs.

The most important part of that is the 7 blogs- this is what they call authority.

More on authority tomorrow…

allforyoublog.com

is not yet the home of this blog. But it will be, soon.

jory the connecter

I had great fun last night talking with Jory and crew from BlogHer, the women’s blogging network. They had a get-together after the first main day of the Blog Business Summit.

I got to meet Jory, Elisa, and Kristin, who is new to the team. I also got to meet various of the bloggers.

After drinks and hour d’oeuvres, we had dinner with a whole slew of folks there for the summit. I got to talk a fair amount with a bunch of interesting people. Mark (he is on the left in the picture) had great stories to tell of his 12 businesses he has built.

I didn’t get to here that much about what Anna does as Director of Marketing at GiveMeaning, but we need to get together so I can hear more. And, this tells you how on the ball she is, I got an email from her at 1:59am this morning. So after the last of us left the restaurant around 11:30, she must have went to her hotel and started contacting everyone she had met. As I said, I need to hear more.

I got to talk with Jim who runs an early stage venture capital fund.

I met others as well, and a few people had run out of business cards by the end of that day. I expect I will hear from many of them next week.

Here are the take-homes from this event:

a) Talking with people in other businesses about what they have been through and hearing advice on your own business is really really fun.

b) You don’t have to have a lot of years in business to tell a good story.

c) If you have not checked out BlogHer, then you are missing the boat. So go read about it. Right now.

d) Everyone should be blogging. Really. You don’t know how much it is hurting you that you are not blogging right now. Get started at Blogger.

e) It is fun to work for a company where people are impressed with the clients. I had not heard of our client AmericanStationery.com before I got this job, but everyone else has. And it means something to them.

f) Most of the BlogHer women are married. Tough.

g) I need to be at the BlogHer Business ‘07 in NYC, and probably so do you.

And to get back to the title, thank you to Jory for inviting all those who hang at BlogHer.org. A great night, more good contacts, and probably more than a few good new clients. Thanks!

pleased to meet you

You think I would understand this by now, being in client services and all, but it surprised me a bit when we talk with a client this morning by phone who expressed how pleased he was to talk with us, to meet us.

Now, we had emailed back and forth, but never talked. Or rather, our boss and his boss had talked, but not us. So now we know what each other sound like, and have a good sense of where the other is at, how happy they are with where the project is at.

We also both got extra information that the other may have deemed not important enough to include in an email, and yet colors the situation in an important way. As in, there is this other project following yours, so we need the site to get done before we can start this other thing.

So besides doing a good job, clients want contact. And they don’t get it much. So give them a call, just to say that everything is all good.

how to say thank you

Today at Service Untitled they are talking about how to say thank you.

One tack we are going to work on is getting company postcards, so after a client meeting, we can go that little bit further in saying thanks.

How can you thank you clients in a way unusual for your industry?

class

The IE 7 team sent a cake to the Firefox folks on the launch day of Firefox 2.0.

Now that’s class.

why we settle for poor marketing

Fear and lack of imagination. Read Seth for yourself.

Where else does his logic apply?

#76 fastest growing blog today

would be our very own All For You- the client services blog.

I found this out by looking at the WordPress dashboard, under blog stats, and looking at my referrers.

Thanks everybody!