and your name was?…

Even when we get the names down, the personal data (did they grow up in New Hampshire or Maine?) can be elusive. Linda commented on my post about connecting with people in business asking how I keep track of all the tidbits.

My answer is to pay attention to a very few people. Which is not really an answer, but an explanation that I do not deal with so many people just yet that I have to have a real system. If I do, I will start posting such data in our project tracking tool, within our company forum. That way anyone talking with the client (not that anyone else should be) will know that so-and-so has a newborn.

The problem with this is, maybe the information I learn about should be kept, not private, but not public. Jory calls it Stalk Marketing when someone you don’t know finds out a lot about you in order to sell you stuff.

Key point, know who you are dealing with and how they feel about their personal information. And err on the safe side.

connecting with people in business

Yeah, I know Kristen at BlogHer because of our business relationship- I want to place ads, she does that, so I know her.

And that is enough for a basic level of caring and trust. Yes, I want her to be happy so she places my ads right.

But it is having met her in person at the Blog Business Summit reception, knowing that she is new in her job as am I, knowing her baby’s name and getting to recommend baby books- this is why I care about her.

Every chance you get, turn your clients into people. Turn your vendors into people. Find out what is going on in their life. Ask them about the weather.

It is so much more fun to do business with people I care about than with clients or vendors I don’t know.

Wondering about my blog title, All For You? Here you go- when I know you and care about you, I can say that I will do whatever I can to make you happy. Everything I do- it’s all for you.

whoever writes the news is the authority- so start blogging right now

Go here, and you are at a Google Finance page for a company. So what? Check out the lower right, where it says Blog Posts.

The first post is mine, where I listed this company (along with 99 others) on the hundred fastest growing companies in Washington State.

Do I know anything about Applied Precision, Inc? No. But because I am the only voice in the blogosphere (of late), I am the authority.

So get off your butt and start blogging, or someone like me, with no real understanding of what you do, will be considered the authority on your business.

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?

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?

#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!

why not to transfer content from wordpress to blogger

Sucharith asked how to transfer content to one of the better blogging tools. I say, don’t do it. Start your new blog on Blogger, but keep all your old content on wordpress. Three reasons:

1. Technorati looks at blogs and links, and assuming your blog has any blogs linking to it, that gives you authority in technorati. Move all your content away, and then that authority is wasted. It would be like getting 50 good feedbacks on eBay, then creating a new account.

Why not just duplicate the content? Because search engines will penalize you. Again, this applies only if your blog has some traction. If your audience is small and will follow you to your new blog, no worries.

2. Links and bookmarks- say someone likes your site and bookmarks to a post. Or another blogger links to you. Poor form to have the file not found. Be kind to your readers.
3. There are other ways of telling how important a blog is, like Google PageRank, that you would lose when you switch services and move all the content over.

Solution- start your new blog, and link back to your old blog often. This balances ease of use for you with keeping authority and pagerank with being kind to your readers.

why wordpress is not good for business blogs

So wordpress does not let users edit the template. In plain English, this means that I can’t add specialized widgets to my blog, say some of the Technorati tagging tools.

This means I can’t optimize the blog by doing all the things I know I should be doing.

So why did I choose wordpress? Easy- my Blogger name was already taken. Of course, when I signed up with wordpress, I assumed the template would be editable- big mistake.

One prof in college called this ‘assumicide’- just because something should be one way, unless you have checked it out, don’t believe it.

So sometime soonish I will be switching to moveable type. $5/month, simple to use. If you are looking to start a blog, look at blogger first- only use something else if your name there is taken.

Of course, you can always buy your own domain name, say at GoDaddy, and that is a better branding move than using one of the generic names (like allforyou.wordpress.com). It is not expensive, less than $20. Sadly, allforyou.com is taken.

UPDATE 2/21/07: Though I wrote this back in October, it still gets tons of traffic. Because Google loves it. And since I have written this, I am still with WordPress.

Intertia mostly. I have a blog area set up on Moveable Type, but I have to build a template for it, whereas I can post here whenever I want. And I have a bit of Google juice- not a lot, but enough to make it a bit painful to move.

Now that I have been blogging for more than 4 months, I would have to recommend Moveable Type as the best software for business blogging. It ain’t free, but it is the best.

Meanwhile I will be on wordpress, where the switching costs are greater than the hassles.

Note also: I now care less about Technorati widgets than about getting Google Analytics installed. I don’t know how accurate the WordPress analytics dashboard is- I would love to test it side by side with Google’s.