Monthly Archives: March 2011

Gary Vaynerchuk is Smarter Than Chris Brogan. Here’s Why:

I walk this funny line between believing in stuff like “The Power of Positive Thinking” self-help ideals and thinking it’s pure bunk. I could go on and on about how that hits me and what it means for my clients, but instead I’ll wrap it in a simple package:

Do What You Promise.

The “Do What You Promise” thing has appeared here several times, and it matters. Especially in a business change and customer service environment such as what exists when the only way you can differentiate yourself from thousands of other potential contractors and business partners, your word, and correctly setting expectations, is everything.

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Posted in business change, Customer Service

Perception Is Reality in Your NYC Food Sanitation Grade

Perception Is Reality NYC Sanitation Food Grade

When is a grade of “B” just not OK?

Besides in my kids’ father’s house and some graduate school programs, the answer is “when the NYC Department of Sanitation comes around to inspect your restaurant for cleanliness”.

But a B is a passing grade when the restaurant police come calling. In fact, a “C” is a passing grade, too. But in a world where perception is reality—and this one sure is—you’d better not get anything below an “A”.

Why do i bring this up, here? Because The NYC Department of Sanitation has unveiled a business change that’s going to help create a healthier food service environment by putting dirty restaurants out of business. Not business change, you say? Read on …

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Posted in business change, Customer Service

“Last Night Never Happened” is Less Than Meets The Eye

You know those drunk posts you left all over Twitter and Facebook last night? What if that never happened?

A new iPhone App is based on exactly that idea. Last Night Never Happened claims to be essentially a “morning after pill” for social networking mistakes you wish you could take back.

It isn’t.

Actually, before I come down too hard on Last Night Never Happened or the very idea of a social networking morning after pill, let me say that for most people, in many situations, Last Night Never Happened will do what it says it will in practical terms. Since 71% of everything you post on social networks is literally never seen by anyone, there’s a pretty good chance that as long as you aren’t a famous person the act of erasing your social networking tracks a few hours or even a few days later could have the effect of nobody ever seeing them.

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Posted in business change

QR and Bar Codes, Scanners, and Supermarket Customer Service

I spend a lot of time thinking about customer service. If you read these words regularly, you know that customer service is so important an idea around here that we’ve gone so far as to erect The Answer Guy’s Customer Service Wall of Shame … a wall you don’t want to find your picture hanging on.

So here’s a customer service question: why aren’t bar-code scanners used to improve customer service?

The question’s been on my mind quite a bit lately, as I’ve discovered that one of the apps on my Droid that ought to be among the most useful is rendered a constant irritant because scanners don’t work as well as they should and stores are not only failing to do anything about it, but are practicing bad customer service in wanting to not try to help customers, and even lying to their customers instead of doing customer service.

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Posted in business change, Customer Service, Search Engine Optimization SEO

The Big Divide: Those Who Believe in SEO Vs. Those Who Don’t

Yesterday, I came across a post at SEOptimise.com. It was a discussion about whether Search Engine Optimization works, and who falls on which side of the issue.

As an SEO Consultant I found the conversation fascinating, if not especially well presented, and I commented. here’s that comment:

I’d like to agree with you. In fact, to a point I do. But I also think that to hold up those examples as being somehow endemic is missing the point.

SEO is so complex (in spite of we practitioners’ constant and accurate use of the words “this isn’t rocket science; you could do it yourself if you had the time!”) that people just don’t know how to describe it.

I’ve had highly-educated, successful friends go so far as to describe SEO as snake oil, simply because it’s so hard to explain/understand.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization SEO

The Future Of Internet Advertising? Cute Kittens

So I’m looking at this picture of a cute kitten. No, a VERY cute kitten. Let me be clear: I’m a dog person; for a kitten to strike me as cute it needs to be one seriously cute kitten.

 

Cute Kitten

Really Cute Kitten

 

Would I kid you? That’s A REALLY CUTE KITTEN!

Do I have your attention? I hope so, but it’s likely that I have your attention for the wrong reason. If you’re a regular reader here you’re dumbfounded that I’ve led off with cute kittens (stick around, please), even if you think that kitten is as cute as I do. On the other hand if you’re a cute kitten fan lured here by the promise of cute kittens and the steps I’ve take to attract you via cute kitten-related Search Engine Optimization, I’m about to lose you. And that’s OK. Goodbye.

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Posted in business change, Search Engine Optimization SEO

What If A Studio WANTED You To Pirate Their Movies?

Hey! I Got Something For You. Come Over Here … Just a Little Closer …

Here’s where the GOTCHA! usually comes in, right? Bogie man jumps out and grabs you. You’re thrown into the back of a panel truck, never to be seen again. A movie studio sues you into oblivion.

You may still want to stay away from shady characters in trench coats offering candy, but last week the specter of the big bad litigious movie studio got a little bit less scary. Paramount has decided to give away The Tunnel, for free, over the Internet, using BitTorrent file sharing software.

The Business Change here is huge, and comes from multiple angles. Susan, Take a Memo!

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Posted in business change

New Entry on Customer Service Wall of Shame. New Way In, Too

If you’ve been missing our stories of bad customer service and wondering why it’s been so long since we’ve had a new entrant to The Answer Guy’s Customer Service Wall of Shame, your wait ends now.

Which might be bad news for Binding Price Moving of Fresh Meadows, NY.

If you’ve ever hired a moving company, you know how many “gotchas” there are. Mayflower Moving, a company whose yellow and green trucks had at one point become pretty much ubiquitous have all but disappeared, and the scant references you can find to them on the Internet are mostly … really bad. Here’s one, and here’s another.

But I digress. Today’s story is about Binding Price Moving. The interesting thing about Binding Price Moving? They just keep saying “yes”.

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Posted in Customer Service

Survey Says: Even If You Use Facebook, You Don’t Trust It!

I’ve been pretty clear about how much I hate Facebook. OK, so I’m cranky and I hate other things too. I Hate Texting, for example.

But I really hate Facebook. Oh, I use it, but I say Facebook is set up all the wrong way, and fails as a tool for social networking.It’s the reason that new services like Doximity are popping up, and will succeed where Facebook is failing. Doximity is social networking for medical doctors, and doctors are flocking to it even though conventional wisdom had been that doctors were a group of people who don’t do that kind of thing.

Speaking as someone with doctors for clients in medical practice management , Reputation Management, and Search Engine Optimization, I can tell you…give them the right tools and even doctors will jump on board.

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Posted in business change

The New York Times is The Top News IN The New York Times

NY Times PayWall Is Top News In NY Times

There’s an old saying about how officials at sporting events should be invisible and anonymous; everyone’s better off if they do their jobs and we never know anything about them other than the fact that they must have been there, but … we don’t remember them.

Just yesterday, a story about that concerning referees in the NCAA basketball tournament ran in The New York Times. Enjoy that story, and quickly; this morning’s news is that the New York Times is about to start charging for access to their online edition, and your ability to read it a couple of weeks from now is not a certainty.

Yep. Look at that picture. The top story in the New York Times’ Business Section is…The New York Times.

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Posted in business change

How Google Custom Search Works

Last week, I told you that Google had turned on a feature that lets you exclude web sites with spammy content from your future searches.

Well, the “exclude what you hate” feature is live. I noticed it yesterday for the first time and poked around a bit:

The way Google Custom Search (that’s not its official name, by the way; there’s a Google product CALLED “Google Custom Search) works makes sense, I suppose. If you read something that makes you want to exclude the website where you saw it from future searches, then by clicking “Back” in your browser and re-displaying the search results that sent you to that page you get a slightly modified version of those search results. The item you clicked previously will include a link reading “exclude results from this site from future searches“. Click it, and that site is banished.

Makes sense. Maybe.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization SEO

Negotiation 101: Use Every Tool You Have for Business Change

Negotiation is simple: He who has the best information wins.

I’ve said that for—yikes—decades, and something I read last week made me realize just how important the idea is.

This piece in Inc. is about “Five Things You Should Never Say While Negotiating”. Of course, there are more; negotiation is one of those “simple yet complex” topics that defies being put in so small a box as this. But the point is simple: you need to know when not to tell the person you’re negotiating with what’s on your mind.

The tenet of withholding information isn’t universal. For example, when President Obama negotiated the deal with BP that led me to proclaim Barama Obama to be the best negotiator of all time, he gained the upper hand in his negotiations by revealing exactly what he was planning to do if he didn’t get his way. But The President of the United States is negotiating from a position of strength unrivaled by anyone.

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Posted in business change

Watch Movies? Like Music? Run a Server? Get Ready to Pay.

The all-you-can-eat train is coming to the end of its tracks.

Every now and then I come across someone who’s still paying by the minute to make phone calls. If you’re very young you might not even know that paying for each call you make was once a possibility, but until 1984 it was the only way phone calls outside your immediate area were sold and until the mid 1990s it was still pretty much the standard way things were done.

Data? It’s free. Bandwidth is unlimited, all-you-can-eat. Right? Not any more.

AT&T has announced the end of unlimited data consumption over your home-based Internet connection. To be clear, the cap on your data usage at home is pretty darned high, so only the hungriest data consumers will be effected. But it begins a trend that can only get worse. Expect other providers to jump on board. Expect data caps to get pushed lower. Expect to be paying for your consumption of bits.

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Posted in business change

Linking, Framing, and Other Not-So-Dull Copyright Issues

If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, the Internet is the most flattering place in the world.

It’s not just the bad SEO being practiced by folks like JC Penney’s Search Engine Optimization consultant. We talk about SEO a lot here at Answer Guy Central, and we believe we do Search Engine Optimization in a clean, legitimate way. Scraping, Content Farm tricks, and the like aren’t clean.

Neither is framing someone else’s content and passing it off as your own. That practice isn’t even an SEO trick; with the proliferation of mobile computing via Apps on SmartPhones, iPads, and other tablets, framing content has become an easy way to make money.

I bring this up because yesterday I received an e-mail from the author of an Android App called World Newspapers, asking me to change the wording of a piece I wrote a few months ago. That man, Abhishek Kumar, thought I was being unfair when I questioned whether World Newspapers might be violating the copyrights of the many magazines and newspapers available through it:

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Posted in business change, Search Engine Optimization SEO

Now Google Lets You Decide What’s Important When You Search

About a year ago I told you that Google had rendered their web site measurement tool Google Analytics worthless. It’s not strictly true; Google Analytics provides a lot of great information about your web site. But because anyone can have their computer put up a big “don’t count me!” sign, what Google Analytics doesn’t do is count all your web site visitors or all the pages that they visit.

As Google continues to struggle with which sites deserve high ranking in the search engine optimization wars, tweaking their results in ways that we can all only hope turn out OK, the real outcome remains in question.

Just this week, Google invested in Hubspot, essentially buying a content farm right after enacting content farm penalties. I questioned that move, but in this post about Rock Stars and SEO also pointed you at something else Google did this week:

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization SEO