Answer Guy Central

If the message that you need to be careful what you say and do on the Internet hasn’t sunk in just yet, get ready: pictures from Chatroulette have been captured, geo-coded, and are available for anyone to see at Chatroulettemap.

If you’ve missed it, Chatroulette is a new web site where you can go to instantly start chatting with random strangers across the Internet. It’s a cool enough idea, I suppose; why not make an occasional new friend this way?

Not surprisingly, there are reasons. The Chatroulette user community is thus far made up of mostly young, mostly male people who will instantly click away from you if you turn out to be anything other than a young, attractive female.  So Chatroulette doesn’t actually work. It might one day, and if he’s smart the young man who created Chatroulette will make a fortune selling his technology to dating sites. But right now it does nothing.

Oh, and there’s another reason not to play with Chatroulette: besides being comprised mostly of fickle young men, the other significant segment of the Chatroulette community is people masturbating on camera.

In fact, one totally anecdotal study of Chatroulette showed that one in seven of your new friends will be naked and touching himself. Watch this movie (don’t worry; there are no naughty pictures):

So now, we get Chatroulettemap. Their use of the data from Chatroulette makes what you do there public. REALLY public. I went to Chatroulettemap this morning, clicked down to  a street level view of midtown Manhattan, and found this:

At least they boys have their clothes on. But seriously; do you want your picture and a pretty-darned-accurate location of where you are out there on the Internet that way?

Still not sure how this Internet thing really works?  Let The Answer Guy help protect your privacy

President Obama is in a war or words with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. I find it unseemly, but that’s not important.

I bring up the subject because I happened across this article in today’s New York Times, and attached to it was a (slightly off-topic) comment on the Supreme Court’s ruling of last January that essentially gave corporations the right to make unlimited campaign contributions. And it asked a reasonable enough question:

If Corporations and People Are The Same Thing, Do Corporations have the Right to Bear Arms?

I referred to this Supreme Court Ruling in a recent post, and now I’m thinking: why is it so important to pick the correct business structure? Are Corporations really the same as people? The Right To Bear Arms example shows pretty clearly that the answer, if there is one, is “no”. But legally, corporations enjoy the same rights as people, don’t they?

A corporation and a person aren’t really the same thing, for a simple reason; it’s illegal to kill a person, but the board of directors of a corporation can end its life any time.

That said: our laws say a corporation has the same rights as a person, so until that changes (not gonna happen!), we work within the system to create change. Business change in this context looks something like defining what “the right to bear arms”—or any other right, for that matter—means to your business.

Recently a client for whom Virtual VIP does marketing consulting asked me: Are There Too Many Blogs? My answer to him was a quick and decisive who knows?

In trying to answer his question, I started by saying that there are way too many for most of them to be terribly meaningful. But that’s a non-answer, right? Thousands of people consistently read these pearls of wisdom, but it’s a far cry from the number who hung on my every word back in the day, when The Computer Answer Guy was an internationally broadcast radio and internet program, and when I did television for CBS News.

So to answer the client’s question, I altered it to this:  “Are There Too Many Businesses?”

Sounds silly? My point was that the landscape is crowded, and the best way to stand out is to MAKE yourself stand out. And that’s what blogs are for.

If you think thousands of people are likely to care about your words of brilliance, well, it’s likely that you’re deluding yourself. On the other hand, blogging isn’t really about that any more; if you don’t establish a meaningful beachhead you will consign yourself to being UNmeaningful. Blogging is the best way to do that, assuming you do it correctly.

At this point the question becomes more real: is dumping your thoughts onto a web page good enough to get you noticed? And the answer is probably not. Blogging and SEO go hand in hand; you need to tell the world your story, show what you’re good at, and . . . make sure people find you. SEO, an acronym that gets thrown about so much I actually heard it at a Bat Mitzvah this weekend, is about yet another obtuse idea: that of long-tail marketing.

Oy Vey, as my people say. Sometimes, business change is about seeing change, even when it looks like the same old thing. Contact The Answer Guy if you want to hear more . . .

Well, it’s happened again: a state has decided to penalize many of the small businesses operating in it by forcing Amazon.com to collect sales tax there. The “how ugly can you make your business change?” culprit this time around is Colorado. It’s just plain not OK. As I told you about as early as February of 2009, when New York led the way in this travesty, the conflict arises when a taxing authority says a company like Amazon.com is “in” their state because the people who sell their goods are located there.

Dig into this, and you can’t help but notice: what’s being flat-out ignored here is that sales taxes aren’t the responsibility of the seller.

States want their revenue, and when you fill out your state tax return you are specifically asked if you made out-of-state purchases on taxable goods that you didn’t already pay sales tax on. If you told the truth (ha!) you’d generate a tax liability for yourself.

That being the case, and given that you pay sales tax to a merchant for them to submit to your state, it seems obvious that it’s the PERSON who is responsible for the tax, and not the merchant.

Essentially, therefore, this kind of land grab by the states is an admission that they need others to collect taxes for them because they believe that their real constituents will lie, and not pay them.

Don’t blame the Amazons of the world. If we enact a national VAT, the issue goes away. If we don’t, the states need to take it upon themselves to find a way to collect that doesn’t put out-of-state companies in a position where they need to act as unpaid tax collectors.

And yes, passing that bill in Colorado, as with the situation that exists in NY, truly did put people out of business. Business Change? No. Business Death.

Ever wonder how your favorite television programs come to be on Hulu? Think about it: the studios that own the rights to those shows don’t like giving them away. They sell episodes on iTunes, they sell DVD collections of their programming, and they sell advertising on the networks that carry the programs, so why give away programming and let Hulu have their content for free?

The truth is, they don’t. When you watch a program on Hulu it carries advertising. Hulu sells those ads and some of the revenue from them goes to the owners of the programs.

It’s Coopetition at its best. And last week Comedy Central decided they didn’t want to play the coopetition game any more. They’ve pulled The Daily Show and The Colbert Report from Hulu. You can still watch the programs for free over the Internet, but now you’ll have to come directly to the Comedy Central website.

Just as putting the programs on Hulu was a business change, media companies taking the shows back and selling their own advertising is a business change, too. Wasn’t that fast?

It makes sense for big companies to do this. Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, one of the largest media companies in the world. They have a sales force in place, so why pay Hulu to sell ads (the question is rhetorical)?

Remember, though, that Comedy Central produces their own programming. One company makes the show, owns it, and broadcasts it over their network.  Generally, networks buy the right to air programming produced by others, who retain ownership rights and need companies like Hulu to do sales at the next level.

Business Change is situational, and often time-constrained. The people who watch Comedy Central’s programming might not like having to make an extra stop to find it, but going to another website is really no different than changing channels on your television. And Comedy Central wants you to program them in directly.

Let us keep you up on these business change issues without having to make an extra stop at Answer Guy Central. You can have updates sent to you automatically through the Answer Guy Central iPhone App, or  the Answer Guy Central RSS Feed.

In today’s world, there are a lot of ways to get ripped off. Ever since software became a mass distribution item, companies have sought ways to protect their products from copying by people who hadn’t paid to use it. In the old days that was called “Copy Protection”, but now it’s Digital Rights Management, or DRM.

And let’s be honest: if it was you, you’d look for a way to protect your property, too. Forget the issue of many people truly not understanding that it isn’t OK to copy software (“but I bought it!“); the rampant, intentional piracy of software is and should be a concern for people who get paid for creating and selling it.

But the protection of your rights isn’t an excuse for trampling on the rights of your customers, and even if you think that’s wrong, ticking off customers when you have a different option is just not smart.

Hello, Ubisoft.

If you aren’t a gamer, or if you don’t have kids who spend way too many hours shooting things on TV or computer screens, you probably haven’t heard of Ubisoft. But they’re huge. Ubisoft is one of the largest games companies, regularly turning out titles that sell in the millions of copies. They’re a true consumer-facing success story of monstrous proportion.

And they make using their software not only difficult, but as all of their recent customers discovered yesterday, impossible. No, really: impossible.

Ubisoft’s latest DRM scheme requires that you have an active Internet connection at all times while playing their games. And no, the games aren’t on-line; you buy them and put them in your computer or gaming console. This would be bad enough under many circumstances, such as you being in a place where you have no Internet connection, or temporarily being without one if your connection was not working.

This weekend, though, Ubisoft’s DRM computers, the ones that your Ubisoft games need to connect to when you start the game, change levels, save, or do pretty much anything, went off-line. This instantly rendered all their customers’ games inoperative.

Now remember: the games are installed on your computer. You don’t need connectivity to play them, Ubisoft just won’t let you unless they can constantly check to make sure you aren’t ripping them off. Think about it: each copy of the game has a serial number. They could require you register the game when you install it and then disallow further registrations under that serial number. They could require periodic check-ins an any number of ways, actually. But this scheme is . . . ridiculous.

I’m not a gamer. I don’t care personally. In fact, I welcome a mechanism that gets my kids to play video games less from time to time. But from a business change perspective . . . Ubisoft, c’mon. Why is it that every time you enact business change it just looks like you’re caring less about your customers?

No uprising/revolt massage. Just the one that matters: business is not about beating up your customers. And even with teenagers hopped up on hormones and adrenaline there is a breaking point. Look at your customers and make sure you don’t cross theirs.

Think Customer Service is an oxymoron? Turns out you’re right.

I’ve written on this topic before. From the supposed communications expert who told me that she didn’t want to hear my opinion, to the software company that thought a good way of doing support might be to go for sympathy by telling me that software development is hard, to the company that just couldn’t communicate, the theme recurs anecdotally for me, you, and just about everyone.

And now Contact Center Industry Analyst ContactBabel has made it official: in the USA, in 2009, looking at 6.6 billion call center interactions, consumers felt overwhelmingly that the centers failed to actually provide support.

Well, OK, so customer service is bad. We knew that. The question is . . . why?

It’s difficult to do good customer service even when a company WANTS to. Finding the right people to staff a call center, training them to communicate the way you want them to, and then keeping them trained as both your product/service offering and general business surroundings change over time is a juggling act that even the dedicated and well-intentioned find challenging.  Once the support center becomes viewed as an expense item . . . or even worse, an expendable expense item, it’s over. And sadly, that seems to happen . . . every time.

Customer Service starts out as a way to win and keep business. Usually, as a company becomes successful, and certainly once it starts “answering to its shareholders” customer service goes into the toilet.

Walk into a Verizon Wireless store. Do you want to buy a phone? a Verizon Wireless employee will help you. Do you need service or repair? The less-cheery people in the back wearing what look like Verizon Wireless uniforms have an extra patch on their sleeves telling you what company they actually work for. That’s right: Verizon Wireless won’t trust their sales to anyone but their own employees, but service? Outsourced, right in their own stores, to people intentionally masqueraded as employees.

I’m a business guy. I understand the need to turn a profit and I know how to massage the resources. When business change becomes about that at the expense of doing the things that made your company successful, you’re missing the point. And it doesn’t need to be that way: like preventive health care contributing to overall wellness, real customer service adds to a business’ bottom line.

Next time you’re thinking about your customer service, remember: it’s the most important function in your company. 6.6 billion phone calls can’t be wrong.

Think you can do your own Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ? Think Again. Even Google can’t figure it out.

That’s right, the people who we all look to for SEO approval in practically the way a child tries to please daddy doesn’t do a very good job of optimizing its pages so it can . . . umm . . . find itself.

Google has released a report detailing their own SEO failings. You can download it here, or read what Google thinks about themselves here. Or . . . just read on:

First, let’s be frank; Google’s SEO doesn’t have to be very good; they’re Google. That said, though, the roadmap they provide to what makes good SEO is one that anyone looking to do their own Search Engine Optimization can learn from.

The question is whether you want to do your own SEO, or hand it over to someone like us. Either answer is fine; SEO, like most (not all, but most) of the services we provide at Answer Guy Central’s Virtual VIP isn’t rocket science. But it takes time. LOTS of time. And a devotion that not very many people trying to grow a business can afford.

Oh: and if want people to find you, you have to do it, period.

Read what Google has to say about Google. And then ask yourself if you can afford not to enact good SEO as your very next business change.

Wouldn’t it be great if software was free? Heck, wouldn’t it be great if everything was free?

And a better question: am I talking about “free of charge”, or walking a “Free to Be You and Me” metaphor? Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, thinks software should be free.

Since Mr. Buytaert is in the software business I presume he doesn’t mean that literally. And wow . . . imagine if he did! The software patent question we had a chance to look at yesterday when Apple sued HTC and last week when Facebook somehow won the ridiculous patent 7,669,123 just wouldn’t matter.

What Mr. Buytaert seems to mean is that software itself has no value and so shouldn’t be used as a weapon against the people who use it. In fact, Drupal is free, and you can use it on your web site without paying anyone a penny. On the other hand, if you love Drupal but would like Mr. Buytaert’s company to host it for you, or provide consulting in how to use it best, that’s not free. WordPress, a much more popular content management system, works the same way.

For that matter, Answer Guy Central follows a similar model. There’s lots of stuff we give away, including the words you’re reading right now, and the Answer Guy Central iPhone App. At some point, though, we certainly hope you become a paying client, be it for The Computer Answer Guy, Virtual VIP, PC-VIP, or any of the other services we offer.

Here’s the important question: what, exactly, should be free?

Last year, we did an experiment using a service called Hubspot. As I told you then, Hubspot is an absolutely great way for a business starting from scratch to attract lots of traffic and attention. Note, specifically that I said “starting from scratch”. Using Hubspot requires a commitment that’s just too hard to make if you have an existing web site and don’t feel like tearing it down and starting over.

What’s worse, though, is this: Hubspot’s business model involves holding you hostage. Once you’re in, there’s effectively no way out.

True, your data belongs to you. If you can figure out a way not only to get the information you create and store using Hubspot back out but also to replicate the connections and other important details that make Hubspot do its marketing magic, you are, as they told me when I brought this point up, welcome to leave any time.

But the whole point of using a hosted service like Hubspot (or  Drupal, WordPress, or anywhere) is to avoid the technical overhead. And I promise: if you had the staff and/or expertise to host the software yourself you wouldn’t have opted for the hosted version in the first place.

Mr. Buytaert’s point, on analysis, really means that hosted software needs to give you an easy way out that doesn’t blow up your other business processes. And he’s right. But that isn’t about either form of the word “free”. It’s about companies like Hubspot not creating business models designed to hold you hostage.

If you need help navigating this minefield, you know where to reach me . . .

Last week I made some noise about how ridiculous Facebook’s US Patent 7,669,123 is, and asked you to make noise too. Now, Our friends at Apple are showing us a real-world here-and-now example of why software shouldn’t be patentable under most circumstances.

Let me be clear, once again: software isn’t “unique” unless it does something that can’t be done some other way. By definition, then, the only time software should therefore “infringe” is when it uses exactly the same code to do exactly the same thing as what the Patents and Trademarks people call “prior art”. Apple, in suing HTC (manufacturer of the Google Nexus One Smartphone), isn’t so much defending its work or intellectual property as an “idea”.

Palm will be next. Motorola (they make the Droid) will get sued too, as will anyone who uses the idea of pinch/spread to zoom/widen. Again . . . Apple’s patent on exactly how to implement “multi-touch” might be unique, but the idea isn’t. The idea can’t be patented. Software patents are ridiculous.

Software patents are a business change that benefits no one except the attorneys who get paid to sue or defend against suits. Don’t fall into this trap. Make your next business change a real change.