worst practices
Web Sites from Hell: Verizon
If a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a video is worth ten thousand. Have a look at Josh Hallett’s screencast of a trip to the Verizon web site to perform the incredibly complex task of finding out what a phone line costs.
I’ll spoil the ending: he never does find out. Verizon, like so [...]
Stuck on Facebook
Got a Facebook profile? Well, if you decide you want to get rid of it, good luck: the New York Times reports that Facebook makes it very, very difficult to ever remove your information from the site:
Facebookâs Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to [...]
Some People Just Don’t Get It
The other day I wrote about my furnace repair guy who had an instinctive understanding of how to monitor and measure his marketing activities. It might have sounded like an overstatement to say that he was better at this than some marketing pros. Not really.
Just after the furnace fun I put an ad on [...]
How Marketers Lie to Themselves: "They Love Our Advertising!"
Mary Schmidt has a post up about one of the great marketing delusions: the idea that people just love, love, love seeing ads all the time.
Commenting about Microsoft’s concept of streaming ads to shopping carts in the grocery store, complete with RFID so it can tell you about Pop-Tarts when you’re in the breakfast aisle [...]
Jacked by the HP Power Jack Problem
I am, of course, old enough to be nostalgic for the good old days when things lasted. Sure, they’d break, but that’s when you had them repaired - because you weren’t going to just toss away something that still had some life in it - especially given that the the cost of repairing something was [...]
A Simple Technology Rule: Use it to Talk to Customers
This seems obvious, right? We’ve got all of this old technology (like phones), not so new technology (email, your web site), and cutting-edge stuff (social networks) available, and so we should use it to improve communications with our customers. Improvement means not just talking in more ways, but more useful ways. We can make it [...]
Stupid Ideas Die Hard
I just received a call - on my cell phone - that was a prerecorded message offering me a certificate for a discount on services from the Durrett Chiropractic & Natural Health Care Clinic here in Houston.
Apart from the little detail that this call was illegal - the number is on the national do not [...]
Stop, Thief!
Dwight Silverman at the Houston Chronicle writes about how he had to call Microsoft and reactivate his copy of Vista because he made too many hardware changes to the machine it was running on. The twist is that it was a virtual machine (he’s running Vista virtually on a Mac) and one of the benefits [...]
Whole Foods Makes a Whole Mistake
I understand why the Whole Foods board decided to ban company executives from blogging or commenting on any non-Whole Foods site, a decision that Houston Chronicle business writer Loren Steffy talks about on his blog. But it’s the wrong decision.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey got in hot water, you may remember, for posting about the [...]
What do you do if you’re NaviSite?
If you’re a B2B marketer in the tech space, you’ve no doubt heard by now about the major fiasco that NaviSite, a web hosting provider, has been dealing with.
They acquired another company, and in the course of consolidating customers into their Massachusetts data center, hit a perfect storm of botched operations and bad luck. As [...]
