Need To Build A Social Network, Read On

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Over the past year I have been working on the first serious social networking site, with heavy Facebook and Linkedin integration, and I have found the following to be true.  When you first start out looking to build out a website with social networking functionality you come across the following solution “methods”:

1. Free/Opensource “Downloadable” Social Networking Solutions
These are things like BuddyPress (WordPress), Drupal Based, Joomla Based Solutions, and Others.
Pros: Sometimes easy to deploy, designs easy to find on ThemeForest.net.
At first glance this seems like a perfect solution.  4 or 5 standard functions like friending people, messaging, groups and chat.  Well, it’s a perfect solution for small outfits that want a social network to be added on to something like a store or a group that has all the needs for social-like functionality.
Cons: Biggest con of them all is niche functionality.  If your social networking-like site (I use “like” because this is a qualifier) is anything other than a social networking site these solutions are not really what you want.  Trust me, all the developers in the world that do development will tell you they can take BuddyPress and add on all kinds of functions, make groups do this or that, but in the end, the amount of customization involved is going to be higher than the original cost of something I am going to mention later.  Another big con is the overhead.  You wanted a social network, but you got  a big pile of code, and with this overhead and complexity.  So, this is a good solution for your book club group or groupies of a band, but if anything needs to be different, like you don’t want the ability for people to friend and groups are kind of different, than stop now!

2. Hosted Social Networking Solution
Ning and others
Pros: Sounds great, right!  You use Ning and they generate a site for you. Speed to market is the biggest pro and learning curve is lower because you don’t need to learn WordPress for BuddyPress so you are not having to take a class!
Cons: Well, the biggest con is you don’t control your data.  You may be able to get a download, but who knows where it is and what they are going to do with it.  You have to read the terms carefully.  But even more so, like the con in the downloadable opensource solutions, you lose control of your app.  If you want to do something or anything outside the norm, you are going to be limited to their functionality. So great for these little social networking sites, but not for prime-time or something serious.

3. Customized Solution In-sourced Social Networking Solutions
Having a customized solution built by a local programmer or programming team is plausible, but it is financially practical.
Pros: Control over the project.  Able to meet with the guy in charge. Get it general close to what you want.
Cons: Cost.  You are going to get burned financially.  A good social networking implementation should cost, in the US about $35,000, and that is for a basic implementation of friends, connections, groups, specialized forms, contacts, and any facebook like or Linkedin like functions.  It could end up over $100,000 if you choose the most expensive team or use a web agency.  That is what it costs to build a site with this kind of functionality, using a typical american development firm!

4. Customized Solution Outsourced Social Networking Solution Without Team or Specialized Experience
You meet some guy on oDesk who says he can do it at $15 an hour.
Pros: Cheap
Cons: If it is a sophisticated implementation, this is going to be a disaster.  Let’s just start with communications.  Even the best outsourced firm will get things wrong.  That’s because english is often not their primary language.  And they most likely will be truthful, but you will find that most of these implementation, especially one man team ones. turn out to be 10 times more costly than you thought and all the functions will be completely wrong!  In fact, I have seen 3 in the past year that were disasters!

5. Customized Social Networking Solution Outsourced With Specialized Experience In Building Social Networks!
Contact us about building a customized solution!
Pros: If you are serious and there is a serious budget or opportunity to build your social network the way you want it, then do it right and control the project.  This is not cheap, but it is cost effective.  In the end, it is cheaper.  This particular team I work with are experts at social networking functionality, so that is the key to working with them.  Just choosing a random solution provider, based on price, is pretty much a mistake.
Cons: I am sure there are some, because there are few in this situation.  One con that comes with all outsourcing-like projects is that the communications must be continual and work correctly.  That is why the team I work with has a specific process for managing the web development from design through html, to a final website or app.

Ok, now that we have gone over all the options for building a social network, please consider building one with the team I have used.  Just fill out the form below and start the process of working with us:

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Tell Us A Little More About What You Are Trying To Build And Why!

The End Of Cable TV As We Used To Know It

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In the recent venture I signed on with, Connect Address,  I happened to come upon one aspect of this biz which touched upon IPTV.   IPTV stands for Internet Protocol TeleVision.  You can do your own research on this, and come to a different conclusion, but essentially IPTV stands for the delivery of television over the Internet.  You know, a connection like Comcast, Verizon or at&t or Fios or Netflix.  We’ll get back to Netflix in a moment.   In fact one of the issues that surrounds IPTV is what will happen, because quite frankly it is not yet been written.  Obviously those who control all the cards today, let’s just start with Comcast, are the established hegemony.  There has been an entry into their world at almost every corner from old telcos over Fiber like Fios, but there has also been flanking competitors like The Dish Network and Directv.

Competitors and then competitors?

The competitors in TV or cable or wireless or whatever you want to call it (because there has been some potential for competitors over electric…), are all after becoming the next form of television delivery.  Youtube and then Hulu and Netflix enter the scene and what you have is a real potential shake-up.  So you see a trend.  New companies are trying to punch their way in and there have been barriers.  Recently I noticed that Comcast tossed another 50 HD channels in our direction.  Not that I am a lover of Comcast, but this seemed like a nice gesture.  What it really was, or is, is a way of throwing us a bone, but that bone has no meat.  90% of these so called extra HD channels are copies of the non-HD and even more depressing to me was like 90% of the new channels are either in spanish or are sports.  I don’t need this.  In fact it is too too much for me, other than the free Sprout Online (thank you Comcast for one decent channel and late nights that I don’t have to keep the kid on my neck). So your customers are starting to see options on the horizon so throw them everything that is cheap and free just about to them to try to keep us happy.

Channel Lineups Are Old School

What I think is going to happen is the days of massive channel happiness are becoming quite useless to me.  I’d rather have Netflix and basic cable than 200 channels I can’t make heads or tails of.  The days of ala cart programming are coming.  That’s what Netflix has been innovating.  For me it started with getting the Roku box, the streaming partner of Netflix. You can now get Netflix built in… Let’s just say that Comcast, remarketed as Infinity and some other kind of Netflix mimicry like Comflix or something is trying to stay at pace with Netflix.   Yes Comcast there will be a future, but not one where Comcast will necessary control the future (though you have lots of money and power to try this). I know it’s your ball of wax, but Comcast is not going to be the only game in town, but rather the pipe.  Their recent acquisition of NBC shows they know this is coming.

Unique and Amazing Programming

With channels like AMC, FX, HBO, ShowTime and even now Netflix offering original programming I think the future will be quite different.  Let’s just say that Youtube and Hulu I expect will have original shows and movies.  What does this mean?  Well, for one many of us will want to buy that content, even if it is $2-$7 on the fly.  Do we all need 200 channels and tons of fluff.  No.  With IPTV I expect more pay for play, more mini subscriptions or low end like Netflix at $9 a month, but the ala carte sounds best to me and what I really think will make some future player a bundle.  Get in, get out.  The days of locking us into month after month contracts may have been good for the past but who really knows what is going to happen.  Amazon and Apple will one day produce a TV show and original programming.  Trust me, it’s coming…

Wifi Built In TVs… The Apocalypse Is Upon Us

On a side note, my wife has become quite obsessed for looking for wifi built in TVs (ever since I smashed one of our 6 TVs).  The key to wifi built in is the ability to have the TV automatically online and the ability to easily surf to an independent online channel and run IPTV as you see fit.  Yes, you still have to pay a Comcast or a Verizon (or steal the local Starbucks wifi), but what you end up with is a way to get to independent programming or whatever you want.  The Roku box we got from Netflix started with like 5 channels, Pandora and and some crap, but eventually about 40 churches, gaming channels, music and even a Roxstar app that allowed my wife to push her DVDs into the cloud and access them through Roku…  All tons of great stuff, but not until your TV is connected is any of this possible.  The built in wifi is only on very few TVs we found.  None at Costco or Wal-mart, yet.  My prediction is that 2 years from today they ALL will be wifi enabled.  Lookout Comcast, the last days are here and things will never be the same after that.  But don’t fret Comcast, you will do even better, because we all need more bandwidth… tons more.  And you ask why.  See below, the future.

The Inevitable IPTV Future

So as IPTV creeps and crawls into our lives, we will one day wake up and say, damn, how did everything get IP based (that means over the Internet). It’s simple, that’s not just a trend, its a reality.  And I see a hell of lot more going on down that pipe, extending the internet to places, it quite frankly does not belong, but its going there.  For instance, I foresee on our TVs the complete merging of Internet sites and video, creating a whole new level of reality IPTV, where you participate in the channel locally.  Ah, there will be webcams and there will be video calls over the TV.  Will it be Skype, who knows.  But let’s just say you are watching a football game and want to make a call and interact with your friends (video phone) as they all watch the game together.  That’s a spot I am quite interested in, because of Connect Address, the product I have been working on.  Let’s just say you are watching a new wave of game shows in which millions participate along with the live show.  That’s where its going, and it really opens up Internet interactivity in ways that have not yet been thought of.

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Sorting Out What’s Important…

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Sorting Out What’s Important…

Years ago, those of us who worked for Bell Atlantic in the 90s, went to a management training program called The Bell Atlantic Way.  The Way was one of a dozen management training programs we were sent through.  Management training was in vogue back then and the phone company was still transitioning from the old guard to the new guard.  This just means that the old time phone company employees were being brought along and lead into the brave new world of cellular and other new technologies like the Internet.  The company feared that the employees were not really prepared for this change.  They were the old time operating phone company employees.  In fact one lady, Elsie, had her 50th anniversary of work for good old Bell in my group.  Her first job was teaching people the rotary dial!  But I was not one of the old timers.  I was in my mid 20s, but I attended these brain changing management programs as well.

There was a Quality Training program and other programs that we went through.  Seemed like there was one every 6 months.  The one that stuck in my mind and still does was The Way.  Most of us who attended The Way seminars probably still remember the core points.  In particular the one lesson that I remember the most was Blue Chips, Red Chips and Yellow Chips.  What they were trying to teach us is that we needed to look over all our chips, work tasks, and make a determination of which color each task or chip represented.  Important ones got a Blue chip, Red for medium and Yellow for chips that could wait.  We would need to reorganize our priorities based on the Blue Chips.  Sounds simple for most of you out there.  But for engineers (and almost everybody at the phone company was an engineer) it is not possible to always prioritize on what is really important.  In fact I have seen many engineers focus on minutiae and details that are not important to the overall business.

Fast forward 20 years.  Seems like many of the Internet start-up guys did not need to learn this blue chip lesson.  They figured a lot out on their own.  But let’s just say that for every successful tech start-up there are something like 3 that don’t make it.  Why?  Because (trust me on this) they may have been thinking like an engineer and not a business person.  What was important was getting to critical mass or revenue compared with making something cool.  Now there is a second part of this, a conundrum.  What is quite ironic is the cool technologies make the big bucks in the end, so for many start-ups having Google Engineers is quite important and all this talk about what is important from a business stand-point may not matter.  But when you are an Internet start-up out there in small town in America or overseas and not in Silicon Valley, NYC, Chicago, Boston or Austin, you are pretty much having to figure out what is important.

So, let’s say you are in a start-up and you partner with a technology guy or gal.  Please make sure that you don’t let them drive the business.  If you are in charge, and you want to succeed and you wrote the business plan, don’t let it go in a different direction.  It is important, as long as you are quite sure about your target, that you don’t let technology people drive the business into the ground because they became consumed with small details that were not critical.  It happens to me all the time.  And it even happens when I take on the role as developer.  Sometimes I build some additional code that was not necessary.

Thinking.  That can be a problem for the technology mind.  Sometimes you have to close down your creative mind and just do what you are told if you are not driving the bus!

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Pivoting A Start-Up: How To Avoid The Big Disaster

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As one CEO of an NTT corp division told me, “I have seen more disasters in my lifetime, let’s try to avoid a disaster on this one!”

Commitment To Failure

A few years ago in my MBA program at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) I remember studying the concept of Commitment To Failure.  This is when a business has chosen a strategic initiative where they are going to finish the project or literally die. It’s often an ego thing, and the company doesn’t want to lose on any project.  But you have to lose sometimes to gain.  Some executive or business owner has made the choice to hit the target or go out of business.  They typically don’t talk about it this way, and denial is part of the issue, but somewhere in the back of their mind there is a chance that they will not make it.  Everybody knows that is the risk of business.  But why go out of business when you could have stopped or changed direction or made an adjustment and survived.

The Strength Of The Human Mind

Someone recently told me about a businessman he met with who dominated the conversation.  This web development consultant had started a contract with a small business owner who would not let him talk, and shut him down if he opened his mouth with a never ending barrage of words.  Even at lunch the consultant was not allowed to look at the menu.  The guy shut him down and controlled everything.  The megalomaniac, smartest guy in the room syndrome, is the one you have to spot right away.  I often joke that these are the guys or gals who sometimes make millions because of their crazy ways, but on the other hand they kill themselves with their all-knowing, god-like complexes.  Hope you haven’t had the opportunity to work with this kind of person.  They make life difficult for everybody for no reason.  And it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Inevitable Future

I love this book Inevitable Surprises by Peter Schwartz (hope I got his name right), where he tells us that the seeds of the future are always around us in the data.  We can see through a crystal ball if we really want to.  Once the future hits and something becomes a reality we are always surprised, but the tea leaves were always there.  People sit around now and say the mortgage industry collapsed for instance, but most of us remember the housing bubble, the 40 and 50 year mortgages, the no questions asked mortgage and lots of other programs that were obviously going to sink the housing business.  These red herrings were right in front of us and the future was something you could sense.  Often we see all the signs but we ignore them.  I have.

Stop, Drop And Roll

So why be ignorant about your own start-up and make the right change early, not when the business is on the ropes?  Great companies have done this and pulled themselves in a new direction.  It’s a rarity, but it happens.  Look at Bill Gates 1995 in the wee hours realizing that the Internet is big and waking up and changing his company! It does not matter how big the company is, sometimes you have to change directions and give up on an idealistic trend that did not make sense.  Can you take what you have already created and go in a new direction, or do you have to start over from scratch?  It depends.  Is your business division doomed to failure down the road?  Then start a new direction, now, not when the division has been laid to rest.  Great businesses know when to say no to a project and either stop or switch gears.  A good example I am going through right now is taking my Take It National software project and possibly switching directions and markets from national event software to national wifi content management software.

First Success Syndrome

One particular syndrome I have notice for start-up guys and gals who have hit the big one the first time around is First Success Syndrome.  Just because they were 23 and created Facebook, they think they now know everything they need to know in life.  This is the kind of person that typically makes the commitment to failure the second and third times around.  I hear a lot about 2nd time failures and many failures for first time successes.  Why does this happen?  I guess our minds play a trick on us and we end up thinking that we know what we are doing and we stop listening.  I would say listening and looking at information can tell you there is a problem and there is a failure coming down the line.  For instance when any young entrepreneur tells me that he is going to create a new non-profit and will make tons of money, I look at him and say “No, not going to happen”.  Non-profits don’t make you rich (unless you are ripping people off).  So some of the logic here needs to be applied up front and directly to people.  But who knows, I don’t know everything.

The 911 Here

Like I said, I don’t know everything.  I think that is the first attitude you need in looking at  your business, your business division and any business situation.  Listening to people is the key to success and not knowing everything!

Tango Speed Dating Is Now A Reality

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Over the past few months, Take It National, Pre-Dating Speed Dating and a small Tango company called 22Tango located in the Charlotte area have been working on the first serious Tango Speed Dating event.  This event is a great test for a potential service nationally.  If you are single and are interested in Tango or dancing in general, then this event is for you.  I would go to pre-dating.com and check it out.

The event information is as follows:

????Tango Speed Dating for All Single Professionals Ages 29-39
Where:     World Dance Center
855 Sam Newell Road , Suite 205
Matthews, NC 28105
When:     July 17, 2012 (Tuesday)
Time:     7:30 PM
Price:     $25
Co-Sponsored by 22Tango! FREE Tango Dance Lesson while Speed Dating!

Click Here To Sign Up

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Marketing Trend: Our Decreasing Need To Remember Anything

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Years ago in the not so distant past there used to be these little black books we all carried around that held in them names, addresses and phone numbers. Ah, yes we called them address books and phone books. To those of us not well endowed with the gift of memorization, these little books were very, very important. Ok, you know I am being facetious. Along with the demise of these little black books (I personally see the iphone/ipad as the death knell), there is also a big trend, in fact a marketing trend, that we don’t need to remember much about who we know, where we go online, who we email in order to contact others. Why is this important? Well if you look at the recent trend of social bookmarking, social media and sharing sites, like Addthis.com, you are seeing a new paradigm emerging where we don’t need to know this contact information anymore. In other words, social networking and other kinds of sites are becoming the conduit for our contact information. The question is how and why can you capitalize on this trend.

Phone Numbers, Cell Phones & PDAs Start The Know Nothing Trend

Let’s step back a bit. I had been in the cell phone business back in the 90s, when the first internal phone books emerged. They were good and you could choose from a list of people to call, but when you broke, lost your phone or upgraded, you had to go through the painful move your contacts over process. But long before cell phones, landline phones, the old phone companies had those 10 digit numbers you had to remember. I am saying “had” because I believe phone numbers one day will be so obfuscated, you won’t need to know a number. In fact maybe you just say a name and your smart device finds that person.

When the Palm emerged (how soon we forget) it had all kinds of contact information apps on it. When the Palm merged with a cellphone, we were ecstatic. We would no longer need to keep that litttle black book for phone numbers. We still had to keep the address book around for the written addresses and some emails at that time. In the late 2000s as the phones got smarter, we were able to keep our contact list, integrate lists eventually with things like Google and Gmail. This made it possible when I lost a phone to get back at least an old copy of my contacts. But we were not free of having to remember some information.

Tell-A-Friend

As a little side note here, we had put the Tell-A-Friend page on almost every site we built up until recently. The problem of course with Tell-A-Friend is, if you don’t remember their email address, you couldn’t tell a friend. So how close a friend were they. So in the early years of the web, you remembered all your friend’s email addresses and if you didn’t, you copied and pasted it from your email program. But this is where the little black book came out.

Google Throws A Life Line

Gmail was the first really great implementation of a technology that naturally offered up contact information, such as email addresses and names of previous email contacts in a way that was unobtrusive. It used a natural intelligence that was not dorky or difficult and did not bother you. Using my Gmail account, I would just start to type either an email address or a name and it would show the contacts I needed. You could still search Gmail and find it other ways. Now, the geeky at-heart will email me and tell me that there were others before Gmail with this capability. I am sure of that. But this is the place I remember losing my “email” mind and not having to add email addresses to my little black book. I think it was around 2003 or so for me, but it doesn’t matter. What is important is I don’t know your email address if you asked me now!

Make It So Linkedin! Now We Don’t Have To Remember Ourselves

The emergence of Linkedin.com is much more than just a place for our business info and contact info. It created a place where we could put our resume information and not really have to maintain a physical resume. We are not totally there yet, but it is the beginning of another little piece of paper shoved into my little black book going away. The critical aspect of LinkedIn is it allowed people to change jobs, lose their primary email address, and keep in contact with you regardless. If you are LinkedIn with somebody, they can change their email address and life is good again. You don’t lose them. Next time you login to LinkedIn they have a different email address but life goes on just the same for your contact relationship. And the ability to use LinkedIn to communicate to you with “send them a message” changed the game. This small innovation in the business world has made it so even my little Gmail artificial intelligence is not that important anymore. The ability to contact and communicate within these types of applications was well underway with the big daddy of them all coming to town, Facebook.com

Social Networks, Honey Where’d My Brain Go?

So now that Facebook is upon us and seemingly consuming 90% of the online time of people who seem to have all the time in the world for Facebook, a second phase of this trend is now kicking in. We no longer need to remember not just phone numbers or email addresses. We don’t even have to remember our friend’s names. When you share a link or webpage on the web and you use one of the many sharing mechanisms, like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Vimeo, and there are others, life has gotten easy to ping somebody. If you use Facebook sharing to share you can send your message by searching for a face now, right? That conceptually means that you don’t need to remember anybody’s name anymore. And I see this trend increasing as Facebook logins and other types of sharing mechanisms seem to be everywhere these days.

The Final Frontier: Smarter Devices Means You Can Be Even Dumber!

When you got your first iPhone and you logged in to iTunes, and you downloaded your first Angry Birds app, the trend became apparent. You did not have to enter your email address each time. Just enter a password. Apple knows who you are, your contact info and basically we don’t need to know ourselves (email-wise). The whole concept of remembering your email address is becoming less important. Once you are on an iPad you don’t need to enter your email address to get on a list with an app. You buy things through iTunes. And if you use Words With Friends by Zynga you interact with people that you don’t really know and your contact info is embedded somewhere on a hard drive in the cloud (“the keyword for India hard drive storage”). So smart devices are making it so we don’t need to even know who we are.

What’s Next?

Well, I have no crystal ball, but obviously Facebooking your way around the web, using Facebook to contact and communicate is here to stay. The smart devices to me represent a major change in how and where this contact info lies. I noticed recently in my Android phone that I can sync my contacts with Gmail and/or the main company I use so I don’t lose it. I guess in the near future some of these mechanisms many cross paths either through mergers, acquisitions or just a central control system, like the old phone company.

How To Kick The Caffeine Habit

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I typically don’t chat about non-web subjects on this blog, but for the 100th time in the past 5 or 6 years a friend asked me “how did you kick the caffeine habit?” Basically I have been caffeine free for like 7 years. That does not mean I don’t drink decaf and it also does not mean I don’t eat chocolate. It just means that I don’t drink regular coffee.

If you knew me back when I was drinking 8 cups a day, you would never have guessed that I would be caffeine free like this. Years ago, I was a coffee junkie, and when the urge comes to drink regular caffeine I feign, because I remember the headaches, urge to wake up in the morning and worst of all the half a day spent going home early from a serious migraine and spent the afternoon in bed under a blanket.

My Coffee Legacy

In the early 90s I started to drink an average of 4 or 5 cups of coffee a day. I had a job back then which put me on a plane every week or every other week to a different city, so getting up early at 5:30AM to make my plane flight at Newark Airport in New Jersey could not happen without a cup of coffee. There would be a cup or 2 before I left for the office. These were the days before Starbucks, so we made the coffee ourselves. Of course this was worse for us compared with Starbucks because we drank it in pots. I mean volume! We all had a cup in our hands at all times, at meetings, outside, at our desks. Today, everybody does a run to Starbucks or they have that one cup at a time machine at the office. Plus, we are talking straight regular American method made coffee, not Expresso drinks or Fraps or whatever.

At the office, at Bell Atlantic Mobile, where I worked at the time, we would sip coffee all day long. When I would make a trip to Pittsburgh for work, in particular, there was a coffee bean grinder downtown where I could get freshly roasted coffee smell the roaster and stare at beans being processed in bulk. For the first couple years of drinking coffee I did not notice any problems. I even drank coffee Saturday nights after a night out drinking and would go to bed within an hour.

In the mid nineties, when coffee shops started to have open mic nights, I would go down to the local shops in New Jersey and do some of my own readings on stage. These local shops introduced us to a variety of coffees and flavors and this was about the time Starbucks entered the scene. I had even started writing coffee reviews for a short-lived online coffee magazine called coffeemag.com, started by an early web designer.

Signs Of A Problem

The first thing you will start noticing beyond the cravings, is a migraine when you don’t have your caffeine by let’s say 10:30 am. Got a call from my brother years ago around noon time saying he was dying of a headache. I asked him if he had his coffee. He said “I have not had one yet today”. I had to explain to him he was addicted. Yes, coffee has caffeine, a drug in it, and we get addicted. Even when you miss it and you have it later on, it is too late, and then you end up with a migraine that can go all day long. In fact, the next stage after years of drinking was an occasional chest tightening pain. No heart problems. Had that checked. It seemed the caffeine started to impact my heart a bit. The final straw was the once a month, I have to go home and crawl into bed impact. A super migraine would occur, not brought on by missing my coffee, it came on after tons of drinking coffee for weeks on end. A super migraine would impact me at the end of the week, and I would feel nausea and would need to go home and lay in bed.

God Gave Me A Sign

Around the time I was having chest pains and super migraines there was a story in south florida I watched on the news about teenagers taking caffeine pills. One girl took just 5 pills, as a way to get high, and she had a heart attack and died. These five pills were equal to 25 cups of coffee. The most I had in coffee was about 10 in one day, but I was almost halfway there. That story was what made me try to stop. I did not want to be that girl, and I was feeling it in my chest. I was about 40 at the time, so maybe it is an age thing. I just couldn’t handle drinking one cup a day. Either I got off coffee or I was in trouble.

So How Did I Do It?

The first thing is I limited coffee at home. I purposely started going to Starbucks to limit how much I drank. With a pot of coffee, I would feel I had to drink it or throw it away. It was an economic issue. At Starbucks, I could control with my spending and time how much I could drink. First I started to ask for a 50% caffeine, 50% non caffeine coffee. I did this for about 2 months. Then I asked for a 75% decaf. I did that for about 3 months. Then I finally went for it and said, give me a decaf. I never went back, and I never had a full regular cup of coffee again.

My Decaf Is My Methadone

So, since I switched, I have drank decaf exclusively. It doesn’t taste as good as coffee, I know that. But theoretically I stop drinking decaf, and I will be back on the regular stuff. It has been 8 years since I quit, and I have no regrets. I wake up in the morning generally rested and go right to work. I have no urge for caffeine. I have no crashes at the end of the day or days curled up in a ball in my bed. I have 2 young boys, so I have to be somewhat awake around them. Now, there was a big side effect. I suddenly because drawn to chocolate like I have never been drawn to it before. Specifically dark chocolate became an obsession for awhile, because it has caffeine in it, but no where near coffee. I have even lessened this obsession and become relatively caffeine free. Yes, decaf has a tiny bit in it, but there is the rub, I am just one step away from falling off the wagon.

Web Migrations & Taking Sites Live Reality Check

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Now let’s say you have been brave enough to either hire a web developer or build your own website yourself, or let’s say you have been assigned to build out a new website for a large corporation. If you know some PHP/Mysql or have some programming skills, or you are a designer, a “web producer” or web product manager or just a plain old entrepreneur, and you are in the middle of trying to get your website live, I understand your pain.

The Brand New Site

Websites run the gamut. They start from a 1-10 page biz card like sites, which only show your basic contact us, about us, services, to a full blown combination of existing systems like WordPress & Joomla adding in customized “serious” app development. They can have 10 lines of programming or in the case of one of my projects over 300,000 lines of programming. Either way, a brand new spanking web site with some level of serious programming will have this kind of logarithmic ending to the project It’s even worse than the old 80/20 rule, where 80% of the work is in the last 20%. It’s more like 95% of the work occurs in the last 5%.

Why so much work at the end? That’s because you typically have a situation where a lot of things are not known till the very end. It does not matter what the developer, project manager, third party guy in India tells you. The hard work in this business starts not on day 1, but day 180, when the petal hits the metal. And this kind of work has more to do with QA than development, and precision, not hand grenade throwing let’s kind of get it working. That’s why many outsourced websites, to overseas folks, die on the vine, or cost 10 times what they projected. This detail work is the work that you, the owner, or a close person to you needs to do. It is not for a guy or gal in a developing nation out there to do. Not to say that overseas development is not cost effective, it’s saying that I have my doubts after the 7th inning stretch.

Civil Engineering vs. Web Engineering

If you compare building a website to building a building. They are similar in that there should be some type of project plan. Where they differ is that a building can’t change, much, once you start building it. The plans for a building are set in stone, or the building could fail. A website is more like a big plumbing project in an old house, even for new websites. You don’t know the full extent of the project, sometimes, till you are in the middle of it. That’s why many web developers are not so willing to take one price stop shopping when selling their skills. Smarter web developers now realize that the big work can emerge towards the end, when a few extra things were discovered.

Web Feature Discovery

I mention web feature discovery a lot in my blogs. That’s because much of the development process on the web is about discovery. A good case in point is you start building a site, and you end up finding a new opportunity along the way. An example recently for me is we were building this college admissions counseling website and we realized about halfway through the project that there is an opportunity to create a series of pages, when SEO’d, would drive thousands of visitors. We would not have thought of this feature, unless we undertook the project. This is not a sequential process. This is a mind map type of process, where you start and many different directions appear. You have to visualize these directions, and rate them and decide which come next, which to ignore and which to take on.

The Migration

Ah, the migration. Another way to say this is what a p in the a. When you are moving a website, it is one of those things that can keep you up every night and you are blind while you are doing it. Even when I had a team of 20 people working for me and with me on a big migration of sites for NTT corp., we could not think of all the details. Our brains can not contain everything. When I recently migrated Pre-dating.com, one of my projects, I did it myself. This was like saying I am going to move myself, and you have a big house of stuff. It will happen, but it is painful. I have moved something like 12 times in my adult life and everytime I have to leave something behind and extricate from my life items and things I don’t want to get rid of. But moving means leaving it.

When migrating, you have this list of all the things that need to happen. Mind you, some techies are great at migrations. But no matter what you know and do, there always seems to be an issue you did not think of. We don’t know everything or sometimes we don’t know much at all. I moved a site recently and I realized after we moved the reverse DNS was set up incorrectly, so when you looked up the site by IP address it was incorrect. AOL blocked the email. Argh! I got it working, but it was in an area that is not my expertise. I fixed it, like fixing a migraine headache. Another issue on a migration I see all the time is slight differences in the servers. The old server and new server may be the same, but for some reason PHP, mysql, sql server, there is always a difference. Hopefully the settings don’t cause a major problem, but it often does. I have even seen a migration and 4 months later the problem is discovered.

What Am I Saying

I am just venting on the issues in taking sites live, and I can’t give you much than a pat on the back when it goes live, whether its a new site or a migration. This is an accomplishment, regardless of what you techie friends would say. There are many sites which refuse to change, move, migrate or improve because of fears of disaster. The disasters, I have seen them, so there are a good possibility no matter what you do. They happen and you deal with it!

Web Branding vs. “Don’t Make Me Think”

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About 10 years ago I picked up a copy of Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. It is by far the simplest bible-like book of user interface design. The principle of this short read is simply creating web page layouts that meet common ways people are used to using the web, and you will make your site is more usable and successful. And according to Krug, deviations from these norms, make people think. Making people think, means they sometimes get confused, sometimes they leave the site and often they don’t make the decisions you want them to make. Basically you make people think and that is a bad thing.

Don’t Make Me Think Example

A good example in the book is the word “Search” vs. “Quick Search” on a search form on a website. The slight difference of the wording “Quick Search” actually makes people think for a second, like is this search really quicker, where is the real search? According to Krug, if you are making people think, the sites usability is lessened and therefor things like conversion rates drop and quality of the site is lower.

Word Famous & Now We Are Starting To Think

I was sitting in on a brand building call by David Tyreman, founder of World Famous Company, and a guru extraordinaire on brand building, this week and he was covering the concept of making sure customers are in their comfort zone, whether as they arrive on your site, your business, in between, or right before buying or during the transaction. This is part of the larger concept of improving and creating your world famous brand.

Brand Comfort Zone

This comfort zone covers both physical and virtual spaces. By physical, a good example for our speed dating business, is when people are getting ready for a speed dating event, are they comfortable, happy, at ease and in the proper zone right before an event. Trust me people are nervously standing around, especially looking at people walking in the door, wondering if they are going to be in the event. For a virtual website, have you created an environment on the website that eases the visitors comfort level and therefor improved their comfort zone? An interesting example is Apple.com. They follow few standards. Often on the Apple.com website, I have to search around and find what to click on and discover stuff. But that is what Apple is all about. It is a tug of war between being Apple (branding) and Making People Not think. Well, this is what I am noticing is a diversion from Don’t Make Me Think, in fact, it’s the time you want people to think, because you are using your brand to improve their comfort zone.

VictoriasSecret.com’s Pink Bag

Back in 2001 or so, I was working at abcdistributing.com, specifically on their website analytics and their cart. abcdistributing.com, which I occasionally talk about in my blog, is the unsung hero of catalog companies that only women who love catalogs know about. They used to get thousands of orders a day online, so small improvements in their site design made a big difference. I was looking around back then and noticed that Victoria’s Secret was the first website to really introduce a different kind of a cart. Theirs was “Add To Bag”. Cart’s were just simply “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” buttons back then, so when I saw this nicely branded little bag, i was impressed. It was really my first introduction to how online branding can be extended to comfort zones online. I just did not know it back then. I tried to think of a way to extend this to abc distributing, a business that did not believe in branding, and all I was able to think of was this box they shipped out had this little fish icon on it. Everybody remembered them that way. That was their brand at the time, and therefor I pushed to switch their “Add To Cart” to “Add To Box” with a little box icon… Of course they did not go for it, but it stuck in my mind. Finally, thank you David, for explaining to us what this is about!

Be Uniquely The Same

So, in the end what I think this means is not everything online fits a cookie cutter way of doing things. Don’t Make Me Think obviously is a great example to start with in building user interface designs. It says don’t put something in a place on a site like a search box on the bottom left, or a menu bar in the middle of a page (not at the top), or the company logo in the middle of the page or change wording like About to “Who we are”. But there are exceptions, many exceptions, but exceptions that have to do with branding, where you want people to think! Another good example of a client of mine recently, who switched the word “Services” to the word “Benefits”. Or a site that uses “Start Your Journey” vs. “Buy Now”. So, it appears, good branding, especially improving the customer comfort zone, trumps Don’t Make Me Think. Sorry Steve Krug, sometimes you gotta think!

How To Write A Strategic Online Marketing Plan – Part 3

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Part 3 – Prioritization In the Online Marketing Plan!

If you are reading this article, you may want to check the first two parts here:

This is the first article in the series on writing a strategic online marketing plan
This is the second article in the series on writing a strategic online marketing plan

The more I think about writing a plan for a company’s online marketing efforts, I think about all the cookie-cutter, repetitive actions taken out there by thousands and thousands of website owners and marketers. This means people are starting to following standards in online marketing and trust me there are many things you should do and are doing right now! But, in a few cases, I’ve noticed that some things in marketing are much more important and easy to do than others, and just because everybody else is doing it, doesn’t mean you have to do it or should be putting resources into it. Just because the other kids are doing it is not enough…

What I am talking about is making strategic decisions about what is not just easy, but what is going to give you the biggest bang for you buck. Now, that is a very important part of the online marketing plan, such as what to first and then next, and so on. But even before many things can be done, there is and always will be a lot of extra setup work. If you want to have an email marketing campaign system in place, you need to at least have a solution to collect emails, possibly segment them, store them in a database, and then find an email sending solution, and then analyze and follow up. But you can’t get ahead of yourself, in that the pillars of a successful part of your marketing may revolve around the SEQUENCE in setting things up. If you just started sending out marketing email, because you were not patient, from the same server as your business correspondence communications (things like receipts, support and customer interaction) and have not come up with a separate domain for sending your email, you may have gotten things out of sequence… Not the end of the world if you are a start-up, but if you had separate domains you were sending from, you would have protected your business correspondence (your real world important email) from getting black-listed.

So for each area of marketing you need to accomplish for your website, I use a rating system for the priority, ease of implementation, time to implement, and other factors. Then based on these additional factors the priority may change. For instance, getting online with a website is still at the top of this list. One thing that is just as easy is creating videos, that are nicely tagged and have content on Youtube pointing back to your site. The same thing with easy to implement blog software like WordPress or Blogger, which also points back to your site for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. So things have changed in online marketing. What was first things first 10 or 5 years ago is not the same. Video and Blogs are now ground zero…not necessarily email… Email is important and the core, but it is a layer now above the website, videos, blogs, picture and other stuff you can easily use to draw traffic. What you have to infer from this, is it is a hell of a lot easier to get out a video camera and make a Youtube video than getting a great email campaign in place. Email campaigns mean more HTML, images possibly, landing pages, etc.

So as part of your prioritization in your online marketing plan, you need to come up with all the ways you are going to market online and focus in on a few quick wins. This is especially true if you want to make something happen now. Everything these days is about now, not later. Yes, some marketing efforts will take some time, but things like fixing a domain name to all be www. or buying a domain name can be done today. Things like fixing a title per page or a url per page can be done now, not later.

Help Is On The Way

Like I have said in my previous parts of writing a strategic online marketing plan, there are many, I mean many SEO and marketing firms out there to deliver your marketing program. But, there few, like me, who actually act as your marketing exec and help you write a plan. It is the writing of this plan you can’t leave to a one trick pony SEO firm. It needs to be an in-house, maybe a consultant like myself, developed thing that represents you and your business. Email me at dgudema AT gmail dot com if you want to discuss it…

Just Say No

You can just say no to cookie-cutter marketing approaches, because quite frankly what is good for the gander may not be good for the goose. If you are a law firm, then how you do marketing is different than an online store. Don’t fall into a trap that they are all the same, everybody needs to do the same thing. The only reason you may hear this programmed thinking from your marketing expert/SEO guy/gal is, that is what they know. What “THEY KNOW” is a common problem in the online world, because we are all limited to what we know. One time I went around and asked a dozen different programmers what language to use. Each one gave me a different language because that is what they know. The each sweared that it was the one and only and the best! What they know is not a guide to what you need to do and in what sequence. This is a task for a VP of online marketing, not a third party SEO firm. Remember if you own the website, you use marketing firms to carry out your plan, and rarely do they have what it takes to name the plan and tell you what to do. Control over your marketing and what you are doing is important and starts from home not externally.

There are many ways to cut a cake and marketing is that cake. I recently ran into a technique being used for a website marketing to seniors and they had removed all website links, forcing the seniors to go down ONE and ONE SINGLE path. There was only one way to go through their homepage and it required entering an email address… Why this restriction? What was going on? Well, after I noticed they were using Google Optimizer, an A/B and Multivariate testing tool, I realized they must know something and they tested and in fact it may be a smart move for them. Did the senior really want to go in many directions/places and the answer was maybe not. Maybe 5% were pissed off and left, but the numbers may be high in the conversion rates on those who entered their email address and stayed. This was about herding the cattle, and it raised some interesting psychological issues with website marketing. Some things may be counter intuitive and not straight forward. How do you figure this out? You have to test!

Testing

In the prioritization should be some testing. You don’t know, so you test. Testing is cheap and easy. $50 in a pay per click account or putting up a page to find out if people click through, fill in a form, etc. This is the best way to go about figuring out what works.

There is always more. I will be adding a fourth article coming up on the same topic… Writing a strategic online marketing plan.