You see, when I started out, I did what most people do and looked for the cheapest hosting. You’ve no real idea as to how busy you’ll get and it’ll be a nice problem to have further down the line if you’re getting hits from Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all.

And another thing that seems quite nice with your unlimited-host-whatever-you-can-throw-at-us-platinum-deluxe-premium package is that you normally receive a free domain.

How can you turn down $4.95 a month for all-you-can-host plus a free domain? Yes, I found it quite alluring too.

Now I’m not going to bore you with the perils of cheap hosting, but I am going to badger you about your domain.

I went down the cheap hosting + free domain route when I started on my DIY road to Webmastering many moons ago. And I set up quite a few sites that way – all with the same host. Currently, I have one domain with them that no longer has a site hosted on it, but I still use an email address for certain PayPal transactions. Last night I purchased something, but found it rather odd that I didn’t receive an email confirmation from PayPal nor the folks I bought something from. I couldn’t find anything in various folders, so I did a simple bit of sleuthing to see if the email was working. No joy. On checking the Whois information I noticed that said domain was now registered to somebody in Korea. I checked my invoice to make sure I’d paid for a renewal, and I had – last August.

In a nutshell, the domain had been transferred even though I have a receipt dated 08/15/08 from both the host and PayPal confirming a renewal payment.

Looking through my emails, I’d received notifications that the domain was due to expire on 08/27/08 after the 08/15/08 renewal invoice date. Knowing this lot as the hapless harbingers of hosting doom they were I should’ve taken those emails more seriously rather than merely thinking they were being a bit stupid.

-1 to me.

I anticipate more pain than it’s worth to see this one through to its natural conclusion.

So, what should you do?

1. Let domain registrars handle your domains and let your hosts handle the hosting. I use Namecheap, others are happy using Godaddy (feel free to share others in the comments). A domain registrar allows you much more control over your domains and besides, that’s one of their core competencies. It isn’t something bolted on as an afterthought. They’re also cheaper in the long run. You’ll be surprised how many free domains suddenly get charged out at $15 a year once they’re no longer free.

2. Set up the domains yourself or at least make sure you have them registered in your name with your credit card and all the login information at hand. You don’t need to tattoo it to your thigh, but just make sure you’re the go-to guy and don’t need to rely on a third party to control the administration of your domain. This means you don’t let your Web designer set it up in their name. What happens if you have a falling out and they decide to turn their phone off and play naughty?

3. Buy your domain for the maximum amount of time possible, usually ten years. Then you really can forget about it for a while. This also has a nice SEO benefit in that search engines think you’re serious and in it for the long haul. It’s exactly the opposite of what spammers do.

4. If you don’t fancy the ten year thing set your domain to auto-renew. It’s much easier to dispense of domains you own than it is to get back one you’ve lost. How many hours would you be prepared to waste over $8.95?

I may have missed a startling piece of insight, so please feel free to share any tips or thoughts in the comments.

With that, let’s take a fairly extensive look into what the candidates are doing today in their paid search campaigns, shall we?

Before we go any further, check out Manny Marrero’s (aka Steaprok)’s excellent post on online marketing throughout this election season (hat tip: Brett D. Payne).  Do not pass go.  Do not collect $200.

Update: Also check the very bottom of this post for a list of articles related to internet marketing and the 2008 Presidential election.  I’ll update as I find them.

It’s a very thorough post on how both John McCain and Barack Obama have implemented internet marketing strategies and where each is strongest and weakest.  Pertinent to this post are the following:

• Going back to February 2007, the candidates had already spent well over $7 million in online advertising by September, not counting search.  Let’s overestimate what they probably spent and say the total figure with search is $9 million.  Pretty impressive, except that $9 million would represent only about 3% of their overall ad spending.  Problem is, US advertisers in general spend about 7% of their budget online.
• Update: Borrell Associates pegs the 2008 political advertising pie slice devoted to online marketing at only 1% (although that’s for everyone, not just the Presidential candidates).
• Both candidates are using some paid search best practices, including using multiple ad copies and landing pages specific to their keywords.
• McCain is spending a lot more and generally doing better on the pay per click side (even on Obama-related terms); Obama much better on the natural listings / seo side.
• Search volume is heavier for keywords with “Obama,” but many of those searches are not necessarily pro-Obama searches (the 4th most searched for term, for example is “Barack Obama birth certificate.”

Paid Search Political Advertising on Election Day

With that background, let’s take a look at today’s paid search landscape (methodology / ranking system at bottom – it’s a doozy!)*.  Keep in mind that this is a snapshot and not necessarily indicative of the candidates’ paid search campaigns over the last few months.  But if you’re not going full bore today for whatever reason and running til the coffers are empty, I have no sympathy for you.

So let’s go.  By coin flip (seriously, we did one), Obama’s up first:

How Obama Ranks for Paid Search Marketing

Anti-Obama Search Terms: 19.5
- Barack Obama birth certificate
- Bill Ayres and Barack Obama
- is Barack Obama Muslim

McCain-Neutral Search Terms: 5
- John McCain
- all about John McCain
- John McCain’s views

Anti-McCain Search Terms: 1.5
- McCain old man
- McCain Bush
- McCain oil

Issues Pro-Obama Search Terms: 0
- Iraq war end
- affordable health care
- alternative energy

Issues Pro-McCain Search Terms: 0
- spread the wealth
- government spending
- offshore drilling

Deductions: -3
For not keeping budgets high enough on election day.  See Methodology #11

Total Paid Search Score for Barack Obama: 23

Of special interest: The DNC did a pretty nice ad / landing page / campaign just for Pennsylvania – thought it was a nice way to show “politics is local.”  Only saw it one place for Obama and nowhere for McCain.  Also, Obama does some really great Fight the Smears advertising – goes to the same Web site (well, subdomain now) that I wrote about before.  In this area, he does a really great job of matching up keyword, landing page, and ad text.

How McCain Ranks for Paid Search Marketing

Anti-McCain Search Terms: 10.5
- McCain old man
- McCain Bush
- McCain oil

Obama-Neutral Search Terms: 14
- Barack Obama
- Barack Obama biography
- facts about Barack Obama

Anti-Obama Search Terms: 5.5
- Barack Obama birth certificate
- Bill Ayres and Barack Obama
- is Barack Obama Muslim

Issues Pro-McCain Search Terms: 10.5
- spread the wealth
- government spending
- offshore drilling

Issues Pro-Obama Search Terms: 4.5
- Iraq war end
- affordable health care
- alternative energy

Deductions: 0

Total Paid Search Score for John McCain:45

Of special interest: McCain seems to run a much more robust campaign, especially on Microsoft adCenter and especially on terms related to his opponent.  Obama is not invisible, but very hard to find on terms related to McCain, generally.

And 2008 Presidential Winner is…

John McCain by a score of 45 to 23. Now go out there and vote if you haven’t already!

I’ll go ahead and put a wager out that these numbers will be much higher on both sides in 2012.  Any takers?

And a final note – boy is Yahoo! the biggest loser in this race.  I didn’t see any official McCain advertising and very little by Obama / related groups or the GOP.

* Methodology

I wouldn’t get an A in my sociology courses (yes, I graduated from Vanderbilt University with the ‘athlete’s degree’) for experimentation, but this isn’t exactly flying by the seat of my pants either.  Here’s my madness’ method:

1. I’m in West Virginia, although sometimes my ip address gets read as Ohio (here’s Wheeling on a map – an hour from Pittsburgh, it’s situated across the river from OH and 15 minutes from PA).  Most pundits think West Virginia is not in play, so I’m going to trick Google AdWords into thinking I’m from Pennsylvania for my searches.  If the candidates are doing any geo-targeting, surely they’re putting dollars there.
2. For Obama, I’ll pick three terms that seem anti-Obama, McCain-neutral, anti-McCain, issues based (pro-Obama) and issues based (pro-McCain).  Then I’ll do the equivalent for McCain.
3. If you disagree with the issues based terms I have, let me know.  I’d love to know what I should have used.  Just don’t accuse me of being for one side or the other – I tried to pick stuff that was highlighted by the candidate or his opponent in debates and advertising.  Obviously some of these could have been put on the other side or not selected at all.
4. A case could be made that it’s inappropriate for candidates to advertise on certain (but not all) anti-opponent terms like “is Barack Obama Muslim” and “McCain old man”.  Because of that, I’m devaluing their listings by 50% of whatever the normal total would be.
5. Not doing any positive terms for either candidate or any neutral terms for that candidate.  Why?  They may still be advertising on those terms, but that seems like wasted money to me so I’m not going to knock a guy for not advertising on them.  That approach was more appropriate during the primaries.
6. Will rate each candidate on the following:
   • 1 point for having a listing in each of the three major search engines (extra point if #1, extra half-point if #2 or #3)
   • 1 point for having ad text related to the term (may deduct or add half a point at my discretion depending on keyword insertion tool usage and manual ad copy)
   • 1 point for a landing page specific to the keyword
   • Bonus points available for useful features on a landing page such as voting booth locations, ability to donate, etc.
7. I’m checking all three major search engines for ad listings, but not going to go through and check each one’s ad copy, destination urls, etc.  That’s just too much time.  So I’ll only use Google AdWords for the digging deeper parts of the point scale.
8. No bonus points for having multiple sites listed, and for the purposes of this report, a site that either the party or another clearly pro-candidate entity puts out will count for that candidate.
9. The results are probably a little skewed by the fact that someone might be doing a broad match and show up for all keywords that contain a candidate’s name, but A. the candidates should probably be doing this anyway, so shame on them if they’re not, and B. I’m hoping this gets tempered somewhat by whether they took the time to do related ad copy and landing pages.
10. Would like to rank based on testing and some other pay per click best practices, but the campaigns didn’t give me their passwords to dive in and check.
11. I only made one manual adjustment and that was deducting 3 points from Barack’s overall score.  The reason is that his ads were showing up only part of the time.  I know that could do some with how Google displays searches to me specifically, but my experience leads me to believe it’s more to do with how their budgets are set.  Not running full steam on election day merits a deduction.
12. Tried very hard not to do double dipping, e.g. giving bonus points out for the same landing page used for different terms.

That’s it.  Let me know what I missed or give any feedback below.

Suggested Reading:

• Barack Obama & John Mccain: A 2008 Presidential Election Search and Social Marketing Analysis
• Finally an Example of being Proactive in Online Reputation Management Courtesy of Obama
• McCain Seems To Have Obama Beat in One Arena
• Obama Makes Money, McCain Ignites Issues With Internet Marketing
• Like Pig Fat Slinging Mud
• Piggybacking on Election Day publicity
• Sarah Palin Most Searched For Term on Internet Since Al Gore Invented It
• Are you a John M(a)cCain or a (P)PC Guy?
• McCain’s Paid Search Marketing Campaign Still A Mystery To “Experts”
• The keywords John McCain and Barack Obama are buying on Google
• Obama Vs. McCain: Paid Search Keywords
• Sponsored-link ads on Internet play campaign role

The list above contains a few from our blog, but that has more to do with me reading all of our posts.  What else am I missing that’s deserving of some linky goodness?

So, no complaints there then.

Large Hadron Collider

You see, tomorrow sees those pesky Europeans turn on their Large Hadron Collider (LHC for short). Reuters spells out five facts you probably didn’t know about the thing:

Though built to study the smallest known building blocks of all things — known as particles — the LHC is the largest and most complex machine ever made. It has a circumference of 27 km (17 miles) and lies 100 metres (330 feet) under the ground, straddling French and Swiss territory.

At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, travelling at 99.99 percent the speed of light. It is capable of engineering 600 million collisions every second.

When two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun, concentrated within a miniscule space. Meanwhile, the cooling system that circulates superfluid helium around the LHC’s accelerator ring keeps the machine at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.34 degrees Fahrenheit).

To collect data of up to 600 million proton collisions per second, physicists and scientists have built devices to measure the passage time of a particle to a few billionths of a second. The trigger system also registers the location of particles to millionths of a metre.

The data recorded by the LHC’s big experiments will fill around 100,000 dual-layer DVDs each year. Tens of thousands of computers around the world have been harnessed in a computing network called “The Grid” that will hold the information.

And The Guardian has quite a nice interactive slideshow thingy detailing CERN’s Big Bang Machine. Or there’s the first part of a rather dandy PHD Comic series here.

Now before you switch to Y2K survivalist mode and start stockpiling water, beans and shotgun shells, and risking suffocation by duct-taping your doors and windows, there’s a couple of things I feel I need to point out:

#1. The reason this could be the end of the end will be due, if at all, to the creation of black holes; and the creation of black holes shouldn’t have a dramatic build up in the same sense of a Hollywood disaster flick (they should also only be really teeny tiny black holes that disappear almost as quickly as they’re created). It should just appear for us to disappear – mankind should be switched off like a light. There’ll be no smouldering cityscapes or bewildered individuals looking at the remains of a rubble-induced New York considering man’s fate while looking out forlornly quizzing his new destiny. Or not in my mind, and that’s quite a reliable source in the cutting edge world of particle physics.

#2. I’m being a bit disingenuous in saying the world may end tomorrow. I mean they’re only setting a beam off at close to the speed of light in one direction with the faint possibility of setting another off in the opposite direction to calibrate all the instruments. There’s very little chance of these two fellas smacking into each other. That should happen in a couple of months or so when they start whizzing millions of the things at each other in opposite directions. But a chance is a chance nonetheless.

Ostensibly, I’m really rather zen about mankind being reduced to a point of singularity. It’s also up to you whether you’d like to give your fortune to a tramp, or take the people you love to a slap-up meal then do a collective runner, or just watch the sunset turn into a starry night before being sucked into that self-same void. That’s your call.

I’ll just be sure to laugh at anybody liveblogging it.

But something nearly as earth shattering as the earth literally shattering is the number of non-geeks who’ve simply started a conversation with the words:

“Have you tried Google Chrome?”

Never have I had conversations with people about trying a browser out. Especially not with people who don’t have a vested interest in tech geekdom. Or aren’t pretending to be tech geekdom adopters/conduits/experts.

Now I think this is brilliant. I love it when the hoi polloi start adopting this kind of thing at the same rate as the enlightened self-appointed technological elite. As much as I proclaim to not get excited about much, I do feel a twinge of said excitement when my Mother excitedly forwards me an email telling me how she’s worked out to forward an email. I love it when people get excited by their own earth shattering technological advances and adoption.

As for you trying out Google Chrome if you haven’t already – I’d probably suggest you have better things to do if the world is about to end tomorrow.

I’d hate for your last moments on Earth to be filled with anxiety and regret over having used Internet Explorer for the past ten years.

The target company who raised the ire of the plaintiff in this case?

From the San Francisco Chronicle, via Webmaster World via a tweet from pageoneresults:

The Target retail chain will make its Web site accessible to the blind and pay $6 million to visually impaired Californians who have tried unsuccessfully to use the site, under a settlement announced Wednesday.

The nationwide settlement, filed with a federal judge in San Francisco, is intended as a model for the retail industry, said a lawyer for the National Federation of the Blind, which sued Target in 2006.

The company must now equip its Web site, www.target.com, with an embedded code [ed note: ALT tags] that can be read by software to provide a vocal description of the page, and links that allow a blind person to navigate the screen with a keyboard instead of a mouse. The improvements are supposed to be completed early next year and will be monitored by the National Federation of the Blind for three years.

In its lawsuit, the federation accused the company of violating federal and state laws that entitle the disabled to equal access to business and government services.

In a key ruling, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel…said the American With Disabilities Act requires removal of all barriers to “a disabled person’s ‘full enjoyment’ of goods or services,” quoting from the 1990 law.

That’s a little longer than I normally go with quotes, but there’s a lot of good information here.  Let’s break it down to the most basic levels:

SEO Basics: The ALT Tag

When you go to seo school*, the first thing you learn after school orientation and the SEO General Theory 101 is probably the title tag.  Or at least it would be if I ran the curriculum because I see this neglected so often.  Around lunch time, you’d learn about the alt tag.

* No such thing, but imagine if there were – it would be filled with 18 year olds blowing off link building classes because they were too hungover from the kegger at Sigma Epsilon Omega on Thursday night.

An alt tag is an extra piece of html code you can use to give an image or other type of multimedia file a description.  Sometimes it shows up in a pop up box when you hover your mouse over an image.  Without delving deeper into seo basics (you haven’t paid your tuition yet), just accept that it is a good thing for making your Web site search engine friendly.

ADA-Friendly Web Development

The alt tag, short for alternative text, wasn’t really developed for SEO purposes (most of the things seo practitioners utilize aren’t).  Their benefit was to developers so that they would know what the heck an image was supposed to be without having to pull it up visually.

Armed with this piece of information, the Americans with Disabilities Act was extended to include Web sites.  People who are visually impaired have special computers that can read to them what the rest of us see.  They can also describe images…if they have an alt tag.  Therefore, all government sites require ADA guidelines such as the use of alt tags for all federal contracting work.

Whether and how this actually extended to non-government Web sites in the real world was pretty much up in the air…until yesterday.

Your Take-away of the Day*

Use alt tags. They help with your natural rankings, the blind / visually impaired access your site (and purchase if you’re a retailer), and your developers.  They also keep you compliant with what is looking increasingly as if it will be mandatory ADA guidelines, meaning you can find a better way to spend your $6 million.  If I could come up with a con, I would.  Even with content management systems, the ability to add alt tags is pre-built in.  No excuses!

* wanna go play by the bay, eat some hay, whaddya say, I just may.  That’s a Happy Gilmore reference; I’m not trying to imply that blind people (or federal regulators) scream at golf balls. Although some of them probably do just like the rest of us.  I hate golf.

I get a little bit peeved at my lifelong insistence on jazzing up the mundane to heart attack proportions, but all in all I’m quite Zen about stuff going wrong or right. Fists pummeling dashboards is nothing more than a meditative chi release.

It seemed like an exceptional idea to finish work on the Friday, have the movers turn up to load the truck at 8.30pm, and drive the three hours it takes to get to Avon that evening. It didn’t seem quite as good an idea once the truck’s battery had died on Main St. after only spending a few minutes with the hazard warning lights on. Thankfully, the lovely moving chaps had the mother of all jump leads so it wasn’t an issue. Me locking the car keys in the trunk of the car was slightly more problematic. But our mover chappies came up trumps again. Although the only thing we had at hand was an old fishing rod that I had to snap the individual eyelets off so they could access the door release with it. First time it’s actually caught something – har de har – and the last as it sacrificed itself snapping in two.

So, at approximately 11.30pm we embarked on our move, to arrive at 3.30am. We were tired. We’d planned to have packed a mattress, or at least blankets last thing so we could just whip something out to sleep on. But of course they’d been packed first thing (our fault, of course). The floor was cold and hard and afforded us no more than a couple of hours of interrupted kip. After spending the day unloading without incident, Steph, her Dad and brother went to take the truck back leaving me to gaily spin around on my leather executive chair on the patio.

Three hours later and my head had spun about its axis and left orbit after coordinating with the mechanics, U-Haul and Steph over the plight of the truck which had packed up again at the gas station. They’d done nothing more than leave the key in the ignition to ensure they put the required 5/8ths of a tank of fuel in the tank prior to returning it. Instead it’d given up the ghost and was taking up two gas pumps, much to the slight dismay of the gas station manager.

U-Haul: You Can’t Crash ‘Em if You Can’t Start ‘Em!

There are plenty of questions to be asked on the where and why front of this Saturday afternoon escapade, but the bottom line was that I had the contact cell phone and the Steph party only had a pay phone at their disposal. I kept explaining how I didn’t rightly know what was wrong with the truck or where they were exactly, which obviously didn’t cheer the mechanic chap up, but U-Haul had had it all explained to them by Steph and they only had to relay that information to the mechanic. Three hours later after a gesundheit of phone calls to and fro and fro and to, I was guiding the mechanic to his ultimate destination as he sounded on the verge of tears not being able to find. It transpired that he’d been given a slightly wrong address and his GPS was therefore leading him a merry dance. It was my suggestion of actually stopping and asking somebody that happened to save the day. What a quaint concept.

I was already feeling a bit jet-lagged from the lack of sleep and general weekend trauma when the alarm went at 4am on Monday morning as I was catching a 6.24am flight to New York from Akron/Canton. I’d cannily checked in online the night previously outside our local Panera Bread and noticed I only had to arrive ten minutes prior to take-off. This is the sort of information that leads to all manner of bother as I wasn’t requiring too much of an invitation to spend an extra half hour in the land of nod as I hadn’t managed double figures shut-eye in three whole nights. Before we left the garage the Garmin was telling us we were barely going to make the airport before the plane took off let alone make the departure gate ten minutes beforehand. But, like all delusional goons we held out for some form of divine intervention or wormhole to tickle the tatties of time. For the record, Steph will never make it in NASCAR.

After being laughed at by the Air Trannie at the check-in for suggesting meekly whether the plane could hold on for a minute, I had to tear back up to Cleveland Hopkins as the next flight to La Guardia from Canton/Akron wasn’t until 2.30pm or so and my flight to Chicago left at 2.55pm, and with it being the first leg of an international escapade I had to be there two hours before. I knew they flew more regularly from Cleveland, but that it was a tad more expensive, but I wasn’t blowing my Gran’s birthday, only money. Although, she had no idea I was going so what difference would it make?

I’ve never felt a wave of relief, horror and helplessness until the Continental guy swiped my debit card for a one-way ticket from Cleveland to La Guardia leaving approximately half an hour from time of swipe. Never has $434 seemed so right and so wrong. At least the ticket was refundable. Anyway, I bid my wife a fond farewell and was ushered through expedited security by the kind Continental chap who’d saved my life/fleeced me rotten. My giving up smoking and intermittent bouts of Tai Chi were really paying dividends as I power walked/jogged my way to the gate. I felt a certain smugness arriving with ten minutes to spare and boarded the plane having not even broken a sweat – only the skin on the side of my hands from bouncing them off the dashboard on the hour drive up to Cleveland.

No sooner were we all aboard and raring to go than we were off again; the blooming cart thingy that pushes the plane backwards had packed up and the time it took for a new one to arrive had caused us to lose our turn in the lift-off line. We disembarked and had to wait another hour. Thankfully, Gate C14 at Cleveland Hopkins manages to pick up some free wifi, so I managed to occupy myself. By ten we were back on and jockeying for take-off with the Captain telling us that Continental HQ had informed him there was a slot, but that air traffic control at Cleveland telling him there wasn’t. I’m kinda glad that air traffic control won the day even if it meant taxiing all the way back to the gate and getting off again. Apparently La Guardia was shut down due to thunderstorms and was still organizing flights from the previous night’s delays.

We didn’t finally take off until around 12.30. Still plenty of time to catch the 2.55pm to Chicago. On landing at La Guardia and finding my check-in there seemed to be quite a bit of confusion and general irate tension hanging in the air. But, that’s what I associate New York with. How did they ever manage to create a city that simply brings the worst out in everyone? Still, they’re grumpily efficient I suppose. On attempting to perform an electronic check-in my machine went blank and demanded that I see an attendant. The long and short of it was that my flight had been canceled. I also received a telling off from the attendant for not shouting at her. More fool me for attempting to wait my turn. So off I went to join the snaking queue of travelers ranging from the mildly miffed to the disgustingly disgruntled with the odd teary breakdown and threat of violence thrown in just to keep the adrenalin flowing through the veins. I have only ever sworn at two people just doing their job in my life, and both of those have been in New York. It’s safe to say I hate the place. The abrupt rudeness of the woman whose job it was to usher those who were flying soon through the queue was staggering. As stupid as I may be, nobody has the right to make me feel like an idiot for answering in the affirmative to a question involving those flying at 3pm of which I supposed to be one.

All I had on me to contact the outside world was my laptop and my iPod Touch. Wifi was the way. So I whipped out my touch to check for signals and Boingo leapt into my browser informing me that I had the option of 15 mins free service. Who could fault that? At least I could fire off a couple of emails to Steph and my Mum to let them know that whatever was going on I knew my chances of arriving on English soil at the allotted time were slim to none. Thankfully, Steph had emailed me to tell me that my flights had changed. Thanks for pointing out the obvious! Of course, 15 mins is great for getting the word out, but maybe not as clever for getting the word back, but I was fairly confident that I could sort it all out later once I knew my new flight itinerary. It would only cost me $4.95 or so for an hour of Boingo service and that would be enough.

After shuffling down the line I was told by the check-in lass that I could fly the same time the following day or fly to Manchester via London from JFK. I plumped for the same day from JFK as I wasn’t holding out for full reimbursement rights on the flights and I had already delved too far into overdraft land paying for last minute flights. And besides, I really hate New York. So, off I traipsed to catch the shuttle to JFK only to be met by hoards of punters trying to get refunds from the ticket chaps. La Guardia was hardly showing the human condition at its finest.

The new-ish American Airlines terminal at JFK seems rather nice. Quite plush. Almost swish in that post-industrial whiteness type of way. At least it made me feel like plonking my buttocks down and firing off a few emails. With my positive La Guardia Boingo experience still ringing in my intertubes, I didn’t hesitate to seek another play with it. I was quite happy to pay for a bit longer this time, but if I could fire off any responses in another free 15 minute trial on my laptop then hunky dory. My luck was out at JFK, so I just stumped up for the hour. It all started fairly well with me firing off a few emails, but then it all seemed to turn into the Internet on molasses. It was slow; it was breaking connections; it was causing Gmail errors that I’d never seen before. So, I fired off a Tweet in frustration as it appears is par for every other twittering fool when traveling. I am not above the mass of idiots to add to noise levels.

Within ten mins I’d unexpectedly received a tweet back from somebody at Boingo. While I didn’t want to waste too much of my intermittent wifi time tweeting with Boingo representatives slap bang in the middle of a poor customer experience, I was fairly impressed that somebody was monitoring the specific online space that is Twitter.

As customer service goes this is proactive. It’s trying to solve problems that you’re experiencing there and then, and can only be applauded. Unfortunately, I was struggling to engage in any form of dialog due to the service being a bit funky. I’ve no idea what was causing it, and I had similar problems in Chicago O’Hare on the way back, so by a process of elimination it’s either my laptop (RIP) or Boingo. Or perhaps some homeland security nonsense. But the proactive customer service continued when I returned to the UK to find a direct twitter message from Jeremy Pepper at Boingo asking me to email him directly. Now I didn’t email him until things funked out in Chicago as well, but I felt as if they were at least trying to help you out, and for that reason alone I feel they deserved my attention in trying to iron out any problems if I could. You see, while I didn’t exactly have the best of experiences with Boingo wifi, I want to have a good wifi experience with Boingo in the future.

U-Haul, on the other hand, I would like to see wither up, shrivel and die. Like painfully. Thankfully, I only had to deal with them on the Saturday trying to convey simple messages explaining that although I was answering the phone number that had been given at the time of renting, I wasn’t with the truck, nor was I entirely sure what the problem with the truck was or where Steph and her family were. And while I may not have had to explain this into double figures, I went through it more than five times. While I don’t doubt they were trying their best, or perhaps they were too stupid to have a ‘best’, their customer service when required was reactive and was causing more problems than the one it was there to solve. It shouldn’t take over three hours to get somebody out to fix a truck.

That’s poor.

And to compound that, when Steph started the ball rolling on obtaining a refund of some description, we then went into corporate customer service buck passing. Hoping you lose the will to live has been the corporate norm for customer service for quite some time. Customer service for these companies is Orwellian double speak. It’s nothing less than a barrier between customer and corporate. Heaven forbid they should be out there listening and reacting and solving customer complaints and problems on the fly a la Boingo.

But the biscuit gets taken when they leave you a voicemail message telling you that you’re “not going to get nothing” because you put the wrong fuel in the tank causing the battery to die. Not only that, but they should be charging us a $300 fee to clear the fuel lines. Thankfully, I have the full message in glorious Technicolor on my cell phone, and am more than happy to share with you the full idiocy if you’d like me to upload it. After all, we understand the contempt and derision most corporations have for its customers. If it weren’t for customers their share price would skyrocket – or so their oxymoronic thinking goes.

By all means hate us, but don’t make us out to be idiots. And don’t lie about the situation. And don’t get caught lying about the situation by leaving a voicemail message. Really, even a toddler understands it’s extremely difficult to put the wrong fuel in a tank in America with the way you size your nozzles – it’s genius. Don’t backtrack on your lies when you’re presented with a receipt for the fuel by claiming it’s unreadable. These are the days of the Internet my corporate halfwit friends, where these tales of nefarious idiocy can be splurged unabated and a throng of other customers you treated like idiots (for it will be part of your corporate culture) can vent. All the search engine reputation management in the world ain’t going to paper over these widening cracks.

I almost prefer the La Guardia/America Airlines/ New York unabashed rudeness. After all, as much as you might hate it, they at least sorted the problem on the fly. Granted, they didn’t pretend like they cared, but I didn’t want a shoulder to cry on, just the problem solving. They had no other option to go into mini-crisis mode and organize everybody as fairly as possible. Although I’m sure you didn’t have too many thinking they were the bees’ knees at the time. But, if the airlines can turn flexibility on like a tap and become this dynamic entity rescheduling flights at the drop of a hat, then why on earth can’t they put a system in place that encompasses that flexibility when the fan isn’t covered in poop.

Why did they ask for an extra $700 dollars after I booked my flight that went from La Guardia to Chicago to Manchester and I asked if I could simply get on at Chicago? Without thinking they managed to send me to Manchester from JFK via London Heathrow. I also had no problems jumping off at Chicago on my way back from Manchester. Imagine a flying culture that bent as and when rather than only when it had to.

However, none of this would’ve been an issue were it not for me being an utter dolt. No amount of new online marketing theory can account for not getting one’s backside into gear in the first place.

Oh, and the customer service award of the past two weeks goes to?

The guy from Chris Miller furniture in Wheeling, his son, and his brother-in-law who not only did a fantastic job packing all our stuff into the back of the wonky truck, but also didn’t even raise a grumble having to jump start the truck and were stars breaking into our car to get our keys out. And they weren’t even obliged to do either. Wheeling, West Virginia wins the day!

Just when I thought I had said all I could say about the WVU eMBA scandal from an online reputation management perspective, I was sent a link to this article:

Interim WVU president has big goals — but don’t count on him blogging

Big thank you to Jason Keeling for sending out this article from the Charleston Daily Mail via twitter.  Oh and if you’re into that sort of thing, feel free to follow me on twitter.  We can discuss hopes and dreams 140 characters at a time.

The title’s a bit misleading, but good editors will sometimes do that to draw eyeballs.  That’s why this post was almost named “Naked Supermodels Bomb Panda Bear Orphanage.”

Here’s the money part to the article, emphasis mine:

Interim West Virginia University President C. Peter Magrath said he plans to focus heavily on [three items].

But don’t expect him to blog.Magrath’s predecessor, Mike Garrison, was the first WVU president to type out his thoughts about the university on a blog — jargon for “Web log.” The venture eventually ended up being a sounding board for his critics over the Heather Bresch scandal.

“I don’t believe in blogs,” said Magrath. “You get a lot of crap. A lot of stuff in the blogs really bothers me because it’s one of the things that’s hurting traditional mainstream journalism is that unqualified, untrained people suddenly start reporting on stuff and it starts getting legs and running.”

[Hits head off desk three times, takes advil, bangs head again.]

For a quick recap of the Heather Bresch scandal strictly from an online reputation management perspective, please see the following:

• Extreme Online Reputation Management: WVU, Mylan, & Governor’s Office Edition
• Update – WVU President Mike Garrison Emails Employees
• Governor Manchin Emails State RE: Daughter’s WVU MBA Scandal
  

Let’s do a quick recap with everything wrong here.  These are the comments I left on the article on the Daily Mail Web site along with some extra info since I’m not bound by a 1000 character limit here:

A couple common misconceptions in this article by both Mr. Anderson and President Magrath that are very, very common:

1. “The venture eventually ended up being a sounding board for his critics….”

   While technically accurate, this statement is misleading. People also defended President Garrison on his blog. He had an excellent opportunity to address his critics there, but waited too long to respond to the crisis and never responding to any commenters. He had people creating a conversation on his turf, but no involved parties were willing to making it a real conversation.  It’s sad to say, but I have had WVU officials agree with me that this will probably be a text book case on how not to respond to a crisis in today’s Web 2.0 world.

   Let me also be clear – having a blog was a good decision by Garrison, one he should be proud of.  It was the execution that was lacking.

2. “‘I don’t believe in blogs,’ said Magrath. ‘You get a lot of crap.’”

   I’m not going to be that guy that says, “What do you mean you don’t believe in blogs?  Do unicorns write them?”  A. I don’t want to demean President Magrath.  By all accounts he’s a really good pick by the WVU Board of Governors and I wish him all the success in the world.  B. That would be silly; unicorns would need gigantic keyboards to be able to type out a blog.

   The folks who attended the Next Generation Marketing series should already be light miming the words I’m about to type.  “Blogs” could be replaced in that sentence by any # of words. How many columnists, movies, songs…are truly good let alone great?  90% of everything is – in President Magrath’s words – “crap.”  Apologies to the fine folks over at firejoemorgan for stealing they’re analogy.  (Fair warning: don’t click that last link if profanity or sabremetrics offend you.)

3. “‘A lot of stuff in the blogs really bothers me because it’s…hurting traditional mainstream journalism is that unqualified, untrained people suddenly start reporting on stuff and it starts getting legs and running.”

   MSM has its place and is very valuable. And some blogging is done very dangerously and suffers from not having checks and balances. But on the whole, it has added to the discourse of our society.  Many important stories have only reached the public because of blogging.  Plus the traditional press has given light to many stories that should have stayed locked in a basement.

   Also, can we please put an end to this main stream media vs. blogging.  It’s just silly.  That’s like debating spaghetti vs. tacos.  They’re both awesome sometimes.  And sometimes really bad.

Here’s the main point I want to make, my flag in the ground if you will, which was also my flag in the ground at the Next Generation Marketing conference series this past spring:

The real question isn’t whether blogging is good or bad – it’s neither.  The conversation will happen.  The question is whether or not you want to join the conversation. It’s going to happen somewhere – why not take part and have your voice heard?

I sincerely wish President Magrath and everyone at WVU the best of luck in moving forward and representing our state proudly.

Frankly I’m not sure he should do a blog since he’s an interim president and has a lot of other work that needs to be fulfilled.  I just hope the next President will take President Garrison’s lead and bring the blog back to the office.

Read this and vent your first amendment spleens in the comments.

I shall be looking to make a citizen’s arrest on any commenter who attempts to shill a product and will invoke Godwin’s Law with impunity.

Sketch of the blogosphere

Blogs and the blogosphere

Interlinked sphere that is blogging

[via]

Have a smashing memorial weekend, my lovelies.

He could only cling to his gun should it slip from his grasp and demolish his foot!

It’s the irony of the 24 hour media that any shade of gray has disappeared to be replaced by seeing everything in black or white.

I come from the North of England which is also decried by the learned elite as a racist backwater. In fact, we’re probably not even decried so much as written off and sniggered at. And they’re right – not to snigger but to identify certain areas as racist.

But I’ll tell you one thing – never trust a liberal elitist sneering at racist half-wits – they’ve never been able to move back to their safe suburban havens quick enough after spending their time larging it with the proletariat just to tick common people off in their life experience list and have tales of the working class to regale at dinner parties. It’s all too easy to demean the underclass for acting like savages after you’ve just locked them in the bowels of the Titantic so posh folk could use the lifeboats without breaking into a sweat. Those elitists have always known how to look after themselves.

Trust me, I’m not bitter, just a shade hunger grumpy.

As an outsider, this primary season has had me hooked. I’m loving every second of it. I obsess over every political tidbit and pour over every cable channel while surfing the Interwebs at the same time. Reading liveblog commentary as the results roll in as they discuss the latest bit of stupidity uttered by some bobblehead is fabulously entertaining.

However, I’ve yet to pick up a newspaper. I also only watch cable in conjunction with viewing everything online. If I had to pick one method of imbibing my Primary crack, the Internet would win hands down.

You see, the Internet is the shades of gray. It’s endless nuance and the comfort of your own choice of black or white. And it’s instantaneous and it’s smart. It can also be ponderous and as dumb as a stump. But the point is you get to choose when, what and how you consume it.

But this election is seeing all manner of Death Match battles to, well, y’know, the death.

We have baby boomers vs the Kiddies.

Old media vs new media.

Bottom up vs top down.

Grassroots politics vs machine politics.

At the heart of this new revolution is the Internet. The kiddies are the ones brought up on the Internet. New media has blogs, social networks and citizen journalists poking fun and pointing out the absurdities and lies spouted by the corporate media. Bottom up means this is a movement of the people energized partly online. Grassroots is the democratizing effect of the Internet allowing for the virtual spreading of messages unlike no other time via email and social networks. It’s the counter-elite – or democracy, if you will. No wonder the telcos are so desperate in their bid to end net neutrality.

Ten years ago Obama would not have got out of the starting blocks. He may even have struggled five years ago, but now his message rides on the crest of a new www. wave. Yes, the other candidates use the Internet, but it’s more because they have to than to embrace what it is truly capable of.

Trying to control the message online is as ridiculous as trying to catch the wind.

He may still fail in the long run as there is still quite a lot vested in the old ways of running things, but there will be more Obamas of all political stripes and their message will resonate even louder across the digital ether. And the consumption of digital media will increase as younger generations blossom and older generations wither.

The problems people are having at the moment are that they are trying to frame their reference by what has happened before. The thing is – nothing like this has happened before. I don’t need to have seen every election since time immemorial to have a hunch that the old guard has been caught off-guard and they’re scrambling about wondering what they can do.

Look at the incessant mis-reading of the polls. I promise you, Karl Rove will be nothing without reliable demographic data.

And the best thing I’ve read about the whole West Virginia is this heartfelt bit of user-generated content that had been linked to via the BBC website.

After all, nobody said the old and the new couldn’t be complimentary bedfellows.

BUT – as always – I’ll try to bring it all back at the end in a way that makes you say, “OK, just give me two minutes of my life back, not all five.”
Anywho, I told Paul a bit ago that “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” was a hilarious flick, to which he responded, “Neat.”

Now, for years I’ve been arguing that the word “neat” when used on its own is THE quintessential conversation killer.

Think about it: if you’re telling someone a story and they respond with “neat,” you’ve got no choice but to put your tail between your legs and hang your head in shame. In fact, try it out the next time your significant other is telling you something pointless (a suggestion which clearly answers the question, “Why is Derrick the only unmarried employee at DOM?”).

Anyways, long-story-short, Paul rejuvenated the conversation by stating that he wants to see the movie so that he can watch Russell Brand in action. Now, I don’t know who Russell Brand is, but seeing as how Paul is a Redcoat, and there is only one person in the movie with an English accent, I figured he meant this guy. Paul mentioned that on the Mother Isle, Russell was a famous presenter – a term which apparently equates to Ryan Seacrest (and that brings me to the point of this blog).

Paul claims that Ryan Seacrest is no taller than 5′2″. Now, being the upstanding and respectable musician that I am, I refuse to watch American Idol (and I certainly won’t link to it!), so I’m not sure if that’s an accurate claim or not. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned while working here it’s that everything can be answered by Google, except of course for “French military victories“. Anyways, I typed in, “How tall is Ryan Seacrest?”

Do you know what I found? I found a THRIVING community of individuals who sit around and discuss the height of celebrities!

… to each their own.

So, my question to you is this: if somebody was able to build a successful site based around unknown heights of celebrities, why aren’t you working to build a thriving community of XYZ’s who really enjoy your ZYX’s?

Seriously. Think about it.

There are plenty of people out there who are interested in what you do and want to interact with either you or other like-minded individuals about whatever it is that your company does. It’s called a niche… and they are usually full of weirdoes who enjoy spending their money.

So, I urge you to find your niche and exploit it, but in a positive way.

You know, give those crazy kids looking for doggy-sunglasses a place to post their pictures. Help those techno-geeks locate a vintage 1982 IBM motherboard.

My point is this: it doesn’t matter what you do or how uninteresting you think your service or product is. Somebody out there will think it’s neat and – chances are – once it starts impacting your wallet, you will too.