PR Fail of Massive Proportions. Insightful analysis from CopyBlogger on Horizon Realty’s public relations blunder in suing a tweeting tenant of only 20 followers. “You don’t get to play by the old rules any more. You don’t get to bury your story on page 47. There is no more page 47.”
PR Fail Prevention bonus link. On the heels of Horizon Realty’s PR Fail is this bonus link on how to prevent a social media crisis using the recent Domino employee YouTube incident as a guide. Good points include being sure to constantly be listening and plan what to do in case a crisis occurs, being prepared to make and launch content in a variety of formats.
Billy Mays 5-Step Guide to Easy Selling. I’ve never seen Billy Mays on TV, yet many Tweeters I follow were genuinely stricken by his recent death. The man continues to get a lot of press, some of it even educational to guys like me who have never watched him. For example this CopyBlogger post lists 5 product characteristics that make it an easy sell. 1) must solve a problem, 2) have mass appeal, 3) be unique, 4) instant gratification, and 5) be demonstrable.
Not enough minutes in the day to study SEO. The 30 Free SEO Tools You Must Know is one of those posts that I would love to walk through item by item if I had the time.
Palm Pre Pics. I just bought an iPhone as you know, but I’m sure the Palm Pre would have been a satisfying alternative. For fun you might want to scroll through this print version of a detailed Pre review to look at the pictures (like I did.)
BarnesandNoble.com, you’re kidding me, right? Mentioning my iPhone reminded me of an experience I had at the bn.com site a couple of days ago when creating a site account to use with my iPhone BN eReader app. I created a user account on my desktop fine, but couldn’t login from my iPhone or laptop. I even spent 30 minutes with bn.com support on the phone. She was nice, but clueless. (I’d prefer pissy but knowledgable.) “Our computers may be running slow, so please wait for a while and try again.” Jesus. It finally dawned on me what was going on. The password I entered on the new account was 13 characters long. My user account created fine and I was tooling around the site. The login form, on the other hand, only accepted passwords between 6 and 12 characters, so it couldn’t match my 13-character new account password. You’d think if a company puts a million bucks into a website they’d do one or two tests on the login form. Two words, barnesandnoble.com: see ya!
Rubix Cubewich. "Cubes of pastrami, kielbasa, pork fat, salami, and two types of cheddar." Mmmmmm.
Nordic Track Ski life goes on. My Nordic Track Ski machine of 14 years died during my Monday workout. Something in the pulley assembly, not worth repairing. So Monday night I sent out 3 emails to local Craigslist sellers and within 24 hours I had a new Nordic Track Ski machine sitting in my office, and HERE IT IS! The machine is identical to my old one in every way, except several years newer and in better condition. $75 dollars. Considering they sell new for $599 and that I usually spend an hour a day on it, I’m a happy fellow. It was also fascinating how through using Craigslist and the internet I was so quickly able to acquire a replacement Nordic Track Ski machine. For an Everyman Links Nordic Track Ski postscript, here’s my recently updated Nordictrackski.com site home page.