Ken's Sandbox

Some Advice for You from Seth Godin

ken.gregg — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:46:53 +0000

Seth Godin is one of my favorite writers. Yesterday he posted an article titled “Advice for Real Estate Agents (quit now)“. The “quit now” advice is directed at the order takers who sit by waiting for the phone to ring. He goes on to lay out a plan explaining how to position yourself as THE person everyone wants (needs?) to go to in your selected niche of the market.

Follow the link above and read the post. Then, if you have time, do what I did and go back through his archives and read everything he has written in the past year or two. He won’t disappoint you.

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Thoughts on Microblogging

ken.gregg — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:44:08 +0000

I have been giving a lot of thought to the idea of microblogging as a replacement for the email conversations I find myself having all the times. Things like setting up a tee time for golf between two or three friends. This currently happens in close-to-real-time email with everyone ccd all of the messages.

My microblogging clone would allow my “followers” to look at my personal tags (areas of interest) and follow only specific tags. For example, my golf buddies could follow my golf tag and would not have to put up with my musings about technology or business updates. A gold friend who is also a client could follow my golf and real estate tags. This would allow me to throw out a “any one interested in playing” post, tag it “golf”, and my gold buddies would get it but clients and business associates who could care less about my golf would not.

I have not joined twitter, so I can’t say you could not use it to do this, but the NIH factor is enough to cause me to want write my own.

eCards - help wanted

ken.gregg — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:19:55 +0000

It’s interesting, that when something surfaces it seems to start poping up everywhere. That is how it seems to be for me now with e-cards. I’m hoping to spark some discussion on the subject. I hope you will take the time to give me your feedback.

A newsletter I receive regularly was talking about sending out Christmas (Holiday for the PC among you) cards and mentioned that she had found a site where you could send very nice classy business type e-cards for several occasions.

Then at lunch today, out of the blue, my mother mentioned how she hates all of the typical e-card sites out there but that she discovered one that was so simple an nice that she just had to subscribe. She said the site was by an artist in the UK who was using the e-cards to promote her art.

I checked out the site mentioned in the newsletter and the cards are beautiful. Their site focused strongly on the environmental benefits of sending e-cards. I believe this significantly helped overcome the “cheapness factor” of sending an e-card over a paper card.

However, when you use their free service, the page with the card is more advertisement than card and the only option to get rid of the advertising seemed to be having them build you a custom e-card site. Fine (maybe) if you are a large company but I believe I can do better.

Normally, at this point I would run off and throw together a proof of concept of what I think a site like this should do. Then it would sit in the drawer (or on the shelf, whichever metaphor you prefer) never to grace anyone’s web browser.

Here is my criteria for what a nice but simple e-card (suitable for use by a business professional) should do or be:

e-cards have become a vehicle for viruses, spam and other ugliness. The card must arrive as an email from the sender with sender defined subject line.
Preferably, the card would display in the recipient’s email program without them having to follow a link. No “so-and-so has sent you an e-card click here …”. Just display the damn card. The recipient may have to click a button to show images in their email client but nothing more. Of course, if they opt to not receive HTML email there would be a link to display the card in their web browser.
Finally, I believe many business people (especially sales and marketing types) would like to have their photo on their cards.

I would really appreciate your feedback on this. I believe a tool like this would be a great relationship building tool. Give me your ideas, suggestions, objections. Is it something you would use and why or why not?

Thank you in advance.

Ken

Dear webmaster

ken.gregg — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 16:50:24 +0000

I just left the Home Depot site where I was trying to locate a strip light for behind a valance in our living room. Working from home I am on a not-so-broad broadband satellite connection and every page load is painfull. Especially considering the site would probably take 30 seconds to load on my 7mb fiber at the office.

I managed to get to lighting ok but nothing in any of the categories or manufacturers seemed like a good fit for my search so I chose the under $50 category. The first 9 of 300+ entries came up. At the top are options to sort, change to a grid view and change the number of results per page. I changed the sort and the page reloaded. I realized that changing to grid view or changing the number of results per page were both going to result in a page load. So, which do I select first? My decision, close the wuindow. Screw ‘em, I don’t need to find it that bad.

If you are the webmaster of a large site like this (or the CIO of the company), you definitely should visit your site through a dial up connection and try to actually use it. When you finally get fed up, go back and add some simple ajax to the site to eliminate those full page loads and make your site usable for those with slow connections and really nice for those with fast connections.

Well, I’m off to Lowes .

Ken

Tom Peters on Personal Branding

ken.gregg — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:08:22 +0000

From Tom Peters This I Believe:

32. Branding is for … EVERYONE.

Whoever has … THE BEST STORY … takes home the most marbles. “Branding?” “Branding is a character issue. Next question?” It is almost that simple. And, thus, that hard. (more…)

Google yourself (Your Personal Brand)

ken.gregg — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:00:50 +0000

My favorite weekend morning pastime is catching up on my on-line reading. This weekend having read everything Seth Godin has read in the past 8 months or so I wandered over to ChangeThis where I found a manifesto (that is what ChangeThis calls them) on personal branding. (more…)

My first Spam Post

ken.gregg — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:13:50 +0000

I stumbled across a post this morning by Chris Anderson (The Long Tail Blog). The post itself talked about how Chris was tired of being spammed by PR people who have apparently purchased media lists and indiscriminately blast their press releases to every one on the list. He went so far as to print a list of the email addresses of people he has blacklisted.

The comments on his post when on for hours. Before I finally bailed, I saw this:

“It makes me wish the e-mail system was designed based on whitelisting or something. I realize how much trouble this would cause, but I might actually be willing to deal with it.”

“Let me help you out a bit — as the guy who released what I’m pretty sure was THE first anti-spam program more than 20 years ago.”

This is where I usually mention that it’s unbelievable that we still use SMTP, endlessly hacking around what’s become painfully clear is a design flaw, rather than designing a different, hopefully backwards-compatible protocol. The amount of cruft that’s been piled on top of this craptastic standard is utterly mind-boggling.

(Seriously… CRAM-MD5? SPF? Bayesian filters? Tarpitting? The endless RBLs? It’s the mother of all kluges.)

Weirder still, this sort of thing strikes me as absolutely counter to the normal disposition of those of us who normally would be expected to solve these things. This problem predates Linux! The open source community built an entire *OS* since then! SFTP replaces FTP, though that’s arguably a far less important protocol. New processor? Gimme! New graphics card? Gimme gimme! iPhone! Woo! AJAX! Ruby! We have entire programming languages younger than SMTP.

Yet despite an almost immeasurable amount of anger, vitriol, and frustration, the beast lumbers on year after year, unchanged. HELO? EHLO? Qua?

The number of hours that’ve been poured into designing filters and maintaining blacklists and so on surely could have yielded something better by now. Sometimes I think about it and it’s almost embarrassing.

Anyway.

Posted by: Adam | October 30, 2007 at 07:43 PM

I could not have said it better myself. This is exactly what I have been thinking. All of the kludges around SMTP do not address the underlying problem. SMTP presumes that the message is not spam. SMTP will allow any server to connect, dump a few megabytes of crap and leave it to the recipient to sort it out.

So here it is. I am now committed to writing several posts about how I believe the problem could be solved. Who knows, I may even try to implement some of it.

Help wanted - Abstraction layer

ken.gregg — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 17:02:48 +0000

I just discovered one of the best essays I have ever read. Although it talks specifically about software development and marketing but I can see how it would apply to almost any business. As you read the essay, think about your role in your company. Is your job to support someone else’s (the company’s “programmers”) productivity or are you a producer of your product? What is your company selling and how can you make your product or service more transparent to your customers/clients?

Do you need an abstraction layer? I now know I do.

An eventfull morning

ken.gregg — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:49:07 +0000

Power is back on. I was out of the office when it went out (my office neighbor said it was about 9:00 AM). The city said it was a fire on a pole near a substation.

The battery backup carried everything very nicely for the expected 45 minutes but that was about 45 minutes short. Guess I either need to beef up the battery backup system or buy a generator.

Note to Joe Whitsett: The modifications to my cpe worked great. Both internet and phones stayed up fine. But you need amend my testimonial ad to say no unplanned downtime due to Comspan.

And then I see this

ken.gregg — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:48:22 +0000

Right after I posted about hosting video tours, I see where Marc Andreessen posted this about how the real estate downturn may be permanently changing where and how agents advertise their listings. Read it here.