Gotta love Apple!
Monthly Archive for November, 2002
Page 2 of 2
I don’t have any motivation to continue actually working for my current employer while I’m at work.
I won’t see any commissions off any sales I make between now and my last day as they only pay commissions once campaigns sold have run and the invoice is paid, which is fair, but makes me not care about actually making any more sales…
They want me to create a ‘how to’ manual for my job. I don’t want to do this any more than I already have because I just don’t want to put that much effort into things. I’d much rather have my boss sit down and figure out what he doesn’t know and ask me questions.
For 6 months I’ve been telling my boss that we needed to hire someone to help me do my job better. In my current job as an advertising sales person, I also do all of the online and print advertising trafficking and take care of all of the client support. I’ve been maxed out for about 4 months straight now and barely have had time to make sure all of my clients’ needs were taken care of, much less write manuals on how to do my job, so now that I’m leaving, I have even more to do to support my clients.
And I’m getting even less support of attention now than I was before I told them I was leaving.
I’m also not the kind of guy to let things slack, so I’m now stuck in this wishy-washy situation where I want to tell them how to do things when I’m gone, but they don’t seem willing to listen.
So, I don’t want to tell them… does that make sense?
The funny thing is that I know that the second day after I’m gone they’ll realize how much they’re fucked without me here to tell them how to do my job and they don’t realize it yet… or perhaps they do, but are so focused on other things that they can’t take the time to learn it all right now. I don’t know…
To me, so many of the problems I’m facing could be solved before they even become problems, if this company just took a little time to plan out a basic strategy and stuck to it for more than 30 minutes. They want to know what all of my usernames and passwords are for the various reporting tools, RFP creation systems, 3rd party ad serving solutions, and the like are. They already know, or at least should, as most of these systems have sent us emails saying “save this email for future reference” including the username and passwords.
They also want me to write up a narrative of explaining everything about every client I have brought in, and the status of the accounts. In January of this year, we installed a great advertising sales management system called Adblocks. It’s not perfect, but its close enough for our needs. We were their first true non-cable customer, and I’ve been intimately involved with getting the system working for non-cable ad sales people. The system does everything that my boss wants me to write out in narrative form. It’ll show him the notes from every phone call, email, or other contact, that I’ve entered since January, on every client, potential client, or former client. But, he’s too busy to learn how to use it. Is that my fault? Should I force myself to write up something about each client when in reality its just a waste of my time and he’ll likely never get around to reading it until after he needs it, and if he learned how to use Adblocks he could have the answers faster through a quick query than by trying to read through a long 140+ client narrative?
Argh…. I think I’ll just keep sliding by until my boss realizes how fucked he is without me, and if that day never comes, it won’t be my problem anymore… but I also hate thinking that way.
So, over the weekend my company’s static IP address changed. I didn’t know that until I needed to perform some work that’s critical to my job. No one told me, or told our outsourced developers.
We have an FTP policy that only allows in certain known IP addresses, so I couldn’t FTP at all, and I needed to badly to do some testing on some creatives.
Our internal IT guy was on the phone with the owner and couldn’t get back to me right away, so there was no way to find out what my ‘new’ IP address was, until our external developers pointed me to this URL:
http://stadiumyamaha.com/ip.asp
I assume that’s just a quick test page they’ve set up on one of their other client’s website, but it works, and its quick. Blogmarking it for future reference.
I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook 2000 for about 19 months now. I use it everyday as an email client and organizer at the office. I’d consider myself a ‘power-email’ user, in that I get 200+ emails on a daily basis. I get email from clients, prospective clients, vendors, friends, newsletter publishers and spammers. My employer uses SpamAssassin at the server level so not a lot of spam gets through, but, some does on a daily basis, at least one or two email messages are spam.
In that 19 months, I’ve slowly learned how to use Outlook better than when I first started using it, but, I still have a ways to go. Outlook doesn’t do a lot of things I’d like it to: things I’m used to like ‘labeling’ of email messages or ‘coloring’ of subject lines, based on custom criteria. The built in ‘rules’ manager is horrendous, in that its only accessible through the damned MS built ‘wizard’ and that wizard is horribly complex, in my opinion.
To be fair, I think a lot of the problems I have with Outlook 2000 have been solved with Outlook 2002, or with a more advanced version of Exchange Server, but my company is so short sighted and cheap that we’re using a version of Exhange that’s at least 3 releases old and there’s no upgrade path in sight (in fact the last upgrade proposal was shot down by the owner of the company).
About a month ago, I read about Inbox Buddy on Scott’s FuzzyBlog!. Inbox Buddy looked promising.
I downloaded it and installed it on my desktop PC at work. After working out a few bugs with Scott and his developers related to our Exchange server based installation (and effectively helping beta test our particular type of set up for them) we got it working perfectly.
Inbox Buddy is a tremendous upgrade to the default Microsoft Outlook 2000 installation. It does a lot of things I wanted Outlook to do, and a lot that I didn’t even know I’d like Outlook to do, but now wonder how I got along without these features.
A few things that it does particularly well include:
- Color codes my email
- Manages email for me based on relationships
- Notifies me when I receive email from particularly important clients or contacts
- Kills the last little bit of Spam that makes it through to my email client
After a quick training session (took less than 15 minutes) upon the first installation, Inbox Buddy started working, and the coolest thing about it was that it just worked.
I can’t really explain how much I like having Inbox Buddy working for me in the background, scanning new email for spam and organizing my email, filing away old email, pushing the important email up to the top of my Inbox and unimportant stuff to the bottom… but I can tell you that I like it.
I like it a lot.
I’m hooked and I’m ready to pay for it once it’s a shipping product.
It’s still beta, but its truly once of the most advanced pieces of beta software I’ve ever used. If you’re interested, download it now to get a feel for what its like. When it actually ships, I’ll mention it again so that you know its ready for prime-time.
This message has been brought to you by an extremely happy beta tester.
iBlog looks like a cool little OS X blogging app. I haven’t downloaded or tested it because I’m happy with the remote publishing interface of Moveable Type, but others might want to check it out. It looks like it does its own content management versus using the Blogger API or the MT API… too bad, in my opinion.
This article on the Motely Fool: Ask the Headhunter: Don’t Get Fired Day 1 couldn’t be more timely.
The company gave you a great offer, a fine title, and a corner office with a window. What’s not to like? Get ready to gag.
Nick Corcodilos does a great job giving a few pieces of advice to those of us looking for a new job, or in transition. I’ll be calling my new boss with a few more questions tomorrow…
Frank ponders the idea of an Apple branded consumer level server that he’s dubbed the iServe. Interestlingly enough, this is just the sort of thing I’m looking for, but there are a few things I’d like to see that he didn’t think of. I’d like to see this little consumer level server also be my own little .Mac server. I want it to hold all of our contact information and other stuff that I sync using iSync. It might be cool to offer one with a litle modem that I could dial into from the road to check email and the like possibly… making my home my little personal ISP?
It would be cool, and would free up my old bondi iMac for more fun stuff like sitting in the guest bedroom for guests instead of occupying space on the home-office desk.
Wow! I love Austin.
We just got home, and I’ve got a lot of work to do to get our house ready to go on the market this week, but let me just say that we found the perfect house… actually a couple of them, but one is just perfect. It’s close to downtown Austin, but its not downtown. It’s in a great neighborhood and sits on top of a hill over looking a valley. I couldn’t point it out on a map, but I could tell you where it was and you’d be impressed.
It likely won’t still be on the market when we’re ready to buy it, but, we know where to look now. There are plenty of great houses near the one we found that are bound to go on sale sometime in the coming few months.
Loved Austin, now I’m going outside to plant pansies.
The wife and I are house shopping in Austin this weekend… posts will be light if not non-existant. Look for a new website announcement on Monday.
Apple has held on to their, well, apple, though its gone from multi-color to one color, at least it’s still an apple. Microsoft on the other hand has just changed fonts.
Check out the 1981 corporate logos on these old ads.
I read this article in the print version of FastCompany a while back, but just re-read it online. the article is just a bunch of quick snippets of sales advice from some of the leaders in the field. I love this line:
… being in front of the customer doesn’t help if you do all the talking. My father used to say, “Many a sale was lost from the jawbone of an ass.” What Dad said then applies today.
Yep, he’s right. Let you’re customer tell you what the problem is, then show them how your product will solve that problem. If you’re product won’t solve that problem, walk away immediately and save yourself and the potential client some time.
I firmly believe in the principle of consultative selling.
E&P Online: Newspaper Circulation Holds Steady
The prevailing thought would be that as online take a stronger and stronger foothold, newspapers will loose circulation. It’s not really happening that way, yet.
“The circulation trends look pretty close to flat, which is fine. It’s not terribly different from the long-term trend, which is one of a slight decline every year for the last 20 years,” said Barton Crockett, publishing analyst at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. “A lot of people are concerned that readers are giving up the newspaper habit and we don’t see that in these numbers.”
This is particularly good news to me, personally, as I’m moving from working in the travel industry to working for a newspaper shortly. I’ll still be in the online ad sales realm, but at a newspaper which has vastly different metrics than a travel publisher.
Sucks to hear that National Airlines is shutting down. For those that don’t know, I just quit a job at a travel related website, and one of my reasons for leaving is that the airlines out there are pretty much fucked. All of them are having a hard time, but I honestly don’t think it’s because of 9/11, I think the majority of the problems in the airline industry are related to bad business practices among the big carriers.
I honestly just hope that America West Airlines holds on through Thanksgiving, as I have tickets to Las Vegas from Dallas for that week (time to take a small vacation, and who really wants to spend time with their huge extended family’s on Thanksgiving? really?)
Adam Kalsey describes a way to defeat RedSherrif‘s Java measurement applets in his latest blog entry. I think I first read about RedSherrif in a MarketingSherpa email newsletter and I was intrigued at the time (can’t remember if that’s really where I heard of them).
I’d still like to research them a little as their technology looks like something that might help those of us driving the production side of the web, and data is useful, but I also don’t know how I feel about collecting potentially private data without a users knowledge or explicit permission. I still believe that privacy is gone for the most part, but I’d like to know that people’s feelings about their own privacy online are as good as possible, for the survival of the whole internet market.
It’s still a touchy, touchy subject that has to be treated very carefully by providers of content.
Quinn disects an internal EDS memo that was posted to InternalMemos.com quite well. Some choice comments:
[We plan to] “reduce our global work force by 3-4 percent over the next several quarters, beginning with 800 to 1,000 positions by year-end. These reductions will not impact service delivery to clients. Service excellence is the foundation of our business.”
That’s impossible. You cannot let even 20 people go and have it not affect service to customers. If McDonald’s loses one person, the goddamn drivethrough gets backed up. Take a lesson from the $3.99 burger industry, morons.
“We remain a profitable business with a steady revenue stream. Our credit rating remains solid. We will maintain adequate liquidity to pursue our business.”
So if you are profitable… why are letting thousands of people go? Why does a healthy company cut staff?
Great job Quinn.
Charlie Buchwalter, VP, Client Analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings, came to Dallas last night to speak to the Dallas Fort Worth Interactive Marketing Association.
Charlie spoke about “The Changing Online Media Landscape” according to Nielsen. It was a great presentation. The following is my attempt at turning an hour long presentation into a quick readable paraphrased article:
1. Ad Creative
Rich Media is drawing more traditional (non-online, Fortune 500) advertisers online.
Rich Media is helping to make creative smart again.
2. Multi-channel Marketing & Analysis – back to the future
Reach and Frequency will be big in the online advertising world in the future.
In aggregate, online is the only media that actually holds reach and frequency all day long. Radio doesn’t. TV doesn’t. Newspapers don’t. Magazines don’t. The internet does. Advertising online is going from Internet vs. everything else to everything + internet. The internet is and will continue to become an integral part of more advertising campaigns. Charlie related this phenomena to the revolution in Cable advertising during the 70s.
3. Broadband – speed means everything
While Internet growth may seem like it’s becoming stagnant, broadband adoption has and is growing at a steady rate, and Charlie sees this trend continuing.
Broadband changes people’s use habits, and more importantly their commerce propensity online. The indexes show that people that use broadband actually have a higher propensity to buy.
4. Commerce Success Factors Come into Focus
- online travel hitting on all cylinders
- content may not yet be King, but paid content online is growing
Travel sites are leading the way in online reach and frequency, as well as growth online.
Compelling content can make the pay model work. WSJ.com works. Fantasy Football and Baseball drive statistics service subscriptions. Online dating services are taking off.
Overall the presentation was very good and some great questions came from the peanut gallery.
I’d also like to point out that I’ve placed the actual presentation online. It’s in powerpoint format for your perusal.
Next month we’ll hear from Debora Wilson, President and CEO of Weather.com, as well as have a wine tasting event at the Temerlin McClain offices in Irving. Come join us on December 3rd if you’re in town.
From Be Your Sales Team’s CIO:
Pick up the phone and call one of your salespeople today. Review customer data, competitive data, reports, and customer feedback. Figure out where you can help one other. Join her on a sales call. There’s nothing like meeting a customer in person to help you understand what your sales force is up against. If your company doesn’t have a sales force, you can still segment your customer base, look at the product mix and competitive environment, and talk to customers. Piece together where the opportunities and pitfalls are.
If you’re in your office with the door closed, crunching numbers and frustrated by a lack of response or results from the sales force, you may be the one missing the point. Get out there — you’re needed!
I’ll add my two cents. A Sales Manager’s job is generally two fold:
1. Remove any internal or external obstacles from the sales person’s path way to a sale.
2. Provide as much support as each sales person needs, all the time.
Information is the weapon of the sales person, they know how to wield it best, but can’t if they don’t have it.
I’ve read a lot about Search Engine Optimization, and I agree that SEO for specific time periods or events can be extremely useful for retailers looking to capitalize on opportunity purchases.
The article Last Minute SEO Christmas List, by Andy Beal, details a few good steps any retailer can take to improve their search engine response during these last few weeks of shopping:
1. Use Paid Inclusions
2. Update your Content
3. Implement a Custom 404-Error Page
4. Update Your Meta Tags
I’d caution any retailer that’s looking to boost search engine response during the holidays or other events should really take a long term strategic look at their website and figure out how to guarantee better results year over year, rather than work tactically every few months to reposition their company online.
If you’re in the North Texas area tonight and want to attend a meeting one of the best professional organizations I’ve ever been a part of, come to the DFWIMA meeting in Las Colinas. The topic is The Changing Online Media Landscape with Charlie Buchwalter, VP, Client Analytics, Nielsen NetRatings.
See you there and if I don’t see you there, you’ll find a summary of the presentation here sometime in the coming days.
Pretty Polly, the lingerie label that makes a virtue of targeting women rather than men, will tomorrow unveil what leading feminists describe as the most “sexist” advert yet.
Oh, they said ‘sexist’ didn’t they?
I think they really meant ‘sexiest.’
Over the past 18 months, I’ve amassed a large pile of pointless memos from our ‘corporate office’ (which is to say, this is something the owners of a small company didn’t have the balls to say themselves to their employees). Some of them are just down right hilarious like:
1. The memo from our VP of Operations telling us we were forbidden from forwarding chain emails or jokes, when not less than 10 minutes before that same VP of Ops forwarded me a joke email.
2. The memo from our owner stating that no one was to speak to the media except for him, which arrived on my desk not 30 minutes before a reporter called me (just because there’s an 800 number coming directly into my office that’s listed on the web site) asking for some background information on our company, which I couldn’t give them based on the memo I’d just read. The funny thing is the owner had the nerve to chew me out for not answering their questions when his own signature was on the memo saying ‘no one is to talk to the media but me.’ Too funny… turns out someone had forged his signature.
3. The memo that reminded us all that we’d signed an Intellectual Property agreement and that that meant that we couldn’t discuss anything going on inside the company with anyone outside the company and that there would be extreme consequences for doing so. My immediate response was “excuse me asshole, I’m a salesperson. I have to be able to talk about the company, don’t I?” My second thought was that the IP agreement had nothing to do with confidentiality, but then again, when they don’t read the agreements themselves, why should they know which is which? My boss told me to ignore the memo.
4. This one’s not a memo, but it’s truly priceless. You have to understand that my immediate supervisor (a VP of the company) puts his heart and soul into his job. He really tries hard to do the right thing all the time. The company doesn’t have a plan (to wipe its ass with) at all, and he’s been pushing for one from the owners for about 2 years now. He’s gotten no where. When he brought this up to one of the owners yet again, her response was too telling: “Relax man, it’s just a job.” That’s the worst thing an owner of a company can tell an employee. Period.
“It’s just a job?”
What does that tell you?
Told me it was time to find a new job… so I did.
See?
I’m not the only person saying that new iBooks are coming out soon in some form or fashion.
epodunk is a totally cool website for learning more about a community.
I just learned that I’ll be moving to the 16th largest city in the country that has a lot of great things to say about itself. Great website.
I really can’t wait to move.
Moving is stressful. Moving and starting a new job is stressful.
But, to me, it’s all good stress, in that the end result from this stressful situation will be very good.
The wife and I are suffering through this stressful situation. We’ve a lot that has to get done in a short period of time, and its getting to both of us. We’ve been fighting with each other a little, but I don’t think that’s not normal (when you last moved, did you fight with others about some things?).
Yesterday we spent the day cleaning out our garage. It hasn’t looked as good as it does now since the day we moved in. We unpacked all the stuff we’d neglected unpacking two years ago. We decided that we really didn’t need a lot of that stuff, so we’re going to donate most of it to the Salvation Army this week. We’re also going to give away a mattress set that’s been sitting in the garage for about a year. After setting up a donation pile in the garage, we started throwing some stuff away, and there’s a trash pile in the garage now too. Lastly, we repacked everything we wanted to keep, and set aside most of the stuff you just can’t move easily (especially if you don’t know if you’ll have a garage when you get where you’re going) like oil, paint, and other flamables.
So, now the garage is completely cleaned out. It looks amazing.
Today, I’m going to walk around the house touching up the paint that we’ve scratched or knocked up a bit over the past two years.
But, back to stress. The wife and I deal with stress differently. I deal with it by working. Getting dirty. Doing something. Even when I feel overwhelmed, I get to work pretty quickly.
The wife doesn’t usually cope as well. She spends a lot of time fretting over how much there is to do. It’s pretty counter productive, and has side effects like stress headaches, and that’s got me worried about her, and angry at the same time sometimes.
I think the difference in the way we deal with stress is hard to pin down, but I think it’s because over the years, I’ve learned to break big problems down into little problems and to deal with the individually. Sometimes I don’t get everything completed on time, but I do get them done. The wife on the other hand might never even get started, and is almost always late.
So, I’m making a list, breaking the big problems down into little ones, putting things in order of dependence, so that we don’t over look something, and hopefully we’ll get through this.
I just have to keep telling myself this is all “good stress.”
From Framing the Problem:
When 70 percent of development projects fail and 80 percent are over budget, there’s a problem.
Pretty good argument for wireframing from an ROI standpoint eh?
Sherpa’s latest case study gives us some insight into the ways that Briefing.com has increased its subscriber base. These 5 tactics worked for Breifing.com
Tactic #1: Converting Free Content Readers
Tactic #2: Branding (with a hotlink)
Tactic #3: Improving the home page
Tactic #4: Adding a site tour
Tactic #5: Educating Trials to Improve Paid Conversions
Read the article for more details.
I have a feeling this would work with a lot of paid subscription sites, not just in the investing world in which it’s already worked.
Simon spent a bit of text pointing us to Joe Gillespie’s pieces on CSS. They all look like great reading, and I plan on reading them as soon as I get a chance.
Joe is a graphic designer with more than 20 years of experience and the fresh perspective he brings to CSS is inspiring to say the least.
Andy sure is singing the praises of Spamfire, a stand alone spam fighting software package that’s currently Mac-only (though there is a page that Windows people can use to request a Windows version). I think it looks pretty cool, but I’m actually quite happy with Mail’s standard Junk Mail Filter. For some reason, it works quite well for me.
Looks cool though… thanks for the recommendation Andy.
Great article: The Joys of Mod_Rewrite: A Beginner’s Guide. It’s perfect for me, the guy that knows very little about shit, but has the guts to break things to get them to work again.
Also see Dirk Brockhausen’s tutorials on mod_rewrite, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
It looks as if the file-transfer utility, Interarchy has been officially updated to version 6.0. I’ve been beta testing this release for the past few months, and let me tell you, the betas never crashed, and have been more stable than Interarchy 5.0 since the day I started using the betas.
There are some great new features like the simple fact that you can now queue your transfers, you can set up delayed transfers, or repeating transfers, and it supports SFTP. It’s also got a whole slew of “Net” tools that are useful and fun to use (these were brought back after getting left behind for Mac OS X).
Interarchy is a great file-transfer tool, and for $45 bucks you can’t beat it. If you’re a developer, try this tip:
Select a file in a remote directory (preferably a text file, or an HTML file). Select the file of your choice, and hit
. Give is a second or two, and that file will be opened in BBEdit for your editing pleasure. Modify the file, then hit for ‘save’. The file will get saved back to the remote directory… no more ‘download, modify, upload’ via the finder… great way to make quick changes on remote files.
Its been a staple of my Mac OS tools for over 8 years now it seems… hard to turn away from a tool you’ve been used to for that long.
As a side note, and to give props to the guys at Panic, who I also love, their file transfer utility Transmit was just recently updated. If you’re not sure which one you’ll like better, download them both and pay the author of your choice 
Rick takes a look at the recent news that says online ad revenue is up right now for the majority of publishers, but that online ad spending was down for the first half of the year.
Let me put it this way:
1. The majority of web publishers out there have seen increases in their revenues year over year: 2001 vs 2002.
2. AOL has seen major declines in their online advertising revenue this year.
3. Overall online ad spending this year was down for the first half of the year (thanks in large part to a weak economy, Sept. 11, and general fear in the marketplace).
4. Onine ad revenues were actually up for most publishers except for AOL.
The OPA has a great chart on this somewhere (I’ve got a copy in a printed report that they gave us at a professional meeting I attended a month ago) that shows that even though Ad spending may look like it’s down because AOL’s done so poorly this year, its actually up overall on a year over year basis, but AOL really makes it look bad because the traditional thoughts were that AOL would always lead the market.
What I think really happened is that the majority of advertisers out there realized that AOL was a horrible platform to spend their money on, and they found other places to spend their money. The first half of the year was soft, or flat, and this summer things took off again (relatively, of course).
The company I’m leaving in less than a month has been selling at 95% of our monthly budget/goal for the second half of the year, and we did that for two or three months in the first half of the year too (and to top it all off, we’re in the travel sector, so fuck the idea that Sept. 11 hurt travel all that much as a sector. The major airlines that are still hurting were hurting before Sept. 11 and are still hurting cause they’re badly run businesses).
Les needs to read Reforming Project Management more often…. I hope things work out for him.
It sucks to be in the position he’s in… I can empathize
I received a wish today from a colleague. I was touched, so I’m posting it here:
May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields, and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand.
It took all of 5 minutes… and only that long because the proxy server here at work slows FTP from my Mac down considerably… Too easy… I love Ben and Mena.
[Note: Now I just have to come up with something truly great for Kasia to link to, so I can test the trackback fixes...]
[shhh: that same little birdie told me today that those Powerbook updates might come as early as next week, and Apple should also be updating the iBook line as well. I'm pumped about it.]
Looks like if I upgrade to MT 2.5.1, my trackback URLs might work again… so I’ll do that this weekend and will need someone to test them (Kasia?)
I apologize for the lack up posts this week folks… I know that there are plenty of you out there looking for the latest in small business or marketing news, and I’m just not ‘cutting the mustard’ so to speak.
For that, I apologize.
Life’s thrown me a curveball, and I connected. The ball was driven out into the infield, and I’m running as fast as I can to get to third base, after having rounded second and noticing that the outfielder made an error, and I might just make it to third.
My head’s down, and I’m huffing it.
When I get to third, I’ll let you know, but it might take a couple of weeks… until then, the posts will be light I predict.
(of course the above is a weak analogy for how it feels right now at work, trying to finish all the multitude of things that I’ve been asked to finish up before I leave, and still making myself leave at 5:00 every day no matter what’s required of me)
