Month: June 2009

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Does Arrogance Come With Success

This is a question that I have been pondering. Does arrogance come with success? Possibly arrogance will lead to your downfall. My husband and I have a private joke… we call business arrogance the “Waldorf Mentality”.

We’ve lived in several different states over the years – Ohio, Florida, Texas, and now Maryland. When we moved to Maryland just outside the DC area we were amazed at how unfriendly the people in the area were in comparison to the other places that we have lived. We’ve lived here now over 10 years and our perception has not changed. In fact, as we have chatted with other transplants, we’ve found that they share our viewpoint.

I am not sure whether it is a “clannish” kind of Southern Maryland thing, where natives have never lived anywhere else and feel that the unfriendliness and outright rudeness sometimes is the norm, but it can be shocking to say the least. For the two of us, we call it the “Waldorf Mentality”. That means, “we are so busy and so000 very important that we do not have time for you or for your little need”. Man, I have to say for businesses who embrace this arrogance, this is a real growth crusher.

It is easy to slip into the “Waldorf Mentality” – hey I live here and I see that sometimes I even get that attitude too. When business is great and clients are really rolling in, you can forget your best business model which by the way my husband and I used to call the “Southern Suck Up”. (This one is the opposite extreme where the customer is always right and you do anything to keep a customer.)

Now, I strive to stay humble and focused on what the customer needs. I may not be the best match sometimes for a customer and am not afraid to say so, but when I am a match, I roll out the red carpet and work my best to be the best “partner” for success ever. So what mentality have you embraced? Is success and the arrogance that comes with it becoming your downfall?

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Facebook Vanity URLs

There’s still time, but you should act quickly. You can get an easier URL to remember and share for your Facebook page. Facebook launched the vanity URLs several weeks ago, so many of the best and smallest names are already gone, but there is no time to waste.

Next time you log into your Facebook account you will probably see a list of URLs that Facebook suggests for you. You can even check some of your own selections. If you are like some of our clients, you clicked this closed and now that you want a vanity URL you cannot find where to get one in the Facebook control panel settings.

Here’s how to get your vanity URL:

1. Log into your Facebook account.

2. Enter this URL in your browser: http://www.facebook.com/username/ 

3. This will bring up the Vanity URL screen and allow you to select your vanity URL.

So what’s the big deal? Well my vanity URL is www.Facebook.com/nancy.mccord that is a whole lot easier to remember than what it was before with a huge string of numbers and characters.

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Our New Twitter Executive Program

For those of you who want to get going with Twitter but don’t know where to start or are too busy to tweet (write a Twitter post) we’ve created our Twitter Executive program. Now we know that this program is not for everyone, and that many of you can set up and do Twitter successfully all on your own, but this program is for the person who wants to outsource Twitter.

With our Twitter Executive program you will get:

  • Twitter set up and account configuration
  • Consultation with Nancy McCord to understand your business objectives
  • Integration into your blog, website, and other social networking platforms
  • Personal training on using TweetDeck
  • Training on how to use Twitter effectively
  • One business week of multiple posts per day on Twitter
  • List of our resources to watch for great content to tweet about

If you really don’t want to do your own tweets after set up, for very select group of clients we will ghost Twitter. You can find out more about these two programs and our pricing by visiting our Twitter services page on our website.

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HootSuite Reviewed

Do you have multiple Twitter profiles like I do? Then HootSuite is just right for you. I have a Twitter account for my business under the name mccordweb and due to popularity and name recognition I now have a second Twitter profile – nancymccord. For me it is a problem to do tweets in two places – too time consuming.

HootSuiteWith HootSuite, I can post to both Twitter accounts or just one account with one click. I can even schedule tweets to one or both whenever I want from one online control panel. In fact that is the beauty of HootSuite, it is an online application that really saves you time. You can have as many Twitter profiles set up as you desire. Then when you want to tweet, just click on the profile icon to assign where your tweet will be published. It’s easy!

HootSuite even allows you to review @ replies and direct messages for each profile on one very handy screen. For me, the power Twitter user, this is excellent news!

Now the reality of the situation is that HootSuite does not replace TweetDeck for me at this point, hopefully TweetDeck will add a multi-profile management option in the future, but for now does not. Typically during the day I will have TweetDeck open to monitor Twitter traffic and topics and also a browser screen open with HootSuite. This way I can rapidly tweet with one click yet monitor my groups and traffic.

HootSuite is not an application to replace TweetDeck, which is still hands down the best Twitter aggregator that I have tried, but it does make posting to multiple Twitter profiles easy which you simply cannot do with TweetDeck.

Just be careful if you have multiple Twitter accounts in posting the same content to all. Twitter can consider this spamming and will close your account so be judicious about when you tweet about the same topic on multiple Twitter accounts.

You can sign up for access to HootSuite for free and check it out for yourself.

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Is There Such a Thing as Too Technology Heavy?

Yes there is a situation where you can work to make your website so technology heavy that you get bogged down and lose the ability to be nimble or become prone to service outages or hostage to your programmer.

I have one large client whose site I occasionally webmaster who has had this happen to him. It crept up on him slowly, but now the tech bloat is really coming back to bite him. big time. The issue is that now his site is so dynamic in nature, pulls in fields from his database from many elements that  he is spending more time fixing things than he is spending growing his business. Right now his administrative control panel is down, broken when his developer added an interface to feed registrations to populate a store shopping cart. Then the developer broke the look and feel of the site when he set up a new password login. It is one problem after another.

Now if his database tied to his computer server in his business office has a hiccup, his website is impacted. It has become so sensitive and the problems now so fierce that he almost has had to set up a cot for his developer. All this for about 30 visitors a day to his website!

This is a situation where you don’t have to have everything fed into your website from a database. For a business this size they just don’t need this type of technological interface, in fact it is overkill.

At this point due to the nature of the problems, now the client is considering scrapping his entire site and all the technology that he has paid to be created and going back to a static site with an off-site place for certain transactions to keep the main site separate from the more dynamic problems. It is a shame that the client did not receive good guidance from the programmer to help scale his needs to his traffic and has ended up throwing money out the window. Technology is a good thing, but don’t let it drive your website before you really need it.

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Blogging on Toilets? Really?

Okay did you think you would ever read a blog on toilets or dual flushing kits? Well all types of businesses want and need blogs. With a great blog writer, you can take a difficult topic or product and create interesting content that will funnel readers into your website to find out more about your products.

Here’s a great example from another of our blog writers who has done just that – taken a dry or difficult topic and had some fun with it and made the blog interesting reading. You can view the blog at Dual Flush by SelectAFlush.

This writer has taken a perspective that the client’s product is something that every water conscious customer should install at home in their toilet. She has blogged on a variety of topics such as:

  1. Celebs’ Climb to Focus Attention on Water Crisis
  2. Where Does Your Trash Go?
  3. Water Woes Batter South Florida
  4. How Easy Is It to Install SelectAFlush Toilet Retrofit Kits?

Although this blog may not be one that is up on your watch daily list, it is an excellent example of how business of all types and sorts are using blogging to drive traffic to their website with unique, interesting, and well written content. If your business is like SelectAFlush, now may be the time for you to contact me to check this writer availability to write for your topic too.  With eight blog writers writing for McCord Web Services clients, we are sure to have a writer who is a good match for your needs too!