Dear Reader,

There are several companies, I love to hate, Microsoft, AT&T, Comcast, Sprint and Firestone to name a few. There are also companies I absolutely adore, Skype, Southwest Airlines, php|architect are all in that category. So it really chaps my ass when I have to say nice things about a company from the first list and it’s even worse when I have to say bad things about a company from the second list.  However, I am always willing to give credit where credit is due.

Recently, I got tweets from two different companies.  These were not twitterspam because they were in direct response to tweets I had made. However their approaches were totally opposite and honestly, opposite of what I would expect from each of the companies.

Comcast

My buddy Fred Leo and I were discussing Comcast. Comcast, if you’ve been following closely, is in the first list, "Love to Hate".  They are usually a pretty easy target. This time however, they caught me off guard. First, when I griped about their (now defunct) P2P Bill of rights, ComcastCares responded as he/she normally does with any mention of Comcast (and he/she posts a LOT) with a simple "We are working on it…". Kinda what you would expect and honestly, I was ready to just move on because I was just venting.  However, they they surprised me.  I got this tweet from Scott Westerman, a VP at Comcast asking me to email him.

So I did and to my great surprise (and consternation, see the part about the two lists above) he emailed me back! He actually encouraged me to keep talking to him. (Scott, I’m gonna write back, I swear, just gotta get over the shock) See, up to this point, my interaction with Comcast has been mainly through their technical support personnel. (Let’s just say it was less than stellar and move on.) But now they not only have someone who is monitoring twitter on a regular basis but someone in upper management has a real clue. (Scott, I hope I’m not killing our friendship by calling you out here) It’s really unusual for a company to have clueful upper management but to be clueful and be on my "Love To Hate" list is unheard of. So it is with great chagrin that I move Comcast off my "Love to hate" list, at least temporarily. Let’s see how things go. (oh and just so you know, it’s not Scott’s job to monitor twitter, he’s one of the rare breed of "upper management who loves technology". I wish more companies would hire/foster these types.)

ComcastCares offers sympathy and help. Scott, offered dialog. He didn’t offer to fix anything but honestly, I would have been suspicious if he had.  However he did offer to listen. When was the last time you got an email from a company on your "love to hate" list offering to listen to your grievances?

Southwest Airlines

I love SWA, seriously.  I fly a lot and when they go where I’m going, I always fly SWA. I even like the new boarding procedures. SWA has long been on my "Love to Love" list. So I was pleasantly surprised when I got this tweet from them when me and my buddy Eli White (you know, the guy from digg.com?) were discussing airlines. It’s nice and polite, kind of like Comcastcares. However, if start reading tweets from ComcastCares and from SouthwestAir you quickly notice a pattern. ComcastCares, more often than not offers to help, offers information, offers insight into the company SouthwestAir offers pleasantries. "Hope you give us another chance" is about as deep and helpful as it gets. Honestly, with a free week and a case of RedBull, I could probably write a bot that could do this. (I have no idea if this is a bot or not. I don’t even know if this is an "official" representative of SWA.)

This, IMHO, is the absolute wrong way to use twitter. You may make people feel better for a second but after they realize that your not really listening, your just talking at them, people will begin to understand. SWA, if you really want to get Eli to switch over, give him a reason to switch. Actually talk to him, find out why he doesn’t fly LUV and figure out what you can do to solve the problem.  You guys/gals are so creative in other areas, it’s hard for me to believe that this is your best effort on twitter. And don’t just do it for A-List bloggers, do it for everyone! (Not that I’m an A-List blogger, I’m sure that’s not why Scott contacted me…I’m so far down the long tail that they ran out of letters and had to switch to numbers to describe me.)

I won’t be removing SWA from my "Love to Love" list any time soon because they do a lot of things right. However, we can all  learn from their (bad) example. If you are going to try to engage the twitter market, talk to them, not just at them.

Conclusion

I talk about how companies should and should not use twitter in my report "Twitter for Marketers" and I’m going to have to update it now to include this case study. Comcast, get it because they have ComcastCares and you get they idea that they might actually care. They get bonus points for having at least one VP who understands that twitter is just a conversation starter, its not the conversation. SWA does not get it because even though they are monitoring twitter, they are not actually using it to make a difference. They are just handing out "I’m Sorry", "Hope you’ll give us another chance" or "Hey! That’s Great" on a good blog post. They are not engaging their customers in a conversation. As Joe Jaffe is quick to point out, marketing is now a conversation and they need to "join the conversation".

Until Next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Regular readers know that I am ecstatically married to wife 1.24, the lovely and talented Kathy. (She is the inspiration for all the love poems at  Cyrano’s Apprentice…and even one of the Burma Shave poems there!) "the lovely and talented Kathy" is a phrase that I started using a year or so ago and always link it back to her web site. Originally, there was no particular reason other than I thought it was cute.  However, of late I’ve been reading a lot about SEO. (trying to find anything that makes me think it’s anything other than horse crap) and for fun, I started sprinkling it liberally throughout my posts to see if I could "Google bomb" the term. Now Google is supposed to watch for this kind of thing and stop it. They do a pretty good job of that but every now and then they slip up, as they have today!

Here is a screen shot proving that, for at least a brief second, I p0wned the phrase "the lovely and talented Kathy".  The very first link is her web site!

Just so you don’t think it’s only because I enclosed it in quotes, here’s the same phrase without quotes.

It’s probably gone by the time I get this post up, it happened once before but I didn’t get a screen shot and it only lasted like an hour.

Anyhow, Happy Mothers Day my angel! I can’t think of a more geeky present to give you than a #1 ranking on Google. :)

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Most of you who know me know that I spend way too much time on twitter.com. During all that time, I’ve learned a lot about twitter and the twitter community. I’ve seen companies succeed using it to talk to their customers and seen companies fall flat on their face. I even recorded an episode of Sixty Second Tech on the subject and even wrote a blog post about it.

Recently I started wrapping everything I’ve learned up into a single document. By the time I finished, it was 20 pages long. I sent it off to several reviewers, marketers and others, took their feedback and refined it over time and am really happy with the results.

So if you’ve ever wondered what works and what doesn’t when marketing on twitter, “Twitter for Marketers” is for you.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 12:30 CT, I will be the guest on Small Business Trends Radio. You can listen live or download the episode for later listening.

I’ll be discussion all things WordPress.

It should be a rocking good time and I’d love to see both of my readers tune in. So drop by and give us a listen.

=C=

Dear Reader,

Tonight I was invited to attend the Nashville Technology Council’s panel discussion titled “Using Social Networking to Increase ROI”. Merrell Ligons invited me to attend as he was on the panel. Also on the panel were Jon Henshaw of Sitening and my buddy Marcus Whitney of Remarkable Wit.

I’ll be honest, when I saw the topic of discussion I did a double take. After all, this was hosted by NTC. NTC is mostly old-school tech in Nashville and for them, this was pretty darned progressive.

I arrived, networked, was pleased to reconnect with old acquaintances like Jerry Dunlop and made a few new friends.

The panel discussion started promptly at 4:30ish. Now call me new-fashioned if you like but a panel discussion on Social Networking that simply has a moderator asking the panelists questions, kinda misses the point of Social Networking totally.(My friend Janet Lee Johnson seems to agree with me.) It wasn’t until the last 10 minutes that the audience was allowed a few questions. After so many *Camps, UnCons and such, this was almost surreal.

Anyhow, Merrel, Jon and Marcus were really the three panelists with clues, they made us proud. Of the others, one was a recruiter who admitted that his sole interaction with Social Networking was LinkedIn, the owner of a software company who felt that their website software that they sold to customers was “Social Networking applied” (um, not) and someone whom I believe was at the director level running a software development team.

There were 2 defining moments for me in the discussion, one good, one bad.

1. Merrell made a statement to the effect of “From a business standpoint social networking is about listening” I liked it so much I tweeted it. Merrell gets it and is a credit to his employer. (I’m looking at you News Channel 5) A lot of people think that business have to get out on the net and talk. I’m putting the finishing touches on a paper and this is one of the main points. If you want ROI on your Social Networking efforts, shut up and listen!
2. One of the panelist talked about the fact that they were interviewing someone for a job once and the interviewee had researched both the company and the interviewer to the point that the interviewee had read an article about the interviewer from “quite some time ago”. This “creeped” the interviewer out and they shut down the interview at that point. Honest to god, I almost screamed. Here this person, wanting the job, had taken the time to do research on the company and the interviewer. To take the time to get to know who they were talking to and gets punished because of it. Oh well, it’s companies like that that keep me in business helping other companies find developers. I usually get my best developers from companies without a clue.

Thanks again Merrell for the invite. It was great to get out and meet some local IT people. Honestly though, I think the Geek Breakfast crowd is much more my speed.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

I’ve added a link in my blog roll but since a lot of you just pull the feed I thought I’d post so everyone can enjoy this. I added a link to daytonatwentyfour.com. He’s one of the genius’ behind the Too Old to Grow Up podcast. (Which I now subscribe to) If you are into comic books, comic book conventions, toys, games, movies, or just into refusing to grow up as you grow old, you want to subscribe to this cool podcast.

Until Next Time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

A good chunk of this blog post was posted over at DevZone. However, this one contains more personal observations and general nuttiness.

I’ve just returned from my second trip to the Netherlands and, as with the first one, I had a wonderful time. This time, I was honored to speak at the PHP Business Seminar put on as a joint project by my good friends Ibuildings and my new friends Sogeti.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a beautiful city and I always love when I get to travel there. The weather was beautiful and I was lucky enough to have a couple of hours to myself. Last time I was there I was so jet lagged that I got a whopping 30 minutes in the Van Gogh museum. This time I got there in the morning and spent about 2.5 hours wandering and admiring his art.

Also, there was a street fair happening in one of the city squares (I believe it’s called Waterloosplain but I am probably wrong.) It was really fun, not because it was big or because I paid 3EU to rinde rides, it was fun because all the music was old 70’s tunes that had been re-mixed into techno dance tunes. One part of the fair was this wheel on the long arm of a pendulum that would swing back and forth as the wheel rotated. People sat in the wheel. This thin had to come within 20 feed of the Madam Tussauds building and at it’s apogee lined up with the big glass window on the 4th (?) from of Madam Tussauds.

Dinner With Friends

Monday evening Ivo Jansch, CTO of Ibuildings stopped by the hotel and picked my up for dinner.
Ivo and I joined Stefan Koopmanschap, Michelangelo van Dam and Remi Woler for dinner and drinks (and one fine Cuban Cigar provided by Michelangelo, dude, seriously, you rock!) It was great catching up with old friends and as one would expect from that group, the conversation never strayed far from PHP. We ate and drank way to late. Remi blogged about dinner here and posted a picture that Stefan took.

Pey-Ah-Pey

Tuesday morning, the day of the conference, came way too early after a late night with friends. Lucky for me, the conference was in the afternoon and evening. Ivo Jansch, CTO of Ibuildings, drove me out into the beautiful Holland countryside to a great hotel where the conference was being held. There I met 70+ people, both management and developers, all gathered to talk about PHP.

To be honest, I did not pay attention to any of the sessions; in my defense, they were all in Dutch. I did, however, manage to catch a few of the phrases like “Zend Platform” and “Zend Studio” and eventually figured out that “Pey-Ah-Pey” meant PHP. My cue to start paying attention was when the host for the day started speaking in English. At that point, I was pretty sure it was for my benefit only.

My Presentation

Presenting my session was fun, ok it was fun for me; I hope it was fun for the audience. The slides can be found on SlideShare, it’s my slideshow called Gardeners, Not Gate Keepers but honestly, there are only 14 of them including the vanity slide and if you weren’t there for the conference, they won’t make much sense. I talked about the fact that thanks to things like RIAs, Mashups, APIs and cool tools like IBM’s Mashup Hub (built on “Zend Framework”:http://framework.zend.com) and WS02’s Mashup Server, our roles in IT were changing. We no longer need to be the Gate keepers to the infrastructure but we need to be gardeners of the application. We need to provide the tools for our users and let them participate in the building of the application. (In retrospect, Groundskeepers might have been a better analogy) Anyhow, I tortured the analogy for 45 minutes before it was all over. As I told the audience, my presentation wasn’t a “Do this or else” type of presentation but more of an “Here’s an idea I have, see if you can use some of it where you are” presentation.

| View | Upload your own

The audience was great for the session and afterwards I was asked several good questions and had some great discussions about the session and PHP in general while eating dinner.

One question asked in the evening session was:

“Why would I want to allow users to build mashups inside my application? Won’t I just be creating a mess of single use applications that I then have to mantain?”

My answer to this is, yes, of course you will. However, no more so than you are doing now. It’s really a mindset change. By (as someone put it on twitter today) supplying them with the rakes and showing them how to use them, we are encouraging users to help take control and responsibility for the application. You have to see the whole show to really grasp it because I am certinly not advocating allowing anyone and everyone to start tinkering with code.

This is my current presentation and I’m available for Business Seminars, users groups, kids parties and weddings, so drop me a line if you’d like to talk about me coming to your meeting.

Following dinner, we changed audiences and went at it again. At this point I need to say a big thank you to my friends at Ibuildings for bringing me a RedBull. I’m pretty sure I would not have made it through the second session with out it. (As it was, I managed to shave 10 minutes off my best time with it.) The evening’s audience was almost all developers, the majority of them from Sorgeti and Ibuildings but there were a few from other companies that snuck in for the fun. Peter C. Verhage and Robert van der Linde from Ibuildings and Sogeti respectively both reprised their sessions as did I. I’ll have to say, I had a lot more fun in the evening talking only to developers.

Conclusion

All in all, it was a great, but all-too-short conference. With only 1/2 a day and a hand full of breaks, there was no way I could meet everyone. The people I did meet were all great and I hope to run into them online to continue the friendships that were formed. I would like to say a special thanks again to both Ibuildings and Sogeti for putting forth the effort to put on a conference like this. As PHP’s popularity grows, it’s good for managers to know that companies like Ibuildings, Sogeti, and of course Zend, are there to help them.

So, as my tradition, as the sun was slowly making it’s way across the sky, I mounted my mighty steed of steel donned the battered fedora and headed off to the next conference. (Actually headed back home to recuperate before my road trip to php|tek…but that’s another story!)

Dear Reader,

The following is an email I sent to a friend who asked me for podcasting advice. I’ll state up front that I am not a podcating expert nor am I a new media guru. There are others who fill those slots nicely. However, I have picked up a few tips and tricks. Since I went way beyond his initial expectations and it was a lot longer than I originally planned, I thought it would be good to post it in case others want to see.

So for what it’s worth, here is podcasting advice from a podcasting novice.

— Cut Here —

Hi!

I now do 3 podcasts, PHP Abstract, The ZendCon Sessions and Sixty Second Tech. The first two are for my employer Zend

Sixty Second Tech takes me 3 hours, start to finish, on the average. 70% of that is research writing…and editing. In one minute I can speak approximately 255 words if I talk fast. Editing my thought down to that few words is a pain sometimes. Recording and post production is pretty simple on that one.

Hardware:

I use a USB microphone from Blue called a Snowball. They are less than $100 and well worth the investment if you are in it for the long haul. I know of podcasts using Logitech headsets as well and those go for $50 or less. In my presentation Podcasting 101, I tell people, do not invest a lot in hardware until you know you are going to stick with it. (12-15 episodes in the can)

Software:

I use Windows XP and Audacity for editing. Great FREE software. If you are on Mac and recording less than an hour, I’d use Garage Band. I’ve heard recent horror stories about Mac, USB and Garage band. If that’s your platform, I’d ping him for more information.

Hosting the Audio Files:

I use Amazon’s S3 for all of my podcasts. I’ve been in hosting for 10 years and that’s the cheapest bandwidth I’ve seen by far. However, you may want to check out libsyn. They don’t charge you for bandwidth, they only charge for the storage space you take up. If I recall correctly, you can get 100MB of space for $5.

Hosting the Site:

I run Sixty Second Tech off of WordPress running on my own server. If you’ve already got a hosting agreement, you should be able to just add a domain and set it up. I use a WordPress plug-in called PodPress, awesome piece of code and really streamlines the whole process for me. (If you don’t have a hosting agreement somewhere else, my site is http://nashvillewebhosting.biz, my entry level is $10/month, unlimited domains, etc…)

Feed:

I use FeedBurner for processing the feed because it does a great job of sanitizing everything. However, this is important, if you use WordPress, get the plug-in for FeedBurner. Never hand out your FeedBurner url, hand out http://yourdomain.com/feed/ This way you own the feed and should you decide to change from feedburner later, you won’t have nearly the trouble.

Advice:

1. Get the website out and a Coming Soon post up describing the podcast.
2. Get your hosting setup.
3. Create a 1 minute promo for the podcast and attach it to your Coming Soon post
4. SUBMIT IT TO ITUNES! 90% of my traffic for Sixty Second Tech is from iTunes. iTunes will give you an error if you don’t have at least one episode up there so wait until you have either cut a promo or released your first episode. iTunes takes about 2 days and they will send you an email. If you don’t get the email, resubmit.
5. Promote, promote, promote. Find other podcasts that speak to your audience and offer to swap promos. Release a press release to anyone who can fog a mirror. If you want to invest money, use a press release service. Otherwise, just start emailing them to magazines, ezines, websites, newspapers, user groups, etc.
6. Share what works. I’m sharing what I’ve found that works. If you find something new, share back. When you make it and get famous, don’t forget those of us still struggling in the trenches.

   Until next time,
   (l)(k)(bunny)
   =C=

Dear Reader,

Ok, I took the plunge and moved “Postcards From My Life” to WordPress 2.5. I was hesitant because over the years I’ve hacked plug ins and themes so I was worried that something would break along the way. This has really grown to a pretty complex WordPress install; but then again, I like pushing the envelop.

I know I’ve said it before but huge props to the WordPress development team. Upgrading the core went exactly as they said it would.

Most of the plug ins I use worked fine because I usually keep them up to date anyhow.

Here are the exceptions:

• aLinks 1.0rc1
  Throws a fatal error on activation. No automatic upgrade. Have not checked the site for a manual upgrade.
• Extended Comment Options 2.0
  Throws a fatal error on activation. No automatic upgrade. Have not checked the site for a manual upgrade.
• Popularity Contest 1.3b3
  Throws a fatal error on activation. No automatic upgrade. Have not checked the site for a manual upgrade.
• NAVT 1.0.16
  I have a love/hate relationship with this plug in. On the one hand, it gives me control over the order of my menu items and some other cool features. The downside is the admin is so ajax heavy that it’s almost impossible to work with. It has gotten better, the previous version used to throw a dialog box in FF telling me the script was taking to long to load. The new version is nicer but there is no “Save”, “Publish” or “Commit”. I guess changes are immediate which I don’t really like but I’ll put up with. Oh and when I upgraded to the current version, it forgot all my menus I had built. Lucky for me, I only had 1 but that could be a pain if you have a lot.

That’s all I have to report. Everything went smoothly, which is why I’m constantly recommending WordPress to anyone who needs a quick but powerful Website. If you are waiting to see if there are problems, I’d say the water is fine, come on in.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Just a quick note to tell you that Sixty Second Tech has a promo on episode 8 of “The New Mediology“. Huge thanks to Bill and Nathan. It’s a good episode on “Online Advertising Stragies That Work”. I encourage everyone (both of you) to drop by and give it a listen. If there are any other podcasters out there that want to swap 30 second promos, drop me a line.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=