Conner's Blog

Well it’s looking more and more like it will be official.  I’m once again going to be a nomadic NFL fan.  For my regular readers you may know that during the past year I became a Vikings fan.  This may not seem like much to most people but it was for me.  I grew up in Montana; a state that not only doesn’t have a major professional team but doesn’t have one in a neighboring state, choosing a team to be a fan of was not easy.  Most people from my hometown were Viking, Packer, or Bronco fans.  I personally never latched onto any one pro football team, and until I moved to Minneapolis, I planned to keep it that way.  That changed last year.  I started listening to KFAN, reading more local sports writers, and slowly came around to the Vikings.  They had rid themselves of the players I disliked while I was a neutral fan, and drafted one of my favorite rising stars, Adrian Peterson.

So I gave them my support last year and had a great time watching them even though they had too many warts to make a legitimate run as a Super bowl.  Then I followed them throughout the off-season and watched as they took our newfound relationship and drove it to the edge of a cliff repeatedly.

It started with the first headline I saw about Favre and the Vikings talking.  Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the NFL is a business and by signing Favre they are no longer going to have trouble selling tickets.  He is also potentially a major upgrade at quarterback and anyone who watched the Vikings last year knows that this is a major selling point.  I can see where management is drooling at the prospect of putting him in uniform.  However, as a fan of the game of football I can’t stand seeing Brett Favre allowed to play this game of chicken.  He strung the Vikings along for months while he “decided” whether he could play, then announced that he was done, claiming it was the hardest decision he had made.  Well he made another decision apparently, because today it looks as though Brett Favre is going to change his mind yet again and sign with the Vikings.

I have no problem with Brett Favre coming out of retirement.  I can’t imagine having to quit doing something that I love at such a young age.  What I can’t forgive Brett Favre for is stringing along both the franchise and the fans for an entire off-season.

If they sign Favre, the Vikings should be ashamed of themselves.  They are allowing a look-at-me player choose the course for their franchise.  This isn’t what I thought this organization was about anymore. They seemed intent on putting players in uniform who were team players.  They have the two incredible players in their backfield who happily share snaps, they had a quarterback dual that seemed nearly resolved but didn’t appear to create any undue tension, and they have an deep wide receiver corps that looked poised to willingly share catches.  It was a franchise I wanted to support.  But, if they sign Brett Favre after everything he’s done this off-season, I won’t be able to support them.

So I’ll spend next season watching the Vikings of course but I won’t be a true fan, and I’ll admit I probably never will be.  If I was a true fan this would not an end to our fan ship, I would just shake if off and continue supporting the team.  Maybe this turn of events is as much an indictment of my poor support as it is of a team willing to ignore their culture for a chance at a Super bowl.

A few weeks ago, Kate Brodock and I got into a discussion regarding the definition of Twitter.  It started as a back and forth on Twitter, and I put up a post and then she followed up with a post.  This is my response to her post.  The main argument I had put out is that defining Twitter is not only impossible it is also a bad idea.  Though Kate seems to agree with me, she makes the point that in a business environment you sometimes are forced into defining sites.  I have to concede this point to her, but I’m giving it one caveat.  I don’t think you should categorize websites anymore.  It’s not good business.  Putting Twitter in the same category as Facebook or Blogging doesn’t work because it shares some of the same qualities as each site.

My idea would be to come up with a set of scales to put sites on.  These scales should define things that are important to your business.  Here are a few I thought of.

Trust – Can people trust what they get from the source?  Facebook is great for this; you have to validate yourself before you create a page.  Sending an email from your own domain is safe.  Twitter is a little sketchy here, and I think we’ll see this change in the near future as Twitter starts to monetize it’s platform.  IM is also a little sketchy, it’s hard to validate you are who you say you are.

Timeliness – How quickly do people read your updates once posted?  For Twitter, most users, if they respond or take action, will do so immediately.  Email is usually a little slower, but for most users they probably read your message within the hour.  This is tough to state unfortunately because everyone uses sites differently.

Message Lifetime – How long does a message exist? This isn’t how long it actually stays around but how long from first sending the message can you expect people to still be viewing it.  E-mail is indefinite as once it arrives in someone’s inbox they can take weeks to read it but it doesn’t go away until they take an action on it.  Twitter’s messages can roll through the system and miss many eyes if they aren’t watching their feed.

Openness – Are your updates limited to just those that opt-in.  Email updates only go to those who ask for them (or they should), IM is the same; Twitter on the other hand goes to those who want them but are public and can be seen by anyone.  All three systems allow users to pass the messages to unsubscribed users, but Twitter allows anyone to find your updates at any time.

As I had written before I think we need to shy away from defining sites as social media, social networking, or blogging sites, because everything on the web is turning into a social network.  If you don’t believe me check out the Google Wave announcement from Google.  Look at how it merges a myriad of sites/services and adds a social element to them.  This is just one example, but as the web evolves having a strict system of categorization forces you to keep reviewing things every time the web evolves and either re-categorizing, redefining the categories, or creating new categories.  Putting services on a sliding scale keeps you from redefining categories and allows you to just move the service up or down if the service changes.

This system has it’s flaws of course, it’s more complicated than dropping sites into categories.  Putting sites on the scales is subject to opinion but at least you can look at a site in an instant and see where it falls for a specific task.

Have I ever mentioned that I hate commercials.  It’s not the concept, I understand they are necessary, it’s the way most of them are done.  Right now I’m watching the Sioux-Gopher game on FSN.  If you ever watch FSN you will see the same 5 commercials in rotation for an entire evening.  Right now there are three culprits that are making me want to throw a rotten orange at my television.

The first is the Burger King “Angry Whopper” Ad.  Now the Angry Whopper sounds like a thing of beauty.  It’s spicy stuff and bacon on a burger, you can’t really go wrong.  But the ad drives me crazy for a variety of reasons.  First the farmer is such a stereotype it’s ridiculous, he has bad teeth, wears flannel, and looks like he hasn’t showered in eight days.  The only authentic quality is his hat.  I grew up in a farming community and most farmers are not like that.  Second, the torturing of the onion is just stupid.  And third who would order the Angry Whopper while wearing tie.  This whopper is made for a black t-shirt, it’s going to be messy and you are not going back to work with the breath that thing would give you.

The second annoyance during this game has been the Car Soup commercial.  These are always bad, but the current version where they say “something sells good”  is ear and eye gouging worthy.

The third commercial that is causing me fits is the new McDonalds McCafe commercial. It starts out with two women complaining about their boyfriends,  checking out guys and generally acting like your stereotypical women out with girlfriends.  Then, at the end of the commercial it just happens to be that they just started talking and didn’t even know each other name.  So they introduce each other after having this conversation and just walk away, no exchanging phone number or email addresses.  Would this happen in real life, wouldn’t they at least give each other a business card if they hit it off that well?

Fine, maybe I’m just annoyed because Alex Kangas is playing out of his mind and it’s 0-0 after the Sioux played a much better first period.  Hold on,  the Sioux just scored at the top of the second. It turns out those three commercials don’t bother me that much at all.

1. Connect your employees with your customers.
   • The best thing about being a customer of a small business is getting to know the employees.  You can use a blog to accomplish this.  Let them write posts about their work day, give advice related to your business, or show off a recent success.  You can let them write as much as they want and moderate and post the best content.
   • You may be lucky and have employees that are excited to write  If you don’t though you can still get great content.  Pay your employees or reward them with gift cards for every post that is published.  Remember you control the publishing so they don’t just post stuff to just earn the incentive.
2. Let it go out as a newsletter
   • Many of your customers probably aren’t web savvy.  RSS and blogs are probably not something they are familiar with.  It’s trivial to setup a system that emails your latest posts to a list of permissive users.  Let them sign upand send it out at a pace they are comfortable with.
3. Don’t advertise
   • The worst thing you can do is turn your blog into a advertising mechanism.  If it’s well done it should be an advertisement in itself without being an advertisement.  Don’t promote your specials, “exciting new products”, or write other forms of sensationalism.  Your blog should be an attempt to leave the old ways of marketing behind.  So what should you write about.  Consider these options: how you choose a new product that fills your customers needs, the solution to a common problem your customers have, useful news from your industry, profiles of your employees or even your customers.
4. Don’t force it on anyone
   • This is a form of permissive marketing, it is not to be sold like a used car.  Put up a sign somewhere in your store that your customers can see, don’t have your sales people promote it.  The best marketing is spread by your customers.
5. Don’t feel forced into the standard blog format
   • You don’t need to write daily.  You don’t need to allow comments,  In fact, I would hesitate to allow them as an irate customers is more likely to comment then a content customer.  If you do allow comments, only allow customers to comment; having a sign up code on your receipts or invoices is a perfect way to accomplish this.
6. Do not let your marketing department or public relations department write your blog.
   • Most marketers will kill any chance it has of being fun.  Gimmicks, marketing slang, and PR spin is death to the personality your blog should develop.  Ask an employee to edit posts, but let your writers be themselves.  Marketing and PR will not let your employees passion for their jobs get through
7. Don’t let someone like me design your blog.
   • Hire a real designer and make sure your site looks professional.  If you can’t afford a designer find a template that is clean and can be customized to let your companies image take center stage.

InternetNews Realtime IT News – eBay Q2 Profits Up 22 Percent.

Not really that shocking when you think about it.  It is similiar to the reason baseball game attendence going up during tough economic times.  You can stretch your dollar further on Ebay which is what nearly everyone is doing these dayys.

1. Most people are unaware of what coverage they actually have.
2. There is very little insurance companies can do when they suspect fraud.
3. Adjusters want to pay and close your claim as quickly as you do.
4. If you are going to experience a total loss on a vehicle, do it when it’s 2-3 years old, otherwise you will feel like you have been shorted. (you’ll still feel shorted, but much less so)
5. No one has enough medical coverage.
6. Medical billing systems are incredibly inefficient.
7. Privacy regulations cost everyone a lot more money and time than you would imagine.
8. Wear your seatbelt.
9. Don’t ride a motorcycle without very good health insurance.
10. Many insurance companies usually pay out around 1 dollar for every dollar they take in on premiums.

Via TechDirt,

Why do you think CBS continues to pull in high ratings? I would bet having happy customers who don’t feel like criminals might have something to do with it.  Of course having great shows is a plus.

You have to love this sign, which was posted in the window of what was previously Globe College. They recently changed their name to Globe University and built a new building. This was the map they posted at their old location to direct you to the new location.

It is difficult to see due to my camera phone’s poor resolution, but they misspelled one of the major roads in Woodbury, Radio Drive, as Rasio Drive. Click for a Google map of the area. Somehow I don’t see this inspiring confidence in students researching the college.