Transportation fees

If you ever ask a toddler to do something for you, be wary of the hidden fees.

Especially when the task at hand involves Cheetos.

Cute Family Videos

Here are some cute videos of the little fella.

Poop – (farewell Ze)

Inewuu

Daddy’s Shoes

Currently Seeking A Few Good Clients

Hey guys,

If you didn’t already know,  Bold Interactive (my company) is currently looking for a limited number of new clients.

One of our main projects launched about a month ago, had some great initial results and is now on auto pilot for a while while we work on the next stages of development, blogging and copy writing. That means I have extra time to take on some additional work.

If you know of anyone who needs guidance with their overall online marketing efforts be sure to send them to BoldInteractive.com or just email me to let me know I should give them a call.

Thanks so much for the assist!

Lessons from Hard Knocks University – College of On-Line Marketing

My friend and partner Garrett French recently wrote this post about lessons learned form recent visits to Hard Knocks University over at the Search Marketing Standard Blog. He mentions and links to a story about a post in which he was getting flamed for flagrant marketing during some recent forum participation on behalf of a client of ours.

Well, that story was informative, but the real story was how we earned our forum participation stripes when we first introduced ourselves to that same wonderful group of fellas.

At the time, the site we were working on was still in development, we had some static pages all linking to amazon and didn’t even have a blog. Furthermore, we weren’t even completely up to speed on how all of the free shipping, price match guarantees and other value ads worked.

Everything we were doing was exploratory into a space we as of yet knew little about.

My goals for the forum participation campaign were as follows: (Garrett’s goals may vary slightly)

• Gain access to smart people who can help us answer tough questions from our users and customers.
• Bring enough value back to those communities so that we will be seen as members of the community rather than outsiders trying to exploit it.
• Use our interactions with the community to fuel and inform valuable content for us to blog about and to bring additional value back to the forums.
• Work all of this into the rest of our marketing with high quality links and traffic.

In the beginning:

We had a nice honeymoon in one particular forum that boasts about 17,000 members. Not a small fish by any means. We had asked about 4 different questions on behalf of site users and gotten great feedback and fantastic input to take back to our users.

Additionally, we made sure to let the users know where we got the answers, urged them to join the assisting forum and made sure to let the forum know that we had done so.

Remember, we didn’t have a blog yet to show them how we were using their feedback.

The lovers quarrel.

Then one day, on post 4, the trolls showed up.

It started with someone posting about how we were just using them for customer service. After some more back and forth one of the forum members went on to our site and ripped it limb from limb with a series of harsh-but-true criticisms.

Reading it, I felt like I was looking into one of those magnifying mirrors women use to see into their pores. It was not a pretty sight by any stretch of the imagination.

Denial – Anger – Bargaining

All three of these stages went by pretty quickly as we realized how true of a text lashing we had just received. We knew what was on the line and how important these forums were to us. We also knew that we would face these problems in every forum we were breaking into.

We thought about ignoring them, giving the forum time to cool off, telling them the site was still young, we would try to change it later and all kinds of other wrong moves. We even considered pulling out of the forums all together like dogs with our tails between our legs until the new site was launched and we had something to show for our effort.

Depression

For the rest of that day G an I were beaten. We didn’t know what to do. Our cred was slashed and our next move had to be the right one. In order to address all of their criticisms I would have to make a couple of days worth of edits to the site as we couldn’t find references to some of the advertised features on Amazon we were being ripped into over.

Additionally, this was not the only forum we were beginning to get push back in.

We slept on it.

Acceptance

That previous evening, we were both up all night and somewhere in there, time gave us back our motivation. The next morning we researched all of the feedback and made a list of way to handle or remedy each blow dealt to us.

For the rest of that day, I made site and messaging changes, added pages and made other alterations to shore up our defenses from further attack.

During this time, Garrett crafted our response to be firm, slightly apologetic but mostly to say “You were right. Look, we fixed it.”.

In retrospect, that was the only wining response we could have come back with and our response informed and helped us smooth over the push back we were getting in other communities.

Victory

Our reply was well received, the site changes and apology/site response worked. We showed this community that we wanted to belong, we were willing to change, we are open and responsive to criticism and that we were serious about this relationship.

If this is beginning to sound like your marriage, it should.

The path forward

Sense then, we have tweaked our approaches, launched the new site and started blogging like gang busters. Because of our relationships with forums, we have had a steady supply of great ideas and feedback to inform useful blog posts and some killer link bait.

The site is breaking traffic records every week and Google alone is now responsible for 35% of our site traffic up from 10% 4 weeks ago. In that same 4 week span, forum traffic as become our is our biggest referral source and before the Google organic results hit a couple of days ago, referral traffic had made it’s way up to 50% of our total site traffic for an entire week after publishing some great linkbait.

Mind you that the linkbait was informed and written with the input of the forum relationship we had saved through an open and honest response to harsh-but-true criticism.

Follow Up

If you would like to learn more about forum participation and how to become part of the conversation in your marketplace, check out the great articles Garrett has written recently.

The Community Correspondent – A Guide To Creating Link Worthy Content Through Forum Participation

Lessons In Branded Content Creation Through Community Participation

Still want more?

Give us a call or email us to see how we can help you become part of the conversation in your marketplace.

919-451-8983
adam@boldinteractive.com

Samuel W. Wolfson High School class of 1997, 10 Year Reunion

So, if you couldn’t tell by the title of this post my high school reunion is coming up in a few months and this post is my way of helping out my friends who are planning and organizing it

I created a MySpace page for the Wolfson High class of 97 reunion with messaging and links to to the Wolfson High School c/o 97 reunion site and am asking for my fellow class mates to add the profile to their top friends. After day one, I have 5 friends and one of them added the profile to their top friends.

Update: The profile has now befriended over 85 Wolfson Alum and at least 25 of them have added the Reunion profile to their top friends.

I also made this cheesy little badge.

Visit the web site for more info.
Update your contact information

If you are a fellow alum from Wolfson high school, class of 97, and you have a site or a blog, please add the badge to your site. Just view source and paste it into a post or your sidebar, the image is being pulled from MySpace so there is nothing to upload. Don’t forget to include the links below the badge too. Those are important.

I am about to slip into full on, spammy seo copy mode so that the post might rank for anything having to do with wolfson, class of 97 reunion, wolfson high school c/o 97 reunion or wolfson 97 10 year reunion.

Finally, if you are an alum and have come across this post, here is all the info you need about the Class of 97 Reunion from Wolfson High School.

Greetings Wolfpack!

10 years have gone by and its time for the Wolfson Class of 1997 10-year Reunion. We are working hard to get ready for the big event and need your help.

Click Here to visit the web site for more info.

Click Here to update your contact information

Please email or call as many alum as you can and let them know about the site and the need for everyone to go there and update their contact info.

Here is the vital info:

www.wolfsonclassof97reunion.myevent.com

Location:
Casa Marina Hotel & Restaurant, Jacksonville Beach, FL

Date:
Saturday, August 18, 2007, 7 p.m. – 11 p.m.

So mark your calendars.

The TV 2.0 Train Is Finally Pulling Into The Station.

So, recently I wrote a couple of posts about on-line TV and my frustration with the current options available to us lowly consumers. I mentioned that while there was alot of great content out there, and that there was some solid technology to view it, both need to come up a notch as the tech still needs work and there still isn’t A+ content available free and legally for online watchers through the existing chanels.

Enter this months issue of Wired.

Did you know that the founders of Kazaa and Skype have formed a new company to compete with the archaic broadcast televison world in the same way they used Skype to upend the traditional telcoms. Well, you do now.

Ladies and Gentelman, I give you, Joost.

(more screenshots)

< wait for applause >

Think YouTube, Kazaa, Skype, Firefox, Democracy Player, and MySpace all wrapped into one killer entertainment app.

Complete with buddies, ratings, p2p distribution.

The kicker, targeted ads. That’s right, think adsense for TV.

Because the ads are more targeted, 2 things will happen.

1. Ads will be more impact-full and we will watch fewer of them with more value to our selves and to advertisers.
2. Becuase the programing is ad supported, it will be free.

Sense Wired doesn’t publish it’s offline content on-line I can’t link to the article but I will summarize it in a follow up post with some of the juicy tidbits.

I have already signed up for the Beta and will let you know once I have a chance to give it a spin.

So now we have to wonder if they will use the new Adwords post and pre roll system for their ads or create their own.

Google Adwords Down for Maintenance

So here is a perfect example to illustrate my point raised in my previous post about Microsoft not knowing how to communicate.

Google Adwords is down and I knew immediately why they were down and for how long this would be the case.

You might be wondering how I knew exactly what was going on so quickly.

Did I check the blog 3 days ago?

Did I get an email about it yesterday?

No and no.

It’s because they came right out and told me, front and center, at the moment that I needed to know.

Not only do they tell me what is going on, they do it in 17 languages, with a follow up links for me to get more information.

They even close with an apology.

That is how you communicate.

Take no chances, accept full responsibility and insure that your message gets through.

Microsoft,

See what I’m talking about. That’s all we need. Just a little thoughtfulness.

PS.

Does anyone know how Vista sales are coming along, the latest Mac ads can’t be helping.

Adcenter, WTF? Microsoft AdCenter is on the fritz… Repeat, MSN AdCenter is down.

So I go to log into micorsoft adcenter today and all I get is this.

Safari –

Firefox -

There is no update, no status message, no… nothing. Does the blue screen of death apply to all things microsoft.

Realy, this is just another example of why microsoft is doomed. They just don’t know how to communicate with consumers. That is to say, they don’t listen, and then don’t respect us enough to let us know what’s going on.

Shit, for all I know, they are only displaying this screen to mac users so we go out and buy PCs.

If any one knows what going on, comment some updates.

Updates:

Simple SEM said last month,

“Looks like the MSN Adcenter had a bit of a hiccup this morning, and they have decided to pull it offline for the remainder of the business day. This was a unplanned outage and is not a good sign, especially for the efficacy of new technology platforms.”

But this is a month later now and I was actually able to access it all month. What’s the story?

I certianly hope that whatever updates they are doing were worth it and that adcenter still works on a Mac when they come back online.

Microsoft,

Thoughts? Would you like to chime in, oh, thats right, you don’t listen to us. My mistake.

Updates:

As I was informed in the comments by Evan (thanks Evan) and then more gracefully by Thomas, this is just scheduled maintenance as specified on the 7th by the adcenter blog. It’s back up now.

Being fairly new to adcenter, I didn’t yet think to check the blog as I should have. (wipes mud off face)

However, would it have killed them to post a link on the error page?

Isn’t that just a common courtesty?

Or is it just me?

A new blog for the productivity minded professional

If you are a professional with a pencent for personal improvement in the realm of time management and personal productivity have I got a great blog for you.

The ADD Executive.

You will find some great resources, success stories, life hacks and most importantly, a place to share your experiences.

Full disclosure: I am helping to put this blog together and if all goes well, I and my partners on this project will share ad and affiliate revenues.

What the f–k should we do?

The other day, I realized that George W. Bush is now directly responsible for killing more US citizens in Iraq than were killed on 9-11. (with Afganastan, that # was surpassed months ago)

That is to say, that over the past 5 years, Bush has killed more Americans than Terrorists.

If someone wanted to do the math, I would go out on a limb and say that very soon, George W. Bush will be directly responsible for the deaths and injuries of more Americans with his un-just, un-warranted, un-necessary war in Iraq than all of the US terrorist attacks, ever.

Now, even more astounding is the realization that as of a couple of months ago, over half a million Iraqis have been killed since major combat in Iraq.

Moreover, this President is un-willing to release research funding to harvest even one frozen, never going to be used for anything else, embryo, that could lead to life saving research for countless people plagued by countless diseases because he values human life too much to permit government funding for the research.

Like many of you, until now, I felt that this whole war was such a magnificent mess that no matter what we did it wouldn’t make a difference. Sometimes I feel like we just need to get the hell out, split the country into 3 and grovel for forgiveness to the international community to bring in international peacekeepers in to protect the new borders. Then, sometimes, I feel that more troops could help stabilize the country and help to slow the progress of civil war, and that we need to be there because its our mess to clean up.

But then I realized something. We are spending billions of dollars on this god damned war. Billions of dollars. To kill people, who are only killing us to get us out of the way for them to kill each other. spree that we are responsible for and kick started with our glorious SHOCK AND AWE. As long as we are there, killing is going to be the only thing that happens.

We must leave in order for any progress to take hold. Furthermore, for every father, mother , son or daughter we kill, out grows more people who will blame the US for their loss and radicalize in order to enact revenge. The implications will haunt us for generations. Just ask the Germans or the Japanese still living in the shadows of their awry past leaders.

More troops only mean more killing and that can’t be the proper path. If bush has his way, I am sure that over 10,000 us personnel and over 1,000,000 Iraqis will have died in this mess since the beginning. WTF!

If you just think of the lifetime potential and global contribution of over a million people. The lost accomplishments of these people, their children, their grandchildren and so on, it’s staggering.

Then we have Katrina. The city still sits. Still festers. Because the rest of this country and it’s President as written it off. Even in his State Of The Union Address, The gulf cost reconstruction was never even mentioned. Not a single utterance. Murder and suicide rate continue to climb and the news media has stopped talking about Katrina all together.

What are we doing spending Billions of Dollars on destroying Iraq, when that money could be spent rebuilding the Gulf Coast.

So that brings me to the title of this post.

I have a family to support, a business to build, and between the 2, that doesn’t leave much time for anything else save for the occasional blog post. I would like to do more but not only do I not know what to do to make a difference, I’m not sure I could commit time. All I have is a love for my country, my family and my friends.

I could wait for the presidential election, but I don’t think we can wait that long. The longer Bush is in power, the more exponential damage he is capable of. I am a member of MoveOn.org. I sign petitions and write letters they ask me to when I believe the cause is just.

But what else can we do. What else are we capable of doing that can actually make a difference. What can we do so that we no longer feel like ants being slowly burned by some big eared, thin lipped kid with a magnifying glass.

What the f–k should we do?

Leave your ideas in the comments and send this post to others for their input.

I will ask for feedback on some of the best ideas in follow up posts and I will personally head up an action commity for a chosen course.