A recent Business Week article discusses the Twitter. Lots of interesting links. One of them was Ellen Petry Leanse’s blog (from the comments); contains loads of Twitter-tips and advice.
Social guru Chris Brogan wrote an article about how he uses LinkedIn which I thought was quite interesting. He advises being generous in connecting but restrained in recommending, which is consistent with my thoughts about best practices.
The only point of difference I have with his article is that he only briefly touches on LinkedIn’s Q&A feature (and then only to commend it as an advertising vehicle). I think that it is one of the most useful things about LinkedIn - a tremendous resource both for gathering opinions from other professionals about issues of concern to you and your business, and for demonstrating your expertise in areas your business operates. (Note that this is different from advertising; advertising is saying you’re an expert. Answering questions on LinkedIn is showing it.)
Former HP boss Carly Fiorina, now shilling for John McCain, says there’s nothing wrong with the USA that can’t be fixed by a little outsourcing. She says it’s great that big companies are able to dodge taxes by laying off their American workers and setting up shop in China. Individuals can’t move to China and lay off the taxman, of course - the little people are required by law to pay taxes on their worldwide income.
Please, God - is a Greg Mankiw comment on this too much to ask? I swear I won’t ask for anything else until I ask for something else.
I’ve read a few interesting posts recently about reputation management - a fancy phrase for “pushing the bad stuff off the first page of Google.”
I’ve been requesting and displaying recommendations on my Linked In profile. Does anyone else use a different mechanism (beyond simply entering them directly on your own website)?
The BNET article gives a good summary. “Think dialog, not speech.”
Last week, Mountain Media issued a press release to announce their PCI compliance. I got intrigued and called the company for an interview. Here’s the transcript:
TheCartBlog: Tell me about the product.
Mountain: Well, it’s a hosted offering built on the LAMP stack. We’re at version 7.0 of the product now. We’ve had a very strong focus on SEO and flexibility from the start, so I’d say those are the two biggest strengths we bring to the game.
TheCartBlog: Great! So as a hosted product, you can’t really change much except for templating, right?
Mountain: It’s funny - that’s a common objection from people who are coming from open source, but in truth, the fact that they’re constantly fiddling with their cart is a bad thing - it leads to problems, instability and so forth. But to answer your question directly, first of all, we don’t call it templating, because each cart’s look and feel is unique. Our implementation process starts with a design interview, and we develop the interface based on the outcome of that interview …
TheCartBlog: I’ve looked at some of your implementations and they’re really quite beautiful. So you do the skinning?
Mountain: Yes. We have a number of designers on staff. Now once the implementation is complete, the customer has the flexibility to change wording, text, even the css, but we find in general that they’d rather not do that sort of thing.
TheCartBlog: Build your business, not your shopping cart, right?
Mountain: Exactly.
TheCartBlog: I tell storeowners that every day. So it sounds like professional services is a big part of your business - right?
Mountain: It is, but if people are working with a designer they like, we’re happy to work with them.
TheCartBlog: Tell me about the company.
Mountain: We’re in Saratoga Springs, New York, about 3 hours north of New York City. We have 15 people on staff.
TheCartBlog: And the typical client?
Mountain: A lot of our customers are coming from other hosted solutions like Yahoo Stores or Volusion. A typical store might have half a million in sales. We get a few well-funded new launches, but a lot more existing businesses looking to grow.
TheCartBlog: And what do implementations generally run?
Mountain: We’re doing a lot around $5K these days. It’s a 30-60 day turnaround, and most storeowners do inventory input themselves.
TheCartBlog: Can you run your whole store from MountainMedia?
Mountain: The back end is very strong. If you have a multichannel operation, you might want to link into some external order management tools, and we can do this integration for you, but many of our customers just use our product.
TheCartBlog: So what’s next?
Mountain: We’re always looking at ways to make our implementation process smoother, faster, more affordable. And we’re looking at more advanced sales tools, like buy one thing, get another thing free.
(Ed: Remember to pitch Better Together and the Better Together Admin Panel to them!)
TheCartBlog: That’s great! Well congratulations on your PCI certification, and we look forward to seeing great things in the future from you!
Thanks for the talk, guys!
If you’re running my Zen Cart Discount Preview extension and displaying Group Discounts in the cart, when you upgrade to Zen Cart 1.3.8, please be sure to apply the patch described in the help. It is required because of an internal change made to Zen Cart in the 1.3.8 release.
… and if you’re not running Discount Preview, you should be! It’s a great mod, and the proceeds from it help fund the free software I create for Zen Cart, like Quantity Discounts and Better Together. Thank you!
I have released the changes required to make the Zen Cart Quantity Discounts Contribution perform discounting on the basis of dollars spent, rather than units purchased as is typically done. There is no longer any need to use the Zen Cart Price Sensitive Discount; using Quantity Discounts has the following advantages:
ExBoyFriendJewelry.com - what an incredible idea for a female-focused store - and a great sponsorship opportunity for a female-focused business.
My friend Jeremy over at Being a Starving Graphic Artist Sucks asks, Do You Assume that Everyone Wants to Regularly Hear about Your Creative Freelancing Business?
Delete the words “Creative Freelancing,” and you’ll find it’s an effective question that every small businessperson should be asking themselves. The rules are:
The best practice here is to use a double-opt-in newsletter provider and allow clients to sign themselves up. I use MailChimp (see examples here) and wrote software to allow Zen Cart users to use MailChimp too. There are many offerings in this space, but I think MailChimp is the best one for SMEs.
