Entries from March 2009 ↓

I just got off the phone with 1-800-Flowers.com. I had tried to get flowers sent to the hospital yesterday, but they failed to deliver them, so I canceled the order. I called back today to try to re-enter the order with a different address, and finally gave up after speaking to several apathetic employees and getting left on permanent hold. The pivoting issue was a minor one related to a gift code, but their seeming unwillingness to even attempt to solve my problem ultimately caused me to go elsewhere.

Any site on the internet requires visitors to be successful. For social networks, this is even more important, because the quality of the site is defined largely by the quality of user interactions and contributions on that site. About 6 weeks ago, I started up a site, The Free Agents which caters to people between jobs. Its a social network where people can share their experiences and meet others in the same situation.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working hard to promote the site. I have no formal training in marketing, so my efforts have come mainly from trial and error and also from advice from marketing professionals, both through their blogs and from actually speaking with them. There are other guides on the internet about generating buzz for your website, but most of them are long on generalities (“Know your goals”) and short on details. This guide is an attempt to nail down some of the strategies that have worked for me, and help others that are getting involved in the social marketing landscape.

Disclaimer: this is a work in progress, so I have inevitable missed some key points or approached some things in an unusual way. I welcome your comments below!

In his latest article called Phone Revolution, Tony Lawrence talks about Google Voice and his excitement about the new features. Its been blogged to death in the last week, but some of the highlights of this cool new service include:

• One number that rings all your phones
• The ability to direct certain callers to certain phones
• The ability to add and remove phone numbers from the list
• Advanced voicemail capabilities like transcription-to-email and web access
• Different greetings based on caller
• Switch phones on the fly, mid call
• Record and store calls
• …etc

What struck me about this post wasn’t anything about Google Voice specifically, since I’ve heard all those features discussed ad nauseum. It was the last line:

This is the kind of stuff our telephone companies (land and wireless) should have been doing for us already.

Cross posted on The Free Agents, a network for people between jobs.

When I was 8, I got a 14.4 modem and an AOL dialup subscription for my birthday. It was one of the best presents I’ve ever received, and I quickly started exploring all that AOL had to offer. Soon, I started to wonder how web pages actually got on the internet, so I found AOL Personal Publisher and started messing around.

In most cases, 8 year olds don’t have too much to contribute to the world, and I was no exception. I just wanted to create a web page for something, so I settled on one thing that was well known to me and friends — video games. I created AJ’s Code Page (specializing in infinite lives, double damage, god mode, and the like) hosted on the now-defunct members.aol.com, and started trying to figure out how to get users.