Looks like the right time for a ToldYouSo.

Betting against Microsoft in the online space is rarely a bad bet, but on May 21 I wrote, "[Microsoft's] products are usually too complicated, and I bet that CashBack will fail for that reason."

Fast forward to August 28, and Techcrunch says, "it doesn’t look like Cashback is having any effect."

The first few commenters cited the complexity of the scheme.

There. Maybe I'll get into the prediction business.

It scrapes the official alerts from the New Jersey Transit site, and mixes in emails and tweets from smartphone-armed commuters. Turnaround time is about five minutes. There is even a mobile-friendly site.

Today it's reached the "presentable" stage, and the data is flowing pretty well.

If you ride the Northeast Corridor trains and want to contribute, let me know.

More on this later.

Grazie to web developer Caimin Jones for the code.

So here goes!

I can't resist an early comment on Microsoft's CashBack service, which will give rebates to people who find and buy products through the MSFT Live search engine. Here's a WSJ story on the service. It's supposed to launch at 1:30ET, which is a few minutes from now. (OK, now it's up.)

A lot of the focus will be on what it means for merchants. My concerns are with the user experience.

This concept just seems too complicated to get tens of thousands of people using it, which is the point where more than a few advertisers really take notice. (Which is the whole point.)

The user is supposed to register with Microsoft, and provide details on their Paypal or bank account. There will surely be multiple email confirmations and validations with security questions and images. Users have to take it on faith that they don't have to read the fine print, and there aren't loopholes for the rebates. All barriers to account setup.

For this to work, regular Google users are supposed to catch themselves before searching for a camera or a book, and think, "Hey, I should use the Microsoft search on the chance that I'll get $1.98 back at some point." Habits are hard to break, and $1.98 won't do it.

I'm not a Microsoft-hater. Live is fine, and the new build-your-own-Flash-game service Popfly looks neat. But their products are usually too complicated, and I bet that CashBack will fail for that reason.

If this prediction bites the dust (like most do), here's how I'll eat digital crow. I'll buy $100 of Live PPC ads on the keyword "cashback", leading to this blog post.

With some effort and startup costs, by 2009 you can stop:

Running your business without an intranet.
A simple intranet can help you share files with remote staff, have discussions, host a wiki, and remain very secure. Open source website software Drupal is a perfect tool for this. Its user and group permissioning is particularly easy, and you can easily extend it into an "extranet" where your partners and commissioned sales reps get access to a portion of the site's content.

Guessing at what your customers are saying in public.
A few ideas: 1) Do a Google search for "better than [your-product-name-here]" or "similar to [name] -- remember the quotes. There are a number of variations to this for tire-kicking customers; i.e. "also considered [name]" "looked at [name]". 2) Yahoo Answers, especially if you cast your net to include competitor names. 3) an RSS feed of your keywords from Tweetscan. 4) an RSS feed of a Bloglines search. The signal-to-noise ratio of these channels can range from bad to good depending on your company name and sector, so it will probably require some tuning. And you'll need someone to draw generalizations from the little data points. (Hello, summer intern!)

Paying to host webinars.
For the medium-sized business that only does the occasional webinar and remote presentation, WebEx is a luxury. It's a great service, but you can get the same effect with Zoho.

Asking someone else to change some text on your website.
In 2001, websites were usually made on a PC and uploaded to the webserver. Dreamweaver was the norm, along with tools like FrontPage. Altering a page (e.g. adding news, updating a headshot) meant asking the IT guy or the web developer, who might have been offsite. Thus began the dance of request prioritization and email tag for reviewing the page. Now, there are sophisticated and near-free content management systems (CMS) that live on the webserver. To make a change, you log into the system through a web browser, and make the change yourself. The key is that you (and the other editors) can be permissioned to make only certain low-impact changes, and changes can be rolled back if you screw up. Good CMS's include my current fave Drupal, Expression Engine, Joomla, and Movable Type.

Relying on a PR firm to monitor the news for you.
A PR person still helps interpret news and coaches you through a response, but there's no reason to lean on them as the source of breaking news about you and your company. For media monitoring, Google Alerts and Factiva ($) will get you 90% covered.

Paying lots for development of embeddable website widgets.
Seen all over Facebook, widgets might make sense for your marketing. If your widget audience is in the tenthousands, then it probably makes sense to get professional agency work. But if you're just running an experiment, DIY widgetmaker Sprout is worth a go. The below widget took 11 minutes to make. (Yeah, it looks like it too. The one on the left took slightly longer.)

Wondering which half of your advertising works.
I'm looking at you, Ogilvy. There are a bunch of ways to reduce that "wondering" to a third or a quarter. Namely: Landing pages, conversion tools for PPC ads, custom URL's for print ads and DM campaigns, and the filtering tools in web analytics. Integrating lead management tools like Eloqua and Salesforce helps you track conversions.

Speculating on how people get to your site.
Knowing where your web visitors is not a new development, but it's worth mentioning here for the smaller companies whose website statistics are accessible only through their webmaster or web developer. The point is that you can have online, free access to reports that show you the following: 1) which other sites are linking to you and how many people are coming from them; 2) what locations your visitors are coming from; 3) which ads they clicked; and 3) what search keywords your visitors used. Google Analytics is the best free tool out now, but there is a new free package called Piwik that bears watching. With GA, You can add fiters and goals to track these people through to conversion.

Paying for shopping cart software.
I admit that the integration and setup of a cart will cost you much more than the cart itself. The bigger point is that quality of free ecommerce software is a lot better now than it was several years ago, and better-supported by a developer/user community. Old and confusing: OSCommerce, ZenCart. New hotness: Magento. Our pals at Avenue Verve, who are our preferred developers of ecommerce sites, swear by Magento.

In English, this means that the speed at which your site loads can have an effect on where your ad shows. If the site is too slow, then your ad's QS drops and you have to bid higher to keep your original position.

Here's how they show it in the Adwords interface:

You can be "faster than average" or "great". (There surely are other tiers, but I'm not going to pack a landing page up with slow-loading widgets just to find out).

This is yet another reason to have dedicated landing pages -- i.e. not your home page -- with navigation stripped out, optimized images, flash etc.

It also is another reason to pay for solid web hosting.

Engages and builds trust with customers and prospects.

Your prospects are looking for a solution from someone that understands their problems. Show your customers how much you know about their business challenge, and they’ll believe your product addresses those needs... especially if you don't overtly mention your product. You can also shape the issues faced by buyers of your products. If done honestly, that can directly benefit your sales effort.

Establishes thought leadership in your industry.
If you're an expert in your field, a blog gives you an effective channel to put your knowledge on display. Blog content is inherently more sharable than a white paper, and more timely besides. HealthpointCapital, a private equity firm, is a notable model for a firm that used a blog to dramatically expand the reach of its research output.

Helps keep your website dynamic.

We all know the the main function of most websites is to develop and qualify leads, and that drives the main content and structure. However, a blog addresses two nonstandard types of user visits. First, buyers will occasionally visit your site and want to know what’s new. Second, your painstakingly written “regular” website content may not address all problems faced by prospects. A blog engages visitors in these two situations and nudges them along the selling cycle.

Lifts your website up the search engine rankings.

Google smiles upon sites with regularly updated content. That means higher rankings on the search results page, and more traffic for your site.

Complements your email and offline efforts.

This is multichannel marcom. For example: Interview a customer, and put it on your blog. Formalize the interview into a PDF case study, which your field sales team can use. Turn the material into a “customer win” press release. Excerpt the interview for your email newsletter to customers. Blogs fit nicely into any marketing campaign.

Does so by not costing too much.

Blog software is cheap, and they can fit into your website without too much effort. That said, the commitment to keeping a business blog is steady and does claim a fair amount of time from your marketing staff. (Or, you can outsource it.)

This morning brought me an example, which serves as an interesting illustration in the free- versus paid- content battle.

We begin with Charles Krauthammer's op-ed in the WaPo. He refers to a "brilliantly detached, coolly ironic" Michael Kelly piece on Hillary Clinton, from the NYT magazine in 1993.

Sounds good; Kelly was an angel with the pen. Let's Google it.

Not at the top, though I see excerpts from the piece.

Giving up too soon, I try the NYT in-house search, reverse-date-sort.

Not there at all! Did the NYT lose the rights to the piece? Did Sidney Blumenthal delete it from their database? This is interesting.

Through a grad student I have access to Factiva, the news aggregator. They only had an abstract of the piece. A search on Lexis-Nexis Academic turned up nothing.

There Must Be a Pony in This Internet*, I thought.

Back to Google. Not too far down the list, we see this. A solitary blogger, who has scanned or somehow scraped the full text of the article from Kelly's anthology.

Score one for the free web. (And copyright violation, I know.)

Postscript: Fusty old Dialog had the article.

* Reagan's favorite joke. The abridged version:
...Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. "What do you think you're doing?" the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. "With all this manure," the little boy replied, beaming, "there must be a pony in here somewhere!"

In general, free and open-source software isn't yet robust enough to stop the corporate dollars flowing to Redmond. Nor are shallow-pocketed companies likely to try, since the development effort to match feature for feature is just too much. Heck, most of these companies may be gone in a few years if they don't make the transition to an ad-supported or paid-tier model. Or get bought for their codebase and user list, like Writely.

But for now, it's a good time for entrepreneurs, consultants and startups. Here's one example why.

Zoho is a suite of free web-based productivity apps (like Google's Docs etc). They've been around for about a year, and in that time have built a remarkable array of services. The only one I've looked closely at is their desktop sharing product, called Meeting.

A WebEx Replacement?

Meeting had an immediate appeal to me. Hours after first learning about Zoho (in a TechCrunch comment), I had been telephone-training a couple of people how to operate Drupal, my pet web-based content management system.

Ted and Nina and I got through the training adequately, but since it was conference-call-based, there were the usual, "Er, what page are you looking at?" moments.

Desktop sharing services like WebEx and GoToMeeting are the preferred tool for this kind of remote demo and training. They work well. I would have no problem paying the $40/month (or WebEx's per/minute/attendee fee) if I had regular high-leverage webinars or demos to host.

But for a casual training session with Ted and Nina, can the free tool do the job just as well?

Road Test

The answer is "apparently, yes." It worked like a charm on the first swing.

The abridged process:

1) Presenter creates a free Zoho account.
2) Presenter installs a browser plugin, if it's his first time.
3) Presenter clicks to start a meeting, and enters email addresses of invitees.
4) Invitees get the email, click on a URL, and once on the Zoho site click on the Join button.

As for the blow-by-blow, I can't add much more than Matt at Paininthetech.com did during his runthrough, or TechCrunch on the Meeting beta a year ago.

Running a desktop sharing app for a meeting always introduces some complexity, but Zoho is worth a go for your next training session.

Plus, you can't beat free.

I've kissed plenty of frogs:

• Topica. A hosted service for medium- and high-volume senders. For a test account, they mistakenly dinged my credit card $500 for four straight months. Although it did get resolved, it was not a pleasant process.
• iPost: A great service started a few years ago by some nice guys (Steve Webster and Greg Fox) who were very accessible on the phone. They eventually joined their rightful place among the higher-priced services like EmailLabs, CheetahMail, and YesMail.
• Campaigner. Inexpensive hosted service. If I remember correctly, their unsubscribe policy was awfully restrictive. If Joe Smith unsubscribed from one Campaigner-serviced newsletter, he was taken off all Campaigner-serviced newsletters... including your own.
• ConstantContact: Another inexpensive service. It's got good market traction these days, and I can't complain about the deliverability and the end product. But the back-end interface is kind of clunky, and the pages don't flow as you go from step to step. For example, the "send a test" function is in the Preview popup window, and the button doesn't stand out. It's difficult to delete a draft email. There are upsell links scattered through the first few pages. To be fair, ConstantContact is aimed at a non-technical audience. There are loads of templates, and the monthly pricing is predictable and cheap.
• eZineDirector. Cheap hosted service. Terrible and unintuitive interface. Delivery can be delayed for hours after you click Send. Major data loss event took place in 2006.
• DadaMail. An installed set of PHP scripts, written by an artist in Colorado. A nominally free package, but you have to pay to remove the DadaMail tagline. In 2007, the guy's website would regularly exceed its bandwidth cap, leaving you without support forums. Now I notice that he's selling links from his home page, a little bit of commercial sleaze which just confirms that artists often do sell out. And yes, the software was named after the surrealist.
• PHPList. Much-used free PHP script package, but it's apparently impossible to strip the "PHPList" tagline out of the email. Other customizations are difficult.
• Feedblitz. Not a true email broadcast service. Instead, it's a web app built to read RSS-formatted blog/CMS output and then send it out to your list via email. Like a complement to "traditional" RSS. Nearly all of my clients have websites built by some kind of blog/CMS application, so Feedblitz was worth a look. There is a rather bewildering array of features, which surely can be massaged into something useful for readers of a blog-centric company. Yet there's a little too much FeedBlitz identity built into the output, and it's more expensive than the cheap services. Not the best fit for my requirements, but one to keep experimenting with.

There are happy customers on all these services, but my search for the right blend of inexpensive/easy/fast/smart/brandable went on and on.

Until today.

Campaign Monitor is a hosted service run out of Australia. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. Inexpensive enough, for monthly senders. Per email blast, it's $5 plus a penny per recipient. The simplicity of this a la carte model is very appealing, even if it's about 50% more than the cheapie email services. Weekly mailers with lists in the '000s won't save any money here, I must add.
2. Works Fast. It feels like the server is next door.
3. Fabulous user interface. Here is where they really shine. As you assemble an outbound email, the pages flow naturally together in a wonderfully linear way. How did they do this? Information is chunked together well, button colors chosen sensibly and applied consistently, labels are consistent, and there is white space to set the important material off. Really, there is so much goodness here I should write a separate post about the UI. Bottom line for the user, a solid UI means less chance of a mistake and less time spent building the email.
4. Focussed. Once you're logged in, you don't see pointers to other services the vendor offers. These just clutter the interface and take you off-task.
5. Brandable. As far as I can tell, there are only two things in an outbound email that you can't "own" with your corporate identity: the URL of the unsubscribe link, and the email headers. That's as unobtrusive as it gets for a hosted service, at least at this pricing level.

Hat tip to Komra for the referral.

I tell paying clients and friends alike that I'm not a web developer (unlike the pros at Design4Results and ImageCog), but more of a "prosumer" who can kick his way through a content management system to get something simple done.

In this case, Drupal. This is yet another open-source PHP-based program, with several things going for it.

• Easy Installation. Download, unzip, untar, upload, change permissions, run installer. Nice. Though, today I tried my had at SSH'ing into the server for part of that job... and hit a wall with file permissions.


• User Management. What attracted me first to Drupal was a "salesforce extranet" project in 2007. The client needed several layers of user permissions, from "go away" to "read content" to "read and comment" to "change anything". Users also had to be able to register themselves, but be allowed in only with an admin's approval. We also needed a forgot-password function. And it had to be dead simple to operate. Drupal had all that.


• Big User Community. Mostly for the sake of troubleshooting. The forums are active and easily searchable.


• Free.


• Fast.


• Good SEO.


• Handles Files Attachments Well. This was important for the extranet project.


• Built-in Keyword Search.


• Loads of Add-ons.The ones I reach for first are Google Analytics, Lightbox2, and DHTML menu.

The only quibble I have is that the themes (i.e. skins, templates) all start to look the same after a while. The one I used was Marinelli, for the record.

Perhaps it was my delivery.

Some weeks after, I saw how it should be done. The WSJ did a brief interview of a popup book designer, who scored 10/10 during his four minutes. I gave my observations on him over at the NYT SBSC blog.

Bottom line, if you're not clicking: Have passion for your business, convey personality, give short answers, and practice beforehand.

The NYT Small Business Summit Center is a microsite that supports an annual day-long event targeted at entrepreneurs.

We wanted to make a major upgrade to the content and stickiness of the site, to support 2008 event sales and sweeten the deal for advertisers.

Our hook is the Share Your Story concept, launched by AMEX -- a major NYT advertiser and a firm that is cultivating the entrepreneur market.

So this week we threw open the doors to Summit attendees, offering them the chance to get interviewed and profiled on the site. Entrepreneurs can also guest blog, and do a couple of other exposure-building activities that will go live in ten days.

See the profile and blog entry by the delightful E.B. Moss of Moss Appeal for a sample.

That's E.B on the right. Clearly happy with the free PR.

Naturally we are hoping to build a community and get comments etc.

The best hook is that the NYT mothership has committed some advertising inventory to the effort, to directly promote these stories. So if you go to the Business section, you'll see this ad:

(The ad was created by our partners at Acorn Design, who have an exquisite way with type and color.)

Plus, no money changes hands, no legal agreements to click through or sign.

For the entrepreneurs, it's a nice shot of free buzz marketing.

If any small business owners among my legions of blog readers are interested in getting featured on the site, give me a shout.

In September they had some problems with their clustered web hosting service, called the Grid service. Some latency, duplicate emails, and the resolution process lingered on a bit. The Grid has never seemed rock-solid, and so they're on a shorter leash with me.

But I write here not to bury MediaTemple, but praise them.

During the problems they sent out updates consistently, via trouble ticket, blog thread, and RSS.

Good for them. Hiding such obvious problems from well-networked buyers -- who are skilled searchers -- is asking for trouble.

And after the system got back to normal, they sent out a credit via email.

As per the last incident update on (mt) Media Temple's incident tracker system, 24 hours have passed and we have seen no further latency issues on (gs) Cluster.2

(mt) Media Temple is issuing 1 month's credit to customers affected by this issue (INC# 285). We would like to take this opportunity to once again apologize for the unexpected access problems. We understand that our customers run web dependent businesses on our systems and that slow or inaccessible websites or email are simply unacceptable. We would also like to convey once more that this incident has spawned numerous internal reviews, new monitoring points and new adjustments to our cluster growth formulas. The primary aim for (mt) Media Temple is for this to never happen again.

We thank you for patience and your continued business.

Regards,

Demian P. Sellfors
CEO
(mt) Media Temple, Inc.

The blog post reads a bit differently. Including the CEO's name in the email had a cooling effect.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I present the last communication from Web Wide Media. They are a Texas-based budget host I inherited for one of my pro bono projects.

In the highly probable event their service announcement disappears with their business, here is the relevant bit.

Topic: Ahoy! Like a modern day pirate, I am assuming command of an abandoned ship....

Let me introduce myself.
My name is [name redacted by Andrew]. I own and operate DoorCountyHosting.com, and previously DoorHost.net until it was sold in April of 2006. I've been working with WWM.net as a support tech, and a client, for almost a year. In recent events, I've had contact with the owners of WWM.net only on three occassions since June of 2007.

One of those times was a two way communication. The others were one sided quick notes from [name redacted by Andrew] , and nothing further.
I'm assuming WWM.net to be an abandoned company, and taking control of it in an effort to ensure the clients with the hosting services and support they have paid for.

Why is it assumed abandoned?
As you can see - the cPanel licenses have gone unpaid, as well as the servers. Neither myself, nor the data center have a reliable method of communication to the owners. Have any of you heard from anyone but me since June??

However, there are many complications with this take over.
First, I've told [name redacted by Andrew] in an email, just moments ago, that I will give back the company if/when he wishes within the next 30 days. I am not out to hurt him, his income, or his company. If 30 days pass with no contact, the company will continue to be assumed abandoned. And any attempts to regain control will be denied without legal order to do so.

Second, I need to work out a time frame with the Data Center on how long I can keep these servers online before payment must be made. I will assume no responsibility for payments due before todays date. Whether that will be acceptable to the Data Center is unknown at this time.

Third, DO NOT EXPECT MIRACLES. I will need time to assess how many clients are left, and how to best organize the clients on the servers for minimal expenses and optimal server performance for the clients' web sites. This means that you should likely expect some of you to have IP changes and custom DNS name servers to need updating.

Feel free to post questions and comments in the general support forum. I will answer/update as soon as humanly possible.

Fourth, I've assumed control of the billing system. As of 12:20am CST (-6 UTC) all credit card processing, and PayPal payments are being handled by me. Any payments made before this time on 10/26/2007 are out of my control and refunds are impossible. There are a select few that appear to have already been set into a batch for processing, that I can not stop or access. So billing date for those will show up as after this date/time. If a refund is requested, and you fall into that category, you will be notified at time of refund request.

Lastly, THIS IS NOT SET IN STONE. Again, I need to consult with the Data Center and/or [name redacted by Andrew] may show up in the next 30 days. Think of this more as a letter of intent....

That is all for now. Expect things to turn around a get better in the near future.

Cordially,
[name redacted by Andrew]
WWM.net

The ensuing thread is a guilty pleasure -- but only because moving my site from WWM won't be a problem.

This was a rather loose end that needed tying.

I can think of three other subjects that a marketer ought to know cold, if they expect to have a say in corporate strategy.

Qualitative Market Knowledge. In other words, you’ve got to know who does the buying and what do we need to give them at each point in the process. Customer interviews form the backbone of this knowledge. Large-sample-size surveys provide hard data to back up the conclusions you gain from interviews.

Quantitative Market Research. How big is your current market? How big will it be in five years?

Prospect and User Metrics. What do people click on? Which ads motivate them? Who calls customer service the most, and the least? This data fills out your knowledge of the customer, both in how they buy and use your product.

Competitive Environment. The product manager, if he’s not in the marketing group, may own this piece. (He may own some of the metrics too.) Marketers can go beyond the typical who-has-what-product-feature by tracking competitor corporate strategy.

Note that these aren’t fungible skills like the ability to write ad copy, perform regression analysis, quote from business cases like an MBA, or do a slick Powerpoint. This is situation-specific data, which require regular monitoring.

Knowing these four subjects keeps marketers from being treated like an ad agency.