Disqus - Latest Comments for Jay Gilmore

Re: Twitter 101: Clarifying The Rules For Newbies

Jay Gilmore — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:26:07 -0000

Oops. Thanks for the information. Seriously. Do I get points for breaking all of the rules?

Re: Use Yahoo and Google Alert as Sales Tools

Jay Gilmore — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 16:30:59 -0000

John,

I took your advice and signed up for both and found both to provide terrible results. As an an example the keyword phrase " website design Canada" provided a page of results that had nothing to do with website design. It provided results for an industrial design firm that happened to have offices in Canada.

I think that there needs to be an optional check box to select degree of strictness for the keyword phrases. For very specific keywords -- like my company name-- it provides results that are desirable but I will leave it for now. Yahoo's was by far the worst for results and has not yet, after a week provided a single desirable result. I just end up with spammy press releases from PRWeb etc.

If you were to truly use this as a tool for your business you the services need a lot of added configurability.

All the best,

Jay Gilmore
http://www.smashingred.com

Re: 10 Essential Small Business Productivity Tools

Jay Gilmore — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 19:06:33 -0000

John,

This is a great list. I have a couple of suggestions for both CRM and pdf output.

First, as far as CRM is concerned, I have moved from ACT to SugarCRM. SugarCRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/) has both commercial and OpenSource (http://www.sugarforge.org/) flavours, is web based and is much more easily managed over Sage ACT-- not to mention the advances throught the very active developer community.

Second, regarding pdf conversion. Pdf995 is a must have, but if you are constantly wanting to convert MS Word Documents into pdf files why not leave Microsoft and their pricing schemes behind and try OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/). Once the open source MS Office clones were a far cry from easy to use and learn, now OO is nearly a perfect clone, little learning curve, if any and, guess what a little direct-to-pdf button in the toolbar beside the print button.

As always John, keep on posting.

All the best,

Jay

Re: Duct Tape Marketing Blog Channel Grows

Jay Gilmore — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 17:56:09 -0000

John,

The header top navigation is now in overload. Time to move to the eBay format. Pick a side. Make a list. Place last post date below or beside. Otherwise it is like a store menu that no one can read.

Congrats on the continued growth and expansion and thanks again for blogging.

Jay

Re: In Search of the Softwareless Office

Jay Gilmore — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:24:27 -0000

Hey John,

Great list. A definite del.icio.us tag, for sure.

I have tried a number of these such as Zoho (very slow), BaseCamp (Excellent), Freshbooks (Soon to start talking to BaseCamp), and others not on your list such as Plaxo (Contact Management), BigContacts (Contact Manager), and Stikkits (Cool but needs to talk to Plaxo and Google Calendar).

QuickBooks Online Edition and Sage (Act Online) are very expensive, restrictive and slow (according to support posts and blog posts I have read.)

My biggest issue is that few, if any of these applications work together--never mind well together.

I am on a quest (http://www.jaygilmore.ca/blog/2007/02/01/fast-i...) to have a set of online tools that work the way I would like as well as have intelligent integration. My personal wish is that Google Apps will become more than a Scotch Taped together set of domain oriented tools. Google's own applications don't work well together and work very differently than my normal Google Account.

I have posted my experiences about it here:
http://www.jaygilmore.ca/blog/2007/02/27/google...

I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about it.

Re: Surprise of the month: Macs crash?

Jay Gilmore — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 10:39:21 -0000

My wife and I are experiencing the Myth of the Mac. We recently purchased a new MacBook so that Tracy could have a laptop and so I could do previews on Safari for my development projects.

First things first. After waiting a very long time for it to make its global trek from Suzhou China to Nova Scotia. We tried to turn the system on and we got nothing. It was dead. We thought maybe it needed to charge. Nope.

After looking throught he manual to find out what to do if it won't turn on and proceed to exercize our hands through the intricate key-press combinations that could qualify as a sobriety test the system would come on but if you moved it it would shut down. If you touched it wrong it would shut down.

We called Apple to send it back. They said sure.

We have recieved the new one (that works) and now are attempting to network with my multi system windows based home office network.

Holy crap. I have set up all sorts Windows and Linux networks using SMB and the like and always with relative ease. Trying to give the MacBook access to the windows files is a major pain. Fortunately I have a network sys admin background or I wouldn't have been able to connect to my file server using the archaic server address required to connect.

After a week I still can't connect to my shared Epson printer which I had always been able to connect to using my Nix boxes.

Mac is easy so long as you have never used a computer before. That way you won't be missing what you can't do.

The Myth Of Mac is stong and powerful but it is just that--a myth.

Re: Blog reading tips

Jay Gilmore — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 23:24:44 -0000

Download FeedReader for Windows http://www.feedreader.com/ hack the hell out of the atom.xsl file and there you go.

Right click to get options to open in a new browser window or click the "Open in Browser" button on the top right of the preview pane.

I will never use online aggregators and I will never go back to using combo apps like Thunderbird or Opera.

All the best,
Jay

Re: Eric Sink is a marketing genius!

Jay Gilmore — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:59:22 -0000

John Dodds,

The problem is that Marketing 101 is not "make a great product and people will love it and want to talk about it." It is usually "determine how you can get the biggest segment of potential customers to buy the product--regardless of quality". And the thing is that both approaches work just fine--it just costs more to market the mediocre product over time. Now we have to think about the Long Tail which tells us that we need to make a bunch of small products for a bunch of small sub-segments.

Marketing is much more complex than can be expressed here. There is first position, (Windows), alternative solutions and under-dogging (mac and linux). There are companies out there whose mediocrity is so refined that we are comforted by their consistency such as McDonald's and Wendy's.

This is the second time I have written this today: Sometimes it takes longer to express the full meaning of one's position.

It is arrogant to say everybody knows this. I have been working with small business for more than a decade and I have learned that you can't assume that businesses know anything about marketing. It is them that will get the most of Eric's article. In larger business if they haven't killed the creativity, they will learn something from Eric's article. For everyone else who knows everything else--they wouldn't read the article anyway.

All the best,

Jay

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Jay Gilmore — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:47:36 -0000

I was just thinking that this was a real issue but hadn't figured on a solution. Not so much for my email as I control my domain name but because I have friends, associates and the like who change their contact information when they change jobs or rebrand etc.

I thought Plaxo was supposed to lead things off into the right direction but shifted focus to being a pseudo LinkedIn. I think that this will be much easier than the supposed Local Number Portability that was supposed to allow customers keep their phone number as they switched telcos in North America.

For me, too I have dozens of logins, usernames, nicks because of formatting, preference of nicks/handles over emails and such so how are some people to know it is me. Avatars help but have no ID or sniff test for people to say, "That's him!" or say, "This person is an imposter.".

I'd be interested to see if a solution for cross application interaction happens.

Re: The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks

Jay Gilmore — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:08:19 -0000

@Dennis McDonald,

I think for it to work it should be opt-in if that is even feasible.

Re: The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook

Jay Gilmore — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:24:34 -0000

Tamar, I've seen and committed a few faux pas but there are some that are so egregious that I shudder and wince.

On Facebook

I had a former co-worker friend me on Facebook and then friend all the single women on my FB friends list and make inappropriate comments and friend attempts.

Another person who volunteered at a client's organization friended me and subsequently filled my feed with images of him drunk, half dressed and involved in acts that should never hit the CCD of a digital camera.

I personally think that you should use Facebook either as an open book or as a closed club but not halfway in between. If you want to share your exploits with a cadre of your closes friends and have your privacy settings adjusted accordingly, go for it. I think as you grow older (as someone approaching 40 might attest to) and your want for connections of a more grown-up nature increases that using Facebook openly, making real friends and connections as you would do in the real world can work well but requires discipline. You need to not friend every person you went to school with. You aren't friends with them and they are not all nice, mature or have clean criminal backgrounds. Your friends reflect upon you in real life and so too in the online world. Be choosey but not falsely elitist.

On Twitter I still give noobs some latitude here but some major knobs still know how to bork their chances of making the most of it.

--Don't auto DM me with a link (of any kind.). I do auto DM but I mean what I say and try to contact every new follower with a real message to make introduction.
--Not every tweet should contain a link. (you look like a spammer)
--Unless your company account is for customer/client support and handled by multiple people, use your real name or some variant for your account name. There are a few exceptions where you're public persona is well known as the alias or for reasons of safety.

I disagree with @Tamar on the use of DMs to reply as a rule as I view that as a personal message channel akin to whispering in someone's ear at a party to share something not for public consumption. Her reasons seem valid as I certainly never get as many @s as she ever will. In addition, DMs require mutual follows and so often people can't respond back to non-reciprocal followers.

I think the tone if Twitter is for some small amount of self-promotion be allowed but the measure is that if you feel that it will truly be of value to two or more followers and not just value to you or your financial or egotistical interests.

Share something dammit.

You're using it wrong if you think it is the same as Facebook Statuses (this is why pownce died in my opinion) no one really cares what you ate unless it was awesome, with a celebrity or you want to invite others. Yes, the Twitter website says "What are you doing?" I don't care, usually. It has morphed into a way to share ideas, links, and make real connections.

Don't protect your updates! If you are worried about spammers get off the internet. It looks rude, you will not get the same benefits of being open and it is akin to walking around with a cone-of-silence over you. You just want to use Twitter to talk to your close friends and family—use Facebook. My analogy for twitter is the people you can meet walking around at a conference intermission. The brief introductions, "Hi, howareya's" and "I think you'd really find this helpful" type of stuff. @Tamar is 100% right (exceptions noted) that if it's going to turn into a long convo it should be IM, Email or the phone.

Re: The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook

Jay Gilmore — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:12:31 -0000

@Rob J your commment

Im kind of on the Path to Enlightenment myself when it comes to striking a balance between confidence, humility, and openess in a social space. To me, thats the goal to building relationships in any context.

Is as true as it comes. Social Media is not a means to an end but a tool for exchange. It is the same in person as it is online. Honesty, humility, earnestness, genuine interest and a want to help will take us where, self-interest, narcism, hucksterism, hubris or outright bull$hit will not.

To emphasize your point and @Tamar's retort to @djpinklady that with no expectations of remuneration and my genuine nature to help folks out I've gained clients without asking or begging or marketing. Just sharing, offering what expertise I hold and connecting people with answers or solutions I've won. I've made acquaintances and a couple clients in the short time I've been actively engaged.

One final note. I think @Tamar's article is a reflection of the accepted code of conduct that stems from the users and is not arbitrary or entirely self-derived. The community creates the standard and some will attempt to subvert the standard and while I'm all for making noise and breaking the status quo, self-promotion and ignorant abuse of that standard will either backfire or kill the community.

Re: The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook

Jay Gilmore — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:05:35 -0000

@Faryl

Just to be clear I'm not saying that you should never post Facebook status-like info on your twitter feed if you feel it is something so share.

I'd also like to revisit the @ issue too. For me I often may start a dialogue that may commence with a person over 2 or 3 tweets and sometimes it swirls into a group and migrating a group to IM from strangers is not possible. Using @s to do it in an open discussion where others might join in is, to me fine.

That being said, I do see people using it like IM and responding contextless to interpersonal nonesuch like like inside jokes and backroom chatter. @s are not for that in my opinion.

If a thread starts that others may find value or have opinions on then go for it. I think that is the win of Twitter. Like so many great conversations you have mingling at a conference with strangers anyone can chime in but we're not intimate enough to IM.