“”Marketing is a Tax You Pay for being Unremarkable”
Robert Stephens
Founder and Chief Inspector, The Geek Squad
While I think that’s a touch on the simple side, it rings pretty true. What would happen if all the people who were concentrating on advertising and PR instead started focusing on making the offering and/or the customer service BETTER?
I’ve posted a lot more detail and accompanying thoughts over at the RescueTime blog… To summarize:
I can’t express how excited I am about the opportunity. RescueTime started as a hobby project to “scratch an itch” that we had. With incredible enthusiasm from our users and a handful of advisers, we’ve been happily dragged into taking RescueTime to the next level.
Every month, Marcello Calbucci diligently posts a list of Seattle Tech Startups sorted by their Alexa/Compete ratings (including details about their movement on the list). The November SSI is out! It’s a great resource and (quite honestly) exciting to see so many Seattle companies doing interesting things. And it’s gratifying to see RescueTime (which is still in private beta, mind you) continuing to climb the list (we’re at #70– well ahead of quite a few funded companies).
Can’t wait to see where we end up when we actually launch.
Of course, it’s important to note that Alexa and Compete are complete and utter bunk. It turns out that most sites/services that try to understand where people are going on the web aren’t reliably accurate. Don’t believe me? Check out SEOMoz’s exhaustive study. Still, just because you can’t trust it doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting. Marcello is smart to include both Alexa and Compete data.
I’d love to see someone create some sort of meta-score… Pull data from Alexa, Compete, Technorati, Comscore, and a few dozen other sources and present the mean/median/standard deviation/etc.
I’ve been running WordPress for this blog since the beginning. It’s a great platform. I’ve officially been drinking the Kool-Aid. I tell my friends about it. I heard Matt Mullenweg speak (at SXSW last year) and I rave about that.
So when it made sense for us to spin up a little blog for RescueTime (my fledgeling time management software business), WordPress got the nod. Rather than host another WordPress blog, I opted for a hosted WordPress account. WordPress offers barebones options for free, but I opted for a few premium options, making me a paying supporter of WordPress. It felt good.
The other day, I got an email from a few strangers telling me that the PowerPoint deck I had posted on my most recent blog entry (“DIY Web Marketing: 16 Resources for SEO, Social Media Marketing, & Viral Marketing”) was a dead link. It HAD been working (I know several people who downloaded it). No big deal, I thought. Tech glitches happen. As a guy who runs a SaaS biz, I’m quick to forgive on such things. It was inconvenient timing though– I’d just had a speaking engagement at Seattle Tech Startups and the PowerPoint deck in question was my deck for the presentation (I’d promised at the end to make it available– which is why I was getting peppered with emails).
My first step was to log in to see if I could fix it myself. No go. In fact, I couldn’t even log in. It told me my account was suspended.
I dutifully researched their message board (I know how expensive support is, so I figured I’d try to help myself) and found that random/accidental suspension issues were occuring as a result of a recent bug. Ahhh– that made me feel a bit better. When I finally got an email response, I was dismayed.
Your blog was suspended because it violated our ToS.
Basically, we don’t allow blogs created solely for commercial purpose,
or for Search Engine Optimization purpose.
I’ve temporary unsuspended your blog, so that you have a chance to review our ToS,
and clean it up a little bit…
www.wordpress.com/tos
Trying to keep my cool, I replied:
What?
It’s a blog about a tiny web service with 8 or so posts (so far). It doesn’t have any advertisements or any revenue generation capability whatsoever. I mentioned SEO in my last post because I did a little presentation at SeattleTechStartups.com a few weeks back– but RescueTime (http://www.rescuetime.com) has nothing to do with SEO (and, at present, isn’t even remotely a commercial enterprise). I reviewed to ToS fairly carefully and see no violations.
Are you SURE it was purposefully suspended? I’ve read several threads (covering the last few days) that seem to indicate there is a bug going around:
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=16792&page&replies=5
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=16787&page&replies=10
It seems a heckuva lot more logical to me that I’m a victim of this bug… I assume that if someone shuts down a blog for a breach of ToS that it would have some sort of note attached to it (to discriminate it from a bugged account)?
Several days have passed with no response. I have no idea if my blog is temporarily not suspended, if it was a bug, or if there truly was a breach that I’m not aware of. The blog is a simple product blog (I know a lot of startup guys who have such a thing– presumably that doesn’t count as “commercial purpose”?). I understand that suspending blogs is something WordPress has to do to be vigilant in the fight against spam, but would an automated notification hurt, citing the ToS clause in question? Given that I was actually a paying customer (not just freeloading off of their free offerings), would it kill ‘em to respond to my last email?
For the record, the blog gets VERY little traffic (thousands of uniques a month is all).
WordPress will continue to be my blog platform of choice– I’m too darn used to their fabulous interface. But (if nothing changes) I won’t be spending money with them again and I certainly won’t be recommending them as I have in the past. As they say, “customer service is the new marketing“.
Awesome quote shamelessly pulled from TechCrunch (I’d link to their Crunchbase entry if I could), who shamelessly pulled it from Yossi Vardi, who shameless pulled it from Theodore Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
This really resonated with me in light of the public (and anonymous) attacks on Jason Goldberg (CEO of Jobster) on the Seattle PI blog. I make no bones about the fact that I wasn’t always supportive of Jobster’s (or Jason’s) strategies. But the guy deserves credit for making a run at it (and I wouldn’t count Jason or Jobster out of the game yet!). He also deserves a ton of credit for getting an entire industry to look at Jobster to save online recruiting… If it turns out that Jobster doesn’t save online recruiting, there’s a small army of people who should step up and share part of the blame (including myself). Scapegoating is just stupid.
