Author: Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.  A few months ago I obviously had some kind of break with reality because I decided that I wanted to grow my own tomatoes.  This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to grow vegetables – and it won’t be my last.

My most recent descent into gardening madness began simply enough.  I purchased three tomato plants at a cost of approx. $4 a piece.  At the time, I had visions of a bountiful harvest of delicious tomatoes grown for a fraction of the cost of purchasing them at the local grocer.

Since I live in Florida, the soil which surrounds my home won’t grow grass so I figured it wouldn’t grow tomatoes either. That meant purchasing SEVERAL bags of potting soil at am average cost of $9 per bag.  Then I needed containers (whiskey barrel halves @ $30) in which the purchased soil and said tomatoes would live.   Oh – and since tomatoes need support, I purchased tomato cages (@ $4) and Mater Magic – the fertilizer which promised to increase my bountiful harvest exponentially for another $4.  The first trip total was roughly $165 – but that’s OK because I’m going to have a bountiful harvest of beautiful tomatoes.

That was then … a time of great expectations.  This is now – a time of great disillusionment.

It’s been about 4 months since that initial trip to the garden center.   You can imagine my HORROR when the tiny tomatoes (TINY – like cherry tomatoes but they’re not) were ripening full of holes with large rubbery patches.  This resulted in several trips to the garden center in search of answers and solutions.  Each trip has resulted in a well meaning employee selling me more stuff to solve my problems.  I estimate that each trip costs approximately $140 – $150 yet none of the “helpful” tips have proven to be helpful at all.  My tomatoes are still inedible and ugly to boot!

At this point, I’ve got about $700 invested in trying to grow these damned things – AND IT ISN’T EVEN MAY YET!!!

I’ve come to the conclusion that unless these tomato plants produce in excess of 700lbs of tomatoes – I would have been better off visiting the farmer’s market and buying pampered organic tomatoes hand painted by local artisans.

So what’s this got to do with social media and the web?  Well, a lot actually.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you have probably entered this realm in the same place I’m entering the world of gardening.   You’ve got your area of expertise – but the web isn’t that area.   When you’re in that position – you don’t know what you don’t know which means you don’t know enough to know where to start searching for answer.

You may have had the same experience I had – asking people who were supposedly “experts” for help and advice only to find that most if not all of that advice was rubbish, accomplishing little more than emptying your checking account.

I can laugh at my utter and complete failure at growing tomatoes in my backyard because it’s only a problem if/when the zombie apocalypse happens.  Until then, I can stumble along and “pay” as I play gardener and continue to purchase tomatoes grown successfully by experts.

However, if you’re a business owner – you probably don’t have the time, patience or resources to invest YEARS trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to your web on the internet.

If you’re frustrated by your efforts at web marketing – contact me and let’s see if we can’t get your web site producing better results than I’m getting with my tomato plants.

Everywhere you turn, you’ll get advice on using social media to “brand” your business.  The gurus and experts talk about branding like it’s something you can “do” to your business – like slapping a fresh coat of paint on a wall.  If only branding were that simple.

Branding is what consumers DO to your business and are not the logo, color scheme, font and other visual elements you use to represent your business.  Sure these elements play an important role  part in branding your business but not in the way you might think.  Those visual elements are not your “brand” but rather those visual elements play an important role in shaping consumer expectations.

It’s not just bad behavior that earns you the wrath of users of social media.  Often, consumers have a tendency to bitch quite freely when a marketing campaign paints an unrealistic expectations.  Unrealistic expectations can quickly turn any social media campaign into an ugly social media nightmare resembling the Zombie Apocalypse.

When expectations are properly “shaped” – then you have a much better chance of pleasing the ever increasing horde of Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts and avoiding the carnage their combined wrath can engender.

On Friday, April 13, 2012 – Zak Muscovitch, the Domain Name Lawyer spent three minutes in an online chat with me, answering a question I had about a prospective domain name purchase.  I want to point out that the only reason I HAD the question in the first place is because I discovered his blog a while back and subscribed to his RSS feed. I’ve followed his blog posts, learning about many of the potential dangers which lurk in the simple process of registering a domain name.  So when I found a plethora of tasty .com’s which included a potential to infringe upon the intellectual property of one of the world’s largest companies – I decided to hit the “chat” button on the website and ask a quick question.

Zak didn’t charge me for his time – and I felt such gratitude that I immediately tweeted about the encounter.  However, I wanted to delve deeper here on how that 3 minute investment of time is working to build his “brand”.

I wish I had found him back in 2005 when Copyscape showed me that a web development firm in New Zealand had stolen every page of content from my previous HTML website.  I wanted to throw up as I saw every article, every page – duplicated word for word on a site representing a firm on the other side of the world where they had placed their own copyright symbol and the current date.

I contacted a lawyer who – quite honestly – didn’t know where to begin or what to do.  Oh, he didn’t come out and admit that when I called – he asked me to pay him a $5000 deposit to get to work on the case.  When I questioned him further, like about what I might expect to receive in return – I was told to expect nothing.

I’ve never proclaimed myself the smartest business woman in the world – but spending $5K to start in an international pissing match with no possibility of seeing a penny in return just didn’t seem like a great investment at the time.

Want to build your brand?  Spend 3 minutes a day sharing what you know.  Who knows – you might get a whole blog post ranting about how wonderful you are like Zak Muscovitch did.  I asked – he answered – and now I’m sharing the link to his website and his blog so you can learn from him as well.

I hope you never need more than 3 minutes of Zak Muscovitch’s time, but if you need help protecting your domain name, trademark, or copyright, or heaven forbid – you need to defend yourself against a claim that is made against you – you’ll know where to turn.

AMC’s The Walking Dead is a television show which follows County Sheriff Rick Grimes who was shot on duty, went into a coma and woke up weeks later in an empty hospital. He discovers that the world he once knew is gone, ravaged by a virus which causes the dead to walk – and attempt to consume the living.

In the first season – Rick joins a group of survivors and spends the entire season searching for safety – a place where there is a cure for the horror that surrounds them. In the second season, the group thinks they may have found a safe haven, only to learn that there is no where to hide from this horror – and they come to grips with the reality that they must learn to survive in this new and horrifying world.

If you’re thinking that social media hasn’t created a horrifying new world where the old rules not only don’t apply but could destroy you – you are kidding yourself just as the character Hershel was kidding himself on The Walking Dead.

Hershel thought because his farm hasn’t been over run with zombies it he could prevent it from happening. He had protocols in place to protect his farm from the occasional zombie but when a hoard of zombies encroached upon his property – he realized how naive he had been.

Here’s a real life example of how social media turned ugly for Lassonde Industries, the Quebec company that makes Oasis Juice as reported in the National Post

Way back in the year 2004 – when the social media universe was shiny and new – the days BEFORE Twitter and BEFORE Facebook accepted profiles from people without an .edu email address- Deborah Kudzman left her job with an advertising agency and launched her own little company making soap. She named her company Olivia’s Oasis. She chose Olivia because it is her daughter’s name – and she chose Oasis because she wanted to convey the image of indulgent relaxation.

In 2005, Kudzman received a letter demanding that she cease operation, recall her product from stores and turn over any profits she had earned to Lassonde immediately. She thought it was absurd as did her attorney so the little soap company took on the big juice maker in Canadian courts.

As the case crawled through the courts, Lassonde wasn’t exactly in a “social media coma” – they were actively promoting their products via their Facebook page.

In 2010, Superior Court Justice Dionysia Zerbisias issued a ruling determining that the little soap maker had NOT infringed upon the Oasis Juice trademark and added that Lassonde had engaged in “menacing and abusive conduct.” The court ruled that Lassonde owed the little soap company $100,000 to cover legal fees plus an additional $25,000 in punitive damages.

Without missing a beat, Lassonde appealed the decision and on March 30, 2012 an appeal panel overturned the original court’s decision.

When the result became public, the court of public opinion made their collective voice heard via “social media” and suddenly, Lassonde was faced with a MASSIVE public-relations nightmare Public figures with massive Twitter followings announced their boycott of the juice while the Oasis Facebook page became an out of control public forum. Instead of voicing their choice of their favorite flavor – consumers voiced their displeasure with the company’s “bully tactics” for all to see.

The backlash was so fast and so fierce, that Lassonde response was to send a high level executive to meet with Kudzman – on Easter Day by the way- to offer to pay her enormous legal bill.

Trust me – every executive officer at Lassonde Industries right now has an entirely different view of “social media” than they held just two weeks ago. What was once viewed as a source of “free” advertising is probably as frightening as a horde of encroaching zombies.

It’s a new world and new rules apply. What is truly horrifying is how many business owners are still operating like it’s “business as usual” – a.k.a. 2004 or earlier.

Oasis Juice has just discovered the “truth” I’ve been preaching for years – that “branding” is not the choice of colors used in your packaging or the logo that you feature on everything from your business cards to your Facebook page but instead “branding” is what consumers DO to your business. In this case, Oasis Juice’s “brand” is now the big bad business bully picking on the woman selling soap.

In comparison – surviving a zombie apocalypse doesn’t seem so bad after all.

Thanks to the domain name lawyer for a heads up on this story.

Social media marketing has more in common with quantum mechanics than with more “traditional” methods of marketing which poses a significant problem for both CMO’s and business owners who desperately want social media marketing to be all about lead generation and sales.

Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of the behavior and interactions of energy and matter.  The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states – in laymen’s terms – that the act of measurement actually changes the properties of the process being measured.  Similarily, trying to “measure” the elements of your social media marketing campaigns will ultimately change the very nature and effectiveness of the campaign.

According to Geoffrey Colon at Ogilvy’s Fresh Influence blog, predicts that one of the top trends in social media for the upcoming year is that social media marketing must begin to demonstrate measurable ROI.  One in three CMOs are demanding to see measureable results in their investment in social media where it counts – the bottom line. Expect the number of CMO’s crying out for meaningful metrics to increase as the “shiny new bauble” nature of social media begins to fade.

Business owners and CMO’s desperately want social media to be about SALES or at the very least – LEADS which can be coverted into SALES – both of which are easily measured.  Unfortunately – social media marketing shares many common properties with another marketing intangible – BRANDING.

The reason it’s hard to measure the success of your social media marketing campaign is simple – buyers – a.k.a. customers – aren’t interested in being “converted” into sales and their interaction with your company changes when they begin to feel the pressure measurement applies.

Is it unreasonable to expect your company’s participation in social media to have a positive impact upon the bottom line?   Definitely not.  However, when I read that social media must show measureable ROI – it makes me think the “experiment” is already over.  After all, when was the last time you heard a CMO announce that the new logo design needed to show a positive ROI on the bottom line?

Whether it’s social media or branding, both have more in common with quantum mechanics than with traditional means of marketing.  When you begin focusing upon measurement instead of engagement – it’s the beginning of the end.

If you’re a small business owner – this post is for you.  In classic catch 22 fashion though –  if you’re a small business owner – chances are you’re not reading this blog even though it is written especially for you.  Instead – you’re busy running your business – oblivious to what’s happening online.

• You don’t know that your business already has a free page one web presence with Google that you just need to claim to put it to work.

• You don’t know that you have dozens of other “free” online directory listings – some of which are coming up first when consumers are looking for your business online.

• You also are probably unaware that when consumers find these free listings – many times they have the ability to REVIEW your business.

This is a case of what you don’t know can hurt you.  Because if someone is “bitching” about your business online – you’d darned well better be there to respond.  Otherwise, all that is out there in cyberspace – the bitching and griping with nary a word from you.

However, there are a handful of business owners who are WELL aware of these sites – and even more aware of the presence of reviews on these sites.  So these businesses have gone to work creating fake positive reviews of their business online.

The NY Times reports in In a Race to Out-Rave, 5-Star Web Reviews Go for $5 that not only are people willing to “sell” you their positive review for only $5 but that businesses are scurrying to take them up on the offer.

Writing fake reviews for your business is like blowing your nose with tissues filled with sneezing powder.    Customer reviews set consumer expectations  and when consumer expectations are set to “high” then a transaction which could have earned a three star review is now doomed to receive a one star review.

I’ve always preached – I mean CHAMPIONED  here that the sure path to business success is to solve a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve.  So it should come as no surprise that there are people furiously working on ways to allow the bots which index the internet to discern between authentic user reviews – and fake ones.

There are already humans who are sharing how you can spot a fake online review.  Sandraparker wrote about her experience writing fake reviews on Money Talks and there’s another article on the site which offers11 tips to spot fake online reviews.

As more fake reviews hit these sites – the site owners will be looking for ways to weed them out.  Keep in mind that Google is a business with a dog in this hunt and they have the $$$ to not only find but implement any solution they find to this problem.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

In the past – when Google and the other search engines have discovered people trying to “game” the system of getting ranked in the SERPS – they have come down hard and fast – banning sites which used what are now known as “black hat tactics”.

If you’re tempted to hire fake reviews for your free business website – remember – the powers that be (a.k.a. Google, Yelp, etc.) are aware of the problem and seeking a solution.  When they implement that solution – you could very well find your online local business listing removed from the most visible sites on the web.

Yesterday- a disaster decimated this and many other websites across the web.  Websites whose sites were hosted on servers at the Colo4.com data center found themselves without a web presence for about 8 hours yesterday – from about noon – 8 ET in the US.

When a data center experiences an epic fail moment like this – it causes a chain reaction.   It not only affects the data center customers – who are web hosting companies -but it also affects the customers of the web hosting companies – and their customers – and  so forth and so on.

Now to make matters worse – it wasn’t oh so long ago that the forums on a popular web hosting discussion board shared tales of another hosting company which went belly up and left their customers scrambling for their website backups.  (It’s times like that when I LOVE Carbonite!)

Because I live with a level of anxiety that most people would call “crippling”  –  that’s where my mind went when my website went down.  I vividly remember the horror 12 years ago when my web hosting provider (who began his web hosting business in his basement – ah, those were the days)  sold out to a then major player who is now history.  The reason they’re history?  Because of stunts like the one they pulled when they acquired my then hosting provider.  My site was down for almost 2 weeks – while I and other web masters (as we were known as the time) wondered if the servers which housed our sites had been strapped to the backs of mules and transported from Kansas City to Atlanta as part of the acquisition.  They then raised the cost of the hosting and demanded prompt payment.  I responded by threatening to pay the bill in pennies.  (Cost to ship the payment was roughly twice what the bill was – it was the principle of the thing!)

Fortunately – that wasn’t the case in this meltdown.  However, because of the scope and magnitude of this disaster – my web hosting provider found themselves in the unenviable situation of trying to do damage control on the very popular web hosting forum. The forums were blowing up with reports of the outage.  Phones were ringing – emails were bouncing – and emotions were raw as  hosting providers and their clients were left wondering how long it would take to get back online.

I am still praising my Lord and Savior that my client’s sites are all safely hosted with a more reliable hosting provider and their sites were not affected by this outage. (Disclaimer: It’s an affiliate link.  I get paid because I’m staking my reputation on this hosting recommendation.)

As I closely monitored the board for news about the situation – I began to see postings from someone who seemed to have a lot of previous experience with my hosting provider.  I’ll be honest, I passed a lot of time researching where I would be moving my site to next and this person seemed to have a history with my provider.  So – I went to see this user’s profile and saw that this user had JUST signed up for an account on this discussion board. The ONLY posts by this user were taunting my provider about the outage.  What ever the goal was  – it failed because it was obvious this user was just a troll.

I did decide to give another web hosting company a try – and believe it or not – it’s one where the user representing the company actually stood up for my hosting provider’s company – assuring customers that this wasn’t my host’s fault but rather the fault of the data center and sometimes it takes an epic fail to realize you need a new data center.

Branding is something your customers do to your business and because of this fact – no matter what you did previously – your brand will forged during times of disaster. 

Many large corporations forged their “brand” with consumers in the South during the hurricanes of 2005.  As just one example, Tide brought in portable laundry facilities for victims of Katrina to do their laundry.   That my friends is how you build a rock solid “brand” – not some crazy stunt captured on video and posted to YouTube.  Those people will have warm fuzzy feelings about a Proctor and Gamble “brand” for the rest of their lives.

A disaster doesn’t have to destroy your business – even when you’re running a hosting company and your data center lets you down.

Whether or not I move my site to the new host I’m trying will depend upon how my hosting provider responds to this disaster.  Their response both during and after the disaster will forge their long term “brand” with me.  Maybe one day they’ll earn an affiliate link from my site to theirs … but for the moment, I and hundreds like me will wait and see how this story unfolds.