An incredibly inspiring video from the late, great, Jim Rohn. Worth listening to once every three months or so to keep you on course. Here’s a summary below:

1. Review your performance – always do more than what you get paid for, to make an investment in your future. Review how you handle situations.
2. Face your fears – don’t dismiss them, just face them.
3. Exercise your willpower to change direction – don’t keep doing the same things, if it’s not taking you to where you want to be. Pick a new destination, and go that way. Clean up the errors.
4. Admit to your mistakes – some of the most powerful words in the English dictionary: “I’m sorry”. Rohn’s right when he says that those two words can change lives.
5. Refine your goals – always review what your goals are, to ensure you’re still heading towards them.
6. Believe in yourself – there isn’t a class you cannot take. There isn’t a book you cannot read.
7. Ask for wisdom – ask people who have been there. Ask for wisdom to help you face challenges. And one of his best quotes; “Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better”.
8. Conserve your time – 10 years or 10 times?
9. Invest your profits – “wages make you a living, profits make you a fortune”. Invest everything you have into everything you do.
10. Find your place – Keep doing it well, and you’ll get to where you want to be. Don’t slack because you hate your job, work harder because you hate it.
11. Work on your gifts – If you work on your gifts, they’ll make room for you. They’ll make a place for you.
12. Demand integrity from yourself – Show integrity and loyalty, and others will show it back. You cannot demand it from someone else. Be the best example of both.
13. Welcome the disciplines – a well-disciplined activity creates abundance, of productivity, and uniqueness. Discipline builds bridges, towns, and cities.
14. Fight for what’s right – Fight for whatever it is that’s important, and keep faith.

Well it’s been a rollercoaster 2011 so far, and updating this blog has been one of those tasks that has slipped down the order of necessity. So whilst I have a few minutes spare, I thought I’d write two things I’ve learned over the past three months.

1. Business is easier when it’s not just you!

Zest has been running for almost a year now and has grown healthily over that period. When I first took the plunge of going self-employed, I only knew the theory about what to expect. I never once believed it would be easy, but I was certain it would be exciting. Learning from other business people has been one of the most rewarding (and time consuming) parts of doing it. I would never have thought the support for start-ups in Oxfordshire would be this great.

This month we’ve grown the team, hiring a good friend of mine, Alex Quail, as a lead consultant. The feeling of having the extra man/brain/ideas/body has made me realise how important the first employee really is. And more crucially, how pressed I was without him. Managing clients and a business, and delivering on both, is almost an impossible task in my view. You can have one but not the other, and ultimately it’s a choice you have to make between being a freelancer or a business.

2. Having a geek gene helps

I’ve always been into technology, and it’s shaped my life pretty significantly. When starting Zest, I was completely focused on making it an efficient business from the start. Whilst I can only learn some things through experience, there were elements I have full control of.

One of these is remote collaboration. Our systems allow anybody to fit in to our model seamlessly, from anywhere in the world. Nothing of any importance is stored on a local machine, and talking over Skype/gTalk is second nature now. It’s still (and always will be) evolving all the time, and anyone who joins us will have their input. Collaborating on a spreadsheet, whilst discussing strategy over Skype is alien to most small businesses. And to be honest, I’m glad I’m in the minority. Things are so much easier this way!

I often think back to why I was so heart-set on this set up. The answer goes way back to university where I attended a D&AD talk by Matt Pyke of Universal Everything. Although just a minute part of the talk, his collaborative setup inspired me to follow in his footsteps. This has been a major factor in the growth of the company and will continue to aid it in future I’m sure.

The above has been a major factor in why I’ve been so negligent towards this blog. My third point, if there was one, would be understanding how quickly time flies. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve just been crazy busy, or because I’m having so much fun. Either way it’s flown by. Weekends are obliterated before they even arrive, and finding time to fit everything in is a real challenge!

My next move is definitely to invest in a book on time/lifestyle management, so any suggestions would be welcomed! You can message me on twitter @AlexMinchin if you have any

(Tips on how to create more time in order to actually read it would be helpful too!)

To me, .htaccess is a necessary demon that I have to live with. Whilst I have a basic understanding of how the file works, the fickleness in which it can break is enough to drive me insane. Yesterday (and part of today) I had that feeling. And here’s a post explaining how it was solved, with a huge credit to Mike Osolinski. I only met Mike through Twitter after an RT from Pete – just goes to show the genuin quality of a strong social media network

The situation as I described was the following:

• Client website is static HTML
• WordPress is installed within a directory (/news)
• Webmaster Tools reporting thirty-six 404 errors from the old website that need redirecting
• Adding redirects manually to the .htaccess file is causing 500 errors

So let’s go through each stage as we approached the fix:

WordPress and .htaccess

By default, WordPress uses htaccess to control it’s permalink structure using the code below. You’ll notice that if you set a custom permalink structure, it will ask you to update your .htaccess file, or make it writable.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>
# END WordPress

redirect 301 /contact.aspx http://www.clientsite.com/contact.html

Line 14 Indent at beginning of line also 2 301′s on the same line.

There are a number of lines where there is only one url and nothing specified to redirect to, There also seemed to be a line space at the end.

[Fri Jan 14 14:08:43 2011] [alert] [client 188.220.6.98] /var/www/vhosts/ADDRESSREMOVED/httpdocs/.htaccess: Redirect to non-URL

Pete was right, the error logs gave some key information that led to the fix. The above statement, ‘redirect to non-URL’ was suggesting that there was an error in the way the URLs were written in the .htaccess file. Pete also mentioned that the destination URL should be absolute meaning the full address should be included. E.g.:

redirect 301 /page.php /page2.html (WRONG)

redirect 301 /page.php http://www.site.com/page2.html (CORRECT)

After completing the following checks, the file now works!

1. No extra spaces or unnecessary line breaks
2. ASCII transfer setting on FTP client
3. ANSI encoding of the .htaccess file
4. Destination URL must be absolute (the full http://www….) (See here)

These settings may not work for you – there’s a lot of factors to consider. But this post will hopefully give you some ideas to help identify the problem you might have.

Haven’t posted in a while due to being pleasantly busy with Zest. I’m learning that Christmas is very much a rush period for businesses, so escaping that is something pretty welcomed! This is my first Christmas spent in Oxford, after moving last February. So far, between my girlfriend and housemate, I’ve covered a lot of ground. We went into town to witness the Christmas lights being turned on. Although it was actually quite disappointing, the spirit was there. I was rating against Chester’s lights, which are amazing in comparison. I’ve been to pubs, restaurants, fetes, and fairs. Overall the experience has been brilliant.

The Oxford Christmas Market at Oxford Castle is the next destination on the list. A traditional German-style market that runs between 26th November and 12th December. The stalls range from wooden toy specialists to local and continental food stalls. There’s mulled wine on offer, stilt walkers, and I’m hoping to pick up a few Christmas presents there too. This pretty much counters the freezing weather although that’s a part of the experience I guess…

I’ve just come back from the cinema having watched the new movie, The Social Network, that takes the rise of Facebook and throws it into the Hollywood blender. It’s a very fast-moving film, starting with Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) inadvertently destroying his relationship with his girlfriend, Erica. Immediately the movie highlights both the strangeness and genius of Zuckerberg which was a decent introduction.

The actual start of the movie isn’t brilliant (lots of coding) and if it’s accurate, Zuckerberg was a class-A dickhead (I’ll leave you to judge for yourselves). What was great is that the directors combined something that is inevitably very geeky, with the student party lifestyle, lawsuits and humour. I think it’s the sheer scale of what he built that interests me most – a 500 million member community valued at $25 billion.

Some points:

• Girls will like the Winklevoss twins – depicted as the ultimate men. Tall, good-looking, ripped, Harvard-attending, wealthy Olympian rowers. We’re not left out though, as there is enough girls to make up for it. Fair for everyone!
• Zuckerberg’s best-friend and business partner was the nicest guy. A complete doormat, but a genuinely nice guy. It’s hard to think why Zuckerberg dicked on him so badly.
• Justin Timberlake’s character is Shawn Parker, the creator of Napster. I’m still not sure as to why he had some an effect on Zuckerberg. Maybe it was envy or appreciation for what he achieved.
• Actually going on Facebook after the movie feels really weird. Like it’s real. Oh wait…

I want to discuss a pretty grey area of the social media ‘bubble’, and that’s employment law. As a business, or an employee, are you protecting yourself correctly? Having attended a seminar this morning that covered this topic, I want to share my notes with you and hopefully stir up some questions. I think this is relevant to us digital marketers, and something we should become more aware of.

The scenario is pretty straightforward – social media is at the stage where it’s literally embroidered into our daily lives as people. As most of us will know, the benefits of our employees using social media in moderation is potentially huge. We have X number of employees consistently increasing the level of communication with clients, spreading our company name about, and ultimately enhancing our reputation as a business. It makes sense to allow a little bit of freedom, but protecting yourself is crucial.

I’ll begin with the well-known Discrimination Act. It’s true that anti-discrimination laws can hold employers “vicariously” liable for discrimination by their employees. If comments are made by an employee(s) against another employee that are deemed harassment on the grounds of protected characteristics (e.g. sex, race, religion), liability can arise for the employer, whether or not the employee is using the employer’s equipment to publish those comments.

Now as an employer, you might contend that the employee was not acting in the course of employment, but tribunals apply a very wide test to this concept. Whether or not the employee was not physically at work, or acting under the instruction from the employer is unlikely to be sufficient in defeating a claim. So how do you protect yourself?

• By taking reasonable steps to prevent the harassment – utilising policies and training to define the acceptable online behaviour, even outside of the workplace, is kept appropriate. Even policies do not offer full protection, so this is where proper training instilled at the induction stage is key to protecting yourself as an employer. Simply having a policy in place to cover all social networking activity isn’t sufficient enough to show that you’ve taken all reasonably practicable steps to prevent harassment or discrimination. Train, train, train!

Another common problem you might face is with confidential information. As an employer, you’re exposed to the risk of confidential information about your business, or your clients, being published online. For example:

• Competitors could gain access to that information
• Customers or clients might be able to view that information online
• Your company could be in breach of a confidentiality agreement between a third-party client or customer

To protect against this, employment contracts should be updated to specifically address this issue. It’s important that this is covered by a contract, and not a policy, because it may be necessary to enforce the terms of the confidentiality provision against the employee, through the courts. For this reason, is must be part of the employee’s contract.

Take, for example, LinkedIn where employees are sometimes encouraged to connect with clients. Once connected through LinkedIn, who owns the data? If clients are added to the private profile of an employee, then even if they leave the contacts still exist in their ownership. This opens up the possibility of that client soliciting business away from your company.

The perfect industry for this example; recruitment. An industry where agents are encouraged to connect with clients on networks such as LinkedIn.

In the case that the database that the employee obtains from the employer is confidential (and this point covered in the employment contract), then ultimately wherever they access that client information from still remains property of the employer. In these circumstances, the contact list could not be copied or removed in their entirety by the employee for use outside of their employment or after their employment came to an end.

The last scenario is with the Data Protection Act (DPA) and what it covers. With access to personal details becoming easier through social networks (and spying!), an employer could be inclined to make a decision on a job candidate based on information disclosed on a social network ‘profile’. For example, the candidate might not specifically disclose information on their application and the employer finds out by way of the internet. E.g. that they are gay, or have a strict religious or political stance. If this data is accessed and has bearing on the recruitment decision, then this would amount to “sensitive” personal data being summoned and a case against the employer would present a tricky situation.

The protection for employees in this regard requires employers to obtain explicit consent to access that data. In order to comply with the DPA, the employer must either:

1. Have the employees consent to accessing that data.
2. Meet another part of the DPA criteria, the most common being that processing of the data is “necessary to the performance of a contract to which the employee is a party”. This would allow an employer to process personal data in order to conform to their contract of employment.

The example would be that if two identical candidates went for a job, but you found out that one was guilty of a poor attendance rate, or that their Facebook photos suggested that openly discuss their drug habits online, how could you shape your rejection letter if they contested it? After all, that information is personal and wasn’t volunteered. Therefore as an employer, you’d be in breach of the DPA if you couldn’t reasonably back-up your decision to choose the other candidate.

Ultimately what I got from this was that you should avoid bringing any personal reasons into your decision, and if it does present a possible problem, then to protect yourself on the grounds that the other candidate was simply better. This presents a much more difficult case for the aggrieved candidate to argue, in court or not.

The points above hopefully open up your eyes to what can happen without the correct policies and procedures in place. I’m not a lawyer, so please don’t only rely on what I state here. Instead, use resources such as the Employment Practices Data Protection Code (http://ico.gov.uk) to inform, and seek professional legal advice where necessary.

As an online marketer, I think we benefit from becoming aware of these laws. Not only are we exposed on a daily basis to social networks, but we work with clients who are. As such, we need to become more informed about the consequences of certain activity, and will increase our value to the client by doing so.

If they’re talking about Google changes on the radio, it’s got to be big! The new update, ‘Instant’, is essentially the introduction of on-the-fly search results. Such a major change will have an impact on both SEO and PPC campaigns, not least because it now adds in extra steps to a search query.

What percentage of internet users spell their first search query correctly? I think this is a very important point. The introduction of on-the-fly results means that the first search is massively important. Let’s face it, people can’t spell. We misspell things all the time, yet if the search result is correct we’ll click it anyway (and why not)! So does this open up a massive opportunity (yes the title is deliberate) for misspelled keywords, given that:

1. A user is typically only going to make one search, even if amended several times along the way.
2. We can’t spell.
3. One wrong character can completely transform a query.

I’ll expand on the third point because this is the one I’m interested in. I’m also assuming that suggested search results are ignored, and asking that you open your mind a little to other search examples. This example is flawed because it’s too commonplace already, but think creatively. Say I’m looking for a ‘used Porsche 911′ – the search has three elements that can’t be affected by Instant, or will probably lose out. The first being the word ‘used’. It’s simply far too vague for it to have any impact on my search. The chances of Google suggesting ‘Porsche’ as an extension is far-fetched. The last part, ’911′ is relevant in terms of the series/models I’m interested in, but crippled by the fact that it’s the last word. There’s a whole bunch of other SERP results ahead of it to compete with. Unless suggested search is kind, we can maybe assume that the user will actually never get to the point of typing the full search term without first clicking on a result they see.

‘Porsche’, however, is interesting. It’s the first specific element of the search that will define the results into something I care about. Of course I’d probably have to get to ‘Pors’ before I start becoming interested in what I’m seeing. After all, ‘Used Por’ might bring up porcelain plates or something way off what I’m after. How about if we went with a ‘H’ next, making our query ‘Used Porshe’. Phonetically it sounds correct and, unless you’re aware of the brand, there’s no obvious reasons why you wouldn’t go along with it.

At this point our search is completely transformed from logically delivering results for ‘Porsche’, to another subset of results for ‘Porshe’, whatever those may be. Yet if we were to optimise for this misspelling we’d have more opportunity to capture that user mid-query, reducing the chances of them clicking the suggested corrected spelling if it were a static search. Ultimately this update is designed to speed things up even more. We’re practically going to be making impulsive choices when searching, purely because of the amount of information thrown at us whilst we search. Instead of humbly correcting our search after we hit enter (and see that it’s wrong), we’ll be fixated on this moving, real-time, dancing results section. Anything that is remotely what I’m after as an amateur user will be enough to earn my click.

It’s my feeling that misspellings and, in particular, early character repetition (ammerica, shooes or hollidays) will see increased success and traffic spikes. Linguistically there is a huge gap that Google couldn’t possibly have accounted for. Words change so drastically with just one wrong character that it would take a monumental effort to translate that into an algorithm that predicted the right result. Yet as people we’re able to hone in on words that are susceptible to being misspelled, and we can make assumptions based on our real-world experiences as to what that user might be searching for. SEOs have been targeting misspelt words for years, it’s nothing new. The difference is that we’re now rushed in our decision-making process. Even with the “improved spelling correction” as mentioned by Google, I can see further opportunities particularly in the more niche stuff that is unlikely to be accounted for as intelligently.

Only time will tell, I guess!