Koka Sexton dot Com

Ohhh…Shiny! My new desk is ready

Koka Sexton — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:52:01 +0000

I have been wanting a new desk for a long time. I have been using my wife’s desk that she had in college ever since I got back from Iraq. Do to the nature of my work and the fact I’m addicted to my computers, I spend more time than I care to admit at my desk working, writing or playing Bejeweled.

When we moved out of SF and into the burbs, I wanted to throw out the old one and start in the new place with a new shiny desk. The old desk was nice but it was small and didn’t have a lot of storage options. I wanted something bigger but we had said that when I got a new desk it had to be better than the particle board one we had. We were looking for something that looked like a piece of furniture and most desks we found were too expensive at the time. It also had to be long enough to cover the long wall of the room under the window.

For Fathers day my gift for being a new dad was a new desk. We ended up getting a modular system from JC Penny of all places. I had gone to the store and looked at the floor model a few weeks ago and after doing some measurements of the walls in the office it seemed to be the best fit of all the other desks we had seen.

I would have enough space to hold my multiple computers, monitors and other gadgets and still have work space all over that I could use.

To have the desk delivered it was going to cost some ungodly amount of money so we opted to have the desk shipped to the nearest store and I’d pick it up. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. When it was time to get the desk, it was more of a mission than an errand. I figured it would take a couple trips and it ended up being three.

Once I got to the store and saw the pieces that had to be picked up I knew it was in for some work. Although there were only 8 pieces, each one was massive and heavy. The file drawers took up a lot of room and I could only get 3 at a time. I had to take the corner desk top on its own which really sucked.

http://twitpic.com/8j6o4

The next process is the one I hated the most. I had to clean off my old desk and move it to make room for the beast I had stacked in the garage. I cleared off the old desk and was reminded about how dirty it can get under there. Really I didnt know it was that bad.

After a long day I had the new desk up and I started putting the components back in place.

After another round of sweeping and tieing the cables out of the way. I think the hard part is over. Now its just a matter of making sure it doesn’t turn out to become a mess like the old desk.

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My Computer Caught the Swine Flu

Koka Sexton — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:02:19 +0000

As if I didn’t already have enough to get done, I found out last night that I somehow got a computer swine flu virus. Well, that’s what I’m calling it anyways. Now it doesn’t look like my computer is going to die but it’s definitely not doing well. I realized I had a virus/malware/rootkit when I typed something into Google and when I clicked a link, Firefox sent me to some completely different site. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t smoking crack so I did this a few more times. Yes, I was infected. The worst part is that the virus is completely random.

Now this virus is not just related to Google searches. I am infected with Bing, Yahoo and any other search engine I try to use.

As I said the browser redirect virus is random so there is a chance I get to the site I wanted to look at. But in this case when I am doing a search for Spyware tools and click on Major Geeks link, I get directed to Stopzilla’s website.

If I go back and click the same link again, I get sent to a completely different site.

When I click the link from the search engine, I am not sent directly to the site I want. The browser hijacks the link and puts me through a secondary domain called appropriateplacefind.info.The domain is held by proxy through Go Daddy and is located in Scottsdale AZ.

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/appropriateplacefind.info

There is also a reference to a domain called overclick.cn but that doesnt seem to be legit.

Luckily, I have a super tech support team online and after posting an update on Twitter and Facebook, I started getting some help. I’ve downloaded MalwareBytes, I’ve run th ESET online tool and each have found more than my original AVG virus scan did. I think I’m going to ditch AVG antivirus for good.

So I’ve identified and removed 3 triojans and 2 other viruses from my computer and followed some additional instructions from a techy friends and restarted my machine.

For now everything looks alright. I can search and be fairly certain I am going to go to the page where I intended but I don’t feel safe yet. I want to know how I got the virus in the first place. Sure it could have been from downloading crap online, which is probably exactly how I got it but I download a lot of stuff all the time and usually I get alerted before the install that there is a virus detected. Whatever this nasty bug is, it beat my defenses and I don’t really like that.

Thank you Shaun for staying up late and helping me out online with this. I’m going to look into buying a better antivirus app with some malware and rootkit detection tools.

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Paragon Software - My New Disaster Recovery Software Gig

Koka Sexton — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:15:58 +0000

Early in March, I was let go from Acronis software. Probably for the best because I got hired to build their Channel Program but the company had so much channel sales conflict I wanted to puke. I fought the good fight despite the company selling their product direct. Being out of a job is not very fun. Especially for a guy who has been working in some aspect since he was 15 yrs old. I kept myself busy redesigning some of my other sites, working with some companies on a project basis and most importantly, I got to spend a lot of quality time with my new boy.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. Thankfully between savings and a little money coming in from other places, we didn’t become homeless in the process of me finding a new job. I looked far and wide. The economy sucks and I knew that finding a place to work was going to be difficult. The unemployment rate just kept going up and with that, my chances of standing out from the crowd was getting slimmer and slimmer.

Then came along Paragon Software. The company has a global presence in disaster recovery and disk maintenance. The great part about the company is the technologies are very similar to the company I previously worked for.

Paragon Software Group has been providing cost effective solutions for hard drive management, storage management and data protection since its inception. Known internationally for its innovative Partition Manager provides proven, full featured solutions for storage lifecycle management. Paragon enables midrange enterprises to effectively and efficiently manage, deploy and protect server and desktop storage resources.

I am driving the company’s Channel Business Development as well as working with the development team and marketing groups as a Product Manager. I will be using most of the same sales skills I have been using for a long time and I will be building on them by participating in the overall product strategies, industry research, analysis, requirements, and software development for new and emerging products.

I am excited for this position, not just because I was out of work but because this is a great place for me to actually use the information I have collected over the years. The company here in the US is small enough that I won’t have to deal with a bunch of legacy BS that typically does nothing more than cause distractions and create roadblocks in a company.

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Super Geek Land - My Geeky Passion

Koka Sexton — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:00:46 +0000

I’ve owned the domain for a couple years and couldn’t find myself to let it go. The idea for the name came from a drunken night with some friends where the conversation of Geek Porn came up. Maybe you had to be there but the idea was that geeks didn’t watch or look at conventional porn, they like to check out motherboards and computer components. Something about Super Geek Land just seemed like gold.

Without any ads or push on my part the site was actually generating a small amount of money on it’s own. All from organic search traffic. Can you guess what the search term was? “Super Geek” and Geek Porn”. People actually search these terms. While I was in my unemployed status I did some work on the site and got it to a place where it looks a lot more like I had envisioned.

It’s basically website that pulls deals for computers, gadgets and other geek stuff from all over the internet and uts it in a single page. Yes, before anyone chimes in, I know there are a few dozen other sites like this. Super Geek Land was more of a project for me to experiment with some additional code and see what would happen.

I am still working on it and it, like many of my sites are a work in progress. I have to work out a few bugs and build in some functionality but all in al, I’m happy with how it’s turning out. There is a Super Geek Twitter profile also and I’m working on the Facebook page.

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FriendFeed Explosion

Koka Sexton — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:04:23 +0000

Whats going on with FriendFeed? FriendFeed is a service which, instead of layering a meta-network on top of all your other social networks, will create a news feed incorporating them all much like the Facebook news feed. It’s an idea that isn’t too difficult or bothersome for social network users to adopt. The site has been around for a while but in recent weeks I have been seeing a lot of activity on my profile that I hadn’t seen before.

FriendFeed aims to be a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The four founders were all team members at Google and helped to launch such products as Google Maps, Adsense, GMail and Google Groups. They’ve brought their expertise to a slightly different area: social network aggregating.

Users tell the feed which networks they belong to (Facebook, Digg, Last.fm etc) and FriendFeed personalizes your data feed with info from each of the sites.

I’ve had an account for a while and never use it actively. I signed up for the FriendFeed account and plugged in all of my feeds and then left it alone. There were other features such as the ability to comment and share links but I never used them. I started following some other social media icons like mashable, l0ckergn0me, Jason Calacanis, Chris Brogan, Leo Laporte, and justine, but I never looked at it. If I wanted to leave a comment, I would do it on the same platform the feed came from and not an aggregator. There wasn’t a whole lot of activity from other people and it looked like most people did the same as me. Set it and forget it.

Looks like things are changing though. Once a dormant social site that I used only for aggregating my rss feeds has now become a full fledged community. In the past few weeks I have gotten a lot of emails of people subscribing to my feed. Really I think I had 5 people following me last month and now I get comments on my links. Now I find myself digging through FriendFeed profiles the way I do with Twitter.

Do you have a FriendFeed profile? If not and you have more than one social media profile, you should really take 3 minutes and sign up for one. Then add me as a friend there and let me follow your online stream.

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SOCOM Sales Redesign

Koka Sexton — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:02:41 +0000

Tweaking my websites and blogs is actually really fun for me. I love finding a new theme and getting into the code to make it my own. Since my online sales tips blog hasn’t had a real refresh since February 08, I spent some time making it look a bit more clean. I used the same theme as HyperLocal Edge since it seems to be my new favorite.

SOCOM Sales started off as a way for me to blog about my journey as a sales person and has morphed into a blog that covers a bunch of different topics. I was getting such a great responce to the site through comments and emails that I even wrote a Channel Sales Playbook to explain how to run a channel sales team. The e-book is free and there are plans to put together a more detailed and expansive e-book covering channel sales in a very simple format.

SOCOM Sales was my first professional applicationof using social media. Besides having a blog with over 300 posts on sales tips and selling skills, I manage a Twitter profile called Sales tools that has grown to a following over 1000.

Most of that growth has been in the past month. I was happy with the followers before but I figured since I am currently out of work I would spend more time building my sales tools network and using social media to fill my time looking for a new place to work. Getting to know more of my sales tools network has been fun and I have met some very professional sales people through Twitter I never would have known before.

I put together a Facebook page for the site as well. Really I just wanted another Facebook page to test my skills on. Since this is in a different niche that the HyperLocal marketing site, there will be a seperate set of tabs and information that will be broadcast on the SOCOM Sales Facebook page. I need to do some more customization to the fan page but I am gad that I have gotten a few fans already even though a few of them are collegues of mine from work.

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HyperLocal Edge: Case Study in Online Marketing

Koka Sexton — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:49:17 +0000

Keeping myself busy in between jobs has been easier than I had thought. After a few weeks I started wondering the age old question “What would you do if you could do anything?” I decided that spending my time using the internet to drive business for other businesses sounded like a good idea.

I started HyperLocal Edge as a way to creatively put my skills to work for others. HyperLocal marketing is a growing trend on the internet.

For small businesses in this challenging economy, getting solid results from a marketing investment is an absolute must. A new survey from Nielsen Online and WebVisible, however, reveals that local businesses and online consumers are often failing to connect.

The survey polled nearly 4,000 Internet users and business owners about their online consumer behavior and business marketing strategies. The data shows a “Great Divide” between media usage and small business advertising. The study provides valuable insight for local businesses that want to better understand online consumer behavior in order to maximize the return on their marketing spend.

Some of the key findings:

Consumers use search engines 72% more often than they did two years ago
Search engines are the No. 1 choice of consumers and small business owners alike when looking for a local product or service.

Yet, of small businesses:

Half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget on Internet advertising
Only nine percent are very satisfied with their results - meanwhile 63% turn to the Internet first when looking for local products or services

Reliance on multiple resources, reviews, blogs

The survey found that 75% of respondents rely on multiple information sources to find local business information; only an tiny minority (6%) said they used a single trusted source. However those “trusted sources” weren’t identified — whether traditional media or online.

Three fourths of users say they read reviews (product/service business) online. The number is higher (80%) as the audience ages:

–60% of 18-24 year olds read online reviews. –Ages 34 – 64 saw an average of 80% reading online consumer reviews.

–69% use blogs as a source for consumer product reviews, yet only 23% have ever posted a consumer review on a blog (among this group of posters: 45% of the posted reviews were negative, while 15% were mixed and 40% were positive).

Shop online, buy locally

Just over 70% of survey participants say they prefer to stay within a 20 minute drive of their homes to reach a business. And 80% of respondents say they have researched a product or service online and then made their purchase offline from a local business.

These findings are consistent with other information and empirical data in the market but serve to reinforce the importance and power of both search/SEM and local search in consumer purchase behavior.

Getting listed on localized business listings like Google Local and Yahoo Local can be tricky. We can mange these for you and make sure the information listed is up to date and draws customers to your business.

From the several online yellow pages and other local directories there are dozens of places we can make sure your business is listed correctly and professionally. Getting listed in these online directories is usually free but not an easy task to accomplish with many steps and waiting for confirmations. We can manage this process and insure your business is listed locally for customers to locate easily.

Maximize your local exposure

Localized marketing on the several online yellow pages and other local directories where we can make sure your business is listed correctly and professionally. Getting listed in these online directories is usually free but not an easy task to accomplish with many steps and waiting for confirmations. We can manage this process and insure your business is listed locally and correctly for customers to locate easily.

Google Local
Yahoo Local
Online Yellow Pages
Yelp.com
Many others

Many of these online directories make it easy to reach out to people who have reviewed your business. By contacting the people with the most positive comments to express your appreciation and possibly give them a special deal, you stay top of mind with some of your best influencers for more business. Even communicating with the people who gave negative comments to get a better understanding of the issues could give you another chance to get another customer for life.

Social Media Twitter

I have a Twitter account setup for the site. Actullay I had the account before the site but it ties in well. Social Help is a Twitter profile that spreads news, tips and trends in social media marketing.

The Twitter profile has been gaining in popularity among others interested in the latest news about social media.Besides pulling the feed from the HyperLocal website, I add in links to other sites that talk about everything from Twitter, SEO and other new media tools.

I knew there was a market for Hyperlocal marketing services and I decided to do a bit of generic marketing to test the waters. After designing the website and making sure it looked professional enough to show to the public and then using the Twitter profile to help spread the word, I got started on Facebook. I set up a Facebook fan page for HyperLocal Edge.

This was the first Facebook fan page I had spent any special amount of time on. I need put myself through some additional training on the system but I have the basic understanding and can make a decent fan page.

Many businesses want to be on Facebook but have no idea how to do this. So I figured this could be a service I offered.

Facebook makes advertising very easy and extremely targetable. I initially started off spending $0.20 on ads specifically in my area. Then I got to thinking and figured I could really offer services like this all over the US and now I have ads placed across North America.

I chose to only run the ads on certain days that’s why there are so many dips in the click throughs. Over all there were thousands of impressions and a couple dozen clicks. After dozens of clicks, that turned into about a dozen emails and call backs.

This only helped me understand what the business model should be. After each of these calls I was able to take note of the common questions and redesign some of the content on the site to address those issues.

I even played around with Google ads. Again these can be extremely targetable ads and I setup both text links and flash ads that are displayed online.

Since there doesn’t seem to be a company that caters to the small business and home based business for hyperlocal marketing, I figured I could be one of the first.

Random Posts

Mayor of Concord HyperLocal Blog

Koka Sexton — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:43:49 +0000

I started the Mayor of Concord blog about 8 months ago blogging about local news and events. I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. It was really an impulsive decision but I stuck with it so far and I am beginning to reap the rewards of managing a local blog for the community. The hyperlocal blog I run is focused on the city I live in and the surrounding area. There are others in the area that have hyperlocal blogs and more of them are popping up every month it seems.

I only have a few hundred posts so far but I am getting a far amount of traffic from the area from people looking for news. I setup a Twitter account almost immediately when I started the blog. The Twitter profile is used to share news from the area and I post my blog and some of y local travels on the micro-blog.

The community that has been built continues to surprise me. I get news tips and information from people in the area and people retweet my posts often.

Since this is more of a local twitter profile I guess the idea that I don’t have a ton of followers is acceptable. Actually I am excited to have as many as I do. I have been having a hard time finding local Twitter users and they tend to find me and then I re-follow them.

Yes I even have a Facebook page setup for the Concord blog. I do a bit of targeted advertising on Facebook for the site and the fan page. nothing expensive but I like knowing that other people in Concord and surrounding area can find me on Facebook.

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Officially Batman

Koka Sexton — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:19:30 +0000

One of the smaller websites I started a while back was Official Batman. I am a huge Dark Knight fan and have been since I was old enough to pick up a comic book. I haven’t put a lot of work into the site. It holds a few posts and then pulls feeds for other Batman news and a feed for Batman Ebay items.

The Twitter profile is just another place where I have links to other news about Batman posted. I like to keep up with all the information on the new Batman movies and video games and this was an easy way for me to collect that information.

I dont interact too much with my followers on this account but I do respond to @replies from people. I don’t have a ton of followers here mostly because I don’t actively manage the account. I have collected about 100 new followers in the past month just from organic searching I guess.

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Awesome Monday Email

Koka Sexton — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:04:48 +0000

Another one of the best internet memes going around is a string of emails written from the perspective of an attorney. These are always entertaining.

You gotta love this lawyer…

Everyone who has ever bought a house will enjoy this. A New Orleans lawyer sought an FHA loan for a client who lost his house in Hurricane Katrina and wanted to rebuild. He was told the loan would be granted if he could prove satisfactory title to the parcel of property being offered as collateral.

The title to the property dated back to 1803, which took the Lawyer three months to track down. After sending the information to the FHA, he received the following reply:

(Actual letter): “Upon review of your letter adjoining your client’s loan application, we note that the request is supported by an Abstract of Title. While we compliment the able manner in which you have prepared and presented the application, we must point out that you have only cleared title to the proposed collateral property back to 1803. Before final approval can be accorded, it will be necessary to clear the title back to its origin.”

Annoyed, the lawyer responded as follows:

(Actual Letter):
“Your letter regarding title in Case No. 189156 has been received.
I note that you wish to have title extended further than the 194 years covered by the present application.

I was unaware that any educated person in this country, particularly those working in the property area, would not know that Louisiana was purchased, by the U.S., from France in 1803, the year of origin identified in our application.

For the edification of uninformed FHA bureaucrats, the title to the land prior to U.S. ownership was obtained from France, which had acquired it by Right of Conquest from Spain. The land came into the possession of Spain by Right of Discovery made in the year 1492 by a sea captain named Christopher Columbus, who had been granted the Privilege of seeking a new route to India by the Spanish monarch, Isabella.

The good queen, Isabella, being a pious woman and almost as careful about titles as the FHA, took the precaution of securing the blessing of the Pope before she sold her jewels to finance Columbus’s expedition. Now the Pope, as I am sure you may know, is the emissary of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and God, it is commonly accepted, created this world. Therefore, I believe it is safe to presume that God also made that part of the world called Louisiana.

God, therefore, would be the owner of origin and His origins date back to before the beginning of time, the world as we know it AND the FHA. I hope you find God’s original claim to be satisfactory.
Now, may we have our damn loan?”

He got the loan.