Readers will note I bolded and put an asterisk next to the ‘at participating restaurants’ part. Of course it’s not every restaurant because not every restaurant is going to give Best Buy some perks. Also, it’s only on credit cards you enter into the system, which if you already have a Best Buy Reward Zone Mastercard like me, then it’s a no brainer for bonus Reward Zone points.

The program doesn’t stop here, there are various tiers based on just how much you can eat out a year. If you have 11 or more qualified transactions totaling at least $275 in the calendar year, you’ll be considered a VIP Member and earn 3 points per dollar. If you simply give them permission to send you spam, er offers, and have fewer than 11 qualified transactions totaling $275, then you are simply an ‘Online Member’ but earn 2 points per $1 spent.

If any of this is of interest to you or you want to learn more, you can visit the how it works Best Buy Reward Zone Dining page. Hey, maybe it’s not as cool as getting an invite to check out Google Wave, but we can’t all be in the 100,000 invited club.

Now there are marketing urges and developer urges. I’m talking strictly developer urges in this post. I’m not saying that from a marketing standpoint releasing some dolled up new version of your software doesn’t continue to promote your brand because obviously it does. The point is: are you adding features the software really needs or would it be better to make another, different program that incorporates and assists the original program? Or how about adding a plugin structure and regularly offering new plugins? This way those users who really want to tinker with your software every five minutes can do so. Those users who want to run the program so slow that the clock ceases to function correctly can go crazy.

And no, no, no I don’t mean upgrading for the sake of patching security holes or staying current with a new OS. That isn’t an upgrade, that’s essential, responsible patching. If you talk to users who get comfortable using a program with a certain interface, they don’t like it when developers change what they are comfortable using and yet some can’t resist. The guilty parties are scrambling, they know who they are.

There are plenty of examples out there of software which has gone too far with adding new features. AOL comes first to mind. I don’t remember any new version of AOL being that much better than AOL 3.0. In fact one of my first posts at this blog was about AOL’s upgradeitis although I didn’t call it that back then. I’ve written about upgradeitis over the years but it’s like that bad penny that keeps returning.

I think Wordpress, another example, succumbed to upgradeitis roughly two years ago. Sure, the new x.xxx design looks better but enough already on tweaking and tweaking and retweaking the interface. You have a mature plugin structure, why bother? Give it up folks, it’s a freaking blog client, not an old car worth restoring. And all these new tweaks seek to introduce old security problems. A friend’s comparison this morning: “WP is becoming like MS security patches.” So true.

And then there is Word. Good old Word. I think this word processor ceased needing new features somewhere around 1995 and challenge readers to point to an absolute must have feature that Word 95 didn’t have that Word 2007 has. Another friend of mine who has been a professional printer for 20 years was so disgusted with the new ribbon interface in Word that when he got a new computer he downgraded back to Word 2003.

That’s probably a good sign that your software has reached upgradeitis status, BTW: when the downgrading begins. Now let’s make a list since everybody loves lists.

10 signs you should stop upgrading your software  … WHEN …

1. … you think it’s time to change an established interface design
2. … users start downgrading
3. … you think users are bored of your software
4. … you are bored of your software
5. … sales are down
6. … the competition upgrades
7. … you want to add a feature that has little to do with the core function of the program (hint: optional plugin)
8. … the year changes
9. … it’s been too long since the last upgrade (hint: optional plugin)
10. … there is a full moon out

Exceptions abound

There are always exceptions like Turbotax which is a good example of software that needs to continue to be updated. Why? The tax laws are constantly changing. This changes the core function of their program and they must upgrade. But if the tax laws don’t change and they simply want to add new features to an already feature-laden program? Stop already.

Have to give credit to a few good developers out there like Dave Winer who seem to understand there is a lifecycle to software. That it’s neither prudent nor wise to kick a good thing in the eye or keep poking the dead hunting for one more smile.

Here’s the historical breakdown so new readers can catch up and old readers can shake their heads along with our family again.

Xbox 360 systems that have died since April 15, 2006
#8: Tuesday June 2, 2009, red rings.  We’re swapping it out at Best Buy today, June 17, 2009. Good thing we bought the warranty! My advice to all continues to be one of the following: 1) never buy an Xbox 360 without a warranty or 2) (new) never buy an Xbox 360 at all.
#7: January 2009, red rings. Didn’t record the exact day, but it was just after the first of the year. This unit is covered by Microsoft’s Red Ring of Death replacement and we just need to send it in.  Microsoft has stopped sending boxes, but we have the packing slip ready.
#6: Saturday August 18, 2008. Three red rings of death. We used Best Buy replacement plan to swap out with brand new Xbox Elite.
#5: January 1, 2008 (Happy New Year, Microsoft!). Status: three red rings of death, unrepaired. Under warranty, Microsoft replaced within a month.
#4: Xbox 360 broken November 3, 2007. Status: broken disc tray, unrepaired. We replaced this system by buying a new Xbox 360 Arcade package (and yes, bought 2-year warranty).
#3: April 2007. Status: red rings of death, replaced three weeks later on April 23, 2007
#2: September 22, 2006. Status: red rings of death, replaced on October 20, 2006
#1: June 14, 2006. Our first Xbox 360 dies. Didn’t even make it two months.

I think with my last post we’d reached ashamed status. Not sure what customer emotion comes next when or if we reach double digits with all these hardware failures. The biggest videogame player in our house is going into the Army in September, so maybe that means we’ll see fewer Xbox 360s die moving forward.

I want, maybe need, to be emotional about it but the truth is I’m past angry, disappointed and perplexed. Without being too dramatic it’s become more of a way of gaming life now. I don’t like it but have come to accept that the time will come when the Xbox 360 will error out and we’ll be forced to dig for the receipt and/or warranty paperwork.

Was telling a friend in IRC this morning that it kind of reminds me of the pinball machine we had. Pinball machines are notorious for requiring lots of maintenance. Too much for a guy like me that isn’t a huge fan of that kind of work. Kudos to those who are but we all have things we like that somebody else feels the opposite.

As long as these systems stay under warranty we’ll keep swapping them out. It’s hard for me to imagine another gaming machine in my lifetime that will have as many great games and encouraging gaming experience but be so completely awful in system reliability. It’s not like any of these 8 systems have tanked during a game – they haven’t - but when you shut the system off you walk away wondering if that will be your last gameplay session on that box ever.

Usually when something is this bad, it’s bad all around but that’s not the case for the Xbox 360. The software side is clicking while the hardware side is frankly inexcusable.

The funny thing is we have two of the original Xboxes and those are still working fine, so it must be a case of Xbox 360 design. Our PS3 and Wii are both doing fine. It’s well beyond making excuses when something breaks down eight times in (roughly) three years. It’s beyond making excuses if something goes bad twice in three years.

So I cannot and will not defend the Xbox 360 hardware problems any longer. As a gamer I will continue to play on the Xbox 360 platform. I’m starting to feel like something I’m not: a fanboy. Or a sucker. Maybe both. Tormented, there’s the word I was searching for.

Whatever the case, maybe some higher power can shower some good luck on our household so no more of these will die. Pretty please with a strawberry from Ms. Pac-man on top? If you are in the Xbox 360 has died brother and sisterhood, yes, we feel your pain.

Time for pictures, a new insurance entrance door blog post and big loud d’oh!

We changed our entrance door from wood to glass and while it looks much nicer and more professional, it confused some clients who were used to seeing a particular entrance type. Even though we added a more commercial open/closed sign and business hours and a sign next to the new door with our business name the new glass door itself was still causing confusion.

As simple as a door. Wood versus glass. It occurred to me that for years we’d had the same door and people were programmed for seeing a very specific entrance to our business. Like changing your hair from blonde to brunette.

To the right of our business is an apartment and they have a seldom-used secondary door that looks very similar to the door we used to have and some clients were trying that door which is almost always locked. Even though that door was a good 10 feet from our entrance door people were checking that door, seeing it was locked and driving away.

Yikes. So I talked to the neighbors and created a sign with a big, green arrow pointing to the left as the correct insurance door. Got their permission to put on their secondary door and am hoping this will do the trick in easing the confusion.

I never contemplated that a new door in the same business location would cause any confusion. How could I have done a better job explaining we had a new door? I came  up with the following ideas:

• make a blog post before the new door was installed letting clients know that our entrance door had changed.
• call clients who regularly come in and let them know. It’s not like we have so many since we are rebooting our business this year that it would have taken a long time to make these courtesy calls.
• email clients and let them know of the change. We are doing a better job than we had before collecting email addresses, so sending out a blast email just letting folks know could have been helpful

Truth of the matter is that I never even considered that changing an existing business door would do anything other than have clients say: “hey you have a nice, new door.” Live and learn, all right. I’ll be more careful in the future. Although in the 15 years we’ve been in business this is the first new door we’ve had installed, so who knows when or if ever we’ll have this scenario present itself again.

Speaking of green, our company logo color, happy St. Patrick’s Day to all those who celebrate. Don’t be drinking too much green beer tonight and stumbling in the wrong doors now..

But once past the terrible web design, I started thinking about marketing. Much more positive thoughts streamed in.

Skittles doesn’t have to keep this homepage for very long and I suspect when they see some of the hashtag spamming and racial slurs being posted through Twitter, they will get rid of it. It has succeeded in getting some passionate, web savvy folks talking about Skittles a lot more than they were yesterday. It’s got bloggers talking about them. Skittles is getting their name out there. A round of applause.

Then I started thinking about what Skittles, the candy, are. They are tiny pieces of yummy candy that, like Starburst, have many different packages of flavors. You munch a couple of them here and there. They are tiny like Twitter updates. Lots to be compared between the two. What kind of people munch on Skittles anyway? It’s a pretty good analogy to making Twitter updates. I give the marketing department thumbs up on this experiment as long as they don’t keep this gimmick running very long and let it get further vandalized. Here’s my famous Skittles tweet:

Sweet, can finally scratch off my life goal list making it to the #skittles homepage!

Now let’s hope we don’t see this copycatted by other ‘small’ things from marketing department. This is a one-off marketing idea and the other companies who jump aboard are not going to fare nearly as well in the buzz department.

WAIT - Wasting the buzz

But wait, this marketing buzz might be mostly for not. Just looked at the Google search results for Skittles and check out the results:

Notice the prominence of “Products” by Google? Now look what happens when you click on the Skittles product page link. It leads to a 404 not found IIS server message:

What? Did the marketing department forget to tell the webmaster that people might follow the buzz and try to maybe look up products? This is wasting the buzz! Skittles web monkeys get the wrench to this ASAP or your buzz will disappear like, well, the taste of skittles in your mouth.

And yes, this still works. Some salespeople have told me over the years that this is a waste of time and I can’t disagree more.

 
Cold calls are bridges to humility

I’ve been calling primarily from our business line at all different times of day and night (never cold calling before 9am or after 9pm and rarely on Sundays) and the caller ID recognizes our business name clearly so anybody picking up the phone will know exactly who is calling. Not using computers to spam mass calls or some other annoying mass contact strategy. Just picking up the phone and dialing one … at … a … time. And I do not call anybody cold who is:

1. on the Do Not Call List. Each number is checked each time before calling and our DNC database is kept current.
2. has a first name listed in the phonebook I cannot pronounce correctly. I like to be able to ask: “is this John?” “Mary?” rather than the more formal: “Is Mr. or Mrs. Jones available?” I’m sure this puts off some people who do not know who I am and hear me addressing them by their first name, but I feel more comfortable and have had more success starting this way than being more formal.

Tuesday night this week I called someone totally new and random, had a very friendly, productive conversation over their speakerphone, made an appointment and went out yesterday and added a brand new client to our 2009 rebooted insurance business. These folks are really nice too and took a bunch of my business cards and promised to help us out with additional referrals.

Then on the way back to the office I stopped off at a nearby mobile home park. There was a big sign as you enter the park that stated in bright red lettering: NO SOLICITING. I drove straight to the manager’s office and walked up to him and introduced myself as a local, independent insurance agent who had lived in town for nearly 20 years. I asked him if it would be ok if I brought a brochure stand with me for mobile/manufactured insurance to his office. He not only said yes, but promised to put it on his desk right by his computer so that anybody who asked about insurance he’d have it there handy for them. Right on.

Yesterday was one of those magical cold lead marketing days. There are plenty of days where the opposite happens, where you are shut down, hung up on and worse. It’s not easy being a cold call salesman but it is very humbling. That brings me full circle to the client I was speaking about who asked me why I kept cold calling people when I could focus on more warm leads.

There are several reasons but the one that is most important to me is humility. To remember how hard it can be to grow our business and attract new clients. If all one does is work the warm and hot leads, including the referral leads, it can spoil you. Or at least it spoils me. I want to appreciate the bond that people have with those they do business with and how easy it is to break, but how hard it can be to solidify.

Add to that, in the current economy especially we’re providing a valuable service for people with important coverage with excellent rates from good companies and serviced by a family owned and operated agency. It’s a driving force to get on the phones or stop by in person and tell our story. Some folks, perhaps many at times, won’t want to hear our story or take part in our journey but it shouldn’t slow us down.

So to other salespeople reading: keep some cold in your marketing. Humility is very important in business and with clients. Never forget how hard it can be to forge a new client relationship and how easy it can be to lose one. It’s not just about plans, products, companies to me, it’s always been about people and relationships. People can choose to change who they want to do business with at any time for any reason they want. Thank your clients often for the privilege of doing business with them. We sure do.

B.L Ochman writes on the oven baked sandwich wars:

More likely, consumers will not care, or will forget who trashed whom, or who won. It’s quite possible that people will figure the Domino’s test was rigged anyway. That’s nothing but a no-win situation all around.  And marketers take note: Domino’s v Subway or vice versa is not at all in the spirit of the Obama era.

Raising my hand in the I Don’t Care About Their Silly Dustup camp. I do, however, care about what each is doing with their respective businesses.

Wait an oven-baked minute. Doesn’t Domino’s do pizza? Isn’t that what they are supposed to be great at? Why are they getting into the oven baked sandwich market? And Subway is supposed to do those sandwiches that help you lose weight and/or stay thin, right? So why are they trying to expand into the pizza scene which from a calorie standpoint is a negative.

Both these companies are wrong. The last time I went into a Subway to get a sandwich I was told I “had” to have the sandwich toasted that I wanted. Beyond stupid. If I want a sandwich not toasted, then I should be able to do so. I can understand toasting pizza bread, but why do they have to bug me about toasting every other type of sandwich? It makes the bread all crunchy and nasty.

Now over to the Domino’s side. Are you out of pizza ideas or what? Look at what Pizza Hut is doing. They aren’t advertising the dark side of sandwich wars complete with some silly dog jumping contest, they are advertising using real ingredients in their pies. None of that artificial garbage.

And what Domino’s delivers? Last time I checked, Subway won’t deliver sandwiches to my door, but you will. Focus on that business strength. Your competition isn’t now and never was Subway, it’s Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, Round Table, Godfather’s and any other pizza joint.

Speaking of Little Caesars, they are the go to place for pizza in our area. They went to $5 one topping pizzas and they make them in bulk. You usually don’t have to wait, just walk in hand them the money and walk out with cheap, good tasting pizza. If I want gourmet pizza, I go to Round Table. They have the sauce that I prefer.

Is it just me here that thinks both Domino’s and Subway are misguided? I understand times are tough, but focus on highlighting the bread and butter, no pun intended, of your business. For Domino’s it’s pizza and delivery and Subway it is not, not, not toasted sandwiches. If you disagree, agree or want to oven bake my opinion, the comment section below is  yours for the tasting.

Via TabascoTequila.com they offer a wide variety of Tabasco Spicy Tequila alcohol drink recipes with names that harken back to their McIlhenny Company roots like, well, Avery Island. The drink has the name of the place in Louisiana where they have been growing the seeds for peppers since 1868.

Since I’m not a hard liquor drinker – not really a drinker at all, per se – I will be unlikely be tasting (m)any of these Tabasco Tequila fueled drinks but I think it’s smart seeing McIlhenny not resting on their laurels and trying to brand Tabasco well beyond their tried and true red sauce.

McIlhenny is a company that clearly wants to continue to expand into new markets. Now if only they were equally progressive technology-wise. The Tabasco.com website doesn’t have a blog (despite me suggesting they should have one for like five years now) – still using an archaic newsletter-only approach - and has a cluttered navigation and style. Is their website powered by Cold Fusion, really? Come on Bent Media, get with the program. If you need a diehard fan to send along a few blog posts here and there, drop me a line.

Using Photoshop I came up with a design that I liked and we emailed the raw PSD file to printer #1. This generated a phone conversation to the person working at printer #1 who asked about the DPI for the print quality. She wanted at least 300DPI, while I used 72DPI for the PSD. The graphic work wasn’t very complex, it was a green upside triangle with our domain name and some formatted text. She said she had begun work on converting it to Illustrator and that there would be a $12 conversion fee.

My reply? I don’t use Illustrator and want to use the imagery on the website without having to convert back and forth between formats. If it was kept in Photoshop it would be easier for me to work with. I said: well, I can convert this in a few minutes to 300DPI in Photoshop and would work on it “later” when I had more time.

Then she said there would be no $12 fee after all and then said somewhat uncomfortably that since she “almost had the work all done anyway” it wouldn’t be a big deal. This made me feel a bit awkward as the cost of the job was not in question to me, it suddenly became somewhat about paying for a service I didn’t feel we needed. Whether or not the printer preferred using Illustrator seemed irrelevant to me as a customer.

“No thank you, I’ll work on it later and will have to get back with you.”

Coming up for air

It’s been a crazy busy week and a couple of days we didn’t even stop to eat.

Later that day we approached printer #2 with the same email we had sent printer #1. Printer #2 is located in the same building as our office and is also our business landlord. What did he do? He printed the sign and brought it right over. He wouldn’t even take payment for the print job.

Next, we also needed some new business cards. So I asked him about that yesterday. He asked what we wanted and I showed him a mockup I made. He only wanted me to send him the graphic I used by itself so he could format it for his print job. I emailed it over and he came over to our office and showed us a mockup design of the cards. There were some minor adjustments in text formatting we asked him to make and he went back to his shop and did the work.

Then I checked my email and what do I find? An email from printer #1 who was apologizing for not getting back to me sooner with sign proofs, and had attached a PDF of the design she made for the sign. I felt badly for her continuing to do work on the sign and thought I had been pretty clear that we’d get back to her. So I called printer #1 shop and the owner answered. He was a client of ours previously, but since we have gone independent this week he doesn’t have any business with us any more. Regardless of that, I felt bad about his employee doing work for us when we had gone elsewhere and gotten the work done.

When I explained why we had the work done elsewhere – basically, because we were in a hurry and didn’t have much time to mess with it – he understood and was totally cool about it.  I asked him to explain to his employee that while the work she did in the proofs was nice, we didn’t need that any more for this particular job. However, I pointed out that when we get a new glass door (it’s coming) that we could perhaps use her design for the static sign on the glass, so please do not throw away the graphic work she did. There could be more business down the road.

Keep it simple

This whole business scenario reminded me that it’s important to keep doing business with you simple. People have different needs at different time. While some customers might be able to wait days for a job, others might be in a hurry and seek the path of least resistance.

I wasn’t very good about telling printer #1 my needs but with printer #2, I didn’t have to. He acknowledged that we had a lot going on and kept the signage details to a minimum. That’s why printer #2 got the business and printer #1 got an apology and some hope for possible future work. It’s likely despite the misstep we will do that static sign with printer #1 simply because I like doing business with people who do business with us. Both printers we have done business with in the past and will continue to do new business in the future, it’s just in this particular case one was chosen over the other for really no other reason than making the process less complicated.

I have done work over the years for business that never materialized and understand that while it’s no fun, it’s part of the territory.  These days I’m a little wiser, trying to limit my time spent to any one piece of prospective business so that it doesn’t consume too much overall time. That way it also doesn’t let me down as much if I don’t earn the business. I remember this one big account I spent over a month working on the details of their business. Never got the business, but absorbed a whole bunch of time gathering details so I could even quote it. I never even got to quote it because by the time everything was gathered the client had already found business elsewhere – faster.

Oh, and as we were leaving the office last night late, guess who met us on the way to the car? It was printer #2 with a wide smile and the two boxes of new business cards I’m shown holding in the picture above. Now that’s great service.

I was talking to a friend and the subject of whether to buy Blu-ray or DVD came up. We’ll get to my answer shortly, but this got me thinking: will that be on the minds of casual technology shoppers this holiday? The friend I’m thinking of isn’t what very geeky, so I’m sure there are people like that.

This holiday season there are some killer DVD deals out there. If you want to build on your DVD collection or buy DVDs as gifts for friends, family and fellow workers it’s an exciting time to be shopping. Yes, even with these troubling economic times:

But studios are facing a scarier fact: perhaps consumers are losing interest in buying DVDs. One particularly bleak spot is the sales of Blu-ray, which was intended to spur consumers to buy expensive DVD players to match their new HDTVs, then replace their libraries with expensive new Blu-ray discs so they could get better picture quality than from standard DVDs. But sales of players have been slow, and sales of the discs haven’t been much better.

While we have a library of over 600 movies, very few are in Blu-ray or the now-defunct HD-DVD format. I’m not and have never been as optimistic about Blu-ray. Let’s face it, DVD will be here for awhile.

Don’t get me wrong, from a quality standpoint, there is no better at home video fix than Blu-ray, but with compelling services like Vudu available offering more HD titles in 1080p than even on Blu-ray, you have to wonder how long the format is going to last.

Blu-ray as a holiday gift? Tread carefully

Back to my friend asking me about buying Blu-ray as a gift for a family member. I suggested to buy the DVD version instead. Here are the reasons I outlined to choose DVD over Blu-ray this holiday season:

1. Blu-ray is best at 1080p TV and despite prices plummeting, most people still don’t own 1080p-capable TVs. You might as well buy the DVD version if it won’t be watched at 1080p. Buying Blu-ray for TV sets that are at lower resolutions is a waste.
2. Blu-ray selection is still too anemic compared to DVD, particularly if you enjoy watching old TV shows. Take the complete series of Get Smart for example which I recently bought for $109 at Best Buy. The other day I saw a Blu-ray 4-set of movies selling for $90! Let’s see, 66 hours of content vs. 8 for close to the same price?
3. Too expensive. Every time I think about buying a Blu-ray movie, I have a hard time justifying the prices. $25-35 for one movie?  Sure, you get it at the best quality ever, but unless it’s a movie you’re going to watch many, many times over, you might as well get 2 or 3 DVD movies for the same price.
4. Too risky. The chance of the Blu-ray format making it another couple years is not very good. If you want to build a library in Blu-ray it better be with a collector’s mindset.

If the person you’re shopping for has a 1080p-capable TV — and if you don’t know, just ask them (if they don’t know chances are very good they don’t) — and IF the person has a PS3 or standalone Blu-ray player. If they don’t have the equipment already and/or don’t plan to upgrade, buy the DVD version instead. If they are 1080p equipped, Talk to them about the type of movies they like and how they feel about their Blu-ray player.

If you asked me what I’d rather have: one Blu-ray disc or a TV season on DVD, I’d choose the latter 9 times out of 10. Again, it’s not that I don’t like Blu-ray, because I think the quality is awesome, but I’d rather watch 65 hours of Get Smart than 8 hours of movies I’ll probably only watch once or twice at a higher resolution.

My last Blu-ray purchase is pictured atop this post. Space Ace (paid same price: $29.99 at Best Buy) is a cool interactive game (Don Bluth along the lines of Dragon’s Lair), digitally remastered in HD. It’s a better version than what was in the arcades. These are the kind of great Blu-ray gifts.