The Puritan Gift

1. A conviction to create Heaven on Earth (or a limitless sense of optimism for progress)
2. Placing a high value on mechanical aptitude
3. Working for the benefit of the group, not the individual
4. The ability to marshal resources and organize on a massive scale

Along with those attributes, the Hoppers credit the Puritans for respecting ‘domain knowledge’ and listening to the folks on the factory floor. As someone who comes from an engineering background rather than a business management, I can see a lot of value in the lessons of the book. I also am learning a great deal about management practices that I never learned while coding.

The Hoppers don’t rest on their laurels with The Puritan Gift as a dry business history text book. The hook is the delightful way they intertwine wit and historic connections while telling the American tale. In fact, it reminds me of an episode of Connections.

The book was a gift from my in-laws and they even were able to snag an autograph from the author. Thank you so much for a great gift!

In the Internet business, astroturfing mostly refers to posting fake comments, “I LOVE Brand X! – Joe Schmoe.” I’ve dealt with a few marketers who wanted to try it and I consistently tell them not too. There are many reasons, but the main one is, you will get caught. While your marketer is working for a paycheck, many forum moderators are doing it for the love, and thus will spend more hours trying to catch you than you can trying to evade.

Now there is another new reason. It’s against the law and you can be fined thanks to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. $300,000 for a few false comments is not chump change. I think the fines and anything else that discourages the practice is good for consumers and Internet businesses.

Google announced a new feature today that let’s you share a page of public information about yourself across Google sites: Google Profile. It’s a very cool features, especially if you want to affect how you appear in Google searches. However, it does raise issues of safely and easily people divide their public and personal information. I wrote a post about this when I first branched this blog from my personal one.

My policy now is that anything associated with my name should be written as if it were going to show on my resume. This means Facebook is only good for viewing other people’s posts. Anything personal, I post to a blog using a pseudo name. However, I stick by the overarching policy, anything that you don’t want the world to know, don’t post it on the Internet. Period. I think Google could do a lot of good teaching people that with their default feature sets and instructions.

For some, the Internet is not easy. For others, it is not easy to make it easy. Especially over the phone.

I think a lot of projects like that fail for a reason that can be described in this metaphor: The tech people make water, beef, and tomatoes in a pot. And if you ask them what they make, they say, “water, beef, and tomatoes in a pot.” The business people want stew.

You need to make sure that everyone on the team knows that you are making stew and that someone is responsible for ensuring that happens. Unfortunately, that person has to be tri-lingual, speaking marketing, tech, and English.

I probably forgot a lot of obvious tips, so c’mon people, show me up in the comments.

10 Tips for Your Small Consumer Web Site: SEO, Buzz, and More
(in no particular order)

1.) Validate your HTML & CSS: Mostly good is good enough.
2.) Create good Meta tags: http://www.webspresso.com/metatag.htm Good <title> tags too.
3.) Start a blog on the site. Many hosting providers have a one-click way to install it at yoursite.com/blog. Link it to it from all pages. Write one or two articles a week about how things are going. Write posts about how cufflinks would be great for St. Pat’s Day. Ask customers to email their photos and stories and post those. I recommend WordPress with the Akismet plugin for comment spam.
4.) Add http://google.com/analytics code to all your pages so you can see how your efforts are doing.
5.) Host all the customer pictures and site pictures on Flickr. Add lots of tags. Link back to the site in the descriptions.
6.) Post your product on eBay every week with the Buy Now option. Link back the site in the eBay description.
7.) Join every social network you can as the site, create groups, get everyone you know to friend you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
8.) Get anyone you know with a site to link to your site. Here you go: An awesome gift idea, cufflinks with your kids fingerprints! FingerPrintCufflinks.com!
9.) Investigate an Amazon Store: the Individual account is transactional, while the professional is $39.99 a month. You could test for one month to see if it covers itself.
10.) Don’t astroturf (put fake comments on other sites) or send out form emails. Personalized emails to editors of shopping and gift blogs may get you a write up, though.

After all these are done and you’re selling lots of cuff links, consider Search Engine Marketing. You need to have good books and accounts. If you can determine your average profit per sale, you can use the Google interface to manage your spend to an Effective CPA for the percent return on investment you want. Jewelery, gifts, and kids are all rather pricey keywords, but you might be able to generate some traffic with some more long tail terms like “memento” or “french cuff.” You know, I think we should all get a beer to discuss SEM in person.

I’ve been playing with Zend v. 6 and found this interesting comparison chart of some other web development IDE options by Davey Shafik.

The biggest problem I have with IDE and frameworks is not the overhead they call create. It’s how to get five different programmers to all buy into the same platform, with out beating them with a stick or owing them beers for the next dozen Fridays.

Jon goes on to posit that Agile development, with the dependence on verbal communication rather than arduous specification, can scratch the social itch.

While my team is not always using strict Agile methodology, we do have frequent “scrum-like” project and design meetings. As a very social beast myself, I love collaborative meetings, as long as their aren’t too many cooks in the room and it’s ultimately productive.