And a big thanks to Pay Simple Blog for the love!

Yesterday Facebook announced – as they do about every two weeks or so – a big change. The popular social networking channel is about to adopt hashtags into their API to track trends. Facebook has said the change is to better facilitate “public conversation.” The process of making hashtags clickable will rollout over several months. Currently, Facebook has stated that hashtags will not be for sale as advertising opportunities.

And we all know that’s code for finding an easier way to sell advertising, right?

Facebook has long been the most valuable tool for social marketers and the most loathed. The network’s long history of pulling the rug out from marketers has both excited and devastated the social marketing community time and time again.

I remember busting out in tears when I saw the change from Fan pages to Pages you Like. I was crying because I was holding the magazine with the media buy that distinctly said “Become Our Fan” and had the stinkin’ icon.  Of course, it is not Facebook’s responsibility to send out memos concerning changes before we purchase ads. It’s not the job of an ostensibly free marketing tool to help me manage my budget. Which so, so super sucks.

A Quick Note About Privacy

Just for the sake of getting this out there

As many have learned from Instagram, even if you have maximum privacy settings on your account. The moment you add a hashtag to a post it is then searchable to the public. For most social channels, this is the case. The shining exception is Twitter. If you tell Twitter you want a private account, they maintain that. You can hashtag the holy heck out of your posts and they will never appear in a public feed for that topic. Just something to keep in the back of your head.

Marketing Implications

A source over at Twitter HQ let me in on the following secret regarding Facebook and hashtags: “Well it’s very effective, so I’m not surprised they did it.”  Yes, undisclosed source. Agreed.

How and why is it effective? For any noobs out there, hashtags provide a way to categorize or track certain topics. Hashtags were originally invented by Chris Messina as an eavesdropping mechanism. Messina is like the original social media J Edgar Hoover. Insofar as he sort of created the first way to “listen” on social channels.

This change to the Facebook API not only provides the potential for great trend tracking (think about the blackout during the Super Bowl and how Oreo got all up on that with a super clever tweet/ad), but it implements a proven way of promoting community engagement.

Get Ready to Revise Your Reports

Just the thought of having to reconfigure my reports again makes me want to stab Facebook in the eye. Which, yes, I realize that personifying Facebook in this sense is completely self-serving. Indulge me.

It will actually be great to gauge the SEO conversation on Facebook. We get a lot of traffic to our site from Facebook, so I am genuinely curious as to what trends I may see. The thing is, with the privacy stuff, I may end up just getting a bunch of very non-relevant content. Much like my Google Alerts for SEO. Go ahead, set one up, you’ll love digging through it every morning for the stuff that is actually related to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION.

For now, I can just brace myself for the rollout. As it the case with Open Graph and some other recent Facebook innovations, I likely won’t see clickable and searchable hashtags come across my desk for a few months.

So really, is this all much ado about nothing? Perhaps. But just as possible this is the toe dip into changing the social networking site from being “Friend” based to becoming far more like Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. In recent months Facebook has experienced a decline in use, especially from younger demographics. Those users have found Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr to provide a better social environment for whatever it is that young people do online.

Bully each other I assume. And watch Twerking videos.

Side note: If I was on Tumblr this is the only thing I’d look at all day. All day, son.

In addition to that, you have to remember that the Baby Boomers have found their way to Facebook. It is just awkward to have your mother liking your posts. And most people consider you a sociopath if you unfriend your mother. But since dear old mom spells it “Tumbler,” she’ll never find you there, ya little Manson. (Jokes. Thems is jokes, kids.)

But seriously, my Aunt just posted this on my Facebook page.

All caps? Really. I’m not even going to get into the usage of U/UR. And if we’re being honest, she made me sound like a tramp. I’m actually not having an orgy to celebrate my birthday, but rather spending it at home with my husband, son and dog.

That alone sums this up entirely.

Facebook, you are walking a dangerous line here with your hashtags. And Aunt Connie, you are on notice.

Tomoson.com is a service to find bloggers who are interested in doing product reviews or where bloggers can find products that they would like to review. It’s currently in beta and free, but once out of beta, I expect that there will probably be some type of paid account required.

Setting Up a Campaign

You start by creating an ad, or a “promotion” with information about your product and who you want to apply to review it. You can choose to manually approve or auto-approve bloggers and set a start and end date for bloggers to apply, how many bloggers you want to give products to and you can also set a quality minimum based on Twitter followers, Facebook friends and Alexa rank. You can offer to do a contest as well.

They have a drop-down menu to set a product verification time, but the only option is 3 weeks. I really don’t like the 3 week deadline they give bloggers. I feel like the deadline forces the bloggers to rush and put out lower quality reviews. I wouldn’t mind waiting longer for bloggers to fully use a product and write a review as it fits their schedule.

Blog Quality

Tomoson lets anyone with a blog join their service, so the quality of the blogs are what you’d expect. There are a lot of low-quality product reviewer and mommy blogs – the kinds of sites created for the sole purpose of getting free products. There are also a ton of blogspot.com throwaway blogs.

This isn’t really Tomoson’s fault though, since anyone can apply. It’s really up to you to choose who gets to review your products. You aren’t forced to give your product away to crappy websites.

Customer Service

I had some hiccups with my campaign because my client had told me that they sent out products, but it turned out that they actually hadn’t sent any to a whole batch of bloggers. Since I marked the product as shipped in Tomoson, those bloggers were then on a 3 week deadline, but they never got their product, so they were receiving warning messages from Tomoson about getting their reviews online, but they had no product to review.

If bloggers post a review late, it effects their ratings in Tomoson, so I started getting a lot of angry emails. I contacted support and explained the problem and they were able to remove the ship date for all of my bloggers so that they wouldn’t receive any more messages or penalties. That was a huge relief to me and all of the reviewers. Customer support was very helpful, courteous and fast.

Quality of Reviews

Most of the reviews were pretty short, which I think was due to the short 3-week time limit. They were all also very approving of the product. I should be happy with that, but I really wanted honest reviews with at least some criticism or suggestions of how the product could be better. I would have felt like it was more truthful that way. I’m sure our client doesn’t mind all the praise though.

The Ratings System

Once a review is complete and online, it’s the promoters turn to write a review and give a rating to the reviewer. This is a a good idea in theory, except for the fact that the rating and review is visible by the product reviewer and everyone who visits their profile. This makes it extremely difficult to provide an honest rating because it gives the blogger an opportunity to edit their product reviews if they receive a poor rating from the company who gave them the product.

I think this rating system scares businesses away from giving honest ratings. If you look at any of the blogger profiles, you’ll see what I mean. Just about everyone has a whole profile full of 5-star ratings, but if you read the reviews on their sites, you’ll see that many are not deserving of 5 stars.

Before realizing this, I was trying to be fair about giving ratings and then I had one blogger contact me asking why I only gave her a 4-star rating. I definitely did not feel safe rating the reviewers after that.

The rating system needs to be removed or should be modified in some way. For example, it could be used for internal use only. Only in rare cases should a blogger show up as a 5-star reviewer, just like what you’d expect with any type of rating system.

Final Thoughts

After getting a better sense of how the whole system works, in the future I will definitely place stricter quality guidelines during the initial campaign set up and I will probably limit my promotions to only 5-10 bloggers at a time.

Tomoson is in beta, so the system is a little buggy and it could use a little more functionality, for example better sorting and filtering options, but it’s actually a pretty useful service and it’s not too difficult to use. I would definitely recommend giving it a try, but I highly suggest testing it with a very small campaign at first.

* image courtesy of Lorena Cupcake

There probably aren’t many reasons why you’d need to convert a bunch of short URLs to their original long URLs, but I can think of one reason. One of the techniques our link building team has found to result in some high-quality and easy wins is one from Seer Interactive on Using Twitter and Backlinks to Build Links. The basic idea is to find your followers on Twitter and compare their bio links to your own link reports to see who’s not linking to you. If they aren’t, your goal is to see if there are opportunities to do so.

A major part of this process is to get a free Twitter follower report from Simply Measured, which includes a list of URLs pulled from the bios of all of your followers.

The problem we’re having now is that it seems that just recently Twitter has started changing bio URLs to short urls, making it impossible to match up our own link reports to the websites pulled from Twitter.

I went on a mission to find a way to convert a large list of short URLs to their originals so that we wouldn’t have to do this process manually, which would really suck.

Using an Online Redirect Checker To Convert URLs

My first idea was to search Google for a short URL converter, but I couldn’t really find anything, so then I started looking for a bulk redirect checker, since that’s what short URLs are actually doing – 301 redirecting to the original URL. That’s how I found this Bulk URL Checker from a company called Search Commander, Inc. It’s free, but it only does 50 URLs at a time. To paste the results into Excel, copy the entire table from the page and in Excel, right click and choose Paste Special > Text.

Xenu Link Sleauth

I continued to search for a tool that could handle more URLs at once and I also wanted other alternatives just in case Search Commander’s tool ever breaks or goes away. Any internet marketer who’s been in the industry long enough knows how common tools just disappear.

Then I thought of Xenu Link Sleuth which is great at doing things like this and it’s free. It works perfectly!

Place your list of the short URLs you want to check in a .txt file and upload it to Xenu, by going to File > Check URL List. Upload the file and wait for it to run.

When it’s done, it’ll ask you if you want a report. Say no, then go to File > Export Page Map to TAB seperated File and name it with a .XLS extension so that you can open it in Excel. There you go!

The only problem with this method is that Xenu Link Sleuth is a Windows-only program, so you’ll need a PC, or if you’re on a Mac, you’ll need to run Windows in virtualization software such as Parallels for Mac ($80 per license) or VirtualBox, which is free and open source. I love VirtualBox, so I highly recommend it.

Screaming Frog

Xenu also has a competitor named Screaming Frog, which works on PC, Mac and Linux. I tested this one out too and it works just as good as Xenu.

Open up Screaming Frog and go to Mode > List. Choose the .txt file containing a list of your URLs and click the Start button.

When it’s finished scanning, go to the Response Codes tab and choose Export and there’s your list in an Excel file. Screaming Frog is free, but it’s limited to 500 URLs per scan, so if you have more than that, you’ll need to run it more than once or purchase a pro subscription for £99 per year.

Batch Link Review Tools and Tab Exporting Browser Plugins

The final option I could think of, and most likely a last resort because of the amount of time it would take, is to use a tool like Ontolo’s URL Reviewer or Linkbun.ch, which are tools that take a list of URLs and open them all up at once in your web browser. Once they’re all loaded up, you’ll need to use a browser plugin such as Send Tab URLs for Firefox. I’m sure there’s a similar plugin for Chrome, but I haven’t used one.

How Would You Use a Tool Like This?

This is the only time I can think of where I needed a tool that could do something like this, but I’m really interested hearing about how someone else might need it. Let me know in the comments!

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Update: If the URLs you’re checking go through multiple redirects, the only tool here that will show you all of the redirects and the final URL is Xenu Link Sleuth. See the picture below of a test I did using my own website. The “/aimlessdirection.com/listing/” is the starting URL, and it runs through several other URL’s before finally returning to my home page.

“When we come to work everyday, we’re not concerned with awards or accolades, which is why it’s really great to be nominated,” said Mike Belasco, President of seOverflow. “Our priority is to make sure we are providing world-class service to our clients to help them further their business goals. We make it a point to engage the community with speaking engagements and the like to educate about how valuable SEO campaigns can be in this competitive business landscape.”

The Colorado Companies to Watch award was developed by the Edward Lowe Foundation to recognize companies that instill pride in the community by making great economic strides and support the state’s economic growth. The award and gala are hosted by Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

The awards ceremony will take place June 28, 2013 at the Marriott City Center in Downtown Denver. seOverflow will join companies from a range of industries to celebrate the industrious nature and success of many Colorado companies. More information and tickets to the awards gala can be found at www.colorado.companiestowatch.org.

This nomination marks seOverflow’s first nod for such an award and the company couldn’t be happier. Best of luck to all the nominees!

Other than being annoying to geeks like me, there are plenty of reasons why you should redirect uppercase URLs to lowercase.

Domain names, such as http://www.seOverflow.com, are not case-sensitive so you can display that however you’d like, whether it’s on the web or in marketing materials. Pages on your site however, such as this one, http://www.seoverflow.com/What-We-Offer/Link-Building/, work differently.

• Case-sensitivity on Linux servers result in 404 errors
• Google will consider upper and lowercase URLs different pages
• Pages will show up as duplicates in analytics

Case sensitivity: Windows servers are normally not case-sensitive, but Windows servers typically cost more than Linux servers and do not have as many features as Linux, so most people choose to host their websites on Linux, which are case-sensitive. If you create a page on your site that has capital letters and someone tries to visit it with lowercase letters, they will see a 404 error page. This can also be a problem if the site goes through a redesign and all pages are changed to lowercase. All of those old URLs will become inaccessible and all of the links on the internet going to those pages will break. Many CMS’s like WordPress and Drupal will fix case sensitivity problems, even on a Linux server, in case you’re checkin’.

Google gets confused: Google sees non-www and www versions of a website as two different URLs and the same goes for uppercase and lowercase versions of the same page. This can spread page authority and link equity among the two pages when instead you should be sending it all to one page and giving it the ability to rank as highly as possible.

Analytics issues: I’m not sure how it works with other analytics programs, but in Google Analytics, I’ve heard that uppercase and lowercase versions of the same page show up separately, each with their own data. If you don’t think to look at data for both pages, you’re not getting an accurate representation of that page.

Arghh! Why Do People Create Uppercase URLs Anyway?

There are actually several good reasons why someone might want capitalize page URLs.

• Readability (Pay-Per-Click, print, or television)
• Branding purposes
• Some webmasters just think it looks better (ok, that’s not a good reason)

Readability and branding are the most common reasons that people display their URLs with capital letters. You’ll see it all the time in pay-per-click ads and instead of clicking the ads, some people might copy and paste the URL into their browsers. Branding is another big reason for capitalizing letters in URLs, especially when handing out print materials that have special landing pages.

For any of the above reasons, someone might visit your website by typing the URL with capitalization, or they might type it in lowercase, even if you’ve displayed it capitalized. People might link to your site both ways too, so you need to make sure both uppercase and lowercase versions are accessible.

Wipe Those Tears Away. Fixing Your URLs is Easy!

If you only have a few pages with capitalized URLs, you can simply set up some easy 301 redirects. If you have a ton of pages that need to be redirected though, you’ll probably find it much easier to set a RewriteRule in htaccess to change all uppercase URLs to lowercase URLs. Check out that link for everything you need to paste right into your htaccess file. There’s also much simpler code you can paste in your httpd.conf file, if you have access to it. I suggest doing this for all of your sites, whether you have a URL problem or not, just as a handy catchall to prevent problems in the future.

The author over at AskApache.com (<—— See what I did there? Ha. I’m so funny.) says that this code won’t slow down the site in any way, so you have no reason not to just do this right now.

* image courtesy of CortneeB

Account Settings

Remember that there are four different types of keyword match-types available on Google, and you have to be prepared to use all of them and optimize your account based upon them. Break out your search and display campaigns separately. These are two entirely different beasts and need to be understood and approached as such.

Remember that Google now assumes you want to match for plurals on your keywords–adjust your settings if you don’t want Google to make an as…..

Ad Group Organization

Break out your keywords into the smallest ad groups with similar match types.

(A co-worker describes the approach of adding hundreds of keywords to a single ad group as the “vomit approach” – love that – because it is often as successful at times as eating spoiled food and hoping to run a marathon after having done so.)

The search engines are going to reward you with a higher quality score, and (ultimately) a lower keyword bid if you avoid the “vomit approach”. Write your ads to be as specific as possible to the keywords in those groups. Create a theme in your ads that matches the key terms. And remember this one very important thing when it comes to your ads:

TEST TEST TEST TEST!

Test ad copy.

Test what is successful in one ad group and what works in other ad groups.

Test multiple variations of ad copy. The search engines are going to reward you and in turn your audience is going to reward you by providing more conversions.

Keyword Considerations

Remember that your quality scores affect your keyword bids. It’s an inverse relationship: the lower your QS, the higher your bid. You’ve got to be willing to make the necessary changes such as including the key terms on the landing pages, adding negatives to the account, and writing ads that are tailored to the keywords in an ad group.

It’s not uncommon to see only broad match keywords or someone as daring as to add a few phrase matches–learn all four match-types and use them. Bid up the keywords that are working based upon a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and/or Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) goal. Bid down those that suck. Search for more specific keywords to add to your account via the search query report.

Landing Pages

Another mistake we see is where someone will send a searcher to a very high level page and/or a landing page that has zero relevancy to the keywords. This tactic may have worked in the Wild West of PPC some 10+ years ago, but the search engines are about presenting the most relevant information to their audiences.

You’ve got to be willing to play this game if you want to be a player.

Remember your target audience when you create your landing pages. Take into consideration their level of understanding of the keywords used. Make sure you’ve got a call to action on the pages and place trust factors/testimonials on the pages themselves.

Conversion Tracking

At a bare minimum, you should be utilizing AdWords tracking as well as BING tracking (if you’re advertising on BING). You should also make sure the tracking is accurate.

Why pay for paid search if you can’t properly gauge what is going on? Seriously?

Another free and highly recommended tracking option is Google Analytics. It takes a little more sophistication, but you are able to easily determine Cost Per Acquisition and/or ROAS goals using this.

Call tracking is also something that should be considered if you are receiving a fair number of leads and/or sales via the phone. Call tracking can often be integrated into Google Analytics, and your reports for clients. If your company is seeking sales leads based upon PPC – consider looking into an end-to-end CRM solution.

Keep in mind that this piece only touches the surface of PPC optimization basics. Since PPC is constantly changing – keep checking the search engine blogs for enhancements as well as other blogs (such as seOverflow’s own blog) to stay abreast of what is going on in this dynamic world. Until next time….

Below are a list of some of the things every PPC manager needs to be aware of and on top of inside a client’s account:

1. Budget management
2. BING
3. Account settings
4. Ad group organization
5. Keyword considerations
6. Landing pages
7. Conversion tracking

Budget management

Managing a budget is a huge challenge. Let’s face it, not all of our clients have an unlimited budget at their disposal. Finding inexpensive keywords is not always a solution – especially in the law, medical, and insurance industries. Budgets can easily exceed what we’ve set for the account, and there are not a lot of easy solutions for this.

A limited budget can also limit your highest performing campaigns. A few options available are day-parting the account, continually searching through your search query report to uncover irrelevant keyword terms that are coming into the report, sticking to phrase & exact match exclusively and/or praying to your old/new god of choice.

Just remember that if you are sticking to the phrase/exact match scenario that keyword expands are going to be limited–you’re going to miss out on expanding your account.

Migrating your account from Google to BING

BING is something that you have to consider for your clients (it’s how you’re going to reach the Microsoft/Yahoo people out there). At seOverflow, we often have clients that are only advertising on Google. As an account matures and/or more budget becomes available, you really need to take a look at moving the client to BING. This transition is especially important in the eCommerce world. We suggest moving over your highest performing campaigns/ad groups, and then optimizing them on BING as the account progresses.

BING’s audience behavior is often different–ad copy responses and even keywords that are most successful are often very different here, and you need to be prepared to react differently in this space. Essentially, you can’t use the same cookie cutter approach you’ve developed for AdWords and expect it to be as successful on BING .

In its simplest terms, BING and Google take a look at these major factors when considering Quality Score:

1. Landing page relevancy to the keywords and ad copy
2. Ad copy and how it relates the landing pages and keywords in the ad groups
3. Keywords and how they work with the landing pages and ad copy
4. Click-Through-Rate
5. Account history

Here are some PPC quality score tips we’ve discovered at seOverflow on how to improve your quality score:

• Create tightly themed ad groups. What we mean by this is you need to keep keywords that are similar to one another in the ad group. Place no more than 20 keywords inside the ad group.
• Keep all broad, expanded broad, phrase, and exact keywords in their own ad groups. Add negatives of the 3 match types not in that ad group.
• Create ad copy that has relevant keywords inside the ads. Continually look for your highest trafficked terms and/or highest converting terms. Use these in the ad copy.
• Use the {KeyWord} insert on Google or {Param2} on BING Yahoo. This allows whatever the individual searched on to be included in the ad itself. (If you’re bidding on competitor terms – don’t use this. You may get a cease & desist letter and/or shame.)
• Continually test ad copy (at least A/B testing – perhaps A/B/C or even A/B/C/D for your top performers). If something is working – figure out why. Replicate this in this ad group and in others.
• Continually search for negative keywords in Google’s Search Query Report. This will improve your click-through-rate by eliminating irrelevant searches.
• Make sure the landing pages are relevant to your ad copy and keywords by adding your most relevant keywords (highest trafficked terms and/or highest converting terms) to the landing pages.

Quality score improvement is an ongoing and continuous process. Your competitors are likely doing it. If they aren’t – it will keep you one step ahead of them. If they are, and you are not – then you’re falling behind.

How, you might ask?  Maybe their expectations aren’t realistic.  Maybe they are so busy or unresponsive it’s hard to meet deadlines and a relatively short project can drag on for months.  Or maybe they’ve been burned by an unprofessional and subpar SEO company in the past; which can lead to lingering trust issues and a need to micro-manage the project, therefore stifling the work flow.

So what can Agencies do to either avoid these issues or at least lessen the potential of them during the project?  There are many and you are likely already familiar with some, but let’s take a minute to look at 5 basic ways we can help ensure our client’s needs are top priority while working in a way we, SEO professionals, can do what we do best.

1) Weeding out potential clients in the sales process that are not a good ‘fit’

No one really wants to turn away business, but after a few “problem” clients it doesn’t take long to notice certain patterns that almost always convert clients to unhappy campers once the project gets underway.  Red flags include clients wanting to rush through the process, clients who want premium services on an underfunded budget, and clients who only want to sign a contract for X amount of hours but we know good and well it could easily take double that to produce the results they are expecting.  Finally, often times we speak with potential clients who have unrealistic expectations; they are competing for highly competitive keywords and expect immediate results.

Lesson here – it will probably save an Agency a lot of time, headache and money to tell a client “we’re not a good fit for you” rather than bringing on these type of clients time after time, which easily can end in both sides being unhappy. Of course, whether to bring on a potentially problem client has to be looked at objectively and quantitatively rather than from the perspective of “I think this client could be a pain in the ass.”   Bottom line…propose a clear and concise contract, explaining it thoroughly to the client during the sales process and reiterate it during the initial project kick-off call, making sure all parties are on the same page with goals & expectations.

2) Kick-Off Meeting

It is essential to setup a kick-off meeting between the key players of your team and the Clients at the onset of a project.  Face to face is preferable, but video or phone is the majority of what we do at seOverflow given our clients are all around the US and world!

This initial meeting will start the relationship building that is all-important in short and long term projects.  Second to the sales process, I think this is the most important juncture where an Agency can contribute significantly, and positively, to the client’s overall satisfaction of the project.  You’ve got to connect with the client and communicate everyone’s needs during this call.  You not only get to know who you will be working with but you will learn what their company’s needs are; today’s needs, next month’s needs, and long term needs/goals.  If all goes well you’ll probably find things your client didn’t know that they needed; if not in the kick-off meeting definitely somewhere later in the process.  When this happens the client knows you’ve got their best interest at heart and they aren’t just another project of the month.

The final details I cover in a kick-off meeting are some of the specifics of the contract – the scope of work.  It is helpful to reiterate the numbers of hours to be worked, deliverables, time frame, et cetera.  This will help prevent problems later on and is another step to wash away assumptions and setup clear expectations for both parties.

3) Phone calls

I am the first to attest it is so much easier to send a client an email than to call them on the phone.  Yes, the majority of my correspondence with clients is via email but there are times when a phone call could prove more beneficial. Good times to call your clients include:

-          If you haven’t heard from them in a while or they are non-responsive to email

-          If something exciting or new has happened; an increase in rankings, traffic and/or conversions for example

-          To clarify technical issues that could be better explained via phone

-          To schedule a meeting

I could add a lot more here but you get the point. It’s about connecting with our clients in a more personal level.  Not only are you connecting interpersonally with them,  it is more organic and you may end up talking about or resolving a few other issues that would not have come out of a single email.

4) Transitions/Hand-Offs

At seOverflow we have a soft transition from On-Page SEO to the Link Building side of things.  It is important for one or more of the On-Page team to join the transition meeting into the Link Building phase.  This is a great time to not only introduce new members of the team, but to be a familiar voice and to answer any lingering questions before the client transitions into a new phase of the project. Clients don’t necessarily want to feel shuffled around.  If they know they have at least one person who has a pulse on the project they are much more open to staff changes.

5) Communicate, communicate, communicate

This isn’t really a step; it should have been present from the beginning; through the sales process, kick-off meeting, emails and phone calls, and project transitions.  It is much easier to talk about something before it happens, than to talk about how to fix something after it happens – be proactive!  Remember, your clients are human beings just like you.  Sometimes they will have a bad day, sometimes they will forget deadlines or meetings, sometimes they will mess something up – it’s ok.  As long as there has been a strong foundation of communication throughout the project everything should be alright.  You can always reschedule meetings and make new deadlines; you cannot, however, gain trust or active and willing participation from a client if all you do is send boiler plate emails and not engage the human side of the relationship.