SmashingRed™ Web & Marketing

It’s been obvious that I have been missing in action for three weeks. I have been working on projects, the business and the future of SmashingRed.

In the next few weeks I will be posting more here as well as developing a new home for my thoughts about business, learning to be a true entrepreneur, and the ways that business, life, ideas and creativity correspond, coincide and collide.

The SmashingRed Blog will be taken (read dragged) back to its original purpose, as a medium for ideas about websites, marketing for and about small business.

I guess Michael Gerber has taught me something about focus and concentration. It worked!

Talk to you soon.

Update: I have obviously not kept my word on this one. I have posted a vague hint at what is to come for the SmashingRed Blog which will be in conjunction with the redesign of the SmashingRed website. -J

Author, marketer, and “Agent of Change”, Seth Godin is in Toronto and can’t find his hole — um…er the Ethernet port. We’ll I am sure he has found it by now since he has just placed a challenge on his blog to anyone who can correctly guess the location of the Ethernet port in his room.

By sheer fortune I have been in nearly every hotel room in Toronto as part of my previous life at a consulting firm in TO and noted that many of the hotels place the Ethernet jacks in one of three odd places:

• The side of the hotel room phone,
• the base of the lamp (not in this case) , or
• in the wall behind the desk.

I am going to say that the port is in the side of the room phone on the right. It could conceivably be in the base of the ridiculously large business phone/fax thing but I am confident with my recollection.

Other weird spots I had seen Ethernet ports in hotels are in a wall jack by the bed, in a surface mounted black box on the desk and in an add on box beneath the phone.

BTW Seth this is a great way to get trackbacks to your site. Great motivation and notice how much we’ll do for so little.

Seth Godin is on fire this year. Check out his latest eBook Flipping the Funnel. His announcement post on it explains it better than I could.

Tag four people and spread the love. I was tagged by Julian Rickards.

Four jobs I’ve had in my life

There are actually about twenty. I often say that I have a Chinese Food Menu for a resume. Lots of choice. It is probably more like the list of items on an all-you-can-eat buffet since some of the work that I have done is so unrelated to one another. I have cut down trees for the power company, sold advertising for a magazine, worked as a maintenance person for a country club, a shipping manager for a dental prosthetics lab, and more. I chose the four below based on duration.

• Subway Sandwich Artist (read fast food worker)
• Photo Lab Supervisor
• Executive Assistant for a Consulting Firm
• Motion Picture and Television Sound Recordist

Four movies I can watch over and over

There are actually about a dozen or so movies I have watched and will continue to watch repeatedly including: Citizen Cane, Rear Window and Dog Day Afternoon (I love Sidney Lumet Films –12 Angry Men, Failsafe…). Here are the four unpretentious flicks for my list.

• Die Hard Trilogy (Pure Fun) — One and Three are the best. Unpretentious fun. Alan Rickman is one of the best bad guys ever!
• Raiders of the Lost Ark. I would have said the trilogy but who really watches Temple of Doom. It just plain bites.
• Jaws. I watch this movie at least four times a year. Never get tired of it.
• North By Northwest. Cary Grant and Hitchcock — what more can I say

Four places I have lived

• Ottawa, Ontario (Birth city (Orleans actually))
• Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
• Hamilton, Ontario
• Toronto, Ontario

Four TV shows I love to watch

• Davinci’s City Hall (Formerly Davinci’s Inquest)
• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
• Lost
• Jeopardy

Four places I have been on vacation

• Walt Disney World (in 1986)
• Hunstville / Muskoka Ontario
• Nova Scotia (While Living in Ontario)
• Ontario while living in Nova Scotia

Four of my favorite dishes

• Beef Tenderloin w/ shrimp or scallops smothered in Bearnaise
• Eggs Dostoevsky (Eggs Benedict w/ smoked salmon instead of back bacon)
• Phad Woon Sen: awesome Thai dish from Satay on the Road in Toronto
• Malai Kofta: Paneer in Butter Chicken sauce from Bollywood in Toronto (North York), Ontario

Four websites I visit daily

See Four Bloggers I am Tagging. I don’t spend that much time on other sites any more it is too time consuming.

Four places I would rather be right now

Nowhere. I really like where I am. Maybe in a slightly bigger house though.

Four bloggers I am tagging

Not that any of these guys really need more traffic they are just the only blogs I make it a point to read every day.

• Rajesh Setty
• Seth Godin
• John Jantsch
• Guy Kawasaki

Call me a cheap bastard or an intellectual socialist, but I can’t seem to swallow the idea that I should be paying to read a research paper that was so prominently marketed to news agencies from a university study. After reading Seth’s post the other day on a story about a study entitled, “Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!” I went on a small scale crusade to find out more about the actual study.

There is evidence of reports on the study abound but you would think that a university study would be available to anyone who wanted it for free.

It may be naive of me to think that a Canadian researcher working at a Canadian University (Carleton) would be beholden (to a small extent) to the taxpayer here since universities in Canada are so heavily subsidized by the Government. So why is a study from a Canadian research group available only through a paid subscription to the journal Behaviour & Information Technology, in which it was published or on a per article website for $35USD.

So no luck on open research and I remain empty handed. I guess I will just wait until it falls from the sky.

I was at a meeting with a client this morning and on my way home I felt like having poutine for lunch. I don’t usually eat fast food during the day but the new Harvey’s in town was calling me. Harveys makes the best, most consistent poutine in the country. This is when consistency is good. I know when I travel and visit across Canada, I can have my fries, cheddar curd and gravy exactly the same as I do at home.

A the drive through, I was greeted by someone who was all too cheerful saying, “Hi, Welcome to the Harvey’s /Swiss Chalet drive-through, can I take your order please?” I thought it sounded oddly familiar and it sounded very rehearsed. I then heard a confirmation call from the drive through speaker asking, “That was two poutine, sir? That will be $8.03. Please drive through to the window.” This voice was completely different and it donned on me that the first voice I heard was a prerecorded message, as if I had called their customer service helpline. It made me feel icky and completely depersonalized. I would much rather have a half hearted attempt at a personal greeting from the underpaid teen or poorly educated single parent than a recording at a drive through.

User expectations are a big issue for marketing a company. When I go through a drive through I expect to be greeted by a person — no matter how insincere it may be — a person. Such is the case when in today’s world I call a large corporation, by and large, I will reach an automated attendant. In Canada this is especially true as we always have “press one for English, press 2 for french”. I was pleasantly shocked when I called Capital One about my credit card yesterday and got a person after I entered my card number. This is the exception to the rule and it exceeded my expectations. The automation of the drive through failed to meet my expectations and therefore leaves me wondering do they even care? Are greetings so meaningless they can relegate them to a recording? Are their staff so incompetent that they can’t do it themselves? Are the training manuals so focused on product delivery that they can’t spend a page on making first impressions?

People buy products and services and people sell them in a world where we are all grasping for the remnants of personal contact. In this way, I feel that personal contact indeed trumps consistency.

Seth points us to Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye, a post on a new study that shows that you your website doesn’t have eight, five or even three seconds to wow the visitors to your site, you have about 50 millisececonds.

I guess design and the above-the-fold content better matter.

Venture capitalists don’t usually interest me but I got turned onto Guy Kawasaki after a post by Seth Godin about the fact that the former Apple man and venture capitalist had finally started a blog.

This is way more than a blog. Guy is putting his whole philosophy down there. Each post is an incredibly thoughtful and insightful work. This is right up there with John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing and Rajesh Setty’s Life Beyond Code.

Sounds like Ontario is the likely place to hold a Web Conference — at least for Canadians wanting to meet in the middle. Mr. Kim Siever over at hotpepper.ca mentioned that he has received feedback that the best place for a Canadian Web Dev and Design Conference might be in Southwestern Ontario (The Golden Horseshoe).

I am thinking that we won’t get enough interest to host this for at least 18 months. If designers, developers, and related consultants are out there and want to get things moving, let me know by commenting here or contacting me and spread the word, by posting announcements and links to the Calling All Canucks post to your message boards, forums, and blogs.

BTW: I have a vision that a Canadian Web Conference should include more than programming and design. The web is beyond code and image and so should be this future conference and therefore must include some aspects of marketing, writing, strategization and business.

To all the Canadian developers and designers for the web, I noted a post on [thelist] the mail list of evolt.org wanting to know if their are any Canadian Web Developer/Designer conferences. It seems as if this is an unheard of event. If anyone out there knows of any other event besides Flash In The Can let me know.

If you don’t know of any such events, let me know if you have any interest in a Great White North Web Conference. It could be held anywhere and or we could rotate locations around the country. BTW my own bent is toward standards-based websites using (X)HTML and CSS but XML and other technologies are more than welcome to discuss and suggest a program etc. I really want to push websites as a marketing and sales vehicle as well. This post is a little stream-of-consciousness but I had the impulse to post.