I Wish Smarter Meetings Were the “PowerPoint Killer,” Not Google Presentations (Presently)

Ideas, Improving Work

Google’s Expected to roll out their “PowerPoint” killer soon, if not today. Even though I was one of the engineers on Harvard Graphics (PowerPoint was called the “Harvard Graphics Killer”) I am really a advocate leaving slide shows out of meetings. It’s far too easy to create slides. You need people staring at you at a table giving you feedback with their body language, good and bad. You need to know that you got through to them. Will Google’s “PowerPoint” just make more awful presentations for us all to sit through?

Managed Rights Media & User Created Content- Birth of a Litigation Underground?

Ideas, Web Site Advice2 Comments

It’s the era of user-created content. Is there a minefield being laid by more and more sophisticated crawling tools employed by the stock agencies, the increase in user-created media, and the pinch felt by artists as microstock and low-cost stock shops grow. For those of us managing dozens or even hundreds of sites, it is very, very easy for an unauthorized image or illustration to make its way into a website. And then the fur will fly.

Microsoft Adcenter follows Google’s Lead in Optimizing Campaigns for “free.”

Optimization

It seems everyone’s bending over backwards to optimize my pay-per-click campaigns for free these days. Google did it a couple of weeks ago, and now Microsoft Adcenter has chimed in. Can the PPC campaigns really offer good value to customers without conflict-of-interest becoming a problem? Or is it a “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” issue?

Abandonment: Leaving Live Customers for Phone Calls Makes ZERO Sense

RANT!

Retail stores don’t seem to realize the importance of customer touch points. That phone call ringing in the background is not as important as customers already in the building. If that phone rings a few times, both the receptionist and the salespeople need to have confidence it will then ring to someone else for handling or to a well designed voice mail solution. Leaving a customer during the sales process is simply throwing away the entire process people have worked hard on up to that point.

SEO Spam Deconstructed

RANT!, Web Site Advice

It would seem ludicrous to even consider SEO services that send garbage SPAM, but amazingly I talk to people at least once per week who have “gave them a shot” because it “surely can’t hurt anything.” In fact, it can hurt a LOT of things. Here’s a deconstruction of the spam itself.