If You Want to Plug Your Product in a Comment, be Honest

I don’t have a fundamental problem with someone mentioning their own product or company in a comment here. If you think your product is the best thing since sliced bread and there is a reasonable connection to the topic covered in the post, why not? if you don’t believe in your product, who will?

What does annoy me is when there is a comment along the lines of “I found this great product…” and when I click through from the commenter’s link, I find that it’s the commenter’s own product. As well as annoying me, that sort of deceptiveness shows that the person has not checked the publicly displayed comments policy here which says I reserve the right to delete comments which I deem to be “…transparent attempts to get traffic without providing any useful commentary”. Even more so when it is not transparent, when it is sneaky.

“Interesting Conversation” by Hugh MacLeod, courtesy of a Creative Commons license

It’s a conversation we want here, not a way of providing anyone who comes along with a free soapbox to harangue us.

Please don’t tell us you “found” or “came across” a product when you are the company owner, or an affiliate, or a sales rep or the partner of one of the aforementioned interested parties.

But let’s say you are honest and upfront and say something like “my product, the XYZ widget, is the best in its class…” then you need to go one step further and add something useful to the conversation, such as why you developed it or what some of the issues are for people looking for that kind of product. In other words, contribute to the conversation. Then I’ll be more inclined to think, “OK, that’s a useful contribution, I’ll approve it”.

I don’t have to agree with you. But I don’t have to clutter the blog with spam either.

For people interested in the topic of comments on blog posts, which is probably most bloggers and also people with corporate responsibility for blog policy, there is an absorbing read to be had with Lorelle Van Fossen’s BlogHerald post The Liz Strauss Comment Counter Plugin Stirs Blog Controversy. She links there to John C. Dvorak’s equally absorbing What’s the value of online comments?

By the time I had read through what these eminent pundits had to say my brain was very stimulated, although frankly I was a tad confused about what would constitute best practice.

So it was somewhat of relief to find cartoonist blogger Dave Walker’s clear, non-nonsense policy on comments, including a handy list of “causes for exclusion”:

I reserve the right not to display comments for any of the following reasons or for any other reason I decide upon:

• The comment contains language I deem inappropriate.
• The comment is nonsensical.
• The comment is expressed in a rude or aggressive tone.
• The comment is posted with the main intention of advertising the author’s own website.
• No genuine e-mail address is given.

Amen to that. And, to be frank, amen to the rider “or for any other reason I decide upon”.

Getting back to where this post started, just be honest. Contribute, don’t spam.

If you had a product and wanted your friends to buy it, would you say, “Erm, I came across this interesting product…” or “Hey, I have this great product for sale”? If you chose the former and they found you out, how good would that be for your friendship?

Lets’ respect the community of readers. Let’s not do what we wouldn’t do with friends.

If I Unsubscribe from Your List Will You Ever Talk to Me Again?

What’s the etiquette of unsubscribing from a friend or colleague’s list?

I have a *lot* of email addresses, some of them belonging more to earlier stages of my business activities but no longer really fitting in with what I do now.

I’d like to close some of them off, especially the ones that have become spam-attractors.

You know, the ones you put as hot-linked addresses on a website before you realized that was a *really* good way to help the spammers? Or that address you *only* used for friends and close business associates but one day, or several times, a friend who did not know better sent one of those alerts for the virus that is about to devour all the hard discs on the planet, and the spammers happily harvested your address and several million others?

Trouble is, as I find each time I start this culling exercise, various addresses I no longer need are the ones which I used to sign up for various newsletters. Or they were on a business card and someone I met at a function assumed that, by giving them my business card, I was asking to be be sent, for the rest of my life, their newsletters that I did not in fact ask for and which I never read.

Now, if the newsletter senders had an up to date system for amending my address, as for example AWeber provides (screenshot above) I could put off the evil day of unsubscribing and maybe offending someone I don’t want to offend and just have a re-direct for those newsletters into a folder which I treat as a specialized junk folder and purge every now and again. I know, inefficient, morally pathetic, stuck at Wimp Junction: but hey, there are just so many decisions you want to make in a given day, aren’t there?

But what I find is that some of the people sending me their newsletter don’t have a way for me to change my address. What they do regularly have are really primitive “systems” for unsubscribing, as in, send us an email requesting that you be unsubscribed. Or just having a “sudden death” unsubscribe option.

Or, as with one just now, having a form for me to fill out with my first and last name and email address (now, which one was I unsubscribing from here?) and then having to click through to two more pages before the transaction was complete.

So what I do, faced with these dilemmas, is to start listing the people I need to contact to get them to change my address. Then, typically, I get bored with that process and tell myself it is not such a big deal to come by now and again and clean out the spam.

But although it’s no biggy, it is an irritant.

And it’s made me conscious of the need to have an easy, painless unsubscribe system for anything I send out. Even good friends and close business colleagues might simply not want to get a newsletter from me and that’s their choice. I don’t want people getting frustrated when they see an email from me. I want them to smile!

I think I would like it if someone could design an unsubscribe system which allowed the person bent upon unsubscribing to check a box for a message to the person who is about to lose a subscriber saying something like:

• I hate to unsubscribe but I need to reorganize all my email and hope to be able to re-subscribe one day
• Sorry I have to unsubscribe, but my doctor says if I want to live longer I have to stop reading all these newsletters and signing up for courses

Or a field where you could create your own excuse.

On second thoughts, just make it a simple, one or two click process to either change the address or unsubscribe. Just the email address. We don’t need first and last names for an email address to be removed and the unsubscribing user knows that. We don’t need to ask irritating questions before we accept the unsubscribe. Make it as painless and friction-free as possible: who knows, some may feel so good about that as to re-subscribe one day.

The AWeber unsubscribe system works well in terms of painlessness and there is some scope to customize the unsubscribe page. I’d like to be able to work out how to make it bit more user-friendly.

There is a page, after you hit the unsubscribe, that asks for comments as to how the list owner could provide better service, but it is not a required field: i.e. the unsubscription does not depend on its being completed.

What’s your tip for painless unsubscribing?  Or do you put it off too?

PS: this post has been submitted to Problogger’s Killer Titles - Group Writing Project [Win a Prize]; check it out

Unique Blog Designs’ 1-Year Anniversary: Prizes to be Won

If there had been a prize for friendliness last year at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, I for one would have found it very difficult to choose a winner, as there was a pervasive atmosphere of friendliness among the exhibitors.

I’ve attended and exhibited in enough trade shows to be able to pick out pretty quickly those who are “being friendly” and those who are just plain friendly, as individuals, as a group. BlogWorld & New Media Expo was awash with the genuinely friendly variety. But without, as I say, wanting to pick winners, I do remember how friendly the people were at the Unique Blog Designs stand and how much I enjoyed chatting with them.

But they had just started, and life and business has a way of being tough, so I was delighted to see that they continued to grow and are now celebrating their first anniversary.

To mark the occasion, they are running the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest

Excellent prizes: Grand Prize an Apple iPod Touch and the new UBD Citrus Theme for your blog: then each of the 3 runner ups get a UBD Citrus theme (choice of three colors).

The requirements to enter are not onerous. By leaving a comment on the blog post about the contest you get one chance. If you write a blog post about the contest and link back to the contest post, you get five entries.

Yes, I think this post qualifies me for five chances to win. But it was nice to pay tribute to these folk anyway.

If you are going to BlogWorld & New Media Expo in September, make sure you say hello to the UBD people.

Business and Branding #4: Online Reputation Management

n the third post in this series on business and branding I shared some thoughts about the concept of “Brand You”. An important part of the process of building your “Brand You” is taking steps to protect the brand and its reputation.

When it comes to talking about the importance of protecting our reputation, I can’t improve on The Bard.

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

William Shakespeare, “Othello”, Act 3 scene 3

Which is why, as individuals, as business owners, we get upset and take action, including legal action, if we feel someone has harmed our personal good name - i.e. our reputation - or that of our business.

Yet I keep meeting otherwise well-informed people who do not seem to be aware that:

• their name (brand) is online
• they need to be active in protecting it in that environment

Some people I speak to about this seem to think they don’t have an identity online. Let alone having any need to take care of their online reputation.

Any of us who have spent any time online, posted a comment on a forum, had an assignment on a website somewhere, been a member of an organizing committee for a community event, or simply had our name on a list which happens to be online, should assume we have an online identity.

You won’t always find it on Google, although it could be there. What is potentially very problematic for a lot of people is that if someone - say, someone you want to do business with - googles your name and comes up with that name but as attached to someone the police are looking for, or adverse comments by someone about you or your business, how would that make you feel?

People who start to think about this but may not know a lot about how the web works, and specifically about how search engines work, may feel there is nothing they can do to remedy the situation.

An example I use frequently to illustrate the potential problems and opportunities surrounding online reputation is the Zoominfo site. It is particularly important for anyone in the job market, or likely to be at any time, to check out their profile on Zoominfo, which is an early port of call for recruiters looking people up online. The info on Zoominfo comes from a couple of sources: a) what its robots find about you, or someone with your name, on the web, and b) what you put in (you can also change info there that is out of date or incorrect). I found I had several “identities” there and was able to sort them out so the ones that were about me were consolidated and I could “disown” the others. I was also able to add a lot of information, so now if anyone searches for me either directly on Zoominfo or on another search engine and the Zoominfo link comes up, the information there is what I want people to see.

There is in fact a lot that people can do. And I would say, should do.

In her post Online Reputation Management a few days ago, Meg Tsiamis wonders why so many companies “do not seem to pay attention to reputation management” and points helpfully to Andy Beal’s excellent Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide, which is still getting favorable comments two and a half years on.

See also:

Business and Branding #1: Built to Last or Built for Now

Business and Branding # 2: Finding What Works

Business and Branding #3: Brand You