Say their name - it's magical
Say a persons name often in your conversations with them.
I first heard this advise from Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. People love to talk about themselves and they love to hear their name.
It’s almost magical how this has a way of building a trust and a bond with a person, even someone you just met.
I’ve made it a goal over the next few weeks to make this more of a habit.
Instead of say “Hi”, say “Hi John!”
Instead of saying “How is your family?”, say “How is Betty and the kids?” and even name the kids if you know them.
This is such a small subtly but it somehow makes the conversation and the relationship feal more personal.
Human relations 101 in a Web 2.0 world
A little personal interest in your customer goes a long way.
I was on the receiving side of this when I signed up for a trial product the other day. After signing up for a 30 day trial of ZenDesk I shortly received a personalized email from a REAL person. In the email the representative used my name, found my website and commented on it and the services we offer and offered some empathy in regard to the likely problems we are trying to solve with their service.
Hi Jason,
Thanks for checking out Zendesk!
I had a quick glance at your site. Cool web services! I’m sure you’re inundated with tons of questions. I think you can effectively manage all these issues with Zendesk.
I use tons of web services for our business and have done many many trials. Unfortunately this type of response is not common (although it is becoming more so especially with startups like ZenDesk and Freshbooks. This small extra personal communication over email pays huge dividends by
- Make an instant human (personal) connection with the customer.
- Open the door for further contact.
- Give a great first impression of what future customer service is going to be like.
Some enterprise services have sales reps that want to call you and sell you. That is way to pushy. A phone call is much more of an invasion of space than an email.
The best thing about all this is that it is dead easy, takes almost no time and costs nothing. By simply planning some automation and using modern tools, a real person can reply with a touch of personalization like this in 30 seconds.
If you took an extra 5 minutes finding your potential clients website and Googling their name to find out their interests how would it affect your first meeting with them.
Loads – not doubt.
A good Youtube Channel can BE your Marketing
This year I decided to pick magic back up as hobby. In my search for products one store really stuck out and kept coming up to the top in my searches.
Magic Geek has a YouTube Channel that covers a nice demonstration of almost every product they sell. Here are some benefits Magic Geek is gaining by posting their demo videos on YouTube.
Youtube Browsing.
Youtube is highly popular and is the largest bandwidth usage site on the world. People routinely surf videos like they surf channels on TV. Youtube does a very good job of getting you found if someone is looking for your type of content.
Subscriptions.
You can tell that Magic Geek videos are kept up to date and fresh which makes the channel appealing for subscribers to subscribe to. When users subscribe to your channel they get email updates when new videos are released so are constantly returning to your channel.
Google Juice.
Videos (especially Youtube) are hot on Google search. People love video and Google knows this, so relevant videos relating to search terms rise to the top of Google very quickly. As long as your videos lead people back to your website you are gaining a whole other stream of traffic to your site.
Cross Marketing.
Because Magic Geek embeds their videos into each and every product page – not only do visitors get to visually see a demonstration of the product they are interested in but they have a whole new channel to view other products. You see after a Youtube video is complete it shows thumbnails of relative other videos (usually from the same channel.)
Magic Geek not only positions their videos well but you can tell they put a lot of effort into the quality and consistency of each one and have developed a strong brand that is very unique to them. A sort of fun nostalgic feel that is very inviting.
My guess is that the Magic Geek Youtube effort is by far their biggest source of traffic which judging from their Channel stats is pretty impressive.
Uploads: 683
Total Views: 7,631,156
Good job guys and keep up the good work.
How to make $70/hr holding a sign on a street corner
We have all seen the guys on the sidewalk next the road holding those signs, advertising for tax places during tax season or the furniture store "going out of business (for the 5th time)" sale.
Usually these guys are day workers that are paid $7/hr.
Well the guys who started the "Aarrow Advertsing":http://www.aarrowads.com company decided they would take a bottom-of-the-barrel job and turn it into a $70/hr job and even a hot national franchise.
So to those whining about their dead-end job - go make an opportunity for yourself! If these guys can turn sign holding into a hot business, what is your excuse?
Check out their story.
Some more slick moves.
Three neat new features in Drupal 7
Drupal 7 has been in development since February 2008, and it’s finally starting to head towards an actual release. It’s currently in a code freeze, which means they’re no longer adding new features, and instead concentrating on fixing bugs and polishing things up. After that, they should be ready to release!
In the mean time, we thought we’d take a look at the development version of Drupal 7 and highlight some of the new additions (keep in mind this version isn’t for production sites yet, and that some things are likely to change before release).
1. Great usability improvements
Drupal 7 features a menu bar built in, with quick shortcuts for things like creating and finding content (which should have icons eventually). It also has an customizable dashboard feature, which lets you arrange blocks to show the most recent comments, quick links, etc. when you login, kind of like Wordpress.

It also improves the organization of forms – which used to get incredibly long. Now instead of an endless sea of collapsible boxes, there is a set of tabs at the end of the form, letting you set things like revision information, comment settings, urls, etc. It’s also easier to change input formats, now using a drop down box.
2. Less modules to download
Usually whenever you start a new Drupal site, you need to download CCK and Imagecache before doing much of anything. In Drupal 7, they’re built in. You can add a new text field, image field, file field, etc. to a content type right out of the box. Imagecache, renamed Image Styles, is there as well, so you can crop and resize pictures. If you’re planning on using views though, it looks like it’ll still be an extra download.
3. Now with unit testing
You won’t see this feature in the interface, but unit testing is huge leap forward for Drupal’s source code. It now uses the SimpleTest framework to automatically make sure everything is functioning correctly, and that means less bugs. It also means that in the future, Drupal’s developers will be able to make changes more confidently, without having to worry if they’re breaking something.
There’s lots of other improvements, such as the Block configuration page, the improved Help module, and better naming in many places. You can read more about them in the links below.
Other Interesting Drupal 7 Links
Going above and beyond "should" be normal
A couple of weeks ago I was in Peoria (Illinois) and looked for a local place to see if they could fix my exhaust problem. I called a local Midas shop and a guy named Chris answered and was able to help me determine the part I would need and told me to come in.
When I arrived I met the manger at the front desk and told him I was the one who just called. He said, “Oh yeah, Chris said you would be coming in.”
After waiting for a bit Chris came out and told me he could fix the problem. When the work was complete he showed me what he had done and made sure I was satisfied. The manager was helping another customer so Chris then came around the desk and took my payment too.
Surely Chris’s job description wasn’t to answer the telephone and check customers out as well as fix exhausts, but he didn’t care, he saw a need and met it. And he did it with a smile on his face the whole time.
I live an hour away from Peoria but I just may go back to that Midas to get my car worked on again… as long as Chris is there.
How hard can it be to sell bait
Last week I took my family to the lake to go fishing. We stopped by the hut at the dock to see what kind of boats they had to rent and to buy some worms for bait.
There was no one else there but me and the guy manning the place. I asked him about the boats and he rattled off a couple kinds they had without so much as looking me in the eye. He looked like I was bothering him.
So I left. None of the boats where going to work for us and I wasn’t about to buy bait from this guy. There is just no excuse for not making someone feel like they just made your day by talking to you. I don’t care if you are selling bait, boats, or yachts.
My wife asked what happened and I told her the guy didn’t look me in the eye. (She didn’t like it that I left but knew I wasn’t going back.) Luckily the park visitor center had some bait and nice young lady that looked happy to see me.
I keep telling my wife that if this happens again at a drive-up window I’m going to say “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you” and drive off and go to another place across the street.
By the way we didn’t catch any fish that day. Not even a bite.
Must see presentation for entreprenuers
I saw this presentation from David Heinemeier Hansson last year at the 2008 Startup School. Out of all the big names that presented there his was the one that hit home with so many, including me.
The idea was simple. Run your company like a business.
1. Make a product
2. Set a price
3. Make a profit
There are a dozen other gems in this presentation and I would recommend it to anyone interested in starting a WebApp business (or any business for that matter.)
WARNING: Unfortunately David drops the F-bomb several times during the presentation.
The secret to making money online
Activity Module
One of the most important features of a social network is that page that lets you see what people you know are doing. On Facebook, the first page you see when you login is the News Feed – a list of everything that your friends have done recently.
Activity is a Drupal module for creating a page like that. It lets you see when people sign up, make comments, post content, join groups (with Organic Groups), or become friends (with User Relationships).
Once you download the module (along with the required Tokens module, which lets you change the activity messages), enable it and its submodules (comment activity, node activity, etc). You’ll probably want to visit the Drupal permissions page and give authenticated users permission to view activity and comment on it as well.
In order to try it out, logout as admin (Activity doesn’t log any actions by the admin user), login as a regular user, and make some posts and comments. Then you can visit the /activity page to see your activity.
If you don’t want that many activities showing up, you can visit the Activity Settings page (/admin/settings/activity) and disable some types of messages. You can also change their wording to fit with your site better.
Adding User Pictures to the Messages
Adding user pictures to messages is simple. If you haven’t enabled user pictures on the site yet, go to User Settings (/admin/user/settings) and turn them on. Then go to Activity Settings (/admin/settings/activity) for Nodes or Comments to edit the messages. You can now use [author-picture] in the message text to insert the user picture.
Adding the Node Teaser to the Message
For MyFishingFacts, we wanted users to be able to see new content right inside of the activity stream. Since Activity doesn’t provide a way to do this, we re-themed the message in our code, replacing it with the node teaser.
You can modify the messages in your theme’s template.php file by overriding theme_activity. In this example, we’ll check for a user creating a page, load the teaser, and insert it into the message.
<?php
function phptemplate_activity($message, $item) {
// Check if this is a page node being created.
if ($item['type'] 'page' && $item['operation'] 'insert') {
// Load the node
$node = node_load(array('nid' => $item['data']['node-id']));
node_view($node, true, false, false);
// Add the teaser text to the activity message
$message .= '<em>'. $node->teaser .'</em>';
}
return $message;
}
?>Put that in your template.php file, clear the Drupal cache, and node teasers should start showing up in the activity stream when you create a new page.
You can also use this method for things like inserting user pictures from the Content Profile module, or changing the layout of the activities table (using theme_activity_table).
Menu and Cobalt
Developing a Drupal site involves jumping back and forth to alot of different pages, and with the default Garland theme, it can get a little old. That’s why the first thing we do when starting a new site is to install the Admin Menu module.
Admin Menu
The Admin Menu module adds a translucent dropdown menu to the top of the page, allowing you to access any admin link with one click. Its only visible to admin users, and even offers some extra links to flush caches and run updates, under the drupal icon.
Cobalt – Quicksilver for Drupal
Another module that helps with getting around your Drupal site is Cobalt. It’s like Launchy or Quicksilver for Drupal. You just press Ctrl+Space, and start typing the name of the page you want to go to. Cobalt brings up the closest match, and you just hit enter to go to the page.
(Cobalt requires either Firefox 3 or Safari, and Google Gears)
These modules really speed things up when developing or administering a Drupal site. You can download them from Drupal.org at these links:
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