I don’t mean that writing is not easy a majority of the time. I mean writing a majority of the time is difficult.

Coming into the new year I had all intentions of writing every day. I’ve not done that. But I haven’t given up. I need to get into the habit of writing daily again. I’ll figure that out.

For now, I’ve got nothing, but here’s an image I saw on Google+ today:

This is a story about attempted escape, potential conspiracy, intrigue, and finally freezing, shit-footed justice. Strap in, folks. Grab some popcorn.

Picture the scene. It is Christmas in upstate New York, and I am staying at my parents’ house with my wife Randi and our dog Steve (pictured at top right). My parents have a large black lab named Coal, and he and Steve constantly run around the backyard without incident. But Christmas night was a bit different.

My parents had gone to bed, and I was about to do the same. Randi was on a couch downstairs, and I took the dog out to….you know.

a. The Setup
As I let him out on the porch, he walked down the steps and immediately peed.

b. Making a Break for it
Steven then sprinted to the far right corner of the yard. Originally I thought that he was trying to get rid of some of the ham he’d eaten, but after yelling his name, whistling, and snapping, I realized that poster of Rita Hayworth was part of his escape plan.

As you can see, my parents have a pool, and the area around and leading up to said pool is concrete. Since I was in shorts and a tee shirt, barefoot, and it was almost midnight on Christmas, I ran down the path to see where he was. It’s hard to see in the above picture, but the letter “b” is resting on a fence. When I got to the fence, I could hear his tags jingling, but couldn’t see him. I knew he’d escaped.

I had some choices. I could jump the fence and try to find him, or I could wake Randi up, knowing that he always responds to her voice.

I woke up Randi.

We both ran outside, barefoot, and I pointed her to “c”, a gate on the fence. We both ran to the gate and yelled for Steve, and because it was her yelling, he ran over to us. We apprehended the escapee. But the story isn’t over.

Earlier I mentioned that my parents have a big black lab. Well, big black labs leave very large, um, deposits on a lawn. And they freeze and become very hard. Randi and I ran about 15 yards through a minefield of frozen dog shit in our bare feet to get our stupid escape artist Corgi that night.

We then had to go into the house, stand the bathtub to wash dog shit off of our feet at 12:15 all while being quiet to make sure we didn’t wake my mom who had to work the next morning.

Of course, the dog was smiling the whole time.

After interrogation, we came up with a couple of scenarios to explain the escape:

1. Steve planned to escape and then run away with Randi. See, he was the only one that forbid our wedding, as Steve wanted to marry Randi. In fact, in his Christmas card to Randi, he photoshopped my head out of one of our wedding pictures and added his own:

2. He’d been planning his escape the whole time. The entire time he was outside running around with Coal, he’d been looking for weaknesses in the perimeter fence. Though he’d found the perfect escape route, he wanted to wait for the cover of night to make his move. He knew that his night vision was better than ours, and he took advantage of the mismatch.

3. He saw an animal, and took off after it. Steve firmly believes that if he was off leash, he could catch any squirrel regardless of whether the squirrel was up a tree. This was his big chance, so he had to take it.

I’m not sure what story to believe, but we’ll be sending our reports to the disciplinary committee and he’ll likely spend some time in seg-u.

It’s a fair question.

I have this blog, a bunch of others, and I start with a bang and my momentum fizzles out completely. The conventional wisdom dictates that you should keep a blog tied to a theme. I have a blog about what I do at work at marketingstartups.com. I had another where I wrote with a pseudonym to conceal my identity because of the whole “don’t write anything your future employers might find offensive” school of thought.

Rather than having 5 seldom-updated but perfectly focused blogs, I’m going to make this blog the KFC bowl of blogs. I’m going to toss everything in here and see what happens. What do I have to lose, right?

Over on the CloudLock blog, I’ve posted an announcement about the launch of the Security Policy Engine for Google Docs and Sites. Our intern, Joel Kennedy, created some excellent graphics that do a great job of simply illustrating a complicated concept:

You know you may have a problem when you see something when driving and think “Wow. That’s a good example of search engine optimization.” You are certain that you have a problem when you then take a photo of said location and blog about it.

The photo:

I apologize for the quality of the image. It was rainy, I was using my iPhone and I was in a moving car. Not the optimal conditions.

I saw the location as a web site, and the entrance you see here is their home page. The other entrance is right by the white car you can see underneath the sign. That’s a landing page.

Here’s what we see on the home page:

1. Vegetables Flowers and Plants- This is their page headline, and they’re using an <H1> tag around it.
2. Northshore Flower Exchange- This is their page title and the name of the site
3. Plants and Flowers- This is their subheadline. They believe that the majority of people searching for what they offer use the words “Vegetables flowers & plants”, but know that some people search for just “plants and flowers”, leaving out vegetables all together.

On the landing page they have the same sign as #1. It feels like a landing page, as you can’t actually get into the parking lot there. You have to follow the call to action and drive around to get in. I’m reasonably certain that if they had a third road-facing side, they would have another large sign that says “Plants and Flowers”. You know, for A/B testing purposes.

Way back in January while I had some free time and was contemplating my next job, I decided to start a meetup group. And in contrast to my usual style I decided to give it a name that actually makes sense: The Boston-Area Startup Marketing Group. At the time, I was consulting out of betahouse in Cambridge and I was inspired by all the entrepreneurial energy surrounding me. I was watching insanely talented people building amazing things, and I asked “what’s your number one challenge in turning ____ into the next big thing?”

The answer I heard most: “Nobody knows about it.”

It’s true. Most solo or small team tech entrepreneurs don’t have the time or resources they’d like to devote to marketing and promotion. There just aren’t enough hours in the day or people to do it. Startups with dedicated marketing people are in a better spot, but still face the same problems of time and resource allocation. With thousands of sites to promote a startup online, the following questions arise:

• Which sites are worth the time?
• Where’s my audience?
• What kind of content are they looking for?
• After taking the time to blog, podcast, etc., how do I put it where my prospective users will see it?

With those questions in mind, I decided to present “Getting Your Startup Found Online” as our first meetup. Since the presentation is very tactical and focused on content promotion and light on strategy, I took a step backwards:

Though blogging, podcasting and promotion are fun, they need to take place in the larger context of a marketing plan. Otherwise you’ll drive yourself nuts by just throwing content out there to see what sticks. In our case we started with a list of our main objectives. In short: what is the goal? For example, if you’re a B-to-C startup focused on user acquisition, give yourself a target user number.

After we had solid, actionable objectives, we moved on to the buyer personas. At this point we wanted to really get to know our prospective buyers. We looked into things like:

• Age
• Industry
• Title
• Online behavior
• Goals
• Day-to-day tasks
• Decision-making abilities

Of course, this is different for all startups, but the goal is the same. You want a deep understanding of who your targets are, where they go online and how they make the decision to buy (or join/subscribe/download) what you have to offer.

We then focused on our Company Persona, giving us a clear picture of:

• How we want to be perceived by our customers
• What tone we’ll use
• What colors we’ll use
• How we’ll set ourselves apart from everyone else

The persona exercises then led into our keyword research, which fed into our content plan. And with the majority of our content planned, we moved onto my favorite part: SEO + Promotion or Getting Noticed Online.

Well, you need to start somewhere, and I can’t think of a better place than google, yahoo, crunchbase, killerstartups, vator.tv and the like. These are directories that usually take some time to index your site, but are important sources of residual traffic.

Next, you’ll want to grab some land. We’re talking about twitter accounts, flickr accounts, friendfeed, vimeo, youtube, stumbleupon, delicious….the works. These will be important when it comes to promotion.

Now it’s time to find your audience. Where do they go online? Do they participate in LinkedIn groups? Ning networks? Facebook? Reddit? Forums? Go out there and find out where your target users are hanging out, and find out what they’re talking about. This is NOT an open invitation to spam people. Instead, find out what problems they have. Find out what they’re looking for. Find out how you can help with what you’re going to offer.

Now get out there and create some compelling content! Shoot some video. Get blogging. Fire up a podcast. Start producing content and you’ll start to see what works.

Now that you have a great blog post, video, podcast, etc. it’s time to promote it. Go get a bit.ly URL so you can promote the link on twitter. Bookmark it in delicious and diigo. Add it on stumbleupon. Submit it to reddit and digg….but only in relevant categories.

I must admit, this is the oversimplification of the decade, but you’ll find more information in the video below. The goal of this presentation was to give a quick overview of my workflow when it comes to content creation and promotion. It’s definitely not one-size-fits-all, but it’s close.

If you’re interested in joining our meetup group, you can find out more here.

Here’s the presentation:

So, it’s Friday, and that means it’s been a full work week since matchmine closed up shop. It’s been a crazy week full of talking with some great recruiters, networking with friends, and hearing from some really interesting companies that might have a good opportunity for me. 

As I am physically unable to relax for more than ten minutes at a time, I was psyched to get a couple of really good freelance projects. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done any side work, so I was really excited to get the chance to focus on one small project for a short time. 

I’m really excited to see what next week will bring. I’m hoping to go on a few interviews, and can’t wait to see what’s out there. Now it’s time to write a quick blogstring post on something that’s been floating around in my head over the last few days. 

This morning, NuConomy launched an API-based analytics suite for social media. The product, NuConomy Studio is free to use, and can be used through a WordPress plugin.

Ontop of the usual page views, unique visitors and other basic metrics, NuConomy Studio is measuring Flash, AJAX, and Silverlight applications. Though it’s been a while, I can tell you from personal experience: hacking at javascript code to make Flash-based apps fire page events is a nightmare. Any kind of metrics suite that works natively with web apps is welcomed with open arms.

From their press release:

By tracking engagement and site activity at the individual user level, NuConomy¹s module automatically builds rich behavioral profiles, or interest maps, for each user  such as who is posting comments on bikes or sharing music recommendations with friends. This level of detail gives publishers a deeper understanding of user behavior so they can optimize their sites and marketing messages for different audience segments, even different individuals.

Additionally, NuConomy features a two-way API that dynamically changes sites based on current metrics and insights, including the ability to show ads or push specific content relevant to a user¹s interests.

Free to use, NuConomy¹s web analytics platform gives businesses and bloggers access to advanced data intelligence that was previously limited to large corporations with extensive data analysis resources. Additionally, NuConomy is very easy to implement; generally it takes, at most, a few hours to implement site-wide. And plug-ins for WordPress, Movable Type, Community Server, and dasBlog mean that companies can begin tracking user engagement on these platforms instantly.

I’ve just installed their WordPress plugin, but since I have no data yet, I can’t really tell how good it is. But even without actual data I can say two things:

The Good:

I love the fact that the metrics dashboard is accessed through the blog itself. It’s amazing how much different it feels to have analytics accessible through the WordPress installation. Sure, it’s just an iFrame, but it just feels like an integrated part of the blog software itself.

The Bad:

After an initial inspection, it seems like NuConomy’s product doesn’t have up-to-date metrics information. Looking at the reporting suite at 5:30 PM EST, it says the data was updated 8:00 AM. This could just be a temporary thing, however. Let’s hope so.

All new social networks and community-focused services face the same challenge: attracting a loyal user base. Having the latest and greatest facebook+twitter+flickr+whatever is great, but worthless without an active community of users. While there are many different ways to run a user acquisition campaign, this article will focus specifically on using a contest to attract new users. We’ll look at one example of a contest created to drive user acquisition, and we’ll examine the social media tools used to promote the campaign. Though we’ll focus on a contest, the promotional methods described here can easily be used for any user acquisition campaign.

The Contest

As one of several user acquisition campaigns, my employer, matchmine, launched a weekly sweepstakes. A little background: the company is a media discovery network, helping partners recommend better content to their users based on the users’ media preferences. The contest was created to satisfy two goals: get users to register and send traffic to partner sites.

The Prize: The winner of each week’s sweepstakes is given the choice of either

• Two tickets to the next New England Patriots home game
• A football signed by any New England Patriots player
• A $100 New England Patriots Pro Shop gift certificate

Promotion

After launching the contest on patriots.com, we identified several promotional opportunities to maximize our visibility and conversion rate.

1. Video- We shot a video that summarizes the contest, including how to create accounts on our partner sites. The video not only gave us an opportunity to succinctly explain a complex contest, it was also a great off site marketing tactic. We hosted the video on blip.tv, which is both a destination site and a publishing tool. End users go to to blip.tv to watch video, and publishers get free hosting from blip. Having the video hosted at blip gave us both a free place to host the video and a new audience that would not have been able to see the video if it was hosted in-house.

In the video, the presenter mentions the URL of the contest, and it appears on screen. This way, no matter where the video is viewed, viewers know where to go to sign up for the weekly sweepstakes.

Here’s the video:

2. Refer-A-Friend- Whenever possible, it makes sense to let the community itself expand your user base. In the context of a social network or messaging system, it makes sense for users to want to invite their friends, as they get more out of the service when people they know are there. But in a contest, inviting friends seems counterproductive: why ask your friends to sign up when each friend registration reduces your chance of winning?

We solved that problem with additional entries. Let’s use an example here. We’ll say that Frank signed up for the contest. Wanting to have the best shot at winning, he decided to invite 5 of his friends to sign up. When all 5 signed up, Frank got an additional 5 more entries. By shifting the incentive to invite more people to sign up, we gave all users motivation to promote the contest.

A great example of a social service that does this well is thesixtyone.com, a music discovery site. The site gives users points for actions like listening and rating music, and also gives incentives to invite friends to join.

3. email- Ah yes, email. When a user signs up for the contest, we immediately send a confirmation email, telling them how they can earn additional entry in the contest. Each week, we also send an email announcing the winner and reminding users how to gain additional entries.

4. Friends and Family- Once the contest was launched, the first promotional activity was what we called a “friends and family” round. We encouraged all employees to send a message to their contacts to tell them about the contest. This served dual purposes: First, it gave us a chance to receive feedback from people we know personally. Second, it helped us identify any glitches before promoting to the masses.

5. Twitter- Once we felt comfortable with the way the program was working, we encouraged employees to mention it on twitter, using a shortened URL from bit.ly. Using the bit.ly url, we were able to measure clicks from twitter, along with metrics on retweets and other twitter users using the same link.

6. Facebook- Our company set up a facebook page and group specifically for this purpose. We linked to the contest on both, and encouraged friends of the company to sign up and spread the word.

7. Company Blog- As soon as the contest was launched, I posted on the company blog, giving details on how to win. I also included the embedded video.

8. Bloggers- Finally, given the fact that we’d instituted a refer-a-friend feature, we decided to extend referrals to bloggers. We compiled a list of bloggers focused on the New England Patriots, and sent them a note about the promotion. If they were interested in posting about the contest, we would create a special URL for the blogger. That way, any reader that signed up for the contest as a result of clicking the link in their blog post would give the blogger an additional entry.

All of these promotional techniques can be utilized in any user acquisition program. Whether you have great prizes to attract the masses, or simply have a great product in need of a user base, using these social media tools is a great first step in driving user signups.

Folks, I need your help.

My father is a huge Steelers fan. I do not hold this against him. I got tickets to last year’s Pats vs. Steelers game and brought him with me. We had a great time. This year I couldn’t get tickets, so he went online to try to find tickets.

There was a gentleman on Craig’s List offering seats for face value. My dad contacted him, and was told to send him a money order. Sure, I was extremely suspicious. But after a cursory check on the guy’s email address, I didn’t see anything. He went ahead and sent the money order. You can probably guess how this ends.

About a week later, the guy emails my dad, telling him he hadn’t received the money order. My dad let him know it was sent, and the seller suggested sending another money order.

At this point, my dad sent me the email trail. I looked up the fellow’s name and address (here in MA) and found him to be a known scammer. Someone that sells tickets he does not have.

The guy is calling my father daily, asking for another money order. I told him to wait. I told him he should not immediately confront the scammer, and that he should somehow contact authorities, as this guy is wanted for paypal, ebay, and sports card fraud.

So my question is this, my friends: What should my father do in order to catch this thief? Who should he call?

There are dozens of people out there on forums posting his name and trying to find out how they can catch him. I have the address the money order was sent to, and he will continue to call my dad, albeit from a blocked phone number.

What should we do?

Thank you!