I’m very critical of most commercials. Either someone is screaming at me, talking down to me, or just making someone look like a buffoon to sell stuff. I hate stupid gimmicks, too. But what I do love today, is American Express’s “Don’t Take Chances. Take Charge” commercial.

First of all, it uses visuals in appealing and clever ways. The vignettes are a bit like found art displays; something worth photographing. The images keep you engaged without stunts or buffoonery.  Next, it uses classical music instead of some over-the-top riff. It doesn’t stress you out even as it’s talking about something stressful: if your purchases are broken or stolen. In other words, the music does what it’s supposed to do, put you at ease. It also sells credit in a time of great uncertainty by promising certainty… at least about some things.

(Note, I have no experience with AmEx personally, so this may all be blowing smoke, but it’s at least what they WANT you to believe.)

Lastly, the minute-long spot successfully reinforces the brand and the message. To me, it’s just smart. Therefore, I’m not bored watching it and may want to watch it again the next time it comes on instead of muting and walking away like I usually do during commercial breaks. OK, so I mute it and then go back to whatever I’m doing on my laptop. Whatever.

There is a preconceived notion that because I’m a woman, I must love shoes or shoe shopping, but mostly both. This is not true. I do love awesome shoes. But here’s a little secret: when I get in my car to drive somewhere, I normally take off my shoes because ever since my pregnancy I prefer being barefoot. How’s THAT for stereotypical?

Shoe shopping, though, has always been excruciating for me. It’s not because I couldn’t afford to get all the shoes I wanted. It wasn’t because the shoes I loved were painful to wear (though they often are). It’s because my shoe size is 5.5. Most places don’t carry women’s shoes in anything smaller than a 6. Normally, I walk into a shoe department and just ask if they carry my size before I fall hopelessly in love with some slingback. The typical answer is, “Sorry.” I take one longing look back and sigh before walking away empty handed.

The result of all of this is that I usually end up avoiding shoe shopping until I absolutely must replace the worn out mess. The time has come. I honestly tried to recall the last new pair of shoes I bought, and I really think it’s been over 4 years! Not that I haven’t tried.

I went to DSW on Black Friday, thinking they’d be stocked up. I went straight to the sale section, because that’s organized by size, making it easy to see the measly pickings that might fit me. My size takes up a half a rack. Size 7s, on the other hand, takes up 4 racks. See why I don’t like shoe shopping yet?

I went through most of the store before I noticed something: neon yellow tags on the boxes. Some said “N,” some “11,” and some… “5 1/2.” In NEON! I took another look around. It was true. DSW made it easier for us odd ladies of strange sizes to find what was available in our size. This way, I could just scan for the neon yellow instead of getting disappointed time and again. This made my trip considerably less painful. Dare I say it? It was even easy. I left with 3 new pairs of shoes.

Thank you, DSW, for recognizing what could make shopping frustrating for some and arriving at a solution. That’s how you build customer loyalty. Maybe I’ll become the stereotypical girl and love shoe shopping as much as some people expect me to.

It was recently reported that a restaurant in Southeast PA had patrons arrested when they refused to pay the mandatory 18% gratuity after receiving bad service. That’s a bad business practice in itself, but it actually gets worse.

Upon hearing the news, former patrons and active online contributors went to Yelp.com in droves to give negative reviews of the restaurant. Yelp’s response was to delete over 300 posts. This is a bad idea because those contributors are likely to notice, which they did. They not only reposted negative feedback about the restaurant, but about Yelp’s questionable tactic. Most of the deleted posts complied with Yelp’s terms of service, and so deleting them was nothing more than censorship.

First, this is called the Barbra Streisand Effect because of a particular incident wherin she demanded her home be removed from certain aerial photos available online. The result is that it was repopulated everywhere, causing much more attention to her home than if she’d just left well enough alone. You can no more stop the Internet community than you can stop time (don’t try it).

I guess when you have bad enough judgment to arrest your customers, little will stop you from screwing up social media, too. The best you can do is explain your position and leave it at that. Let the wave come and pass. Something will take our attention tomorrow.

Back in the summer of 2007, the New York Times reported on a study that revealed that obesity is contagious - if your friend becomes obese, you are 57% more likely to become obese yourself. I guess if misery loves company, so does cellulite. If weight gain is social, then is weight loss? And if the web is now social, can losing pounds be?

More dieting sites are now engaged in community building then ever, recognizing that the lonesome journey can be less so if there are others cheering you on. A friend of mine is a case in point. After losing a lot of weight, getting to his lowest number on the scale in his adult life after a prolonged fight with pneumonia, he regained.  But since becoming part of an online program, complete with a coach and others on the same program, he’s… unrecognizable. He’s thoroughly committed to the program and, last time we spoke, just 3 pounds away from his all-time feather-weight.

It just goes to show you that you don’t have to see your friends in person to be friends, as any social networking site’s active participants will attest. This is an example of how the social web can do more than share videos of cats playing the piano. If there’s a common goal in sight - whether it’s losing weight,  being successful at breastfeeding, learning to cook, or building the best lego structure ever - the social web can help people become a better version of themselves. There’s so much “noise” online, it’s easy to sometimes forget that.

What is your site doing to help people help one another? Is there some service you could provide to build that?

I hate Bank of America (BOA). They make it so unpleasant to do any business with them. I used to be a customer, but when I lost my job and money was tight, I found they just wanted to see me in the red. They apply your debits before your credits, and they apply the larger debits first so you may end up having more negative transactions they can charge you for. Then there were the holds on my checks, some longer than 2 weeks - for my paychecks when I did find some work.

The final straw was when I called the branch to address the issue. The bank manager told me that he’d look into the issue and call me back. I asked when I might hear from him. He said within a half hour. He never returned my call.

When I changed banks, not only were the tellers friendly - they were helpful. When I brought in a check that would have a hold, they let me know and informed me how it might be avoided. If I went to the originating bank and got an official check, they would apply the value that night. BOA never disclosed this kind of helpful info. I’m no banker; how am I to know? While with BOA, I was drowning, trying to manage my money when I had no way of knowing when it would be available.

I was all too happy to close my BOA account, but I had to deal with them again today when I got my first paycheck from my new job. I didn’t get direct deposit yet and so needed to deposit a check. My new bank disclosed that it wouldn’t clear right away and advised me to go to BOA and get cash, warning me BOA would likely charge me for cashing it. I reluctantly drove to the nearest branch.

No one acknowledged me when I walked in. When it was finally my turn after a very long wait (and there was only 1 person in front of me in line), I handed them my check and asked for cash. The teller asked for my debit card. I told her I didn’t have a checking account with them anymore, though my husband did. She took my check and did whatever tellers do to process it without saying anything to me.

While she was working away, I checked my pay stub and saw the number I would be expecting: $XX99.20. I decided that it would be easier on both of us if I dug 80 cents from the bottom of my purse to make it a round number. I handed her the change and explained why. She took it without comment.

Right before opening her cash drawer, she informed me that there would be a $6 charge. I asked, “Even if I have a credit account with you?” She looked annoyed and said, “You didn’t tell me that.” She also hadn’t asked and hadn’t told me about the charge until then. She re-did whatever tellers do and silently counted out the cash behind that ridiculously tall wall they have so you can’t see the money. She never counted it out for me. She didn’t give me a transaction receipt. She just put the money in an envelope and handed it to me. “There you are.”

I trusted everything was in order and went back to my bank to make the deposit. I filled out the deposit slip for the nice, round number and took the envelope and deposit slip to the friendly teller who acknowledged me and talked to me like a human being. Then she took the money from the envelope, and two dimes spilled out with the cash. She counted it 4 times in front of me.

I made the observation, “If you were counting out those little bills, don’t you think you would have remembered that I’d handed you the change to round it out just a couple of minutes before?” She chuckled a little and agreed. Before I left, transaction receipt in hand, I helped myself to 2 cookies, one for me and one for my son while another patron helped herself to some fresh coffee.

The lesson is this: BOA gives me attitude, bad service, bad money management, fees for everything, and tellers who can’t add 80 cents to an amount. My bank (Capital Bank) gives me friendly service, assistance when I need it without having to ask for “special treatment,” warm Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, and fresh coffee.  I leave happy, which makes me LOYAL. It frustrates me to no end that BOA is labeled”too big to fail.” They are terrible and deserve to fail.

I don’t usually manage my mail through the webmail client for Road Runner. I have too many email accounts, and I use a central inbox to inport my mail and then handle it through that one client. I don’t use an installed program because my laptops have a tendency to die without notice, which would leave me without my email messages.

Every now and then, I get a notice from NC Road Runner that my inbox has reached its limit, which requires me to go into that email and clean things up. But every time I do, I get further annoyed.

For starters, I only get 100MB of space for my email. A couple of emails from zealous parents who don’t post online and send me a link instead of attaching everything to an email, and that quota is up. That’s not a lot of space. Free email providers give you much more.  Gmail gives me 7384 MB.  I’m not paying them anything.

What’s more, when I do use the web client for NC RR, I get ads. It’s kind of an uspoken agreement in the web world that if you pay for services, you don’t get subjected to ads. It’s either/or. With Time Warner, who owns Road Runner, it’s both. That’s just not cool, TWC.

And don’t even get me started on how your “improvements” to my DVR have made navigating shows more difficult…

But I digress.  Time Warner needs to cough up more disk space for its paying customers, offer more ways to manage your email, power up those services so that it doesn’t take a half hour to clean up my old emails, and take those ads off. I’m paying, after all. Don’t make me decide to take my business elsewhere.

I just went hunting around for a service, and both companies I wanted to contact posted an email address on their sites, but didn’t have a way for me to post my question to them on the sites. No feedback form? What’s up? We’re talking Web 101 here.

To add insult to injury, when I did send an email, one of them sent me back an autoreply with absolutely no content in it. This is disturbing on so many levels. What should happen? Allow me to list.

• There should be a contact form, and it should address the most common reasons someone would contact you and provide a way to provide a message about “none of the above.”
• When that message is sent, it should generate a confirmation that the message was sent and when to reasonably expect some type of response. You get bonus points for giving the sender a cc and additional ways to contact you if the timeframe is not acceptable.
• That customer info should go into some CRM so that you can track where your leads are coming from and how fruitful those leads are.
• The customer should also get a response via the preferred contact method the user indicated in the timeframe that was specified.
• If it’s customer support, the user should be given a way to check on the progress of the request so that they don’t need to send you another.

There are more things you can do, but these are the musts. Note that your business may dictate other musts. Otherwise, you’re not measuring, you’re not communicating, and you’re just plain doing it wrong.

I have quite a lot of experience with content management systems, and I’d like to provide you with a brief overview of some of the things I’ve learned over the years. Here are some pearls of wisdom, in no particular order:

• There is no perfect solution. You may have the chance of creating something that fits your needs perfectly if you build it yourself, but there are so many out there already, there must be one that’s close. And you should honestly settle for that.
• You need to get rid of your bad practices to make it work. A company will want a new CMS because their current processes are too time-consuming. Then, as you do the requirements gathering, they want to keep the processes in place but just use a different system to “try to make it easier.” You are much better off getting in a room, holding a JAD session, and getting down to how you should be doing things.
• Workflow/Smerkflow. When people hear “CMS,” their eyes get glazed, and they start imagining all these great ways they can manage workflow. They often  come up with some very imaginative, complex, and difficult to implement flows from there that they deem absolutely necessary. Humbug! When it comes down to it, most of these companies really only need 1 or 2 steps, and many just end up giving the author publishing rights because it’s too much of a headache to do anything else. If you have content contributors who don’t have superb writing skills for a customer-facing site, add an editor who has mastered spelling and grammar to the workflow and save yourself some embarrassment. If your content contributors are good, just let them publish. If you’re in a regulated industry with a low risk tolerance and are unable to provide your content contributors with adequate training, use a solid workflow that’s enforced. Otherwise, simpler is better.
• Talk to your techies. If you’re looking at a system, make certain it’s a good fit with their capabilities, even if it’s a SaaS CMS. You want to be certain they are on board with the direction you go and that they are comfortable helping out with the implementation and management. This is not the time to dictate to IT.
• Have a plan. This needs to cover all the bases: goals, strategy, measurement, content strategy, etc. You need to know why you’re going with a CMS or why you’re changing to a new one. You need to think about what your user experience will be for people using the system as well as the consumers of your site. You need to make certain that the content your users expect to find on the site is there on the new one. You need to get all your ducks in a row and then do risk management like it’s going out of style.
• When selecting your CMS, remember that you need to find the right solution for your company, not for the mega-conglomerate that you hope to be 10 years from now. Don’t think about how you might use the bells and whistles. Think about what you’ll actually use, and be honest. Overkill is the biggest killer for any CMS implementation.

I admit to watching too much television lately. Thankfully, I usually record shows on DVR and can fast forward through commercial. This is a blessing not because I don’t want to be exposed to marketing messages; it’s because the ads are just annoying and, in the case of the ads I’m going to discuss here, insulting. It just makes me wonder, “What are they thinking?”

The first of the two insulting ad themes these day is of the dufus husband/bachelor. According to Hardee’s, he can’t unwind a twist tie to get to the bread. According to Glade, he can’t figure out how to work an air freshener. He’s always doing the wrong thing and either can’t help it or is unapologetic for being a dufus.

The first thing to notice about this trend is that in nearly all instances, the object of the advertisers disdain is a white man. I note this, not because I want to get into a political debate on a touchy subject, but just to bring up the point that it’s only acceptable to make fun of this demographic any more, political correctness as it is. If you were to use any other group as the butt of the joke, it simply wouldn’t be allowed. The fact that this is so should send up a red flag for an advertiser.

The second insulting ad is a bit less obvious. There is a trend in advertising to sell things to mothers by promoting this idea that if you buy the advertised product, you won’t be a complete failure as a mother, you won’t be despised by your children, and may even be (gasp!) appreciated. How this really misses the mark is by being so patronizing and exploiting a mom’s fears instead of her hopes. I’m a big fan of appealing to the modern mom by telling her how the purchase will make her life easier, not how it will make her less embarrassing to her teenage offspring. Totino’s tells mom’s her son and friends will stand on the couch and sing her praises (while still not setting down the game controllers). Most kid products end with the child saying, “Thanks, Mom,” with the implied “… for not sucking,” implied by her expression of pride and relief.

These two approaches also relate, because all too often, the not-stupid and adequate mother comes to the rescue of the bumbling husband, as in the previously mentioned Glade commercial. The wife is condescending, superior, and adept.

Something I’d like to see:  a man being adept at doing the laundry. A woman being praised at work for doing a job well. A child being helped by his father. We marketers need to think about the world that the consumer wants, not necessarily the fears that sometimes paralyze us or the easy jokes to make us feel better about ourselves. When advertising does a better job about talking about a better world, it’s certainly more suitable for a world in recession and looking for some reason to be optimistic. And maybe consumers would be less jaded about advertising to begin with and less likely to fast forward.

I got into a completely unintentional debate with someone in a LinkedIn group discussion. I prefer to avoid confrontation, but I did respectfully disagree with someone. Here are the gritty details.

Someone posted to an e-business group a post about web design vs. SEO. I thought that the poster had missed the point. Design ultimately has little to do with SEO (or doesn’t have to), it’s how the page is put together and what the content is. Whether a design is original or out of the box or whatnot does not have the biggest impact on SEO. The role of design is to brand, to provide usability, and to appeal to your market (among other things, but that’s a discussion for another time).

The first comment was from an advertising and marketing guy who stated that a site is just an electronic form of a sales brochure and that you’re after sales leads for a sales person to close and nothing more.

I added the following comment:

Well, Frank, with all due respect, I have to disagree. A website should not be a brochure. It should have strong call to action. Getting a sales lead from a website, depending on your business, is the same as making a sale online, so a site does do sales work, and should be doing sales work. Appropriately, mostinspired.com had the following on its blog post today:

“The branding and image of a company is extremely important, because ultimately a good image leads to more sales – period. Psychology dictates that a person is more likely to buy a product/service if they have an emotional attachment (which can be achieved visually) to that product or service in the way it is presented. In basic terms, if a visitor “likes” your website they’re more inclined to buy something from it. The way you can build an emotional attachment is through design aesthetics which create a feel of quality or affordability (dependent on which image you’re going for).”

As far as web design impacting SEO, design is not what impacts SEO, it’s the code and content. Best practices are to keep design and content separate. If your code is a mess, whether it’s from a template you bought, one that came standard with your CMS, or one that your designer created, it’s all the same to search engines. Clean code, effective use of CSS, and good content and metadata are what makes a site search engine friendly. It’s all in the implementation. That said, design should reflect your brand and be usable, making a custom design the much more likely choice.

Frank didn’t like my reply. His next one started with something like, “I have no idea what SEO is…nor do I care what html or dozens of other acronyms mean. My focus is on generating sales leads that a salesman can close.” He went on to say that web designers are no different than printers (I suppose interaction design experience notwithstanding).

Frank’s error is in making a generalization in the reason a site exists in the first place. The GOAL. When I start any project, I make certain the goal is defined. How else do you know when you’ve succeeded? The goal of a site may be to generate sales leads, but it might also be to provide a means to actually close sales, let people buy plane tickets, chat with friends, play a game, learn something new, promote a cause, or any other number of things. For every human interest or endeavor, there is a web site. There are even sites dedicated to anti-technology groups.

And let us not forget the most lucrative online business. There is not usually a person closing sales leads on porn sites (a business Frank brought up, by the way). The popularity is partly due to the fact that you don’t have to talk to a sales person to do business. Just a connection and a credit card. Obviously, the purpose in all of these can’t possibly be to generate leads. So many businesses now try to prevent users from calling up or try to prevent the need for a real person to follow up; it’s more cost-efficient to close those sales online.

While it did prove interesting to argue with someone online, it did make me realize that tunnel vision affects even the most seasoned among us. And it does make me wonder why someone who doesn’t know what SEO means is on an e-business group…