The Warrior Dash looks like a very cool race.  A bunch of my friends ran it last year and had a great time, so I signed up as soon as I could this year.  I’m very excited about the race, but I’m very disappointed in how they manage their Twitter account; all talking, zero listening.

On July 13, they tweeted that registration was now open for the “Southeast” race next May.  They have 3300+ followers, over 800 tweets, and seem to use TweetDeck to handle most of it (indicating that they’re likely somewhat Twitter-savvy).

In the five days since that post, here are a couple of the questions that people directed to @WarriorDash:

• soleoblues @WarriorDash — Is your registration site experiencing issues? Friend and I tried to sign up earlier today and kept getting error messages. (link)
• JMAC1775 @WarriorDash any swimming involved in Mountain City, GA event? (link)

Beyond that, a few others asked questions of them but didn’t use the @ correctly.  A simple search would pull these in (which is a breeze in TweetDeck).  Here’s an example:

• marathonjohn Dear Warrior Dash, I’m trying to register for you, but your website won’t let me. Boo and/or hiss. Regards, jrs. (link)

How many did the folks at Warrior Dash respond to? Zero.  This isn’t a cheap race either ($40+ per person), so each tweet that helped these users would be worth around $40 to the company.  Want to earn $40/tweet? Apparently they don’t.

Going beyond those tweets, there are many others that are opening contemplating the race (“should I do it?”).  Jumping into those conversations should be a no-brainer as well.  They might not sign up, but being easily available to answer their questions would probably help quite a lot.

Keep in mind that these examples are just for the past five days.  Suppose that with proper support on Twitter, they could have gotten one extra sign-up per day; that seems quite reasonable, if not downright simple.  That’s $40/day in extra revenue, or over $14,000/year. Find a part-timer to work 5-10 hours a week answering Tweets — they’ll make some money for their work, and the organization will still come out thousands of dollars to the positive.

If you’re on Twitter, listen and respond; it’s not just a bullhorn.

Warrior Dash is a cool race, but needs to listen better is a post from: MickMel

I’m obviously a big proponent of technical automation — I live much of my life by centering it around online tools.  However, I’ve recently encountered two companies that have taken it much too far:

Jim Tidwell Ford

The first is Jim Tidwell Ford.  We were looking for a new car so we filled out the form on their site.  Here’s what followed:

• Justin sent me a generic email, asking what I needed.
• I replied to Justin (we’re looking at xx model, have xx to trade in, etc), but never heard from him again.
• Later, Chris sent me a 90%-generic email (you could see the font changes where he cut-and-pasted).  We went back and forth a few times and he was fairly helpful.  We even set an appointment to see a salesperson (Anthony) in a few days.
• Then I got call from Kevin, asking what I needed.  I didn’t answer, so he sent an equally generic email.
• Next, I got an email from Shawn (but it came from the email address that Chris was using), asking how everything was going.
• That’s five different contacts, with emails from three different domain names, none of which were “JimTidwellFord.com”.

At that point, I canceled the appointment.  We were looking at a few dealerships, and ended up with Wade Ford (horrible website, but great people), whom we’ve used before and we’re quite pleased with.

I emailed all of the people that had been in contact with me to tell them what a mess it was, and I walked them through step-by-step what had happened..  I also mentioned that they might want to work on their website, as it was stuffed with keywords (apparently for SEO), but missed some very basic SEO techniques (H1 tags, canonicalization, etc).

Someone later called to apologize, and was amazed that I wasn’t using them “because of their website”.  I told them the website advice was free, and I wasn’t using them because they can’t get their act together even a little bit.

After all of that, another guy called asking if he could help us with our purchase.  Ugh.

We had also put in a query with Team Ford, and they sent us an email that started with:

“I regret that I’ve been unable to reach you at 770-xxx-xxxx (our actual number was in there). I’m ready to discuss the pricing on the 2010 Ford Trks Explorer 2WD that you inquired about…”

I quickly told them to get lost.  Thanks for asking about the 2010 Ford Trks Explorer 2WD, though!  Over-automated, perhaps?

Sears

Sears was just as bad, but for different reasons.  We recently went in the store and purchased a new washer and dryer.  Our salesman was great, but unfortunately the next delivery date was nearly three weeks away.  It wasn’t his fault and our old machines were still clunking along, so we went for it.

A few days before the scheduled due date we got a robo call from Sears to tell us that they’d be calling the night before our delivery (between 6-9, I think) to tell us our delivery window.  Ok.

The night before our delivery they never called.  I finally called around 11pm to get the window, and it was a bad time for us.  Neither of us could be home for the entire time (12-2 or something), so I connected to a rep to reschedule.  She set it for two days out, and requested an afternoon delivery.  With that in mind, I moved my afternoon appointments to the morning so I could be ready.

The night before, they again failed to call.  I called in around midnight and got the window: 9-11am.  Uh-oh, we requested afternoon.  So, I connected to a rep, who could do nothing but reschedule again and cross her fingers.  I asked for her supervisor and was quickly kicked back out to the phone tree; I guess she didn’t want me to talk to her boss.  I tried going through again, but got nowhere with the next guy either.

So, I shifted things around so I could be home between 9-11.  Fortunately, they arrived on time and did a good enough job.  They switched the hot/cold lines (which had us confused for a few days — why was the water never cold?), but we eventually worked it out.  A manager later called to apologize, but admitted that the same situation would likely happen the next time we ordered from Sears, because “that’s how it works”.  Pity.

Their system is broken, they admit that it’s broken, and they have no plans to fix it. I like Sears well enough, but I doubt we’ll buy another appliance from them.

Where’s the personal service? (I’m talking to you, Sears and Jim Tidwell Ford) is a post from: MickMel

Our recent trip to Disney World was great — we had a blast!  However, a few things struck me as very technologically inferior and I thought I’d share them here.

First, though, I’ll touch on what they did right. The card they give you when you check-in is amazing.  This single card allows you to:

• Open the gates to get into your resort.
• Open your room door.
• Access the parks.
• Charge food to your meal plan.
• Charge food/gifts to your room.

If you’ve ever worked in a large organization, you probably have some idea how difficult it can be to combine systems.  They’ve managed to combine hundreds of different systems to all talk together and work with a single card.  It works very well and is quite impressive.

Now for the bad…

It’s really not that bad, but these things bugged me:

• No Wifi: Our resort (“Port Orleans: Riverside”) was very nice, but didn’t have wifi. Really?  No wifi in 2009? They had “high speed internet” available, but it was via ethernet.  The port was “conveniently located” on the opposite side of the room from the table, and they wanted $9.95/day for it.  Awful.  Fortunately, AT&T had excellent 3G coverage there and I did well with my wireless card and Cradlepoint.
• No GPS buses: With all of the Google Earth work I do (site, blog), I’m constantly seeing new apps and mashups that show live bus locations for various cities.  Given the complex network of bus routes around Disney, I was sure they’d have something.  Nada.  The buses themselves worked well enough, but we often waited 15-30 minutes for a bus that was going to the correct destination.  Having a way to check on that bus ahead of time would have been very useful.
• IE6 recommended: Disney’s “PhotoPass” card is the one thing that’s not tied to your main Disney card.  I’d expect they’ll fix that before too long.  In the meantime, it’s a separate card you need to carry around and hand to Disney photographers.  They take your picture, then you can log into the PhotoPass site to view them later in the day.  It’s really a pretty nice system.  However, if you try to access the site using Google Chrome, they kindly suggest you use Internet Explorer 6 (among others).  It also recommends “Windows 98, 2000 or XP”.  I guess Vista and 7 are out of the question, huh?  The site works fine in most browsers, aside from being a bit slow.  I just thought the warning message was pretty funny.

All in all, it was a fun trip.  I don’t expect the GPS-enabled buses to roll out anytime soon, but I sure hope they have wifi next time…

Disney’s technology was surprisingly lacking is a post from: MickMel

Just about exactly a month ago, I went out and purchased an AT&T Microcell.  AT&T reception in our house is awful, and I’m not in a position to switch to Verizon.  Therefore, the Microcell seemed like a good choice.

If you’re familiar with the Microcell concept, it’s a small device that uses your internet connection and essentially creates a cell tower in your house.  I set it up in our office and now we have full 3G bars through the entire house!  My wife and I both have iPhones, and friends have used various other 3G phones.  They all work very well with the Microcell. You can read more about it on AT&T’s site.

Cost: $149 to buy the unit.  If you want, you can sign a contract for $14.95 month for an individual ($29.99 for a family plan) and minutes you use via the Microcell don’t count toward your monthly minute caps.  It’s a neat idea, but we’re always under our minutes anyhow so we didn’t do it.  $149 and we were out the door.

Installation: Simple, but buggy.  It’s not hard to set up, but you need to wait 90 minutes for it “configure itself”.  After a few hours it was still failing so I had to call AT&T.  There’s a GPS inside the Microcell so they can make sure you only use it from your house.  Somehow the coordinates they thought I should have didn’t match with the Microcell, so it would never connect.  Once they fixed it over the phone it worked great.

Adding Users: For a person to be able to use it, you need to add their number to the system.  It’s easy to add one, but you’re limited to 10.  I’d like to just add all of my AT&T friends and be done with it, so when they come over they’ll get full bars.  Sadly, I need to swap them out from time to time.  Seems pretty silly to have to do that.  The idea behind this is to prevent your neighbors from leeching your signal, which makes sense.  Still, why a limit of just 10?  Also, it’s worth mentioning that only four calls can be made simultaneously on the device.  I doubt that’ll ever be a problem for us.

Issues: AT&T brags about a seamless hand-off if you leave your house mid-call.  It’ll transfer your call from the Microcell to the nearest tower without a hiccup.  That may be true, but our data connection gets messed up whenever we leave the house.  It’s a few minutes (or a reboot) before data will work again.  Kind of a pain.

Bottom Line: If you have AT&T cell phones in your house and have bad reception, get a Microcell!  It’s a shame that you need one, but it does the job.  As a friend said: “You need to switch to Verizon. I don’t need anything special from them to get cell reception in my house.”  It’s true.  I hate that I had to pay AT&T $150 to fix their pathetic network, but now I get great reception with my phone and I’m happy I did it.

Review of the AT&T Microcell is a post from: MickMel

We recently got a puppy for our girls, and so we’ve been spending some time at PetSmart.  I’m not overly familiar with the layout of the store, and it’s a big place, so signage is important.  PetSmart fails badly.

They get the big layout right — large sections, color coded by pet, so you know where to go first.  Good start.  I see the giant green “DOG” sign and head that way.  Once I’m in there, I see a bunch of aisles with green signs, so I start looking for the one that would have something to do with training pads for the puppy to pee on.  The end caps all have nice large signs that say “dog”.  All of them.  There’s probably 20 aisles of dog stuff, with signs on both ends, so that’s 40 “dog” signs and nothing that really helps.  Here’s a pic I grabbed:

If you look down the aisle, they have a few signs that kind of stick out, but they don’t help very much.  I’m already in the very clearly defined “dog” section, so why not use those endcaps to give more detailed information.  I’m thinking supermarket style would work best, with a short list of the main items in that aisle (“food”, “toys”, “leashes”, etc).

All in all, this seemed very poorly thought out.

PetSmart’s signage isn’t very smart is a post from: MickMel

Snip-its is a cute place to take a young child for a haircut.  They have lots of bright furniture, TV screens, games, etc.  However, the store (and the entire company) seems to be falling apart quickly.

It started when we pulled up their website.  Are those AdSense ads on the bottom?  I certainly have no problem with a site using them, but this just seems tacky and desperate for a consumer business site.  Still, no biggie.

We arrived, and found the TV broken, just like it’s been for the last year or so.  Lovely.

Not exactly the pretty happy-land they show on their site:

Still, that’s not the point of this post.  What shocked me was the number of signs around the store that said  ”DO NOT” do various things like play with toys, climb on the chairs, touch the giant red tree, etc — things that you’d expect all of your “customers” to try and do!  Apparently the stores were designed very poorly or something, because this apparently is a huge problem.  I’m quite sure Seth Godin‘s head would have exploded in a place like this. Here’s a sampling of some of the signs.  Most were repeated all throughout the store — I was trying not to make a scene while taking the pictures, so I only grabbed a few:

It was staggering. The store was littered with these signs.   This last one isn’t too bad, but by the time we left I was sick of seeing lists of what we couldn’t do, and this stuck out more than usual:

Wow.  It was amazing.  I’ve seen examples of stores with long “do not” lists before, but I’ve never witnessed one this bad.  What’s the worst that you’ve seen recently?

Snip-its forgot who their target audience is is a post from: MickMel

It’s a fairly common thing to protect your photos from being hotlinked — shown on another site but still hosted on yours.  Bandwidth costs money, and people don’t like to have their hosting abused like that.

A common solution is to configure the server to show the correct image when people are on your site, but show a different image if it’s being shown elsewhere.  The “other” image is typically a message along the lines of “this image was stolen from mysite.com”.

The NHL Officials apparently are trying to be proactive and prevent that from happening with the photos they’ve posted of the league officials.  Unfortunately, they’ve neglected to include their own site on the “safe” list if people forget to use the www prefix.

Try it for yourself:

Featured Officials — http://www.nhlofficials.com/featured_officials.asp
Featured Officials with “copyrighted image” — http://nhlofficials.com/featured_officials.asp

This leads to two quick points:

1 –Make sure to use proper canonicalization. It’s a big word, but easy to implement.  Not only will it help avoid situations like this, it’ll be a small boost to your SEO.  The NHL Officials should be doing this already, but they’re obviously not.

2 — Be careful how you protect your photos. For tips on how to do it, just search Google for “hotlink protection” and you’ll find plenty of tutorials.

NHL Officials protect their photos from…themselves. is a post from: MickMel

Just thought I’d post a bit about Cool Ray, an Atlanta-based heating & air company.  You can read the full story over on my SEO blog, but I thought I’d summarize it here.

• I found them via Twitter
• The answered the phone quickly
• They could come out the same day
• They arrived on time
• They did great work
• They were polite
• They had fair prices

Nothing extraordinary — just solid from start to finish.  I bash on companies quite a bit on here, so I thought I’d toss this one out there to be nice.

The little things can add up is a post from: MickMel

We go to the Atlanta Zoo quite a bit — I’d say 8-10 times/year.  We have a season pass so that makes it quite affordable, and the girls have a good time.

I recently got a new GPS, so I thought I’d plug the zoo address in there.  I fired up my iPhone, typed in their URL and got this:

Ahh, so pretty.  100% flash.  Done.  I ended up just waiting for the Garmin to find it though it’s POI database (sloooow, but effective).

The sad thing is, the site isn’t 100% flash.  They’ve just got some weird flash-detect script that means that the Flash-less among us (like iPhones) are DOA.  Stupid.

They’ve got a few other problems as well:

• Zoo News, which lists a variety of zoo-related news items, doesn’t have an RSS feed?  Why not?  If I came to the site and cared enough to click on the news, I might actually want to keep up with it.  Why not let me?  Heck, just make it a blog and you’ll get many more benefits as well (ping new entries, etc).  Also, “Zoo News” isn’t clickable from the home page.  Weird.
• The Panda Cam page, arguably the only useful page after directions, hours and cost, “will go dark at 5 p.m. on December 31, 2008“.  Hurry!
• “Best viewed with Internet Explorer at 1024×768, Windows 2000+, Mac OSX, Flash 6 or above”.  Where was I that I saw a bunch of sites with instructions like that?  Oh yeah, 1998.
• The “Press Room” link at the top of the site is broken when clicked from a variety of pages (“Calendar”, “Careers”, etc).
• The site doesn’t canonicalize properly (force www or non-www into the URL).  Most small sites don’t, but it’s just kinda sloppy.

Don’t get me wrong — the zoo is great.  We had a wonderful time there today.  Too bad their site is such a mess.

Zoo Atlanta: Fix your site (in a number of ways) is a post from: MickMel

I was flipping through a “Choice Savings” booklet that came in the mail.  You know, the little half-sheet sized glossy-covered coupon book.

While going through it, I found an ad for “Frankie’s”, a local italian restaurant.  We’ve been there before and it’s pretty decent, but the map really caught my eye.   They didn’t screw it up in any major way, but the fact that they were able to get three things wrong in only nine words was quite impressive!

• Winn Dixie has been closed for years. I’d say it’s been gone for 6-8 years now.  It was empty for a while and now it’s a gym.  Why is that still on the map?
• “Quick Trip” is spelled wrong.  It should be “Quik Trip”.
• It’s not “Old Canton Hwy“, it’s just “Old Canton Road”.  I checked on Google Maps to verify.

If you’re going to build a map with so little though behind it, why even use it?  What does this sloppiness say about the rest of your business?

Frankie’s doesn’t know it’s own area is a post from: MickMel