Jacquelyn Lynn, Business Writer, Speaker

Travel Tip: Pack a portable power strip with your computer

If you travel by air on business, you've probably spent more time than you want to think about working on your laptop in airports. But what happens when the airport is crowded, every electrical outlet is in use, and your battery runs out of juice?

A portable power strip can solve the problem by letting multiple users plug into the same outlet. The portable models are compact, easy to pack, and run about $20. They also come in handy in hotels, especially older ones with an insufficient number of power outlets. 

Online Reputation Management: Lawsuit Resolution and Business Decisions

I told you about a company that sued me in small claims court for what I wrote on this blog. All of the posts related to this situation are listed under the category of “lawsuit” if you want to read them in chronological order.

I was fortunate to have the services of a great attorney, Dan Perry. From the very beginning he believed, as I did, that if this matter went to trial, I would prevail. However, it would cost me hundreds of dollars and several days of valuable time to travel from Florida to Boston to appear in court.

In an effort to avoid that, we made a business decision. He contacted the company’s attorney (who was not involved in the initial filing of the lawsuit) and made this offer: I would remove any reference to the company by name or description from my blog if they would dismiss the lawsuit.

Emotionally, it was not an easy decision, but it was a sound business decision. Everything I wrote about this company was accurate. If this company was suffering negative consequences, it was because of its own conduct, not because of what I wrote. But I simply did not want to spend the time or money to fight them. So I made a concession to make the issue go away.

I learned a lot from this process and I’ll be sharing those lessons with you in future articles. Stay tuned.

 

Jacquelyn Lynn 

Go Daddy lets you opt-out of on-hold music

This morning I called Go Daddy tech support and had to wait for a few minutes before someone was available to help me. When the phone system gave me my estimated wait time, it then offered me this option to press 1 if I didn’t want to listen to music while I was on hold.

I’m sure Go Daddy isn’t the only company to offer this, but it was the first time I’ve come across it and I thought it was great. It let me leave my phone on speaker and work while I was waiting for the tech to come on the line without being distracted by music.

If your business phone plays on-hold music, consider asking your service provider about this option. Your callers will appreciate it.

Jacquelyn Lynn

Online Reputation Management: I got sued for a blog post

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a company that refused to accept responsibility when one of its representatives stole from a customer. I used the situation, which I learned about from an article by consumer columnist Greg Dawson in the Orlando Sentinel, to offer a few lessons on how a business should respond in a similar situation.

 

A few weeks later, I put up another post about that company. Dawson had reported that the company’s general manager was no longer employed there, and I was going to recognize that the company was taking at least some appropriate action. But before I could write that, Dawson corrected his report: the general manager was not only still there, but the company was gleeful about it. So my post repeated what had been published in the Orlando Sentinel.

 

A year or so after those first two posts went up, the company contacted me and asked me to take the post down because the information wasn’t true. I responded that they were giving me no evidence that it wasn’t true and offered to post their side of the story, but did not take the post down. But I did use the way they attempted to have me remove the post as an example of how not to approach online reputation management in another post.

 

I didn’t hear from this company again until May of 2009, when it sued me in Boston Small Claims Court.

 

Now could be the time for snail mail

A substantial portion of my communication is done electronically through e-mail, texts, blogs, Twitter, websites, etc. It’s fast, convenient, efficient—but you know all that.

 

Even so, since I was a small child, I have loved getting real mail: envelopes and packages delivered to me by the USPS. In the last year, the volume of snail mail arriving at my home and office every day has seriously dwindled.

 

Direct marketers are clearly evaluating the cost/benefit ratio of bulk mail and many are probably purging their lists to reduce costs and better target their prospective customers. That’s just good business and we all applaud it.

 

Because of that, a truly personal letter, a hand-written note, or other targeted communication arriving in the mail has a better chance of getting read now than in recent years. This could be the right time for you to consider the role of traditional mail in your marketing efforts.

 

Jacquelyn Lynn

 

 

Could your e-mail marketing campaign survive an evaluation by Chef Ramsay?

One of the great things about e-mail marketing is that it doesn’t cost a lot, but that’s no excuse for not giving your e-mail marketing campaigns the same amount of care and attention that you would if you were sending out full color brochures by first-class mail.

 

Morgan Stewart’s witty piece, “What Would Chef Ramsay Say?”, is as on target about e-mail marketing as the love-to-hate-him chef is on “Kitchen Nightmares.”

Before you dump those old computers, clear off the hard drives

Maybe you’ve upgraded your equipment or downsized your company—whatever the reason, if you’ve got some old computers, don’t sell, trash, or give them away until you’ve erased the data from your hard drives.

 

“It is fairly easy for someone else to recover files from used hard drives,” said James Wiebe, president/CEO of WiebeTech, a provider of data security and data mobility solutions. “As a test, we bought used drives on eBay and recovered everything from corporate data to email conversations to financial data to legal documents.”

 

WiebeTech has introduced Drive eRazer™, an affordable (prices range from $100 to $200) hardware solution that does not require a computer and can completely remove data from a hard drive without destroying the drive itself.

 

If you shred your paper documents before discarding them (and you should!), you need to “shred” the data on your hard drives before discarding them as well. Wiebe pointed out, “As many people discover too late, trashing a file does not erase it from a hard drive.”

 

If you’re getting rid of old computers, it’s a worthwhile investment to make sure the drives are clean—failing to do so could be a very expensive mistake.

 

Jacquelyn Lynn

Note: This is not a paid endorsement; I have not been compensated by WiebeTech nor have I tried this product. I received a press release and thought the information was worth sharing.

Treat Social Media Like a Cocktail Party

When it comes to marketing, I think David Meerman Scott is a wise -- as in, really smart -- guy. I personally don't participate a lot on the various social networking sites. I have a Facebook page I don't do anything with, and a LinkedIn page that has helped me connect with a lot of colleagues, but I don't use it as much or as profitably as I could -- which is to say, I'm not a social networking expert, especially when it comes to using social networking as a marketing tool.

So don't take my advice, but do consider David's advice when he recommends treating social media like a cocktail party. Essentially, he says, don't do anything on a social media site that you wouldn't do face-to-face with someone over a drink and hors d’oeuvres. Don’t engage in pushy sales tactics. Be polite. Be helpful.

Click to read David’s blog post, “Social media is a cocktail party.”

Jacquelyn Lynn

Another Lesson in Online Reputation Management

Over the last not-quite-two years, I have written three times about a company, using the conduct of its service technician and senior management to illustrate some important customer relations issues.

 

Here's the background:

 

In August 2007, I first wrote about this company and the lessons that both consumers and businesses could learn from the situation that was described in Greg Dawson’s Orlando Sentinel column. Click here to see that post. (All of Dawson's columns referred to here are available in the archives at www.orlandosentinel.com for a small fee)

 

In September 2007, I posted a follow-up to that article. Click here to read that post.

 

Fast-forward to a year later: In August 2008, someone with this company e-mailed me and asked me to take the posts down, claiming the information wasn’t true. I offered to post his response on this blog, but he did not answer me on that. Click here to see the post I put up about that.

 

I would have completely forgotten about this except for the fact that my blog gets comments from people who want to share their experiences with this company. And then on May 11, 2009, I received notice that this company had sued me for slander (note: the correct term would be libel) in Boston. The claim states that I have no proof the incident ever happened and that "the post was removed by the original source due in part that their facts were fraudulent." Well, the "original source" was the Orlando Sentinel and the article wasn't removed due to any error but simply archived as the Sentinel regularly does.

 

When Greg Dawson learned of the suit, he shared the story in his May 24, 2009 column in the Orlando Sentinel, “Business digs itself a deeper hole.”

 

The trial is scheduled for July 20. I’ll keep you posted.

Jacquelyn Lynn

Website Design Tip - What does your site look like on a cell phone?

More and more people are using their cell phones to access the web for more than just e-mail. Have you looked at your website on a cell phone? Is it user-friendly on that small screen?

Pull up your site on a cell phone and look at it from the perspective of someone who has not seen it before and has no idea what it looks like on a desktop or laptop monitor. Does it open quickly? Is the navigation easy to follow? Can the user conveniently find you, contact you, or buy from you? If not, you may want to consider a redesign in the near future.