Chaotic Neutrality

Earlier today, Apple announced its big plans for the iPhone which include an Over the Air (OTA) Application Store and full on Enterprise support.

Since Apple has already quickly grabbed 28% of the smart phone market (compared to 41% for Research in Motion’s Blackberry line), it seems that the upcoming 2.0 enhancements will allow the iPhone to vault into the #1 spot in the mobile smart phone arena.

Honestly, this is the day that I have been waiting for since I purchased my iPhone. Sure, the roll out is “a few months” away, but the details have been released and the SDK is available for download. This is a great day for iPhone owners and a scary day for RIM (stocks down $2.75 for the day currently. Related? You tell me!).

If nothing else, iPhone 2.0 will empower current owners with an impressive array of applications and give the ability for business / enterprise support. But, in reality, it will also launch the smart phone industry into bigger and better places and RIM (and other competitors) will be forced to be more innovative as well. A win-win situation!

The iPhone SDK will lead to:

• Mobile Games
• Powerful applications (AIM, IRC, Money Management… the sky is the limit!)
• Easy Updates through the App Download Store

The iPhone Enterprise enhancement promise support for the following:

• Push email
• Push contacts
• Push calendar
• Global Address List
• Certificates and Identities
• WPA2/802.1x
• Enforced security policies
• More VPN protocols
• Device configuration
• Remote wipe

 Email This Post

 Print This Post

Background
I was laid off from my full time position as Internet Marketing Manager at MKTG Services towards the end of last year. Fortunately, I was able to jump right back into the saddle as I quickly hooked up with a past colleague and began working on a freelance / consulting basis with them.

In some ways, I have enjoyed the freedom of being unencumbered by a full time position. It is easy to become accustomed to setting your own hours and own pay rate. However, I have come to learn that being self employed can also be more stressful and more ‘work’ than a full time position, also.

Here is a quick list and breakdown of my own personal pros and cons of this lifestyle and work environment:

Pros of Self Employment

• Setting Your Own Schedule — You have a great amount of control over your schedule and your availability. As long as you meet your deadlines, you can do your work during any period that works best for you (early morning, late night, in between episodes of Law & Order on A&E).
• Higher Hourly Rates &mdash Since you are not receiving the package of benefits a full time job would provide for you, you should generally be able to command a much higher hourly rate for compensation purposes. Some general rules of thumb that I have read suggest taking the yearly salary that you would be paid for a full time position, divide by 2,000, and then multiply that by 30-40% as a starting point for your hourly charges. Depending on the market, your skills, and your clients, you can well charge more (or sometimes less). Do your research and don’t cut yourself short.
• Control Over Clients / Projects That You Work On — Since you are in charge (usually), you can choose the projects and clients that are best for you. This could be tough when you are first starting out and trying to build your client base, but you still have the final choice on whether to take on a specific project/client.
• Managing Your Own Comfort Level — You can overwork (or underwork) yourself if you so choose. Just because a normal business day has 8 hours in it, this doesn’t mean you are constrained to that schedule. You can work and bill for however much time per day you (and your clients) are comfortable with.

Cons of Self Employment

• Less Stability — Until you build your client base, you will likely see an instability and fluctuation in the amount of hours that you are working per week. After you have built your client base, it is still possible that you lose a big client and have an increase in instability during certain periods.
• No Benefits — This is a big one. You don’t receive health insurance, paid time off, paid holidays, profit sharing, bonuses, 401k plans, or any of those other perks that come with a full time position. This is why you need to build the cost of these benefits into your hourly rate. You need to be able to charge a rate that will allow you to cover your expenses for these benefits and still make a profit.
• Self Employment Tax — Being self employed means that you actually pay an additional 7.65% during tax time for your Social Security and Medicare withholdings. If you are employed in a full time position, you pay 7.65% and the company covers the other 7.65% of these withholdings. This is another piece of the ‘expense’ puzzle that your hourly rate needs to cover.
• Taxes Are More Annoying — In general, the whole tax process is slightly more annoying.
  • 1099-MISC — You will receive 1099-MISC tax documents from all of your clients (if you earned over $600 with them) that document your earnings. In my case, I did not receive them until I requested them from my clients.
  • Business Expenses — It is possible to lower your tax burden if you had expenses related to your business. This requires solid record keeping and itemization for all of these expenses. It’s just another piece of the puzzle that adds to the complexity and annoyance of the whole process.
  • Record Keeping — You don’t have an accounting or human resources department at your disposal, so you need to be the keeper of all the records.
  • Federal and State Taxes — It is likely that you will not have any tax withholdings from your pay checks. This means that at tax time, you will have to pay all of those taxes that would normally be deducted from your full time check. You will need to plan for this and not let this take you by surprise when the time comes to pay the government (Setting up a specific bank account to hold your tax withholdings would be a wise step.) The following year, you may be able to pay Estimated Taxes throughout the year to make this easier. When tax season comes, you will have to remedy your Estimated Tax payments with your actual earnings and see where you end up. Good times!
• Always Selling Your Services — Since you live and die by your clients and your projects, you need to put on your salesperson hat and always be looking for ways to expand your business with a current client or find new business with other clients. The whole constant selling and constant battle for new business was definitely a piece that I did not enjoy dealing with!
• No Safety Net — If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. If your computer breaks, you have to buy a new. There is nothing to fall back on here. You either land clients and find new projects or you are going to be in trouble. In a full time position, there is a whole support structure built around you.

Verdict
All in all, I have enjoyed my experiences and the inherent flexibility of being self employed. I have also come to learn more about myself during this period and have reached the ultimate conclusion that this is not the right place for me to be at this point in my career.

Farther down the road, with a much larger network of colleagues and contacts in hand, perhaps there would be reason to revisit the freedom and stress of being self employed. For now, I am eager to return to the full time workforce and become involved with a company that embraces online marketing and fosters an atmosphere that is team driven and enjoyable.

 Email This Post

 Print This Post

One of the reasons that we love interactive marketing so much is the speed with which we can create, update, and maintain website content, email marketing pieces — items that will potentially reach hundreds or thousands of people in the blink of an eye.

The unfortunate part is that this love of speed often carries over into the production and implementation process and can lead to careless mistakes that do exponentially more damage than the two hour delay of doing extra testing or proofreading ever would.

And, let’s be honest, we’ve all fallen into this ‘trap’ at some point or another. We sacrifice our process in order for faster delivery. We proofread the content or do all of the beta testing by ourselves… and something eventually slips through (CNN Sloppy Mistake | ESPN Sloppy Mistake).

Some of these common avoidable mistakes include:

• Missing images
• Broken links
• Incorrect grammar
• Typos

Not only are these embarrassing mistakes when they make it into the live environment, but they are damaging mistakes. Unless you are a huge mega-brand, you run the risk of driving away your users since these mistakes are completely unprofessional looking. They also often destroy or end the user’s experience with your marketing piece. A broken link or poor proofreading will often lead to a closed page or a deleted email message.

Avoiding these small disasters is actually fairly simple…

• Don’t let speed blind you
• Let your extended team members (copywriters, proofreaders, testers) do their jobs
• Stick to the process that you originally defined and don’t try to cut corners

The development and implementation processes that you have defined should help keep you on track. These processes are the foundation of a successful interactive project. Keeping them close in hand or mind and making sure to constantly revise them as you continue to learn more will lead to the right pieces of the puzzle being put into place at the right time.

Don’t let these sloppy mistakes damage your marketing or your brand.

 Email This Post

 Print This Post

Activision announced that Guitar Hero 3 has amassed $115 million in it’s first week of release. This isn’t very surprising due to the predecessor’s popularity, plus GH3 (subtitle: Legends of Rock) also boasts a cast of some pretty cool Rock/Metal bands such as The Rolling Stones, Metallica, Disturbed, Slipknot and a lot more.

After finishing the game on Easy mode (dexterity is lacking), I was presented with a heavy, ultra-fast power metal song by a band called Dragonforce. The song was kind of cheesy, but it grew on me so I decided to check it out on iTunes on my iPhone.

As I was browsing through the Top Rock Songs, I was immediately surprised by the fact that a few of the songs that I had just played in GH3 were on the lists.

Top Rock Songs
12. DragonForce - Through Fire and Flame
16. Metallica - One
17. Rolling Stones - Paint it Black

Sure, it’s possible that Metallica and The Stones were already on there. But Dragonforce? Seems unlikely.

So, even more interesting than Guitar Hero 3’s success is the tangential effect that the song must be having on all/many of the songs that are present in the game. I’d wager that a lot of the GH3 bands are raking in a nice little boost of $$$ as a result of people hopping on iTunes and buying their songs (in addition to whatever royalties are in their deal with Activision).

 Email This Post

 Print This Post

In an effort to make sure that I could connect to the internet when I was traveling and no Wi-Fi was available to borrow or purchase, I unwittingly signed up for a dial up service called PeoplePC.

The PeoplePC service boasts of thousands of dial up numbers scattered throughout the United States and requires you to download their PeoplePC software to install on your computer to manage your connection, your account, and web experience.

I’m sure it boasts of great customer service also, but I can attest to the fact that this is not the case.

For a primer on how not to provide customer service, I would direct anyone to PeoplePC to experience the pain and suffering of having to deal with a company that just doesn’t get it.

Here is my personal experience when trying to cancel my free trial.

Web Support
Their account management website worked about 1 in 3 times that I tried to navigate to it. The rest of the time, the server did not respond and left me with a timed out browsing experience. Plus, even when it did work, there were very few options that you could even affect through the web and none of these options pertained to cancelling your account. The FAQs area did not mention anything about how to cancel either.

Email Support
On the contact page, a customer service email was provided for inquiries. Response time for my messages seemed to be between 6-18 hours. Unfortunately, the email response said that I could not be helped and that I instead had to call their 800 number to talk to a representative.

Phone Support
First, their automated 800 number script is poor. You can’t skip around through the menu even if you know the sequence that you need to press. Also, on multiple occassions, the numbers that I pressed did not register properly. Even upon connecting with a CSR, half of the time that CSR spoke Spanish and not English and then tried to connect me to the proper Customer Service line, only to have the call end in dead silence and hang there until I finally gave up.

1. 11/6/07: Connect with CSR after 10 minutes. CSR speaks Spanish, but switches to English. Unfortunately, the person either wasn’t able to communicate effectively or their phone line had issues. Eventually had to hang up due to inability to understand the CSR’s requests.
2. 11/6/07: Connect with CSR after 5 minuts. CSR speaks Spanish and says he will connect me to the proper line. Phone rings a few times, sounds like it is answered, then dead silence for 10 minutes. I hang up after another 5 minutes of silence.
3. 11/6/07: After 15 minutes, call connects with something, again ends in dead silence. I hang up after another 5 minutes of silence.
4. 11/6/07: After 10 minutes, call connects with something, again ends in dead silence. I hang up after another 5 minutes of silence.
5. 11/7/07: Connect with CSR after 5 minutes. CSR speaks Spanish and tells me in English he will connect me to the proper customer service. Call connects withs something, ends in dead silence, and I hang up after another 10 minutes of waiting.
6. 11/7/07:Connect with CSR after 5 minutes. CSR speaks English and actually helps me resolve my issue. SUCCESS! They still tried to pawn a variety of stupid up/cross sells off on me, someone who is disgusted with their service and wants to cancel, but at least the end result was resolution of my inquiry. Finally!

(In between calls #4 and #5, I decided to send another email support message. I detailed the problems I am having in the email, provide all of my account information, and ask for assistance in cancelling my service. I receive the same form letter from my previous attempt telling me to call the support line. Awesome.)

All in all, a terribly painful experience for me. I would never consider using this service again… all because of the aggravation and frustration I experienced while dealing with their support.

 Email This Post

 Print This Post