Lifes a Bench

I just received an e-mail from Richard Cleaver following up on the VistaDB offer and my comments about it.

Richard writes a password management utility called Access Manager and is doing an offer that if you blog about any aspect of security best practice and include a link to him then you get a free copy of the pro version of his software.

Richard “gets it” - He isn’t forcing people to blog specific words about his product without trying it, he isnt even asking you to specifically blog about his product at all. He is offering a way for people to try the software first (the non-pro version) and best of all he is asking people to blog about security best practice and if that isn’t a good idea then I don’t know what is

A cracking example of blogger marketing done right.

I know I am late with this one but Scott Adams is blogging!! and to me that is worth a meme just because its Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy, for those wondering).

Maybe it’s the way I was raised, but I find that I get mad about all the wrong things. For example, when I hear a news report about some serial killer who buried 43 victims in an underground bunker that he constructed beneath his shed, my first reaction is Wow. He built an underground bunker under a shed! I find myself admiring his industriousness and passion in the pursuit of his dreams. That’s clearly wrong.

Then today I read in the November 2005 Reader’s Digest about Marine engineer Richard James who invented the Slinky in 1943 after a tension spring from a meter used to test battleship horsepower fell off his desk and “walked” end-over-end. I hate that guy. I don’t know the full story (that’s why they call it the Reader’s Digest) but it sure seems like he was rewarded for being clumsy. I can’t respect that.

Goodness baked right in, i’ll be amazed if he can keep this level of quality and quantity up but lets hope!

Technorati Tags: Dilbert, Scott Adams, Slinky, Underground Bunker, Serial Killer

I am very glad I finished this at the weekend so that all I had to do tonight was set the theme live and upload my after screenshot to the CSS Reboot site because I am currently feeling like death warmed up due to a bug I have at the moment. Anyway, the CSS Reboot design is live now (I know its supposed to be from midnight, but think of it like you got an early Christmas present if you see it before then!).

The timing of CSS reboot this time was pretty fortunate because I have been using a very quickly hacked together version of an existing theme since moving across to WordPress a couple of months ago. I have always tried to keep away from using others designs so CSS Reboot was a convenient excuse to re-do my design.

I wanted to stick with the same basic image of the bench since I based the blog name on a pun around the image (I am a total sucker for a pun!). The image was taken by me at on Lytham Green (right next to the windmill) with a Canon 20D and a Canon EF-S 17-85 IS USM. All of the images that make up the background are made up from that basic image, cloning and healing were used to expand the sky to cope with large resolutions and a levels adjustment applied to an area of cloud to form the darker area at the top. The logo image was written on a Tablet PC using Windows Journal and simply screen captured.

The CSS/XHTML design is integrated into a WordPress theme (obviously) and uses a modification of the catfish technique from SitePoint to get the top and bottom of the image fixed in Internet Explorer as well as FireFox.

It has been tested in IE6 and FireFox 1.0.7, please leave comments if you either have any problems with it or if you like/dislike it.

Technorati Tags: CSS Reboot, CSS, WebDesign, XHTML, Web Standards, Lytham

Well, I am just finishing up my CSS Reboot design tonight, hopefully I will get it finished in time. It is based around the same photo as above but I do have at least a couple of cool new things in this one and it is mine from scratch rather than a hacked version of Rin like I have at the moment..

This is the time consuming bit though, getting it working with IE and integrated as a WordPress theme.

*edit* What a time for COLOURlovers to go offline!!! I need my colour fix!!!

cssreboot

powered by wp-flickr and www.flickr.com

Technorati Tags: CSS Reboot, CSS, WebDesign

So after my previous post about VistaDB and their dubious blogging PR offer, I thought I would submit my blog URL to their system in the hope that they would read the post and find out what I thought about what they were doing.

A strange thing happened, I got a license code for their software… I didnt expect that!

I guess one of two things could have happened here:

• If I was cynical
  I would assume that this means that noone is checking the content of the blogs that are posted for this offer and it is just some automated service handing out license keys to anyone who submits a URL.
• If I was not so cynical
  I would think that they read my blog and figured that if I tried the software that I would change my view of their company and maybe blog positively about them when I have used it.

Now, I read a post from esdaniel that made me think that the CEO of Vista software, Anthony Carrabino might actually care about what people think because he is definately answering e-mail from people about his software, so I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and go with a non-cynical view for now, however a comment by Anthony or someone VistaDB here would prove this.

Technorati Tags: VistaDB, Meme, Blog Marketing

Blog about VistaDB and get a free copy! Sounds like a good idea? right? Well maybe, but if you read on in their page its not so great. To get this free copy, you have to quote verbatim their ‘glossy’ marketing spiel, they don’t encourage you to try the product before you do this (there is a trial version available but it is not mentioned or linked), and while I have no doubt that people will blog this and get their free copy and your PageRank might even go up a notch, I really don’t think this is the right way to use bloggers to gain publicity.

Take a leaf out of the book of a company that is doing this properly and offer people that free copy of your software for just proving they have an active blog and leave it up to them if and what they post about it. You have obviously decided that you can take the revenue hit by giving free versions of your software away to bloggers but this way you will get better publicity out of it because you will get real publicity out of it. You might even learn something about your users, what they like and more importantly what they dislike and as a company will gain credibility too, if I read your press release copied and pasted onto 100 blogs, I will know that is exactly what it is and think, well… I will think (and blog) exactly what I have written here. However, if I see 20 or even 2 people blog about it with real experiences (good or bad, as long as its not really bad, but you do believe in your product, don’t you?) I will be 10x more likely to try it and talk about it.

You had a good idea by using bloggers to get publicity to your new product, however it is not too late to save it from being badly executed. Don’t be afraid to change it now.

Technorati Tags: VistaDB, Meme, Blog Marketing

This from Gap has to be the most bizarre viral advertising I ever saw. You are supposed to create a character of yourself in this little shockwave app and then it will do… errr… well, it will do a strip tease for you…

But honestly, I am a 20 year old woman with large breasts!!!

I would love to see the stats for how many “women” have tried this! I would be willing to bet that the “Make yourself as a character” rather than “Make any character you would like to see strip” came out of the fear of bad mainstream press but to me it just makes the whole thing more bizarre and therefore entertaining

I bet this cost less than a single 30 second TV advert to create and I bet it makes a bigger impact via blogs/msn/aim/e-mail/etc… and the feedback from trackbacks and referrals should be invaluable (Note: If you are from Gap or the marketing agency that was behind this and are checking stats and trackbacks, leave a comment below )

Old marketing is dead? Long live the age of viral strip tease simulations!!!

I just got an invite to join the beta of Flock, a new browser that integrates with del.icio.us, flickr and has blogging tools built right in. It is a pretty early beta by the look of things but given that the browser itself is based on Gecko (the Mozilla/Firefox engine) it should at least be able to view sites well.

Oh and this was posted from its blogging tool

Technorati Tags: Flock, Del.icio.us, Blogging