The New York City Dispatch

I don’t think I’m the only one who has noticed the that Jason Castro looks like John Travolta.

Digg it. Bookmark it. Pass it on…

A big part of sales is qualifying — asking questions or evaluating THEM to make sure that they are capible of becoming your customer. Qualify early so you don’t waste time trying to close a prospect who can never close. That craigslist post is not likely to pass the mustard, obviously, don’t waste your time…

I get requests for services almost every day because of these sorts of listings on google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=higher+google
http://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+video+services

One of my main criteria for qualifying an email lead is: How much did they write — how well did they describe their project. I get very short emails like these:

How much does it cost to make a music video

or

What are your rates?

It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even reply to emails this short. I don’t have the time to reply (Occasionally, the question is written in the subject line and the actual email is blank!) I know from experience that 99% or more of these requests are from people who are unable to become my customer and the remaining 1% are barely worth the trouble anyway.

Requests for services from short emails are not usually not worth the bytes they are written on.

http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/glengarry.html

LEVENE
I can’t close these leads, John.
No one can. It’s a joke. John,
look, just give me a hot lead.
Just give me two of the premium
leads. As a “test,” alright? As a
“test” and I promise you…

WILLIAMSON
I can’t do it, Shel.

Pause.

LEVENE
I’ll give you ten percent.

Pause.

WILLIAMSON
Of what?

LEVENE
And what if you don’t close.

LEVENE
I will close.

WILLIAMSON
What if you don’t close…?

A recent episode of 30 Rock featured a Google reference — Jack being called a Class A Moron on NY Post’s Page 6, and consequently, he was showing up #1 in Google for the search phrase “class A moron”. During the course of providing SEO service in NYC I’ve had the dubious challenge of dealing with negative publicity. Typically, a company or person will encounter some bad press, angry bloggers or forum posts in consumer sites like the Rippoffreport.com — and this negative publicity appears high in the search engine result pages for my client’s brands or personal names. Since we are unable to control what other people write, I advise a three pronged approach for dealing with this sort of internet publicity:

• Technical - doing things to web pages to effectively move the negative publicity off the first pages of search engines like Google.
• Business - If the problem is not a single lone angry blogger, but a pervasive problem, I advise my clients to consider altering the business practices which are generating the negative publicity.
• Direct Social or legal pressures - Contact the bloggers or people who are talking smack. Start from a point of win win — in a nice way, try to negotiate with them to take down the negative pages. If that doesn’t work, consider talking with a lawyer to see if you can put pressure on them that way.

As a search engine optimisation professional, I can only really help with the first bullet point, which I’ll discuss below a bit, and I suggest the other strategies, which fall outside my realm of expertise and within the professions of public relations, business procedures & strategy or law. The strategy of pushing negative publicity off the front page of Google involves placing positive web pages above the offending posts on the Google result pages for the predefined phrases. Presumably, your site will already appear above the negative publicity when people are searching your brand — if not…you need more SEO services and call me ASAP.

Beyond that, essentially, the strategy involves the use of publishing new content that is optimised for the target phrases. We publish the new content on sub-domains, job postings and 3rd party sites like wikipedia. Job sites are great because they often score high in Google and it’s an obvious place to publish a brand. Sub-domains are still treated as separate web sites by google. You need to publish unique content on the sub-domains because Google has at least two or three ways of filtering duplicate content out of the index. Here is an example of a client who dealt with negative publicity by this strategy. Notice how the rippoff report is way down off the first page of Google when searching their brand. This wasn’t always the case — it used to appear directly under their site, so when their potential clients were searching their brand, they saw it. Of course, the devil is in the details and this is only the basic strategies. I hope this helps people who are getting hit with negative publicity. If your firm is really under attack, however, consider contacting somebody like me to manage the process.

One of my New York SEO Service clients is Glenn Pere from PerePartnership. PerePartnership is a unique advertising and design agency in New York, located on top of Penn Station @ 1 Penn Plaza. Glenn Pere is a great creative director. He’s a guys guy and into football, baseball and boxing. You wouldn’t think he has an eye but I’ve seen him direct his staff on Photoshop. They present him with a comp — a very good poster design or flier for a big client like HBO. To me, the comp looks excellent. But Glenn will take about two seconds to tell the designer “make the sky more red. take that font size up. burn in their logo more here. make these people pop more…” Ten minutes later, the designer will be printing the new version and it’s 10 times better than the old one. I also have seen him color correct video better than his video editors — take the darks lower, boost the saturation — boom — the video pops. Anyway, Glenn is a face to face type guy — you have to meet with him. And he’d rather talk to you on the phone then send an email. Well, I’m an email kind of guy…I like sending emails. So whenever I send Glenn and email, he always calls back and says to my voicemail “Hey Eric — Glenn — I got your email. I don’t know what it means. Give me a buzz. Bye.” My wife just keeps a note @ my desk that reads “Glenn Pere Called.” We don’t take it down — no need. It’s a permanent fixture (I’m thinking about framing it.) He always calls so it will always be there. Ordinarily, I charge clients extra for this sort of service…but not Glenn. There is rarely a conversation with him where I don’t learn something new. Plus, I know what to expect from him so it’s all about expectations…quality work takes a more effort then just getting by. Glenn Pere knows how to produce quality work.

I’ve got to watch myself. I’m a sucker for features or gadgets. I like clips, zippers, pockets, holders and Velcro. The world is full of geek candy like that. But when is enough ‘enough’?

I used a vintage bike messenger bag for years — just a bag with a single inner zipperless pocket. So I was understandably excited about the new one, with two zipper pockets inside, a couple of pockets without zippers, a pocket for a cell phone, a place for some pens and two outter pockets — one zippable and one not — and a clip to hold my keys. It also had a couple of detachable reflective flaps that are intended to give me added visablity. I was excited about all this, that is, until I started using the bag.

In the old bag, I always knew exactly where to look for things. There were only two places — in the bag or in the pocket — and it was very easy to do that. In the new bag, on the other hand, I can never remember which pocket contains the thing I’m looking for and so time is wasted zipping and unzipping pockets. I end up frustrated because I don’t see what I want. And the detachable flaps are also annoying because I think I’m opening the bag and I’m really detaching a flap. No doubt about it — this bag is over designed. I may end up sewing most of the pockets shut.

Compare these two baby backpack:

While the first one might look better, I assure you, 9 times out of 10 times it’s not

Same with knives:

These classic French Opnel knives:

Are way better for cutting pears on a hike then these absurdly over designed ones:

Okay, that was a joke, but this is not:

I’ll take an Opinel any day.

I got wordpress running on the oneandone.com host. So I’m going to start blogging here. I thought it could be nice to start off with a poem that I wrote, which is based on titles from paintings by NYC artist Mark Kostabi which were named on his game show TitleThis.

They met in boozyness
The bar on Second Street
During UNhappy hour
The madness of midnight

He, an idea who’s time had come — an Ideal man
Pure potential
She, with the unmistakable scent of sin,
Put a spell on him

The games people play
She promised him everything under the sun
Everything all the time
She delivered nothing
and prolonged instant gratification

The future came fast
Soon trapped in Monday’s mirror
In the vortex of a tranquil routine
Their innocence evaporated
She had a cruel history
She did him wrong

That’s when inspiration took wing
Fly away, fly away
He flew into the dada
Into the comfort of mythology
Her love lifted him
Her love was the wings which wilted
And he fell
Back into their living room.
Back into the love seat
Back into the relationship
Not you two! Not again!

She pours another cup of desire
Sugar — her last touch
Mystery brewing
Gives him some milk
He sips silently
In perpetual anticipation
Humbled by yesterday’s song
By that cup of malice
And that cup called loneliness
Generous to a fault with love
She changes his mind