No To Arts District - Dot Com

I'm watching the 10:00 news the other night with my wife and there's a story on an effort to turn Topeka's somewhat dilapidated yet promising North Topeka business area into a cool arts district. I'm all for that! It's like it's own little downtown and I love the entrepreneurship of North Topeka, and I think those old buildings would lend themselves nicely to an artsy area.

The news announcer told us of their website, www.notoartsdistrict.com, and pronounced it NoTo (sounds like Toto) Arts District - Dot Com. My wife looks up from her laptop and sees it spelled out on the screen and says "no to Arts district?"

Chalk this one up to another really unfortunate choice of a URL. Yes, a campaign for something that, if read the way it is spelled, sounds as if it is against it.

Which reminds me of an old email I received a long time ago featuring really bad website names. I know it's getting ever more difficult to find good domain names -- trust me, I have to do this pretty often -- but SERIOUSLY folks, if you think it could have a double meaning that would make you and your organization look foolish, don't go there! 

Here's the list:

1. "Who Represents" is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is www.whorepresents.com
2 . Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com
3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net
4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com
5. There's the Italian Power Generator company, www.powergenitalia.com
6. And don't forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales ,
www ...molestationnursery.com
7. If you're looking for IP computer software, there's always
www.ipanywhere.com
8. The First Cumming Methodist Church Web site is www.cummingfirst.com
9. And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky Web site,
www.speedofart.com

Shortening Long Links for Twitter Posts

You want to tweet a link to a great article about Apple's new iOS 4, or a great app that you like, but out of 140 characters, the link itself takes up 100 of them. What do you do?

Let's say your tweetable link is http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/198758/goodreader_for_ipad_adds_vga_output_performance_boost.html.

Go to http://bit.ly/ and enter that URL in the URL Shortener, then click on "Shorten." The URL is shortened to http://bit.ly/dbhD2z.

Then when you hover over that shortened URL, it gives you the option to copy it to your clipboard, which you can then paste into your Twitter post.

A Big BP Person Caring for the Small People

As if the oil spill hasn't been the biggest PR disaster any company has ever suffered, I saw on the news last night that the company’s chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, said: “People say that large oil companies don’t care about the small people. But we care. We care about the small people.”

Speaking as one such small person, "Wow, are you kidding me?"


The company's PR people, poor damned souls as they are, jumped out of the lake of fire they currently find themselves in long enough to blame it on a clumsy translation. I don't care if he's a Swede or not, "small people" is a universal term used by snobby elitists worldwide.

I imagine a sliver of their problem is that Brits and Swedes are communicating to  people they have absolutely nothing in common with -- the small people of southern US. That's a huge communication gap to overcome. Then again, from what I've seen of response to the president's speech the other night about the matter, he and his plan for a panel and to "make them pay" didn't fare much better. They just want action down there. Spare us the panels and recriminations until AFTER the problem has been solved.

Fast websites rank higher among customers, Google

One thing I've always recognized is the impatience of net surfers. I know it because I am one -- and have become even more impatient as the years and technology advances has brought us ever-faster loading times. What I used to tolerate in terms of page loading now will cause me to move on to another site if the one I aimed at is just a wee bit too slow to load.

I'm not alone. Here's a good read on the topic. In this article, it refers to an experiment conducted by Google in which they slowed down the delivery of search results. They found that increasing a page's loading time by less than half a second has a measurably negative impact on searchers. And, the author found, "the customer is highly, highly impatient. They scan a page like they scan a signpost as they're driving down a motorway. They hardly even read full sentences."

Which is why marketers who write the copy for their websites like they do an informational brochure -- heavy with graphics and large blocks of text -- are missing the opportunity. To take the article's author's metaphor a step further, it's like the highway department putting the "how to merge" section of the driver's manual on the sign next to the highway instead of the recognizable symbol for doing the same thing.

Fresh look at Perception Management

My wife and I just had to run over to the church to do some promotional set-up for our VBS registration table. I was walking through the darkened halls and looked up at a wall-mounted brochure rack. For the first time I noticed the words on the sign above it: "Information to Educate." Really? It just looks like brochures to me, and I GUESS that's the point of brochures, right? To educate?

But what a dorky way to say it.

Which made me think what would happen if I were able to take my old-timer blinders off and see the place fresh for the first time. What would I REALLY see, and would I be impressed or not?

It's hard to see things through the eyes of a visitor, or in the case of a business, your customer. You see the same place so often that the signs on the walls and the rust on the railings just becomes part of the landscape.

Get a notepad out and just try to see things as if you'd never seen them before. Secret shop your own place and see what you discover. If you find it an impossible task, for some reason, ask an outsider to do the same thing.

We don't want to miss the obvious and glaring signs and dirt and grime and cobwebs and bad service that outsiders will notice and forever impact their perceptions.