Hope everyone had good Labor Day, whether you were relaxing or keeping your entrepreneurial pedal to the metal.

My weekend was very productive and enjoyable. I got some serious thinking and writing completed. I played solid tennis and watched the US Open too.

Holidays on Mondays always seem to throw my calendar off a bit. I thought it was Monday all day.

It likely didn’t help matters that I spent half the day grueling over two fraud charges on one of my credit cards.

A lesson about fraud for everyone with a credit card.

Six months ago, I noticed two charges on one of my credit cards. The first flag: it was a card I never use; the second: it was paid to Web hosting company with whom I have not done business.

I immediately called American Express. They opened an investigation and removed the charges. I never thought about it again, until this morning when I received two letters from a collections agency about these two charges, demanding payment and informing me that my credit score was at risk.

Again, I called American Express immediately. They were very nice and helpful, but explained that once something goes to a collection agency, they are out of the loop and the responsibility is back on the card owner. They said I needed to call the collections agency. Boy that was a treat. Even though they tell you that the calls will be monitored, the service and level of kindness was a minus 15 on a 1-5 scale.

This took one and one-half hours. I got disconnected twice and rerouted three times. When I finally had a live person on the phone, she scolded me for assuming the credit card company had handled the matter and informed me I needed to call the company who registered the charge. Here we go again.

I called the Web service provider and experienced the same dreadful phone tree, excessive hold time, disconnect, and redirect for around an hour more. Eventually, I heard “Customer service and billing how can I help you?”
I explained my story again, now for the third time to the 11th person, and he said, “Ma’am, just because American Express removed the charge from your card, does not mean you don’t owe us this money. It is your responsibility to contact our fraud department if, in fact, you think its fraud. Would you like me to connect you?”

In a calm, yet hostile voice I said, “Please!”

Wouldn’t you know it—the fraud department voice mailbox was full. I had to leave a message and I got a double shot of tequila.

About an hour later a gentleman phoned me back. “I’m Josh from fraud services at company XYZ returning your call.” I explained my situation again; I don’t know this company, never bought anything from them, etc. He put me on hold and said, “Let me look into something.”

After grilling me with bunch of questions, there was a pause. “Ms. Post, I see a series of missing information in this record. That means I believe you are telling the truth and concur that this is fraud charge. I will remove the charge of $39.00 from your account and you are free to get back to your life.” OK, I made up that last part.

Here’s the point. A small charge like this one for $39.00 can screw up your credit for a long time and cause you to waste a boat load full of precious time along the way.

If something appears on your credit card that is not yours, you must file a claim with the provider, and monitor it until it is resolved. Filing a claim with your credit card is not enough!

In the midst of this bloody mess, while on hold, via one of my great interns, I did discover two very cool, FREE tools to help monitor your competition and your online footprint success. Check these out.

Find out what your site is worth

$timator.com is a calculator that ranks a site’s worth based on SEO, content, back links, traffic, and more and provides you a snapshot of your online effectiveness. Happy to report, Oddpodz earned a “very good” on overall site evaluation and a valuation of just under $600,000. You can run your site along with any of your competitors.

Find out how your site is ranking with social media, buzz, and other marketing channels

Dataopedia.com provides a lot of diverse data concerning the Web; gathering data from more than 50 sources. Datopedia.com is an aggregation web service that lets users find out all the valuable facts about any website, such as traffic, online buzz, contact information, popularity in social bookmarking services…in short, all the essential facts about every website you can come across on the Internet.

This tool is one-stop resource for finding website facts, and the service can be accessed via the website, the mobile site, embeddable widgets for your website, and browser add-ons.

About the author: Karen Post, a.k.a. The Branding Diva® is an international authority on branding, marketing, and entrepreneurial matters. She has been featured as a business expert in print publications; on TV, radio, and on Web channels. Karen authored the best-selling book Brain Tattoos Creating Unique Brands That Stick in your Customers’ Minds and she is co-founder and CEO of Oddpodz.com.

Here’s a great new spin to interning. Mid-career Interns.

Check what “Women on the Web” did. This a sassy web site for women started an innovative mid-career internship program. High-level former executives, — including publishers, editors and VP’s drawn from the shrinking print media companies — are retraining in on-line skills at wowOwow.com.  Joni Evans, WOW’s CEO explains, “These are people with wisdom and worth.  In our program we draw on their skill set for WOW while teaching them new skills, reequipping them for the new economy.  It’s a win-win situation.”

Lois Dreagin, a 55-year-old former senior editor at TV Guide is one of these mid-career interns. In her old job she did not need to know a URL from an SEO, facebook from twitter, or a Google trend from search engine optimization. Now at WOW she’s paired with a 24 year old WOW staffer, Randi Benfield, who’s teaching her how to write tag lines for Google and URLs in return.  Lois supports Randi with expert literary instincts and flawless copy-editing skills.

WOW editor in chief, Deborah Barrow, who conceived the program, says that she thinks, “This could only happen at a company like WOW.  This website is run and owned by women.  The idea of women helping women, empowering each other, participating in a caring community, is so different than the way male dominated workplaces have functioned.”  Deborah believes that other companies should imitate her concept of women helping women as a means of survival in the new economy.

wowOwow.com, was founded just over a year ago by former Simon + Schuster publisher Joni Evans, author Peggy Noonan, columnist Liz Smith, ‘60 minutes’ correspondent Lesley Stahl, and advertising guru Mary Wells.  Contributors Candice Bergen, Joan Juliet Buck, Joan Ganz Cooney, Whoopi Goldberg, Judith Martin, Cynthia McFadden, Sheila Nivens, Marlo Thomas, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Wagner join them on line.  These iconic women are making history with the first-ever website aimed at educated affluent experienced Women.

by Karen Post, a.k.a. The Branding Diva®

It’s Worth Talking About Wednesday.

The hump day that shares the brilliant! and the bad (roadkill) ads from around the planet.

Where do you find those Sarah Palin glasses or the Obama flip flops?
Here is a cool resource that will tell you in a text massage on your phone, fast.

ChaCha is like having a smart friend you can call or text for answers on your cell phone anytime for free. ChaCha works with virtually every provider and allows people with any mobile phone device - from basic flip phones to advanced smart phones - to ask any question in conversational English and receive an accurate answer as a text message in just a few minutes.

What’s your question?

Simply text your question to 242242 (spells ‘ChaCha’) or call 1-800-2ChaCha (800-224-2242) from your mobile phone to ask any question.

This innovative service gets the bright light. Well done, easy Web site and got to love the name.

Have you seen any interesting campaigns worth talking about? Have you created one yourself? We want to hear from you.

About the author: Karen Post, a.k.a. The Branding Diva® is an international authority on branding, marketing, and entrepreneurial matters. She is has been featured as a business expert in print publications; on TV, radio, and on Web channels. Karen authored the best-selling book Brain Tattoos, Creating Unique Brands That Stick in your Customers’ Minds and she is co-founder and CEO of Oddpodz.com, an idea engine for creative professionals and business. Her work has benefited large and small organizations in the United States and around the world.

We couldn’t agree more. Sure, we might be biased, but this is good advise nontheless.

We found this article by Brandon Leibowitz, president of SEO Optimizers, via Marketingprofs.

His ten reasons are below. Our comments are in italics. To read the full article in E-commerce News, which is excellent, click here.

1. New Directories Can Become a Dominant Web Site in the Future
True. You never know which one will take off, and there are an abundance of directories to choose from. Fortunately, it’s not too time consuming to enter your information. And, directories require less day to day interaction vs. a social networking strategy in which one should be actively participating, updating the profile, building a contacts list and rapport with other users (potential colleagues and clients).

2. Many New Directories Are Free
Thankfully, this is true. For a majority of them, including ours, the only cost is your time.

3. All Relevant Links Are Valuable in SEO
True. Check to make sure that the site is SEO friendly. Find someone in the network, then, go to a search engine and search their name. Does it show up? This is an important tip - don’t use a cryptic user name when entering information in the directory. If people search your company name, make sure that name is what you use in the directory, and be consistent across directories.

4. Many Directories Do Not Require a Link Back
We can’t speak for all, but ours doesn’t.

5. New Directories Are Not Cluttered With Links
Not yet!

6. Potential Clients Can Find Your Site Through Directories
This can be helpful if you haven’t had a chance to do a super duper job on your own Web site. Oddpodz also allows people to rate your company and recommend you which can amp up your rankings within our directory for added exposure.

7. Web Directories Are Highly Useful Resources for SEO

8. Qualified Visitors Will Find Relevant Information
A targeted directory (such as Oddpodz) is great for this. Imagine the confusion someone experiences if they go to Google and type in “Branding expert.” Yikes. Between all the natural search results and the paid results, someone with limited knowledge of the branding arena could have a meltdown. They wouldn’t know where to start sorting through this list, much less how to choose a professional or firm. When visitors go to a directory, some of the mystery has been removed. They know what is likely to appear in the directory. Likewise, entrants in the directory know that visitors to and searchers of the directory are looking for them.

9. Less Time to Edit and Approve Listings
We touched on this in #1.

10. Directories Help Search Engines Gather Information

Take a few minutes and search for some of your competitors and see where they turn up. Also search for directories in your business field and see what comes up. There should be quite a few to choose from. It’s also a good first step into internet marketing and more involved social networking. Give it a try!

By Karen Post, a.k.a. The Branding Diva®

Getty the photo folks have launched a very interesting brainstorming online tool called Moodstream. Pick your mood, adjust your music, color and intensity. Start creating. This app is well done and a nice break from anything you are working on. Check it out. Any mood can take you places. See something you like, you can buy it, too.

About the author: Karen Post, a.k.a. The Branding Diva® is an international authority on branding, marketing, and entrepreneurial matters. She is has been featured as a business expert in print publications; on TV, radio, and on Web channels. Karen authored the best-selling book Brain Tattoos, Creating Unique Brands That Stick in your Customers’ Minds and she is co-founder and CEO of Oddpodz.com, an idea engine for creative professionals and business. Her work has benefited large and small organizations in the United States and around the world.

…to us!

We launched the first version of our Oddpodz site and our blog in 2006. We will have to put together a retrospective. That will be a hoot!

We are thisclose to being able to rattle off another list of accomplishments (and the aforementioned retrospective), so we’ll save that for another time in a week, or so.

In the meantime, and for a trip down memory lane, here’s last year’s “birthday card” to ourselves.

We launched the very first version of our Oddpodz site, our Odditeaz line and our blog on July 1, 2006. We can’t believe another year has gone by. We also can’t believe how much we’ve achieved. We’re not bragging or nothin’ (yes, we know, nice grammar), but our team of THREE has done A LOT in a year. Just one example, we pulled this giant rabbit out of a tiny hat.

Some other brief highlights:

Read the rest of this entry »

By Karen Post The Branding Diva®, co-founder of Oddpodz

The story I’m about to share with you exposes some very hard lessons learned in my recent journey to build a dream and a company. As a business owner, this tale was a brutal, expensive misfortune. In fact, it cost over $300,000, at least 12 months in delays to get to get our concept to market, and countless heart palpitations and sleepless nights. But as some wise start-up warrior once said, “What does not kill you adds to your value.”

I could blame the IT firm we engaged, but that is not productive and gets us no closer to our goal. I could beat myself up, but that’s waste of needed energy too. So instead, I take responsibility for the bad turns, accept that what happened, happened and keep on the road toward success.

In 2006, my business partner and I had an idea for a company. We envisioned a niche social network for creative people, the right-brain thinkers of the world. We had read several books and studies about the importance of this market, knew it was big enough to attract outside funding and we believed it was underserved. We did our research, wrote our business plan, raised seed funding, and we were off to the races. From the get-go, we acknowledged our strengths and recognized our weaknesses in certain knowledge areas too, particularly in technology and Web development. This was a big investment and a vital piece to building our company’s success. We moved with caution, did our due diligence, and carefully assessed all our options.

So what happened? Two smart businesswomen who carefully selected an IT outsource-firm, royally screwed up on the vendor choice and couldn’t see the train running off the track, until it was a very bad wreck.

A snapshot of our situation.
Oddpodz’ vision was to build a niche social network that appealed to a defined segment of consumers called the creative class. This termed was coined by social scientist and economist Richard Florida in his best selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class. We wanted to create a distinct brand and user-experience that would stand strong against the mass, main stream networks that had emerged earlier like myspace®, facebook, and LinkedIn®. So we set out to build our platform.

Hindsight is better than 20/20 and here is what we see clearly now.
We are like most entrepreneurs are optimists. We get very excited about our ideas and proudly maintain a mindset of “yes, we can do anything”. While this is a good trait, sometimes it overshadows the reality of the world. In our case, our overly positive attitude did not invite the devil’s advocates to enter our thinking or vendor evaluation. We were so focused on the building our baby, we failed to consider the “what if this happened,” the subsequent domino effects, and their impact on our entire business.

We knew we had IT knowledge weaknesses and that the space we were entering was virgin territory, even for veteran IT companies. In 2006, social media was in its infancy. We did not establish an outside advisory team as a sounding board: instead, we put 100 percent of our trust into a paid vendor. This was a dangerous way to go.

What we did, what we got, and what we learned.
We sourced and interviewed many Web dev service providers, both in our backyard and out of town. We thought buying local, from a larger company would reduce risk. We thought having a vendor with a client list of known blue-chip firms demonstrated solid IT expertise. We thought Web dev was Web dev, if the firm had seasoned programming and project management teams, they could deliver any Web platform. We were wrong.

The company we engaged could not have been further from what we needed. They built nice corporate Web sites. They were a Microsoft shop. They were not a social media, open-source savvy company. And to make things worse, they had excessive staff turnover, which consistently interrupted our project team flow and effectiveness.

Turned out what we really needed was a hardcore specialist in social media; pioneers in a company making strides in Web 2.0; a team who worked with start-up firms, not blue-chip companies; and could relate to our Oddpodz creative-culture, and that of our market and their needs.

After almost six months of planning, meeting, architecting, and programming, we had a $300,000 sub-par site. The user interface was clumsy, the basic features of networking were missing, and it sure didn’t drive like a social network Porsche on the autobahn. It was user-unfriendly, expensive to maintain and about 10 percent of our vision. This Web debacle that not only sucked in its ability to perform but, impacted other investments like ad sales teams, ad server expenses, partnership deals, fundraising, and most of all our credibility with our community.

In a podshell, here are some lessons we learned.
Hire only specialists. (Unless you have a lot of time and money.)
When dealing in a new space or with a breakthrough product like we are with social networking, if the founders don’t come from that discipline area—as in our case—you’ve got to hire a master surgeon, not a general practitioner. Even if they’re outside of your home base.

Work from a Business Requirements Document (BRD) first.
Not one ounce of site planning or even budgeting should start without a detailed BRD that is aligned with your business goals and financial model. If you’re unable to think things through and create this document, you should stop immediately and reconsider what you are doing.

Avoid hourly budgets and terms.
They can easily become a runaway train. Instead, from your BRD have the firm build a fixed estimate with lots of detail – not only about features, but also function and performance metrics.

For sizeable investments, don’t sign any contracts unless you’re a lawyer. If you’re not a lawyer, get one!
Most sophisticated vendor contracts are one-sided. Unless you have modifying language to level the field, should you decide to pursue a legal remedy over a dispute you’ll, at minimum, double your work, expense, and risk. If the vendor won’t budge on the contract language, look for a different vendor. If deadlines are important, include penalties in the contract should the deadlines not be met. Pay close attention to warranty terms and what is and is not included in a fixed-price estimate.

Beware of over-promising vendors.
Along with all the good that comes from the entrepreneurial world and its spirit can come a tendency to over-promise. Even if you’re generally optimistic, always keep your skeptic’s hat on when you examine schedules and low-ball budgets — especially when it comes to high-dollar investments.

Stay connected and communicate honestly with your brand evangelists.
In light of this bump in the road, and our delayed time to market, we’ve always kept open, honest communication with our members and supporters. If you maintain this, you will earn the company miles of understanding and patience as you correct and improve your offering.

Was there a silver lining in this misstep IT vendor experience? Well I don’t know that I’d go that far, maybe a tin lining. But, there are definitely some positive pieces and meaningful lessons we gained.

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by Abe Sauer

It’s widely acknowledged that word of mouth works better than almost any other marketing medium. There’s even a Word of Mouth Marketing Association. And there is an insurmountable pile of advice out there about how best to make word-of-mouth marketing work for you, including books and websites full of tips.

To save you work. We looked at as many of them as we could before wanting to draw a warm bath and slit our wrists and now bring you a summary of the most agreed upon three.

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Unless you just saw that monster from Cloverfield in the building lobby security line downstairs, there is never ever never positively no reason whatsoever to send me an email that employs an exclamation mark.

Thank you.

Magnifying glass on the decline of civilization site Perezhilton isn’t known for its subtle approach to the finer subtleties of the written word; indeed, “Sperminated!” may someday come to replace “in a motherly way.”

But, one thing we have noticed and on which we begrudgingly compliment Mr. Hilton is his impressively appropriate use of “you’re” and “your” (see example below); impressive because it is one of the most infuriatingly common mistakes around.

After the jump, a small collection of disasters that you’re organization would be wise not to make. Read the rest of this entry »