Come for the Ride…

LOST is finally starting again. Even though the show has dragged on a bit longer than it should have in certain parts, this is still one of my guilty pleasures. Anyway, below a video from J. J. describing his mystery box and how/why most of his productions are what they are. Some of the things he talks about can certainly be tactics used in marketing.

Being the senior interactive marketer on the team, I feel I need to address something that recently happened on this blog. For our regular readers, nothing noticeable happened. However, for those affected, I want to apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused.

As part of the team’s training on everything interactive, it is my job to come up with various exercises for the team to test and enhance our understanding of new technologies, online promotions, viral marketing and business development.

During a recent meeting I assigned one of the co-founders the task of promoting this blog. Even though his primary function is business development, I figured learning how to build traffic would be useful to learn while the main site is under construction. The goal of the assignment was to get 100+ subscribers via FeedBurner before our main services launches since the idea of this blog is to share our story with fellow entrepreneurs who may be in similar stages on their startup. After all, the point of this blog is to chronicle our progress and to educate others based on various successes and failures based on our actions.

Unfortunately it seems I may have over estimated my co-founder’s understanding of building web traffic and as a result, the vague assignment resulted in us crossing the line of acceptable promotional techniques.

In addition to some of the valid methods of web promotions through networking events, telling friends and family and so on… it seems he had made a questionable post on Craigslist which brought in unqualified traffic. I remember getting an IM from him while working that said “I’m testing something new and I’m confident this will be in tons of traffic.”

Well, as most of you know, no analytics program has live, up-to-the-minute data so after receiving the message I kind of just left it at that.

A few hours later I logged into Analytics and saw the graph above. We had indeed gotten a spike in traffic. As I dug deeper into sources of referral, it seemed like half of the increased traffic was typed in while the other half came from Craigslist. Curious… I dug deeper until I finally landed on referring page.

What I saw REALLY disgusted me and even more so, I was shocked that we were the party responsible for the message. It would appear for his test, he had placed a job opening on Craigslist saying the blog needed to a designer to revamp its looks but on top of that, he also made the claim we had a $10,000 budget for the revision!

Even though we did receive a spike in traffic, unfortunately neither of the statements are true and I am honestly disappointed and sorry that we resorted to tricking users to come to the site. As someone who uses the web and hates spam, this action was totally unacceptable.

So why am I writing about this mistake instead of just letting the incident pass and hope nothing bad happens? Well, there’s a lesson to be learned here and I’m hoping this entry will prevent others from making the same mistake.

1. A spike in any unqualified traffic from any source is a waste of resources. People that came to the site looking for a $10k payoff don’t care about our content vs. people who are coming here to get stories about our entrepreneur adventures.

If this was done at a larger scale where we would have to pay for bandwidth, the additional traffic would have costed us money and the visitors would not have converted to paying customers; a double whammy.

2. People don’t like to be tricked. While my co-worker may think this was a clever idea when he made the post, his actions made the entire team (and business) look bad. Have we now completely lost our credibility? I don’t know but we are still getting hate mail and comment spam days later as a result.

3. Screw ups out shine a good performance! While my co-worker did actually generate some good traffic in parallel, his efforts to generate qualified traffic were completely lost in this scandal. In case you think this is a good way to impress your boss, don’t do it!

4. People still get tricked easily. This isn’t so much a mistake on our part as much as it’s an observation. Even though the post looked questionable, we are getting a good number of people asking for a chance to chat in order to discuss the project at hand. Sorry guys, we don’t have the budget for this upgrade right now.

5. The unknown… while I can only see what the immediate feedback has been, I’m really not sure what extended damages this unintentional test may have caused. I really hope no long term or permanent damage has been done but in all honesty, I just don’t know for sure.

With that note… I hope our mistakes will prevent you from making the same.

Are you currently working on your startup and want to help bring more exposure to it?  If you feel like you have things you can teach our audience, please feel free to contact us for a guest blogger spot.

We are focused on educating web startups with common don’ts and do’s.   If you’ve walked this path and have knowledge you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from ya!

This was a really cool talk I found over at TED. It showcases some really cool technology as well as graphing of social data.

I think I’m in Love… Well, maybe after a test drive first. I changed the picture on our blog today from the theme’s default Porsche to the new Tesla Roadster. I don’t think anyone actually looks at the pictures on our blog, but I feel the change was necessary because the Porsche really doesn’t fit our style. I didn’t want to alienate the two or three people that may actually look at the pictures and judge the blog by its cover; I know you’re out there.

Of all the cool cars out there, I picked the Tesla because they represented change and smart design. While many other companies are building bigger and louder engines, Tesla’s building a sexy car without the noise and the dependency on gasoline. Is EV better than Hybrids? I really don’t know… but what this company is willing to do to invoke change and shake things up is what I love about them. If they ever want to send me a demo vehicle so I can show them off in Atlanta, I would love them that much more! *hint* *hint*

Anyway, if you like what you see, click the link above to learn more on their website.  They’ve recently been approved for safety so they are now in the clear for U.S. sales.  The company even has a blog! Way to go guys… maybe one day I’ll get to own one.  They do look pretty hot.