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By Neptune Moon, January 23, 2012 5:55 pm

I’m annoyed this afternoon and I thought it was worth a blog post. WHY would you ever send an email that could not be replied to – especially if that email is in response to a customer support issue? This practice continually both amazes and infuriates me.

Case in point, web hosting companies that send you email updates on a support issue but if you try to email back a response to their update, put your message in the great void. How do you think you are making your customers feel when they are trying to communicate with you and they get an email back that says something like this:

Thank you for contacting Company X Customer Support.
The mailbox that your message was sent to is unmonitored, and as a result your e-mail will not receive a response.

If you require support for problem A go here: www.companyx.com/problemA
If you require support for problem B go here: www.companyx.com/problemB
If you require support for problem C go here: www.companyx.com/problemC
ETC…

So, now I have just spent time writing my message in response to the email you sent me (usually telling me how you have not yet solved my problem) and now I can’t just reply to the email to continue the thread and get my issue resolved. Why must I wade through 10 options to figure out where I should go next? How is this servicing your customer? The answer – it is not.

Even companies who are well-known for their customer service can fall into this trap. Southwest Airlines, which is generally a fantastic example of customer service, uses this same type of system for Customer Service emails. We had an issue on a recent flight experience and after receiving a long and thoughtful reply from their Customer Service Department, with a case reference number, I had to go back to the web site and fill out their comment form again, to send a follow up to their reply – not very user-friendly!

We could probably all benefit from taking an objective view of our communication and customer support practices. Try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes – is your customer service department easy to contact and quick to respond OR does it function more like a complicated choose-your-own-adventure story?

It is worth taking a look at your process and discovering if you’re treating your customers the way you’d want to be treated if you had an issue. If we all took the time to follow the golden rule when designing customer service responses, the world would be a much less frustrating place!

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By Neptune Moon, September 29, 2011 1:14 pm

The web does not need to be homogeneous. Usability is important and making sure your site is meeting visitor expectations is critical, but I think we are losing our ability to create sites that are appropriate for OUR audiences. Case in point – the redesign of the Slate web site. Haven’t seen it yet?

Here’s a look at the new home page layout:

Not so bad or different from how it used to be, but scroll down further and it is a disaster:

I don’t even know where to look?

I am getting a little exhausted by what seems lately like every web site’s attempted reinvention into some type of social media experience. Not everything needs to look or feel or function like Twitter or Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are great tools and can play a really important role in your relationships with your customers and potential customers. A web site is not a social media outlet – why do we keep trying to make them into one?

Even Facebook is arguably trying to turn itself into some strange Facebook Twitter hybrid with its new design.

Enough already.

Today’s web sites should be about integrating your web site proper with your social media efforts. Turning your site into a real time experience with constantly refreshing content and comment streams, well, takes away from the experience most visitors are looking for when they choose to visit your web site – instead of your Twitter feed or your Facebook page. There is still room for a well designed, user-centric web site in your internet strategy. Let’s make the most of what a web site can be and stop trying to make it do everything.

The comments about the Slate redesign have been overwhelmingly negative. Look, I know people aren’t generally great with change, but the criticisms of this redesign really resonate with me. And they should resonate with anyone who is still designing and developing web sites for clients in today’s climate.

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By Neptune Moon, September 1, 2011 10:58 am

I haven’t addressed this topic in a while, but it is critically important. Who controls your web site – you or someone else? Are you even sure? I’m reminded now, as I am working with several clients to reclaim control of their domains and web sites, just how important this issue is… You must be in control of your web properties, period.

What do I mean by this? When you have a web site, there are several components that you should control – the domain(s), the hosting account and the web site itself (design & content). Let’s look at each of these elements and why they need to be under your control.

Your Domains

A domain is a web site address, such as www.neptunemoon.com. Are you or your organization the registered owner of your domain(s)? Do you know how to find out? At the most basic level, you should make sure that your organization, not an outside provider, is the registered owner of your company’s domains. Only the registered owner can make changes to the account. Only the registered owner gets the renewal notices. You spend lots of time and money building your web site and brand online – make sure you control the domain.

How can you tell if you own the domain? If you don’t have your domain registration account information on file, a quick search at Network Solutions’ WHOIS tool will show you who is the registered owner of the domain. If you are not the registered owner, contact your provider who is listed as the registered owner and ask them to transfer the account to you. They will need to authorize the transfer as the account holder. Do this now, while relations are good between you and the provider. It is your brand, you should own it and control access to it, not an outside party.

Web Site Hosting Account

Every web site has to be hosted somewhere. Do you know who your hosting company is? Do you control the hosting account? Many web design and development firms insist on setting up and managing the hosting for their clients. I could not disagree with this policy more! Again, your web site is mission critical to YOUR organization, not the design firm’s. The hosting account should be in your or your company’s name. You should control access and grant it to your chosen providers, not the other way around.

When you let an outsider control your hosting, you are setting yourself up for unnecessary potential problems. If you don’t control your hosting account, you could find yourself in any of the following situations, with little recourse:

1. Your web site could be taken offline at any time and not be accessible to customers or clients
2. Your vendor could fail to pay the hosting bill and your site could be suspended
3. You cannot end your relationship with an unsatisfactory provider because they won’t relinquish control of your site to you
4. Your provider could cease to exist and it is very difficult to get control of an account set up by someone else without their cooperation

What can you do? If you don’t know where your web site is hosted, find out now. Ask your provider for all hosting account access credentials. Ask them to work with you to transfer the hosting account ownership to you or your organization ASAP. You should have control of the account and make sure you keep the access credentials on file. If your provider refuses to transfer the account to you – you might be in trouble. If you followed our advice about the domain, you can always set up a new hosting account and copy the site to the new account.

Your Web Site – Design & Content

Who owns your actual web site – both the visual design and the content? Don’t assume that the answer is you. Your original web site project contract should clearly spell out who owns what. In general, most reputable firms will transfer ownership rights to you, the client, after the project has been approved and its invoices fully paid. Not all firms do this, so make sure that you have a clear understanding of what you own and what you don’t.

Assuming that you own the site, design and content, you should be free to move it wherever you want. Sometimes firms make it difficult for you to move a site – that should be a warning that they are not putting their customers first. I’ve worked on projects where the previous firm made it really difficult for the client to get access to their web site components. I don’t understand this behavior. I understand wanting to make sure that the hosting environment is a good one and that it has all of the technical components that the site will need to run smoothly. I don’t understand locking a site down so that a client cannot access it or move it away from you.

If you need to lock your clients in that tightly so that you retain them, perhaps you want to take a look at your business model and customer service practices? Clients should be free to do whatever they want with a site once they have paid for it. Be wary of a firm that insists on total control and refuses to allow you access to the actual site files. You could find yourself in a hostage situation.

Web Site Common Sense

No one likes to go into a new relationship planning for it to fall apart. And, I’m not suggesting that you have that pessimistic of a view. I am, however, suggesting, that you make sure that you and your organization are fully in control of your web properties so that the choice of where you host your site and who works on the site is always yours. It’s your business – protect it!

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By Neptune Moon, November 3, 2010 11:03 am

Facebook recently enhanced its Groups feature  – as is the case with many enhancements, the new feature also comes with a few potential problems.

What’s changed in Facebook Groups? Essentially, now any of your friends can add you to a Group – you need not agree or opt in to be added. The idea behind this feature was to allow users to create subgroups within their Facebook friends so that you could share some information with select sets of friends and not necessarily all of your friends. This ability has been available in Facebook through the use of Lists, but most users have no idea that feature exists, or how to use it. Groups have 3 levels of privacy available – Open, Closed and Secret.

I think allowing Facebook users more control over what information is shared with which friends is a great idea. Being able to separate out posts for friends, family and co-workers just makes sense.

Reaction to this new feature has been mixed. There have been the expected cries about privacy – and I see where these folks are coming from on that. I really don’t want anyone adding me to a group without my consent… When you are added to a group (either by doing it yourself or having someone add you) it generates a news item that goes into your feed and spreads across your network (unless the group is secret). For me, it just adds one more thing to have to monitor – not exactly an enhancement for a casual user like me.

You can’t opt out of this feature either – there is no mechanism to have your default setting be that no one can add you to a group. See Facebook’s Help Answer here.

And then there are the marketing possibilities – imagine organizations and companies creating groups and tapping some of your friends to be part of them. Before you know it, you could be added to quite a few of these purely marketing groups… See this article on Yahoo! for more.

Is this feature a major concern level issue? Probably not. But it certainly has the potential to make Facebook more frustrating to use. One of Facebook’s recommendations to help make sure you don’t have people adding you to groups you don’t want to be added to is to be careful whom you choose to friend… easier said than done. Interesting too, since several of Facebook’s other changes in the past year have been encouraging users to share more and more information with more and more people.

What do you think? Will this change the way you use Facebook? Does it even matter at this point?

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By Neptune Moon, October 13, 2010 11:07 am

The Wall Street Journal has a fantastic series all about this topic – it is definitely worth the read.

The article that originally caught my eye was addressing the topic of data scraping and its pervasiveness. Most of us think that only some of what we might post online is vulnerable to being captured and attributed to us, right? Not so fast! We all know that Google has tons of information in its database about what we search for, and most of us don’t give it a second thought. We also all know that if you create an account with a web site, that company has your particulars.

But what about the stuff you post on a site behind a login, such as Facebook – that is private, right? You have complete control over who can see your postings through the site’s privacy settings… or do you? I’m not just picking on Facebook here, the data scraping is happening over the entire web. I’m using Facebook as an example because it is so widely used. Companies often engage services that help them to find information online about prospective employees, including “private” posts. The WSJ article highlighted a particular case where a marketing company was scraping a private patient discussion board.

Pretty unnerving stuff. I guess the old adage “never put anything into writing you wouldn’t want to have to admit to later” now goes a step further. Don’t post anything online that you don’t want to have to answer for later. To their credit, most web sites are actively mounting defenses against this type of scraping, but much like viruses, it is a constant game of catch up and innovation.

So what’s the bottom line? Most of us know that when we post something online, even if the site is “private” or password protected that there is always some risk of the data being accessed by unauthorized persons. In exchange for easy communication we have ceded some ground on the privacy front – it is a deal we are generally willing to make these days. But it is certainly worth thinking about…

Managing your online data and your online reputation gets more complicated by the day!

Access the WSJ section here.

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By Neptune Moon, October 16, 2009 10:48 am

SEO is intimidating. SEO is confusing. SEO is prohibitively expensive. These are all comments I’ve heard from clients, potential clients and people I meet at events and presentations. My answer is always the same – it doesn’t have to be.

Somehow, Search Engine Optimization has gotten a reputation of being part science, part black magic and part crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. Part of the reason for this is probably because there are a lot of people and firms out there who call themselves SEO Experts who, let’s face it, are not. In fact, they know how to perform a few tricks and apply the same tactics to every site they work on. An expert in SEO, this does not make.

So what does qualify as true expertise and how can a non-expert determine if an SEO provider is full of it?

1. Experience counts. I’m not saying that every SEO professional didn’t have to start somewhere, we all did, but you want to work with a provider who has experience with optimization – not just in theory.
2. Results speak. My clients appreciate my expertise, but let’s face it, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. Can your SEO consultant provide you with real examples of results they have achieved for other clients?
3. Feelings matter. Do you feel comfortable with this person? Do they not only seem to know what they’re doing, but can they explain it to you in plain English? Comfort with your provider is critical.

Choosing an SEO consultant doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, if you find the right provider, it should be one of the easiest business decisions you’ll make.