Watch out, cat post coming!

Recently a credit card of mine was identified by the issuing bank as possibly having been included in a set of stolen data or online tampering. A new card was issued. Then I went about updating services paid with this card.

One of these services was our phone company and DSL provider, Frontier Communications. After not being able to login to the online bill pay I called and was informed the only way to change the card on file was to login via online bill pay. My description of not being able to login or successfully retrieve login information was falling on deaf ears, so I restate this information. I am informed of Frontier’s excellent security measures and the rep reiterates that the only way to change the card on file is through logging in online, knowing full well that I cannot do that.

In a rare moment of vanity-search weakness (yeah right!), I Googled my name (Lee Odden) and was surprised to see an AdWords ad from salesforce.com. I am not sure why they would do that as there are so many other people in search marketing whose names are searched on more frequently, are well known, more prominent in the industry, etc.

Out of curiosity I started plugging names into Google (50+) to see which ones would pull up more ads from salesforce.com and the only other names pulling up salesforce.com ads were Danny Sullivan and John Battelle.

This is very strange indeed as I don’t belong in the same room as those two guys. The even stranger thing was that the landing page is pure crap. There’s nothing on it. Maybe it’s salesforce.com’s call for search marketing help?

Something I’ve been noticing the past few months is an increasing number of web sites that do not use www. Either this is a trend that’s full force and I’ve missed it (busy with SEO clients) or it’s a trend picking up steam. Or maybe it’s a techie geek sort of thing as most of the sites I’ve noticed are a bit geeky. And they would take that designation as a compliment I think.

First I noticed Glen Stansberry’s excellent blog was shortened to just lifedev.net. Then Thomas aka TwisterMC’s new blog, bloggerdesign.com did the same thing.  And just today I noticed Greg Hartnett (greghartnett.com) of BOTW has just said no to the www. It’s not just these sites though, I’ve noticed many others too.

In the course of working with a fast growing business, you get exposed to many different people. Prospects, clients, employees, potential employees, vendors and consultants all bring different communication skills to the table. That’s not news of course, but it’s simply amazing to me the lack of effort some people put into communicating effectively.

Here are my top 5 online communication pet peeves:

1. Emails asking for a call back and they don’t include a phone number in their signature, and many times, not a signature at all.
2. Phone messages with a name and a number and no reason for calling.
3. Phone messages and the phone number is read so fast, you’d think the person was in a contest for fast-phone-number-reading.