Do you sometimes feel like you are talking to a machine when contacting support where ever it is you contact support? I know the feeling and despise it. It’s the canned (predefined) answers that do it. Even though a person might have selected that specific canned answer for your question it’s still slightly off, because it was made to solve as many questions similar to yours as possible. If you are lucky you will be able to decode a solution to your problem from the robotic ramblings, but you might also receive something complete and utterly useless, like the example below.

This is the answer I got when I asked why one of my domains suddenly stopped redirecting to another of my domains when I hadn’t tampered with anything (left out the company name, throwing mud is not my point).

“Changes to the settings of a domain take up to 48 hours to become effective because of the number of networks involved, and because these networks are controlled by several different agencies. This delay applies to all domains with any Registrar, not just [bliiip]. Please allow for this delay when planning web sites or configuring a domain to work with your services.”

The answer has scaringly little to do with my question and I had to waste my time contacting their support again with the same question explaining that their first answer didn’t solve it. Eventually the issue got solved, but a bad experience could have been avoided if the support staff had taken the time to look up my account and read my question, instead of just feeding me from the can.

What they should have done is what this other web hosting company did (again not mentioning any names). A short and precise answer to my specific question, with a good sense that there’s actually a thinking individual behind the email.

This answer is what I got when I asked if I could still use a domain with that specific web host; just not transfer it until after 60 days.

”Yep, you got it! Once the domain is pointing to our nameservers you will be able to host it here indefinitely and then transfer over the registration of the domain once it’s passed the initial 60 days of registration.”

The only service/support there is in canned answers is that someone else searches an FAQ for you. You don’t really need help with that do you?

I just heard about a fairly new marketing acronym which makes sense to me: SMO or Social Media Optimization. The definition on Wikipedia:

“Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a way to optimize websites so they would be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites. For example allowing RSS feeds, easier linking, incorporation of third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos.”

Some interesting posts on the topic of SMO:

New Rules for Social Media Optimization

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social Media Optimization – Get to Know SMO

Managing marketing assets is still a problem for many teams. Files that cannot be found, out-of-date images being used and way too much time and money spent on exchanging and distributing material. And these are just some of the most common problems.

Headlight includes simple Digital Asset Management (DAM). This feature makes it easy to organize, share, and distribute your marketing material to other members of your team or to external partners. Simply upload the files, fire up your web-browser and they’ll follow you always.

Besides these benefits the DAM feature also allows you to quickly create campaigns using the centrally stored assets. All performance numbers (impressions, CTR%, CON% etc.) are then linked automatically to each asset why it’s easy to gain an overview of the most valuable marketing assets.

Marketing assets in the first version of Headlight can be a media (Yahoo, Google, Wall Street Journal etc.), a creative (flash banners, .gif banners), a campaign page (the destination page of a campaign), or a list of keywords (which you use when creating campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MIVA, MSN etc.).

Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.

Most companies are very different from each other and most have different overall marketing objectives. This is simply how the world is and also how Headlight has been designed: with flexibility (e.g. customization) as one of our overall product paradigms – both regarding the user interface (UI) and with the backend architecture.

One example of customization and flexibility is our central Performance Dashboard. It is very straight forward to define/create/add/remove the most relevant information to your specific business.

Sample elements you can create could be custom Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and/or custom Performance Goals. These are defined and added to the Performance Dashboard in just seconds:

Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.

The idea behind the WhyChart is to combine events with visual data charts in order to try and explain cause and effect relationships. We’re simply tired of just displaying data without at least trying to explain: “WHY WHY WHY???”.

In the first version release of Headlight we’ve decided to keep it pretty simple: The events we track and “flag” on the WhyChart are when campaigns start, change, and/or end.

In future versions we expect to extend the definition of “events” to include other types of information e.g. external data such as “weather information”, “stock prices”, “national holidays”, and “special news events”.

We in TraceWorks all think this is a simple and awesome feature and we often fight over who actually came up with the basic idea! I just love when that happens.

Sign-up for the beta-release of Headlight here.