Brokentoy

At my last job I let a 2-3 hour commute get the best of my fitness plans. Now I’m much closer to my new digs and I’m picking up where I left off and getting back into good health and nutrition habits. A month or so into the routine I saw Traineo featured on Solution Watch. It looks like the a decent web tool that could soon compete with some of the paid subscription weight training and weight loss sites out there.

So far you can:

• set a goal for your weight loss or weight gain (for muscle building)
• track calories burned by choosing from types of common activities
• estimate how well you keep to your diet with clever slide bars and informative graphs
• keep to your goals by sharing your results and receiving feedback from “motivators” that you select

I think this is just a few steps away from eclipsing many paid services. I’ve been using the Men’s Health Abs Diet web app because it gives me a meal plan and workout routine that adjusts the more I use it. In the Traineo forums some of the staff have been hinting that this is the next direction to go. Definitely something to keep an eye on if you’re interested in fitness or weight loss.

Technorati Tags: traineo, fitness

Last night I went banner hopping and came across designerID, a directory and portfolio service for designers of all kinds. I completed the first part of their sign up form but stopped at the free trial when I had to enter my credit card. I added it to my ma.gnolia bookmarks and made a note to take another look later. To my surprise I got an autoresponder email from Brian at designerID that really impressed me:

Dear Michael,

We noticed that you identified yourself and did not make the account active by finishing the last step. I would like to extend a year-free trial to try designerID out and not have to enter your credit card information. At the end of the year trial you can either disable your account if it is not a fit or simply pay for the next year. Simply enter “[omitted]” in the promotional code field on the credit card screen and ignore the other fields and hit submit.

Thanks for taking the first step and we hope you’ll take this next one.

We look forward to seeing you on designerID.

Best Regards,

Brian Hock
Chief ID Officer

–

designerID
2175 Central Parkway
Cincinnati, OH 45214
USA
+1.513.289.4048
www.designerid.com

There are a lot of annoying autoresponders out there (GoDaddy and LinkedIn are on my worst offenders list) but this one really stood out as a great example of how to do things right. Let’s go through the details:

Tell me who you are and how you got my email

The first thing I look at is the email’s from line. The message is the real name of a real person working at a real company. Brian Hock, not the name of a department like “sales@freestuffgateway.com” or the arbitrary name the developer set up in his php mail() function. I would even be happy with a from line like “donotreply@abccompany.com ” if nobody was responsible for monitoring the list. Now that I know who is emailing me how you got my email I can stop freaking out that one of the sites I used this email on has sold me out to a spam list.

Clearly tell me what you want

The first sentence of the email tells me why you’re emailing and what you want to offer me. You recognized that some people interested in your free trial weren’t expecting to hand over their credit card information and you want to give me another option to become a customer.

Some marketers try to sneak a few sentences from their mission statement before they get to the point. People don’t fill out forms and hand out their emails to products they know nothing about. Not unless Kevin Rose or 37signals tells them to, anyway. This isn’t the proper time for you to try and explain me anything but why you’re taking my time up by reading your email.

Impress me with the little things

The email was addressed to my name. It thanked me for my time and extended an invitation one final time - tactfully. Plus I got the full contact information of a real person. Truthfully, I found it difficult to tell if this was an autoresponder or an actual person emailing me. And in this situation I’m happy to not know the answer.

Startups take heed

This email made enough of an impression on me to make me take a second look at designerID. If anybody out there has a project on the go then do yourself (and your customers) a favour and use this email as a guide.

And the icing on the cake? When I complimented Brian on designerID’s email I got a reply back before I finished writing this post.

Technorati Tags: designerID, business practices, etiquette, marketing, communication

I’ve been reading Digg for just about a year now.� I stumbled onto the Podcast scene around episode 10 and it’s been a steady source of tech news, offbeat sites and entertaining videos.� Recently I’ve been taking a more active role in the community by adding stories and trying to add value to the comments.� The results have been a little unsettling.

When I post a comment on a blog I make sure I follow some basic rules of courtesy:

• fully read and understand the post
• acknowledge the authors and previous commenters’ opinions
• check the article the next day and respond to anybody who responds to my comment

In contrast, the majority of commenters I saw on Digg:

• read the article title and go right to the comments
• repeat each other because they don’t read other comments
• rarely respond to criticism of their own comments

It’s rare to see a high rated comment that adds value.� Usually the top comments are stinging one-liners to a beligerant user, a Simpsons quote or “tubes”.� It feels like high school - the class clowns get all the attention and the people there to learn are ignored.� I’ve decided to keep submitting articles but I’ll leave the commenting to somebody else.

Technorati Tags: digg, etiquette

Back in March I heard about ClaimID , an online identity manager. The idea is that you create your profile and start linking any website, article, meta site or blog comment that has anything to do with you or your work. It’s a great tool if you want to show people what you’re up to professionally or around the web community. It also has a cool side effect - it can drastically increase your search engine ranking.

One of the things that Google and other search engines look for to determine a page rank is third party URL recognition. The more external links you have to your domain the better. Putting Brokentoy on ClaimID helped bring my page rank from #12 to #1.

Unfortunately for me a glass blower, a Bishop, and a handful of CEOs share my name so getting it on the first page is going to be difficult. I’ll take any help I can get.

If you have a website you want to promote then I highly recommend signing up for ClaimID. Here’s my ID if you want to see an example.

Technorati Tags: seo, search, claimid

This post was written in Writely, an online collaborative word processor and a recent acquisition of Google. With a Writely as a tab on my Bookmarks I officially have no reason to open Microsoft Word ever again. With the Google Spreadsheets to take care of quick formulas and calculates I’m also covered when it comes to Excel. Is there any real reason that I still need Office? Should Windows Live be worried when it’s web version of Office offers no core document features and will charge $29.95/month after the beta?

I think that for you - the designer, developer or any other casual user of Office - these two web apps can take care of your basic needs. You can write, make formulas, invite others to view works in progress, and save out to typical Office and online formats. If you’re like me and you use multiple computers over the course of the day you don’t have to worry about licensing multiple copies and spending hundreds of dollars each time - both tools are free. And since your documents are stored online you never worry about files or versions - your current work travels with you.

Google Spreadsheets are available to anybody with a Google or Gmail account. Writely is giving out beta invitations but if you know somebody with an account you can be invited instantly by sharing a document. Both projects are currently listed as beta.

Technorati Tags: writely, google, office, microsoft