What’s Hip Hapnin?

A few months ago I posted about the horrible UI experience when trying to buy a printer on the HP website.

Here is another example.  But instead of coming from a big company that you would expect to be clueless it is from sphinn a forum on internet marketing

Not only do they make you go back and try to remember some math problem from fifth grade.  They also make you decrypt a secret code.  I tried to make it through the registration 5 times before I realized my encrypted code was actually case sensitive-it seems like that would be an important detail to include.

So the point of this is that with any transaction the risk must be shared.  If consumers are carrying too much of the risk they will sense that and go away.  Traditionally companies pass on the risk to the consumer with restrictive return policies, expensive warranties, etc.  Typically the lower the price the more of the risk you will inherit.

In this transaction they obviously don’t want to pay somebody to go through every account and moderate them and make sure they are legit.  So they are passing on the pain in the transaction to real users.  I pay the price because they don’t want to pay another forum moderator.

I tried to create an account 5 times before I cracked the code.  How many times would you try?

How are you frustrating your customers and making your job easier? how long do they have to wait at your call center?  How many questions on your contact us form are for you and not them?  What are you charging for that you should be giving away?  Just because a few people abuse a service that is offered doesn’t mean you need to make a policy about it. You should be finding ways to make it easier for your customers every step of the way.

Hey everyone I am sure you are all very sad that I haven’t posted in a while.  I am sure you didn’t know what to do with yourself when my crappy posts aren’t interrupting your day

I haven’t said anything for about a week because my old host finally got so terrible I couldn’t take it anymore.

I was with powweb and have been for years.  They were dirt cheap and had great performance.  Now they are just cheap.  I don’t know what changed (JR said they were sold) but they have been terrible since about December and I finally gave up.  It would take forever for my blog to load and forever to write a post.  At first I thought it was my problem so I tried to modify the page streamline it reduce the image sizes etc etc. nothing worked.  So then I was thinking “well I am getting way more traffic these days maybe I just need to upgrade my hosting”.  Guess what powweb is so simple that they have one hosting plan that sucks equally for everyone. No upgrades to your sucky slow hosting.

So I spent last week moving all of my websites to media temple hosting.  It isn’t cheap anymore but it works.  I am trying to convince Jeff Nemelka and JR Dansie to move all of their sites as well.

Anyway I will be producing more lousy content soon!

This was my response to a recent profnet on viral marketing for small companies.  I thought it was worth sharing.

The larger your potential audience the harder it is to make something become viral.  The problem is that we all have the same base interests but our higher level interests are weird and varied.  Everyone watches when somebody starts to take their clothes off, but only a few people are interested in bird watching or canoe making.  So as a small business if you are marketing to everyone in America between 20 – 30 and you want to stand out then you are in big trouble.  There are millions of people competing for the attention of the audience and they are all using tactics focused on the base interests of the masses.  But if you narrow that audience to a tiny niche that is made up of your very best customers creating something just for them making something viral becomes very easy.   I like to focus my clients not on building an audience but on building a congregation.  An audience tunes in occasionally but has no loyalty.  A congregation is much smaller but more passionate.  A congregation will evangelize you to their sphere of influence.  A congregation will forgive some of your mistakes.  So if I am a small company with a niche product and I want to create something viral my first step is to build a congregation.  The second step is to give that congregation what they want.  Once you have done this making something spread virally through this congregation and the people they influence will be easy.  It is much better to have a few hundred people who are crazy about your products than a few thousand people who are familiar with them.

I found this page a minute ago while looking for images of canoe’s. “The Strippers Guide to Canoe Building” I thought it was a perfect title.

I thought this picture was just too amazing not to post - brilliant marketing

“Our target market is men who will die someday”

Fact - I invented fat guys running marathons on October 6th 2007
Fact - My nickname has been “fatboy” since the 7th grade - ask anybody they will tell you
Fact - My wife is way more attractive than me
Fact - I better get something from these guys - I will settle out of court for some free swag

some of you may know this already but wind turbines are currently being installed in the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon. I went up there last week with my son Ashton, he is 2.5 and LOVES windmills. I am 29.5 and I love windmills too so it was perfect.

I heard there were going to be 9 total - I only counted 8 but there could be one more that I missed. As you can see in the picture only two are finished but don’t appear to be spinning yet. I loved this picture, strip mine the land and then once it has been sufficiently abused throw up something green. Utah has to be the only place this would ever happen, well truthfully this would probably happen everywhere but Oregon. I am hoping the City or the power company turns this land under the windmills into some kind of park it could be a really beautiful location with the river flowing right through the middle.

This is a good shot of all of the poles the one closest to the camera has the generator sitting on the ground next to it. Just to give you some scale that is about the size of an average camping trailer.

Here is a picture of Ashton standing in the base of one of the blades. He is about 3 feet tall. I don’t know if he thought this was cool, but I sure did. Growing up White Trash I have a similar picture but I am sitting in the wheel of Big Foot at a Monster Truck Rally. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world when I was little.

I wanted you too see how big the bolts are. These are used to hold the blades to the Generator.

Each blade has a long row of these tiny fins. I am not sure what they do but this is my geeky guess. In the morning the wind blows very hard out of this Canyon. They have been experimenting with smaller windmills for years at the mouth of the canyon and they always break because the wind is consistently too strong. These larger windmills have Rotor Hubs at the base of the blades so they can be rotated to reduce drag. I think these fins help reduce the drag as well. They should also help reduce the noise which is good because there are houses about 1/4 mile away. If somebody actually knows why they are there and can debunk this guess go for it. Your actual knowledge would be appreciated.

I thought these would be made from aluminum but when I looked closely it looked like sandwiched layers of fiberglass or something, I looked up what it really is and this is what Wikipedia said:

Modern rotor blades (up to 126 m (413 ft) diameter) are made of lightweight glass-reinforced plastic (GRP) with an epoxy or polyester resin matrix

Here is the Wikipedia Article on Wind Turbine Design

I threw this picture in because I thought it was cool that the deer didn’t care are all that I was there.

Google Maps Satellite View Of Wind Turbine Location

Google Maps Street View Of Wind Turbine Location This is the view from highway 6 as you are going toward Denver through Spanish Fork Canyon.

Alex Koritz has a great post on his blog that he calls “The Harvard Syndrome”

“Some schools, “Branded” schools (tempting, but I’m not going to mention school names), put it into the heads of graduates that upon leaving the workforce, they can enter a company mid-level. They’re too good for the typical grunt work that most ‘newbies’ are asked to do. They’re ready to manage accounts! I’ve come to call this the “Harvard Syndrome”. “

I like this post because I graduated from UVSC (soon to be UVU). There is another side to this story, not only do people from the schools with big brands have a sense of entitlement. But many people automatically assume they are “more qualified, more intelligent, or more whatever” than people who choose another school. How did dropping out of Princeton get more street cred than finishing something you started?

There is another thing that really bugs me. When somebody has worked for a big well know organization and they try to throw that weight around for the rest of their careers.

This is what I want in an employee:

Somebody who can finish what they start - college, car payment, home improvements, Eagle scout project, Marathon, anything really I will take a finisher over a coaster every time. Starters are good to have around but don’t have too many on your team or you will never go anywhere.
Somebody who is intelligent but not an intellectual - don’t talk DO, Stop thinking and start DOING.

Somebody who has made small things bigger - I don’t care if you were a small part of a big thing I want you to be a big part of a small thing

Somebody with bad grades - “C’s get degree’s”, “Someday the A students will teach the B students how to work for the C students” - I worked full time while going to school. I graduated with 6 years of full time work experience with a bunch of random companies. I had about a 3.0 Average and I Damn proud of it. I should put that on my resume.

Hi, Josh Carr.

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I don’t usually get this much action in a month.  It is like the prom and my date is REALLY drunk.  Now the pressure is on to post something insightful.

We recently moved from Divinci Draper (great central location) to Divinci Cottonwood (nicer larger office).  We were all talking about what made our new office space better.  Melissa made the observation that when you are a girl you know you are in a nice building when your heals click as you walk in.  This struck me as profound for some reason.  It is a simple thing but really ads to the “brand” of the building.

• Have you noticed that laminate floors look the same but don’t sound as nice as real wood?
• Have you noticed that nice cars have a different sound when you close the door than my Mazda?
• Jen pointed out today that she doesn’t like to work at starbucks because they make it too noisy.  I bet that noise is part of the brand.
• Your Ipod makes a nice comforting click when you do something.
• Leather sounds “rich” when you sit on it
• Did you know Harley Davidson trademarks the sounds of it’s bikes?

Sounds are an important part of the user experience.  It seems like I knew this once before but I just realized it again.

Ok so after reading this post on social analytics I decided to see what I have been recording on myself.

Don’t bother me on Wednesday nights at 10pm because that is when I am catching up on my blogs.

Blog Traffic - my ego wishes these numbers were higher

I am not very popular on Twitter…I probably don’t say anything worth reading.

This is from Linked In and is pretty surprising.

Well that was some interesting trivia but probably a total waste of time.

I have always like Obama better than Hillary but that second image in row 1 might win my vote. I didn’t know we had the same hobbies.