Deck The Sites, a Christmas Font Song
Interesting Social Media Observations and Psychology
I’ve been playing with social media for about a year and a half. I say playing because I haven’t had any agenda. I just wanted to meet interesting people, build some relationships, have some fun, experiment and learn. Every now and then I promote a little something like a blog post, a tutorial, or a friend. But as far as monetizing Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, I’ve done almost nothing.
I’ve been the kind of user that posts status updates only when I have something I believe people will be interested in and enjoy. I interact as much as possible. I scour Twitter and Facebook for updates I can respond to, and LinkedIn for questions I can answer. I retweet often. I promote projects others are doing. I join groups of like-minded individuals. I believe I’ve made some good friends online. In other words, I am doing what is supposedly all the right things.
So it was a major surprise to me over the past couple of weeks that I finally had something to ask for help with, and I’ve gotten almost zero response. I asked for two things – to retweet/spread the word, and to back a project for as little as a dollar. My request is very personal and requires very little commitment. It’s not a multilevel program or anything else third party.
I’m talking about my Time Travel Survival Guide project on Kickstarter.com. My previous blog post here explains the project and what I was requesting.
With thousands of followers on Twitter, over 500 “friends” on Facebook, and another few hundred connections on LinkedIn, as well as a personal list of 70 people I felt I could email directly, you’d think I’d get at least a few positive responses. What did I get? 15 backers and 2 retweets.
Now, I don’t read every Tweet and status update of those I follow and am connected with, especially lately as I’m spending most of my waking hours helping my best friend’s wife care for him as he’s dying of cancer. So I understand not seeing a single post. But I’ve posted several times and I’ve gotten responses on other posts I’ve put up. Even the click through on the link to the project is low. I don’t get it.
My only thought is the old “outside expert” idea that people you don’t know or who are far away have more credibility than people you do know. It’s the reason friends tend to not buy from each other, or join MLMs with each other, etc. I guess the more you know someone, the more you realize they are not geniuses, and their contributions lose value. What do you think?
Time Travel Survival Guide Project
I am writing a book titled The Time Travel Survival Guide. I have posted this as a project at a site called Kickstarter, where people can back the project financially from a dollar on up. Pledging $19 or more gets a copy of the book when it comes out, so it’s kind of like a preorder of sorts, too.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chucklasker/time-travel-survival-guide
The way Kickstarter works is, people pledge a dollar amount, and it only gets charged if the project reaches its funding goal in time. So, if I don’t get $3,000 in pledges by November 23rd, the project dies and nobody gets charged.
As someone who reads my blog, I could use your help. There are two ways you can help:
- You could back my project with a pledge. I have some cool stuff I’m sending my backers, and you’ll be part of something I think is pretty cool. Even if you pledge only a dollar, it will help my project get on the front page of the site for popularity.
- You could pass along the link and tell people you know me and think this will be a great book (I hope you do!). Here’s some sample text if that helps:
“An author friend of mine, Chuck Lasker, is writing a new book called The Time Travel Survival Guide. It’s a humorous, nonscientific look at surviving if you’re suddenly thrust back in time. He’s looking for backers for as low as a dollar to help him get it finished. You can see his description and even a cool video of him explaining his book at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chucklasker/time-travel-survival-guide. Pledging even a dollar would help him move up in popularity at the site and you’ll be a part of something pretty cool.”
That’s my pitch. I appreciate any help you can send my way!
What My Shih Tzu Loves to Eat
I have a 2 year old Shih Tzu. His official name is Peter the Great, Conqueror of the Badlands, but we just call him Petey.
As I took Petey out this morning for his first, er, constitutional, he, as usual, tried to find some rabbit poo to eat. We have a warren of rabbits in the park behind our house, and they come into our yard regularly to eat, have babies, hang out, and poo. Petey will chase the rabbits when he sees them, unless he’s tired, but he never catches them. I’m not sure if he wants to or what he’d do if he did. And maybe it’s the excitement of those chases that has gotten him to think eating rabbit poo is the greatest treat in the world.
Before you freak out, we do try to stop him, and usually succeed. But he’ll trick us, kind of wandering around, then jamming his snout into the grass and chowing down as much as possible before we yell at him to stop. We also try to find the poo and clean it up, but it’s little pellets in our 4″ tall grass, and we don’t have the olfactory powers of one Petey Lasker.
This whole topic got me thinking about all the things Petey likes to eat. Here are some of his favorites:
- Bananas
- Peanut Butter
- Meat (okay, like all dogs)
- Carrots
- Sweet Potato Treats
- Popcorn (more than anything in the world)
- Rabbit Poo (we do what we can to stop this, but he sneaks when he can)
- Toilet Paper and Paper Towel Rolls (actually he just likes to tear them up)
- Sale Papers (not newspaper, just the shiny sale papers, just to tear them up and make a mess)
- Stuffed Toy Stuffing (he doesn’t swallow, but he works intently to get the fuzzy stuff out as quickly as possible)
- Greenies Pill Pockets (he’d eat these for dinner)
- Ham (I know this is meat, but he gets especially excited about sliced sandwich ham)
- Purina Carvers, Beef or Chicken
- Three Dog Bakery Treats (I use these most as rewards for tricks, as seen in the video, above)
- Ice (I believe it’s his main hydration source he eats so much of it)
- Flowers (we bring home fresh flowers and hold them for him to smell and he just wants to eat them)
While Petey would eat almost anything, he does NOT like dry dog food, most manufactured dry bone treats, and anything he thinks we want him to eat.
Why do I bring all this up? Good question, because I have no idea if anyone cares. But I’m sick yet again, and bored to death, so I decided to type and this is what came out.
10 Reasons Why I Prefer the Miva Merchant Shopping Cart
I have been working with Miva Merchant for over seven years as a user, a consultant, and now as owner of MerchantTutorials.com, a Miva Merchant Flash Video Tutorial site and Miva Merchant Educational Partner. Why do I prefer Miva Merchant over other shopping carts, especially when some carts are “free?” Here are my 10 reasons:
- With hundreds of third party modules available (usually for $20 to $100), adding functionality is extremely easy. Alternatively, most platforms, especially open source, require custom programming or, worse, have free open source add-ons that are not supported well.
- Miva Merchant can be hosted with any of dozens of hosts who specialize in Miva Merchant. Many platforms require you to host with the company itself, reducing your options and leverage for support. Additionally, if you’re hosted with a shopping cart company, and they die, your store is gone forever. All good Miva Merchant hosts will move your site to their servers at no charge.
- Miva Merchant is one of only a few platforms who are investing the hundreds of thousands of dollars to be PCI PA-DSS Compliant by the July 2010 deadline. Any platform that is not compliant will not be able to (legally) accept credit cards after that deadline. Many shopping carts, especially open source, will have to close up the deadline. http://www.tophosts.com/articles/009189.html
- Miva Merchant 5.5 is based on MySQL, which is much better than the dBase database format of version 4. It allows unlimited numbers of products, categories, customers, etc., without a loss of site speed. Sites on Miva Merchant 5.5 are significantly faster than the prior version.
- Most other platforms are written in PHP. This commonality has made PHP applications a target for hackers. All PHP applications, like Wordpress, need updates constantly. Usually a security flaw is discovered only after hundreds or thousands of sites are compromised. Miva Merchant is written in their proprietary language (MivaScript), and then compiled so nobody can see the source code. I have not heard of a single security vulnerability with Miva Merchant 5.5.
- Done right, Miva Merchant can be easily understood from one developer to the next. So, if something happened to your site developer, you could find someone else in the industry who can get in and, within an hour or two, know everything about your site’s setup. With most other platforms, there would be so much custom functionality you’re pretty much forced to use the same developer, and it’s expensive to pay a new developer to reverse engineer his code.
- Some carts actually charge a percentage of all sales, leading often to hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in fees. This is especially true of Yahoo Stores and Amazon. With Miva Merchant, you can lease your license through a Miva Merchant expert host usually for less than $10 a month when you host with them.
- Miva Merchant has a dynamic user and developer community that is willing to help with almost any question at the user forums and/or directly. I learned all I needed about Miva Merchant from other users (since my tutorials were not available), so I contribute back as much as I can on the forums. Competing developers, hosts and consultants are very cordial to each other, unlike any other community I’ve seen. This makes the annual Miva Merchant user conference as enjoyable as any conference I’ve ever been to.
- Once you get used to it, Miva Merchant is extremely easy to manage. Check out this video tour of the Miva Merchant administrative area I created to help you see how quickly you could be up to speed.
- Miva Merchant is extremely flexible. It defaults to a base structure – header, footer, left column navigation, content section, navigation bar…
But you are not stuck with that structure like most carts. There is simply no limit to how you can customize your store with Miva Merchant. Check out the Miva Merchant Store Galleria and you’ll see what I mean. If you are not a designer, you can purchase one of dozens of Miva Merchant skins to get your foundation quickly, and be online with minimal work.
Check out my Miva Merchant page on this blog and get your free Miva Merchant 5.5 Cheat Sheet.
Do you have reasons I haven’t listed, or even reasons you don’t like Miva Merchant?
