For the most part, I’m not inclined to explain myself. If I do something, I know why I did it and if others can’t understand, or if they misunderstand me, I tend to think of that as their problem, not mine.

In the past, this attitude has gotten me in trouble.

In business and marketing, it can really get you in trouble. I recently saw a post by DreamHost staff making fun of their own downtime. At first, it was very confusing. Do they now know how offensive their clients find downtime to be? It seriously angers me when a host I pay good money to can’t keep their servers up.

But I’m sure they know that. They just didn’t communicate their knowledge of it very well.

In business, especially the Internet kind, I think communication is extremely important. Explaining where you see your organization going is important. Explaining how you will deal with challenges that arise, and how you plan to overcome challenges that have arose; these are important tasks, and fundamental to marketing.

Customers can’t read you mind. You need to tell them exactly what you’re thinking.

That’s my thought for the day, and one that is somewhat related to my post about Brand Management.

This is a story of a young girl who recently moved to Paris, where she discovers her budding sexuality…

Oops, sorry, wrong book.

Most folks reading this blog have most likely already read Seth Godin’s Purple Cow (aff link). Aaron Wall first recommended it to me, years ago, and since then pretty much everybody in this industry has recommended it sometime or another. It’s one of the few “must-read” books, along with maybe four or five others.

This review is intended for those who have not yet read the book.

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It seems to me that many - or perhaps most - online companies dread refunds. They fight refunds like they were the plague. They expend massive energies fighting refunds, and drawing up contracts and terms of service agreements that do not permit refunds.

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Yahoo.

And the most popular on Yahoo?

Google.

Hard to please some a lot of people.

This highlights an interesting trend. People are typing domain names into the search bar, rather than into the address bar.

“These statistics confirm an observable trend: An increasing percentage of surfers uses search engines (most likely through search bars) instead of their browser’s address bar. But interestingly, there is a contrary development. Large numbers of people ignore search engines entirely and type whatever they are looking for (plus .com) directly into the address bar“.

Branding is as important as ever. And it will get increasingly important in the crowded search space.

Moral Superiority

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ThePlanet & EV1Servers, two top dedicated server providers, recently announced a merger.

A little history might be handy.

EV1Servers used to be RackShack. They have a horrible record for customer service. They lose hard drives, lose entire servers. When you try to cancel, they refuse to cancel billing. They are possibly the most hated dedicated server company on the Internet.

A couple years ago, I had a dedicated server with RackShack, and after three weeks of working on it, RackShack informed us that they had inadvertently blocked the very IP’s they had issued to us. We cancelled the server in the face of this incompetence and moved elsewhere, yet RackShack refused to cancel billing for six months or so, maybe longer.

When I posted about it in the forum, their customer service manager and several staff members joined up to defend RackShack by insulting forum members. Yeah, pretty dumb. So we put up a RackShack / EV1 webpage, which ranked #1 for “RackShack” and “EV1 Servers” for quite some time. (That’ll teach ‘em to mess with SEO’s )

So, RackShack / EV1 is pretty much evil.

ThePlanet, however, is like a cold beer on a hot day. They offer great servers and great support for fair prices, and their customer service is second only to ServerBeach. ThePlanet is one of the most highly regarded dedicated server companies on the Internet.

So, if I wanted to make a textbook branding mistake, what would it be?

*Thinking*

I got it! Merge the two! Voila, ThePlanet gets to share the hatred of EV1 Servers, without all the hassle of years of incompetence.

There’s a reason Toyota doesn’t put “Toyota” all over Lexus. Brand confusion, brand dilution, and in this case brand murder.

I used to have several servers at ThePlanet at a cost of several thousand dollars a month. Now I have none. And it’ll stay that way.

Recently an acquaintance launched a new website and a new service. The service should have been trumpeted from mountain tops and featured in the Wall Street Journal. It wasn’t. It was ignored, blown off and pretty much went unnoticed.

Why? (more…)