This should be a ongoing series. There are so many companies who still do not get basic customer service. Today’s example is brought to you by VistaPrint.

I’ve used VistaPrint only a few times: to order business cards for both my wife and I, to have some cheap brochures printed up, and to take advantage of a couple of freebies like branded refrigerator magnets. But since I started to use them the volume of email offers they send me (daily) has reached spamming proportions. I get sometimes two email ads from them a day, offering 24-hour savings on everything from cards to coffee mugs, shirts, hats, banners. Everything I pretty much don’t need.

But today they lost my business. They send me an email (fancy, designed like a newsletter) with photos of my business cards. The ad states that these items still are in my account cart, but if I do not place an order by December 15, they will be removed from said cart. What reason–other than strong-arming a sale–could they possibly have for needing to clear out my cart? Are they running low on disk space? Database is getting too full? Need more room for higher-end customers? I tell you, I can’t believe they have resorted to threatening me to make a sale. Here’s the copy from the email:

We wanted to let you know that the items currently in your VistaPrint account portfolio (shown below), have not been ordered and will expire on Dec 15, 2007. Once the items have expired, you will be unable to recover them.

Well, what goes around, eh? Not that I am a volume consumer of their products, but now I am not at all a consumer of their products. I wonder how many others were equally turned off by this tactic. Do you suppose it worked on lots of others and they just racked up lots of sales? No, I don’t either.

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: online marketing bad customer service vistaprint

Many months ago (perhaps even two years ago) I installed the WordPress multi-user package on my development host. Within minutes, I abandoned it. I can’t recall now what the issue was, but I do remember thinking to myself that if it is this broken just trying to get the thing up and running, it isn’t yet ready for prime time (or my debugging time, either).

But yesterday, imagine my surprise when after downloading, unpacking, and installing I found myself tricking out a fresh instance of WordPress Mu (the Mu is actually a symbol rather than letters on their site). I went out and found some very nice themes; one three-column setup that I am particularly enamored with, and began customizing and exploring the new features.

Why am I bothering with this? Because WordPress in an of itself is a simple but powerful content management system. It can be tailored for almost any kind of site (newspapers, universities, any kind of blog), and makes it very easy for writers and editors to publish and own their own content. It also integrates well with other open-source tools, like vBulletin. And now, having this multi-user version, we can literally host hundreds of blogs using the same WordPress instance. Imagine a company with several brands or locations that wants to have their sites all look and behave similarly but also wants each to manage their own content. This kind of flexibility (and centralization) is a huge step in providing that kind of control. I’ll be spending a lot of time with this system in the coming months.

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: cms, multiuser, wordpress

I think always of economy in my work. Not what I get paid or how many hours I work. But rather, what needs to be done to solve a problem or create a better solution, and how that solution can be reused and modified to solve other problems. Simplicity in all thoughts and all things.

I found an article tonight on Huffington Post that buzzed me because I also am aware of this type of economy in my personal life. I hate waste. I don’t like buying things knowing they are junk. Or buying silly, stupid little geegaws and gimcracks for my kids simply because they want them, knowing these things are destined only to our next yard sale. I’m not a cheap guy; in fact, I love to spoil my girls (my god, I am truly doomed as money conduit). But I also want to send the message to them that they do not need every little thing that captures their eye.

Which is why I love this quote from the article:

Create a pile of goods, point it out to random bystanders and say, “Take what you want.” How long would the pile last? An hour, or 30 seconds?

I feel the same way about design and development of websites. People seem almost greedy about ‘web 2.0′ gadgets and widgets. Sure, you can have all you want. But which of these things delivers what you need for your business? Which brings you satisfaction that your website is serving you and your customers well? A really great website is the result of reviewing all those lovely gadgets out there and deciding which are the ones that will be useful and relevant to your business and your message.

Ask yourself: do you need that Ajax interface to deliver your message? Ajax is cool, but it can also mess with your Google exposure. Can you deliver the message without it?

Focus on content. How to structure that content in a readable way. How to make sure that content gets picked up by Google. How that content is perceived by your readers. The true economy comes from delivering your particular and unique content in ways that are attractive and pleasing but also functional and useful to your audience. Focus on your message first and your tools second.

written by Christopher Murray

Brilliant slideshow by Khoi Vinh discussing the differences between digital and print media from a design perspective. The takeaway here is that print media was designed to tell a story … that narrative was the guiding principle and as such control was the most critical tool. With digital and interactive media the guiding principle is behavior, thus removing some (if not most) of the control from the designer and putting in the hands of the user (a notion that infuriates many designers). Fascinating stuff and worth clicking through the slideshow.

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written by Christopher Murray

I have a client who is upgrading their internal systems and processes. They have chosen to use both SharePoint 2007 (because they are inherently a Microsoft house) and Ektron CMS400.net. SharePoint will be used to migrate from QuickPlace; Ektron is being used as an engineering document repository. Neither has any connection to or knowledge of the other. They do have an existing Intranet (one that I built years ago when an employee there). It’s a mix of LAMP and ColdFusion and anything else people wanted to try over the years. And it is a mess. The same sentiments apply as in yesterday’s post: I can’t find anything ... Our Intranet sucks.

So now we’re off with these new systems, building new sites and tools as the different groups request them. (We’re learning how to use these tools as we go along.) But there exists no sense of portal or commonality, of connectedness. Everything we are building is stand-alone, unaware of any of the other sites. And while each of these tools has a value to someone, there is nothing tying them together. Now, rather than one Intranet, we have several, disjointed systems to manage.

How do you avoid this? Before touching the first line of code or dragging-and-dropping the first widget, you have to ask yourself a few questions:

• What is the goal of this new system? New functionality? Better integration with existing tools?
• Are we going to replace the old Intranet or are we simply going to add to our toolbox?
• If we’re adding, how does this system integrate with the others?
• Who owns this system? Is there an administrator to see that it does not turn into yet another file dumping ground?
• Is there likely to be redundant data with other systems? What will you do about that?
• Is there a corporate mandate on which systems to use and for what purpose?
• Is there a set of standards to follow for consistency, repeatability, data structures, metadata?
• What about Search? Will you create a unified search across all systems? What’s the cost of that? What’s the cost if you don’t?
• Have you looked at this and the other systems with an eye toward developing a portal? Is there a sense that these systems and tools belong together?

These are not difficult questions, but they will give you an idea of how to move forward. If you want to avoid the “our Intranet sucks” anthem, you should consider how your systems will play together before you bringing more on board. You want also to consider what those systems will be used for and how you are going to structure the data going into them.

This is my mission now: helping people answer these and other questions to build better systems to support their business. I’m working closely on this with Mark Cahill over at VarioCreative, a guy who gets this stuff and has been successful at it for years. Give us a call and tell us how we can help you.

written by Christopher Murray

One of the key areas I am focusing on in my new business is Intranets. I have long been a vocal advocate for the business value of the Intranet, for building the business and the culture alike. But a common theme in business seems to be “our Intranet sucks” or “I can’t find anything in our system” or ” that’s your stuff, I need to find my stuff.” Too many businesses see their information systems and processes as a cost center rather than leveraging them as competitive advantages and assets.

The area I live in is ripe with business; office parks line the highway corridors and spot the wooded areas as well. And everyone has infrastructure. So, my question to you is how do I find them, those folks who would be interested in what I offer? I know they are not going to come looking for me. I have joined a few local groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the BNI. I could go “old school” and start knocking on doors with some cards. I certainly am using my network to full advantage (at least I am trying to), but what happens after that?

I would love to hear your advice and thoughts.

written by Christopher Murray

I felt bad leaving my good old cmurray.org blog behind. That was my first crack at writing a blog, the one that let me pretend to be one of the Churbucks, O’Regans, Cahills, or Slaters in this space. I left one last post out there letting people know the site would languish and to please come visit this new site. But even better, I found some tools to help me.

The easiest was to simply edit my Apache configuration file to include a redirect from cmurray.org to northboroughgroup.com.

RedirectMatch ^/$ http://www.northboroughgroup.com/blog/

Using this method rather than a meta refresh tag makes it seamless to the viewer (the refresh tag is often slow to actually take action).

But what of my feed? How do you redirect that? Turns out there is a nifty WordPress plugin called FeedBurner Plugin 1.2. The process was as simple as uploading the code to my site, activating the plugin from the control panel, and then adding the URL of the feed to redirect to. Now anyone who gets the cmurray.org feed through a reader (like Google Reader or BlogLines) will see articles from the northboroughgroup.com feed.

written by Christopher Murray

Many companies do not have an information management strategy, or if they do, it usually lacks the focus required to truly add value to the organization. If your strategy is predicated on the notion that Information Management is merely a cost rather than an investment, then you likely see no return. If you do consider it an investment, and treat it as such– supplying resources and being vigilant in your processes–your business can reap huge rewards.

A true strategy begins with a corporate mandate on how and where documents are to be stored. In more complex organizations, such as engineering or scientific companies, a corporate librarian or archivist acts as gatekeeper; all documentation to be checked-in goes through this person who ensure propers tagging and metadata. This system also requires constant checks and balances to ensure that documents are maintained with consistency.

Getting to this point is not a simple shift in thinking or a quick fix. In fact, the initial audit to create a more robust information management infrastructure can be time consuming and even frustrating. In order to discover the extent of your information, you must perform a lengthy process of discovery. Going through all of the shared folders and rogue websites and other corporate artifacts can indeed be overwhelming. But in order to achieve a level of information management where that data becomes useful this process must occur. This process is best broken down, either by department, or by types of documents, or even by starting with those areas that seem more organized than others (this last approach may also help to not frighten you off too early in the game).

Once you have identified and categorized the full breath of the data, you must then begin to think of how you want to use that data. It might be tempting to go ahead and try to find a new product at this point and just start jamming all that old data into it; but in time you will have nothing better than where you came from. You must first take a hard look at the types of data you have, where they come from, how they relate, what their commonalities are, and how might you want to bring them together in a useful way in the future. You also must begin to consider and development things like metadata and taxonomy.

From here you can begin to consider tools and possible structures for capturing and storing this data. Cost certainly is going to drive this discussion; but it is worth looking at a variety of offerings even if they are out of your price range to give you ideas of the kind of things you may or may not want in your new CMS.

Putting structure around your data is critical. Metadata is a good place to start. Taxonomy is hugely valuable as well. I recall recently having a discussion with a group of people and trying to explain to them the value of taxonomy. It was hard for them to get past the notion of just keywords and directory structures (and the jokes about stuffing animals). What really threw them was that with a proper taxonomy, you could conceivably drop all of your documents (and I mean all of them) into one folder in your CMS. (You would not want to do this, of course, because for the people who are managing the content and checking in documents this would be a difficult way to see and use the data.) But the fact is that if everything is properly tagged within the taxonomy, you can use search to find anything you want. In fact, at that level you can employ a facetted search, which simply means that you can pick the area of the taxonomy you wish to search specifically (for example, products -> hardware -> printers).

Information Management is not just a phrase that means you have information and places to put it. It implies that there exists a strategy for identifying, categorizing, tagging, retrieving, and aggregating that data. It means that you have recognized that data as an investment that can return valuable information more consistently and efficiently, which can in turn create opportunities and drive your business goals.

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: information management cms taxonomy

Welcome to the first post of The Northborough Group blog. This is a very exciting time. Projects are inplay, the business is forming and coming together, the new web site is up, lots of discussions with partners and folks I’ve known for years around new business and ideas.

Please come back here frequently to read not only about events related to the business, but also things we find along the way, anything from how to implement mapping on your sites to style sheet and database tricks. Most of all, tell your friends about the new site and the business, and keep us in mind when you have a new project starting.

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: welcome