There are a number that sound like they fit the bill, but many are plugins associated with a specific service (namely theirs) that let you backup to their service.  Others require you to log in, create a directory and give it admin permissions.  I just needed something I could install via the WPadmin panel, click a button and grab the theme as-is.

That would be Solid Code Them Editor, a WordPress Theme Backup & Editing plugin.

Hope that helps someone else :)

In my time hiring outsourcers I’ve been able to mentally catalog a number of criteria that make the difference between an outsourcer getting hired or their being passed over, either by myself or by others who review their credentials.  What this is really about is marketing yourself as a resource for someone who is looking for you as a resource.  So, like most effective marketing, people reading it will say, “Well, that’s obvious” after having read it.

The thing is, like most effective marketing, it’s clearly not obvious to people (even though they always think it is) because most outsourcers do not do these things.

Use A Professional-Sounding Email Address

I cannot count how many hundreds of job applications I’ve reviewed from sexygurl1984@hotmail.com or headshotkilla@gmail.com or any number of other ridiculous email addresses.  It’s free to register an email address and if you’re using Gmail then you can even forward it to your normal address, so there’s no excuse for this.  Obviously the best option would be to have a portfolio site with your own domain, but you don’t need that.  You just need something professional.  Start with something simple like yourname@gmail.com.  If that’s not available, tweak the format a little and register [firstinitial]name@gmail.com.  If that’s not available, keep playing around until you find something that sounds professional.

Don’t List Silly Hobbies On Your CV or Resume

I also can’t count how many CVs I’ve seen with interests listed on them that include shopping, airsoft, music and whatever else.  First off, I don’t care what your guidance counselor said, no one cares about your interests.  No one cares about my interests either.  This is never more true than in the world of outsourcing.  Unless your interest is directly relevant to the work you’re applying for, don’t bother to list it.  For example, if you’ve spent 5 years managing an online forum and you’re applying for a job in social networking then you might list it, but leave off anything not relevant.  If you don’t have anything relevant then leave off interests altogether (this means 90% of you).

This one might sound harsh, but the goal of your resume or CV is to communicate your professional skills and your fitness for the job. Anything that detracts from that in any way, however small, needs to go.

Use Whatever Communication Methods The Client Requests

It would take both hands, both feet and some other appendages to count how many times I’ve written back a candidate in response to their applying for a job only to be told something like, “I don’t have Skype, sir.”

Let’s just put this out there: If you don’t have Skype installed or if you don’t want to use it then pick another career field.

The point here is not which app is best, though, it’s that if your immediate reaction is to tell an employer you’re not willing to use whatever application they want you to use then what you’re really telling them is either A) “This person is lazy or stubborn” or B) “This person is too dumb to be worth hiring.”  Whatever your actual thought process at the time, this is the perception, I promise you.  So just install the app, register an account and reply with your id at that service.

And If That’s Skype, Then Always Have A Mic

This is another one that constantly comes up with outsourcers. Skype is the most popular communications platform for outsourcing and if you have it then you should have a mic so that people can chat with you.  And if you have a mic then you need to be ready to chat with short notice.

I’ve visited countries where people are outsourcing from and I have many friends in these countries, so I know that often outsourcers live with their extended families and/or in noisy environments.  People are understanding, so if that’s the issue then tell them it’s a little noisy right now and ask if they mind the noise.  You can always mute your mic. Do not constantly have some excuse about why you don’t have a microphone. If you genuinely can’t afford one, just tell them that you’ll buy one after you get paid.

I can tell you from experience that whatever the reasoning, constant excuses about not having a mic are perceived as you not wanting to communicate and that makes employers mistrustful and, ultimately, irritated because they can’t communicate with you.

Don’t Work On Two Projects Simultaneously

Many outsourcing jobs these days are essentially virtual assistant jobs where you’re basically acting as a resource for needs that arise regularly – whether that’s transcription, general administrative help, research or whatever.  That means you need to be available quickly during a set time period to carry out tasks, just like all of us do at our jobs.

When you’re constantly gone for 30 minutes at a time and tasks take you an exceedingly long time to complete, with regular excuses about needing to research something or carry out one or another activity that’s not directly productive then, I have to tell you, we’re not stupid as employers.  We know what’s going on and we know that you’re doing two things at once – and that one of those things is probably working for someone else.

It’s perfectly appropriate to work simultaneous jobs and, depending on your arrangement, it may even be expected, but if you’ve been hired to man a specific position for a set time period then don’t try to play this game.  The default position of most employers in an outsourcing relationship is to assume that you’re going to cheat them in some way.  That may not sound nice, but it’s the hard truth.  Even if you’re actually being totally honest, doing something that makes them think you’re being dishonest simply confirms an already held belief.  In marketing, the one thing you don’t want to do is fulfill a negative stereotype that people hold of you.

Take Major Payment Methods

PayPal’s a pain in the ass in some ways for sure, we know it takes an extra week for the money to get to your account after you withdraw it.  Still, the employer sets the payment terms and PayPal is what most employers will want to use for smaller jobs – maybe moneybookers if you’re lucky.  Don’t expect anything more, though.

I’ve had outsourcers make repeated requests to be paid by Xoom, even though it only allows (or did at the time) US accounts as payers.  I’ve had outsourcers request to be paid by moneygram as well, which is a pain for businesses to use in many cases.

If you’re outsourcing then you’re subject to how they want to pay unless there’s a very compelling rationale for change – and they’re probably going to want to pay you either through PayPal or through some escrow function of a site like oDesk or eLance.  Just deal with it.  Yes, it sucks.  I know.  This is life.

The Onion Bernanke satire: http://onion.com/oODFwW

Thai Rath serious editorial: http://bit.ly/qAI8kL

My Small Business Email Marketing Background

In the early days, there wasn’t really a small business email marketing company out there worth using. I worked on my first real email marketing campaign in about 1999, I think. By “real” I don’t mean sending some emails out of Outlook; I mean a templated file with personalized values filled out by an injector as the data was pulled from a database after which the finished email was sent by an MTA.

I was working at MileSpree at the time, an early frequent flyer mile rewards outfit, and we’d built our own internal list of several million users. When you had millions of users in 1999 there weren’t a lot of great options between DIY solutions and paying through the nose for consultants to give you what amounted to a DIY solution. So, our VP of Software (RIP) built an email marketing application that did what we needed and eventually we had several servers running in tandem so we could get our weekly deals out to all our users.

Running your own server is a pain in the butt, frankly, but it can lead to some truly hilarious moments (not at the time, of course). During the first test run of the server, an errant line of code meant that a guy named Dan at AOL was sent 50,000 copies of a single email. Turns out when you don’t clean all the commas out of your email address field it’s not a good idea to parse flat files looking for a comma. That wasn’t my mistake, thankfully. I just sent out emails titled “Your Free Peasant…” instead of “Your Free Present…”

Skipping Ahead A Bit

In today’s world, small businesses and startups have what amount to online marketing utilities that are available for use, which makes life a lot easier. You don’t need to build an email server, you can use a small business email marketing company like Constant Contact or AWeber or… MailChimp.

I’ve used them all, really, all of them. I’ve also used fully fledged in-house email servers of different kinds. I know all about reputation and deliverability and personalization and conditional logic and so on. I also know that a small business doesn’t need to know about these things, it just needs to get the message out as easily and quickly as possible. So, why is it that I run across clients regularly who flatly refuse to use the best tool on the market even when they’re advised? It’s a puzzle.

Here are what are arguably the most well-known ESPs (Email Service Providers):

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• AWeber
• MailChimp
• Vertical Response
• Constant Contact
• iContact
• Get Response

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If you haven’t seen all those sites, go click around for a bit. Which site impresses you? Which one would you choose or have you chosen? Why? This fascinates me.

Use MailChimp, Dammit

I know which one you should use and why you should use it – the answer is MailChimp. It’s got the best deliverability, though you can make a case that AWeber’s right up there on deliverability. It’s the easiest to use. It’s got the most flexible, simplest templating system for small business owners to use to get set up quickly while creating good looking emails that can convert.

Beyond that, it’s got the best workflow, the most interesting conditional logic for personalization, the best API integrations, the most thorough reporting, the best mechanisms for split-testing and so on.

It’s also the best looking site, obviously, with the best marketing – at least to me.

So why is it that, time and again, clients looking to do small business email marketing choose another solution and become instantly loyal to it? I can understand if you’re heavily integrated with another solution, if you require a solution that’s specific to your CRM or if you just don’t want to move your database of 1,000,000 records over from your existing ESP, but I often run into clients with relatively small lists (100,000 and below, let’s say) who don’t yet have an ESP and who refuse to listen to my, frankly, expert advice on this topic.

A Final Plea

So, let me put this out there for free for anyone who is receptive to advice:

If you’re a small business owner looking for a great small business email marketing company, choose MailChimp. I don’t care what your friends use, I don’t care what you heard was good or what some other small business owner told you worked for him or her, it’s not relevant. The only thing that matters is using the best tool. MailChimp is the best tool for all the reasons described above, but let me sum up the case in one sentence:

MailChimp will get you set up faster, help you send more attractive emails, make better suggestions about how to improve your emails, compel you to test your email creatives more easily, deliver more emails to your customers’ inboxes, give you the most flexibility in designing and customizing your emails easily – all in a workflow that just makes sense.

I try to think like a small business owner here, so I look at the templates offered (assuming small business owners won’t have custom designs) and the packages and pricing offered (assuming price matters). I look at what it takes to sign up and so on (knowing people will avoid onerous signup procedures). I check out all the benefits and hurdles to conversion. It seems like just a no-brainer. The templates on every single other ESP are just plain bad. The built-in editors on the other ESPs suck, frankly, where MailChimp’s is fun to use. The price point is free on MailChimp to get started and so on. Barring extenuating circumstances as alluded to above, there’s no obvious reason why so many clients choose lesser – sometimes just plain bad – ESPs and refuse to even look at what I recommend.

God bless them, the small business clients I’ve dealt with are mostly lovely people. Fortunately, like their doctor whose advice I hope they follow, I get paid even when clients don’t listen. Unfortunately, though, I like to see clients using the best tools possible that present their business in the best possible light and that free them up to focus on doing business instead of tinkering with cumbersome technology, so I’d rather they just chose MailChimp and stopped wasting their own time and money on other solutions.

Give MailChimp a try already, jeez!

It’s okay if you’re not sure what to do with this facebook stuff yet. I don’t know how to cook. You can do the basics yourself, just let me help you avoid some common SNAFUs with a handy guide.

[notice] Before we get started, if you decide you’d like to get even more out of your restaurant facebook page, or if you’re running a regional chain, just drop me an email or call me at (USA) 832-699-0466. The advice below explains how to undertake a DIY effort (and it looks like one on purpose), so it’s not indicative of my professional service quality :)[/notice]

If you’re running your own restaurant and you’d like to get started right now, here’s a DIY primer on getting set up followed by some ways to get the most out of your page:

Restaurant Facebook Page Setup: Step 1

Get Going, Then Stop & Do A Little Thinking

To get started, go to this URL:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Then select “Local Business Or Place” in the upper left-hand corner (looks like the image to the left). The box will roll over and reveal some form fields.

The next step is, surprisingly, the part where people first start making mistakes that will snowball. To avoid the easy problems, let’s do some quick thinking that will result in not-losing-out on business.

So, get some notes out, open a browser and work through the following:

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• Restaurant Name: Do you run multiple outlets? If so, will they have individual pages? Then name each page with a location (e.g. Burger Shack at The Houston Galleria). Is your restaurant name unique? If not, add a local term (e.g. Luigi’s on Clear Lake).
• Street Address/City/State/Zip: Facebook’s mapping brain interfaces with bing maps, so check your address here. Type in variations until bing pinpoints your business, then indignantly copy where bing thinks you are.
• Phone: Enter your phone number in the format that’s most accessible. Depending on what country you’re in, that may mean country codes or God knows what else. Just think like a customer.

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Why is all this important? Restaurants face some challenges that aren’t common to all local businesses, so you have to think like a restaurant.

People need to be able to find you on Facebook for your page to matter. Most of your fans will come from check-ins and Likes, but some will find you looking for nearby restaurants or by typing in the name in a search engine (or Facebook’s search). You need to anticipate these needs and make sure you’re easy to find in every channel – and that’s what I’m helping to make sure you do!

Restaurant Facebook Page Setup: Step 2

Filling Out Forms (The Easy Part!)

Now that you’ve done your homework ahead of time, fill out the form on the page as follows.

Restaurant Facebook Page Setup: Step 3

Adding Your Business Profile Picture

Next you’ll be presented with a page asking you to upload a Profile Picture, so let’s do a little prep work here. First, some things you need to know about your Profile Picture:

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• Size: The maximum dimensions are 180px wide by 540px tall, meaning that you should use that space to advertise your business. Don’t clutter it up too much, though.
• Contents: Don’t just toss a logo up, add crucial info or promotions. That’s logo on top, with only a few lines of key promos (e.g. Happy Hour 5-7 Every Day!) or info (e.g. Open From 10AM-1AM Daily) below.
• Composition: If you’re not a designer, keep it simple; white background, logo on top, text below (use one clear font), maybe an image or two – pixlr can handle editing. Designers, of course, go to town.

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Is that the best possible solution? No, ideally you should have a designer work up something attractive that presents a clear message.  It’s a small project, so I’d be surprised if a simple, attractive business profile pic cost more than $25 all-in, assuming you have the outsourced contacts (I do). Of course doing the DIY version I describe will still put you ahead of 75% of the non-chain restaurants I see.

Once you’ve finished creating your profile picture, go ahead and upload it.

Restaurant Facebook Page Setup: Step 4

Don’t Listen To The Bad People

On this step, you’ll be presented with the “Get Fans” screen. It makes absolutely no sense from your perspective to share anything at this point – what have you got to share? Facebook knows, though, that you’re caught in the flow of creating your page and vulnerable to giving them a bunch of free contact info. We’ll do this later, carefully, but for now:

Just ignore the two buttons, make sure the “Share this page on my wall” button is un-checked and then click Continue. Your page has no content, it’s not yet interesting and you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so wait until your page is really ready to be shared. We’ll get to that soon.

Restaurant Facebook Page Setup: Step 5

Add Some Basic Info

The first thing you’ll need to do here is get your restaurant’s web site URL ready. Easy enough. Then, more importantly, you need to write out a 255 character “About” statement for your site.

Your “About” copy will appear on the left-hand sidebar below your page links, so it’ll be prominent. One other important thing to note about it is that URLs in approximately the first 80 characters of your About section are clickable. Normally, you need to post the URL to your site on the wall or people have to dig into your info section (which most won’t do) before they’ll visit your site. If you put your URL here, however, it’ll be clickable and draw a little more traffic to your site.

Once you’ve written out something clever, go ahead and fill out the form – you can change this stuff later and see how it looks after editing, don’t worry!

Restaurant Facebook Page Setup: Step 6

Welcome To Your Page – Start Editing Things!

Unfortunately, the fun is just beginning. Now it’s time to go through all those little hidden settings and tick all the boxes before you can get to the entertaining part where you post photos, add friends and start having an impact on your business.

By now you might be able to see why many businesses pay to have this done for them. Not only is the end result usually a bit more professional looking, but it also saves you several hours. If you’d like to have all this taken care of, and talk about how to get results from your restaurant facebook page, drop me an email and let’s talk. Or, if you’d like to continue on, keep following my little guide here and get a solid page up and running on your own :)

At this point, you should be staring at a page that looks something like this (click for full size):

You’ll notice that Facebook’s already asking you to do even more stuff. Their recommendations aren’t exactly bad, but they get the cart before the horse a bit as mentioned previously. Let’s do it my way instead.

First, confirm your page category at the top by clicking “Update Category” like so:

Then, just below the big Get Started, click on the “Edit Info” link with the little pencil next to it (like this: ). You’ll be taken to the “Basic Information” tab where you’ll see a ton of little things to fill out. Most of these are obvious, but I’ll cover a few here that aren’t and offer some tips.

• Community Page: This is supposed to be a kind of community you’re associated with, like “Pizza” or “Peoria, IL.” If you select this, a link to the community page you select shows up under your title drawing traffic away from your page. A big rule in Online Marketing is don’t send traffic away from your page, so in most situations don’t select one.
• Place Sub-Categories: Allows Facebook to further understand what you are, so a burger joint would select “Burger Restaurant” and so on. Choose three of these that apply to you for sure.
• Description: This appears at the top of your Info page, so make sure it’s a compelling message that has pertinent info as it’s the first thing people will read when they go to your Info page.
• Food Styles: Select every single one of these that’s possibly applicable, but don’t be dishonest. The more categories you belong to, the more times you’ll appear to Facebook users and the more customers will try your restaurant.

Once you’re done filling in everything on this page that applies to you, go ahead and click “Save Changes” at the bottom.

Once the changes have been saved and the page reloads, look at the menu on the left-hand side and click Your Settings. There’s not a ton to see here and for now you should just leave both of these items checked. We’ll revisit this in the next article about promoting your restaurant facebook page.

Now click Manage Permissions. You’ll be presented with a number of options that seem pretty straightforward, but they have important implications, so let’s make sure we don’t do anything that could hinder your ability to be found or keep people from participating on your page.

I’ll go over the key points quickly here:

• Page Visibility: Obviously, leave this unchecked so that others can find your page.
• Country Restrictions: Unless you’ve got a compelling reason to restrict your page to one country, or a few, don’t put anything here. There are complex reasons not to do this, but the basic Online Marketing rule is don’t limit exposure in any way unless you absolutely have to.
• Age Restrictions: Leave this at 13+ unless you’re running an XXX establishment. If you make it any higher, your page exposure will be limited in searches and in terms of public visibility (see previous exposure rule).
• Wall Tab Shows: In every case I’ve ever worked on for a small business, it’s always been better to let users post on your wall. It gives your page a feeling of being alive and makes you look more popular, which people respond to. Leave this as All Posts.
• Default Landing Tab: Unless you’re running a special promotion, leave this as Wall. There are some cases where you may want to direct people to a custom landing page, but this is way overused. Keep your wall current and direct people to it.
• Posting Ability: You might want to take out the ability of users to add tags to photos if you start seeing them abused (other businesses will tag themselves in your photos). Otherwise, leave all these checked for now.
• Moderation & Profanity Blocklists: Leave these empty for now and only use them if you experience problems with people trolling your page offensively.

Now click on Featured. We’ll just go through these.

The Featured page contains options for Featured Likes and Featured Page Owners. Until you use Facebook as your business page and Like other pages, you won’t have any Featured Likes to select to display so don’t sweat this one right now.

If the owner of the page (maybe you?) is a Page Admin and wants their personal account to appear on the page sidebar as the owner, this is where you make that happen. Just make sure you’ve made the owner an admin of the page (see Manage Admins in the same menu) and then, on the Featured page, click “Add Featured Page Owners” and do what it says.

Resources are useful in promoting your page, but it’s a little premature to start doing that yet, so we’ll cover it in the next article about promoting your restaurant facebook page.

Manage Admins is pretty self explanatory, so there’s no need for explanation. One important point here, though. Be careful who you admin, as they’ll be able to change almost anything on the page.

Apps is something we don’t need to worry about right now. We’ll cover that in the next article on promotion of your restaurant facebook page. For now, though, just skip past it.

Mobile is another topic that doesn’t merit a lot of coverage here. If you do have an iPhone, Android or other device that has a Facebook app then using your mobile device is a great way to quickly upload posts and photos. Even if you don’t have one of these, you can still use the email address on this page to send in photos and updates.

Insights is a great way to figure out more about who’s viewing your page and what they’re doing. Of course you don’t have any visitors yet, so while you can take a look around, this is another one we’re saving for the next article on promoting your page.

Deals is the last item on the list (forgetting Help) and another that we’ll deal with in the next article. For now, though, let’s focus on getting your page up and looking like a living, breathing business.

Restaurant Facebook Page Setup: Step 7

Let’s Decorate This Place

To get started, click the “View Page” button at the top right-hand corner of your admin screen. When you get there, you still might be looking at the Get Started screen. If so, click the Wall link on the left-hand menu for your page. Now you’ll see a wall page that looks a lot like your personal wall.

At this point, there are a few things you need to do to get your page up and looking good:

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• Add at least 5 photos to your page as they’ll fill up the 5 slots across the top. Try to make them colorful shots of food or of any well-known signage or other symbols of your restaurant.
• Add enough posts to the page to fill up the basic wall. Make them interesting and concise – and remember that photos will show up as posts, so add a photo and then add a post and so on.
• Have a couple of friends look at the page and see what they think. Once you’re satisfied that it’s up and ready to go, turn it loose on the world

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Restaurant Facebook Page Setup: Closing Step

One Final Point

There’s an issue that many of you will have. As of this writing, Facebook’s still got problems with there being a separate Place entry for a business (based on people having checked in there) and a separate Business Page (the thing you’ve just created).

For some page owners, a Merge button appears allowing you to merge the two, so that people check in to your page, but many report problems with this functionality. For some, it just plain doesn’t work, while for others the button isn’t even there. Essentially, right now most people will need to make do by managing their Facebook Place and their Restaurant Facebook Page separately.

They’ll get around to fixing this, but Facebook’s quite famous for being completely unresponsive to their community, so don’t expect an announcement or much help. It’ll just work one day. For now, if there’s already a Facebook Place for your business, just make sure you fill out all the info correctly and tell Facebook that you’re the owner (using the Do You Know The Owner? link on the Place page for your business).

Now that you’ve set up your page, you need to promote it. That’s what the next article in this series is about (arriving soon).

If you have any questions, comments or concerns you can post them below. If, on the other hand, you’d like to outsource this whole process, have a professional looking page and then talk about how we can use it to drive more people and more revenue to your restaurant, you can give me a call at (USA) 832-699-0466 or email me at kevin@kevinmcgaffey.com. I’ll be glad to chat about it!

Prologue

For some time I’ve wanted to write a retrospective analysis of how Apple’s marketing got me. As I type this sentence, I’m on my little MacBook. There are two USB cables attached to the MacBook. One runs to an iPhone 4 and the other runs to an iPod shuffle. Attached to the iPhone 4 are a pair of Apple in-ear earphones. Sitting on my desk is what used to be a functional iPhone 3GS. Turns out the panniers on my mountain bike weren’t waterproof. Oops.

My point here isn’t to slobber over Apple Tom Friedman-style, it’s to point out that I’ve now spent thousands of dollars on Apple products. Ten years ago I owned no Apple products and the only Apple product I had in my possession was a copy of Quicktime installed on my desktop PC. Not only was I not a consumer of Apple products, I didn’t want to be. I had always been impressed with the marketing Apple did under Steve Jobs and their products looked and seemed innovative when he was around, but they’d been in decline for most of my adult life and as I lived more and more of my professional and personal life online I had begun to grow a disdain for Apple consumers, who were deservedly famous for being smug, arrogant and petulant about what is, after all, a corporation and an array of consumer goods.

In short, I wasn’t looking to become an Apple consumer and I wasn’t a very good prospect in many ways. But there was one very specific area where I was vulnerable to pretty much anyone with a good solution and that’s how they hooked me.

“C:\Lame\lame.exe” –preset “poop.wav” “poop.mp3″

I began ripping my own MP3s from the command line sometime in the mid-1990s. I think I found some instructions on a BBS I was logged into at the time and then managed to cobble together the programs I needed to create my first MP3. I still recall that the hardest part was digging around a much smaller internet for a copy of the Fraunhofer codec, the magical puzzle piece that compressed the music from the massive raw audio file on the CD down to the relatively tiny MP3 file on my computer. It required multiple steps and a bunch of goofy command line switches, making it a tedious affair, but it felt neat at the time even for all the trouble. Tiny, portable music. We never had that before – how cool!

Of course, as I ripped one CD after the other I began filling up my massive 120MB HD. This was back in the day when the only reliable CD-R drives were SCSI-based, something I didn’t have the money for, so I began storing MP3s on iOmega Zip Disks. Zip Disks, for anyone who didn’t work for a law firm or a design firm – or anyone born after 1990 – stored up to 100MB and were accessible via iOmega Zip Drives. 100MB on a single disk, whoever heard of such a thing?

Really Whipping The Llama’s Acid

Over time I managed to get my library onto a single hard drive, which centralized it without organizing it. I was still mostly interested in playing music, though, and back then most of us used WinAmp to play our MP3s because it really whipped the llama’s ass (also because it was a nifty free product and worked well). It had a built in equalizer as well as tons of add-ons like skins and audio plugins. It also featured weird fractal screensaver-type visuals for the acid crowd to trip on I guess, but I never could get into staring at visualizations. Or acid, for that matter.

What WinAmp did best, though, was play music. On the other hand, it didn’t organize music. After a while, the ability to make, store and re-use playlists was added, offering some limited organizational capability. Still, it was up to you to store your files somewhere and to somehow keep track of what was where. This didn’t seem so hard with a hundred files, but when you suddenly had several hundred, or several thousand, managing them became pretty unwieldy.

At this point I should probably have a sentence like “Enter ID3 tags” but, instead, I have a prolonged excuse for why I didn’t use them at the time. ID3 tags, the metadata in an MP3 file that notes things like song titles, artists and so on, were pretty limited at first and most of us never filled them out when we ripped our music – I’m not even sure if they existed when I ripped most of my CDs. Even if you wanted to edit your ID3 tags, the freeware editors out there were pretty clunky and there seemed to be competing tagging standards. Consequently, most people just had huge directories full of randomly titled MP3 files that had few or no tags. If you were lucky they’d have an ALL CAPS SONG TITLE and then the name of the program that created the MP3 automatically stuck into one of the fields. Joy.

To solve this problem, I got out my Bondo and bailing wire and carefully constructed directories divided into genres and artists to store my music in. This genius solution worked really well until I ran into my first soundtrack featuring a vocal duet after which my clever solution turned into a sisyphean task and my collection devolved into a morass of cross-filed or duplicated tracks that only I could find. I was the proud owner of the music library equivalent of Fred Sanford’s yard.

Oh Rio, Rio, Hear Them Shout Across The Land

About this time, in 1999 I think, the earliest MP3 players were also debuting, meaning that I could take a break from my OCD-like obsession with organizing my music library and focus on what made MP3s cool in the first place – portability.

After reading about the release of the first mass market MP3 player, I decided to play early adopter (never a good idea) and take the next step. With only a couple of players on the market at the time there wasn’t a huge selection, but I’d been a fan of Diamond’s video cards and so I stuck with them. I bought my Diamond Rio PMP300, a 32MB MP3 player with a SmartCard memory card expansion slot (I bought one of those too), and began taking my music with me.

In my recollection, you could stuff about 10 standard MP3s onto a Diamond Rio, though they encouraged you to use the downsampling feature to lower the quality (and therefore the file size) of your MP3s as you uploaded them to your Rio. That kinda defeated the point of having those nearly flawless recordings, didn’t it? Oh well, that was the world we lived in.

All in all, though, the Rio did what it was supposed to do: It played MP3s. That was, frankly, revolutionary at the time. It took forever to load songs onto the Rio, it didn’t hold very many, the device itself felt kinda cheap and it cost about the same as a modern iPod, but even with all the limitations you just knew right away that this was the future of consumer audio.

In some ways, the Rio felt a lot like the previous generation of electric cars in that almost no one owned them, they didn’t go very far, they didn’t look very cool and you knew they’d be replaced by something more practical as soon as the market figured them out. Little did I know at the time that these little MP3 players would far eclipse the electric car market within a decade. Maybe that quip about letting Steve Jobs run GM wasn’t so crazy after all.

Match.crap

I didn’t escape from the music library management issue for very long. The Rio came with a tool that managed your library and handled the upload and download of files. I believe it was a very early version of Music Match and using it was quite a chore. Most importantly, I remember feeling annoyed at how it handled my music library. In many ways it felt a lot like the Rio – a rushed first effort at accomplishing a task that was beginning to need a real solution.

Over the next few years other music library management tools were introduced and I did a lot of installing and uninstalling. I’d check out Music Match periodically, find that it had added a pretty new skin or that it allowed you to rip songs now, but it never really felt like a program designed for the end user. Instead, it felt like something designed by engineers that marketers then bolted revenue-generating opportunities onto and painted over. I can’t succinctly describe in bullet points what differentiates products like this from well-designed products, but if you’ve used a lot of software then you know the feeling. It was was slow, clunky, a chore to use and you always sighed a little inside before you double-clicked the icon to launch it.

Was anyone actually using this stuff? Or were they just cranking it out, selling it as an OEM MP3 tool to companies like Dell and then going out and negotiating deals that allowed them to bolt some other functionality onto the app to bring in some cash? I can’t say for sure, but it felt like the latter.

Return Of The Mac(World Expo Guy, What’s His Name?)

In the late 1990s, while I was wrestling with my music library, Steve Jobs made his return to Apple Computer (now just Apple, which I’ll get to later). In fairness, Steve’s journey is a lot more interesting than my attempts to organize MP3s, but this is my article!

I remember his return vividly because it had been foreshadowed by some corporate acquisitions and I had advised my mother to put some money into Apple stock, then at about $21 a share (she didn’t). I also remember it because for years I had been avidly reading about the history of personal computing and Silicon Valley, even visiting and spending time there. In all the reading about the industry, few characters are as compelling as Steve Jobs and few stories are as dramatic as his rise and fall and re-birth. Whatever your opinion of the company and the man, and whatever your prognostications for his second stint with Apple, you just knew that things were going to be interesting.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple I had really only just started to work in marketing, Online Marketing specifically, and I can recall being really impressed first with Apple’s new Think Different ad campaign and later with the products they began turning out. I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention at first, but Apple quickly became hard to ignore as, season after season, they released products that completely sucked the air out of the room. With industry trends being what they were and online music transitioning from a geeky hobby to a nascent industry, what happened next seems inevitable in retrospect. Good marketing always does after the fact.

Apple Plants A Seed

By the early 2000s, I had owned two Diamond Rio players and I had all but given up on managing my music library, which I eventually just began neglecting and playing in WinAmp. I was more and more busy with work at my first real startup company and that left less and less time for toying around with things like organizing MP3s on my computer.

I do recall that it was sometime in this period that I first heard of iTunes and the iPod. I wasn’t an Apple user and, at the time, Quicktime was the only Apple software widely used outside of Apple. So, other than playing games on my cousin’s Apple ][ as a kid, and later seeing his Mac in use, I really had little exposure to the company, which had been in decline for most of my (then very short) adult life before beginning its transformation under Steve Jobs II.

Back then, most of our important software was still tied to the desktop and you couldn't buy many popular games or software packages for the Mac. Macs looked a lot cooler, but they weren't running OS X yet and while more and more hardware and software had become available for the platform, the balance was still tipped massively in favor of Windows. I'd sometimes poke through the little Mac section at CompUSA and maybe check out the games available at EB, but I remained a Windows user by default.

So, if I think back honestly, my impressions about Apple at the time were that:

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• Apple seemed interesting and innovative
• Macs were expensive
• The cost of converting didn’t confer any killer app level of utility
• Reading about Macs online had left me with a pretty bad taste for the user base

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The second two impressions are pretty rational, but the first and last ones are entirely emotional – that’s not fun to admit. Still, if you’re going to figure out your own real consumer behaviors you have to admit when you’re being irrational and this was a time when I was being irrational.

Mac users were (still are) prone to outbursts of fanboy-inspired rage against anyone who didn’t share their love of Apple products. That’s inconsequential taken on its own, but for people whose first exposure to the Mac community was online, it meant that Apple as a brand looked great from the outside, but felt like Jonestown from the inside. You couldn’t ask newbie questions without being harangued and you had to tiptoe lightly around any topic that might be perceived as questioning the Mac’s capabilities. I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t put me off of the company and its products further.

A Brief Point About Irrationality In Marketing

This is where I break to make my first marketing point, which is something most creative marketers know: attitudes and beliefs are much more powerful than facts and logic. They’re easier to instill and nurture in some cases than in others, but if you look at the way everything from politics to consumerism works you’ll see a theme. Most people I talk to will agree that other people’s consumer decisions are affected by emotional manipulation, but assume that they, themselves, are immune. It simply isn’t true.

We all have closely held and largely irrational attitudes and beliefs that govern our behaviors – and that includes consumer behaviors. The best we can do is accept this, try to recognize when it’s happening to us and attempt to ignore the impulses. Fortunately for those of us in marketing, most people aren’t particularly introspective, if at all, so we don’t have to worry about a lot of resistance once we can implant and cultivate those attitudes and beliefs.

In that light it’s fair to say that thanks to inspiring advertising and excellent product marketing I was now intrigued by Apple’s brand and open to suggestion, but they hadn’t hooked me with anything yet and their online community was essentially acting as a repellent. I was a potential customer, but I hadn’t become an actual customer yet because of various hurdles to conversion.

Wrapping Up

At this point there are several key things going on, most of which I mentioned and some of which I haven’t:

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• I had an MP3 collection that needed organizing
• Taking my music with me was more than a bit of a chore
• Downloading music from the internet was becoming more viable and more common
• Apple had developed a solution to my problem, but it was only available on Apple computers, so I hadn’t seen or used it
• Apple computers and Apple’s brand were compelling, but the luxury price point and perceived lack of software/hardware options worked against justifying conversion
• Apple’s community of fans was tarnishing its brand for me, which irrationally reinforced my probably rational decision not to consider purchasing Apple products

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In retrospect, I was in a perfect position to become an Apple consumer at this point, but at the time becoming an Apple consumer practically required purchasing an Apple computer, which was a hurdle too far for me. That was all about to change, though.

Read: Part ][: The iTunes Cometh

This totally useless post is now on the books!