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There is definitely no such thing as bad press just bad monetization…This video was brought to my attention by a friend and it got me thinking about the media. I believe that it is wrong in coming across as if it is on a moralistic higher ground than the story it is covering. This is an news story that ABC covered yesterday and I have to say that this site will get a whole lot of exposure that will benefit its bottom line. Now this post has nothing to do with the story in the video itself, but about the fact that both ABC and vidmax.com, the stunt men and maybe you will benefits from coverage of the stupid things people do for money. The news agency (’the publisher’) will benefit because its viewers will remain entertained by watching idiots being paid to hurt themselves. Thus their able to command top dollar for ad spots on their network. The website (as a content provider) on the other hand benifits because they increase their exposure and thus increase their ad revenue through traffic volume. This website also has the same relationship with the stunt men except that this time they are acting as the publisher, where as the stunt men are the content providers. No I’ll have to admit right away that I am leeching the content off this story for my own gain, but this is my point. Before you criticize this type of social leeching I want you think about something. If at any point you mention this story or this post to anyone, then you in turn become a publisher and thus receive a beneficial payment (social benefit…aka: Wow you are an interesting person with interesting stories). Now if not with this particular story, then I know it will happen with others. The point I am trying to make is that we are all someway acting as a content provider or as a content publisher to further our own bottom line. Just make sure you focus monetizing your efforts and on maximizing your benefits.
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Submission By: arpad
A day and a half after posting my logo design competition I already have 38 logo submissions. Now I’ll agree that there are a lot of poorly designed submission, but what is important is that there are several promising ideas. Sitepoint lets you critic all the submissions, which in turn allows the designer to progress towards a perfect logo. I am amazed at how powerful the internet is in bringing together talent from around the world to work on a project. What I also love is that not only is this a much more affordable to achieve something great than directly working with a professional, you are also working with many professionals competing at no cost for their time. You only pay for the final design you choose to declare the winner, and you get to choose how much you are willing to offer. By the end of the competition (Sunday, 26th of August) I expect that I will have an array of amazing designs to choose from.
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Something has to be said about maintaining a quality impression when your business is serving consumers. I walked into a Quiznos today and ordered a sandwich, and by the time I walked out of the door I vowed never to return to that Quiznos again. First of all the guy behind the counter was very unreceptive and non-animated when he greeted me (his opening words were “What to you want?”). I believe that first impressions are vital and will give you a certain degree of forgiveness and flexibility from your customers if something should go wrong further down the sales pipeline. If you are able to immediately establish a friendly relation with the customer he/she will often overlook minor imperfections in you service because of this relationship. Well in my case, immediately after I ordered the guy preparing my order dropped his knife on the floor and then picked it back up. Without even hesitating he went on as if nothing happened and was about to cut the bread before I spoke up and asked him “Hey, did you see that knife fall on the floor”. He did not even flinch in his response by saying “Ya!”. It was not until I asked him, “Do you think it might be a good idea if you washed the knife before you use it to cut the bread I’m about to eat?” that he actually turned around and did what I asked of him. After that I micro-analyzed every mistake that he made (which every consumer will do after their faith and trust has been violated). This included not asking me what I actually wanted in the sandwich (lettuce, tomato, CHEESE…), and with the sandwich (pop, chips, soup…). Not only was this guy bad, but the other guy at the till did not say a word to me before or after I paid except to say “Over there” (while pointing) when I asked for pickled peppers.
I can say with absolute certainty that they will never see me there again. There is a chance that the 2 customers before me will never go there again, especially after walking out of Quiznos with a disgusted look on their face. They both saw the knife fall and when they grabbed their meals they did not seem please to have purchased it. This is not the first Quiznos that I have been into that I have had a bad experience with, which indicates there might be some underlying customer service issues. I’m not a difficult customer to deal with either is that is what you were thinking. What is funny is that I know now why they are the only food retailer on the only block who is not completely jammed by traffic. Anyways stay away from these guys:
Quiznos - Store #4768
228 Wellington St W
Toronto, ON M5V 3W1
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As everyone knows every corporation needs a logo and stationary and as only some of you know - I can’t draw worth a damn -. So I decided to once again utilize the social networking aspects of the internet and bring designers to me rather than the other way around. I setup a design competition on a very useful website called Sitepoint.com. This is an amazingly useful webpage and as it turns out running a contest on the site is very responsive. I submitted the competition at around midnight last night and within 12 hours I already had 19 submissions. There are already several of the submissions that I like, and I am sure there will be many more to come. The details of the competition can be seen on the contest brief page if you are an artist and want to compete for this prize money. One thing that I forgot to announce is that I will probably be picking about 3-4 winners and utilizing their designs I will let my consumers pick the most successful design. As I did when picking my corporate name, I will use Google Adwords, Google Analytics, and Shopify (as recorded in my previous posts) to guide me to the best and most responsive logo. I’ll let the CTR (Click Through Rate) and CR (Conversion Rate) make the decision for me. I’m giving the power to the consumers.
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…I have received almost 10 private messages in the last two days either complimenting or criticizing me on my posts. Whether to make a point for or against or just to poke fun at me, I welcome all comments that you may have about me or my posts. I challenge you all to come up with witty and insightful comments that will further discussions in the posts and lead to progress.
P.S. I have a thick skin so don’t worry, your “smart” little comments wont even sting a bit…but please keep them constructive for the sake of progress 
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In my previous post I forgot to mention one other important factor that help me decide what name I should pick: Conversion Rate! I used two important services for this. The first is Google Analytics which I have to say is an amazing tool. I do have to admit I am still a novice when it come down to utilizing it, but I still found the important information I needed. The second is the Shopify e-commerce shopping cart which allowed me to quickly setup a mock e-commerce site in order to test out my conversion rates. Another one of the reasons I picked Silverback over Airwear was because Silverback converted almost twice a well as Airwear, which I imagine is because of the Nikeish affiliation.
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Silverback Apparel Inc. <- Loves -> 
The Result
After much deliberation I have finally chosen a name . I am currently in the process of incorporating under the name Silverback Apparel Inc. in the State of New York. There are several factor that came into play for why I ended up with this name, but I will mostly attribute it to one of my favorite companies: Google. First off I was not looking for something that everyone liked. Vanilla is not my thing and so I wanted something that people either absolutely loved or hated. Silverback was exactly that. It was either the favorite, or the one that people did not like. It is important to differentiate yourself from your competitors in business and I know that Silverback is very unique in my product category. Especially after reading Seth Godin’s Purple Cow and his blog I really realized now that I made the right decision. He is a branding and marketing genius and has become known in the last 5 years as one of the most innovate and creative people in his industry. His books are a definite must for an budding entrepreneurs. I know that I have chosen well also, because every time I tell someone my corporation’s name they remember it. This will go a long way to saving me money, resources, and time which is going to be important during my future branding and marketing campaigns.
The Process
Referring to my previous posts I basically after polled about 50 people and ended up with this list (in order of polling results):
| Rank |
Name |
What I personally though of these names |
| 1 |
Vérité |
Liked but too boring. |
| 2 |
Airis |
This was my second favorite but it does not stand out enough. |
| 3 |
Airwear |
Something you would expect from Nike or Airwalk. |
| 4 |
Nuair |
Nike thing again. |
| 5 |
J Denis |
Too many designers use this sort of naming scheme. |
| 6 |
Silverback |
Personal favorite because it speaks to me and my target market. |
There was no conclusive winner when it came down to the results, although Vérité was liked by everyone. I intended on using the simply to create a shortlist of names and this is what I got. Once I had this short list it was time to figure out what was the best way to figure out what consumers would respond to the best. The best way that I believe that you can achieve this is by testing the names within the market, and that is what I did. By utilizing Google’s Adwords program I was able to put these 6 names through a campaign that included 27,918 impressions evenly distributed throughout the names. I ran the campaign for several days and low and behold I did have a conclusive answer: Airwear and Silverback. These two both out preformed the other names by such a wide margin that I did not even bother thinking about the other names again. This left me with having to decide between the two, and because of the uniqueness of Silverback and the ease of rememberance, this was a quick and painless decision. An there you have it! Google to the rescue once again. This is a tool that is in my opinion under utilized and I know that I will be using Adwords much more from now on.
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I had a conversation with someone the other day about the $100 million budget shortfall the City of Toronto is dealing with. The solution that the city has come up with is to reduce services, which will primarily target non permanent bureaucratic workers. This person was not pleased with me when I suggested that the government needs to start outsourcing many of the current governmental jobs out to private corporation in order to cut down on excess salary payments. I explained to this person that a lot of money could be saved by not having to pay inflated union salaries and cutting down on the number of workers required to complete a job (due to higher private industry productivity derived from merit based promotions rather than seniority based, and steaming union protected laziness). This person refuted this idea by saying that the people working in the government have families to raise and so it is important that there are a lot of high paying government jobs for this reason. Basically this argument entailed that having a wasteful government is justified on the basis that people need to raise families and thus are entitled to high government salaries.As citizens of this country we should be outraged but comments like these based on flawed and somewhat idiotic logic. The taxes that every one of us pays out of our pockets every year is not for the purpose of supporting ridiculously high governmental salaries packages, and the families of the governmental workers.
The reason we pay taxes is so we can receive communal benefits that our society deems necessary and thus we charge the governing body with the responsibility of the management of these funds. Thus paying out huge governmental salaries to workers who’s jobs could easily accomplished by the private sector at a fraction of the cost does not fall within this mandate. If private corporations are able to do the same work at a lesser overall cost compared to the bureaucratic organizations currently assigned the work, then it is safe to say that our government is not doing its job of successfully managing these funds. Simply put, it means that money that should be going towards social services and support is being redirected towards the pockets of government employees as well as wasteful and redundant bureaucratic infrastructure. Outsourcing to the competitive private market would allow our taxes to be extended to important underfunded programs that matter in the well being of society, while possibly even providing tax payers a relief from the tax burden (thus increase the monetary welfare of society).
Union and government workers will obviously get upset at the though of we as a society making our taxes work more efficiently and bettering the welfare of countless people in this city, province, and country. This is of course driven by their selfishness and the belief that thier welfare takes precedence over that of society as a whole. We do not pay taxes so they can receive lucrative salaries for their unproductive work that lack any form of innovation or progress. They will always suggest that the tax payers pay more taxes in order to solve any budget shortfalls, but this is a huge mistake for several reasons. The first a repeat of the point made earlier about the reason we pay taxes, and how they are not to support lazy government jobs. The second is that doing this rewards bureaucratic organizations for their lack of productivity and thus reinforces their wasteful behavior. Instead of working to better productivity and reduce the organization’s footprint and better efficiency, they are given monopolistic bailouts that will lead to a swelling of the size of the organization.
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Through my focused effort on finding a corporate name for my business, I have realize that the process is a lot more intense and mentally extenuating than I thought it would be. I have found an excellent resource in the form of a visual thesaurus and article on naming your business from the same site.
I have also subjected the names from the previous post to an online ad campaign through Google Adwords. It too has taken longer than expected to get a result but this is due to my inexperience with Adwords. I am now still about a day from getting a conclusive return on my investment in this advertising. I will post the results of all my polling and Adwords shortly as well as what decision I have taken for the name.
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This is going to be a quick one. After doing extensive polling I have narrowed down the list to 9 names whose popularity was above and beyond that of all the others.
Here is the list:
Vérité
Airis
Airwear
J Denis
Nuair
Silverback
MarloWear
DeCosta
InUnI (In Unison)
I have an idea not long after I narrowed down the list which involved setting up a poll on Facebook and increasing the amount of polling traffic. I have just set it up and I am eagerly awaiting the results. Something else that I am going to setup is Goolge AdSense ad campaign in order to test the online marketability of the various names and see which names are more responsive. I’ll have a much better idea of the results in my next post.
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