Sometimes your Digg friends just don't know when to quit.

We've all seen the person that seems to have just discovered the shout button and sends us 20 spams, er shouts, a day. We've been smart enough to turn off the email notfication for new shouts, but it's still clogging up our shout pages.

We don't want to lose them as a friend, because frankly they send good stuff once in a while and they digg our stuff, but there's just no way in Digg to get them to cut it out. It's either receive every shout or stop being friends.

A Script to Block Those Bothersome Shouts

Now there's a solution. If you haven't already, go install Greasemonkey. Really. Go do it right now. Then install our new Greasemonkey Script to Block Digg Shouts. After you have Greasemonkey installed you just click on the link and the script will install itself. You can make things more efficient by right clicking on the Greasemonkey icon, selecting Manage User Scripts, and then moving the Digg Shout Blocker to the top of the list -- that will make it get executed first. Note that Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension, so you'll have to install Firefox if you haven't already done that.

We have both Freemium (free to registered users) and Premium (paid) versions of our software. You'll need to be at least a registered user of Promote-My-Site to use this tool, because you'll need to set up an account on the PMS Social Suite. The freemium version will do everything you need. You'll want to follow the installation instructions. You don't actually have to install Imacros in order to use the shout block capabilities, but there are so many other features that you're going to want to install it as well. We have to require registration because we need to maintain a database record of who you're trying to ignore.

Once you've registered, go to the tool and click on the Profiles tab. Click the Add button and enter your Digg Username and Password, then click the Add button at the bottom. Now go to the Manage Friends tab. Your Digg Username should be filled in already, so click the Refresh From Digg button. The API calls will run and you'll get your grid populated with your current friends.

Let's say we're getting a lot of unwanted shouts from Oliver Taco. We can enter his name in the Friend Name field then click Query and we'll see this:

Now we just click the Toggle Block button and then Query again and we'll see that OliverTaco now has a status of Yes for Blocked. We've now marked him in our database as someone that we don't want to see their shouts.

How it Works

The Promote My Site server maintains a database of which friends you've decided to block. The Greasemonkey script checks that database each time you view your shout pages in Digg. If it sees someone on the blocked list, it runs a bit of code that mimics pressing the delete button on the shout. Viola, that user can no longer shout to you!

The script runs entirely in your Firefox browser. Other than the fact that you're able to delete shouts fairly quickly, there's no way for the Digg server to tell what you're doing. It does the same thing as if you had kept a spreadsheet of digg friends you want to ignore and delete each shout from them every time you load a shout page. Except it's a lot easier.

Blocking shouts is permanent. When the page loads, the delete code is run and they'll really be gone. But you can always just go back to the PMS Social Suite and toggle the Blocked status of a user back again.

Of course, if you block everybody that's shouting eventualy you'll just get back a blank page from Digg. You can see how many shouts were deleted by looking at the Shouts Received tab on your Digg page. The script adds (n Ignored) in italics right next to it to show you how many were ignored.

BTW, while I used OliverTaco as an example, I wouldn't suggest blocking his shouts. The rumor is that he's pretty good about using the PMS Social Suite and if you send him good stuff and reciprocate, he's very likely to Digg your shouts. So is LtDraper.

Other free Greasemonkey scripts we suggest to enhance your digging experience are Help Digg Your Incoming Shouts and Quickly Delete Your Shouts. They're part of the install process for the PMS Social Suite anway.

Managing Shouts isn't the only thing we've improved in the PMS Social Suite. We've also made a number of enhancements to the manage friends tab. The major features of this release are:

• Calculating Deadwood - what percentage of your submits does a friend Digg, and how much do you Digg them back?
• Welcome Messages - An easy method for the care and feeding of new fans
• Shouting - Send a shout to a group of friends
• Go To Friend Page - more options for which page to visit
• Multi Digg Submits - now you can Digg the submits of a group of friends

BTW, some users have been confused by the fact that the PMS Social Suite shows up in the "Free SEO Tools" section in the left sidebar. It's in the right place, because there is a free version of this product. You can do a number of useful things with it, but if you click on something that's only in the premium version you'll get the message telling you that it's a premium function. You must be a registered user to have access to the "freemium" products.

New Features in Manage Friends

Let's take a look at the new "Manage Friends" tab in the PMS Social Suite:

Welcome to Being My Fan

The first thing you'll notice is the new "Welcomed Status" filter and "Toggle Welcome Msg" button. This was an idea submitted by a user. The concept is that when you get a new fan you'll want to send them a welcome message. The other day I received a very nice welcome from a digg friend:

Thanks for becoming a fan. I figure something about my diggs must have piqued your interest, so please take a look at my favorites and digg them if you like them. The favorites are the first 3 submissions on this page.

That's a nice touch. But it could be a bit tedious to maintain if you're trying to build a very large friend network, so we've added a feature that you can mark your friends as "welcomed". When you get a new fan, you'll want to send them a nice shout and then mark them as welcomed and you won't commit the faux pas of welcoming them twice.

Shouting Efficiently

The next thing you'll notice is the entire section at the bottom of the screen for sending shouts. Just click on a user (or multi-select many users), put some text into the Shout Text field, and specify a minimum and maximum number of seconds to wait between shouts. Click Send shout and an Imacro script will fire that shouts to each of those friends.

Keep in mind that you can generally only shout to mutual friends and fans since most people turn off their incoming shouts except to friends. If you shout to someone that won't accept your shout, the script will generate an error and keep going. Don't worry, just let it fail and move on.

We specify a waiting period between shouts because depending upon the speed of your internet connection the Digg server might think you've become a flooding attack and try to trip you up. Waiting 30-60 seconds (the default) seems to not be a problem.

No, this isn't a spam machine. It takes quite a bit of time to run, so it's really only useful for things like a welcome message. If you really need to blast to 200 people at a time, you'd be better off using Digg's own functionality. Likewise, if you only need to send a message to 1 or 2 people, you'd be faster to just go to their page and click "Send Shout" on their Digg page.

Visiting Your Friends

The "Go To Friend" button has had a set of radio buttons added to it that indicate which page you'd like to visit. Selecting "Profile" just takes you to their profile page (the old functionality). But now you can jump directly to their submissions, diggs, shouts send, or incoming shouts. Ok, it's not rocket science, but it does save you quite a few keystrokes or mouse clicks when you want to go check out what someone is submitting.

BTW, the Greasemonkey Script to Help Digg Your Incoming Shouts has also been upgraded to add the Digg buttons on the submissions and diggs pages of users. This is a bit of overlap with the "Digg Friends Easy" script upon which it was based, so if you're running that script too you'll want to pick which one. You must have our script installed in order to use the premium Manage Shouts functions, so guess which one we suggest?

Getting Rid of the Deadwood

What's the best kind of friend to have on Digg? It's someone who will Digg your submissions, but not too much. If someone Diggs 100% of what you submit, Digg will decide that you've become a voting block. They then discount that vote -- it still counts, but not nearly as much. What you'd really like to have is someone that will consistently Digg around 20% of what you submit. Those people are gold. On the other hand, friends that never vote for your submissions are pretty much worthless. And since Digg limits you to 1,000 friends, after you hit that number (quite easy to do with this tool), you'll going to need to start culling out the deadwood.

So how do you tell how much someone Diggs you? Select a friend (or many) in the grid, then click "Calc Deadwood". It takes a while to run -- when you think about it, there's a lot to do -- but when it comes back you'll have the "Digg Percent" and "Dugg Back Percent" columns filled in the grid. Digg percent tells what percentage of the last 100 of your submissions were dugg by that friend. Dugg Back Percent tells you what percentage of their last 100 submissions that you've dugg.

As you can see in the screen capture, I've been "stalking" some new friends. My filter is set to Friend=Yes and Mutual=No, so these are people that haven't friended me back yet. Notice the number is pretty small (13). That's because I've cut out the deadwood pretty aggressively. If I friend someone I give them about 3 weeks to friend me back or start digging my submissions. If they just ignore me, they get unfriended. You can see from the Digg Percentages that a few of them have starting Digging my submissions, even though they haven't friended me back yet. A non-mutual friend that Diggs your stuff is as good as a mutual friend, perhaps even better. So you wouldn't want to cull those out unless you had much better friend "in the pipeline." See, it's just like high school.

Digging Others Submissions

Nothing is so attractive in another as them finding us attractive. I don't remember who said that, but they were right. It goes double on Digg. If you want to get someone's attention, start digging their submissions. Better yet, digg their submissions when they've only got a few votes. You'll stand out. Keep it up, and after a while they'll friend you back and digg your stuff. If they don't, it's time to move on. There are plenty of fish on Digg.

The previous version only implemented that functionality for a single friend at a time. Now you can multi-select several friends and click the Digg Submits button and an Imacro script will fire that Diggs their last N submissions, within a range of the current number of votes on that submission. Give lots of desireable friends that treatment and you're sure to become popular!

Where we Get This Stuff

Most of these features came as suggestions in feedback from our users. If you've got an idea for some useful functionality, drop us a line or comment on the blog and we'll throw it into the pile of stuff we want to do.

So given all the time that this can save you, why haven't you upgraded to premium yet?

I'd like to thank everyone for their testing on the Social Suite with Digg Analytics and Automation. It was, well, interesting. I've done a lot of beta testing inside client sites but haven't really released a program into the wild since before the internet. (Remember FidoNet and shareware distribution? Yikes!)

At the end of the day we decided that it was usable enough to replace the old Digg Friend Finder. Which, given the number of daily users, was a pretty uncomfortable and tricky decision. However, the actual traffic on the free version of the Social Suite has gone up from the old Digg Friend Finder, so mission accomplished there.

Mainly, however, it was quite a learning experience for us in how people use automation software when it's not part of a larger corporate sponsored project.   We clearly recognized that individual or small company buyers had different price and function points, but the variable cost of time and overhead is so much less accounted for in smaller firms that a lot of our positioning was probably not necessary.  Fascinating. 

Social Suite Beta Test Pre-Natal Expectations

I was expecting a LOT of criticism for the UI. I quite like it and it has a lot of technical advantages from our standpoint, but it is not the typical UI.

Not one word.

I was also expecting people to balk at installing iMacros (especially since you have to install the previous version because of bugs in the new release) and running the Suite in its own Firefox window.

Not one word.

I thought there were too many columns of numbers in the Find Friends panel for people to really wade though them. It turns out people ignore the numbers they don't understand or think are unimportant. Fascinating.

We got a lot of good feedback about our documentation and how to help reduce the complexity of what the suite can do. Over the next week or so I'll be publishing some articles to help people use both the free and premium versions of the software.

Beta Test Post-Mortem

This is going to sound strange, but our take homes were:

1. Our target market uses paypal rather than Amex. We were startled.
2. People want videos rather than user manuals. I guess it's the YouTube phenom coming home to roost. I actually find it easier to write a manual. (Yes, I own a typewriter, why do you ask?)
3. We were right to go with value based pricing and to aim for "professional diggers."

Value Based Pricing

There are (broadly) two ways to price anything: cost or value. Walmart prices own-brand cornflakes a price+markup. Apple prices everything at value. The difference differentiates your market.

So when we decided to price the first version of the social suite we tried to balance off users, user time/value, revenue, support costs/expectations, server load, investment timeline, etc. We put a stopwatch on a lot of in-house testing, spoke to the alpha users extensively about the value proposition, and did some magnificent fiddling on a whiteboard.

And came up with a buck an hour.

If you value your time at more than a buck and hour and use digg to drive revenue, then you should be paying us to use the social suite. And our beta testers, as they converted to paying customers, confirmed this observation.

Why Not Charge More?

If you look around, there aren't that many SEO tools that successfully charge an admissions fee. So our goal was to establish a precedent and, as we add value and reduce time/cost we will raise our prices.

If You Missed the Beta

Look, if you were taking a nap under a lilly pad or something, just go to our contact us page and drop us a line and we'll help you out.

Wow, that may be the most specific post title I have ever written.  But I want to capitalize on the extreme amount of google love we're getting lately to save someone else a LOT of time.

We're doing a beta of our Social Suite and it depends on iOpus's most excellent iMacro for FireFox.  Except that they released a new version (6.0.4.1) which killed our software.  Thanks guys.

So, how simple could this be: we just needed the previous version (6.0.3.9). 

Which is NOT on their website.  Nor is it mentioned in their otherwise comprehensive wiki. And when you try to search google for it, well, good luck with that. 

So, it turns out that previous versions of iMacro for FireFox are kept on the FireFox/Mozilla website.  Go here to get version 6.0.3.9 and earlier versions of iMacro for FireFox.

You know what else I know now?  There is (often) a "see all versions" button at the bottom of the addon for FireFox that gets you to the same place. 

We use filezilla as our Pointy Haired Boss friendly (*cough*) ftp front end. It rocks, and it is free - what more can you ask for?

Lately I've been testing screen capture software and have been spending a lot of time rebooting my PC (install/uninstall) and reconnecting to our servers, shoving a video up, testing it on several different computers. Rinse and repeat.

And it was really bugging me to have to change the destination directory to /home/pmsforms/images. Sure, it was three mouse clicks in a sea of other mousing, but my backbrain was telling me I was being a luser.

Timesaving Tip

Yeah, how stupid am I? Go to the File->Site Manager dialogue box, go to the Advanced tab and set the default remote directory.

Heck, if you have more than one directory that you use a lot you could create two different profiles that take you where you need to be.

Wish I'd thought of looking for this about a thousand mouse clicks ago!

It's always great to get a new tool like the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ and I always appreciate an article explaining why someone built it.

But that is often all you get. I have to admit, I rarely read detailed instructions, so I'm a bit reluctant to, you know, write 'em.

How It Works

The Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page has a a pretty traditional advanced search form built around a grid. And since most of the people here are going to be search professionals, I am very much going to continue to resist explaining how to use an advanced search form, but below I have covered the search, status, and filter options so that it is all a bit more clear.

Search Options

The search options are the normal and useful ones:

• Name
• URL
• Domain
• Description
• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords

The "domain" variable is the stripped down url, so "http://promote-my-site.com" becomes "promote-my-site.com" - which is handy for deduplicating our list against the one you use.

It is also useful for using "%.br" to find all the Brazillian domains. The url is what we were able to make load in our browser: "http://www.myfunkysite.com" loads but "http://myfunkysite.com" does not.

Status Options

These are pretty simple:

• Live - site is what you think it is - pligg or scuttle or myspace/facebook clone and you can login, post, etc
• Dead - does not resolve, throws error pages >5 days a month, etc
• TBD - have not had time to look at it yet
• Waiting - waiting on a response to test the site
• Zombie - site resolves to a link farm, or it loads but does not work reliably enough to be "live"

I'm sure someone from Gartner could come up with more expensive names, but those should be pretty clear.

Filter Options

And the filter options (equals, min, max) are:

• Page Rank (PR)
• Google Backlinks
• Yahoo Backlinks
• MSN Backlinks
• Pages Indexed by Google
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo
• Pages Indexed by MSN
• Name in Google
• Name in Yahoo
• Name in MSN
• Load time

I think the only things here that require explanation are:

• Name in Google/Yahoo/MSN - How many times does "VOIPigg" show up in each search engine. Think of this as a rough (very) strength indicator.
• Load time: how long to load the home page from our server. Yes, yes, I know that this isn't perfect, but it gives you a rough order of magnitude (ROM) for how fast/slow a site is. The range for live sites is from almost 10 seconds from Alexadigger to four tenths of a second (0.04) for eZine Writer.

All of the search and filter terms are available as columns in the grid. Obviously.

Downloads

Now, rather than swearing at google docs, you can download the whole list as a csv and filter away in Excel. Heck, if you're a glutton you could even put it back into your google docs and hum the Heintz Ketchup "anticipation" song if you want.

You do to register first to download. Why? So you can have the option to be notified when the list changes. Or when you next want to download the list you can get only the stuff that has changed. Handy, we think, and worth a quick and painless regsitration.

Feedback

Please do give us your feedback of the features and functionality. Things that seem obvious to us but not to our beta testers have pretty much been eradicated, but each time we release a new tool and thousands of people come bang on it we find they've done stuff we did not anticipate.

We already caught the problem when someone puts "-0.5" in the PR field, but what else will people come up with?

Enjoy!

And remember, since the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ is fully ad supported freeware, you can count on it sticking around. We have around a hundred updates to the list but wanted to wait to get it into this new form before putting them in.

So you're rocking along, doing some pretty good dollar consulting, and you build a small product, internal use only, to help you get your fixed price projects done more quickly.  And now you're really pulling in some bucks.

Disaster Strikes

A junior consultant you just hired from Compsci-U gets drunk at TGIF with the client and spills the beans about your groovy-o tool.  The client, who is billing $100K/month with you, demands a demo.  Upon seeing the (very rough) demo he wants to drop down to $10K/month in consulting and $25k/month in tool charges.

You want to fire Mr. Junior Consultant-man but you do the math:

$100K/month @ 25% (gross) margin = $25K/month (gross) profit

versus:

$10K/month @ 25% gross margin = $2.5K/month (gross) profit

$25K/month tool use at 100% (gross) margin = $25K/month

Total (gross) profit: $27.5K.

Total (gross) upside: $2.5K

Hmmm, up $2.5K plus you have fewer heads on sticks to worry about getting drunk and telling the client what is really going on.

Brief break for the hula dance of victory.  With some Walk Like An Egyptian dancing thrown in.

Money Left on the Table

Hey, wait, all those RFP's and client requests you couldn't fill?  Now you have people.  Time to start dialing!

Revenues go up, bench time stays low.

What is a Tool?

I am using it in a generic sense. It might be an actual tool that takes input and produces output, like WordFinder.  It might be data, like D&B records.  It might be a newsletter, like ValueLine.  Heck, the Yellow Pages is a product.  There are different kinds of products: Shrink Wrap, Custom Off The Shelf (COTS), Consumables (newsletters), etc.....  You'll know which category you're in, and they have different sales characteristics, but at the end of the day, they all fall in the tool bucket and the discussion below applies.

Defensible Business

Consulting is a human resource constrained business so growth is hard.  Suddenly you see how you can sell maybe a quarter of your customers this tool and double your top and bottom lines with the same resource base.  You're rich.  Well, you do have to start investing in resources to improve, grow, and bullet-proof your tool.  So maybe you're just doing better and not well. Still, it's easier money in many ways.

Plus you are suddenly holding a defensible business with a 99% margine.  Before a competitor could come in, offer to do the same job at 80% your rate, and boot you out.  How would the client know the difference?  But now there is this cool tool where the client can pay 35% what they were paying before and get the same benefit.  It's a win-win because they won't be able to get the service cheaper and you can't come under much (if any) price pressure.

Business Fundamentals: Cost / Payment Cycle

When you first start a consulting business you can finance it by floating your expenses on your credit card while you wait for clients to actually, you know, pay.  After a while you learn to build up a bank account so that you don't have to use your home equity line or pay big Amex penalties while you wait for your client's AP department to cut and mail a check.

If you're pretty smart you prepare a bigger reserve before you hire your first non 10-99 employee so that you can pay their salary and expenses too.  If you're like me, well, you're just glad that you put 20% down on your house 15 years ago.  Eventually, though, you learn to keep a tempting pile of cash around (business reserves) relative to

• Employee headcount
• New employees costs and ramp time
• Bench time - expected (occasional) and sudden (client driven)

Costs Start to Rise

If you're really really smart you got ahead of the cost cycle, otherwise you eventually figure it out in time.  (Else you're reading this post from a post-Dilbert cubicle slapping your head!)  But what is probably surprising you is the rising costs of maintaining your cool new tool.

See, the tool got built by the guys on the bench because they need to do something wihle they're not working.  And you figured, hey, if my guys are only spending 10% as much time at client sites then....

But it doesn't work that way over time. Consultants are the king of the one-off – each client gets a customized solution.  It’s very hard to step back from that and introduce release cycles, source control, Q/A,  and a one size fits all mentality.  In fact, your consultants probably can’t do that and you’ll need to hire dedicated product staff and not just guys on the bench.

Regardless, the product gets more complex so you need dedicated resources.  But you have better margin, revenue, and gross dollars to pay for them, so on you plunge. 

And then you need bigger office space.  And you need support staff.  And so on and so forth.  Suddenly you're spending a LOT of money building in features that will be required for future sales.  And now you have a product manager - how did that happen?

The Sales Revolution

Suddenly you have a sales guy.  Or you realize  you need one.  Maybe at first your senior consultants were making the sales for you, but as costs of building and maintaining the tool rise you realize that you need to convert more and more of your customer base to tool users.  And you need to poach, er, convert your competitors customers, which is a much more sophisticated and complex sales cycle.

So now you have a salesguy absolutely eating money as he travels around and does the needful making sales.

Industry Conferences

Got a spare $50K to $100K lying around?  Because now you feel you need to go to the industry conferences.  If not for leads, then certainly for branding (whatever that means for you).  Good luck keeping it down to one or two conferences!

Revolution In The Ranks

Back when your consultants ruled the roost they were busy and happy and well bonused. Now they're carrying water for the product guys, there is some strife, and you're having higher turnover.  Oh, and consultants are paid bonuses based on utilization.  With shorter engagements and because you're spreading them across customers suddenly you have to bonus people for bringing in less money.

Remember your Reserve?

Before, with a staff of a dozen people, you were keeping $75K to $125K in the bank to cover salaries, float, bench, and expenses.  Now you have thirty or forty people and only a dozen of them are pulling in steady and predictable monthly revenue.  So what's your reserve now?  Maybe $350K?  Oh, wait, you've signed up for two conferences so you need another $50K set aside for that.

Hmmm, by now you're at the beginning of the turnover cycle for install base customers, but since new customers are signing up it's all gravy.  Except that now revenues are growing at a slower rate.

Inflection

Andy Grove, the most paranoid and brilliant man in the semiconductor business, describes an inflection point as where a business fundamentally changes from catepillar to moth.  You're just noticing that your consulting model is necessary to your product sales model, but that your company is built around a product model.  You've reached an inflection point.  He also noted that capital is the grease that rides you over the bump.

A Little Planning Meeting Discovery

Usually on a Saturday, usually right after a tight payroll, usually after the cash reserves go down two months in a row, usually this is the discovery:

We need capital to get past this inflection point

You briefly consider using your reserve but then remember that many of your staff own guns.   So you think that maybe the partners can go lite on salary, but they're already only pulling down $40K/year, or less than half the company average, so not much blood left in that rock.

But you've run the numbers, and while you can keep going like this for at least a year, you're going to have to either go back to being primarily consulting or somehow find $1M to just push through the wall.

Enter the VC

To Be Continued....

We've talked about why you wouldn't want to outsource to Amazon (and were proved right when they went down hard recently) but when Aaron wrote an excellent article on The Future of Business Process Outsourcing I thought it might be good to give a (slightly) dissenting opinion.  He makes a lot of very good points about the hardware and software side of outsourcing, but I think he kind of runs off the rails when he looks at the opportunities and people in India.

Aaron's Complaint

It's a long article, and worth reading, but he's basically frustrated because it is hard to find people who will tackle what I'd call small(ish) projects - things under, say, $250K per major piece.  I'd agree, but then again we have a shiny technical group, so we do all that in house.  But one of his observations is that this is really hard stuff to send to India.  I'd really agree with that.  A 5 person three month development project can't be green-fielded to India. The overhead of getting it running and the risk simply do not make it worthwhile.  However, if you have a larger project ($500K budget) then you'll definitely be able to invest in India and get a tremendous time/money boost.

Our Background

In a previous life Don and I had a technical team (7 total) and a business process team (60 total across 3 shifts) that handled internal operations for a very large multinational.  We spent three years building the group from scratch and it had several key distinguishing factors that made it different from the average "outsourcing team" in India:

• 2% annual turnover
• Promotion from within
• Promotion of females to management positions
• Fresher training plan

Rocket Science

It ain't.  You can't run a group in India like you would one from the US, but they're still people struggling with Maslow's Hierarchy, though perhaps with some different ordering.  I mean, really, if you haven't looked at that picture in a while, then look around the categories, think about the people you've worked with from different countries and cultures - you'll be shocked at what you can fit in there.  (The real beauty of being an academic is that if you're the first to write down something obvious you are famous forever.)

(Those of you familiar with India will appreciate the color coding!  And, no, I'm not going to explain that joke if you don't get it.)

So let's just assume that you are having regular team meetings, offsite team building exercises, reward dinners, and all that jazz that you have to do with remote teams.  Let me give you a

India Specific List of Success Factors

In no particular order:

• Have a real presence
  • Show up often
  • Plan for the long term with facilities and equipment
• Work type is important
  • Don't try to outsource small stuff
  • Start with smaller projects, with closer deadlines, and with lower risk and complexity levels.  Your Indian team needs to succeed and learn how to work with you under good conditions rather than while flat out and scared.
  • If you don't understand what you want the project will fail
  • No customer facing activity, even internal customers
• People are key
  • Hire someone in the states who has built a team and succeeded as it is too expensive to make a mistake
  • Hire a manager in India who has successfully managed for an American company
  • Hire expensive high quality high level people - there is little cost advantage (3:1 maybe) there because of shortages but they are critical to getting leverage from large teams of freshers (10:1) and juniors (8:1)
  • Bring your senior staff to America. Plan on this process taking a long time to arrange if someone needs a passport because they will probably have to make three trips to their home state to get it.  Over a several month period.
• Culture
  • Lean the culture
  • Learn what areas your people are from
  • Native costume day is a great icebreaker for when you're in town
  • Learn how to ask questions like an Indian not an American
  • Yes doesn't mean yes and no doesn't mean never
  • Learn how to eat the food ... with the right hand
  • Before you eat meat in front of a vegetarian, ask
• Relationships are critical
  • They will want to know a lot about your family and life
  • You should ask them about families and life
• Personal Stuff
  
  • Anticipate Delhi Belly, even in the ITC Sheraton in Bangalore
  • Don't fly Indian Airways, certainly not in coach, and even business stinks.  First is meh.
  • Get a driver who speaks English well and always get the same guy.  Tip effectively, your life is in his hands.
• At Home
  
  • Your home office technical staff needs to be more senior and better communicators because their job will be harder.  On the other hand, since they will be doing technical leadership and the really interesting work you'll be able to hire better people.
  • Don't have all the meetings on US time - this is rude, swap it around

My Favorite Non American Place In The World

I really really like India as a country - a big messy sprawling vibrant alive democracy.  With great food and tasty cold beer and beautiful sights. And, yes, grinding poverty which is being pushed back as fast as humanly possible.  It's good to remember that in the 1940's about 1 in 5 draftees were unfit for service in the military because of poor childhood nutrition or gross physical infirmities. 

And my team in India and the Indian co-workers and friends I've had over the years have only strengthened my attraction to the county.

So if you have the money, the time, and the need, then extending the capability of your company by building a team in India could be a professional success and a personal reward.

This is a big weekend here at Promote My Site because we're moving servers, shuffling software around, changing DNS, upgrading this and that. Oh, and putting two free SEO Tools out. Phew. I'd be nervous but the technical guys threw me out at 5pm and locked the door behind me. All they'd say was: Don't Panic.

Free SEO Tools?

Well, not really free because they are on pages containing ads and, based on past experience, we figure the clicks will pay for the service.

But also not free because these SEO Tools (and the upcoming ones) are designed to get people used to our name, our architectural solutions, and our services. At which point they'll be more likely to buy our to-be-announced SEO tools.

So not really free, just an investment in ya'll.

What Tools?

We'll announce them early next week. Stay tuned.

Why new Servers?

Yeah, well, I have a list of 100+ SEO Tools from various people and I would say that at least 20% of them are not working properly at any given time. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a major contributor is that they produce server centric solutions and put too much stuff on one server. Our solution is to create web based client-server applications and host the server bit on a biiiiig hosted box at the end of a wide pipe.

So upgrading servers before go-live is experience talking. It is also the advantage of having a professional development and deployment organization - we tend to avoid a lot of mistakes or at least only make them once.

Best Under Construction Page on the Internet

I tried to get the guys to put up my favorite ever Under Construction page but they refused.

Check it out here and please to notice the page rank. This page is at least 7 years old, unchanged, and still funny as can be.

Not for very long anyway.

I reviewed several manualized social network automators (OnlyWire, Social Poster, Social Marker , EkStreme, Post Toaster, etc) and then summarized the 114 sites they supported. And one of my criticisms was that they either had (a) no monetization or (b) weak but clear. And what fruit does that bear?

Uptime Status for Social Network Automation

Well, of the 114 total sites supported, there were the following errors:

• Excites - 7 minutes to load the home page, etc -> zombie
• Feed Me Links - No registrations allowed
• Feedmarker - No regsistrations allowed
• igool - NSFW Porn
• Linkatopia - No signup allowed
• Musigg - Would not load
• MillionsOfGames - Would not load
• Scuttle - Open source page (duh)
• Shadows - Dead
• Unalog - Dead
• Xilinus - Dead
• Yample - Dead

That is 12 sites, or more than 10% of the list.

I dunno about you, but I can't have a 10% error rate in my business.

List Rot 

Look, we all know there is rot in the list of secondary and tertiary social bookmarking and networking. So you have to check that pages load, that google is still indexing in the primary index (or whatever they're calling it this month), that logins process and links post.

We have a fairly large list of this sort of thing and it really costs a bit in maintenance to keep it up to date. But it's part of our business overhead.

Because "free" isn't "free" when it's broken too often.