Customer Service, Marketing

The Genius Behind Small Business Saturday

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Small Business Saturday is held annually on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Looking at that another way, it’s sandwiched between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday.

Small Business Saturday Rocks

I heard people talking about Small Business Saturday days before Black Friday kicked-off. That’s pretty impressive, considering that it was launched less than a decade ago.

Small businesses like it. Folks who support small businesses like it, and who doesn’t like small? Local businesses have a reputation for the kind of personal service that you might not receive from a bureaucracy or impersonal multinational corporation.

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Marketing, Social Media

WordCamp is a Playground for WordPress People

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I just got back from WordCamp Seattle 2017, and it was the best I’ve attended so far. WordCamps are regional, annual gatherings of people with a shared interest in WordPress. This blog runs on WordPress software, and it’s in good company: Over 25% of the world’s web sites run on WordPress.

This year I was an attendee, a contributor, and a speaker. I enjoyed that four sessions were available to chose from every hour, and on Sunday one of those sessions was the Contributor Track.

The One-Man Focus Group

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General, Marketing

Selling Eclipse Glasses

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Eclipse glasses became nearly impossible to find a week prior to the Great American Eclipse. Since the glasses are the only way to view the eclipse safely, demand swelled and counterfeits abounded.

Amazon made the situation plain by flagging at least some of their eclipse glasses as :

Currently unavailable. 
We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.

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Customer Service, Technology

How I Repeatedly Broke My WordPress Web Site

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In the beginning, I was a support tech at a vertical market startup. The developer asked me to try to find issues with the software, and I found some – including one major bug. He dubbed me Bug Buster, and the nickname stuck.

Before WordPress

It was only logical that my first site was called BugBuster’s Best. It was a very simple site, and I prided myself on hand-coding it using Notepad. The next incarnation was Steve Case’s Place. Since it was still a simple, hand-coded site, it was easy to migrate to the stevecase.org domain when I acquired it. I completely gutted it soon after that, because my original content had been pretty random.

Twitter’s 140-character limit was far too little for some topics, so I decided it was time to compliment my microblogging with a full-on blog. The hosting company where my site lived offered WordPress as a free blogging platform, so the obvious choice was to start with that.

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Marketing, Technology

When Next Day Shipping Takes a Week

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I previously wrote about how Amazon is Taking Over the World. Amazon‘s Prime Day (which actually ran 30 hours this year) only underscores that impression. The marketing and sales bonanza “surpassed Black Friday and Cyber Monday, making it the biggest day ever in Amazon history.”

Can You Have Too Many Choices?

Amazon Prime members can chose from a variety of shipping options that may include same-day, one-day, next-day, "Standard" and "No-Rush"
Amazon Prime members can chose from a variety of free shipping options

Amazon’s Prime members can chose from a variety of shipping options that may include:

  • Same-day
  • Next day (“One-Day”)
  • Second day (“Two-Day”)
  • “Standard”
  • “No-Rush”

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Marketing, Technology

Think Twice about Crowdfunding Technology Products

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Many say crowdfunding is a great way to support a cause or product that you believe in or want to encourage. It’s the financial version of crowdsourcing. I have supported over a dozen crowdfunding campaigns myself, ranging from movies to mine removal.

Crowdfunding lets you experience The Thrill of Victory… and The Agony of Defeat

As suggested by the opening to ABC’s Wide World of Sports, you win some and you lose some. When it comes to crowdfunding, the project can go any of three ways:

  • Doesn’t raise enough in pledges and they are never collected
  • Collects the pledges and accomplishes what they said they’d do
  • Collects the pledges and doesn’t accomplish what they said they’d do

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Always asking "What are you trying to accomplish?"