I am a fan of FeedBurner. But URLs are permanent.

What happens when you have visitors subscribe to a standard feeds.feedburner.com URL?

• People subscribe to a URL owned by Google.
• If you want to discontinue the use of FeedBurner, you’ll lose those people because you don’t own the feedburner.com domain.

FeedBurner was really cool to offer their MyBrand service. Basically, MyBrand allows you to point people to your domain name instead of theirs. For example, when you subscribe to my feed, you’re subscribing to feeds.clearcrystalmedia.com. But under the hood, the feed is powered by FeedBurner.

This is awesome because if I ever wish to discontinue using FeedBurner, or if they ever discontinue their service, I can still host my own feed at feeds.clearcrystalmedia.com/glass-case. Basically, I won’t lose anyone in the process.

This requires a little bit of technical wizardry. If your web guy or hosting company cannot handle it, then you may want to consider switching web guys and/or hosting companies.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, feedburner, glass case, google, mybrand, rss

I’ve been a fan of 43 Things for a while. On their site, you add your goals—no matter how big or small they are—and 43 Things connects you with a community of people who are trying to accomplish the same goals.

They added a simple quiz to their site today. It didn’t take much time and generated an amusing answer. It was just a matter of checking of some boxes of things that I’ve accomplished. In exchange, they let me know about their new book and gave me some code that I could paste in my blog to help spread the word.

A very nice branding opportunity and a way for them to get the word out about their new book. And it was set up in a format that would resonate with their audience. I like it.

Technorati Tags: 43 things, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, internet marketing, viral, viral marketing, web 2.0

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Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap is a quick read that leaves you with a lot. Neumeier left behind prose for this one and presents his ideas in a presentational “white board” format. Once you’ve flipped through, you’ve learned what a brand really is and how to create an effective one.

I think the book falls in line with Seth Godin’s tenet that everyone in the company is a marketer. Everyone in your company contributes to its brand. If accounting is late on paying a bill, that department has left an impression about its culture on whomever was effected. Your company’s brand is not just its logo. It’s how people experience interactions with your company.

I love this kind of stuff because it discourages companies from cutting corners. A company best be concerned with its value and customer experience, or else it will be yet another story to tell about failed companies.

Everyone’s becoming a commodity, but some are not perceived as so. As a person and a company, how are you being perceived?

Technorati Tags: brand, brand gap, Branding, brands, marketing, marty neumeier, the brand gap

While it’s not realistic to close the entire gap on this problem, I envision a new work environment where as many people as possible will be forced to eat their own dog food. What if you set up your business to make it a customer of its own products and services? Let’s think about it a little.

How I came to this realization

A few months ago, I had a client install Adobe’s Contribute CS3. Contribute allows people who are not familiar with HTML to edit web pages on their own site. The interface is a lot like Microsoft Word and other familiar publishing products. A major advantage of using Contribute is that you can edit content directly onto a web page. But important parts of the page, like navigation, are “locked,” so those with less technical experience won’t mess up the layout when they’re making their edits.

You would think this was a dream setup, right? Guess again. The client was very confused about what Contribute allowed them to do versus what they had to ask me to do for them. We also ran into tons of issues where the site wasn’t exactly set up the way it needed to be in order to work with Contribute.

Had I been using Contribute to edit the site, we wouldn’t have even run into these issues. But I was off using Dreamweaver, a more advanced web editing product. Everything was fine from my vantage point, but not from my customer’s.

37 Signals leads the charge

Companies like 37 Signals have an ideal situation because they are direct customers of their own products. In fact, they discovered the opportunity of selling their own home-grown software to others accidentally.

Because they must live with using their products every day, they can figure out the best enhancements and improvements to offer customers. I cannot think of a better way to have visibility and accountability to make things better!

What would this look like in less ideal situations?

Let’s pretend that you provide remote customer service for other companies. Let’s pretend that your customers are very specialized, so there is little opportunity to experience this customer service for your self. It’s not as simple as all Charmin employees using its own toilet paper. How could we make this company a customer of its own services?

What if the company used its own customer services resources to man internal requests for IT, HR, and marketing? What if the CEO of the company was forced to use this same customer service every time he or she needed something?

I can’t imagine having an environment where your company’s service is held more accountable. If brand is defined by people’s experience with your company, then your company better be as aware of its customer experience as it possibly can be!

How I’m going to practice what I preach

From this point forth, I am going to find ways to use my own products. For example, Clear Crystal Media’s upcoming product line services customers that want to operate an online store. Why don’t I start my own e-store and use my own software to sell products online? And I’d better use Contribute to update my website and blog if that’s what I’m advising my clients to do! (Note that this blog entry was authored in Adobe Contribute CS3.)

What can you do to start eating your own dog food? A coworker of mine at my day job instead says, “We drink our own champagne.” Is your product or service more like dog food or champagne? Are you even that sure of your answer?

Photo credit: Dog Food Bowl by JnL. Some rights reserved.

Technorati Tags: adobe, business, contribute, contribute cs3, customer, customer experience, e-commerce, ecommerce, experience, help desk, information technology, it, marketing, product development, support, Technology

I spent a lot of time deciding on which of my doodlings to use for a logo. Let me explain how you should always approach this kind of decision for your company.

Getting input

I had thought about polling all of my friends on Facebook and asking them which logo I should use. I had about 12 to choose from (most of them pretty asstastic). Then I had thought about my company’s image and who should really be making the decision.

You know what? It’s my role to decide what my identity should be. Sure, I want to be open with the outside world and with customers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the outside world should choose my identity for me.

37 Signals says it best in their chapter about opinionated software. Those that try to please everyone will end up pleasing no one. And sometimes it’s best to make choices for your customers. Yes, you can, and should, have some control over the experience.

Maybe that’s why Adobe’s controversial new Creative Suite 3 product logos eventually grew on me. (Or maybe I just have a lot of pride about finally paying $1,000 to have the rights to have those icons on my desktop!)

What you could have chosen from (if I would have given you a choice)

Comment as you will, but here are the doodlings that I was choosing from.

Yes, I know I should be embarrassed about some of them. I hope that you can at least admire that I had the balls to put these up here.

The bottom 3 logos ended up being my favorites. I’ll probably use the very first one for technology-related marketing activities. I figured that the dashy-looking HTML comment was a little abstract for my target audience.

Technorati Tags: brand, Branding, design, graphic, graphic design, logo, logos, marketing

I wouldn’t be surprised if people think that I’m a spammer.

Sure, I’ve got my reasons for appearing so slavish. I’m busy doing work for clients. But for you as a visitor, you don’t care. Do I want to be the guy who’s too busy to have a nice blog, or do I want to be the guy that goes the extra mile?

Let this be a lesson: your blog’s personality is very important. Right now, my blog makes me look like a used car salesman.

Technorati Tags: blog, Blogging, marketing, spam, spammer, spamming, wordpress