Focus Consulting was born over 11 years ago in this great city of Oklahoma City. Since that time we have met some amazing people and found some amazing businesses that exist in our city. And new business ventures are starting every day. This city is getting better, and we are excited to be a part of it.

One of the things that  helps our city grow are all of the business networking events that take place . Whether it is a weekly event that you attend or a special once a year event at the OKC CoCo there is always someplace where you can go and meet like minded business men and women who have the same passion or success that you do.

At Focus we’d like to do our part to support the business community and the networking events that take place here. To help with this part of our city we have created a new Oklahoma City Business Networking Page on our site. This page is intended to list the great networking events that we have heard of around the Oklahoma City Metro area. In addition we have created a set of guidelines that are intended to help those budding entrepreneurs or other people that don’t get out and network much. Our goal with the guidelines is to make you look as good as possible when representing your business.

If you attend a weekly or monthly networking event and we don’t have it listed on our page please Contact Us and let us know about it. We will get it up there ASAP.

I saw something this evening that was disturbing. It is one of many ways of not being transparent online and risking your reputation and the trust of your current and future customers.

One of our local news outlets NewsOK has a contest called the Readers Choice awards. They are one of several in the area that have this sort of contest. It is a marketing tool for the news outlet, and it brings in great press to great businesses. Businesses that people already knew were good and that are able to stand on their own merits.

As I was catching up on my Twitter stream I saw that someone had voted for “Jeff Click Homes” in the NewsOK Annual 2010 Readers Choice awards. I was thinking “Great” as I moved my mouse over to click on the link in the tweet. As far as I know they are a great company that produces good looking homes. I’ve always been a fan of their work.  I clicked on the link that person posted after their vote and it took me to this page:

http://jeffclickhomes.com/story/our-2010-readers-choice-ipad-giveaway

Basically Jeff Click is having a giveaway for an iPad if you vote for them, tell everybody that you voted for them so then your friends can vote for them and also have a chance at winning an iPad?  This is also part of the FAQ for the contest:

Do I have to live in Oklahoma City to participate?
No, not at all.  However, each state has different laws regarding giveaways.  So, as they say, “Void where prohibited.”

In the middle of me reading up on this I was sent a DM or two about  other companies that are doing the same thing for this same contest. Customers and employees are being rewarded with prizes, casual days, food, etc. if they vote up for their company in the contest. What? You offer to give your employees food if they vote for you?

To any companies that participate in this practice: Please reconsider. If you believe you are good enough to win said contest then encourage your customers to vote for you based on your merits. Make sure they see the full slate of who they can vote for and let them vote their conscience. If you are truly worthy of winning you will have no problem getting votes and you can look yourself in the mirror in the morning without a problem. By offering a prize (like a very popular iPad) you are encouraging people to vote for an iPad,  not vote for you. People that don’t know who you are and don’t care will vote just to win this piece of lovely hardware.

To NewsOK: I was not able to find any rules about your contest online. If they are there then I am sorry. . If you don’t have any rules online about this then please get some. But only do it if you care about your reputation also. If you are not going to post any rules about this then when listing the winning consider adding the disclaimer that “winners may or may have not offered awards in exchange for obtaining votes”. I think that your rules should state that any company involved in this practice should be disqualified from winning. As of 1:03am Tuesday morning I know that you have at least two companies doing this. I would not be surprised if there are more.

In the grand scheme of things this is trivial. A lot of life is a popularity contest. But I would not have gone through this exercise if I didn’t think that the parties involved should not be held to high standard of business. That is why I care. Not for the iPad but for the standard.

Let’s set the bar high and keep it there.

6/20 Follow Up Disclosure: I have done marketing work with other Oklahoma builders in the past, and I will probably do so in the future.

Are you an individual or small business local in Oklahoma City that needs a good basic computer for the home or office ? If so Focus has a spare computer that we’d like to sell to you. The machine is barely used and still in the box we bought it in – where it has spent most of its life. It comes with a legit Windows Vista Home license sticker attached to the machine. We put XP on it but it can easily be reformatted for whatever you want.

It is a Compaq SR5123WM-B. Click on the link to see the specs.

Our asking price is $325.00. If you are interested please give us a call at 405 283 6287

I’ve always wanted to know what is going in the area. My area. My zip code. And the zip codes around me. Sometimes I care what is happening a mile away. Sometimes I care what is happening 50 miles away. I’d like an easy way to switch between the two worlds without a lot of work.

Hence our latest projects OKayByMe.com and MetaNYC.com. This is an experiment to see if we can easily map news and information to the area that people are immediately in. If you are at home you want news in your home area. If you are at work you want the news from that area. It would nice to switch views easily for that too.

Not sure where this is going. But I know other people want this same information also. Visit the site and let us know what you think.

Later – Patrick

We had a chance to go up to Bartlesville and speak to them about the joys and perils of Online Video. There was standing room only in the room and we could have gone for 6 hours on the subject. But, alas, they only gave us one. Here is a post seminar review.

Quote from the article:

“We’re in an age of relationship marketing,” he said. “A business does a lot better trying to build up relationships and giving out free information than it does trying to sell somebody something.” By sharing information in a personal way through video, potential customers become comfortable with the business owner. “They’re already sold before they ever walk in the front door,” he said. Allmond said he’s not a fan of the company spokesperson, however. Customers want to see who will be in the business when they go inside.

Click here to read the full article

Class is in session again and your bus drivers are stepping on the gas . Come join Focus Consulting at Francis Tuttle on 1/12 at 8:30a and dip your toe in the online marketing pool. If you want a fast-paced introduction to Social Media then this is the class for you.

Focus Consulting will be onsite co-teaching a class with the amazing Shelley Cadamy of Francis Tuttle fame. We will be covering the following topics to help get your business off the ground:

• What is Social Media?
• Examples of people/companies that are doing amazing things in Social Media
• Examples of people/companies that just don’t get it and are really messing it up
• How you should approach a Social Media strategy?
• Getting started on the popular platforms: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Where to go from here?

This class always has a waiting list. To your name on the list and guarantee yourself a spot then drop Shelley Cadamy a line at SCadamy@francistuttle.com

November 2009 marks the decade + 1 mark for Focus Consulting.

It is hard to believe that 11 years ago this November we chose to break away from the corporate world and start our own consulting business. Since that time we have grown, shrunk, traveled the country back and forth, and even consulted overseas. Times have been great and times have been hard. But we would not go back and change any of of our experiences. They have shaped us as individuals, and as a company.

Our roots still hold true in the great state of Oklahoma. Here is to the next 11 years, and a great upcoming 2010.

Not to quote the opening of “Friends” but man it has been a rough time for them.

They had some more downtime yesterday morning, and possibly some more early Sunday morning.

Here is the explanation for yesterday morning: http://forums.volusion.com/t5/Status-Blog/bg-p/Status

I am not going to bore you with the details. But let’s just say one of the better ecommerce/online shopping carts on the market has been having technical issues over the past 48 hours (and some would say longer) . People are extremely pissed off and they are looking at alternatives. The thing that is breaking my heart is seeing the PR fiasco. I believe if they do not pony up big time and pony up fast they are going to lose more customers due to poor PR than actual downtime related to their technical issues.

My thoughts to the Volusion management:

What your company really needs right now is some serious transparency from the management level down. Your CEO needs to personally address these issues either with a letter or a short video up on YouTube – Video updates from the CEO would really look good in your PR stock. I am going to give Volusion every chance because we have another store with a company that ends in ahoo and it is a POS compared to Volusion . But these outages combined with the fact that the company is silent (besides their great community evangelist Ryan) on a root cause and a plan to fix it is going to kill you. People are going to start to leave (and some have) like rats on a ship. I have been browsing the forums this morning from your competitors. There are people that would rather have no store right now than be up on Volusion’s service. We want to open two more stores at Volusion but I am going to hold off. It would just irresponsible of me to do it watching what everybody else has gone through recently.

This is a chance for you guys to really get some good PR by just coming out boldy and saying how screwed up this is and what you are going to do to fix it. This could be a big win if you guys handle it right. But the lack of communication is killing you as much if not more than the downtime. PR (as I am sure you know) is all about managing the impression of reality, not the actual reality. The other carts are making a killing off of this bad PR and they are owning the PR picture right now. By you doing nothing you are giving them default control of your message for you. You guys need to take that PR back and own it.

I am pulling for you.

Patrick

Well we’ve had the Volusion Shopping Cart for a client up and running for customization for just under a day and here are the thoughts so far:

Things that are easy to work with:

1. Uploading CSV files is going a lot faster in Volusion than in a Yahoo! store. I am keeping track of upload timings and so far the upload time is not decreasing proportionally with the number of products that we are having in our store. We will be eventually writing a full .NET class library to manage the Volusion store (let me know if you are interested in this) but for ease we are going with the CSV route for the initial upload.

2. Our client loves the fact that you can designate products in different warehouses across the country, and the shipping is calculated from the correct warehouses zip code. This is the bomb yo!

3. We see some promising thing with the fact that you can track your distributors part numbers and your cost from your distributors in the product. Hopefully there are some ROI reports in there for each order, month, etc.

4. You get full blown FTP access to your site. This is awesome. Any developer or designer knows that once you have raw file access there is not too much that you cannot do. This remains to be seen, but so far this is very nice.

5. We accidentally dove into some of the site stats. These look quite extensive.

6. It looks like there are some great options for the store manager after an order has been submitted – like being able to send the SAME order back to the customer for a different payment type.

Things that are a challenge so far (Disclaimer: Some of these may be a result of ignorance on our part) :

1. It took forever to figure out why a file we were uploading was not working. It says that there was no data in the file or that the file had no CSV data. This was clearly not the case, and even their support acknowledge the file looked good. This is a definite area of improvement – the diagnostic error messages that come out parsing file uploads. In the end it turned out being an issue on my end. But it just took too long to figure out. To make matters worse I gave the file to them and they uploaded it into my store OK. The end result: The file I was using did not have CRLF on the end (Carriage Return Line Feed). It only had LF. You could not tell this by opening the file in Notepad or Excel as both of them opened OK. I only saw it when I opened the file with Notepad++ and turned on the option to see hidden characters. Phew – that took all day to figure out.

2. Finding the encrypted password you need for API customization was a bear. Thank god for their forums. That should be there back in the admin interface someplace.

3. Your PRODUCTCODE (the unique key for every product) is limited in length. This is more of an adjustment than a gripe. In the current version of the store we are migrating you have 2-3 times the length. We had to move from an SEO optimized code to shorter numeric one. We will get over it.

4. I was not happy with their SEO options. You are limited on length and what control you have over your custom URL. They give you a field PRODUCTSHORTNAME where you put in your SEO optimized page name, but it is limited in length. So you page names come out to be www.sitename.com/productshortname/productcode.htm and not www.sitename.com/productshortname.htm (What I would have expected). Probably more of a mindset change on our part.

5. We were reading up on the Google Analytics tracking in the forum. We are going to want to implement full shopping cart/ecommerce tracking. This looks like it is going to be challenge once we get to it.

6. Even though you have full control over the page templates, there is a middle section called page_content. We are still hunting as to where this is created.

More to come as we get deeper in.