Stop Cyberbullying, Not Free Speech

I've written enough about good and bad online behavior that I feel compelled to weigh in on the Kathy Sierra situation and the ill-advised "stop blogging until someone does something about this" crusade that's been unleashed on the blogosphere.

For those who don't know, Kathy Sierra is a talented software designer and writer who's become the victim of some truly heinous threats on her blog. She went public about the threats and her fear of them, and that's led some other bloggers to decide to go dark to protest the poor behavior of a few miscreants.

This, of course, is a bad idea. The only thing accomplished by everyone jumping on the Sierra blackout bandwagon is to empower the attention-seeking lowlifes who posted the comments in the first place. From their anonymous accounts, they've now sent a shudder through the blogging community, and they're probably bragging with glee about how powerful they are.

This is why you don't feed trolls. They're like Freddy Krueger. If you ignore them, turn your back on them, you take their power away. If you confront them, you embolden them. It's that simple. Every blog that goes dark just contributes to the aggregate success these self-important idiots now feel.

It gets worse when the news media sums up the campaign by saying, "Fellow bloggers have declared tomorrow 'Stop Cyberbullying Day.' They will suspend their online journals, hoping to focus attention on the dark side of free speech. " The dark side of free speech? Maybe we should do away with this "free speech," seeing as it's so dark and destructive. Maybe David Louie, who penned this repugnant line, ought to go practice his journalism in China, where he'll have much less free speech to worry about.

Yet Mr. Louie is not alone in his opinion. Bloggers and readers are calling for "something to be done." That something is, no matter how you look at it, censorship, and it's worth noting that Ms. Sierra's distress stems not just from comments on her blog, but things posted on other blogs as well, so the scope reaches beyond simply deleting inappropriate comments from one's own blog, which any author is free to do. What's being said by a few is that this sort of behavior, anywhere, on any blog, ought to be stopped.

This is that slippery slope we keep hearing about. I agree that the posts in question have no place in civilized discourse, and that the people behind them should be shunned, banned from posting on other people's blogs, and paid visits by law enforcement if their threats cause undue distress. At the same time, Ms. Sierra needs to understand that she, like all prominent bloggers, is a public figure, and one of the "perks" of being a public figure is having irrational people threaten you, stalk you, and, in extreme cases, attempt to do you harm. There's no shortage of celebrities who have to deal with this. It's the price paid for stepping into the spotlight.

Stalkers are best handled through law enforcement. Cyberbullies are best handled through marginalization and shunning, not any sort of agreed-upon "standards of behavior" that limit free expression. And bloggers serve their purposes best by writing about what's happening and inviting discussion, not by going dark in protest.

This Is How We Do It

I won't go into detail about what cookiepots.com did to deserve my wrath. Suffice it to say that they should have known better, assuming they ever had a modicum of education in an American high school or university.

And at the risk of overreacting to something, let me say that I don't like veiled insults to my company handed out by people who have no idea what they're talking about, especially when these same people have already earned my wrath for doing something that they shouldn't have done in the first place.

So in the interests of educating these people, along with the readers here whom I care about and might wonder about this sort of thing, let me pull back the curtain a little on our operations.

We are not "middle men" who take your order and farm it out to the "real" company and then "hope for the best." Anything and everything you order at 1-800-Bakery.com is shipped direct from a bakery that has several years' experience doing this sort of thing, and we're in constant contact with one about any orders that come in. These bakeries have been hand-selected by us for their quality and attention to customer service, and anyone who fails to live up to our standards soon finds themselves gone from the site.

Almost every product ships on one of our account numbers, so any delivery issues get sent straight to us. In many cases, we're able to get packages delivered even when there's an address problem, thanks to our quick responsiveness to these issues and the volume of things that we ship. We're also able to extend availability of certain products (we had King Cakes for almost a week after they were gone from Randazzo's own site) and provide exclusive products (like our Small Chocolate Lover's Cake) thanks to the personal relationships we've built with our partner bakeries.

In short, cookiepots.com, I'll put our customer service and delivery expertise up against yours any day of the week. I also notice that you lack a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee, and that you specifically state that edible gifts are nonrefundable. We stand behind everything we sell. If a customer is disappointed, that customer gets their money back, or a replacement of equal value. It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen. Why don't you stand behind your products the way that we stand behind ours?

Until you're ready to stand behind what you sell, I suggest you keep your comments about how other companies do business to yourselves.

Shopping.com: A bunch of liars

Deceptive advertising really ticks me off. You've got enough misinformation to sort through without some "marketing genius" trying to mislead you when you want to buy something.

Boohoo Search Marketing apparently does a much poorer job than Google of protecting it's advertisers' interests. Case in point: This new ad from the liars at shopping.com:

1 800 Bakery at Shopping.com
Find, Compare and Buy 1 800 Bakery. Choose from Thousands of stores.
www.shopping.com

I won't dignify the rats at lying.com with a link. You shouldn't dignify them with your business, because, as I've said many times, if someone's going to lie to you, how can you trust anything they say?

Here's an honest statement:

We are not affiliated in any way, shape, or form, with the liars who run shopping.com. You will not find our products there, only lies.

That should get the point across. The filthy lying liars at lying.com need to stop buying ads on our company name and misleading our customers. Boohoo Search Marketing ought to do a better job of preventing this. I've rewritten our ad in Boohoo, and I'm fully expecting a rejection for "trademark violation," at which point a lovely conversation will begin with them about why one company is allowed to break the rules and another isn't.

You can rest assured that I'll post every word.

Combating Chinese Click Fraud

If you're following the latest news, there's a good chance that you came across the BusinessWeek story on click fraud in the current issue. I've been involved in a battle of my own on this issue that runs beyond the scope of their article, so I thought I'd share the story.

We started looking at our server logs after a quarterly report showed around 12% of our traffic was coming from China. We don't sell our products in China, and we've only had a couple of orders sourced from that part of the world. I knew it was fraud as soon as I saw the numbers.

The traffic was coming from a handful of sites, listed here so that you can see if they're showing up on your own servers:

http://aries-search.com/index.php
http://buddah-search.com/index.php
http://800-search.com/index.php
http://www.hit2seek.com/
http://www.agafra.com/

If you look at these sites, on most of them you'll see the same text: "80% bid, $5 payout," which should be your cue that you're dealing with fraud. Here's how they work: These "search engines" are actually scraping content from pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. They sign people up to sit and click links all day, then give the clickers a portion of the revenue generated from the clickthroughs--in the case above, 80% of the payout on the clickthrough (if you're unfortunate enough to wind up on these sites, you'll see the value of the click to the clicker) up to $5.

Imagine an Internet cafe filled with people clicking away on your ads to make a few pennies. That's what you're up against.

Since I was batting a thousand on instinct, I decided to blame Google AdWords. They've had problems in the past, the search terms that were coming up had been pulled from Boohoo Search Marketing, and the traffic was out of line with our daily bill from MSN.

That decision lowered my instinct average to .500. If I'd thought about it, I would have realized that Google could not be the culprit. We've taken steps to prevent this from happening, including limiting our ads to the United States and opting out of the Content Network. I sent Google an apology after I heard back from them, one that I'll reiterate here. It wasn't Google--they've done right by us so far.

I did a little research based on the landing pages the fraudsters were seeing. As it turned out, all of the fraudulent clicks were coming from two second-tier advertising networks that I'd forgotten about--ePilot and Miva. I suspended our accounts with both providers, and sent an e-mail explaining the situation to ePilot, but I haven't heard anything back from them. I'll assume that's because they're busy finding ways to stop these fraudulent clicks.

What tipped me off was the ads that were appearing on these click fraud engines. I always vary the copy from ad to ad, partly to A/B test, and partly so I know where the traffic is coming from.

With the accounts disabled, the fraudulent Chinese traffic disappeared. I'm still keeping an eye out for it, but so far we're clear. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but anyone in small business knows that a penny lost to fraud is a penny better spent on promotion.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer the following Five Tips for Combating Click Fraud:

1. Avoid second-tier advertising networks. Stick with the Big Three.
2. Opt out of international placements and content-network placements in your campaigns. If you can't do this (Boohoo Search Marketing, I'm looking at you) then carefully consider your ad spend.
3. Vary text between different PPC providers, so you can track sources.
4. Watch your server logs for suspect traffic.
5. Immediately suspend any account that generates suspect traffic. Print a copy of the server log and keep it in case you need to file a claim for a refund.

It's a Changing Time O'Year

The end of August brings with it many things, like autumn cookie assortments and the start of a new school year. It also means that lots of seasonal products for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas will be available soon. Keep an eye on our Seasonal Treats page, which will be updated on the 1st and the 15th of the next few months with new cookie and collections.

We've also added some new categories to Shop by Occasion. Sympathy Gifts, Get Well Soon, and Baby and Bridal Showers list our most popular selections in each of these areas. Everything on our Showers page is eligible for a shipping discount as an added bonus.

Finally, there's some changes in store for this blog. Regular readers (if any) know that I tend to alternate between site-specific news and marketing-specific news. The new Blogger Beta will allegedly allow me to separate those areas out into different categories, so the folks who like the food stuff can get the food stuff, and the folks who like the marketing stuff can get that. I'm also taking the opportunity to redesign the blog a little and possibly incorporate some features found on my radio show's blog. (I'm thinking of the weather and the RSS feeds, not the funny headlines).

Does that mean you'll get twice as much content? No, just the opposite. It means I'll essentially have two blogs that get updated less often than this single one did.

So if the blog goes down for a bit or you log on and it's a mess, just check back later. My CSS skills aren't what they could be.

More Fun with Yahoo!

You know what I love about the Internet? It's the way our stressful workaday lives have been eased through the valuable assortment of online tools that deliver information to our fingertips. Compiling sales and marketing reports used to require wading through piles of data and converting it into a usable form. Now, one merely needs to set the date range and all becomes clear.

Unless, of course, you're using Yahoo! Search Marketing, hereafter to be known as Boohoo! Search Marketing for the anguish it causes each time I dare to make sense of its bewildering interface and substandard tools.

Today, I made the mistake of trying to figure out what my pay-per-click keywords have been doing over the past year. Simple enough in Google--just set the date range, and the data magically appears. MSN's AdCenter won't let me specify a date range, but they will give me year-to-date data, which is just as useful. Truth be told, that functionality might be there, but there was a friendly dropdown menu offering me a good approximation of what I wanted, so I used it.

I saved Boohoo! for last, expecting, rightfully so, to be frustrated and defeated by their interface. Their 20-minute automatic logout "feature" also turns every Boohoo! adventure into a fast-paced game of Beat the Clock that I need to postpone until late in the day out of concern for the well-being of my coworkers and anyone else who might be in earshot.

For a change, clicking on the "Reports" link actually took me someplace helpful, and I could find the account report I wanted. I entered my date range, and waited for the report to appear.

Instead of getting a report, I received the following error message:

The date range is limited to 95 days.

Wow! A whole 95 days of tracking! Just what I needed for those quarterly reports. Unfortunately, I'm working on an annual report, so 95 days doesn't do me a damn bit of good. Had I known that my reports were limited to 95 days, I might have set up a system to download and compile them every quarter. I also might have done the smart thing and never gotten involved with Boohoo! Search Marketing.

This lack of functionality is a joke, right? There's another link somewhere I can click where it says, "We were just kidding," and gives me the data, right? No? Well at least it should be fast when I request my quarterly reports, right? One 90-day date range later, instead of a report, I get this message:

Your request is currently being processed. To obtain your report, return to this page and enter your request again. If the request has been completed, the report will be displayed at that time.

Awesome! Low functionality and slow response times! It's like tripping back in time to the 28.8 modem days. And the best thing is, every time you click on the little calendar icon to change the date range, it defaults to today's date! Think of the fun you'll have trying to figure out what the heck you're trying to do as Boohoo! error messages fill your screen--and by "fill," I mean appear in tiny, almost unreadable text.

And to think Boohoo! is working overtime to release the new and improved version of Search Marketing. Guys, you can't make a diamond any more perfect. Please, I beg you, leave the damn thing alone, subcontract to Google!, and let the rest of us get some work done.

Is Yahoo! Editing Your PPC Campaigns?

I'm beyond frustrated right now as I find myself in Day 2 of undoing the damage that Yahoo! Search Marketing editors have done to my PPC campaign. I wasn't even aware of this until yesterday, when I started modifying our existing PPC ads with new conversion tracking code.

There, among the ads I'd written, were things with titles like, "Affordable Gourmet Gift Baskets" and "Buy Great Cookies at Low Prices." If you're at all familiar with this site, which Yahoo's "editors" clearly aren't, then you know that we don't use words like "affordable," "low prices," or "discount" to sell our products.

In fact, we told Yahoo! this when they sent us a proposed list of keywords, which included the above offending terms along with the ever-popular "cheap." Who wants cheap gourmet cookies? Anyone? Anyone?

Compounding the problem was a series of ads I don't recall creating with URLs pointing to our home page instead of the appropriate category pages on the site. Here's an example:

Buy Great Cookies at Low Prices
Visit 1-800-Bakery.com for great birthday cakes. We also offer pastries,
chocolates, candies, cookies, desserts, bread and more. Amazing prices. Order
online.
http://www.1-800-bakery.com/?src=overture

That conversion code doesn't work with any of our tracking programs. Every one of the suspect ads featured this URL, so my advice to anyone out there running a PPC campaign is to sort through your ads (good luck with their terrible interface, which sets a new benchmark for lack of usability), look for that URL, and see if they've been playing with your campaigns.

I'm infuriated about this on two levels:

1. Yahoo! has misrepresented our site with claims of "amazing prices" and directed potential customers to the home page instead of appropriate landing pages. We paid money for every click generated by these fradulent ads, so we handed somebody cash to make us look bad.

2. I now have to spend my valuable time undoing the damage caused by this editorial tinkering. The deeper I look into what they've done, the more problems I discover.

Once I saw what was going on, I sent them the following e-mail:

Dear Yahoo! Team,

If you want to continue having us as a customer, I would like answers
to the following questions:

1. Who is editing our ads?
2. Why are they editing our ads?
3.
How do I get them to stop doing this?

When we were first approached by Yahoo!, we made it very clear that
terms such as "low cost," "affordable," and "inexpensive" were, under no
circumstances, to ever appear in any of our advertising. Yet there it is.

I've also noticed a number of ads with incorrect URLs and conversion
tracking code. This is, quite frankly, unacceptable on any level.

If these issues cannot be addressed, immediately, then I will take
actions to suspend our account with Yahoo! We will also be reviewing our recent
bills to determine whether or not we paid for misdirected links provided by your
editorial staff.

Sincerely,
Derek Gerry
Senior Producer
1-800-Bakery.com

I did get a prompt reply, as follows (edited to remove identifying account information):

Hello ,

We have reviewed your account per your e-mail concern about your ads
being edited. Your ads are being edited by members of our editorial staff. They
are being edited in order to help your ad get approved. We can stop your ads
from being edited by notating your account. We do apologize for any
inconvenience this may have caused you. Per your request, we will notate your
account internally, for no changes to be made to your title and description in
your account.

If your URL's and tracking codes are incorrect, we apologize for this
inconvenience as well. We can change any part of your ads to whatever you want
us to change them to. You can submit these changes via spreadsheet in your
account, through the edit listings function in your account or you can call us
or e-mail us to inform one of our Gold specialists, the changes that you want to
make.

Once again, we are truly sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused
in your account. For assistance or questions with your account, please call us
at 1-866-YAHOO-SM (1-866-924-6676). Our hours are Monday - Friday: 5:00
a.m.-8:00 p.m., Saturday: 5:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.,
Pacific Time.

Sincerely,
Mark Taylor
Customer Solutions
Yahoo! Search
Marketing

Gee, thanks, Mark, I'll be sure to put a spreadsheet together for you guys. If I'm putting that much effort into it, I might as well make the edits myself. Here's a better idea for future reference: Don't mess around with my campaigns. I don't have to take this aggravation from Google or MSN, and if an ad agency or PR firm ever did this to me, I'd fire them on the spot and sue for breach of contract.

We're in the process of reviewing our logs to determine how much of this unqualified traffic came to our site, and I'm considering whether or not we'll continue to maintain a relationship with Yahoo! Search Marketing.

To the rest of the marketing folks and Web masters out there, let me again advise you to carefully check your campaigns and make sure you're getting the traffic you're supposed to be paying for.

UPDATE:
I've taken 29 listings offline because the descriptions and/or titles contained "low prices," "affordable prices," or "amazing prices," three phrases I would NEVER use to drive qualified traffic to the site.

Consistency Is All I Ask

Today's daily task: Letting DMOZ off the hook, maybe. I was blessed enough to have an actual editor from The Open Directory Project contact me, thanks to some things I've said in my blog. Said editor told me that 1-800-Bakery.com was not eligible for inclusion, and pointed me toward the Editorial Guidelines.

After a thorough read of the guidelines, I couldn't find a single thing that would exclude us. So I wrote back, asking for further explanation.

It turns out that we're the scourge of the Internet. A filthy, evil, insidious, disgusting dropshipper. You thought we were just a nice baked goods gift site, but no, we're unwashed pagans unworthy of entry into the sacred tower that is DMOZ, lest we sully it with our proscribed partnering ways that provide visibility to small bakeries that couldn't afford the online promotion on their own. Mere parasites feeding off the good fortunes of innocent bakers as we help their businesses grow.

All this time I thought my lack of cocktail party invitations was just an oversight on the part of busy friends. Now I wonder, do they know that I work for a dropshipper? Do they avoid me for fear that I might corrupt their children with promises of outstanding customer service and a 100% money back guarantee? Or do they fear that their own will power isn't enough to keep me from seducing them with unique products and one of the largest varieties of any bakery site on the Web?

And where is all this spelled out? The closest thing I could find to the obviously well-advised decision to exclude verminous dropshippers from DMOZ was this sentence in Editorial Guidelines, filed under the ominous heading, "Sites Not to Include:"

Sites devoted to the sales and distribution of a single product should be avoided if they are affiliate sites or if the site is merely a distributor for a manufacturer already listed in the Directory. The purpose of the ODP is not to replicate the individual listings of an online shopping catalog.

I don't see the word dropshipper in there, I suspect because DMOZ is afraid to write it. What I do see in the directory, however, are several sites that carry the exact same products that we sell, such as:

• Macy's--they sell the same cookies we carry
• ProFlowers--they also sell the same cookies
• Home Shopping Network--they sell the same cakes
• Cooking.com--let's say you're Delightful Deliveries, and you can't get listed in DMOZ because you're a dropshipper. You can always sell through a site that isn't a dropshipper, right? Right!
• Future Memories--who would ever think that this site was a dropshipper?
• Bunn Family Gourmet--we can't expect the Bunn Family to make everything they sell. After all, they need time for sleep and family dinners gathered around heaping plates of USDA Prime steaks
• efendos--or as I like to call them, "eFiendos." Not just a dropshipper, but a "FREE" shipping liar

My editor friend went on to tell me that carrying unique products isn't enough. So it seems dropshippers need to be segregated from the rest of the online community, for the good of us all. I was told that I could file a complaint at the DMOZ Resource Zone, but I don't want to ruin someone else's DMOZ good time, and I find something unsettling about DMZ and Zone in the same sentence.

DMOZ is a private entity, and they're free to run the directory any way they want. That's their right, and I support it. Getting as much as they have out of a group of volunteer editors is commendable, but a little more vigilance across the enterprise would leave me far more gruntled.

The bigger issue is the decision by search engines to rely on outside sources to do their work for them. I can understand anyone not wanting a bunch of editors and writers hanging around the office--we're a general nuisance, and we take all the free food.

But by outsourcing, what should be a level playing field is skewed in favor of those with the money and the influence to get coverage from DMOZ, CNN, Associated Press, and the other "expert" sources. Small businesses face enough of this oppression in the brick-and-mortar world; we don't need it carried on to the Web.

Another Loss of Confidence

Seems I'm not the only one wondering about the whereabouts and welfare of the editors over at DMOZ. The nice folks over at MarketPosition included an article in their last e-mail explaining how to get MSN to update your site description in their search engine.

Of note in the article is this lovely quote: "But what if you've been trying unsuccessfully to get the Open Directory to update your listing?" Should you send a search party? Alert the FBI? Perhaps, but if you want some results, there's a new meta tag that works with MSNbot to update that tired old description.

Author Scott Goodyear closes the article by saying, "We can only hope that other engines will follow MSN's lead."
And there it is, a mass-media scourging of the hard-working, overburdened DMOZ editors, who will soon fear to look upon other Web sites in their fleeting nanoseconds of downtime as the tide of mildly disgruntled Web masters continues to rise.

DMOZ now joins the President, Congress, and our legal system in losing the confidence of the American public. What can we belive in anymore, if we can't trust a group of unpaid volunteers to provide free indexing for multibillion-dollar behemoths like Google and MSN? The very core of the Internet is starting to fail, and I can only hope it doesn't cause a cascade like the Y2K virus almost did. Imagine a world where search engines are forced to use the meta descriptions written by biased, manipulative Web masters instead of the fair and balanced descriptions created by Starbucks-fueled volunteers, whose only mission in life is to point people toward what's relevant and genuine.

Let's hope that this slap from MSN encourages the powers that be at DMOZ, assuming there are any that can be found, to break out the whips and demand 26-hour days from their underperforming editors, because I don't think I could live in a world where DMOZ didn't guarantee those lucky enough to have their submissions actually reviewed an extra point or two of PageRank.

A number of people suggested that I become a DMOZ editor after my last post on this subject. "Just post your site and then resign," was heard more than once. I don't approve of those kinds of shenanigans to begin with, and to me, becoming a DMOZ editor because they won't list your site is like going into the kitchen and getting your own food because you can't find your waitress.

A Pathetic Anniversary

My thoughts go out today to the hard-working staff over at DMOZ, the Open Directory, for their tireless efforts to keep the public at large informed about what's happening online.

They must be overwhelmed with the constant addition of new sites to the Internet, and all the requests they get from Webmasters to add sites to their directory, which is still considered an authority site by no less than the mighty Google.

Indeed, working at DMOZ must be a ceaseless Sisyphusian struggle against the rising tide of e-commerce, with the sleepless nights toiling at laptops and desktops willowing relationships with family and friends.

So busy are the all-powerful DMOZ volunteers that they lack the time for basic social interaction, regular television viewing, or even the fleeting calm of a coffee break. I say this because today, the Summer Solstice, marks the one-year anniversary of my submission of 1-800-Bakery.com to DMOZ, and after one year, we're still not listed.

Despite assurances that our site would be listed in weeks, three months at the most, visitors to DMOZ are denied the knowledge that our humble baked-goods emporium is available for thier high-calorie snacking and gift-giving needs.

I can only imagine the nightmare that must be the life of the Top: Shopping: Food: Baked Goods editor, his or her fingers a gnarled and withered mass flopping from carpal-swollen wrists, glazed, owllike eyes peering from sagging eyelids drained to alabaster by too many hours spent indoors. The miniscule feeling of accomplishment at adding a new listing erased by a heartbeat spiking at the sight of so many bakery sites waiting for inclusion. The growing sense of doom that normal life has been swallowed by the morass of sites silently piling up in the In Box.

Only the ignorant would dare to call these brave soldiers of Web organization lazy. If they ignore our pleas for inclusion, or our repeated e-mails to addresses that don't really go anywhere, it's only because their passion for completing their task of listing everyone in a timely fashion prevents them from pausing, even for a moment, to acknowledge our concern.

I salute you, tireless Top: Shopping: Food: Baked Goods editor. Your efforts have not gone unnoticed, and your dedication is an example of the spirit that made America great!

Now can you get my freaking site listed already?

Liars Get More Cakes

It finally happened. The single-cake site that lies about free shipping (you might know them as gocakego), got more flavors of cake! They've got FIVE, count 'em, FIVE whole flavors now (we've got 18 flavors of cake, and that's not counting the cheesecakes or the coffee cakes). And all of those new flavors come with FREE shipping, which for some reason costs more than our cakes. Their 10" carrot cake checks in at $79.95. Our carrot cake, including express shipping, is $60.65.

Now to be fair, they do include plates and napkins and candles and such with their cakes. But if you saved $19.30 with us, I'm sure you could get your own plates and candles, maybe even have a little left over for some soda or a moderate bottle of wine. Or if you've got those things lying around the house, you could get the birthday girl or boy a DVD.

So let's review: Gocakego, with their much-ballyhooed FREE shipping, costs $19.30 more than we do. For the extra money, you get some plates and napkins and candles, and everyone gets to send e-mails to the birthday celebrant. I suggest that you rush out right now in a buying frenzy, because that's a great value. No, really, it is. Like that time you paid $20 for mint-on-card Star Wars figures because they'd be a great "investment."

It's days like this that I feel like an idiot. Here I am, trying to figure out ways to LOWER our shipping costs, when all I had to do was raise our prices and claim that we have FREE shipping. This is why I'm just no good at business.

Myspam

I'm on Myspace, because if everyone else jumped off a bridge, I'd want to see the blog that made them do it.

Actually, I'm on Myspace to promote my weekly radio show, which airs on 91.5, WMFO, and has little or nothing to do with baked goods and everything to do with comedy and politics. It's called Hbee Inc. Radio, and it airs on Thursdays from 6-8 PM. It's also simulcast on the Web, and if you decide to tune in, be prepared for shouting, eclectic music, and the occasional joke that goes too far.

Myspace is a good place to promote this sort of thing. It gives me the chance to post four free MP3s and reaches millions. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the spammers caught on to this.

On Monday morning, I received an invitation to join a group from MySpace. These invites don't always tell you what the group is, and I know a few folks with groups, usually based around a comedy show, so I clicked the link and found myself in the "Get Paid to Take Online Surveys" group. Unlike all the other "Get Paid to Take Online Surveys" links I'd seen, this one promised to get me access to the surveys that really pay, complete with testimonials from folks who had quit their jobs and were now raking in $300 a day by filling out forms in their pajamas.

Man I'd love to have that gig. Too bad it's fictional. Folks, if you want to make $300 a day for an hour's work, here's how you do it:

1. Be born really funny.
2. Learn to be a great writer.
3. Spend 10 years losing your dignity and confidence five minutes at a time in comedy clubs.
4. Promote yourself relentlessly.
5. Develop an hour of material and hope that bookers and audiences like you.

If you can do that, you, too, can make $300 for a night's work, although it isn't really a night's work, more like a lifetime. That's how standup comics do it, and precious few succeed, though more people are actually making a living by doing this than by clicking on online surveys.

Myspace seems to be doing a good job stopping the spammers, as the group was deleted by midday. That didn't stop the spammer from setting up another group and sending me another invite, but that group was also deleted.

It'll be interesting to see how long Myspace can keep the spammers at bay. My guess: Not long. They always seem to find a way. At least I haven't been asked to join the "Help me transfer $10 million from Nigeria" group yet. That would be hard to resist.

The New Deceivers

There are two truths about new technology:

1. It won't work the way it's supposed to.

2. Someone will find a way to use it to deceive people.

In the past, I've exposed the Free Shipping Phonies and the Dubious Discounters, and today I'd like to add the Customer Confusers to the list, in the form of shopping.com, who don't get a link because they're a bunch of hooligans.

Shopping.com is basically a giant pay-per-click (PPC) shopping site that tries to recruit online businesses to be listed in their directory. If they can't get a popular site legitimately, they're apparently not above doing an end-run to deceive people into visiting their site. This gets a little tricky, so pay close attention.

Google provides two outstanding online services: AdWords, for my money the best PPC value online, and AdSense. AdWords lets you create those little ads that you see to the right of your search results. AdSense lets you run AdWords ads on your site and get a commission every time somebody clicks on them. There are people online attempting to make a living off Google's AdSense by creating gateway pages for popular search phrases and filling them with AdSense ads. They're called "Scrapers," and they're universally loathed by people looking for actual information online, because their sites contain no content.

Shopping.com has developed a variant of the Scraper tactic. If you search for 1-800-Bakery in Google, you'll see a Shopping.com ad. I've said this before, but I'll be as specific here as possible:

We are not affiliated with Shopping.com.

What they've done is created a search gateway page linked to our domain name. When you click the link, you're shown some products from our competitors (that will cost more than what we offer) and our AdWords ad, among others. No matter what you click, shopping.com gets a commission. Never mind that you're confused as to where you are, they're making money by leeching off our domain name.

I tried to solve this problem with an AdWords campaign that said the same thing as the bolded text above. Google won't let me do that, because Shopping.com is trademarked.

If I ever start deceiving people, remind me to trademark my domain name first so that nobody can fight back. In the meantime, I'm sure that shopping.com will be happy to see the phrase, "Who needs a directory?" every time somebody clicks on their AdWords link.

Answering a Common Question

Here's the question that's asked the most by folks who call our Customer Service number: "Do you deliver to (insert city or state name here)?"

Yes, we do. As long as it's in the Continental United States, we'll ship it there. We'll even send stuff to Alaska and Hawaii, if you ask, but that's more expensive. I can even recommend a few things that we can ship to Canada, despite the customs delays.

This seems to be a tough concept for people to understand, and to me it's one of those collision points between the world we knew and the world as it exists today. Times were when any place worth inhabiting had a local bakery, and if you needed cookies or bread, you went there. Maybe they offered a regional delivery service, but you'd never expect a cake to travel from one side of the country to the other.

In the new online world, we deliver products from one end of the country to the other every day, but the experience creates an intimacy that makes the process seem local. If I'm in my house ordering croissants on my computer, they must be coming from someplace nearby, right? Not necessarily, but it's a good practice for online retailers to make it feel as if you're doing business with someone who's across town, ready to respond to your needs instantly.

That sense of closeness, combined with the traditional bakery/customer relationship, breeds the shipping question. I'm sure that most if not all of the online bakeries deal with the same question each day. I don't mind answering it, because it tells me that the customer understands that my site is a collection of local bakeries, and not a giant nationwide corporation.

Look at How Clever We Are!

It seems the folks who lie about free shipping and can't tell the difference between "cakes" and "cake" thought it would be cute to buy our domain name in AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. Either that or they thought it would be some brilliant new marketing concept, as follows:

IDIOT 1
They're one of the most popular sites for cakes. Let's buy their domain name.

IDIOT 2
Wow! What a great idea! When's the IPO? We're gonna be rich!

Of course, the single-cake site trying to compete with us is like Woot! trying to compete with BestBuy, with one major exception: Woot! runs a different product every day and delivers some amazing values to its customers. The single-cake site offers...well...a cake...and some kind of e-mail thing, which is probably a terrific value if you're one of the five people who's online but doesn't have e-mail.

To say I was annoyed when I saw them coming up for my domain name would be accurate. To say I was annoyed enough to complain about Google, Yahoo!, and MSN yesterday would be entirely accurate. To the credit of all three of those companies, Google got the problem fixed within a day--and sent a nice e-mail explaining that things were busy--and Yahoo! and MSN set a new processing speed record by having my ads up in less than 24 hours. I'm impressed with all of you, but Yahoo!'s interface still needs a major redesign.

The reason I was annoyed is because decent people don't buy their competitors' brand name. Chevy doesn't buy Ford. Wal-Mart doesn't buy Sears. Hershey doesn't buy Godiva. Partly its a matter of being polite, and partly its a matter of not wasting marketing dollars. If a customer is searching for Chevy, they probably don't want to hear Ford's sales pitch. That customer is searching for the brand, not generically trolling for a car. Inserting your ads at that point is at best confusing and at worst a deliberate deception.

So the single-cake site forced my hand, and I bought the domain name and its variations as a keyword. And because I think turnabout is fair play, I bought their domain name as a keyword too. The funny thing is, once my ads appeared, theirs vanished.

I suppose it's only fair, and far less hypocritical of me, to stop advertising on their domain name. As I look at my schedule, I can see a lot of work that needs to get done. Add in the processing time for Yahoo! and MSN...and the ads should be gone by this time next week. Which, coincidentally, is how long they were squatting in our space.

I think I caught USABIrthdays hanging around in there too. For the record, guys, I refer our customers to you when they ask for something that we don't have. I'd like to continue doing that, but only if you play nice.

And as for you, shopping.com, you know full well that we don't sell through your site, although some of our AdWords campaigns appear there. You're buying our domain on a technicality, and if needed, I'll be happy to point out how we're beating your prices.

Searching for Solutions

I love Google. Nice folks, good service. Most of the time. I'm a bit annoyed, though, when automatic filters in AdWords thwart my marketing attempts.

Case in point: Yesterday I created a new campaign because I noticed some liars in a place where I don't want them to be. During the ad creation process, I got an error message along the following lines: "Google AdWords does not allow superlatives. Please remove them from your copy."

The "superlative" in question is the number 1 in 1-800-Bakery.com. I filled out the exemption form as usual, explaining the reason for the 1 being there, and expected the usual swift processing of my ad.

After 24 hours, I'm still waiting. And I doubt I'm alone, given the large number of "1-800," "best," "fastest," and "finest" domain names out there. I'm assuming that the huge volume of AdWords ads is slowing the editorial response time at Google, but some feedback, any feedback, would be nice. Something along the lines of, "Please allow 2-3 business days for review."

Or, if you really wanted to solve the problem, just turn that filter off in the Display URL field, because what you're essentially doing is telling a host of advertisers that they're second-class citizens because Google doesn't like their domain names.

They're still doing a much better job than MSN's AdCenter, which can take up to three weeks to approve PPC ads. I've submitted time-sensitive ads to them only to have the holiday pass before the ad was approved. I know things take time, but this is the Internet, and customers expect a quick turnaround. If it's going to take the better part of a month for an ad to go live, let the users know so we can plan ahead.

I'd be remiss if I didn't slam Yahoo Search Marketing while I'm at it. These guys need to spend some time reading Jakob Neilsen and redesign the entire interface. Figuring out how to navigate their site is like trying to find a number-two washer at Home Depot--I know what I need is here somewhere, but there's no easy way to get to it, and all the employees have gone on break.

There's my suggestions to the Big Three search engines. Now my suggestion to you: Microsoft is debuting its new Live Search at www.live.com. There's some interesting attempts to reinvent the search engine wheel here, and I like the idea of having all the results on a single page that can be scrolled instead of having to wade through pages and pages of results.

How NOT to Use AdWords

Everyone loves Google AdWords. If you run an online business and you know what you're doing, it's a cost-effective, not to mention very effective, form of advertising. MSN and Yahoo aren't bad, but AdWords is king.

Where else, after all, can you lie about offering free shipping for pennies a click, only to lure customers in with the promise of "cakes" and offer only one kind of cake? There's hours of fun to be had.

Sometimes, though, it goes too far. As you probably know, "bird flu" is a popular search term these days. Any time a search term gets popular, advertisers want to jump on it. Eight pages worth of advertisers, in this case, offering everything from respiratory masks to advice for businesses on how to deal with an outbreak.

Then there's this ad:

Bird Flu
Whatever you're looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.ebay.com

Order now and we'll rush vials of HN51 straight to your door! Only $59.95 with PayPal! Check my Rating! L@@K!

Not quite what they had in mind, I'm sure. The AdWords link actually takes you to a list of bird-flu-related products, including a number of books about why you should be terrified, some pills that may assuage your fears, and T-shirts for those who prefer to laugh at fate with the words, "Bird Flu! Run for your damn life!" beneath a silhouette of a man running from what appears to be the silhouette of a hawk, or perhaps an eagle.

There's also someone offering to sell the domain name www.birdflu.org, described as the "Best domain name for BIRD FLU!!" As of this writing, it's up to 12 bids, with a top bid of $14,100. The seller is also offering free gift wrapping on this item. I don't know how you'd wrap a domain name, but if you're imagining the gift wrap, that is free, so I'll keep the seller off my list of liars for the moment.

Incidentally, the reserve for this domain name has not yet been met. I'll keep an eye on this auction over the next two days and see if it gets there.

So the eBay ad is true, if unsettling, and folks should really think about how they phrase their AdWords copy. You won't lure a lot of customers with the promise of bird flu.

There's also a couple of other conclusions I can draw.

First, Dick Cheney was doing his part to control the spread of bird flu until, as usual, a lawyer got in the way.

Second, no crisis is so severe that someone, somewhere, won't try to make a buck off of it.

Deal or No Deal?

Everyone loves to find something on sale. I'm a Filene's Basement veteran myself, and I've participated in a lot of conversations that go something like this:

"Hey there, acquaintance or family member. That's a spiffy new article of clothing you've got there. It must have cost a bundle."

"Actually, I got it at The Basement. It was originally $250, but I got it for $35. Sure, it's slightly irregular and the sleeves keep falling off, but I'll just keep sewing them back on."

I don't mean to malign The Basement. They actually sell good stuff, and an astute shopper can find some great bargains in there. Unfortunately, there are those among us who would seek to exploit my--and your--thrifty nature with pricing shenanigans that place them in the dimly lit corner of the Online Liars.

Yesterday, I talked about the Free Shipping Phonies. Today, I'd like to expose their equally nefarious cousins, the Dubious Discounters. These online hooligans post fake "list prices," then offer what looks like a steep discount to make you think you're getting a bargain. You're not, you're just being fed a lie along with the cake you ordered.

There's a certain site out there that's selling cakes that are eerily similar to the cakes we carry. I won't name names this time out of respect to one of our partner bakeries, but the hooligans know who they are. Their catalog pages offer a "list price" for each cake they sell, which is then crossed out with another price published beneath it. In red, next to that lower price, are the words, "You save $4.00." At least they don't punctuate their lies with exclamation points, but putting them in red is a pretty close second.

If you bought the same Chocolate Satin Cake from us, you'd actually be saving almost a dollar over their price, including shipping, or almost $5 over their fictional "list price." So we're cheaper than they are, and we don't lie to you.

We could do the same thing, of course. List our cakes at $50 a piece and claim fictional savings, but I like sleeping at night.

The practice of fictional list pricing reached a head in retail jewlery sales in Massachusetts a couple of years ago, when several stores were offering savings of "up to 80%." The Attorney General's office caught wise to this deception, and demanded that the following language be included in such advertising: "List price reflects a price at which offers may or may not have been made." In other words, they had to admit that the products may never have been sold at the "list price," which makes the discount fictional. Someday the forces of fair play will catch up to these practices online, until then, buyer beware.

So how can you tell if a discount is genuine? Shop around. I regularly check our competitors to make sure we're giving you the best possible price. If you know what things cost to begin with, you can spot a real bargain. Overstock and Woot are both the real deal. Efendos, which claims "free shipping" is not. They're charging more than we are for cakes, and we just adjusted our prices to reflect the higher fuel surcharges we pay for shipping.

Whoops--did I just say that? Yes I did. We raised our prices a little on some of our products to reflect higher shipping and ingredient costs. And if those fuel surcharges go away, we'll lower our prices, because we're committed to giving you the best possible value for your dollar.

Some folks lie to make you think you're getting a deal. We actually give you one.

Lie Cake Lie

I don't like liars. I don't think they're the sort of people that one should do business with. Yet liars persist in this online world, as a Google Search of "overnight cake delivery" will attest.

There's one company lying to you in its ads, and one that's not. I'm sure you can figure out who's who and what the lie is, but for the record, one more time:

There is no such thing as free shipping.

Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you and playing on your vulnerable desire to get a bargain. They'll probably try to convince you that there's only one flavor of cake in the world, too.

I'd like to know what happened to truth in advertising. Oh, right, this is the Internet, and there's a lot of shady characters around here, some of whom have actual marketing budgets. I'm tempted to buy an AdWords ad that reads,

Liars, liars, liars
Admit that you pay for shipping
On overnight cake delivery

Listen, I could charge $65 a cake or $75 a cake, hide the shipping costs, and tell you that it's free too. I could also tell you that I'm eleven feet tall with a moustache made of solid platinum and Razor scooters where my feet should be, and that I use my increased mobility and bullet-proof upper lip to battle crime every night as Platinum-Razor Man. Wouldn't make it true.

Do you really think a cake costs sixty bucks? Doesn't it seem like there's some additional charges hidden in there somewhere? Wouldn't you prefer a little more honesty in your life?

At the very least, I consider claims of "free" shipping to be very unethical. At worst, it's an outright lie, and when you put it in your ads with exclamation points, you're lying, plain and simple. I couldn't sleep at night knowing that I was lying to my customers, but I guess some people can.

Random Monday Thoughts

"Random Monday Thoughts." I might make this a new feature on the blog. We'll see. I just figured that since most folks have today off, I could mail in the segues and just write a bunch of unrelated stuff that wouldn't rate as a full post by itself. So here goes.

1. Telephone Tips: Believe it or not, your calls are important to us. Really. We like talking with our customers and helping them get what they need. Sometimes we get busy, or it's midnight and we're not here, and you'll get our voicemail. If you do, please make sure to leave a 10-digit phone number where we can reach you during the day. Don't assume that we know your area code, and don't leave more than 10 digits, as we don't know which 10 to choose.
   
   And if you don't hear back from us, please call us back instead of telling everyone you know that we have lousy customer service. We want to call you back, but we can't if we don't understand your phone number.
   
2. Blogger was down on Friday afternoon, which is why I never got to my other big announcement last week. I'm not getting to it today, either, because sending out information on a Monday holiday is like putting a billboard on top of Mount Everest.
   
3. Sometimes our packages show up early. It happened at Christmas, and it happened again last week. Why? Our friends at UPS have a policy of moving things as fast as they can during the busy times, and Valentine's is second only to Christmas for shipping. We do our best to get things there on the day you specify, but we are at the mercy of our shipping partners. I'll throw a nod to a competitor who shall remain nameless for turning this occasional event into a bonus. In their shipping information, they say, "May arrive early at no extra charge." That's good marketing.
   
4. Buy a King Cake, but do it soon. We're closing orders for these on Thursday, if not sooner. Remember that you'll be helping a Louisiana bakery recover with each purchase. I'm thrilled with the response so far from our customers, who have moved the King Cakes into our Top-10 products faster than anything we've ever offered on the site.
   
5. Finally, it seems that NBC is lamenting poor ratings for the Torino Olympics. I'll give you three reasons why they're down: First, the lackluster performance of Team USA, especially on the ski slopes, where it's like watching a train wreck. Then again, Americans love watching train wrecks, so that's only part of the problem.
   
   Second, the fact that we know the results before the broadcast. That always cripples the ratings for an overseas Olympics. Would you rather watch Bode Miller when you know he's been disqualified or watch the always unpredictable American Idol? I'd rather watch the Olympics, but I've got to go out of my way to avoid the coverage.
   
   Third, too damn many commercials. Those "Life takes Visa" spots have become such a pervasive nuisance that I'm reaching for the remote at the first sign of a break. More than once I've seen NBC come out of a commercial break, run about two minutes of coverage, and then go back to commercials. There's too many breaks, and too many repeats of the same ads. If I wasn't going to buy a Chevy the first 7 times I saw the ad during the Opening Ceremonies, I'm not going to buy one now. In fact, I'm so annoyed that I won't buy one ever, and I may even tell my friends not to buy them, in the hope that they run out of advertising dollars so I can enjoy two-man bobsleigh without screaming at the TV every time I hear the Olympic theme played on car horns.
   
   The incessant advertising has made watching the games a chore. Couple that with already knowing the day's results, and you've got a healthy audience for "House" over on Fox. NBC would do well to follow the "less is more" rule and give us 15-minute blocks of programming with higher-priced commercial breaks in between. IF Chevy and Visa want to buy all the spots, let them sponsor the night. Fox did that successfully with Ford for a couple of "24" premieres.
   
   Just stop ambushing us with the same ads over and over again. It's like going to one of those "salespeople on commission" stores and having people jump at you with sales pitch every time you turn a corner. I don't shop in those stores.
   
   And I'm not watching those Olympic commercial breaks, but I'm trying to watch the games themselves. I guess that puts me in the minority.