So, I just got done relocating across the country for a new job.  Things moved fast and the situation required that I move from Chicago to Los Angeles in a matter of weeks.  While already a daunting task to undertake, the fact that we have a 14 month-old daughter at home made it necessary to outsource heavily.

For the first time ever, I hired a moving company.  I went with one of the largest, most reputable, full-service movers.  Before the smooth-talking salesman visited our home, I did some research online.  The biggest compaints that people have about any moving company are:

• The company added on charges after the job started
• The delivery didn’t occur on time
• Things were broken and the coverage was inadequate

  So, when the salesman showed up I told him:

“I’ve read all about moving companies and the problems people have.  I want you to promise me that you’ll be honest upfront and not try to sugarcoat anything just to make the sale.  I would rather your quote is accurate than the lowest price, I’d rather know what day my things will arrive than you tell me something you can’t achieve”

The salesman was good.  He gave me a “guaranteed price”, and even came out twice to recalculate the estimated weight.  He gave me a 3 day window for the delivery, which seemed very realistic to me.  The size of the company he represented offered other benefits, like online GPS tracking of the shipment, and additional available insurance to cover valuables.  Bottom line was, I thought paying extra was going to protect us from the problems people have with movers.

Boy, was I wrong.

The first thing that happened was the packers showed up and told my wife

“wow, you have a lot of things”

Although dreadfully underprepared and shorthanded, that’s the only thing I’ll say about the packers because they turned out to be the best thing this company had to offer (although, to be fair, these folks were subcontractors and didn’t work for the moving company).

With our things packed, and a young child in tote, we stayed at my sister’s house nearby.  I showed up at the house at 8am on move-day, and the truck was already there.  The truck wasn’t just there, though, the driver was pissed (for the rest of this story, I’ll just call him ‘Ponytail’ .  As it turns out, our move coordinator (I’ll call her “The Uncoordinator“) didn’t ask my wife until the day before our move that we might want to get a permit from the city to block off parking for the 60 foot semi they sent.  Even though city hall on a Friday afternoon is a really fun place, my wife thought (as the uncoordinator suggested) that there was nothing to worry about.  The truck could just pull into the alley if there weren’t spots available.

Wrong again.

Ponytail was livid.  He was clearly mad at the uncoordinator for not having us get the permit.  He was mad that he was behind schedule.  He was mad at me, I thought.  We yelled for a little while and then he left.  Just left.  I called the salesman and the uncoordinator and told them what happened.  They called the truck back, and I negotiated with ponytail to put the truck around the corner and charge us for a long-haul (200 extra feet or so).  I signed an addendum, and then it started raining (doesn’t really impact the story, but added to the fun).  I took all the furniture apart so that ponytail and the hired muscle (2 kids) could work on carrying things.  I figured, anything to get us out of town tonight, only 8 hours behind schedule, at this point.

Everything on the truck, I signed the final paperwork and said “I’ll see you on Tuesday, then” (the last day the were contracted to arrive).  Ponytail said,

“there’s no way I’ll make it there by Tuesday, my boss wants me to move his kid. Looks like Thursday at the earliest.”

Again, I called the uncoordinator and the salesman.  The salesman told called me back an hour or so later to tell me that everything was cleared up and it had been a miscommunication.  My stuff would get there on Tuesday.

So, we took off in the car for California.  We had a great, slow drive across the country.  We arrived on Saturday and moved into our empty house with just an air mattress and one pillow for the three of us.

Tuesday, ponytail called me.  He said “my truck broke down in Cheyenne, Wyoming for the entire weekend and I’m not going to be there until Thursday”.  I tried to check the GPS on the company website, and it said “couldn’t find your account, please contact your coordinator.”  I called the uncoordinator, and again the salesman, and told them “this is total BS.  Your driver told me he wouldn’t be there until Thursday when he left.  Why are you lying to me?”.  They all claimed that they weren’t lying.  But, of course they were.  I’m not stupid.  Still, what was two extra days on the air mattress?  We were told we’d get $125/day for the late fees (woo, what a deal).

Then Thursday came.  From this point forward, Thursday will be referred to as “Hellday“.  I went to work on Hellday, figuring “we’d see” if ponytail was actually going to show up before I committed to an entire day of waiting around.  Surprisingly, he showed up at a reasonable time.  Not surprisingly, something was wrong.  Ponytail couldn’t navigate the truck around our cul-de-sac close enough to unload our things directly on the walkway.  He was pissed, yet again.

Calls with the uncoordinator, calls with salesman.  Cell phone pictures of the 28 paced steps he refused to carry our stuff.  He was asking for a “shuttle” (a small truck to move our things the extra ~75 feet).  The Chicago company didn’t think he needed one.  All in all, as with everything, it was our job as the customer’s to try and get the job done.

Then, he left.

Ponytail drove off with our stuff.  We had no idea what was going on.  The uncoordinator said “we can’t reach him right now”.  At that point, I was forced to unleash the full power of an internet marketer.  I told the Chicago company

“You don’t want to mess with me.  I will make sure that anyone who ever searches for your company sees a detailed story of my experience before anything else.  You will lose so much business you won’t even know what hit you.” 

Their website was a PR2.  It’d be easy.

Hours went by, then someone new called and said “he’ll be back at 6pm” (apparently a direct result of the threat).  Ponytail came back, with 3 new hired hands, and finished loading our stuff into the house by 11:30 on hellday by shuttling to a small truck a block away.  The whole thing seemed kind of silly.  The Chicago company told us there would be no extra charge and that ponytail was being investigated.  I don’t believe any of it, by the way, as I’m certain the whole experience happens all the time to people who feel bullied into paying extra without raising an eyebrow.  Customer service for the moving company called us to tell us we would be getting a $500 check for our troubles.

So, at the end of the day, we have our things.  I have a few new gray hairs to show for it.  It’ll take some time before we feel like we are over the events of the last few weeks.  But, the experience reminded me of something:

Internet marketing can be powerful stuff, as not many people understand it.  People that do understand it should treat it like a loaded weapon, not to be abused or brandished in unwarranted aggression, but certainly to defend yourself and your family from schmucks like this moving company. 

I’m only going to use ‘the moving company’, ‘ponytail’, ‘the salesman’, and ‘the uncoordinator’ because at the end of the day, I got all I could expect.  But, without wielding the threat of internet marketing, who knows what would have happened?

Anyone following this blog may have noticed my lack of updates over the last month or so.  The reason is that I have been totally consumed with some pretty major life changes:

1) I have accepted a new job with ReachLocal, and have already started

2) I am living in corporate housing for now, and will move the wife and daughter here at the end of September.  That’s right— we are moving to California!

After much searching, I have found what I think it going to be a great house to rent.  It is in Oak Park, CA, the irony of which is not lost on me at all.  It is in the mountains and is very remote (see map).  It certainly isn’t what you think of when you think of LA.

View Larger Map

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, ‘avatars’ are those graphical computer representations of users you find around the net.  You’ve definitely seen them by now.  Some people try to make them as realistic as possible, while others make them as fantastical as they can.  Some avatars are static, two-dimensional images, and some are animated 3D.  Mine (on Yahoo, at least), is an angry version of myself with a weiner dog and a fishbowl:

Avatars can have a number of uses.  Some of the most common places you will see them applied are:

• in Video games
• on Internet forums
• as a part of Internet chat (including instant messenger programs)
• on Blogs (although, I don’t use them here)

In the early days of the internet, it seemed possible that everyone would have their own avatar, which would travel with them as they navigated around the web (ever see Tron or The Lawnmower Man?).  In many ways, it made a lot of sense.  Creating a digital representation of the real world (a la Second Life) provides many possible benefits, and maybe some new and interesting opportunities for monetization of non-ecommerce websites. 

But, that isn’t the way that things have evolved.  Instead of a bunch of Max Headroom’s surfing through pages of the net, the primary method of navigation has become search engines.  While it is a more utilitarian way to get around, and certainly much more anonymous, it may be a little more boring compared to what else is possible. 

Finally, however, there seems to be a resurgence in some of the ideas that may lead us further in the futuristic-direction of avatar-based web navigation.  Google has now launched a new beta, named Lively.   

Lively looks to be pretty cool stuff.  It not only lets users create their own avatar, but allows them to build a “space” for them to “exist” within.  That space can include links to other “rooms” containing videos, photos, even games.  Avatars visiting these rooms can interact through chat or IM.

Right now, it doesn’t really look like all that much more than a scaled-back version of Second Life.  But, there’s a reason that Google has chosen to get involved in the avatar game— and, it is possible that they see the potential for evolving the foundation of internet navigation, and are not just looking to get more into the internet chat pickup scene.

Imagine, if you will, each space containing all of the internet properties associated with a particular user.  My own space would contain rooms for my photographs, videos of my baby girl, each of my other websites, IM programs I use, my social networking pages on other sites, and even this blog.  Some rooms would be available by invitation only, and some would be open to the public to browse.  My space would be linked to other spaces, much like hyperlinked navigation works today.  Heck, my space might even include ads for products and services I promote (yeah, come to think of it, it probably would).  People would find my space because it would be linked to other people’s spaces with similar topics, ideas, or themes.  Popular spaces would be easiest to happen upon, while unpopular spaces would be obscure. 

Doesn’t seem so far-fetched, does it?  In fact, it sounds quite a bit like the way PageRank works today.

Well, the future all starts with an avatar.  I guess I’ll build mine on Lively when I get the chance, and while it is still free.

This morning, while catching up on reading everything I missed over the 4th of July weekend, I happened upon an interesting story about gas prices across the country.  A site (certainly appearing to be a MFA (’made for Adsense’) appeared on Digg because it had mapped gas prices by US county, and put up a cool heatmap illustrating the range of prices:

This got me to thinking.  It did strike me that this map seemed remarkably similar (swapping red with blue) to another color map we have all seen (over and over again) this election season.  You know the one, red states and blue states:

On first glance, this looks like grounds for a conspiracy theory.  Blue states, on average, have higher gas prices.  But, there is sure to be a lot more to it.  Blue states are: typically higher in population density, have more of the country’s larger cities, might impose larger taxes on gas stations, and are generally located on the coasts and not in the center of the country.  These are all factors that could account for the prevalence of red and orange on the gas-prices heatmap in so many of the “blue” states.  There are certainly a few things that don’t make any sense at all— Illinois (blue) is Orange on the heatmap, while neighboring states like Indiana (red) is Yellow, and Missouri (red) is Green. 

Take that for what you will.  I’m going to leave it to the political blogs (for either party) to argue if there’s an issue there or not.  That’s not what we’re here for, we’re here to discuss internet marketing.

So, I decided to see if there were any noticeable similarities in the price of clicks for keywords associated with “gas prices”.  I loaded Google’s Traffic Estimator with the same geoqualified keywords (gas prices, gas stations, etc) for each of the 50 states and District of Columbia.  I analyzed the results in Excel, and found some interesting things. 

I assigned estimated CPCs of $0.00-$0.25 a score of 1 (for low), CPCs of $0.25-$0.50 a score of 2, CPCs of $0.50-$1.00 a score of 3, and CPCs over $1.00 a score of 4.  That gave me the opportunity to make my very own fancy map (thanks to tamu.edu for the utility), a heatmap of Gas Prices CPCs in Google.  There were some surprises, like the high competition in Georgia and Texas:

 
Then, I gave Gas Prices from the heatmap similar scores: Green got a 1, Yellow got a 2, Orange a 3, and Red got a score of 4.

Lastly, I averaged the scores for Blue states and Red states to see if there were any noticeable trends:

In conclusion, it appears that there isn’t much ground for a conspiracy theory, afterall.  Both the average CPC scores and average Gas Price scores that I calculated seem pretty consistent when viewed in aggregate.  There are aberrations, but they don’t favor either the red states or blue states, and virtually cancel each other out when viewed in total.

So, I guess in the end we are all in it together.  We’ve got high gas prices, and internet marketers in both red states and blue states are paying for the increased competition they create. 

On June 30th, Google announced that it is “retiring” its Adsense referral program.

As posted on the Adsense Blog (and also sent in an email to all users of the referral program):

“We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August.”

The change is set to go into affect at the end of August, 2008.

For those unfamiliar with the program, Adsense publishers had the option to select from a list of advertisers and choose specific ads (text, as well as varying banner sizes) to display on their site.  Included among these ads, and probably the most popular, were advertisements for Google’s own services:

Unlike Adsense content-matched advertising, or searchthis feature gave the advertiser control over which ads showed on their site— basically, acting like affiliate advertising.  Payouts varied by the advertiser, usually paid as a flat fee based on a selected action. 

In fact, it was the purchase of affiliate manager Doubleclick that ultimately led to the program’s demise:

“We are currently reevaluating the Google Referrals program to ensure that it is providing the best possible monetization opportunity for our publishers as well as meeting the needs of Google. At this time, we have suspended the Google Referrals program.”

This change should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick/Performics.  The industry has expected Google to incorporate Doubleclick’s affiliate management system into their own, to expand their content network (beyond text-based PPC ads, where the majority of usership has always been) and move towards a more action-driven model.  It remains unclear what Google intends to do with the rest of Doubleclick/Perfomics, namely the account-management side— which, Google has always stated represents something of a conflict of interests.  It also remains to be seen if Google will choose to advertise their own products on the system, including Adsense or Adwords (these products are not yet appearing on Doubleclick).  Perhaps the investment is no longer worth it, with Google being the defacto search advertising solution for such a broad usership.  Maybe it isn’t a cheap source of leads any more.