David F. Carr, 07.27.10, 06:00 AM EDT

Taking reservations and collecting money online for an underground restaurant.

Russell Jackson speaks not very plausibly about maintaining “plausible deniability” about the years he ran the San Francisco “underground restaurant”SubCulture Dining.

In talking about his experiences, Jackson uses the phrase “if it actually happened,” as if it were all hypothetical. Then again, now that he has gone legitimate with a traditional brick-and-mortar, health-department-inspected restaurant called Lafitte (lafittesf.com), he is promoting it on the Web and promising a “crazy intangible element that made SubCulture Dining work so well for so long.”

Jackson was part of a foodie movement in cities like San Francisco that achieved a small cult following for arranging gourmet dinners in people’s homes or other ad hoc locations. SubCulture Dining cultivated an air of hip exclusivity; you supposedly had to be “in the know” and with the right connections to know when the events were happening.

I spoke with Jackson to learn about the online marketing campaign he used to make SubCulture Dining successful, especially since that success helped generate the buzz that led to the opening of his above-ground restaurant. The process, he admits, took longer than he had expected. (More at Forbes.com)

This is a case study of event marketing with EventBrite for an “underground dining” restaurant. Interesting one for me to report that I’ve done quite a lot of custom event marketing work with my web development clients, using my own scripts and (more recently) WordPress plugins to handle RSVPs and email invites. There are always advantages of having something custom built for your own purposes, but I’m impressed by the range of functionality EventBrite offers.

Chef Jackson and his business were also undeniably fun to write about.

Shopping Around for Business Software
Software Directory CEO Cites ‘Biggest Mistakes,’ Invites Reviews

By David F. Carr

Capterra CEO Michael Ortner sees a few common mistakes with how businesses, particularly small to midsize ones, select enterprise software.

Writing in response to one of my recent columns (A Software Maven Picks Her Tools), he argued people also need to know how not to pick software. Some of the mistakes he cites:

1) Limiting your choices to the first few products you come across. The software industry is insanely competitive and there are usually dozens, if not hundreds, of choices for virtually any kind of software.

2) Deciding upon requirements too quickly. You and your company need to give serious thought to what your needs AND wants are both now AND a year from now. The end users should give the majority of the input for the purchase.

3) Underestimating your software budget. So many people are looking for the absolute cheapest product when they may have a lot to gain in the grand scheme of things by spending just a little bit more up front.

4) Maintaining your same business processes. Now that you are automating through software, there are probably lots of things you are doing that you should either stop doing or do very differently. Every activity should be questioned.

Now, you could say Ortner has a vested interest in getting you to spend more time researching your software options, as he is in the business of providing tools to help you do that research. Although I didn’t realize it when I first spoke with Ortner, Capterra also supplies the data for the software finder on Forbes.com (software.forbes.com).

“I’m basing my list of user mistakes, #1, on user behavior,” Ortner says. After 10 years in business, he has spent a lot of time studying how many listings visitors to the website click on when they are exploring a product category. The website also allows visitors to submit a request for information with their requirements to multiple software makers in a given category, and since one of the fields on that form is “budget,” he says he has a good idea of how often buyers are “lowballing on price.”

A former management consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ortner also worked in corporate IT at J.P. Morgan. He came up with the idea for Capterra during a brief stint at the Internet firm Digex, working on software partnerships. “That really opened my eyes to what a huge and fragmented market enterprise software was. Prior to that, I only had experience with the big guys,” he said, referring to the likes of SAP and Oracle. “But I saw that was only the tip of the iceberg.”

The business model is this: Capterra provides free listings to software publishers and makes money by selling enhanced listings – not ads per se, but listings that get top placement with upgrades available for displaying the company logo or a link to a demo page.

The objective editorial content on the site comes in the form of user-generated reviews, so that the site functions as a sort of Angie’s List or Yelp for enterprise software. Or, at least, it could if there were more of those reviews, particularly critical ones.

Ortner says most of the reviews come from the software makers encouraging their customers to post something, and therefore most of the reviews are positive. I imagine some of them are spurred on by a discount at license renewal time or free drinks at the user’s conference, too (although that’s probably also true of published case studies, including some of the ones I’ve reported on). Still, it does show the software can boast some happy customers who are willing to put their name behind a product endorsement.
As for negative reviews, Ortner says he encourages the software companies to take them as an opportunity to show how well they respond to criticism.

“That was a concern for us in the beginning – what if we really alienate our biggest customer? But the way I’ve dealt with it is that no anonymous reviews are allowed – you have to give your name and your company. And if the vendor wants to, they can respond to any review, publicly or privately, to say, ‘You know, that was a valid concern but we’re addressing that’ or ‘That was true a year ago, but not in the latest version.’”

Capterra’s policy is that the only reasons for removing a review Is when it contains slanders or profanity, or where the software maker can demonstrate that the reviewer was never a customer.

“We did have an instance about two months ago where there was a very negative review, and because we thought it contained useful information we wanted to keep it – even though the vendor was shouting for us to take it down. But it did contain some profanity and name calling. So in that case, we reached out to the buyer and said, ‘We’d like to keep this, but you need to clean it up.’ Unfortunately, they refused to do it. They said, ‘These guys are bastards, and this is our review.’ They refused to change it, so we had to remove it. But we actually wanted the review to stay because we believed it was a useful negative review.”

To which I say, let’s take the man at his word. If you’ve had a negative experience with your business software package, do your peers a favor and post a warning to them on this site. Just be polite about it. And put in a good word for the software that’s proven its worth to your business, too.

–
David F. Carr is Forbes’ columnist on technology for small to midsize businesses. Contact him at david@carrcommunications.com

• Hire me if you want a writer and editor, not just a technician. Because of my background as a Technology Editor for Internet World and current role as a tech columnist for Forbes.com, as well as years of web copywriting and work with clients other marketing materials, I can help you define your message and create compelling copy.
• Hire me if you want to pursue sustainable search engine optimization. The right way to do it is by creating compelling content that people will want to link to and search engines will want to index. We can bake targeted keywords into the headlines and body copy for the search engines, while still delivering something humans will want to read. But it takes work and patience. Beware of hustlers promising easy riches.
• Hire me if you want help with web strategy. If you know exactly what you want and how to achieve it, you can hire cheap coders from overseas to accomplish it, and I can’t afford to compete with their rates. But if you want help translating your business goals into a web strategy, hire me.
• Hire me if you want the option of being independent or self-sufficient. Virtually all my work these days is based on the WordPress web publishing system, which allows me to give my clients a password they can use to post their own blog entries and page edits. Even if you want me to make the updates most of the time, you should have the option of doing yourself if you need something posted (or deleted) quickly and I am unavailable. I strongly recommend against hiring a webmaster who won’t give you that level of access to your own website.
• Hire me if you want someone who is flexible, adaptable, and multi-talented. If you have a bigger budget, maybe you can afford to hire a whole team of people, each with a specialty in writing, editing, graphics, programming, database, JavaScript, and so on. I can do a little bit of everything, or pull in subcontractors as necessary.
• Hire me if you want help with email marketing and social media, not just the website. I’ve worked with several systems for distributing email and learned all the hard lessons about spam filters and the varying HTML support of different email clients. I actively work my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and I’m up to 1,400+ professional contacts on LinkedIn.
• Hire me if what I have to offer matches what your business or organization needs. Contact me at 954-757-5827 or david@carrcommunications.com

LinkedIn

Use LinkedIn as your professional social media page. Create a complete profile, mirroring your resume (but adapted to the web format). Include relevant links.

Make sure you enable the public profile. Consider including the link to that profile in your email signature and on business cards / contact cards.

Example: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfcarr

My public profile on LinkedIn

Give recommendations to colleagues bosses (particularly those you genuinely like / respect) and they are likely to recommend you back.

Join groups that reflect your professional affiliations. This can be a source of new contacts. Many of these groups have their own job boards. Post thoughts and observations and comment on other peoples’ posts. Showcase your knowledge professionalism.

The free LinkedIn account allows you ask your professional contacts to connect with you through the service. You can upload addresses from your email program to automate some of that. But part of the point is to grow your network by getting introductions to people who are connected to your contacts.

An upgraded account allows you to shortcut the introduction process, but don’t consider upgrading until you have mastered the basics with a free account.

Facebook

Not professionally focused, like LinkedIn, but there may be people you can reach through Facebook who aren’t active LinkedIn users.

To set an address that you can put on business cards or in an email, go to www.facebook.com/username

My username is www.facebook.com/davidfcarr

(Note: I personally like to limit my Facebook friends to people I have some actual social or community connection to, whereas on LinkedIn I’m more aggressive about building a wider network of professional contacts in IT, marketing, media, and technology. I may ignore your friend request if I don’t recognize your name.)

If using this as a job hunting tool, avoid posting anything that might reflect poorly on you. Employers are checking these profiles to see who is spending all their nights on sex and drugs and rock and roll.

Twitter

A little more difficult for the uninitiated. Twitter revolves entirely around short “status” posts of 140 characters or less. Posts are often cluttered by codes like “Ran into @davidfcarr last night, thinks he’s an expert on online #careers #jobhunt LOL”

Translation: @davidfcarr is a reference to another twitter user, #careers is a keyword and LOL is short for laughing out loud.

Again, you may reach people on Twitter who aren’t on Facebook or LinkedIn.

On twitter, I’m twitter.com/davidfcarr

Email

Email was the original Internet killer app, as significant as the web to drawing people online. But people often don’t use it effectively.

A few key points:

Use a clear subject, specific line. Not “Hello” or “Follow up” but “Application for Lowes Sales Manager Position” or “Follow up on interview for Lowes Sales Manager Position”

Identify yourself clearly. Make sure your email program is set to include your name, not just your email address in the “From” field. Recipients should know who you are and why they should open your email from the “From” and “Subject” lines alone. You have to stand out from the spam!

Provide complete contact information, including a link to your LinkedIn page, at the bottom of every message. The easiest way to do this is to set your email program to insert this automatically as an “email signature.”

Here is what that looks like on the Settings screen in Gmail:

There many more subtle details about how to use these Internet communications methods, but my goal here was just to share a few of the essential details.

I write a column on technologies for small to midsize businesses for Forbes.com and also freelance for publications such as CIO Magazine. I’m a former Technology Editor of Internet World Magazine and Baseline Magazine, where I had the opportunity to profile major internet operations like Google, Yahoo!, and MySpace, as well as report in depth case studies on corporate IT.

I also do ghost writing and produce white papers and other marketing materials for corporate clients.

As a consultant, I help small businesses and nonprofits use the web, email, and social networks more effectively to promote themselves and make money. My practical web skills include PHP programming, WordPress customization, and integration web services such as PayPal. I also boost my clients search engine rankings using tools like WordTracker and Google Analytics.

I bring a mix of editorial, analytical, and technical skills to any project I undertake, whether that means writing search optimized headlines for articles I write for publication, polishing the front page copy for a website, or monitoring the feedback to a web or email campaign.

I’m looking to bring those skills to organizations that would value that mix, either on a fulltime or contract basis.

My editors, colleagues, and clients will all tell you what a reliable and resourceful guy I am, and I look forward to proving it to you.

Latest incarnation of my explanation of who I am and what I do, prepared for a career seminar.

Commentary

Organization That Fights Slavery Stretches Its Network

David F. Carr, 07.13.10, 06:00 AM EDT

International Justice Mission and the importance of centralizing and optimizing.

When John Lax joined International Justice Mission (www.ijm.org) to manage its IT systems, he stepped into another world after 30 years in the software industry.

The IJM combats child sex traffic and slavery, working to identify instances of these practices and convince local authorities to crack down. By contrast, his previous job involved product development at Intuit ( INTU - news - people), the company behind Quicken and QuickBooks. Lax says he made the jump so he could be “working on something with meaning, rather than adding another $100 million to the company’s bottom line.”

In his new job, he faced an extreme version of the same technology challenges faced by many organizations, large or small. IJM has about 340 employees, 80 at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. and the rest overseas. Like every other organization, IJM needs to maintain communications with its branch offices. The problem for Lax, though, is that many of those offices are in developing countries, where network bandwidth is scarce, expensive and unreliable.

>> Read More at Forbes.com

I’ve written several versions of an events management plugin. This next one will have 2 main advantages:

• By taking advantage of the built-in WordPress custom post types and URL-mapping, the events listings will take advantage of more native functionality, including the search engine optimization virtues of WordPress.
• I’ve been working to do a better job of handling events that span multiple days.

This is still a work in progress, need to make it prettier and more functional still.

Single event test 2

come on now

Test 3

test 3

This is my Test

Here is a first real test

This is a test event for Christmas 2010

Open your presents now!

Whoo, hoo!

This work sample is from 2008, so for more current info on WebKit, see the Qt website.

Healthcare Reform and UltiPro, June 2010

Deciding Which Cloud Services To Trust

David F. Carr, 07.06.10, 06:00 PM EDT

A security expert evaluates Internet business apps.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a seductive concept for the small, cash-strapped business. No software to install or manage, minimizing the need for you to hire your own IT staff or contractors. Pay a monthly fee, with little or no long-term commitment. And trust that the service you are hiring will do a better job of managing or protecting your data than you could yourself.

But are you sure about that last point? Ronald Knode, a director of global security solutions at the consulting firm Computer Sciences Corp. ( CSC – news – people ), suggests taking your time to make sure. (Read the rest at Forbes.com)