Atilus Internet Marketing & Web Development

If you run a search for “Comcast Sucks” on Google, you will find a tremendous number of search results (approximately 125,000) all centered around the media company’s lack luster image. There are a serious number of popular blogs, viral videos, and chat forums that have chosen lamb basting Comcast customer service as their niche.

SO why is Comcast still a national leader in cellular and telecommunication services despite the lack of favor shared for their customer service by a growing number of their consumers?

Even in consumer reports Comcast ranks fourth from last among leading internet service providers (ISP), third from last among nationally branded television service providers, fourth from last in long distance telecommunication services, and SECOND FROM LAST in overall national scores!

And yet these are the profit results from Quarter 1 2008:

Snapshot: 1Q Results
COMCAST
Revenue: $8.4 billion, up 14%
Operating Income: $1.6 billion, up 23%
Free Cash Flow: $702 million, up 59%

The LA Times reported that in the fourth quarter of 2007, Comcast said it signed up 613,000 digital video subscribers and added a net 508,000 digital phone customers along with 488,000 high speed Internet subscribers.

SO again, why is Comcast still a national service providing leader if they fail to meet the needs of the consumer, particularly in customer service?

Marketing.

Comcast has “moved to a more aggressive marketing plan,” Comcast chief operating officer Steve Burke said, with new double- and single-play offers, increasing marketing spending in the quarter about 20% year over year. (Multi Channel News)

They are buying their way to the top.

But how long until the internet, with the help of social media tools and applications, builds momentum giving the consumer a louder, clearer more powerful voice that can neither be stifled nor ignored?

How long until media conglomerates and other big businesses will have to begin spending more on damage control and less on buying their consumers?

25 Jul | Post by Scott L. Clark. Filed under Internet Marketing, Tech Trends, social media.

If you haven’t heard, one of the newest Instant Social Bookmarking applications is Slingpage. Still in it’s infancy, but gaining ground, this application allows friends and or subscribers to instantly be alerted when someone sends, or ’slings’, a web page or video.

So why do I think this could get big? Well, personally I like the idea that I can be updated on the newest sites, news, or whatever online. It’s kind of like Twitter meets StumbleUpon. Also, I can see all the slings I’ve made or the slings that others have sent me. Slingpage stores my Favorite Slings or my Web Dev Tips Slings in a place where anyone can subscribe.

Two things I don’t like about this application:

1) The fact that only certain slingcasts, subscriptions to pages you may like, are shown from slingpage’s site.
2) I can only invite my friends from other applications like facebook instead of searching for them and adding them to slingpage.

I’m sure that as more people sign up this will change.

Well, I have got to go sling some more pages. If you make slingpage part of your social networking applications, be sure to add me as a friend and sling some good pages my way.

22 Jul | Post by Jermaine Primus. Filed under social media.

If you are in need of clarification as to the meaning behind, the purpose of, the use of, or the structure that is social media web applications (e.g. Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, etc), then look no further than this excellent video brought to you by CommonCraft.com that will explain social networking in the most simplest of terms and examples:

Find it HERE.

17 Jun | Post by Scott L. Clark. Filed under social media.

The SXSW (South by Southwest Interactive Conference) interview, March 9th, Austin Texas. This was no ordinary interview, chosen Business Week Journalist Sarah Lacy was to interview keynote speaker Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
I would like to be nice and feel sorry for Sarah, but the utter truth is this interview was a “trainwreck”. Because of Mark’s shy, nature it was uncomfortable for Sarah from the beginning because of her way of “personally” interviewing him. Throughout the interview she dropped self-references, and had a “flirty” style of discussion (body language says it all), further she enjoyed talking about her relationship with Mark as an interviewer, more than asking him questions about Facebook or the like.

It didn’t stop there however; Sarah did not connect with the audience on any level. Sarah in my opinion created an adversarial relationship with audience. At one point the crown became so upset and vicious with her she responded to the crowd by saying “You don’t know how hard my job is up here” and she said “I am trying to ask interesting questions….you think you guys can do any better?” After asking the audience to come ask their questions, she said to the audience: “If you think I suck so bad why don’t you send me an e-mail?” The next audience member then responded by saying: “what’s your e-mail address?” At this point the roar from the crowd was out of control. She begins speaking of his journal that he writes about his ideas for Facebook and that she heard that he burns them, and Zuckerberg says “I don’t burn them” He proceeds by saying “You have to ask questions”, if you watch the video you’ll hear the crowd roar and clap in Zuckerbergs favor. At one point in this utter disaster (supposedly an interview), she says “You’ve seen me throw a full glass of water at Michael Errington, I just want to warn you” Zuckerberg reaches for the bottle of water, and places it on the floor. What else could possibly go wrong?

There are two sides to every story right? or shall we call it “crisis management”?

Throughout the interview both Sarah and Mark took two completely different routes if you will. A few days after the interview both Zuckerberg and Lacy responded on her Twitter message by responding “Seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.” This is clearly not the way to manage crisis, despite all of the criticism she received from the audience and bloggers days after the interview.

Zuckerberg, took a much more humble approach, he held a Q & A session , with a little humor Zuckerberg began the Q & A by saying “Yesterday’s Q & A wasn’t enough fun”. The audience asked him about privacy issues and where Facebook as a social network sees its self in the near future.

This keynote interview, had two sides to the story. Look at how Lacy responded on her Twitter message with a cold shoulder, and look at how Zuckerberg held a Q & A and humbled himself.

Was Lacy handed “the pink slip” after this interview?Unfortunately not.
Do you think Sarah Lacy learned her lesson? To be brutally honest with you, NO!

06 May | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under Business, Community, social media.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way… you need a website. Period.

And not just any ol’ website, but a great website with clear, crisp professional, easy to navigate design with superb user ability and functionality. Furthermore, you need a website that is just as easy for you to use administratively, as it is for your site visitors to use.

It doesn’t matter if you are a national corporate brand, a smaller brick and mortar with ‘plenty of business’, a brick and mortar with only local business, or an ice cream shop that only sells to people between 5′10 and 5′11 wearing baseball hats before 3 pm only… you still need a website! Your business can be broad or niche, it can be large or small, and despite what you may believe… you need a website!

Now, what does a website cost?

Read the rest of this entry …

10 Apr | Post by Scott L. Clark. Filed under Blogs, Business, Design, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design, social media.

The body is a wonderland! I mean the body of social networking sites available for so many applications. There’s Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, My Space, Classmates, Flickr, and even Amazon. You can share files, pictures, stories and information. You can buy and sell things. You can talk about what you’ve bought or sold. I am a prime example that you are never too old or too late to join in the game.

After spending years in customer service and sales I realized - I really didn’t like people - in that context anyway. So, I jumped ship and decided to spend time with my computer and I’ve actually started to like people again. It’s a different relationship, one where I’m not a punching bag and I don’t have to smile all the time. Social media is a complex and intimidating game, like trying D&D for the first time (that’s Dungeons and Dragons). I log into a site and have to swim around to figure out which way’s up. And I’m a relatively seasoned internet user. The issue these days is if you’re not involved in at least three of the social networking vehicles then you’re really missing the boat. These are a great means to staying connected to friends and colleagues or re-kindling relationships with old contacts i.e., people I like. Not to mention the job opportunities that can come from the incredible networking. If you’re in sales this is a fantastic medium to find warm leads. Forget cold calling, that always gave me the heebie geebies. Love a product you bought for your kids? Post a comment to start a discussion. Hate a product? Do the same thing.

So far I’m into Facebook for my personal use and LinkedIn for professional use. I can’t bring myself to Twitter because I don’t think I’m that interesting, but I think that’s next.

The body of social media is a never ending Wonderland. Whether you blog about your area of interest, swap pics of your kids, refer a friend for a job opening or just stand back and observe how it all works, you’ll always be connected to someone somewhere about something.

07 Apr | Post by Meaghan McCann. Filed under social media.

Ok, we’ve created our fancy login system for our site. Now what? How do my members intereact with each other? This bring us back over 5 years ago when MySpace.com first debuted. Every web programmer on earth went “gaga” over how such a simple method used for “friending” another member became so big! Today we have sites like friendster, facebook, and orkut that use the same theory behind virtually friending your friends!

Here’s how they do it:

If Member1 wants to friend Member2, a request is made via a link or action on Member1’s part.

Using a relational database, this is what this request will look like.

Member’s Table (this contains all of our members, it may also contain other information like name, password, and other profile information.)

memberID
1
2

Friend’s Table (This table is updated whenever a member invokes a “friending” action.)

memberID	friendID 	Confirmed
2		1		0

When the member represented by the “friendID” confirms that they would in fact want to be friends with the member represented by “memberID,” then “Confirmed” will be updated to “1″ in place of “0.”

So now, our scripts will have a way to tell if one member is friends with another, how many friends any given member has, how many requests for friends a given member has.

MySQL Snippet for querying the number of friends of a given member

SELECT count(*)
FROM  Friends
WHERE memberID = 1
AND Confirmed > 0;

03 Apr | Post by admin. Filed under Software, social media.

Social networking applications usually take the form of websites that allow people to share information with other people. To really wrap our minds around the concept of a social networking application, we have to look at it’s purpose. As suggested by the name, the purpose of these applications for the user is to socialize. So process this in your mind: people of a community or network of communities come together in one place (a website) to socialize by: visiting the site, registering, logging in, sharing information with others — How does this work? What does it look like to the programmers behind it? What makes this website tick?

Let’s make up a name. We’ll call our social network, MyParenthood.com — a social network for parents. Great, we have a concept and we have a domain name (in our example we assume we have demand for such a website.) Next step is to enlist the help of some crazy-cool programmers to make our dreams a reality.

Personally, I would start with a screen design. Then I would throw it to the programmers to make the design come alive. The reason I do this is so the programmers have a good picture of the concept. The screen design shows them things like current features and potential future features.

Here’s what our site will hopefully look like:

For obvious simplicity sake, our application will only have 2 features:

• MyParenthood.com will allow members that are stored in a database to login.
• Once logged in, the following message will display: “Welcome, Devin Castro!”
  while my name will be replaced with the user’s name as stored inside a database.

The programmer will first choose a database technology suitable for your application. In our example, I will use MySQL. l then create a table to store users inside of. Databases use tables to store information, similar to an excel spredsheet that contains rows and columns.

This represents the data in our table:

Alrighty, the application’s coding will take the form of 1.) HTML (this controls what people see when they visit your site) and 2.) Dynamic Language (this processes information your users pass to your website e.g. username and password in order to login)

We’ll assume we have the HTML part done. It will look something similar to this:
(Note: this HTML does not represent the styling shown in our first figure.)

Now, the part that people don’t see include things such as:

• Database interaction.
• Form processing.
• Output of HTML.

Here’s a simple snippet of code that will accomplish our goals mentioned earlier:

This code will take the username and password that the user entered on our HTML page, then it will attempt to look for a matching user in our user table. Finally, if there is a match the script will output a welcome message that contains the user’s first name and last name as taken from the database table.

Albeit, this code is very crude, may be buggy, and has some serious security holes. Also, websites that have similar functionality may contain more than only 30 lines… more like hundreds or even thousands of lines if the site does more than a simple login. Professional programming requires consideration to factors such as security, reliability, and scalability.

So there we have it… a somewhat crude, but functional login area for our MyParenthood.com Social Networking website. Of course, no other functionality has been developed as we have not gone through how a social networking application actually allows users to share information with other users. That task involves a bit more complex coding and while this was only a mere example, you can see what the pre- “guts” of a social networking application might look like.

26 Mar | Post by admin. Filed under Software, Web Basics, social media.

Read a terrific post about social media marketing over on Pronet Advertising:

Linkbait - Will Search Engines Ever Regulate Your Linkbait?

Is it possible that search engines will start regulating your linkbait? Seems highly unlikely - after all, good content is good linkbait. However, what if it does happen, do you have a backup strategy?

Design - Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes

Applicable both to traditional desktop applications as well as web-based applications (such as Facebook Apps.) or localized widgets. Keep these 10 application design mistakes in mind and do your best to avoid them.

For more information please check out the full post.

24 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under SEO, social media.

We are all very excisted at Atilus as next week myself and one of our lead PHP developers will be attending The Future of Web Apps. The Future of Web Apps, put on by the Carsonified crew, is a combination seminar, networking event, and party. The event focuses on the literally the future of web apps - how to plan, build, execute, and market a successful web app featuring those who have done it most successfully. This year’s the event features some titans including:

Kevin Rose - Creator and Founder of Digg.com
Erick Schonfeld - Creator and Editor of TechCrunch.com
Cal Henderson - Director of Engineering Flickr
Matt Mullenweg - Founder Wordpress
Kevin Marks - Software Engineer Google
Leah Culver - Founder POWNCE
Blaine Cook - Architecht Twitter

…and much more…

We look forward to networking with some big industry insiders, having fun, and learning more about the development and marketing of web apps.

18 Feb | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under social media.