There’s a lot of information that you can gather the analysis of both the website and the whois records. The first can tell you if it’s been thrown up in a hurry and if it’s a template site. If it is, no worries, but if both the former (shoddy website) and latter (domain registration) don’t jive, that’s a sign to run very far away before you get taken for a spin.

The whois record shows the registration of the domain and whom is in charge of the business itself from billing to technical to administration. Every major corporation will have their own IT departments in charge of these records and thus the emails will always be from a corporate domain. For example, ibm.com is registered to the corporation and the emails all have ibm.com on the end.


Registrant:
International Business Machines Corporation
New Orchard Road
Armonk, NY 10504
US

INTERNET-SERVER.ZURICH.IBM.COM 195.176.20.204
NS.WATSON.IBM.COM 129.34.20.80
NS.ALMADEN.IBM.COM 198.4.83.35
NS.AUSTIN.IBM.COM 192.35.232.34


That is a huge tell-tale sign that says that someone is a legit owner and knows what they’re doing. If not, then whether or not you’re a legitimate business, you could be stereotyped into the bucket of “scammers and fraud” even before you start your wheeling and dealing. And is that something you really want to do to yourself if you’re trying to create partnerships and sales? Definitely not.

So do the right thing. Register your domains in the right method and keep yourself from having a lot of headache explanations in the future.

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

There are certain things I believe in business.   One is that you need to know when to choose your battles.   The other is that you have to disseminate relevant information so that people know why they have to do something that is pretty self explanatory to you because of what you know.

Perfect example:  At another position in my career, we were told to put our time in as salary employees into Niku, then Clarity.   You would have to go through training to use these tools and from an engineers perspective it was a complete waste of time since most of our project schedules should have been self explanatory.   We were never told what the big picture was and why these tools were being used to track the time.   Looking back from the eyes of a project manager, whomever was tracking the time and cost and earned value should have explained what the point of this tool was for, but they just figured everyone should be using it.

One thing about technical people?  No one likes to do things that there’s no “reason” for and if you don’t provide a reason for it, then it’s not good enough.  And the PM should have said that it was to track the amount of money we were spending against what we were making.  It was that simple, but yet no one ever bothered with the disconnect.

I believe that this is the duty of a good project manager.   An instructor of mine once told me that a PM’s position is communicating ninety percent of the time.  I’d like to go one step further, and say that the PM’s position is also communicating the right information ninety percent of the time.

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So basically how it works is that Yodlee aggregates all of your financial data in one place. The way they do this is that you put in your logins and passwords, and they go in and use a technique called “screen scraping” which logs in as you. I don’t know why they didn’t create an API connector where it secures the connection with each of the major banks… well, I know why.. because it’s the long and complicated way even though that’s the right and secure way to run the business. Now, while there are many people that defend what they do as part of the advancement of technology, screen scraping has been around for decades. The problem doesn’t lie in the ethics of screen scraping (although this does bother me), but the legality of allowing some other service to act on your behalf.

You see, some major banks have specific terms of service that say that if you authorize a third party service to act on your behalf, then if there is a breach from that third party service, then the bank is not liable for loss. This translates into … if Yodlee gets compromised, then any loss of funds are your end will not be insured by the bank since you authorized them to act on your behalf. And if you read the legal terms of Yodlee, they basically go and protect Yodlee from lawsuit and not you as a user.

I’m not saying that Yodlee doesn’t practice good security policies or anything, but that clause gives me the willies. I mean, that basically means that on the off-chance that some hacker or script kiddy does get your bank data and comes and empties your accounts, neither the bank or Yodlee would protect you. Thanks but no thanks. Some people are willing to take the risk of their bank accounts being emptied without the bank protecting you, but not I. Not I.

This is also the same reason why I have kept it away from my small business accounting service even though it doesn’t give me quite the range. I have to think about my customer base in both legal and technological fashion for them and protect them as best as I can. If you give users ease of use but go lacks on security, it’ll come back and bite you in the long run. Call me crazy, but I’d rather protect my customers from a potential breach.

I sign a lot of legal documents in the contracts and deals that are forged for my web based accounting business. But there’s one thing that I’ve noticed where a lot of creative types are not careful with when it comes to newsletters and websites. When it comes to business, you want to market yourself and many people sign their names as a sort of personal touch. Here’s the key.

Don’t sign your full name.

First name? Sure. But never sign your last name unless you’re looking to sign a check or a legal document. Why? Security. It’s one thing to have your identity stolen, but it’s another to invite your identity to be stolen. And for most legal documentation, your power is in your signature. I mean, it’s already easy enough to pick it up from carbon copies, checks, and other things out there. But why make it easy enough to pull off with a little Photoshop work?

Protect yourself and don’t just leave it around. You can personalize and brand yourself. But in my humble opinion? Leaving your John Hancock just laying around is a disaster waiting to happen.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

When it comes to family, it comes before all.

Except in business.

People sometimes forget that your business of thirty or more years could be all for naught if you hand the reins over to someone that doesn’t want the same for the business. Driven into the ground, you might say. Or, it could be the next best step in taking your business into a new generation. The question often sits on whether or not you would have hired this person if they were not of your family. If the answer is “no”, then you might be going down the wrong path. If it is “yes”, then you could be in for a treat.

Family often clouds business judgment because there is emotional attachment. You often know what the financial situation is with that family member and could have an impact on firing if it came down to it. People also hold grudges in family businesses when there are firings done. You often see holidays broken up due to family’s that have some sort of business dispute.

The other side of the coin is that family often work very well together. You already know the personalities, strengths, and weaknesses of each other and that creates an instant dynamic team that can hold each other up during the largest business catastrophes. This is extremely important in the world of small business when it seems like every little issue happens to be the next huge disaster. And it’s very difficult to find people that you can jive with in a regular work setting as well as family.

So if you’re ever in a situation with hiring family versus outside, ask yourself this: Can your family member compete against this person on an even playing field against the outsider. If the answer is yes, then the tie-breaker might win out for the family member. But if your answer is otherwise, then it’s time to consider letting someone else in.

It’s something that I’ve never understood when people write out thousands of words in your marketing piece that’s targeted towards an audience that has the attention span of about fifteen or twenty seconds. It just doesn’t quite work. So my personal feelings are that if you’re going to write blog posts do things such as:

• Use bullet points.
• Short paragraphs, not one giant one.
• No more than two-three hundred words.

Believe me, when I say that unless you’re just writing for the sake of writing and people have the time to sit down and read it, it’s really not worth the effort in busting out a huge opinion article that most people will just skim. In this information world, I personally follow on a daily basis over two hundred sites these days. It’s actually impossible for me to read everything so I skim the things that seem to capture my attention and skip the ones that look like they’re long and boring. Call it the Internet age of ADHD.

Since lately, I’ve been in a branding mode and was constantly thinking about a product’s naming it hit me that Liquid Plumbr went Web 2.0 brand a long time ago by dropping the “e”. Just think about it. Flickr, Zoomr, and there’s a whole bunch of other brand names out there that are Internet based and how they’re named today to make them unique. Notice that names these days are two to three syllables for online but if it’s an offline product then more syllables is acceptable. Part of it matches with the fact that you have to take into account domain names. The other is ease of typing.

In any case, I thought it was very interesting that Clorox had it going on back when the Internet wasn’t even a daily occurrence in people’s lives yet. That’s pretty forward thinking if you ask me.

Have you ever noticed that Internet branding is actually very different from your normal offline branding?

Well it is.

Look at the majority of your web applications. The names often do not have a business affiliation, or is anecdotal at best. From large to small (Twitter to Zimbra), there is really isn’t some sort of great reference to the business itself even though the company might be extremely successful. Moo.com is a great example of an entirely wonderful business that has a name that doesn’t really reflect the business itself. Unless someone is going to tell me that the sound a cow makes happens to relate to printing somehow.

In any case, the branding style of the Internet is different in this sense because it’s actually more based on the number of syllables and how easy it is to type into your URL. The majority of Web brands are two to three syllables. Just take a look at this name generator and you can see what exactly is going on.

Now there are definitely different schools of thought on whether or not you should attach another word to your brand to reinforce the industry that its from. My feelings are that the motto or tagline is a great place for this but don’t make it a part of the name since it holds your business back if you confine it too much from the beginning. Just as a pitcher’s throw is all in the wrist, branding is all about the marketing.

I believe that this is something that any Internet marketing has to take heed of since the markets and trends of the Internet are vastly different to the traditional platforms due to the differentiation in participants.