thinks

There’s no right answer here. Fred Wilson has a great post providing one - very informed - point of view into behavioral targeting, list building and privacy one - very informed - point of view into behavioral targeting, list building and privacy. Obviously, you need this data to grow your business - and to offer valuable services to your customers. But, it’s critical to act appropriately from a brand-building, customer and legal standpoint. What to do?

From my perspective, I think it’s most important to do well by doing good. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer - or better yet, your most conservative customer - then decide what to do. For instance, in a past life, we enrolled customers into a loyalty program at time of purchase unless they opted out, then provided the ability to opt out in both our purchase confirmation and the email confirmation sent. Oh, and in every follow-up communication.

And if you can, ask them what they’re cool with.

If it were you, how would you want a company you don’t know to treat your personal information?

Never. Don’t believe me? Check out Seth Godin’s latest.

OK, but what about IT’s argument - and you know they have one - that it increases overhead, management, blahdee, blah, blah, blah? They’re probably right. That’s where analytics come in. If your traffic has:

1. Completely vanished; OR
2. Results in zero revenue

Then, you can set up a 301 redirect to your home page or other suitable content. Perhaps a human-friendly 404 that leads to useful information. But, the URL itself should never vanish into a black hole. Trust, me, your IT team will get over it eventually.

Mike Moran has a great feature today talking about optimizing profits in internet marketing campaigns. Alan Rimm-Kaufman notes in the piece, “Discounts are an addictive drug.” I’m continually amazed by the number of otherwise smart marketers I know who immediately think in terms of discounts to drive traffic/sales/what-have-you. Lowering a price is easy, no matter what it does to profits. It’s also short-sighted. Here’s one example why.

I have worked for the last several years selling hotel rooms online for a number of hotel brands. A colleague at a competitor listed his company’s hotels in their search results by price, low-to-high. The result: his hotels started lowering their prices to get “premium placement.” The hotels higher on the page often got more reservations, but all lost profits from the reduced rates. Some even failed to make a profit on some sales. Oh, and he lost his job. Um, oops.

Anyone can sell a dollar for eighty cents and try to make it up in volume. The really smart folks figure out how to find customers who are willing to buy your products for the right price, not just a cheap one.

How’s your week been? Mine. Not so great. Last Thursday, my web hosting company appears to have closed their doors, taking this site down with them. Gone. Dead. Kaput.

How would you like to spend your weekend trying to get your site up and running again from scratch? Worse, how would you like to do it on big revenue days like a Monday? Yeah, me neither.

I’ve learned - re-learned - some valuable lessons during this period. I thought you might appreciate avoiding my pain by hearing what they are.

1. Keep backups. I know, I know. We’ve all been told this. Here’s the thing. How many days do you want to spend getting your life together after if it goes away? Backup one day less than that. If you’re OK with spending a month putting your life back together, back up every 29 days. I did my last backup on November 4. When my site died on November 25, I got screwed. EVERYTHING between those two weeks was gone. Is gone. If anyone has a copy of my blog posts, boy I’d sure like to have them. Seriously.
2. Make a copy of the backups. No, really. It doesn’t take much to backup your hard drive with a site like Carbonite (PC-only today, though Mac is coming) or any number of Mac services. I had the nightmare scenario. My laptop - where I do all my writing - died the same week as my web host. Think stuff like that only happens in Ben Stiller movies? Surprise! Fortunately, I had a copy on a share drive in addition to the one on my laptop. I’d have been way more hosed if I hadn’t. It’s likely I still wouldn’t have content on this site. And just imagine what happens to your Google PageRank then.
3. Develop a checklist of emergency tasks. For instance, should you stop your paid search campaigns first or should you put up a page telling your customers what’s happened? Most small companies don’t have the resources to do these in parallel, so it’s critical you - and your team - understand what the priorities are. When you find yourself in a hole, first you need to stop digging. It’s bad enough that you’re losing revenue. Don’t make it worse by not knowing how to stop.
4. Make sure you have all your critical contact information for your hosting company, development shop and other key providers available in more than one location. For instance, I didn’t have my web hosting company’s super secret tech support phone number I’d dug up a while back anywhere but on my local drive (see item #2 above). While I found their main number on Google, they weren’t answering that line anymore.
5. Manage your DNS separate from your hosting. If my DNS was hosted by the same company as my website, I’d seriously be dead right now. In truth, I wouldn’t remotely know how to deal with that situation. Which is another item for #3 on this list now, isn’t it?
6. Pay attention to trouble with your service providers. I don’t recommend jumping ship every time you have a little bugaboo with your service. Managing websites/hosting/development is complicated and occasionally things go wrong. But if you start to see a pattern of issues with a provider, demand immediate resolution or start shopping for a new provider.
7. Always have a Plan B. What saved my butt was that I was already in the process of moving my site from one host to another. You don’t want to have to figure out what your alternatives are when you have no alternative. No matter how happy you are with your hosting company, development shop, analytics provider, marketing agency, what-have-you, you need to know who else is out there and what they can do for you. Take an hour or two every month at lunchtime and review alternative providers. That way, if you do need to make a sudden move, at least you’re not starting from scratch.

I know this list is incomplete. Preparing for emergencies with your site can be a full-time job. But, these are the critical items most businesses need to have covered. Please add anything I missed to the comments. And I hope you have a better week than I did.

What’s it going to take for the mobile web to catch on? Om Malik gives a view of the underlying business of mobile data vs. the mobile web. Well worth the read. He’s certainly right in talking about the adoption of mobile broadband cards. I practically sleep with mine these days. But I think the phone will improve, too. As many of Om’s comments note, the iPhone changes the experience dramatically. Additionally, they’re easier to tote, cost less, and far more common. Once screens adopt more iPhone-like capabilities and networks improve - and Verizon’s recent “bring your own device” plan is a step towards that - expect consumer adoption to grow.

Is the picture of the mobile, local web (the backyard web) beginning to take shape? With over 3 billion mobile phones in consumers’ hands and with increasing access to valuable mobile services, like Google’s new geolocation services, it seems likely consumers will start expecting tools like these. How ready is your business to have your customers find you via their mobile?