I’ve Twitter Graded Myself

That sounds dirty.

Hubspot has a site to “rate your Twitter mojo.”  My mojo is 61 out of 100. Given how not a Twitter celebrity I am, I’ll take it. But that doesn’t mean my competitive side won’t try to raise it…

There’s also a tool for ranking for press releases and websites, using a various set of criteria. It’s not that similar tools aren’t already available on the web, but I found these interesting and somewhat entertaining with a bonus nice interface. (I especially liked the dancing logo while waiting for the website review to arrive. What can I say? I’m into cute icons…)

I plopped a recent press release about our new Cloud Summit Executive event into the text box and scored a 90 out of 100. Not bad. The report tells us we should be doing more with SEO and our releases, so we’ll take the advice.

I then ran www.cloudsummit.com in the website grader but on this one, we didn’t fare so well. Just a 62 out of 100. To be fair, we put the site up in about 8 business days, and while we got high ratings in many areas, there are some standard SEO things that need to be fixed.

In a perfect world, we’d have budgets for a fancy SEO agency to help up get our rating up. But since we don’t, tools like these are nice to have so we don’t get lazy and sit around eating bonbons in the afternoon.

But as soon as I’m done with that bonbon, I’m going to work on my Twitter ranking!

To Be Or Not To Be…An Asshole

I’ll confess. I work for a company that sends lots of email. It’s not like we sell crack to crack whores — we sell conferences and one of our tactics is to use email. We’re CAN-SPAM compliant. (As if those laws have actually helped cut the number of real SPAM anyone gets…)  But as we’ve watched email ROI eclipse direct mail over the last 18 months or so, we’re fans of email. And while we know some people hate email, for us it’s a necessary evil.

We’re not perfect in our email sends, yet we constantly look at how many emails one person can get over a certain period of time and how to make our opt out process easier for our recipients. But my inbox was an interesting study in the world of human behavior this morning.

First there was this:

“Goddammit!

I don’t appreciate you assholes spamming the fuck out of me!

I wouldn’t go to one of your conferences now if you paid for the whole thing. And I’ll damn sure recommend against attending your conferences to all of my colleagues.

What a piss-poor marketing strategy.

I’ve been putting up with this shit for months, and I’m sick and tired of it. Get my e-mail address out of your databases immediately!

cc: Attorney General, State of California, Attorney General, State of Illinois, Attorney General, State of New York, Attorney General, State of Nevada.”
(my note: ooooh. scary.)

Then there was this:

“I’d be grateful if you could help me with a bit of a problem I have.

Somehow, your company got ahold of my email address, and has been sending me invitations to things I have no interest in.

I would be grateful if you would ensure that I never again receive email from any of your business units. I think it’s better to do it this way than to forward this to our email team to request that your domains be blocked.”

Both names will immediately be removed from our global list — but I have to admit, I am tempted to provide the first guy’s email to as many “sign me up” boxes I find across the web. Call me evil…

Nebraska Loves You. And Your Kids.

Have you heard the news out of Nebraska? They’re the last state in the U.S. to pass the “safe-haven” law. A law that allows parents to abandon unwanted children without question within a variable (by state) amount of time, usually 72 hours from birth.

Only instead of giving parents 72 hours, Nebraska’s law gives the parents 19 years!

Imagine the ad campaign for this law:

Kid sucks? Drop ‘em off.

Your child a druggie? Let us deal.

Tired of cleaning up after your little slob? We’ll take on the task.

Give us your disrespectful, ungrateful, selfish, self-centered monsters. No questions asked.

What’s even crazier about this law, is that anyone can give the kid up. If you take a vacation and leave your child with a babysitter, and they decide the Friday rave is better than caring for your little beasts — poof! They can be given up!

When I was a kid, my mother’s big threat was: “Wait till your father gets home!” Today it would be something like “Wait till I pack you up and drop you off at the fire department!”

Nuts.

Update (November 26, 2008): Since September, 34 kids were dropped off at Omaha hospitals and none of them were infants (the olders was 17). The law has been rewritten to only permit children as old as 30 days to be dropped off. Finally, some with a brain was taking action.