I’ve received the odd mention in the press – usually some obscure point about an irrelevant Internet governance or technical policy issue. I never expected to get any attention from the hardcore IT press for anything of technical substance – good, bad or otherwise. Having recently assumed responsibility for managing the retail aspects of the Mailbank business portfolio, I guess all bets are off now…

Based on messages being sent out from Tucows, the migration process has hit several speedbumps.

- via ITworld.com.

Joel Shore, the author of the article, goes on to nail the source of of our problems square on the head. My planning process was rushed, which lead to corner cutting, which lead to mistakes and problems and a decreased focus on getting the quality equation just right. This lead to avoidable mea culpa’s on the retail network status page and our customer bulletins – which eventually lead to Joel’s article.

The good news is that the fixes are well underway and ahead of schedule. The bad news is that we could have used the time spent fixing these issues on more productive activities – not to mention completely avoided invoking the wrath of our customers and Joel’s unflattering attention.

Take the time to dot your i’s and cross your t’s. Your customers will thank you for it.

For some more detail on the issues we’ve run ourselves into, you can check out our customer blog where I’ll be posting some more information the steps we’re taking to improve our quality control processes over the coming days.

(speaking of QA, when I clicked on the link on the ITworld website to send a copy of the article to the folks here at Tucows, here’s the response I got from their webserver  – click the thumbnail for a full view)

Tucows launched a corporate blog a couple of weeks back. Its about time I say! Tucows manages one of the larger hosted blogging platforms out there (blogware.com) in addition to owning several great “makes blogging better services” like Domain Direct and Blogrolling.com, so its nice to see the company take the step and start showing the human side of the company through what might actually turn out to be a decent blog.

Anyways – that’s not what I wanted to get on about. The real reason I think that the Tucows blog is going to be a smashing success is because the caretakers aren’t afraid to post gratuitous nipple shots to it. Faint, and carefully disguised by a t-shirt. Tasteful even. But still, a nipple.

Just a while ago, I would have thought that such an event would be inconceivable. And now today, its happened. Actually, it happened yesterday, and no one, except me, seems to have noticed.

My how far we’ve come.

Nipples indeed.

I don’t even want to think where this might take us.

I’m running for the CIRA Board of Directors again this year. CIRA has drastically changed its bylaws to prevent the sort of irregularities that cost me the nomination last year. I’m really hoping that I can get re-elected so that I can pick up the work that I left mid-stream when I was defeated last year.

I would really appreciate your support if you are a CIRA member. You can cast your vote at the CIRA election web site. Please let me know if you have any questions about the process.

My platform is very straightforward – I’m looking to reform the membership structure to ensure that CIRA’s members (dotCA name-holders) have a direct say in the creation of CIRA’s policies. Right now, CIRA’s membership really only gets to provide input after a series of policy drafts have been created by CIRA’s staff or consultants. Involvement comes at a fairly late stage and I’m really hoping to change this for the better by having CIRA’s members involved up front.

I’m a pro-privacy candidate, which is evidenced by my support for the Whois policy reform that is finally coming to fruition. There are no strong reasons for registrant data to be displayed publicly – I’m really happy that CIRA is implementing such a strong set of privacy oriented policies.

I’m also very interested in making sure that the Board focuses on its primary responsibility of managing CIRA’s overall strategy. In my experience, the Board has had a tendency of getting too involved in the mechanics and tactics of the organisation and I would like to change this.

I am also hoping to take a different approach to pricing in the dotCA namespace. Every year the Board has a discussion of what the price ought to be, and most years the price for a registration decreases. And then, at the end of the year, CIRA ends up putting a whole bunch of money in the bank. I think that its time to start pricing dotCA registrations based on what CIRAs budget is. This might mean that the price will float from year to year, but it would also mean that Canadians are paying a fair and realistic price for dotCA registrations, instead of paying based on what the Board’s best guess is.

The good folks over at OneDegree did a quick interview with me earlier this week about my candidacy – you can view it here. Also, you can view my candidates statement here.

Thanks in advance for your support!

Stop thinking in terms of what you sell and start thinking in terms of what your clients buy or think they buy.

– Duct Tape Marketing Blog

I also touched on this in my Sticky Services slide deck that I presented at ISPCon earlier this year. People don’t buy laptops, they buy learning (amongst other things).

Its imperative that you get inside your customers heads to figure out exactly what it is that they are buying from you. I’ve found that one of the best ways to accomplish this is to talk to them about what their goal are – i.e. *why* did you buy my product? What were you seeking seeking to achieve?

Once you have an understanding of what their goals are, it becomes much easier to sell to them – simply help them achieve their goals and they will give you money.

Apple has this nailed. They’ve had it nailed for at least 20 years. Here’s how they sold their Mac’s back in the eighties –

The bottom line? A Mac makes it easy for you to publish great looking reports that will make you more successful at the office.

Here’s what they were selling against at the time…

Commodore’s bottom line? Our computer is a totally flash piece of equipment that has all sorts of geeky features that people still don’t understand 20 years later.

So here’s my bottom line with this post – unless your customers understand how your product or service going to make them more sexy, smarter, successful, productive, or otherwise help them achieve one or more of their goals, you may as well pack it in now and free up your operating capital for some other entrepreneur that does understand this.

just do the "duh" thing.

 – Creating Passionate Users

Please.

Do not forget that the holidays are coming!

We have a new podcast up on TalkCrunch - an interview with Tucows CEO Elliot Noss. Tucows just acquired one year old Ajax calendar Kiko for $250,000 on ebay.

– Techcrunch

…the most important tool is your brain. You have to think about what makes sense for your business and your clients. They will be searching for things from their perspective, not yours.

– Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

I’ve been dying to blog this for a week. Tucows is the “mysterious” persona behind Powerjoe1998’s high bid for the recently auctioned Kiko Calendar and Kiko Events services.

The shiny new Tucows blog has the background scoop on our rational behind the purchase, and the Retail Services weblog (the DNS is still propagating for the Kiko URL which resolves to the same weblog that we use for the rest of our retail services).

Kiko Calendar and Kiko Events will both be run out of Tucows Retail Services group that I’m responsible for (along side Blogrolling.com, NetIdentity, Domain Direct and others). We have some pretty cool integration projects ahead of us to help bring the calendar and event services closer to our other retail services.

Over the short term, the mantra will be “Do No Harm” (okay, actually that’s the long term mantra too ) so we will be first looking to simply bring the servers and applications into the Tucows environment, and then from there, we will be slowly evolving the service in a direction that makes sense from everyone’s perspective.

I’ll definitely be posting more on this. In the meantime, go get your own calendar – I’d love to start getting feedback from you about how we might improve the service.

NewsMap creates a snapshot of the most recent news headlines across several categories.

– Strategic Public Relations

Newsmap is a really cool little service. Here’s my Technology/Canada Newsmap.

I’m actually enjoying going through these older items. I also feel a little bit better knowing that what happens in the online world can actually wait for a few months before I found out about it. I used to believe that the universe would implode if I wasn’t the first person to know about things like this. It seems that I can actually wait a few months, still be the first to know. Balancing the needs of the universe and my personal time is turning out to be much easier than I thought.

Let me know if you see any small tears in the time/space continuum.

This page has been created to provide a list of resources concerning astroturfing

– NewPR Wiki

Unfortunately, the wiki doesn’t provide any real definition of “astroturfing” – at least not one that I could find. Perhaps I'm just dense.

Anyways, Wikipedia helped me figure it out pretty quickly.

The NewPR Wiki could have made it easier for thick laypeople like myself and just linked to Bret Fausett’s post about Bill Hobbs as an example.

I wonder if Bill would take the anti-astroturfing pledge.

I wonder how happy everyone in Bill’s blogroll is with the link-love they get from Bill. I wonder if those that are uncomfortable with practices like this would ask Bill to remove his links to their web page as a show of good faith.  Doc Searls? J.D. Lasica? Do you need links from bloggers like Steve/Bill?

Do your homework or risk embarrassment.

– eWeek.com.

I'm really serious about the answers I get to this question. The answers I get tell me so much about each candidate – moreso than any other question I ask. From this simple little question, I find out what kind of research skills they have, how passionate they might be, how creative they are, how internet-savvy they are, whether they are an ass-kisser or not (don’t tell me how great my blog is in an interview unless you actually read it. If you actually read it and like it that much, how come you’ve never left a comment, linked to me or sent me a followup email on a post?).

This question presents such a great opportunity for a candidate – an opportunity that 99% of candidates squander. Tucows is a public company, most of what we do is on the record. Financials, strategy, acquisition history, etc. Most candidates come in mumbling something about our shareware business.

Wrong freakin’ answer.

In the past, I’ve been fairly polite in the face of such answers, but after seeing this bit featured in an article about the absolute most basic mistakes you can avoid, I’m more likely to cut the interview short if I don’t like what I’m hearing when I ask this question.

Ross’ New Rule: When you come into an interview, you must be at least as prepared as me. If you aren’t expect me to take the interview as seriously as you did.

I’d rather have people buying my cars than talking about them.

 – Marketing Genius

Creating buzz, is usually just that.

Creating excited buyers, now that’s a talent.  A talent lacking in many of the startups that we so often hear so much about – hear about from insiders who aren’t going to spend a nickle with them.

Sort of like Snakes on a Plane. Release date: August 18th. Advance Buzz: Huge. Box Office Gross (as of Sept. 1) – $29,125,000 (source: BoxOffice Mojo).

Contrast that with “Invincible” another late summer release, which came out a week later on August 25 and as of September 3, has already done close to $35m in ticket sales. Advance buzz? Nada.