John Follis, President and Creative Director for Follis, Inc, spoke at tonight’s ICCA NYC meeting about getting prospects excited. I really enjoyed his talk and he answered many questions I had. For instance, how does marketing differ from networking?
The difference between networking and marketing has long been a blur to me. I often wondered when one stops and the other begins. As John puts it, networking is one on one while market reaches more than one person. I am networking when I meet a new person who might be a prospect or a referral to a prospect. On the other hand, a monthly newsletter is marketing as it will reach out to more than one person at a time. Having articles published is another form of marketing as it reaches a greater audience than networking alone.
Another concept John mentioned tonight that I liked is how people perceive the difference between investment and expense as it relates to marketing. When marketing is done right the cost is an investment while marketing gone wrong is an expense. Here’s hoping I will continue to invest in my marketing strategy and avoid having a huge marketing expense.
Lastly, John pointed out that marketing is not just about giving out information. Giving out information can be stale and boring. Marketing should tap emotions. For White Peak Software this means illustrating the experience and excitement felt as the result of a successful software release. I plan to incorporate the concepts shared by John at tonight’s meeting. And as with last month’s ICCA meeting, the presentation provided real value to small IT business owners like me.
From Laguna Beach to Chapel Hill to Maine, we have been bouncing around the country for the last few weeks. And here are the pictures from our travels. Enjoy.
Nik Kalyani of the DotNetNuke core team will be speaking at the next NYPC VB SIG on Wednesday, October 6. I’ve heard Nik will be talking about the internals of the portal software and how to write your own extensions. You should plan to attend if you have an interest in DotNetNuke. I know I will be there. The event starts at 6:15 PM at the Microsoft Office, 1290 6th Avenue, one block north of Radio City Music Hall.
Some of you may have noticed that the site was down today. An unfortunate set of events prevented me from getting the site up sooner. It all started this morning when I deployed a new version of the site software.
I tested the changes on a Windows 2003 Server running .NET Framework v1.1. However, the production environment is running .NET Framework v1.1 Service Pack 1. Core pieces of the web site framework code that have been running problem free for years failed under Service Pack 1. I fixed the code after trouble shooting the problems, but then came more problems.
A series of network problems prevented me from deploying the fixes. From an issue with my wireless access point to service provider issues, it seemed as if there was something that did not want me to deploy the fixes. And to top it off, while talking with a prospect I asked that he visit the White Peak web site forgetting that the site was down. Definitely not the image I want when talking with someone about building web applications.
After a long day, the site is finally up and running. The code is a bit better as a result, and I’m reminded of the importance of testing software in an environment that mirrors the production environment as closely as possible even for a site as simple as this one.
I posted pictures of a recent trip to Brussels in the gallery.
I had the pleasure of meeting Jeffrey Richter of Wintellect today during his full day talk on .NET Framework internals. He talked on topics such as threading, asynchronous programming model, app domain, reflection, and key differences between C# and VB.NET. His presentation style was entertaining, and I was amazed at his depth of knowledge around the .NET Framework. I definitely learned more than a thing or two from Jeffrey.
I ended my day with the monthly ICCA meeting featuring Liz Lynch as tonight’s speaker. Liz is a business management consultant and the author of 102 Secrets to Smarter Networking. She presented her approach for smarter networking, which is based on concepts of preparing, connecting, and strengthening. Her advice was invaluable and will help me improve my networking skills.
It’s been a great day of learning. However, I’m exhausted and ready for bed.
I encounter a rather strange problem today. I have a set of HTML files stored locally on my machine. I can view each of the web pages in Fire Fox but not in IE. Every time I attempted to open the HTML in IE, IE would report that the file was missing even though I knew it was on the hard drive. I tried opening the file using the menu item File|Open from IE but it reported the same error message. Finally I decided to load the HTML file into Visual Studio.NET. To my surprise the file would not load and VS.NET would not report an error message. If I attempted to load the file a second time in VS.NET, the IDE would simply lock forcing me to kill the process.
After some detective work, I discovered the source of the problem. Seems that each HTML file I attempted to open had a comment line near the top of the file that looked like this: . Apparently this is special information that Microsoft products such as IE and VS.NET look for. I’m not sure how the information is used but I do know that neither tool reported meaningful messages regarding the commented line in the HTML file.
To resolve the problem, I removed the saved from url lines from each HTML file. IE and VS.NET are now happy as can be with regard to viewing these files.
Here is a list of contact management tools that provide integration with Outlook. Business Contact Manager from Microsoft is working for me but others may be interested in other options.
Users of Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 should be careful when deleting accounts. All business contacts linked to the account will be deleted when you delete the account. And there is no warning message when deleting an account. Simply highlight the account and press the delete key and your account and linked contacts are gone.
From the menu bar, you can go to Business Tools | Others | Delete Items to see the delete account. However the deleted contacts will not appear in the list. The Delete Items feature seems like a nice idea but not really a useful. Besides, there is no “undelete” feature.
I highly recommend making a backup of your data prior to deleting any information in Business Contact Manager. To make a backup go to File | Business Database | Backup on the Outlook menu bar and follow the instructions for making a local backup.
Also, if you need to delete an account but want to keep the contacts, unlink the contacts from the account prior to deleting the account. To unlink a contact, you must go to the business contact detail screen, click the “…” button for the account name, and click the “Clear Selection” button in the pop-up window.