Good Customer Service = A Customer For Life!

February 14th, 2011 Zander Posted in Business Essentials

While I was in Dallas, my wife called to let me know that “the TV is blurry”. When I got home, I found out that one of the convergance boards had gone on my aging 55″ RPTV. The TV had lasted 10 years, and the cost to repair it was $400-600. For a few hundred more, I could get a whole new TV with all the latest and greatest features. So that’s what I decided to do.

Now, I used to be a huge A/V snob, but this time around I decided to keep things simple. A 50″ Plasma with 1080P was what I wanted. I ended up finding a Samsung (C680) for $999 at Best Buy, and it came with a free 3D starter kit (2 sets of glasses, and some 3D movies), and it included free delivery and removal of my old TV. Good reviews, looked good in person, SOLD!

Here comes the problem. I go to my local Best Buy, and they tell me they’re out of the TV. They call over to another store about 15 miles away, and they have 1 TV left. We ask them to hold it, and go over there to purchase it. When we get there, they tell us the TV is available, but the 3D starter kit has been sold out since Monday. (It’s Friday). No rainchecks, and no way to backorder the starter kit in their system. They tell me to take it or leave it.

I leave. I was pissed that they neglected to tell me this before I drove over there. No wonder BB gets a bad rep.

I decide to head next door to PC Richard and Sons, another electronics retailer much like Best Buy. They had the same TV, only it was $1199 and didn’t come with the 3D Starter Kit. I showed them the Best Buy flyer, and asked them if they’d match the deal. (TV, 3D kit, and delivery/removal) I didn’t think they would go for it since their price match policy excludes the add-ons and delivery. But the manager came back a few minutes later and matched the deal!

This is great customer service! I never bought anything from them before, but you can be sure I’ll be shopping there in the future. (And I’m telling everyone I know about them as well) The TV is being delivered tomorrow, and I can’t wait..

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Back Home After The Super Bowl

February 9th, 2011 Zander Posted in ZanderLand

First off, sorry for the lack of posts over the past month.. While the road trip was an amazing experience, it was also hard being out of the office for such a long period of time. Our first leg of the trip was nearly 7 days long.

Two days after I got back, I came down with the stomach flu. Thankfully, it only lasted 24 hours, as I was flying down to Dallas for the Super Bowl a few days later. Add in some weather delays (my partner’s flight actually got cancelled because of the ice storm that hit Dallas), a taxi strike, and a few other issues, and it made for a LONG weekend..

Still, it was awesome to go to the Super Bowl. Check out this picture I snapped from my seat:

The icing on the cake? It was impossible to get a decent flight home after the Super Bowl. I managed to get on an 8pm flight on Monday night, and that was a FULL flight. Finally got home around 1am, and have just tried getting caught up on everything now.

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Posting from the road!

January 25th, 2011 Zander Posted in ZanderLand

So I talked about how companies are more apt to use social media to reach their audience, and now I’m experiencing it firsthand..

I’m in the midst of a road trip from Chicago to New Orleans, courtesy of Chrysler!

The trip kicked off Sunday at the NFC Championship game, and wraps up Friday in New Orleans. Along the way, we’ll stop to see some sights and shoot footage for upcoming YouTube videos.

The experience has been awesome so far, and I’ll blog more about it when I get back home.

Until then..

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2011 – The Year Of The Blogs

January 19th, 2011 Zander Posted in Marketing, Wordpress

I got my start in the blogosphere back in 2004-2005, getting my feet wet with a free Blogger site. Frustrated with the limitations of Blogger, I quickly make the move to WordPress v1.5.2.

Blogging was a fringe novelty back then, but what a difference 5 years makes! Blogging and social media as a whole have become mainstream, and anyone who’s anyone has a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, etc.

Even better, Madison Avenue has taken notice, and traditional advertising is being replaced with social media campaigns. Bad for TV networks and magazine publications, great for the “little guys”. Two of the big three auto makers have approached us in the past month about doing extensive marketing campaigns with them. A powerhouse athletic company recently flew me and 89 other bloggers down to Dallas to show off their new apparel line. A brand that regularly advertises on The Biggest Loser wants us to help promote their line of healthy snacks.

What is going on here?

Big brands have finally come to realize that traditional advertising is dead. Thanks to DVRs, no one watches commercials anymore. People spend more time on the web than ever before, and that’s fantastic for bloggers and others with a large circle of influence.

On Sunday, we embark on something pretty exciting.. I can’t talk about it yet, but check back then for more details! :)

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Recovering Lost Disk Space!

January 6th, 2011 Zander Posted in Product Reviews

My computer is overloaded with crap, and lately my main drive has been getting dangerously low on space. Mind you, I’ve got a second hard drive that’s 500MB, along with an external hard drive that’s 1.5TB. And ALL of ‘em are full!

After cleaning out a ton of temporary files and stuff, I decided to see if I had any duplicate files on my computer. Back in the day, I had a program that would check for dupes, and it often came back with results that surprised me. So after scouring the web, I found a utility called “Check Identical Files” that offered a free 30-day trial. The reviews seemed good, so I decided to give it a shot.

The program found a BUNCH of duplicate files, saving me nearly 4GB of space in the process! That should hold me over until I pick up some more blank DVD-Rs.. :)

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The New Adsense Interface Stinks!

December 30th, 2010 Zander Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Google

Why did Google go and mess with the Adsense interface? It used to be simple, but this new interface makes everything 10x as complicated to use!

All I want to do is run a report to show me earnings since my last payment. In the old interface, the option is right on the main page, simply pull down the View menu and choose “Since Last Payment”. Try as I might, I can’t find any such report option in the new interface. It’ll let me generate reports for today, yesterday, last week, and this month. No “since last payment” option.

They do show you the amount you have earned since the last payment, but you can’t break down that figure to show what channel is earning what. This is what’s important to me, as I need to see what sites are earning what, and if I need to make any changes.

I realize the new interface is still in Beta, but I hope they go back to the old way.. Simple is best, it’s what Google was built on. Don’t overcomplicate things just for the sake of change!

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Spyware Infection.. FML!

December 29th, 2010 Zander Posted in ZanderLand

My wife ran upstairs to see if some celebrity couple was still together or not, and then called down to me when “something weird happened to the computer”. I come up, and she’s got one of those fake error messages saying some virus was detected or something. A quick CTRL-ALT-DEL to kill the Internet Explorer session, and I thought she’d be good to go.

But no, I immediately noticed a new icon on her desktop.. And then these crazy error messages started popping up from the taskbar. They looked pretty realistic, but the error messages themselves were ridiculous. “Your hard drive is missing. Please fix your hard drive” Stuff like that.

I had to deal with idiots who mucked their computers up with spyware in a past job, so I’m all too familiar with how to fix things.. But this had to be one of the more persistant spyware I’ve seen. I figure up my secret weapon, it finds 11 infections, and we go to work on it. A few of them couldn’t be contained until the system was rebooted (since they were still running), so a quick reboot should have done the trick.

Nope. Instead, I get the fatal BSOD (blue screen of death). FML. I spent the next 45 minutes trying to get back into the system, but it was royally fucked. If I had to guess, I’d say that it replaced some system files, and when my software removed it, it took out the OS.

So I grabbed my trusty Windows XP disk, and started doing a Repair. (I’ve done TONS of Windows XP support in my life, but I’ve never actually done a Repair before. Usually it’s just easier to wipe everything out and reinstall a new image. But that’s in corporate America, where everyone’s files are stored on a network, and reimaging a drive can have you back up and running in under 30 minutes.)

Anyway, the repair did work, but it took over 45 minutes to do it. And when the system came back up, there were still quite a few problems. (Her computer was running XP SP3 with IE8, and my recovery disk was for XP SP2 w/ IE6) Still, it got me back in so I could backup her e-mail, music, and other important files. I did a few updates to get the system stable, and 2 hours later I went to bed.

This morning, she complains that things are still acting funny, and asked me to look at it. At this point, I was annoyed. These low-life scumbags had already cost me 3 hours of my time, and things still weren’t 100%. I had a Dell server that I was no longer using, with a faster processor and 4x the memory of her old PC. I reformatted the drive, reinstalled XP, moved over all of her files, and made sure everything worked as it should.

The new computer has an extra HD in there, and I’m going to setup a nightly backup or something to protect her files. RAID seems like overkill for her, as she doesn’t have too much stuff to begin with. Guess I should look for some software to automate it.

Total time spent – Almost 6 hours. Around $500 in billable hours!

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