Mike Seidle ...notes from the road

The last few weeks have been crazy.  First, we moved from Fishers back to Indianapolis, and then this happened:

Linda T. Sanchez (D-CA) has a really bad idea that she would like to make into law:

Straight out of the bill (I can't even make one up this bad):

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both....

Most companies and brands use Twitter as follows:

1. Follow people, and when they follow back, unfollow them.
2. Search for people saying things about your company or brand.
3. Use Twitter to advertise to your followers.
4. Rinse, Repeat.

This strategy is comfortable and safe. It's just like email. Just get them to opt-in. Then broadcast away, just like you do with ConstantContact. Here's why this strategy gets the fail whale: it's stupid and short sighted.

One thing that gets old and tiresome in helping companies with internet marketing: dealing with misconceptions on what spam is, what it isn't and what you can do about it.

It's really not that tough to understand.  And it is an important issue because if you are in the US and you send emails of a commercial variety, then you need to know the law, and you need to know the rules that ISPs and blacklists will make you play by.

Instead of wasting your time with my opinion, here are the facts:

The Law

I recently did a vanity search for myself, and found one link that was very inaccurate. It was for Spoke.com, social networking's answer to parked domains or those annoying "fake search engine" pages. Spoke apparently spiders the web and tries to create profiles automatically for you.

There's a reason people like using the internet and it's not premium, name brand, video content. It's that the internet is one of the few places we've got the freedom thing right. Here's what happens when you do it wrong: the internet just routes around you.  And in this case, you happens to be the most connected country in the world:

Lately, I've been a little obsessed with Twitter. Here are a couple of things I've learned:

Ok, so you are driving along and it starts raining money.  Apparently the thing to do, if you want to stay out of the way of every law enforcement agency from the local police to the DEA is to help them pick up the money, that is unless you want some new legal headaches.  Take this situation in San Deigo where suspects tossed thousands of dollars of drug money out the window:

News 8:: KFMB Stations, San Diego, California-DEA: Return Money Thrown During Freeway Chase, Or Else

Ever wonder why most startups fail?  They usually meet up with one of the four horsemen:

1. Overestimation of demand. Turns out no one wanted you whiz-bang change the world internet-connected superconducting toilet paper holder.

2. Inadequate cashflow or availability of bridge funding. Either didn't have enough or couldn't keep it when you got it. Oh, and overestimating demand compounds this.
   

Recently I was asked on LinkedIn how upper management demotivates employees and why companies do things that appear to demotivate employees.  Every business owner or CEO I know doesn't like doing things that suck to their employees.  Problem is that it's easy to be a good guy when you are small and growing.  Reality gets in the way the bigger you get because it's hard to get lots of great people.  Turns out though, the real problem isn't that managers are mean, nasty and wa