Obviously, for those in the know-how and geekdom, this is a pretty simple task of dissection. But this isn’t like an IBM commercial where it’s targeted at business people. No, this is something targeted at your normal everyday Joe Schmoe that doesn’t really care one way or another if your application is in the “cloud” or not. I mean, in all honesty, you just want things to work, and work well. Do you care whether or not it works in the cloud? Of course not. It’s like me trying to explain the differences between CDMA and GSM and the difference in call quality based on technological differences to my mother. If she’s going to buy a cell phone, she cares about the way it looks and how cool it is instead of what the infrastructure it sits on.

Same thing here. Thus, that Microsoft ad turns out to be a total cheese to those that know, and totally misses the ball with those that don’t. Always make sure that you understand your audience before you play technical keywords at them.

There’s a lot of information that you can gather the analysis of both the website and the whois records. The first can tell you if it’s been thrown up in a hurry and if it’s a template site. If it is, no worries, but if both the former (shoddy website) and latter (domain registration) don’t jive, that’s a sign to run very far away before you get taken for a spin.

The whois record shows the registration of the domain and whom is in charge of the business itself from billing to technical to administration. Every major corporation will have their own IT departments in charge of these records and thus the emails will always be from a corporate domain. For example, ibm.com is registered to the corporation and the emails all have ibm.com on the end.


Registrant:
International Business Machines Corporation
New Orchard Road
Armonk, NY 10504
US

INTERNET-SERVER.ZURICH.IBM.COM 195.176.20.204
NS.WATSON.IBM.COM 129.34.20.80
NS.ALMADEN.IBM.COM 198.4.83.35
NS.AUSTIN.IBM.COM 192.35.232.34


That is a huge tell-tale sign that says that someone is a legit owner and knows what they’re doing. If not, then whether or not you’re a legitimate business, you could be stereotyped into the bucket of “scammers and fraud” even before you start your wheeling and dealing. And is that something you really want to do to yourself if you’re trying to create partnerships and sales? Definitely not.

So do the right thing. Register your domains in the right method and keep yourself from having a lot of headache explanations in the future.

I sign a lot of legal documents in the contracts and deals that are forged for my web based accounting business. But there’s one thing that I’ve noticed where a lot of creative types are not careful with when it comes to newsletters and websites. When it comes to business, you want to market yourself and many people sign their names as a sort of personal touch. Here’s the key.

Don’t sign your full name.

First name? Sure. But never sign your last name unless you’re looking to sign a check or a legal document. Why? Security. It’s one thing to have your identity stolen, but it’s another to invite your identity to be stolen. And for most legal documentation, your power is in your signature. I mean, it’s already easy enough to pick it up from carbon copies, checks, and other things out there. But why make it easy enough to pull off with a little Photoshop work?

Protect yourself and don’t just leave it around. You can personalize and brand yourself. But in my humble opinion? Leaving your John Hancock just laying around is a disaster waiting to happen.

One of the things that I’ve never understood about smaller regions and how they market tech sectors is the fact that they don’t play to their strengths. They take a nationally well-known topic and try to compete in the same sector. It’s not that it’s impossible, but it’s more of the fact that when someone has more resources and you know they can out-gun you, you don’t take them head on.

Thus, I’ve personally always felt that niche markets are the place to be when you’re the smaller player in the marketing field. Most of the big league people around the States are all doing biotechnology. Biotech this, biotech that, and the same goes for the Piedmont Triad. Now, I’m not saying that it’s bad to compete on this level, but you put yourself at a disadvantage because of location (smaller cities), and less resourcing (bigger cities have bigger VCs). Yet choosing a niche within biotech such as prosthetics or skin regeneration, would be able to take much of the current degradation of furniture and textiles and shift them into a suitable marketing position.

Niches have always been the bread and butter of small businesses. Even my own business focuses on the niche of small business accounting. This is because the competition at the larger markets (Walmarts and Targets) is so vast that they don’t need to target ethnic variety as much. Yet, these businesses that fill in the cracks of the spectrum are the ones that keep things going. A small mom & pop store doesn’t want to compete on the scale of Walmart, and nor should they. The same reasoning goes for regional marketing.