Month: November 2007

You’ve heard me say it a billion times. You’ve heard others say it too. Here’s another fantastically respected expert saying it again: make it your strategy to be unique; making everyone happy is the road to failure. Read the Strategy Means Saying “No” article here.

I have two free tuition prizes for the ASMP SB2 event of your choice to give away. That’s up to a $300 value (depending on your membership status) and, to be clear, it’s ONLY to comp the tuition–no travel or lodging or additional consultations included. ASMP has donated these scholarships.

Here’s the rub: I’m reserving one for those people on my mailing list as of November 28, 2007 AND who let me know they want to be in the raffle. If you’re not on my list or do not wish to be added to my list, you have only one chance to win. But if you are on my list then you have one chance with your peers and one chance with them and anyone else who enters.

Yes, that means people on my list have two chances to win. 🙂

Btw, the actual odds of winning depend entirely on the number of entries in each group.

For everyone, here’s what you need to do to enter. Click one of the links below to send me an email. Regardless of which one you choose, make sure to include the following in your email:

Full Name
Mailing Address
Work Phone
Email Address (if different than sending account)
ASMP membership status (member or not)

INCOMPLETE ENTRIES WILL BE THROWN OUT!!!

Click Here to enter AND to be added to my Free Manuals in Your Email list.

Click Here to enter and NOT to be added to any list (your data will be deleted after the drawing)

Click Here to enter if you are already on the Free Manuals list.

One entry is all that is needed. That means, if you want to be on the list (one entry for members’ only drawing) and enter for the general drawing, just clicking the first link will enter you in both. Or, if you are already a member of my list, clicking the 3rd link will enter you in both drawings.

You will receive an auto-generated reply acknowledging your attempted entry. THIS IS NO GUARANTEE of entry, however, because, like I mentioned earlier, if you don’t send all the contact info, you’re entry will get dumped. But I will try to contact you if that is the case so you can fill in the missing data and still be entered.

The drawings will be held on December 5th, 2007. We will literally be drawing out of a hat so that everything will be equal and as fair as possible.

ENTRIES WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED after 11:59PM PST November 28th, 2007.

Winners will be informed via email and their info will be passed on to ASMP National for confirmation and further info/instructions.

This is going to be a fantastic learning opportunity. If you’ve already signed up to attend one of the events, you can still win, too!

Good luck to everyone!

I’ve been an Intuit user for years. Quicken, Quickbooks, and even TurboTax (because my taxes are simple–a CPA is better for most of my readers). One thing I never do, though, is sign up for the automatic renewal. I can usually find a deal somewhere on TurboTax and so I prefer to buy it when I’m ready. Last year when I purchased the product and did our taxes, I carefully selected to “opt out” of the automatic renewal.

Imagine my surprise when I got a letter from Intuit announcing that my automatically renewed product would soon be available. I immediately went to the company site and changed the settings (which were wrong) to delete the automatic renewal.

A couple of weeks later, I got an email stating that the product would be ready within days, and when it was my card would be charged and I could download the product. I tried to call the customer service number, but it was after hours, so I, after digging through the Intuit site for hours, resorted to again deleting my info and canceling the auto renewal. I received an email confirmation to this effect.

To be sure, I also posted a question on the Intuit forums, under the Customer Service heading. That resulted in someone else posting that they were in the same boat, then the moderator writing, I’m not making this up:

The forums are for people to help each other. We don’t have the necessary information or tools to help you with situations like this. Please Contact our sales and service team via the shopping and account info link here…

What, pray tell, is the purpose of a Customer Service Forum if you won’t serve your customers?

It doesn’t matter, the story gets worse from here.

Today, I got an email announcing that my auto-renewed product is ready for download.

What the…?

I called the customer support number. Customer service is only available between 8am and 4pm PST, so I thought I might actually get someone with the company. Nope. Some poor Indian wage slave had to deal with a terribly irate me. Imagine trying to get someone who can barely speak English to understand “Burns-Dell’Acqua” as a name. Ugh.

This poor shloob did understand English well enough to say that my account had never been canceled. When I said I had email proving it, he tried to say that I must have made a mistake. This went on for some time. Finally, he said that he would cancel everything AND send me an email confirming that. I was to receive the email withing 2 hours of the call.

That was 6 hours ago and counting.

Well, guess what I’m now advising my clients? Stay away from Intuit products.

What a great trip. Except for the mind-numbing (in places) drive, everything connected with the Phoenix trip was great. I met loads of talented and really kind folk and we had a wonderful turn-out at the event (standing room only!).

Thanks to ASMP AZ/PHX for their warmth, humor, and outstanding production for the event.

I’m heading out shortly to drive to Phoenix. I’ll be speaking there tomorrow night (the 7th) at ASMP-AZ/PHX. Hope to meet lots of you at the event!

However, the travel means I may not be as able to post as usual. So please forgive me if I’m a bit lax in that area for the next few days. Hard to get an internet connection zipping through Gila Bend, don’t-cha know. 🙂

I head back on Thursday, and will be back at my desk on Friday.

Wanna do something good for your business? Support the Writers Guild strike. Why is that good for your creative business? Because these people are fighting for exact the same thing we do: payments for the value of their work.

The media corporations and producers, etc., don’t want to pay writers for when they sell additional copies of shows on DVD and the internet. These are new uses. Think about how many tv shows you now see for sale on DVD–this never used to happen! And downloads! Anyway, they don’t want to pay them at all for any of these “additional uses” to be truthful, and if they win, you can bet it will be a thousand times harder for a photographer to convince a client that being paid for each usage is fair.  They’ll start to demand more and more be thrown in, under rubriques like “promotion” or “collateral.”

So, if you want to do something great for your business, support the strike. Bring food to the picket lines, write posts about how important these issues are for ALL creatives, don’t cross the picket lines, etc. Helping other creatives fight the same fights we must face is the honorable thing to do.

There is a regular poster on the PDN Forum who hates me. This guy, whom I have never met, is almost scary with his devoted loathing of me. He goes so far as to have in his standard post sig a link to his website followed by “LBDA not welcome” and he even wrote a post where he quoted me, from a completely different forum, as having said his site looks cheap (which, btw, it does–I was writing in response to someone who specifically mentioned this guys site and asking if he had good ideas about marketing) and accused me slandering him, etc. (which I did not–I only said his site looks cheap/low-end).

The only reason for this utter hatred, as far as I can tell, is because I disagree with some of his contentions about the best way to do business.

Yesterday, this guy posted a question/statement on the PDN Forum. Another photographer responded. I responded. The guy deleted the thread (which you can do when you are the original poster) then reposted the thread, but only with his original post and the other photographer’s response. I posted asking why he did that, and he did it again. I pointed out that the purpose of the forum was the exchange of ideas, how I was trying to help, and he deleted the thread entirely and permanently.

What a waste of energy. I feel sorry for this man who spends so much of his time hating me. I don’t hate him. I’m confused by his actions and wonder about his motivation, but I don’t hate him. In fact, I hope he opens his eyes some day to see that the information I offer can actually help him be more successful.

I know people like this. In fact, there are members of my family who would rather fight than learn and who hold onto a position so tightly that they hate anyone who disagrees with them. I used to be like this too, and what a waste of energy that was! It was a wonderful day when I finally learned that by letting go of my anger and hatred those people lost all their (perceived) power over me.

This is a good lesson for your business. When someone tell you something you disagree with, notice that you disagree and look at it dispassionately. Are there some valid points in the argument, on both sides? Can you find common ground? Can you learn something maybe from what this person is telling you, even if you don’t really want to hear it?

You can’t grow unless you challenge your thoughts and beliefs at least a bit.