Pat Phelan has a post up over at his blog in which people have been discussing boundaries and blogger ethics in terms of full disclosure. This kicked me up the arse to go and do something I’ve been meaning to do since Day 1: add a Disclosures page to my site.

There are some cases that are cut and dried, like the instance Pat is highlighting. If you’re being paid by Flixwagon, using Flixwagon on your site, demoing Flixwagon, and/or writing about Flixwagon in your own space or others, you need to disclose that you have a financial relationship with Flixwagon.

And then it gets muddy. Because by paid, I mean any exchange with a monetary value attached to it. If I got free hosting from Blacknight (which I do, although not for this blog) and wrote about Blacknight and how awesome they are (which I have), I would be ethically obligated to disclose in my post that I get free hosting from Blacknight (which I did, just for the record).

Furthermore, were I interviewed by a journalist about blog hosting and mentioned that I send all my clients to Blacknight, I would also be ethically obligated to disclose to said journalist that I have an existing financial relationship with them in that I get free hosting.

After that, it’s up to the journalist to put that fact in the piece or not, but I think they should. If they didn’t, you better believe I’d be right here in your browser (or RSS reader, as the case may be) disclosing that myself as soon as the article was published.

Why? Because the fact that I am either getting money or getting freebies by its very nature colours my perception of whoever is giving them to me. Tom Raftery hates them, and I know this. I, however, love them - in part because I’ve never had an issue with them, but also in part because they have given me something that makes me happy. I feel special, warm and fuzzy about Blacknight because they give me stuff, and the fact that they give me stuff slants my opinion of them.

Therefore, when a journalist asks me “What is the best blog hosting?” and I say “Blacknight,” this is not based on an survey of the market or even on my experience as a typical customer. My opinion is no longer impartial because I have an extra relationship with them, and it’s one that involves money, goods or services.

And if that’s true of €33 worth of free hosting for a tiny site that isn’t even running, it’s exponentially more true as the numbers and visibility go up. The web is incredibly powerful in forming opinion, and to not reveal a paid relationship when you endorse or evangelise about a company, product or service is an abuse of readers and viewers. It harms - and can potentially destroy - credibility.

Which, before you ever pull a referral, ship a product or sell a service, is the most important thing anyone has online.

The tiniest bit of internet sleuthing reveals that Dublin based marketing firm Inspiration were the SEO company behind Irish Greeting Card’s recent debacle. Their homepage proudly declares it, in fact.

The part that made my jaw drop, however, was the next notice on their home page:

Cathy McGovern, Inspiration was one of three guests invited by Enterprise Ireland’s eBusiness Unit to participate in a round-table discussion on issues surrounding eMarketing and how it can be exploited by SMEs in Ireland.

Emphasis mine. I don’t have a problem with Enterprise Ireland and I think they’re providing key help for a number of high potential start-ups. Given the state of the economy, God knows bright businesses need the help now more than any time in EI’s history.

Somehow, though, I don’t think this episode is the kind of “exploiting” EI had in mind when they funded Irish Greeting Cards for online marketing consulting. A relationship between EI and Inspiration would seem to exist, but if that’s the case, my hope is that in the name of upholding best (or even acceptable) practices for online business, EI’s eBusiness Unit terminates it.

Post haste.

I started cringing as soon as the email hit my Inbox and it just got worse from there.

A fairly new business called Irish Greeting Cards has been dumping little email missives onto a number of Irish bloggers today. From the badly worded, poorly punctuated and grammatically convoluted copy, we have:

We’ve just completed a major upgrade of the site… The cards are unique in that you can personalize most cards on the outside and your own message on the inside. What we’re looking for is for bloggers to mention the offer and site to their readers (if you think it might be useful to your readers of course) and point them to the Greeting Card Site and perhaps encourage their readers to tell people who might think the cards are worth ordering.

According to Mulley, this contacting campaign was devised by a SEO strategist hired by the company. I have no idea who this SEO guru is, which is good - because if I did, I’d be sorely tempted to haul him out back and shoot him. Frankly, this company had more than enough going against it to begin with without his specialist help.

I am willing to bet that this SEO expert also advised them on their spam blog. And wrote all the “content” himself, lovingly filling it with re-constituted pork. It’s easy to see exactly how much effort went into this grand affair.

The only thing they did right was to mention in the email that “We’re not looking for better Google rankings” and invite me to set my links to no-follow. Which is the only thing they asked me to do that I’ve actually been happy to comply with.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this is that I would have used this service. I hate trying to remember occasions in advance, I hate going to the post office, and I hate filling out cards. I have been looking for a service like this in Ireland so that I can pretend to care enough to send cards by being horrendously lazy and doing it online.

What could they have done better?

• Emailed me an offer to try their product myself. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to forget I have a blog. If I liked it, I’d have blogged it, just like I do with other online services I love using.
• Dropped in a humble PS invitation to tell my friends if I enjoyed my card sending experience with them. Blatant solicitations to pimp their untried products to my blog audience is not the kind of transparency we’re looking for.
• Not shat on the entire concept of blogging with the absolute worst example of… I’d say blogging, but that isn’t anything close to blogging. That’s using WordPress as a CMS for spam.

Granted, not having a product that sucks out loud would have helped, and a little more thought about their “Irish cards, Irish diaspora” positioning wouldn’t have hurt, either.

I mean, know I’m a transplant, but I’m pretty confident there’s nothing particularly Irish about stock images of toast.

Having said that, I’m desperate enough that I probably would have become a regular customer of this outfit and sent the crappy cards to my friends and relatives, just on the basis that they’re better than the cards they are currently not getting at all. At this point, however, all I can do is tell all my friends:

Don’t use Irish Greeting Cards.

Update

Apparently my RSS feed and Pat Phelan’s RSS feed decided yesterday to run off to Jamaica together. For about 20 minutes during a server hissy fit, his site re-directed to mine, and his millions of loyal follwers got my posts in their Pat Phelan feed.

We thought the problem was resolved after 20 minutes, so I’m test posting to see if this is still occurring or if our feeds have returned to their respective marital homes.

If you are a Pat Phelan reader, I apologise unreservedly for what must be a very confusing feed reading experience. If this issue is still occurring, there may be a subsequent post here to check the next fix has worked. Again, apologies.

It is rare that I make a supplier decision that makes me rave with happiness. It happens, but not often. This is one of those times.

The other day I blogged about choosing a project management system and my decision to go with Teamwork instead of ProjectPlace or Basecamp. Six days later I can report that Teamwork absolutely was the right decision - not only for the application, but for the team behind it.

In terms of functionality, there are a lot of things I like about Teamwork, but the things I love the most have nothing to do with managing projects. At the bottom of every page on my Teamwork site is a button that says Feedback/Suggestions. This isn’t just a form you fill out that disappears into the ether; it’s my feedback page. Every comment I make gets logged, timed, date stamped and posted there. And underneath every comment I make is Teamwork’s response to me. These people aren’t just filing away user feedback for some future user metrics calculation or later version rollout; they’re holding themselves accountable for responding to it.

I absolutely love that; it’s a real world, real value example of the transparency we all blather on and on about but so rarely see implemented in meaningful ways.

Way more than that, when these folks say “We take it all on board… seriously” they aren’t kidding. This morning at 9:06 I made a suggestion for a new feature. By noon, Dan Mackey had not only responded to me, but implemented my request:

As a product user, I’m really not sure what more I could ask for.

Alas, not everything is as flawless as Teamwork. Late last week Teamwork’s host, Hosting 365, suffered a denial of service attack and Teamwork was down for about two hours. Since I have quickly become a dedicated Teamwork junkie and am now using it to run my entire work life, I was on the phone to Teamwork in the first ten minutes. In the two hours that followed, I got two emails and a phone call to update me on the system status. That’s customer service - and I haven’t paid these people a single euro yet.

Today I caught up on some of my far-behind blog reading and read a post from Richard Hearne on another company doing things right: Intertrade Ireland is running around trying to get bloggers to raise the profile of Seedcorn, and managing to do it without pissing off the entire internet. Seedcorn’s got €280,000 for startups who are really going for it. I think Teamwork is a fantastic application with a huge potential audience. It’s an Irish Web 2.0 company with an actual, functioning revenue model, and I think they should enter.

The only thing that would make me happier is if they’d sign their feedback responses to me with “Lurve, Teamwork.”

After slacking off for a shameful uh, two years, I attended my very first Cork Open Coffee on Friday when Bernie Goldbach lied to me to get me to go. I had sort of imagined five spoddy boys and the divine smelling Conor O’Neill huddled round weak cups of tea, but it was actually a jam-packed, vigorous and entirely delightful event where I got to catch up with a ton of people and meet a ton more.

I will be a dedicated city centre attendee from now on, so between Open Coffees and the parade of other fun events scheduled over the next few months, it’s shaping up to be a fun summer here in the People’s Republic. Here’s what’s on my calendar:

• 17 June: A farewell dinner for Tom Raftery at Proby’s Bistro before he leaves for the warmer, spicier climates of Spain.
• 27 or 28 June: Lunch with Deb Hadley (formerly of the Humble Housewife and now of Tast.ie) in Cork at Cafe Paradisio.
• 16 July: The very first Open Coffee BBQ in Ireland will take place in Terryglass Village in Tipperary. There will be casual presentations, and I’m hoping to do a gig with Frank Prendergast provisionally titled How the Hell Do I Hire a Web Designer. Eimear the Wonderdog will also be in attendance.

So if you’ve any interest in food, technology or just some fun events with some really great people, sign your name on the appropriate dotted line and we’ll see you there!

It isn’t very often that you get to watch a real live-action example of true crisis PR. But when you do, it’s always instructive, and usually amusing in that “bang head against wall, wash, rinse, repeat” kind of way.

This weekend, The Planet experienced a catastrophic outage when a transformer at H1, their Houston data center, exploded, blew out the walls of the electrical room, and started a fire. The building was evacuated, the fire brigade called, and at the insistance of the fire chief, all power - including backup power - shut down.

The good news: nobody was hurt, and data on all 9,000 servers was secure. The bad news: none of the servers had any power.

I do not consider this to be a particular failing of The Planet. Catastrophes happen, even with the best of plans. While it sucks for the people affected, and we were lucky to not be on that list, at the end of the day people, not hosts, are responsible for data resiliency and catastropic backup plans. If you’re not prepared to pay for the technical know-how and costs associated with that, then you’re either not running anything mission critical (my blog: not mission critical) or you’re going to have to be prepared to suck it every now and then.

Amidst all the bitching, moaning, threats of law suits, and small contingent of cheer leading, The Planet did a lot of things right:

• Within hours, they promised updates every sixty minutes on their forum, and delivered them - even if all they had to report that there was no update.
• They let customers know very early on that their SLAs would be honoured and that refunds and credits would be calculated as soon as normal operations resumed.
• They pulled in manpower from their vendors, contractors and staff in the middle of the night on a weekend and worked for 28 straight hours to rebuild a power system virtually from scratch and manage a huge volume of support calls.

There were also some extremely odd choices made, some of which are harmful to their PR. As everyone playing along at home can guess, these failures were primarily in the area of transparency:

• NONE of these updates appeared on The Planet’s blog. Not a single word. If you were pissed off enough to hunt down and root through their customer forum, you got info. If you go to their blog, which is where you’d expect to get crisis updates, you get bupkis.
• For a particular set of legacy customers, both NS1 and NS2 nameservers were both hosted in the H1 data center. This was an example of EPIC FAIL on the part of The Planet, one which they remained basically silent about while the 3,000 customers hosed by this oversight were still without websites.
• They did not post photos of the crispy data center. Seriously, guys: pics or it didn’t happen.

But there is one more thing they didn’t do that was a complete no brainer. Let us assume that several thousand people were on the phone, screaming for their boxes to be rescued from the embers and transported to the nearest operating DC. Let us also assume that there are only a certain number of boxes The Planet can fit into the racks in Dallas. At that point, you either take the customers who make you the most money, or knowing that you’re going to lose a boatload of customers one way the other other anyway, you take the customers who are in a position to do the most damage to your reputation.

They should have located the servers that host b3ta, the world’s most awesome and snarkiest website for nerds and geeks, picked them up, put them in a car, driven them to the Dallas data centre and prayed to the gods of DNS propagation for mercy.

But they didn’t. And three days later, b3ta is still in the “hosed” camp, without a website* and instead running an emergency forum, where the punters are predictably making “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” jokes and creating graphics that will commemorate this event for far longer than The Planet’s lack of blog entries.

This is really not a group of people you want to fuck with.

A couple of weeks ago I took the early morning train up to Dublin to renew my accidentally expired passport. The US Embassy in Dublin is open for approximately 3 hours each morning, 4 days a week, so this meant getting on the very first train from Cork and I still barely made it before they closed for what is presumably a 21 hour lunch.

Entering the compound one might politely describe as The Ugliest Building in Dublin was a very bizarre experience. In the US, I’m used to armed police on the streets, metal detectors in schools and heavy security at shopping malls. In Ireland, none of that happens. So it is extremely disconcerting to find ones self in Ballsbridge, entering an already freaky compound through something that very closely approximates airport security complete with uniformed guards, a metal detector, an x-ray belt for my handbag, and the requirement to leave both my phone and my nail scissors at the checkpoint. I spent more than a moment wondering if I was being shielded from a potential hostage situation or actually be taken hostage.

Neither event came to pass and everyone was exceedingly nice, from the guards to the cashier to the lovely French woman who helped me complete my application. My new passport was required for our mortgage paperwork, so I was anxious to get it back as soon as possible and minimise any delays. When the form asked for my email address, I provided it willingly so that the consulate could have one more way of contacting me if there were any issues.

There was no opt in/opt out checkbox and no disclaimer or fine print of any kind, so I naturally assumed my email address would be used only for purposes pertaining to the application on which I provided it.

Today, three days after the prompt delivery of my shiny new passport, I received an email from wardendublin@state.gov - something long and rambling to do with absentee ballots and Minnesota. Here it is in all its spammy glory:

First of all, I have no idea what they’re on about, nor do I care. I have never lived in Minnesota and doubt I could locate it on a map if challenged to do so. I have certainly never voted in Minnesota, and voting information specific to Minnesota is irrelevant to me - as it is to every other US expat in Ireland who is from any of the 49 states not named Minnesota.

Second of all, and far more irritating, is the following:

• I have no idea what this list is. It is not identified in any way in the footer. The sender, likewise, is unidentified.
• I did not ask to be on this list, and at no point was I told that my information would be used for what amounts to federal spam.
• Most importantly, there is no mechanism provided for me to opt out of this list now that I’m on it.

I am, to say the least, irate. I have an immediate need to drop someone’s trousers and hand out a suitably painful, lesson-instilling spanking. I am absolutely positive that this practice must break a US or EU spam law, and I am old and crotchety and spoiling for a law suit.

I don’t want to write a letter to some dusty office in Dublin, Brussels or Minnesota; I want to haul someone into court and beat them up for their pocket change, because I am exactly that pissed off.

So tell me, dear interpipes, who do I sue? Seriously.

I need, very badly, an accounts assistant.

In short, I need someone to come to my house, plop down on one of our many, many laptops, and enter invoices, payments, receipts and expenses into the spreadsheet supplied by my accountants, then file them carefully in some sort of tabbed monthly notebook thing. If this person could also go through our pile of bills and make me write cheques and then actually drop them in the post as well, I will love them forever. I need someone to do this with more financial accumen and love for spreadsheets than I myself posses.

I’m looking for someone for about 2 hours a week, and I’m probably looking for a SAHM or UCC student who just wants to put Accounting 101 to work for some extra cash. I love telecommuting but for this, I need an actual human - preferably a capable, competent one.

We are currently located in Cork’s city centre off of Shandon Street, and will (hopefully) be re-locating to very near UCC this summer. The upside is that I am the very definition of flexible; I don’t care what day or what time you come and it doesn’t need to be the same day or time each week. Also, the coffee here is very serious and the kettle is always on. The downside is that I smoke and I’m not planning to quit any time terribly soon.

If you know anyone or you yourself are interested in this gig, please send me either an informal CV or just an email to sabrina [at] sabrinadent [dot] com. Thanks!

Dear Internets:

I am completely willing to admit I do not know everything. I believe in taking advice on the things I am clueless about, usually from you and your pal Doctor Google. Foolhardy, possibly; but it’s always worked for me.

This year marks a transition for me from being part-time employee and part-time freelancer to being full-time self employed. It also marks the year in which we will, at some point, be applying for a mortgage. (Yes, I am 35 years old. No, I don’t own my own house. I’ve also lived in three countries in 10 years and been broke in all of them; give me a break.)

So while getting my financial ducks in a row is a high priority, the broader world of full-time freelance is also a bit of a mystery I hope to unravel with your help.

Things mama never told me about service providers:

• Where can I find an accountant or financial adviser in Cork to do my stuff and give me advice about setting aside enough money for taxes and paying PRSI and all that jazz?
• As my previous employer will no longer be paying my mobile bill, which I’ve never even seen, I need to know which provider and plan to go with. Hint: I like to talk. I do not believe SMS is a medium in which real adults can carry on real conversations. That said I really only use my mobile when traveling in Ireland (about once a month) but can rack up several hours in calls then.

Speaking of money, down to the nitty gritty:

I have no idea what market rates are in Ireland. I design sites, I code sites; I provide consulting and strategy for online marketing and positioning; I package and brand products; I write understandable web copy that reads like it comes from humans; I do site assessments, usability analysis, and user testing.

For all of these things, I have been charging a figure that is less than €50 an hour, except for usability testing - I charge test group costs plus the same hourly for that. The people who are paying me are telling me to charge more, and I know they’re right but I have don’t know what the right numbers are.

• What should I be charging for all of these various things?
• How can I keep costs accessible for people who have fun and interesting projects but low budgets? I often like those projects; they tend to refresh my creativity and I don’t want to price myself out of ever being offered them.
• If you’re booking clients months in advance, do you take a deposit now to block out the time for them at a future date? Usually I do 50% up front and 50% on delivery or go-live, depending, but getting 50% now for something I am not going to get to for three months seems a little dodgy.
• What do you do if you’re killing yourself to stay on top of a series of tight production schedules and a client doesn’t have their bits ready for their project’s agreed upon start date? My contracts state that if they can’t deliver their clearly articulated To Do list, delivery dates will be pushed accordingly, but what if you literally do not have room for slippage?

So, dear Internets, do you have any words of wisdom and experience for me? This is my year of Getting Things Done, and I’d like to do them right.

Yours, always,
Sabrina