Why is this so hard to get right? In the software arena, missed project deadlines, or worse buggy software, are chronic problems that have plagued the industry since day one.

In the web space, projects suffer even worse. Often, unlike their software brethren, web projects don’t have dedicated QA (quality assurance – testing), network and deployment topology is a neglected after thought, and the under-resourced team has to live with a schedule that basically consists of “get it up ASAP, we will fix it later”.

Some days this is cause for despair. If a big company like BP can’t get a drilling project right, how can we keep a large web application smoothly running, given all the cards stacked against it in the first place?

It is the very transient nature of the web that saves us. Sure the code was slapped up there ASAP and sure it was hacked and tinkered with to massage it to ever changing requirements (”well now that I see it … it needs to …”), but web infrastructure often doesn’t last. Web sites are continually evolving and changing. A project is doing well if it lasts more than 3 years without a major rewrite. Vendor platforms get swapped in and out like a new pair of shoes.

With the web we can tear down the foundations and rebuild at the whim of the latest VP. It just takes money. We don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike BP. And given the chaotic nature of the web .. that’s a good thing.

Last week Facebook introduced a new feature that “allowed non Facebook partner sites to personalize your experience using your public Facebook data”. The partner sites listed are Microsoft Docs, Pandora, Yelp.

The fact that the default setting was “Allow” immediately touched off a furry of posts that urged friends to: “Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck “Allow”. Please copy & repost.” I got at least 4 of them in one day. I did wonder whether most actually read through the feature, or just participated in the knee jerk reaction “there goes Facebook trampling on my privacy again”.

It’s easier to opt out than to think through the ramifications, which are pretty broad. First of all you have to think through what about you is public, not just public public, but to your network. Someone who is not my facebook friend can see quite bit about me because he is in my “network” (depending on how your privacy settings are set). And if my facebook friends don’t opt out, they can still share my public info with these sites, even if I opt out, to prevent that I have to explicitly block the actual applications. So perhaps it is time to review those settings again to more tightly control what is public.

Do I really want the guy in accounting to know I listen to speed death metal? That I gave a poor review to a steak house because I’m a militant vegetarian (for the record I like trip hop, electronica, folk and do eat meat). Do I really want my facebook identity linked with my yelp persona? A site that that tinkers with review placement?

I’ve done all of one (yes just one) yelp review, and I use last.fm more than pandora, so it’s not likely not that big of an issue for me, but sharing data like this is huge and will have unanticipated rippling effects. In the end it’s a control issue. Better make sure those electronic footprints show up where I want, so let’s opt out in a futile but proud gesture.

BTW, anyone see the South Park Facebook episode? Great episode, unfortunately overshadowed by the episode 201 controversy.

It seems for some of us, that twitter and facebook is the new virtual watercooler. For me at least it’s a handy way to track the goings on of my mostly past colleagues (and a few that are still present).

I know that one of my overseas colleagues is mad for cricket and tweets on the fortunes of his home team. I wasn’t surprised when one of my past colleagues was quoted in the Economist on his views on Cloud Computing, because I have followed his writing efforts on twitter. A past member of a team I managed has turned into quite the wine connoisseur. This is all courtesy of social media.

While not a substitute for real world interactions, Twitter and Facebook are not a bad placeholder for the social discourse I miss by not getting out of the house.

No one really should be using IE 6. Its security failings are widely known and missing features such as tabs should goad anyone to upgrading to IE7 or IE8, if they wish to continue using Internet Explorer, rather than Firefox.

In fact a recent eWeek article tied google’s recent announcement to the gmail Chinese hacker incident, where hackers that originated from China got access to gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents, apparently exploiting security holes in IE 6 to place some malware for download onto user’s computers. Google in their blog simply points out that the web is evolving at a fast rate and the newer browser versions offer a better experience.

The change will first roll out on google docs and sites on March 1st and then work its way through calendar and gmail through out 2010.

Bottom line? It’s time to upgrade.

These moments are so wonderful when they happen that sometimes they blind us to how to win the game. Which is … consistency and high percentages of not necessarily winners but keeping the ball in play.

Consistency is what we all need to do more with in our jobs and our businesses. Would you rather have a site that was a flash in the plan and earned a lot of money in one week or the site that is a steady if not spectacular earner for years?

Think of this in the context of PPC vs. SEO as a SEM strategy. While arguments can be made to the contrary, PPC in general is better for quick results and SEO is slower and works best with consistent efforts. Which one do you prefer?

It’s no wonder that Facebook attracted 25 million new users in the last month alone.

Facebook, a phenomenon that started with the under 35 set, is maturing in both demographics and uses. Facebook was born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and originally only for college students. A year later, high school students were allowed in. In 2006, Facebook got rid of its gatekeepers and began letting anyone in.

Over the next year, it grew from 12 million to 50 million users. Then it launched versions in Spanish, French and German. Today about 175 million people are on Facebook.

While most Facebook users are younger than 35, so many older people are now using it that the portion of the college-age users has dropped to 41 percent. Robert Scoble, a blogging and social media technology expert, says eventually Facebook’s popularity will slow — but not any time soon. And it remains hip with the college crowd.

“Having older people there doesn’t affect your experience,” Scoble said. “It’s segregated. You have your friends and your whole experience there is based on who your friends are.”

Of course some overlap occurs. Parents are finding that Facebook is a good way to keep in touch with their college age children who previously forgot to email or call. Of course some young people in college may be a little wary of their parents keeping tabs on them that way, however most just remove a few pictures that the parents might not appreciate.

The older crowd is here to stay on Facebook, in fact UC Davis is examining the “effectiveness of social media used by the higher education sector to communicate philanthropic news”. In other words, UC Davis thinks there might be enough people on Facebook with enough cash to help fund higher education. Since Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign, which heavily leveraged social media, it has become acceptable to run social media fundraising campaigns. Entrepreneurs are following suit and are using it to reinforce and create new business connections.

Think about the essence of a marketing campaign. You decide on your messaging and branding and with certain key activities you build momentum and buzz towards your event. This translates well to Facebook. Your Info tab .. or even better your business page, informs everyone about and even brands you and your business and your Facebook activity builds momentum towards the event you are marketing. It’s a natural fit.

Whether you plan to use the internet purely for personal reasons or you are looking for professional networking, Facebook will open doors you didn’t even know were there.

While clearly, in today’s turbulent times, keeping your head down is attractive, I found this article an odd juxtaposition with the revolution in branding that social media is creating. Corporate branding, ho hum, personal branding is what is hot. If you haven’t figured out, you are brandU. What we say and do on twitter, facebook and our blogs becomes part of the gestalt that defines the online perception of who we are and what we have to offer.

So what does your brand say about you? Is it disorganized and not clear? Show me yours! As someone whose brand is not as together as I would like, I would love to see a a great example. Just post your URL or social media handle
below.

The two trends to watch are use of twitter for branding, as Martha Stewart has, and the its search engine.

If you haven’t jumped yet onto the twitter bandwagon, check out this blog post I got from the Web 2.0 group on LinkedIn, an excellent group of links on using twitter.

Every morning she had cold-cuts for breakfast. When when guests came to her home, she served them only croissants and jam, because she had never heard of cooking.

One day her friend Mary called her, in great excitement. Mary told Suzie that she had just discovered a something new and wonderful, and that it was called cooking. Mary hastily explained that she had come across an advertisement on the Internet, which explained what cooking was.

After hearing a few sentences of explanation from Mary, Suzie got very excited herself. Amazing! One could actually put food into pots and pans, heat it up, do different things with it, and then one would not have to live off of croissants and cold-cuts.

But it got better. Mary went on to explain that cooking wasn’t only for experts, but that that anyone – even someone like she or Suzy, could learn to cook. And that in fact, they could do it right from the comfort of their own homes.

“Wow!” Suzy said. “How do I learn this?” Then, a little timidly, she asked, “Do I have to go to expensive night school? Because I don’t have ….”

“Oh no!” Mary said. “You don’t have to go to night school. I found a wonderful website online, and there is a very nice girl there, who will teach you how to cook. All you have to do is buy her eBook for $37.00. You can download it any time (even if it is 2 am!) and start cooking right away!”

Suzy ran to her kitchen computer and logged on. She quickly bought the eBook entitled “Cook at Home.”

The next day, Suzy was so excited, she even skipped her cold cuts. She grabbed a glass of milk (she had never heard of coffee yet, because that would have involved cooking) and opened up her eBook. She began to read it avidly.

On page 3 of the eBook, the author recommended a free software program which would help Suzie measure her flour and sugar, in case she needed to double or triple a recipe. So Suzy downloaded the software. (Of course, she had to enter her email address first, but that was okay, because it was free. Besides, they offered to send her a very helpful free newsletter!)

On page 10 of the eBook on cooking, Suzie arrived to her first recipe. It taught her how to make scrambled eggs. Suzy went to the kitchen, and got out an old frying pan that had belonged to her great-grandmother. “Ah, so that’s what this thing is for!” she said. She had butter, but no eggs. So she went to the store.

Suzy got caught in traffic and by the time she came back from the store, it was two hours later and she was very tired. She logged on to check her email. She was pleasantly surprised to see that already had the first issue of her newsletter!

The newsletter explained to her that, while most people tell you to cook with a frying pan, that’s really old-fashioned and slow. And that the best way to really cook was to get a special pan called the Super-Sonic-Fryer – which would “fry her eggs in less time than it takes a sun beam to get to the other end of the milky way”! That sounded exciting, so Suzy went to buy that Super Sonic Frying Pan.

The next day before Suzy started on her cooking exercises, she decided to search around Google a bit to see if anyone else had tried the super sonic frying pan. She got a bit distracted through, but that was okay. Because she came across something very exciting. A bread cookbook!

The advertisement explained that there are lots of things to cook, but nothing as powerful and effective as bread. And that, if she really wanted to succeed as a cook, she had to bake bread.

So Suzie of course downloaded that eBook and began to make bread.

Half-way through the recipe she realized she needed to buy yeast, so she went out and bought some.

When she returned, another newsletter had arrived. And this was exciting! It said, “Forget scrambled eggs, forget bread, that stuff is for the birds. What you really should make, is Italian pasta!!” Not only that , but if she signed up now, she would be eligible for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (which could expire at any moment). She could sign up for a free online course, and for only $29 per month, she could learn how to make all kinds of Italian Pasta – everything from tortellini, to ravioli, to spaghetti, and more.

So of course, Suzy forgot about her eggs and her bread, and she hastily purchased this new Italian Cooking eCourse. Her incomplete scrambled eggs project was no longer useful, so she threw it away. She had some bread dough rising, but while she was studying her new Italian Cooking eCourse, she forgot all about it – and it eventually fell flat and had to be thrown away as well.

A week later Suzy was depressed. She had bought all these eBooks and materials on how to Cook at Home, and had been working furiously at it, but she had yet to make a single dish!

All was not lost, however. She saw an ad for a new cookbook, which was said to be quite excellent. According to the testimonials on the sales page, many people had been trying for years to learn to cook at home, but only had success after they read that cookbook.

So, with a sigh, she bought it. Maybe this one would have the answer she was looking for.

Two months later, Suzie had accumulated an entire bookshelf full of cookbooks. Her refrigerator was full of leftovers of incomplete dishes she had begun to prepare. But she had not yet completed a single dish. Not even a piece of toast!

Suzie sat back in her big chair and let out a long, sad sigh.

“Well, she said. I guess those people who tried to warn me were right. I’ll never Cook at Home. Cooking is a scam!”

The above is a true story. But its not about Suzie, and its not about cooking.

Its about Internet Marketers like you and me.

Some people succeed at Internet Marketing, and others don’t. Why? Well, there could be many reasons.

But first and foremost – do you finish what you start?

Or do you hop and jump from one idea to the next, in search of the next great recipe?

Do you start to generate income with a certain method, only to receive an email which tells you how “that method is really slow and if you really want to make money online, now, fast, then what you should actually do is …..”

Do you have so many good ideas that you start on all of them, so that none of them can get the amount of attention they truly need, in order to succeed? Well, if you do, don’t be surprised at what you probably wind up with – a bunch of incomplete projects that haven’t yet begun to generate substantial income.

You’ve heard people say “take action,” and that’s true. You’ll never get any eggs scrambled if you sit around reading cookbooks all day, and you’ll never make any money online if all you do is read eBooks.

But there is a little more to it. Suzie took action, but she never followed through. She took on more cooking projects than she had time for, and none were completed.

As an Internet Marketer, you are most likely trying to build up streams of income. It might be a website which generates regular sales or ad revenue. Or it might be another successful campaign. So, in a sense, those projects are never really “done” (unless you drop them).

But there is a phase when you are still establishing and building up that income stream, and there is a phase when that income stream is actually creating regular revenue (which can ideally be maintained without a lot of work).

If you don’t carry your projects through past that first phase, you will wind up with a bunch of projects that are still in the “establishment” stages, but not generating substantial income.

It takes self-discipline and control to stick to a project and carry through with it until it is successful. It can be very easy to be led off in many different directions in search of greener fields.

Its a continuous pull. Call it what you like – diversion, distraction, persuasion, or “the call of the inbox …” It will always be there, perched on the side of the highway, ready to pull you off the road at any moment, like a vulture waiting for vulnerable prey to pass.

Be alert to it, and continue to push forward with your current project.

————————

Anna Williams article, “The Story of Suzie” was originally posted on Holly Mann’s Blog
Anna has written a basic and succinct post following this story, which contains some simple rules you can remember, to keep you on track and progressing. To read this post please visit If You Want a Project to Succeed at Anna’s blog.

Has this happened to you? You’ve joined a program or built a site and you know that your most important task every day is to drive traffic to that site. Even though you know that you must drive traffic to that site, that the very survival of your enterprise depends on that traffic; you waste countless hours every week opening the offers that flood your inbox every day instead of promoting your own site or program. Come on admit it. Everyone does it, but the really successful marketers are able to focus their energy like a laser on their single most important marketing task.

It’s hard to not look at all the offers that you receive every day. After all, marketers everywhere continue to use email to get their message out and some of them are very creative people. The subject lines in your inbox are screaming, “Open Me” as loud as possible. As an intelligent person you are naturally curious to find out what’s inside that message. Don’t do it! For more please visit online marketing

As enticing as those subject lines are, don’t waste your time opening them up. You have already built your site or chosen your program. You need to be promoting only that site or program. The time that you waste looking at someone else’s offer can never be recovered. Each of us only gets 24 hours per day. You need to spend as many of those 24 hours promoting your site or chosen program. Until your site ranks high enough to get natural traffic from the search engines, your primary task is to drive traffic to your site – nothing else.

One way to stay focused on your online enterprise is to protect the email addresses that are linked to your offer. Never use these addresses to join lists or subscribe to newsletters. If you do, in no time the mailboxes will be filled with offers instead of messages pertinent to your enterprise. For example, use sales@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com and info@yourdomain.com for the payment, customer support and general information requirements of your site and never use them for anything else. That way you can get through your daily email chores quickly and have more time for traffic generation. For more please visit internet marketing