Internet Issues, Close to Home and Far Away

Today just proves that the issues facing an internet marketer can be very diverse!

Google has once again set tongues a-waggin' in the internet industry with the announcement of their proposed new free email service, Gmail. Now first of all, the announcement came on April Fool's Day, so not a few people thought it was some kind of joke. Considering that Google further stated that each user would get 1GB of storage space, and that emails would never be deleted. They also stated that all messages would be scanned, and appropriate advertisements inserted. The same press release mentioned applying for jobs on the moon...

Except for the lunar outpost, everything was, in fact, actual fact. Google really is debuting a new free email service to a select group of users, and it does indeed have all of the features mentioned above. This has created a veritable firestorm of posts on forums and blogs throughout the industry, along with an instant condemnation by privacy advocates. Issue #1 is the "forever" aspect of your emails: If they are never deleted, then personal messages will always be available somewhere, for prying eyes to see. Whether or not this is likely, it IS possible, and reaction ranges from disapproval to outright fear. Issue #2 is the ads being placed into the emails. Many people feel that humans will be reading their emails, even though Google insists it is just their spiders that will do the reading. Even so, do we really want to see our personal messages peppered with paid advertisements? Google says this very advertising is necessary to pay for the service. I will say only this: Extra storage space is nice, but this "free" email service seems to charge a high price in return. If you have any privacy issues at all, or if you are already turned off by the advertising that has permeated every corner of the web, then this service is probably not for you.

On another front, we have found yet another case of someone basically stealing one of our websites. In this case, they replaced virtually every word on the site with "pancake". Not every word, though, and using the company name was enough of a coattail to ride on, to get them a nice high Google ranking under one search term we tried. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then our ears are certainly burning over here. Much more flattery of this nature, and we may start changing our websites every single day!

Finally, we have been having internet issues. Specifically, bandwidth and connection issues. This is not a good situation for an internet marketing company. At certain times of the day, our connection speeds were getting extremely slow, and when we added two more users, we even started getting service interruptions. A review of our DSL contract showed that we should be getting 1Mb, more than enough for our needs. Investigation showed we were getting more like 256K, and discussions with our provider were unhelpful, to say the least. Accordingly, we investigated alternate internet providers, and have hooked up our cable internet today on a test basis. So far, it's about six times faster.

There are business lessons to be learned from this experience, which carry through to all types of businesses, in all circumstances. The first thing is to watch where your money goes and make sure you're getting what you pay for. If we hadn't added the two extra users, we would never have investigated the DSL service, and never would have found out that we were, essentially, getting cheated. This just proves, again, that it's worth following up on things that seem wrong. As an internet-based company, we should have known better.

The other thing is the policy of keeping good business relationships. Our former internet provider has lost not only a client, but a company that referred business to them. This is a direct result of how they chose to address the situation of of promising us 1Mb when they in fact only delivered 256K. Instead of trying to make good, they instead basically claimed that we should be happy with what we were getting, which was substandard service, and refused to promise that it would improve in the future.