Homerun: Beware-There’s No Free Lunch, Movies or Facials

Okay. Who started this Homerun thing, anyway? I received an email from an old acquaintance whom I’ve not seen in years offering me free movie tickets from Homerun. I was delighted, because I love movies in general, and free movies even more.

Not sure what this was all about, I clicked on Homerun and noodled around for a while, knowing full well that there isn’t any free lunch. I couldn’t figure out what it was all about, lost interest, closed the app and deleted the email. End of story, right? I wish it were that simple.

Within a few days, I received several emails from friends and colleagues thanking me for the free movie tickets. What? One of my friends told me that she had received five emails from me offering free stuff–spa treatments, movies, facials, etc. This was alarming. I googled Homerun, and search results included Ripoffreport.com and scamchecker.com. Both of these sites monitor and report on internet scams, and both are all over Homerun.

The complaints are based on Phishing–a way of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. I read some of the reports on the Scam sites, and one guy’s entire contact list received Homerun emails from him–none of which he originated or gave anyone permission to send.

This is so insidious. A techie friend’s advice is to not open any Homerun email that hits your inbox because you’re setting yourself up to have your contact list poached. I wish I’d had that advice when I opened my first message that started this whole mess.

What can you do? Go to spamchecker.com and ripoffreport.com and file reports. I did that, which will probably go nowhere, but it does provide an opportunity to vent. What’s scary is that Homerun’s antics feel like a cross between identity theft and a computer virus–neither of which you have any control over once they get started.

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Social media: the help menus suck; learning lessons the hard way

I manage social media for my clients, and it’s no wonder people are intimidated by social media. Listen to this one:

I logged into Twitter for one client, and dropped all 1000+ contacts into the Invite Friends field, then got a screen that said that Twitter was over capacity, to come back later.

This has happened before, so I waited an hour or so, then tried again and received the same message. I figured that the application could not process that many contacts, so I broke the list in two, inviting 500 people in two batches and received the same message.

Now that I had pretty much confirmed that Twitter was pooped and couldn’t manage large lists, I broke the contact list down further and invited contacts in batches of 100. The message that I received after each 100-contact invitation was a confirmation that I had sent an invite to 100 contacts. I sent my client a little report telling her that her list of 1000+ contacts had been invited and confirmed by Twitter.

I wish that were it. Unfortunately, I got a message the next day from my client, and her clients had been sending her hate mails complaining that they’d received 4-5 invitations to share her Tweets on Twitter. I was horrified. So many people are being dragged kicking and screaming into this online space and when something like this happens, it is a huge setback, especially for my client, who is very gingerly trying to embrace the social media phenomenon.

I talked to one of my pals about this, and he used the B-word, calling it a bug, but it is this kind of thing that makes people crazy. It’s not the strategic issues–things like accountability, measurement or analytics that people can’t get their arms around; rather, it’s the day-to-day usability issues. I learned this little lesson the hard way, and at the expense of my client. But what’s frustrating is that the only way you can learn this kind of thing is from trial and error–which always seems to come at a cost.

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Google’s new Also Include field: What were they thinking?

I have one question: What were they thinking? A few days ago, I clicked on “Compose” to send a email to one of my colleagues, and I noticed that there was now a new field at the right hand side of my screen on the same line as the CC and BCC fields that said: Also include, with the names of several people whom I often included on emails to this colleague.

When I clicked on these live email addresses; they were inserted into the CC field. I tried deleting them, but these guys weren’t going away. I totally freaked out. I thought that now whenever I sent an email to this colleague or any other who was project-related, these other names would appear. I went to google’s Help section, and clearly, I was not alone in being horrified at this new functionality.

I wanted to send an email to my friend Jim, but it was personal, and I didn’t want his grown children who showed up in the Also include line to be cc’d. I was frustrated because I just wanted to send him–just him–an email, and couldn’t figure out how to do this.

I reached out to a techie colleague and a big gmail user, and he did a little research and figured out that google was just suggesting these names. Unless I clicked on them and inserted them into the CC field, they would NOT be included in the email. I did a few tests, and, thankfully, he was right. But the fact remains that this is a very confusing feature. It’s easy enough to create a distribution list or just start typing the names of those whom you want included into either the To, CC or BC fields of an email.

I think rolling out this feature without any kind of warning is very, very bad policy.

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Empty Fields = Missed Opportunities

I do a lot of social media work for my clients. They know they should be using these channels, but don’t have the time or interest to figure this out. And can you blame them? What is it with Facebook? They’re always fooling around with the interface, the Help menu is absolutely worthless and usability issues bring you to your knees. No wonder people are overwhelmed by these social media apps.

I was reading some things about how you sabotage yourself on Linkedin. Some of these are really fundamental, but I was looking at some profiles, and sure enough, a lot of people were missing the boat.

In general, never–ever–miss an opportunity to provide information about yourself and your company. If there’s a field, fill it in. Remember that it’s not just about your LI presence, but contributes to your SEO strategy.

• Update your message frequently. I try to swap mine out daily, though I don’t always make it. Prepare a week’s worth of messages at a time. That way, you can just upload it every morning without having to think.
• Include links. Keep people happy by giving them something to click on. Keep an eye out for articles or other information that is relevant to your audience.
• Ask people to give you recommendations. Offer to do the same for them so that there’s a better chance of their doing it. If you really like them, ask them to post the same testimonial on Yelp–a lot of people place high value on Yelp recommendations.

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