DriveTraffic’s owner, Darlene Moore, is going to try her hand (or is that leg?) at running for the first time ever by participating in the annual Santa Shuffle on December 1.

The Santa Shuffle is a 5k event that supports The Salvation Army/Armée du Salut. Secure online donations can be made at the Running Room Events web site with your credit card.

For more information about the Ottawa Santa Shuffle 2007 on Saturday December 1, 2007, please visit https://www.events.runningroom.com/site/?raceId=3130.

Thank you for your generous support for The Salvation Army/Armée du Salut. View my fundraising progress!

Some of our clients are without electricity and telephone during these terrible fires in Southern California. We are hopeful that you and your families remain safe and are able to return to your homes later this week.

Thinking of clients and colleagues….

I always get asked the question from people who stay on the edge of the SEM industry, how do I sort the wheat from the chaff?

In other words how do they know what to believe when they are reading a variety of sources? My answer is to practice - don’t just read but put into practice what you are reading and see if it works.

Now I have a question…how do I sort the wheat from the chaff that emails me? On Thursday morning I received the following email from a Toronto Communications Firm. Smells fishy to me but the phone number does represent the company; I wonder if this persons boss knows that they are unprepared for a 2pm meeting and are desperately trying to hawk someone’s work for their own presentation?

Hello - I represent and am assisting a significant client in finding an SEO/SEM consulting organization. I found your site and was impressed with how you present your business.

I would love to be able to either talk to someone or better yet get a credentials presentation from you that I can review with my client. Here’s the rub - I need it by 1pm today (Thursday) as I am meeting them at 2pm.

Please either call me or e-mail if you have questions. I monitor this address constantly.

Regards,

I was out of the office and would not have had time to respond anyway. I save urgent requests for existing clients, not communications firms that are desperately trying to look prepare for this afternoon’s meeting…

Would you have responded?

Yes this is a plug - but there is a reason for the plug :-) I wanted to take a moment to thank Sheila from www.ComputerTamers.ca for helping me get rid of leftover program files and horrible spyware from my computer last week.

She logged on remotely to my computer, asked questions, had me “drive” at times and essentially after 2 hours had my computer cleaned right up.

Before you waste another day trying to get rid of viruses, spyware, defragging, etc. please consider giving Sheila a call to do it for you - use your time on you, not your computer!

Recently my colleague and I purchased an Ikea glass table top and base online…err…over the phone because you can’t actually complete a transaction online - something to do with calculating shipping.

We had an Ikea home installer come to the office and assemble this and other furniture that we purchased for a recent tradeshow - he told us that we were missing a piece. I called Ikea online and they told me to go to a store to get the piece; unfortunately there are only 2 stores in Canada that carry this inventory and neither one are near me. I did call one in Edmonton but I didn’t reach the store, I reached some other warehouse or something and they did not have the product nearby to check for missing pieces that could be sent to us.

Long story short, the glass table top (Billsta) does not attach to the Billsta table base - you need to have another table top between the two of them such as a wooden table top and you set the glass table top above. After much humming and hawing, the local Ikea store returned our purchase, excluding shipping.

I called the online shopping number again to request the shipping fees be returned - after again more humming and hawing and speaking with a product specialist, they pointed out that there is a section on the website that has the headline “good to know” and underneath this headline it says “To be placed on BILLSTA table top”.

Is that a warning? It looked like an upsell to me today when I read it! Was it even there a few weeks ago when I made the purchase?

At the end of the day I have invested hours into this purchase which I no longer have and simply desired my $45 in shipping to be refunded. A big fat no is the answer, even when I told them that it meant losing my future business, that of my colleague and our designer - three unhappy customers all for $45? Give me a store credit - think of the big picture here - customer service!

I guess Ikea doesn’t have to… but eventually they will…there are other stores that sell cheap furniture, both online and off, and will hurt Ikea’s reputation and bottom line.

At least one can hope *sigh*

I always say there is a lesson to be learned from this and my lesson today is that I desire to provide good customer service to all of my customers all the time.