Happy Birthday, Google!

Google 13th Birthday Doodle
Google celebrates its 13th birthday with a special Google Doodle!

It’s hard to believe, but the website most of us use everyday to start just about anything we do online didn’t exist until 13 years ago.

Their rise to dominance didn’t take place until later, but the company was incorporated in September, 1998. By 2000, they were processing 100 million searches per day… and of course, today they own the US search market. (Market share varies depending who measures it and what they measure… but for all intents & purposes, they’re the search engine that matters.)

In addition to the 28,000 people they employ directly, Google and its products have an impact on the businesses, careers and income on an incredibly high number of people. I’m sure someone has tried to do it, but it would truly be impossible to measure the economic impact of this behemoth. This could be why Google officials were recently testifying before Congress regarding the competitiveness of their operations… but that’s something for another day.

For today… on behalf of small businesses and marketers everywhere… Happy Birthday, Google! We’re celebrating right along with you today!

Reflections on 9/11

9-11 Tribute in Light Copyright June Marie / Caity via BigStockPhoto.comIt’s truly hard to fathom that 10 years have passed. We were changed by that day, and perhaps we still don’t comprehend fully how.

For me, the day serves as a bookend… the beginning of a season of work that continues to grow and develop today. I launched out full time in Epiphany Marketing (the business I still operate) on Monday, September 10th. Had Tuesday been uneventful, Monday might be a faded memory… perhaps I might not have even really marked the date in my mind.

But Tuesday was eventful. A sudden jolt that reminded us all that life is short. That things can change… instantly. That whatever you’d been doing suddenly may no longer have been important. Perhaps it had never been.

Since it came at the beginning of a new season for me, it underscored the fact that there is important work to be done. That, as Seth Godin pointed out today, “…we have an obligation to stand up, stand out and to do work that matters.”

I’ve shared on a previous anniversary of that fateful day about Sarasota’s role in its events, and on the amazing community response.

Today, however, my thoughts are simpler and clearer. As a change agent, there’s still so much to do.

Photo: © June Marie via BigStockPhoto

Yoga as a Parkinson’s Disease Treatment

I never cease to be amazed at the things I learn in my line of work. As someone who works almost exclusively with business owners, I’m always finding ideas, thoughts, services and products that are brand new to me.

Carol Fisher of Inner Key Yoga
Carol Fisher of Inner Key Yoga

For example, recently I have had the great pleasure of getting to know Carol Fisher, who is an instructor of yoga in Walnut Creek, CA. Carol is one of those people you run across that is truly a delight. She was referred to me by a mutual friend several months ago, and we were able to get acquainted during the course of helping her with marketing strategy for her business.

I’ve learned a few important things from Carol, some of which we’ll save for a different post (since it has very little to do with yoga). But in the process of learning about the work that she does, she helped me understand something about the importance of movement, balance and strength for persons suffering with Parkinson’s disease.

Now, I already have a fair amount of knowledge about Parkinson’s disease, in no small part thanks to the Parkinson’s disease doctor who has been a client of ours for several years now. So I’m familiar with the tremor, the gait and other unique symptoms that Parkinson’s sufferers have to deal with.

But until I met Carol, I never would have imagined that training under a yoga instructor could really improve the quality of life for a Parkinson’s patient.

Why Yoga for Parkinson’s Disease?

Evidently, there’s quite a bit of research which suggests that exercise is helpful for Parkinson’s sufferers. Since that’s true, it makes perfect sense that yoga might just be an ideal form of exercise for Parkinson’s disease patients.

And while yoga (nor any other form of exercise, for that matter) doesn’t truly treat any Parkinson’s symptoms, one can see how the flexibility, balance and strength gained through engaging in yoga could, in fact, really improve the overall health, confidence and quality of life for someone facing this disease.

A Parkinson’s diagnosis can, in and of itself, bring a great deal of stress along with it. Yoga is widely known as a great tool for dealing with stress. In addition, the average age of Parkinson’s onset is approximately 60 years. Thus, Parkinson’s sufferers are also dealing with the normal issues related to aging. This means that staying physically active and improving balance and strength are more important than ever… and much more so given the symptoms of the disease.

And this is only the beginning. Carol has begun writing about Parkinson’s disease and yoga, and she is doing a fantastic job of explaining in greater detail how yoga can serve to help Parkinson’s sufferers. Be sure to check it out! And if you happen to be located in the area east of Oakland, California, then Carol and Inner Key Yoga may be just the physical fitness solution you’ve been looking for — regardless of your age! Perhaps a visit to her yoga in the park in Walnut Creek would be a great way to start!

EMR Software: Meaningful Use Incentives for Physicians

When I first launched Epiphany Marketing back in 1998, it was a side venture and a vehicle for handling smaller projects that didn’t require a full-time effort. In 2001, however, I decided it was time to make it a full-time effort and start taking on bigger projects.

One of our major clients in those early days was a software dealer that focused on providing electronic medical records software (and the related hardware like computers, scanners, tablet PCs and so on) to physicians’ practices. The company wanted to expand into Florida and we worked with them to develop and implement what turned out to be a highly successful marketing strategy.

Along the way, I became very acquainted with the ins & outs of the modern-day medical practice. Many physicians were already accustomed to using “practice management software” that handled important tasks like scheduling patient appointments and billing insurance companies, medicare & the patients themselves for services rendered.

Electronic Medical Records Software

However, at that time, it was still a relatively novel idea for a smaller, privately-owned medical practice to be using a system for handling electronic patient records (or electronic health records — EHR — as they have come to be known). Even more novel was the idea that an electronic medical records system (EMR) would be integrated with a “practice management” system so that all the patient data was in one place. At that time, if practices were using an EMR system, it was typically completely separate from the scheduling & billing functions that were traditionally part of a practice management system.

We worked with this software company for an extended client engagement which lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of about 13-14 months. I met a great many medical practice administrators and doctors in various medical specialties from all over the State of Florida during that time period. Some of the doctors that we worked with went on to become friends and even clients of ours in the years that followed.

Since that time, I have remained interested in medical software. In fact, a friend of mine and I started a consulting firm focused on working with physicians to evaluate their own needs and the EMR systems that were being marketed and sold in order to help them make wise decisions and end up achieving long-term ROI (return on investment) from their technology decisions.

But, as time went by, I spent less and less time focused on that world and more time focused on newer clients and growing our primary business. So… I spent some time away from the space.

In the last few months, however, I’ve had good reason to pay a lot more attention. And it’s interesting to me today to see that the EMR systems available now have very little to offer that’s in any way new and improved over the leading systems from 7-9 years ago. In fact, some of the more “cutting edge” systems from years ago were actually further along than where the major players are today. Sadly, many software companies have come and gone — something that seems to be a bit of an epidemic (if you’ll pardon the pun) in the world of medical software.

In fact, the churn in this unique space has created a great deal of reluctance on the part of the typical private medical practice. The doctors who own and/or manage these practices have seen and heard a lot of sales pitches over the years. In some cases, they have invested tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in systems… only to have the software company go out of business or otherwise become unable to provide the much-needed ongoing support that is so critical to a medical practice.

So it’s not surprising when the average physician is reluctant to think about making technology-related changes. To them, it’s about as much fun as a root canal… or exploratory brain surgery (unless, of course, you’re a neurosurgeon… in which case the brain surgery would be fun… as long as it’s being performed on someone else).

Meaningful Use Incentives

Today, however, the government has stepped into the game. Uncle Sam now has a vested interest in making sure that all physicians are tracking patient information (including diagnoses, lab results, prescriptions, etc.) electronically. After all, paper charts have always been incredibly inefficient. And this is all the more true when you have a major role in paying for services being rendered, medications being prescribed, and diagnostics and treatments of all kinds. Aggregating data, keeping track of which physicians are doing what, and which patients are being treated for what illness… these are all reasons to try to force medical practices to use electronic medical records software.

Setting aside the very interesting political and societal ramifications of all this for a moment… what it comes down to today is that government has set up incentives (for now) to reward doctors who can demonstrate “meaningful use” of a qualifying electronic medical records system.

As you might guess, “meaningful use” and “qualifying EMR systems” all have very lengthy (and somewhat bizarre) definitions. But the bottom line is that the first doctors recently got the very first sizable checks from the government to pay out the incentives for using these systems.

On the back side of the incentives is a deadly set of penalties for not adopting a qualifying system within specified time periods. Practices who demonstrate meaningful use early get rewarded. The ones that wait will not only not be rewarded… they’ll actually begin to see cuts in payments for services rendered to Medicare and/or Medicaid patients after a couple of years go by.

What all of this means for the average medical office is this: it’s time to take this seriously. Any medical practices that are using older, outdated systems that don’t meet new government requirements will have to find a new system if their software vendor doesn’t make the necessary enhancements in time. Medical practices that haven’t begun meaningfully using an electronic medical records system at all (you know… the ones still chasing 2-inch thick — or thicker — patient charts around the office) will be forced to purchase and implement a system.

As a patient, you’ve probably begun to see certain physicians taking advantage of technology. Some doctors have welcomed technology quite openly… and you’ll see them carting laptops around the office and typing up visit notes while you wait. Others have dragged their feet and will only begin using technology against their wishes. Some will undoubtedly retire early rather than face that kind of change. Others will be driven out of business by the expense… especially when added to the already high costs of medical malpractice insurance combined with the pressures of reduced reimbursements from insurers and government payers like Medicare and Medicaid (not to mention the high costs of providing health insurance benefits to their own employees).

Regardless, your privacy as a patient is going to be affected. It’s already been greatly reduced in recent years. Pretty soon it’s not going to exist at all thanks to Uncle Sam’s meddling in this game.

On the other hand, the arguments in favor of using EMR systems are substantial. Medical practices that have truly embraced the process and have implemented systems have been able to greatly reduce their operating costs, increase efficiency, increase the speed with which they can access and utilize needed information (very important for you when facing an urgent medical issue of any kind), and even recover from disasters (after all… do you think they had backups of their paper charts?).

The bottom line? We’ll be keeping a close eye on all the issues related to electronic medical records, patient privacy and the economics of practicing medicine in the 21st Century. It’s all about to change…

Facebook Is More or Less Done

Yes, I’m trying out Google+.

No, I’m not yet convinced that it will kill Facebook. (Is that even possible?)

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook

But the CNN Tech coverage of this week’s big announcement from Facebook gave an interesting air to Mark Zuckerberg’s view of where his pet project is headed.

First: the big announcement. Facebook now has video chat via Skype. While it does seem clear that they’ve been working on this for some time, it’s awfully interesting that the big announcement took place without much drama only 1 week after Google+ announced “Hangouts,” which includes group video chat. (Zuckerberg says group chat isn’t important right now since most Skype users only chat 1 on 1 via video.)

The second big announcement was apparently an afterthought: Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook now has 750 million users.

But what seems most interesting to me about this coverage was the quote from Zuckerberg about Facebook. The CNN Tech coverage gave the impression that Zuckerberg and his Facebook pals have accomplished their big goals. Third parties will be developing new “features” for Facebook, rather than Facebook itself, Facebook isn’t afraid of Google+, etc.

One quote, in particular, stood out to me. I had to look elsewhere for the entire sentence just to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding it.

“Social networking is at an inflection point,” he said. “Mostly it was about connecting people and there was still this question about whether social networking was going to be this widespread, ubiquitous service in the world. That chapter is more or less done at this point.”

This is certainly lifted out of context, but really… what does he mean? It certainly left me wondering if Facebook has reached a point where they feel like they can sit back and relax.

If so… all I can say is, “Wow. Great timing.”

Google is coming.

Photo: Guillaume Paumier

You Can Have Anything In Life You Want

“You can have anything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”

-Zig Ziglar

This is one of my favorite quotes from the master motivator and sales trainer. (And I think I share that sentiment with lots of other people!)

We use this quote often when speaking to audiences and training business people in the art & science of getting the message about their products and services out to the right people. It’s been my observation that people don’t buy what they “need,” in most cases… they buy what they want.

So… understanding what the right people (those who are likely to be your future buyers) really want and finding away to get it to them is a key business philosophy.

But at the heart of this quote is something far simpler and more valuable: a philosophy of service.

All the great business people — regardless of the size of their employee rosters or the number of zeros at the end of their annual revenue numbers — have always striven for this. Ultimately, those who serve best win.

Erma L. Carroll

Erma L. Carroll
Erma L. Carroll
April 17, 1922 - May 10, 2011

In the early morning hours yesterday, my Grandmother, Erma L. Carroll née Adler, peacefully passed away. She was comfortable, thanks to the wonderful people who cared for her around the clock for nearly the last 2 years of her life. Like her late husband, the Rev. Jack C. Carroll, who preceded her by a little more than 15 months, she was ready to go after a long, fruitful life.

“Mow-Wow” was how I always knew her. The story goes that my brother (who was her first grandchild) invented the moniker for her as a toddler, and it simply stuck. She was a loving, devoted Grandmother to me, who frequently had a mischievous gleam in her eye and was always quick with a remark and a hearty laugh.

But behind the spunky exterior was a quiet strength that was born in her large-family upbringing on a farm in rural Oklahoma. Her German-speaking grandparents left difficult circumstances in Russia and landed in Nebraska. Her parents married and eventually made their way to a new homestead outside of Weatherford, Oklahoma, where they started a family, eventually having 10 children.

The community in Weatherford was a tight-knit, family-oriented one. As it became more & more likely for World War II to impact the United States, she took a job with the War Department in Washington, D.C., which eventually led to her meeting the young Marine who stole her heart. The story goes that she actually dated his friend, but he snagged her. They fell in love and were married in September, 1945, once he returned from the Pacific theater at the end of the war.

They started their life together in Georgia, where he attended college and entered the ministry. She lived the majority of her adult life as a Pastor’s wife, caring for people and contributing her myriad skills to the congregational life and activities in churches across Oklahoma, eventually settling in Denver, Colorado.

Mow-Wow demonstrated a tremendous amount of diligence in her life. Some of my earliest memories of her involve her sitting at the breakfast table in their Littleton, Colorado home, praying for each & every family member by name and poring over the Scriptures. It seemed she was always memorizing passages from her beloved Bible, and if I walked by her, I would frequently hear her “muttering” the Scriptures under her breath. She lived & breathed the Word of God.

She raised 3 incredibly gifted and talented children, one of which thankfully became my Mother. All of her children have tremendous musical abilities, and I’m a grateful beneficiary of the disciplines that were part of her household where music lessons are concerned. Her children are all 3 accomplished pianists and music lovers. We are a very musical family, and I believe in large part we owe it to Mow-Wow’s determination to cultivate those abilities.

I’m grateful for so many experiences with her in my life. As a boy, I learned Scriptures from her and always enjoyed visits to her home. She was a hard-working homemaker, an amazing cook, and a joy to be around… although not without the occasional cantankerous moment. I was so grateful when she & Pa-Po decided to make the move to Florida in 1998 and spend their twilight years here. It has meant that my Mom’s side of the family has spent significant amounts of time together, which I’ve been very blessed to be part of along the way.

Unfortunately, she had a late-night fall 2 years ago, which resulted in a broken femur. The surgery to repair the break was a little hard for her to recover from, and she had a further setback when she had a stroke in the recovery process. My Grandfather had been by her side through her major heart surgery several years prior, and was always strong for her. But after her fall and subsequent stroke, his own health began to decline. He passed away in January, 2010, just a few days shy of his 89th birthday. She lived to reach her own 89th birthday in April of this year, but was tired from her health struggles.

She was greatly loved and will be sorely missed.

A public viewing will be held on Thursday, May 12th, from 6pm-8pm at Brown and Sons Funeral Home, 604 43rd Street West, Bradenton, FL 34209 (map here). A funeral service celebrating the life of Erma L. Carroll will be held on Friday, May 13th at 11am at the same location. She will be interred at the Sarasota National Cemetary at 2:30pm.

Sarasota Coffee Shop Groupon

My favorite independent Sarasota coffee shop is currently featured as a Tampa Bay Area Groupon deal! Just wanted to give a quick heads-up to my Sarasota readers who are also coffee connoisseurs. Spend $6, and get $12 worth of stuff on your next visit. Here’s the Groupon deal. Get it now: it expires today!

While they also sell & service espresso machines (residential & commercial), their cafe on Bee Ridge has been a welcome addition since they opened last year. Great-tasting food, free wi-fi and lots of beverage options make The Beanz Man a fantastic choice. And, as we’ve mentioned before, they make the ultimate Almond cappuccino. Be sure & tell ’em I sent ya!

WordPress Site Hacked: NoIndex and NoFollow All Links

Yes... You Know Who You Are
Yes… You Know Who You Are

This morning I made the startling discovery that an important WordPress site belonging to one of our clients had been hacked.

A Little History

If you’ve heard me speak in the last 5 years, you know that I’m a huge believer in the power of content marketing. We regularly recommend and teach business blogging basics to our clients. We have no desire to turn them into bloggers per se, but we’ve trained them that producing fresh, high quality content is a fantastic way to achieve visibility online and even provide fodder for social media outlets like Facebook & Twitter.

So… one of our clients who hired us to build out their WordPress site and for whom we’ve provided a fair amount of training and coaching for some time now began to experience a decline in search engine rankings. In their case, WordPress is installed on a separate domain from their main website. Their main website was historically not performing well from a search engine point of view (although it was great from virtually every other perspective when it was built), so WordPress was being used as a way to help prop up the main site. And it worked. Really, really well.

Imagine my surprise, then, when this particular site began to drop in the rankings for no apparent reason. Nothing had changed that we could tell. We did a little research and paid attention to what the competitors were doing and could see nothing significant enough to account for the change. It was very much an anomaly, because all of our other clients who were doing what we trained them to do were doing just fine.

So today, quite by accident, we found the culprit.

The WPRef Plugin

We were reviewing a piece of content before it got published when we discovered that a couple of the links had a rel=”nofollow” attribute. The content writer who was working on it had no knowledge of how to manually create that type of link (we certainly don’t train people to do that… especially for links that are created intentionally for search engine purposes!), so we knew something was up.

I inquired a little further to find out where the link had come from, and the answer was, “I copied it from another post.”

Hmmmm…. well… I assumed at first that something had crept its way into an earlier post and perhaps it had been duplicated a couple of times. I wasn’t looking forward to hunting down the original link. As I heard someone say recently, it’s like looking for a needle in a needlestack! But then I noticed that there was more than one link acting that way. So… I used the WordPress “preview” function to take a look at how the new post would look, and decided to “view source code” to see if the changes I’d made were taking effect.

That’s when I noticed this:

Every link within the content had been modified with a and a rel=”nofollow” sitewide.

That would be a problem. The site’s being running for a while and there was a significant amount of content.

Digging a little deeper, I found that a plugin had been installed and given the name “WPRef”

We had backed up and upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress on February 3rd. So… we checked our backup and found that the plugin was not contained in it. On the server, we found (via FTP) that a file called “wpref.php” had been copied to the /wp-content/plugins folder on February 10th.

Not only had the plugin been placed in that folder, it had been activated.

Checking a little deeper, we discovered that the plugin’s only function was to add a tag and a “nofollow” attribute to every outbound link in the site’s content.

This amounts to a very specific, malicious attack. The only purpose of it can be to cause Google (and other search engines too) to ignore the site’s links.

Needless to say, I was infuriated. We’ve taken steps to harden that particular site. All my searching and other efforts to find evidence that others have encountered a hack like this have turned up nothing. It appears that (at least for now) this is a one-off, one-shot hack job. It’s hard not to believe that this site was specifically targeted on purpose.

The amusing thing was that the plugin added an options panel into the “Settings” menu. Within that, it output a bunch of gibberish, including some Russion domain names.  In the “Active Plugins” area, it purported to have “code.google.com” as its “plugin site” and its author was listed as, “Sergei Brin.” I was so distracted by the infuration and frustration of the whole thing that I failed to recognize that it wasn’t just a Russian-sounding name to match the other Russian references… it’s the (botched) name of the famous Google co-founder.

Humorous.

So… we’ve saved a copy of this little piece of php code. Obviously, we’ve removed it from the site in question and have tested the site out. Our links are back to normal now. Presumably, this client’s search engine rankings will return back to their prior positioning. Actually, since the rankings were declining, we’ve stepped up the game for this client with some additional efforts and so the rankings should actually move higher than ever. So… if this was, in fact, a malicious attack which singled out this particular business… the plan has backfired.

Thanks. Whoever you are.

BarCamp Sarasota 2011

**Update** The BarCamp Sarasota Fall 2011 event takes place October 15-16 at GWIZ. Epiphany Marketing is making presentations there as well. We hope to see you!

I’m writing this from inside an Entrepreneurial Roundtable session being facilitated by locally-based technologist Stan Schultes. The ideas being generated within this “open source” group of people are absolutely stellar. There are folks in the room who have been there, done it, and are looking for an opportunity to share back and forth.

This is just one example of the benefits of having an event like BarCamp Sarasota. This year’s event is being held this weekend at GWIZ, which turns out to be a perfect venue because of their various small rooms that seem ideally suited for sessions like those you’ll find at a BarCamp event. The sessions are on a wide variety of topics — both technology-focused and otherwise. Skimming through upcoming session for today, here are some of the topics on the menu:

  • “Leadership and Community Building, Why Now More than Ever?” with Sara Hand
  • “The Zen of Building Sustainable Technology” with Lorrie Vervoordt
  • “Programming Humans” with  Tracy Ingram
  • “Facebook Marketing & SEO” with Thao Tran

At 11am, we’ll be presenting…

David g. JohnsonMaking It All Pay: Growing Your Business with 21st Century Tools

Yes… technology is great! We love it… but without a comprehensive, written, measurable strategy in place, most every business will find themselves floundering in a sea of unfinished initiatives — nearly all of which have failed to produce any significant result from a business standpoint.

For example… how many businesses have websites, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc. but can’t point to any new business that they have produced? Or (perhaps worse) know that some business has been produced, but the metrics aren’t in place to identify how much and from which initiatives.

So… we’ll be talking about the strategy piece of the equation… and lining up all the elements in a way that gets you the result you desire. For most businesses, this means new customers, bigger  market share and long-term profitability.

Hope you join us for our session… More reports from this year’s BarCamp event later!