Keeping Clients, the Google Phone, Shrek and Easter Eggs

Keep Good Clients Good

Todd Malicoat had a great blog post yesterday entitled Breaking Up With Bad Clients: It’s Not You…It’s Me which took a fun look at how to politely (and not so politely) get rid of the troublesome clients you’ve lovingly dedicated your office dartboard to. I giggled at Todd’s post, but frankly, all that seemed like way too much work for me. It’s far easier and cost-effective to keep good clients good than to watch them go sour and then figure out how to get rid of them. Or even worse, unload them on your friends.

A couple months back we had a post entitled How to Make Friends and Inspire Clients that offered some valuable tips on helping clients to behave and get them to stop peeing on the contracts. It may be worth another read. You also may be interested in our Chicago 2006 session recap How to Make Friends and Influence Clients. You go read those; I’ll go read a book on How Not To Keep Using The Same Blog Titles Over and Over. I’m special.

Google Phone Confirmed…Only Not

Yes, the geeks were excited only to be disappointed once again. Aw, such is life for a geek.

Isabel Aguilera (I won’t make a "no relation" joke here since my last one seems to have bombed), Google’s chief executive in Spain and Portugal, confirmed that Google was working on a mobile phone for use in developing countries. So the phone rumors were true, it just wasn’t the Super Phone tech geeks were hoping for. Or at least that’s what we thought for most of this morning.

Then, after we were resting confident in our Google phone knowledge, Danny Sullivan burst our bubble saying that Google wasn’t working on a mobile phone, but on the mobile software. Sigh. This phone thing is so confusing that I’ve now officially lost interest.

Google Easter Eggs

As usual, the Google Operating Systems blog has the fun dirt behind the latest Google feature. Ionut Alex. Chitu discovered several Easter eggs lurking in the new Google Personalized themes. The Beach theme comes complete with a Loch Ness monster, Sweet Dreams has a lit up Pi, the Tea house has some weird mice-looking creatures, etc.

If you want to see the fun surprises for yourself, either be up and alert at 3:14 am OR you can do a quick tweak to your theme’s corresponding CSS file, as explained by Ionut. I think the second option is actually less painful.

Fun Finds

The usually sweet Dazzlin’Donna couldn’t help but note the striking resemblance between American Idol contestant Melinda Doolittle and Shrek and I Could. Not. Stop. Laughing. Donna hopes Melinda never stumbles across her blog post because she’d "hate to hurt her feelings." Heh

Poor Kim has blogging stagefright thanks to all the talk about that A-list thing that doesn’t exist but everyone wants in on anyway. Its okay, Kim. You just be you and we’ll form our own B-list-on-paper-but-A-list-in-our-heart bloggers group in New York. We should make buttons!

And most amusing of all, the mood of this neurotic-but-adorable blog has finally been identified over at Creative Flow. Apparently I give off a "swimfan-SEO-stalker-soap-opera-fights-with-Susan Vibe". Interesting.

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.