Matt Mauldin - Marketing Pro

my.MediaPost.com Started Strong, then Fizzled

Written by Matt Mauldin on Wednesday, November 05, 2008

MediaPost has bee a staple in my daily news intake for several years now. I subscribe to quite a few of their newsletters and they do a great job of covering many aspects of advertising and marketing. So when I learned of my.MediaPost.com, I logged into my account to build my profile right away.

You can view my profile at http://my.mediapost.com/mattmauldin. Let me warn you...it's sad.

Initially, the experience was just like many of the other social engines out there. I added in some contact information, interests, books, about me, etc. All pretty standard.

Then I got into the "Your Networks" feature, which is one of the best features I've seen in an online profile yet. This allows you to enter the address of your other online profiles:

Examples of sites MediaPost's Your Networks tool: 

• Community - Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bebo.
• Media Sharing - YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket.
• Bookmarking - Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Furl.
• Blogs - Blogger, WordPress, and Technorati
• Music - lastfm, SoundClick and MOG.
• Events & Review - yelp, Meet Up, and Upcoming.
• Gaming - Gamespot, and IGN.
• Others - Twitter, Digg, eBay and Amazon.

Don't be fooled. This is not a comprehensive list. In fact, this isn't even half of the sites they are integrated with. And even if you don't find the site you want, you can request that a site be added to the list.

The real problem began when I wanted to add my profile picture. It turned out to be impossible...so far. Seriously? Trouble with a picture? I've tried in Firefox, IE and Chrome with no luck. I've tried three sizes of JPEGs, a GIF and a PNG. Still no. In fact, I've tried no less that a dozen times spread out over several days with absolutly zero success. Every time I try to upload a profile pic, I get this message:

Couldn't store file to server. (looks like we got not XML document).

OK, media post. It's time to either get your XML document or offer a little more help here. I can't find any help documentation or any solution when I google the problem.

In addition to that, I am unable to upload any photos. Everything just craps out and I don't get any type of error message. I even tried both the form based and Java based uploaders.

Finally, there's a really cool "Add a feed" option on the profile page. Cool! I'd love to include a few feeds on my profile to help fill out some content and provide links back to my other work. But again, it's not working. I've added my RSS feed, Atom feed, even a Feedburner feed and each time I get the message that says:

sorry, no feeds found at this url

Again, seriously? It's Feedburner! Their stuff works.

In summary, my.MediaPost.com could have been (and still has the chance) to be a great online profile. But right now there are a few issues holding it back. Maybe I'll be able to update this post in the near future with an "all is weel" post.

Until then, going to http://my.mediapost.com/mattmauldin is a waste of time.

Matt Mauldin Tweets on Twitter

Written by Matt Mauldin on Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Today I read a story on SearchEngine Watch called Zappos + Twitter = Innovative Success!

Sage Lewis takes the time here to compare the Twitter profiles of three companies,

1. http://twitter.com/GMblogs
2. http://twitter.com/TheHomeDepot
3. Zappos' CEO Twitter account

As a newbie on Twitter, this was a really great profile on how to use Twitter. The key is to be genuine. Don't tweet fake messages, ads, commercials, or self promotion all of the time or you will NOT be followed, and even if you are followed, you will soon be blocked.

Beyond that, Steven Spencer elaborates on Zappos' use of Twitter in his article Why Zappos is into Twitter - CEO Tony Hsieh speaks:

For Twitter, we don't really view it as a marketing channel so much as a way to connect on a more personal level, whether it's with our employees or our existing customers.

Initially, we started getting the entire company more involved with Twitter because we saw it as a great way to help build our company culture. But then we discovered it was also a great way to connect with customers as well.

Now it's my turn. Check me out at http://twitter.com/mattmauldin for my tweets. Follow me if you'd like.