#weird ass random geocities sites

[juliannos]

not to be back on my bullshit, but with the way discord is leaning into making a social media app (rather than chatting application) really should boost people to find other platforms to host some of their content

with more and more getting locked behind social media accounts, less and less of the internet will be a) searchable and b) archived. discord is not accessible by non-users and even when it is, it is hard to navigate and incredibly bloated. when info get centralized it can be hidden with more ease.

i realize the hypocrisy of posting this on tumblr (a social media platform). but the reality is, there aren't many other places to go these days.

and that makes me sad

[shiftycryptid]

Suddenly had a random memory of something that happened in elementary school. I was doing a project on bats and we were discouraged from using wikipedia as a source so I'd just end up on random-ass weird websites looking for information. There was one in particular that I used quite a bit, as it had quite a bit of info and also looked cooler than most other sites, and I'm pretty sure it was just someones geocities page or something and it just had an anthro bat just chilling in the sidebar. Anyway I just thought it was a site mascot or something at the time but looking back on it, yeah that was definately the site creator's fursona and was probably my first exposure to furries, long before I knew the term. I can't remember anything else about the site but if you're out there, bat furry person, thank you for helping me write a report in 5th grade.

[kintatsujo]

Um... This is going to sound like a weird question, but... you watched Yu-Gi-Oh back when it was still airing, right? What was that like? Did you have any theories or predictions about what would happen? Were they confirmed? What was the fandom like? Was there discourse? I ask because I was so little back then that I only caught snippets of episodes, so by the time I actually got into the fandom the series was over and I got spoiled pretty much immediately. Sorry if this is out of the blue!

okay lol sorry for taking a bit to answer this it’s been

one of those weeks

Okay so yes!  Yugioh was the first fandom I was actively in and yes, there was fandom fighting

We basically fought about literally everything; it’s a lot more laid back even if you consider that I’m better at picking people to be in a community with now

Some Debates included 

what continuity was Better (much like today but complicated by the fact that for a while it was harder to get one’s HANDS on certain continuities; which is why there are people who think Series Zero was Super Serious as opposed to being Pretty Silly)

Shipping wars, as you’d expect, but Silentshipping was actually a pretty huge ship at the time (and I’m still convinced its rarity now was because of a concerted bullying effort, given the reaction I still see to @shizukazilla every time someone finds it)

Whether or not Alister was a dude or a chick in the Japanese, which lasted about a week but was quite vicious

“Yami Terrence,” where someone insisted Malik was going to be renamed “Something stupid like Terrence” randomly on her personal shitty-ass Geocities site (which was literally just a profile about herself with a random rant about how much she hated the Yugioh dub) and then an entire section of the fandom took it as gospel that this was going to be his name until the episode he’s first called “Marik” aired

Lots and lots and LOTS of Tea bashing, which I am quite relieved most of the fandom has moved on from because I Have Seen Things Which Cannot Be Unseen

“It’s impossible to do a good nexgen”

I did indeed have at least one theory confirmed and that was basically that Atem was going to die (and I feel bad about that in retrospect but my tendency to be too genre savvy for my own good is one I’ve had for a long time)

The biggest subset of fandom theories was generally about what Atem’s actual name was going to turn out to be and they were pretty much all wrong

Also: The reason I never much got into Yugioh The Abridged Series is because initially it was literally all jokes we were literally all making with some shit that made me genuinely uncomfortable thrown in, go figure I guess?

There were a lot more fics and speculation based on the video games than there is now and I honestly miss it even though I never did play them

At its height Yugioh was absolutely more popular than Pokemon.  Like, I’d walk through the store and there’s Mai on the TV Guide.  I have so much random ass packaging from cereal bars and cereal; also the cereal was basically triangular Captain Crunch and again I genuinely miss it

The readership for one of the fan magazines thought Johnny Depp should play Malik in a live action movie and I’ve never forgiven them

A “dueling tutorial” DVD that one of these magazines put out where one of the kids insisted on calling Celtic Guardian “Seltic” Guardian like the basketball team and clearly was very smug about the dub pronouncing it “wrong” (the dub isn’t pronouncing Celtic wrong btw)

actually on that note of non-digital fandom both Junior and Senior year of high school I basically sat and watched my Junior year boyfriend’s buddies play Yugioh and DBZ every lunch and one of the kids insisted on calling his all-female monster deck his “Vagina Deck” (I know), plus there was a lot of ragging on Exodia

SO MANY little independent fansites like oh my god, like if the internet were a vast ocean and Tumblr were a continent these would basically have been the Pacific Islands 

one of the most notable fansites was run by this guy named Edo and a Big Theory is that Edo Phoenix was actually named after him; he actually made this like, really broken little computer game for the card game I think he never finished but which Invid played for like weeks worth of hours

There was a Mary Sue Test people kept referring people to that was more stringent about character design than whoever drew the Battle City background characters

there’s

there’s a lot

it was a lot

[syntheticaesthetic]

Okay y’all I can’t do it anymore

I HAVE to tell you about my crazy-ass coworker at the radio station I volunteer at

I literally can’t even with this guy

So, I met him this summer at the big event in our town. I had only come into contact with a few people at the station at that point, so the day was already a whirlwind of faces and information. And then this guy shows up. I was super excited about getting me some cherry pie from our fundraising booth, so I got some. And The Guy ended up serving it to me and making a BIG FUCKIN’ DEAL about the fact that HE MADE THIS PIE AND ITS SO GOOD AND YOU WON’T FIND ONE BETTER IN THE WHOLE VALLEY. 

Okay. 

So I’m hanging out with my mom and my neighbor and my volunteer friend, and this guy comes over and pulls me aside to introduce himself since we’re going to be working together. He then proceeds to tell me EVERYTHING about his professional life and radio life and talked about how he was like A Filmmaker who has a script/project he’s been working on for 15 years with some b-list scifi actors and Some People From The Cast Of Star Trek, do you know what The Star Trek is little girl? Well they LOVE my project and its very exciting even though zero progress has been made on in for 15 years. Oh wait, who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? We should go yell at this guy for wearing a Trump hat. Oh fuck this lady with the dragon tattoo, who does she think she is? And that husband, with the NASA hat? POSERS! Oh you do social media? You should help ME find a job! Here’s my card - contact me ASAP!

So, that was fun. I went home and had a good giggle at his website. He’s a Navy Vet (read: he was in the Navy band for a few years) and is OBSESSED with this fact. His job is as a web designer and graphic designer but it all looks like web 1.0 - I’m talking some GeoCities and clipart from Word bullshit. So I get a good laugh. 

Every time I see him at fundraising events he’s like “call me, help me find a job” even though he owns and runs both the web designing business and a DJ business on top of his show he has at the radio station. 

Now, at this point I have to tell you that there are some things that are VERY EVIDENT when I talk to him. 

1) He thinks I’m a dumb little girl who doesn’t know anything. 

2) He’s VERY threatened by this dumb little girl who doesn’t know anything. 

Now, at the radio station I’m working on PR. Social, promotional, website, flyers, all that fun stuff I went to college for. I’m not having a whole lot of success for a bunch or reasons not relevant here, but I’m making big strides in some departments and we’re having an increase in some areas important to us. So I feel like I’m helping. 

I’ve heard from others that in the past he has offered do a bunch of stuff for the station before, but has never followed through. 

Now, though, I’ve arrived, and I’ve been told there’s been a 9000% increase in the amount of offers to do literally everything I do from him in a very short time span. 

“I don’t work right now (but let me advertise my business), so I can only devote 2-4 hours of my time that I’m not doing anything to help out.”

So here he’s basically saying “let me redo our entire website that’s free and working pretty well especially since it works for people up here who don’t have access to strong internet.”

So, there were some questions and concerns from the rest of the volunteers - mainly about being reliant on This Guy for access to our site, who’s generally considered a flake. 

“Its so unlikely that anyone other than me should be able to access the website to make changes to this thing we work on collectively that I’ve never really shown any strong interest in until this dumb little girl from Oregon shows up.”

So of course my dumb ass needs to chime in. “Servers cost money, which we don’t have, the Wordpress server we have now is free. Its simple. There’s several of us who know how to use it and update it and in case someone ever moves or dies or doesn’t want to volunteer here anymore, anyone can take over.” 

“Look at all these TECHNICAL TERMS THAT I KNOW. LOOK AT HOW SMART I AM. WORDS! WEBSITE THINGS. STUFF YOU ARE TOO DUMB TO UNDERSTAND. LOOK AT ME YOUR MIGHTY WEBMASTER WHO KNOWS THINGS! What? What you have works for you very well? WELL SHIT ON THAT. IT IS SHITTY. IT IS A THING THAT IS SHIT. I AM SUPERIOR. YOU ARE DUMB LITTLE GIRL. FUCK YOUR WEIRD NAME. LOOK AT ALL OF THESE SHINY THINGS I CAN OFFER THAT WILL DO NOTHING TO HELP US OUT AT ALL. LOOK AT THESE THINGS THAT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO WHAT WE ARE DOING OTHER THAN TO CONFUSE THE OLDER PEOPLE HERE.

Bruce Banner is judging you.

We hem and haw and no decision is really made. A few weeks later I get this, completely out of the blue, with no preamble:

“Its a simple task, but I’m assuming you’re a moron so here let me do it for you Dumb Little Girl. i’m ALSO going to CAPITALIZE RANDOM words SO that YoU PAY attention to WHAT i’m saying. By the way, here are some random skills I have that I assume you don’t, for no reason other than I want to lord it over you. I’ve also used a completely different email address plus a slightly altered version of my usual signature for unknown reasons.

P.S. FUCK WORDPRESS”

I actually found that I was having trouble following his train of thought. What are you wanting? Why are you making extra work for me? What is this going to accomplish other than annoying me? So, my dumb ass asks questions. 

We’re back to the fucking website hosting issue again, out of nowhere. “Fuuuuuuuuccccckkkkkk Wordpress. Also: here’s some ‘advice’ I want to give you, completely unsolicited that, if you took it, would completely inconvenience you, because I’m a paranoid ass-hat. BAD NEWS. SAD”

After that, there was an email sent to all the folks at the station, complaining about being cut off during the last five minutes of his show. (Honestly, we all think he wasn’t paying attention to the time, because we’ve told everyone repeatedly the station’s clock is off and we can’t make it sync to the “real” time or at least the time the computer cut off system has. 

In response, a volunteer sent this to some of us. 

Gross.

And then today we get this nugget: 

“I’m a whiney man-baby who can’t handle the fact that this is an all volunteer station filled with non-professionals/experts trying their best and that no one loves me and appreciates me and fuck things that aren’t jazz and might be important to people. Did I mention how VITAL and IMPORTANT ME and JAZZ are? We’re IRREPLACEABLE to the people of this community.”

Guys, I just can’t stop fucking laughing. 

[waqasblog2]

Top Five Dreamforce 2017 Lessons For Digital Marketers – Smokehouse SEO

So, as you have probably read on here by now, I went to Salesforce’s Dreamforce event last week and it was, of course, incredible.

This week, I’m going to present to you a quick rundown of the top five things I learned, digital marketing related and otherwise, at this amazing event.

5. Scanned Badges = Spam Emails Later = Not a Good Look

For those who may not know, when you go to a conference like this, they give you an ID badge to wear so security knows you’re not some random schmo who snuck in and also so if you meet different sponsors and vendors, they can get in touch with you. Apparently all of your contact info is associated with your badge. Genius, right? No need to carry around business cards or leaflets and flyers that can get lost or ripped during your day.

Well, neither Salesforce nor any vendor told me this and I spoke to tons of vendors.

All the vendors said, ‘Hey, can I scan your badge real quick?’ whether I was just walking past the booth or if I actually wanted more information. I assumed that they did it to keep track of how many people came to their booth or whatever, so like an idiot, I let them.

Keep in mind, I spoke to tons of vendors.

Tons. Of. Vendors.

So what happened?

I checked my work email after the conference and my inbox was just a sea of spam.

Spam from this company, spam from that company, spam here, spam there, everywhere spam.

What did I do? That’s right! I just put a check next to all the boxes and clicked ‘delete’.

Didn’t read a thing.

The lesson here is this: if you’re a company and you’re a vendor at a trade show, for the love of everything that is holy, TELL PEOPLE THAT THEY ARE GOING TO GET EMAILS FROM YOU IF YOU SCAN THEIR BADGE. 

A conference is not another opportunity for you to get email addresses to spam. It doesn’t look good for you and it doesn’t make the unknowing person who has to wade through all that noise when they get back to town very happy either.

Not everyone is a business conference veteran so some people will be completely surprised when they get an email from a company they just happened to be walking past when someone said ‘Hey, can I scan your badge real quick?’  that says, ‘Hey, it was great talking to you at XYZ Conference this year! Here’s the information you wanted..’ Also, it’s a waste of time because, as I told you earlier, all I did was click all and delete. I didn’t open a thing.

4. If You’re In Marketing and You Use Salesforce, You Need the Marketing Cloud

I was lucky enough to see a demo of this and let me tell you, even though the interface isnt as ‘slick’ as some others out there, this tool is powerful. It can track your users’ journeys across multiple channels, give you detailed customer stats and analytics and, the best part is that it, of course, syncs with Salesforce so you have everything in one place instead of having to import and export .csv files all day like this was 2002.

This works for B2B customers and B2C customers and can house your social, email and other channel efforts as well.

I can’t even begin to get into why I liked this tool so much so I just suggest you check it out for yourself here. Whether you’re a B2B company, a B2C, a Non-profit or a Fortune 500, you should really look into this if you use Salesforce.

Which leads me to my next point…

3. Non-Profits Need to Start Thinking and Acting Like For-Profits

Are you a non-profit organization?

Does your non-profit organization sell things?

Does your non-profit organization have a website?

Does your non-profit organization sell things on its website?

Did you answer ‘Yes’?

Congratulations, you need to stop half-assing things and actually do real work on your site and your digital marketing.

At Dreamforce, we saw some major non-profits like The Girl Scouts of America represented and this just proves something I’ve been saying to non-profits all along:

Yes, you’re a non-profit and your end goal isn’t to make money. Yes, you’re a non-profit and you have a limited budget to work with. Yes, you’re a non-profit so you probably don’t have the staff or the resources a major corporation would.

But you know what?

The internet doesn’t care.

Artificial Intelligence doesn’t care.

Your customers don’t care.

Face reality. You’re competing with for-profit companies for that advertising space. Act like it.

Google’s algorithm doesn’t care that you’re a non-profit when it comes time to rank your site in the search results.

AdWords doesn’t care that you’re a non-profit when you aren’t bidding high enough and your tech isn’t good enough to help win those auctions.

Facebook Ads doesn’t care that you’re a non-profit when it comes to winning those social ads auctions in your target market.

Most importantly of all, people who visit your site don’t care that you’re a non-profit when you’re asking them to put their credit card into a site that looks like a 1996 Geocities nightmare.

Look, it’s like this:

Yes, your budget is limited but that means you have to stretch your dollar.

Here’s what it does not mean:

‘You know what, let’s just cheap out on everything because what the hell, we’re a non-profit! We’ll get by on our super duper name (which we don’t really have but just think we do), member donations (which are drying up for some weird reason but it couldn’t possibly be because we haven’t updated our site or membership benefits for 20 years) and telling people how great we are instead of giving people what they actually want!’

If you’re going to half-ass things like that because you’re a non-profit, you may as well just whole-ass it and just get a free trash Wix website and be done with it. Better yet, pay a guy to spin a sign with your name on it on the corner during rush hour. You’ll have about the same amount of success.

2. Personalization Is Key To Everything

Want to know how to be successful in marketing? Personalize everything.

If your only method of making your message personal to your customer is to pull in some nonsense in your emails from a merge field, you’re doing it wrong.

We already know that targeting your ads properly is something we need to do but take that a step farther. We need to be borderline-creepy when it comes to personalization. We need to know where that specific customer is, what channels they want to be reached on and what message they respond to. At Dreamforce, Adidas had a great demonstration of how they do this via Salesforce and the marketing cloud but even if you don’t have access to that, you need to be doing these techniques as well.

People make decisions in micro-moments – ugh, I hate that word but it’s true – so you need to be there when that happens and the only way to do that is to get super personal with your marketing. I mean almost stalk your customers. Everybody says they don’t like it and they think it’s weird when they see ads for things they were only talking or thinking about but really, that kind of advanced, predictive knowledge of your customers works and that is why people do it.

1. Make Sure Your ENTIRE Company Knows The Effect Of Your Digital Channels

So at Dreamforce, there was this speech that really worked for me by the people from the hat store, Lids. It was all about how they use something called a ‘Press Box‘ which is basically a social media command center powered by the Salesforce Social Studio (part of the marketing cloud) to monitor all social channels all the time.

Great idea, right? I thought so and if you don’t, you really need to up your social media game.

Lids, however, takes it a step further and they have these giant TV monitors in their offices so literally every employee can easily see not only what Lids is saying on their social accounts and what people are saying about them but also what kind of effects this is having on their business.

I love this to no end.

This is the perfect thing to implement in your company if you have the following issues:

More than that, though, it can also encourage your employees and visitors to like, share and comment on posts from your official account to their friends and followers.

You see, monitoring and responding to your social channels and giving people what they actually want on there is how you build a brand. It’s how you build brand ambassadors. It’s how you build a loyal following and audience. If you don’t know why this is important and how it will make things so much easier for you when you’re trying to sell something, then stop reading this and go attend a Marketing 101 class.

If your company happens to have product managers, executives or salespeople who have no faith in social marketing, then this is the perfect way to convert them – if you’re doing social right, that is.  It’s no longer ‘that one Facebook guy from marketing’ screaming about how great of a job he’s doing, it’s actual hard numbers, statistics and customer comments showing them on a screen how effective social can be.

The Bottom Line:

So there you have it, those are my personal top five takeaways from Salesforce’s 2017 Dreamforce event! While it didn’t make my personal top five list, an honorable mention goes to the drastic rise in Artificial Intelligence. Einstein, Salesforce’s AI, in particular. 

Machine learning, from Google’s Rankbrain to this, I think, is going to be critical in all facets of marketing in the years to come so now is the time to get involved  in figuring it out.  If you’re not getting on this boat now, you’re going to sink later.

Also, the Dreamfest concert was gangsta. Just sayin’.

This content was originally published here.