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Sorry, Twitter friends, but I need to network with more important people. It’s not that I don’t like you. Really. You’ve all been so fun and informative. Unfortunately, your Klout scores are dragging me down.

Apparently, the new algorithm changes on Klout take into account not only what I do in my social networks, but what you do as well. And, frankly, you guys just aren’t keeping up. So instead, I’ve decided to follow Justin Beiber and Oprah. The plan is to tweet smarmy things to them all day, until one of them finally retweets me.

Just kidding.

Over the past month, though, I’ve been monitoring my Klout score and how it relates to certain of my behaviors. My verdict? Klout continues to be mind-bogglingly bad. And if you’re still paying attention to your score, you need a life.

Twitter was ablaze yesterday with complaints about the new algorithm. Seems folks were unhappy that their scores dropped — in some cases significantly — after the change. Mine dropped 10 points. Why? Well, from what I can tell, several of my friends “lost influence.” In addition, several people are no longer included in my “immediate influence network.” Okay…

Let’s get to what’s messed up about this:

Among those no longer in my immediate influence network? My brother, a coworker who sits five steps away from me and a client. I dare say I have at least some influence with those folks. At the very least I can influence my coworker with a spitball to the head, or my brother by passing the rolls over dinner.

Among topics I’m influential about? Media, Quinoa, Bacon, Social Media, Puppies, Los Angeles Lakers. Admittedly, I talk often about media and social media. Quinoa makes the list because I once asked a Twitter acquaintance what it was. We had some back and forth. Then I received a few +Ks as a joke. The Lakers? They were a topic of discussion one night with a friend. Frankly, I don’t find myself “influential” in any of these topics. Or any topic. Then again, influence is not my goal on Twitter.

And that brings me to the point of all this:
If you use Twitter to exert or gain influence, please leave.

I can already hear the community managers and workplace social media experts now: “But Dan, that’s what we do for a living. How are we supposed to *insert random goal* for our brand lol?”

I understand where you’re coming from. You’re just wrong.

Using social media to gain influence (or, better yet, get a number that supposedly correlates to influence) is like boiling water in a toaster. Besides the fact that you’re using the wrong tool for the job, it’s dangerous.

Social media’s intent (outside of making money for the services themselves) is to attract folks who want to connect with other folks. And of course businesses want to be where the people are, so social media experts were invented to get money from businesses and teach them how to ruin social media services in order to influence customers. Or potential customers. Or something. Jury’s out on that still.

Those social media experts have to prove their expertise somehow. And proving that to businesspeople who are used to relying on numbers can be difficult. Used to be that you could brag about the number of Twitter followers you had. But as I showed in this post, those numbers are meaningless, even for Twitter rock stars like Chris Brogan. When Klout came along, it offered the promise of a grading system to prove, definitively, who is the biggest deebag on Twitter. I mean, who is the most powerful Twitterer of them all. (In case you were wondering, it’s Justin Bieber, who has a perfect score of 100).

The problem with Klout is that it isn’t really clear what it’s measuring or why it considers those metrics important. Worse than that, it’s wrong. I know nothing about quinoa, and yet I’m the second-most influential person in the Klout-o-sphere on the topic. I’m not even kidding.

Chris Brogan has a Klout score higher than that of either Pepsi or Microsoft. Does that make sense?

After a month of paying attention, I’m ready to walk away from Klout, other than perhaps to throw down some +K for funsies every once in awhile. Because the experiment taught me something really important: I’m not on Twitter to be important and I’m not important because I’m on Twitter. I’m just there. And I don’t need a number to validate the importance of my friends, either. Despite what Klout says, their worth to me is beyond measure.

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You know who Ken Evoy is, right? Of course you don’t. I didn’t either.

Basically, Ken is the online equivalent of one of those “make money from home” guys you see on TV — the infomercial guys with offers that sound too good to be true. He offers a service called Site Build It, which promises a simple solution to help folks with great ideas build and monetize websites in a snap. Sounds great, right?

Well, Ken’s been on a rampage for a couple years now, complaining about Google and the existence of “the Googlebomb” — a threat so heinous that it threatens us all. In a nutshell, a Googlebomb is the use of nefarious tactics to get a page ranked high in Google search results for a particular term. Ken claims he was a victim of a Googlebomb (in fact, he likely was). The short story is that a blogger named Lis Sowerbutts wrote a scathing review of SBI!, calling it a scam. Then a few folks helped jack her post up in Google rankings by using backlinks. To this day, Sowerbutts’ post ranks no. 1 in Google for “site build it scam.”

Evoy has made it a personal quest to eliminate Googlebombs. Or maybe just his. Or maybe just to get Google to admit they still exist. Frankly, I’m not sure. What I am sure about is that he is all over the Internet, posting long-winded comments on every blog without a word limit in the comments section.

I first heard of SBI! when a client of mine read about it and asked my opinion. Like any decent consultant, I cased the service for him. My impression? Meh. To Ken’s credit, the site doesn’t promise overnight success. In some respects, it follows the mantra I’ve repeated for years: Work hard. In order to make money on a website through SBI!, you still have to pay for hosting, still have to create content, still need to advertise. It’s not a magic bullet, by any means. My recommendation to my client was the service may be worth a try, but I didn’t see it offering anything more than he could get cheaper and better by using a WordPress install.

What troubled me, however, were Ken’s rants, which I started seeing all over the Internet. And the more I saw, the less I trusted him. The more I read, the less I believed he was doing right by his clients. In fact, Ken’s own success isn’t based on his own system — it’s based on selling his system. And sure, Ken has lots of testimonials from clients on his website and around the Internet, but many of those are affiliates — folks who make money selling his system to others.

Recently a friend of mine wrote his own blog post about the Googlebomb, citing Ken’s problems. Ken, of course, couldn’t resist commenting. Frankly, I couldn’t either. And I let my own opinion fly:

You know what would be awesome? If Mr. Evoy spent more time running his business and less time running around the web, commenting (at length) about this issue. Do Googlebombs exist? Sure. Fine. You’ve proved it. The best thing you can do now is to concentrate on getting positive reviews of your business online. Make your customers happy. If there are 100 positive reviews for every bad one, well, you’re doing just fine.

Interestingly, what Ken has managed to do is draw more and more attention to Ms. Sowerbutts’s post. The more attention he draws there, the more Google believes it’s a legit post.

To be honest, it sounds like Ken doesn’t like the content of the post, and doesn’t want people to read it. Whatever the case, he’s made himself look maniacal with the number and length of comments he’s made regarding the topic — not someone I’d want to give my money to.

Admittedly, my comment was not good-natured. What followed was a mind-boggling exchange with Mr. Evoy in which he attacked my work, ridiculed the Alexa ranking of sites I’ve built, and insinuated my clients would be better off with his service than mine.

Well, I’ve seen Ken’s top performers, and of this I’m sure: Ken’s clients don’t make near as much as mine do. And they do it without gaudy web traffic. And you know who gets richest off Ken’s service? Ken. That’s what he’s selling.

How do my clients perform so well? They aren’t Internet marketers. They’re brick-and-mortar businesses. They aren’t making money off AdWords. They’re making money selling real goods and real services to real humans — humans they’ve met. My clients include a national cable installer, one of the nation’s top gift-basket companies, a company that sells network security solutions, the nation’s premier rifle barrel manufacturer. I’m building sites for municipalities, nonprofit organizations and small, local community shops. And I’m worried about Alexa rankings? Why?

I’ll tell you why I’m not. I’m not because a small-town health club owner doesn’t need fake traffic from Russia. She needs REAL traffic from the town she’s in. And that’s what I provide. A cable installer wouldn’t benefit in the least from thousands of visits per day — he needs one visit from a $25 million client. And that visit comes from a phone call — not a Google search. When that client hits the site, he’d better be grabbed by what he sees. It must be visually appealing, easy to read, and not be obviously created to pander to search engines. It had better be written FOR that visitor.

Ken and his ilk are so tied up worried about pagerank that they’ve forgotten business fundamentals: Find your niche. Treat your customers right. Provide exemplary service. That’s what I do for my clients. I work tirelessly to give them great service, websites they can be proud to show off, advice that’s based on real-world experience. Because of that, my clients’ websites have been very successful.

I have no doubt, however, that Ken is more successful than I am. Not only does SBI! seem to be bringing in clients, but Ken has made a big show of informing me that he needn’t run his business anymore; he has a “senior management team” that does it for him.

I put a call in to SBI! and I found out some interesting information. According to the gentleman I talked to, the company has 40,000 clients. Some 20,000 of them, he told me, are affiliates. He also told me the software used to create websites has been updated four times in the last eight years (for the sake of comparison, WordPress has been updated that many times this year alone). The man I talked to, who identified himself as working in the sales department, wouldn’t tell me how many employees the company has. But let’s do some math.

If 40,000 people are using SBI! for at least $300 apiece, that’s $12 million. How much are those site owners making? The salesman wouldn’t say.

Here’s the bottom line: I don’t care about Ken Evoy or SBI! But there’s a bigger point: When you’re in business, run your business. If you want to be the public face of your business, as Ken is, act like someone people want to do business with. And you’d better damned well know what you’re talking about before you open your mouth. In Ken’s case, opening his mouth only showed his ignorance and the weakness of his own product.

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I’m about to break your heart, and I don’t even care. It’s for your own good.

I’m enthralled lately by all the discussion around Chris Brogan’s decision to unfollow all 131,000 people he was following on Twitter. It’s mind-numbing. Seriously. Just the comments on the blog post he wrote about it drive me crazy. And at this writing there are 415 comments — about 10 times what he normally gets per post.

A little about Chris: He’s a blogger, who’s amassed 190,000 Twitter followers. You can hire him to talk to your company about using social media. He’s even written a book. You can read a lot more about him on his blog. He’s basically one of those guys who has made a career of selling himself as a social media expert. He teaches people how to use the stuff. Supposedly.

When I started seeing little things pop up online about how he was unfollowing 131,000 people, I was amazed — not over what he was doing, but the reactions. Some people were angry. Some were understanding. Some were confused and hurt.

Me? I laughed.

I laughed because as Chris explained his rationale, I saw the man behind the curtain — the one you aren’t supposed to pay any attention to. The one pulling all the levers and twisting the nobs that create smoke and bluster. And that man wasn’t a wizard or rock star. In fact, he’s probably worse at social media than you or me.

See….I didn’t need to follow 131,000 people to realize you can’t follow 131,000 people. Sure, you can click that button, but you can’t pay attention to them. So Chris Brogan wasn’t following you. Not really. In fact, this guy who preaches engagement really wasn’t engaging those he followed at all. He put out his “content” and replied when people mentioned him. But unless you were talking to or about Chris Brogan, he wasn’t paying attention.

But Chris didn’t perpetrate the “Great Twitter Unfollow Experiment of 2011″ because he doesn’t know how to use Twitter. He did it, he says, because he’d “started receiving over 200 direct message spams a day.”

If you use Twitter, you know you can’t get direct messages from folks you aren’t following. So Chris Brogan was following enough spammers that he supposedly received 200 spam messages daily. Why was he following spammers?

I told you awhile ago about my own little Twitter experiment, where I used some spam bait and gained 60 followers in a matter of a couple of days. If you want Twitter followers, there’s an easy trick I learned from my friend Freddy: Just use keywords that will draw the attention of bots. It’s true! And to keep those “followers” (who aren’t really real at all), you just need to follow them back. You know who ends up with a LOT of fake followers? People who tweet about social media. That’s because their tweets are loaded with phrases Twitter bots love.

Whether Chris Brogan knew it or not, he was padding his follower count with bots and zombies. Do your own little investigation and scroll through his list of followers. It’s not as impressive as you thought, is it? As we all know, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. After amassing a decent number of followers (and a reputation for following back), you can brag about how many Twitter followers you have…and then get more Twitter followers. And then write a book.

To save you the trouble, I’m not a social media rock star. I’ve got a few hundred followers — not a few thousand or several thousand. I’m just a guy who hates bullshit. Don’t author a book called “Trust Agents” and then be disingenuous about how many real Twitter followers you have and how you got them. Don’t tell me you had to unfollow everyone because you had too many direct messages. And don’t tell me you can’t manage to keep up with all the replies you get — that has nothing to do with the number of people you’re following.

At best, if you give him the benefit of the doubt, Brogan’s clueless when it comes to using Twitter. At worst, he’s no better than Newt Gingrich — padding his numbers to look more popular and more impressive than he really is. Honestly, now, would he impress you if he had 100 followers? 200? A social media expert with 200 followers isn’t much of an expert, is he? I mean, that’s like a rock star who’s never gone platinum…

Absolutely.

Nickelback is an inarguably terrible band. It is also the best-selling band of the past 10 years. The numbers don’t make them good at music; the numbers just make them rich. The record industry has done an excellent job marketing terrible crap. On the other hand, our garages are filled with amazing musicians who will never sell anything.

I’ve told you before, and I’ll tell you again: Beware social media experts. Especially those who seem to market themselves well. Because when your money’s gone, do you really want to tell people you spent it on Nickelback tickets?

Do you?

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I get a lot of spam. A lot. And sometimes, well…I can’t help but answer it. This one made me chuckle.

From: Douglas Wild
Subject: LOVELL:URGENT RESPONSE.

ATTN:LOVELL,

I am a Trustee and Executor of the estate of a deceased client(Dr P.LOVELL) in Budapest, Hungary. I have sat on a 5 year forgotten financial inheritance. In few weeks time, this fund will be transferred to the state as required by law since there’s no claim made.  We can both collaborate and share the proceeds 60/40. Your part would be to receive the funds as the beneficiary, since you have the same lastname as my late client, and I will prepare the required documents and have it released to you in just days. Please reply this mail stating full name, phone and fax number details if interested. So I can start the claims process as we build a mutual trust.

Many thanks in advance as I look forward to our partnership and trust.

Regards,

Douglas Wild

My response:

From: Daniel Lovell
To: Douglas Wild
Subject: RE: LOVELL:URGENT RESPONSE.

Doug,

I’m so glad you contacted me! I lost contact with my uncle, Dr. P., and looked for him tirelessly ever since he announced – somewhat unceremoniously at my parents’ 30-year wedding anniversary party, no less – that he was moving to Budapest. Lest you think I’m some lowly gold-digger, my intentions in finding Uncle Dr. P were purely innocent; he left a very expensive diamond brooch in his apartment when he left, and I desperately wanted to return it.

I’ve tried several times to bring the brooch to pawn shops, but despite being expensive, it is terribly ugly. It’s shaped like a prawn or a crawdaddy. You may actually have seen my appearance on “Antiques Roadshow,” where I was told the brooch was clearly priceless in terms of the size and number of diamonds, but also nearly worthless, because worth only counts if someone is willing to actually pay for it.

Now, of course, I am heartbroken to hear of my dear Uncle Dr. P’s passing. He was a great man. His discoveries in the field of anchovy packaging cannot be easily overlooked. With so many anchovy patents and licensing agreements under his belt, I’m certain he died atop an enormous mound of money!

Before I offer any other information about myself, may I ask whether the money smells of anchovies? I’m not partial to anchovies, nor the way they smell. Perhaps my 60 percent could be chosen from bills that smell less of anchovies than the rest? Of course, if you don’t like anchovies either, then we have found ourselves in a quandary.

Please let me know at your earliest convenience! Perhaps together we can solve “the curse of the crawdaddy brooch!” lol.

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For years, designers have decried spec work and contests as being bad for business. Why, they say, should they work for free? Why should they design a logo for a client who may flat-out dismiss the work and never pay a penny? Why should they waste their time entering logo design contests, competing against 100 other designers, when only one will make anything at all?

These practices, they say, devalue their work. Designers are highly skilled professionals who must be allowed to work with an engaged (read: paying) client who won’t just flake out on a whim and hire someone else. Their talent and skill must be trusted and appreciated because — let’s face it — a client knows nothing about design.

Here’s the truth: Contests and spec work don’t devalue the work of a designer. Bad design and poor value do.

Let’s step back.

When I started website design nearly a decade ago, it was for one simple reason: I was appalled by the BS I was being fed by “designers” who felt they could charge whatever they wanted — purely because I didn’t know how to put a gif of a rotating phone on a web page. There were keys to that kingdom which they held close to the breast, and I was to pay for that knowledge with my firstborn.

The truth is I’d already been a designer. I’d studied newspaper design under one of the nation’s premier designers, and I’d successfully designed or redesigned more than a dozen publications. I have a solid understanding of color, weight and spatial relationships. Also, I’m left handed. I’d done logos, newsletters, stationary. Pretty much everything. But I didn’t know how to get those things to the then-nascent Internet. Fortunately, I have a geek for a best friend, and he was more than happy to learn.

Our first act was spec work for the newspaper company where I worked. The company had dabbled in the Internet before, paying a firm to develop a news site — and ended up a quarter million dollars in debt. For free, my friend (and now business partner) built a site from scratch, which we delivered to the company. That piece of spec work landed us both new jobs, and as we learned more about web development, we began to offer our services to others.

Since then we’ve done plenty of spec work, designing mockups of websites for clients who, more often than not, are gunshy because they’ve been burned by poor design or unreliable designers who charge too much and deliver too little. Often we’re hired to take the job. Sometimes we aren’t. Dem’s da breaks.

The trouble with the argument over spec jobs is this: There’s a difference between designers and Designers, and that difference is not apparent to the client until they’ve seen what you’re capable of. Sure, a resume and a portfolio are nice, but let’s be honest: Designers only use their best stuff in their portfolio. No matter how good a portfolio is and no matter how much a reference might rave, the client and the designer just may not be on the same page. Ever.

For these clients, a logo contest works quite well. First, they probably don’t have much money to work with. Second, they’re looking for as many options as possible — often in the hopes of finding a designer they can actually work with long term. One client I work with used Crowd Spring when trying to develop a new logo. Not only did he get something he was happy with for a very reasonable price, but he made contact with the designer and has used the same person again.  Maybe 50 other designers didn’t get that job. But maybe they shouldn’t have. And maybe their work really wasn’t worth paying for.

As has been noted in articles across the web, contests like these often bring out the dregs of the design world — folks who, by virtue of the fact that they’ve pirated Photoshop, believe they’re designers. But Photoshop doesn’t make you a designer; finding someone to pay for your work does. Perhaps — just perhaps — these “contests” can help weed out some of those dregs. Maybe after losing every contest they’ve entered, some of them will study a little, some may study a lot, some may drop out altogether. But the idea that spec work and contests are unfair because not everyone gets paid for their work is, well, silly.

It’s also silly to ignore that the cream rises to the top, and that the best designers will more than likely win, add padding to their portfolios, and likely find clients they can work with again and again.

Do I enter contests? No. I’ve built a reputation for being fair, honest, hardworking and talented. You know what else I do? I don’t expect a dime from a client until the work is finished. And I don’t call it finished until the client is 100 percent satisfied. If they don’t like my work, I take it with me. I’d rather they spend their money somewhere else.

Here’s the bottom line: If you don’t want to work on spec or enter contests, don’t do it. But every argument against this work sounds the same to me: You want to get paid for everything you do and you don’t like having to compete for fear someone else will get the job. In that case, fine. That means more work for those of us who are willing to put our customers first and our wallets second.

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Let’s say you love your job. And let’s say you’ve got a whole bunch of Twitter followers, and you want to tell them about the new and exciting things happening at your job. It’s only natural to tweet whatever news you have to the public to spread the word.

Recently I’ve noticed a surprising number of folks on Twitter who not only tweet about their jobs, but tweet for their jobs using their personal accounts. There are two big reasons why this happens, and several reasons why it shouldn’t.

Business tweets come from your personal account because:

1. You are a well-meaning employee who really wants to help your company or organization, and you feel you can do that through your Twitter feed.
2. Your company expects you to use your Twitter feed and clout to further the company’s goals.

Here’s why you should strongly consider ending the practice:

1. In most cases, your Twitter account is your account. If it existed before your job did, the first risk you take is alienating your followers, who are there to follow you — not to get your work spam. You wouldn’t (usually) send emails or postcards about your company’s services to your friends and family. And most employees would take offense if they were instructed to do so.
2. You’re confusing people. There are cases in which the tweeter becomes the public face of the organization on Twitter. That’s a good thing. A very good thing. An organization should have a personality people identify with. Unfortunately, a good communications professional will continuously spread the positive news about the company — all the way up until they change jobs. When the new job starts and the subject matter changes, you’ve suddenly begun to tell folks about things they never signed up to hear about. Imagine @comcastcares suddenly tweeting support messages about Little Debbie snack cakes.
3. Your personal brand is tied too closely with the company brand. When you love your job, this is not a problem, as long as things go right. But if your company is in the midst of a PR nightmare, your personal reputation is immediately on the line. Today you could extol the virtues of your company’s philanthropic endeavors, only to find tomorrow’s headlines about your boss being charged with stealing from senior citizens. In the end, you appear either complicit or ignorant.
4. You’re being used. Nine times out of 10, you’re asked to use your personal account because nobody follows the company account. Odds are there’s a reason for that — maybe several. The truth is most people just aren’t interested in engaging with a brand. Rather than creating interesting content, companies like to take the easy way out by hijacking your account. If the company wants to build a Twitter following, your challenge is to help do that — not to loan them yours.
5. If you’re doing all the talking, why do I need to follow the company? Tell me you love your job. Tell me I should follow your company’s Twitter feed if I want updates. But if you’re already giving me all the updates I’d ever want, your company’s feed will suffer.

Don’t get me wrong. Even I’ve tweeted about work. When I’m excited about an event or a bit of media I’ve created I let people know. But my personal vs. business tweets are probably 500 to 1. I save business tweeting for the business Twitter account, where people expect to see it, and where it will be seen only by those who want it.

Bottom line: Be careful out there. It’s easy to get caught up in creating a role for yourself in your company’s social media campaign. But you and your followers must come first. Don’t turn your followers into unwitting customers. And don’t turn yourself into a shill.

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There. I said it.

I follow way too many social media experts on Twitter. Too many folks who want to teach your company how to be successful in social media. They promise you heaps of good fortune with your Facebook page and they’re super excited to do your tweeting for you as well. There’s a whole industry now built around these folks, and regardless what they call themselves, they really have no idea what they’re doing. If they did, they wouldn’t be doing it.

Social media platforms weren’t really designed for business; they were designed so folks like you and me could connect with each other, share little things and basically keep in touch — in a superficial, but somehow meaningful, way. As these sites attract users, they also attract businesses — especially those who want the Internet equivalent of a storefront on Main Street.

Problem is, the goals of a business and the goals of an individual in social media are severely different. I choose to use Twitter to connect with folks, whether I know them in real life or not. Facebook is the place where I maintain a loose connection with old classmates. LinkedIn is for keeping in touch with colleagues. Businesses, on the other hand, use social media for two reasons. Those who do it closest to correct use social media to respond to customer complaints, join conversations about the brand, monitor chatter about themselves. But the majority are there to sell.

I can already hear you: “OMG, Dan. What’s wrong with that lol?”

The problem is companies and organizations overestimate their customers’ desire to engage with them. Sure, I love Pepsi and my BlackBerry. I follow both on Twitter. But I don’t engage with them. I don’t remember the last thing I read from either company. But that’s not the point…

Remember in high school how you and your friends found that perfect spot to hang out? No parents or cops or teachers…it was a place where you’d sit back, chat, maybe even sneak a couple of dad’s beers and share them in the summertime. That’s how most social media sites start. They’re little clubs where the cool kids hang out.

Imagine you’re at your little hangout and suddenly a McDonald’s opens 20 feet away. And then the AT&T store opens next to it. And an auto dealership. And 30 social media experts open storefronts, all surrounding you. Suddenly you can’t even talk to your friends without wading through all these businesses, and they all keep trying to get your attention. And of course your parents and teachers show up, because they’ve all heard your hangout is cool. After awhile, you and your friends just decide to find another place.

That’s what social media experts are bringing to social media.

Myspace was cool at first. Everyone connected with each other. You kept in touch. You shared pictures and songs and everybody was happy. Bands all wanted Myspace profiles, because it made getting a web presence easy. Then businesses all wanted to be on Myspace, because that’s where the kids were.

Where’s Myspace today? Overrun by businesses, musicians and celebrities. My own band still has a page there, and our only friend requests come from TV shows, movies and businesses. It’s over, people. Businesses are just standing around in Myspace land, begging each other to buy.

The same is happening on Twitter and Facebook, where social media experts, in order to keep themselves in jobs, continue to push the importance of a business being involved in social media. Unfortunately, that one little fact shows just how little they understand about social media, and their own role in destroying it, one site at a time.

The sad part is that I agree that companies need to have Twitter and Facebook accounts. I think we’ve come to a point where you’re silly if you don’t. But never once have I seen anyone point out just how bad businesses are for social media. Our social media experts never say “Listen, we should be on Twitter, but we have to realize our mere existence on Twitter will surely hasten Twitter’s demise.”

That, folks, would be an honest, and knowledgeable, expert. Anyone out there ever heard that? I bet not.

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HP has finally gotten on my last nerve. I’m absolutely fed up. And, frankly, I’m surprised I’m not hearing more of an uproar from the Internets.

I’ve had quite a few HP products over the years — mostly printers and desktop machines. A year ago I decided on an HP laptop. Though I really like the machine, I was immediately assaulted with a bunch of crap I didn’t need — various HP-branded software that “helped” me do things on my brand-new Windows 7 machine. On top of that, I got the obligatory crapware, games and trial antivirus software. I deleted and uninstalled all of it, and have been pleasantly surprised by the machine. I liked it so much that when it came time to buy a new desktop machine, I bought a big HP, with lots of bells and whistles.

Again, I was forced to remove a bunch of crapware when I got Karen (I named her Karen). But I guess the sad commentary is that I’m used to that ritual. Karen ran beautifully for several months. A couple of months ago, however, I got the dreaded blue screen. The first of many.

At first it was no big deal. Karen would start up again and continue along where we left off. But then things started going crazy. So I called HP tech support. The computer was under warranty, I was told, so no worries. It would be fixed. But there were worries.

Immediately, tech support blamed the software I was running. Nevermind that I’d been running it for months, or that I’d spent a considerable time online hunting down the specific BSOD error and knew the cause. His solution was to uninstall the software I was using first and see if the problem persisted.

“Well,” I said. “It’s video editing software. And I actually use the computer to edit video. If I uninstall it, I will not be editing video…and probably not using the computer.” I asked if he had specific procedures for the BSOD I was getting. He said he did not. In fact, he did not take note of what the error was. I asked to talk to someone who had used a computer before.

I was transferred to someone else. This time, I was told immediately to format my hard drive and reinstall the operating system. The gentleman offered to walk me through the steps to do so. “No,” I said. “This is not an OS problem. It is a hardware problem.”

He challenged me, and told me to run HP’s hardware diagnostics. He said he would call back in two hours so I could report the results. “This is not a hardware problem,” he said. “If it’s a hardware problem, the diagnostics will show us.”

Well, the diagnostics wouldn’t run. The machine bluescreened in the middle of the tests. And the guy from HP didn’t call me back in two hours. In fact, HP didn’t call back for four days. My computer was 30 miles away. They said they’d call me back later that night. They called six days later. Again, I wasn’t expecting the call. I was at the mall. They said they’d call the next day.

Miraculously, things started working again. I thought perhaps they were right. Maybe it was OS related. Maybe it was just a bum update from Microsoft that was fixed. And life went on. Until two weeks ago, when the blue screens came fast and furious. Poor Karen crashed within minutes of booting up. And things were looking grim.

I backed up all my files. I wiped the drive. I reinstalled the OS. The blue screens continued.

My call to HP went as I expected. I was told to reinstall the OS again. I was told I would have to spend $20 on rescue disks to restore the machine’s factory OS install. Again I was told to run the hardware diagnostics and to call back when they completed. When Karen bluescreened during the diagnostics I called. On the other end was Buck — the first American I talked to throughout the ordeal.

It didn’t take Buck long. He listened to my story. We ran the diagnostic test again. He asked me a couple of questions, took lots of notes, and set me up immediately to get Karen sent in for repair. Less than a week later, she’s back at my desk. And things are going well.

So…why am I complaining? Look: I had a pretty simple problem. The fact is, HP’s tech support staff did everything it could to keep from having to fix it. Team members blamed me, my software, Microsoft’s software…anything but the build itself. They failed to return phone calls when they were promised (in fact, at one point a caller claimed they’d called me every night; I just hadn’t answered the phone). They didn’t even listen to the symptoms or document them so that someone who actually knew something about computers could help.

At the end of my experience, I was left thinking HP’s method of dealing with customer problems such as mine is to stonewall, argue and put off any solution until the customer gives up. It’s unacceptable.

Let’s add to it my HP wireless printer. No, I can’t just install it like a normal printer. I actually have to use a setup CD, which is impossible on my netbook. So to print a simple document I’d typed, I had to download the software from HP and install. And I was horrified to find not only had it installed the printer, but also several other pieces of software — all accessible through four — FOUR — desktop icons. It’s a printer, folks. PLEASE let it BE a printer.

HP needs to learn to respect its customers. I should not have to spend time removing garbage I don’t want. I should not have to spend hours talking to tech support. Setting up a printer should not take 20 minutes. Show customers some respect and you’ll earn their loyalty. You’ve already lost mine.

UPDATE:
As you’ll read in the comments below, my poor Karen began bluescreening again, just days after she was returned to me.

In the days since, I’ve spent countless hours on the phone with HP tech support, the escalations department, and the executive customer relations department. I’m going to try to keep this update short, but I don’t know if that’s possible.

My first call to HP to report they hadn’t fixed the problem went poorly. As you can read below, I was told to test the hard drive for the umpteenth time. I politely declined, and asked if I could talked to someone else. I was told I could not, and that if I refused to run a hard drive diagnostic, the tech would not help. I was given a number to call, but that number went to dead air.

My next call didn’t go much better. I talked to two different people, and was finally told my case was being sent to the escalations department, where someone would decide how best to proceed. I asked to have that person call my cell phone any time the next day from 9 am to 11 pm.

At 2:30 am, my home phone rang. It was HP, offering to help fix the “problems you are having getting online.” Well…it was 2:30 am, and at no time did I ever say I was having a problem getting online. And I had just told them to stop calling my home phone.

The next day, Jon from escalations called. He called my home phone, again after I said not to. I returned the call, and somehow ended up with Kelsey, who said  she’d be happy to help resolve the issues I was having with the “computer booting up.” Again, not the problem I was having. After talking to her extensively, I was offered the opportunity to send Karen back to Texas for repair. And I guess I could have just agreed to that. But these are people who utterly failed to diagnose and correct the problem already. I told Kelsey I want someone to come to my house, or I would like to take the machine somewhere to have someone actually look at it — someone I can talk to. She told me although my warranty didn’t cover such things, she’d send an email to someone else and try to get a home visit approved. I thanked her, and asked her to call my cell phone when she had an answer. We confirmed the number.

The next day, she called me back. On my home phone. I received the message and called back, where a man named Michael happily told me a tech would come to my house. To replace my hard drive.

I’ll admit that at this point I flipped out, and I appreciate Michael’s patience. I told him the hard drive was fine. I explained the situation. He told me he builds his own computers, and agreed the BSOD error didn’t sound hard drive related to him either. His guess was motherboard and processor. I’ll point out that in my first call to HP tech support — on Dec. 31st — I told them there was a problem with the CPU.

He made a note for Kelsey to call the next day (yesterday). Again, she told me a tech was coming to replace a part that isn’t broken. I said no. I told her I wanted someone to come look at the machine, diagnose the problem, and fix what was broken. But the repair staff doesn’t troubleshoot, Kelsey told me — that’s what the folks on the phone do. And those folks on the phone just tell the repair staff what part to replace.

Long and short is that my computer still isn’t fixed. My warranty runs out in just days, and the HP staff doesn’t seem to want to put in the effort to make sure it works.

They’ve made a big deal of waiving a $50 fee for a home repair call. But the fact is they’ve cost me hours of time and weeks of productivity. How have they made it up to me? How have they tried to make it up to me at all? They haven’t. They seem to believe it’s enough to merely get me back to where I started, despite the fact that they’ve cost me time and money.

Thank goodness for my Acer netbook. It’s gotten me through this mess. And I can assure you, HP will never get my business again.

UPDATE 2:
So…I scheduled an appointment with HP to have a tech come to my house last week to fix Karen. Well…to replace the motherboard. I took the day off, as I was told the tech would arrive between noon and 4. At 9:30 my phone rang. The guy on the other end said he was calling to confirm my appointment. “Yes,” I said. “I’ve taken the day off from work, and will be waiting.”

“Well,” he said, “if we can’t make it today, will you be around tomorrow?”

What?

He explained they were trying to find a tech, and he’d call me in a couple of hours to let me know when they’d show up. He never called. Nobody did. I spent the whole day waiting. The next day I set up another appointment, for Saturday. But you know what? I was sick of it. Something needed to get done.

I called Kelsey the next day and told her to get creative, make me an offer and make me happy. She promised to get back to me the very next morning. She didn’t. I called and got Todd on the phone. Though she’d promised to call, Kelsey actually had the day off. And that was really all it took.

I’d decided the night before that it was time to take more drastic action. I told Todd I was through being nice. My next stop would be small claims court. His tone changed immediately. He actually listened to my story — even acted bewildered when I told him I’d diagnosed the problem even before making my first call to support. He offered to put in a request to send a new machine. In the meantime, he told me to allow the repairman to replace the motherboard — just in case.

Saturday came, and the motherboard was replaced. The repairman watched as Karen booted up and promptly bluescreened. He called HP.

I could hear his conversation, and he explained the BSOD error. “Why are you replacing the motherboard?” the guy on the other end said. “This is a problem with the CPU.”

Exactly.

It’s now Tuesday, and I just got off the phone with Todd. HP is sending me a new computer — one with better specs than Karen. I’m relieved to hear that, and I’m glad to know this fiasco is finally coming to a close. But my feelings haven’t changed. The next time I shop for a computer or printer, HP will not be on my list.

It should not take three months and the threat of legal action for any company to listen to its customers and response appropriately. Had I been listened to three months ago, Karen would have gone to the shop, the CPU would have been replaced, and I’d be singing HP’s praises here. Instead I’ve been frustrated, annoyed, and treated like a fool.

I’m not a fool.

UPDATE 3:

Well, the saga seems to have ended. I received my new computer on Friday. It wasn’t the one I was promised — that one, I’m told, was sold out — but an acceptable replacement. I used it over the weekend, and it seems to be working fine. I’m now about to send old Karen back to HP, where I hope she’s treated well.

I’ve certainly written more than enough on this subject, so I don’t want to belabor the point much longer. Yes, in the end, HP did the right thing. But that end took a LONG time to get to, not to mention several threats on my part and hours upon hours of aggravation.

Here’s my advice: Do not take no for an answer. Fight tooth and nail to get what’s coming to you. If HP refuses, don’t be afraid to take the company to small claims court. Remember that you’ve paid for the machine, and the law says you should expect it to work.

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I’m writing this from my brand-new netbook, which shows you exactly how useful and user friendly I find the iPad, and how excited I am that a new iPad is just days away.

You may recall that I mocked the iPad a bit at its launch, pointing out nine things the iPad couldn’t do. But I bought one anyway, knowing the limitations, because it felt wrong to trash a device I never used. Perhaps, I reasoned, I was missing something about the overall experience. And I believe in giving devices the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve been living with the iPad now for about two months, and I can tell you that not only has life with the iPad confirmed everything I wrote at launch, but the device is actually less useful than I expected. In many ways, it’s just plain worse than I imagined.

First off, it just stinks to type on. The on-screen keyboard is a miserable experience for a touch typist. Yes, it gets better with practice. But I shouldn’t HAVE to practice typing. I know how to type already. That means e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, document creation and editing are all miserable. Any time I have to type on the iPad — even just typing URLs and search terms — I cringe. Apple has not improved on the keyboard. At all.

Secondly, you really have no idea how much Internet you’re missing without Flash until you try running a device without Flash. And there’s a lot of Internet out there that the iPad just can’t display. A lot of that content is Flash video; on the iPad, you get nothing but YouTube and whatever video you find in apps made specifically for iPad. The most annoying thing ever? The e-mail from a friend, linking you to a video…that you can’t watch.

But at least you’ve got YouTube, right? At the iPad launch, Steve Jobs said YouTube “shines” on the iPad. Well…not quite. You actually don’t even get all of YouTube on the iPad; instead, you get only what’s available on the YouTube mobile site. That means unless a video uploader has specifically chosen to make their videos available for mobile devices, you won’t see it. Videos from Vevo don’t even show up in search results. And worse? No device I own has a tougher time playing YouTube videos. The constant halting and buffering is enough to make me curse Steve Jobs at the top of my lungs, out of pure frustration (I actually yell “JOOOBBBBSSS!!!). And I can’t even choose which resolution to watch those videos in.

The only thing I’ve found pleasurable on the iPad is gaming. And only casual games, at that. Angry Birds and Cut the Rope are fun, easy time wasters. I enjoy Doodle Fit, a couple of air hockey apps, checkers. But more intense gaming that requires using on-screen joystick controls is nearly impossible. Games like Super Fly, Mortal Kombat and Back Breaker are difficult to impossible. And the entire device is too heavy to hold comfortably.

Frankly, the iPad just doesn’t do anything it does better than any other device. The Nintendo DS is a better, more portable and cheaper gaming device. My netbook is better at surfing the net, composing and reading e-mail, watching video, and generally, well, everything. It’s just about the same size as an iPad when closed up, and it cost me half what the iPad set me back.

The new iPad addresses some of the shortcomings of the original. It includes cameras, a dual-core processor, HDMI out. But it doesn’t address the fundamental issues: The iPad is not useful enough to be a must-have device. In fact, I pick mine up rarely anymore. And that only to play a quick game or watch YouTube video.

Apple has shipped a lot of iPads, and they’ll ship a lot more in the coming year. A trip to any computer store will show you that the netbook market has eroded (I haven’t seen anything other than Acer Aspire One models in ages). My fear is that netbooks will soon go the way of the dodo, based purely on the “oh gosh” factor of the iPad. Thanks to its price and “magical”-ness (read: marketing), the iPad is one of those devices people desire. Unfortunately, it’s a disappointing little beast.

That’s not to say the iPad is all bad. I see plenty of ways businesses — especially sales professionals — could use it. But for me, still, it just isn’t right.

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In the last few days, Klout — which rates your social media influence — has undergone some changes. Most notably, the service has changed the algorithm it uses to calculate influence scores, which has folks all in a tizzy.

Most of the people who are upset saw their Klout scores drop, without a really good explanation of why. Klout offers this blog post, but it’s a head scratcher, and I challenge you to figure out what the heck they’re talking about after reading through it once. The long and short is they’ve tweaked a few things, and since they’re grading on a curve, a change in algorithm means some folks will be very disappointed with their scores. I’ve seen my own score drop six points.

The furor over this algorithm change is sort of silly, honestly, when weighed against a much bigger question: Why are we trusting Klout scores at all?

Whenever I look at my own Klout dashboard, I’m amazed at just how incorrect it is in a couple of key areas. For example, it lists five people who influence me. Two of those people I have never retweeted or responded to at all (I don’t even follow one of them). One I haven’t interacted with in months. The other two…well, okay. They’re friends. But Klout is dead wrong in three out of five of those cases. When we look at who I influence, it lists one person who hasn’t tweeted since June, another who hasn’t tweeted since August, and one who hasn’t tweeted since early December. Of the other two, only one interacts with me in any way. This time, Klout is wrong four out of five times.

That’s not all.

Under “Content Analysis,” Klout lists five topics in which I’m apparently “most influential.” Among them? “Christianity” and “hard disk drive.” It does rightly list “syracuse” and “iPhone,” both of which I tweet about often. But it also lists “developers,” which is suspect, at best. It does not list things I tweet about most — like social media, Yankees baseball and soda. And as far as Christianity and hard disk drives go, I’m not only not influential on those topics, but I don’t converse about them. Giving Klout half a point for “developers” means this list is only half right.

These are three little pieces of evidence that immediately make me question what’s actually going under Klout’s hood. But we can add to that a few other things, like that fact that Klout and Twitter seem to have different retweet counts, that the number of likes and comments for Facebook never seems to changes,  and it doesn’t even have my correct number of followers.

If Klout can’t get these basic things right, how can we trust it to get anything else right? And since we have no way of knowing how Klout scores are calculated, we can’t double check the numbers and see whether it’s doing anything in any way that any of us would agree with. Yet many of us in the social media world actually use Klout scores to judge someone’s influence. We should be a lot smarter than that.

When I look at a person’s influence online, I want to see just a few things. First, how many followers do they have and how many are they following? A person with 10,000 followers doesn’t impress me if they are following 20,000. In fact, I’m more impressed by the guy with 500 followers who is only following 100.

Next, how often do they post, and what are they posting? A person with 20,000 tweets about lunch is not impressive; neither is a person who tweets once or twice a week.

Next, how often are they engaging with those they follow or who follow them? I’m way more impressed with someone who uses Twitter as a two-way street.

So, here’s the thing: I’ve seen a lot of folks stick up for Klout. It’s a free service, they say, and it’s not fair to be tough on them if they’re doing the best they can. Well…the unfortunate truth here is that with everything we can clearly see Klout is doing wrong, it’s more than wrongheaded to put so much faith in the scores it assigns.

What Klout seeks to do could be very helpful. But, for starters, grading on a curve in this case just doesn’t work. And I can’t help but look at what it gets wrong as evidence of some shaky logic underneath. I suspect the algorithm used is too complicated. A much easier formula, made up of followers, followers-to-follow ratio, tweet-to-retweet ratio and replies, could be much more helpful.

I believe there’s room for a service like Klout. I’m just not sure Klout is the service we need.