“HE HATES YOU!”

“Good morning to you.” I replied.
It was 4:08 am PST and I was about as interested in hearing about yet another person who despises me as I was in doing fireball crunches on the Bosu Trainer. (Read: I would rather have had root canal without anesthesia through my belly button.)
“How could you recommend him? This is a huge project. MILLIONS OF DOLLARS. CRITICAL to our success… ” The voice from the other line continued yapping.
I switched to side plank splits while the voice droned on and on about my recommendation; what was I thinking; yadda, yadda, yadda.
“He blogged that you were a bully, Amy. Jennifer said that you recommended him for that conference when they wanted someone to vouch for him other than the Wizard, whose recommendations are suspicious at best I might add, and then he blogs that you are a bully and that people should have walked out of your session.”
“He doesn’t like me or my style.” I said. “But he’s the right consultant for you. The guy is unbelievably smart and he has experience with big retailers like you. I have seen his work. I have reviewed his work for clients. He is 200% the right person for this job.”
 The speaker phone reverberated with more muffled comments about why I’d push someone who obviously didn’t enjoy me. I was obviously not adequately preparing for my early onset dementia.
“Look…” I said, as sweetly as a girl with a Hitleresque, bully personality can muster. “I am not inviting him to my wedding – I am suggesting that he…”
And then it finally came. The same words I hear every time I recommend {insert name of marketing consultant here – we’ll call him Ronald for the time being.}
“He doesn’t believe in best practices. He thinks they’re evil.”
Ahhh, the best practices statement. I swear, I should have a prerecorded message I can play every time I hear that. I’ve figured that it’d save me at least two hundred hours a year to not discuss it.
“Are you kidding?” I shot back. “Ronald certainly does believe in best practices. He tells people where the online marketing hotbeds are – do you think everyone in a specific state is a good online customer? I mean really. He has plenty of best practices. He just doesn’t happen to like mine, or me, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use him. There are a lot of people who hate best practices, some folks hate them because they have semantics issues and others just hate them because, well, they don’t know them.”
I stopped my swingkicks to focus on the discussion. (Not to mention I was extremely out of breath.) “You can learn something from almost everyone in this industry. We all have different experiences and expertise. I really believe in best practices. I think it’s helpful for folks to have a benchmark of what’s out there. I don’t call them perfect practices and I don’t call them made-for-everyone practices, more of solid-place-to-start practices.”
The other end of the phone was silent, allowing me to continue on my soapbox.
“Here’s the thing. I didn’t appreciate Ronald’s blatant disregard of best practices till I spoke with Bill LaPierre of the Millard Group. (For those of you who don’t know Bill LaPierre, he is a genius. Unbelievably good at what he does. Cantakerous as all get out, but VERY bright.) He told me that he has clients that still ask for mail date studies so they can plan their mailings. Can you believe it? Bunch of lazy, crack smoking copycats!
For the love of all things holy, if I tell people in my seminars that it’s best not to e-mail people first thing in the morning because e-mails that are in your inbox first thing in the morning are twelve times more likely to be deleted than those that arrive just before lunchtime, it’s a good tip for most people in the room. However, if you sell to plant managers who work third shift, it’s not. In fact, it would be terrible not to mail them in the early morning because about eighty minutes before you leave work is one of the few “hot times” during the day. (When people want a distraction, their e-mail box is an excellent place to start.) Anyone who listens to people like me preach about best practices needs to take what they know about their business and apply it to what I am saying. If it’s not a good practice for you or your customer, and you apply it anyway, well, you might be a webneck.”
“A webneck? What on earth (sic) is a webneck? Is this a term you’ve coined for someone who doesn’t think you’re a goddess?” Laughter followed on the other line. Some people really crack themselves up, I thought, and it’s usually the least funny ones.
“You’ve never seen Jeff Foxworthy?” I replied somewhat incredulously. “The guy who says that if you think the last words to the Star Spangled Banner are ‘gentleman start your engines’ you might be a redneck?”
More guffaws. Not sure if it was the joke or my faux Southern accent. Bless my Yankee heart, it’s horrific. I just don’t have enough Sweet Tea in my blood, I guess.
“I can’t believe you’ve never heard of him.” I said. He has a whole line of Redneck jokes. You might be a redneck if you… think Taco Bell is a Mexican Phone Company; if your Dad walks you to school because you’re both in the same grade; if your Dad’s cell number has nothing to do with a phone; if you ever stared at a can of orange juice because it said concentrate; if you go to the family reunion to meet women; if you think a quarter-horse is that ride in front of Kmart; and so on. Anyway, a webneck is like a redneck but it’s of the web. Someone who refers to fifth grade as their ‘senior year’ of the web, if you know what I mean.”
“Webneck.” The voice replied. “No wonder Ronald doesn’t like you. Probably scared to death that you’re going to show up at one of your conferences with a sawed off shotgun and start shooting people who don’t follow your orders.”
“Naw, a shotgun is too big. I pack a Smith and Wesson .500 magnum and I may just have to use it if you don’t call Ronald today. I’ve got to run, I’m headed to yoga. Bikram for Bullies, they call it.”

ARE YOU A WEBNECK?  YOU JUST MIGHT BE…

If you only e-mail once a week because you “hate e-mail”… and therefore assume your users hate it too, you might be a webneck. If your unsubscribe and/or blocked rate skyrockets, you are mailing too much or you are sending irrelevant things. Let your users decide how much they want to hear from you.
If you are too lazy to develop proper C-Navigation (top, left and bottom navigation and a strong righthand column) and just “let your text search handle it”, you might be a webneck.  Text searchers have the second highest propensity to buy among all your visitors. Unfortunately, they also have some of the highest exit rates as even if you have it (which there’s an 80% plus chance that you do) users often have a difficult time figuring how to say/spell exactly what they want.  A solid “C” takes a lot of emphasis off the text search.
If you aren’t looking at your top ten exit pages every single week and figuring out how to change/better them, you might be a webneck. Failed or successful text search = not an acceptable exit page. Acceptable exit pages = checkout or lead form confirmations.
If you haven’t recently tested or don’t use entrance and/or exit pop-ups because “everyone in the world has a pop-up blocker”, you might be a webneck.  Yes, it is a small world but it only takes a small percentage of success for stuff like that to pay.
If you aren’t using P/S (problem/solution navigation) on your site because it’s, well, just too difficult, you might be a webneck.  Problem/solution is drop-down navigation that allows your users to shop based on a dish, not an ingredient. See www.greatgardenplants.com for their shop by zone or www.demco.com for their “I need help with….” P/S.
If you are proud of your 11% abandoned cart rate, you might be a webneck. If your abandoned cart rate is lower than fifty percent, it’s more than likely that you are not getting enough ATC (adoption to cart.) In other words, you probably need to be more aggressive about getting people to put stuff into their baskets; using perpetual carts (carts that stay with you at all times); buy now/add to cart buttons; and so on.
If you really, truly, honestly think that someone who abandons a cart or a lead form (if you are not an ecommerce site) will come back on their own, you might be a webneck. You get what you ask for on the web. If you want them to come back, use a solid trigger e-mail program (five or more e-mails); pops on exit; and perhaps even outbound telemarketing.
If you aren’t asking for e-mail addresses at the top of every page, you might be a webneck.  Burying your e-mail capture at the bottom of your pages in the middle column is one of the worst online mistakes you can make and one of the easiest to fix. Speaking of which, the more you ask for it, the more you get it. That applies to almost everything on your website.
If you are not using plugs (non-animated banners) in your righthand column, you might be a webneck. Plugs entice people to drill deeper into your site. They’re like mini-advertisements for the stuff you promote/sell. They are very effective tools to increase page views, drills, user session, sales, conversion, and so on. Sure, they make your boring-and-filled-with-white-space site a bit cluttered but what’s a little ugly for a lot of sales?
If you don’t put your top products or services above the fold, you might be a webneck. Web designers look at things in pages. Users see each screen as its own page. That means every view is a page. Considering you can’t count on everyone to scroll, you need to make sure your message is very apparent in the first view.
If you can defend a less-than-two minute average user session, you might be a webneck. C’mon folks, which sites can you place an order on, besides Amazon with one-click, in under two minutes? I mean really. The more they stay, the more they pay.
If you think your somewhere-around-fifty-percent bounce rate is acceptable, you might be a webneck. Yes, an acceptable bounce rate should be determined based on the referring URL so there is no average “magic number” but we all know that it wouldn’t be acceptable to have half the people who come to your site leave immediately. Most of us wouldn’t accept a quarter either.
If you don’t leave your cookies open indefinitely, you might be a webneck. Yes, indefinitely means forever which is a very long time.
You also might be a webneck, if you’re not using www.eightbyeight.com.  Wait, you’re definitely a webneck if you’re not at least doing that.