This past week, I have been re-designing the website for my Home Staging and Furniture Leasing business, Pineapple Interiors. As a part of the re-design, I decided to get in touch with some clients for updated testimonials. The testimonials I received are fantastic, but I found myself asking if testimonials were old school. Do they still work? It didn’t take but a minute to find a great article on testimonials and how to properly use them. The article covers How to Choose the Right Testimonial, Getting Great Testimonials — Even if You Haven’t Sold Anything Yet, and Strategies for Using Testimonials Effectively. Check out Entrepreneur.com to find out what makes a good testimonial, where to put them on your website and more! After reading this article, I will be looking at our testimonials in a whole new light and making sure they are effective in promoting our business, establishing trust in our product and that they relate to our customers.

There’s a phrase in software called Premature Optimization.

It’s when you worry about the details before you have any of the broad strokes in place… and we’re all guilty of it.

I have the tendency to try to build elaborate plans and get excited about the tiny features we’re building for our customers before I even write a line of code. Being enthusiastic about your product or service is great but make sure you are making your plans a reality before you worry about the finishing touches.

So many plans change from day to day. We find out that some features won’t work or that some product enhancements don’t actually enhance at all. However, many times we don’t realize this until we’ve already started building the feature. If we had planned out the details of the feature then we would have wasted hours or days that could have been spent on useful features.

The solution to Premature Optimization is to get your hands dirty. Cancel your meetings, shred your planning documents and make something.  It doesn’t have to be perfect but just make something.

How have you gotten past Premature Optimization?

I always thought we were in a great industry — we provide great software as a service for small businesses. But today I saw that Inc.com ran a list of the best industries to start a business and number 4 is “Software as a Service”!

Twitter is great for mini-inspiration that comes in randomly throughout the day.  I just saw a message written by @tsfalls that said:

“if your users think everything you do is awesome, then your users suck; and you probably suck too.”

Good software gets written because someone is trying to fix a problem they have.  Great software gets written when many people come together to share their own perspective on a problem.

We all have one or two customers that always want one more feature or one more change to an order.  As much as those people can drive us nuts, they help make our businesses great.

As the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  But if you never have a squeaky wheel then nobody’s riding your bike.

Admittedly, I can be a bit of a geek. I get really excited for new technology that can help my business or personal life. There are two things that I am excited about this week. First is the iPhone 3.0 software upgrade that will be available on June 17th. I absolutely love my iPhone but there are some things that I have really been waiting for including MMS texting ability and copy and paste functionality. For those of you that have been holding off on purchasing an iPhone, I think now is the time. Check out the guided tour at the Apple website and geek out with me!

Another great tool that I am hoping to take full advantage of is a service called PSD to HTML. There are quite a few companies now that will convert Adobe Photoshop files into HTML files. My graphic designer, Erin Conigliaro at e-design, is fantastic and I want her to design, not write code. PSD to HTML Services can take design files and turn them into the web pages that I need, all for very reasonable prices. Vandelay Design has compiled a nice list of companies that offer this service on their blog.

I purchased a book today called, “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing“, after seeing it recommended by Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss. On Amazon, I was surprised to see that it only had four stars after the glowing recommendation but the recommendation bumped it up to five stars for me.

I glossed over other books Amazon recommended for me and found that nearly every book had a four- or five-star rating.  At first I thought the ratings were rigged or slanted but then I realized that I had read many of the recommended books and they were great.

I thought of my other recent purchases too: a Roku, an iPod Touch and an Altec Lansing speaker dock.  They’re all products that I not only love but I rave about them to other people too.

They’re all five-star products.  I’m a five-star snob.

If I come across a product that is only four stars then I debate purchasing it and if it has three stars, well… it’s out of the question.  There are just too many great products these days to settle for less.

So what happens when you have to choose between great products?  Where do we go from here?  Do we add another star?

I’d argue that it’s our niche that tips the scale.  A recommendation from someone in my social circle not only gives me confidence about my purchase but also pulls me closer into a niche.  It makes me feel like I am a part of a club.

As marketers we need to make it easy for customers in our core niche to connect to others and spread the word.

What else will there be that differentiates between great products and services?

I wish I had found a set of tutorials like this when I first started using Twitter.  These are a great way to hit the ground running with Twitter:

Top 7 Twitter Tutorials on YouTube