Have you heard of Larby Amirouche?  He knows all about how to travel, as he’s a busy man.  Becoming skilled at navigating airports, hotel programs, and all manners of transportation is no easy feat.  But should you need travel tips, this is one guy to talk to– as he knows his way around.  As a businessman, he also has a deep understanding of affiliate marketing.  His knowledge is so deep and his results so impressive, it should be considered a crime or scam for him to particpate.

Today I received two “urgent” messages from a Facebook user named Brian Zisk. They are both similar in content and tone, so I’ll just post one of them below.   There is a game on Facebook called “Friends For Sale“.  You buy and sell friends, and in the process are able to give them nicknames, send them virtual gifts, and write on their walls.

For fun, I bought a number of folks and promoted the company that I work at.  I even promoted the affiliate marketing blog of a friend, who was promoted on TechCrunch.  Turns out, this Brian Zisk fellow carried out his threat.  My current status message in this game is now ”I’m the ShitzLocal.com Spammer. Boycott my company!“

For a proponent of the arts and self-expression, it’s surprising to see someone get his panties in a wad over a silly Facebook game.

  

Facebook

to Dennis

Reply

Brian sent you a message.

——————–
Subject: Please… Time sensitive…

Dear Dennis Yu,

Please change the message under my name on friends for sale  to something like it was before, or anything non-offensive, but please remove the reference to your company from my listing the next time you log in so I do not have to see the association, or I will buy you on friends for sale and you will most likely not be happy with the text I associate with your name and company.

I am sure this is but a misunderstanding, but do not find it amusing, and would appreciate you removing this irritation ASAP.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Brian Zisk

We’ve got over 100 projects in our Basecamp– and that makes for potentially messy project management.  Basecamp doesn’t allow you to group projects together, except under companies.  So our workaround was to create companies named “Non Profit support”, “Tier 1 Clients”, “BlitzLocal Platform”, “Cosmetic Surgeons”, and so forth to bucket projects together.  On the plus side, it does organize projects into nice indented groups.

But then I took a tip from how we name our campaigns and ad groups inside AdWords Editor– to prefix the names of these items to force them to sort in the vertical hierarchy on the left.  You see, in AdWords, we can force sort campaign names by calling them 1_[theme] or 2_[theme] or 3_[theme] to group by priority and by head or tail.  

Same thing with our project names in Basecamp.  I hope this helps those of you with a ton of projects in basecamp– or perhaps too many ad groups and campaigns to manage in AdWords.  I’d give you a screenshot, but I think you get the idea here.  Sometimes the simplest tricks are the most effective– the ones that require zero programming.