Hello, I'm Mike Prasad.

I just got word that I was heavily quoted in the Australian Financial Review (paid article link) in an article talking about investment funds leveraging data and social media analytics for fund intelligence! I can’t post the whole article but it was printed in the newspaper on December 22, 2011. Below are excerpts of my quotes:

I love the chance to talk about applications of social media in industries that typically shy away from it. Plus the AFR is a big deal in the financial world. Big thanks to Claire Stewart for including me!

Pardon the rough draft writing, since now have less than 24 hours to do at least 36 hours of productive work. I have to make this fast.

There are just some things you expect when you stay at a decent hotel: A clean room, hot water, amicable staff, and a parking spot.. Sadly almost none of those were right during my stay at Marriott LAX..

So every year my team at www.ani.me covers Anime Los Angeles, which is held at the LAX Marriott hotel. Every year the convention is held there and hotel has always been aware of that. This year we had 3 rooms, 2 under the convention group rate block and 1 room (mine) under a standard AAA rate. I had to manage my team coverage and panel at the convention but I also had a bunch of consulting work to do for a 4pm deadline on Monday. I figured by getting an extra room for myself, I could save drive time and get both coverage/panel work and consulting work done. The premise was that the cost of the extra hotel room was worth the hours of productive work.

Let me also say that I’ve stayed in a hotel nearly 100 nights in the past year alone and this was the most frustrating hotel stay I can remember. This is also the only hotel issue I’ve ever blogged about. To the credit of the few staff that did help, the issues were eventually solved but only after I proactively took initiative and only after adamant resistance each time.

Here’s what happened:

Thursday

• Checked in late night Thursday January 5th: no problems.
• Woke up in middle of the night and got out of bed to step on a soaked carpet. Was too tired to care, washed feet, went back to bed.

Friday

• Woke up, and noticed the floor was significantly more wet, called guest services, told them they had a possible under floor leak. They sent an engineer who told me a 5th floor pipe had leaked and they were working on it. Offered to bring in air movers to dry out the carpet.. and that housekeeping could towel carpet.. I said I have bad allergies and mold is a real issue, or worse if it was a sewage pipe issue. I also noticed the entire wall was soaked and deformed and needing to be torn out. Engineer agreed but said he couldn’t work on it while I was in the room.. I wasn’t staying in a torn up room or leaky room. He said to talk to front desk. Called Front Desk, and no new room but they offered to send housekeeping.. which wasn’t a solution. I went to the front desk in person and told the person there that the Engineer needed to tear open the wall and as such, he sent me to be moved to a new room.

• Got moved to a new room, Pepe the bellhop helped me move and upon walking into new room, we both reacted to a heavy smoke smell, which eventually made my eyes itch. I made a comment about it and Pepe agreed that the room was pretty bad. He called the Front Desk from the room to try to get me moved again, but no response, so he left and went in person to get me to a different room. Came back 15 minutes later saying he wasn’t able to get me moved but they told him housekeeping would come spray the room. He suggested that I talk to a manager. I thanked him for his help, tipped him well for his effort and walked to the Front Desk again. Found an assistant manager Michael who recognized the issue, and moved me to another room with a small upgrade. Thanked Michael and finally moved into a non-smoky non-soaked room.

• Morning = wasted all work time

• Went to Front Desk again to check into other 2 rooms that I was paying for for my staff. Asked to add my staff names to room, and was told they could only add their names to request keys. Right after, when I finally get to sit down to start working, I get a call from my staff saying self parking was full and valet won’t let them park because the room is not in their name therefore they “are NOT a hotel guest” and cannot park.. Even though they are the ones actually staying in the other 2 rooms. I have to stop, walk out and deal with that in person. More wasted time. Also this happened separately to 2 other members of my staff, and all 3 times the attendants were rude. A 4th staff member had to park blocks away on the street. I don’t understand how with 3 rooms, why 5 people aren’t considered guests because the room is paid in my name.

Saturday

• Wake up to no hot water. Take a cold shower after hearing there is no estimated time to repair and I have a panel to host.

• Ask for 30 to 60 minute late checkout for next day so I can get some work done before meeting and was told it was impossible. (Fair enough.)

Sunday

• 4am-ish power goes out for a few and resets my devices..

• Wake up, shower, pack all my stuff up, call bellhop to make regular checkout time.. and wait for OVER AN HOUR for bellhop to come. Bellhop gets to room and sees my 7 bags and 3 boxes (smaller boxes) of gear and am told they arbitrarily CANNOT ACCEPT THE BOXES FOR CHECK IN. Only the bags. I obviously can’t carry all the boxes myself, and can’t stay in room, so bellhop offers to take all my bags and boxes down to the lobby where I can “sit with it”. Um, no, I need the hotel to hold it so I can go work, meet with my team and continue coverage of the last day of the convention. Thankfully on the way to the lobby, I bump into Pepe who asked how things are and he solved the problem by allowing me to check in my small boxes.

• 3:30pm I go to get car from valet, and wait nearly 45 minutes, after giving ticket, with another bellhop (Slovakian guy), After waiting, the Slovakian bellhop is wondering where my car is, and so he goes to look into it, and comes out with my car keys, still in the booth. No one had gone to get it. Mind you, every person in front of me had left already. I thank him and tip him well and finally leave the hotel.

Here’s why I’m frustrated

Each time there was an issue, the hotel’s strong first response was never a solution. You can’t use air blowers to dry out a continuous leak. Neither does spraying a ton of air freshener make smokiness do away. It makes it smell nasty and more irritating. Also each time, it often took hours and pushing or luck to reach a solution. Which meant I was screwed out of work time, which was the whole reason I was paying for the hotel. I also had drastically less time to do my job at the convention itself.

Even worse, I felt that I only even got a response (though never a solution) because they saw my room was NOT a convention rate room. Often they would apologize for the convention crowd to me, as if that was some excuse or justification or something that needed apologizing for. They were much less helpful when I called for other things from the convention rate rooms of my staff.

All in all, I ended up wasting at least 6+ hours waiting or arguing with the hotel to convince them to solve problems that shouldn’t have even been questioned. Dealing with the hotel meant my team got much less covered and each time the hotel tried to get away with not solving the issue. If it weren’t for Pepe, Michael or the Slovakian Bellhop, or my not accepting their fake “fixes”, it would have been worse. Also, every one of my staff that drove up had to deal with rude parking attendants and issues with them being considered “guests” of the hotel.

In summary, worst hotel experience, with issues EVERY day and an adamant initial pushback to solve the issues. I will not be staying at a Marriott again, and will do whatever is possible to make sure none of my staff do either.

/EndRant

30 minutes of more wasted time writing this. Now I have to get back to not sleeping tonight to get all my work done..

UPDATE

To the credit of the @MarriottIntl social media team, they saw my tweets and promised to look into the experience. On a Sunday no less.I wonder what they will find/do/say.

Also, my staffer (who was in a convention block room), upon reading this, said that Pepe was the only bellhop who came to accomodate his bags, after calling 4 times and being told there would be someone coming in 5 minutes. On the last call, upon saying he called 4 times and was told 5 minutes each time, he was rudely told that he “would need to wait” because “all you guys” are checking out right now. All he needed to know on call #1 was an accurate time. Seriously Pepe needs to get a raise.

What I don’t get is why it was so bad this year? Last year, the staff was much more accommodating AND CONSIDERATE to the convention attendees.

So I’ve been working on (among other things) launching a Daily Deals site for Ani.ME and decided since we were closer to Woot.com than GroupOn AND we wanted to offer branded swag, so a modified shopping cart / eCommerce system would be best. After much deliberation and research I went with Shopify, and so far its been great.

SIDENOTE: As far as I researched, IMHO the best hosted SaaS ecommerce platforms are Shopify and BigCommerce, and the best self-hosted solutions are Magento and OSCommerce.

Customizing Shopify has been relatively easy and the Liquid templating system can be very powerful. One thing it doesn’t support by default however is easy sub-navigation. It has Link Lists for main navigation but it doesn’t allow more than 1 level of menus. There are a few posted workaround methods to create dropdowns and tag based sorting but I wanted a solution that met the following requirements:

Functional Requirements

• Once setup, be able to edit/manage each sub-menu using Link Lists, a menu/link management feature in the Shopify admin, and not have to edit template code. This allows you to use the link list filters and other dynamic features and easily create smart collection-based sub menu links.
• Each sub-menu should automatically load up the correct Link List based on page it is on.
• If no sub-menu exists for the page, automatically either display a specified message or simply not load any sub-menu at all. This means you only have to define the pages you want a sub-menu on, while not requiring you to specify every instance or mess up the rest of your store pages.

Assumptions

• You already have an area defined where you want the sub-menu to appear.
• This sub-menu area already appears where desired in the template (as with most themes).
• You use pages or collections on your main menu navigation, at least on the pages where you want a sub-nav.
• NOTE 1: The example below is shown using collections as the list identifier, if you use pages then change collection.title to page.title.
• NOTE 2: I use sub-menu, subnav and sub-nav interchangeably. They refer to the same thing.

How To

1. Determine which main menu/top level pages or collections you want to have a sub-menu for.
   
   

2. For each such page/collection that you want a sub-menu for, go to the NAVIGATION in the Shopify Admin and create a Link List with the desired sub-menu links.
   
   
   
   

3. Write down the Handle of each Link List. In this case it is daily-deals.
   
   
   
   

4. Go to the Template Editor and open the theme template file that contains the area where you want your subnav to appear. In this case, I am using the free Structure theme, and it is in the subnav.liquid snippet.
   
   
   
   

5. In the above image and below snippet, you see the code we are about to create already inserted. The code consists of 2 parts. The first part identifies the page that is loaded and pulls the page title or (as above) the collection title. It then creates a variable value that corresponds to load the correct Link List. The second part, simply outputs the links in the format you specify. If a link list doesn’t exist for the page that is loaded, you can specify a different output or none at all.

   <!-- BEGIN COLLECTION-BASED SMART SUB-NAVIGATION -->
   <!-- From mikeprasad.com, visit for detailed instructions. -->
   
   <!-- Determine Page or Collection and assign matching LinkList Handle -->
   <!-- Edit 'Title' and 'link-list-handle' to match each main nav page.collection with the desired link list -->
   
   {% if collection.title == 'Title 1' %}
   {% assign linklistHandle = 'link-list-handle-1' %}
   
   <!-- Repeat additional 2-line sets of elsif and assign code for each additional submenu -->
   
   {% elsif collection.title == 'Title 2' %}
   {% assign linklistHandle = 'link-list-handle-2' %}
   
   {% elsif collection.title == 'Title 3' %}
   {% assign linklistHandle = 'link-list-handle-3' %}
   
   {% else %}
   {% endif %}
   
   <!-- Print the matching linklist as a sub-nav -->
   
   {% if linklists.[linklistHandle].links.size > 0 %}
   {% for link in linklists.[linklistHandle].links %}
   
   <!-- This formats the output of each link, modify as needed -->
   <a href="{{ link.url }}"{% if link.url == collection.url %} class="active"{% endif %}>{{ link.title | escape }}</a>
   
   <!-- This is the divider HTML that is output between each link, modify as needed -->        
   {% unless forloop.last %} <span>&#124;</span>{% endunless %}
   
   {% endfor %}
   {% else %}
   
   <p>This is the output if there is no matching linklist for {{ collection.title }}. Modify or delete this line as desired.</p>     
   
   {% endif %}
   
   <!-- END COLLECTION-BASED SMART SUB-NAVIGATION -->
   

6. If you have any basic experience, you can stop at this step and simply copy and paste the above code, then follow the inline comments. If you don’t, the next steps should help you out.
   
   

7. For the first page or collection you want a submenu for, you simply replace Title 1 with the page or collection title that Shopify generates. This is the title (with spaces and capitalization) you input when you created the page or collection in the Shopify admin.
   
   NOTE: To make it easy, once you save the above code snippet in your theme (but before you modify the last few lines), it should display this in the subnav area when you browse each page in the statement saying there is no matching subnav. You can also insert {{ collection.title }} anywhere to display this.
   
   Next for the corresponding link list that you want to show as the subnav for this page/collection, just replace link-list-handle-1 with the correct link list handle as shown when you edit the link list in the Shopify admin.

   {% if collection.title == 'Title 1' %}
   {% assign linklistHandle = 'link-list-handle-1' %}
   

8. For each additional page of collection, simply add the following 2 lines of code, replacing Title and link-list-handle as done in the last step.

   {% elsif collection.title == 'Title 2' %}
   {% assign linklistHandle = 'link-list-handle-2' %}
   

9. This line determines how each subnav link is output. Edit as needed. Also, the active class part will show the link as the active link if its url is the same as the loaded page. This class is usually already in the css of most themes, if not, the link style will default to your normal theme look.

   <a href="{{ link.url }}"{% if link.url == collection.url %} class="active"{% endif %}>{{ link.title | escape }}</a>
   

10. This outputs the divider separating each link. Edit as needed.

    {% unless forloop.last %} <span>&#124;</span>{% endunless %}
    

11. This last part is what is output when there is no defined link list for the loaded page/collection. You can delete this line if you want to display nothing or edit it as desired.

    <p>This is the output if there is no matching linklist for {{ collection.title }}. Modify or delete this line as desired.</p>     
    

That’s it. The code should load wherever your theme template has a subnav area and automatically populate it based on the loaded page. You can now manage each sub-menu using the Link List/Navigation screen in the Shopify Admin. If you decide you want to remove a sub-menu for a defined page/collection, just remove its links in its matched Link List. The only time you need to go into the template code again is to define new sub-menus for new pages or collections.

Enjoy!

It’s SXSW Panel Voting time again and I’m really hoping to talk this coming year, as its been a while and I think a revised version of my social media talk I gave at iStrategy Melbourne this year would be perfect. The talk was the most tweeted, referenced, and requested at iStrategy but since it deals with all U.S. based case studies, I’d very much like to present it here at SXSW.

Help make that happen by taking a look at the slides below and VOTING AND COMMENTING FOR THE TALK HERE!

The Secret to Social Media: What do you love?

I love my iPad 2 with AT&T 3G Service. It’s great, and I get more utility out of my iPad because of it. In fact, 3 months ago, when a colleague of mine was in town from out of the country and we had to collaborate, they bought iPad’s and I prepaid 1 month for 3G over AT&T. It worked wonderfully.. 

Fast forward to now.. When I realize that despite the 2 iPads 3G being disabled before leaving the country and never used again, my credit card was still being charged every month.

Now before I highlight multiple points of EPIC FAIL and possibly consumer deception, I’m going to admit there is a possibility that the 2 iPad’s were not properly canceled via the iPad settings. EVEN if this is the case, it should not be as impossible to cancel a AT&T Prepaid Data plan without access to the device.

FOR EXAMPLE: What if you lost your iPad/device? Or it got stolen?

Anyway, here’s what happened and how also the solution to canceling your iPad 3G plan in all but 1 circumstance:

• First thing I did, naturally, was check the email receipt you get on signup for a customer service number. Nope, no number at all. IN FACT, no contact information whatsoever. 
• Next, logically, check the website on managing and iPad 3G Account. Nope, no mention of the iPad or related service anywhere on the homepage.
• Ok.. so then I called AT&T Wireless and spoke to a rep.. Who told me iPad’s did not have “real accounts” and therefore she had no way to look up the recurring charges. I was also told that as a prepaid, they have no way to track down the account records.. But apparently they can still charge and track usage..
• BUT WAIT! Don’t you create an account with an email and password on the iPad when you sign-up for service? YES! Surely you can look it up that way? Apparently not, as they aren’t “real accounts”
• So I asked her what I should do? ACCORDING TO THE AT&T REP, THERE IS NO WAY TO CANCEL A RECURRING iPAD 3G DATA SERVICE WITHOUT ACCESS TO THE DEVICE. Her solution was to for me to call my credit card company and dispute the charge. I asked if the dispute would cancel recurring charges or would I have to dispute in perpetuity? She couldn’t say. Not to mention, how was my credit card company going to know which AT&T charges to block, as I have an iPhone4 and my own iPad with 3G.. She did offer to give me Apple’s general Apple Care support number however, suggesting it was Apple’s issue, not AT&T’s. I politely said thank you and hung up.

• TO THE WEB! Surely some others must have had the same issue right? Yes, quite a few, as the 26,500,000~ results suggest. Go forums go! After a bit of searching, I found the following link in a AT&T Forums post directing me to a somewhat confusing sales page: http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/devices/ipad.jsp

• ON THE BOTTOM of this page which advertises buying an iPad, there is the following box offering the purchase of more data:

• Now if one was to click on the unintuitive “Shop Now” button, you would be prompted for the mythical user/pass login you created when you signed up for 3G on the iPad. If you happen to know it, you can log in, then “Edit/Upgrade” your plan, and once there, find the small cancel link to cancel and close the 3G Data account. SOLUTION AT LAST!
• BUT? What if you really did have your iPad stolen or just don’t remember the login for the account? Well your S.O.L. then, because to recover the login info, you need the IMEI and Device ID off the iPad itself, so in the end, you’ll likely have to call your credit card company and dispute the charge and hope for the best.

So one might say, “Mike, why are you pissed enough to write a post? You got it canceled.” To which I would reply, “I did get it canceled, after paying $150 for 3 months x 2 of unused data fees..” BUT MORE SO “I got it canceled despite the AT&T lack of solution and responsibility. Here are a few of the points of failure that annoy me:

• No contact information on the signup receipt/confirmation email
• No way to find on website a way to cancel
• No solution by customer service AND denying responsibility + ability to close my account, yet still be able to charge me
• That in the end, I had to find my own solution provided by other frustrated consumers as AT&T said the only way was to dispute the charge.
• FINAL FAIL is that the only way to cancel the account without access to the iPad was to (in a hidden, non-offered and non-apparent manner) go to the website, go to a shop page to buy the iPad plan, click on an Add Data link, login (assuming you have the access), then edit a plan, to FINALLY FIND A CANCELLATION LINK.

The only positive I can say is that when I tweeted about the issue, AT&T’s twitter rep for back to me, but this was AFTER I solved it on my own, and they may not have even had a solution.

Am I ranting for no reason? Or do you agree that this is ridiculous and misleading? Let me know in the comments.