.:RIMproInsider:.

One of my internet marketing heroes died yesterday. Corey Rudl was killed during a race, doing someting he loved to do.

Corey was one of the legends of Internet marketing and was considered among the most influential webmasters of all time. His success is often cited as a reason many online marketers entered the field. Corey was the passenger in a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT which veered off the track at the California Speedway and crashed into a safety barrier at over 100 mph. The driver, Miles Keaton was airlifted to Loma Linda University Hospital where he died about an hour after being admitted. Corey died at the scene of the accident.

Despite never meeting him, he was a mentor to me. I have read his newsletter for years. I have listened to him in teleconferences. He is someone I respected greatly. He taught me much.

You will be missed. Thanks for the wisdom, inspiration and ideas you shared.

The customer list, once seen as sacred, especially when an employee leaves the company - is no longer…. unless you make it so. In a recent case in Illinois, a couple of salespeaople who left a compnay also accessed an online database where all the old compnay customer lists were held, and made full use of them. The originating company sued on to lose…

‘In the case of Liebert Corp. v. Mazur, the Illinois Court of Appeals has held that customer lists stored online in password protected directories were not entitled to trade secret protection where employer did not adequately make employees aware of the lists’ confidential nature…

The court held that ‘[r]estricting access to sensitive information by assigning employees passwords on a need-to-know basis is a step in the right direction.’ This precaution in and of itself, however was not enough. The court was ‘troubled by the failure to either require employees to sign confidentiality agreements, advise employees that its records were confidential, or label the information as confidential.’

So make sure you sign those agreements, those non-competes with your sales team.

For more details visit Internet Cases.com

In the next few weeks the RIMproInsider website is going to begin undergoing some transformation. Our primary educational delivery format is out newsletter. If you are not getting it, subscribe today at RIMproReport. It is free! To not get it would be crazy. It will become much more of the focus area for us.

We will be providing more value in the site for you our subscribers. I think it is pretty good already. But we want to improve it. If you are part of the RIMproReport you will get the heads up when it changes.

Everyday I talk with many of you and what I constantly hear is your desire to improve… improve sales, improve marketing, improve web results, improve employee performance, improve time management, improve hiring process, improve efficiency, improve … improve… improve.

Here is the problem I see. You cannot improve what you don’t measure.

Case in point. I hear this one alot from my clients.
“I want to improve my web site results.”
My question then becomes. “What results are you getting now?”
The answer I get most often.. “I don’t know”
My response… “How do we know if we are improving if we don’t know where you are now?”

So the best thing you can do is measure everything you want to improve. Religiously. Intensely. I measure my web stats 4 times a day. I know who has been on the site, how long they stayed, which links they clicked, how many people clicked which links. On my newsletter The RIMproReport, I know how many times people have looked at the email, who they forwarded it to, what articles they wanted more on and what was the actual read rate.

Everything I can measure I do. And by measuring all these things, I have the ability to know where I want improvement, then the metrics to know after changing something, to know if I actually got improvement.

In the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette there is an article on FACTA’s affect on the shredding industry. Service providers Shop n Shred and Confidential Shredding Services , manufacturers Martin Yale Industries and Industrial Paper Shredders both got mentioned in the article. Iron Mountain also got mentioned. The FACTA law is a story that is making it’s way into everyday business life.

Every single one of you should be contacting your local reporters with Press Releases and offering them your take on the story. You are missing a great oportunity if you are not marketing using this free medium for your business.

Do it today!

Back from Hawaii and into more than a foot of new snow. What a change.

Despite a pretty small turnout for the PRISM Business Across Borders Conference, it was a very valuable conference for those who attended.

For those of you who wanted my powerpoint and notes, you can download it here.

Back in the saddle now. Losts of good posts this coming week.

Don’t bring your need to the marketplace, bring your skill. If you don’t feel well, tell your doctor, but not the marketplace. If you need money, go to the bank, but not the marketplace.
Jim Rohn

A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
Steve Jobs

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
Henry Ford

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.
John D. Rockefeller