For the last 5 years I’ve worked at a small retail/manufacturing shop. There are three of us, a coworker and the owner. It’s a franchise, the chain is international. (It’s a great place to work. I get to take my dog in with me every day. We are getting more orders than we can reasonably handle. It’s been a great year. In case you were wondering.)

There are only two locations in all of San Diego county. There are more than 15 in Los Angeles county. The chain spends advertising money in the L.A. market but not any further South. No print ads, no mailers, no TV. I think they’ve run 2 radio commercials in the last 5 years.

I was hired as the office manager when the shop was a year old. I do some production work but primarily I’m supposed to answer the phone, be the face to the customer and perform other management functions, including building and maintaining the shop’s website (cwsandiego.com if you’re curious).

The website’s the focus of the present issue between the franchise chain’s owners and my boss and me.

In less than a month at the shop I realized how unknown our chain was in San Diego and how much we needed a way to publicize ourselves. “Corporate” wasn’t going to help. We paid into a marketing fund every month, only to have those funds used to finance campaigns in other cities. The contribution of only two shops won’t fund much. So I started pitching low to no cost methods of getting better known to my boss. The first shop owner was a geek, an engineer and a very nice person. But she was by her own admission no salesman. We couldn’t really afford a full-time salesman. But we could afford a domain and website.

I’m a well read geek. I’ve enjoyed and been challenged by books like The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Naked Conversations. So I advocated for permission to start a website and get us involved in various social/business online networks. She liked the idea and I went ahead and bought our domain with the same host as I’d used for other registrations (1and1.com. I like them, some don’t. Decide for yourself. I confess I don’t care much for GoDaddy, not much at all.) The domain is registered in my name and I am paying for it. The first owner backed me all the way, as has the current owner. He’s even more encouraging than the first owner was. We’re considering Facebook.

Predictably, the chain’s owner called and told the boss the website needed to come down. They provided a cookie-cutter site for each of their franchisees and they don’t want competition. Sadly, their sites can’t be modified much and have a uniformly boring layout. Input to those sites, like a price quote request, goes first to the corporate people then they have to forward it to us, awkward and unnecessary. Their sites are sterile and don’t encourage conversation. I could go on for paragraphs about how much the site they expect us to “use” offends me, and I’m not even a hard-core site builder. I don’t disguise the fact I use Word Press. Some no doubt consider that not much better than using Front Page, I’d argue otherwise.

Anyway, twice now they’ve objected to the site and demanded its removal. The first time I told the CEO to bug off; I own the domain and the site. I’d be happy to remove any mention of the franchise from the site (including the links to their sites). I can type our name so that it doesn’t mention the chain.I never heard back from him and considered the topic closed. Oops. They’re at it again.

We’ve been averaging 7000 unique hits a month. Time on site and pages read are decent enough for our type of site. We have a relationship established with those subscribed to us that trancends the international brand. Can they show me equivalent numbers for their sites? Our email address is our domain. It’s been a great marketing tool. Our coporate email address would be long and hard to remember.

We have an established reader base for both our site, our blog and our newsletter. Did I mention I also get to publish a monthly (sometimes) newsletter? Well, I don’t want to brag, but…

I’ve put a lot of time and effort, for which my boss has paid me reasonably well, into being creative and personal in our efforts to establish a relationship with our readers. I eschew stiff and unfriendly websites in general. I try to come across online the same way I would in person. And I’m not a big fan of formality. I wear jeans everyday. Everyday.I’ve also worked to make us within the first 5 returns for certain keywords on Google. I’ve made sure and do it properly, no cheating or dubious shortcuts. Our integrity is important to us. I don’t know if corporate shares those standards or not.

So I guess, once again, we get to play “Whose domain is it, anyway?“, a form of poker. I’ve got a great poker face when it comes to tech. The corporate guys have shown they don’t “get” the web. Our shop uses Twitter. Not as much as I’d like, but I’m stretched a bit thin these days, considering we’re doing over three times the business we were when I started all this, and there’s still only 3 of us. Several other franchises are on Twitter, but not the owners. The big boys show no interest in reaching out to the online community. I consider this especially insane in light of the fact that we work in a field that is tangental to the lives of most every computer owner out there, their printer. Who reading this doesn’t own a printer? Come on, raise your hands. I thought so.

We’ll see who wins this round. There will continue to be a site at that address.

Security sites are warning web users to beware fake Twitter invites in their email inboxes. The reports, based on an alert on Wednesday from Symantec, say the emailed invites come with a malicious attachment which, if downloaded, harvests email addresses from your computer and copies itself to removable drives and shared folders.

The emails carry the subject line “Your friend invited you to twitter!”, while the sender’s address is spoofed as “invitations@twitter.com”. Unlike a typical Twitter invite, however, the email contains no invitation link: instead it carries the attached file Invitation Card.zip, tempting the receiver to download it. The attachment, of course, contains W32.Ackantta.B@mm – a nasty, email address-harvesting worm.

Read more on this at Mashable.

It’s been said a thousand times before but deserves to be repeated a thousand times more: Do not blindly click on “Yes” or “Next” in any registration box when registering on a website without carefully reading what you’re agreeing to.

Many sites (some legitimate some not so much) have a multi-step registration process. First you pick a username and password, then you’re often asked to fill in your profile information, agree to the Terms of Service and quite often, whether or not you want to send an email or text message to your contacts inviting them to join you on this site. Beware of agreeing to that.

Granted, social sites are not as enjoyable when no one you know uses them. But too many of these sites will send out an unsolicited email on your behalf to every name on your Gmail, MSN, Yahoo or AOL contact list inviting them to join you at this site. Is this going to be welcomed by every one of your contacts? If I’m on your contact list the answer is a resounding NO. I’m happy you found a site you like. I might consider taking a look at it if you send me a personal message or email telling me why this particular site would appeal to me. But if I recieve a generic email from a site I’ve never heard of telling me that my friend has joined this site and I’m invited to do the same, I’m tossing that email in the trash and re-evaluating my opinion of that friendship.

Our email inboxes are already polluted with too much spam. Even the best mailbox filters can’t catch it all. When people on my contact list spam me, that garbage gets a pass from my filters, since it’s from someone I know.

So please, the next time you find a cute new game to play on Facebook or join a new social networking site, do not blindly click on the option to add all the friends on your contact list. Show your friends some respect. If you can select particular contacts to notify, and you know for a fact that this site will appeal to me, go ahead and send me an invite. But do it from your own email account so I know the invitation is intentional and not the result of a twitchy right index finger.

An example of the pitfalls of blindly sending out invitations to everyone on your contact list has been posted to Time’s website. It’s worth a read. Sean Gregory, Tagged: The World’s Most Annoying Website.