By David Gewirtz
It's a holiday weekend here in the U.S. We all know what that means: extra work doing family tech support. Mom and Dad, Grandma and Aunt Lucy have all saved up their dumbest and most annoying tech support problems, just waiting for you to arrive and fix them.
Somehow, between requests for you to sit at the dinner table, you're going to have to reinstall Windows, update drivers, remove the spyware Uncle Bob installed while surfing "those" sites, and do it all between bites of cold hotdogs.
For many of us, helping our users is a day-to-day job as well. And while you're trying to get your regular work done, all of us with the techy gene are also stuck helping our co-workers use their digital cameras, Photoshop, their camera phones, and their sad little blogs. Connected Photographer, of course, is an ideal resource for off-loading that support load. Just point your users, friends, and co-workers at the magazine and many of their questions can be found in our back issues and the articles we publish each week.
We got a letter on this topic last week from DominoPower reader Olek Leszek and it applies just as well to Connected Photographer:
I'm suffering from an inability to be in 300 places at once. I support nearly 3,000 Notes users and on any given day, I've got 300 or more requests for support. I'm constantly pointing my smarter users at DominoPower, but it always seems I have to remind them to check you first.
I'd like to just sign them all up for DominoPower's mailings, but your site requires me to enter one name at a time. Is there any way I can just sign up my whole company and be done with it?
We told Olek in DominoPower that many magazines sell site licenses or company subscriptions. It's actually a quite lucrative area of the business, netting publishing companies thousands of dollars per license sold. It's an area of business here at ZATZ we've also found quite lucrative in the past.
But, in the spirit of the Memorial Day, we'll take pity on all our readers who are in the trenches of the tech support war. For a short time, we'll waive our usual site license fee and sign up your company, group, school, or organization en mass to all the ZATZ magazines, including Connected Photographer, at no charge.
How to sign up
Signing up a large group is actually something of a complex process, in part because we need to make sure we're still getting opt-in subscribers and avoid any hint of spam. To make this work, you'll need to complete two steps: send us your list and send us a permission form.
Send us your employee email list
To send us your list, simply collect all the email addresses you wish to subscribe in a file. You can also include full names, but the names must be separated by a tab from the email address and the entire list must be sent to us in a text file (it must be a .txt or we won't open it!). Send the list to editor@ZATZ.com with the heading "CONNECTED PHOTOGRAPHER SITE SIGNUP LIST".
Include your phone, fax, and email contact information in the email so we can contact you if we have any questions.
Please note that all the email addresses must be from the same domain and the email address you use to send us the list must also be from the same domain. We will not sign up personal email addresses or any addresses from domains that aren't explicitly managed by your company.
Send us a permission statement
Before we can mass-subscribe members of your company, we need to be sure we have your permission. Please write a letter, on company stationary, with the following paragraphs:
This letter is to request ZATZ Publishing sign up our employees and/or members to Connected Photographer Magazine.
We hereby authorize ZATZ Publishing to subscribe all of the email addresses we have provided via separate email transmission. We attest that we are the owners of the domain ________________ (fill in) and are fully authorized and empowered to sign up users with email addresses within that domain.
We further attest that we consider this letter to be full and complete opt-in permission to mail further issues of Connected Photographer to our employees and/or members and that each individual has the right to unsubscribe at his or her own discretion.
This authorization indemnifies ZATZ against any claims by us or by any of our employees and/or members regarding the signing up for ZATZ publications. Further, you are permitted to provide copies of this authorization letter to any entity or organization necessary for any defense of claims arising out of the action of signup for our employees and/or members.
We understand you may terminate any or or all subscriptions at any time, at your sole discretion.
Have an authorized signatory for your company or organization sign the letter and fax it back to us at 321-406-1001. Once we have both the list and the authorizing fax, we'll get your employees set up in less time than it'll take Uncle Bob to reinfect his computer.
That's about it. In the spirit of the holiday and as an attempt to take a load off our readers, we're making a very expensive enterprise service available to you for free. It won't always be free, so take advantage now.
And make sure you get a second burger before you fix Cousin Stef's webcam, ok?