From the category archives:

Marketing

How does your personal brand support your customer’s experience?

by Dave Saunders on August 20, 2010

What if you gave your product away but charged admission for people to work with you? Would the experience your customers get be worth the admission price? Disney does this. You pay a handsome price to get in the park and then all the rides are free. When I was young, I remember going with [...]

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The Quest for Unified SEO: Why are search results different between the search engines?

by Dave Saunders on June 30, 2010

A reader on my mailing list recently asked why search results are different between the different search engines. The short answer is that each search provider has independently developed software that converts its view of the content on the web into a list of results when you enter a search phrase. There’s no “unified search [...]

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Great Moments in Social Media Customer Service: Thanks Bose

by Dave Saunders on June 23, 2010

I love my Bose ear buds. They rock. They’re very comfortable. They fit my ears (which many ear buds don’t). I’m on my third pair, as I lost my first pair at a hotel in Vermont (which is to say, I forgot them when I checked out), bought a replacement pair and then upgraded to [...]

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Turning Lack into an Asset

by Dave Saunders on February 22, 2010

Everyone starts somewhere. Invariably, that somewhere is “the beginning.” The beginning may look different on the surface from one person to the next but absolutely no one is born playing violin, writing novels, doing taxes, hunting down all the Jedi in the universe, pounding on opponents in heavy weight fights or winning bouts on The [...]

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What If You Charged Admission For What You Do?

by Dave Saunders on February 21, 2010

I could write a lot on the book The Experience Economy, but there’s one thought that really hit me from what I read. What if, instead of charging for your product or service, you instead charged an admission and gave the rest away for free? How would this impact how you interact with your market? [...]

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Twitter Gets a Boost From Real Time Search

by Dave Saunders on February 15, 2010

Shout out to LeeAnn Prescott at VentureBeat for reporting on this. The gist is that Twitter has experienced a 9% boost in traffic since Google’s real-time search was introduced. I guess the point is that search is far from dead and it still does make sense to pay attention to keywords, trending topics and to [...]

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Who really is looking out for you?

by Dave Saunders on January 29, 2010

This ad ran in Time Magazine (June 30, 1947). That’s right, the headline reads DDT is Good for Me.  When I make jokes about this, I’ve actually had someone respond with “well yes, but the benefits of DDT in Africa can’t be argued with.” Really? I understand that Malaria is a horrible affliction, but if [...]

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Coke Gets a Clue

by Dave Saunders on January 13, 2010

Once upon a time, companies registered domains for everything. One frozen food company registered a .com domain for every single product they sold. The idea back then seemed simple enough (relative to a limited understanding of the Internet): There were no useful search engines, so why not make it possible to type “[productname].com” into the [...]

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What’s 2010 Look Like for Yahoo?

by Dave Saunders on December 29, 2009

If Google is the Godzilla of the search market and Bing is Mechazilla, Yahoo! is Mothra: Kind of sad and dorky looking but people still know who he (it) is. Of course, it wasn’t always that way. I remember when people talked about Google as being a “pipe dream” if founders Larry Page and Sergey [...]

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How’s this for a successful effort rebooting a personal brand?

by Dave Saunders on December 24, 2009

Back in 1901, the first Nobel Prize was awarded. Alfred Nobel set the prize into motion using his fortune largely earned from his invention of dynamite. Amazingly enough dynamite was actually a safety improvement over highly volatile nitroglycerine which was under heavy use at the time. Dynamite could be used for the many earthworks efforts [...]

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