TELNET

You know it.

Black screen.

Green Letters.

Kind of like The Matrix, but far less entertaining.

At least I never saw “blonds, brunettes and redheads” while staring into the screen. Well, maybe that’s not true but they were reflections of people walking behind me while I continued to be lost in the pixels.

Twenty-one years ago today, it was my first visit to the offices of my first soon-to-be-called-dot-com-industry job.

We sold TELNET software for the Macintosh–these days it seems that the term Macintosh is as cool as a pair of sequined bell-bottom pants. I’m supposed to say Mac–to government contractors and Fortune 1000.

The punchline is that we sold this software against some stiff competition. That was a public domain TELNET application written by our own CTO while still in college.

You think your market is tough? Give away a free version of your product and sell directly against it for $100s a copy. Go ahead. I dare ya.

It’s time for a new year. On a cosmological scale, the distinction is quite arbitrary. Next month is also the anniversary of the rotation around some random point in the universe too.

This is as good a time as any though to make a change.

What are you going to do? With your job, your business, your service, your products. Whatever.

How would you sell yourself against a perfect replica of your offering that’s made available for free? It’s a perfect replica so you can’t change the features in your commercial version. Even if you did, the reality is usually those differences are nothing more than window dressing.

And yet, maybe window dressing is the clue.

What’s the difference between a storefront with well-maintained, fresh displays that are constantly tweaked without actually changing anything about the products offered and a store with some dusty old sign in the window that’s two seasons out of date?

The answer is simple, business A gives a crap.

How would your business change if you put a little life into it? I mean the kind of life that doesn’t require the proverbial mirror placed under your nose to see if you’re breathing.

What if the only thing you did differently this year was to do what you did in 2011, but do so on purpose and with purpose.

Same hours.

New energy.

New impact.

The other guys aren’t wearing kid gloves and waiting for you to get on your feet before engaging in some “friendly competition.” They don’t matter anyway. Chances are you’re the biggest risk to your own wants and dreams.

I’m not going to use the cliche about getting out of your own way. I instead advocate getting behind yourself and pushing yourself into oncoming traffic. Try playing your life like you’re the main star of Frogger for a while. It may not be a good way to live your life 24/7 but how do you think you’re ever going to level-up if you don’t stick your neck out and take a real, intelligent risk?

Step up.

Step out.

Make a difference.

Act like you really care.

“Watch your thoughts for they become words. Watch your words for they become actions. Watch your actions for they become…habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. And watch your character, for it becomes your destiny!” –Margaret Thatcher

If you want to get found more, you need more content. It’s that simple. I’m not going to drone on about how that content must be quality content. I don’t believe in producing junk content and I’m sure you don’t want to be a search engine spammer either.

Each piece of content you create is like virtual real estate. Somewhere in the body, title, description, etc., you include keyword phrases, which are simply the things you want to be associated with so the people who need what you have can find you when they search online.

To further expand on this, I made a short pencast. Click play below to check it out.

SEO is a big subject. I plan on doing a series of these posts and pencasts so if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, SEO

As CES was underway this past week, I monitored news releases, blog posts and product announcements from companies with cool new things to share with the world. While the things they had to talk about did seem cool, the ways in which many companies shared the news was, in my sometimes-not-so-humble opinion, so ridiculously bad I wasn’t always sure whether to laugh or cry.

Brand new companies—without a shipping product—put out news releases starting with “XYZ Corp, the leading provider of…” Seriously? I’m the leading provider of partially chewed gum with bite marks made by the bridge in the top right of my mouth.

And that’s not all.

I ran into a new product announcement page that rambled on and on, until about half way down the page there was a phrase that gave me some hope…

It read, “…simply put…”

Oh yay! After four paragraphs of crap, they’re going to tell me what the heck their product even does!

It continued with, “…product name…buzzword…synergy…win-win…”

Please stick a fork in me. I am soooooo done.

Without naming names, here’s a product description I’m reading right now.

“…integrated services that are process based with a focus on satisfying business requirements.”

That’s what came after the words “simply put.”

Enough with the hype already. It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2C, or B2B business—or maybe you don’t know or care what those terms mean and you simply have something cool which will be of great value to the right people—you’re talking to humans.

So speak like one.

If your copy reads like anything up above, don’t despair. It’s better to suck than to sit around with nothing but a blank screen. Such “perfectionists” don’t even have bad copy to show for all their nail biting analysis and deep thought.

Here’s a simple formula for speaking to human beings when you have something cool to share.

1. Here’s what I got.
2. Here’s what it will do for you.
3. Here’s what I’d like you to do next.

That’s really not all that hard is it? Try it and you might be amazed at the results.

Technorati Tags: copywriting, Marketing

One of the things I love about Kurosawa samurai films is the way mastery shows itself through so many of the people. The samurai aren’t just into swordplay—though the movies wouldn’t be as much fun if there wasn’t plenty of that—but also show an appreciation for understanding the world around them.

That attitude of mastery is focused to the tip of their blade, but mastery can show itself through anything, like a perfectly made bowl of rice.

Sometimes there’s an upstart who starts out brash but then wants to learn from a master—to develop mastery too.

Mastery is infectious.

From one generation to the next—or just from one person to another—the pursuit of personal mastery has many benefits. For the person working towards mastery, there’s the energy unleashed through the expression of that passion. For those on the receiving end of that mastery—ok, unless it’s a bad guy getting stabbed with a sword—there’s a benefit to being able to hear a new piece of music, see some new art, eat a lovingly cooked meal or receive a well-written TPS Report.

Mastery is even expressed through how you show love and caring towards another.

Regardless of what it is, each time you try the results come out a little different from the last. That’s a good thing. Develop your mastery through the iterations. Learn from the successes as well as the not-successes (seems pointless to call them failures).

As long as you try, it’s worth something.

Mastery isn’t something you arrive at.

It’s a journey.

It’s an expression.

What do you love to do?

How can you express it today?

How can you make it better over time?

How can you turn that mastery into something that will support you for life?

Technorati Tags: Marketing, personal branding, personal development, samurai

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 my parents to Disney World. My mom never got on a single ride. She took pictures and brought my brother and I towels when we came from the water ride soaking wet.

Did she need to ride the rides to get her money’s worth? She says no. She got the experience.

What do your customers get?

Chances are, your products and services can be found elsewhere. What experiences do your customers get along with the “product”? How does that experience showcase and create the context which encapsulates the entire experience? Your personal brand feeds this as well. Whether you closely tie yourself to each client or you’re the distant guru, that persona shapes how your customers experience you and how they experience what you offer.

My mom never complained about not riding the rides at Disney because she got the experience she wanted and she paid the same as everyone else who rode the rides from sun up to sun down. How about your customers? If you stopped charging to ride the rides and instead charged admission for what you do, would you customers get more or less value from the experience?

Technorati Tags: experience, Marketing, personal branding

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 algorithm” for search so there can’t be “unified search results.”

How do search engines work?

The process is pretty straightforward: A search engine starts out with a collection of web pages from the Internet in a big database. It gets these page through direct submissions and through automated web browsers called spiders.

The search engine also has software to analyze and index that collection of data. It’s like the Dewey Decimal System on crystal meth.

When you enter a search phrase the search engine organizes its collection of web pages into the most relevant results. Those are the search results.

Because the search engines don’t know what you’re going to search for, the system has to be very adaptive and fast. When you search for “best BBQ grills to buy for my mom,” the search engine has to figure it out.

The computer logic that creates that list of search results is worth a lot of money to the search provider because the more reliable you perceive the results to be, the more you’ll trust that provider in the future.

Pay Per Click ads and not search results

By the way, most search engines also display a series of paid advertisements that relate to your search phrase. These ARE NOT search results. They are paid ads. Paying for an add is not SEO. More on that in another post.

The evolution of search

The complexity of the search algorithm has evolved a lot over the years. Once upon a time, you put keywords into the META KEYWORDS field of each HTML page on your web site. If you wanted to beat someone else in the search listings, you would repeat your main keyword more than the other guys. Obviously, this got abused and now the META tags are completely ignored for search results.

Some people think the META tags are what SEO is still about…usually when I’m talking to a new client about SEO, it’ll come up. Someone in the room will say “Oh, we’re already doing SEO. We’ve filled in the META tags.”

{{Sigh}}

The results from even one search engine change over time because the search algorithm is in a constant state of tweaking and development. Simple frequency of keywords in your content used to be enough for a good ranking. Other factors like “back links,” and words related to the keyword being searched for also oscillate in importance. Google and the other major search engines—basically Bing—invest a lot of time and effort into their search technology.

Why?

Well someone’s gotta pay for this. If you go to Google for your search, and assume the results to be the best results, why would you go to another search engine and look up the same thing? The more a search engine keeps you on their site, the more valuable their ad space.

What if you’re not Google and want people to use your search engine? You need to convince people that your results are either better or that you provide some additional service making you more valuable.

The dark side of search

Search engines also have to deal with spammers and “black hat” SEO techniques. There have been lots of attempts to manipulate the search algorithms and provide junk pages. One method involved something called cloaking. Special web software knew the difference between a search engine spider and a human being—in theory anyway—when the spider would visit, it would be shown a web page highly optimized for a specific keyword. When a human visited, they were shown a sales page of some sort.

This makes the search engine look bad because you blame them for sending you to a spam page. As a result, some of the search technology is designed to keep web pages out of the listings. This also varies from search engine to search engine. It’s a constant cat and mouse game.

What’s on the horizon for search?

Competition for search is heating up. Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi recently told the LA Times that Bing has “caught up to Google” with their search results. That sounds like a dare to me, but we only benefit from two sluggers like Google and Microsoft working harder to provide us with better search capabilities.

Times change and so do search results

New content is showing up in search engines as well. Twitter is now indexed by Google in “real time,” and YouTube videos often get top search rankings these days. This is a reflection of what people consider to be relevant results. If you Google for the latest buzz on a new movie, Twitter traffic is likely to be where the conversations are taking place. Some crusty movie review section of a major newspaper is less relevant because it’s not where the people are.

Ultimately, search is a reflection of the people behind the content. If the Internet was only about connecting computers, it would be an uninteresting place indeed. Likewise, if search results were nothing more than a dry listing of data and web pages, it wouldn’t be all that interesting either. As search evolves, pulling in geolocation as part of the relevance factor as well, the results will become an almost group Rorschach Ink Blot test.

The results of a search are a reflection of us.

SEO and you

When it comes to your own web presence, SEO is not something you can set and forget. It requires constant effort. Not daily effort but if your search results are important to your business, you monitor the results you’re getting for keywords you’re interested in and keep an eye out for competition.

Is search and SEO important to your business? What questions do you have about it? Sound off and leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Optimization, SEO

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 the version with the integrated mic.

Anyway, there’s a little clip that attaches the cord to your shirt. It’s handy because it prevents the cord from whipping around when you walk and if you take the buds out of your ears, you can let them drop and the clip prevents them from dragging on the floor.

In my experience, they’re not built to last. There’s a little pin that breaks off. It’s happened three times now.

The clip is lame.

When it happened the third time, I mentioned on Twitter that Bose should sell the clips in six packs, because they keep breaking on me.

A short while later, I get a tweet from someone at Bose offering to send me a replacement.

Sweet.

It turns out this is called the Stability Enhancement Accessory.

Really, it’s a shirt clip. C’mon.

Whatever it’s called, I was mailed a new one and it arrived yesterday.

Now, how much did this really cost Bose? Less than a dollar?

Will this make me buy more Bose products? Well, I’m not making any promises, but “probably.”

This is a great example of simple social media engagement. Your business might not have the online volume of mentions as a company like Bose, but considering how easy basic monitoring like this can be, it only makes sense to do it.

Have you had a cool online customer service experience? Share it in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Social Media

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 Iron Chef.

So while being a 3rd don black belt is super-cool, that same person started with a white belt, no belt or their pants down around his or her ankles (literally and/or metaphorically speaking). The same can be said about you for everything you’re good at today.

And what’s wrong with that?

There’s energy in newness.

I know people on Elance who created an account and then bid on jobs saying “I’m so new, I’m going to bed over backwards to give you a better experience than anyone else bidding on this job.”

I once worked at a communications hardware company that sold millions of 56K modems months before they finished inventing everything necessary to ship the product.

I’ve personally stood in front of company CEO’s saying “this has never been done before and that’s why we should do it,” and they said yes.

And find me someone who worked on the NASA Moon launch team with experience sending rockets to the moon.

Inexperience doesn’t mean incompetence. We just elected a President with no real executive experience. Of course, now that he’s there it’s his job to step up and do what he needs to do and learn what he needs to learn, and deliver.

Watch the movie Julie and Julie (I know, there’s a book too). I presume Julie Powel at least knew how to boil water and pop stuff in the microwave, but was probably not ready to bone a duck when she started her blog. That wasn’t enough of a reason for her not to start, but I see people much further down the road look at blogging, consulting, writing, building a shed and all sorts of other things with an amazing level of fear…due entirely to their lack of experience.

No matter what it is that you’d like to do. If you think you’re missing something before you can get started, ask yourself how that lack is actually an asset. Reframe how to see lack and turn it into something you have that’s a gift.

Technorati Tags: Assets, Branding, Marketing

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?

How would this change your focus on the customer?

The best example of this contrast is a theme park like Disney World (or Disney Land) vs a carnival. Whether or not you personally like Disney World/Land isn’t the issue…their cash flow statement clearly shows that plenty of people do.

When you arrive at Disney you pay an admission to enter the park. At a carnival you often go in for free.

At Disney, once you’re inside, the rides are free. At the carnival you buy tickets and then spend them to get on the rides individually.

How does this change the experience? Are the rides really all that different? I can find trolley rides with robots at either venue. Roller coasters,  rides that spin, rides that go up in the air…functionally it’s the same thing right?

But it’s the experience that changes the context.

I’m guessing that in many cases, the net outflow of cash from your pocket is about the same. Whether you pay for everything a la carte or in a lump sum at the door, what you pay is probably equal.

At Disney World I go through “It’s a Small World” every single time and never calculate it from the “cost per ride” as part of the original admission.

At a carnival, if I had to pay 15 tickets for it, I’d be pissed. My focus is turned from the experience of being there to a critique of the worth of an individual ride.

Heck, the Tilt-A-Whirl isn’t worth 15 tickets to me these days.

Wooden roller coasters? They kill my back. There’s no way I would pay to get on one…and yet, when I visit King’s Dominion, near where I live, I get on their wooden roller coaster every single time. I swear I can feel my vertebrae clack together. It has nothing to do with getting my money’s worth and everything to do with immersing myself in the experience.

Anyone who witnessed me shoveling the snow for the past couple of weeks may have realized that this is how I roll. Snow down my back from a big wind gust? Soaking wet from climbing on top of SUVs? All part of the experience. Love it, even when I’m in agonizing pain from the exertion.

The last three times I’ve been to Sea World, I’ve spent an entire day feeding the dolphins. (I had to pay for all those sardines too.) The last time I was there I paid another $150 to take a “behind the scenes” tour.

So I paid admission to pay to feed dolphins and pay to look at tank filters for a bunch of sharks.

Sign me up.

I wasn’t the only on there, doing exactly the same thing, either.

I can’t think of a single story of an experience I had from a carnival or fair I’ve been too, but I can describe lots of awesome experiences I’ve had with friends (and some I’m sworn to never share…cough cough…Pleasure Island at Disney World). I’ve ridden the chocolate factory tour ride at Hershey Park more times than I can count (and I don’t think it’s ever changed) and I can vividly remember some of the people I rode with and the fun times we had.

I’ll pay a lot for an experience but I’m kind of cheap when it comes to paying for the individual components that make up that same thing.

I don’t think I’m alone in this either.

So how about you? What would your own business look like if you were to charge admission for it and give away a part that’s currently charged for? If not your business, how about some other businesses out there? Leave your comment below and share your ideas.

Technorati Tags: Branding, Business, Marketing, The Experience Economy

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 join into the right conversations at the right time. Of course, plenty of boneheads misunderstand the key points to what it means to join a conversation and simply spam the world with their junk.

At some point, I’m sure we’ll see some “expert Internet Marketer” come out with a tool that exploits all this, and will ruin the fun for everyone else.

Much like Tag and Ping went from being a cool trick to an absurd way to bring blogger.com to its collective knees.

Technorati Tags: Google, Marketing, real time search, twitter