How’s your SEO going?
I’ve written about Search Engine Optimization before. It’s one of the things we do here at Answer Guy Central, and (self-serving statement aside) it’s the single most important thing you can do for your business’ long-tail marketing efforts.
SEO isn’t hard, exactly, but it requires a basic understanding of quite a few things, the ability to write well, some content expertise, and a lot of time.
I’ve weighed in with my opinion on patents—particularly software patents—a few times. For the most part, I think software patents are a very bad idea, because they describe process, and process can’t be patented.
Unless, of course, it can be.
“The Facebook Patent” (7,669,123) is one example of a patent that describes a process, but no thing. Amazon Patent 7,739,139 is even worse in this regard. Both talk about how something works, but don’t actually describe anything that’s been “created” other than an idea. Ideas can’t be patented. Business Process therefore can’t be patented either.
I’ve mentioned Paul Krugman before. He’s one smart guy, and I’m not at all embarrassed to admit that he’s operating in an intellectual space that I’ve not only never visited but don’t even have an apt name for.
And Obama-administration-adviser-and-New-York-Times-Economist Paul Krugman says we’re in a Depression. Not just a recession, you understand . . . a full-blown depression.
The Status quo is broken. Change is here, and the only question is whether you’re going to enact business change fast enough and well enough to remain a “have” in a world more and more frequented by have-nots.
There are lots of reasons to contract out pieces of the work that keep your business in business. We’re talking flexibility issues, liability issues, expert-availability issues, and more.
But it can be hard to know who to hire as you execute business change. You really no more want to spend your days continuously scouring the earth for talent than you want the liability of having employees sitting idly on your payroll.
One of the beautiful things about using SmartPhones like the iPhone, or my Android-based Droid is that I can now access my computer from literally anywhere, and I don’t even need to carry a notebook computer to do it.
Of course, that’s one of the ugly things too; being connected all the time means either that you let your work take over your life or you create rules to prevent that.
If you live in New York City you know The Village Voice. In fact, even if you don’t live in The Big Apple you’ve probably heard of what was once an important, influential weekly newspaper.
The Village Voice has become irrelevant. Why?
A few days ago, I responded to a tweet by social media guru Jeff Jarvis. His question: “When Did The Village Voice Become a Prude?”
Have I said enough about the importance of social networking in business change? Nope. Not even close.
A new survey from the dating site Are You Interested reveals a trend that can only be seen as disturbing. Fully one in four people think that it’s OK to break up with somebody by posting a change to your Facebook relationship status.
Many years ago, within just a few weeks of buying my first car (an old-school Volkswagen Beetle) I walked out one morning and found that one of the front fenders was partially hanging off the car. I don’t remember how it happened, but I do remember the feeling of being young, having no experience dealing with this kind of thing or money to do it, and wanting to get it taken care of without my parents finding out . . . because they’d certainly have had opinions about how it had happened and I wasn’t likely to come out looking very good.
As an Android user, one of the things that I’ve yet to figure out is why there are no Apps to capture what’s on my screen. They just don’t exist.
OK, so that’s not completely true. If I “root” my Droid SmartPhone, meaning tweak it to bypass the regular Android operating system and make it do stuff that Verizon, Motorola, and Google didn’t intend, screen grabs become a possibility. I give up my warranty and any hope for technical support if I even need it, but I gain some control and a feature I often wish I had.
When I grow up, I want to be half as adept as President Barack Obama is at the art of business negotiation.
In announcing his agreement with British Petroleum getting the oil conglomerate to put aside $20 billion to fund clean-up and damages from the oil spill from BP ‘s well in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama pointed out that by law, BP’s liability was technically limited to just $75 million. While there’s no way BP would have gotten away with hiding behind that shield, they could have just waited until the lawsuits started rolling in and dealt with them then. And they’ll have to anyway, so why give up $20 billion ahead of time?
Remember back in February when Facebook was awarded United States Patent 7669123 for Social Networking? Remember how little sense that made? Well, our friends at the United States Patents and Trademarks Office have set the bar for stupidity even higher. Friends, I give you USPTO example # 7,739,139 of not understanding what a patent is, or even what a patent is supposed to be for.
On the Internet, where pornography is the single largest business, questions like “what is porn?” take on a whole new meaning. Forget what we’ve learned watching the US Supreme Court try to answer the question, or from that famous lawsuit in Cincinnati against Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt. Porn is what you think it is, and community gatekeepers have de facto powers of censorship because they grant it to themselves.
Apple has famously thrown many apps out of the iTunes Apps Store, because they were “too racy”. Steve Jobs makes no apologies for this, even having gone so far as as to state that he believes “his users want to be protected”.
Not being from Finland or an expert in their legal goings-on, my reaction was predictable: That’s ILLEGAL There ?!?!?
Yesterday, Starbucks announced that their semi-free Wi-Fi is about to become completely free. My first reaction was “it’s about time”. McDonalds figured this out last year, and others have known that the extra business gained by encouraging people to stay at your store is a no-brainer for quite some time. Sure, the Wi-Fi at Panera Bread is unreliable, but at least they have the good sense to offer it.
Two of my favorite marketing guys are Chris Brogan and Seth Godin. Both occupy space in my personal Rolodex, and both are brilliant.
I’ve picked on Chris a few times lately, while Seth’s been largely missing from these pages for a few months. Well, he’s back: a couple of days ago, Seth told a story that got me thinking, and you should pay attention to the lesson.
While my natural inclination is to be as transparent as possible and do full disclosure pretty much all the time, Seth points out that sometimes full disclosure can hurt you, hurt your customer relationships, hurt your marketing efforts, and had it been employed would have added nothing of value.
What kind of computer do you use? Are your files all stored on a hard drive in that computer, on a network drive, or off in the cloud somewhere? What software do you like?
Do any of these questions matter?
More and more, the answer is no. There was a time when the choices you made in computers and software defined you, because there was no easy way to exchange information with people who had made other choices. It’s the reason Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office became dominant; everyone needed to use the same hardware and software so they could exchange files with each other by passing around floppy disks.
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