See all the stuff that goes into Search Engine Optimization? It’s a lot of stuff. A LOT of stuff. You can’t afford it.

Of course, you also can’t afford not to do it.

A few weeks ago I came across this Google+ Thread. It was started by an SEO practitioner who said, simply, that you can’t afford SEO. Interesting. He even made a point that will make getting your business even less likely: you can’t outsource SEO. And you know what? He’s right, on both counts; you can’t afford SEO and you can’t outsource it because computer geeks don’t get your business well enough to be entrusted with such a task.

That’s why, despite having major computer geek talent hanging around the halls of Answer Guy Central, we aren’t computer geeks; we’re marketing and business consultants. We handle geeky stuff. We handle artsy stuff. We handle linguistic stuff. We handle your paid advertising, marketing and distribution. And that’s only the tip of the Influency* iceberg.

But back to that Google+ thread.

The point that got bandied about was argued from a lot of perspectives. One was that businesses were better off putting their money into Pay-Per-Click advertising than Search Engine Optimization. Also not OK; SEM doesn’t actually work very well unless SEO is done, first. All of this stuff, simply put, feeds each other. We call that Influency Marketing.

So let’s simplify things. Here’s another, less convoluted way to look at Search Engine Optimization:

Feel better? No? want me to break this down further? Click here to get your SEO, SEM, Development, Design and the rest of the Influency Equation under control. Can’t make this much simpler.

Influency is about controlling everything. Optimization is about making everything work together. Strategy is about Coffee. And the line between Content and News? It gets a little harder to make out every day.

Influency and its elements are only simple if you decide ahead of time what you’re going to pay attention to and what your budget is. And while that’s a great practice, making those decisions in a vacuum won’t work. Let us show you what that means. It’s free.

He’s not usually thought of the way Seth Godin is, but Mark Schaefer is one of the best marketing minds around. And this week, just as Godin has, Mr. Schaefer threw out an idea for discussion that we use here.

You know what I’m talking about: It’s Influency*. In Influence marketing: What’s next?, Mark Schaefer makes the point that Influency Marketing is all about; marketing is undergoing a huge change, and if you don’t manage a lot of things well, your marketing will fail. And that’s Influency.

What I really like about Mark Schaefer and his spin on Influency is the way he tells his story. Schaefer’s caught my attention before; this piece on the validity of SEO both lionized and praised Search Engine Optimization, and that’s what Mark Schaefer is really great at; most stories have at least two sides, and Mark Schaefer is great at identifying and covering them all. And whatever side he takes, Mark feels authentic. It’s a lot like coffee; you know what you’re getting, and you trust it to deliver.

By the way, I left a comment on Mark’s story, but it was deleted; I presume his commenting system ran amok (it has in the past). This is why our position on commenting systems is to not use them. Mark, if you’re listening: badly-behaved commenting systems are a detriment to Influency Marketing; you might like to fix this.

I’ll leave it there, except to add part of the comment I left at Mark’s blog, because the issues that make up Influency are important:

The common thread among commenters seems to be “yep, but … huh?”. Marketing is segueing into something that’s incredibly difficult to discuss well. You name the pieces and describe them perfectly, but … is a Kim Kardashian hook a great thing (yes, yes, it is) or a useless thing (umm … yes, yes it is) (http://answerguy.com/2009/12/24/britney-spears-kim-kardashian-pepsi-super-bowl-business-change/). And “followers counts? Puh-leeze … that’s measure of almost nothing (http://answerguy.com/2010/02/05/how-important-is-twitter-social-networking-really/)

And those stories are both from over three years ago!

A few months ago, I wrote a piece about everything. You know … everything. Every thing you could ever want to know about everything you’ll ever encounter. Everything. I hope nobody thought I meant it. I ended the piece with these words, to underscore that:

If it sounds like I’m running a tremendous number of ideas together in one story, well . . . I am. And that’s the point. You can boil everything down to Influency* , but before we can, we need to figure out what everything is . . . for you.

Everything, of course, is never actually everything. And while you can’t ever get to everything, when you try and fail, you’ll still, more often than not, have—or say—too much!

I’m not suggesting that you be secretive, by the way; I’ve mentioned before that you need to get as close to transparency as you can with your business processes; it’s how trust is built. But you also need to know when to … stop.

Don’t ever sell WordPress.

I say this, and I mean it. But do I mean ‘WordPress is bad’? No; WordPress is a great environment for building and presenting your Influency efforts and right now we recommend it for pretty much everyone. What I mean is that (usually) your clients don’t care what systems you use to help them; they only care that what you do works. For them, and their goals.

Your design has to be great. Whatever that means. Your execution needs to be flawless. Everything you do has to work optimally. But you don’t have to talk about “what you do”. Clients only care what the work you execute for them does for them.

Knowing where the lines on the subject of everything lie isn’t always easy. Does your operating system matter? No. Unless you come across someone who needs to be told why. And you have to know … when that is, and for whom. Yikes!

I find it amusing, by the way, that the page I linked above on ‘Don’t ever sell WordPress’ is currently running a rather prominent advertisement for Wix, a web site that is very much WordPress.com-like. Here’s why:

It all comes down to how much you say. Wix is actually a great tool. It lets you build a beautiful site (emphasis on the “beautiful” part) more easily than any other tool of its kind. And the price is right; Wix hosts your site for you at a rate that it’s hard to argue with. But as with Hubspot, once you’re in Wix, there’s no getting out. So overall, it’s a bad idea.

But almost no-one who goes there understands this. Should Wix disclose? Should the guy running the advertisement for them? Well no, of course not. Caveat Emptor falls to you.

So you read what you read, and the writer discloses what they disclose—or feel they need to. It’s like us disclosing where we get our art. And by the way, the “everything” art at the top of this page came from the blog we embedded in the image (good enough … ), but I’m going to go farther and tell you that the blog belongs to an author named Stuart Kelly. Mr. Kelly wrote this book, and this one, and if you click on those links and buy Stuart Kelly’s books we get a commission (wow! more disclosure!)

All of this is Influency* in the making, and all of it matters. Because whether you understand this or not, WordPress Runs Headway and Headway runs WordPress.

But you probably don’t care until I tell you to, and maybe not even then.

And that’s everything you need to know about … everything.

Yahoo!/Tumblr: Finally Making Porn a Legit Business

You read it here first. Pornography just went legit, and we have Yahoo! to thank for it.

That’s probably not the first thing that Yahoo! buying Tumblr makes you think about, but it’s the biggest change that this $1.1 billion transaction makes happen. Yahoo! would like to think otherwise, of course, and we’ll talk about that, but the biggest impact of Yahoo! buying Tumblr is that porn just went legit.

Typically, big companies don’t like porn. And social/censorship issues notwithstanding, that’s a perfectly acceptable business position; who needs the liability of hosting questionable content on your servers?

Tumblr, despite its size (and Tumblr is big in its way) isn’t a ‘big company’, and it’s run by a guy who dropped out of high school to devote his time to it. Can’t fault him; when the deal closes he’ll be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But Tumblr, with that pedigree in effect, is run like a company helmed by a smart, brash young person, and there’s a lot of pornography on Tumblr. Want to see? search Google Images for ‘tumblr porn’ (WARNING: DO NOT click this at work or with the kids around, or if pornography offends you, please). And Yahoo! has promised not to make the porn on Tumblr go away.

Titillation factor satisfied, let’s talk about what the Yahoo! / Tumblr merger means.

First, it’s a clear validation of something I’ve been telling you for a while now; media matters. You want to get your web site images set up the right way, optimized, and out there. You want to start producing video too. That’s what it means to you. But What about Yahoo! ?

Until now, I’ve felt as though Marissa Meyer had no real plan for Yahoo! I’ve changed my mind. It might not matter, but now we can see that Yahoo!’s CEO has a clear plan, and it makes sense: get big, and get big, quick. Yahoo! understands it isn’t a search engine any more, and the traditional idea of being a portal is passé. Want proof? Google’s gone so far as to shut down iGoogle.

But aggregating lots and lots of user activity in every possible configuration? Bingo. Tumblr was just about the last huge source of driven-by-young-people traffic left, and Ms. Meyer just spent a billion dollars very wisely. And you thought Yahoo! buying the rights to video from Saturday Night Live was a smart media play!

It’s big business change. It’s what Influency Marketing can be for your company.

Where should you blog? Probably not at Tumblr. But there are a whole lot of young people that disagree, and Yahoo! is tapping that. Yahoo! is trying to optimize Tumblr’s position. Is it content? Is It news? Does it matter? At this scale, not very much. But obscenity just became a bit more OK.

What matters is that you get your media act together, and now. And The Answer Guy is Right Here to talk about it.

Just how important is a) creating video and other media and b) owning it? Ask Lorne Michaels and the production company that owns Saturday Night Live.

SNL has been around for a very long time, and the volume of video that the decades-old franchise has produced is huge. And until now, the only place you could see it was at the web site of NBC, the television network that airs Saturday Night Live and always has. Well, SNL’s archive is moving to Yahoo!. Meaning that NBC, which you’ve always thought was the company that guarded the assets of everybody’s favorite weekly comedy program, just lost the rights to air those videos; it turns out NBC didn’t own them. Live from Yahoo!, It’s Saturday Night!

Sound weird? Imagine what the folks at NBC think.

Congratulations to Lorne Michaels (and hopefully to Yahoo!), condolences to NBC, and … you aren’t going to get yourself on the wrong end of a deal like this, are you?

While I know that my fantasies about the Influency Daily Video series having one gazillionth the value of the SNL archive won’t be coming true, I also know that we own the videos we produce, with emphasis on both ownership and production; video matters. Whether it’s The Short Cutts, Video Calls, or a discussion about Talking Head Videos, you need to get with this video thing. Now.

Short message about a big issue? You bet. Short solution? Right Here.

In case you’ve somehow missed this, we’re big believers in Search Engine Optimization. Let me be blunt: remove the “it’s snake oil” part of the conversation (and it isn’t), and the simple truth is that if you don’t optimize your presence on the Internet so search engines can and want to find you, you have a very big problem.

SEO, though, is not a panacea. It kind of was for a while; people who figured out early Search Engine Optimization strategies like keyword and tag stuffing pulled a lot of traffic for a few years, until Google and the other search engines got smart about how people could manipulate their algorithms. We work with one company that sells forklift parts (seriously, forklift parts; some businesses really are that specialized), and one of their competitors remains at or near the top of Google’s search results for the phrase ‘fork lift parts’, based on a web site they built and haven’t updated since 1996.

We’ve finally got that problem licked, by the way; and it took years.

What I’m saying is that Search Engine Optimization is a process, not a task. At least it is now.

Lee Odden Agrees.

I don’t talk about Lee nearly as often as Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, but Mr. Odden is a marketing guy with a long pedigree, and he has come up here a couple of times before. He’s bright—really bright—and may rank right up there with Brian Clark as one of the smartest guys in business today. I mentioned Lee Odden as far back as 2010, and then a bit over a year ago Lee was the topic of this story on the intersection of Art and Science in Search Engine Optimization.

Lee’s 2012 book, Optimize, (buy the hardcover version here, or the Kindle e-book version here), wraps all of this together. It’s kind of dense writing, as several of the reviews point out, but get past that; Optimize says what matters—there’s a lot you need to tie together, whether you think of that as merely a statement about Optimization, or go broader.

A couple of weeks ago, Odden wrote a piece on the subject that I had to comment on. He asked the question in a way that I believe is wrong, though. Lee’s headline read “What Should Lead Your Online Marketing Strategy: SEO or Content Marketing?“. My response, of course, was that this isn’t an either/or conversation any more. We went back and forth, and Lee agrees.

I bring this up because … well, for a bunch of reasons.

First, like all of us I like when smart people agree with me, and Lee Odden is a smart person. Second, we contend with the same issues that our clients do, and this piece is content to market with, and it’s optimized to handle that part of things; publish or perish, as they said in the old days.

And then there’s this:

As the rules change, a lot of the pieces I’ve been sharing here for the last few years start to look more and more like they really do all come together to a simple point that’s … still pretty complicated and convoluted. In fact, they’re becoming more so. I’ve said for years that computer consultants are really business consultants and marketing consultants are really business consultants, and you’ll create problems for yourself if you hire people with computer, marketing, media, or pretty much any other expertise if they don’t understand that. But getting that point to the place where it makes sense requires a simple approach, and while we do a lot of good in our “virtual COO” role, we decided that both Answer Guy Central and our client base would be better served if we emphasized a new way to talk about a single part of what we do.

That’s the thought behind Influency. A lot goes into getting found and being thought of highly enough to win business and generate word of mouth, and you need to do all of it.

All of it. Not SEO. Not ‘Content Marketing’. Not Paid Advertising. All those things, and more. Yes we handle them all, Yes, I want to you hire us. Duh.

I realize, of course, that by speaking so effusively about the work of a potential competitor like Lee Odden I risk sending you to him. That’s OK, it’s what coopetition is about. Lee published my comment at his blog and engaged with me on the matter publicly; same idea. And that’s what this post is really about.

By the way: Anyone remember this story? Lee Odden’s Comment Policy strikes me as exactly right. Lee, I may just borrow that from you, OK?

As the Internet, Search, Marketing, and all of the other subjects that go into Influency evolve it’s coalescence that matters more and more. Don’t like F-Bombs? Me neither, but consider the context. And if you still think NOFOLLOW is a good idea, well, you aren’t paying attention.

Optimize. Please. But understand that optimization isn’t about tricks any more, it’s about having something to say and saying it in exactly the right way. That’s Content Marketing. And that’s Influency.

Here’s a game changer: Digital Zoom isn’t all bad.

Media has a huge impact on Influency*, and we adjust our views of and advice on how to handle certain issues as the realities surrounding them change. Search Engine Optimization is getting harder, for example, so much so that we’re talking about images more than ever. And we used to tell our clients to stay away from video, but that’s changed: you must produce video as part of your optimization efforts.

And in an act of complete photographic heresy, I’m changing my position on Digital Zoom.

OK, so that’s only true in a small way. For the most part, using Digital Zoom will leave you with bad results, illustrated well in the image above. Optical Zoom? Fine. Digital Zoom? Bad Boy! Bad, bad, bad! But as this article points out—and I’d never thought of this before, either in my professional capacity as a media influency and optimization person or as the hobbyist photographer I sometimes am, Digital Zoom can actually improve your photographic media.

It’s a narrow position; basically, if you’re shooting in less than ideal lighting conditions and the thing you want to zoom in on is in a dark spot or in shadows, Digital Zoom may improve your images. But it’s a huge change, nevertheless; Digital Zoom, until now the pariah of photography and video, has a use!

While we usually talk about copyrights and business issues when images are the subject here, photographic storage concerns and technical photography issues matter, too. It all matters. It all impacts your marketing efforts and the effectiveness of your strides toward Influency*.

Most important to all of that? When things change, you need to change with them. That’s the most Influence-y thing you can do, of all.

What do you think? Talk with me about it. Go ahead; I dare you. You can even take a picture.

Computers Are Too Hard.

Being The Answer Guy, I get asked a lot of questions about not only our 2013-era focus on Integrated Marketing and Influency, but also, more broadly, computers. How DO those things work, anyway?

When Windows 8 was approaching release I did some testing of the new operating system—not so much because I was excited to upgrade but because Microsoft had announced the end of support for Windows XP. I don’t really need help with Windows, but ‘the end of support’ means that there will be no more security upgrades, and in our always-connected (or EVER connected, actually) world that’s just not acceptable. This meant that I needed to choose between replacing many of the computers at Answer Guy Central or upgrading the operating system in them.

I tried going the upgrade route on two of the computers recently. Moving what was my laptop before I switched to an Acer Netbook a couple of years ago and then to a Chromebook last year was surprisingly easy. And that laptop is now used for little more than random web browsing by a couple of Answer Guy Central denizens; not only did the migration to Windows 8 work, but the computer, reformatted, actually runs better now than it did when we put it in service five years ago.

Last week, I tried moving the computer I use when I’m in the office to Windows 8. It did not go well.

I tell this story as a cautionary tale; Influency is about controlling a lot of things, and although I’m less and less inclined to even bother chasing Microsoft any more, I have some specific needs for doing a couple of things here at Answer Guy Central. Video editing on-line leaves me cold, for example; there are lots of reasons to do that directly on your local computer.

So on the day before its fifth birthday I began trying to upgrade my Dell Vostro 400 Desktop computer to Windows 8. Despite its seeming old age this computer is up to every task I throw at it even today—or it was until a week ago. I have four gigabytes of RAM memory in this thing, and it rocks a Quad-core processor. And amazingly, after five years I’ve never even need to wipe things clean and start over to get rid of the gunk that builds up over time.

And then I installed Windows 8.

Nothing went “wrong”. The upgrade process checked everything  warned me about a couple of potential hardware and software incompatibilities, and then, after I removed the offending items and continued the upgrade process, chugged away for a few minutes and presented me with a Windows 8 computer in pristine condition.

And then WiFi got cranky.

Not a little cranky. WAY cranky. It would run for a few minutes and then die, and most of the time when the WiFi crashed, the computer crashed, too, to the point where hitting the power button was the only option. I spent pretty much a full day checking everything there was to check. I replaced the WiFi adapter with a new one that was officially Windows 8 compatible. No dice. For reasons unknown, this computer wasn’t taking to Windows 8. I replaced it. I’m now running a Lenovo computer with double the RAM, a new, fast processor, and again, four cores. And Windows 8 itself is astonishingly fast, but as I suspected most of the software I use performs no better now than it did on the five-year old Dell. And I’m using the WiFi adapter that seemed to be causing problems on the Dell.

Which means I need to play around. Because, well, again, I’m The Answer Guy and there were a bunch of open questions.

Windows 8, whatever you think of how it looks and acts or its Jekyll-and-Hyde interface designed to accommodate tablets, phones, and computers but not really doing the best job on the latter, is actually pretty terrific. Yes it takes a bit of getting used to, but it works, and well, and some of the things that have always driven people crazy about computers—like several-minute-long boot-ups—are gone. And that’s where Windows 8 goes wrong.

The reason computers have always taken so long to boot is that there are quite a few steps that need to be taken sequentially before you see the working interface you’re familiar with. First, the computer’s BIOS runs, making a few diagnostic checks. Then, the BIOS looks for the operating system. Then, the operating system runs tests of its own before it starts the process of making itself useful to you. Windows 8 crams all of those things together; it actually controls the BIOS routine in your computer, and while it isn’t as fast as a Chromebook’s five-second boot, a computer running Windows 8 and using a new-era BIOS will boot and be useful in about fifteen seconds.

Which means that the operation of external hardware like my USB-powered WiFi Adapter that doesn’t integrate with the computer at all the levels Windows 8 wants it to is questionable. I didn’t know this. I blame only me for that, but I also blame Microsoft for not talking about it. I know; most people don’t understand this kind of thing, so why bother them with details they don’t need?

Because Microsoft makes a point of telling people that Widows 8 won’t run certain older software, like older versions of Microsoft Office. Oh … and because that’s a lie. I’ve haven’t felt the need to upgrade Office sine 2003, and actually prefer the way that version of Office works to more recent versions. And Office 2003 installed under Windows 8 without a hitch, even though Microsoft swears it won’t work at all.

In other words, Windows 8, whatever else you think about it—and let me repeat that I like it—is an example of Microsoft misdirecting us, but only when it’s convenient for them. Comment on the new BIOS integration? There’s no money in that. Lie about software compatibility? That’s another story.

What’s this have to do with Influency*? I’ll tell you.

You want to be Microsoft. You want to communicate in a way that tells people what they need to hear and stays away from subjects that can confuse your message. For example, Bill Gates recently commented on what’s wrong with the iPad and why people would move away from it to PC-based tablets.  His comment was ludicrous, but as I point out here, the idea was that iPads make things inconsistent when compared to Macintosh computers, whereas Windows 8 looks the same—sort of—on anything. Gates’ point got lost and was reacted to by most people negatively, even though it was sound.

But you don’t want to be on the OTHER side of Influency; you need to be able to cut through the garbage. So: Windows 8: Good. Sort of. Microsoft’s marketing, as usual, awful to non-existent.

And your place in all this? You’re after Influency.

Influency takes a lot of work. And sometimes what was influence-y yesterday is less so today. This is why, even though there’s nothing about Influency that you couldn’t make happen yourself if you had the time, you hire The Answer Guy.

Here’s a new example of why.

This morning, both in my newsfeed and on Google+, I came across a story by Barry Schwartz. I’ve mentioned Barry here once before, referring to his site Search Engine Roundtable as a great resource for Optimization (and of course, therefore, Influency). I still read Barry, but that might change soon; I’m starting to think that Influency is in the process of passing him by.

Barry’s story today is about Google seeing News as different from Content, and what that means if you’re in the search engine optimization business. As I pointed out in comments on that story, this change to how Google sees News isn’t actually news at all. We do Search Engine Optimization for several magazines, and figured out quite a while ago that Google sees News as something special, deserving of higher placement in search results when it’s current, and then dropping off in comparative importance over time.

This means that you have a leg up in real-time competitiveness for Google’s attention if you’re a news outlet, but that as a news source you’re also at something of a disadvantage over time. Except, of course, that because you “do news” your volume of content is high, and that boosts you back up in Google’s eyes and as a Search Engine Optimization target.

I bring this up because Barry Schwartz, as another comment on that story points out, seems to have forgotten that he wrote about this issue a couple of years ago; it isn’t news, even though he thinks it is.

In other words, Search Engine Optimization is becoming a lot more granular and a lot more complicated. And of course that means it’s also becoming more difficult. This is part of why we don’t call ourselves Search Consultants here, even though Search Engine Optimization is a big part of what we do; Influency is more than just knowing how to work search engines; Influency is about Marketing.

Google … <ahem> … owns everything. And they keep changing the rules, and you can’t, frankly, trust them. Certainly Google doesn’t give up much information on how to work their search engine algorithm, so the question of when and how to speak to attract attention and build Influency is complicated. Is this a conversation about social media? Sure. Video, too.

Mostly, though, this is a discussion about business change. If you don’t get the changes happening all around you under control, your business, and your Influency are going to disappear. And Google doesn’t care.

Do You?

I love the coincidences that happen in the pursuit of Influency. Like coming across the picture you see here at a blog about Intellectual Property, just a few days after telling you how we handle image copyrights.

Or that Seth Godin, a marketing legend who feels as though he’s pretty much dropped out of sight lately, could cross my radar so soon after a piece I recently wrote about him. And Seth’s point, for a second time in a week, boils down to this:

Sometimes, even in marketing, it’s OK to be a contrarian.

That flies in the face of conventional wisdom on the topic. “Never is heard a discouraging word” is a much more typical marketing strategy, but sometimes you can do better by just … telling the truth. Sometimes, your message can be amplified by speaking your mind. Sometimes, you just need to be the gadfly.

Sometimes, you need to point out what’s wrong, to get to what’s right. Of course, it helps if you have an actual point, and have done your research (are you listening, John Dvorak?).

So now, Seth Godin, a guy who I’ve noticed parroting me before , seems to be adopting the contrarian position. Seth says “say it backward”. I say “tell it like it is”.

They aren’t always that different. It’s time marketers start paying attention to that.

One of the ways we’ve demonstrated this recently is through a video series focused on the wrong way to build a web site. You Can’t Build a Web Site in One Hour is lying; of course you can build a web site in an hour, and the video we keep talking about in our series proves it.

It just won’t (ultimately) be a web site worth building.

And even that’s a difficult position to defend; many businesses will build a lovely electronic business card following the not-as-simple-as-it-really-needs-to-be video on building a web site in an hour. And as long as that’s all you need, then you can build a web site in an hour.

But it isn’t all you need; it just isn’t. And if you try to build it in an hour you’ll find that later when you realize you need to build a ‘real’ web site you’re going to need to start by either unraveling what you already have or throwing it away. And neither is OK. Either will decimate your Influency.

Marketing is simple: all you have to control is everything. And as Seth Godin says, a new, surprisingly viable way of making that happen is to work backward. Start with the goal and deconstruct.

In other words, be Influency.

Generally speaking, I hate software patents. I believe they stifle innovation and make it harder to achieve Influency unless you’re a lucky company like Apple, sitting on a trove of patents, or you’re one of those folks making an entire business as a patent troll.

Sometimes, though, someone comes up with something that gets done, via software, and it’s inventive enough and unique enough that the question of whether software patents are a good idea takes on another personality. This isn’t that.

But this might be. Apple has been granted a patent on software that tells you what the best way is to contact someone.

Despite my longstanding position that texting is mostly an awful way of communicating, and the existence of our little see-who-cares-and-how-much-long-tail-marketing-juice-it-generates project I Hate Texting,  I text. I use e-mail. I reach people via their Facebook accounts and through other social networking sites. And the job of remembering which method is best for each person I communicate with, and whether that might change depending on variables like time-of-day in their time zone is a lot to keep up with.

Wouldn’t it great if a piece of software—presumably but not necessarily in your SmartPhone—knew what the best way was to reach someone so you didn’t have to worry about it?

That’s the premise behind Apple’s latest patent, and assuming there’s actually something more unique than “phone looks at contact and knows what time it is” going on in there, it’s a fantastic idea. And if you read the patent application you’ll see that it’s just complicated enough that there’s almost something inherently ‘unique’ in there.

Bringing us back to the question of Influency.

We give you every opportunity to reach us through whatever method is easiest for you. We do that by making sure our phone number is on every page of this web site, along with our social networking links. We also have a contact page—also accessible on every page of Answer Guy Central—that lays out your options, and we link to it liberally. Like I just did. And here it is again.

You’re making things that easy for your contacts and potential customers, right?

Influency is the culmination of a lot of pieces, and you’re in control of all of them—or you could be—at least on your side of the equation. Want to talk about it? I’ll bet you know what THIS LINK is for …

Yesterday, Netflix lost the right to carry about 2,000 movies. Also yesterday, YouTube ‘declared victory’ over television. And this weekend, my fiancée and I are moving her daughter into an apartment of her own, where she has no plans to sign up for cable television.

Wrap you head around all that, and if you come to any conclusion other than ‘the media business is really, really changing’, you need to start over.

Long-time readers know that I’ve been talking about changes in the media business for a few years now. Media executives seem to have a serious problem getting out of their own way, and when Louis CK demonstrated how much smarter he is than most media executives, you just knew this game was escalating.

Although they’re doing it with the speed you’d expect from a company of their size, Verizon is starting to change the way they look at media. People are demanding choice and reasonable prices, and even rich, smart Venture Capitalists aren’t against resorting to piracy. That’s less about money than choice, of course, but this stuff is converging, fast.

So think about it: last month I told you about Aereo, a way to get broadcast television over the Internet, legally. You know about Netflix, of course, and Hulu. You’re probably about as interested in the intricacies and moral and legal issues surrounding piracy as most people, so imagine you’re twenty-two, moving to your own place for the first time, and can get Aereo ($8 per month), Netflix ($8 per month) and Hulu Plus (surprise! $8 per month) to cover live broadcast TV, old episodes and movies, and nearly-current broadcast TV. $24 per month instead of at least $50 for cable, choices you make and program yourself, and the added benefit of it all being available to you everywhere—not just in your home.

Game over. The media business has changed, and the old-school media companies have lost.

All of these stories paint a pretty convincing picture, but YouTube’s “we’ve already beaten television” stance is maybe the best of all. Because they’re right. YouTube is the ‘winner’, because, well, they’re YouTube. But the real story isn’t about YouTube, at all; it’s about the fact that people now wish demand the ability to watch what they want, when they want, where they want, and in that environment, we’re all in the media business.

Where is your media Influency coming from?

A couple of years ago, I told you that producing video wasn’t a great idea. I’ll stand by that position to a point; if you don’t do it right producing video is expensive, and won’t—certainly not in the Hulu/Netflix/Aereo/YouTube era—pay off. But for the most part, in a much larger way, I’ve reversed my position: you must start producing video, right now. Just … do it right.

In other words: you can’t build a web site in an hour. But … build one, you must. And get people there. And do a lot of things the right way.

Or disappear.

Take a look at your media marketing strategies. Grab The Long Tail And Hold On. And when you’re ready to get serious about Influency and your media strategy, Contact Me here.

When are you too old to be a programmer?

As an old guy, my perspective is skewed. That’s OK; all of our perspectives on all issues are skewed by who we are. But is there an answer that ‘makes sense’?

According to a new study, older people might actually make better programmers than younger ones. This is a seismic shift in the way the topic has long been discussed, and in conflict with something I asked about a few years ago; might older people be too set in their ways to use SmartPhones?

Or, it makes perfect sense and the only question is what took us so long to figure it out?

Often, achieving Influency is about seeing what’s changing and acting on that. As I said, I’m more inclined to believe in the innate intelligence of older people versus the kind of smarts most younger people have, right up to the point where I’m OK asking so politically incorrect a question as whether Armando Kirwin is even old enough to deserve an opinion on the business he believes himself to be an expert at.

As Influency seekers, let’s take this study seriously. And let’s add to it the likelihood that older employees might know not only more stuff, but more people—and that can be an Influency booster, too.

Of course, that still leaves the issue of older programmers, as in most fields, costing more than younger ones.

Influency lesson 101: Don’t be a sheep. More on that, tomorrow …

How does this book factor into a discussion on Influency?

If you’re looking for a quick read/impossible-(for most people)-roadmap-to-Influency, use this link or click the picture at the top of this piece and get your hands on a copy of It’s Not About The Tights.

It’s Not About The Tights is a book by Chris Brogan, who I’ve mentioned here quite a few times. Often, I pick on Chris for being too-much-about-acting-like-a-guru-and-too-little-about-substance; mostly I prefer the style of Chris’ sometimes writing partner Julien Smith. But It’s Not About The Tights, despite being all full of guru-like prose, feels different to me, because it makes a clear point: you make what you make.

I’m speaking less about a self-help book than about the way Influency works.

I stumbled across It’s Not About The Tights last week, when Chris ran a one-day giveaway of the Kindle e-book version. Chris and I are connected on Google+, and that’s where I heard about the giveaway. The book itself, as I said above, is a quick read, albeit one that I fear many people will find difficult to take to heart. What’s fascinating is the back-story.

Chris seems to have published It’s Not About The Tights as e-book-only. For a two-time New York Times Bestselling Author to do that is interesting all on its own, but Mr. Brogan has tightened his grip on It’s Not About The Tights even further by making it Amazon Kindle-only.

Which doesn’t mean you need to own a Kindle to read It’s Not About The Tights. You can install the Kindle app on an Android device, or on an Apple iPad/iPhone, and read the book on those devices too, as well as on your computer. What it does mean, though, is that Chris Brogan is keeping better control of his e-book, keeping a much larger portion of the revenue from sales, and reducing his workload managing multiple e-book versions of It’s Not About The Tights.

All little pieces. All add up to Influency.

For my part, aside from wanting to point you at It’s Not About The Tights (and yes, make make a few cents if you buy it), I wanted to talk again about the way we go about (and you can, too!) using Optimization to make Influency happen. Last week I wrote about how we manage images at Answer Guy Central, first here, and then here. I pointed out that our image and media management schematic at Answer Guy Central was designed both to make us certain that our links wouldn’t stop working and to gain as much Search Engine Optimization traction through images as we could.

But you see that image for It’s Not About The Tights at the top of this page? We threw away our own rules on that one. Why? First, we’re pretty much certain Amazon.com won’t ever break that link. Second, if you click on the picture we might make some money. Go ahead. Scroll up, click the picture, and buy yourself a copy of It’s Not About The Tights.

A calculated risk? Sure, but that’s Influency; there are so many pieces in the puzzle that part of the equation is always being willing to try new things. It’s not unlike Chris Brogan giving away his book for a day to create buzz and see if doing that will sell more.

In fact, since we’re at it, here are our affiliate links to “the Chris Brogan Catalog” on Amazon.com. Click away. And let me know how you feel about It’s Not About The Tights.

Cover	Title	Format
	It’s Not About The Tights	Kindle
	The Impact Equation	Kindle
	The Impact Equation	Hardback
	Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust	Paperback
	Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust	Kindle
	Google+ for Business	Kindle
	Social Media 101	Hardback
	Social Media 101	Kindle

It’s a complete coincidence that I told you about the way we handle pictures at Answer Guy Central just a few days ago. This morning, I heard for the first time about PhotoDropper.

And I’d like to point out that I’ve linked to Photodropper.com both in the image at the top of this story, and in the link you see above.

Big deal? You bet it’s a big deal.

I linked to PhotoDropper because I want to be clear about who made this very cool little plug-in for WordPress sites that you host yourself (and we’ve been clear that self-hosting is the correct choice, right?), and I point out that I’ve linked to Photodropper in the image above because that image, clearly by the folks at PhotoDropper, isn’t from PhotoDropper. It’s from the PhotoDropper page at WordPress.org.

Having disclaimed the controversial elements of this story sufficiently, allow me to point out that I believe I’m doing right by PhotoDropper and that they deserve that. And of course, WordPress doesn’t need my help (WordPress Traffic, anyone?). But I’ve done today what I described here, as much for the reasons I explain in that post as because I needed the correct image size and orientation image to back up this description of PhotoDropper and neither PhotoDropper nor WordPress had them available.

We aren’t using PhotoDropper. We don’t plan to start. But if you’re willing to forgo a rather major slice of Influency*, and find yourself needing incredibly easy access to stock images, grab PhotoDropper, right now. It’s that good.

Now I’ll tell you why that’s a bad idea. As I explained a bit in this story, pictures make for some of the best optimization you can create on your web site. But merely having pictures doesn’t lead to amazing search engine optimization; great SEO comes both from having pictures, and formatting them the right way.

Optimization is part of the Influency equation, and not one you should leave to chance. By using PhotoDropper to auto-magically drop pictures into your web site, you give up too much control over how the images get optimized. Period. PhotoDropper is a great tool, and you still shouldn’t use it unless speed and ease are more important to you than impact. And they aren’t.

But what do we know? Some people think you can build a web site in one hour.

Want to talk about this stuff, and why ease and Influency aren’t always a great match? Me too.