We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Most companies turn to outside consultants, focus groups and media relations firms to try to understand their market.

Apple creates products like a monarchy, with all big decisions flowing down from Emperor Steve.

Here is a quote from Steve Jobs saying that Apple doesn’t do market research from a post arguing why no one innovates like Apple.

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.”

Mr. Jobs elaborates the Apple design design philosophy from Fortune.

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

Jonathan Ive, Apple product design VP, explains how Apple’s primary goal is not to make money, but to make great products that people will love.

“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products… We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”

Apple has a very clear vision: Make the very best products that people will love to use, business will follow.

Read more at Bokardo.

Read more about the Stompernet video about Referential Integrity and how to capitalize on the advanced search engine research from the stomper search marketing team.

There is a new way to access the unlimited datastore of the internet using google docs and the web.

Google spreadsheets has a feature called GoogleLookup that lets you do real time automated lookups through their spreadsheet feature.

What makes GoogleLookup really cool is that it references data not only from your spreadsheet (as with functions like =SUM(A1:A12)), but searches that incredibly expansive body of published information directly from the web. By performing a specific websearch, GoogleLookup attempts to return facts about the entity you specify. City populations are a nice example. Entering =GoogleLookup(”Los Angeles”, “population”) in any spreadsheet cell will automatically retrieve the number of people living in Los Angeles.

It is not perfect, and if you choose a value with multiple locations such as Portland, it may be incorrect. It is important to verify any auto-generated data before using.

Google just created a simple API to access the unstructured data online.

Read more about GoogleLookup from beahburger.

In the book “Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig a father tries to teach his son the basics of life, which also happens to coincide with the basics of business.

People who do more than the basics and actively listen and help people will succeed. Companies that do more than only what is required are rewarded with happier customers, more referrals and better profits.

A few pleasant surprises

I called ATT Wireless I was pleasantly surprised to be greeted by a friendly US based worker who was genuinely happy to talk with me. I had a problem with extra international roaming charges, and was billed an extra month for ATT world connect.

The ATT rep cheerfully removed this charge and apologized because her ribs were hurting from being thrown from a horse the previous weekend. She said it hurt to laugh, which she frequently did. In 5 minutes I was on my happy way.

Alaska Air is the default airline on the West Coast and I have had positive experiences with them. Their customer service is helpful and generally very effective. After booking a flight I found an online fair for $50 less than what I had paid. After some negotiations with them, Alaska agreed to give me a $50 voucher for my next ticket.

In the extremely competitive, low margin air travel market I think this was a deal and thank Alaska very much.

Not so good service

I received a free printer from Hewlett Packard and tried to install the driver on my Mac. No luck, the computer would not recognize the printer. So I had to call tech support and work with them for 1 hour to resolve the problem.

I had to download the latest driver (190MB, HP how in the heck does it take this much code to run a printer?) from their extremely unfriendly, unclear and unusable website. If HP had just taken the time to install the latest driver in the printer box, they would have saved themselves the support call, which probably ate up their profit margin on the printer.

Paypal still has nearly nonexistant customer service, and tries to hide their phone number as best they can 402-935-7733. They have the nearly useless “Ask Jenn” automated help robot that sometimes answers general questions.

If you have a detailed question, expect to wait 1 week+ for an answer from a non US based support center.

I think this post will grow as new customer service situations present themselves.

From the department of D’oh – several SEO firms are trying to get their job listings placed in front of applicants by keyword stuffing their postings.

See this screenshot for examples of recent listings for SEO/SEM positions.

I know you have to mention that you are a search engine optimization firm in the job posting, but your keyword density should be below 10%.

This just encourages applicants who wish stuff keywords on client websites, not a good way to begin a career in online marketing.

SEO jobs are a hot position at the moment, but candidates should carefully screen job postings so they don’t end up in an unreputable shop.

Advice from James Hong on starting a $20 million dollar social website from his living room. He founded HotOrNot.com which lets users upload photos and rate other people’s photos. The killer paid feature of this social service is the ability to “meet” or connect with other users that you wish to connect with.

As soon as they launched, there were 100 competitors. The challenge was to increase PR to show they were the leaders in the photo ranking space.

Save information for major publications, they love to break stories. They let the New York Times announce the founders names, and they distributed the press release and gave them huge exposure.

Rackspace gave free hosting in exchange for writing articles to let them scale. Rackspace got lots of free advertising, even 9 years later.

Bandwidth was $1000/mps extremely expensive. Now anyone can create a competitor.

Ended up converting 18% of users from free to paid accounts.

Most Important Features

• website speed
• removing extra unnecssary steps to view people
• always see “click here to meet me” button
• add step: premade message then they can use to communicate easier.
• Removes mental block of talking to a stranger.

Andrew Warner gives a lively and engenertic interview with this young entrepreneur that will help inspire struggling businesses. Listen to this while you work and get ideas that will help you out maneuver your competitors.

 

 HOT or NOT- James Hong Interview: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download