Customers want to know “who is Apple and what does Apple stand for?” Basically tell your customers who you are, because who you are is the brand you/we are!

The best information I got is the following: (See Slide)

Good info to get seen in Facebook it is all about news feed. Concentrate on the newsfeed more than anything else. Fan page tabs are a wasted effort.
Yup it makes sense Facebook faces similar problems as Google. Too much info junk. Facebook comments trump “Facebook likes” by a lot from what I hear.
If you look up in the upper right corner of the photo Edgerank is to Facebook what PageRank is to Google They also said that personal pages carry a lot more weight than business pages in terms of being shown in the feeds. Average posts only show up in 3-7% of your fan/friend base in almost all cases. And in most cases is is in around the 3% range and less.

Facebook is challenged with the overflow of information as we all are. Their new platform is designed to curate a lot of that content just like Google has done with 2011 Panda. What do you think? If you have any other Facebook marketing tips please do share them.

Changing gears, look at the adoption of Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail over the last decade plus. As of August 2011 Wikipedia reports that Hotmail has 364 million users worldwide and Yahoo Mail has 280 Million and Gmail has 191 Million users. Obviously there probably is a high percentage of these mail accounts that are dormant, I know I have a few. But still there is a lot of business being taken away from the good ole United States Postal Service.

Just yesterday the New York Times reported that the USPS might shut down if they don’t make some drastic changes or get a bail out they will just plain run out of money. With everything else going on in the world today in the shock news genre it seems like no one actually cares. But wait! Do you think they won’t care if that Social Security Check doesn’t arrive in the mail? I know they won’t worry about my little postcard mailings.
Here’s a look at the data:

While first class mail has dropped significantly over the years the USPS is still stuck with all of the infrastructure and labor, and oh by the way the Postal Workers have a union contract that says they cannot be laid off, how is that for a deal in these tumultuous times? They might not get laid off but they all might just not get paid!

What amazes me at this point is the silence is deafening and I have not heard or seen much online or in the newspapers about the travails of the USPS. Just wait a few more weeks and month when the next big multibillion dollar payments are due from the USPS and if delivery is disrupted we just may hear more than a little noise, we could hear the natives getting restless.

As an end note what about the artwork in the post offices that was created during the depression era? What is that value and how will the assets be divided if they are dissolved or sold?

In doing a search for a well known business in SEO and local I wanted to see how they them selves ranked in Google Places. I mistyped the keywords so this is probably why they did not show up. However what was more interesting were the results that showed up after I clicked on “Rate Places to Improve my Recommendations.

What I got was a grid like listing of several places listings that I could: save for later, star, save as “not interested.” So now I am compiling a database for Google of the places I like and don’t like. I am compiling this database for myself as well so next time I want to go to a different city I can check the places I want to go back to or visit for the first time while I’m there with the easy access of Google.

Living, traveling, planning entertaining and working might just have gotten a little bit easier with Google.

Once the photo is tagged properly with the proper image tag it can sometimes find it’s way to the top of Google in the Web search results as well as the image search results pages. While this is helpful it is probably not going to convert into revenue however if you create a bunch of images that are similar in nature and have different but similar tags you might find a body of traffic that will be relevant to your niche.

At the same time video will do the same for you. Just the other day I created a simple sunrise in Marblehead video overlooking the ocean and it now ranks just a few days later for sunrise in Marblehead with a video thumbnail.

While there isn’t a huge amount of people searching on this keyphrase the point here is that is a very short time you/we/me can all rank for some keyphrases that we want some traffic on. And to make it one step better we have a compelling video to send the right message to our audience that can sometimes seal the deal. And to help matter even more for both photos and videos we can spread them around the social media camp fires and get some legs there as well. I hope you enjoy watching your sunrise in your organic search results.

Recently I got a call from a PhD client whom I built a site for and he said received an e-mail from Getty Images. The mail said that he was in rights violations of an image. He needed to contact the person(s) who built his site. (That was me). He needed to find out where I got the image from. Luckily I licensed it from iStockPhoto. I also had the receipt. Here’s a look at the photo.

When I spoke to the person at Getty Images I shared with them I purchased the image at iStockPhoto. She said that was a “problem.” I said but it is not “my problem.” She concurred. I asked her if she had a relationship with iStockPhoto and she said “yes, we own them.” So I’m not sure what happened on their side but the issue went away for now, but it might be resurrected now with this blog post, who knows. I was annoyed that I had to waste my time and my clients with their incompetence.

So I am creating a new “ad campaign” for my own business. I wanted to use some images from Times Square and create a campaign that says something to the effect as a website consultant I can cut through the clutter online and use a Times Square image and an example of information overload. I went back to iStockPhoto. I like their offerings. However I did not see an image that I was really excited about. So I went over to Getty images. I did find some Times Square images that I liked however if I wanted to use them for 2 years in social media or on my web site I was going to pay between $1,050 and $1,250 for the 2 year license. Ouch!

I’m originally from New York City. I now live in Boston. I work with John Hubbard of Hubcam.com. I told John we need to go on a road trip to NYC and shoot our own original content, which he said he will do. We need to take pictures of Times Square, the George Washington Bridge, Central Park etc….and sell them to the stock photography guys. When I got on the chat portion of the Getty Images I asked them how much does the photographer get of the $1,050? Guess what, I did not get an answer back. So this tells me that the photographer might get a very small portion of that fee, do you agree? They get paid well for licensing and enforcing those licenses, how is that for a business model? Pretty good if you ask me.

Here’s an interesting article John sent to me discussing the business model for photographers and the stock photo guys, total over saturation of inventory.

Destination Video from Jim Peake on Vimeo.

We don’t have to look far to see businesses that were here yesterday and gone today.  There are so many outside factors that play a role in how businesses succeed and fail.  I have a client who is in the small appliance business (they would rather not have me use their name) and they approached me with something that is effecting them in their e-commerce world.

They are getting business from three channels

1)      Retail big box (i.e. Home Depot)

2)      3^rd Party Online (i.e. Amazon and smaller online retailers)

3)      Online Direct from their own web site

Let’s say they make a humidifier and the suggested retail price is $100.00.  They sell the unit to the big box retailer at $49.00.  The profit margin is about $50 for the big box retailer.  Both the manufacturer and the retailer are happy.  Same exact situation goes true for smaller online e-tailers.  Many e-tailers use Amazon as a fulfillment house to order and ship products however Amazon themselves will match the lowest price on their own site.

Here’s the problem though.  These humidifiers are showing up on Amazon for a retail price of $58.00 which undercuts the big box retailers.  Since the big box retailers have higher overhead they can never compete at these prices, hence they will warn the manufacturer if they don’t “fix” this problem they will stop distribution all together.  This makes sense because it just is not profitable for the big box retailer.

I asked the manufacturer how they could lose control of their inventory and I was told the following.  Some of the smaller distributors probably have sister companies operating under a different name that they move the products to and market them under that name so it technically does not look like a breach when in fact it is.  The only way to know is to stop shipping to a few e-tailers to see if this is so.

The manufacturer has to find the e-tailers who are doing this and stop shipping them product.  If the manufacturer doesn’t stop shipping to the wayward e-tailers they risk losing major big box retailers if they don’t get rid of them.  They can also create exclusive products for the big box store and either private label them or put different features and functionality on them.  When I suggested this to the owner of the business he complained of the logistical headaches creating different versions of the products for each retailer, which I can’t blame him.

Right now we are in a wait and see mode and have to wait for the e-tailers to run out of inventory and determine if they are the ones who have been shipping discounted product.  (We think we know who the culprits are but are not 100% sure). The problem is that the online retailers are a growing part of the business, so it is a double edged sword.  The manufacturer can make a profit selling to them however they risk losing a bigger portion of their orders if they do so.

We can also put RFID chips in the products or packaging and track them but their problem with that it is takes time, energy, logistics and money.  It seems that the shipping companies are “unknowns” as far as labels go and they are untraceable.

If you look at the recent Google Farmer update there were many businesses whom were affected by the recent update.  Here today and gone tomorrow.  Depending on Google’s algorithm your business can either pass or fail especially if you are earning a lot on either their SEO or PPC results.  That is really living in a fragile business model economy.  We don’t have to look far with My Space being the premier social media site only to be eclipsed by Facebook in a couple dozen months.  Remember when Aol bought Time Warner back in the 1990’s?  In the 50’s and 60’s and up to the 80’s it seemed like businesses did not fail as often or as fast.  In today’s high tech environment things have changed so quickly even governments can be brought down fast.  Look at Egypt.

The point of this post is that if we stop paying attention to the world around us we could be engulfed by a Tsunami before we have the time to recover, chances are someone else has had a similar problem.  The other point is we all also have information at our fingertips that we can access through the Internet so we can preempt and plan for potential threats to our business model.  Like any breathing thing a business has to be able to adapt to the conditions and the markets.  Not to plan fear in anyone but what would we do if the Internet went down for an extended period of time? Does our business have a plan for that as well?  These are the kinds of things we could never imagine happening but no one ever thought the Fukushima nuclear disaster was going to happen either and it did.