By Samuel J. Scott

A lot of business and marketing is impossible to measure quantitatively but still widely regarded as valuable. Take branding, for example. Companies spend millions on logos, product appearance, communications, and guerilla marketing – among countless other tactics – to ensure that consumers think of a desired connotation when they think of a brand. It’s not a cheap endeavor – it can take years to build a solid brand.  Read more...

By Daniel Goldstein

In February 2011, Google unveiled the first in a major series of updates collectively termed “Panda” to its search algorithm. The latest Panda update occurred on November 18, and many websites lost search-engine rankings (and thereby traffic) on and after that day. See the comments in this post for just a few examples of the many that we have seen.

What the Panda updates aim to do overall is devalue the rankings of poor-quality websites including content farms, spammers, built-for-advertising sites, and those with little original content or text that was copied (or “scraped”) from elsewhere. The most-egregious offenders sometimes have their sites removed from Google’s index completely. In a nutshell, Panda wants to judge the quality of a website from a human point-of-view rather than that of a machine.  Read more...

The following is the fourth part of a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.

Moore opens with a quote from Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably aren’t going to get there.”

The fundamental principle to cross the chasm is to pick a specific niche market and focus all your resources on achieving the dominant position in that segment.

It sounds simple but most organizations fail.

Why?

According to Moore, it’s a high risk, low data decision.  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

When I was a kid, I loved “Alf” – an NBC comedy that ran from 1986 to 1990 and was about a lovable, sarcastic space-alien living with a suburban California family. I even had an “Alf” stuffed animal that my mother had bought for me when I was six or so.

So, when I was bored one day, I scanned Facebook pages for TV shows, saw one for “Alf,” and “liked” the page. I had forgotten about the “like” until much later, when I saw this item in my Facebook news-feed earlier today while catching up with the latest news from my friends and family:  Read more...

By Josh Cline

When you think about the strategy behind your current or future online presence, you likely think about beating your competitors (perhaps in search-engine rankings or in direct sales on your website) or becoming a recognized thought-leader in your specific industry.

Today, however, such a strategy is becoming increasingly difficult – if not impossible – in a world of millions of websites in which a select few have usually dominated their online markets for years (and will most likely continue to do so). If your company sells books, you will likely never beat Amazon. If your firm wants to create the next Facebook (and you are not Google) and replace the popular social-media network, it will take years even to come close to Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth. The “first-mover advantage” exists for a reason.  Read more...

The following is the third in a series about high-tech market strategy based on Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

A big, strategic failure that many organizations get into is picking the wrong market. Either, they don’t pick one at all and just see what sticks or else picks a market that is so wide (“everybody with a cell phone,” “mothers over 30,” “all people of a specific religious or ethnic group of a certain age,” “all Java programmers”) that it’s impossible to develop a market penetration strategy.

If your market is everybody, than your market is nobody.  Read more...