Biznology

Image by exfordy via Flickr

I don’t know if this is an American thing, but we seem to have a trust in technology so deep that it can never really fulfill our fantasies. I thought about this on my trip to Europe when I saw a design for flushing a toilet that allows the person to decide whether they need a big flush or a small one. (I’ll leave it to you to figure when each is appropriate.) And I realized how America solved this same problem–the government limited the number of gallons that could be used for any one flush. And my toilet is always clogged. We could have saved just as much water with the European solution, but that would have required relying on people rather than technology.

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Image by fredcavazza via Flickr

It’s the musical question that everyone seems to be asking these days. And the answer depends on what you are trying to do. Too often, people ask that question, assuming that what they have in mind is all that can be done with social media. So, when a PR person asks, they look at social media as a communications mechanism. Marketing people want to run a social media campaign. Customer service people want to help customers on Twitter. Who’s right? Yep, all of them.

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Image via Wikipedia

In my speech at SMX Stockholm today, I challenged the audience of mostly search professionals to think about what they are doing, whether it breaks the search engines’ rules or not. If you are interested in how to make a case for white hat SEO, then check out my latest post on Search Engine Guide, “Do Your SEO Tactics Work for Everyone?”

Image by Lynn (Gracie’s mom) – I’m here & there via Flickr

I am old, so I remember the Walt Kelly comic strip from the ’60s called Pogo, of which the most famous line ever was “I have met the enemy and it is us.” In Internet marketing, it is so often true that we are our own worst enemies. I was reminded of that recently when I taught one of my many classes to veteran marketers looking to understand this Internet thing. Most traditional marketers have some amount of struggle with the Do It Wrong Quickly concept, but on this occasion I ran into one who was apparently so threatened by it that nothing was going to penetrate. And my diagnosis is that the fear she was grappling with was preventing her from moving forward—that she was literally her own worst enemy. And it happens to all of us sometimes.

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Image by fredcavazza via Flickr

by Frank Reed
I realize that the terms “social media” and “slowing down” are never to be used in the same post (let alone a headline!) according to the Secret Brotherhood of the Social Media Industry Public Relations and Hype Machine (the SBSMIPRHM for short ;-) ) but I did it. Why? Well, this week I came across a report that was put together by Network Solutions and some folks from the University of Maryland and I was a little surprised by one chart in particular.

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