Think Basis It's Good For Business

For the most part, SEOs and Internet marketers seem to be a fairly collaborative bunch, especially in the social media realm, where so much of your success is predicated on strong relationships with other like-minded people. However, it seems like there is always a bit of a disconnect between the people who work with clients and the people who spend the majority of their time working on independent projects. The main question usually is, “If you’re truly an expert at something, what incentive do you have to teach others? Wouldn’t you want to just work on your own projects and make money for yourself?”

Well, if money is the main motivator it’s hard to argue with that logic. But, in taking a look at a few of the other factors, it seems like there’s a lot more going on here than just looking at which path can make you the most money. First, let’s look at a few of the reasons a person might choose to teach someone:

1) They’re a Saint

I’ve been told that for whatever reason, there are some people who legitimately enjoy helping others. These are the people that typically make me extremely uncomfortable and leave my inner monologue pinging, “What’s your game…? No one can be this nice,” while I politely thank them for going way beyond what I ever would have expected. These are the born teachers, and the people who just can’t help but pass along a quick pointer to someone if they know it’s going to help make their life easier.

Strangely, they almost never seem to expect anything in return. They actually want to see other people succeed, and are rewarded by knowing they helped contribute to someone else’s prosperity.

2) They’re an Ego-Maniac

These teachers fall on the complete opposite end of the spectrum and typically just want to pass along enough information to make sure you understand they are a genius. Usually they are extremely knowledgeable people, but when they pass along information they tend to be less concerned with whether you understand what they’re saying than they are about making sure you understand how brilliant they are for saying it.

3) It’s a Relatively Safe Option

These are the people who choose to teach primarily because it offers some form of a safety net. For some it’s purely financial, and for others it equates to being able to place the risk squarely on someone else’s shoulders. Either way, these people have enough expertise to be a valuable resource, and are able to carve out a successful career being exactly that. Also, a fair amount of the people in this group probably pull some traits right out of group 1, and take a tremendous amount of pride in seeing their clients succeed. That’s what makes them good consultants in the first place.

Obviously these categories are a bit simplified. But, I’d definitely argue most search marketers that do consulting are at least leaning heavily toward one of the three, even though they may have characteristics from multiple groups.

There are bound to be some people who can’t comprehend why anyone would choose to take a different approach than they do. And sometimes it seems like the more entrepreneurial individual has a hard time understanding the in-house SEO that works a set schedule and is required to put in the same long hours day after day while being inundated with internal meetings. And, on the other side, the more risk averse person can’t always comprehend how someone could pour countless hours into a project with no guaranteed ROI, or have the confidence to pursue their own ideas as a sole source of income.

But, as with anything, there are plenty of pros and cons to both pursuing individual projects and choosing to work with clients. Here’s a quick list I threw together with some of the obvious ones:

My feeling is that neither one is more “noble” than the other. And, whichever side a person feels more comfortable on is almost certainly going to be the right choice for them. It seems if you just examine the reasons behind why someone would choose to teach in the first place, and the basic pros and cons of consulting versus working on your own projects, certain people will just gravitate naturally to one role or the other.

However, I’m interested in hearing whether or not other people agree with this philosophy.

Is there more merit to one than the other, or is it really as simple as “do what makes you happy?”

There are a number of things businesses do that aren’t in the best interest of the consumer. A lot of them are unavoidable offshoots of wanting to maximize profit, but some of them can be shortsighted, lazy, or even dangerous. While I’d never say some of these practices can’t be extremely successful, I would certainly argue there’s a good chance you’re sacrificing long term equity for immediate gain.

1) Trying to Prey on Fear

Plenty of companies thrive on using a consumer’s fear of missing out on the product they’re after by using a manufactured scarcity to push people over the buying threshold. Suddenly the car that’s been sitting on the lot for six months has “several other potential buyers” as soon as you express some interest. Similarly, Gamestop insists you pre-order your games despite the fact that they’ll have dozens of additional copies laying around the store, and has even gone as far as refusing to sell these extras to customers in an effort to instill the value of pre-ordering.

While this strategy might be successful in the short term, it commoditizes the sale and reduces or eliminates customer loyalty. By manufacturing scarcity you encourage your customers to snatch up the product they want as soon as they find it, and it’s likely your competitors will be the beneficiaries.

I was recently in the market for a new bike, and as such, completely expected a certain amount of “used car type sales tactics” that would eventually culminate in someone asking me, “What can I do to get you on this bike today?” Shockingly, I was met with the total opposite, and the sales force practically bent over backwards to prevent me from making a hasty decision. They made some recommendations, helped me narrow it down to two, and then said they’d hold both of them for me so I could come back when it was sunny out and take them both on a “proper ride.” No pressure, no mention of possibly selling the bike I wanted while I was mulling over my decision. The end result is I now have a stronger allegiance to that particular retailer than I probably should…and a sweet new bike.

2) The Perpetual “Ending Soon” Sale

Every city seems to have a furniture store that has been going out of business for the past three years. The commercial shouts about how you better “hurry in this weekend, because everything must go!” The logic is sound enough. Everyone loves a good deal, so if you make people think you’re having an incredible sale for a “limited time only” they will come running. The only problem is, after two-plus-years of the same ploy the sale means absolutely nothing. Not only that, it has now devalued everything in the store to the point where if it’s not on sale, there is no reason anyone would want to buy it.

Allposters.com is a prime example of the perpetual sale. Here’s the last six months worth of sales offers I’ve received:

While the constant barrage of emails have (arguably) kept them “top of mind,” the offers are pretty meaningless and eventually just turn into noise.

Contrast this with Active.com’s considerably more intermittent–and product specific–offers that still maintain some “top of mind” value but don’t give me the expectation that anything I purchase through them should always be at a discounted price.

Granted, the immediate response to any individual offer will probably be less for the second example. However, the long term results will be more items sold at full retail and higher conversions during times when there is no sale being offered.

3) Arbitrary Product Release Dates

Small tech companies seem to be the biggest offender of this particular consumer letdown. Although premiering your latest product at a conference or having a usable demo ready for a board meeting is good in theory, it’s still useful to remember there’s a lot of truth in the whole “one chance at a first impression” philosophy. Ask cuil. Although balancing the strains of needing to drive profits with the need to deliver a quality product is always going to be a challenge, it’s hard to recover from an underwhelming product launch or an application that was hurried into production and doesn’t deliver on the vision you promised.

At a previous company I witnessed firsthand an incredibly disappointing product launch resulting from decisions to start selling something that simply wasn’t ready for consumers. Without going into too much detail, I will say the decision to rush to market had a lot to do with VC funding and a desire to show dramatic revenue growth over the previous year. However, after watching the product devolve from its original scope into a neutered version that could “be ready by January,” it became abundantly clear that none of this was for the benefit of customers.

The end result of this major product launch was an underwhelming amount of sales, a continued retooling of the product that resulting in halting all sales efforts for a one month period, and a number of dissatisfied customers that had been sold a product failing to live up to its initial value proposition.

Obviously it’s ridiculous to think you can keep moving something back indefinitely while you fine tune it to perfection (unless you’re Blizzard). However, if you’re honest about the reasons for your “drop-dead” release date, it might just be better to cope with some internal disappointment upfront to avoid a public disappointment when you launch.

4) Strict Adherence to “Corporate Policy”

While having policies and best practices in place is always a sound idea, failing to allow for some old-fashioned common sense and good judgment can be a huge mistake. Sure, it can be easier to hide behind a generic policy, but when it’s taken too far you’re left with instances like Jo-Ann Fabrics’ refusal to let a customer use the bathroom, or Bed Bath and Beyond not letting a customer use a phone to dial 9-1-1.

This seems like a head smackingly obvious statement, but by filling your organization with quality employees who are empowered to sidestep “company policy” when all common sense and human decency is telling them to do so, you’re sending a much stronger signal to your customers.

Like I said earlier, there are plenty of successful businesses that do some (or all) of these things, and I’m not saying these can’t be profitable (the first three at least). However, as a long-term strategy, and in an increasingly competitive environment, taking a step back every once in a while and making sure your customers’ best interests are aligned with your own isn’t a bad way to do business.

Too much is said about the ulterior motives of some of the submissions on social media sites. From time to time, great content has been called out by people in the community as being “spam” simply because it has a commercial agenda. To me it seems like judging a piece of content based on what its creator hopes to gain is pretty much on par with boycotting a movie because you don’t want the director to make any money. The bottom line is that if you find the content interesting, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to go around complaining about what’s going to happen as a result. Quality is quality and you might as well just enjoy it.

This isn’t to say that there’s not a huge amount of stuff being promoted that is both weak and heavily commercial, it’s just to point out that commercial doesn’t always equal bad. I for one, will never get tired of watching Terry Tate level an unsuspecting colleague.

So, in that vein, here are a few pieces of content I’ve come across (or been “force-fed”) over the past several months that I’d never have found if it hadn’t been for some savvy company leveraging social media to deliver me a subtle advertisement which I happily consumed.

Thule Trail

Despite seeing this a little over a year ago, it still resonates as a great example of what you can do with a relatively straightforward product and a lot of creativity. Thule is probably best known for their ski and bike racks, and–through what must have been some brilliant brainstorming–decided to remake everyone’s favorite elementary school classic The Oregon Trail as modern road trip across the country. The result is an ingenious game that has minimal ties to their product line, but does a considerable amount toward branding their product. Also, it’s a lot of fun.

How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor?

Easily the most bizarre of the four, this amusing quiz showed that with a little ingenuity you can take a topic as boring as bunk beds and just add a carnivorous dinosaur to the equation. It’s another great example of a company providing light-hearted content that helps distinguish their brand, but also offers a bit of fun for a huge amount of people that have absolutely no need to ever buy their product.

Salary Madness – 2008 March Madness Predictions By the Dollars

When the NCAA tournament brackets were announced back in March of this year, PayScale, a salary information resource, had the idea of using some of their data to forecast the tourney based on the median salaries of the school’s graduates. Since there’s a natural curiosity surrounding how much money people make, this was a great way for them to capitalize on something that was topical while also showcasing the core strength of their service. It hardly matters that the site itself offers subscriptions, because this was a quick piece of content that could be enjoyed without even taking the time to find out what it is they do.

The Eight Phases of Dating

With some incredibly successful linkbait and an increasing notoriety among social media communities, the dating site Mingle2 has gotten a decent amount of flack from some users that apparently object to having anything they’re looking at tied in with a service they don’t want to subscribe to. Here’s one user’s comment on the Eight Phases of Dating comic:

Admittedly, this one was harsher than most, but it does show the unwarranted disdain some people have for all things commercial. Contrast that with the similarly themed XKCD comic, that will likely receive little flack because it has no specific call to action on the page.

It seems as if many users don’t typically equate sites that rely on ad revenue as having just as much of a commercial interest as those promoting a product or service, and Digg has even gone as far as banning some retail driven websites altogether.

It’s probably not the most mind blowing take away, but it’s hard to look at the above pieces of content and say they don’t have some entertainment value as a stand-alone from the product or service they’re promoting. There’s no reason why each piece of content shouldn’t be judged on its own merit. Anyone should be more than welcome to promote their content across whatever social media sites they choose, they just need to be damn sure they make it interesting enough to stand on its own, because if it’s linked to a commercial site then it’s going to be an uphill battle.

As someone who spends an unhealthy amount of the workday on Digg there are a few mind-boggling trends I’ve noticed. Certain stories seem to pretty much guarantee several comments that are nothing more than variations on “Really? That made the front page?” but they still seem to get consistently dugg up by a large number of people.

Slideshows

It is unlikely at this point that anyone could click through to an AskMen or Forbes.com list without knowing they’re about to endure another painful eye-raping in the name of page views. But still, these one sentence per page lists seem to perform reasonably well, despite a comments section riddled with complaints and an almost guaranteed 100+ diggs to the first person willing to copy the list over in a simple, easy to read format. For other offenders see EW and Maxim.

Huffington Post

For the past several months Digg’s 2008 U.S. Elections category has been redirecting people straight to the Huffington Post. Despite a fair amount of backlash in threads like this and this the Huffington Post has continued its total dominance of all things political.

Web Comics

There’s about a 50 percent chance that any given XKCD comic will have several comments whining about how it seemingly rockets to the front page no matter what, an inevitable link to http://www.isxkcdshittytoday.com/ and a few people simply stating “not funny.” However, there’s an almost equal chance that any other web comic that finds its way to the front page will end up getting called out for being “a cheap knockoff of XKCD.” So, if you want to make the front page, but also get people to tell you how much you suck, make a web comic.

Cracked Lists

Cracked.com is pretty much the Huffington Post of comedy, assuming the Huffington Post’s shameless stealing of NBC’s content doesn’t already qualify it for the title.
Although at least some of their lists can miraculously fit on one page, it seems like the bulk of them are just too funny to be contained on anything less than two. Either way, Cracked gets nearly a list a day on the front page even though a fair amount of them are met with intense, well thought out criticism like the following “That was dumb.”

Mr. BabyMan

This one probably ties in with the a larger category of duplicate submissions, since stealing submissions seems to be treated like the crime to end all crimes. But despite this, Mr. BabyMan continues to drive through a puddle and splash mud all over the weak submissions of us common-folk on his way straight to the home page. However, for the amount of rancor this guy has to put up with I’d say he’s allowed a free pass on stealing whatever the hell he wants. Now would you mind submitting something for me Mr. BabyMan?

Verbatim Comments

Watching a video and then putting a direct quote from the exact same video in the comments section of said video shouldn’t really be rewarded with diggs. And usually you can count on someone to point out that this is a pretty lame thing to do. However, almost without fail, this comment will be given a noteworthy amount of diggs, despite the fact that it contributed pretty much nothing more than some instant nostalgia. For examples see almost every Zero Punctuation review ever.

Rick Rolls

Actually…diggers love Rick Rolls more than they love Ron Paul giving the finger to the RIAA while downloading music onto a Mac.