Feb
07
Posted by brianrants at 8:44 am

I'm a Creative and Marketing Director Who Designs Effective Client EngagementDesign // Marketing // Strategy // SEO // PPC // Copywriting
The benefits of increases in search engine rankings can’t be summarized by a simple linear relationship. In finance, if you go from $9m in revenues to $12m in revenues, you have a simple 33% increase in revenues. If you move from the #11 spot (first page) in Google to the #10 spot (first page) you can expect a 143% increase in traffic! If you move from the #2 spot to the #1 spot you can expect your traffic to double.
This great article by Todd Jensen explains how 2nd page is 1st loser.
The takeaway: investments in SEO that result in improved rankings will have an effect more akin to a power curve on traffic than a simple linear effect!
Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.
Dennis Bakke, founder of AES
Profits are a byproduct, like happiness. Those who pursue happiness at their sole end find themselves lacking it. Those who have purpose, clarity, and discipline reap happiness in full measure. So it is with profits.
As prepared for IT Strategies, University of Denver PMBA. References John Gallaugher’s “Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology:”
“Often Imitated. Never Duplicated.” Whoever it was that first uttered this famous marketing adage, it is certainly appropriate as a descriptor of Facebook. The darling of Web 2.0, its meteoric rise has seen it hit milestones that seemed simply impossible five years ago
But despite these heady numbers, we have to ask: is Facebook worth it?
The reach of Facebook into the daily lives of people around the globe is analogous to religion or politics. Indeed, Facebook has played a leading role in the uprisings spreading across the Mideast. Facebook Connect and social plugins now often replace the discussion area on websites. Facebook is used as the login verification system for a variety of websites like LivinSocial.com. As Gallaugher points out, Facebook is enveloping the web and other business models.
However it is Facebook’s business model that is the “issue at hand.” Google’s remarkable stock price increase over the last few years has reflected what its financial statements have consistently shown: its paid advertising is a cash cow. When people visit Google and search for “clearance hiking boots,” advertisers have made the resulting ads their “store windows” for Keen and Timberland boots.
Facebook’s strength is in its social reach. However, Facebook’s own research indicates “an average Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows the news on only forty of them, communicates with twenty, and keeps in close touch with about ten.” So when a user indicates a like for hiking, are they necessarily indicating a need for hiking boots, or will the ads simply seem annoying? When their friend shares pictures from their great vacation to Mexico, the readiness of their friends to make a similar purchase is not necessarily implied.
Can Facebook profit from the gargantuan amount of consumer data it has without creating a privacy debacle (as they have before) that creates a mass exodus? Can it create dependable revenue streams with its partners and advertisers? Or from a Profit and Loss standpoint, is Facebook all bark and no bite?
At the heart of Facebook is what Mark Zuckerberg calls the “Social Graph.” Like it sounds, it is the global mapping of users, organizations, and how they are connected. All potential solutions for Facebook come back to leveraging this social graph, and the reach it has into how people connect with one another.
The solution I recommend is a combination of all three. Together they build a comprehensive business platform for millions of small businesses in the US and globally. Greater adoption of the platform would include greater benefits:
Our use of technology is beautifully (and dangerously) ingrained. The way it has changed our daily lives is profound, and yet we are often unaware of those changes. I often observe a whole-hearted acceptance, even unrealistic allegiance to technology as the messiah of our age. There seems nothing we cannot conquer with technology.
I take naturally to technology, and it makes sense to me. I also have a streak of distrust of anything in society that is embraced without reflection. In the news headlines we see people grappling with the darker sides of technology: nuclear radiation, pollution, privacy in social media. This tension with our relationship to the tools we need in our lives is not new. It must’ve been quite the shock when the first stone tool was used to bludgeon someone instead of building a house.
The pace of technological growth is exponential, and I fear our ethical growth is lagging. It is difficult for us to synthesize as business leaders these new realities into our strategies, our organizational culture, and our personal lives.
In many of the scandals of the last decade, we see individuals whose “creative use” of the tools at their disposal outpaced their personal development. The selling and reselling of mortgage-backed securities, the credit-default swaps – these were all very creative usages of industry technology and the scale of modern economies. However, those involved were not grounded in the appreciation of the risk they were injecting into the system, for everyone from homeowners to securities holders.
Questions I want to be able to answer:
IT is much like web design, the industry I am in. Every 6-12 months there is a disruptive technology that makes the technology of several years ago obsolete. I would like a greater understanding of current technologies at use in business. Also, I would like to discuss emerging technologies that are potentially disruptive over the next several years.
Ultimately, my real goal is to develop the sort of IT strategy matrix that enables me to understand how to make good decisions with IT. The processor speeds, available technologies, user interfaces, and so forth are in perpetual change. However, with the proper decision making matrix, I can arrive at an optimal decision.
Questions I want to be able to answer:
From my learning outcomes paper for IT Strategies at the University of Denver.