Saturday, September 10, 2016
Sunday, July 24, 2016
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Best Basement Waterproofing Services in Rochester NY
Visit them at http://rochesterbasementandroofing.com/ for more information on our basement waterproofing services in Rochester NY.
Monday, January 18, 2016
What Is UX? Who Owns User Experience Optimization? What You Need to Know About SEO & User Satisfaction from #SEOchat
What Is UX? Who Owns User Experience Optimization? What You Need to Know About SEO & User Satisfaction from #SEOchat was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
User experience (UX) is the web design and marketing concept concerned with satisfying the user in their every interaction with a brand's website and products. Attention to UX spans all aspects of digital marketing, including images and videos, design, website architecture and content. When we hosted #SEOChat last week, we immediately knew what we wanted to talk about: user experience. It's an integral part of digital marketing, and something we can never pay too much attention to.
Read more of What Is UX? Who Owns User Experience Optimization? What You Need to Know About SEO & User Satisfaction from #SEOchat.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Are You the Shark in the Pond? It's Time to Find a Bigger Pond
Whether you've been in business for 10 days or 10 years, whether you've got $10,000 in revenue or $10 billion in revenue, there will be competition in whatever pond you're in. As the pond starts to fill up, even if you're at the top, someone or something is gaining on you to knock you from your perch.
To continually innovate and keep things going, you must do one (or more) of these: find a bigger pond, explore new ponds, expand the pond you're in, or move to new bodies of water and go deep-sea fishing. It starts by asking yourself these questions:
• What's next?
• What do we need to do to reach our goals?
• How will our brand, services, products, technologies, and above all our people keep standing out from the rest?
For me, it was making myself big in my hometown of Sioux Falls, then the state of South Dakota. When I was big in South Dakota, I realized there are 49 other states I need to make myself big in. Once I've made myself big in the other 49 states, it's on to South America, Europe, and beyond. I started with my local pond of Sioux Falls and am working on expanding to global ponds and oceans.
The best way to look for and find new ponds is to be willing to start all over. To do it successfully, you must follow these three A's to success:
• Adapt
• Ask
• Automate
Adapt - Re-Envision the Pond
When I first launched C-Suite with Jeffrey Hayzlett on Bloomberg Television, it took off like a rocket. When Season 2 never came to fruition on Bloomberg, haters thought it was because it was cancelled - and they couldn't be further from the truth. The show was so successful that I brought it in house on C-Suite TV and on the business channel on United Airlines. I knew there was something bigger out there and was ready to adapt and meet it head on.
Adapting means being ready to change at a moment's notice, and to be prepared for anything. I adapted C-Suite to be delivered online on C-Suite TV, breaking away from the traditional TV model because I firmly believe that's where the future of TV is heading. For me, personally, I don't ever take on a project without thinking at least five to ten years ahead, so I can map out how I can get it there.
The speed of business today makes adaptation more essential than ever. You must strike a balance between satisfying demand for who you are and what you offer now and adapting.
Ask - Find New Ponds
Traditionally, businesses find new ponds by building new stores, expanding their reach, tapping new markets, or buying competitors. But the concern here is overexpansion, which can lead to the pond drying up. What leads to overexpansion? Failing to translate your value proposition to new markets. What's effective in one market may not translate well whatsoever in another.
The key to expanding and finding new ponds? Asking questions and, more importantly, genuinely listen. Take the time to understand and listen to what your current and potential future customers are telling you before tapping them.
Automate - Move Faster in Your Pond
If moving to a new pond or growing the pond are not options, then you need to become the most efficient, deadly, fish in the pond you're currently in. Become the biggest, baddest version of you you can be through better communication, automation, and systemization.
However, don't confuse the word automation with personal. You can automate your communications without losing a beat of personalization. But by moving repetitive tasks to become automated, like welcome emails or drip campaigns, you're freeing up valuable time.
In business, we can't be so fixated on attracting new customers that we forgo our greatest asset - happy, current customers who keep coming back for more. If you can't expand or move ponds, then these people are your bread and butter, responsible for most of your profits, and who should be protected at all costs.
The Key
There's always someone bigger in you than your pond. The key to becoming the biggest and baddest? Always ask yourself what's next. This way, you can determine whether you should grow your pond, find new ponds, or do better in your current pond to decide how to grow and sustain your business.
To continually innovate and keep things going, you must do one (or more) of these: find a bigger pond, explore new ponds, expand the pond you're in, or move to new bodies of water and go deep-sea fishing. It starts by asking yourself these questions:
• What's next?
• What do we need to do to reach our goals?
• How will our brand, services, products, technologies, and above all our people keep standing out from the rest?
For me, it was making myself big in my hometown of Sioux Falls, then the state of South Dakota. When I was big in South Dakota, I realized there are 49 other states I need to make myself big in. Once I've made myself big in the other 49 states, it's on to South America, Europe, and beyond. I started with my local pond of Sioux Falls and am working on expanding to global ponds and oceans.
The best way to look for and find new ponds is to be willing to start all over. To do it successfully, you must follow these three A's to success:
• Adapt
• Ask
• Automate
Adapt - Re-Envision the Pond
When I first launched C-Suite with Jeffrey Hayzlett on Bloomberg Television, it took off like a rocket. When Season 2 never came to fruition on Bloomberg, haters thought it was because it was cancelled - and they couldn't be further from the truth. The show was so successful that I brought it in house on C-Suite TV and on the business channel on United Airlines. I knew there was something bigger out there and was ready to adapt and meet it head on.
Adapting means being ready to change at a moment's notice, and to be prepared for anything. I adapted C-Suite to be delivered online on C-Suite TV, breaking away from the traditional TV model because I firmly believe that's where the future of TV is heading. For me, personally, I don't ever take on a project without thinking at least five to ten years ahead, so I can map out how I can get it there.
The speed of business today makes adaptation more essential than ever. You must strike a balance between satisfying demand for who you are and what you offer now and adapting.
Ask - Find New Ponds
Traditionally, businesses find new ponds by building new stores, expanding their reach, tapping new markets, or buying competitors. But the concern here is overexpansion, which can lead to the pond drying up. What leads to overexpansion? Failing to translate your value proposition to new markets. What's effective in one market may not translate well whatsoever in another.
The key to expanding and finding new ponds? Asking questions and, more importantly, genuinely listen. Take the time to understand and listen to what your current and potential future customers are telling you before tapping them.
Automate - Move Faster in Your Pond
If moving to a new pond or growing the pond are not options, then you need to become the most efficient, deadly, fish in the pond you're currently in. Become the biggest, baddest version of you you can be through better communication, automation, and systemization.
However, don't confuse the word automation with personal. You can automate your communications without losing a beat of personalization. But by moving repetitive tasks to become automated, like welcome emails or drip campaigns, you're freeing up valuable time.
In business, we can't be so fixated on attracting new customers that we forgo our greatest asset - happy, current customers who keep coming back for more. If you can't expand or move ponds, then these people are your bread and butter, responsible for most of your profits, and who should be protected at all costs.
The Key
There's always someone bigger in you than your pond. The key to becoming the biggest and baddest? Always ask yourself what's next. This way, you can determine whether you should grow your pond, find new ponds, or do better in your current pond to decide how to grow and sustain your business.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Does native advertising really work?
I’ll lay out my stall straight away, I don’t particularly like native advertising. However, I’m seeing this as an exercise in trying to dispel my own confirmation bias.
Competition time: win tickets to Connect, our two day search event
Search Engine Watch has launched a brand new search event, Connect, taking place on the beach during 4-5 February 2016 at the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne in Miami.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
What do you need to know about 'responsive content marketing'?
Content itself will soon be responsive . Text will actually change depending upon the device. Content will adjust automatically just as a responsive website would adjust to the device it is being displayed on.
43 Reasons SEOs Can't Fear Change: 2016 Digital Marketing Predictions
43 Reasons SEOs Can't Fear Change: 2016 Digital Marketing Predictions was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
There's a word for fear of change: metathesiophobia. The way search, media, technology and consumer behavior changes from week to week, it's not a phobia that SEOs can afford to harbor. Instead, digital marketers race to get ahead of competition, ahead of algorithm updates, and ahead of upcoming technologies with early adoption and forward-looking strategy. Where […]
Why companies create content - Part one: to create and change perception
There's a lot written about how to plan, publish and promote content, but much less on the reasons for doing so in the first place.
Google integrates Panda into the core ranking algorithm
Google has made Panda part of its core ranking algorithm, meaning that it will be paying more attention to site quality signals than ever before.
US display ad spend will overtake search ad spend in 2016... wait, what?
In news that will possibly contradict what you assumed about display advertising, in 2016, digital display ad spending will surpass search ad spending in the US for the first time ever.
Should you be paying more attention to DuckDuckGo?
I took a look at some of our own client’s data points to see how this search engine was performing and provide my own point of view.
Monday, January 11, 2016
YouTube creators interview President Obama following his final State of the Union
"We're going to have 21st century fireside chats where I'll speak directly to the American people in a way that I think will enhance democracy and strengthen our government." - Senator Barack Obama, November 15, 2007
Tomorrow evening, President Obama will deliver his final State of the Union address to Congress, which will broadcast live on YouTube. Then, as he has every year after the speech, he’ll turn to YouTube and Google to take questions from Americans about the issues that matter to them.
This Friday, January 15, Destin Sandlin, Ingrid Nilsen, and Adande Thorne—three popular YouTube creators—will travel to Washington, D.C. to host a live YouTube Interview with President Obama. They’ll join the President in the East Room of the White House, asking a selection of questions that are top of mind for them and their fans. You can watch the whole thing on the White House YouTube channel—and if you have a question for the President, suggest it by using the hashtag #YouTubeAsksObama on social media.
The interview will stream live on the White House YouTube channel on Friday, January 15 at 2:15 p.m. EST. And don’t forget to tune in on January 12 at 9 p.m. EST to watch the State of the Union address live, as well as the Republican response, live on YouTube.
Throughout his time in office, President Obama has used technology to open up the doors (all 412 of them) to the White House—from posting behind-the-scenes photos of life in the West Wing to uploading a weekly address on the most pressing topics facing the nation. We’re excited to have played a role in this process with our seven YouTube Interviews, tackling issues big and small, poignant and personal. We look forward to helping future presidents connect with Americans in compelling ways.
Tomorrow evening, President Obama will deliver his final State of the Union address to Congress, which will broadcast live on YouTube. Then, as he has every year after the speech, he’ll turn to YouTube and Google to take questions from Americans about the issues that matter to them.
This Friday, January 15, Destin Sandlin, Ingrid Nilsen, and Adande Thorne—three popular YouTube creators—will travel to Washington, D.C. to host a live YouTube Interview with President Obama. They’ll join the President in the East Room of the White House, asking a selection of questions that are top of mind for them and their fans. You can watch the whole thing on the White House YouTube channel—and if you have a question for the President, suggest it by using the hashtag #YouTubeAsksObama on social media.
The interview will stream live on the White House YouTube channel on Friday, January 15 at 2:15 p.m. EST. And don’t forget to tune in on January 12 at 9 p.m. EST to watch the State of the Union address live, as well as the Republican response, live on YouTube.
Throughout his time in office, President Obama has used technology to open up the doors (all 412 of them) to the White House—from posting behind-the-scenes photos of life in the West Wing to uploading a weekly address on the most pressing topics facing the nation. We’re excited to have played a role in this process with our seven YouTube Interviews, tackling issues big and small, poignant and personal. We look forward to helping future presidents connect with Americans in compelling ways.
International domain structures and SEO: what works best?
Businesses with multiple sites across different countries have a number of decisions to make on how they structure their various sites.
Sunday, January 10, 2016
What's Eating Silicon Valley
Like most people, I look up to and admire the heroes of Silicon Valley (the real ones, not the ones from the TV show). They've given rise to services (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber, LinkedIn, Airbnb) that we use every day and make the world a better place. They've created value, wealth, and opportunity at unprecedented historic levels.
I've also had the chance to meet some of the leading CEOs and entrepreneurs of the Valley and they are, by and large, good-natured, brilliant, and thoughtful people. They're earnest and committed to building positive things. Some of them are donors to my organization, for which I'm immensely grateful. It's clear that Silicon Valley is today more than ever the center of innovation and technological progress.
That said, there are a few things about it that are starting to make me nervous.
I've had several friends tell me that they're leaving the Valley because they want to rejoin the real world. A successful entrepreneur told me he fantasizes about leaving because he wants to raise his kids the way he was raised in Rochester, and that his money would effectively triple as soon as he left. Another successful entrepreneur who moved to San Francisco said he felt like "just another cow in the pen," and that he enjoyed spending time in other parts of the country because it made him feel more like he was making a difference.
What are these people talking about? What are the things that are starting to freak people out about Silicon Valley? There are a few themes that come up again and again:
The epicenter of wealth and young money
There are a lot of young people, generally from very good colleges, making more money than most people will ever see. These are summer college interns (non-engineers) who are being paid $7,000+ a month and getting perks like free flights home to visit on weekends. Bidding wars and five and six-digit signing bonuses are being paid out for freshly minted engineering grads, particularly from Stanford. Average salaries are now close to $200,000 in the Valley, to say nothing of the upside of equity-based compensation, which can be dramatically higher.
All of the above makes business sense--I'd offer the same thing to a young person whom I thought could potentially be a difference-maker. But it's a lot relatively early in people's careers.
Supercompetitive
Technology companies tend to operate in winner-take-all spaces and thus adopt a very high-commitment culture. That is, if there are 10 or 100 mapping apps or social networks, the one company left standing is worth billions, and the rest are worth a very small fraction of that (probably only what people will pay for the talent on hand). As a result, the organizations are ultra-efficient and expect long hours and constant availability. It's either win or lose big for a lot of companies, and there's not much in-between.
Hard work is awesome. But when you see an army of people staring at their computer screens in the evening post-dinnertime, it's a little eerie.
War for talent
If you want to win big, you have to get the best troops. Well-resourced tech companies are now on the hunt for talent like never before, building massive recruitment pipelines to hoover up top prospects and engineers. Google recruits the heck out of Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and other top schools offering six-figures to start, plus bonuses. Facebook sponsors hackathons at the top schools, stays in touch with professors, and invests tons of resources in order to be the most visible and obvious employer.
Don't think that the smart kids haven't noticed--the proportion of Stanford students majoring in the Humanities has plummeted from over 20% to only 7% this past year, prompting wails among History and English professors whose classes no longer have students. One administrator joked to me that Stanford is now the Stanford Institute of Technology. In 2014, more Harvard Business School Grads went into technology than into banking for the first time since the dot-com era.
Again, I'd do the same thing. But is this the optimal assignment of our best and brightest? And is it a good thing that one of our nation's top universities seems to be going vocational?
Insular culture/Not awesome at diversity
The corporate campuses and workplace amenities of Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. are legendary. They're insider tourist attractions. For the average employee, you wake up and drive from a leafy suburb to a grounded spaceship. You stay there and eat the subsidized gourmet dinner with someone who's a lot like you. Or maybe you take the dark-windowed company bus from San Francisco and tap out emails with headphones on. Even smaller companies are competing on rock climbing walls and ping-pong tables.
This way of life doesn't generally expose you to people who are living different ways of life. And the people on the bus and spaceship aren't representative of most of society based on gender or race or education or age. "Silicon Valley is a bubble" doesn't refer to valuations or money--it refers to the fact that you live in a bubble.
Crazy high cost of living
Simply put, it will blow your mind what things cost in terms of housing in the Bay Area right now. Modest houses for well over a million dollars. Little apartments the same. One bedroom apartments start at over $3,000/month. The average home in Santa Clara county sold for $1.25 million in August of 2015, up nine percent from last year. How is a teacher or just about any regular person going to live there?
Even if you can afford to live in a neighborhood, the elevated costs make it easy to compare yourself to others and say, "Well, sure I'm richer than anyone I grew up with, but I'm not that rich, because look at that guy I work with or went to school with or who lives down the block. That guy's really rich." It's not an environment of plenty, but one of keeping up with the Joneses.
These are some of the things that are making people uncomfortable both in and about the Valley. None of these issues are anyone's fault. It's just the market at work -- the capital market, the market for talent, the real estate market.
It reminds me a fair amount of Wall Street. Wall Street's public image took a hit post-financial crisis in part because they were bailed out by the government, in part because they contributed to the crisis, and in part because they don't produce tangible goods and services (no one got as mad at Chrysler, for example).
But another reason Wall Street had trouble maintaining goodwill was because of some of the attributes above--hard-charging, too much too soon, parallel reality, money flowing everywhere, rich white guys, etc. To use a sports metaphor, it's like the Yankees or Duke University or the Patriots--they start getting hard to root for, unless they're your home team.
Solve the big problems
Perhaps the biggest critique of Silicon Valley comes from a technologist quoted in Vanity Fair's recent article by Nick Bilton--"SF tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me?"
Getting a car on demand, finding something online, business productivity tools, connecting with people--these are solutions that the market demands and rewards. They make money. Silicon Valley is like Wall Street in that it will fill and pursue market opportunities to their logical extremes.
If there's one way that Silicon Valley can lead and distance itself from critiques of insularity and out-of-touchness, it's to tackle the big, thorny, difficult problems that would improve the state of the world. Problems that are messy, protracted, and involve the prospect of failure and embarrassment. They don't have a ready market. They affect rich and poor alike. They touch flawed systems. They're less "What did Mom do to make my life better?" and more "What would make Mom proud?" They require you to do more than cut a check, and instead hunker down and grind away for years.
What problems do I mean? Here are a few that come to mind that would give Silicon Valley the moral leadership to match its economic and intellectual might:
Water
We all know that California is stuck in a multi-year drought. It's the great equalizer. The Bay Area has been hit less hard by water rationing than Southern California, but the dry spell is finally starting to impact people's ability to water their lawns and take out the Slip 'N Slide, not to mention its influence on the epic wildfires that are destroying homes all over the state.
Imagine if the resources of Silicon Valley were to tackle this challenge. How about building a water pipeline from Canada to northern California? Megascale desalination, Israeli-style? Large-scale conservation technologies? If there's something that would get everyone in California declaring companies as heroes it's this. Water is free in California, but not really--so be the water bringer.
Traffic/infrastructure
One CEO commented that it took him about an hour to make a 15-mile commute in the morning to Palo Alto. I found myself shaking my head at the thought of all of these millionaires inching along in standstill traffic twice a day, even those that did their best to engineer a short commute. While some of their Teslas can drive themselves so the driver can send emails and whatnot, commute length is the single biggest determinant of day-to-day happiness according to psychologists. What use is being a mega-baller if you're stuck in traffic every day?
I know, Google self-driving cars will go mainstream by 2030 and greatly reduce traffic (and potentially eliminate hundreds of thousands of driving jobs). In the meantime, how about dynamic tolling? Staggered commute times? Jetpacks? A public-private partnership to add four lanes to widen Route 101? Again, whoever did this would be a hero, and could probably name the new lanes after their company.
Diversity and social issues
America is bifurcating fast. Social mobility is down, technological unemployment is rising, and we're heading toward a country where the non-white majority in 2043 will have lower levels of income, wealth, education, physical freedom, and political participation than the white minority. That's the country kids are growing into.
Technology companies are starting to focus on getting more diversity in their own organizations, which is a great place to start. But there's much more that can be done.
Take the current controversy over policing. You're telling me that the best non-lethal weapon we can give an officer in 2016 is a Taser with a range of 25 feet that was developed back in 1974? Or that I can have a video camera on my phone but we can't stick one on every badge?
Is there really no better system than to rely on overworked guidance counselors and standardized testing at age 16 to identify talented minorities in inner cities?
Technologists could do a lot to lead in the right direction.
Education
National SAT scores are at their lowest points in a decade. Online education is ubiquitous, yet we don't seem to be getting any smarter. If anything, it's kind of the opposite. We have decades of research on effective education that isn't being implemented nationwide. Meanwhile, we plow millions of kids through a factory system that was designed in the agrarian era.
I love Altschool, Minerva Project, and the Khan Academy, but we're still just scratching the surface of both the opportunity and the need around the country. So many people want this, it's unreal. There's even money in this one--the US spends $621 billion on public education, with uneven results.
Is filling out bubbles with a pencil on a test designed in 1901 still the best we can do to measure human potential?
I'm optimistic because this generation of techies is starting to have kids. Nothing motivates you to figure out what's going on with a system more than when your kid has to enter it (even private schools).
Government
When technologists interact with government, they tend to focus either on things that are good for their business interests (immigration, internet access) or libertarianism (stay out of the way). Otherwise, money gets lost in a maze. It's a swamp, another world. The operating system of the government is out-of-date and needs an update--only it's not capable of updating itself.
Don't let the system scare you off. Look at Lawrence Lessig--he's a law professor who's trying to get money out of politics and crowdfunded $11 million dollars to do it. That's how much Google spent on lobbying last year.
Or Jen Pahlka and Code for America, which sends coders and designers to save cities money by showing them what a lean, talented team can do.
Or Megan Smith who left Google to become CTO of the US, along with the wave of heroes who moved to Washington DC to save Healthcare.gov.
It's still your country. Don't give up on it.
Unsexy entrepreneurship
For Silicon Valley denizens, this is the golden age of entrepreneurship. But if you look across the country, entrepreneurship is at a 24-year low and most young people are not starting businesses, online or otherwise. They're looking for jobs in Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, St. Louis, Providence, Cincinnati, San Antonio, upstate New York, and wherever else to pay back loans and maybe start a family.
Entrepreneurship in these other cities looks quite different than it does in the Valley. It's unsexy and gritty, measured in credit card debt rather than VC meetings, by getting customers instead of visitors or users, by changing the neighborhood instead of changing the world. Companies are started not with a desire to be huge, but because there's a problem to be solved.
These entrepreneurs look up to the people in the Valley for inspiration. You wouldn't believe how big a difference it would make to have tech rockstars spend time in these cities and commit to making them better. It would make these entrepreneurs think all things were possible.
These are just problems that come to mind for me. The truth is that you could choose just about anything under the sun that you felt strongly about, as long as it came from a good place.
When I ran a company, I didn't have time for much else. I thought that the work that I was doing represented the most profound impact and good I could make in the world. I was focused. I wanted to be rich. If someone asked me for help I would make a small contribution, but I felt my greatest contribution was my day job.
After we got acquired, I thought about joining or starting another company. Instead I wound up founding a non-profit to make entrepreneurship more accessible and distributed throughout the US.
That decision has driven the last five years. It's been a struggle and a massive education. The market's fuzzier. Nothing is as clean as you want it to be. The humanity of it can be overwhelming.
But underlying the humanity is the conviction that the problem you're addressing is worth solving. It challenges you in ways similar to having a child--you grow up or you quit, only quitting would make you a loser.
Here's the plea to Silicon Valley: we're worried you're losing your soul. Please take on challenges that are worthy of you, that demand your heart, reputation, treasure, commitment, conviction, and values--not just what the market's asking of you. You're the builders of this era. It's not enough. We need you to lead.
This article originally appeared in Quartz
I've also had the chance to meet some of the leading CEOs and entrepreneurs of the Valley and they are, by and large, good-natured, brilliant, and thoughtful people. They're earnest and committed to building positive things. Some of them are donors to my organization, for which I'm immensely grateful. It's clear that Silicon Valley is today more than ever the center of innovation and technological progress.
That said, there are a few things about it that are starting to make me nervous.
I've had several friends tell me that they're leaving the Valley because they want to rejoin the real world. A successful entrepreneur told me he fantasizes about leaving because he wants to raise his kids the way he was raised in Rochester, and that his money would effectively triple as soon as he left. Another successful entrepreneur who moved to San Francisco said he felt like "just another cow in the pen," and that he enjoyed spending time in other parts of the country because it made him feel more like he was making a difference.
What are these people talking about? What are the things that are starting to freak people out about Silicon Valley? There are a few themes that come up again and again:
The epicenter of wealth and young money
There are a lot of young people, generally from very good colleges, making more money than most people will ever see. These are summer college interns (non-engineers) who are being paid $7,000+ a month and getting perks like free flights home to visit on weekends. Bidding wars and five and six-digit signing bonuses are being paid out for freshly minted engineering grads, particularly from Stanford. Average salaries are now close to $200,000 in the Valley, to say nothing of the upside of equity-based compensation, which can be dramatically higher.
All of the above makes business sense--I'd offer the same thing to a young person whom I thought could potentially be a difference-maker. But it's a lot relatively early in people's careers.
Supercompetitive
Technology companies tend to operate in winner-take-all spaces and thus adopt a very high-commitment culture. That is, if there are 10 or 100 mapping apps or social networks, the one company left standing is worth billions, and the rest are worth a very small fraction of that (probably only what people will pay for the talent on hand). As a result, the organizations are ultra-efficient and expect long hours and constant availability. It's either win or lose big for a lot of companies, and there's not much in-between.
Hard work is awesome. But when you see an army of people staring at their computer screens in the evening post-dinnertime, it's a little eerie.
War for talent
If you want to win big, you have to get the best troops. Well-resourced tech companies are now on the hunt for talent like never before, building massive recruitment pipelines to hoover up top prospects and engineers. Google recruits the heck out of Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and other top schools offering six-figures to start, plus bonuses. Facebook sponsors hackathons at the top schools, stays in touch with professors, and invests tons of resources in order to be the most visible and obvious employer.
Don't think that the smart kids haven't noticed--the proportion of Stanford students majoring in the Humanities has plummeted from over 20% to only 7% this past year, prompting wails among History and English professors whose classes no longer have students. One administrator joked to me that Stanford is now the Stanford Institute of Technology. In 2014, more Harvard Business School Grads went into technology than into banking for the first time since the dot-com era.
Again, I'd do the same thing. But is this the optimal assignment of our best and brightest? And is it a good thing that one of our nation's top universities seems to be going vocational?
Insular culture/Not awesome at diversity
The corporate campuses and workplace amenities of Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. are legendary. They're insider tourist attractions. For the average employee, you wake up and drive from a leafy suburb to a grounded spaceship. You stay there and eat the subsidized gourmet dinner with someone who's a lot like you. Or maybe you take the dark-windowed company bus from San Francisco and tap out emails with headphones on. Even smaller companies are competing on rock climbing walls and ping-pong tables.
This way of life doesn't generally expose you to people who are living different ways of life. And the people on the bus and spaceship aren't representative of most of society based on gender or race or education or age. "Silicon Valley is a bubble" doesn't refer to valuations or money--it refers to the fact that you live in a bubble.
Crazy high cost of living
Simply put, it will blow your mind what things cost in terms of housing in the Bay Area right now. Modest houses for well over a million dollars. Little apartments the same. One bedroom apartments start at over $3,000/month. The average home in Santa Clara county sold for $1.25 million in August of 2015, up nine percent from last year. How is a teacher or just about any regular person going to live there?
Even if you can afford to live in a neighborhood, the elevated costs make it easy to compare yourself to others and say, "Well, sure I'm richer than anyone I grew up with, but I'm not that rich, because look at that guy I work with or went to school with or who lives down the block. That guy's really rich." It's not an environment of plenty, but one of keeping up with the Joneses.
These are some of the things that are making people uncomfortable both in and about the Valley. None of these issues are anyone's fault. It's just the market at work -- the capital market, the market for talent, the real estate market.
It reminds me a fair amount of Wall Street. Wall Street's public image took a hit post-financial crisis in part because they were bailed out by the government, in part because they contributed to the crisis, and in part because they don't produce tangible goods and services (no one got as mad at Chrysler, for example).
But another reason Wall Street had trouble maintaining goodwill was because of some of the attributes above--hard-charging, too much too soon, parallel reality, money flowing everywhere, rich white guys, etc. To use a sports metaphor, it's like the Yankees or Duke University or the Patriots--they start getting hard to root for, unless they're your home team.
Solve the big problems
Perhaps the biggest critique of Silicon Valley comes from a technologist quoted in Vanity Fair's recent article by Nick Bilton--"SF tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me?"
Getting a car on demand, finding something online, business productivity tools, connecting with people--these are solutions that the market demands and rewards. They make money. Silicon Valley is like Wall Street in that it will fill and pursue market opportunities to their logical extremes.
If there's one way that Silicon Valley can lead and distance itself from critiques of insularity and out-of-touchness, it's to tackle the big, thorny, difficult problems that would improve the state of the world. Problems that are messy, protracted, and involve the prospect of failure and embarrassment. They don't have a ready market. They affect rich and poor alike. They touch flawed systems. They're less "What did Mom do to make my life better?" and more "What would make Mom proud?" They require you to do more than cut a check, and instead hunker down and grind away for years.
What problems do I mean? Here are a few that come to mind that would give Silicon Valley the moral leadership to match its economic and intellectual might:
Water
We all know that California is stuck in a multi-year drought. It's the great equalizer. The Bay Area has been hit less hard by water rationing than Southern California, but the dry spell is finally starting to impact people's ability to water their lawns and take out the Slip 'N Slide, not to mention its influence on the epic wildfires that are destroying homes all over the state.
Imagine if the resources of Silicon Valley were to tackle this challenge. How about building a water pipeline from Canada to northern California? Megascale desalination, Israeli-style? Large-scale conservation technologies? If there's something that would get everyone in California declaring companies as heroes it's this. Water is free in California, but not really--so be the water bringer.
Traffic/infrastructure
One CEO commented that it took him about an hour to make a 15-mile commute in the morning to Palo Alto. I found myself shaking my head at the thought of all of these millionaires inching along in standstill traffic twice a day, even those that did their best to engineer a short commute. While some of their Teslas can drive themselves so the driver can send emails and whatnot, commute length is the single biggest determinant of day-to-day happiness according to psychologists. What use is being a mega-baller if you're stuck in traffic every day?
I know, Google self-driving cars will go mainstream by 2030 and greatly reduce traffic (and potentially eliminate hundreds of thousands of driving jobs). In the meantime, how about dynamic tolling? Staggered commute times? Jetpacks? A public-private partnership to add four lanes to widen Route 101? Again, whoever did this would be a hero, and could probably name the new lanes after their company.
Diversity and social issues
America is bifurcating fast. Social mobility is down, technological unemployment is rising, and we're heading toward a country where the non-white majority in 2043 will have lower levels of income, wealth, education, physical freedom, and political participation than the white minority. That's the country kids are growing into.
Technology companies are starting to focus on getting more diversity in their own organizations, which is a great place to start. But there's much more that can be done.
Take the current controversy over policing. You're telling me that the best non-lethal weapon we can give an officer in 2016 is a Taser with a range of 25 feet that was developed back in 1974? Or that I can have a video camera on my phone but we can't stick one on every badge?
Is there really no better system than to rely on overworked guidance counselors and standardized testing at age 16 to identify talented minorities in inner cities?
Technologists could do a lot to lead in the right direction.
Education
National SAT scores are at their lowest points in a decade. Online education is ubiquitous, yet we don't seem to be getting any smarter. If anything, it's kind of the opposite. We have decades of research on effective education that isn't being implemented nationwide. Meanwhile, we plow millions of kids through a factory system that was designed in the agrarian era.
I love Altschool, Minerva Project, and the Khan Academy, but we're still just scratching the surface of both the opportunity and the need around the country. So many people want this, it's unreal. There's even money in this one--the US spends $621 billion on public education, with uneven results.
Is filling out bubbles with a pencil on a test designed in 1901 still the best we can do to measure human potential?
I'm optimistic because this generation of techies is starting to have kids. Nothing motivates you to figure out what's going on with a system more than when your kid has to enter it (even private schools).
Government
When technologists interact with government, they tend to focus either on things that are good for their business interests (immigration, internet access) or libertarianism (stay out of the way). Otherwise, money gets lost in a maze. It's a swamp, another world. The operating system of the government is out-of-date and needs an update--only it's not capable of updating itself.
Don't let the system scare you off. Look at Lawrence Lessig--he's a law professor who's trying to get money out of politics and crowdfunded $11 million dollars to do it. That's how much Google spent on lobbying last year.
Or Jen Pahlka and Code for America, which sends coders and designers to save cities money by showing them what a lean, talented team can do.
Or Megan Smith who left Google to become CTO of the US, along with the wave of heroes who moved to Washington DC to save Healthcare.gov.
It's still your country. Don't give up on it.
Unsexy entrepreneurship
For Silicon Valley denizens, this is the golden age of entrepreneurship. But if you look across the country, entrepreneurship is at a 24-year low and most young people are not starting businesses, online or otherwise. They're looking for jobs in Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, St. Louis, Providence, Cincinnati, San Antonio, upstate New York, and wherever else to pay back loans and maybe start a family.
Entrepreneurship in these other cities looks quite different than it does in the Valley. It's unsexy and gritty, measured in credit card debt rather than VC meetings, by getting customers instead of visitors or users, by changing the neighborhood instead of changing the world. Companies are started not with a desire to be huge, but because there's a problem to be solved.
These entrepreneurs look up to the people in the Valley for inspiration. You wouldn't believe how big a difference it would make to have tech rockstars spend time in these cities and commit to making them better. It would make these entrepreneurs think all things were possible.
These are just problems that come to mind for me. The truth is that you could choose just about anything under the sun that you felt strongly about, as long as it came from a good place.
When I ran a company, I didn't have time for much else. I thought that the work that I was doing represented the most profound impact and good I could make in the world. I was focused. I wanted to be rich. If someone asked me for help I would make a small contribution, but I felt my greatest contribution was my day job.
After we got acquired, I thought about joining or starting another company. Instead I wound up founding a non-profit to make entrepreneurship more accessible and distributed throughout the US.
That decision has driven the last five years. It's been a struggle and a massive education. The market's fuzzier. Nothing is as clean as you want it to be. The humanity of it can be overwhelming.
But underlying the humanity is the conviction that the problem you're addressing is worth solving. It challenges you in ways similar to having a child--you grow up or you quit, only quitting would make you a loser.
Here's the plea to Silicon Valley: we're worried you're losing your soul. Please take on challenges that are worthy of you, that demand your heart, reputation, treasure, commitment, conviction, and values--not just what the market's asking of you. You're the builders of this era. It's not enough. We need you to lead.
This article originally appeared in Quartz
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Thursday, January 7, 2016
The importance of relatability in social media marketing
Do you own a small business? If so, you’ve likely been told by a marketer, a customer or even a relative that you need a presence on whatever social media site is flavor-of-the-month.
The Digital Marketing Conference Calendar: 100+ Events Across the Globe, Updated for 2016
The Digital Marketing Conference Calendar: 100+ Events Across the Globe, Updated for 2016 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
Throughout the year, Internet marketing conferences are held all over the world, from Los Angeles to Paris and everywhere in between. The thousands of SEOs, SEMs, content marketers, social media strategists and business owners who attend these conferences do so for the whirlwind of information, education and networking. Where else but an Internet marketing conference can you learn from the likes of Gary Illyes, Duane Forrester, Rand Fishkin, John Mueller and Bruce Clay all in a single day? 2016 holds more than 100 digital marketing conferences and events and we've updated our Internet Marketing Conference Calendar to help you view them all to start planning your year ahead.
Read more of The Digital Marketing Conference Calendar: 100+ Events Across the Globe, Updated for 2016.
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
What do you need to know about Voice Search?
In the last six years of owning a smartphone and all of its intrinsic technical bells and whistles, I have used its voice recognition software only once. This was a request to Siri to, “Open the pod bay doors HAL.”
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Why do brands pay lip service to social media?
I recently stumbled upon a study by Sprout Social, which explored how responsive brands are on social media channels. The short answer is that they’re not very responsive at all, with retailers among the worst offenders.
Monday, January 4, 2016
10 Questions Never to Ask in an Interview
Employee hiring is an important and unavoidable part of small business HR. And the most common way most small businesses handle their employee hiring? Through interviews.
While asking questions during an interview is obviously one effective and necessary way to determine whether a candidate is right for the job, there are some questions that are simply off limits. These questions, even if asked innocently, could imply possible discrimination and maybe even lead to legal action from the candidate.
Take a look below at these 10 questions to avoid during an interview, and be sure to jot them down as part of your HR management solutions.
- What is Your Religion?
Unless your organization is specifically religious, such as a church or religious camp, there's no reason to ask about a person's belief system. Some job candidates may bring up the subject without any prompting from you. Just redirect them to addressing job requirements and don't engage in the discussion. If you are concerned that an employee's religious beliefs will prevent them from working certain days and schedules, just ask, "Can you work the days/schedules required for this position?" - How Old Are You?
As long as you know the job candidate is legally old enough to work, age shouldn't be a factor at all in your employee hiring decision. If there is a question about the candidate's age and age is a requirement for the job (like driving), you may ask something like, "Are you over 18 years of age?" or "Do you have a valid driver's license?" Don't go any further. - What is Your Political Affiliation?
No, no and no! While political opinions have a way of making themselves known, and certainly have an appropriate place and time to rear their heads, a job interview is not that place or that time. With the presidential campaign already off and running, politics are on everyone's mind. But someone's feelings on our future president have no effect on his or her ability to perform the job in question. No substitute questions - just don't ask! - Do You Plan to Become Pregnant?
Some women of a certain age are likely planning to have children. It's a fact that their family lives will no doubt affect their careers. Even so, it's never appropriate to ask a woman if she's planning to become pregnant. - Do You Have Children?
This one is a close relative to the above question, and just as inappropriate. Unless the job candidate specifically requests a flexible schedule because of his or her children, it shouldn't be addressed. If the job requires overtime or extensive travel, just ask "Can you work overtime on short notice or can you travel as part of your job?" - Are You Married?
Marriage has nothing whatsoever to do with a person's career. This question relates to the previous two questions and have no business in the interview process. There's no benefit to asking about marriage status during the employee hiring process. No alternate questions for this one! - Are You in Debt?
Believe it or not, this question has been asked during interviews. Maybe the employer thought a person's credit history said a lot about his or her level of responsibility. This may be the case in some situations, but often the reason behind debt is an uncontrollable circumstance. As an aside, using credit reports as a basis for hiring decisions is inappropriate and even illegal in seven states. These reports can lead to litigation when used to make adverse decisions. - Do You Smoke?
Frankly, what a person does in his or her spare time away from work is none of your concern as an employer. Even if you have a non-smoking environment, you may not ask this question prior to hiring. By asking such a question, you violate the applicant's privacy and even run the risk of a claim of discrimination. After all, cigarettes are legal. - Is Career or Family More Important to You?
There's no right answer to this question for your potential employee. If he or she claims career to be most important, the interviewer might consider him or her shallow. On the other hand, if family is said to be the first priority, the employer might worry that the candidate won't give 100 percent on the job. Why ask it at all? Again, questions like this open you up to claims of discrimination. - Where is Your Spouse Employed?
Just like the marriage and children questions, a spouse's employment is no indicator of how capable your candidate is to perform the necessary duties. In fact, this question runs afoul of question number six about the candidate's marital status. Stay away from this type of discriminatory questioning.
What's Next?
When it comes to employee hiring, it's important to know which questions to avoid asking in order to prevent discrimination lawsuits and other potentially costly situations. This philosophy is a crucial part of valuable HR solutions for your organization.
Margaret Jacoby, SPHR, is the founder and president of MJ Management Solutions, a human resources consulting firm that provides small businesses with a wide range of virtual and onsite HR solutions to meet their immediate and long-term needs. From ensuring legal compliance to writing customized employee handbooks to conducting sexual harassment training, businesses depend on our expertise and cost-effective human resources services to help them thrive. This article first appeared on the MJ Management Solutions blog.
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Eight quick and easy user interaction hacks to boost your SEO performance
User experience is increasingly important, and your site must continue to engage and satisfy the user, in order to make their online journey as fulfilling as possible.
Google Cross Device Tracking and Audio Watermarks
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Some rights reserved" width="800" height="621" class="size-full wp-image-16020" srcset="http://www.seobythesea.com/wp-content/broadcast.jpg-300x233.jpg 300w, http://www.seobythesea.com/wp-content/broadcast.jpg-768x596.jpg 768w, http://www.seobythesea.com/wp-content/broadcast.jpg.jpg 800w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" />Advertising on the Web is going through some changes because of how smart phones and tablets track visitors on a site, and how advertisements may broadcast high-frequency sounds that may act as audio watermarks that other devices can pick up upon. Imagine watching TV, and your TV broadcasts a high-frequency sound from an advertisement that your phone hears, and shares with the advertiser, who may then track whether you search for or purchase the product offered on a web site?
These are well described in the following Irish Examiner article, Future of Mobile: Advertisers and the quest for your data. If you read that and have some familiarity with how Google works, you may ask yourself if Google has followed such practices, or shown any sign of doing so.
In November, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a workshop on Cross Device Tracking, where they investigated practices that different companies were getting involved with, and they did some diving into the topic in a very informative way. There are a couple of videos linked to from that page that are worth watching if you want to become better informed on the topic.
I noticed a couple of recent patent filings at Google that were relevant to the workshop and to that article that fit into these changes, and are worth thinking about:
The first of these considers some of the different types of devices that are quickly growing in usage across the Web, such as smart phones and tablets, that don’t use browsers that save cookie files, and aren’t tracked from that type of approach as these Web users travel across the Web. Instead, these devices often use an Advertising ID, or other means of tracking behavior from one device and sharing that tracking with other devices.
Cross Device Notifications
Pub. No.: WO/2015/200051
Publication Date: 30.12.2015
International Filing Date: 16.06.2015
Inventors: Michael Koss Campbell, Justin Dewitt, Katie Jane Misserly, Dmitry Titov
Abstract:
Techniques for cross-device notifications are provided. An example method includes receiving a first indication of an event detected at a first device associated with a user account, determining one or more characteristics of the event based on the first indication of the event, detecting whether the determined characteristics match at least one selection criterion, automatically identifying a second device from one or more devices associated with the user account, and providing, if the determined characteristics match the at least one selection criterion, the first indication of the event to the second device associated with the user account, where the provided first indication of the event is displayed at the second device to allow management of the event at the first device from the second device.
This second approach, involving high-frequency sounds that you wouldn’t even hear, surprised me. The patent itself doesn’t talk about that kind of tracking itself. But, it does share information about what you’ve been subjected to (a particular advertisement) so that your future activities involving that advertisement might then be tracked.
Communicating Information Between Devices using Ultra High Frequency Audio
Pub. No.: WO/2015/195808
Publication Date: 23.12.2015
International Filing Date: 17.06.2015
Inventors: Shyam Narayan, Naveen Aerrabotu, Sreenivasulu Rayanki, Yun-Ming Wang
Abstract:
A client device encodes data into an audio signal and communicates the audio data to an additional client device, which decodes the data from the audio signal. The data is partitioned into characters, which are subsequently partitioned into a plurality of sub-characters. Each sub- character is encoded into a frequency, and multiple frequencies that encode sub-characters are combined by the client device to generate an audio signal. Frequencies encoding sub -characters may be above 16 kilohertz, so the sub-characters are transmitted using frequencies that are inaudible to humans. The audio signal is communicated to an additional client device, which decodes frequencies from the audio signal to sub-characters, which are then combined into characters by the additional client device to generate the data.
The future of advertising and tracking advertisements on the Web will involve multiple types of devices, and may also involve the use of high pitched frequencies that are outside of the range of normal hearing by human beings. Google now has patent filings that describe their possible use of this kind of technology.
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