Entries Tagged 'marketing' ↓

This is a parable in two parts. Story and the Moral. If you are in a hurry you might want to skip ahead to the moral (But you miss the beautiful story).

The Story

Long ago was the kingdom of Foobr, a kingdom mostly of shepherds, who grazed their sheep under the benevolent but watchful eyes of their King Oggle. There were all types of shepherds in the kingdom, some had only a few sheep, and some had a few hundreds. The sheep too were of all types and varieties, some gave a ton of wool, and some only a few bales.

What man webmaster of you, having an hundred sheep sites, if he lose one of them gets one penalised, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?
Luke 15:4

For a long time the kingdom, and its economy based on wool prospered well. It was not a very efficient marketplace, though, as the shepherds who had more sheep grazed more of the common fodder and pastures, and these shepherds got rich. The shepherds who had a single but more productive sheep could only make so much wool!

The king though of himself as hard but fair. “Ah! I need to overcome this inefficiency in my kingdom. I need to reward those who use resources judiciously, and punish those who have a lot of inefficient sheep.” he thought. He asked his Sages to get to work to determine which sheep were inefficient, and needed to be killed! “This will increase the efficiency in my kingdom, and make the kingdom happier overall.”

The sages worked hard, analyzed millions of records and found out that red sheep were less efficient than other sheep. “If we kill all the red sheep, the efficiency of the kingdom will go up by 10% and in two years the production by 5%.” The king was duly impressed and ordered all the red sheep killed. As promised, the efficiency increased by 10% overnight!

****

Ramu was a simple shepherd. He had but one sheep. It was efficient, but as luck would have it red in color. The king’s decree left him without a means of income. “I guess this was my bad luck. I will not buy a red sheep next year, and buy only the most efficient sheep.”

For some reason, unexplained at that time, the quick gains in efficiency were not maintained. “I know, we need to kill the least efficient sheep again.” So the sages went back to their laboratories again, and found that now the pink sheep were the least efficient. The king ordered all pink sheep destroyed. Guess what was the color of Ramu’s sheep?

Ramu was not alone in this misery of his. Many other people, who had but one sheep had their sheep killed, and went to a starving condition. The real culprits, the people who the king wanted to target, the people who had hundreds of sheep, lost many of their sheep as well, but only a percentage of their total sheep. Everyone saw this happening, and even those people who had only one efficient sheep decided to hedge their bets, and started having many inefficient sheep. The more sheep the king killed, the more prudent it became to have many inefficient sheep. In no time efficiency had plummeted, and total production of wool was a fraction of earlier.

The Moral

Spam in webpages is a major problem facing search engines. For long the Search Engines have tried to counter this problem by algorithms in which nobody knows which website will be classified as spam. If the algorithms decides that your website is spam, boo, it is toast.

With Google driving most of the traffic to most sites, no webmaster can afford to have his only source of income depend on Google’s whims. This means that they must hedge their bets against the vagaries of Google’s changing guidelines, and instead of building one kick-ass website must build a large number of websites. Bye-bye engaging content, welcome mediocrity.

For trade to flourish, and for wealth to be made there must be a set of rules which everybody knows, a priory, and if they hold themselves to these rules they must be assured of their safety. This is not the case on the Internet. On the internet, rule of man, not rule of law works. Google is the judge, jury and executioner. This leads to a wild west landscape where webmasters must hedge their bets by having a large number of so-so websites.

In security, for long we have known that “Security through Obscurity” does not work. I postulate that even in fighting spam, “Security through Obscurity” does not work. After all for ten years Search Engines have tried fighting spam though Security through Obscurity, is it not time that we rethink the strategies?

One of the biggest inventions for English society, which allowed their citizens certain inviolable rights, and which allowed them to build a strong society on rule of law, not rule of men was the Magna Carta, which proclaimed,

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, … but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land….

We need a similar proclamation

No Website shall be taken or penalized, or be relieved of its Ranking, or Traffic, …. but by the lawful judgement of the Law of the Land which are known to all ….

This will give the webmasters the peace of mind to focus their energies on one website, with deep and engaging content instead of making them hedge their bets on many mediocre web site. It will give the peace of mind that they will not be penalized by an ever changing law, which will make some of their tactics shady, and take away their only source of income.

Here is to a better internet.

If you liked this, you might also like Parable of the Captcha or Parable of the Nofollow. The name is of course stolen from Parable of the Lost Sheep

Oh and yes, 42topics is live now. Did you know we have an SEO section, and that you can create a topic about topics you care about?

Michael Trier is a long time Django user and evangelist. He has worked with a number of technologies including Rails and .net. His insights on marketing Django to traditionally Enterprisy areas were extremely informative. He produces TWiD, along with Brian Rosner which is great to keep abreast of the latest happenings in the Django community. He graciously agreed to be interviewed by the 42topics blog.

Shabda: Would you tell a little about yourself, how did you get started with Django, what other projects have you used or are associated with?

Michael: Well, I’ve been programming ever since I can remember, probably around 11 years old. I grew up in Silicon Valley, and that whole story is a pretty interesting one. I did the usual thing of starting out with languages like ASM, C, C++ , Pascal. Moved on to things like Delphi, VB, and most recently I spent quite a bit of time with Ruby, Rails, and within the past year and a half dabbling with Django.
I came to Django for a particular reason. I was focussed on building a high content push type of site and it just seemed like Django was a much better fit for that than Rails. Obviously I could have done it with either language, but I believe in using the right tool for the job.

Shabda: You are using Django for your next venture. What are the specific areas where using Django been a better way to develop for you, compared to any other choice you might have made, say Rails?

Michael: I hate to bring up the scaling issue, but that was certainly something I was seeing as a problem with Rails. The type of site I’m building I hope to see some pretty high traffic (don’t we all). So that was one thing. The other thing was that it seems like if you’re doing a large content driven site, Django just makes that very easy. Additionally, as most people say, one big win for Django is the built in Admin. It has allowed me to focus on the front end of the site, while giving the other people involved a way to immediately start working on the content part. Right away this helps us see where we may need to enhance functionality or perhaps we’ve built in too much flexibility.
That kind of feedback comes back to us quickly and so that is invaluable.

Shabda: How do you compare Rails to Django? In what areas is Django better than Rails (Apart from scaling/efficiency)? What does Django still need to learn from Rails?

Michael: That’s a good question and not something I’ve given a lot of thought to, but off the top of my head I would say that with something like the Admin, Django definitely wins over Rails. Now within the Rails community there are a lot of interesting third-party plugins that have attempted to mimic the Django admin, but up until now those that I’ve looked at have fallen short. It’s a huge effort as we’ve seen with the amount of work being put into the NewForms-Admin rewrite.
I also think the middleware stuff in Django is very nicely done, although it could use a bit more options in terms of request / response ordering of the middleware items. I also think Django templates are just perfect. I really can’t see how to enhance on those at all.
As far as Rails is concerned, there’s a lot of nice features in rails that Django could learn from, and most of it just has to do with the maturity of the two projects.
Rails caching takes caching one step further. Rails has model level validations which are very nice and quite frankly the right way to do it, in my opinion.
ActiveRecord, Rails’ ORM, has things like aggregation support, and supports a lot of flexibility in how you are able to filter the dependency relationships between your models with things like has_many :through (basically intermediate models).
I also like the before_filter and after_filter type of stuff in rails. It makes it real easy to invalidate cache or do other things in an event driven way.
Oh one thing back on the Django side, I think NewForms are done really well. It’s an elegant solution. And it is interesting because in the .net world I’m starting to see a copy of that through things like dynamic data controls.

Shabda: One specific area which I believe Django can learn from Rails is marketing. What would you say to this? With 1.0 release coming soon, how can Django start to market itself better.

Michael: I would agree with you on this. I think the impending 1.0 release will definitely do a lot on its own to market the product. There are also at least 3 more books coming out in the next several months. The Google App Engine announcement that heavily featured the name of Django has also helped to bring it focus.
But there’s another element that I don’t know if you can fabricate and that is that DHH is a charismatic individual.
In terms of real things that can be done are obviously things like more screencasts just featuring the product. It’s interesting to note that consistently the number 1 screencast on iShowU is the Django one that features a simple tutorial on Django. Although a lot of people have no interest in screencasts, there are a lot of people that do. We all learn in different ways.
I also think that on the djangoproject.com weblog we can do a much better job of regular blogging on what is going on within the community.
There are times when you look at the weblog and it’s 2 or 3 months old. From the face of the website you would think that nothing is going. The last release is over a year old. Meanwhile those of us that are in the community every day, we see that tons of stuff is happening. This needs to be communicated better.

Shabda: Talking of GAE, what effect do you see of it on Django? How can Django make the GAE-Django integration painless, or even if this should be done, and what efforts the Django community should expend on this instead of say focusing the efforts on 1.0 release?

Michael: I think GAE helps Django, but only a little bit. It helps it from the standpoint of name recognition and will cause a lot of people to say to themselves, “what’s this Django thing all about.” I think GAE really helps Python in a real way.
In terms of making the integration painless, that’s going to be a very difficult task. I have a taste of that with the django-sqlalchemy project I’m working on, and I’m just mapping a relational model to another relational model. With GAE it’s quite different. That said, Google folks are working on on a project to do “some” mapping of Django to GAE. I think over time it will expand in its focus. I think if they are willing they are the best people to do the work. I’d rather see Django focus on getting to that 1.0 point.
As far as GAE itself is concerned, I’m kind of on the fence on the real value there. I know that people like Jaiku are porting their stuff over to it, and Kevin Rose said that it would have been a great platform for something like Digg. Personally, I’m not really convinced of that, but it’s still early so we’ll all have to wait and see what comes of it.

Shabda: Your TWiD has been a great help for people to keep track of all the happenings in the community. Would you like to share some interesting tidbits you have learned with TWiD, and point to the more interesting ones?

Michael: Thank you, I’m glad that people find it helpful. I think one of the interesting things is the amount of work that goes into it. A lot of people are surprised because neither Brian nor I are very professional, so when we’re on the mic it sounds like we’re just sitting there talking about whatever. The reality is that it takes quite a bit of work in finding the stuff we want to discuss, attempting to understand enough about the topics to at least sound somewhat intelligent on them, and then there is the recording and post-production.
As far as actual topics the two recent episodes on Internationalisation have been a great learning experience for me personally. Going into it, I really didn’t even know enough about it to know what questions to ask. Thankfully Malcolm Tredinnick put the whole thing together. He’s been a huge help to the show.
Another show that was fascinating for me was the one on GeoDjango with Matthew Wensing. It’s a fascinating topic and I hope to put together more shows on that subject.
I think a lot of people like the interviews, and we do too, but we also don’t want to make the show just interviews every week. So we try to split it up.

Shabda: Would you tell a little about the venture you are working on?

Michael: Sure. The project is a hyper-local media site. We’re working on providing an online place for a mix of general media type of content (stories, events, etc…) with citizen journalism types of offerings. A lot of people are working in this space, trying to figure out how you bring the big media type of stuff down to a local level.
We then want to mix some of that with interesting datasets, a la EveryBlock, as well as provide some level of social interaction. The cool thing is that once we release we’re going to make the entire thing available on a New BSD license.
Frankly, initially it’s not going to be that interesting. A lot of what we’ll provide in the way of Classifieds, Marketplace, Aggregators, stories, etc.. will be similar to the types of offerings that you see in things like Ellington or just about any newspaper’s online presence these days. Down the road I hope that we can expand it into something quite useful.
The framework we’ll be releasing is called ArEyah. So expect to see something from me on that in the next several months. Timeframes are tough to nail down at this point because this is a side project in addition to some of the other things I’m involved in.

Shabda: For many people, such as me, the question is what business advantage remains for you after you are releasing all your secret sauce under an open license. For example even EveryBlock will have to release all their source under an open license, after the end of the Knight Grant expiry period. What would you say to this? What do you hope to achieve with releasing the project under a BSD license?

Michael: That’s really a good question. For me it was two-fold. First I wanted to take the “intellectual value” of it off the table. In other words, I did not want to be in a position with my partners where I had an extremely unfair advantage. Secondly I really think this is something that could benefit communities everywhere; of course that remains to be seen. If that is the case, then I think a lot of individuals would get involved and make it a better product for the benefit of all.
As far as competitive advantage, I really see that being in the execution. In comes down to how well we serve our community. If we are not doing a good job of it then someone else should be able to come along and beat us out there. There were certainly be some things that are specific to the community that we’re targeting that don’t have a place in the general framework. Those things will be our own and they will be highly tailored for our use, in order to serve a specific need we have here.

Shabda: We see a lot of comparison going on between Django and ROR, or Django and Turbogears. But we do not see enough comparison between Django and other traditionally ‘Entrprisy’ frameworks. Say Java based frameworks like Struts+Hibername or Asp.net. As you have worked with .net, how would you compare Django with these frameworks. What can Django do to make itself popular in the areas dominated by these frameworks?

Michael: The differences have less to do with feature set comparisons. A lot of what I do every day for corporate clients could be done much more quickly and actually often more robustly with something like Django. So it’s not a thing where you can say feature x is in .net but not in Django. That said like any framework / language there are edge case types of things where you might say “Java is the right tool for this job.” What it really comes down to is the corporate culture. .NET and Java own those corporate cultures. There are real reasons why it makes good business sense to build your corporate infrastructure on Microsoft products. You can pick up the phone and get three .NET developers tomorrow. Regardless of whether your company is based in Louisville, Kentucky or White Plains, New York.
In the case with Microsoft, much more than in the Java world, they provide a singular full-stack solution. No one, in the executive sense, needs to make any more decisions about which reporting tool, which database backend, or which IDE they are going to decide to use. Often that alone is motivation enough.

Shabda: Your last post on your blog was about the benefits of DVCS as compared to Centralized systems. What are the compelling benefits of DVCS over, say, SVN. In particular how can moving to a DVCS help Django?

Michael: Well I’m somewhat new to the DVCS world, as are a lot of people, so I’m no expert on the subject. To me though the benefits of a DVCS are at more of a personal level. I have seen tremendous personal benefit in being able to commit while sitting in a coffee shop, or being able to branch code locally and then merge that back in.
As far as benefit to a centralized project like Django, I guess it remains to be seen. I’ve been watching the shift of Rails to Git with great interest.
So I guess in summary, I just don’t know enough at this point to say that it would be beneficial. The shift is probably more psychological. I think, for a lot of projects, it would be just another way to have a centralized repository.

Shabda: You and Brian Rosner are working on django-sqlalchemy. How would a sqlalchemy based ORM be better than the current implementation? What is the status of this project?

Michael: Yes, Brian and I are probably the primary committers, but we have several other individuals that have pitched in on the project. I like to think about the benefits in two separate areas. First, there’s the approach where you just plug django-sqlalchemy in and continue to use Django with its filter syntax, etc… In that case the benefits you gain are not benefits at the ORM level (because you’re still using Django’s syntax, which doesn’t support things like aggregation). The benefits instead are things provided as a result of having SQLAlchemy as the backend. So this would be things like multi-database backends, sharding, additional database support like DB2 or Firebird.
The second approach is where you actually need things like aggregation or more complex queries, without resorting to raw sql. In that case we expose SQLAclhemy’s ORM right on your models. So the full power of SQLAlchemey gets exposed and available for you to use whenever you need.
So I could technically have 90% of my ORM code just using Django’s syntax but then realize that I need to do something a little outside of its capabilities. In that situation I might chose to just use the exposed properties to get what I need.
Finally there’s one more thing related to this that we still do not have clear at this point, but will come down the road, and that’s actually adding different functionality at the model level. This might be things like Intermediate Model support being made available through django-sqlalchemy.
As far as status of the project, it has been moving along very well. We have a few more filters to implement and a handful of management commands, plus lots more testing. One of the things I’ve done in the past week is to code up a test application using django-sqlalchemy to see in a “real-world” sense where some of the problems are. That has been really helpful.

Shabda: So if the extra features added by SQLachemy is not needed, then this aims to be backwards compatible with current Django syntax?

Michael: Yes, our aim is that you could plug it in and run all your stuff just as is. In other words with django-sqlalchemy as your backend db (that’s how it gets exposed) we should be able to pass all of Django’s test. Once we’re able to do that we tag it 1.0 and get some people hammering on it.
We do have one big hurdle that I have not discussed. Currently we are using multiple inheritance to modify the Django classes. That doesn’t work for the contrib apps or third-party apps because that would require a change to their code base.
We took this approach originally just because we wanted to focus on the mapping issues first and prove the concept. The eventual plan is to use some class replacement techniques to inject our stuff right into the Django models at evaluation time. That will make it work across the board.

Shabda: Before we leave. Would you like to share a tip, or hard to find information about Django with our readers?

Michael: Not really a code tip, because we do those each week on TWiD, but more of an approach tip. The generic views stuff is extremely powerful, and quite often I see a lot of new users doing stuff in views that could easily be done with a generic view, or with a wrapped generic view. James Bennett has a great post on this, and I suggest everyone check it out. I think often, especially for people that are new to the community, the power of it is overlooked.
Finally one more thing, spend some time in IRC. IRC is a great way to get an education in Django very quickly. Reading the questions and the responses has been invaluable to me in learning how to use Django more effectively. It’s a great community.

Shabda: Thanks a ton for this great interview. It was extremely informative and interesting.

Michael: Thank you.

This was the interview of Michael Trier. This week I am not going to any more interview, but stay tuned for next week, we have even more Django interviews coming.

And of course, the 42topics is live now. And we have a Django section. (How 42topics works?) So join now, and lets get rolling.

For all its technical merits, Django is still a very niche technology. It is my belief that the thing which is holding Django back the most, is due to one of its strengths.

Making reusable apps is easy and simple in Django. In Django this is the correct way to do things. You take a few apps, mix them together in your project, and deploy to start your site.

Compare the installation steps of Wordpress and an imaginary blog software better than Wordpress called Djangopress.

Wordpress

1. FTP wordpress to webserver.
2. Point browser to site.com/blog
3. Next-Next-Next done.

Djangopress

1. Svn checkout Djangopress
2. Svn checkout django-registration
3. Svn checkout other Django apps Djangopress depends on. Maybe django-mptt, django-threadedcomments or a few others.
4. Edit your settings.py to add all these apps to INSTALLED_APPS.
5. Add database settings, and other changes if needed.
6. Telnet to your server and do syncdb
7. Create templates. Done.

This does not take into account the extra hoops Apache makes you jump through, compared to using a PHP app.

How I got started with web programming.

I wanted to run a forum. PhpBB was free, and seemed most widely used. Installed it, and wanted to tinker with it, so learnt Php. If there was a different forum software, which was technically superior, but which asked me to write templates for it before I could start a forum, guess which one I would have chosen?

So how to popularize Django.

In my interview of James Bennett, I asked what is Django’s killer app. And he said there need not be a Killer app for Django, reusable apps will do. I guess I will have to disagree. Even internet needed a killer app to get breakthrough popularity. Let’s see what a Killer app gives you.

1. It fills a big niche, so people are forced to learn your language/framework.
2. It forces the Hosting company to support your language/framework.
3. If a large number of places use it, it gives your framework name recognition.

So to popularize Django, I propose setting up DjangoPackagedApps.com to distribute packaged Django apps, to complement reusable Django apps. A packaged Django app, must have these properties. 1. All dependencies must be included. 2. Beautiful templates must be included out of the box. 3. Users must not need to modify anything in settings.py apart from the database settings.

And installing the PackagedApp must be no more than the number of steps needed in Wordpress.

1. Svn checkout/FTP DjangoPackagedApp
2. Only thing to edit in settings.py is database settings.
3. Do syncdb. done.

Do yo use Django? Do you program? Find things which YOU will love reading at 42topics.com.

Bob Massa is a pioneer in the field of Internet marketing. He has been working on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Placement since 1997. He has operated Magic-city.net and SearchKing. He gained both fame and notoriety when he sued Google, which is a classic case study in PR stunts. We talked about the importance of SEO and Marketing for startups. More information about him can be had at bobmassa.com or his blog at Ask the SEO guru.

Shabda: Would you tell us a little about yourself. How did you get started with SEO and Internet Marketing? What is about this field which keeps you inspired?

Bob Massa: I’ve always been a modest sort of person and find it difficult to speak of myself without being self deprecating. So, instead of blowing my own horn, I’ll use some of the things others have said about me.

1. Bob Massa has been one of the more respected figures in SEO & Internet marketing since before my time. He originally gained fame - or notoriety - for suing … v7n blog
2. Bob Massa is one of the most eloquent people in the search marketing industry. I have wanted to interview him for a long time, and finally got around to it. He was probably one of my favorite interviewees. Aaron Wall - Seobook
3. Bob is one of the Internet’s most recognized, leading experts on top search engine placement. i-cop

I have been in sales and marketing most of my life and in 1996 my wife and I owned a printing company. Each day more and more of our customers wanted us to “get them on the internet”.
I was killing myself trying to make a living in a small printing company. I was working very hard. It’s tough making a living when you’re selling sheets of paper for a penny each. Especially when Kinkos sells them 5 for a penny.
Then in ‘96 the 14 hour days, fast food 2 meals a day and the three packs of cigarettes caught up with me and I had a heart attack at the age of 41. It was a mild one, (something only a doctor would say), but it did force me to take a hard look at my life and cut back to one greasy burger and two packs a day. I’m not much of a take-it-easy kind of guy so while I was recuperating, I put in the AOL disk I’d been spammed in the mail with and got online, (even back then knew that sucked). BUT, since we already had customers coming into our print shop asking us if we did “websites”, and I couldn’t sell them printing, I talked my wife into reading Webpages for Dummies and we were rolling.
I’d write the text and she’d build the pages but it didn’t take me long to figure out, “Ok, there’s the webpage, now what”? That led to me reading everything I could get my hands on about search engines and search engine placement. Back then there wasn’t much, it wasn’t called SEO yet and what was there was wrong. It was great. I enjoyed the challenge but even more the confidence and sense of accomplishment from seeing my efforts go to #1 spots. It was fun and it was easy to sell.
As for keeping inspired, that isn’t really the thing. I have done so much SEO for so many clients over the last 11 years that most of the time I see it as simply my job. Every so often a project comes along that gets me excited at the challenge again but most small businessmen don’t stay in the same business for years because they make so much money they want more. Most of them stay in the business because they can’t afford to get out. I’m no different. I have a lot of people depending on me, it is a good business, I’m good at it, I’ve built a good team and I still get excited at the challenge. So is that inspiration or just not being able to afford to get out?
And then there is always THE question. If it is this good now, what’s it going to be like in 10 years? I like the feeling of being a part of that and even in my own small way helping to define that direction.

Shabda: In many circles SEO or Internet Marketing is equated with spam. Why is this impression of SEO and what can Internet Marketers do to counter this reputation?

Bob Massa: The negative impression comes from a LOT of people talking about it but few really understanding it. The more people that understand SEO is not about being #1 in a search engine rather it is about increased awareness of a product, service or concept that generates traffic that converts into a desired action, the sooner the industry will be able to serve more people better and at a better return.
I’m not really sure internet marketers can counter anyone’s reputation other than their own. In my opinion, any professional needs not concerns themselves with others but instead focus on what they can control and strive to learn more, manage better and exceed their clients expectations . Delivering excellence will always be a viable product in any industry. To say it is easy. To deliver it is hard work BUT once delivered trust is established and that can not be discounted.
There is nothing in the world that can not be made with a little less quality and sold at a lower price. He who considers price alone is this man’s legal prey.

Shabda: Talking about startups, many startups I talk to believe that if their product is any good, the marketing will take care of itself. “After all Google grew this big on word of mouth“, is what they say. What would you say to this and what would be your advice?

Bob Massa: I would say that nothing sells itself and to believe that Google relied on word of mouth alone is a mistake of epic proportions. There can be little argument that Google actually built a better mousetrap at a time when the world was overrun with mice. BUT, the better the product performs, the more need there is to market it effectively.
If you think for a moment that Google was not as brilliant at marketing and PR as they were at mousetrap building then you really should read The Google Story. That book will clearly illustrate that a LOT of marketing went into all that free word of mouth. They worked hard at getting early adopters and that coupled with a value rich product is the formula for success with any business.
By the way, early adopters are the ones who tell the communicators who are the ones who get people searching for information about you. To learn more about how that free word of mouth thing works, read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. It will make you money!

Shabda: Say I am a small tech startup with a budget of 10000 USD only. I can spend this to make a kick ass product, and hope that marketing take care of itself, or spend 5000 for making a so-so product and spend 5000 on marketing. What would you recommend?

Bob Massa: Spend $1,000 building a kick-ass product and $9,000 on marketing. Marketing NEVER takes care of itself.

Shabda: You have sometimes mentioned the example of one of your clients, who used to post post-it notes to public restrooms, and got a ton of leads this way. How can startups use these types of unconventional marketing to get users?

Bob Massa: There is one indisputable fact. If you believe you can’t afford any marketing —- you’re right.
The smart thing is to develop a strategy, set a goal and a budget and then spend that budget and hit your goals.
I have no idea why, but it seems most startups do a LOT of work and planning on almost every aspect of building their company except marketing. It seems so strange to me. Sales are the MOST important aspect to any start up because you may have invented the world’s greatest mouse trap but if you don’t sell them, you go broke and a year from now no one will even know you ever existed. A sales strategy should actually be the first thing you plan for.
You should hire professionals when you can because in the long run it will be cheaper by delivering results faster, but for many start-ups funding and capital is a major issue. That does not change fact you market well or you die! The world doesn’t care whether you’re underfunded or not. Consumers don’t need you nearly as bad you need them. You can blame everyone but yourself for failing but the reality is that regardless of what your budget is, it is up to you to move your product or service. If you don’t —- you die. That is just the way it is and the sooner you accept that reality and deal with it, the better your chances of success.
There are a LOT of ways to get the word out. Read that book I mentioned “The Google Story” for starters, but even beyond that, there are bathroom walls, there are taxis always looking for money, there are events, conferences, rally’s and get togethers everyday. Maybe you can’t afford an ad at the conference, but could you afford to put a poster in the coffee shop next door to the conference hall? Could you pay a guy to circle the block on a bicycle with your ad on a trailer?
Could you put a monkey in a T-shirt with your ad on it?

Shabda: For a startup which is just starting out, would you recommend focusing their marketing spend on PPC (which will give them costly but predictable returns) or focus on organic results, which have a bigger upside but higher risks?

Bob Massa: Well, every business is unique and every business owner’s objectives, (And budgets), are unique, so there’s no perfect answer that would be the “right” thing for every business.
PPC is good for generating traffic instantly, split testing ads and potentially burning through a lot of cash fast. If the business chooses to implement a PPC strategy, it is very important to set strict budget and stay on budget.
To me, there is no such thing as either or. I believe every website should always be focused on building organic traffic. You may choose to use PPC but you should never choose NOT to include SEO.

Shabda: What are the resources which a novice to Internet Marketing, but an accomplished technology person can use to come up to speed on SEO/SEM?

Bob Massa: Try to spend a little time each week reading your favorite seo blog or forum and of course the more time you spend, the faster you learn, but outside of that, you really don’t need any resources other than simple common sense.
Make sure your site is getting spidered and indexed, try to stay focused on appropriate content for the appropriate page or section and most importantly, always be looking for linking relationships and try to stop thinking like a technician and think like a customer.

Shabda: You have a long association with Internet marketing. What are the broad changes you see in Internet marketing landscape today, compared to say 5 years ago. Compared to 10 years ago? What is the direction this industry is moving into?

Bob Massa: Compared to 5 years ago, I would say it is blended organic results. 5 years ago you only had to compete with other people in your field. Now you are competing with Wikipedia, Youtube, books and news at least on virtually every keyword.
10 years ago it was Google and their Page Rank algorithm.
And where is moving now? PERSONALIZATION. Showing a specific set of results to you based on your online history, (which includes a LOT more than just search history), and then showing different results to me based on my online history.
I also think this next two years is going to explode in wireless. As more and more carriers offer web services on mobiles at a fixed cost, literally billions more people will start accessing the web. Remember a lot more people have cell phones than computers.

Shabda: How do you see the Social aspects of the web, and in particular social media affecting the search industry?

Bob Massa: To you and I, social media does us little good outside of just hanging out and/or trying to make links “look” natural. There is tons and tons of data on every social media site and the vast majority of it inane. We would go crazy trying to find anything other than our circle of friends we like to play with. However to a Google who is very interested in personalization and with the resources to index and cross reference all that data now they are in a position to know much, much more about you and better know what ads you would most likely respond to favorably. Increased return on their ads, that how I see it affecting the search industry.

Shabda: Would someday Google be dethroned of their prominence in search space? Would social search play a part in this, and are you bullish on the social search?

Bob Massa: It is always possible. There is always someone capable of building a better mousetrap and unseating the established leader. I believe if MSN acquires Yahoo, that could pose a threat and I also believe Google pushes the line and I could see a time when the US Government may step in a do to Google what they did to Microsoft.
I’m not sure what you mean by “social search”. If you are referring to social search as the wiki refers to it en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_search , the no, not really. Unless you are able to index and cross reference all that data and assign it to an individual, then I don’t see it having a lot impact other than research.

Shabda: Before we leave, would you like to share some insight, hard to find information, or quick tip for the small tech startups?

Strive not for adequate, strive only for excellence. It is wonderful to dream big and shoot for the moon but you build a business one customer at a time. Focus on the little stuff and the big stuff will take care of itself.

This was the interview of Bob Massa. You can read more of Bob’s insights at 1, 2, 3. This is part of our series of interviews about “SEO for Startups”. So subscribe today and stay updated.

Oh and did you know that 42topics is live now? And we have a startup and a SEO sections. Or you can create your own! So join now and lets get rolling.

Widely respected for their engineering talent, and amazing hacker culture, Google is never credited for the amazing marketing they do. When we look for the companies which have done a great job at marketing/branding, we think of Guiness, Apple, or Ikea. Today I want to talk about the marketing lessons we can learn from Google.

It is all about the ROI.

For Barcamp Hyderbad, Google let us use its offices. They generally let you use their premises for hacker events. Let us calculate the ROI for Google for allowing this event.

This event was on Saturday, so cost of distraction to normal operations was minimal. There is some cost incurred in lighting and electricity, and Google’s famed free snacks. For this the 300 odd hackers, in this event, get to see Google’s campus/infrastructure/people first hand. In many companies in India, the cost to get an employee is in the ballpark of INR 50000. If even ten people from this group decide to sometime join Google, the ROI for Google is made up, many, many times over.

This is such a no-brainer, I always wonder why every company does not go all out to ask people to organize such events in their campuses.

Owning a word in prospect’s mind is the best way you can market your self.

“The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind” - So says Al Ries.

Google does not yet own own the word search, at least not yet. But they own the word, PAGERANK, in the prospect’s(webmaster’s) mind. Now pagerank is a grossly overhyped concept, and is just one of the 200+ factors even Google considers when ranking a page. Yet as this is simple and easy to understand concept, countless webmasters have spent countless hours agonizing over their pagerank. Using pagerank, Google is able to push their toolbar(people install toolbar so that they can see the page rank of each web page), which helps them get more data, and to further refine their search.

You should always be pushing your products.

In his book The High Performance Enterpreneur, Subroto Bagchi tells the story when he was in a high profile keynote address by Bill Gates. Subroto Bagchi was sitting expecting Bill Gates to tell the directions IT was going to take, and give a speech befitting a visionary, and instead BG gave a speech telling how great Windows XP was, and a sales pitch about WinXP. “If you are not proud of your product, and sell it at every opportunity, who will” - infers SB.

Google mixes new products it launches, or wants to give a boost, very strongly in its organic search results. A search for video shows embedded Youtube links in organic search results. Most searches link to Google-groups, and Google videos. For a long time Google pushed Booksearch with web searches. Not that it is bad, but you must always be pushing your product, nepotistically.

If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.

This is again from The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Google can not beat Microsoft in desktop office suites, so they start a web based office suite. This seems so obvious, and yet Microsoft and Yahoo are trying to better search by playing by Google’s rules. They might create better algorithms(and I profesize that Yahoo’s algorithm is at least as good as Google’s), but more data beats better algorithms, and Google has way more data than Yahoo or Microsoft have. Social search has so much potential, and yet we see half baked products from Wikia?

You can get away with murder, you just need to position yourself right.

What would you call a software which logged every search you did, sites you visited, times you stayed on them? If not from Google, spyware, if from Google, toolbar. Of course, you can classify this as an example of permission marketing, by showing you the page rank of all sites, easy access to Google sites, they get permission to track you, and data mine you.