His argument? Flash “falls short” of what it could be and what is needed on a mobile device.

What would Jobs have said if everyone jumped Apple’s ship when their iPod batteries “fell short” of operating for more than a year? Rather than fix the known problem, they continued to sell iPods with faulty batteries.

They followed the same strategy with faulty power supplies that burned out after a year or two and power cords that ripped and failed. Did Apple quickly fix the problems, apologize for the inconvenience, correct the problem?

Of course not — that’s not Apple’s MO. Customers who stuck it out can buy replace

From a company that engages in that kind of “customer service,” complaints that Flash “falls short” of what it could be ring hypocritical.

Adding to that hypocrisy, Jobs complains that Flash is a “proprietary” and “closed” system. Really, Apple? So you can’t take your own medicine, is that the problem? Apple continues to create a closed, stifling environment for developers and yet criticizes Adobe for the same thing?

While I’m not a fan of Adobe’s encouragement of a probe into Apple’s monopolistic tactics in mobile technology, I am in favor of Apple becoming a team player in the mobile marketplace. Until then, I’m sticking with my open and ever-improving Android phone.

“I’ll add you on Facebook!”

“Hey, we are Orkut friends!”

“I’ll subscribe to your RSS feed right away!”

You will agree, these are some of the most touted phrases that we use when we “network”. However, this is not the way the journey had begun. The transformation from toys to tools was a revolution that brought out a whole new “Social Economy” in “Social Networks”.

Emotions have been replaced by emoticons, expressions have given way to smileys and the English Language has seen drastic reforms in the present era. Yes, we are using a super condensed and more “expressive” way of communication, thanks to social networking.

Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and many others took birth in the World Wide Web and primarily made their presence felt as networking toys. Little did we realize then, about the enormous networking capabilities they had. Soon, along with inviting our near ones to hang out at a party, we were “inviting” them to our online profiles on these websites. There were friends, friends of friends; can I say an online “big bang”?

Yes, the concept might be surreal, but the sheer fascination and excitement to be a part of this revolution paved way for the dynamics of theses toys to mutate into tools. It would be quite difficult to point out the exact period when this transformation took place, but you knew it was there when you were networking more online rather than calling up or e-mailing the same people. Your business cards and identities changed during this era and now included information of your online profiles or networks.

“Human networks” is the word of the hour. We have been consistent in synthesizing our conversations through these digitally woven, close environments, with a wide array of inbound and outbound hyperlinks dominating our online presence. We are scheduling meetings, hanging out, having conversations, sharing interests, making a social statement in a world of our own. All these worlds come together in the digital universe. The good news is, we are getting addicted to it every day and striving to reach its epitome.

“To err is human…” What is human? Is it an online Avatar or the one who sits behind it and controls its actions? Are our online counterparts facing an identity crisis?

The principles associated with this new social economy have brought about the tools in toys and I am now a part of it. The trick of the trade is to propel your identity towards the proper direction and your intended audience.

Welcome to the world of social networking once again…have you noticed the change?

The Online Asbestos, Asbestos Cancer, & Mesothelioma Authority

Suppose I have a website that is an equivalent to exporter-importer yellow pages. A prospective buyer visits my website to see if he can find prospective sellers for his product. After every 2 search pages I ask him to register or login.  He gets frustrated and leaves my website for another similar website which allows him to search prospective sellers at length and only asks for registration or login when he wants to see the contact info. I lose a customer, but with web analytics I can find out why my customers are leaving the site. Not just this! In addition to this behavior or design analysis, the analysis also includes detecting the personal preferences of customers who frequent one site and determining if a customer will repurchase the service or product you are offering. This detection and analysis is done by monitoring the amount of purchases in terms of money by a customer in the past, finding out the geographical locations from where you get the maximum or the least number of visitors or customers and finding out the number of visitors who actually turn customers of your service or product. Other metrics include predicting which products or services are most likely to be bought by your customers among many others.

Web analytics can also help you to determine the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising campaigns. Until then, play around with the analysis tools provided by your web hosting provider or you can even get started with Google analytics. Uncover hidden secrets of what your customer wants!

Whenever you submit your search query to a search engine looking for relevant results or information, the strings of data that comprise your search query is matched against keywords that are referenced by a website or by a particular web page. Conventionally, such information is already mined by search bots in advance. More or less, conventional search engines technically function as mentioned and dynamically generate your desired page comprising of your search results.

With advanced forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concepts being seamlessly integrated in programs that power search engines, the present scenario is evolving or rather, has already evolved. Whenever you initiate a search, every data associated with your search query is stored in the search engine’s database. This data is then referenced and cross referenced further with related searches that have been performed by you, or by other individuals. The search engines index this information and intelligently arrange them in order of maximum relevance, all on the account of the search history available. Some search engines may even use a history of searches to create knowledge bases in order to improve the efficiency of the AI based search engine.

Yes, I am talking about the basic principles of personalized search. Against a particular search keyword, the search results that might be relevant to you might be not be for another individual! Personalized search is all about delivering information that only you can relate to as an individual.

Here is an example:

Chord-One word, many meanings! Yes, if I am a music freak, then probably half the number of times I would use this word to indicate a particular scale. However, I would interpret this word more as a line intersecting a circle had I been inclined more towards Geometry. Personalized search helps in rendering a word from its general sense to a more specific sense, to its intended audience. But how do search engines achieve this intelligence?

Though the entire process is quite complex and non-deterministic, it may seem simple if viewed from a distance. While you are searching for information, what these search engines would typically do is dynamically monitor your search habits and capture them over time. This data would now be used to train the AI based search engine where it would acquire knowledge related to your search habits and preferences. As the search engine acquires more knowledge, its classification power increases. You would notice a considerable increase of relevance in your search results.

I guess you now understand the concept loud and clear. Did you know that you could use these features to increase sales for your business? I am talking about SEO in an era of personalized search. Well, I would be glad to talk about it, but on my next post.

Marketing through search engines can be done in usually two ways, namely organic SEO and inorganic SEO. Organic SEO, as the name suggests, is nothing but the natural way for optimizing a website in the search engine pages. Since, this does not involve any sort of monetary transaction, good content of the web page full of creativity and relevance is of utmost importance. Another thing that one should keep in mind while using organic SEO is that, the content should continue to advance according to the need of the people searching the net. Moreover, optimization of this kind helps the websites to achieve a higher order of ranking for a longer period of time. This means that organic SEO has a natural, long-term impact.  However, the only shortcoming here is that one might have to wait for over a month or so in order to “see” the desired results i.e. to get one’s website ranked higher in the search engine pages for a particular search criterion.

Now, talking about inorganic SEO, the first thing that I would like to mention here is; this type of optimization involves a substantially larger amount of money from the respective website owners. The website owners, who aim to attain maximum popularity of their website within the shortest time period, are advised to exercise this artificial form of optimization. In this form of SEO, the website owners pay an amount for making their ads appear on a prominent part of the search results page. Consequently, substantial amounts of inbound traffic are drawn to the website. Compared to organic SEO, this is a bit expensive, and hence, inorganic SEO is best suited to those who can afford an enormous “flow of funds” to be paid for the optimization. Unlike the organic way of optimization, inorganic SEO can bring in the desired results much quicker, but the impact or the effect of such optimization is not that enduring.

People have their own reasons and opinions regarding the debate that which one of these two forms of SEO is more effective. On the basis of the evaluation made on search engine marketing services, both Organic and Inorganic SEO have their own shares of advantages and drawbacks. You can choose any of these services, which you feel suits best with your requirements, strategy and budget. In my opinion, I would say that a balanced combination of both the services could bring in the desired results, wherein, your website can be seen at the highest position of the search engine pages for a longer period of time and also, draw inbound traffic faster.

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.
Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.

Writing personas

To get started on writing a few personas, you have to think about your target audience for link building, in the same way that you’d think about it for anything else related to marketing. Who are these people, what are their age groups, what is their “culture”, what will speak to them and open up the connection in a positive manner? If you’re in doubt about your target audience, talk to the owner of the site you’re working on. Once you get basic information, start to dream up a few actual people who fit the profiles that you have, and flesh them out as much as you can.

A typical persona should contain as much identifying information as possible without being so unique that it cannot be used to speak to a larger group. That’s the tricky part, but you can overcome it by imagining common characteristics of users (they like punk rock) rather than specifics that will only fit a tiny percentage of your audience (they like early Avail). Start out by identifying a few different segments of your audience, writing a persona for each. Once you have these, take one and read it until you can get into the mindset of it, and write your link request accordingly. Remember that this persona represents your target link partners, so make use of language and references that this group will respond to, and adjust as needed.

Sample persona

Below is a persona created by one of my link builders for use on a restaurant review site:

Caren is a 43 year old mother of 3. Her children are 15, 17, and 21. Before having children, Caren obtained a degree in elementary education and taught until her second child was born. Since then, she has been a stay at home mom. She has been in charge of cleaning, cooking, carpooling to and from soccer and rugby practices. Her oldest child is attending a university in the city. Her husband is the local family doctor and can still be found making house calls. Caren’s happiness comes from her family and baking. She bakes often and makes the occasional trip into the city to check in on her oldest child.

This persona does make use of some serious specific. However, that’s just so we can get into the mindset of knowing how to approach someone like Caren. If you take the basics, you’ll see our target market for link building here, which is a woman in her 40s who wants a few restaurant suggestions for when she’s in the big city every now and then. We hope to approach the Carens of the world in such a way that they will find it in their hearts to link to our site. Thus, we probably aren’t going to speak to them as if they’re college-age males who are heavily into sports. We also can make more informed decisions on other relevant sites to approach for link building once we’re in Caren’s mindset, as we think about other interests that someone like Caren might have. Once you have the basics (woman in her 40s making a few trips to the big city), you’re well on your way to identifying other types of interests that Caren might have. Armed with this information, your link building efforts should be just the slightest bit easier.

The enhancements to Ask.com will help the site retain existing users and attract new, said Caroline Dangson, an IDC analyst.

Natural Language Search

Ask.com’s new technologies differ from those used by competitors such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and MSN Search because they enable Web surfers to type real questions, instead of a series of keywords, said Erik Collier, vice president of product management at Ask.com.

To find out what football games are on the TV Sunday afternoon, users simply type in, for instance, “What NFL games are on TV this Sunday?”

That is where DADS comes in. The acronym stands for “Direct Answers from Databases.” The technology takes structured data feeds and converts them into information that Ask.com tags.

“It’s different than a traditional syntactical text matching. We’re understanding what the subject is, so we have discrete subjects. We’re talking about TV listings, event listings that have a much smaller semantic breath than a general word search. We optimized that, and it is discrete. We are able to identify that as a TV query; translate the different piece of your sentence into what they really mean,” Collier told TechNewsWorld.

So, today is Monday, Oct. 6, then “this Sunday” means Oct. 12, and NFL means the National Football League.

“We don’t get lost in that traditional what does ‘a bat’ mean when someone says ‘bat.’ That’s DADS, and we’re going to be doing that across a lot more verticals or discrete data sets. Right now, we’ve done that with our TV and event listings,” Collier added.

Giving Structure to the Unstructured Web

Direct Answers From Search (DAFS) is a bit different, in that it does gather the information from a structured feed. It is information gathered from the Web around which Ask.com tries to create some structure in order to best answer users’ questions, Collier said.

“It’s a much more difficult proposition. We’re trying to extract information from the Web pages themselves and trying to then create an answer to a specific question term. If you said, ‘What is the largest state in the U.S.?’ then it would have a DAFS response that would tell you directly on the page, ‘Alaska is the largest state,’” he explained.

DAFS does not offer quite the same level of natural language comprehension as DADS because it is more difficult to deal with unstructured documents on the Web, Collier noted.

Similar to DAFS, AnswerFarm combs through the unstructured content on Q&A sites such as WikiAnswers and Wikipedia searching for what Ask.com calls “Q&A Pairs.”

“There’s a question and an associated answer with it. It flips the way people interact with Web results,” he said.

Say a person asks, “How do I get rid of love handles?” On other search engines the questioner would receive some document it has identified as having a lot of keyword matches, and it will return a title and description in the search results, according to Collier.

“You don’t really know if that page will answer your question. AnswerFarms are different. Let’s say that same URL (universal resource locater) does answer [the question]. We present it in a way that the question, not the title of the page, is immediately visible. And instead of traditional description text, the start of the answer is given,” he stated.

“I love AnswerFarms because it changes the way that people interact with search engines,” Collier added.

Market Status Quo

The new technologies are intended to produce more relevant results so users click less. “Our goal is to return the best answer the first time, every time. We think its a better approach. We make your search faster and we’re trying to reduce the amount of clicks it takes for you to find what you’re looking for,” said Collier

“People don’t want to talk to a search engine like a computer. They want to be able to do a search the way they would ask [a friend] over the phone. ‘Hey do you know what the largest state in the U.S. is?’ instead of ‘state, most area, square miles.’ That’s not the way you really want to ask it. You want it to understand all those implicit things, all the background knowledge you provide in a single word,” he pointed out.

That may be true, but IDC’s Dangston does not see the new Ask.com posing any threat to its leading search competitors, Google, Yahoo or MSN Search.

“The Ask.com redesign is not a game changer. Google has incredible brand recognition. An incredible number of U.S. consumers are in the habit of Googling. We know that media habits are hard to change. According to IDC’s recent U.S. consumer online attitudes survey, 75 percent of online Americans said they had used Google.com in the past 30 days whereas only 15 percent said they had used Ask.com,” she concluded.

If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson’s blog, Trends in the Living Networks.

A New Conversation

Social networking has removed many of the obstacles that got in the way of better understanding prospects and customers, and serving them. Here are a few insights from trying to stay up with how Web 2.0 is changing how companies interact with prospects and customers:

• Overbalance the scales with offers of knowledge, not sales hype. Instead of blasting out PDFs that tell prospects how great your company is, think about setting up weekly webinars where you invite in an industry expert that freely shares their knowledge of what’s working in the area your products, services or software deliver value. Before you dismiss this as just for the Fortune 1,000 realize that industry experts need PR coverage too and often you can get them do these in exchange for promoting their practice.
• Define a Web 2.0 strategy now for your company and start executing on it fast. The two best bloggers in this area are Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester who write Groundswell. These two authors, through their analysis of social networking and the Web 2.0 landscape, continually show how transparent and more connected previously isolated social networks, both in private and commercial areas, have become. What also emerges from their analysis is that when Web 2.0 technologies are used for connecting with customers, sales hype is dead. Informative, knowledgeable content that solves a complex question or problem for a customer is all that matters. Blogging to deliver solutions to customers in the form of knowledge generates real leads. It takes some companies a year or so to see any sales from this, yet it is hardly time wasted. These companies have changed how relevant they are to customers by delivering significant value without first asking for an order. Sales follow knowledge.
• Consider your own YouTube University. Getting a channel on YouTube to upload videos that can be inexpensively produced is another approach to gaining a reputation as a company willing to share knowledge with potential and present customers. The development of your own YouTube University also needs to have periodic updates, fueling new traffic in the process. It’s a fairly large resource commitment to make, yet getting your best product experts onto your own YouTube channel can increase your company’s credibility across the industry and with prospects.
• Work with any channel, technology or services providers to offer them participation in your trade shows and events, and vice versa. This works well as many partnerships have overlapping customer bases, yet have their own unique market segments as well. Developing this type of partnership significantly reduces the costs of trade shows and increases face-time with prospects, a critical part of lead generation.
• Understand that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) AdWords is only as effective as your landing pages, lead management process and continual managing of keywords. Google has delivered some exceptional tools in this area during 2008, including the ability to optimize a landing page design by testing it iteratively before its launched. This is the largest lead generation strategy for many technology companies, and their continually improving of landing pages and key words generates significant results.

Knowledge Is Power

I’ve not spent years studying lead generation, yet what I have seen is that many companies are still doing very well with leads despite news about the economy this year.I’m convinced it’s because they have worked very hard using the strategies discussed here to get and stay relevant to prospects and customers. They’re delivering more knowledge, value, insight and intelligence than anyone else.

As a result, they’re trusted more and sales happen. Lead generation cannot be reduced to a series of causal factors; it all begins with trust in your company. In a Web 2.0 World, earning and retaining that trust is much more about offering insight and knowledge first.