There’s a huge traffic flow these days. Billions of people worldwide take their lane, every day. We can see three kinds of driving behavior: The first enjoy the rat race – from the kindergarten’s square sandbox, trough the cube-shaped university and cubicle career to the weighty top management position. In the System they see a secured “happy smile of success”, someday, somehow, somewhere – after 40 years of work FOR somebody. There’s lot of isolation from your own values, family and life here.
The second type of guys manage to establish and work IN their own companies, 12-14 hours a day, until they grow, sell or quit the business. Kind of ambitious, brave, creative, innovative and “suicidal“.
The third kind enjoy an automated passive income (web service, IPOs, commissions, etc.) on the third lane, while working ON themselves, globetrotting the world in a search of the perfect mate, life, value, etc. Kind of adventurous, speedy and peaceful at the same time.
Recently, I found (by investigation) that in this high density region:
We often pass each other from the inner lane
The traffic flow in the low density region of the outer lane is enhanced and kind of “reserved” for a strange, extra-ordinary, out-of-the-box type of people
There is a benefit if you stick to your lane and don’t change it unnecessary.
I used to stick to the first lane for an year, switched to the second for 10 more years and now, after I tried the third one (and it seems to be my type), I’m ready to keep the pace there and enjoy the freedom of doing what you love at the time and speed you prefer with the ones you love (their smile, creative time, etc).
Tablet PCs have been a huge trend in the last decade and especially at CES 2010. As noted by Deloitte: computer manufacturers are predicted to sell millions of “NetTabs” worldwide, a market of 612 million GBP. By 2015, shipments are forecast to reach about 57 million units annually.
Microsoft announced the Tablet PC concept 10 years ago and once I got my first Acer C300 (convertible Tablet PC) in 2003, I never moved back to “laptops”.
I decided on a TabletPC because I didn’t want to be chained to my desk at the office/home when you can design and sketch digitally everywhere – on the plane, on the beach, in the mountains, in the café – sketching your ideas, stories and the life that surrounds you….only a TabletPC can give you that freedom and experience. This devices are the perfect match for creative professionals – a digital sketchbook where you can do everything we used to do in our studio + much more – getting notes and digitizing content, sketching logos and websites, painting with thousands of brushes and canvas types, sculpting and rendering 3D models with endless choice of materials and lights, designing business presentations, CNC toolpath, SWOT/ web analytics/ SEO reports for customers and of course the casuals – web surfing, video conferences and Skype calls, music, emails, eBook reading, office apps - all of this on the move, out of the office, on the fly – wherever you want to go. Once I grabbed a tablet PC, I never looked back (currently spending less than 3 hours per week at the office). Designers love to use simple things like stylus (pen one end, eraser on the other) or fingertips in 90% of the cases, using a PC as natural as possible.
The first major UMPC improvement came last year with Dell Latitude XT2 and HP TouchSmart tx2, packing a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo behind a 12.1” multitouch screen, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB disk, secured with a fingerprint scanner, which I enjoy every day. The only drawback is that the 256 pressure-sensitivity works only in a couple of applications, while Wacom Intuos4 has 2048 pixel-level pressure sensitivity, with several different brushes and even detects at which angle you hold the stylus to the surface.
After Apple joined the “tablet” party with it’s iPad this month (a pen coming soon), the slate PC market will grow exponentially, but the creative professionals are (almost) forgotten. The NetTabs are only larger media-focused readers/ phones, so I have to use my old convertible C300. After Acer discontinued all their tablet PC recently, I’m still searching for the ultimate tool for creative professionals:
Large Screen – 12.1” SXGA is my favorite and it really does matter. The larger the device, the more useful it is, as far as you can carry it in a standard office bag.
Wi-Fi, 3G/UMTS – I can leave with a Wi-Fi + Bluetooth connectivity , a tablet is not a second phone plus you can always speak in speakerphone mode. Data plans will come down when 4G is spread in 2013
Rigid design and Battery Life – you can choose from 2 to 10 hours. Just cut in half what the vendor says or get a second battery to secure your new customer while making your great presentation.
eBook Reading – while electronic paper is still the best display type for reading if you read a lot, but we need a devices that work well for both books and multimedia, artists don’t think in black and white.
Win 7/ i7 applications – content is critical, applications are critical. We need a working tool to make us $$$ per hour, not a plastic toy. Multitasking? Intel does, iPad doesn’t.Games, TV and videos are different story for other devices.
Pens, Brushes, Rugged, Waterproof… – sometimes a feature makes the device. If you want to use it outdoors, in the rain or charge it in the car? Get a Motion computing tablet
Price? $500 to $5000. My first generation Acer was very expensive, this year we’ll have a convertible for less than $500!
Toshiba Portégé M750 and Fujitsu Lifebook T4310 are nice office tablets, Motion J3400 and Duros 8404 are great rugged tablets with the best outdoor display on the market, iPad and Pegatron are nice entertainment media tablets, but I can’t see the ultimate device for creative professionals. Rather than buying a dust-collector, I will wait until the end of the year, hoping to see the best tablet PC. Lenovo U1 Hybrid is really close to the perfect one!
What’s your tablet PC experience?
Tablet PCs have been a huge trend in the last decade and especially at CES 2010.As noted by Deloitte: computer manufacturers are predicted to sell tens of millions of “NetTabs”worldwide, a market of 612 million GBP.By 2015, shipments are forecast to reach about 57 million annually.Microsoft announced the Tablet PC concept 10 years ago and once I got my first Acer C300 (convertible Tablet PC) in 2003, I never moved back to “laptops”.
I decided on a TabletPC because I didn’t wantto be chained to my desk at the office/home when you can design and sketch digitally everywhere– on the plane, on the beach, in the mountains, in the café – sketching your ideas, stories and the life that surrounds you….only a TabletPC can give you that freedom and experience.This devices are the perfect match for creative professionals – a digital sketchbook where you can do everything we used to do in our artist studio + much more – getting notes and digitizing content, sketching logos and websites, painting with thousands of brushes and canvas types, sculpting and rendering 3D models with endless choice of materials and lights, designing business presentations, CNC toolpath, SWOT/ web analytics/ SEO reports for customers and of course the casuals – web surfing, video conferences and Skype calls, music, emails, eBook reading, office apps - all of this on the move, out of the office, on the fly – wherever you want to go. Once I grabbed a tablet PC, I never looked back. Designers love to use simple things like stylus (pen one end, eraser on the other) or fingertips in 90% of the cases, using a PC as natural as possible.
The only major UMPC improvement came last year with the HP tx2 tablet, packing a 1.3GHz Core 2 Duo behind a 12.2”multitouch screen, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB disk, secured with a fingerprint scanner, which I enjoy every day. The only drawback is that the 256 pressure-sensitivity works only in a couple of applications, while a Wacom Intuos4 has 2048 pixel-level pressure sensitivity, with several different brushesand even detects at which angle you hold the stylus to the surface.
After Apple joined the “tablet” party with it’s iPad this month (a pen coming soon), the slate PC market will grow exponentially, but the creative professionals are (almost) forgotten. The NetTabs are only larger media-focused readers/ phones, so I have to use my old convertible C300. After Acer discontinued all their tablet PC recently, I’m still searching for the ultimate tool for creative professionals:
·Large Screen – 12.1” SXGAis my favorite and it really does matter. The larger the device, the more useful it is, as far as you can carry it in a standard office bag.
·Wi-Fi, 3G/UMTS– I can leave with a Wi-Fi + Bluetooth connectivity , a tablet is not a second phone plus you can always speak in speakerphone mode.Data planswill come down when 4G is spread in 2013
·Rigid design and BatteryLife– you can choose from 2 to 10 hours. Just cut in half what the vendor says or get a second battery to secure your new customer while making your great presentation.
·eBook Reading– while electronic paper is still the best display type for reading if you read a lot, but we need a devices that work well for both books and multimedia, artists don’t think in black and white.
·Win 7/ i7 applications- content is critical, applications are critical. We need a working tool to make us $$$ per hour, not a plastic toy. Multitasking? Intel does, iPad doesn’t.Games, TV and videos are different story for other devices.
·Pens, Brushes, Rigid, Waterproof? – sometimes a feature makes the device.
If you want to use it outdoors, in the rain or charge it in the car? Get a Motion computing tablet
·Price – $500– $5000?. My first generation Acer was very expensive, this year we’ll have a convertible for less than $500!
Toshiba Portégé M750 and Fujitsu Lifebook T4310 are nice office tablets,Motion J3400 and Duros are rugged tablets with the best outdoor display on the market, iPad and Pegatron are nice entertainment media tablets, but I can’t see the ultimate device for creative professionals. Rather than buyinga dust-collector, I will wait until the end of the year, hoping to see the best tablet PC in 2010.
Lenovo U1 Hybrid is really close to the perfect one!
Днес за 4-ти път ме питат “Защо сайтът ни излиза на първа позиция, как така, нали не сте започнали оптимизацията”?
SEO
“Излиза на първа позиция”, защото
a) Вече сте посещавали този URL (>3 пъти)
b) Google счита сайта ви за най релевантния за квартала (понякога район с радиус от 250м)
c) Сайтът ви е оптимизиран и таргетиран за конкретната фраза, търсачка, език, държава и настройки на браузъра
d) 1001 други причини…
Позициите и трафикът нямат никакво значение, ако сайтът не превръща уеб трафика в Клиенти, дори да е един клиент от 10000 посещения на месец и 9999 отказали се посетители.
Моля запазете спокойствие и се фокусирайте върху конверсията и резултатите.
Не се занимавам със SEO теория, в Google ще намерите 44 милиона SEO страници, при това на български.
Годината се смени, приоритетите остават същите: ръст на бизнеса чрез отлично представяне на бранда, стратегически иновации и перфектно обслужване на Клиентите. Тъй като обичам това, с което се занимавам, измерваме резултата с 2 основни метрики – ROI (възвръщаемост на инвестицията) и CAGR (Годишен темп на растеж). Ако питаме Cambridge какво е маркетинг, то дефиницията е „управление на процес, който идентифицира, предвижда и задоволява нуждите на клиента, печелившо”.
За да бъде още по-резултатно развитието на бизнеса (чрез естествен растеж и преструктуриране на разходите), тази година добавих в нашия CRM освен RFM Стойност на Клиентите (Jim Novo е любим авторитет от студентските години), и Рейтинг на клиента. Нещата са прости:
А Клиент, който знае какво иска и знае каква инвестиция е нужна;
B Клиент, който знае какво иска, но не знае колко струва;
C Клиент, който не знае какво иска и не знае колко струва.
Още в първия месец на годината новата функция намери перфектно приложение за нови клиенти – трите водещи доставчика на складово оборудване в България. Още отсега знам какво ще се случи. Компанията с рейтинг А ще ни е клиент дълги години, защото инвестицията в мощен и топ позициониран уебсайт ще им носи CAGR от над 40%, втората компания ще е доволна, че има солиден уебсайт, а третата ще възприема уебсайта си като разход за луксозна брошура, задоволила нуждите на шефа, с 15% отстъпка в цената и 98% отказ на потенциални клиенти още от началната страница.
През 2010 над 80% от европейците отново ще намират търсените продукти и услуги в първите резултати на търсачки и web 2.0 сайтове. Ако не знаем накъде отиваме, няма значение коя посока ще изберем.
Каква е вашата система за рейтинг на Клиенти?
А вашата стратегия за развитие на бизнеса през 2010?
___
Summary in English: This post is in Bulgarian, since the brand new year started (un)accidentally with projects for the top three storage system suppliers in Bulgaria. This gave me a great chance to update the rating and valuation system of customer accounts in our CRM plus the chance to monitor three top Google ranking projects in the same industry. The customer RFM value was implemented back in 2003, but we needed a simple Customer Rating (A: Customers, who know what they want and know how much it will cost, B: Customers, who know what they want but they don’t know how much it will cost to reach it and C: Customers, who don’t know what they want and don’t know how much it will cost to reach it). The account is given a rating, which multiplied by the RFM value determines the general standing of the account. According to Cambridge, “Marketing is the management process which identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer needs, profitably”, but still, no one in Bulgaria has defined the key metric – CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate), maybe that’s why most of the marketing activities down here have negative ROI, like the last century’s 80’s in the States.
Many philosophers have thought there is no universal, ultimate perfection – the perfect One is different because everyone has different wishes. Other argued that the perfect One is flexible enough to be able to meet the wishes of anyone or at least the wishes determined by the majorities. Evolution theories, fairy tales, magazines and movies propagate ultimate beauty as essential for well-being and survival. I have to admit, there are some “beautiful” features, which are fundamental signs of health, growth and evolution, beauty as certified quality – attractive attributes, that positively correlate to quality, healthiness and fertility (no, not the hour glass 0.7 waist to hip ratio or the ultimate celebrity features):
Wise & Intelligent – mature, insightful, trying to go beyond your exact search, seeking to get a sense of what you’re looking for and pull up the best, based on understanding, experience, trends and hot topics.
Organic & Natural – with a good sense of humor and ear for music, optimistic, attuned, deleting all things against us (like grudges, past, etc.)
Warmhearted & Broadminded – talkative, sincere, funny, patient but passionate, caring but sensual, outgoing but easy-going.
Intuitive & Creative – energetic, one who makes us feel like we’re the best one in the world and one who can complete us, encouraging to change for the better.
Diverse & Flexible – one with multicultural heritage, self-confident and inspiring, trust-worthy and surprising, mission-critical and adaptive
Beautiful & Humane - curvy and asymmetrical, kind and polite, with a sense for the most relevant actions to current challenges and problems, especially in extreme situations, where coolly observation is required.
Focused & Suggestive on the best traits and strengths, outsourcing the rest to third parties, helping to find the best way to the desired topic.
Communicative & Sharing knowledge, experience and solutions, supporting your common world of interests, goals and everything, which contribute to higher soul/body/ lifestyle levels.
Now finding the perfect and successful one is easier than ever. We can search, create, enjoy, present to the right friends and audience and archive, if necessary. She has a great voice, keeps us well organized and comprehensive, increases the assets and reduces the maintenance costs – an outstanding solution for us, our SMB or even our brand. She is multifunctional, solving problems in minutes, with a wide supporting community of friends and contributors. She offers intuitive management, fast and easy to use, without advanced knowledge, attended by detailed life-books/ manuals?…
HolyMoly - who is she: a perfect Woman, Muse, Content Management System, Search Engine, musical Composition or all of the above?
Never mind, she is always on the road to perfection. See ya at the top!
2010 is just around the corner and with it come all kinds of warm reflections time and great strategy advice about what we should be doing and what we should avoid.
December was full of rebranding projects. We helped 10 brands – most of which with over a decade of history – to start the New Year with rebranded identity and websites (links and case studies coming soon).
After thousands of answered question concerning their brand strategy, web architecture, site structure, layout, design, content, ranking, long-tail keyword clusters, tags and gadgets…in the end of the day the formula of industry perfection, profit explosion and business optimization is brilliantly simple and repeatable:
Not only to survive, but to grow and thrive the highly challenging “downturn” economy, we need a systematic approach and focus to identify the current values and capitalize on new opportunities, far ahead of the competition.
So, what will work for 2010 is absolutely the same top 10 trends, which worked perfectly in the last 3 years:
Brand strategy – a clear and solid foundation for your sales. Leverage all channels and maximize your current resources and business growth activities with measurable, brand performance metrics.
Innovation – creative thinking, mindmapping, drawing, playing music – one hour a day, away from the stressfull office meetings and negotiations.
World-class design. Good design means clarity, clearly differentiated value proposition, performance, function and service, sales and trust. Quality in products, customer experience and content is the king. Brand reputation through word-of-mouth – the queen. Satisfied customers – the key to repeat business.
Budget & time to cut operating costs – everything which helps to cut costs and improve performance. Focus on what you do best and outsource the rest. The core fundamentals – strategy, KPI’s and most profitable customers. Outsource areas that are not your business’ core competencies. Let the experts do the work. They are better, faster and more cost-effective.
Digital media as the main channel for reaching your customers. Web & mobile are now mainstream, faster, cheaper and easier to target your perfect customers with immediate, real-time and measurable results. Forget print and postage delays and fees. Go wireless, invest in digital and grow organic.
Reach the top of the Search. 1.3 Billions of indviduals are searching for a specific need every day. If you are not found by your target audience on the first page of Google, you don’t exist. Being on the top leads to serious sales. Digital users research and digg before they buy. Leverage Web 2.0 tools to allow the customers to engage, share, follow and become fans of the brand. Get the best brand awareness, market research and real-time knowledge about your customers for free! Local or global – search engine optimization and top ranking are sophisticated, time consuming and change on an hourly basis, so better outsource them to an expert.
Build the Brand. Top companies make absolutely certain that brand is a central management principle, the platform on which your customers make their buying decision. Any time they touch the brand via any channel, it must consistently and credibly communicate its promise and value.
Move to the SaaS cloud, digg the CRM Database. Make sure your have a detailed platform, deeply integrated with all brand channels and Web 2.0 interfaces.The new world of permanently online, social & knowledge hunting communities provides you with endless opportunities.
Leverage the good old analytics – we define and measure progress toward critical organizational goals, offline and online metrics, established in the strategy. Try and improve – new layouts, design, titles, copy, meta… Only results matter.
Wherever you are, enjoy your holidays! Cheers for a great 2010!
Yesterday was the first clear day in a month, clear and sunny enough to dream about snowy peaks, ski vacations, Christmas and presents… after the rain is gone, one can see clearly that we all are eager and busy to update our brand platforms, deeply immersed in Google Wave or Huddle’s tags-based collaboration. The localization of our branding platform in 4 new languages runs well, the last projects for 2009 are polished on a staging server.
Recently some clients of mine have been asking about Google changing the SEO game again, why all their linkbuilding efforts crashed, why strong on-page and off-page ranking factors are so messed and interwoven, why we optimized the websites of 3 direct competitors for top3, do we provide a top3 ranking guarantee – you got the idea.
Well, after the last month updates and Google Caffeine grabbing real-time results twice faster, chances are you are not top3 anymore, your competitors grab the most of the leads (don’t worry – they don’t). With only few organic results showing up above the fold of the browsers, recent changes at Google mean top3 rankings are more valuable than ever, and SEOs will have “few” more Christmas projects.
Crawling deeper, it means that we all need a brand new victory plan for 2010, a platform foundations upgrade, regardless whether to launch a new product, rebrand your company and emerge stronger.
So, get your brand moving again and grow on your global top5 ranking mission. Still I have to admit – there are some brand-building elements, where we have to forget about precise control and “the long-term healthy future” – it’s only the clear facts and the very moment of NOW which exists. The key metrics are still the same – Authority, fresh growing Content and relevant Anchor links. Website growth rate is getting very imporant, as well as organic brand growth.
How much of your time does it take, dear Mr. CBO? An hour to set up the platform, 3 hours to train the co-workers, an hour a day for writing, updates and monitoring, permanent linkbait and snippet links stacking /scultping. Brand-building is a process, not an event.
In the end of the day it gives us 3 sweet competitive advantages to outrank and outperform the competitors: top ranking, brand awareness in thousands of web channels and a brand-crisis proof shield.
So, don’t moan – act now! Fish where the fish are, in the muddy postcrisis waters. Only after that can we escape the “unable-to-stop” collective insanity, visiting dozens of global locations, collecting music, wisdom and tribal art, inspired and creative, full of fresh energy, as in the good old school days.
December is always full with tons of professional SEO webinars and seminars, so I’m looking forward to seeing you there or on our InterNations Christmas party!
Back to our personal values, goals, beliefs, muse… and digital branding projects. After a long vacation, it’s kinda hard to sync back with ongoing projects and schedules. Shouldn’t independent consultants merge their free and working hours to dissolve the difference?
Well it depends from your level of lifetime design freedom – what you do, when you do it, where you do it and with whom you do it. Some of us still can’t afford to travel all over the world for 4 months and keep up with all important todos in parallel. Even if you cover 80% of them, you still need the rest 20% shortly afterward.
Despite the falling leaves, energy is here, the timing is right, we just need some more time, right? October usually starts with a day for dissection of personal and business life. What we dream vs. what we should do. Today vs someday. Excitement vs. existential vacuum of business boredom. Realistic vs. Reachable.
My approach is to sit down with a sheet of paper and glass of good wine ( helps getting terrific life-hacking insights) and cut down half of my activities and tasks to the bone, leaving only the 3 most important projects. Less follow-ups, more planning. After eliminating the “muda” waste (as a Japanese friend of mine use to say) , it’s time to dig in the swipe-file data and deliver (and overdeliver!) what I promised to myself and to the customers ASAP. To do what we do best, with greater speed, accuracy, efficiency, creativity and honesty.
This means launching important websites, upgrading production equipment, tuning brand performance. No communication distracters, no trips, no music making, no poetry, no blogging, and most of all, no fakebook chitchat (sorry virtual friends, I’ll be off for a while and I don’t care “Which kind of pasta are you” . Let’s cut the fat from our schedule, clone or replace ourselves with partners, outsource the fluff, free our time and focus on bigger/ better things.
Searching for the best life, unleashing our potential on a world-class level, living our days to the best with energetic passion and harmony… 500 months still to go? Just pass me an extra one please.
Cheers from the sunny slopes of the autumn mountain! Great branding brains are warmly welcomed at our official BrandBuild launch – 20 October 2009.
P.S. What’s your secret recipe to recover your performance and sync your time, financial and ranking independence? Where you will be in one month?
I do agree that “virtual” and “real” friends are our best brand builders (not only on our birthday), but consumer’s recommendation from known people or strangers is not a form of advertising. You also missed the biggest brand trust builder - Google’s top5 organic search results (I hope intentionally
Social media is the key for building trust in brands?
Yup, in a few “developed” countries, the rest of the world use it for time killing and enterprise resources wasting activities.
Consumers trust real friends, virtual strangers and brand websites the most? So, I have to start to trust my virtual friends same way like the people I know, right?
Yada yada. It’s like “the law of big numbers” by Mr. Power. You start a spammer’s “social network”, expose thousands of personal emails in their profile URL to Google and than you claim that Quantity is what matters. When you “build your network”, you do some business with 1 in 100 people, good businesses with 1 in 1000 and than “1 in 10000 of those people will become mentor, supporter, helper in your life”.
Well, I really have great ideas sharing and collaboration experience with hundreds of “virtual friends”, but I do care only for real friends I’ve met in personal (most of which started out as online ones .
Do we need a friend/girlfriend in every city? Nope, just few real friends, who care, dare and move ahead, together eventually.
Just a recent example: When you share your birthday wish (to help few kids from “underdeveloped” countries get a color text-book and attend a school at least for few days) with hundreds of “socially responsible and concerned” western “virtual friends”, you get (accidental, inspirational and spontaneous) response by few “real friends” from your eastern neighborhood?! and zero feedback from them.
Hey Mark, where’s the “friends”-list sanitazing app? Let’s make every day a great one and let’s care about our real friends and Future. Yeah, birthdays, holidays, virtual or real…
THANK YOU FRIENDS for all your phone, facebook, email, twitter and sms birthday messages. I’ll have a small out of town/ traffic/ heat/ smog chill-out party with lot of music, cocktails, fruits and icecream… A big thanks again for all the birthday wishes, everyone!
Do you have virtual friends, who are as good as real ones (without huge exposure in facebook, twitter and other illusions ?
Tablet PCs have been a huge trend in the last decade and especially at CES 2010. As noted by Deloitte: computer manufacturers are predicted to sell millions of “NetTabs” worldwide, a market of 612 million GBP. By 2015, shipments are forecast to reach about 57 million units annually.
Годината се смени, приоритетите остават същите: ръст на бизнеса чрез отлично представяне на бранда, стратегически иновации и перфектно обслужване на Клиентите. Тъй като обичам това, с което се занимавам, измерваме резултата с 2 основни метрики – ROI (възвръщаемост на инвестицията) и CAGR (Годишен темп на растеж). Ако питаме Cambridge какво е маркетинг, то дефиницията е „управление на процес, който идентифицира, предвижда и задоволява нуждите на клиента, 
December was full of rebranding projects. We helped 10 brands – most of which with over a decade of history – to start the New Year with rebranded identity and websites (links and case studies coming soon).
