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It’s Google’s Universe, We Just Live Here. Find Out Where…

You know that people looking for particular goods, services or information find your website by conducting a search through Google. But do you know how it works? Of course you don’t, unless your last name is Page or Brin. The methodology and mathematical formula that drives the company’s dominant position in search is secret. Really, really secret. Now, in a move akin to stealing Coke’s recipe, PPC Blog has diagramed how it thinks Google search works. It’s worth studying [http://ppcblog.com/how-google-works] to learn how your potential customers and readers might find you by rummaging around in electronic universe. Just remember that having a fully optimized website can’t deliver everything you need and desire. There’s also social media, a whole other galaxy to master.

Necessarily Blind, Not Deaf

If history and our own lives teach us anything it’s that our species is remarkably inept at doing the things we KNOW we should do that involve short-term pain for long-term gain: dieting, quitting smoking, reducing carbon emissions, saving money. Individuals, families … entire countries can drown in debt, for instance, and go down the tubes because of a refusal to make this short term/long term tradeoff.

And then, shades of Don Rumsfeld, there are all the unknown pitfalls lying in wait because we don’t see what’s coming. Consider the plight of companies tripped up by their own success. Dominant players of the past such Digital Equipment Corp., General Motors, Sony, and virtually every newspaper company sat on their leads and didn’t innovate because they felt confident their successful business models that would carry forward into the future.

Lesson: Technology is disruptive, and it’s paradoxically necessary to depart from successful business plan before you’re left behind. Nimble transitions are necessary, like a clothing retailer responding to fashion changes. The saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has become “Break it before your competition does.”

Even if we don’t know exactly what changes are in store, we should know that there WILL be changes – and we should be prepared to adapt (quickly) to survive. For individuals, continual, life-long education is a must. For companies, finding, listening to, and learning from customers through social media are key. We can’t see the future, but we can keep our ear to the ground.

Half and Half

As of today, there are six months left in the year. Half of the year is gone, for those glass-not-quite-full types. Some say the glass is just too big. But however you see our worldly vessel, the question is what you do with what remains.

It feels sometimes like we’re in a worm hole, doesn’t it, whizzing into new dimensions without quite getting our bearings in the last one. We suddenly are expected to communicate almost constantly with emails, Tweets, blogs, texts, phone calls and even face-to-face conversations. How can we keep up — plus, you know, work and live real lives too.

Every innovation has always had a past-due date, but those dates are getting shorter and shorter. If you don’t replenish by improving your skills, increasing your reach, building your customer base or otherwise growing you go stale. Curdle up and die.

Businesses (including entrepreneurs who have come to see themselves as “brands”) need customers, which means they need marketing communications that put rapidly developing information technology to work for them. (PubArts of course can help you with that… just saying.)

Here’s the tricky thing with progress, though: the better we do, the bigger the problem we make for ourselves because expectations grow faster than the ability to deliver. As Nicholas Rescher wrote in Unpopular Essays on Technological Progress: “Progress produces dissatisfaction because it inflates expectations faster than it can actually meet them.”

It’s a phenomenon that extends to our personal lives and even to political order. Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington did groundbreaking work on the paradox of increased unrest in backward societies emerging out of poverty – the progress itself creates higher expectations that can scarcely be met, leading not infrequently to bloody revolution.

So welcome to the restless new world of 24/7 communications. The more that is technologically possible, the more that is expected of you, even though you were perfectly happy the way things were. And if you can’t or won’t get with the program, your competitors are more than happy to emerge from the encroaching darkness to help themselves to your lunch. Half full or half empty: just drink it up and pour yourself another.