At the end of February, Google announced that beginning April 21^st, websites that were not ‘Mobile-Friendly’ would go down in Google’s page ranking system for mobile search and subsequently lose significant web traffic.  For business execs that count on their website to drive sales, this can have a very real effect on the bottom line. Some have called it the mobile SEO-pocalypse, but what does it mean?  

For the uninitiated, Google makes money from advertisers paying to have their ads appear on or near the front page of search results.  But people don’t use Google to see those ads, they use it to see the organic search results; the ads are merely ancillary.  An organic search result is one that is not sponsored.

Google uses algorithms that it has painstakingly developed over the past 20 years to find the best search results, that is, the search results that appear to directly answer a user’s search query or question, which has been the driving factor behind the popularity of content marketing.  Google’s algorithms have changed the shape of the internet and the way we find information, but they are also the reason that 44% of online shopping begins on a search engine and Google controls 65% of the search engine market.  Last year Google also commanded 40% of the global $40 billion mobile advertising market.

But lately Google has been feeling the heat from the mobile revolution, particularly from social media and specifically from Facebook.  Facebook has spent the better part of the last 5 years trying to improve the user experience of its mobile app, and it has worked.  In 2012, Facebook connected more people over its mobile app than its desktop site.  Today Facebook has over 1.4 billion users, 900 thousand of them use the social network daily, and 745 thousand of those use Facebook’s mobile app.  Facebook carried 18% of the $40 billion global mobile advertising budget last year.

From Google’s perspective, it knows it can’t compete with Facebook on social media with its Google Plus platform, so it is absolutely necessary that Google remains number one in search.   It can only do that by keeping up with both the changes in innovation and the way people access the internet itself.  Two of the most important facts here are 1. Mobile surpassed the traditional desktop computer as the way most people connect to the internet back in early 2014, and 2. The growth of mobile search has risen to 42% of all organic searches over the last 36 months.

So what is ‘Mobile Friendly’ exactly and what is Google doing?   The easiest way to describe what ‘Mobile Friendly’ is, is to first describe what it is not.   A non-mobile-friendly site was designed to be viewed on a desktop computer and presents mobile users with things like poorly formatted text and links, slow load times and horizontal scrolling.  Not only are these sites difficult to navigate on a mobile device, but they are difficult to even read leaving many users saying, “I will just wait until I get home to do this.”  Google’s solution to this problem is to, first, not show people those sites anymore if they are using a mobile device, and second, to find and show people the sites that are designed to be viewed on a mobile device and hence are easier to navigate and use on that device.   Google does this by using its algorithms to analyze each site for the proper ‘Mobile Friendly’ criteria, and if a site is found not to contain those elements, then Google will lower its page rank.  A site’s Google rank directly correlates to where that site will appear in Google’s search results.  It becomes all the more relevant for businesses when you consider the fact that 75% of people never go passed the first page of a Google search according to Net Applications.

Google seemed to be hinting at the fact that this was coming for a little while.  Last November, Google released a ‘Mobile Friendly’ tag that would simply let the user know that a site was not optimized to be viewed on their device; however this addition still left it up to the user to choose whether or not to click on a non-mobile-friendly link.

There was a more obvious indicator that Google was planning to use its ‘Mobile-Friendly’ criteria as a ranking signal to take away that choice.  The same press release that announced the ‘Mobile-Friendly’ tags also included a link to a tool that could tell web masters and site owners whether or not their site was in fact ‘Mobile Friendly’.  I suggest that any person or business possessing a web site take a close look at it.

So what do you do if your site is not Mobile-Friendly?  If by using the tool provided by Google you have determined that your site is not ‘Mobile-Friendly’, then unfortunately you will probably need a complete site redesign in order to stay visible on Google and for all intents and purposes, on the web.  Web developers generally have two options when redesigning sites to be mobile, and those are to use either responsive or adaptive design methods.

Responsive Web Design is driven by a set of rules based primarily upon screen size and percentages.  For example, a web-developer would program rules to stipulate that one element will take up 30% of the screen, another one will take up 20% and yet another will take up 50%.  Additional rules would say things like these things should line up from left to right, be a certain height, include certain styles and content etc… By laying a foundation based upon percentages, the website will be able to dynamically adjust to the screen size that it is being viewed on.

Adaptive Web Design is a bit more rigid in how it is presented.  The principals of conforming to the screen size are similar; however instead of a website dynamically growing or shrinking to conform to a screen’s size like in Responsive, Adaptive uses predefined trigger points to detect the size of a screen and uses that data to display whole alternate website layouts.

Right now I would recommend responsive web design, because by making everything dynamic, you are taking into account devices and screen sizes that do not even exist yet.  This becomes a significant factor in light of wearable technology innovations, e.g., Apple’s Watch, that are starting to peak consumer interest.

In summary, the popularity shift from desktop and laptop computers to mobile devices has happened extremely fast, and so not all businesses have had the opportunity to incorporate a mobile responsive design into their digital marketing plan or budget.  Many companies are so severely under-invested in mobile that the gap between them and their Mobile-Friendly competitors is becoming insurmountable. In light of this upcoming change from Google, the importance of mobile responsive web design really cannot be overstated.

Mobile tech is here to stay – streamlining once mundane tasks with ease.  Nowhere is this movement more evident than in marketing.  Today the trend seems to be hyper-local advertising, and brick and mortar retailers seem to be the big winners here.   Where it used to be common to hear predictions of the end to brick and mortar at the hands of e-commerce, now we hear the call of hyper-local advertising promising more foot traffic to local retailers.   Innovation in this movement has made it more possible for marketers to create almost a concierge aspect to local retail.

Google’s local inventory ad product is one aspect of hyper-local advertising that gives Google users the ability to see what retailers near them have the products that they are searching for actually in-stock.   However, news broke last Wednesday that the largest retailer in the world, Wal-Mart, had pulled out of a deal to utilize Google’s local inventory ads.   The reason being, that Wal-Mart would have to disclose daily updates on inventory (duh), and pricing data that could be used to understand  how Wal-Mart does what it does to be the most successful retailer of them all.  While there is a point to be made about the sensitivity of inventory data, it is inventory transparency that will allow a consumer to know that a trip to one particular store will not be in vain and that also cues that  consumer to choose one retailer over another.

Should this cause any concern for Google, or for other retailers either utilizing or looking to utilize Local Inventory Ads?  – In my humble opinion, not at all.  People being able to see whether or not a product is available before they leave the house is such an advantage to brick and mortar retail, that Wal-Mart’s exit from the program shouldn’t be alarming, but may even bolster other retailers decision to get in.  And while the loss of big clients like Wal-Mart certainly has an effect on Google, people need to remember that, there is Wal-Mart, and then there is every other retailer.  Wal-Mart can afford (for now) to jump out of that relationship.

According to Google, their local inventory platform is quickly growing to include other big retailers like Macy’s, Recreational Equipment and Office Depot.  And if Wal-Mart’s move to pull out did in fact prove to be infectious among larger retailers, as ridiculous as it might sound, it could be smaller businesses that step in to fill that void.  Google is an aggregator among businesses, but it is also quite simply the glue that holds our mobile world together at this moment.  I would even venture to say that if current trends in location based tech in mobile advertising indicate anything, it’s that Wal-Mart may come back to the program at a later time.

Yahoo owned a large stake in Alibaba, and when Alibaba had its record breaking IPO last fall, Yahoo made a lot of money.  They cashed out $9 billion worth of shares, and their remaining 401 million shares of stock climbed to a value of about $40.5 billion.  Investors have been eagerly speculating on what Yahoo planned to do with that influx of capital burning a hole in its pocket, but recent rumors have been swirling about the internet that CEO Marissa Mayer is eyeing up cable networks.  But is that a good idea?

It might seem that buying cable networks is a bad move in this new era of “cutting the cord”where more and more people seem to be relying solely on online sources for content.  However, cable networks at this moment are still very valuable because of their brand recognition and high quality content.

Cable networks should be thinking about pivoting their content more towards the online market if they want to maintain that value.  Yahoo, being one of the biggest online corporations of the last 20 years, is well positioned to update the content strategy for the next chapter of online video content, and utilizing already established brands is a good way for Yahoo to start.   Yahoo laid a solid groundwork for this by purchasing the online video ad platform BrightRoll late last year.

So who is Yahoo considering? Rumor has it  that they are interested in purchasing Scripps, which owns  HGTV, The Food Network, The Travel Channel, and DIY to name a few.   It actually seems pretty brilliant when you consider most of the shows on those networks sell products themselves. According  to a report in Business Insider that cited a source with firsthand knowledge of Yahoo’s interest in Scripps, Scripps’ demographics line up pretty well with Yahoo’s most in demand demographic, women who are 25 – 35 or older.

Yahoo has been receiving a lot of good news lately, for one Mozilla Firefox choosing Yahoo search for their default search engine over Google.  Search is still very relevant, but Google still dominates not only over Yahoo in search but over Mozilla Firefox with their Google Chrome browser.  It would be foolish for Yahoo to try to relive the glory days of being the number one search engine by putting too many resources into competing with Google.

All eyes are on what’s next for Yahoo, and as T.V. content migrates online, buying cable networks could be part of a winning strategy.

I used to get frustrated when people asked, “does SEO still matter?”  because while it was obvious to me that it mattered,  there are definitely a lot of ways to answer the question, a lot of them long and technical.  But now I just say – ask Ebay if SEO still matters.  

You see, in one sentence on a financial call with investors over this past summer, Ebay’s CFO Bob Swan pretty much summed it all up disclosing that Google penalties relating to their SEO had cost the company an estimated $200 Million in revenue.   $200 Million!!!   As a result they lowered their full year revenue guidance from $18.5 billion to $18.3 billion.

Analysts have estimated that as high as 90% of people on the internet use search.   Therefore, we should consider SEO and online presence, a.k.a visibility, intrinsically intertwined.   For the uninitiated, when Google changes how it indexes websites, it does not warn or notify the owners of the affected websites.  Basically, when a site is penalized by Google, it shows up pages and pages later in search results than it did before Google’s change.   When you factor in that 75% of people never go past the first page of search results, a Google penalty means your web-traffic will grind to a halt, your sales will drop and your bottom line will shrink.  In Ebay’s case, after an update of what’s known as the ‘Google Panda Algorithm’ Ebay’s domain went from being #6 on Moz’s  list of the top 10 domains to falling to #25 in a matter of days.

There have been unconfirmed reports however, that what happened to Ebay was even worse than that.   I’m talking about what’s known in the SEO world as a manual action, which is when a human being personally reviews a site, like Ebay, and decides that they need to be taken down a notch or two or three.  It’s important to note that Google has not admitted to taking any manual action against Ebay.

The reality is that Google controls 68% of the search market, so they’re powerful, and scores of businesses rely on their model.  But what can be done?   – Well here are some interesting things that have evolved.

Just this past November Ebay decided to stop utilizing Google sponsored text ads for mobile devices and instead started to use Microsoft’s Bing Ads.  Commenting as a spectator, I’d say it sure looks like an act of retaliation for Google’s SEO penalties, but is it realistic to think that Ebay could hurt Google the way that Google has Ebay?  Not really, but there are other forces at work in the SEO arena.

Mozilla Firefox has decided to make Yahoo, not Google their default search provider in the U.S.  Just last month in fact, Firefox initiated the change with the release of version 34 in what PC World Magazine called “the Yahoo Search era.”  Google has been Firefox’s default search since 2004.

This is a big win for Yahoo.  Many basic web users will not alter the default settings as to what search engine is being used via Mozilla related platforms, so it will certainly drive more revenue towards Yahoo.  My concern for Mozilla is that the user experience on Yahoo search isn’t of the caliber of Google’s at the moment.  However, in terms of presenting value to advertisers, Yahoo will become much more relevant with all the search traffic initiated via Mozilla’s push.  As for Mozilla, their user base is holding currently at around 16% of web browser market share, but has been on the decline since 2010 – losing out to Google’s Chrome browser.   It will be interesting to see if Yahoo’s current upwards momentum will carry Mozilla with it, but I would contend that Mozilla has made a mistake.

Google is number one for a reason.  They too have a vested and monetary interest in providing the end user with the best most relevant possible search results.  Google didn’t get to the top spot by not improving and evolving their search algorithms. People use google because they tend to find what they want on Google, and that’s why most businesses will play by the SEO rules and continue to advertise there.

Celebrities with a large number of Instagram followers have taken a substantial hit this week devaluing their accounts as Instagram announced that they have “completed a fix to remove spammy accounts.”     Stars like Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry both saw their followers fall by over a million each.

There’s a huge advertising opportunity that lies at the intersection of celebrity and social media.  Mega stars on social media boast audiences of millions of people, with a quantifiable percentage of interaction/ engagement, and brands will cozy up to these celebs paying big bucks to get them to broadcast a message that will help to either sell a product or generate some brand recognition.

Networks and studios spend billions per year pooling together talent, developing and creating content and then marketing it all, but they still can’t garner the kind of followage of the stars they create.  For example Kim Kardashian has 26.7 Million followers as of writing this, but the network that made her a household name, E!, only has 7.07 million.  It’s a bit like a genie that grants a person’s wish to be all powerful.

But a lot of those friends/fans/followers are in fact fake profiles created to give the outward appearance of being more popular among social media users.  There’s also the issue that many stars attract fake spam accounts that are created to piggyback on their fame.  This is nothing new, and social media networks have done their best over the years to stem the tide against fake accounts, although it appears nothing as effective or sudden as the recent move by Instagram.

The fact is that a high number of followers, either fake or real, does have the effect of attracting a percentage of real followers, so buying fake followers wasn’t or still isn’t necessarily a bad investment, when you consider the amount of money stars get paid to broadcast a message from other brands.

 Twitter Experiment:

Someone who works for me told me about an experiment he did for his last job, where he paid $250 for the promise of 10,000 real targeted followers.  Over the course of a few months he saw his followers increase by about 12,000.  But were they real?  He put all his new twitter followers onto an excel spread sheet, assigned a random number next to each one.  After sorting the spread sheet numerically by that row, he took the top 100 and analyzed how often they tweeted, how many followers they had, and who else they followed to determine if they were real and targeted.  What he determined was that exactly half of his new followers were real and exactly half of those followers were targeted correctly.  Though it wasn’t exactly what he paid for, he was impressed by the breakdown.    Was it worth it?  He said in the end that it wasn’t for him.

But at the price of $250 for 10,000 (which is actually pretty expensive in the fake friend market) one million fake friends is like $25,000. Depending on their star power, celebrities can make big money over time from brands looking to broadcast on their accounts.

What do celebrities get paid to advertise for brands on social media?

According to a report from the Huffington post from 2013, Frankie Muniz got $252 per tweet at the low end with only 175,323 followers (he has 214k followers today).   And at the high end there’s Jared Leto (1M followers) and Khloe Kardashian (8M Followers) fetching $13,000 per tweet.  The more famous Kardashian apparently gets a maddening $20,000 per tweet.

Should brands stop paying so much if a celeb’s number deflates though?  Absolutely!    Celebrity in and of itself is a brand, and what stars are experiencing with this ‘culling of the herd’ by Instagram, is a lot like what brands and companies experience on a regular basis from the likes of Google, and it’s the reason SEO or Search Engine Optimization has dominated digital marketing for over a decade.   This is just the cost of doing business.

In defense of Instagram, while this purge of fake friends definitely hurts celebs, there’s a lot of stiff competition among social media networks – and their only real value is in the number of actual people using them.   These networks have to adapt to the way people use them or else some other network will surely come along and blow them away.

Celebs shouldn’t be mad, what is happening through competition and new technologies is just a process of democratization whereby networks and search engines are giving the public more of what they want – actual valuable content.   Should stars stop buying fake friends?  – Stars themselves can only wait and see how often social networks do a purge like this in order to make that call.

Brick and Mortar establishments, small ones included, are getting wise to the mobile revolution. Folks used to talk about ecommerce winning the war over brick and mortar due to its convenience, but companies are beginning to understand the dynamics between that ultra-convenience of mobile ecommerce, and the human need to get out of the house every then and again.

Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar:

You think of something to purchase, and subsequently two other things: 1. where you can get that item, and 2. if getting it fits into your schedule. You then decide to take a shopping trip and some-time later while in the store, you realize that you’re not quite sure where the item is. After having trouble getting an associate’s attention, you find where the item would be, but you realize the selection is meager compared to what you had in your head. After a little internal debate you decide to settle on a product only to then have to stand behind a line of other customers. After the cashier takes 10 minutes to resolve an issue with a customer 6 or 7 people ahead of you, it hits you: “Why am I doing this, why would anybody do this?” You take the item back to its former location (or not) and go home to get the item you really want online.

This scenario is why e-tailers have picked up so much steam over the past decade. When you think of how you can avoid all the pitfalls of on-location shopping with just a few clicks in amazon from the comfort of your home, it’s hard to imagine precisely how the online e-commerce scenario could be improved upon exactly. But it’s also hard to deny that for all its convenience, we sometimes miss going out and getting that item in person. Hence brick and mortar stores are starting to utilize mobile technology to attract new customers and come up with solutions to the problems that were previously frustrating their customers.

So how are they doing it?

Using ads based on Geo location is one example of how a company might use mobile to attract more foot traffic. This is when ads are pushed out within a given radius of a business. Sound complicated? Well Facebook made this exceedingly easy with an ad product dubbed, “Local Awareness Ads.” Businesses can craft their own ad and then choose a radius around their business, e.g., 1 mile – 10 miles, around their address that will reach people within that radius through their Facebook News Feed.

Imagine you were shopping online for say a ceiling fan. You’re online, so of course you go back and forth between your task and your Facebook newsfeed. When all of the sudden you see it, right there in your newsfeed – the exact fan you were looking for, and it’s on sale just a 10 minute drive from your house. You could take care of this task right now. You could even purchase the item online with a few short clicks, then go and pick it up and have it installed in-time for the company you were going to have over this weekend. Why not?

Or…

Imagine you were looking at t-shirts online. You saw one in particular you liked, but decided not to buy it. Later in the week you are walking through the mall, you sit down on a bench for a minute to look at your phone. You look at your Facebook newsfeed when you see an ad for the very same shirt you were looking at earlier, and it’s on sale at a store just 50 short feet from the bench you’re sitting on. Why not?

Target is getting in on the act as well with a couple new features that they are rolling out on their mobile app, just in time for the holiday shopping blitz. One feature is the in-store inventory option, where not only can you browse the items that Target typically has, but you can also see if the Target near you actually has that item. Target is also implementing in-store maps that will direct you to the very isle where that product is located. Gone are the days of wandering around the store looking for an associate wondering if what you are looking for is even in stock.

From the delivery side of things, brick and mortar stores have something that strictly e-tailers do not, and that is locations and inventory nearer to where people live. We’re seeing brick and mortar stores becoming more ingrained into the delivery game, and that is making for some interesting competition.

UBER seems to be throwing its hat in the ring to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google, both also have growing same day delivery services. The difference is that UBER has a fleet of cars and the infrastructure in house that could prove to be quite nimble and efficient – positioning them to forge ahead and grow into industries that they don’t currently reside in.

Another service called Deliv is making people’s lives easier in a number of ways. Using Deliv, customers can check out either on site at a physical location or online, the customer can then choose same day delivery and also a time window for which they want the packages delivered to their doorstep.

In Northern New Jersey, malls and shopping centers are offering same day delivery with Deliv free of charge through the holiday season. People can shop the mall without having to carry around heavy bags through stores and parking lots, rather they can just tell customer service what time they will be home and the merchandise will come straight to them – hands free.

While mobile technology and ecommerce has had a huge effect on the way today’s businesses operate, it doesn’t mean the end for brick and mortar, rather we are seeing a shift of brick and mortar stores using mobile technology to offer more concierge type services. There are so many angles to how mobile technology can make our lives easier that it can be difficult to predict just how businesses may innovate in the future. Industries are adapting to create new opportunities that are making our everyday experience smarter, better, more efficient and more fun.

To say that the way people consume media, or content is changing would have to be the understatement of the decade. While bandwidth and computing speed has continually increased since the 90’s, people have been discovering new digital avenues to interact with news, entertainment, games and even each other.

Some food for thought:

Today, people spend almost a full hour more online than they do watching television, therefore it only make sense that popular Television Networks are beginning to leverage more online content and following models more similar to that of NetFlix.

• Prime time ratings for the broadcast networks were down 5.1% in August, while cable ratings sank a “shocking” 9.8%.
• Even major networks like CBS and Disney reported a major slow-down in TV ad revenue over the Summer, while at the same time acknowledging that ad-revenue is growing on new media platforms.
• In a recent poll from Advertiser Perceptions, 34% of  over 300 advertiser’s and marketers who are planning to increase their mobile ad spending over the next year said that the money for that would come from their T.V. advertising budgets.
• Companies already spend more on digital advertising than either print or radio.

The Past:

Television has been a dominant force in entertainment and information for the past 6 decades.  Well, Television’s reign is ending as content moves online.  Analysts say advertisers will spend more on digital advertising than on T.V. advertising by 2016.  Ironically, the seed that started it all was planted by Cable itself with On-Demand programing.

Of course some might argue it was Digital Video Recorders like Tivo or the standard one in your cable box that started the demise of the Television age, but these services are more like the little brother of the VHS.  Realistically since the 80’s, you could watch your shows whenever you wanted as long as you had the foresight to program your VHS to record it onto a tape, but even then the show had to air before you could watch it.  Also, programing a VHS was hard and most of us were too lazy to learn how, subsequently I never missed Welcome Back Kotter….I was sure to clear my schedule.  Even with the vast interface improvements of the DVR, there was still a scheduling aspect.

The real sea change was on-demand.  On-Demand gave people back control of their schedules allowing them to forget entirely what time their show came on, and instead gave them the choice to watch a program whenever they wanted, also giving people access to a show’s entire back-catalog at once.  If we’re being totally honest, the way that this service works is more like the internet, with servers in a separate location streaming data.

The next iteration of this on-demand type programming comes from internet streaming services like NetFlix Hulu and Amazon Prime.  These essentially work the same way as the on-demand through your cable company does except the hardware is your actual computing devices, which I think we all can agree are infinitely easier to navigate than the clunky interface on our cable boxes.

Once streaming services started developing their own content the future of episodic entertainment started to become more in-focus.   Some of the best “T.V.” shows coming out, are not on T.V. at all, but are streaming from the internet, shows like:  House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Transparent, Alpha House, The Wrong Mans  –  the list goes on… Net Flix even recently signed a deal to do four original movies with Adam Sandler.    HBO, which has one the most impressive lists of award winning series, will also be offering a streaming only service that is sure to give people one more reason to “cut the cord,” when it comes to cable television.

Cable companies are, at very least, clearly in a transition, and, at most, in a fight for survival.  Over time, the main focus of cable programming may be limited to “live” sporting events and news with some streaming programs mixed in for good measure.

In the next decade, there will be even more outlets like NetFlix and Amazon with their own programming, and all “T.V.s”  will likely be hooked to, or be,  a computer that is connected to the internet.  A world where people are turning primarily towards online for episodic programs is just on the horizon.  However, there is only so many programs we have the time to watch.

So “the Snappening” happened last month, and 90,000 private photos taken by Snapchat users (mostly of an explicit nature) were leaked over the internet.  But according to a new study by Sumpto, the majority of  college students still trust Snapchat and will continue to use it.  My thoughts are that Snapchat isn’t blameless, and  people should be more wary of what they use it for.

So how did it happen?

Someone hacked into a server in Denmark that stored Snapchat photos. If you’re wondering how the photos got on a server in Denmark in the first place when they were supposed to disappear, you’re not alone. In these cases where photos were leaked, the intended recipient (another Snapchat user) was also using a service called SnapSaved that had the ability to save the “snaps” for future viewing, bypassing the original Snapchat auto-destruct feature. SnapSaved wasn’t helping people to save these pictures on their phone necessarily, but rather it was saving them onto this server in Denmark where people would have continued access to those pictures, unfortunately a hacker found a way in also.
Snapchat put out a statement shortly after claiming that its servers are secure and places the blame elsewhere for the “leak.” And I suppose that’s true to a certain degree. If the server where people were storing the pictures was in Denmark, and Snapchat didn’t own it, why then should Snapchat take any responsibility for being insecure? It’s a good argument but I think it redefines terms in a way that is designed to get you to stop thinking about the fact that they cannot address the real problem.

Let me explain:

What is the point of the auto-destruct feature of Snapchat’s messaging about if it’s not a security or privacy feature? There is none. And what would you call the action of giving a third-party a security code that would allow them access to files that were supposed to self-destruct if not a hack? I think “hack” is as good a term as any. So let’s be clear – Snapchat was hacked every time someone used SnapSaved to log into Snapchat and save files, and that was the easy part.

If people were only storing these images on their phone, and people do just by taking screenshots, then victims could claim that their trust was only violated by the person that they intended to view the picture. But since the motherload of pictures were stolen all at once and shared with the entire world, we’re no longer addressing the initial violation of trust.

The problem with Snapchat’s rationale is, most people started using snap chat because of the disappearing nature of the messages. It made them feel more secure and willing to send and disclose more. It’s an interesting statement from Snapchat, where they blame any leaks on their own users, but it’s a bit of victim blaming if you ask me. While Snapchat asserts that their servers (or whatever) have always been totally secure, Snapchat’s service, what people actually care about, has never been and will probably never be. Other people were always the problem with any privacy violation – Snapchat aimed to take care of that with a disappearing message and that just didn’t work.

HubSpot  recently had a very successful IPO, but does it have what it takes to be successful long-term?

Recently it seems we are living in an era where some big tech company seems to launch, get bought, or has an IPO every other week.  The business models for some of them are something altogether untested and new, and their valuations can seem crazy.  The key to understanding the value of HubSpot is understanding what it provides to the consumer and in HubSpot’s case the consumer is business.

HubSpot is a company that designs and offers software as a subscription service to help businesses and marketing agencies market products online.  That means they design tools for social media marketing,  email marketing, content management, analytics, and search engine optimization (SEO)  among many others

My company has used Hubspot’s product for nearly 4 years on all of our contact forms as a lead management tool.   It is an outstanding product but my concern is that it can be difficult for an average user to effectively leverage.  It requires deeper assistance from a web developer and in many cases a marketing expert as well.  Implementing HubSpot’s tools is a major hurdle.

The notion that HubSpot  is entirely a “Software as a service” or SaaS product is also somewhat misleading. The need for manual assistance is required and in turn, makes it hard for marketers to get full value from it. With that said, Salesforce.com has some of the same problems and has become a major player and dominant in the lead management space.

HubSpot has operated at a loss over the last year, of $33 million to be exact, which may seem problematic for investors.  However, HubSpot’s revenue stream is that of a subscription based service and most all software subscription services tend to slump in the beginning.  HubSpot seems to be turning that corner now with revenues last year of $77.6 million on 50% year to year growth.   In February they were given a valuation of more than a billion dollars from The Wall Street Journal.  And that’s not to mention that HubSpot raised over a hundred and twenty million dollars in their recent IPO.

I don’t know if at this point it even needs to be said that inbound marketing and ecommerce are taking over their old counterparts, but that doesn’t mean that businesses understand it.  Digital is the focus of marketing going forward and businesses are in a mad rush to figure out how to get data on their customers and use it to increase their bottom line online, and that’s the niche that HubSpot is filling.

Like Facebook – the value is in knowing the customer, and companies are shelling out big bucks to Facebook because Facebook knows everything about their customers.  But getting someone to click on your link in Facebook really is only like getting them to walk through the door of your store.  What tools do you have to keep customers engaged with your brand and products?  What exactly should you be analyzing to get to know your customers better or at least as well as Facebook?   And how can you tell if your efforts are even working or if you need to change your approach?  These are the tools of the inbound marketer, and it’s where HubSpot excels.

Every company that wants to survive in the future will need to become experts at profiting using inbound marketing techniques.   HubSpot provides business’ marketing teams, and marketing agencies alike with tools and analytics to become online marketing powerhouses.  Hubspot’s IPO will help place more of an emphasis on the digital marketing industry and may cause other companies to follow suit.

I believe that, going public often gives companies the focus to begin to fine tune their product…Facebook is a great example of this.  In my opinion, HubSpot has the right stuff to do well in the publicly held arena and will be a winner.

As part of the promotion for the latest iteration of the Iphone, Apple inadvertently ticked off a lot of customers -presuming that they’d like a copy of the new U2 album and thereby uploading it onto their devices. In doing so, Apple basically said, “whether you like U2 or not, you like U2.”

This deal definitely benefitted U2 over Apple. Let’s face it, U2’s best is behind them. I’m even a U2 fan, but when I go to a concert I am looking to hear their hits and if they play their new music, I am less than thrilled. Plus they got paid something like $100 million and got their music out to the masses with little to no effort.

In this day and age when marketers know more than ever about what people like, what they value and what they find offensive – it really is a wonder how one of the most successfully marketed companies in history ever came to the decision to go through with this. Some of the words used to describe the publicity stunt were very telling about the way it made people feel – words like violation, intrusion, presumptuous.

There was some division among music fans and critics at first. Some wondered what the fuss was all about, after all it’s free music. When the dust settled though, it was pretty clear that it was a bad move on everybody’s part. If Apple had offered the album to people for free who could then either take it or leave it, things might have been different, but no, you had no choice but to own it the way you owned every other album in your Itunes library. These Mp3 libraries are the new record or cd collections for people, and for a lot people, especially music fans, every song in there represents a very personal choice to put it there.

The way we interact with music is a very personal thing that we cultivate over years. Our music represents more to us than just preference or taste, but a deeper reflection of our personality, our experience, our friendships and our memories. For most of the past hundred years we could turn to our physical albums and mixed tapes that we’d accumulated over the years and feel that same passion and fervor for the collection itself as we do for the ephemeral music affixed to it.

But for the past decade or so we’ve seen our physical music collections begin to disappear and I think to some degree it has weakened our relationship to music. I think that upsets us all a bit whether there is something we can do about it or not. In this instance in particular, it was as if the largest corporation in the world, Apple, viewed the buying public as one monolithic consumer instead of individuals. I think it’s clear today that even vaguely eluding that everyone might enjoy the same music is nothing short of tone deaf.

The ultimate irony for me is how the single U2 released tells of the potent musical experience of hearing The Ramones for the first time as something new and different, while the release itself seems to rob people of something approaching that feeling.