One rainy morning in 2005, I walked out of class in Popovich Hall on the campus of USC. Next to the Starbucks coffee cart, I saw a floor sign, “Dennis Bakke. CEO of AES. Speaking at 11am.” I followed the arrow to an auditorium packed with MBA students. I was an undergrad, and I had happened upon something great. I found an open seat. What I heard next made an impact on me that has lasted to this day.
According to Quantcast, Yelp is the tenth most popular website on desktop and the second most popular website on mobile in the United States. With so many sites out there, why is Yelp so special?
My theory involves Yelp’s use of identity. Identity is central to the human experience. One of the first things we learn is how to say our names, “I am Eisaiah. I am Susie. I am Peter.”
Yelp’s users call themselves as “Yelpers.” Top users are called “Yelp Elites.” Businesses identify themselves with stickers that say, “People love us on Yelp.” In the video above, there are 41 pieces of my identity attached to my Yelp profile.
The phrase “Barnacle SEO” means riding along on another website’s SEO.
Magic happens when you give shoppers a way to identify with your brand. Just a few days ago, an article titled, “Product Success Is Not About the Zeitgeist,” flashed across my LinkedIn newsfeed. Eager to see if the author had touched on human universals, a topic near and dear to my work, I clicked on it.
Email is 43 years old. GIF is 29. As much as these two get around and despite the age difference, you’d think they would have found each other… fallen in love… and made animated email babies a lot sooner. At least what’s what I thought when I opened the above email on June 17, 2016.
LinkedIn recommendations are key to building your personal brand. Below is my R.A.D. technique to get LinkedIn recommendations. It uses the human universals of reciprocity and one.
Questions are a window into the mind. Here are my questions today:
Yesterday, on May 26, 2016, SiriusDecisions presented a research report, “2016 B-to-B Customer Experience Study,” during its 2016 B2B Marketing Conference / Summit shared some areas for improvement for B2B Marketers. The finding I especially relate to is:
Aleksander Nowak and I experienced the need to provide post-sale support on the front lines of our reputation management company that we started in 2012. Alek and I had daily involvement in the sales, marketing, operations and support roles of the company. I personally responded to 200 to 400 support tickets per day for two years; the customers must be satisfied!
Companies are not things; they are groups of people. This fact seems to be simultaneously well-known and lost on everybody. Perhaps this was more obvious in the days before modern brands when businesses were smaller. Now it is all too easy to think about companies in terms of their products, buildings or stock performance.
Yet products, buildings and stock performance do not a company make. These things are the result of the sum total of the labor of a company’s employees. Many companies forget this when they prioritize investment in new technology, real estate or other ‘things’ over employee happiness and productivity. I am not saying give everybody a Segway. What I am saying is instead of investing in a panacea like information technology, invest in “employee technology” by establishing a culture where employees take ownership of their roles as author Daren Martin explains. Once you begin to put this culture in place, bring your employees from all levels of the organization to the table and ask them what investments you should make.
When I learned math as a child, I went straight to memorizing numerals. What I did not fully understand was what the numerals actually represent. This slowed down my math.
Determined to solve this problem, I figured out a system for counting that groups numbers 1 through 9 into chunks of three. This counting system is pictured above. It almost looks like braille and could be converted into raised bumps for the blind and visually impaired.
This system came to me in February 2016 as I was walking through my neighborhood and trying to count leaves on clovers or petals on flowers. It was hard to arrive at an accurate count after only glancing at the object. In fact, the dictionary definition of Subitize offers that the limit for humans to subitize is seven.