Personal

Why is Yelp the 10th most popular website?

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.

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What is Barnacle SEO?

The phrase “Barnacle SEO” means riding along on another website’s SEO.

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One millennial’s review of AT&T’s Workforce 2020

Picture of a modern workspace.
“Naunce_09” by K2 Space is licensed via CC BY 2.0. Office is not AT&T.

In February of this year, AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, was quoted as telling employees, “There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop.” I was excited to read this.

Fast forward to today.

As I was flipping through the pages of the latest Harvard Business Review, Inside AT&T’s Radical Talent Overhaul caught my eye. Interested to see how Randall’s retooling was going, I poured over every word of the article.

The article explained that AT&T is calling its talent overhaul program “Workforce 2020.” It is a company culture reboot of unprecedented scale. Many aspects of the program make sense to me as a millennial; here are my top three features:

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How I got ‘hooked’ by Harvard Business Review

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“Lego Star Wars – Chewacca” by Fernando Bueno is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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.

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GIF in Udemy email—got my attention

GIF with popsicle melting over Udemy Logo
Animated image from a Udemy email “Last chance to treat yourself to a new skill at 30% off.” Message to Eisaiah Engel on June 17, 2016.

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.

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How to ask for a LinkedIn recommendation? (R.A.D. technique)

Color Me Rad race - people in Pink
Color Me Rad has nothing to do with this but if it gets you to remember then great! Credit: “Color me Rad_111” by ludo is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flikr.

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.

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How I think: Thursday, June 2, 2016

Rubix cubes floating across outer space
“synapsis” by Leo Grübler is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Questions are a window into the mind. Here are my questions today:

  1. What is perceived as more valuable: a 28 page PDF with tutorials or a 100 page PDF with tutorials?

    • Bob Bly says that electronically delivered books need to have 10x more information than physical books to get the same price point.
    • The trend is for copy to be short.

  2. When will email be dead and what will replace it?

  3. What can finance teach marketing?

    • Where do financial concepts overlap with marketing concepts?
    • Could finance and marketing be two sides of the same coin?

  4. Is rel=me transitive on Google, Yahoo and Bing?

    • What will the future use of rel=me be?
    • When will there be a rel=me for companies so that our B2B marketing databases can do things like connect PG.com to all of its related domains?

  5. How does my environment influence me?

    • What triggers are influencing me?
    • How do I encourage others to give me feedback? I tried this survey.

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“The most important competitive differentiator in b-to-b is the customer experience,” –Megan Heuer, Vice President, Research of SiriusDecisions.

Filipino rock icon, Rico Blanco, during his album launch last November 9 at Teatrino, Greenhills.
“Galactik Fiestamatik” by Miguel Santiago is licensed under CC BY 2.0

{Drop the mic. Exit stage left.} Megan Heuer’s quote says it all.

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!

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Companies are bands of people

Stick figure drawing of a team of employees.
“The team” by Edwin van Geelen  is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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.

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How to Subitize – See numbers in your head

Easily subitize by breaking numbers into pairs of three. 1,2,3 and 4,5,6 and 7,8,9 can be grouped together.
To subitize is to mentally count individual units of one. A quick way to subitize is to group numbers in three’s.

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.

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