Talking about Google vs Apple, I made the point that Google is run by engineers.

Well Apple is run by marketers.

Steve Jobs genius is as a marketer - thinking up and refining and packaging products and offering them in such a way that people go..... nuts for them.

In case there's any doubt about it, here are 10 TV commercials from Steve Jobs and company (and one from when he was on the outs with Apple, for contrast).

The 10 Most Viral Apple Ads of the Jobs Era

Any questions?

(In case you were wondering.... I think Microsoft is run by salesmen)

People invent new methods of marketing daily.

Most of them are never heard of.

A few are clever enough, well-enough financed, and useful enough to get big.

Many of those eventually peak and die.

Why?

A big part of the growth is buzz, and a big part of that is hype, and people climbing on the bandwagon.

When I say "marketing methods", by the way, I don't just mean "skywriting" or putting ads on the floor at the grocery. Facebook is basically a marketing method. It's a free service so that Facebook can then sell advertising delivered to its members.

As word spreads, and whatever it is becomes more popular, people tell each other, it becomes the thing to do, good salesman jump on board, people invest money in it, and so on.

But the ultimate success of any of these depends on three things:

1. That it is useful enough to its consumers.

2. That it has a moneymaking business model.

3. That something better doesn't come along and knock it off its pedestal.

We've seen very visible examples of all three of these in the world of the Internet. Some of them are going on right now. Facebook appears to have peaked. A lot of people joined because everyone else did. It was only a novelty to them.

Groupon is very useful to consumers and the businesses that advertise, but they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't think they have a plan to become profitable, especially since it is too easy to set up your own Daily Deals, for a particular industry or niche.

Facebook so took over the territory MySpace once owned, that MySpace has become a joke.

Not that many companies manage to weather the first two of these hazards, and they will always be vulnerable to the third.

Steve Jobs has stepped down from running the show at Apple. He didn't explain why, but the assumption is his health is deteriorating and there is no expectation it is going to get better. In short, that he is dying.

The articles about this read like obituaries which is surely a bit premature.

It is worthwhile contemplating the career of one of a handful of the most influential people in the world of technology.

And there is no better way to look at it than through his own words:

Steve Jobs Best Quotes

My favorite:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle."

I've commented many times on how running click ad campaigns is not for amateurs.

Do you know what the biggest money wasting mistake people make, trying to run their own campaigns?

They run Display as well as Search ads.

Display are the ads that appear on other people's websites. Search are the ads that appear on search engine results pages.

It only takes a few clicks to select which of these your ads appear on. But there's nothing on the screen that tells you one key fact:

These two types of ads are WORLDS apart.

Just think about this: Your search ads are ONLY displayed when someone is actively looking for what you are selling.

Display ads are exactly like traditional advertising. If you are selling something golf related, you advertise in Golf magazines or in the sports section of the newspaper. It is the same online.

So only a TINY fraction of people seeing your display ad are actually prospects.

Since you only pay if someone clicks, you can say, "what's the difference?"

Just one little thing. No one reads a magazine ad and then accidentally telephones the advertiser.

Yet It takes exactly ONE click to get charged for a visit to your website.

Now with that as an introduction, the AVERAGE percentage of clicks on display ads for Google fell last year from 0.1% to 0.09%. Just to make the math clear, that is less than one click out of every 1000 ad displays.

Do you think one person in a thousand might accidentally click on a particular ad on the screen? I know I do sometimes.

Let me be perfectly clear. 90% of the time we do not run display ads for our clients. Even though they are cheap, 9 times out of 10 they aren't cheap enough.

Great article here talking about the subject of fake reviews, good and bad:

In a Race to Out-Rave, 5-Star Web Reviews Go for $5

Reviews will undoubtedly continue to grow in importance. We know that Google gives quantity of positive reviews importance in determining how high your Place Page (map listing) shows on the Search Results page.

There's not much you can do about fake reviews. The best answer continues to be to get tons of positive reviews from your customers.

A client of ours was concerned about negative publicity on the Internet for his business. His company does about 6000 jobs a year. If just 5% of those customers go online and do positive reviews, that's 300 positive reviews a year.

What do you think the average person would think, if they saw that, along with a few negatives?

Exactly.

Yesterday, Google rolled out expanded sitelinks.

Sitelinks are the extra links to interior pages of a website, you sometimes see below the main listing.

They appear most of the time, when it is clear, or very likely, that you are looking for one exact specific result.

If you are searching for "Joe's Plumbing", Google expects you are looking for the website of a company near you with that name.

To speed things up they give you these extra links so you can go directly to directions, pricing, ordering page, or whatever look like the most important and relevant pages in the site.

Now they are showing as many as 12 such links, they are providing a short snippet of info on that link, not just the link, and they are showing them more often.

Here's Google's official announcement, with a short history of the subject: The Evolution of Sitelinks.

Until a few years ago, Apple and Google were not in competition at all.

Now, mostly because Google keeps doing more and more things, they are increasingly competitors.

Here's the latest: Google bought Motorola's cell phone business. That puts them into direct competition with Apple's iPhone business.

So now they are competing on browsers, computers (at least theoretically, with Google's Chromebooks), mobile operating systems, cell phones.

All we need is for Apple to go into the Search business.

Try to Understand Them.

Work at understanding where Google is coming from.

Try thinking like they think.

Do the things that would make you happy if you were Google.

They are very secretive about their algorithms.

But they are VERY open and vocal about their philosophy and what they are trying to do with their Search rankings and results.

So read what Google staff themselves are saying on their blogs, and take that as gospel in directing your efforts.

Sure, it may be more work. On the other hand, you won't disappear from ALL search results the next time Google catches on to what you are doing, or makes an algorithm change.

That's how we work. The result? We have sites we haven't touched in three years that still dominate search rankings in their industry.

Two of the biggest, most successful companies in the world, both giants of the Internet, represent two very different approaches to business, technology, and innovation.

I find this fascinating. It proves there is no single company philosophy, approach or culture that is the best.

Apple is about style, must-have features and user interface. They take products that already exist - the personal computer, smart phone, tablet, mp3 player - and do them so much better than anyone else as to blow away the competition.

Steve Jobs has stated they don't do market research because they are doing things people don't know they will want. They are much about "bolt from the blue", viral-buzz-spreading, gotta-have-it technology.

The Mac, iPod, iPhone, IPad, iTunes - the story is repeated again and again. Great styling, brilliant marketing, intuitive and intelligent interface, features nobody knew they were missing - that is the Apple brand.

Google is all about engineering and iterative improvements. They don't come out with big splash products. They pick up where others left off and make them better, and better, and better until there is no comparison.

They are all about market research in the sense of test and measure. They test thousands of possible changes every year.

Only about one in 20 makes the grade. Many of the more than 400 changes Google makes in their search algorithms every year, are tiny.

But every year a few are big, as are a few of their new products, changes in user interfaces and features. and they add up and leave everyone else playing catchup.

You could say Google's ambition is to be boring. I mean, other than confirmed Google Watchers like me, who gets excited about something Google does? And yet most people use Google products every day, and in preference to the competition - whether that is YouTube for videos, Google Search, AdWords for click ads, Android for phones (which has now passed Apple for smart phone market share), or the fast-rising Chrome for browsers.

Two different approaches.

Both work.

That itself is very interesting, but the reason they both work is the same: They both deliver superior value to the consumer.

SEOMoz, one of the major sites for us SEO types, has a wonderful page where they seek to track major changes by Google.

Google Algorithm Change History

It's pretty instructive from a couple of angles. For one, you can see the recurring theme of overcoming the tricks used to make low-quality sites rank high. For another you can see the increase in sophistication over the years in what Google is doing.

Finally, back in late 2009 when Caffeine was rolled out, I predicted that Google would be making major changes at a much faster pace. And sure enough you can see that in the change from typically two major changes per year, to six listed in 2010 and nine already so far in 2011.

One benefit of being in the marketing business, and of running Internet marketing programs for a number of clients across a range of industries.

We get to see what is going on iin the economy, up close and personal.

Internet traffic and actions taken were down almost across the boards, in the days leading up to the increase in the debt ceiling.

Traffic volume spiked up, immediately once it was clear that a deal was going to be made and the U.S. government was not going to shut down or go into default.

That lasted about two days. Over the last week, day by day, traffic volume has been drifting downwards.

With all the bad news, downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, bad unemployment figures, etc. etc., almost every day there has been less action online than the day before.

Now we know from experience that is not going to continue. Eventually people realize that we aren't all about to die, and they get on with living, and buying.

The moral of this particular story is - and has been for over three years now - that we are on the craziest economic rollercoaster you have ever seen, and there is no end in sight.

I am repeating myself for the umpteenth time when I say there are only two possible answers to this:

Hunker down and hope things will get better

or

Increase and improve your marketing.

Now which of these sounds like a better course of action?

Would you rather succeed, or would you like to be able to blame someone (President Obama, the Tea Party - you pick 'em) for failure?

Do I make my point?

You've probably seen QR codes - the square scanning codes showing up more and more, in ads and elsewhere. You can scan them with your smart phone and click through directly to a web page.

Even the Post Office has gotten in on the act. They are currently running a Special, 3% off postage on mailings that include QR codes. I'm not making that up. The Post Office!

So maybe it it is time to pay attention. We've found two important ways to use them:

1. You can use them in any and all advertising (including window signage), with a click through to your website. This works best if it clicks through to a discount offer. But regardless, a recent study has found that you need to put a caption on the code. Tell people what it is - "scan for a discount" "scan to visit our website".

2. With reviews more important than ever, you can put a QR code for your Google Place page on handouts or mailings to your customers, to encourage and make it easier for them to do reviews and ratings. You can even put it on a page on your website.

This is something that is not going away, it is only going to keep getting more popular.

Here's a high level way of thinking about marketing.

There is only one way to get your marketing noticed:

Deliver it where the people are.

Think about it, whether it is Google search, street signage, direct mail, or TV ads, the reason you market in certain ways is the same as Clyde Barrow's answer as to why he robbed banks: Because that is where the money is.

Of course they need to be the kind of people you are looking for - the real prospects who need or want and can afford what you sell.

The more specifically your marketing is targeted to reach the EXACT right people, the more cost effective it is likely to be.

THAT is the core of what makes Google the huge success it is. Newspapers reach "everyone that reads newspapers in this town." Think of all the wasted newsprint you are paying for! Same with just about any traditional advertising channel.

So there's a second part of this, which is, if you can build something to attract your exact target market, you can get rich.

I know a company that made it big building an informative email newsletter for computer system administrators. They had 450,000 subscribers to whom they could sell things that sys admins would need and want.

It's what makes Trade Shows work. Get people trying to sell and people looking to buy what they sell together, all in one place at one time. Make them BOTH pay for the privilege.

Think about how you can make this work for you.

I confess: I'm a Google lover.

It isn't "love is blind." I know they aren't perfect.

But they try, and in comparison to everyone else, they usually come out on top.

(Not always. I do use an iPhone, not Android.)

Take Google AdWords vs. Microsoft AdCenter - the two big players in click ads. Google owns about a 2/3 market share in the U.S., Microsoft almost all the rest.

When you compare the two services, most of the time it is either "Microsoft is as good as Google because they are imitating what Google does" or "Microsoft isn't as good because they are doing something differently from Google."

AdCenter's procedure for setting up agency access to a client account is so weird and counter-intuitive - and obscure even to their own people - that it took 3 weeks, about 6 phone calls, a chat and probably a dozen emails to get it straight. It requires two different logins, one to accept the invitation to manage, and another to actually manage the account.

Why?

A recent article says that AdCenter has now achieved near parity with AdWords as far as cost of clicks for comparable searches. I don't find that to be the case. With our clients, Microsoft ads are consistently much cheaper. So on that basis it is worthwhile to run AdCenter ads.

I also find the potential clicks are way less than 1/2 that of Google's. Since Google's tools for campaign management are superior, our typical process is to set up and fine-tune campaigns in AdWords, then set up a duplicate campaign in AdCenter and fine-tune it for differences.

Microsoft is losing billions of dollars on click ads. Google of course wants Microsoft to stay in business, because if they fold, then Google really is a monopoly and governments will come down on them like a ton of bricks.

What will happen?

Say tuned.

One reason for being different is so people will remember you.

This has been studied, even has a name, the Von Restorff effect.

Now that's not exactly surprising but it is worth remembering.

In case you're ever shy about doing something unique in your marketing.

Geico's made it big with a talking lizard and an irate Neanderthal.

Of course it can be overdone. Do stop short of the bizarre, things that will turn off the potential buyer or give them the wrong impression.

You can play a role in fighting back against dangerous and illegal websites and unfair competition.

Google has long had a mechanism for reporting violators. Now they've souped it up.

Article on the announcement:

Google’s Spam Report Page Gets “Biggest Refresh” In Years

You have to have a Google account to make a report, but then you can report a wide range of issues including paid links, inappropriate content, infected pages, copyright violations, as well as "webspam". Webspam is any effort to trick Google into giving high rankings.

You don't have to just take these things. You can fight back.

I've seen several studies claiming that the #1 organic search position gets more than 30% of all the clicks on the page.

I never believed it (and said so) because it didn't match our experience for ANY of our clients.

I'm talking actual numbers, across a wide range of industries, and national as well as local search.

Consistently, we find #1 or #2 gives a nice bump over being lower on page 1. The top half of page 1 is definitely better than the bottom of page 1. And being lower than page 1? Fuhgeddaboudit!

A new study supports these numbers. The Value of Organic Search Rankings.

Per this study, #1 got 18% of clicks, #2 gets 10%, going down from 7% at #3 to only about 1% for #10.

The big lesson here is to fight the battles you can win. Being #18 for the most competitive term in your industry will get you less traffic than being #1 or #2 for a term that gets less than 1/10th the traffic.

Sure, go for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But that is often a long-term strategy.

Short term, fight the fights you can win.

In case there was ANY question about the importance of the Internet to marketing:

Google makes more from advertising than all the nation’s newspapers combined.

and that's just Google. There's Bing, Yahoo, other smaller search engines and the many websites that sell access - Amazon, eBay, Kayak, Hotels.com, etc. etc.

(Link to the article quoted from: How Google Dominates Us.)

Google has been under a lot of pressure from governments lately.

One change they've made recently, probably in response, is to stop "stealing" reviews.

For some time now, Google Places (the map/ local listings) has shown content from review sites such as Yelp, Demand Force and others, as though it were their own.

This led to complaints on the part of some of these sites that Google was stealing their content, thus making it unnecessary for someone to visit their site.

That is no longer the case. Google now shows links to these sites and the number of reviews, but the only reviews it actually shows on the Place Page - and the only ratings - are those entered directly into Google.

These reviews are of great importance to Place Page optimization (getting your local listing to rank well), as well as to SEO in general (since Place Page ranking strongly affects the rankings of combined local and organic listings).

Add this into the mix. This is a huge positive in getting your listings clicked on - actual quoted positive reviews directly on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Any company that has been depending on third party review sites needs to get a strategy going, to get their happy customers to go onto Google to add reviews.

Just in case there is any question about it, this is HUGE for local search.

A New York ad agency is running billboard ads aimed at monkeys.

No really.

This is thought to be a first. Some would say however that is nothing new.

All kidding aside it shows how far off the rails a lot of advertising is. No surprise the project is a collaboration with an Ivy League psychology professor.

There's a few ways marketing goes wrong. Trying to apply academic psychology in place of common sense, experience and know-how is one of them.