antimarketing

Basically everyone is waiting for Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Iceland to crash. None of them have, despite all the screaming and all of them will have to implode in their own sad ways, eventually.

Thus, despite all the media talk about fear, drama and emotion people in the investment community are actually very unemotional and pragmatic and unfearful (I can not say they are courageuous now can I?)

The problem is that all of the above countries are still stuck in economic bubbles, yes the bubbles are not as rosy but they are in bubbles still — partly to keep American, British and French banks safe (who are the largest other party to all the debt that these countries have taken), partly because the populations there love to delude themselves.

Investors will get back into Europe after the crash to buy on the cheap — almost everybody is as cunning as a fox these days, nobody buys when the price is percieved to be too high, because of the abudance of information.

These types of investors are small guys like you & me, sovereign wealth funds.

However, there is an another type of investors who look for even a bigger score. Obviously, the counterweight to buying on the cheap in Europe is that a lot of banks in the U.S., British and France will be up for grabs as well.

To give you an example of how these other type of investors operate — you might not have noticed but there was a lot of noise during this late summer from the controlled alternative media, such as Zerohedge and even your trusty old charlatan Alex Jones and from rumours on the trading floor about Societe Generale being on the verge of a collapse — these rumours were magnified until the moment that S.G. turned to the Rothschilds in France for help and guardianship — then suddenly everything stopped. Heheee.... somebody is beginning to take control of the banks on the cheap.

The funny part is that the Rothschilds are not as rich as people claim or think they are — there have been a lot of people in the U.S. who are richer than them in terms of net worth, however they just manage affairs by spreading rumours and perception better than you or I can or that glamorous, over-the-top big, soverign wealth fund ever can — connections, connections.

I mention this as an example to conclude that there are two types of investors, the ones who are waiting for the big crash and the ones who are trying to manipulate through the anxiety and rumours prior to the big crash.

But nobody is particularly scared of anything as far as things go. Everybody is preparing themselves, like F1 cars for the start of the race. A game of nerves, perhaps but not of emotions if you know what I mean.

References, before you judge me:

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110823-709045.html [2] http://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/banques-finance/...

First of all, an attempt at a correction to one of the motives of the article. I think Milner's jewish background has nothing to do with his success. His family, while Jewish, had and still have a complete worldview that only a member of the russain intelligentsia can have. It is such a bizarre and wonderful world-view and way of life that it defies my abilities to explain — being delicate among a world of merciless brutality. The cultural class of Russia really are a class apart.

I suspect that the influence of growing up surrounded by cultured Russians, as few of them as they were in Soviet Times is why he always stands a little bit disconnected from the crowd.

The air of Russian culture is gentle but always restless.

Russia is a land of big crowds but the intelligent among that people always desire to be a little bit aloof, if not in solitude.

I swear, elop is the most unpopular man in Finland. If not for U.S military might Finland would declare a war because of what he has done to their national crown jewel.

As a former marketing manager I think you simply wrote the most wonderful product pitch I have ever read. You rock!!!

Amazon Prime is available from Amazon UK.

This is a common media strategy. It is a win-win situation:

a) Amazon rep. unofficially approves a "leaky" article just before the press conference. b) Bloomberg journalist guarantees a front page story on their web page. c) Amazon reaps the benefits of more coverage

You are forgetting that Amazon Press Conferences, without these advance buzz giving messages would not be even 10% of what Apple conferences are. Now they get at least a half of that.

Everybody in America is waking up. Everybody in Europe is bored at work. Everybody in Asia is enjoying their evening.

Ideal.

I bet everybody who was a stakeholder in the release of this project had a long talk about messaging this a'la Steve Jobs.

no-no, they mean that these are special offer prices. Normal pricing will be more expensive.

This is a temporary move, when 4G becomes widely available in a couple of years or even six months from now, in some countries web optimization via cloud computing will become a trivial.

Microsoft became dominant because Gates is the most ruthless businessman on the planet.

Facebook is becoming dominant because humanity in general can not grow up from its glory days in college-rules.com

I agree, and I have a "nutty" conspiracy theory to explain why things are this way:

Social media is simply the middle class and the tax payers paying for investments in technology. The U.S. government inflates the money supply, through bailouts and zero interest loans, for banks, who refuse to lend to the general public. However, this money can not sit on the sidelines, since inflation the cash itself creates cause it to lose value so tons of it end up in wacky technology investments.

It does not matter which type the investor is — angel or some other sort of creature. A billionaire or a friendly neighbour. Everybody wants to invest as much money they get from banks as loans and as little of their own as possible.

The money the banks give ultimately comes from the middle class that consumes these services (can't really call them products can we?) in the first place.

Thus the middle class is paying a bunch of middle men and lucky dorks with it's own money to invent these services and they will be later paying lots more to "enjoy" them.

Nevermind the loss of privacy, which is simply an icing on the cake.

Question: if these are social technologies shouldn't the State be doing these types of investments in the first place?

Or if they are social in the other sense, in terms of authentic grass-roots and anti-state citizenry — shouldn't social media be about personal blogs, news feeds, videos etc..?

Great answer.

Yes, that is a very important point, precisely because people do not want to focus their attention upon it.

Google has gone from a company that does not do any "evil" to a company that tries to make a progressive / positive impact and therefore they feel entitled to collecting more information about their users than they ever thought they would need at the beginning.

In that sense Google is like the government in the original Austrian economics. From utility to expansive progressive force. But with what results this time?

Edit: this reminds me off the "Faceback" app from the movie Good Guys.

Good question, I played the Devil's Advocate inside my mind. Here is what I get as return / output: All the traditional elements of marketing are different:

a) Is the target market specific?

Yes for q. & s., no for c.c.

b) Is the target market pro. / high-end users with high sense of fidelity to the topic / site / brand or casual consumers?

Yes for q. & s., no for c.c.

c) Does the target audience return to said sites regularly, participate in a community (with hierarchies, badges, comments and replies etc..)?

Yes for q. & s., no for c.c.

d) Do the specific topics discussed get relevant links from blogs, tuts sites etc.. from similiar fields

Yes for q. & s., no for c.c.

This is simply the tip of the iceberg.

Google has given precise and clear signals of what to do with other releases from other teams, the Google Panda team is not directly responsible for rankings. The information is purposefully fragmented among the different releses, blogs etc.. of different teams. Because that is the way Google is structured, works and also because they want to avoid giving stupid people too much power by providing an easy "how-to" guide to rankings.

You need to be a pro. marketer and know a bit about programming to keep up with Google's recommendations. I have done this, I simply do not want to share this information here where marketers read and make thousands or millions off it, but I would be glad to share that information with small site owners privately for free, one on one. No marketing orgies allowed! :)

Simply stated, if you would for the next month study everything that Google has released the last couple of years (80+ hour work wweks) you would realize where they are going in the next couple of years not only theoritically, which is very useful, but also with practical steps in how to become a friend of Google.

The reason that Google does not produce a even more straightforward guide to SERP / SEO field than they do right now (to lazy to link to it, because it is not that important right now) is that most marketing people are dumb and simply want to build an automatic system that generates money for them without hiring someone or fixing stuff themselves. I think they, meaning Google, consciously want to keep the human element alive and active in search engine marketing right now, therefore you saw Panda, you saw Google+ and you will see a lot of other things down the road as well.

You have to understand that Google sees itself as educating, if not enlightening marketers with their activites as well.

It might surprise you, but most marketers are ignorant of how their field really works. Having attended tons of seminars and a few conferences to boot, they can not even grasp simple technological innovations like HTML5 Video, even if it is explained to them nice and clearly many, many times.

So from Google's stand point, they want to make this learninge xperience slow, step by step, and like a puzzle for a child.

(I am leaving out all the criticism of Google that I have and portraying it in a neutral light for now)

I can help you out, I am a pro. web marketing guy with experience in highly competitive fields. Just tell me if you want help with a reply to this message.

By the way, I really love the Panda update since the way I do marketing is 100% legit and head of the curve of the trajectory of what Google will be using in two years time.

Programmers should try to solve problems and not try to achieve lofty goals set by management like "improve the copy experience".

When you try to achieve goals set by management you compile all the problems together into one package, nicely designed or not, without actually solving any of the root concerns.

How you really bring results as a programmer is when you divide the issues into the smallest reasonable parts and then find the best way forward for each one of them.

And then later bringing all of the separate lines of work together into one whole symphony of code and experience, so to speak.

Thanks for this, do you happen to have any other helpful links?

Isn't this an obvious marketing play by people behind Zerply?

edit: Look at the one line positive comments that appeared straight after posting this article. Really funny.

Besides the general attention that an article like this gives this is also a perfect SEO tool.

Personally, what I think that these dudes are doing is building a linking pyramid that passes on the famed Google juice from Y Combinator (PR 7) via the blog article (contextual links, a big thing after the Google Panda update) to their own site.

Anyone can find person X to write a semi-beliveable article about their service or tool and submit it here. Clever stuff but not clever enough.

Actually, kind of dumb, because sooner or later, people running this message board will have to rethink what types of articles can be linked to.