May 5, 2017
Marketing Tips & Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business
Marketing Advice and Quotes
The Online Library of Babel
“Too much information, and so much of it lost. An unindexed Internet site is the same in limbo as a misshelved library book. Therefore, the successful and powerful business enterprises of the information economy are built on filtering and searching. Even Wikipedia is a combination of the two: powerful searching, mainly driven by Google, and a vast, collaborative filter, driving to gather the true facts and screen out the false ones. Searching and filtering are all that stand between this world and the Library of Babel.”
– James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
James Gleick is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard graduate who has been at the forefront of internet theory and marketing since it was invented. Many often attribute the invention of internet services to Gleick.
What James Gleick is saying in regards to your website is that if your site is meant to drive business to you or provide a service to others, yet it is not easily found, then it is no better than a misplaced book in a library. However, if your website is indexed by search engines and optimized in a way that generated accessibility and traffic to it, the potential for your business is limitless. The only thing keeping you from the exact market you’re trying to reach is the ability to be found. Once you conquer that, you’ve crested the mountain.
If you are interested in taking James Gleick’s advice and having your website indexed and optimized, please feel free to contact our Search Engine Optimization Specialists.
Another word of marketing advice.
George Orwell was Right and Wrong.
When I was in middle school I can remember reading George Orwell’s 1984. At the time, the book seemed farfetched, with the whole idea that “Big Brother” was watching you always. Star Trek seemed to be more comfortable with the idea, as the video could be extracted from any place at any time, absent seemingly of cameras and the like, although there didn’t seem to be this overbearing sense that people’s personal freedoms were violated. Even Star Trek graduated in this, however, when the pins on their uniform became communicators, and anyone could be found at any time but again, no effort was placed on tracking a person’s everyday movements unless it pertained specifically to the mission.
Years have passed since the writing of George Orwell’s book, and 1984 itself has come and gone in fact it was the year I graduated high school, with, at the time, no real press towards a Big Brother society. But along came the late 90’s and the internet, social media, and google, and I must say, that although Orwell was wrong about the year, conceptually he was right in that your movements can be tracked. I don’t mean to be a sensationalist about this, but here are the facts:
Your cell phone has a GPS in it that can identify your whereabouts with reasonable accuracy. Smartphones already tag most photographs you take automatically with GPS information and sometimes address information so you can see exactly where and when a photograph or video has been taken. One of the guys from Myth busters, Jamie Heinemann made the mistake of posting one of these pictures to the web in the last year and people could find exactly where he lived by the information stored in the picture file.
Marketing Consultation Advice
Every time you use your credit card, there is a record of where you have been.
Most big box stores have video cameras that track your whereabouts in the store, and many have cameras in the parking lot as well.
Many interstates in larger cities like Atlanta have cameras all the way down the interstate to monitor traffic, not to mention the red-light cameras that track every vehicle going through an intersection.
Facebook also has a “check-in” feature as do other social networking sites, that sense your location with the GPS and give you the opportunity to report your whereabouts at any given time. Facebook has already started to use facial recognition technology to automatically tag people. This technology will only get better, and eventually, it will be able to identify you immediately once the photograph, video or the like (hologram, someday?) is shot.
Your IP address is kind of like a “phone number” on the internet. An IP address is assigned to your DSL Modem, Cable Modem, or the like and this number can be used to trace/track everything you do on the internet. IP addresses are also assigned to your cell phone when you surf the web.
Your car, if newer may have a GPS tracking feature built into it, particularly those with OnStar or the like.
And Google, perhaps the biggest offender of privacy, tracks every search you make, specific to your Gmail account, if you are logged in, and uses this search history for its own purposes. On top of that, with their “Street view” feature, Google has sought to LITERALLY photograph the ENTIRE WORLD so that it can give you an actual 360-degree view of any roadway in the world. Their trucks/cars are photographing the world now, as we speak.
And these are just the things I can think of, off the top of my head. Now I don’t say this to cause a stir or a panic. These are just facts, and they’ve entered our society rather quietly, so quietly in fact that many don’t know that their privacy is no longer. When I was in high school, if I got in my car or went to the store, it would be difficult to find me if someone wanted. This is no longer the case. It’s not a videotape of exactly what you’re doing like in Star Trek, but it’s also not far from that. I can hear the objections already, “but John, if you’ve got nothing to hide then who cares?” That’s true, if the person tracking you has good intentions, like in Star Trek. These devices were used to help people, not to track their every move for their own unknown purposes. 
So now that you’ve been educated on all of this, what should you do about it? Well, that depends on you. But know these things:
I read something a few weeks back that bears saying, with respect to Google, Facebook, and the like. YOU ARE NOT THEIR CLIENT. Google’s purpose is not simply to provide the best search possible. Facebook does not give you a profile just because they’re “nice.” Google and Facebook both have clients, you’re just not one. Their advertisers are their clients, and let’s be clear: these are for-profit companies, that would cease to exist without money. They are in the business to make money, and their advertisers are their clients. Your information can and will be used to satisfy the need to make money. More specifically, your personal information will be leveraged to bring them the next dollar. So know this, it’s true. Every time you search Google, whether you are logged into your google/Gmail account or not, they are tracking your IP address and know what you search. Their intent is to make money, and not necessarily to make the world a better place.
There are things that you can do to protect your privacy. Google is rolling out new privacy measures this week. You can opt of some of their data collecting. I recommend it. Facebook also has recently updated its privacy policy. I recommend you go in and check the privacy of your account to see what your privacy settings are. You can also turn off the GPS feature of picture tagging on your phone as well, and opt out of checking in on Facebook if you don’t want people to know where you are. Keep in mind that other people can check you in for you as well if you opt in on this feature which means any friend can tell the world that you’re not home. That last one is at least worth some thought. Yahoo wrote a good article on what you can to do protect your privacy here.
Many of you may be thinking, “John, what do you do?”
Here are my strategies for protecting my privacy online and in life:
I don’t ever give out my bank number to anyone.
I do not do online banking. If someone is smart enough to encrypt something, someone else is smart enough to decrypt it. There have been too many banks who have been hacked for you to believe your information and money is safe like that, so I don’t do online banking.
You won’t find my social security number or any of my businesses tax numbers stored anywhere on any of our computers. Anything I store on my computer; I assume is public information and is at risk.
I make sure that I stay logged out of my Gmail/google account always. This keeps my history from being recorded site by site (not that I have anything to hide, but where I go is my business, not theirs). You also must know that Google manipulates search engine results based on this search if you are logged in as well, so I stay logged out of my account so my search engine results are not manipulated.
Know that I do check-in from time to time on Facebook. Normally, this is not so much because I want to alert someone to my presence so much as it is for the benefit of the business or organization I’m attending. They get free press when I check in.
I do turn off, from time to time the location feature on my phone so that it’s not automatically tagging my photos. Sometimes I think it’s more of value to have it, so I probably leave it on more than not.
Mostly, folks, I’m aware… yeah, Big Brother has become a part of our society, and I have to live with it. I can no longer take a drive in complete obscurity. Some of that is good. Some of that is not so good, but at the very least, I understand it, know it and am aware of it, and I am aware that every shred of my personal information can be used to leverage someone else’s business gain.
“Be Excellent to Each Other.” -“Ted” Theodore Preston, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
While Google was driving down all those neighborhood streets, they were allegedly sniffing for WI-FI packets and recording network IDs. I’m no expert on this, but in theory, that network ID could be detected by Google while you are browsing. Google could, therefore, determine your identity by cross-referencing that ID with the house address, also recorded during the drive-by.
If you need a consultation about SEO or Web Design, our company, Make It Loud, can at the very least help you to discover if SEO or a good website fits into your budget. It doesn’t cost anything to find out and we’d be honored to serve you, face to face when geographically possible. Feel free to contact us by email at info@makeitloud.net, visit our website at www.makeitloud.net, or call us at 678.325.4007. Even if you’re not local to Gwinnett or Atlanta, we’d be happy to do an assessment.
