“You can’t make smart pricing decisions without taking your costs, competitors, customers, and sales-people into account. But nearly all experts agree that making any of those factors the primary basis for your decision is a big mistake. Instead, the right price for a product or service should rest on one thing - the value that a product or service provides.”

Inc. Magazine, June 2005

“Branding doesn’t mean you have to be flashy or loud or scream your value proposition, but you have to know who you are….Run a good business and your brand will follow.”

Fast Company, October 2005

Guy Kawasaki on Public Relations:

It used to be that ink begat buzz. Life was simple then: you sucked up to the Wall Street Journal, one of its reporters wrote about your product, and the buzz began. Journalists no longer anticipate or create buzz–rather, they react to it: ???Everyone is buzzing about FaceBook. There must be something to this, so I had better write a story about it.??? This role reversal has fried people’s minds.

The latest development is that blogs beget buzz. Blogs have changed everything because they represent a cheap, effective podium for creating buzz on a massive scale.

“We demonstrate globally from our office in Wellington, install our products remotely and receive funds electronically. We have US phone numbers in our office. The barriers to global commerce are minimal. We don’t really even think about, we just do it.”

Rod Drury, of New Zealand based AfterMail (recently acquired by Quest Software for US$45 million)
[via Read/Write Web]

Check out this video from a Chinese company. Is this you?
Don’t work so hard.

Note: This is a good example of viral marketing.

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it harnesses the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.

“The reason you go to a building to go to work every day is that steam or water power used to turn a giant winch-like structure that went right through the factory building. Every workman used that power to do his work. As factories got more sophisticated, it remained efficient to move the workers, not the stuff.”
Seth Godin

When it comes to search engines, it doesn’t matter who you are. If you use any SPAMMY techniques chances are you’re going to get booted.

Don’t believe me? Ask BMW. This week Google removed their German site BMW.de from its index for presenting “different content to search engines than you display to users.??? This and many other web design no-no’s are clearly laid out in Google’s quality guidelines.

Moral of the story - don’t cheat. Follow the guidelines.