Archive for the ‘benefit’ tag
In Defense Of The High-Frequency Hackers
It’s a potential “doomsday machine.” It’s “quite literally out of control.” Hedge fund managers and Nobel winners say it should be banned. Others insist it should at least be regulated. Its practitioners are “parasites.” Mark Cuban says they are “the ultimate hackers,” who “scared the hell out of me.”
Last week they wiped out $440 million of Knight Capital’s capital. Earlier this year they messed up Facebook’s IPO. A couple of years ago they caused the Dow’s 1,000-point flash crash. And everyone’s horrified by that GIF making the rounds. Yes, it’s the bête noire to end all bête noires; high-frequency trading.
The only problem here is that I don’t really see the problem.
Oh, I’m not saying high-frequency hackers are saints. And the claims that they improve market liquidity don’t seem to hold water. But:
as long as small investors only trade in or out of each position only once a or just a few times a year, [losses due to HFT] are often less than the losses they may have incurred from higher trading commissions as little as 10 years ago.
An apparently damning ZeroHedge interview with a high-frequency trader is defanged at the end by the very same point:
You can mitigate this risk by being patient with your orders. If you enter a limit order and it isn’t hit in the first hour, don’t impatiently move it. Stand your ground. That way, you can dictate the price you take, even in the midst of all the HFT noise.
So who are high-frequency hackers hurting, exactly? Not Warren Buffett-style buy-and-hold investors:
Most of the vocal critics of HFT are short-term day trading types – why? Because computers are better at arbitraging away the small price differentials those guys live off of. [HFT] does not serve a social benefit, but the people it is taking money from also don’t really serve a social benefit.
argues one MetaFilter contributor, convincingly. And that Knight Capital blowout? Apparently that’s just what you get when you accidentally release your test code into the New York Stock Exchange. Live by the sword, die by the sword:
Aug 1 NYSE glitch explained, by @nanexllc nanex.net/aqck2/3525.html previously, nanex.net/aqck2/3522.html Highly recommended. /cc @fanf @greatdismal—
@eqe (Andy Isaacson) (@eqe) August 05, 2012
Still, you have to admire the HFT hackers’ sheer chops. “You always hear about Google programmers being the best in the industry, but I’ve been to a couple Google interviews and turned them down both times because the engineering quality just isn’t there,” claims one HFT programmer. There are even (admittedly somewhat crazed) claims that HFT trading will have spinoff benefits such as fleets of transatlantic drones and neutrino-powered communications. Even if not, though, it’s hard to see how high-frequency traders are anything but paragons of virtue compared to the bankers who were busy packaging collateralized debt obligations back in 2007.
At the end of the day, I subscribe to the quaint notion that companies actually have intrinsic value independent of Wall Street’s daily delusions, and if the latter grows increasingly disjoint from reality, then at fundament that is its problem, not everyone’s. The financial industry seems very fond of the notion that the civilization as we know it would collapse into anarchy without it continuing to mint huge profits from arcane financial convolutions, but I can’t shake the sense that–in the long run–another humbling financial catastrophe might actually be good for us all, since we don’t seem to have learned much of anything from the last one. Even if their critics are right, those hackers might inadvertently being doing us all a huge favor.
Image: Shanghai maglev train speedometer, by yours truly
Daily Search Forum Recap: August 10, 2012
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- Video: Google Knowledge Graph Carousel, Gmail In Search Results, Advanced SEO Advice & More
This week, Google pushed out the knowledge graph worldwide, adding a carousel feature in instant knowledge to the search box. Your Gmail emails can now show up in your search… - Google: A/B Testing? Don’t Cloak, Use 302s & Use Rel Canonicals
I covered this at Search Engine Land last night, but it is worth covering here as well.When you do any A/B testing or Multivariate testing with your web pages or web site…
- Google Translate Now Translates Pictures
Google announced they closed the loop on features for Google Translate by adding in a Google Goggles feature to the Translate App… - Google Death Benefit: 10 Years Of 50% Pay To Family
Forbes has a story, which Google confirmed on Google+ of a new benefit that makes me go absolutely wow.If a Google employee passes away while employed at Google, Google will continue to pay the family 50% of the Googlers salary for ten years…
- Google: Do Not Force Users To A Specific Language
Google top guy on localization and internationalization at Google Search, Christopher Semturs, spoke out on one of his pet peeves when it comes to this topic.He said…
- Android Neon Lamp
I am telling you, the stuff Google makes as swag and ultimately sells at the Google Store for Android is completely whacky. For example, take a look at this Android shaped neon light. I mean, really
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
- Google Settles FTC Probe Into Privacy Charges With $22.5 Million, WebmasterWorld
- A Panda Protection Plan?, WebmasterWorld
- Known Issue: MCC users seeing 404 error when navig…, AdWords Community
Google Death Benefit: 10 Years Of 50% Pay To Family
Forbes has a story, which Google confirmed on Google+ of a new benefit that makes me go absolutely wow.
If a Google employee passes away while employed at Google, Google will continue to pay the family 50% of the Googlers salary for ten years…
Googlers Can Make More Money Dead Than Many Do While Living
We all are well aware of just how big a deal it is to work at Google. There are endless perks (did you know that no Googler on campus is supposed to be further than 100 ft from a food source at any given time?).
So you know, this is not a gripe post. The fact that Google decides to treat its employees so well is a testament to their understanding that their employees are their business. They give a lot and expect a lot and both of those are more than OK. I will even admit to having a bit of envy but that’s my problem not Google’s. The fact is that all of these benefits that the company offers their employees are incredibly good things (by the way Google, I am not a Phd or anything like that but I would be available for an interview if you have some ‘just has a college degree’ quota you need to hit 
).
To exactly what extent these benefits go became oddly clear following an article in Forbes this week that explained a new and really interesting perk Google is rolling out to all its 34,000 employees.
Should a U.S. Googler pass away while under the employ of the 14-year old search giant, their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive a check for 50% of their salary every year for the next decade. Even more surprising, a Google spokesperson confirms that there’s “no tenure requirement” for this benefit, meaning most of their 34 thousand Google employees qualify.
I see and hear a lot over the course of a day but this one blew my mind. As a result, I decided to do some quick ‘rithmetic and came up with the following.
According to the Social Security Administration’s website
The national average wage index for 2010 is 41,673.83
Then you get the following information from a post at the Business Insider from June of 2011
A comparison of tech companies by Payscale confirms what you thought all along: It would be sweet to work for Google.
The survey looked at salary, company culture, job satisfaction and benefits & perks at nine major companies. Although the companies weren’t ranked, Google excelled in every category.
Googlers have the highest mid-career median salary at $141,000.
Aside from the nit pick of comparing an average to a median and figuring out the exact salary at the exact mid-point of a career (I have other work to do by the way 
) a little quick math shows that if the average Googler died while being an active employee of the company, their family or partner would receive a salary for the next 10 years that is about 70% HIGHER than the average person makes in a year in the US. Not a perfect comparison but one that probably holds up pretty well across most ranges.
So what’s the marketing angle on this one? Well, how about doing something special for your employees that you can then take to the press and make everyone say ‘Really?! That is pretty cool’. We talk a lot about reputation here at Marketing Pilgrim. Oftentimes in relation to Google those discussions center on things that tend to ding Google’s reputation. Whether it’s about being a monopoly or not being the best keeper of promises regarding privacy they are not good things. What better to try to offset that talk than to point to the good they do for those working for them.
Now, of course you can quickly take the path of saying ‘Google keeps these folks at bay with great perks so they can carry out these various dubious deeds.’ That’s a valid point as well. But just think about the number of companies that not only mess with customers but also under-appreciate or mistreat employees every day. At least Google gives a nod to something a little bit bigger by saying ‘Hey, we know there are others in your life so don’t worry. We’ll take care of them for a good while when you’re gone.’
Now, let’s not be completely naive here and think that Google didn’t have an actuarial do what amounts to an insurance company’s assessment of exactly how much this will cost annually based on mortality rates etc. If they didn’t they would be stupid but the fact is that they took a pretty bold step with this benefit. I gotta tip my hat.
What about you? Like this? Hate this? Find it uncomfortable because you assume you are immortal and will not die? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments section.
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Google Death Benefit: 10 Years Of 50% Pay To Family
Forbes has a story, which Google confirmed on Google+ of a new benefit that makes me go absolutely wow.
If a Google employee passes away while employed at Google, Google will continue to pay the family 50% of the Googlers salary for ten years!
Forbes wrote, “Should a U.S. Googler pass away while under the employ of the 14-year old search giant, their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive a check for 50% of their salary every year for the next decade.”
Are there eligibility requirements? It seems like if you start the job at Google tomorrow and die the next day, your family is still eligible.
More so, Google told Forbes surviving spouses will see all stocks vested immediately and any children will receive a $1,000 monthly payment from the company until they reach the age of 19 (or 23 if the child is a full-time student).
Google confirmed it saying:
Forbes talks to Laszlo Bock, our VP of People Operations, about the philosophy behind the perks we provide for our employees and one of the newest benefits, which support employees’ families in the event of their death.
Forum discussion at Google+.
Cash Is Essential For A Free Society
The furor over Starbucks investment in Square is boiling over like an exploding espresso machine. It’s pretty frothy.
Starbuck’s CEO, Howard Schultz said ‘The consumer is going through a seismic change in which cash is eventually going to be obsolete.’
That’s a bit much. As I pointed out in Anonymous Cash = Freedom, cash is a prerequisite of a free society, while enacting a system without anonymous cash is only attractive to the government and moralists:
A strong society that accepts human nature without moralizing will always have anonymous cash.
And who does such a system benefit? Not the part-time sex worker, trying to make ends meet in a down economy. Not the bellman at the airport, whose tips might disappear after the transition to cards. Not the homeless guy I gave $2 to the other day, or the busker playing guitar in the train station. Or the Green Peace folks collecting coins at the park.
The ones that benefit are the those selling the cards and the readers. And the policy-makers who want to see the flow of cash to find — supposedly — drug lords and terrorists, but secretly want to know everything about everybody.
But this is the argument for pervasive surveillance again. In the name of security and safety, they say we should all accept the intrusion of the government into our private lives so that the state can be protected from its enemies. After all, they say, if we aren’t doing anything illegal, why should we care? What have we got to hide?
But we have the right to privacy in our doings. We don’t have to say why we want privacy: it is our right.
And the shadowy doings at the margins of people’s lives are exactly the point of privacy. The man funneling money to a child born to his mistress without his wife’s knowledge, or a woman loaning money to her brother without her husband knowing: they want anonymous cash. The rich golf champion that takes a woman not his wife out on the town has a right to privacy, even if a narrow-minded and moralistic society doesn’t think so.
We have known for years — decades — that pot is no more (and perhaps less) dangerous than alcohol, but the laws are slow to change. And in the meantime, millions of people are buying pot. At some point in the near future, the prohibition will end, and it will then become a regulated and taxed commodity, like alcohol. In the meantime, people slip into the shadow world to buy a bag. And they are justified, since laws that are enacted without regard to science and health — that are ideological and repressive — are illegitimate, and the people have the right to run around them.
Historically, tyrannical governments have attempted to raise taxes to unsupportable levels, and cash money could change hands without the government being aware: the gray economy. While today’s government may not be engaged in this sort of economic control, the use of traceable digital money would certainly be the sort of economic foundation a tyranny would want.
The advocates of total intelligence as a way to catch the bad guys are going down the wrong path. To counter the drug lords, we simply have to make pot legal. And if we contort our free and open societies to counter terrorists’ use of cash, they have won.
This is similar to the ‘security theater’ that goes on in our airports: where techniques that do not work are employed to convey a sense of security, and unobtrusive techniques that do work — like the Israelis’ airport security — are not used because of the politics around ‘profiling’. In order to meet some hypothetical threat from terrorists, our personal privacy and free movement are held hostage. At what cost? Who benefits from all the back scatter scanners being bought?
I maintain that cash is a prerequisite of a free society. If the authorities start rounding up all the money, and begin distributing smartcards, it’s time to rally in the streets.
Cash is not a metaphor for freedom, it is a requirement of freedom. A strong society that accepts human nature without moralizing will always have anonymous cash. Only totalitarian governments — where everything not expressly required is illegal — would want to monitor the flow of every cent.
Technically, it would be possible to design and deploy anonymous digital money, just like we could be encrypting all telephone calls. But governments always want to reserve the right to listen in on our conversations secretly, so the phone systems are inherently insecure. But cash predates the notion of modern nation states, and even our modern currencies are unbugged.
We shouldn’t let the government be a party to every transaction, gift, or exchange we engage in. And if we let them, they will want to, and once they get that ability, we might never be able to go back.
So let’s not jump up and down too much about the glories of traceable digital money. Perhaps Square will rollout anonymous digital money soon, too. Then I will applaud.
- Howard Schultz Explains How Square Will Caffeinate Starbucks (wired.com)
- “Privacy”: Why it matters much more than you think (salon.com)
De–Leveraging
In the banking world, when you borrow too much money and you fail, you go through a period of de-leveraging. It is a painful process.
Our worldwide economy is about five years into a de-leveraging process. Many of us lost jobs, or took a beating on home values, all part of a de-leveraging process. It stinks.
This happens in our world, too. You can tell by looking at a profit and loss statement.
Here’s a summary of a reasonably healthy profit and loss statement.
- Net Sales = $50,000,000.
- Ad Cost = $5,000,000.
- EBITDA = $6,000,000.
- Ad to Sales Ratio = 10%.
- Net Sales = $53,000,000.
- Ad Cost = $8,000,000.
- EBITDA = $5,000,000.
- Ad to Sales Ratio = 15%.
- Net Sales = $55,000,000.
- Ad Cost = $10,000,000.
- EBITDA = $3,000,000.
- Ad to Sales Ratio = 18%.
- Net Sales = $35,000,000.
- Ad Cost = $5,000,000.
- EBITDA = $3,500,000.
- Ad to Sales Ratio = 14%.
- Nearly $20,000,000 of sales is being generated for no benefit whatsoever. Why generate sales that don’t produce short-term or long-term profit? Be honest.
- What could you be doing with the $5,000,000 of ad cost that is not generating any profit whatsoever?
P.S.: I cannot tell you how often I run into the “$20,000,000 demand and $0 profit” problem. It’s everywhere. Your paid search people cause this problem, and your catalog circulation people cause this problem. You mail so close to break-even or by paying for clicks right around break-even. Now, I get it, you’re theorizing that the long-term value of these decisions pay for themselves. That may be true. But what the heck else could you be doing with that money? You could practically start a new business! But nobody wants to lose $20,000,000 of demand that generates $0 profit. And I know, you’re going to start leaving comments with MBA theory about why this is a good decision. We can agree to disagree.
Guest Posting on Sites with a Low PR: Is There an SEO Benefit?
It’s no secret that guest posting is becoming one of the most popular ways to earn quality backlinks. Contributing a guest article in exchange for a link back to your site not only improves your SEO, but it helps your company gain visibility and credibility in the industry. However, there are a few known rules [...]
Origins Of Brand Management
Many frequently misuse the term “brand” by interchanging it with advertising, marketing, naming or a design. These improper applications have caused much confusion as to what branding is and how it works. As such, “brand” has become a bit of a buzzword. But, what does it really mean and how does it work? Where did it all start and how can it create value? To benefit from the effects of branding, a common understanding of “brand” must first be established.
Pioneered by P&G
Procter & Gamble pioneered the business strategy of “Brand Management”. Brand management focused attention on product specialization and differentiation instead of business function. By distinguishing the qualities of each brand from all other P&G brands, each would avoid competing with one another by targeting different consumer markets with a different set of benefits. This was especially important in product categories that the company manufactured several competing brands, like laundry detergent.
Over the years, P&G and the companies that embraced the brand management concept became extremely successful. The most successful brands — those that lead their category and produced the highest ROI — used what Rosser Reeves termed the Unique Selling Proposition or “USP.”
The concept of “USP” has three guiding principles:
- The proposition must be clearly stated to the consumer: “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.”
- The proposition itself must be unique. It must express a specific benefit that competitors do not, will not, or cannot offer.
- The proposition must be strong enough to pull new customers to the product.
Brand Positioning
In the late 60’s and early 70’s, the concept of “brand” began to take on new meaning, including the larger concept of image and values. Al Ries and Jack Trout captured this evolution in their Harvard Business Review article and later authored a book by the same title: POSITIONING: The battle for your mind. Their concept stated that it was not product superiority that mattered, but rather consumers’ perception of a given brand that paved the road to success. This concept was dubbed “brand positioning” and to this day it remains the standard for developing successful brands.
In practice: A brand is an experience living at the intersection of promise and expectation. Here’s how it works. A company expresses its brand as a promise, both overt and implied. That promise lives in consumers’ hearts and minds as an expectation. When brand promise and consumers’ expectations reflect one another, the brand holds tremendous value for both parties.
Consumers use brand as an identification tool
Without brands, the marketplace would be overwhelming. Imagine a world without brands: You’re out of ketchup. You run to your local store where you are met by a wall of red bottles with simply the word “ketchup.” Without brands there would be no signals to illustrate the differences between the vast array of choices other than size and price. No name, no unique packaging, nothing! So which one do you choose, why and how?
You can quickly see how making a purchase becomes an ordeal and making a repurchase of a product you liked would be next to impossible. However, we live in a world where the mind has a system for differentiating products and services as well as tracking experiences. Brands provide a method of classification, differentiation and identification that allow the consumer to simplify their ketchup buying decisions.
Branding is managing customer expectations
Branding is not about getting people to choose your offering over the competitions. It is the act of managing consumers’ expectations so as to condition your target audience to see your offering as the only answer to a specific need.
By defining a realistic and manageable promise of what the brand owner will deliver and what consumers can expect of the brand, branding has become the backbone of modern business strategy. “Brand” drives consumer purchase decisions and affects nearly every functional area of a business. With product offerings converging into sameness, companies are viewing “brand” as the only avenue of differentiation.
Branding defines market position (brand strategy) and, through a series of signals, articulates that position as promise (brand positioning). When strategy and positioning work as one, brands obtain sustainable and favorable market positions. This has shifted the task of brand building and management to the primary business strategy.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Eric Schulz, Co-Director of Strategic Marketing & Brand Management, Jon M. Huntsman School of Business. Excerpted from his new book “The Smart Marketer’s Toolbox”
Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop
5 Ways Crowdsourcing Improves Your Content Marketing
As content marketing matures, marketers continue to identify appropriate channels where their investments will pay off with content that sells. Content creation remains a huge undertaking, however, and as Jay Baer puts it, the opportunity costs are significant. The drivers behind a potentially long sales cycle involves content created and distributed over a broad array of social media channels that need to be measured against business objectives.
But if your company’s resources and budget are stretched to the limit, what else might you leverage? Crowdsourcing, when done properly, can play a pivotal role with your content marketing. Below are five ways crowdsourcing is impacting the future of content marketing:
Crowdsourcing speeds up the content creation process (and frees you up)
You will never have enough time in the day to create the amount of content you want to create. If you’ve been writing blog content for any length of time you’ll realize it can be difficult to get a regularly scheduled article published. Writer’s block, vacation, major deadlines, and other business emergencies can get in the way. With sites like CrowdSource.com, you can employ a scalable crowd of workers to create your content. No matter how many articles you write each week, more is better. With scalable labor, the only limitation to posting 5 articles per day is your budget. Keep in mind, however, that crowdsourcing projects do take a lot of moderation & feedback. But it does help the content creator get around the “writer’s block” problem.
Crowdsourcing gets your customers & potential customers involved
Invaluable crowdsourcing systems build in options for your community to produce work, not just paid crowdworkers. Letting your target audience get involved is like handing out the mic at a conference. People love to step up and give their opinion. Customers and prospects providing input are not only valuable for your market research team, but is now being used as content marketing to attract others who feel the same way. Plus, giving your followers their 15 minutes of fame creates a bond that’s hard to break, making them naturally more loyal to your brand.
Crowdsourcing gets your target audience invested
Not only do your customers and potential customers get involved and actually tell you how to sell to them, but because they were involved with the process, they’re also now invested. Do you remember the last time you helped make something, or were involved with a big project? How many people did you tell? Everyone! Imagine if you were to get a guest post on Forbes, or a video on America’s Funniest Home Video, or a shot on American Idol? You would tell everyone you know to tell everyone you know because you’d be invested in it.
Crowdsourcing offers you diversity and creative choice
One of the main draws of using a site like Genius Rocket to crowdsource a commercial or viral video is the number of options to choose from along the way. Imagine what your video would look like if you or your internal team created it. It wouldn’t necessarily be bad, but over time, your videos would begin to look similar. The scripting, filming, acting, and even editing would begin to take on a uniform appearance. Once you turn this over to crowdsourcing, you begin picking from 30 different scripts, written from 30 different individuals from several different countries, cultures, & backgrounds. The diverse perspectives these individuals bring to the table is invaluable. And this is only for the first step in the process.
Now apply this benefit of diversity to the earlier benefit of drawing input from your customers and potential customers. Your target audience will begin to show you all the different ways they want to be approached – They’ll essentially be giving you your ideal marketing strategy.
Crowdsourcing inherently atomizes your content marketing process
By its nature, crowdsourcing does not atomize the process. In fact, it’s quite common on your first few tests of crowdsourcing to assume the crowd will simply do the tasks you don’t want to do, verbatim. Only after you get unsatisfactory results will you start to break processes down so small that “no one can mess them up.”
It always starts out this way because crowdsourcing is not natural. In a country where everything must be bigger and better, reports were due yesterday, and quantity & quality must be equally outpaced, it’s tough to imagine that projects need to be broken down into steps that could take no more than seconds to accomplish. However, to effectively use crowdsourcing, every project must be atomized as small as possible.
Consider the task of moderating your forum. As an alternative to hiring a forum moderator, every single post could be fed through MTurk with a simple Yes or No question: “Is this post offensive?” Any Yes responses could be removed or reviewed. By atomizing this process, crowdsourcing can keep your forum (or any UGC Content) valuable and problem free.
Summary
As you sit and think about your content marketing strategy, engage your community and solicit their input. Each industry and community is different, offering quality analysis and creative ideas. Content marketers will be able to accomplish their objectives by using crowdsourcing as a means of better engaging and growing their social networks.
About the David Bratvold:
David Bratvold is the founder of Daily Crowdsource, an open-format website that aims to educate the public on the topic of crowdsourcing and a producer of Crowdopolis 2012, a major crowdsourcing conference teaching the future of crowdsourcing in advertising, technology, and content marketing scheduled this July 19. You can follow David on Twitter at @TDCrowdsource.
5 Ways Crowdsourcing Improves Your Content Marketing is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting