Open source software, of many varieties, has swiftly eclipsed the traditional “closed source” model. If you’re a programmer, you tend to have libraries, code and other snippets available on your blog, github profile or Stackoverflow, all of which require time, effort and valuable skill to create. These bits are all available for free, usually with some attribution or another, to those who would like to exploit the functionality for commercial advantage. The result of all this is that the value of any given system is less today than it used to be, as eventually, there will be an open source alternative that, while it might not be the dominant force in the market (FireFox anyone?) will cause ripples that change the entire industry. If you’re in the Content Mangement System business, expect to hear the question, “How is this better than WordPress?” If the answer is, “We include behavioral targeting out of the box,” expect to hear a snark filled reply. “I can get that for free in WordPress, with this plugin.” If you’re curious, Interwoven used to be the “bees knees” in CMS systems. Does the search interest in their brand reflect this, or is WordPress winning?

Granted, the open source solution might not be perfect out of the box, might require some polish, but let’s face facts. Apache powers the web, as the web server with the largest market share in the world, it’s not going anywhere. The features, functionality and capability outstrip the closed source alternatives by a zillion to one. Do you develop for the web in a given scripting language? Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby are the most common server side scripting languages, so called fourth order because of their natural language like syntax, lack of compile and are all built in C, another open source paradigm. Are these programming languages perfect? Nope, none of them are. If you use a database layer, REDIS started as open source, MongoDB is open source, MySQL was open source before the acquisition and so on. Want a site search engine? Lucene and Solr are as powerful as Endeca and the cost, well, you get the idea.

What does the closed source, or Golems, view of the world look like?

Let’s take a look at a few high profile examples of companies that leverage closed source technology. Microsoft, for one, has seen it’s share price flat line over the past nearly decade, according to Google Finance. Yes they provide a dividend, but let’s compare that to Apple, which uses (gasp) Linux as the underpinning for their operating system, from their server, to their laptops to their IOS devices. Without putting too much math into the question, AAPL went from a $5.50 price about a decade ago (split adjusted) to say, $550 today. Sure that’s the wrong way to look at it, as they don’t actually provide a web server software, nor do they provide any open source software themselves that I know of. However, the point is about leveraging the open source, as it’s that open source which will win out in the end. A million people all fixing bugs, patching the code, contributing their ideas is infinitely better than closing up the nuts & bolts and pretending that your group has the lock down on the best ideas, the “precious” ring which will somehow bind the universe to it. Redhat looks like it was a great bet over the last decade, as the leading commercial vendor supporting Linux. Seems that you would have increased your investment about five fold in the same period.

Sony, you know, the company that famously has complained about people, “hacking their devices,” to (gasp) install other stuff on them? Ya, their stock is down by 50%. Sure they provide a dividend, but what we’re looking at here is the pure, unadulterated financial return. Closed source, close minded and closed thinking yield poor long term performance. Amazon, the first platform to offer independent authors a way to reach the masses without going through ridiculous courting rituals with traditional publishing. The first company to offer cheap, easy CDN services for websites. You get the idea. Amazon increased about 400%, from nearly $50 ten years ago to $200 today.

Would you rather hoard access, code and insights – or let it fly and get help improving the system, for free?

Not everybody has the courage to let the light shine into every nook and cranny of their business. It’s a hard, gut wrenching process to go through, having your pride, joy and life’s work out there for scrutiny by the proverbial unwashed masses. However, it’s not about the naysayers, the critics, the ones who would rather throw a stone than build a foundation. It’s about improving access to core knowledge, platforms and enabling ecosystems. It’s about interactions, scale and continual improvement. The companies who embrace this thinking, in code, in business process or in other ways, are those that win. The stock price, the search oriented interest, I can continue, but I think the idea is pretty well covered already. Open up and win big. Cover up, hide and cower in the dark, well, the rest of us will have no choice but to believe that the “precious” you’re stroking is really a path to self destruction, rather than a powerful force for growth.

Ultimately, that’s what your prospect will see, which will make word of mouth, social media and other types of, “earned media” that much harder as each fracture of your message dilutes the power of the message. Can you imagine a group of people talking say, the exact problem that your business solves. Then, one after another, a real person, embodying those disparate marketing messages, tag lines and tracking URLs or micro-sites tries to sell them, in sequence, on the benefits of your particular solution? The reality is, this won’t be nearly as effective as if each sales person said the same thing, the same way. Sure you want to make it contextual, but if it’s the same prospect, over and over, you need to make sure the core message is exactly the same to get the value of repetition, halo and word of mouth.

A few tools I have some experience with include Omniture Test & Target (Offermatica was rebranded as this…), Webtrends, Google Website Optimizer and Sitespect. Each of these tools has it’s pros and cons of course, but given the lens of website performance optimization, Omniture’s tool, Google’s tool and Webtrends tool are clearly inferior. Sitespect here is superior because of the low impact to the latency of the web experience and given the impact of load speed on conversion, it’s mission critical to test in a way that does not degrade the web channel.

Anything is good in moderation, with that adage in mind, let’s review some recent examples of marketing brilliance as it relates to pricing strategy, especially in the case of ebooks. Many people charge the absolute minimum for their ebooks, despite zero evidence to suggest that this will maximize revenue, profit or marketshare. In this blog post by Sacha Greif, you’ll note that the author achieved 1,500 sales in less than two days of his ebook – without distribution on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Apple. So we have one example at least, along with a host of evidence and citations in that blog post, that says when selling an ebook, you must offer two editions, one priced low and one high.

There is another side to the story, of course. Why not price things as high as they possible can be priced? If you read through the, Part two: premium pricing, this post by Jarrod Drysdale, you’ll see that not only is there another way to address the issue of price for a good, but that in this specific case, it also earned the author even more money than the scenario “A” or “B” which the original author outlined. So is there a right or wrong answer to the question of maximizing value? Nope. The only thing I will point out in this debate and the overall price discussion is that when in doubt, consider the long term impact of your price, your customer experience and the market at large. Walmart competes on price, one hundred percent of the time. So does Amazon.

Despite my personal admiration for Amazon in particular (they published my book after all) three out of the last four kindles we purchased broke in less than a few years post purchase. The apple products we’ve bought? Never a single mass failure, unless the abuse given to the device warranted the implosion of functionality. I say price your book according to what you think its worth to you in terms of knowledge or entertainment value. I personally have a failing in that I tend to underprice everything and reading those two articles made me think more about pricing strategies and how ebook pricing in particular is are truly subjective.

• Include the most common keyword phrase for the page towards the left of the title
• Keep the repetition to a minimum, as it won’t read natural
• Use direct marketing style copy

On the meta description, search engines will not always show this if it does not have the keyword phrase, in an exact, broad or fuzzy match for the listing. So on the meta description, the rules are:

• Include the most common search term, in one of these three match types
• Use behavioral economics or other triggers to entice people to read the whole 154 character message
• Include your brand name, relevant details and use direct marketing style copy – 3rd person narrative here will tank your CTR

Many sites have gone off the deep end on these factors and despite the studies, they will see Google Webmaster Tools report abysmal click through rates, despite fantastic rankings. If you rank well but do a poor job of drawing the click, it’s effectively the same as ranking poorly and your business will not benefit nearly as much as it should from the search placement you achieve.

Fast forward a few years and while I’m not an expert, I have dabbled in the process enough to convert a few photos. Most of those, you’ll see here or there and the difference between a standard photo and an HDR shot is truly unreal. Every friend, family member or acquaintance I’ve shared my “favorite photo” library with has been blown away by the visuals. While I would love to take all the credit, a massive chunk of that has to do with the discovery of Stuck in Customs website, the tutorials there and the amazing photos. A link is a small payment for something so wonderful and so I’d like to ask you all a favor. Take five minutes, surf his website and then share it with friends, family or loved ones who appreciate stunning, beautiful images. I have never met a person who abhors nice pictures and his are truly masterful works of art in their own right.

1.  My first step was to take a look at whats out there and read the docs from apple .
2. Came up with a color scheme: 
3. Reviewed key features and came up with a product map
4. Wireframing: Drew some sketches/models on my notepad and iPad.
5. Jumped into illustrator and Photoshop 6 to start working on the mocks and here is just one screen shot:

So far I just have five of these mocks done. It’s going really fast and I am sure that I will have a few more iterations of the main design before I’m done. The great thing about this project is that my son (age 11) decided that he has to have his input, whenever he can he’s been keeping me company and giving me his very opinionated advice instead of playing in other ways. I have to say his insight has been very helpful.

Once you have your fan base, two common uses of your social media presence are the following:

Social broadcasting – this is generally pushing content towards engagement, social sharing, caring and feeding of the base and most importantly, culling the sales, where possible, from the ripest prospects.

Social response – this is generally done by a customer care or product service organization as increasingly, it’s more cost effective for an individual to complain on your facebook page than it is to call, wait twenty minutes through a gauntlet of an automated menu to get real help, only to have a underpaid, overworked call center employee on the side of the globe fail to address the issue.

Tools that might be considered for social broadcasting spredfast , or Hootsuite, or any number of others. Radian6 also has social broadcasting capability, and the space is rapidly evolving, with Google+ possibly having a larger role to play, or perhaps not. For social response or social CRM, there are tools Batchbook, Sprout Social, SalesForce, and many more.

Whether you are part of a large org or run a small business, these types of tools can be an amazing asset to help in responding to your fans as well as providing them with interesting and unique relevant information.

• Is it informational, transactional, advice oriented copy?
• Is it positive, neutral or negative in style & tone?
• Is it evergreen or time delimited copy?

Each content archetype will have specific triggers. Sales oriented copy will have words like buy, purchase, price, sale, discount, premium, luxury and so on. Many of these will also overlap with your keyword strategy from an SEO perspective. Positive, negative or neutral sentiment has overlap with social networking strategies in determining customer sentiment – was the experience good, bad, delightful, disastrous, etc. One tool to determine a basic positive or negative sentiment analysis for your copy is http://www.liwc.net which you can use to copy / paste a chunk of text and then get a read on how it scores on sentiment.

Evergreen copy does not need to be updated regularly, as the tutorial, information, e-commerce page or other stands the test of time and will be the same in the future as it is today. Time delimited copy could be things like sales, discounts, press releases or other newsworthy items that, while they might have a variable window, the long term is that they simply won’t have the steady magnetic effect of drawing in or being leveraged by prospects that evergreen copy will have.

Many undervalue the impact of the words they use and the meanings and feelings being expressed by those words. More consideration should be given to cultivating outstanding copy.