They care about whether you exceeded their expectations.
If you want to delight, if you want to create a remarkable experience, if you want people to talk about you or buy your stock, the secret is simple: give them more than they expected.
If I walk into your store and it looks and feels like stores I've been into before, my expectations are locked in. Now what? But if I walk into your showroom and it's like nothing I've ever experienced before, you get a chance to set my expectations, right? Marketing isn't merely bragging. Marketing creates a culture, tells a story and puts on a show.
In our rush to get picked or get noticed or build buzz, the instinct is to promise more. Perhaps it pays to promise less instead, to radically change expectations and to reset what it means to deliver on the promise of delight.
Airbus is hoping to take US market share from rival Boeing by assembling jets in Mobile, Alabama. Airbus is a French-based company, jointly run by French and German management.
Senator Rick Shelby (Alabama) is supportive of the move. Boeing, as one might have expected, issued complaints of European subsidies, as if US defense contracts don't in essence amount to the same thing. Both sides have complained to the WTO.
Airbus announced plans to start assembling passenger jets in the U.S. starting in 2015, a move likely to affect labor and trade relations on both sides of the Atlantic.
Airbus outlined the plan Monday at an event in Mobile attended by U.S. suppliers, airlines and politicians, carefully stage-managed amid potential negative reaction on both sides of the Atlantic. EADS shares rose 2% Monday in Paris.
The company said it would create 1,000 jobs at its Brookley Aeroplex in Mobile, doubling the company's U.S. workforce. One assembly-plant job typically supports up to four at suppliers, Airbus said. Parts for the aircraft will be shipped to Mobile from Hamburg, the site of an existing single-aisle Airbus assembly plant.
"We go where the talent is," Airbus Chief Executive Fabrice Bregier said in Mobile ahead of a parade of local politicians welcoming the $600 million investment. He didn't respond directly when asked whether the move would shift employment to the U.S. from Europe. The company's European unions have voiced concern about production moving overseas, according to French media reports.
He said labor flexibility afforded by a union-free facility in right-to-work Alabama helped drive the plan. So, too, did the opportunity to change the balance of dollar-generated revenue with costs that are generated mainly in euros.
About 40% of the average cost of producing Airbus planes is with U.S. suppliers. A senior executive said labor accounts for only 5% of an aircraft's costs.
"We're going to do everything [we can] to create the environment," Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.) said at the Monday event.
Battle for Market Share
Just what are assembly costs in Germany if it makes economic sense to ship parts from Hamburg to Mobile, Alabama for assembly?
Clearly something more is at stake here, and that something is a hope by Airbus to capture more US market share.
But will it? Regardless, expect more battles in the WTO and more battles from Washington state, Boeing's headquarters. Washington in not a right-to-work state and is dominated by unions.
Airbus to Open Factory on Rival Boeing's U.S. Turf
Flanked by local Gulf Coast politicians, top executives from European planemaker Airbus unveiled their plans to build their first U.S. factory -- a move they said that would help them take market share from rival Boeing Co.
The unit of EADS believes that opening a plant in Mobile, Alabama, which will assemble its narrow-body A320 aircraft, will help it take "more than a few percentage points" of market share from its prime rival in the world's busiest aviation market, according to Airbus sales chief John Leahy.
Due to open in 2016 and expected to create some 1,000 jobs, the company said it will be only the second Airbus plant outside Europe that builds its top-selling workhorse jet; the other one is in China.
Airbus currently has a 20 percent market share in the narrow body jet segment in the United States, compared with 53 percent of the market worldwide.
Airbus' announcement drew a lineup of heavy-hitters from U.S. airlines and suppliers, including American Airlines CEO Tom Horton, JetBlue Airways Corp CEO Dave Barger and Goodrich Corp CEO Marshall Larsen.
They arrived to the strains of the rock group Steve Miller Band's 1977 hit "Jet Airliner" -- that homage to Boeing's 707 is something of an anthem for the aviation industry, and Boeing last year hired Miller himself to perform it for workers at its Everett, Washington, factory.
Another Warning to Unions
This is yet another warning to unions. However, they will not hear the message. After all, this is just about "assembly", at least for today. Tomorrow it will be about actual production.
Production is returning to the US, but it sure will not go to California, Illinois, New York and other high-costs states.
Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom and Doom Report, spoke with Bloomberg Television's Betty Liu this morning and said that, "If I were running Germany, I would have abandoned the eurozone last week."
Faber went on to say, "In the case of Greece, one should have kicked out Greece three years ago. It would have been much cheaper."
"If you put one or 100 sick banks in a union, it does not change the fact that they're sick. In my view the markets are rallying because they were grossly oversold. When markets are grossly oversold, especially markets of Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, then any news that is not disastrous news propels stocks higher. I think that combined with seasonal strength in July, the rally has carried on somewhat. But it is another cosmetic fix, a quick fix that does not solve the long-term fundamental problem of over investment in the euro zone. And what it does, basically, it forces Germans to continue to finance people in Spain and Portugal and Greece that are living beyond their means."
"If I were the Germans, if I were running Germany, I would have abandoned the eurozone last week…It is a costly decision, but losses are there and somewhere, somehow, the losses have to be taken. The first loss is the banks. In the case of Greece, one should have kicked out Greece three years ago. It would have been much cheaper."
On whether he's picking up European equities:
"Yes. In Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France, the markets are either at the lows of March 2009, or lower. Along with bad companies and the banks, there are also reasonably good companies. Stellar companies, but they have been dragged down. I see value in equities, regardless of whether the eurozone stays or is abandoned."
"[I'm buying] anything that has a high yield, or what I perceive to have a relatively safe dividend. In other words, I do not expect the dividends to be slashed by 90%...I am not buying banks, but maybe they could rally. I am just not buying them because I think there will be a lot of equity dilution and recapitalization. I'm not that keen on banks."
Economic activity in the manufacturing sector contracted in June for the first time since July 2009; however, the overall economy grew for the 37th consecutive month, say the nation's supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®.
"The PMI registered 49.7 percent, a decrease of 3.8 percentage points from May's reading of 53.5 percent, indicating contraction in the manufacturing sector for the first time since July 2009, when the PMI registered 49.2 percent.
The New Orders Index dropped 12.3 percentage points in June, registering 47.8 percent and indicating contraction in new orders for the first time since April 2009, when the New Orders Index registered 46.8 percent.
The Production Index registered 51 percent, and the Employment Index registered 56.6 percent. The Prices Index for raw materials decreased significantly for the second consecutive month, registering 37 percent, which is 10.5 percentage points lower than the 47.5 percent reported in May.
Comments from the panel range from continued optimism to concern that demand may be softening due to uncertainties in the economies in Europe and China."
The median forecast in the Bloomberg survey called for a decline to 52. Estimates of 70 economists ranged from 50.5 to 53.5. The gauge averaged 55.2 in 2011 and 57.3 the prior year.
While an index below 50 indicates contraction in the industry, a reading greater than 42.6 generally indicates the economy as a whole is expanding, according to ISM.
Manufacturing is weaker in the rest of the world. The industry in the euro-area contracted for an 11th straight month in June as Europe's debt crisis sapped demand.
Perfect Score
All 70 economists polled by Bloomberg came in on the high side. Collapses are never expected.
ISM and Recessions
click on chart for sharper image
The above chart by Doug Short (annotations in red, green, and purple by Mish) shows the importance in not relying on a single indicator as strong evidence of a recession.
Since 1959, the ISM dipped substantially below the 50% mark on five occasions when there was no recession. Moreover, in the 70's oil crisis, a recession began with the ISM near 70. The reverse happened in the wake of the Dot-Com bust as a recession did not start until the ISM was near 40.
Nearly everyone but the die-hard hyperinflationists thinks the US will decouple from the global economy. This reverse-decoupling idea is primarily based on the absurd belief the Fed will not let the economy or the stock market down (when the Fed is in fact not in control). For further discussion, please see Is There a Limit on Central Bank's Ability to Inflate?
The debate on the Fed will remain, but the facts show that I disagreed with decoupling in 2007 and I disagree with reverse-decoupling theories now.
Sifting through server logs has made me infinitely better at my job as an SEO. If you're already using them as part of your analysis, congrats - if not, I encourage you to read this post.
In this post we’re going to:
Briefly introduce a server log hit
Understand common issues with Googlebot's crawl
Use a server log to see Googlebot's crawl path.
Look at a real issue with Googlebot wasting crawl budget and fix it.
Introduce or reacquaint you with my favourite data analyzer.
It’s critical to SEOs because:
Webmaster tools, 3rd party crawlers and search operators won’t give you the full story.
You’ll understand how Googlebot behaves on your site, and it will make you a better SEO.
I’m going to casually assume that you at least know what server logs are and how to obtain them. Just in case you've never seen a server log before, let's take a look at a sample "hit".
Anatomy of a server log hit
Each line in a server log represents a "hit" to the web server. The following illustrations can help explain:
File request example: brochure_download.pdf
A request for /page-a.html will likely end up with multiple hits because we need to get the images, css and any other files needed to render that page.
Every server is inherently different in logging hits, but they typically give similar information that is organized into fields. Below is a sample hit to an Apache web server, and I've purposely cut down the fields to make this simpler to understand:
In reality, there are many more fields and a wealth of information that can only be gained through web server logs.
Googlebot crawl issues you can find with logs
Specifically in regards to SEO, we want to make sure that Google is crawling the pages we want to be crawled on our site - because we want them to rank. We already know what we can do internally to help pages rank in search results, such as:
Ensure the pages are internally linked.
Keep important pages as close to the root as possible.
Ensure that the pages do not return errors.
This is all typically standard stuff and you can get this information easily without server logs, but I want more, I want to see Googlebot.
I want to look for Googlebot specific issues like:
Unnecesary crawl budget expenditure
Page it considers important / not important
If there are any bot traps
Is Google making up 404 errors by trying to make up URLs (think JavaScript)
Is Google trying to fill out forms? (Yes, it happens)
Using server logs to see Googlebot
Step 1: Get some server logs.
Ask your client, or download a set of server logs from your hosting company. The point is to try and capture Googlebot visiting your site, except we don’t know when that’s going to happen – so you might need a few days worth of logs, or just a few hours.
To give you a real example:
Example domain has a PageRank of 6, DA of 80 and receives 200,000 visits a day. Their IIS server logs will amount to 4gB a day, but because the site is so popular, Googlebot visits at least once a day.
In this case, I would recommend a full day worth of logs to ensure we catch Googlebot.
Step 2: Download & Install Splunk.
Head over to http://www.splunk.com, sign up and download the product – free edition.
Note: the free edition will only let you upload 500mb per 24 hours.
Step 3: Adding your server log data to Splunk
I would recommend that you put your server logs on you local machine to make this process nice and easy.
I've put together a quick few screencasts, I know they sound cheesy, but whatever.
Step 4: Only displaying hits containing Googlebot as the user-agent
Step 5: Export to Excel
Simply click on the Export link and wait for your massive CSV to download. (Note: If the link doesn't appear, it's because the search isn't finished yet)
The Analysis, problem & the fix
The problem
Every time Googlebot came by the site, it spent most of it's time crawling PPC pages and internal JSON scripts. Just to give you an idea of how much time and crawl budget was wasted, please see below:
The real problem is that we had pages on the site that hadn't been indexed, and this was the cause. I wouldn't have found this without the server logs and I'm very grateful I did.
A look into my Excel spreadsheet
How to confirm what you're seeing is actually Googlebot
It's possible to crawl or visit a site using the Googlebot user agent, and even worse - it's possible to spoof the Googlebot IP. I always double check a list of IPs to what I see in the server log report and I use the method officially outline by Google.
How did I fix this?
1) Crawling PPC pages
I checked that these pages weren't indexed or receiving any traffic first, then I used robots.txt to block only Googlebot from these pages. I was very careful about this since I wanted to make sure that I didn't block Google Adbot (the robot that needs to crawl PPC pages).
This was just another simple robots.txt block because Google didn't need to request these scripts. Googlebot basically got caught in a form, over and over again. Realistically, there's no reason for any bot to crawl this, so I set the user-agent to all (*).
User-agent: * Disallow: /*/json/ Disallow: /json
Results
I'm pretty happy to say that a week later, there was an increase of 7,000 pages in the index as reported by Webmaster tools.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter @dsottimano, don't forget to randomly hug a developer - even if they say they don't like it :)
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Photo of the Day: President Obama Views Colorado Fire Damage
President Barack Obama views fire damage with firefighters and elected officials in Colorado Springs, Colo., June 29, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
In Case You Missed It
Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:
Weekly Address: An All-Hands-On-Deck Approach to Fighting the Colorado Wildfires President Obama thanks the brave firefighters and volunteers who are providing food, water, and shelter to those who have been impacted by the devastating Waldo Canyon fire, and makes clear that his administration will continue to bring all resources available to assist efforts to combat the fires.
Major Step Forward for Gulf Coast Restoration Our goal and commitment is not simply to address the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill - it is to ensure the long-term improvement and restoration of the Gulf Coast and its unique ecosystems.
Shine is fresh and new and it sparkles. Shiny catches the eye and it appeals to the neophiliac, to the person in search of polish.
Patina, on the other hand, can only be earned. Patina communicates trust (because the untrusted don't last long enough to earn a patina) and it appeals to a very different audience.
The old guy at the gym in spandex, taking steroids and brutalizing himself on the big machine--he's trying to be both and accomplishing neither.
Brands and organizations face the same choice. A book like Permission Marketing could be updated weekly, in a vain attempt on my part to keep it shiny. But that makes no sense, as the ideas in it are important because they've been right for a decade, not because they're new. That's what a new title is for.
The challenge, then, is to let your classics thrive precisely because they've earned the right, because they have a patina of quality--but not to rest on those laurels, but to get busy inventing the new shiny thing for those that demand it.
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