eBay Testing New Search Features
eBay said this week it is launching a new offering called “Garden by eBay,” an area on the site that will allow members to test new features and provide feedback for improvements and changes.
Garden by eBay is an opt-in initiative with a concept that is similar to Google Labs where users can test and experiment with different features before they are officially released.
eBay says that Garden members’ feedback will be provided directly to the teams that manage new, proposed or existing features. The goal is to bring buyers and sellers into the process and help the company introduce, test and roll out features faster.
The first major feature to be introduced is a new “streamlined search” aimed at making it easier to browse and view search results. Streamlined search offers a cleaner view of inventory, and better ways for buyers to browse items. Users can compare auction and Buy It Now listings side-by-side, refine their searches with fewer clicks, get an at-a-glance view of an item’s name, price and format and view same-screen pop-up windows for item detail.
“The new Garden by eBay represents a new collaborative conversation with the eBay community-a chance to listen to their thoughts on upcoming features, and to bring them closer to our own innovation process,” said Christopher Payne, eBay vice president of search.
“And by seeding the Garden with streamlined search, we’re asking for the community’s input on improving one of the most important areas of eBay.com.”
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Why Be Fair
We’ve discussed in the past about how our brand is “everything we do”.
As an SEO provider, business owner, or service provider, your brand is more than your logo, website and advertising. It’s also what you say, what you do, how you act, and how you treat people.
Today, let’s look at the benefits of using fairness as a way to add value to your brand.
The Importance Of Reciprocation
We all know about “win-win” deals.
The best deals leave enough on both sides of the deal so both parties can prosper. A deal where one party takes all and the other party gets very little isn’t desirable for many reasons, one being it just isn’t fair.
Rational business theory often overlooks this point. If a client “wins” by screwing you down to the very last cent, and concludes the deal, then supposedly everything should now proceed through to delivery and conclusion. But humans are emotional. The aggrieved SEO is hardly going to act like a true partner. More likely, they’ll look to reciprocate the treatment they’ve received.
What is the cost of negative reciprocation?
We are social animals. If someone treats us well, and is fair, we feel we should treat them likewise. If someone screws us over – well – they can’t expect us to give 110%. What they can likely expect is negative reciprocation, which can manifest itself in many different ways. It’s not quite “revenge”, but such ill-feeling can end up costing a lot more than any savings the customer made on the deal.
The same is true of your customers.
The Process Of Fairness
It is important that your dealings with customers be:
- Fair
- Transparent
- Honest
If you commit to being fair, and be seen to be fair, you can still get more out of the deal than the other party – win-win deals don’t need to be, and most often aren’t, 50/50 – but the other party is unlikely to resent you for it if they feel the process by which the deal was arrived at was a fair one. Psychological studies have shown people often care more about how a decision was arrived at, rather than what the final decision actually was.
Fairness of the process colors people’s perception of the outcome.
What Does It Mean To “Be Fair”?
Be seen to be fair in the eyes of the person you’re dealing with. This can be difficult to make concrete, but if you don’t have a genuine intention to be be fair, you almost certainly won’t achieve it.
In practice, it means not making arbitrary decisions, listening to all parties and considering their view. It also means making making the rules transparent. A game where only one party knows the rules breeds resentment.
An outcome should be reached where each party can see each step taken, and why it was taken. People may not even like the outcome, but they are much less likely to reciprocate in a negative manner if they feel they have been treated fairly, in a fair process. A sense of fairness runs very deep in our psyche- it’s tied up with ego, self-respect, status and recognition.
This attitude of fairness can run across all aspects of business, not just in deal making and sales. It also applies to customer service. If a customer highlights a problem, how do you react? Do you see it as an opportunity to build brand? Do you seek an outcome that will advantage only you, or do you aim to arrive at a fair outcome for all? I’d wager aiming for the fair outcome is the better long-term bet.
But what happens if a customer is being unfair to you?
Of course, this can and does happen. Some people will take advantage. Again, seek to make the process fair and transparent, even though they might not like the outcome you seek.
Hard But Fair
Yes, yes – this all sounds very nice, but it’s a shark-fest out there! That may be so, but you can still play hard whilst also using fair process. You’ve heard the phrase “hard but fair”. The fairness makes the “hardness” acceptable. “Hard and unfair” tends to result in lawyers. In this respect, a fair process itself can add value, rather than destroying it by incurring extra costs.
Brand And Fairness
Proctor & Gamble have an internal set of “Ten Commandments” and the very first commandment is “Do The Right Thing”. Their employees must demonstrate” rectitude, integrity and fairness”. Sure, all companies say that, but the companies that actually do it build stronger on-going relationships, and strong brands. Do you return to companies who you felt treat you unfairly?
Your brand incorporates relationships with all those who you deal with, and may of those people you’ll deal with over and over again. Great brands aren’t just about the outcomes they achieve. They are also about how the process by which they achieve those outcomes, and if that process adds emotional value, as opposed to destroying it – by being seen to be fair – then your brand becomes stronger.
Why Many Successful People Become Jerks
Why Popular People May Seem Negative to Some
I was chatting with a friend today about one of our projects and he mentioned how he stopped liking a few other internet marketers recently due to their negativity. Him stating that gave me a bit of internal reflection, and I think it comes down to a few things…
- When people get from a certain level of success to say 5x or 10x, many may feel guilty about making the money and become negative about others to justify their own behaviors (after all, in *many* cases, when you grow income beyond a certain level it can require either moral flexibility and/or the ability to sharply change your internal values).
- Some people forget where they came from and become arrogant.
- Market forces force you to value your time. If you don’t the market will set it at $0. And so (the people they used to help for free) they now tell to screw off simply because their time is valued more and they keep having less of it to spread around to a larger pool of people. This is also a learned behavior because the neediest people are often the laziest, rudest, and least appreciative. If a person is not willing to pay you for your time they simply DO NOT VALUE IT.
That third point is worth thinking through from an economic perspective. The law of marginal utility states that the first x is worth more than the second x (be it Dollars, hours of free time, video games, pieces of food, etc). But if you are becoming abundant in one resource (cash) and scarce in another (time) the impact on the required rate of conversion is multiplied…not only is your time worth more, but even at a higher price you still have less of it to spread around.
I look to pass off some consulting projects I would have loved to have done years ago just because I have no time. (Or perhaps I lack the creativity to be able to derive sufficient yield from those projects). And, at the same time, in spite of having plenty of money to hire them I have been rejected as a potential customer. Rejection sucks, but trying to please everyone is a sure path to failure.
What is Popularity?
In Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody he described popularity as basically being an imbalance between the attention you garner and the attention you can give the market. Sure you can reach out to a few dozen people. A few hundred? Maybe. Thousands? Not a chance.
You Can Never Give Enough
In this interview Bob Dylan talks about how he can never do enough, and how the media distorts a lot of what he does in a negative frame:
On a micro-level, consider how a person who suddenly became popular may have been happy (and excited) to do an interview or 2 felt after about a dozen AOL robo-reporters contacted them in a single day. Suddenly it doesn’t feel as exclusive, important, or exciting. Wait a week or 2 and see that 90% of the interviews they did never got published and it feels at best wasteful.
And people who are popular (even in small niches) have people try to give them false complements and try to goad them into doing free work. That is part of the reason I love our current business model. I can respond with “Great question. Feel free to ask that in the member forums!” It not so subtly tells them that if they value my time they are welcome to it, and if not then they are not.
Does the above always work out perfectly? Not always. I have been told I was rude from people who had questions about things with our site (and were alleged potential customers) but most of them were from people who were too lazy to read the publicly accessible information BEFORE trying to dip into my time. If someone needs a lot of your time to become a customer they are not likely to become a customer. And if you sell consulting then they are likely going to waste a lot of your time if/when they actually become a customer (as they will be the type of person who reads nothing, ignores responses, and has about 40 questions in their first day).
*(Perhaps the only exception to that is large slow moving corporations which need a sign off from many people. But even then I never do RFPs just because it means you are being shopped and they are not serious about hiring you).
Just a Quick Question … (or 10)
You have to filter or else you are valuing your time at nothing. This is especially true if you run a small company and have heavy load on yourself day in and day out.
The big issue with email (especially with non-customers) is that you can never give enough. Even if you give your time away for nothing many of them try to use the “just one more quick question” approach. A recent freeloader asked “what do you recommend for an internet business?” and my response was “sell your time and expertise to people who value it enough to pay for it, and forget the rest of em.”
And he got the message 
But while mentioning the above about the perceived negativity of some other internet marketers to a friend, I wrote “the thing is, if we didn’t chat and you didn’t see me helping on the forums and just read my blog, sometimes I would sound quite negative right?”
A person who read the last dozen blog posts but didn’t know the background context on Mahalo would certainly think that way. But those posts were made out of love for the industry. You just need to share the love to understand it. 
Deciding what goes where bit is also where selling information becomes tricky. There are tips worth 3, 4, 5, or even 6 figures (based on results) that have been shared in our community. And I have also shared many such tips on the blog here too. But it is tricky to figure out what to post where. You want to post enough publicly to maintain relevancy and audience and awareness, but you want to keep a lot of your best tips private so the people who are paying you get far more than their money’s worth. That is the only way to keep subscribers happy. And it is far more efficient to keep current subscribers happy than it is to churn through a ton of members & hunt for more.
It is amazingly hard to have enough time to keep learning, come up with original stuff, and keep adding value in a saturated marketplace for a few months straight. And it is infinitely harder to do it for close to a decade. But we try our best, in spite of the fact that expectations from us and pressure on us never lower.
When Doing Charity Work…
Once you go from helping everyone because you think you have to & feel it is your duty … to a person who realizes 95% of people are useless (and won’t even listen to the advice they claim to NEED, but need for free) … well it makes you more cynical when helping the needy and resource-less, and keeps you focused on productively spending your time on the 5% who do matter
There is a large segment of people who think they can act like dirtbags just because you are a small business, but trying to help those types of people will just pull you down rather than lifting them up. Their lack of perceived value in others is a reflection of an internal perceived lack of value. The best marketing techniques are often a reflection of the passion of a business owner. Its very hard to make a career out of providing marketing services to people who lack self-esteem (unless perhaps you are selling a get rich quick package).
The fact that you cant help everyone forces you to filter. And if you want to do charity work you may as well monetize your time at market rate then use some of that income to feed a bunch of poor children in the third world, rather than give your time away to pikers who don’t value it.
Insecurity / Peter Principal
Many people who are successful are not any smarter or more gifted than everyone else. They are not superheros. In most cases they just work harder and are more focused. Timing helps too.
And in some cases if people become popular too quickly they may fear that their reputation has got ahead of them. Any time they interact with others is some level of risk of being exposed. And if they interact with people quickly and hastily then those people will be far more likely to misquote them or try to tear them apart…so sometimes it is better to be non-responsive than to respond, especially when the opportunity offers little to no upside to counterbalance the associated risks.
A relevant example:
Bullying Freetards
One time a guy on Twitter complained about our conversion flow and he was too lazy to click the “don’t show again” link on a pop up…while being too lazy to click that link he was willing to go to the length to write a feature attack post on his blog.
Another time on Twitter a girl threatened that she would no longer recommend our site because we require people to set up accounts to download our free tools. I explained that the email option is primarily so we could give the people who would potentially care to convert another path / chance to. But she stated that I needed to state what all promotions I intend to email for the next x months/years upfront to collect an email. Meanwhile you can’t buy a server from her company without going through multiple high pressure sales calls with multiple final offers, etc. Freetards *always* demand more transparency from you then they provide themselves (or offer at their place of employment).
After reading a post on why I thought making Google Chrome SEO extensions was a bad idea that would cost me money while providing 0 yield one guy wrote a blog post about how evil I am for only offering Firefox extensions. He then explained how he thought all SEO stuff should be free. Meanwhile he is a programmer who has done exactly nothing useful for the SEO industry and has already heavily wrapped his blog in cheesy ads, promoting some of the very paid tools he stated should be free … (and the ads were often promoting the scammiest end of the market, too).
Summary
Lots of great things are free. And its awesome that there are so many cheap or free options. But figuring out how to combine them all into something profitable is valuable. Having the courage to invest heavily (in marketing, in education, in content, etc.) is crucial in a market saturated by noise. Food and rent are not free, and neither is our time (when you consider that we all eventually perish). When some people filter out noise they may be seen as negative, but in most cases if you were in their shoes you would probably do the same things they do.*
* Except for the cheesy mo-money rapper photos. Nobody likes that crap. NOBODY
LinkedIn Allows Users To Edit Profile Layouts
It’s no secret that most people like having a measure of control, and today, LinkedIn gave it to them. Members of the professional network can now rearrange their profiles’ sections in order to highlight whatever parts of their resumes make them proudest.
Aaron Bronzan, an associate product manager, explained the change on the LinkedIn Blog. He wrote, “You will notice that the headers of each of the sections on your ‘Edit Profile’ page now have handles that can be dragged. To reorder a section, all you need to do is click and drag one of these section headers up or down the body of your profile.”
This move should allow all sorts of people to get more out of LinkedIn. Students who have only worked in fast food could, for example, show off the name of a prestigious university. Or people who’ve been laid off could highlight recommendations proving that they left on good terms.
The change is definitely a welcome one. It’s apparently not going to represent an isolated upgrade, either.
Bronzan promised, “The ability to reorder the sections on your profile is just the first of a huge number of enhancements that are coming to your LinkedIn profile in the upcoming months. And, as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions about how LinkedIn can help you to represent, manage, and share your professional identity.”
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> LinkedIn For iPhone 3.0 Launches
> LinkedIn Launches Faceted Search Feature
Why Mahalo (and Other Content Scrapers) Render Google’s Spam Team Flaccid
I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at a conference where Demand Media’s CEO spoke, and he stated that nobody asked the big question: “what if google decides they don’t like you anymore?”
Then I got thinking about how Google torched Squidoo after Jason Calacanis went on his public campaign to rebrand it as spam. But today under the same level of scrutiny, how is Mahalo (which scrapes millions of 3rd party content listings *without any editorial filter*) not spam? Squidoo at least donates $10,000 a month to charity. Mahalo just “borrows” your content without permission and keeps all the cash.
In the past Google hated content scrapers pretty bad. How bad? Well a guy named Teeceo used to make scraper sites, and here is how Matt Cutts described his work:
In the chat room, I said hello to teeceo, but I know the stuff that he was doing and it’s shoot-on-sight. I think anyone who is blackhat knows (or should know) that I’m happy to talk to anyone, but that we’ll still take action on the spam we find.
Imagine taking that approach to hunting search spam all day long, and then ignoring the *fact* that Mahalo is scraping millions of third party listings and using them as content with no editorial filtering.
Then I started thinking about why the Google spam team could ignore something as outrageous as Mahalo, especially when it was built by a guy who was a false anti-spam evangelist. Is it because Jason is a good guy? No. Is it because there is some actual editorial vetting of the content? no. Is it because Google is getting a cut of the AdSense revenues? Google doesn’t need the short term cash flow (look at all the affiliate AdWords advertisers they just torched), so that is too cynical of a view.
Yes Google wants display inventory (their biggest opportunity for 2010 according to the quarterly call), and these “content” websites have already given themselves over to Google as inventory. But it must be something deeper than that. So I started thinking about it from a longterm strategic level…
Google won’t penalize sites like Mahalo (even though they blatantly violate Google’s guidelines) because Google *wants* to use the works of companies like Mahalo, Demand Media, and Aol to lower the value of other content and bankrupt a lot of the traditional media companies.
Why would Google want to do that?
There is excessive duplication in the marketplace. The faster that duplication is driven out of the marketplace the more desperate companies will be to cut deals with Google. And while there is a down market Google can drive companies out of the market and just claim that it was the economy that did it (much like how Mahalo used the down economy as an excuse to fire most of their editorial staff and replace them with content scraping robots).
Once a lot of media companies are bankrupted, the market is far more efficient, and there are fewer mouths to feed, that means Google can squeeze greater profits margins out of the media ecosystem by getting a fatter cut of the ad revenue.
Currently this shift is risk free because almost nobody understands how the marketplace works. Sure Paul Kedrosky and Mike Arrington blogged about the search results getting spammier, but until you frequently read the above listed sequence on sites outside of the SEO industry there is no damage to the Google brand in them turning the internet into a cesspool.
Once it starts harming the Google brand then I suspect them to act quickly and decisively. And sites like Mahalo will see a sharp drop in traffic. Jason better milk it while he can. The clock is ticking.