Seth Godin has caused me to raise my eyebrows again.

“Marketing (the use of time and money to create a story and spread it) works. Human beings don’t make rational decisions, they make emotional ones, and we’ve seen time and again that those decisions are influenced by the time and money spent by marketers.

So, assuming you’ve got no argument with that (and if you’re a marketer who doesn’t believe marketing works, we need to have a longer discussion…) then we get to the next part of the argument.”

I have an argument with that. I like Seth, and his ideas are extremely interesting. But is that his definition of marketing? “The use of time and money to create a story and spread it”?

Time and money? Create a story?

At the most basic level, isn’t marketing the link between the product and the customer?

The rest I agree with:

“We’re responsible for what we sell and how we sell it. We’re responsible for the effects (and the side effects) of our actions.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Which is why we have the following policy on our website:

We reserve the right to refuse to work with any application that we are not comfortable with. This may include (but is not limited to) adult, gambling, lottery, fortune telling, applications that are based on unsound principles, applications promoting violence of any kind, and any application that we deem unfit.

In addition, we will not work with any software that we feel will not benefit from our services. This may include (but is not limited to) software that we feel will not sell, software that is poorly implemented or software offering no competitive advantage.

There is morality in marketing. We’re not all pushing cigarettes.

Marketing Morality

Yes, it’s time for another update on the state of Windows Vista – and according to the latest news, it will be available by the end of January. Prices have been released, too, although technically it’s more of a question of “leaked and covered”.

Particularly eager Vista-ites can order their copies from Amazon already.

“Full-copy prices are:

Windows Vista Ultimate for $399; Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade for $259; Windows Vista Business for $299; Windows Vista Home Basic for $199.”

There, I hope that helped scratch your Vista itch for this week.

Vista availability: Make that ‘late January’

At SoftwarePromotions, we’ve become increasingly aware of the potential of social bookmarking websites, and it’s also something we like to handle for our clients. More and more site owners are reporting significant traffic boosts from sites like Digg and Del.icio.us, and they can certainly be very helpful for making a wider audience aware of your product and/or site.

Of course, it’s usually not as simple as submitting your site and hoping that other people will have time to notice it before it’s swallowed up or pushed down by a deluge of other submissions. No, you need to make more of an effort than that.

Think about the things you like to read, or are likely to bookmark. Interesting or helpful stories, lists of tips and hints, articles which talk you through complicated ideas or procedures. These are the kind of items that other people are likely to notice, too.

On his blog, Rohit Bhargava has published what he calls the 5 rules of Social Media Optimization. In other words, how do you make your site content more interesting, and more likely to be bookmarked/linked to? Other people have added more rules, and they now stand a total of 16.

My personal favourite? Rule 6: be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense – although I might have altered it to “even if it doesn’t offer any immediate benefits”.

Oh, and over at SEOmoz, Rand has published a list of his best sites for SMOing. Also well worth a look.

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization

Is there are difference between running a business-to-business site and a business-to-consumer site? Probably, yes, although it depends on the site. But essentially, it all comes down to reaching the individual, human, site visitor. And people tend to behave like people, whether they’re browsing at home or at work.

This is what I’ve always thought, and over at UIB, Jared Spool is of the same opinion, and goes as far as calling the difference between B2B and B2C a myth:

“Having looked into this for the last ten years, we can conclusively say you won’t find any difference in how people behave on one site or the other.”

Very good point, methinks. Well worth a read.

Designing for B2B is No Different From Designing for B2C

On Sunday night, Google announced the availability of Google Apps for Your Domain:

“A set of hosted applications for organizations that want to provide high quality communications tools to their users without the hassle of installing and maintaining software or hardware.”

Or, in other words, private-labeled Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Page Creator. So far, only the free version has launched, and it’s available worldwide as a hosted service.

Not surprisingly, the Internet is already buzzing about this. So far, the consensus seems to be: read the terms of service very carefully – especially if you’re at all concerned about data collection.

Google Launches Hosted Communications Services

So, it looks like Microsoft is set on sticking with their 12 principles. They’ve now extended a helping hand to Firefox developers, offering to assist them to ensure that Firefox will work well with Vista.

One of Mozilla’s “phenomenologists” has declared that they’re definitely “interested in getting some one-to-one support”.

How lovely.

Not surprisingly, suspicion and conspiracy theories now abound in the open source community.

Microsoft offers helping hand to Firefox

I suppose it is Friday, but I must admit I wasn’t prepared for this. A study which will soon be released argues that the Internet can be just as addictive as alcohol – I don’t quite agree, but so far nothing new.

No, what’s new is that this study predicts that employers will be held responsible for future Internet addicts, and can expect to be sued when their workers discover that they’re hooked on technology. From Ars Technica:

“”Employers rightfully provide programs to help workers with chemical or substance addictions. Addiction to technology can be equally damaging to the mental health of the worker,” states Porter, an associate professor of management at [Rutgers University School of Business at Camden].”

I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous. I don’t even know what else to say.

Employers may face liability for connectivity addiction

If you make use of the Google AdWords My Client Centre, you may be interested in a recent post regarding MCC Alerts on our Google AdWords News blog.

Actually if you work with Google AdWords at all, you should probably subscribe to our Google AdWords News feed.

Have you ever come across domains like funnymsn.com, or genuinewindowsvista.com? Or perhaps you’ve just mistyped a URL and ended up somewhere like xbox360com.com? When you go there, these sites are just full of adverts and meaningless content.

For Microsoft, this is a growing problem, because more than 2,000 of these types of domains are registered every day. And now they’ve had enough.

Yesterday, they announced in a press release that they are filing two civil law suits against a total of four defendants who they claim are profiting from these trademark-infringing domains. These defendants are named and shamed in the press release.

Microsoft are also working hard to stop the online auctions that sell these domain names.

I wish them luck. It’s exactly this type of spammy, useless content that the Internet needs less of. Much, much less.

Microsoft Launches Enforcement Campaign Targeting Web Site “Cybersquatters” Who Use Online Ads

 Matt Cutts has an excellent posting on what you should be writing about if you want to attract search engine traffic. It’s easy, really: write about something that hasn’t already been covered a thousand times.

Okay, that might sound difficult, but Matt’s point is that you should seize any and all opportunities. In other words, every time you’re looking for something obscure online and have trouble finding what you’re looking for, write a small article on that topic. Get to know the niche first, use your keywords correctly, and voilà, you have link bait.

Just make sure it really is a unique and useful topic, rather than regurgitated nonsense about the benefits of this mortgage or that online casino. In Matt’s example post, he talks about changing the default printer for Firefox on Linux. Very narrow and targeted, in other words.

Great advice.

Writing useful articles that readers will love