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How Apple Dominates

What makes Apple tick? How is it that it came back from the dead to surpass both Google and Microsoft in market cap? French consulting firm faberNovel takes a stab at explaining Apple’s success and its strategy against its two main rivals in the SlideShare above. (In the past, faberNovel has created similar slideshows about Google).

The 48-slide presentation, titles “Apple: 8 Easy Steps To Beat Microsoft (And Google),” boils Apple’s strategy down to eight steps including “the arrogance of simplicity” (Step 1) to customer lock-in (Step 3), selling at a premium (Step 4), cross-selling products (Step 5), and, of course, think different (Step 7). Much of this is not new information, but seeing it all in a detailed slide presentation helps put Apple’s various moves in context.

Apple starts by stripping away complexity from computing products, paring down features in favor of making their products more effortless to master. Apple locks in customers by controlling every aspect of a product through vertical integration. For instance, it doesn’t make much money from iTunes, but that is how it keeps customers coming back. It makes its money from hardware, which it sells at a premium. It has been able to increase its gross margins from 23 percent in 2001 to 40 percent last year.

Over that time period, it went from a niche, high-end computer maker to a consumer electronics company. But its iPods, iPhones, and iPads bring new consumers into the Mac fold and drive sales of Mac computers, which of course work better with all of its other devices. The iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad are what drive mainstream adoption for Apple and have propelled it to become the powerhouse it is today.

PS: How Apple Dominates (In Slides)

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing (via Search Engine Journal)

Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing (via Search Engine Journal):

Do’s:
1) Build a strong social network.
2) Expend your effort building the trust quotient of your site.
3) It’s simple, it may sound a little hackneyed, but it is also true – pretty impossible to drive a social media campaign without a blog.
4) This is a classic tip, works every time. You may remember a time when ‘List’ posts were all the rage
5) Keep your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your finger on the pulse.
6) Social media marketing can hardly be possible unless you are willing to be, you know, social.
7) Stick to your brand philosophy.
8 ) Be familiar with the social culture of the communities.

DON’Ts:
1) Don’t ‘spam’ on social sites.
2) Avoid blatant marketing tactics, be subtle.
3) Don’t forget to keep your social profiles live and updated.
4) Don’t forget about Online Reputation Management.
5) Don’t drop search in favor of social.
6) Don’t try to do too much too fast. Let your SMM take a natural course.
7) You social media activities should be primed to bring exposure to your site.
8 ) Don’t engage in social climbing.

PS: More info about this blog at Do’s & Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

15 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed (via mashable)

(via mashable) Please find the post that will render you more knowledge about Social Media. Social Media Resources:

Social Media:
1) 5 Stellar Ways to Explore Space Using Social Media
2) 6 Easy Ways to Score the Best Deals with Social Media
3) 4 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Google Buzz
4) 10 Beautiful Free Blogger Templates
5) The Future Newsroom: Lean, Open and Social Media-Savvy
6) 10 Essential Design Tools for Social Media Pros
7) 15 Insanely Popular Lady Gaga YouTube Videos


Mobile:
8 ) How the Fashion Industry Uses Location-Based Marketing
9) 3 Useful iPhone Apps to Help File Your Taxes
10) 5 Brilliant iPhone Apps for Baseball Fans


Business:
11) Why Your Brand Needs to Be on Facebook Now
12) How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media for Real Results
13) Yelp for Business: 4 Steps for Success
14) 13 Essential Social Media Lessons for B2B Marketers from the Masters
15) How Pixar Creates Great Films and Balances Art, Tech and Success


PS: Complete blog on 15 Essential Social Media Resources via Mashable Social Media Guide:Social Media Resources

SOA

What is SOA?
1) A paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions.
2) SOA is a way to define a distributed system where several autonomous services work in conjunction by passing messages across boundaries using well defined interfaces.
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more on SEO

1) robots.txt file The robots.txt is a simple text file that is placed on our root directory. Search Bots, crawl each URL and the first thing they search on an URL root is the robots.txt file. A simple robots.txt looks like:
User-agent: * Disallow:
"User-agent: *" means this section applies to all robots, the wildcard "*" means all bots. The "Disallow: " tells the robots that they can go anywhere they want. To exclude all robots from the server:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
robots.txt should have the same place where you put your web site's main "index.html".Also remember to use all lower case for the filename: "robots.txt", not "Robots.TXT.

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SEO basics

This post discusses about search engine ranking for the pages and some simple ways to improve ranking on google. Few basic points to keep in mind:

TITLE Element: Make sure that the TITLE Element is relevant to the content on the page. Page title elements are normally 60-80 characters maximum in length.

META description Tag: The META description tag usually consists of no more than 160 to 180 characters total . The META description also shows up in many search engine results as a summary of your site.

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