Of the $4.3 Billion in quarterly profit that Apple reported for 2010′s Q4, over $1 Billion came from iTunes sales.*

Seth Godin’s latest book Poke the Box (Read a Summary) encourages provocation – challenging long held beliefs or accepted practices.  Seth (and others) suggest we need to re-examine our “boxes” and relish the opportunity to reinvent them.  I’m looking forward to reading it because, personally,  I think the box is dead.  And at the same time, more important than ever before.  Let me explain…

It dawned on me the other day when I did a quick inventory of the juggernaut business success stories of the 21st century – Apple.  Amazon.  Ebay.  Facebook.  Google.  Zappos.  From A-Z (literally), these businesses have one thing in common – they’ve made their billions not by selling better boxes or “thinking outside the box”, but by escaping the box mentality completely.  These companies (and others) create platforms.

Simply defined, if a box is a clearly defined product or service, a platform is a basic set of parameters that allow others to create their own boxes.

Whether it’s internally or externally facing, a platform consist of four core components:

A base:             The internet works well for this.  So does any existing physical entity.

Tools:               A platform is a place for others to build.  Give them the tools to do so.

Simplicity:   Complexity creates walls; a lid.  Too many rules and your platform will start to look eerily like a box.

Purpose:        Facebook gives people a chance to connect with their friends.  eBay’s a place to make some money.  Tell people why they should build on your platform.

The challenge with traditional boxes is that even the most successful have a limited shelf life and a growing number of competitors.  Let’s revisit Apple’s revenue report – the other $3.3 Billion in profits from 2010′s Q4 came from iPhones, Macs and iPads.  How many of the current versions of those products will be selling the same volumes six months from now?  Two years?  To be in the box business, you need to be constantly creating new boxes (iPad 2 due out early this year).  Not so with platforms.  Apple needs to make virtually no changes to the iTunes store to maintain (and likely grow) the current level of activity.

Unlike Boxes, Platforms have exponential growth potential.  They are inherently designed to benefit from socialnomics.  As more consumers adopt, more contributors are drawn in who, in turn, create more for consumers to adopt.  And the faster the platform grows, the harder it becomes for a new competitor to stand a chance.  First Mover’s Advantage takes on whole new implications in the Platform world.

So are boxes dead?  Traditional boxes, yes.  We need to think about them in new ways.  As mentioned, the iPad is a box.  But it’s also a portal to the Apple platform.  And that’s the important part.  Understanding that Apple typically keeps 30% of every App sale, how many Apps do you think a consumer has to buy before Apple made more off those than they did off the device itself?  There’s a reason why Apple TV was re-launched at $99 last year – Every person that buys one is also committing to a significant number of App Store purchases and, by lowering the price point from the original $229, Apple encourages new user to adopt their platform as well.

The main message is to not limit yourself to box thinking (regardless of whether your “outside the box” or in it).  Boxes are best when they act as a base for a well thought out platform.

One final thought on platforms:  They work as well internally as they do externally.  In my list of platform companies above, I mentioned Zappos; an online shoe retailer that sold in 2009 to Amazon for $1.2 Billion.  They sell shoes.  Zappos is, however, noteworthy for another reason:  Zappos didn’t turn their offering into a platform.  Instead, they used the power of the platform internally – turning their call center job description into a platform.  From their Las Vegas head office, Zappos call center representatives are given the training, tools and freedom to dazzle and impress their customers on their own terms.  No script, just a genuine desire to help.  And permission to do so.  Does it work?  Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh has 1.2 billion reasons to think so.

*http://www.macrumors.com/2010/10/18/apple-reports-q4-2010-profit-of-4-31-billion-on-20-34-billion-revenue-best-quarter-ever/

Chris Taylor is President of Actionable Books; a resource center for busy managers who give a damn about their team.  He helps them build platforms for change.  Learn more about their tools at actionablebooks.com/workshops.

With so much business being conducted on the internet these days, I find myself on a perpetual quest to discover the latest and greatest “secrets” for digital sales.  Not surprisingly, I often find that the “secrets” are really just the fundamentals, being practiced very well.  I recently sat down with StickerJunkie.comCEO, Andrea Lake, to discuss their digital sales strategy and what has made them so successful. Stickerjunkie sales are 100% digital and as such, optimizing their website traffic and experience is a must. Andrea attributed their success to three key strategies:

• Letting customers share- After a person places an order  they are prompted to “Share” their stickers on their Facebook wall. On the wall it links visitors back to a unique personalized page on the StickerJunkie website displaying the stickers they just made. The page is within the StickerJunkie website, and invites the visitor to create their own stickers, oftentimes converting them to a client right on the spot.
• Let customers create- While it is not necessarily feasible on all sites, giving customers the ability to customize their orders in a variety of ways gets them invested in the site. Our average time on the stickerjunkie.com site is 5 minutes, thanks to some simple customization tools
• Let customers find you- We use a ton of ad-words and get VERY specific, all the way down to the exact type of sticker, be it bumper, refrigerator, etc. This level of specificity ensures we attract the exact type of customer we want.

Recent statistics from Google+ show that 86.5% of people using the new Google+ are guys…..

And 1.4% are other, I think that’s the Mashable, New Media Film Festival, New York Giants and more…. i.e. businesses (even though Google asked businesses not to do, but hey how are they going to stop them?)

In the top 100 Google+ users 15 are female, which is not many – where are all the women ?  As a female online I am rather disappointed that “girl power” is just not there.  Having used Google+ here’s why I think this is the case,

1. They didn’t get invited in the initial set of invites
2. There aren’t enough women running online/tech companies
3. The top people in companies such as Google & Facebook are guys
4. There aren’t as many women in this space period
5. Having played with Google+ it isn’t as visually appealing as Facebook
6. Although it may be mainstream in the tech world it isn’t in the “real” world
7. Women are more cynical after the *HUGE* success of Google Buzz (that’s sarcasm J)
8. There are less female geeks than male geeks
9. It’s invite only, so creates scarcity and guys have bigger ego’s
10. For women it is “what’s the point if none of my friends are on it?”
11. From the reviews it doesn’t really offer much more than Facebook
12. Guys want to show off by telling friends they are on Google+

One writer for Mashable – Tamar Weinberg believes that it will yes have lots of sign ups, but the number of actual users won’t actually reach critical mass as it doesn’t address any unmet needs, she sees it as a glorified Facebook.  I tend to agree… would love to see what any guys reading this think!  Did you join to feel special?

Google+ has launched to much excitement, and few are as pumped about it as businesses and nonprofits.  Finally, they can be a part of the social media wave rather than catching up to their customers.  But is it too early?

I say yes, and trust me it is not easy to say that.  As the Director of Marketing and a social media nerd, I am having to sit on my hands to stop myself from creating a Google+ account for GiveForward.  But as someone who has dealt with the ups and downs of running a business’s social media, I can tell you now, patience is a virtue.

Lets start with looking at why Google doesn’t want businesses on the site just yet. Google has come out and said they aren’t ready for organizational profiles and are even saying their policy team will “actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profiles”.

To entice organizations to hold off Google is promising an experience that is unique to businesses and includes deep analytics and connection to products like AdWords.  In fact, they have even provided a spreadsheet where “non-user entities” can apply to be a part of an experiment to test out Google+ with businesses.

But my hesitations are about more than just the limitations of the experience that Google+ currently provides.  My concern is what happens when a group starts with a user profile and later tries to shift to an organizational profile.

This exact problem is something that a number of organizations ran into during the growth of Facebook, and many are still figuring it out today.   Businesses are trying to figure out how to shift their “friends” into “likes” and are losing users in the process.  Another issue is if a company needs to change the name on their Facebook page.  You can’t do it, instead you have to create a new page with the name you want and again, migrate all of your users to the new page, running the risk of losing people.

While I am pumped about Google+ and am having fun with my own user profile, I’ve seen enough businesses struggle with getting their social media profiles sorted out that I believe jumping into Google+ will just cause undue stress and frustration when the business pages emerge and everyone has to shift to take advantage of the new functionality.

The pros of joining don’t outweigh the cons just yet, so for now, my recommendation is wait for the Google+ business profiles.  In the meantime why not join Google+ with a personal profile and learn it as a user so you can have a great plan in place to reach users when you can kick off you organization’s page?

Recommended book: What Would Google Do?

Schmidt’s departure might be directly correlated to pressure the Google is feeling from social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter.

In Google’s recent earnings call Schmidt deferred to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page when asked about Google’s future strategy in Social Media.  Here are their paraphrased responses.

Brin: ..two important trends. One is the notion of real-time, and the other is the broad notion of social in terms of identity relationships and so forth. Both of those are very important to search. In fact, you’ve seen us roll out functionality along those lines. First of all, we have real-time updates built into our search, which includes Twitter and other sources. You’ve also seen us deploy social search, which allows you to find search results that are related to people who you know and friends of their friends and so forth.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg and there’s far more opportunity. We’ve touched just 1% of the capabilities that could be deployed in that realm, and you should expect us to continue to develop those kinds of capabilities.

Page: The last part of what Sergey says really resonates with me. If you think about the next five years and what your life will be like, online, socially, and what kind of things the tools will be able to do, we’re only at the very very early stages, and I’m incredibly excited about the possibilities

Schmidt’s deferral on social media hints at possible internal tension and the reason for his departure.  It probably didn’t help Schmidt when Google wasn’t able to forge a deal to acquire social deal-of-the-day provider Groupon for a rumored $6 billion dollars.  Google social initiatives Sidewiki, Buzz and Wave have failed publicly.  More damaging is the fact that Facebook has surpassed Google in terms of Web traffic.  Hitwise found that 8.9 percent of unique online visits were to Facebook this year, compared with Google’s 7.2 percent (source: Washington Post).

Ken Auletta the author of Googled posted in the New Yorker today that Schmidt, according to associates, lost some energy and focus after losing the China decision. At the same time, Google was becoming defensive. All of their social-network efforts had faltered. Facebook had replaced them as the hot tech company, the place vital engineers wanted to work.

So Eric Schmidt is out at the Google helm and Larry Page is in.  Page’s first mission will be to figure out Google’s social media strategy.  The task will not be easy as the #1 and #2 searches on Google last year were “Facebook” and “Facebook Login” respectively.

Page seems to be hitting the ground with both feet running.  While not officially taking over until April 4 Mashable reported that Google plans to launch Google Offers which will be a direct competitor to Groupon and LivingSocial.

Moments after the news Eric Schmidt posted on Twitter: “Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!”

By Erik Qualman

Recommended books for this post:

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

Googled: The End of the World As We Know It

Confidential Screen Shot of Google +1 | Please note the share functionality in the toolbar (source: TechCrunch)

• Reported image of Google +1 (formerly Google Me)
• Notice “Confidential” at the top and the share buttons
• Toolbar would exist at top of Google properties
• Key part is “loops” = “groups in Google terminology
• New toolbar expected to launch early next year

Google is playing catch-up in the social space.  Buying Groupon would have been a big game changer for them,  however as reported by several sources on Friday this appears unlikely at this point.  According to the Chicago Tribune report Groupon believes it is better off to stay independent.  It’s estimated that Groupon will make  $2 billion in revenue this year.   Next year Groupon may decide to do an IPO as well.

My personal take is Groupon should take the money and run, but I respect their independence and it’s always more fun to have more companies around.  The reason I believe they should take the money and run is that long term the robust couponing may actually be causing the businesses to be losing money.  One such reason is that some states (e.g. New Hampshire) have strict laws on expiring coupons and hence that’s a large liability to have on the books (hat tip Casey Chesire).  Who knows though, Facebook turned down a buyout and that seems to have worked out in their favor.

Thanks to TechCrunch for supplying the above information on Google +1.

By Erik Qualman

If you plan to do any holiday travel this season, it will be a bit more enjoyable as Google is providing free Internet on available flights. For social media addicts this is wonderful news!

Google Chrome has teamed up with AirTran Airways, Delta, and Virgin America to offer free Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi on every domestic flight from November 20, 2010 through January 2, 2011. These participating airlines have outfitted their entire domestic fleet with Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi.

Smartly, Google requests an e-mail address to access the free Wi-Fi.  The good news though is that you have to check a box (opt-in) to receive promotional e-mails. So, unless you check this box, you will not receive unsolicited e-mail.  Last holiday season Google successfully supplied Internet access at select airports.

I’m actually using Google Chrome (browser) while typing this on my Delta flight. I tested video Skype from this, but it didn’t work well. My guess is that if video Skype does work well on flights that authorities will quickly shut this off as I’d imagine it’s some form of security breach.  Also, I can imagine it would be quite annoying for other passengers and the drain on the bandwidth would make others surfing experience less than optimal.  Enjoy the holiday season in the friendly skies. Written by Erik Qualman

Infographic byWordStream Internet Marketing

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Top 20 Websites in the World {source: Google

Google  released a list of the top 1,000 sites in the world. This list is a result of new

features that Google has enabled for its AdWords clients, specifically allowing advertisers to  only show their  ads on these top 1,000 sites.

Facebook secures the top ranking globally with 570,000,000,000 page views and 540,000,000 unique visitors. This is interesting as Facebook self reports just over 400 million profiles, so at a “dirty math” level Facebook influences 35% more people that don’t even have a profile on Facebook [note: very dirty math].

It particularly piqued my interest, because when we were researching data for the Social Media Revolution 2 video (below) we only indicated Facebook topped Google in the U.S. for unique visitors (Hitwise). This now appears possibly a bit conservative – perhaps Facebook has achieved the top spot globally.

This list from Google will be updated monthly and does not include adult sites, ad networks, or Google. The fact that Google doesn’t include themselves is interesting to say the least and leads one to ask the question…do they not list themselves because they are no longer #1?

Google says the data is aggregated from Google Toolbar data, Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

Google can see first hand that their fiercest competition is coming from the likes of Facebook, QQ, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.  As consumers it’s fun to see this intense battle of the big boys as it only makes our Internet offerings better.

The week of SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin is an appropriate time for data to show that Facebook has overtaken Google in U.S. Market Share according to recent data from Hitwise.

Facebook surpassess Google in traffic in the U.S. according to Hitwise

While I’ve often said that Google views Social Media as their top competition, this rapid ascent by Facebook is astounding.

Facebook surpassed the previous most popular site, Google, in terms of overall traffic for the week in the U.S. Globally Facebook has 450 million users and would be the third largest country in the world behind China and India.

There is a great post on Digital Beat by Devindra Hardawar that goes into more detail:

+ Facebook 7.07% U.S. web traffic vs. Google 7.03%
+ Facebook traffic +185% vs. Google 9%
+ Comscore still ranks Google ahead of Facebook
+ TechCrunch still ranks Facebook behind Google, Yahoo and MSFT