Authoritative and strategically sound counsel for brand marketers.
A business book offers advice for brand marketers about search engine optimization.
While SEO is a common marketing topic, Schmidt says some in the field miss its most obvious benefit: “The entire point of SEO is to rank higher in search engines.” Instead of focusing on the technical aspects of SEO, the author sets his sights on its strategic use. The book begins with a helpful, basic overview of SEO, including a brief glossary of key terms. Then Schmidt, an SEO expert, quickly moves to the idea that anchors the work—a concept he calls “Brand Primacy,” which means “brands have an advantage over other websites in internet searches.” The author largely concentrates on Google, since it is by far the dominant search engine. He offers background on Google’s development (intriguing yet not mandatory to know), but more important, Schmidt makes a compelling case for how “Google favors brand websites.” In fact, he even suggests “Google ‘owns’ part of your brand in a way, which can be tough to accept.” The author displays his considerable expertise in covering such areas as “topic authority,” “long-tail keywords,” and “content clusters.” Some readers may find these terms intimidating, but Schmidt explains them clearly and directly relates them to brand primacy. Perhaps one of the more broadly useful chapters is about brand awareness. Here, the author details ways to improve online brand awareness, including public relations, guest blogging, and the creation of excellent content. A key point he makes is that brand awareness can be significantly boosted with the use of videos, especially if posted on YouTube (a Google property). Marketers will also undoubtedly find the chapter on “outranking the competition” of particular interest since it addresses specific tactics for rising above competitors in Google rankings. Thankfully, Schmidt is knowledgeable enough to predict at least the probable direction of searches in the future. He envisions, for example, that brands will evolve from information publishers into “news organizations.” There is more to the author’s predictions, but suffice it to say Schmidt has an informed eye on the future. That’s one reason marketers would do well to pay attention.
Authoritative and strategically sound counsel for brand marketers.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5445-3239-4
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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