Still Zappos sent an email around to customers, which said:

First, the bad news:

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any additional questions about this process, please email us at passwordchange@zappos.com.

TechCrunch shares an email from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to the company’s employees which says:

The most important focus for us right now is the safety and security of our customers’ information. Within the next hour, we will begin the process of notifying the 24+ million customer accounts in our database about the incident and help step them through the process of choosing a new password for their accounts. (We’ve already reset and expired their existing passwords.)

Zappos was acquired by Amazon in 2009.

Original Article: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh sent an email to Zappos employees today informing them that Amazon is becoming the only shareholder of Zappos stock. The following video from Jeff Bezos was also posted on the Zappos Blog:

Here is a sample of what Hsieh said in the email:

Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say "Amazon acquires Zappos" or "Zappos sells to Amazon". While those headlines are technically correct, they don’t really properly convey the spirit of the transaction. (I personally would prefer the headline “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…”)

We think that now is the right time to join forces with Amazon because there is a huge opportunity to leverage each other’s strengths and move even faster towards our long term vision. For Zappos, our vision remains the same: delivering happiness to customers, employees, and vendors. We just want to get there faster.

Zappos employees will still have their jobs, and the company will continue to run the same way. In fact, Zappos says they will need to hire more people to continue growing. The company’s leaders will remain in place as well.

For all of the available details, you can read the entire lengthy email here, as well as a Q&A. The transaction is not one of cash. Zappos shareholders and option holders will be issued 10 million Amazon shares. More details of the deal will be made public after an SEC filing.
 

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The event is pretty heavily weighted toward SEM and I asked what turned out, to those in attendance, to be a bit of a dopey question. I asked "How many here are interested purely in SEM?" then when only a couple of hands were raised, I was encouraged to think it may be more of an SEO crowd, so I asked "How many are interested purely in SEO?" and saw only another sprinkling of raised hands.

So, based on one of my previous experiences at a major company where the team was half SEM and half SEO, and my current position, which is entirely SEO team with no SEM – I assumed a similar situation would be true of most in-house teams at substantially sized companies.

My assumption was apparently skewed. It seems that most do double-duty on in-house teams. When I asked "What’s the balance here?" a few people said, (a few with emotion) "Both!"

That surprised me, based on what I knew before asking that question. But now I know that, at least among the crowd attending Search Insider Summit, that the oft joined SEM/SEO label applies to most. Well I suppose that was a gaff then, but…

Later in the day, I overheard a conversation on a shuttle bus which makes me wonder if SEO is being best served by in-house SEM/SEO’s. After two strangers from the conference exchanged greetings & pleasantries, the inevitable "What do you do?" came up from one.

The answer, "SEM and I’ve been tasked with learning SEO for our team." (emphasis mine) Then the response from an ill-informed questioner was short-sighted and probably simplistic thinking from those who THINK they understand SEO – "So you’re learning about meta tags and H1′s?"

I’d like to argue that the two disciplines should be divided and I’d wager that many SEM’s who love what they do will agree. The skill-set is completely different. Both SEM’s and SEO’s deal with keywords, and target search engine results pages, but that is where the similarity ends.

Having recently worked day-to-day with an SEM team in-house and being separated only by a cubicle wall for 18 months. I recall the SEO team only dealing with the SEM team during our bi-weekly online marketing group meetings.

So if someone who loves SEM is "tasked with learning SEO," (like that overheard conversation I mentioned above) they are not likely to understand or fully invest themselves in truly learning an important aspect of the Search Marketing business. They’ll learn a couple of things and not all aspects of the work. They’ll continue to do a great job of SEM and start doing a poor job of SEO.

I’ll also argue that if that role is reversed and an SEO is "tasked with learning SEM for the team" then they will learn a few things, but not all of the elements of good SEM and not do a complete and thorough job of SEM but will continue to do a good job of SEO.

I recall a couple of job interviews about 5 years ago where in both cases, I was talking with an SEM manager who had convinced their boss that they needed a full-time SEO on staff to handle things they weren’t able to continue doing as the company grew. Rather than evenly split SEM and SEO tasks among two staffers, they were dividing the two. That’s the smart way to go.

I didn’t take either of those jobs, and I’m quite happy about that now. I also walked away from a job that would have required me to significantly sharpen my SEM skills so that I could handle both. I didn’t doubt that I could do it, but love SEO and very likely wouldn’t have done as well with the SEM piece.

So I’d like to ask the question of those SEM/SEO dual purpose people – are you doing both because you love both or are you doing both because you were "tasked to learn" one of those pieces because your company won’t increase the budget enough for a new head on the payroll? Would you rather focus on one or continue doing both?

Comments

This recent article about a practice at Zappos.com where they pay new customer service employees $1,000 to quit after their first month of training caught my eye. They seem to be thinking it’s doing well so far in making sure the employees working for Zappos.com really want to be there and feel that they are a good fit for the company.

It also brings up some questions. Does this affect the type of applicants they are getting? Do they have people applying with plans to actually quit ahead of time? Seems unlikely to me to go through a month’s worth of work and quit just to get an extra $1,000 opposed to keeping the job.

Is $1,000 enough? Would the number of employees quitting change if the number were $5,000? $10,000? They say that 10% of employees take them up on the $1,000 offer. How many take them up on a $10,000 offer? Is it the amount of money that matters, or just really giving the employees an easy out after the first month when they realize it isn’t for them?

Could this technique be used for more advanced positions? It seems to be working for customer service, but would it work for software developers? Marketing executives? Sure, you probably have to raise the number, but if I hired an experienced product marketer would they quit after a month for $10,000?

As I think through it, I think it might be the easy out of a job you don’t like instead of people really wanting the $1,000. Thoughts?

Comments

Repetition is key.  If a company’s name happens to involve four or five words, perhaps not all of them needed to be included in every sentence (searchers are likely to type an abbreviated form, anyway).  Here’s a point again, though: repetition is key.  If a name occurs once on one page, and sixty times on another, the second page is likely to be judged more relevant.

Linda Bustos notes in regards to the Zappos site, "[I]ts Nine West page . . . includes 272 occurrences of "Nine West" on this page – that’s 4.55% of the entire page copy.  This is what is referred to as ‘keyword density.’  Though keyword density is not as important to SEO as was once thought (title tag, keyword rich backlinks from other sites and the domain’s overall authority have more impact), this page certainly is considered highly relevant to ‘Nine West’ by Google."

 Zappos.com

There are other things to learn from Zappos, too.  The page Bustos highlights has scads (with "scads" being equivalent to "more than I care to count") of user reviews and ratings.  Some of the ratings are quite low, yet the apparent honesty and existence of a community here will make users trust the site even more.  They may go on to purchase other products, or if they can get past the reviewers’ objections, even the same low-rated ones.

What users like, Google likes, of course, and even ignoring the user-generated aspect of reviews, they should count as unique content.  Things that make a site stand out from the competition are almost always good.

Consider imitating another Zappos tactic, then, and put tempting offers in title tags.  Consumers have little chance of not noticing the company’s free shipping policy; if you’ve got anything similar, show it off.  Google’s probably noticed by now that people are drawn to words like "free" and "cheap."

Add together all these factors, and Bustos states, "Zappos ranks #3 in between some of Nine West’s own domains.  This is significant because search engines can recognize brand names’ official pages and consider them ‘vital’ results.  To outrank vital results takes skill.  Sure, this is just one page, but run a few brand or product searches in Google and you’ll find Zappos in the top 3 most of the time."

Since Zappos has managed to achieve its success in such a huge market, many of you will hopefully be able to pull off similar victories in whatever sectors you serve.  Don’t expect anything magical to happen overnight – Zappos was founded in 1999 – but at the same time, everything aside from the user reviews can probably be pulled together in a short period of time.