Apple issued a big “screw you” to detractors yesterday when they announced their quarterly profit results.  The cold, hard facts are below, but in recent weeks, the media has issued shrill warnings that Apple had lost its touch and become “arrogant.”  Apple had lost its way.  Apple was producing crappy products.  Antennagate.

Working in the financial sector, I know that the proof is always in the earnings pudding – and in Wall Street’s take on it.  Here’s what Apple announced, according to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

• Quarterly profit surged 78%, as the company booked strong initial sales of its iPad tablet computer and the latest version of its smartphone, the iPhone 4.
• Apple’s revenue in the quarter ended June 26 rose 61% to $15.7 billion. SIXTY ONE PERCENT.
• Apple is selling iPads and iPhones “as fast as we can make them” and “working around the clock to try to get supply and demand in balance.”
• Shares of Apple rose 2.5% in after-hours trading. The stock closed Tuesday at $251.89 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
• Apple sold 3.5 million computers, up 33% from a year ago.
• Apple said it sold 3.3 million iPads since the tablet went on sale, generating revenue of $2.16 billion. The company said the average sales price for its iPad was $640, suggesting many customers opted for higher-priced models with cellular-data service.
• Research company iSuppli earlier raised its estimate for iPad sales in 2010 to 12.9 million from 7.1 million, saying the only limitation was production capacity, not demand.
• While analysts were also concerned that consumers might hold off buying iPhones in the quarter until the iPhone 4 was released, Apple sold 8.4 million iPhones during the period, up 61% from a year ago.
• Apple posted a fiscal third-quarter profit of $3.25 billion, or $3.51 a share, compared with $1.83 billion, or $2.01 a share a year earlier.

I  could go on and on, but let’s first address the iPhone 4.0 issue.  According to Jobs’ press conference, demand has not abated since “Antennagate.”  People still want the phone.  BUT – if iPhone sales fell, other sectors are still strong.  iPads are selling as fast as Apple can make them and Macs sales are up by a third.  Even if they did not sell a single iPhone 4.0, they would have generated a profit.

I held my tongue in recent weeks because I wanted to see what the earnings and Wall Street said.

The verdict for Apple?

Screw you, Antennagate.  We’re as strong as ever.

Mark

P.S. – Since this post touches on the financial sector, I’ll let you know that the thoughts expressed in this post are mine and mine alone and do not reflect those of the Chairman, Commissioners or my colleagues at the Securities and Exchange Commission.  So there.

I applaud the spirit of entrepreneurialism.  An aspiring genius sees a void, produces a product or service that fills that void and profits from it.  That’s the free market, right?

Oh – except when something annoys the living hell out of you, like spam.

Sure, I hate the offers from Nigerian royalty and people offering to enlarge my various body parts, but I could tolerate it when it came via email.  When Verizon (my ISP) lost a class-action suit AGAINST SPAMMERS – who was your lawyer on that one? — I began filtering all of my email through Gmail.  Their spam filter is a lot better than the sieve that is Verizon.  So I got that pesky email spam under control.

Then I created the blog that preceded this one – with an email address.  Whammo-bammo, hello Viagra and Cialis – AND FOR FREE!

So I created a CAPTCHA form.  More comment spam.  For this blog, Mr. Akismet tells me that he has kept me from 51,973 spam message.  Hey, thanks!

Then I got a Twitter account. When I started getting some  followers, pictures of scantily clad females with one post, following 12,000 people and with 200 (apparently stupid and desperate) followers showed up, I figured out how to block people.  And Amanda Chapel.  Twice.

Then I started testing on Twitter and would use the word “porn” in my Tweet just to see what happens.  Suddenly, I would gain 50 college coeds looking for a good time.  More spam.  W00T!

Now I use Posterous, and I am just waiting for these evil geniuses to catch up with me. But I have a solution:  HIRE THEM.

International Hire a Spammer Day

As an employer, you often seek those people who are most creative, profit-driven and willing to do what it takes to get your message out.  Hello, spammer job description!  U.S. lawmakers cracking down?  No problemo.  We’ll take our server and head offshore to somewhere where they don’t even know that have the Internet.  THAT’S the spirit of entreprenuerialism.

C’mon. It’s the holidays.  These poor guys living overseas want to come home from their villas and mansions and start helping the millions of idiots who click on these links every day.  Remember the movie “Catch Me If You Can,” when Tom Hanks hired Matt Damon to help catch forgers?   Same deal.  Hire the people you are chasing.

So if we make tomorrow International Hire a Spammer Day, we can take all of these poor, lost souls and show them the way of the righteous path.   Or, according to Robert Scoble, we could just have them do pitching for public relations agencies.

C’mon. Forget the widow and orphans.  Hire a spammer.

Mark

P.S. – Dear FTC:  this is satire.

This post is a bit of an intro to an upcoming contribution to For Immediate Release that will air on Monday, but I have been giving a lot of thought lately to the role of social media in government from the consumer perspective.

Last month, ForSee Research released their annual survey of government Web sites. The good news? Perception of the usability of government Web sites is on the rise. The bad news? Most still fall behind sites in the private sector.

Like the old “Family Feud,” survey said:

• Citizen satisfaction reaches an all­ time high. Satisfaction with e‐gov rates a 75.2 on the ACSI’s 100‐point scale, the highest aggregate score ever recorded by the E‐Gov Index.
• E­gov that satisfies citizens is still the most efficient and cost­ effective channel. The federal government can save overhead costs related to call centers and localized office locations by meeting citizens’ online needs and expectations. Citizens who are highly satisfied with a federal government website are 86% more likely to use the website as a primary resource (as opposed to other, more costly channels), 79% more likely to recommend the website, and 52% more likely to return to the website.
• Functionality remains the top priority for improving federal government websites, in aggregate. Citizens are looking to federal government websites with expectations for features and functions that are not yet being fully met. Functionality, look and feel, and navigation are the top priority elements for a large proportion of sites. In addition, 88% of the subset of sites that measure citizens’ opinions on their search feature found it to be a top priority element. Improvements to these satisfaction drivers will have the largest impact on overall satisfaction with federal government websites, in aggregate, and therefore could increase a citizen’s likelihood to return to the sites, recommend them, and use them as a primary resource.
• Satisfaction increased for all four measured website function categories, but citizens are most satisfied with e­commerce/transaction government websites, which had a notable quarter‐over‐quarter increase from 77.6 to 81.5 as a category, as did career and recruitment websites. These two categories are the smallest, however, so it is important to note that increases were also measured in the much larger portals/department main sites and information/news categories.
• Satisfaction with e­gov is catching up to satisfaction with the private sector. Aggregate citizen satisfaction with e‐gov still lags behind satisfaction with e‐retail and search engines, but e‐gov outperforms online brokerage and online news. At the individual site level, a larger proportion of e‐gov websites score over 80 than do e‐retail websites. Some sites from the Social Security Administration and from Health and Human Services surpass even those of the private sector stalwarts like Netflix and Amazon.

So why is all of this important?  Two BIG reasons.

1. Even with the health care debate raging in Washington, it is reasonable to think that some form of health care reform will pass.  This will move millions of citizens from private sector Web sites to government Web sites.  We have to keep up;  this will not only be new Web properties, but likely an entirely different way of interacting with the federal government.  Think about the point above of citizens carrying out transactions with the government on the Web”  “Citizens are looking to federal government websites with expectations for features and functions that are not yet being fully met.“
2. We are approaching — or at — retirement for baby boomers.   More than ever, this flood of people will be accessing sites like social security and Medicare with questions (and the good news is that the Social Security Administration ranked #1, #2 and #3 in the survey for some of their micro sites).  There will also be an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the “greatest generation” to their offspring — the largest in American history — in the coming years.  Hello, IRS.gov.

My two cents is that “good enough” is not “good enough.”  If the federal government requires, or offers the option to sign up millions of Americans for services, we have to have the absolute, number one, best-in-class, most usable Web sites.  Period.

Disclaimer:  I am Director of New Media for the Securities and Exchange Commission.  This posting in no way reflects the views of the Chairman, the Commissioners or my colleagues at the SEC.  Or probably of the two people who will read it.

Mark

There has been amazing success and a lot of fun with #followfriday.  The last few Fridays, I have forgotten to do my own, and then, all of sudden, I’ll see my Twitter followers tick up by a few and realize that someone out there was nice enough to send people my way.

So here’s my idea: #blogmonday.

I wish I had the time to read all of the insightful, informative and entertaining blogs out there, but I also know, that, as big as my blogroll is, I could be bigger.  While we encourage others to follow someone on Twitter on Fridays, these thoughts sometimes link to blogs, and other times link to thoughts.

With so many good, “wicked smaht” people out there, I think that we should, starting on Mondays, compose posts about the other good bloggers out there.  Let’s improve each others’ Google rankings, Technorati rankings and other visibility tools and show the world some good blogging.

Not only is this good to publicize each others’ efforts, it’s also a good way to push back on the “bad PR”/bad blogging practices that we have heard so much about lately.

Do what do you say?  Let’s give a shot to #blogmonday this coming Monday, April 27th?  I’ll start.

If you are into it, give me some @ love on Twitter.

Mark

As the dad of two young children (my favorite job), I can finally come out of the closet and say it publicly:

I LOVE DISNEY.

But now my heretofore inane ramblings of a parent who actually knows that Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana are the same person (just learned that) have been legitimatized by none other than The Motley Fool, a Web site for pretty sophisticated investors.

The Fool is one of my favorite publications when I want to learn;  it’s not an easy read, because they use big words and terms that I am still learning.  However, imagine my surprise when I read “Disney in 2012” by Rick Aristotle Munarriz- and there is a significant social media angle.  As someone who works in social media, blogs, tweets and spends a lot of time in front of the ‘ol laptop, I will be much more inclined to spend my discretionary dollars with a company that “sells” me with informative, easy-to-use and sexy online content.  Sell me online and I will be much more likely to dig deeper.  Make me call an 800-number and you can fuggetaboutit.

Because of my day job, I can’t say much about stock valuation, but for those of you with parents, here are some WAY cool things that the article brings forth, much of which demonstrates that, in terms of an online presence, Disney gets it:

• Disney Cruise Line – This is not the first thing in the article, but it sure is first on my list.  My family and I will be taking our 4th cruise in five years in about six weeks, and although it’s not inexpensive, it is the experience of a lifetime.  Imagine 24/7 entertainment for your children while you sit, sunning yourself and a wait staff person (who comes right up to you poolside) delivers you a rum and coke at 11:00 am.  And it’s guilt-free (aside from the fact that you are drinking at 11:00am) because you know that your children are being taken care of my people who do it for a living.  About every night, I have to drag my children from Disney activities kicking and screaming.What’s the social media angle, Mark with cruising?  Glad you asked.Wireless. For Type A propeller-heads such as myself, they now offer wireless in the rooms (before, you had to find a hot spot on the ship).  So wanna find out what you favorite sports team is doing while sitting on the veranda of your stateroom?  Fire up the ol’ laptop and you’re good.  But don’t spill that drink on the laptop, for God’s sake.

• An outstanding Web site. There are cool things like a virtual ship tour that help make it more concrete for your kids, an age breakdown that provides “what’s in it for me?” even for your snarling teenager, as well an online booking for reservations, shore excursions, dining as well as massages and spa treatments.  OK.  Enough pimping.

• “I’M GOING TO DISNEYLAND!!” Lines?  We don’t have no stinkin’ lines! From the Motley Fool post: “The biggest changes have actually been taking place inside the parks, as technological advances generate more efficient load times and customized experiences. For instance, your kid’s favorite character actually comes looking for you, instead of the other way around. Interactive in-line diversions on moving walkways make queuing more enjoyable. Only disoriented foreigners wait in line for the counter-service eateries, given the ease of ordering food and snacks through Disney’s wireless devices. There is a lot more social interaction between park guests, electronically, too.“  I can only imagine me whipping out my cell phone and sashaying past a group of disoriented (and ticked off) digital illiterati with this advance.  Heh.
• “Destination Clubs.”  Ok.  For those of you who have heard the concept, it does indeed reek of “time share.”  But here’s what Rick has to say about it: “And with Disney about to break ground in Hawaii for an 800-unit resort in Oahu, its Disney Vacation Club will be a great one-stop shop for time-share fans who want to stay at Disney’s theme parks or its existing beachfront properties in Vero Beach, Myrtle Beach, and Oahu in a few years.“  Can someone say “hit the beach in winter?”
• Vacations and social media are  inextricably linked. Again, Rick nails it:  “Entertainment destinations don’t just win back discretionary income. They earn a bigger chunk of it by tailoring themselves more to customers’ preferences. Creating content isn’t a worthless craft in a digitally-delivered future. It’s the tasty hunk of cheese that lures you deeper into a monetization mousetrap.“

Ok, so I am now out of the closet as a mid-40’s Disney lover.  But so is my family, and I am willing to spend my discretionary income on a company that knows that I plan  stuff online first and hit the pool second.

Mark