Here’s an educational video show two GIA certified “Excellent” cut diamonds. Ron explains why these diamonds are so in demand – not just for their ideal/excellent cut grades, but for their sizes. Click here to see our in stock specials!
February 27, 2013
September 13, 2012
How bout them O’s?!?
The Orioles began September with a great performances against the Blue Jays and the Yankees. After last nights intense win against Tampa Bay, they still remain tied for first place in the AL East. We hope you are watching the Orioles third game against the Tampa Bay Rays at Camden Yards! This will be the last home game until September 24th!
Go Orioles!
July 14, 2011
An Outsider’s View of an Insiders Industry
Some reflections about my first month with Samuelson’s
I have now been with Samuelson’s for a full month. Not only have I learned a lot about buying diamonds, gold and silver from the public but I have also learned a great deal about the retail environment for the luxury segment. I have developed a few thoughts and opinions about what I have witnessed and learned thus far.
I never knew that the competitive landscape of the buying business was as cutthroat as it is. Not to mention the ever-growing amount of competition in the market. However, I have heard overwhelming feedback from our clients that we are the most fair, patient and cleanest operation around.
Today was one of the most interesting days as the largest silver transaction I have witnessed was just processed. I must say that processing silver is by far one of the most tedious processes. However, it is nice to see how educated and enthusiastic our clients are in Chevy Chase. Additionally, every seller has their own story, as do the coins or bullion they are selling. In a backwards way, each transaction contains a bit of a history lesson. I also never knew that bags of silver trade for different prices when compared to spot silver…did you know that?
When it comes to diamonds, I never realized how many people expect to receive the appraised value for their stones. My guess is that approximately 20% of the people have walked into our Chevy Chase office this way. We take pride in educating our clients about the diamond market so that they are more informed to make an educated decision about selling their stones. After we go through the Samuelson’s process, our clients understand the diamond market and how the process works. It is great working with people that are honest and willing to share some insider information about the diamond exchange otherwise known as rapnet.
Having mentors like Ron Samuelson, David Dannenbaum, Paul Bogat and Steve Samuelson have made the learning curve for such a dynamic industry significantly easier. The knowledge and vastly different areas of expertise that each person possesses has made the first month truly exciting. I look forward to developing many exciting campaigns for our clients/consumers and continuing to have fun each day at Samuelson’s Diamonds.
Dave Levin
Director of Marketing
Samuelsons Diamonds
david.levin@baltimorediamonds.com
April 22, 2010
You Should Be Paid to Use Facebook
Have you ever seen those groups on Facebook that declare boldly, “We’re against Facebook charging for usage”? The “Petition against Facebook charging money”? Search for it, if you want; but know this: Facebook will never charge money for usage. In fact, I’d argue that they should be paying you for logging in an noodling around.
Take a look at F8: Zuckerberg, if you get past the jargon, wants to map all of the relationships on the web. Why? Because this is valuable to businesses, large and small. It is valuable to non-profits. It is valuable to governments. It is valuable to regular citizens. It is valuable to everyone.
If you want information on people’s needs, likes and habits, you need as many people as you can get. This is what you’d learn in any statistics class.
If you’ve ever tried to use a US appliance outside of the country, you also know that you need the same format to connect to the same network. Therefore, to make a map of the network of all these folks, you need them all in the same place, on the same format.
In short, they need everyone to get on Facebook.
Charging a fee for Facebook would raise the cost of entry (literally!) and mean that there are fewer people for Facebook to add to their map.
Facebook doesn’t charge because they know the value of each person they add for free will outweigh a subscription fee significantly.
So think about this: Why doesn’t Facebook pay us to use it?
April 9, 2010
Yelp: A Web Master’s Perspective
Given that we’ve recently had a run in with Yelp and their way of handling business to business relations, I’ve had this post in my thoughts for some time. Understand that despite the fact I work for Samuelson’s, I am sympathetic to Yelp’s position. I am, however, not an idealist; nor do I strictly believe that Yelp’s founders or operators are idealists either. Given some of the news that has come out lately – allegations of misconduct on Yelp’s part regarding advertisement plans and quid-quo-pro arrangements – I decided I’d finally give my opinion.
Yelp Is An Idea
First, it’s helpful to understand that Yelp is not a scam. Or rather, Yelp was not created to be a scam (perhaps a lightweight cult, but not a scam…) but that the ways which it seems to guys in our position that Yelp is a scam, is because of what Yelp has to do to make their model work.
The idea as I understand it is to be a form of free yellow pages with a social network built into it, which connects people via interests, places they visit, and regular social connections (friendships, etc.) The goal is to become the REAL source of independent reviews of restaurants and other businesses (primarily restaurants – more on that in a moment.) In order to do this, Yelp!, unlike Google or WeddingWire or others, actually takes it upon themselves to help weed out reviews that are fake.
But what constitutes a fake review? That’s a non-trivial problem, and given that, the simplest solution is to allow all reviews to stand and let the normal non-trivial processor (the human being) figure it out using old-fashioned judgment. Most people do not take one or two five-star reviews at face value; but they also may have a good first impression even if they read and doubt.
But Yelp, as I have already stated, has a bit of idealism in them: They want to actually be the Real Reviews by Real People service, and not just in press releases.
So they take it on themselves to figure out what a ‘real’ review is. In doing so they send conflicting messages: they don’t want to you send people who had a good experience to them, since obviously this can skew results. But why would a business let anyone know Yelp exists if they don’t have some chance of benefiting from it? (And the more popular Yelp is, the more crucial this becomes!)
Additionally, restaurants are something people tend to want to make reviews on, whereas other experiences (a grocery store for instance?) do not share this impetus; therefore the ability to get ‘real‘ reviews of anything other than restaurants, maybe spas, resorts and other service industries of that type – is limited.
If you are in a place where Yelp is big, you may have some recourse; there should be enough Yelpers to get a good perspective on your business without you doing any seeding on your own. But for the cities which Yelp has as of yet neglected – you will be stuck fighting getting reviews from first-time Yelpers who may have no credit, even if they are truly Real Reviews. (Yelp has recently tried some measures to reduce the effect of this.) Because Yelp has left this decision to an algorithm, therefore the judgment is guaranteed to be poor. Like with Wikipedia, articles that are not viewed or edited much will have poor quality. You might think it’s the other way around, but it’s not. (hint: the more something is edited, the more the editors pay attention to it.)
Yelp! Is A Business
Enter the practical side of Yelp. They need to make money somehow. This I think is why they enter cities one at a time only – only the largest and most potentially profitable markets. If they don’t do this, they will probably tank.
Now, consider the pragmatic side’s logic: It makes sense to offer benefits to paying customers – and a great benefit to businesses on a site like this would be to have more control over how you appear. Advertising makes sense, but the pragmatist might even say, we should let the businesses challenge reviews and have them removed if they are a paying customer. Why should they not? Do they pay to get punished by irate customers?
Now this would be fine if Yelp’s idealistic side had not dictated already that they were to be the site for Real Reviews – meaning, they want to project the image of being a complete listing of businesses – and to allow, as per social media / web 2.0 standards, people to add their own content, including letting Yelp know about businesses that are not on their map.
So what happens? Businesses get ‘opted in’ without their consent: Therefore the idea of offering benefits to paying customers, which in one case would seem like a benefit, now to some businesses seems like extortion. (And again, the more successful Yelp is, the worse the extortion will seem!) If I voluntarily enter into Yelp for free with knowledge that I may receive bad reviews and not be able to remove them – but such is the risk I take – there would be no problem. Then I could pay and have more control. That makes a lot of sense.
This is (still) not the case, however! And that brings us to our inevitable news.
Yelp Is Having Some ‘Issues’
Of all the news – the only bit of which I find interesting is this:
Lawyers representing plaintiffs dismiss an assertion Mr. Stoppelman has made on Yelp’s blog that they’re just going after the start-up’s money. …
It is an interesting accusation, and it tells me that probably the following has occurred: (These are not accusations, but pure conjecture!)
- Yelp originally intended to create some kind of quid-quo-pro relationship with businesses, but the auto-opt-in I discussed above has made such a thing impossible. That Mr. Stoppelman even stoops to claim that they’re just after his money is a sign that he knows he’s not totally clean.
- In all likelihood, a Yelp employee somewhere along the line in fact did offer the quid-quo-pro – once – and that employee was immediately fired. (As they should have been!) However, Yelp failed to come clean about it since popularity on the internet is like sainthood, ‘Your righteousness must exceed that even of the Pharisees.’ Any doubt is every doubt, when doubt is viral. This is simply to say, I believe that Yelp does not extort.
Yelp has recently taken action to try to appease small business owners, but it amounts to allowing people to view the filtered reviews after filling out a captcha (they couldn’t before!) – this is to prevent bots and search engines from indexing these reviews.
What Should We Do?
In conclusion, I do not have a solution for Yelp (or for us, really) except for one idea. To allow businesses to opt-out of Yelp would be a great step in the right direction. Businesses who do not have a good experience with Yelp because of the inherent randomness should not be punished unduly. And indeed, the experience model with different businesses varies extremely.
Yelp, like Microsoft, will find that its success punishes it: The more successful Yelp is, the more pressure there will be on businesses who did not ask to be listed to deal with Yelp – and the more pressure there will be on Yelp to offer some kind of real reconciliation between irate businesses and irate customers, and to deliver a satisfactory experience to two groups who historically hate each other in our society: ‘consumers’ and ‘corporations’.
And indeed, more pressure to find ‘real reviews’ – with an algorithm? Good luck with that one, fellas.
March 19, 2010
Facebook Groups for Business Collaboration
This is David here. I’m Ron’s brother-in-law, married to his sister, Ellyn. I’ve been here at Samuelson’s Diamonds for about six years and I handle lots of the finance and marketing related issues for the company.
We’ve been talking about how video needs to be a more active element of our marketing efforts and we sat down recently with a creative video production group to put together some concepts for Samuelson’s Diamonds. As we were wrapping up our meeting – keep an eye out for some great videos next month – we brought up the idea of collaboration.
How would we effectively share our ideas with one another? I don’t know about you, but I tend to get ideas at all kinds of weird hours and in some pretty strange places. Instead of trying to keep an email chain going indefinitely and having to search Gmail or Outlook for the one email that someone forgot to “reply all” to and is now MIA, we decided to use Facebook as our tool of choice. Although Google Wave is exactly structured for this type of cooperative work, Facebook is a much better option from the standpoint of familiarity. We all know how to update, share, join, invite, etc. Nobody has to be educated or trained. We simply set up a private group, invite the people involved and start adding thoughts, content, comments and more.
Just when you thought Facebook was exclusively a place for social networking and viral marketing, turns out it can also be used for doing actual work!
February 11, 2010
Changes in Facebook – Thoughts about Social Media
For the umpteenth time since last year Facebook has changed its interface. (actually, it’s the second, I think) It seems a kind of petty thing to comment on, but given that 400 million people use Facebook, it is more interesting that you don’t see commentary on this kind of thing in the mainstream.
Facebook is free. Additionally, as a part of web 2.0, it is in a real sense ‘permanently broken’ or incomplete. Nobody really knows what we’re doing, and so things change and adapt quickly. However, a real question arises – if it is true that for instance Facebook will be launching a gmail clone – will people begin to actually rely on it for vital communications? If this is so, what will a fairly moderate interface change mean? Given that people on the web are about as vocal every day as strikers are on the day of the ‘general strike’, can a service like Facebook ignore comments? What are they to do if a change removes key functionality (such as in this case, viewing updates from a specific application or status updates alone)?
It can easily be argued that Facebook is free, and therefore, you pay for what you get. But Facebook itself does not have that attitude; that’s a ‘screw you’ attitude that they’d never be caught uttering. Therefore we can assume that despite being free (on the front end, anyhow) Facebook wants to give its users the best experience possible, as though they were being paid for all of this. (They are, but not directly by us.)
What is interesting in all of this is that when I spoke to Ron, he mentioned that his iPhone app still had the same functionality. In other words, the same Facebook ‘data’ is sitting there, there is just a new ‘terminal’ we who are using the Web need to use. It makes me think that going forward we will see Facebook clients, much the way we see clients for Twitter. The difference is of course that Facebook is many times more complex! Imagine though, if you could get a Facebook client for 1.99 – Facebook gets a cut of that – over a possible group of 400 million folks?
And what about how widely used (and despised?) it is… I am reminded of everyone carping about Microsoft whenever they try to change something. Difference is, we have to accept the change on Facebook. With Microsoft at least there is a few years for us to adapt. And yet we keep using it!
Free, rich communication is valuable; just like a very generic & flexible operating system is. Maybe Facebook will give up trying to play nice and annoy us until we pay to stop the annoyance. I’ll bet they won’t lose people – where else will they go? Twitter?
Or maybe the value is like that of a huge fan page – everyone is there! How can you take credit for that?
January 22, 2010
News in the Internet Age
For years now, newspapers have been trying to figure out how to finance news journalism in the internet age. Or, as it is more commonly put, “get people to pay for news online.” For a time, it seemed like micropayments would be the solution, but the profitability of online payment transactions relies on the rule of fewer transactions, larger amounts. It is far easier to move a one-hundred dollar bill than ten thousand pennies.
But beneath it all there was a deeper issue; we have been trained on the internet to search for news, and search algorithms rely on spiders, or automated or robotic browsers, to follow links and search content. Paid content may sit behind a wall, disallowing both robots and humans from finding it. The converse is that which is searchable is accessible.
Then there is the issue of what the subscribers do with the information. In traditional print, there was some limited oversight in reprinting and republishing and redistribution, mostly because of the cost and effort required of such things. On the internet, you can go to the public library, log in, and start a blog on blogger and publish to the world. Even before this, it was fairly inexpensive to get your name out there, with a bit of know-how.
This all adds up to the concept that if you do not offer the news that you may have paid to compile or write for free, someone else will. Indeed, early on some savvy writers such as Drudge took advantage of free distribution to gain immense popularity while newspapers were still struggling to figure out what the internet was, much less how to maintain their current business through the changes it would impose.
The New York Times has suffered no less than any from this unwelcome disruption, and their recent actions show that they are still trying to figure things out:
The news that The New York Times will start charging for access to its website broke over the weekend, but now it’s officially confirmed. As anticipated, one of the world’s most recognizable newspapers will be introducing a metered model, meaning they will “offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.”
There are various comments, both by the author and by his commenters regarding the situation. It is always a touchy subject. Some like to get their news for free, and would never pay for it. Others see the ebook tablet – Kindle and so forth – as a possible route for rescue of the newspapers.
Either way, the internet offers no help; the information on the internet is in practice not free to produce or distribute (there used to be time and rate limits on internet, if you can remember back that far…!) but the scale of the internet combined with the ubiquity of computers distributes that cost. If it had come around 50 years ago out of the blue, the $500-$1000 for a computer alone would be enough prevent illusions of it being free of cost. Those of us who grew up with computers had our first use for ‘free’ as it were; with our parents or guardians paying for both computer and internet access.
The way I see it, if we set up a system to reliably pay for journalism, we prevent two things: The first is invasive and pervasive advertising, and the second is outright begging. It’s a cultural thing. Will my generation adapt?
December 18, 2009
The ‘New’ Influencers?
No formal connections to Twitter (as far as we know.)
I like to pay attention (with one eye at least) to the happenings in the social media world, since it is likely our success on the web going forward will involve more and more of it.
It is somewhat amusing to see the ‘new media’s equivalent of the Oscars, the Pulitzer and so forth – as it more often than not serves as a promotional tool for itself! As an outsider of course I find this intriguing, but it also makes sense from their perspective to do so.
So on to the meat here. We have the ‘most influential people on Twitter’ – and the irony of the day is Mashable reporting that their own Pete Cashmore is regarded as #1:
Along those lines, INQ Mobile has just released their 2009 Twitter (Twitter) influence study, determining the most influential Twitter users in both the UK and the world. The winner? Not Oprah, not Ashton and not Diddy, but Mashable (Mashable)’s founder and CEO Pete Cashmore!
I’d offer congrats, but then, the way social media works he has probably seen too many congratulations already to read them.
An interesting fact here is that I was not surprised in the least by this, and not because of a kind of general theory about being a media person on Twitter and thus producing a lot of tweetable content, but on this simple fact. I actually follow Cashmore.
Generally speaking, I do not follow people who have a lot of followers or who follow a lot of people (10000+) as I have no interest in shouting for attention among thousands, and I certainly have little interest in gossip or self-help. Social climbing is not for me either (you can see I have few that I follow!)
But I followed Cashmore, mostly because of three things (that I can recall.) 1. He seemed like he was really there using the account. 2. He was active. 3. He offered things I was interested in, that were if not completely unique or original represented some kind of genuine work; a collection of stories and opinions which reflect Mashable’s take on things.
Many who are out there for ‘twitter success’ seem more like they’ve randomly grabbed stuff to put up; there’s no story to the stories. All chatter, no thought.
And I tend to think that this difference itself is Cashmore’s X-factor.
November 5, 2009
What not to do, American Airlines Edition
I’ve often written here regarding social media, and the ‘world’ it inhabits, one of interaction, where instead of carefully choosing interactions with a mind for secrecy, 
we carefully choose secrets with a mind for interaction. Obviously not everything can be ‘open’ (to do so would in many cases be more confusing than helpful, as twitter or facebook can often show us) but then the old fortress mentality is both unattractive to public opinion and in this time of rapid advance, often harmful in its effects on business practice itself.
Enough from me, though, check this out:
A FEW MONTHS AGO, I wrote an article expressing my displeasure with American Airlines‘ hideous online presence. I also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To my surprise, a user experience designer at AA.com emailed me an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations.
…
An hour after I posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.
Read the whole thing (it isn’t long.) It is sad, perhaps, to have a non-disclosure agreement which prevents what the author suggests is a needed innovation. Sometimes business reality prevents much being done as a result of even helpful commentary from customers, and often for large corporations a comments box is open so that ‘cranks’ (people who are irate) have some place to vent.
But when things are genuinely wrong, or could be better, it is not unreasonable to interact with customers. Granted sometimes this conversation can be harmful rather than helpful – anyone who has seen an order messed up by mistake at say, McDonald’s, can recall how temper mostly just serves to cause the problem to be resolved slower. Especially this is true when the person who receives the criticism has no power to act on it. It would be rather pointless to take the cashier to task in McDonalds for the poor quality of their ketchup.
It is our sincere hope – and we think it is for many other companies – that Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other venues can be a place for conversations like the one Mr. X got fired for.
Of course, to be fair, the size of the company matters (as bureaucracy tends to scatter power rather than delegate it) and a large company, like AA often has little choice but to keep following its present policies. Internal politics, arcane rules, and just plain human limitation all play roles.
All in all, the new landscape is difficult for those who have the most power in it – in mass media, and in money, it is large corporations. But their method is largely impersonal, and even when their icons work, it still feels like puppetry.
