Category: Internet

Why hide your address?

If you have an online address, be it a web site, social media account, Google or Facebook Place page you need to tell your customers about it.

There’s a lot of concern about businesses not having a website with estimates that between 40 and 60% of all enterprises simply don’t have a website and most aren’t using social media.

Businesses who haven’t bothered setting up a site, or at least a free Facebook or Google Places listing are missing out on customers, but even many organisations with an online presence aren’t publicising them well.

A recent walk down my local shopping strip went past nearly 200 businesses. Of them only four had a reference to their website or preferred social media platform.

Even businesses do have a website didn’t choose to display them where customers or passers by could see them.

Worse, some of the fast food chains that are running social media campaigns had no indication that checking in or liking could win a customer a deal which makes you wonder just how committed those business are to these channels.

It could be that businesses are afraid that referring to their online presence will encourage customers to move away from their physical store, if that’s the case most business owners are wrong.

Customers are expecting to find our websites even if they intend to visit our stores or hire us. Our sites – even if they are only a free page from Google or Facebook – should be telling propective customers who we are, what we do, why are we great and what hours we’re open.

Just as time is money to the typical business person, shoppers want to make sure they are going to the right place for the right product and won’t be wasting their time if they show up on a Sunday afternoon or after 6pm.

There’s no reason not to have your web page, social media addresses and other online contact details somewhere prominent where customers can see them so they can see how great you are. Should your competitors be telling their story, they are going to be getting the customers.

In a noisy, busy world we need to telling our stories both online and offline, peoples’ attention and time is too scarce to let an opportunity go by.

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Google+ explained

What does Google’s latest social media platform mean for the ordinary business or home Internet user?

The latest shiny thing in the online world is Google+, the search engine monolith’s latest attempt at a social networking service. What does it mean to the average user?

Google+ differs from most social networks – particularly Facebook – in that you can segment your online connections into different groups called circles so when sharing information such as comments, updates or photos you can choose to only let certain circles or individuals see those posts.

This addresses the biggest problem with social media; that what we share with our family is not necessarily what we want our friends or work colleagues to see, an issue identified by then Google designer Paul Adams, who has since moved onto Facebook.

At the core of Google+ is the Google Profile which is shared with most Google services such as Gmail and Blogger which gives rise to quite a few privacy concerns as those you share with can get access to this information, although this is the same with most other social media services.

Google+ has quite a few interesting features such as Hangouts which allow impromptu video conferences and Sparks which are random popups of things you might be interested based upon your search history and posts.

As a consumer product, Google+ doesn’t have the gaming and the social features that Facebook offers however that’s expected to change as the product develops.

For businesses, Google+ is off limits. Right now it is only open to individuals although we can expect that will change as Google integrate the product with their small business Places platform along with adwords and their online application service.

Right now Google+ is for the geeks and that’s why the tech media is talking about it. For the average home or business users it’s not quite ready to replace or complement Facebook or other social media services although it’s worth keeping an eye on to see how it evolves.

The stakes are quite high for Google with this product as the overwhelming amount of data at every Internet user’s fingertips is seeing people seeking out sources they trust for answers, recommendations and advice. The social aspect of the online world is going to define the web in this decade just as search did in the previous decade.

For this reason, Google are going to be working hard on making sure Google+ is part of the social web, for the average user we’ll be choosing the tools we trust. It remains to be seen if Google+ is one of those tools.

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Password protection

Our passwords are valuable, how should we protect them?

The suspension of eighty students from a suburban Sydney high school once again illustrates how careless we often are with passwords and the access to our computers. In an era of Internet banking, online shopping and social media sites holding our personal details, we have to take web security seriously.

In many ways the teacher who let their password slip to their students was lucky. In the United States, authorities haven’t always been so forgiving these sort of mistakes, and in this case the kids and the system administrators were a lot more adult and responsible than their Connecticut counterparts.

What the incident does show is how the weakest points of our technology networks are ourselves – the most secure systems, toughest passwords and best anti-virus protection won’t help us if we don’t take care.

We looked at protecting organisations in an earlier post, Protecting your data, and here’s some steps on how to take care with your personal details.

Shut down computers

When you’re finished working, make sure you log out of email programs, secure sites, social media services and shut your computer down.

In an office context, this is very important if you’re going away for a meeting or a break as people have been known to use co-workers computers to access prohibited sites or sensitive information.

Should you be using Internet cafes, hotel business centres or airport lounges you should be doubly careful to make sure you’ve logged off completely before walking away from the shared computer.

Hide your passwords

As the teacher at Prairiewood High found, your password is gold. Do not divulge it under any circumstances.

Often doing so is almost certainly a breach of your organisation’s Acceptable Use Policy and sometimes this can mean disciplinary action or dismissal from a job. With your online banking, disclosing your password or PIN can mean you won’t be compensated if money is stolen from your account.

Even a seemingly trivial social media site can cause trouble for you if crooks can get onto it.

Having a complex password is good and we look at a neat little trick for memorable but tough passwords in our Protecting Your Data post, it’s worthwhile making sure your logins are both easy to remember while being secure.

Understand your AUP

An AUP, or Acceptable Usage Policy, is part of the conditions of you using a computer or online service. Many government and corporate networks have a box pop up forcing you to agree every time you login. Take time to occasionally read this.

Should you accidentally give away your password, say to a site that’s fooled you that it’s your bank or a social media site, the AUP will usually have a clause or a sentence on what to do in that situation. Understanding this will give you piece of mind if something does happen.

We’re now in an age where our personal information is more valuable than ever before and we need to guard what who has access to it. Passwords are going to be part of protecting our data for some time to come so understanding how to use them properly is essential.

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The quest for virility

Chasing big numbers on the Internet is the most basic online mistake of all.

One of the common Internet traps is a mindless quest for numbers; when we first go online we’re obsessed with gathering Facebook friends, Twitter followers and LinkedIn connections.

For businesses, we get seduced by the prospect of big markets to sell to; which isn’t surprising when there’s nearly 700 million people on Facebook, over 50 million tweets sent every day and the group buying market is growing almost as quickly as the number of new entrants into the industry.

The current holy grail for many businesses is the viral video; a troupe of dancers extolling your business to surprised commuters, a cool ex-football player giving advice from a shower or a tasteful video of your staff doing their jobs naked is seen as the way to get millions of ‘likes’ or ‘follows’ from eager web consumers.

For the successful ones, creating an online clip seen by your mother and a million of her friends is an easy way to get a campaign to worldwide markets without spending massive marketing budgets. Not to mention the trip to Cannes and the accolades for any advertising agency associated with it.

Sadly creating a video that goes viral is harder than it looks as we discussed at the Media 140 Conference in Perth last week; it has to be quirky, entertaining and attention catching which is pretty well the antithesis of the typical corporate video.

To compound the budding viral videographer’s problems, there’s the corporate desire to control the message. Almost every high profile blogger or online editor has stories of struggling to get permission to use an organisation’s clip because of the managerial urge to control distribution.

No doubt those managers have good reasons for controlling the use of their videos but we can be sure those same control obsessed administrators are constantly bugging their agencies to create something viral.

Losing control is a great risk for managers and bureaucrats. Last year prolific wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk visited Australia and gave the local wine industry some great publicity.

Sadly, in reviewing the some wines from his visit he described a Yarra Valley wine as having “a taste of burned vomit” (at 4.25) probably put the Australian wine market in the US back a decade.

Gary Vaynerchuk is probably the best case of someone who has grown a business through viral video, through adding interesting valuable content with a real character. An equivalent Australian success has been Natalie Tran’s Community Channel.

One of the other points with these is many of the early successes have been because they were early entrants into a new market. Today, the marketplace is a lot more crowded and videos, like any other online content, are struggling to get heard.

That’s not such a bad thing as it takes away the obsession with numbers and makes us focus on the quality of our online audience. Rather than obsessing about raw hits, we start considering where our customers are.

Group buying is a good example of where well targeted campaigns work well. The successful group buying advertisers are thinking about where the offer, product and audience fit in their business plan rather than just fixating on the tens of thousands of potential customers for a quick sales boost.

While a Charlie Sheen tweet might drive page views, the real business objective of the web is about establishing our brand and attracting the customers we want, not just achieving big numbers.

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Picks and Shovels

A business gold rush a great time for entrepreneurs, are you prepared?

It’s often said the real money in a gold rush is made by those who sell the picks and shovels. A great example of this is yesterday’s announcement that Dealised, who provide software for group buying services, has raised $5 million in investor funding.

Undoubtedly we’re in a gold rush for group buying sites with new services being launched weekly. One thing that many observers don’t understand about group buying sites is they aren’t really technology businesses, but sales driven directory services which have more in common with the Yellow Pages or the a giveaway local newspaper than Google, Facebook or Microsoft.

Technology though is important to these businesses as they need to track and publicise their deals which is what Dealised does. By offering this as an off-the-shelf service, it frees up capital and makes life easier for the dozens, if not hundreds, of group buying services being launched around the world each week.

Reducing barriers to entry is one of the things the tech industries are extremely good at ­– as the early group buying sites like Groupon and their local counterparts have found – and it’s something that all businesses need to keep in mind.

The wave of group buying start ups is part of a broader wave of disruptive businesses that are entering all parts of our economy. As we see cloud services remove the cost of buying equipment and software, it becomes easier for new, hungry entrepreneurs to find opportunities.

Another interesting aspect of Dealise’s business model is that the business itself is a spin off from the Spreets group buying service which was sold to Yahoo!7 at the beginning of the year.

Overlooked in most of the coverage at the time was that the sale only covered the group buying operations and not the Dealise technology. This freed up the founders and their investors to focus on developing the Dealise software without the distractions of running a daily deals site with its troublesome sales staff and pesky customers.

Most importantly, it kept the software platform which is the most scalable part of the business in the hands of the founders. This has given them the opportunity to build something that can be resold to thousands of other businesses.

In the tech industry we’ve seen examples of this in the past, the best example is when Bill Gates and Paul Allen licensed their MS-DOS software to IBM rather than selling it outright which allowed a massive new industry around IBM compatible computers to develop with Microsoft getting a payment for every computer sold.

While we may not see Dealise become the next Microsoft, it’s worthwhile considering some of these lessons, certainly both the gold rush and the licensing aspects show how we shouldn’t jump for what appears to be the easiest money.

Our industries may not appear to be in a gold rush, but those reduced barriers to entry are affecting everyone from booksellers to manufacturers and café owners. Have a look at some of the software your competitors are using, it’s no longer business as usual.

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Carving up the web

What the new domain names mean to your business

As we discussed in 2008, there’s a new type of Internet address about to sweep into the online world. It may well change the web, but not quite in the way the promoters are saying.

On Monday ICANN, the International Committee of Assigned Network Names, approved the release of custom global Top Level Domain names. Organisations can now buy their own Internet addresses rather than adding a .com or .com.au to the end of their online business names.

For example Telstra can replace their telstra.com.au or telstra.com addresses with .telstra and offer sites like support.telstra or shop.telstra.

Some are claiming this portends the end of the dot com era as business drift across to these newer domains and abandon the addresses we’ve become used to over the last 20 years. Others say it will make data easier to find and consequently kill the search industry.

In truth, the immediate effects on business are going to be limited, but these new names are part of a much bigger change that is happening in the online world.

Take up will be slow

One of the first things to understand with these domains is they are mired in bureaucracy with ICANN itself estimating the approval process will take between eight and eighteen months.

Should an application be approved, there will also be a period where approvals will be subject to appeal, this in itself will prove interesting when conflicting claimants  decide to fight over a domain.

The arguments over who owns generic names will probably end up in the courts while geographic disputes say between Melbourne, Florida or Melbourne, Victoria over the .melbourne address will require some very tricky negotiation.

Costs are high

The application cost of one of these global Top Level Domains is estimated to be $185,000 US with $25,000 annual fees so this is a game for only the biggest players.

Even then, we’ll see many corporations not bothering. Given the current proposal includes strong provisions against cybersquatting, there’s no need for trademark holders to rush, it’s quite feasible that many will sit out the hype and wait for the prices to drop.

ICANN’s track record is not good

Over the last decade ICANN have approved 14 new domains ­– .aero, .coop, .museum, .name, .pro .asia, .cat, .jobs, .post, .tel, .travel, .biz, .info, and .mobi – the last three have been mildly successful but most of these names have been ignored, a precedent that doesn’t bode well for a corporation or government building their own domains

There are some useful network management reasons and possibly some branding opportunities with these names, but the risk of confusing customers or web surfers seems to be high.

In this respect, the argument that the new domains will kill search engines seems odd as more addresses is going to increase the demand for a reliable way to find things online.

The middlemen assemble

Already some are touting the new domain names as an opportunity to get more money out of businesses with the idea various sectors can be enticed to use industry or location specific names. However history isn’t on the side of those schemes as we’ve already seen the release of the .travel and .jobs domains being greeted with a yawn.

One effect we can expect is that we’ll be told over the next few years how important it is be to list our business names with a whole lot of new domains; musicians might be urged to sign up with .music or Perth based enterprises to lock in a .perth name. In many ways these ideas already seem to be an attempt to replicate the old directory businesses that the Internet has destroyed in the last decade.

Locking down the web

Along with being a cash grab by ICANN, the custom domain name is part of the attempt to divide the public Internet into a cluster of privately controlled fiefdoms.

We’re seeing with social media sites like Facebook – and we can be pretty sure .facebook will be an early candidate for listing – striving to lock users onto their service. These new domain names will help them do that and in turn protect data on their networks being shared on the wider Internet.

This is going to play out in a very interesting way over the next few years as the large players jostle for their slice of the web.

Some larger businesses, and gullible governments, are going to fall for this money grabbing exercise, while the majority of Internet users will be excluded simply by the cost and bureaucratic requirements.

This grab for the Internet is a game for big, well funded players and most of us will be spectators in this struggle. Have no doubt though that while watching the big boys fighting over their Internet turf will be fun sport it will be us that will pay for the results.

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The ideas revolution: How to set up a blog

It’s never been easier to tell the world about your ideas, passion or business

It’s been a big month for ideas in Sydney with the Sydney Writers Festival, TEDx, Vivid Sydney, AMP Amplify and XMedia Lab along with many other events intended to stimulate thought and action.

One of the things that’s great with the Internet is we’re able to get our ideas out to the world very easily without spending much money. If you have a great idea, for a business, community group or just an interest there’s nothing stopping you letting the planet know about you and your dreams.

During the Sydney Writers Festival we saw debates between food bloggers and the print critics, particularly notable was Food blogger Rebecca Varidel and her Inside Cuisine website.

Earlier in May, Louise Hewson launched her 52 Suburbs book and exhibition which was born out of her website chronicling her discoveries around the suburbs of Sydney.

The biggest challenge is setting up a website so you can be found on the net, today’s tools make it very easy to set up a site. Here’s a few you can use.

Facebook

If you already have a Facebook account, it’s very easy to set up a page covering your topic or idea.

While it’s simple to create a Facebook Page, be aware there are risks as the company has some quirky policies and not everybody has a Facebook account or is comfortable with it.

Blogger

This is the best basic starting tool which also has the attraction of being free.

Blogger’s simple layout which you can change by dragging and dropping the various parts of the website works well and you can add features such as subscription services, advertising, e-commerce and other features by turning on various “gadgets”.

52 Suburbs and Grab Your Fork are two good examples of Blogger based sites. In Louise’s case she registered the 52 Suburbs domain name – the bit behind the “www” or “@” in an email – which costs around $20 a year.

WordPress

The big daddy of Internet publishing is the WordPress tool. This free software drives most websites and is becoming the software of choice. Rebecca at Inside Cuisine and this website are using WordPress along with thousandds of businesses.

One WordPress’ great attractions is it features thousands of ready to use “widgets” and templates that makes it extremely easy to add features and customise your website.

WordPress offers a free service that gives you the basics of the platform. To get the most from WordPress you need to host the site with a web hosting provider and this can get more expensive and complex.

Other tools

There are hundreds of other platforms you can use to get your ideas out to the world. Worpress, Blogger and Facebook are just three of the most popular and easy to use. It’s worth exploring with what you find works well for your idea or business.

Growing your site

As your site grows, you’ll need to manage content, track visitors and promote it through the various social media and traditional methods. We have some free resources from NSW Microbusiness Month that can help you manage and grow your online presence.

More information

In July we’ll launching eBu$iness: 7 Steps to Get Your Small Business Online… and Making Money Now! Which will cover all the steps of getting your business online, promoting it and tracking your success. Pre-release orders are available now.

We also have some free workshops for business wanting to get online sponsored by the NSW Government, contact us for more details.

If you subscribe to our newsletter we also make available various free offers along with keeping readers up to date with smart new ideas.

There’s nothing to stop you getting your ideas online. If you want to do something interesting, or even change the world, the tools are now here for you to do it.

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