Why manners matter online

Good manners go a long way on the Internet

Yahoo!7’s attempt to reduce bullying and offensive behaviour in their forums and comments illustrates a problem we have in the online community — that many people forget their manners when they connect to the Internet.

Manners matter online because there is no divide between your behaviour on the Internet and in the physical world. What you say and do online can affect your personal and professional life.

In previous posts I’ve looked at how this affects business people and politicians, but poor online behaviour such as bullying, offensive language and just downright poor manners can affect all members of the community, even if you aren’t online yourself.

Much of the problem lies in that people forget the Internet is a global medium, what you post from a computer in Parramatta can be seen by someone in Paris. Many also think they are anonymous online when it’s actually difficult to cover your tracks.

So here’s a few ideas on how to be a good cybercitizen;

You are what you tweet

Keep in mind everything you do online can affect your job, your family and your personal assets. All the rules and laws of the physical world apply online as well.

If you wouldn’t do or say something on the street, then you probably shouldn’t do it online either.

You are not anonymous

Okay, you signed up to a forum with a false name and setup a dummy hotmail or gmail account to confirm your identity. You are still not anonymous.

Upset enough people or seriously break the law and you will be found. Being truly anonymous on the net actually takes a lot of effort .

Show respect

We all have ideas and opinions which the Internet is a great medium for spreading, be it using social media tools life Facebook and Twitter or in forums and comments sections on websites.

Regardless of how good your idea is or how passionate and well founded your opinion is, there will be those who choose to disagree with you. Respect those views and don’t get offended when dissenters, however shallow or ill-informed appear.

Be helpful

If someone is asking a silly question or is clearly new to an online forum, be polite. Don’t put them down or call them names, just help them or direct them to where they can get assistance.

Take a deep breath

If someone has got under your skin and you’ve written a savage reply, think before pressing the “submit” button. Often, that witty riposte doesn’t look so clever when you’ve calmed down or looked at it in the cold light of morning.

Avoid foul language

Swearing online makes you look low rent, just as it does in the real world. Save the invective for when you’re with your mates in a private forum. The Internet is generally not a private forum.

Walk away

Sadly the Internet attracts trolls who enjoy upsetting people and provoking strong reactions. Don’t join them.

If you find someone is upsetting you or sucking you into a vortex of pointless arguments, just walk away from the discussion. Block them, unfollow them, defriend them.

In the worst case, if you’re finding one online venue such as a web forum or social media site attracts people who upset you, stop using it. Your life is too short to be sucked into negative, carping discussions with people who thrive on criticism of other’s hard work and ideas.

The Internet is becoming the repository for our culture while our society has a lot of negativity we’ve also done great things. So rather than be part of the negative aspect, be part of the solution — be bright, welcoming and honest but most of all show respect to your fellow online citizens.

A strong and vibrant society is built on respect and manners so let’s make our online communities how we’d like the world around us to be.

Should you upgrade to Internet Explorer 9

Every big software update has its traps

Big fat computer updates always worry IT people as the changes can break important business software and leave a lot of irritated staff complaining they can’t do their job because “the computers won’t work.”

Microsoft’s latest version of Internet Explorer – released two weeks ago – has to be treated with a bit of care as IE is a fundamental part of Windows, something which made the spyware outbreaks last decade so problematic, so any change to the inbuilt web browser can ripple through your entire office network.

Internet Explorer 9 itself is a decent improvement over earlier versions with improved loading speeds, a download manager and integrated search, all features which had been lacking against the competing Firefox and Chrome browsers.

Most importantly, IE 9 has a range of security features that makes it a lot safer to use than previous versions. However those safety features are where the problems can lie as legitimate programs may be blocked along with the bad guys.

The immediate problem with IE9 is that many organizations that are still in the dark ages of Internet Explorer 6, having locked themselves into bad technological choices at the beginning of the millennium, and so will struggle with the new versions. If you deal with the websites of these organisations, who are often government departments and financial companies, then you can expect some hiccups in their online communications.

Inside your office, you may find some of your older software doesn’t play nicely with IE9, this is probably the major reason why many businesses have hung back from updating to Windows 7 from Window XP. If you are still using XP then Internet Explorer 9 won’t be an issue for you as it only runs on Windows 7 or Vista.

Microsoft’s not making IE 9 available for Windows XP is probably the strongest sign yet that the software giant is going to make a concerted effort to move users off what is now a decade old operating system.

For businesses, if your systems support it then IE 9 is a good and important update, however it’s best to use an alternative like Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari for day to day browsing and reserve the Microsoft tools for the sites that insist upon it.

As with all major upgrades you have to test your systems before rolling out the new program across your network. Install the revised software on one or two key staff members’ computers and get them to test the new programs in a working environment to check that key operations aren’t affected or, if they are, how you can fix or work around them.

Overall, Internet Explorer 9 is a worthwhile update and an important part of Microsoft’s trying to stay relevant in a world where computing revolves around the Internet rather than the desktop.

Whether Microsoft can manage to stay relevant is a topic for another day, but at least IE9 keeps them in the game.

Magazines 2020

Content Providers, curators or experience makers?

As hundreds queued around the world for the latest Apple iPad an Australian media tycoon told a business breakfast that newspapers were a sunset industry. Where does this leave magazines and other print media?

The last decade for magazines has been tough, as readers drifted to largely free websites with the advertisers following. The challenge for publishers is how do they follow their markets onto the web while still making money.

Magazines aren’t unique in this challenge – the media industries, like many others, have been affected by the rise of the web. Magazines themselves sit somewhere between the recording and newspaper industries with news stand sales and subscriptions being a bigger proportion of incom while not having the same newspaper classified income which has collapsed so dramatically in recent years.

The Shift Online

We’ve seen a massive shift to the web over the last decade and that movement is only accelerating as advertisers start to follow consumers and the public embraces social media and online gaming.

PriceWaterhouseCooper’s Entertainment and Media Outlook forecasts the magazine industry to lose 1% of advertising market share – from 5 to 4% of the overall spend – over the 2010 to 14 period with all the losses going online.

While the magazine industry looks at losing 20% of its advertising revenue to the Internet, figures are similar for newspapers, radio and free to air television with online advertising moving from 18% to 26% of the market. The advertisers are, quite rightly, following the customers.

Following readers online is the great challenge for the magazine industry, the question is how do they do it and continue to be profitable.

The Internet Challenge

The greatest problem on the Internet is making money, businesses have trained web surfers to expect online products – particularly news and entertainment – for free. Even physical goods have become increasingly commoditised as deal of the day and group buying sites have used “cheap” as the main hook for buyers.

Today’s reader and consumer expects goods they find online to be cheap and any content they discover to be free.

That isn’t fatal for a business as the broadcast television industry has shown us you can provide free content paid for by advertisers and make a good living while there’s no shortage of merchants who’ve built empires on the fast moving consumer good model of “stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap”.

Part of the online magazine industry’s response to the challenge of adapting to these models has been to use free labour. The rise of the Digital Sharecroppers, where writers provide content for free, has been the result.

People have been prepared to provide content for free for all manner of reasons. The problem for publishers, and readers, is quality writing is not sustainable under this model and we’re beginning to see the end result where writers are forced to drive buses and the free content is being increasingly sourced from PR agencies, their tame blogger bunny friends or from content farms more concerned about gaming Google through SEO keywords.

Free content also reduces the barriers to entry, which are already extremely low in online given a geek with a WordPress site or YouTube account can have a site up and running in a couple of hours for less than a hundred dollars. If content is low quality, there’s little reason for readers to have any loyalty or to stick to any one site.

There is the other type of free content though, User Generated Content (UCG) consisting of the comments, forum posts and free articles submitted by readers. Many of these followers are fans and this is perhaps where salvation for the magazine industry lies.

What formats can we expect

The old magazine format isn’t going to go away, it’s just going to decline as part of the overall distribution. We’re going to see more short and long format online content complimenting the magazines along with a lot of user content in the comments and forums sections.

We’ll also see more cross platform selling like we currently see with magazines like Better Homes and Gardens though with a much bigger online and interactive component than the present TV-magazine tie ups.

Content though will be more important than format. The SEO driven plays and content farms are a transition effect and as both search engines and readers become more savvy,  the influence of sites like eHow and The Huffington Post drop away.

Probably the biggest sleeper though are the electronic readers such as the iPad and Kindle, it is just possible these devices might resurrect the fortunes of the publishing industry in a similar way to the Compact Disk did for the music industry in the 1990s. Certainly Rupert Murdoch is hoping this.

How will magazines engage with consumers in 2020?

Successful magazines are going to find the niches where readers and advertisers will pay to be engaged and identified with key groups, demographics and markets. Adding value to readers is going to be the key to revenue on an Internet that is full of noise of movement but with increasingly fewer nuggets of wisdom.

It’s those nuggets of wisdom, useful analysis and unique worthy content that will be what time poor and somewhat information addled consumers are going to be looking for.

They are also going to be looking for a platform to get their views heard. So it’s going to be critical that magazines make that platform available through comments, forums, reader blogs and giving loyal and knowledgeable readers the opportunity to write for the publication.

Engagement is going to mean allowing site visitors some ownership of the content. The more you can build conversations and contributions around content, the more likely it is that readers will come back and the more likely they are to pay for add ons and read advertisements.

Where will the revenue come from?

The great challenge in the Internet era is making money online. We’ve trained the market to expect news and information to be free and that genie is now out of the bottle, and despite the paywalls we try to put up, we’re going to struggle to convince readers of our value.

As writers, journalists, editors and publishers, we’re going to have to demonstrate our worth to the people who are prepared to pay for content. Right now there aren’t many of who will pay for relevance and quality, but things may be changing as readers realise much of what they currently find on content farms is unsatisfactory.

Subscriptions and advertising are still going to be critical while events, merchandise and other revenue streams are going to be useful revenue centres but it’s hard to see how they will contribute to the bottom line any more than they currently do. It’s also important to remember that successful staging events is an expensive task involving skills many publishers simply don’t have.

Hyperlocal is a fascinating area for magazines. While much of the focus has been on adopting local search to the newspaper industry it could be that specialist magazines can deliver effective localised products through directories and mobile phone applications.

For instance let’s say we have an offal magazine for those who like to offal. A Brisbane businessman visiting Adelaide feels like a plate devilled kidneys for dinner. It could be that Offal Eaters Monthly magazine has a paid app or a subscriber site that allows him to find what he wants in a strange city.

What is the role of the publisher/editor?

More than ever the publisher and editor are going to have to know their market intimately. At a time when audiences are going to be widely fragmented it’s going to be essential to understand what the readers want.

User generated content provides an opportunity for publishers and their editors to understand the market and monitoring what is being said by the target audience is going to be a key role of the modern editor.

Moderating and controlling what’s being said on the platform will also be a key role for an editor. We all know the Internet is God’s gift to opinionated idiots and the risks of defamation, piracy and other brand damaging activity on websites are very real. The editor’s job will increasingly be to filter out the lunatics while encouraging interesting discussion.

Most people though don’t want to create content, beyond having a quick comment on a post or sometimes joining a discussion. Another important role of the editor is to balance the higher quality, paid content with user generated material to ensure the publication’s site doesn’t dissolve into just another web forum.

Publishers too are going to be challenged by this and their task is to find the deep niches where these models can succeed then convince advertisers and subscribers that their sites are worth signing up to.

Given the ease of launching new sites, the key to success is being the trusted leader in your segment. If your content can be easily replicated or bought from another source then the survival odds are firmly against you.

The next nine years

We should also keep in mind change isn’t new, broadcast television gave a death sentence to news magazines like Life or the Bulletin a generation ago, and these publications only survived because of indulgent owners.  The magazine industry met those challenges, evolved and survived albeit with great change and a few casualties.

The same is happening now, the industry is evolving and adapting to the new mediums and the changed behaviour of advertisers and readers. It’s not pretty or easy but the rewards are going to be there for those who figure it out.

Had we been around when Gutenberg invented the printing press we would have wondered what will happen to all the monks who up until then had spent their lives manually copying religious texts and important documents. Change came to the monks, but not in the ways they expected.

The web only recently turned 20 and in 2020 it will still be less than thirty years since its invention.  All of us will still be learning, making mistakes and discovering where the opportunities are.

It’s a time of challenge and the rewards for those who get it right are great. The key for magazines, like all of us, lies in understanding our markets and audiences.

The rebirth of the middleman

Groupon, Google and Apple prove there’s still money in the middle

For many years, we believed the Internet would see the middleman’s demise. Just as it has with the newspaper and recording industries, we expected manufacturers, service providers and content creators would stop using intermediaries such as agents, brokers or retailers and move to set up their own online distribution channels.

The new middlemen

The rise of services like Groupon, along with booking platforms like Wotif and employment services like Seek, show just how wrong we were. What we’ve actually seen is a rise of new middlemen to replace those who have fallen away like telephone directories and record stores.

If anything, we’ve seen even more powerful intermediaries develop like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon develop to replace the old gatekeepers.

Why we need intermediaries

Part of the reason for this is that none of us, even the biggest corporations, have all the skills to bring a product to market; retail itself is a tough business, marketing is hard work and distribution is easiest when you have economies of scale. Middlemen bring these and other skills required to get products into the marketplace.

The danger with middlemen is they can dilute your brand. We see that with Groupon as businesses give their brand over to them with steep discounts on their products. As Esther Dyson points out at Salon, Groupon will eventually destroy many of their merchants.

None of this is new as many brands who’ve found themselves hostage to single outlets have found. This isn’t a just a small business problem either as we see hotels and airlines try to break their dependency on travel websites whose readers mainly shop on price.

The Internet’s price paradox

Price is one of the big paradoxes we have on the net, we’ve largely trained customers to buy on price – or look for free – yet for the middlemen to make money, it’s essential there’s a decent profit in the chain. If a $50 product only has $10 margin to share across the supply chain, there’s not a lot in it for the various intermediaries.

Right now, we’re seeing another paradox as the middlemen are keeping their profits while retailers and producers – such as the hairdresser, restaurants and personal trainers selling through group selling sites – are taking the pain and absorbing both cost increases and reduced income from retail price discounting.

That’s not sustainable and it’s probably a transition effect as the technology changes distribution and marketing at the same time that the Western economies are moving from being driven by consumer debt.

Are most of us really middlemen?

We were wrong to predict the death of the middleman, they provide too many benefits and many of us are middlemen ourselves whether or not we’re prepared to admit. What does happen is the middleman’s role evolves as markets, technology and industries change.

Regardless of whether we use, or are, middlemen it’s necessary to keep an eye on that evolution and make sure we aren’t caught out when the market tips and moves against us.

Tipping points

What happens when industries are hit by massive change.

We often assume change is immediate – for instance, the moment the motor car was invented, all the horse cart makers went out of business – what usually happens though is the two technologies or industries sit side by side for some time and the old industry may even continue to prosper for sometime and the new methods struggle.

Eventually though the newer technology takes over and the older one falls away quickly, leaving slow to change incumbents with an irrelevant business model.

Illustrating this, two fascinating posts by Michael DeGusta on his blog The Understatement tracks two major trends in the US newspaper and record industries, noting how the sectors are now at 1960 and below 1973 levels respectively.

The record industry

Michael’s tracking of per capita recording sales is striking both for how technology, trends and musical tastes have shaped the record industry along with the predicament it now finds itself in.

The 1970s show how the recording industry adapted, we see sales start the decade in decline until a sharp uptick in vinyl sales happens in the late 1970s, probably driven by the heavily hyped “rock opera” and concept albums foisted on us by the likes of Pink Floyd and the Electric Light Orchestra.

It’s interesting that during this period cassette sales largely flat lined, as digital revenues have today. As a child of that late 1970s era, we used cassette recorders – mine won in competition at a jeans shop in outer suburban Melbourne – to tape stuff off the radio and jerryrig with record players so we could create mashups of Alice Cooper and Skyhooks.

Cassette revenues eventually grew, but the the Compact Disk quickly took the growth off the cassette tape and drove the record industry to new highs, probably as people replaced their vinyl collections with CDs that weren’t easily copied through the 1980s and much of the 90s.

The peak of CD sales was hit in the late 1990s, which is almost certainly due to the arrival of personal computers equipped with recordable CD units. All of a sudden, we could go back to copying the music we’d already bought.

To make things worse, the rise of the World Wide Web meant we suddenly didn’t have to go through the gatekeepers – the record stores, radio stations and magazines – to find the music we wanted.

For a while the record industry fought back, even seeing a minor resurgence in 1999 and 2000, but then the rot sets in. The tipping point was clearly in 2001 and can probably be traced to the online streaming services, including YouTube, and the rapidly maturing peer-to-peer services.

The only solace the record industry in its current form can hope for is to see a surge in digital sales like they saw with cassettes in the mid-1980s. It’s difficult to see how that can happen unless they can quickly strike some very favourable deals with Apple and other online distributors.

Newspaper advertising

Print media’s performance over the last fifty years has been one of success until 5 years ago. Despite most of us turning from newspapers to broadcast television for our news through the 1960s and 70s, revenues stood up.

From the 1980’s there was a slow decline and in a few years early in the new millennium it even looked like the Internet wasn’t affecting revenues and the new streams from online advertising were actually increasing overall income.

Then in 2005, the tipping point was reached as classified advertisers, particularly employment and real estate, fled to online competitors with the display buyers not far behind.

For newspaper publishers, that their online revenues have barely grown in the last five years most be the most worrying aspect of the collapse in their income. Their online strategies simply aren’t working.

What this means for other industries

This “tipping point” pattern is typical when we see technological shifts. For various reasons – customer inertia, government regulations, uneven distribution of the new tools – a game changing technology usually takes time to be adopted and usually goes through a process best described by the Gartner Hype Cycle.

New technologies and ideas rarely change industries or societies overnight, but once a technology reaches maturity and mass acceptance, the barrier eventually gives gives and people quickly move across to the new way of doing things.

We see this in the record industry – particularly in the switch to cassettes, CDs and then collapse as the net takes over – then again in the newspaper industry.

These two industries though are just examples, the same process is happening to many others. One good example is the phone directory business where the tipping point is happening right now as consumers and businesses move online and away from printed directories.

That many businesses still haven’t figured out this change in consumer behaviour indicates they too are being blind sided by tipping points that could leave their ventures stranded by history.

All of us have to understand how these changes will affect our livelihoods and trades. Are you looking at how your business is affected by the rise of the net and the end of the cheap credit?

The saddest sign you’ll ever see

When a landlord takes possession of a business, there’s a lot of pain behind the signs.

The sign on an abandoned business announcing “Landlord taken possession” usually hides a pile of pain and distress.

It’s not cheap or easy for a landlord to take possession of a business premises and for most to do so it’s usually the end of long period of unpaid bills and broken promises.

Behind that sign is usually months, if not years, of stress and despair as a business owner has held onto a failing enterprise, bluffing their landlord, their suppliers, their staff, their own families and often themselves.

Almost every one of those signs has a story of failed relationships, destroyed friendships and ruined marriages.

Often they didn’t understand the cost of doing business and in many cases because they hadn’t consulted a bookkeeper or accountant earlier they didn’t understand their venture was always loss making despite what appeared to be a healthy cashflow.

When the truth about the businesses becomes obvious, life for the honest owner of a failing enterprise tries to bluff themselves and those around them that things will be okay, that the dream is still alive.

This is what worries me about many of the businesses that participate in group buying deals, they are desperate to keep their business afloat and believe the cashflow or publicity will save their failing venture. Even worse, many don’t understand how that “50% off” deal will affect their ability to pay staff and the landlord.

Even where the failed proprietor has been one the “two percenters” – the 2% of our society that runs their affairs with no regard for the pain and suffering of those they hurt – many people, particularly the smaller suppliers and low paid workers, have taken a hit as bills went unpaid and promises were not kept.

Most business owners though believe in their idea or vision and work long and hard in an attempt to achieve it. The majority of those who end up with the landlord taking possession are often those who ignored the signs and believed things would come good next season, next month or next week.

I’m always saddened when I see a “landlord taken possession” sign like the one near me in the window of what was an Italian restaurant until recently. What’s the saddest business sign you see?

ABC Nightlife: The business web revolution

Business is changing as customers move online

The March Nightlife technology segment looks at how the web is changing business as consumers go online and cheap, easy to use tools make it easier than ever to set up an effective Internet presence.

The podcast of the program is available for download or listening to from the Nightlife website. Some of the programs and online services we refer to on the program are listed below.

Last year’s Sensis e-business report found over two thirds of Australians had made a purchase online. Increasingly, customers are using the web to find shops and services rather than the phone directory or local classified adverts that local businesses have relied upon in the past.

At present only half of all businesses have a website despite customers using the net as their main way of researching purchases and finding local merchants. This is partly because of the cost, time and complexity involved in setting up a web presence.

Today it’s possible to set up a free website in half an hour and be listed on the main local search engines within an hour.  On the March ABC Nightlife Tony and Paul looked at how to get online and use these tools.

Aspects we discussed include;

  • Can you really build a web page for free
  • What’s replacing Yellow Pages
  • How do businesses list on these services
  • Are they a substitute for a web page
  • Do consumers actually use local search
  • How to remove Norton 360
  • Protecting yourself online
  • Dust build up in systems
  • The next version of Windows

Our next spot is on April 28. Visit the events page or subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with other ABC segments we might be doing.

Useful Links

Some of the software and webpages we discussed on the program included.

Getting Australian Business Online
Adding your website to Google Listings
Listing your business with local search
Norton 360º Removal Tool
Windows Scripting Host (for Windows XP)
Malwarebytes virus and spyware removal tool

If you have any suggestions for our April 24 show, please contact us. We love to hear your ideas and comments.

If you are in Sydney, our Web for Beginners seminar still has spaces available. In three hours, you’ll have your business online with an effective Internet presence.

Running your own coupon campaign

Do-it-yourself coupons may be the better tool for your business

The group buying goldrush continues as now even Facebook are considering starting up their own service, but do businesses need to be using these platforms at all?

Behind the group buying mania is the idea retailers can use these services’ large mailing lists to promote their business while clearing excess stock to bargain conscious shoppers.

Those reasons are valid, but for the privilege of accessing their databases the group selling services charge substantial merchant commissions, representing a 20 to 50% cut from the seller’s income. If the discount is really deep, say 80%, then the site often takes the remainder of the sale leaving the retailer giving the product away.

For access to a mailing list, that’s a pretty big outlay to the merchant who may be operating on thin margins to start with. The cost can even be greater given most of the group buying subscribers are shopping on price and converting them into loyal customers can be a struggle.

It is possible to run your own coupon campaign. Both Google Places and News Limited’s True Local have features in their free local services where you can set up coupon campaigns and publicise offers.

The advantage with these is you capture shoppers in your neighbourhood, the coupon lasts longer than one mail shot and doesn’t require a fat discount to grab the attention of shoppers already jaded by 60% off waxing services and half price exercise classes.

Running your own coupon campaign puts you in control, saves the often fat commissions and when done cleverly can break you out of the damaging deep discounting mentality the group buying sites promote.

You can also put links to these offers on your website, Facebook page and other social media channels, further building those channels and giving you more opportunities to convert one off buyers into loyal customers.

There’s also the advantage that the search engines, particularly Google, love these offers – it’s part of their US roots where clipping coupons is a fundamental part of retail marketing.

You don’t even need to come up with a new offer. If you currently run ‘cheap Tuesdays’, happy hour or other promotions, you can build a coupon campaign around them.

All of this is another reason why you should be taking the local search tools seriously even if you do already have a website.

Group buying sites do have benefits for a retailer such as exposure to a wider, new audience and it’s worth considering them in the right circumstances. Trying a do it yourself local coupon campaign may turn out to be the better option for most businesses.

Paul will be holding a masterclass that looks at local search, adding coupons and how to get a small business fully online in two hours on March 24 at Mosman, NSW. Spaces are still available.

Group buying sites explained

Are big Internet discounts right for you or your business?

Fancy half price seafood dinners, deeply discounted electrical goods or 80% off personal fitness training? Thousands of people who’ve signed up for group buying websites certainly do and hundreds of businesses are prepared to make big discounts to attract those customers.

What are these services? Are they worthwhile and how do the businesses make money from them? Should customers be wary of advertised big savings and are merchants cutting their throats when they enter the world of deep discounting?

What are group buying websites?

The idea behind group buying sites is that merchants will offer cheap deals to take advantage of bulk sales, clear inventory or as loss leaders to attract new business. The products offered can be anything from a cheap haircut through to discounted whitegoods or a cheap meal.

Customers subscribe to the group buying websites and receive a daily email detailing the deals in their areas. If they like an offer, they can choose to be part of it and if it goes ahead, their credit will be debited and they’ll receive a voucher for the deal.

The group buying websites usually approach businesses to take part. For the privilege of having their businesses featured, the website takes between 20 and 100% of the offer price as commission.

What are the consumer benefits?

Naturally the main attraction for consumers are the cheap deals on offer. Some businesses are offering 80% off their list prices for products, so there can be substantial savings to be made.

There’s also the opportunity to try out products or outlets you wouldn’t normally try for instance you might not usually be interested in Zumba classes, canoe hire or replacing your TV at normal prices but an 50% discount could tweak your attention.

Are there risks for the consumer?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch so there are a number of risks when using a group buying site.

Impulse buying is probably the biggest risk, if you’re a sucker for a deal then these sites will love you. It’s an opportunity to sign up for a lot of things you don’t really need, probably will never have used and maybe can’t even afford, but fact you saved 80% makes you feel good.

There’s also the risk you’re not really getting the full discount. A lot of canny merchants inflate the list price to make the amount off look greater. Many also reduce the size or quality of the discounted product to recover their margins.

A big risk is that you may never get to use your voucher. Either you’ll forget about the voucher you received or the merchant is so overwhelmed by the offer’s response that they can never get around to catering for all their people who took them up.

Finally there’s the spam factor. Many merchants see a group buying offer as an opportunity to build their mailing lists, so you may find yourself being spammed for fitness classes and restaurant offers for a long time after you take up a deal.

Business Benefits

These sites wouldn’t have taken off if there weren’t businesses to advertise on them and hundreds of merchants have taken up the opportunity. So there are clear benefits for the outlets that use these services.

The most obvious one is they get to promote their businesses. All of these sites claim to have subscribers numbering in the hundreds of thousands, so it’s an opportunity to get your products in front of a large audience.

Clearing excess capacity has been one of the main drivers for these sites in the United States where many businesses have found themselves with too much inventory or staff sitting around. These sites are a great way of clearing inventory or smoothing demand cycles.

Business downsides

The first problem is that excess stock. A business can’t afford to be carrying stock that requires big discounts to clear, if these offers become a regular feature then your business is in trouble.

Even if your business isn’t in trouble, these offers risk devaluing your brand. As the major retailers have found, offering frequent discounts trains your customers to expect lower prices.

Offering these bargains may alienate existing clients. Those customers who are prepared to pay full price aren’t only going to be irritated to find they could have got your products cheaper, but may also be unhappy with your business being overwhelmed by cheaper, price conscious clients.

Those price sensitive shoppers aren’t really your customers either; they are loyal to the buying platform and cheap deals, so if your competitors have an offer later on another platform, those customers will go there. There’s a lot of work to be done converting these bargain hunters into repeat clients.

One of the most misunderstood parts of group buying sites is the commission structure, most of the services charge a commission of between 20 and 50% – with some going up to 100% – on the advertised price, so that 50% discount to the customer is actually 60 to 75% off the merchant’s selling price. This can be a massive hit to a business’ profit.

Is group buying for you?

For businesses group buying sites can be a good idea if they are used as a part of a well thought out marketing strategy or to clear occasional excess stock. But they shouldn’t be seen as a quick way to attract new customers.

Customers are the big winners from group buying sites, as it’s the opportunity to pick up some great deals. But users have to use a bit of judgement instead of just jumping for the best looking deals.

It’s an old saying, but if anything looks to be too good to be true then it probably is. In the Internet age, that saying is probably truer than ever. Group buying sites can be good for both businesses and customers, but watch the wallet.

Backing up your online calendars and contacts

It’s important to have a backup of your web data

Online mail services like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are great for the small business owner and anyone who is often on the road. Having a central website containing all your emails, contacts and appointments makes life a lot easier when you don’t spend your time sitting in an office.

There is a downside though, if your account get hijacked or inadvertently closed down then all of those contacts, appointments and emails may be lost. So it’s a good idea to have some backup in case disaster happens.

Hotmail

The best solution for Hotmail users is to use the synchronisation tools included in Windows Live Mail. Download Windows Live Mail from the Microsoft website, install the program then Sign In to your Hotmail Account using the button in the top right hand corner of the screen then click the Sync menu and select everything. This will save a copy of all your Hotmail details onto your computer.

Yahoo! Mail

If you’re a Yahoo! user, you can backup your contacts by clicking on the Tools button that appears in the top centre of the contact screen above your contact list and select either export or synch. Synch will synchronise your data with devices like iPhones and computers although this varies on what equipment you use, while export will save a file to your computer which you can then import into whichever program you use. If in doubt choose the Comma Separated Value (.CSV) option as most programs can read that.

For your Yahoo! calendar, click Options on the right hand side of the screen and select Synch, the following page will take you through the steps of synchronising your calendar with various programs. That page will also explain how you can subscribe to a calendar from a different account which will then let you save.

Gmail

In Gmail you can export your contacts by opening the Contacts page, clicking on the More Actions button on the centre top of the screen then selecting Export. You’ll then get options for Google, Microsoft and Apple contact lists. If stuck, choose the Google option.

For Gmail calendars, at the bottom of My Calendars on the left hand side of the page click Settings. Under the Calendars setting tab, click the Export button which should appear under your list of calendars. This will then download a backup of your calendars.

A nifty tool for Gmail users is Backupify, a free service if your data weighs in at less than 2Gb, this can automate backing up your Google and Facebook settings.

Mobile phone applications

If you have a mobile phone, you’ll find the software that came with it may have a function to synchronise your emails, contacts and calendar. It’s a good idea to set this up if you have the opportunity.

Data is the most important thing on your computer and things do go wrong with technology so it’s essential you back it up on a regular basis.

Is Getting Australian Business Online right for your business?

the free options for a business website

The Getting Australian Business Online initiative is a great move from Google and MYOB to make it easier for the 50% of businesses who don’t currently have a website to get an Internet presence.

MYOB’s Chief Executive Tim Reed identifies the three barriers to small business getting online as being fear, time and cost.

All three barriers are addressed by this service; it’s free, simple and takes around half an hour to configure.

The results are fairly basic, a business ends up with a template that shows their location, contact details, some links and a basic description of the enterprise. It won’t win awards, but it is a basic web presence.

While GABO is a good idea, and strongly recommended for smaller businesses, it isn’t the right solution for all as it doesn’t include an email address, has few customisation features and most of the local search features have to be configured separately.

There are other cheap options available, registering a domain name for around $20 year and then using Google’s free Blogger platform is a straightforward alternative and there are other options using hosted WordPress, Weebly and Squarespace.

Given you get a free domain out Getting Australian Business Online, it’s worthwhile signing up if your business doesn’t have a website, however keep in mind there are cost effective alternatives that offer more flexibility and that all important email address.

Our workshop, Web for Beginners, takes business owners and managers through the process of setting up a Getting Australian Business Online account as well as signing up with the key local search services. Places are still available for our March 24 workshop.

The web’s cheeky scammers

If you want to see some of the web’s more cuddly sharks, register an Internet domain

Yesterday I received a note claiming to be a renewal letter for an Internet domain, the part of a web address that appears after the ‘www’ or behind the “@” in emails. The kind offer was a mere four times the price that I’ll be charged by my current domain registrar when the time to renew the address arrives.

This little scam, which almost every Internet domain owner has encounterd, is one of the quaint but profitable rorts that make the online world so interesting. Just as the web has opened up massive opportunities to new businesses, it’s also given birth to a new generation of cyber-swindlers and con men.

Part of the problem is the cult of free we’ve allowed to develop on the Internet, by giving away goods we’ve trained our customers not to pay for stuff they find on the web. Where we can get customers to hand over their credit cards, many businesses find thin margins as shoppers are buying on price.

The domain registration business is good example, it’s a tough game being a domain registrar, the margins are tight and, being a transactional business, they offer a fairly generic service. Many tend to offer add ons, such as web hosting and design, to pad out the margins and for many registrars their domain registration service is a loss leader for more profitable products.

As a consequence for domain holders it’s worthwhile shopping around as the prices vary dramatically, particularly if you choose not to take up the registrar’s offer to host your site or desigy your pages.

Sadly you don’t always get what you pay for and before changing registrars I always make quality check on the Whirlpool website where I look in their Web Hosting forum to see what people have to say about the registrar’s service.

One thing that often pops up is why the heck are local registrars so expensive? With the bigger Australian registrars a .com domain costs between $20 and $75 a year while the US providers are delivering the same for almost half the price. The .com.au domains are nearly double the price for the .com equivalent.

I can understand it the .com.au being a bit more expensive given the charges imposed by AuDA, the Australian Domain Authority, but the discrepancy seems a bit on the high side.

Every business should have their own Internet domain registered, partly to improve website search engine ranking but more importantly to protect their trading name, so all of this is relevant to almost every proprietor or entrepreneur.

When you do register a domain, note who you’ve registered with and when the domain expires as even the legit registrars have a habit of invoicing very early for renewals.

The domain registration business can be likened to a shark tank, fortunately for the business owners who are forced to swim in it, the sharks are the relatively harmless gummy types compared to some of the others like hackers and fraudsters prowling the net.

With a bit of knowledge and attitude you can keep these predators from nibbling your toes.