Tag: web

Google tries to drive American business online

Can Google convince reluctant American businesses to move online?

Google’s quest to sign the world’s businesses up to websites stepped into the big time this week with the launch of America, Get Your Business Online.

The US program is based upon the Getting British Business Online program which was followed up with similar projects in Australia and then Texas prior to being launched nationally across the States.

An interesting aspect with the rollout of the various programs has been Google’s choice of partners — in Britain the key supporter was the incumbent telecommunication company BT.

For some reason the subsequent programs have chosen to partner with accounting software companies and small business groups. The US program is no exception.

These partnerships are interesting as the software companies involved are threatened by online cloud services — both Intuit and MYOB have their business models of selling boxed software to small businesses under siege.

While Google regularly cite the Boston Consulting Group’s survey on the importance of websites to business, it seems most small operators don’t care as about half of small businesses don’t care about an online presence most developed countries.

In Australia, the Getting Aussie Business Online fell short of its 50,000 sign up target which indicates smaller enterprises still don’t see the point.

They may be right — for the local locksmith or lawn mowing service a Google Places account may be all they need rather than a relatively high maintenance website.

Part of the problem is that small business proprietors are probably the most time poor people on the planet, so  filling in another set of forms is one of the last things they will do.

Were Google to link Google + for Business to their other services so information wasn’t being duplicated there would be a far quicker and greater take up of their services.

America, Get Your Business Online should be a useful service for some local enterprises but the real challenge for Google is to integrate their services to make it easier for smaller operations to use.

Mosquitoes of the Internet

Stupid people have rights too and the Internet allows them to exercise those rights.

Sydney Morning Herald urban affairs columinst Elizabeth Farrelly recently fell foul of one the big fish that inhabits the shallow, stagnant intellectual pond that passes for Australia’s right wing intelligentsia.

As a result, Elizabeth found her personal blog infested with insulting comments from the Big Fish’s Internet followers.

What focused their ire was Elizabeth complaining about a delivery truck parked across a bike lane. A bit like this genius.

The funny thing with the righteous defence of the poor truck driver’s rights to privacy and blocking cycleways is where it the driveways to the gated communities for self-righteous and entitled self retirees that these commenters inhabit were blocked in a same way many of them would be reaching for the blood pressure pills.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it allows all of us to have our say without going through the gatekeepers of the newspaper letters editor or talkback radio producer.

The down side with this is that it gives everyone a voice, including the selfish and stupid – the useful idiots so adored by history’s demagogues.

Luckily today’s Australian demagogues aren’t too scary and the armies of useful idiots they can summon are more likely to rattle their zimmer frames than throwing Molotov cocktails or burning the shops of religious minorities.

Most of these people posting anonymous, spiteful and nasty comments are really just cowards. In previous times their ranting and bullying would be confined to their family or the local pub but today they have a global stage to spout their spite.

These people are the irritating mosquitoes of the web and they are the cost of having a free and vibrant online society.

It’s difficult to have a system where only nice people with reasonable views that we agree with can post online. All we can do is ignore the noisy idiot element as the irritations they are.

This is a problem too for businesses as these ratbags can post silly and offensive comments not just on your website but also on Facebook pages, web forums and other online channels.

Recently we’ve had a lot of talk about Internet trolls, notable in the discussion is how the mainstream media has missed the point of trolling – it’s about getting a reaction from the target. In that respect The Big Fish and his army of eager web monkeys have succeeded.

The good thing for Elizabeth is her page views will have gone through the roof. That’s the good side of having the web’s lunatic fringe descend upon your site.

A world of criminal sheep

Are we are all criminally inclined sheep that need to fleeced and controlled?

Notorious unpaid blogger Michael Arrington recently described his battle with a bank over direct debit charges.

To overcome a fraudulent recurring charge on his credit card, Arrington cancelled his account only to find the bank moved the recurring charges to the new card, a ‘service’ designed to avoid fraud and save customers the hassle of re-establishing legitimate direct debits after a new card is issued.

Both of those are noble reasons but the core of this philosophy lies in a contempt for customers which can be summarised in two principles.

A customer is;

  1. A sheep to shorn of any available cash through sneaky fees and shady business practices
  2. A criminal

In the 1980s business school view of the world, customers are criminally inclined sheep who have to be regularly shorn to enhance profits and controlled so they don’t go anywhere else.

Only businesses operating in protected environments can get away with this today and the two obvious sectors are banking and telecommunications.

The telco industry long soiled its nest with consumers with dodgy charges and a contempt for customers which reached a peak (nadir?) with the ring tone scams where kids had their phone credits pillaged by fees they never knew they had signed up for.

While those dodgy charges paid the handsome bonuses of telco executives, it proved to another generation of consumers that these companies see their customers as sheep to fleeced on a regular basis.

Ironically it’s that lack of trust that dooms the telcos in the battle to control the online payment markets – their practices of the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s mean few merchants or consumers will trust them as payment gateways.

One of the strengths banks bring to that market is trust. Like cheques, credit cards succeeded as a payment mechanism because people could trust them.

In screwing customers over direct debit authorisations, the banks are damaging that trust as Arrington says “I really don’t think I’m going to be giving out my credit card so freely in the future.”

That’s a problem for businesses as direct debiting customers have been a good way to ensure cash flow and reduce bad debts but when clients perceive there is a high risk of being ripped off they will stop using them.

Businesses that insist on direct debits will be perceived as potentially dodgy operators who rely on locking customers into unfair contracts rather than providing a decent service for a fair price.

So the banks’ position of legal power works in their short term interest and against them – and the merchants using their services – in the longer term.

While bank and telco executives with safe, government guaranteed market positions will continue to treat customers like criminal sheep it’s something the rest of us can’t get away with.

The winners in the new economy are those who deserve to be trusted by their customers and users, if you’re abusing your market and legal powers then you better hope politicians and judges can protect your management bonuses.

Making business accessible

Making your business website easier to use helps everyone, particularly your customers.

Internet payments giant Paypal yesterday released a survey showing how businesses with a website grow faster than those without an online presence.

There’s surprise to anyone paying attention that a business website is essential, but what happens if a business’ site isn’t accessible to those with impaired eyesight or a disability?

We tend not to think about accessibility issues when building websites and that oversight might be hurting the effectiveness of our online marketing efforts.

Access iQ was launched two weeks about by Media Access Australia, a not for profit organisation that works to improve disabled access to the media which was formed out of the sale of the Australian Caption Centre in 2005.

Federal Disability Commissioner Graeme Innes pointed out at the Access iQ launch that accessibly makes life easier for everyone – making shopping centres and footpaths easier for wheelchairs to navigate also made those places more accessible for parents with prams, the elderly and able bodied people. Everybody, particularly the shopkeepers, won by making things easier for everybody.

What’s true in the physical world has even more effect online, as the features which accessibility programs use are the same ones the all important search engines use when ranking websites.

Titles, headings and metadata – the descriptions of the site, pages and images built into websites – are important as they let search engines and accessibility programs understand what a site is actually about.

Getting your metadata right is a basic part of Search Engine Optimization and it’s key to having an accessible website as well.

A good tool for checking how well metadata is being used on your website is the Australian diagnostic site BuiltWith, whose free service gives you a basic report on how a page is using SEO best practices.

While how well a site uses headings and metadata is important, its also important that the site works properly. Problems with a website’s design make it run slower and can affect how it works in some browsers. So minimising design errors on a page matters as well.

The best tool for checking a website’s underlying code is the W3C’s Markup Validation Service. This checks your site is complying with web standards and picks up an errors that might have crept into the design. Eliminating as many errors as possible means the site runs quicker while improving the SEO and accessiblity aspects.

For checking accessiblity issues, the Web Accessibility Evaluation tool (WAVE), shows you where problems might lie in your site and steps through each part of a page highlighting potential issues.

While a web site’s code isn’t something business managers and owners should spend a lot of time worrying about, the accessibility and SEO does matter so it’s good practice to use these tools to check how your site is performing.

Once you’ve run these tests, sit down with your website developer and see where you can improve. The more accessible a web site is, the more it will help your customers.

Writedowns and triumphalism

Sometimes headlines don’t tell the full story

The contrast between Microsoft’s and Google’s results released on Thursday attracted a lot of interest – for the first time in twenty years Microsoft posted a quarterly loss with Google’s profits continue to grow.

While there’s no doubt Microsoft are challenged by the effects of their lost decade and bad decisions made in that time, but the business itself is still extremely profitable.

Microsoft’s posted loss is due writing down 6 billion dollars in their aQuantive investment, an attempt to compete with Google in the online ad placement space.

Despite a six billion dollar writedown, Microsoft only posted a 500 million dollar loss showing the business is still making over 5 billion dollars profit each quarter.

Google on the other hand posted a profit of 2.8 billion, up 11% from the same period last year.

But Google also has some nasty writedowns coming in the future – the purchase of Motorola will see some substantial write downs of that 12 billion dollar deal. It’s conceivable that a very big portion of that investment will have to be written off as well.

Right now, Google’s seeing some benefit from the Motorola acquisition as the phone company’s cashflow is covering a decline in online advertising revenue, a threat to Google’s core business.

It’s easy to be triumphant when the headlines proclaim you’re a winner, but it’s often worthwhile looking at the fine print to see the real story.

 

Outsourcing’s changing face

Freelancer’s 50 fastest movers job list shows some interesting trends

Outsourcing company freelancer.com regularly releases the fifty fastest moving job descriptions requested by their customers.

This year’s list shows how the online industry is changing – content creation, social media and SEO job requests are all down substantially as users and gatekeepers like Google adapt to the information flood we all have to deal with.

Keeping in mind the market that Freelancer.com caters to small businesses and many of the jobs posted are for fairly small – some would say laughingly tiny and insulting – amounts, it’s probably safe to say we’re looking at the low value end of the market.

Article writing (down 15%), proofreading (5%), blogging (13%) and submission (4%) jobs are probably the cheap and nasty “Demand Media” style of low quality content designed for SEO purposes.

SEO itself is in trouble with jobs in that sector down 7% indicating Google’s Panda and Penguin search engine changes have achieved their objectives of improving search results and knocking out those gaming the system with low quality content.

A similar thing has happened with social media. Facebook is too hard for many businesses and they’re not seeing a return on their substantial time investment.

“Companies in industries from consumer electronics to financial services tell us they’re no longer sure Facebook is the best place to dedicate their social marketing budget—a shocking fact given the site’s dominance among users,” Freelancer quotes Nate Elliott, an analyst at market research firm Forrester.

A bright part in Freelancer’s list is the rise is in open standards as HTML5 starts moving up the list with 20% growth.

“The Internet is becoming more interactive, and the technologies that are winning and will continue to win are open standards like HTML5 and jQuery- to the detriment of the incumbents proprietary technology providers like Adobe and Microsoft,” says Freelancer’s CEO Matt Barrie.

Open standards aren’t winning everywhere though as Apple’s iOS is clearly winning the developer war as iPhone grows by 30% and iPad by 26% compared to Android’s 20%.

Freelancer’s list is an interesting snapshot at where industry demand is right now, what’s we’re starting to see are some of the transition effects working their way through the system. The rise and fall of the social media and SEO specialists being one of those.

The full Freelancer list is below;

On being a hater

A cheap slur hides real problems with online communities and anonymous comments.

The phenomenon of the “Internet hater” has been one of the unfortunate developments of the web.

Just as entry barriers for new businesses are low, so too are the restraints on clueless and anonymous idiots posting comments like “drop ded you faggot” or “hope you get canser bitch” onto web forums and social media pages.

English comedian Isabel Fay has a great rebuttal to the haters with a clip that co-opts some of Britain’s top comics with their experiences.

These haters are sad little people as the BBCs Panorama program found when it tracked down one individual who had posted offensive comments.

We knew Darren Burton of Cardiff, aka Nimrod Severen, would be a pathetic individual. Those who post anonymous, hateful comments are rarely anyone who has anything useful to contribute to society.

Online “haters” are a real problem and cause distress to people who encounter the foul comments these creatures post. However the “haters” tag is increasingly being misused to shut down fair comment and criticism.

Legitimate critics or dissenters from the groupthink and shallow advertorials that increasingly dominate parts of the web will quickly earn the tag “hater” as well.

Every multi level marketing spiv or con merchant with a few followers will quickly throw the term out at anyone who dares criticise their behaviour in the hope of rallying their followers to shout down the dissenters. Usually it works.

If you’re prepared to think outside the group and genuinely challenge those selling old rope as new ideas, let alone expose the hypocrisy of those who claim to open and transparent while hiding their real intentions, then be prepared to wear the tag “hater”.

The only reply is to stand on your beliefs and be prepared to use your real name. The real trolls are scared, frightened creatures – just like many of the useful idiots co-opted by the spin merchants and Internet spivs.

At least “hater” is just a cheap insult and they aren’t coming for dissenters with pitchforks. Yet.

Monetizing the Masses

How do social media services make a profit?

Monetization is a horrible word.

The term is necessary though as many online business models are based upon giving away a service or information for free. For those businesses to survive, they have to find a way to “monetize” their user base.

When Google were floated in 2003, the question was how could a free search engine “monetize” their users. The answer was in advertising and Google today are the world’s biggest advertising platform.

Facebook’s Inital Public Offering (IPO) announcement raises the same question; how does a company valued 99 times earnings find a way to justify the faith of its investors?

Advertising is the obvious answer but that seems to flattening out as the company’s revenue growth is slowing in that space. The AdWords solution tends to favour Google more than publishers as most advertising supported websites have found.

Partnering with application developers like the game publisher Zynga is another solution. Again though this appears to be limited in revenue and Zynga itself seems to be having trouble growing its Facebook user numbers.

So the question for Facebook is “where will the profits come from?”

There’s no doubt the data store Facebook has accumulated is valuable but how the social media service can “monetize” this asset without upsetting their users is open to question.

For Facebook the stakes are high as the comparisons with Friendster and MySpace are already being drawn.

We’ll see more partnerships like the Facebook Anti-virus marketplace, but these seem to be marginal at best.

In the next few months things will get interesting as Facebook’s managers and investors strive to find ways to make a buck out of a billion users who don’t pay for the service.

While “monetization” is an ugly word, it is one that every online company thinks about.

Every web based businesses will be watching how Facebook manage their monetization strategy closely as the entire industry struggles with the faulty economics of providing services for free.

Consumer surplus?

Inventing euphemisms for your dead business model

Last week I came across the term “consumer surplus”, the Boston Consulting Group claimed the gap between the cost of producing media content and what customers are prepared to pay creates a “consumer surplus”.

That consumers of media want it but aren’t prepared to pay for it is a basic truth; the 20th Century media model is based upon advertising subsiding journalism and entertainment.

For all forms of media this was true; from TV and radio stations being fully funded by advertising to newspapers and magazines’ cover prices barely covering distribution costs.

Take out advertising and all these models are dead. The only alternative is government funding.

Losing the advertising rivers of gold to web services is what’s killing the established business model. It appears that TV and radio will hang on, for now, but newspapers and magazines are in serious difficulties.

Simply put, there has rarely been a market for journalism; readers and viewers aren’t prepared to pay. Journalism’s golden years of the 20th Century were based upon having a relatively captive market for advertisers; now advertisers can go elsewhere, they have.

Putting a sophisticated  label on a basic concept is something consulting companies are very good at and Boston Consulting Group has done an excellent job with this report.

The fundamental truth is that it doesn’t matter how good your product is, if you can’t find a way to make someone pay you for it then you don’t have a market or a business.

Which is what the real challenge is for online content creators, finding the model that pays. The first person to do that becomes the 21st Century’s Randolph Hearst.

A website can’t save a dying business

Online tools can’t fix an organisation’s structural problems

The last week has seen some interesting changes in the local online business community.

Embattled department store David Jones’ announced they are following Harvey Norman into an “omni channel strategy”.

Harvey Norman chief executive in turn appeared on national television to state the “internet drives no sales.”

In the political field, it was reported the Australian Labor Party are looking at using Blue State Digital tools to counter voter and member apathy.

Each one in it’s own way illustrates how organisations can be distracted by shiny new technology while ignoring much deeper problems.

In the case of David Jones, the department store ignored their core competencies and tried to ape their down market competitors in milking the financial services cow.

This worked fine while they could offer 24 and 36 month interest free deals and as soon as their partners American Express started charging a monthly “Administration Fee” that business evaporated.

One of DJ’s down market competitors is Harvey Norman, co-founder Gerry Harvey has spent his life building a fortune based upon providing cheap credit to consumers.

It was always going to be a mistake for DJs to compete with Harvey’s as Gerry is far better at the business than the well connected, genteel board of David Jones and their snappily dressed friends in the store’s executive suite.

Worse for DJs, the whole strategy alienated their core markets and while management focused on financial services customers went elsewhere to find the quality goods and services that the upmarket department store should be providing.

For both though, the financial services business model is now fading as the 20th Century debt supercycle comes to an end; consumers no longer want to load up on “buy now, pay later” schemes.

So all the talk of “omni-channel strategies” really doesn’t address the underlying weaknesses in both business.

This disconnect with reality is true in politics as well where the ALP is reported to be considering using the Red State Digital tools that Barak Obama used so well in his 2008 US Presidential campaign.

While the tools are impressive, they don’t address the problem that the electorate – and the member bases of the major political parties – have become rightly disillusioned and disconnected from the political processes that exclude everyone except an increasingly smaller circle of cronies and insiders.

The only good thing that will come of using US political communications tools in the spectacular eruption the first time one of the ALP’s factional warlords encounters a grass roots online campaign like The Great Schlep.

Heck, the resulting furore might even see some of the apparatchiks distracted from partying and whoring on their union credit cards for a day or two.

All the frivolity aside, the reality for the Australian Labor Party, David Jones and Harvey Norman is their problems are far deeper than a well designed website and impeccably executed social media strategy can fix. These organisations need major rethinks about how and why they exist.

It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the web or how effective your social media strategy is – if the foundations of a business are shaky then a nice “omni-channel strategy” aren’t going to fix things.

For some of organisations, a failure to embrace the online world may be one of the causes for their problems, for many though there are far more basic issues they need to address.

The death of local newspapers and media

How does the regional press survive in the digital era?

The bankruptcy of Lee Enterprises, publisher of 48 newspapers across the United States, is the  latest episode in the steady decline of local  printed media. Is the newspaper, particularly the local publication catering for a smaller market, dead?

Futurist Ross Dawson certainly thinks so, last year predicting US newspapers won’t exist as we know them by 2017 with them being replaced by digital platforms like the web, iPad and Kindle.

The problem for the media industry is how to fund news gathering in a digital environment. Newspapers are dying because advertisers have moved online, so Google now makes $30 billion a quarter on the income the local paper has lost in classifieds and display advertising.

For web surfers, this is also a problem as much of what appears on the net — in blogs, Facebook, on Twitter and circulated around message boards — comes from newspapers and largely subsidized by their rapidly eroding print revenues. Take out the traditional media, and many of the authoritative online sources disappear.

Much of the free web content we’re seeing is a transition effect as we evolve to paid online models, something that is going to be driven by advertisers following consumers’ eyeballs to the net.

For the publishers who don’t go broke in the meantime, this will probably save them in whatever form they evolve into.

Cutting costs to survive the current lean period is essential for newspapers, the tragedy is many are following other industries in cutting the very areas that give them their competitive advantage while keeping antiquated and expensive management who hang on to failed strategies.

Poor management is probably a bigger threat to the news empires, as it is for many other industries.

The damage done by poor business leadership is far greater than the cost of outsized management salary packages and entitlements. Until shareholders address the number, cost and suitability of the managers charged with running their investments, the future for these organisations is bleak .

Local journalism is going to change as we start seeing old media’s economies of scale being replaced by cheaper technology that allows local people to reclaim their news and community stories.

They will be doing this through blogs and social media while using their mobile phones and cheap cameras to capture and document local news.

For the local newspapers and media outlets who understand and harness their community, they’ll remain valued local commercial citizens; for those who see their readers as a mass of dumb consumers, they’ll be lucky to last the decade.

Santa’s online business checklist

The run up to Christmas is a good time to make sure essential business information is online

Regardless of what sector your business is in, the web has become the way customers find us. Giving the key information shoppers are looking for is good start to getting their business.

An analysis by search engine giant Google of Australian consumers’ online Christmas shopping habits shows how the web is evolving as it becomes the main way customers discover businesses in the crowded marketplace.

Even if your business isn’t in retail, it’s worthwhile paying attention to the survey as a guide to what customers – both in the business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) spaces – expect online.

Do you list opening hours?

Number one failure of many sites is they don’t list opening hours or hide them. Warehouses, distributors and suppliers are particularly bad for this and if you’re in retail it is the unforgivable sin.

Your operating hours have to be clearly shown on the front page and come up early on a mobile site, people don’t want to navigate ten menus, subscribe to your newsletter or, worst of all, have to call you to find out if you’re open Sundays or in the evening.

List shut down and public holiday hours

If you’re in an industry that shuts down during the Christmas break, make it clear when you won’t be available.

Sending out a terse email message at 10am on the day of the close down and putting a sticky taped note on the front door that your accounts, receiving or sales department will be shut for two weeks doesn’t help your business or your customers.

Where are your contact details?

Probably the most bizarre aspect of hospitality industry websites is how many bars and restaurants hide their location.

This is fine if you’re one of these Melbourne laneway hipster haunts where only the ‘in-crowd’ are welcome, but most businesses actually want customers to find them.

Have your address and a map on your site showing exactly where you are. If you are in hospitality or retails have a mobile version that shows this first so lost shoppers and taxi drivers can find you.

Are local listings up to date?

A lot of mobile phone applications get their data from services like Google Places and True Local so get your listing up to date with these services, making sure you have accurate Christmas trading hours and that their maps accurately show your location.

The good news for hard pressed retailers is the overseas online threat fades in December as foreign websites can’t guarantee delivery after the first week of the month and local web outlets drop out around the 16th.

If you want to grab those last minute shoppers – which includes most men – then you’re going to have to make sure they can find you when they pick up their smartphone or log into their computer.

As Telstra have found, people are no longer turning to the phone directory and calling you for information, they expect contact details and opening hours to be clearly on your web site.

The web is where our businesses have to be, so make sure you can be found there.