On Internet Business

Internet traffic and social media

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Social Media

Business people are increasingly aware of social media, without always knowing how to exploit it, or even how to react to social media incursions into the business word.

First of all, it’s important to understand what social media is – it’s a communication system, rather than an information system.  In other words, it doesn’t just supply the customer, or potential customer, with information but allows interaction. In the simplest form, this interaction could be as limited as letting viewers vote for a video or article (Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon) or as complex as the way that Flixster can recommend films to a user, by using the ratings of films provided by other Flixster users with similar interests. The strongest forms of social media allow not just communication but creation – such as the Skittles brand which was supposed to allow visitor uploads of Skittles related videos.

Managing Social Media

Managing social media is complicated – that same brand awareness campaign for Skittles had the Twitter component pulled after an upbeat start to the campaign degenerated into a long run of profane and pornographic tweets … all of which were appearing, in real time, on the Skittles homepage. The facebook campaign has been more successful, and the demographic data collection resulting from visits to the Skittles homepage has been highly successful (to enter the site you have to type in your date of birth) allowing a data-cull of immense proportions.  Presumably though, Skittles set out to increase brand awareness and sales, not to reap data, so the jury is still out on these kinds of highly managed social media campaigns – they involve high risks for the brand, especially if negative commentary outweighs positive.

Static websites may soon not be enough to sustain a business with a large online component. The internet is no longer website-based, it has become a fragmented series of systems, including social media, each of which appeals to different groups. Twitter, for example, is said to be a turn-off for teenagers (although in the weeks following this claim, many teenagers tweeted vociferously about failures in the research that led to the Morgan Stanley report) but MySpace is a big hit with the same teenage demographic. Facebook is a great campaigning area, but is also associated with bullying, both of individuals and groups. Brand bullying is a potential outcome of using this kind of social media, and that’s pretty well what happened to Skittles.

Getting Social Media Wrong

The way to avoid problems is to ensure that you build trust through social media, doing more listening than ‘talking’ and ensuring that you are relating to your customer base, not to trolls who can warp your views of your demographic as well as trying to force you to make revealing or damaging remarks as happened recently at radio station KNRK in the USA.

Most experts advise getting as senior a person as possible to be the ‘face and voice’ of your social media, which is working very well for Ford in the USA for example, who have senior communications executives blogging and tweeting about Ford’s restructuring. However, if your exec is not extremely media savvy, they are likely to end up making horrible blunders. Alternatively you can use a professional service to manage your tweets and micro-blogs, but that also has its problems. Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) has recently been caught out after a silly mistake on his blog revealed that he wasn’t actually writing the material himself.

Next time – how to get social media right …

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How a website can please a search engine

Posted by Michael under Paid Search, Search

Understanding what a search engine needs to put your business at the top of the search table is vital if you want to have any kind of online business. We’ve talked about the way Google Caffeine might change the way businesses look at their SEO tactics, but the basics remain the same.

Here’s a quick rundown of what the major search engines do, bearing in mind that the developers don’t just hand out details of the algorithms that decide the search rankings.  If they did, SEO experts would be able to use them to design websites that matched the algorithm perfectly!

Google

Leaving aside the alterations that Google Caffeine will bring to the SEO business, the standard Google-courting system will still apply.

Google is the Emperor of SEO and there are a lot of SEO practitioners who base their service package entirely on getting a site higher up the Google rankings. And it is simple to state the basic Google need – content, content and more content. Pages that appeal to the Google algorithm have three main attributes in terms of content: they are easy to find, they are coherent (clearly written and logical) and they have high information content.

Google also responds positively incoming links from other relevant websites. It treats each link as a ‘vote in favour’ of the relevance of your site, and that pushes your page up the results ranking.

Technically, it’s vital that your site is easy to navigate – Google is the search engine that is most like a person, it responds to clear linking. This means that you need to have at least one static link that points to every page of your site to satisfy the Google algorithm as well as the actual visitor.

Bing

Is not new, despite the vast amount of advertising that seems to suggest it is. It’s a revamp and rename of Microsoft’s old Live Search – it’s been much more heavily promoted in the USA than in the UK, especially through hotmail and the MSN pages. A couple of interesting features are that Bing ‘makes sense’ of its search results by organising them into helpful categories, rather like the Clusty search engine so beloved of journalists (but perhaps not loved by many others as it’s not become a credible rival to the big three) because it allows them to exclude searches that don’t meet their needs when tracking down leads in a hurry. Bing also broadens a user search by offering related search terms that – it says – will increase the likelihood of a searcher finding what they are looking for.

To please Bing, you can use the same algorithm tactics as for Google i.e. relevant and popular content provision, but it does seem that Bing is predisposed to give a higher rank to websites that have the search word in the URL – so, as an example, websites that have ‘cruise’ in their URL rank about some others that are more content rich but are simply cruise company name URLs

Yahoo!

SEO used to take account of Yahoo! But now that its search engine is going to be powered by Bing, there’s no differentiation in tactics for these two engines.

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Google Caffeine: is this the end of SEO?

Posted by Michael under Search

Currently codenamed Caffeine (although complaints are being heard – and apparently serious ones – from the Mormon community, about the name) it’s a substantial upgrade to the Google search engine which, the developers say, will improve improves the speed of response to queries, the index size and the value of search engine rankings. If true this would make it a faster, more accurate, larger and more comprehensive search engine.

What is SEO ?

SEO is the art, craft, trickery or business (depending on your viewpoint) of optimising a web site by altering both internal and external aspects to increase the traffic arriving from search engines. Because most web traffic is driven by the big three or four commercial search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc, SEO is a vital part of online business strategy.

If your site isn’t fully and properly visible to search engines or your content doesn’t fit into their databases, you fail to get visitors who use search engines to find matches to their desires. In other words, a customer who may want what you have goes straight past you. It’s as if your High Street shop is blacked out, so nobody walks through the door.

Search queries are the words typed into the search box. Finding the best terms and phrases to register your site with search engines can bring massive results – search engine traffic can create or destroy a business

So how has Caffeine changed Google search results ?

Let’s start with what a search engine actually does. According to the google webmaster central blog a great search engine needs to:

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible

So, on those terms, Caffeine has changed the landscape phenomenally, and not always in ways that businesses want to hear about. The search is faster, search response times used to be a key decider in which search engine people use, but now response times are measured in milliseconds, it’s not likely to be a key determinant in Google Caffeine’s success.

More importantly, for business, the short term impact from the google webmaster central blogseems to suggest:

•        an increased weighting on domain authority and some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages and Feedfriend, as well as Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority.
•        perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names
•        either a bit better understanding of related words/synonyms or an algorithm that’s better at picking up related words and ‘curving’ the related word results back into the search results in proximity to the key word.
•        turning down some of the value given to video and some universal search results
 (source http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine)

 What is the likely long term impact of Google Caffeine?

Well, on one level Google is going to doing everything in its power to diminish the ability of the SEO industry to manipulate search engine results. This means that  the job of the SEO professional is much more demanding. The new s algorithm seems to rely more on keyword strings to produce better results which means that the keyword manipulation tools used by many businesses to fine-tune their search engine rankings are not just out of date, the actual model they are based on could be obsolete.

Is this the start of the end? Who knows? One thing is certain, it’s going to become harder and harder for new websites to come top of Google.

If you want to find out for yourself – try Google Caffeine here.

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SMEs and the Internet

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail, Social Media

Many smaller businesses wonder why they should bother about the internet. There are three main reasons that getting to grips with internet technology and communication will help any business to thrive, and they are the same three reasons that can send a business under. The internet now:

1. challenges how business is done
2. extends customer expectations of a company
3. reveals new opportunities for growth

Concrete examples of each of these from the real world of business show just why even the smallest SME can’t afford to ignore the explosion in internet based communication.

Challenged and failed

Neal’s Yard were challenged, and failed, when they were given a chance to engage with bloggers via the Guardian’s online ‘pages’. Guardian Deputy Editor Adam Vaughan opened the ‘You Ask, They Answer’ blog so that the luxury toiletry and healthcare retailer could answer queries. Hit with dozens of questions from intelligent and sceptical consumers, asking about everything from the way Neal’s Yard homeopathy products could be said to ‘help fight malaria’ to their pricing policy, they failed to produce the responses they’d promised. Then Max Clifford weighed in with a trenchant soundbite on where, when, why and how they’d got it wrong – exactly the kind of publicity no company needs. You can read Clifford’s excellent explanation of why you can’t ignore questions here

Neal’s Yard still haven’t stepped up to the mark to engage with literate, intelligent, highly communicative questioners – but their failure to do so will remain on the internet for decades to come …

Expectations not met = fail, expectations exceeded = business growth

Customer expectations may range from understanding a company’s carbon footprint through to being able to contact the company and ask detailed questions about the product at any time of the day or night.

eBay is the perfect example of how customer expectations have changed the way business operates, and it could even be said that eBay is why Woolworths went out of business in the UK. Both were businesses (or systems) that allowed people to browse a range of similar goods and choose what they wanted, buying in small quantities and often providing low cost items that were needed in a hurry.

But eBay offered thousands of times more choice, and allowed customers to have their goods delivered to their door. Above all, it allowed each customer to ask questions of each vendor such as: how do I wash this? Can you confirm that this is microwave safe? Have you tried to use this underwater … all questions asked of a sandwich box vendor. In Woolworths, the staff would have answered with a shrug, but the sandwich box seller went on to create a short video, on Youtube, that described both the cleaning of the boxes and showed some ways of packing lunches including making radish roses and cartoon character cakes. His business took off exponentially because he’d exceeded customer expectations and they bought into his aspirational funky lunches, not just his cheap lunch boxes.

New opportunities for growth

In late July there was a heavy rainstorm on the South Coast of the UK – road drains were clogged with summer rubbish, streets ran with water and many an unhappy householder discovered that their gutters or drainpipes were blocked too.  On Twitter, a tiny decorating/handyman company seized the day. Their cheeky 140 character advert:  Recession Busting Prices – Front gutters cleaned and checked – £15.00 Front and rear £25.00. Worthing & surrounding areas – was retweeted around the planet. Although it didn’t generate a single customer, TandSWorthing think it was worth it because a lot of potential customers will have got to hear about them and will subconsciously remember the name when they want handyman type work carried out.

The basic rules to mastering the internet business model are to be:

• Integrated – don’t leave the internet to your tech team, make sure everybody understands what the internet business model means for your company
• Fast moving – respond to market opportunities or threats, to customer queries or to events that could change your business behaviour, like a local storm!
• Aware of development – a website that is static and hasn’t been updated for two years is like not opening your mail for a month, it implies you don’t care about those customers. You don’t have to use Youtube or Tweetdeck or Facebook but you do need to know what they are and why you aren’t using them.

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