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Thursday, August 07, 2008
Web 2.0 flurry appears to be slowing down
Researchers at McKinsey, the business analysts, have discovered that the initial enthusiasm there was for "Web 2.0" is now waning. In fact, far fewer businesses have taken up things like blogging and social networking than was predicted.
As you can see from McKinsey's own graph (above) on average only around a third of all businesses have actually engaged in any form of Web 2.0. Hardly a resounding ring of support for these new technologies is it?
Yet blogging, for instance, has been with us for more than 10 years - it's hardly new in the Internet world. Social networks also began 10 years ago - Ecademy, for instance, was one of the first online social networks and that was formed more than 10 years ago now. Business has had time to catch up.
So why are they not engaging with these new technologies as much as the pundits predicted? In spite of Business Week magazine claiming over three years ago that blogging was a business pre-requisite, most businesses have yet to take it up. True, there has been an increase since the last time McKinsey did its survey, but still the majority of businesses do not engage in any Web 2.0 activities.
The answer is simple: there's no money in it. In spite of what you may read about "making millions from blogging", most of the people doing that are actually writing blogs about "making millions from blogging". For the rest of us, blogging and social networking is more about brand, reputation, image, presence etc. And those are the bits of business that hard-nosed CEOs can't put a value on.
You can't easily calculate the ROI on blogging or social networking. So, unless someone in a firm can put together a business case, it tends to get ignored. The McKinsey report shows us that there is increasing dissatisfaction with Web 2.0 as a whole. Those people using it are finding it of less value it seems. That would imply that we are already at the peak of interest in Web 2.0. But that is tosh.
We are so early in the use of blogging and social networking as a business tool that people are still experimenting. We are in the phase of early adoption. Business thinking actually moves much more slowly than we'd like to accept, so it is going to be several years yet before big companies truly see the financial benefit of blogging. Meanwhile, of course, all those online start-ups are busy stealing their customers. By the time big business wakes up to the benefits of Web 2.0 and realises there is a financial benefit, it could be too late.
Check your email - quick - another one might be in....!
How often do you check your email? When you install email software, such as Microsoft Outlook, it is set up to automatically check for new messages every 10 minutes. Few people change the default settings, so most people get used to emails popping into their inbox regularly throughout the day. It becomes the norm to keep on seeing that inbox grow.
But wait a mo....! When you didn't have email, did you check your postbox every 10 minutes for physical mail? Or did once, or perhaps twice a day, do?
A new study by AOL has revealed we are becoming ever more addicted to email. According to the research, almost half (46%) admit to being hooked on email. So much so that people even check their emails while in the bathroom, on a date, or even during a church service. In response, AOL recommends clearing out your inbox, getting a new email address and starting again.
But that's no answer - all that will happen is that your new email address will also get checked every few minutes, your inbox will grow and you'll find yourself checking for messages while making love.
It doesn't have to be like this. You can break free from the clutches of email.
Step One: Change the default settings on your email program to check only every four hours.
Step Two: Set up a special folder in your email program called "Action"
Step Three: When you check your emails (now every four hours) move the emails you need to deal with to the Action folder. Ignore the rest.
Step Four: Set a time in your schedule to deal with the Action folder - this is a once-a-day time, perhaps at 4pm.
Step Five: Go through the Action folder at your scheduled Action time and deal with the emails - then file them
Email addiction is nothing of the sort - it is merely an inability to take control. Most people are letting Microsoft run their daily life by accepting the nonsensical default of 10-minute checking.
And if you think this will not work - consider the case of Tim Ferris. He wrote "The 4 Hour Work Week". He only deals with emails twice a day and manages to earn a million dollar fortune and run a busy, enjoyable life without being ever-stuck to his inbox. His book demonstrates that by reducing your checking of emails you can actually increase both productivity and profit. We have all become umbilically connected to our inboxes through no reason, other than habit and assumption. We assume that our emails need immediate attention, when in fact, they do not. As I have said before, if it is really, really urgent you will get a phone call, not an email.
Don't forget - the Internet exists "within" the real world - it's not a separate place...!
Sometimes data comes along and you just have to go - "oh my goodness, how daft is that?". Well, new research from search engine marketing specialists, iProspect, shows that the vast majority of online marketers appear to have forgotten there is a real world out there. That's because this study shows that the majority of people responsible for marketing their businesses online tend to ignore offline marketing.
Say that again? That's right, the study shows that online businesses are largely ignoring the offline marketing they could be doing. Even more surprising is that a quarter of online companies say they don't integrate their search engine marketing with their offline marketing because they are not doing any offline marketing whatsoever.
That's patent stupidity. Search engine marketing is part of the "mix" of all the marketing you do. Even if you say you do no offline marketing - you do. People don't see you mentioned in newspapers, for instance and make the assumption when they bump into your web site that you can't be as good as those folks they read about last week. Or, what if one your staff attends a business meeting and hands out a business card, with an old email address on that they have had to cross out and handwrite a new one in - that's marketing...! It shows what a duff company you are.
There are clearly businesses which believe that the only marketing they have to do is online - but as the pie chart above shows, the online marketing exists within an offline world. In fact if you ignore offline marketing you are significantly reducing your sales potential. Even those Internet Marketers who sell millions of ebooks online do a great deal of offline marketing at events, for instance.
The iProspect study reveals the fact that many online businesses have failed to understand how people arrive at their web sites. Most people get to most web sites as a result of places other than search engines. If you concentrate on search engine marketing alone, you are neglecting a significant proportion of your potential audience.
A couple of years back, there was much talk about the increased use of online video, thanks to the launch of YouTube. Then along came video on the iPod and the BBC launched its iPlayer. The online video revolution, we were told, was upon us; soon, we were "reliably" informed by all those gurus, that we'd stop watching the TV and that the Internet was going to be the place where we would watch video. Some even predicted the end of broadcasting.
Well, unless I'm in some parallel universe, broadcasters are doing OK; true they might be down in advertising revenue, but on the whole, viewing figures are holding up. People haven't rushed headlong to watch video online.
New research confirms this. A study by the consultancy firm Frank. N. Magid shows that only 7% of people watch fewer DVDs, for instance, because they watch online video instead. Six out of ten people still prefer broadcast media to online media, according to the study.
Why might this be? Online video tends to be very short - often only a couple of minutes. Flash technology limited video to 10 minutes anyway, as did YouTube. The result was we were all told (by those gurus again) that people don't want to watch long videos online - they prefer short ones.
But that's the same approach as saying that people on a desert island prefer to drink coconut milk - if it's the only milk they can get, of course they prefer it. Online, video has only ever been short, so there is tons of evidence that people only watch short videos online.
However, think about our experience of broadcast media - it's centred around 30 minutes, 50 minutes, 60 minutes and 120 minutes slots. Long, long, long. Deep down we expect video to be long - at least 30 minutes. No wonder we don't like watching video online - it's too short; it doesn't match our expectations of what video should be, hence we shy away from it.
So, what should you do? Start producing long videos for your web site - not short ones. The notion that people have short attention spans is nonsense - otherwise they wouldn't be watching hour-long programmes on TV. If the content is good and gripping they will watch. The danger with short video is that the largely amateur programme makers don't have to make good content because it doesn't last long enough for people to really notice that much.
But you can't get away with this for long - eventually people will realise that the bulk of what YouTube dishes up is garbage. Your web site can stand out if you produce good, quality LONG video.
Interesting article, I agree longer video is generally much more satisfying, in a similar way that most people prefer novels to short stories. The success of the BBC's iplayer shows that people are quite happy to watch long video on their computers, but producing quality long video is difficult. Even professional broadcasters struggle to stop people channel hopping. I think the argument is less about short video 'v' long video and more about quality. When it comes down to it I sure it is possible for websites to produce engaging long video but it will take a lot of investment as making quality television programmes is not cheap and a talking head for 30 minutes is not going to cut it.
Gordon Fletcher www.skinflakesblog.blogspot.com http://twitter.com/skinflakes skinflakesblog@gmail.com Gordon Fletcher www.skinflakesblog.blogspot.com http://twitter.com/skinflakes skinflakesblog@gmail.com
Before the Internet came along there were two main ways of finding suitable suppliers for things we wanted to buy. If we knew we wanted something but didn't know who to get it from, the first thing we used to do was ask a friend or colleague. And if they couldn't come up with the answer we had to thumb our way through Yellow Pages.
Then, the Internet arrived and we had a "third person" we could ask. Gradually, web sites replaced the Yellow Pages. Indeed, each year now we get two copies of Yellow Pages delivered (because we have two phone lines) and both of them sit in a corner gathering dust. I can't remember the last time I looked inside Yellow Pages - can you?
For the past few years we have changed our habits. We have carried on asking friends and colleagues for advice on where to buy things, then heading off to the Internet if they can't suggest a suitable place to go. But things are changing.
New research shows that over the past year we have been dumping our friends in favour of the Internet. Now, 58% of people go to the Internet FIRST to find suitable suppliers, only then asking their friends and colleagues if they can't find what they want online.
In other words, the Internet has become the most important place for finding suitable suppliers, products and services for most people. It is our new best friend.
If you run an online business, or promote any products or services via a web site, this has important implications for you. It means you need to generate customer reviews, allow customers to contribute to your site to comment on your services and generally allow "user generated" pages to be created so that your web site visitors can see recommendations and reviews - that's what they are looking for.
People are seeking from the Internet what they used to get from their friends and neighbours - honest, third-party, independent advice and suggestions. Your business now needs them to be online because that's where bulk of your customers are looking.
Today sees the launch of a brand new search engine, Cuil - and it's an important development in the world of search. For a start it has been developed by a former Google engineers, plus it has a unique way of delivering results.
As you can see from the screen shot, the design is much clearer than Google - plus because it is multicolumn it makes it easier to read, especially online. But, here's the clever bit - look at the top of the screen shot. I've done a broad search for Internet Marketing, but it has automatically produced tabs for related, more in depth searches (such as Internet Marketing Strategy and Internet Marketing Services).
What this means is that Cuil (pronounced cool) is already doing some sorting for you and categorising search results. This is particularly important since the human brain depends upon categorical organisation to help us recognise things. The frustration we have with Google is that its search results, whilst they can be useful, are non categorised. Google expects us to do the categorisation by refining our own search terms. Cuil does that automatically for you and presents the results in an easy to use way.
For the past nine years, there have been no threats to Google. Microsoft has tried, but in fact all they have done is try to copy Google - the results pages are similar, there is lack of categorical organisation and no intelligence to find extra things related to your search terms.
Cuil is the first search engine that is different. Google needs to notice this. Why? Because the world switched from using Yahoo to Google almost overnight because Google was so different to the "traditional" search at that time. Cuil is now remarkably different and therefore may well find a home amongst those people who find Google difficult and cumbersome.
And remember - the vast majority of people who use Google report that it fails to deliver what they were after until they refine their search term. Cuil seems to be getting that right by delivering alternative searches related to your original term in a friendly tabbed interface that is much more tastefully designed than Google's plain and rather untidy offering.
I suspect that with the right PR, Google will find Cuil much tougher competition than either Yahoo or Microsoft.
I agree with you Graham that Cuil looks, well kinda cool and seems to have neatly developed the search engine interface.
What I would say is that it was dreadfully slow and here's interesting for a rival of Google, it does not seem to have indexed any blogs hosted on Google's Blogspot platform - or at least none I have searched for painfully slowly.
Thanks Nigel and Dan for your comments. True, Cuil does have some teething troubles. But we forget that it was a couple of years before Google really sunk its teeth into search properly. Remember all those failed searches because they couldn't cope with the server loads? Remember all those sites that took up to six months to actually appear on Google's index?
Today is only Day One for Cuil and expecting it to be where Google is after nine years of development is asking a lot.
I'm looking at this from a different angle - a cognitive psychology one. Google's results are comparatively difficult for our brain to interpret, Cuil's results are much easier for us to work with. That means a significant human advantage for Cuil.
And as for nothing ever beating Google - didn't someone once say it would be impossible to build a flying machine, or that the world would only ever need four computers? One day Google will fall from its pedestal - and my bet is sooner rather than later.
Of course Google will be beaten - studies show that 8 out of 10 people who use Google FAIL to get any useful results. That means for most people most of the time Google isn't working - but, because it is largely all we have, people persist in using it because the alternatives are weak.
Give Cuil some weeks to build its index and to increase its server capacity and it will be the most serious threat to Google we have seen.
And 10 years ago I remember being told that Yahoo had a monopoly on search and no one could ever catch them. No what ever happened to them...?
I've just checked it out- my website in on page 1 of google for 4 search times, including being at number 1 for careers coaching but I don't appear on the first 5 pages of Cuil.
Also spotted a lot of the entries are from sites with Yalwa in their name, wondering what that's all about?
Intuitively I like Cuil. Testing it on a search for me, my business or me and my business and it fails each time. 'Fails' as in it doesn't point to me - as does Google. That's a huge disappointment for me.
If other searches 'fail' in the same way will the users care as long as they find what they want? Graham's probably right.
However, many people are searching for a specific business and if that doesn't appear in the search results users will consider Cuil to have failed too. Will they give it a second chance? In time perhaps.
Quote: Today is only Day One for Cuil and expecting it to be where Google is after nine years of development is asking a lot.
No it isn't. When you announce to the world that you are launching a product that's superior to the one most of the world already uses then the least you can offer me is a working search engine. Cuil doesn't even offer this (yet). So why should I go back and give it another go? People are creatures of habit/lazy, any marketer will tell you motivating people to change their buying habits is very expensive.
Beyond the novelty of the 'magazine style layout' I also think the masses will prefer a straight list. There's no obvious heirarchy to the information Cuil presents. We are used to information being presented in a heirarchy (newspapers, web pages, magazines). Why should I change?
I also think they've made a big mistake with their 'the world's biggest search engine' strapline. Take a clipboard into the street and start asking people who is the biggest. Whether they're actually bigger on some metric or not, the fact is most people believe Google to be the daddy. If you're going to take on a giant you don't do it on their terms. I can't help feel that if they are making such basic mistakes in their marketing then the substance isn't going to materialise.
And finally as for Google not working for 8 out of 10 people, having a crap product but a dominant market share never stopped Microsoft.
Google is infuriating but I don't see Cuil being the great white hope.
Thanks for your comment - I suspect we are going to have to agree to disagree. However, people will change because the results are contextually presented. Google does not have any heirarchical presentation anyway - so if you want that you have to move from Google.
Like many others, I'm disappointed that I only come up on page 3, whereas a search on my name in Google puts me at number one on page 1. Other search terms don't pick me up at all. I find that the same sites come up on page 1,2,3 and so on. I wonder if Cuil is truly international; it seems to have a strong US bias with no option to "Search pages from UK only" There is no cuil.co.uk. Maybe we have to think again about search engine optimisation.
I agree that Google doesn't have any heirarchical presentation but most people's perception is that the search results are presented in order of importance. The whole SEO swindle is thriving on this misconception (as is Google itself and its ridiculous adwords policies).
Now I'm not a psychologist so if you're going to shoot me down please use a silencer and make it a head shot, but isn't the whole problem here one of perception? People think Google is the biggest so it's the best. People think Google presents search results in order of 'importance' so rarely look beyond the first page.
I'll agree to disagree. At least Cuil has got people talking 9and thinking) about whether Google is any good and that's no bad thing.
You're right about the SEO situation - indeed we only need SEO because Google is so poor at indexing. They would like us to think it's all complex but I suspect smoke and mirrors.
Yes, perception is important. But so too is effect. People gave up on Yahoo because it was having less and less effect. More and more pages were being added to the web and Yahoo couldn't keep up. Along came Google which boasted it could and we switched in our droves.
Cuil is different because it handles search completely differently to either Google or Yahoo. Google and Yahoo don't look at context but Cuil does. That means it will have more useful effect to people - once it has built its indexes. It claims 120 billion pages, but Google claims 1 trillion. So Cuil is only one tenth of the way there.
Remember too that Google began with only word of mouth and PR. People switched back and forth between Yahoo and Google for quite a while before Google became de facto. The same will happen with Cuil - PR will help it build up its index, attract some users, helping it develop further. Then more PR will help it attract people who will share it with Google. Then when they see the results are completely differently presented and that the search is more relevant and useful they'll go to Cuil. Social networking will replace word of mouth and Google will have to respond.
Even if Cuil ultimately fails, it may be the boot up the rear Google needs to reduce their arrogance.
I like the look & agree that Google deserves that boot, but you asked 'Has Google met its match?' Not if this report from the Register is to be believed; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/31/inside_cuil/
Should you worry if your online social group isn't very active?
Social networkers who form groups, clubs and the like, often worry that they are not getting enough participation. They point to the fact that even though many people may have registered, few take part. Indeed, there are social networking clubs and forums dedicated to helping club owners increase their participant rate..!
However, new research suggests that the "lurkers" (the people who just read the group, but don't contribute) may actually be getting something out of it. So that means you group will have influence - even if only a handful of people actively contrbute.
The research was published recently in the Journal of Medical Internet Research and it found that lurkers in health-related forums did gain benefit from simply reading material. Indeed, the results show that "lurking" has the same effect as actually taking part. So much so that therapists may even recommend reading forums as a kind of therapy.
Although the study was restricted, it does point to the fact that merely hanging around on the sidelines of a group can provide a benefit. As a result, if you run a social networking site or lead an online club or monitor a forum it may well be that you don't need to concern yourself with getting more active participants. It seems your group is having its effect anyway, even if few people contribute.
Sometimes data comes along and you just have to go - "oh my goodness, how daft is that?". Well, new research from search engine marketing specialists, 
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