The world has just celebrated ten years of blogging. That's right, blogging started back in 1997 and since that time over 70 million blogs have been produced with 120,000 starting each day.

Yet, the vast majority of web site owners and online businesses have yet to start a blog. What's keeping them? Other technologies introduced a decade ago, such as sequential autoresponders or sophisticated shopping carts have been adopted with relish. Yet, blogging is comparatively easy. Setting up autoresponders or shopping carts requires technical skills; blogging is just typing.

But therein lies the problem. Most businesses online are technologically led. Setting up shopping carts and autoresponse systems is the stuff of engineers. They love the challenge, the editing of the code and the sense of achievement when it all works. Just typing words doesn't turn them on.

Most businesses place their web site in the IT department. Hence, most business web sites are technologically based, rather than business based or marketing led. Blogging is a huge marketing tool that can dramatically change the online success of a business. But because most business web sites are controlled by IT, blogging doesn't get as much of a look in as it might.

The time has come for businesses to take web sites away from IT. Once that happens we'll see even more blogs. The next ten years looks even more exciting.

Labels: blogging

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Sit down and take a deep breath; this may come as a shock. But one part of the UK Government is better at online business than Tesco. I'll say that again...Tesco is worse online than one arm of the UK Government. I know, sounds mad doesn't it?

When you consider that Tesco generates £1.3 billion in sales via the Internet, this is some boast. But, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is doing even better. On average, each day of the year, the DVLA is "outselling" Tesco by £600,000. Every day the DVLA takes around £4.2m in car tax completed online. According to Computer Weekly magazine, the DVLA completes around 273,500 car tax applications each week online.

So, why is the DVLA out-doing Tesco? Simple. It's convenience. Finding your MOT certificate, your insurance documents, writing a cheque and then trudging to a Post Office only to queue for 20 minutes is not the most pleasing task in the world. Getting your car tax paid online takes less than five minutes.

Tesco also offers convenience, saving people the time and bother trudging around the vast cavern of their local "Extra" store to get the weekly basics. But with tangible goods that people want to touch and feel it is more difficult for retailers to sell the idea of online shopping.

The DVLA success story tells us one thing - if you produce intangible goods and services, such as consultancy, business services, publishing and so on, how can you make it more convenient for people to buy from you online? It is pure convenience that has driven the DVLA's online success in little more than a year. Focus on providing convenience for your customers and you too could succeed online.

Labels: internet marketing

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Small business owners are failing to do enough online in order to make their firms succeed. According to a new study by BT just over half of Britain's small business use the Internet However, four out of ten companies do not have a dedicated web site and one in five British businesses have no Internet presence at all.

What is revealed inside the report is the fact that even though the majority of small businesses say they do have some online presence, less than 10% say they are doing anything with that. Looking at the table below taken from the report you can see that only 8% of small businesses have any kind of online strategy.

Source: http://businessclub.bt.com/downloads/businessandtheinternet.php

This is the same as printing a pile of brochures and leaving them in the corner of your office in the hope that one day they may come in useful. Business owners would question spending on physical resources that had no return on their investment. But when it comes to the Internet, either they simply don't bother or they don't care.

So why is it that the vast majority of small businesses are ignoring the true value of the Internet - even though three quarters of them say it is very important to their business? The answer lies buried in the BT report. Business owners say that the Internet has reduced the personal nature of business. One of the reasons people set up their own small business is because they like people. The Internet appears to reduce the value of the interactions they seek with others.

Another reason is that business owners do not understand the Internet enough - they feel it is a technological "thing", without appreciating it from the business perspective. Less fear about the technology would certainly help. So too would assessment tools to help businesses work out their return on their investment on the Internet.

But unless British small business grapple with these essential tasks - and soon - they will find they are losing out to competitors from other parts of the world. British business owners may bemoan the lack of face-to-face working, but other business cultures do not care about this so much. They will use the Internet to take customers away from Britain's small businesses. No longer can Britain's businesses neglect the Internet, or merely set up a web site and do nothing with it. Act now, or you will lose your customers to International competition before the year is out.

Labels: internet

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Children know much more about things than we give them credit for. You will find plenty of books advising parents on how to protect their children when they are using the Internet. But few of these books, or the articles you read on online protection of children, tell you it is the parents who need to know more than their children.

Earlier this week I spoke to a large group of children at the annual Quaker Summer Youth Event. My task was to help them be safe online. But it was apparent that they knew more than many adults about online safety. I asked them whether or not they would do something, like make their personal details available online. Who would be foolish enough to do that was the chorus of replies I received. Well adults would. That's why identity fraud is so easy.

Adults like to think they know more than children, but often it is not the case. A few years back I visited one of the UK's growing group of high tech schools and discovered that seven-year-olds there were dab hands at PowerPoint presentations, surfing the Internet and selecting appropriate information. As the head teacher told me the children were often teaching their parents.

Now it seems that Microsoft is bidding to help schools become even more high tech. But as the BBC TV programme Click points out all of the software and services that the children are getting used to are - hey presto - Microsoft ones.

Like banks that try to acquire students, they know that if you "get them young" you keep many of them for life. Building high tech schools is a fantastic idea, but allowing them to be put together by a single commercial supplier might not be a good suggestion. It will mean that the Internet of the future will be a Microsoft led one, rather than at the moment a Google led one. Ho hum, the battle goes on....!

Labels: future, speaking

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Shoppers are in different states of mind depending upon which activity they are engaged in. Imagine, for instance, that you are in a store browsing for something; you are not looking for anything in particular, but you might buy if you see something interesting. Would you respond to an in-store announcement saying you had to "buy now" before the doors closed? You would probably leave the shop - you weren't that bothered anyway.

But what if you had to buy something, you were looking for anything that might be suitable for a friend's birthday and you needed to get it today. The in store announcement suggesting you needed to buy now because the shop is closing would have an altogether different effect on you. Doubtless you would grab something and head to the checkouts.

It's the same online. People respond differently to sales signals such as "buy now" buttons or time-limited offers and so on. Their response depends upon the mental frame of mind they are in at the time they see the signals you are providing.

An interesting study by Dymo proves the point. At first sight, the research might suggest that you should change the colours of your "buy now" buttons, that you should alter the phrase "add to cart" to "proceed to cart" or that you should change the size of the shopping cart buttons. Indeed, the Dymo study shows that if you do these things you could get a hefty increase in sales in your online shop.

However, the details of the study show that it wasn't as simple as this. The colour of the "buy now" button, for instance, had varying effects depending on where it was in the sales process. For instance, early on a red button led to an increase in sales, but later in the process, as people neared checking out, a blue button had better results.

The effect of colours on our state of mind is well known, but what this research shows more than anything is that the right colour to choose for your web site's buttons is not straightforward as it clearly depends upon the pre-existing state of mind of your customers. And your online shoppers will be in different states of mind to each other and at certain points in your sales cycle.

So, if anyone tells you there are any "rules" about shopping cart buttons and words, just tell them it's nonsense. There are no "rules" unless you know the psychological state of your individual web site visitor at each particular point in your sales process.

All you can do is get close by testing colours, sizes and words on your particular clients. The people who buy from Dymo are not the same people who will shop with your site. Hence, the only way you ever know whether the size of your buttons are right, or whether or not you are using the right shopping cart labels, is to test them with your specific audience. You might want a short-cut to helping improve your sales, but rarely do they work better than testing in your specific marketplace.

Labels: shopping

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Social networkers who read my article on the future of social networking may have thought my suggestion for a single "uber-network" that connected all the social networking sites together might have been a bit far fetched. Indeed, I received a couple of emails telling me I was talking out of my hat.

Well, perhaps I wasn't so wide of the mark. Google has sponsored a project at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, called Socialstream. According to the developers the idea behind the project is to "create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks". In other words, Google sees the value in creating an "uber-network", much like my suggestion.

The human value in this will be in time saving. How much time do you spend in updating Facebook, Ecademy, MySpace and so on. Social networking is fast taking over people's lives. Indeed, one well known social networker, Thomas Power, is so busy networking online he needs someone to help him do that - his "digital biographer". With the rapid growth in social networking sites there is a danger we would get nothing done each day as we would spend too much of our time updating our contributions and administering all the sites we belong to.

That's why the Socialstream project is so exciting. And the fact that Google is behind it means that you can expect it to be rolled out in Google Labs before too long. Check out this video demonstration of the system.

Once Google take hold of this, expect all your social networking to be done through this system. The end of individual social networking sites may be nearer than we think.

Labels: social networking

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At July 27, 2007 7:25 PM  Harry said…

At July 28, 2007 8:18 AM  Graham Jones said…

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Oh dear. Did you manage to think of a pink elephant even though I told you not to? Now I've mentioned it twice it's very difficult for you not to imagine a pink elephant. But that's precisely what I want you to do - pause, deep breath now....do not think of a pink elephant.

Trying not to do something is often easier than trying to do it. It's easier for you to think of a pink elephant if I tell you not to do it than if I tell you to do it. This is because in order not to think about it your brain has to suppress the thought. And stopping thoughts takes up more brain processing power than generating the thought in the first place.

So, preventing yourself from thinking things is actually difficult, which as it happens is quite important in terms of the Internet. Everyone of us has mental "baggage" - stuff we carry around in our heads that we would rather not. It may be negative experiences of some kind, it might be difficult or stressful times at work, or it could be relationship troubles. But what we tend to do is try to keep all that material "locked away". We try not to think about it. And that's hard.

Millions of people are using up considerable amounts of psychological processing power in attempting to stop themselves from thinking about those events and experiences they would rather forget.

Luckily though, human beings have developed a way of getting rid of the problem - sharing the secret thoughts or experiences with other people. Sometimes it might be a family member, a close friend, or even the hairdresser. But as the saying goes, a problem shared is a problem halved. And indeed this appears to be true. Once you have "let out" your secret or concern to someone else your brain no longer has to commit all that energy to stopping thinking about it. Hence you feel much more free.

But when you "tell all" to your hairdresser they take part - it's a two way situation. This means you are aware of their reaction to what you are saying and you give more or less detail as required by their reaction. In other words you don't go too far.

Now, though, many people are using blogs and so on to share their secrets and innermost feelings. The problem is, says Psychology Today, that people don't know when to stop because that monitoring process that occurs face to face, preventing you from revealing too much, simply doesn't happen online. The result is that blogs can often go too far, revealing too much.

The private self is not so private any more thanks to blogging and other new technologies, such as social networks and forums. So we clearly need to take more care. Blogging may have therapeutic capabilities as it enables you to offload some of your thoughts you were trying not to bring to mind too much. This allows you to free up your brain for more important tasks.

The danger is in the way people will react to you. In a face to face situation you would be able to stop things going wrong. But online you can't easily do that, so you could offend or upset your readers, without care.

There's only one way to be sure about these things - testing. If your blog contains material that is revealing something about you on a personal basis, it would be best to get it checked by someone who already knows you well. In other words, even therapeutic blogs need editors. Not for the text itself - but for the author's benefit.

Labels: blogging, internet psychology

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People spend $91.32 every second of every day with Amazon. It adds up to a whopping $2.88 billion dollars of income. Not bad for a company that doesn't really own anything. All they do is show you a list of things other people have produced.

Actually, they do own something, of course. They have a database into which they pour details of the books, CDs and DVDs that other people produce. They also own a database of customers. The clever bit is in connecting the two together. Well, it's not that "clever" really - it's standard relational database work that has been going on for decades. All rather straightforward really.

So what has Amazon done to bring it in around $33,000 every hour? Clearly the shareholders are impressed because the company's value soared by over 11% yesterday after the announcement of record profits.

What Amazon have done is good, old fashioned, straightforward business. They have discovered something people want - convenient books - and delivered them at a price people are prepared to pay. They are not the cheapest way you can get books and CDs; neither do they have the ultimate customer service. But what they do have is simplicity in terms of their business strategy.

Their strategy is to provide you with what you want in terms of books, CDs, DVDs, software and so on. And all they need to do that is a couple of databases. In other words, Amazon's success has come about from simply finding out what you want and then connecting you with it; that's the "secret" of any business success, online or offline.

However, far too many less successful online businesses would have us believe it's all to do with the technology. Amazon teaches us that it's to do with choosing a marketplace and then simply providing people with what they want. So don't overcomplicate your Internet business; just find out what your customers want and provide it for them.

Labels: internet marketing

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At July 26, 2007 2:11 PM  SRKNET said…

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Bloggers who make money are few and far between. There are some well known bloggers who earn a ton of cash, but few bloggers are generating real incomes. Yet it all seems a great idea. Just sit at your PC for an hour or so each day, write a few bits and pieces and watch the money flow in. Well it doesn't quite work like that.

Every day 100,000 new blogs are started, so finding ways to make money inside the huge growth of blogging is very difficult. Yet clearly it can be done. Darren Rowse, a former church minister in Australia, now earns his income blogging. He was featured in a recent article in The Times and there's one comment he made, buried towards the bottom of the story that's absolutely essential to success in blogging.

Darren said that you need to be creative. A blog that is "ordinary" will not make money. You need to be unusual, different, weird even. Perez Hilton makes money from blogging about Hollywood tittle-tattle, for instance. Overheard in New York makes a reported $8,100 a month simply from things overheard in New York!



Clearly making money with your blog needs creativity. So here are some web sites that could help you with being more creative:

7 Keys to Creative Genius

Headsurfing

Creative for Business

Finding Your Creative Edge

Creative Thinking

What can you learn from these sites? How to free yourself from the "standard" blog and become more original and different. That's how you will make money.

But there is another way - the option I use. My blog is fairly "standard", but it's aim is not to make money directly. Instead I make money from this blog as it establishes my reputation and expertise in my subject area. So, you can make money from blogging without any cash "from the page" itself. But if you do want to make money directly from blogging, you cannot be "ordinary".

Labels: blogging

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Online business owners are mostly facing the wrong way. They are all looking at the technological solutions to improving their business. You will find that several internet marketing experts will tell you that the "secret" is in analytics - knowing exactly which pages your visitors go to, the route they travel through your site and so on.

Other "experts" will tell you that, yes, analytics are important, but the real "secret" is in eye tracking - knowing where your users actually go on your pages. Once you know that you can design things to match what they do.

But you will also find "gurus" telling you that you do not need to spend money on eye tracking or go in for complicated analytics. All you need to do, they say, is focus on the copy; write right, they say and all your troubles will be resolved.

Everybody, it seems has a "secret" to online success. Well guess what - they are all right. Yes, you do need analytics to see what is happening with your site, yes eye tracking will help you and copywriting is an essential component of a web site. Yet in spite of them all being right, none of these are actually "secrets" to running an online business.

The problem with them all is that they are largely focused on the technology and what people do with it. But what people "do" is not an indication of how they actually connect with your business and your products and services. For instance, a retail store needs to know where shoppers go in their shop - footflow it's called. But knowing where they go, does not tell the retailer what people actually want to buy and why they want to buy it. So, footflow is only one component in a retailer's box of tricks.

One of the most common ways in which retailers discover what to sell and how to sell it is using market research surveys and focus groups - in other words, traditional businesses focus their attention on talking directly to customers and understanding them and their motivations.

Online, businesses are focusing on the technology. It would be like a supermarket deciding on what to sell based solely on footflow analysis. So, what is the "secret" of an online business? It's the "secret" already known by the offline world - talk to your customers. Technology will help support what you do, true enough, but far too many people believe it is the answer to their failure to thrive online. Talk to your customers with market research, surveys, focus groups and so on. Do that and you will be able to organise your online business to meet the needs of your customers.

Labels: internet marketing

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Visitors to museums may soon be able to read information about exhibits on their mobile phones. The label in front of the item they are looking at could simply have a special form of barcode upon it. They then hold their mobile phone camera in front of the barcode, press a button on their phone and within seconds they will be connected to the most relevant Wikipedia page for that exhibit.

Sounds a fanciful idea? Well, it's already happening. The concept has been put together by Semapedia.



All you do is insert the web page (URL) of the Wikipedia article you want people to know about. Semapedia then produces a set of labels for you in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. These labels can be attached to anything - displays, walls, vans, documents you hand to people - anything that's physical. All the viewer then does is scan the barcode with their mobile phone and instantly they are connected to the Wikipedia page you want them to read.

The possibilities for this for online business are huge. You could set up Wikipedia pages relating to your business and then direct people to them via a physical product. Clearly, the system only uses Wikipedia at the moment, but the notion of a mobile phone readable barcode linking to web sites means that it will be possible to extend this beyond just encyclopaedias.

For instance, say your products all contain the barcode. This could be linked to an order page on the web. Anyone who wants a copy of your product, or needs a replacement, just runs their phone over the item and then clicks on the "buy" button. No searching needed (watch out Google...!).

The connection of the Internet to the physical world is only just beginning. But you can be sure it will change the way we do business and the way people use the Internet. Plan for it now, or lose out.

Labels: future

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Harry Potter couldn't work his magic for many children today, in spite of months of planning for one of the biggest book shopping expeditions ever. The reason is that the British weather confounded him.

Yesterday, much of Britain was given a tropical lashing unseen in decades. It took me just over five hours to complete a six mile journey, meaning I was very late to collect my son from school. But I couldn't have got there anyway. His school was knee deep in water and the children had to be rescued by boat. Much fun for the children who are all as pleased as punch today because their pictures are all over the newspapers and my son was on the BBC national TV news bulletins....!

Meanwhile, stuck in the floods was a lorry driver who could go nowhere - yet he simply "had to". Why? Because his lorry was full of Harry Potter books ready for delivery to stores. Many children will have been disappointed. My son was disappointed himself this morning; our planned delivery of the latest Harry Potter book didn't happen. It was sent out on time it seems, but the postal lorries couldn't make it through the traffic and the floods on time.

No doubt all over the southern half of Britain, there are plenty of children disappointed that Harry's magic couldn't overcome the weather. Mind you, if you want a copy, our local Sainsbury's is piled high with them this morning - and not a single person appeared to be buying any...!

Amazon is reported to have taken orders for two million copies online, so it would seem that many people actually pre-ordered via the Internet. Online shopping in advance like this is clearly a convenient way of getting what you want. But when the weather intervenes, there is obvious disappointment.

For any online retailers this is clearly an issue. Distribution is the bottleneck you have to cope with. Few online retailers focus on distribution, instead concentrating on web design. But the most important aspect of an online retailer's business is distribution. If you can't get your products to your customers it doesn't matter how great your web site is.

And while your distribution system may not have to cope with the massive contrasts of the British weather, you do need to ensure your distribution system can cope with most eventualities. If your online business doesn't focus on distribution, you could lose out. Just like Harry Potter did yesterday.

Labels: shopping

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Social networkers love things like Facebook and MySpace, but as this discussion in Facebook shows people are getting frustrated with so many different social networking systems. If you want to network properly you have to be a member of everything and that takes time to keep all your profiles up to date.

For some time now I have said that social networking is in its infancy and that it will not really get underway until we have portable profiles and interconnectivity between the social networks. My theory is that anything you write in MySpace would also automatically appear on your Facebook page or in Ecademy or whatever.

Now, a service that is in beta stage is offering something approaching that. Called Profile Linker it allows you to have all your social networking activity on one page. There are some faults with the system, for instance it doesn't import all your LinkedIn contacts, but it shows promise.



See: http://www.profilelinker.com

A further service, called Wink, allows you to link all your profiles together in a "people" search engine. For an example take a look at mine at:

http://wink.com/profile/grahamjones_uk

These services are clearly only the beginning, but already we can see the coming together of social networking sites into an interconnected service. When these services take off, that's where you will need to be. And it will save you time - one place, lots of networking.

Labels: internet, social networking

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At July 20, 2007 7:36 PM  Emily said…

At August 19, 2007 5:02 PM  Brian said…

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Lovers often look into each others' eyes and whisper "sweet nothings". They are just a string of words, sometimes just noises, that mean "so much". Darling, gorgeous, bunnikins - whatever takes your fancy. But these words of high emotion trigger our brain into some high level activity.

New research conducted in Germany has looked at the way our brain functions when it is stimulated by emotional words - and the results have important implications for anyone running a web site.

What the study shows is that when our brains are triggered by emotional words it boosts understanding of what we are reading. Emotional words therefore make it easier for us to read. (You see I said "boosts understanding" - "boosts" is emotional, the alternative of "make it easier to understand" is neutral and therefore more difficult to instantly "get").

Newspapers are frequent users of emotional language, which means that if your web site is to succeed in getting rapid recognition of your message - quick as a flash (oops more emotional words for you) - then you need to write like a newspaper reporter. In fact, web sites are read rather like tabloid newspapers - people skim through the pages, flitting from bit to bit, looking at the pictures, reading captions and only reading the whole story if they like what they see.

So writing your web pages rather like a tabloid newspaper is likely to engage readers more and help them understand what you say thanks to the high levels of emotional language. Sorted.

Labels: internet psychology

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People who have "dubious" friends are often avoided. Think about some people you know whose contacts you are not "too sure" about. There's something about these people that's not quite right. You can't put your finger on it, but the people they associate with don't seem appropriate.

In the human world, we often make value judgements according to the connections other people make. We decide not be friendly with a particular person simply because of the "company they keep".

Well, Google is just the same as you and me. It looks at who you associate with - or at least who your web site links to. If Google thinks the online "company you keep" is not appropriate, it tends not to like you and dumps your web site further down the search engine listing.

A few years ago, people were encouraging web site owners to get links - any links. It just seemed that getting a link to your web site was important. But why would anyone running a camera shop web site, for instance, want to be linked from a farmer's web site? There's no reason for such a connection other than the fact that it is "a link". Whoopee...!

Then search engine "experts" told us it wasn't about links, but about "reciprocal links" or even "three-way links". All sorts of "systems" for getting links were devised which were supposedly going to help you rise to the top of Google's rankings.

Like so much of the advice - it was nonsense. Sure, Google is interested in the raw number of links you get, that's true. But it is only a factor in assessing your web site. More important to Google is the quality of those links - who is linking to you? So, if you run a camera shop you want links from camera manufacturers and so on. What you want are "relevant" links.

In much the same way as we check the "company" that people keep, Google is looking at your web site and checking who is it linked from and are they "right" for your web site. One of the best things you can do to enhance your web site is to attract links from relevant sites (good company for you) rather than just getting links from all your friends and contacts, or anyone who'll give you a link.

Labels: internet marketing

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