Gosh...! Is it any wonder the "R" word (recession) is now being spoken about openly. Already the US authorities have cut interest rates twice in a week in a massive bid to prevent the country falling into an economic downturn. And UK commentators are saying thinks like "when the US sneezes, the UK catches a cold", which I'm not sure what it means, but apparently suggests we are also going to have economic problems.

In the USA, few people have been saving money over the past few years and that means the amount of debt now equals the amount of savings available nationwide. The USA is stoney-broke. In the UK, things are no better; the average personal credit card debt is equal to several years wages for someone in the Far East.

However, the real problem for the Western World, it appears, is that no-one is at work. We've all shut up shop and nothing is being done. At least that's what it seems like at first sight when you read surveys like this.

According to this latest piece of research, billions of pounds are being lost to the British economy because everyone is spending at least half an hour a day on social networking sites. That adds up to a massive £6.5bn - or almost £1m for every minute of every day when we're busy on Facebook or MySpace.

But wait - there was a survey only a while back which showed us that the average worker now spends 2 hours a day dealing with emails. Some even believe it could be as much as 2.5 hours. Then we need to add in half an hour for lunch and a further 30 minutes a day spent getting coffees, visiting the loo and other "necessities". So, together with the social networking sites we're up to four hours taken up without any work being done.

Then, there's an average of 30 minutes a day socialising with work colleagues and on personal phone calls. Plus, according to one study, people admit to "frittering" away 2 hours a day on - well, they don't know. So, that's a total of 6.5 hours on average without any work being done. But, we also have to add the time lost by being late due to traffic - around 10 minutes a day on average. Then you have to allow for the time wasted in meetings - many people "drift off" in meetings it seems and this bothers many people. So, if you allowed a further 50 minutes for non productive meetings, we have another hour, taking us up to 7.5 hours. Considering that the US Department of Labour tells us that on average people only go to work for around 5 hours per day, you can see the problem.

Of course, it's all nonsense. Sure, people surf the web at work; certainly they visit social networking sites; and definitely they have chin-wags with their colleagues. People have never worked for 8 hours a day. They may have been in the office or down the pit, but during their 8 hour stint they spend a great deal of time socialising. Work is a social activity and many businesses have yet to realise this. As we spend more of our life online, it means inevitably people will look for social networking activities in that world. Far from banning social networking to "improve" productivity, businesses need to realise that by allowing social networking they will be boosting the effectiveness of their workforce.

Good to see that CISCO last year bought into social networking technology - it stands to make big bucks of we all go social networking crazy. But the company is also a firm supporter of social networking - just take a look at the huge array of forums it already runs for itself. Clearly, the company that is the most significant supporting structure of the Internet reckons that its people and customers are highly productive if they interact online. So why do so many other companies fall for the spurious statistics that everyone is "wasting time" online? Time spent on the Internet IS productive time - it's just that many of the "old school" types running business have yet to realise that.

Labels: internet marketing, internet psychology, social networking

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McDonald's is one of the first companies within the UK to start offering qualifications deemed to be the same standard as at A-level. Whether you actually need such a high level qualification just to flip a burger is debatable. However the idea is that different companies start offering a variety of qualifications which are then portable. At the moment employers know the value of an A-level or a GCSE but they don't know the value of a training course held within a particular company. For instance you might get a certificate just for turning up without demonstrating any particular knowledge.

The new standards of qualifications from within particular companies is meant to address this problem. The idea is that accredited companies will be able to award particular qualifications the standards of which will then be understood making them portable from one company to another.

Already though, there is an outcry about this idea. Negative comments about qualifications in burger flipping or in the case of FlyBe "Trolley Dollyology",are already being made across a wide range of media. The reasons for this is a lack of trust. People tend to see making burgers as a relatively straightforward, menial task. But we forget that McDonald's is a multi-billion-dollar corporation and you don't achieve at just by cooking burgers. Similarly, people who criticise air stewardesses as being "Trolley Dolly's" were probably very grateful for their expertise, experience and qualifications when that British Airways plane crashed on to the runway at Heathrow. Until we actually experience somebody else's expertise it is often very difficult for us to understand or realise that they are indeed highly qualified and valuable to us.

The reason why there is so much negative publicity around the new qualifications being offered by McDonald's and FlyBe is the low reputation of people who flip burgers or hand out drinks during short-haul flights. We therefore are less likely to trust any qualification these people have gained in the course of their work. Is a diploma in burger making really as valuable as an A-Level, we ask.

But, for instance, once we experience the expertise of a flight attendant during a critical time, such as an in-flight heart-attack, we truly appreciate them for what they are - and we are really glad they took that in-house course in first aid. Equally, when we see someone in a McDonald's handing out a burger we do not truly understand the management training programme they may be on. And that management programme has helped turn burger flippers into senior directors who propel the business into ever increasing profits.

So what does all this mean for Internet marketers? It means that people will not trust you and will not believe that you could help them until they experience your expertise. In other words, you have to really demonstrates your expertise to them before they will consider buying anything from you. Many online marketers attempt to achieve this with free give-aways. However the things they give away are usually, frankly, rubbish. What you need to give away in order to demonstrate your expertise and gain the trust that you need people to buy from you is something that has real value, something that truly demonstrates your expertise so they experience it.

Giving away a few hints and tips is not enough. You need to give away something of really big value. That way you demonstrate your expertise, your potential customers experience your expertise and in doing so you enhance your reputation. The result is they see you in a much more positive light and are therefore much more likely to buy from you.

The problem with the likes of McDonald's and FlyBe is that the experience we have as outsiders is at a very superficial level. And that's why these qualifications have attracted so much derision today. If people only experience your products and services at a superficial level, you too could be treated with derision.

Labels: internet, internet marketing, internet psychology

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At January 31, 2008 1:27 PM  Rob Watson said…

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You would think that it would be easy to find the £3.6 billion missing from one of France's biggest banks. After all it's not a small pile of money. Somebody must be able to spot it.

So where is it? What most people seem to have ignored is that if the money isn't in that French bank, it's got to be somewhere. We know that the rogue trader doesn't have it, so somebody else must have it. Money does not evaporate.

Traders in the financial markets are nothing more than barrow boys. Essentially they buy things cheaply and sell them on more expensively. That's how they make their money. The fact that this trader has lost so much money implies that somebody somewhere bought whatever he was selling, options for instance, at a cheaper price than he paid for them; it isn't complicated.

Even though the French authorities are running round trying to find this rogue trader, all around the world there are probably severalvery happy people who have benefited significantly from his mistakes. He is unlikely to have been trading with more than a hundred people. Which means each of them are now £36 million better off. Nice work if you can get it.

But with the world's media focused on the hunt for the rogue trader, no one is busy looking for the multimillionaires he's helped create. They are literally laughing all the way to the bank.

What's strange about this tale is that it's exactly the same as we have seen countless times on the Internet. For example, high-street booksellers have been complaining for years that people aren't buying as many books. They have lost millions of pounds in book sales. They focus all their attention on looking for the missing millions. But those millions are not missing -- Amazon has got them.

There really is only so much money to go around: governments do not keep printing money. If they do that it would lead to runaway inflation. So, money supply is kept fairly static. When one business loses money another business gains money. So when your business sets up online, if you have an established offline business the chances are it will lose money. We have just witnessed this with the Christmas trading figures. Dozens of retailers complained that their sales were down in the high Street. But their sales were up online.

They seemed to think that by establishing an online presence they would somehow increase their income. Whilst this is perfectly possible, the chances are that if all you're doing is replicating your offline service with an online oonr, all that will happen is that people will choose your online business for convenience. Simply by setting up a shop online, you are unlikely to increase your income. To do that you need an altogether different online approach. Few retailers have yet to work this out. for any particular business.

There is only so much money to go round; if you're offline business doesn't have the money, your online business will probably have it. Just like the missing money from the French bank, the money hasn't disappeared. It has merely gone elsewhere. If you truly want to increase your market share and really want to increase your online business you need to provide something different than merely a replacement for your offline shop.

Labels: internet marketing

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Xobni is one of the most fantastic applications I have seen in goodness knows how many years of looking at computer software. Never before have I reviewed a piece of software either for myself or for a computer magazine and have been so bowled over so instantly.

Xobni is actually the word "inbox" spelt backwards. It is an add-in for Microsoft Outlook, but revolutionises the way you deal with e-mail. For instance, it tells you the best time of day to e- mail individual people so that you're most likely to get a response from them. It knows by looking at the history of when people have e-mailed you the best time of day to e-mail them. As an example Xobni tells me that one of my contacts only ever replies to e-mails between 8 p.m. and midnight. There is absolutely no point in me writing to that person at 9 a.m. as I'm not going to get a reply for another 12 hours. I may as well use my time on something more productive.

Xobni does more than that: it provides me with instant threaded e-mail conversations. So rather than having to search I can see in an instant all the various e-mail conversations I've had with particular individual. If I'm previewing a particular e-mail, it shows me automatically all the previous e-mails for that particular conversation with that specific individual. It also automatically extracts telephone numbers out of e-mails and highlights them to you in the corner of your screen. Instead of having to search for a particular phone number or scroll through the e- mail. or switch and look at your contacts list, you can phone or even Skype people direct from Xobni.

As if that weren't enough, it also produces a list of all the attachments that you've ever has swapped between yourself and each individual. Plus, it tells you which individuals are connected to each other. There is also a statistical analysis telling you when you last contacted a specific individual - this helps make sure your business keeps in regular contact with key people.

The result is a massive shift in productivity. I only installed Xobni an hour ago and I can see already the dramatic improvement it is going to make to my business. Anyone, like me, who is running an online business spends a great deal of time using e-mail. However, current estimates suggest that we are spending around two hours every day dealing with e-mail. I'm pretty confident that Xobni will be able to slash that time in half, if not more, providing my online business with more time to make more money. At the moment Xobni is only a beta product. But if you're willing to test it -- and I suggest you do -- you can get it for free. I cannot recommend Xobni, highly enough.

Labels: internet

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At January 23, 2008 4:51 PM  Bryan McCrae said…

At February 01, 2008 5:09 PM  Jewelled said…

At February 01, 2008 6:10 PM  Graham Jones said…

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People tend to work not very far from where they were born -- indeed, in the UK, the average commuting distance to work is just 8 miles. Most people in the UK, live within about 10 miles of where they were born. We don't actually travel as far as would like to think.

So why is business, the Internet and everything we read about the way society is going emphasising the global? You would think that from the concentration on being international we all lived in a world where we are constantly travelling, constantly in touch with people from thousands of miles away and constantly buying things from shops that we can't possibly visit because they're on the other side of the planet.

However, many of the people on a teenager's social network are actually kids they meet at school or in the town's youth club. In online business and social networks, a significant proportion of the contacts that people have are people they've physically met first and then connected with online; and the people we meet physically are usually people who work or live close to us.

So, online social networking fools us into believing that we have an interconnected global group of contacts. Similarly, onlin shopping fools us into believing that we are buy from some distant warehouse. But guess what; many of the retailers will deliver material that you bought online from your local shop. You shop online at Tesco.com, but the stuff you're buying is actually taken off the shelves from a Tesco store just a few miles down the road from you. Internet shopping seems global, but it is frequently local.

Now the Internet is increasingly providing local publishing. For many years you've been able to buy local newspapers, but these have tended to cover a region, a city or a town. For a publisher to produce a newspaper or a magazine that is specifically about your part of the town is very difficult. It simply costs too much money. Though some local business magazines do succeed. However, magazines like these are much more localised than traditional, regional publications - emphasising again the true value of local.

Now, publishers can produce highly localised editions of their newspapers, but online. Triblocal.com is one great example of how the Internet is increasingly becoming local. This Chicago-based newspaper group is able to produce a printed newspaper for the whole Chicago region, but highly localised online editions to cover tiny little geographical areas giving people highly specific local news exactly what they want.

People like to read about the things going on in their own tiny little part of the world. They like to meet each other in their own tiny little part of the world, and they like to buy things from shops in their own tiny little part of the world. If your online business emphasises its global nature you could be missing out on the growing local phenomenon.

Labels: future, internet, internet marketing, shopping, social networking

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At January 18, 2008 7:12 PM  Web Design Fort Myers said…

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So EMI has announced that its set to lose about 2000 people worldwide. In a major restructuring of the music company announced today, the boss has suggested that digital downloads of music are part of the problem. For years, the music industry has been telling us it is struggling against illegal downloads or people buying music at a cheaper rate from legitimate sites, like iTunes. However, when you look into this, you discover that not only does the music industry not understand the Internet, but they are also blaming the Internet for something that is nothing to do with the online world.

New research shows us that actually over the last few years the proportion of music downloads is very tiny compared with the number of CDs that have been sold. Indeed, even now, after several years of things like iTunes, downloadable music only represents around a quarter of all music sales. Yet the bleating that we've heard from the music industry over the last few years would suggest that the entire industry is being ripped off by a bunch of teenagers in their bedrooms downloading music and preventing artists and the industry from receiving its much deserved income.

Looking deeper at the sales figures and the predictions for the coming few years it is possible to see the downloadable music sales will increase at the same time as CD sales will decrease. But by the time we get to 2011 there will still be $3 billion worth of CDs being sold still representing about half of all music sales.

All the sales data actually shows this is that people are buying less music overall. The issue that the music industry is facing is not that people are buying more chepa downloads - but that the recording companies are not providing the music we want. If it was, we'd buy it. The fact is, we are buying less music and that must mean the industry is failing to give us what we want.

The music industry has focused its entire attentions on the Internet and the problems it perceives the Internet is creating. In fact what's been happening is that the music industry has failed to understand what its market really wants. So the music industry as like many other industries - focused on technology issues about the Internet because it thinks that's where it's problem lies. But the music industry's problem clearly lies in not understanding what its market really wants.

And that's the same for many online businesses as well. They think the answer to their problems lies in some new piece of technology. But in reality, most online businesses fail to understand their markets sufficiently well. As a result, they behave like the music industry, spending time on technological issues and solutions, when their businesses could be transformed by simply understanding their customers a little better.

Labels: internet marketing, shopping

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At January 15, 2008 5:18 PM  Anonymous said…

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If your online business suffered a problem, would you be able to cope? I don't mean problems like not getting enough traffic or not getting to the top of the search engines. What I mean is something that would actually prevent you from doing your work.

What if you were unable to type? What if you were unable to connect to the Internet? What if you were unable to use all your necessary software programs? The thing is that most people assume that that they will be able to connect to the Internet that they will be able to type and that they will be able to use all their software programs. But one day, that could all change in a flash.

Last Friday, I tripped over in the street. I thought my shoulder hurt a bit only to discover a little while later that it was actually fractured. I am now unable to type, unable to use a mouse unable to drive and seemingly completely at a loss to run an Internet business.

However, as you can see I am busy blogging, I have been processing my e-mails and I have been able to carry on relatively normally. luckily I have Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and that means I'm able to dictate to my computer. In the past I have used this program to convert audio files into word processor documents. Now I discover that I am able to control my computer using my voice rather than using my fingers. Consequently, I can carry on running my business. Of course, if I didn't have Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I would have had a real problem on my business will taken a nosedive, much like I did last Friday night!

But what practical measures have you put in place to ensure your business can carry on operations even if you become incapacitated?

Labels: future, internet

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At January 14, 2008 12:58 PM  Rob Watson said…

At January 15, 2008 11:32 AM  Graham Jones said…

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Sir Michael Grade tries his best to talk up ITV, but he must know his service on the brink of doom. For several years, TV advertising has struggled. Indeed, six months ago I wrote about how television advertising was hard to come by. ITV, in it's interim report, says that there has been a slight increase in advertising revenues to 2006 levels. What it doesn't say, of course, is that these are far from the hay-days of TV advertising income levels.

In our house, we don't watch any TV adverts; we use Sky Plus to record everything, then if it is on commercial TV we just zip through the ads until we get back to the programme. For people under the age of 25 things are even simpler. Most people aged 25 or less in the USA watch TV on their laptop, using software that deletes adverts automatically.

The thing is, people dislike advertising on TV because it interrupts them. The idea from commercial television advertising folk that we love adverts is patent nonsense. If we want to make a cup of tea mid programme, we don't need an advert, we just press live pause. The only people left watching TV adverts are the very people who the advertisers do not want to reach - those on low incomes who cannot afford systems like Sky Plus.

So what has this all got to do with the Internet? Well, an influential group of analysts is predicting that within the next year in the UK, advertising on the Internet will be higher than on British TV. By 2009, more money will be spent on online adverts than on those which appear on TV, says Group M. At the moment, according to eMarketer, online advertising represents only around half of TV spending. But, the new analysis suggests that by next year the situation could be dramatically different. Indeed, in Sweden online advertising already exceeds TV advertising spend.

This all has significant impacts on TV production. Without the income they are used to programme makers will not get the budgets they want. That will drive viewers to more and more specialist programmes, available via the Internet or subscription channels. The days of the family sitting down to watch the telly are now well and truly over - which means if you are going to by that 42 inch plasma today, make sure it is PC compatible and that you can use something like Windows Media Center; you are going to need it sooner than you think.

Labels: future, internet marketing

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At January 10, 2008 9:30 PM  Ayd said…

At January 17, 2008 2:42 PM  Jeremy said…

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Sir Stuart Rose, the boss of retailer Marks and Spencer, was on TV this morning defending his company's fall in sales figures over the Christmas period. The High Street giant saw a fall of more than 2% compared with the same three months in 2006. Even though Sir Stuart presented an up-beat and positive response to the situation, shares in the company initially fell by 19% - wiping the value of the company by almost a fifth.

What a ridiculous response from the City. If they had delved into the figures a bit more, they would have found that M&S online sales had increased by a whopping 78% compared with Christmas a year ago. In other words, the 2% fall would have been much, much worse, if M&S had not done so well online. Indeed, without the online sales increase, M&S would have been looking at a potential crisis today, rather than a blip.

This clearly shows a huge shift - even amongst "traditional" M&S customers - to online purchasing. Shopping on the Internet is now clearly an everyday occurrence and not just an occasional matter for the technically adept. So just think what M&S could have achieved if their online shop had been any good. At the moment, though, their online shop and whole approach to Internet marketing, leaves quite a bit to be desired as I have explained in a previous article.

Labels: internet marketing, shopping

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At January 13, 2008 11:44 AM  Jeremy Jacobs said…

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