News 2008-08-28 13:Aug:th 2008-08-28 13:Aug:th http://www.ivt.com.au info@ivt.com.au Copyright 2008 Internet Vision Technologies Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:21:02 +1000 Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:21:02 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/114 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Just like the hottest rock bands, the latest "hot new thing" in e-business may seem to suddenly appear over night when in fact it's been in gestation for years, bubbling away below mainstream consciousness and appreciated by just a few bleeding-edge early adopters who saw the potential before it became famous. Then at some point in time a confluence of events results in an "ah-ha!" moment in the collective psyche, and all of a sudden the latest hot new thing seems to be everywhere you look.

I believe we're currently right on the cusp of just such a moment, and in the next 12 months we'll see a certain concept go from obscure "why on Earth would anyone want that?" status to "can't live without it!" ubiquity.

That concept is location-based services.

The great catch-cry in the early days of the internet was globalisation: the concept that an obscure little company in a backwoods country town could throw up a website and gain instant access to a global market and compete with existing multinationals, with their location being irrelevant. Nice in theory, but of course there were all sorts of catches and even now it's a rare business indeed that can trade online without consideration for the geographic location of its customers.

So people are now starting to realise that things like search results really need to take into account geographic location. I can't even guess the number of times I've done a web search over the years and wished I could apply a rule such as "only show me results for businesses within 20km of my current location". When you're searching for somewhere to buy a washing machine it really matters where it's located: the electrical goods retailer with the best washing machine website in the world isn't going to be a lot of use to you if you're in Melbourne and they're in Minneapolis or Mayfair. I dream of the day that Google Maps and Google Search are merged into one, and I can select an area on the map and say "search for 'dog grooming service' right *there*", or "search for 'scuba dive operator' right around this area *here*".

Most of the time we *want* location to be relevant, but on the internet we've lost the sense of physical context and proximity that is so important when dealing with people and businesses in the real world. We've been stripped of something that is fundamental to the way our brains are wired.

Another application where location could provide enormous additional value is social networking. For years I've talked about a hypothetical device that people could carry around in their pockets that would be a sort of "proximity alert" that tells you when a friend or colleague is nearby, allowing you to stumble upon chance meetings that right now are probably passing you by. Walking down the street there are times you meet people you know, but it's likely that far more often someone you know will have walked down that same street one minute before, or one minute later, or have stepped into a shop while you walk past, or been on the other side of the street. Wouldn't it be cool to have a device in your pocket that could say "hey, your friend Mark is just over the street in that coffee shop!" rather than walk past totally unaware? And for someone like me who travels a lot it would be particularly handy, because by expanding the "alert" range from say 100 meters to perhaps 20km when I travel to another city it would help me catch up with people I don't get to see very often.

You know what? You may not have heard about it yet, but those devices are in mass production right now by big-name companies including Samsung, Sony, and Nokia. In fact you probably already have one in your pocket. It's called a mobile phone.

A moment ago I talked about location-based services suddenly becoming a recognised mainstream phenomenon, and there are a couple of trigger events that are bringing it about.

The first trigger event is that almost all new mobile phones now have GPS built in: a while ago it was unheard of for phones to include cameras, but now many of them have two. Likewise phones with GPS have been few and far between, but very soon it'll be almost impossible to buy one without it. GPS will be everywhere, in everyone's pocket, and nobody will think twice about it.

The second trigger event is the release of simple, easy-to-use software and online services that take advantage of the ubiquity of personal GPS. That's the stage we're at right now: the hardware platform is out there in people's pockets, and now enterprising developers are dreaming up new ways to utilise that platform. One perfect example of the sort of building block currently being put in place is a new service from Yahoo! called Fire Eagle (fireeagle.yahoo.net), which might sound a little bit obscure at first but has enormous potential to change the way online business is conducted. The simplest way to understand what Fire Eagle does is think of it as a pinboard where you can post a note stating your current location, and that information can then be used by third parties to provide you with more relevant services. Fire Eagle itself doesn't do anything "useful" as far as an end user is concerned, but as a building block for other services it's critical.

The way it works is that you create a Fire Eagle account, and then use one or more methods to regularly update your location within the Fire Eagle system. You can do it manually by logging into the website and setting it, or you can run a little program on your mobile phone that regularly checks your location by GPS and updates it automatically, or by linking your Fire Eagle account to a travel planning service like Dopplr that knows what cities you will be in and when.

With your current location in the Fire Eagle system you can then authorise other services to make use of that information. Examples include websites like wikinear.com, which looks up your location and cross-references it to Wikipedia articles related to places nearby - a great way to find random interesting things in your vicinity that you may never have been aware of previously! Or rummble.com, which is a search engine that personalises your search results based on factors including interests of people within your social network and your current location. Or outalot.com, which (provided you're in New York or San Francisco!) uses your location to find nearby restaurants, bars, movies, and shops. Or zkout.com, which does the same thing but for people you know who happen to be nearby. Zkout even provides a live map which updates to show what's going on around you.

How does this relate to e-business? Right now: not much. In the near future: a lot.

As users become aware of the power of location-awareness we're going to see a lot more services spring up that take advantage of it, and people are going to start expecting websites to "locate" themselves geographically. For example, websites will need to have location metadata embedded so that they will appear in search results when users search for things like "cheap washing machines within 20km of my current location".

And if we're really lucky we'll see an end to those really annoying websites that ask you to select from a country before you can proceed: websites should just know automatically where you're located, and behave accordingly. As a side issue while talking about this, one of my all-time most hated websites is www.bunnings.com.au, and for one specific reason: it won't even let you get to the home page until you tell it your postcode! They've got the right idea, but it's implemented in such an obnoxiously obtrusive way that it drives me nuts.

So in a year or two when you're doing a web search and restricting the results to your local area, or walking down the street and your phone tells you that your best friend is two blocks away, it will probably seem like the most natural thing in the world. Once again science fiction becomes a typical everyday event.

Cheers :-)

Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:26:01 +1000 Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:26:01 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/110 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Over the last couple of weeks I've been watching an interesting project unfold as Samsung run a promotion here in Australia called "Samsung People". The promotion has been carefully designed to use the power of social networking to increase awareness of their brand and particularly of a new product, the MX10 video camera. I'm not involved in running the project in any way but I am involved as a contestant, so I've been able to see a bit of what happens behind the scenes as they put all the pieces in place and it certainly makes an interesting case study of how companies are starting to use social networking for marketing purposes.

This particular promotion has several stages, each designed to encourage people to use their own social networks to get others involved and therefore exposed to the brand. The basic premise is to promote the Samsung MX10 video camera, which uses a memory card instead of video tapes or hard disk and is designed to be very simple to operate. Samsung wanted to spread the message that this camera is ideal for people wanting a basic camera to post video diaries, put video online on sites such as YouTube, and generally communicate with their friends and family. So they hired a promotions company who equipped a number of staff with the MX10 and sent them out into the streets of Sydney to talk to random people and ask them the question "where is your mind?", recording the interviews and posting them on a special "Samsung People" website that they set up for the project. They also invited people to enter a competition by answering the "where is your mind?" question online at the Samsung People site.

The next stage was selecting ten finalists from the people who entered the competition, and this is where the social networking effect really kicks in. They gave each of those ten finalists an MX10 camera and video editing software, with instructions that they have to keep a video diary until the end of the competition period at the end of August. The rules state that finalists are only allowed to use the camera and software supplied by Samsung, and the video diaries must be hosted on the Samsung People website. Finalists were each given a username / password so they can log in and upload new diary entries whenever they want to.

During this stage of the competition the public can view the video diaries and vote for the finalist they think should win. This obviously means that it's in the contestants own self interest to promote the competition as much as they can, and reach out using their social networks (both in the real world and also online using sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn) to get as many people voting for them as possible. This turns the contestants (and, to some extent, their first and second degree friends who will want to help their friend out of loyalty) into active promoters of the competition. Each contestant's vested interest in winning the competition becomes their motivation for promoting it, and, in turn, promoting the company behind it.

Very, very clever.

Of course, *I* have a vested interest because I'm one of the ten finalists! The grand prize is quite significant (a trip for two to Tokyo, New York, and London) and I'd love to win it, but quite apart from that I'm fascinated by the way the competition has been engineered to maximise exposure for Samsung. There are some serious technical problems with the way they have implemented the diary system itself, but as a concept it's very interesting indeed and probably a good indicator of the sorts of promotions we'll see more of in future as companies start to gain some understanding of what web 2.0 and social networking actually means.

So please vote for me! But even more importantly, think about it as a model for what you can do with your own business. There are all sorts of variations that could be used depending on your particular business model, your target market, your product type, etc.

Oh yeah, and you can find the competition site at www.samsungpeople.com.au.

Cheers :-)

Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:33:48 +1000 Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:33:48 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/108 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

The web was originally designed as a text-only medium: it didn't even have images, let alone all the embedded multimedia such as video and audio that we see today. I remember being excited when a new version of the Mosaic browser came out in December 1993 with the ability to display images in web pages, because prior to that a web page could reference an image but it couldn't actually be displayed as part of the page itself: the browser had to download it separately so it could be viewed on your computer using an image viewing program!

It's amazing how much has changed.

From the point of view of a search engine, though, the web still looks pretty much the same as it did back in 1993. After all, most of the advances in the 15 years since Mosaic 2.0 was released have been about pictures, animation, and sound. Great for people, but computers are pretty much blind and deaf. They can process text-based information but if you put content such as text inside a picture it may as well not exist. To experience the web as a search engine sees it you can use a variety of tools like this one:

webtools.live2support.com/se_simulator.php

Flash is another technology that can lock content away from search engines and prevent them seeing it, because the browser itself can't understand or process Flash objects: it needs to use a plug-in from Adobe which displays the object for it. When you look at a site containing Flash your browser doesn't even know what it's displaying. It just knows there's a "box" of content being displayed, but not what is happening inside it. Search engines are the same, and they've traditionally treated Flash-based content as an inscrutible block of nothingness. There *are* ways to provide alternative access to content displayed using Flash but they're clumsy and an additional burden on web developers so Flash-based sites have always been considered second-class citizens when it comes to search engines.

But now Adobe's Flash player technology has been licenced by Google and the rules may be about to change forever.

What Google are doing is using Adobe's technology to give their systems the ability to "see" into Flash-based content, making text inside Flash objects as easy to find as text in a regular web page. They've already deployed the first version of their new system with Flash support and as of July 3rd it's been shown that content contained within Flash can now actually be found using the Google search engine. Search Engine War in the UK ran some tests and proved that Googlebot could find and follow links embedded inside Flash objects:

www.search-engine-war.co.uk/2008/07/flash-time-to-c.html

It's not all peaches and cream though. At present the Googlebot can only see Flash if it has been embedded within the web page in a certain way, and there are also problems with "deep linking": providing a link from a search result page to a specific piece of content within a Flash object. What many people will probably find is that they see a search result to content that looks like it's just what they need, but when they click on it they won't go to the content they're expecting but just to the "home" of the Flash object and then have to find their own way to the correct place.

Flash is still a difficult beast when it comes to playing nicely with search engines, but at least Google have taken a big step in the right direction and implemented the first stage of support for what is now a very widely used technology.

Cheers :-)

Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies Thu, 01 May 2008 11:41:10 +1000 Thu, 01 May 2008 11:41:10 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/106 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

One of the most fundamental tools used in any form of e-business is email, but most of us don't really think about it - we just use it out of habit, not with any real plan. And as business becomes ever busier it's easy to become inundated with email and fall so far behind that it becomes useless and customers get frustrated with lack of responsiveness. In "How To Build A Website And Stay Sane" I talked about some of the macro aspects of email in e-business, such as establishing an acceptable response time, delegating responsibility for inquiry responses, and use of role addresses such as "sales@example.com" so responsibility can be re-delegated when staff are away.

But I didn't talk about how to actually manage what ends up in your inbox - how to file it, archive it, and prioritise it.

Over the years I've tried a few different approaches to managing email. I personally receive about 1000 emails per day so my message load is probably a little bit higher than most, and that means I have to work really hard to keep up with it or I risk getting to the point where I have to declare email bankruptcy and just delete my inbox and start again. This morning I had 473 messages waiting for me when I got to work - and that was just new messages since I checked it before I went to bed last night!

So staying on top of email is one of the biggest burdens I have to face, and it's a problem faced by everyone heavily involved in e-business.

For many years my preferred approach was to use a highly structured filing system that had many different folders each with multiple levels. For example, I had a "Clients" folder, then inside that I had one folder for each client. As time went on that became unwieldy and just opening the Clients folder presented me with a list of hundreds of clients, so I broke it down further into Current, Inactive, and Archive - but then I was frequently shuffling folders around, and I had to remember where things were stored. I also wrote a whole bunch of filing rules on the mail server so that whenever email came in it would be automatically directed into the correct folder without my email software having to do anything.

But eventually it got to the point where it would take over half an hour each morning just to open my email software because it took so long working through the enormous list of folders, and I still ended up with over 50,000 unread emails in my inbox at one point. Not fun.

My next tactic was to just give in to the inevitable and let the avalanche sweep over my inbox. I gave up on filing entirely, leaving everything in my inbox and relying on search to locate messages related to particular customers or friends. That's the basis on which Gmail works, and it's actually a pretty cool approach. It worked for me for a while but it also had problems. Search became really slow because I had something like 400,000 messages in my inbox and it was very hard to pick out messages that still needed action. So to improve search performance I created one archive folder for each year of email, and put all messages from 2006 into one folder, 2005 into another, etc. My inbox became all messages from my current year, with anything earlier being in a year-based archive. Basically it was the "full inbox" approach with trivial archiving.

After a few months of that approach Arjen Lentz introduced me to the concept of "inbox zero", a technique developed by Merlin Mann from 37signals. Inbox zero is based on the "Getting Things Done" methodology made famous by David Allen and it's designed to leave you with an empty inbox at all times.

The promise of email nirvana!

I was sceptical at first but when you're drowning it doesn't matter what comes into reach - you'll grab at anything you can! So I thought I'd give it a try.

What I've ended up with is a system that's a blend of my previous year-based archive with the "inbox zero" prioritisation technique applied as a triage mechanism on incoming messages. I still have archives per year, but rather than use the inbox for all messages from the current year I also created an archive for the current year, and the objective of the game is to get every single incoming message into the archive as fast as possible by applying some rules to them. And that's where the "getting things done" mindset comes into play.

The first discipline is to never read an email twice while it's in your inbox. My natural tendency is to read an email, think "ok, I'll get back to that", and leave it there - but that's bad, because then you have to re-read it later to regain the context and actually do something about it. For every message that arrives in the inbox, you have to read it *once* and then classify it immediately. Do *not* think "I'll get back to that": classify it *now*, and don't take more than about 3 seconds thinking about each one.

Which leads to the second discipline: classification. I use a slightly modified version of Mann's classifications. For every email that comes in I mentally throw it into one of 5 piles: Do, Delegate, Delete, Defer, Archive. It's become a bit of a mantra that runs through my head at all sorts of odd times!

If it's something quick and all you need to do is dash off a reply, just Do it. Then file the email in the current archive.

If it's something that can be passed on to a colleague, forward the email and then file it in a "Delegated" folder.

If it's something that you really don't care about, like time-wasting "look at these funny pictures!" messages from that cousin you haven't seen in 6 years, delete it.

If it's something that will take a bit more care and time to actually follow up on, file it in a "Defer" folder.

If it's an email you want to keep for future reference but don't actually need to do anything about, file it in the "Archive" folder for the current year.

After a few minutes working through your inbox you should have every single message either Done, Delegated, Deleted, Deferred, or Archived. And your inbox will be empty. A miracle has occurred!

The third discipline is then to go through your Defer folder several times per day and action the items that will take some time and care. If you've been brutal enough with your classification process this will hopefully be a relatively short list. Once each item has been actioned, move it into the Archive folder. Once again your objective should be to achieve an empty Defer folder, but that's often not practical. I've heard of people using this technique who write a mail rule that takes anything which has been sitting in the Defer folder for more than 30 days and simply deletes it. After all, if you've deferred it for more than a month it's not likely you'll actually do anything about it, so why not just accept the inevitable? Personally I don't do that but I can understand why people do.

The fourth discipline is to regularly go through your Delegated folder and check if there's anything you need to follow up. Often you'll delegate a task to a colleague and never hear the outcome, so the messages in the Delegated folder can act as a prompt that you need to check the status of that task and then move it into Archive once it's done. Once again your objective is to have an empty Delegated folder: a sign that all the tasks you are delegating to other people are being completed quickly.

So there you have it: my technique for drinking from a fire-hose without being washed away. Everything comes into the Inbox, then is redirected into one of several folders, and eventually filters through to the archive for long term storage. Conceptually simple, but the trick is applying the discipline needed to make it work!

There's a very cool video online of Merlin Mann doing a Google Tech Talk about inbox zero. It's well worth a look if you're anything like me and wish you didn't have to spend so much time dealing with email.

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925 Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:53:33 +1000 Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:53:33 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/104 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

There are big differences in registration policies between different types of domain names: for example, ".com" has a "free for all" policy that allows anyone to register any name (with the exception of trademark breaches) and sell domain name registrations at will, while ".com.au" has much more strict policies that require registrants to be an Australian company, organisation, or registered trading name.

The result is that the .com namespace has been a hotbed of speculative trading and shifty practices with many people registering huge numbers of domain names and putting them on the market for sale to the highest bidder. It's now almost impossible to register a reasonable .com domain name because everything even remotely obvious (and a lot that look like random strings of characters!) has already been registered by someone, somewhere. The number of .com domain names has exceeded the number of words in the English dictionary many times over for quite a few years now.

Country-code top-level domains (known in the trade as "ccTLDs") such as ".com.au" have been largely spared the craziness of domain speculation due to more stringent registration requirements specifically intended to prevent domain trading. However, for .com.au those requirements have been just a bit too stringent because they have also prevented some legitimate domain transfers, or at least forced them "underground" with transfers being performed in breach of regulations. For example, a business which is acquired by a larger company typically has its assets transferred into the control of the acquirer - including not just physical infrastructure but also debt liability, creditors, and other assorted contractual arrangements. But because current .com.au registration requirements prohibit transfer domain registrations, there could be a grey area regarding how to handle any existing web and email infrastructure.

Last year auDA, the Australian domain name administrator, convened the 2007 Names Policy Panel to perform a review of .au registration requirements and sought input from various interested parties regarding possible amendments. Many internet professionals including myself provided submissions to the Policy Panel, and I'm pleased to say that the domain transfer policy has now been amended to incorporate many of those suggestions. The result is a policy that is structured in such a way to make pure domain speculation extremely difficult, while providing sensible rules to allow businesses to transfer domain ownership when required by legitimate business circumstances.

The new policy comes into effect on June 1st this year, and you can learn more details of the specific policy changes from the auDA website at

www.auda.org.au/news-archive/auda-14042008/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:15:51 +1000 Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:15:51 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/102 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

The recent media exposure about my RFID implant has resulted in some people writing rather, err, "interesting" things about me online. There are blog posts where I'm referred to as an indicator of the coming of Judgement Day, and people saying that I'm now carrying the Mark of the Beast. I've even seen websites that claim I have a "mainframe computer" running my house! Doing a search for my name can uncover all sorts of unusual things.

What do people find if they search for your name? Or your company's name? Or your product names or brands?

The internet is being used now as a first port of call for information on everything from the weather to the work history of potential employees, the business dealings of suppliers, and customer reviews of products. It's critical that you keep track of what people are saying about your company online and act proactively to maintain the sort of image you'll be happy to look back on years from now - something that is commonly overlooked is that once you've said something on the internet, you've always said it. Words on a web page or in a discussion forum don't fade away with time. Even if they're removed by the site owner they'll often live on indefinitely in search engine caches and in projects like The Internet Archive, which maintains searchable snapshots of most of the internet indexed by time so you can effectively hit "rewind" and view websites as they were at various dates in the past. Things that you and your customers say online right now will probably still be visible in some form in 10, 20, or 30 years to anyone who wants to do a quick search.

A very useful little exercise is to periodically go "ego surfing": use a search engine to look for references to your company name, your products and trademarks, and even your own name. Imagine you're a potential customer trying to find information about your company and go looking for any references you can find, good or bad.

Start with a general search engine such as Google and run searches on your company name and products. To find exact matches you can put your name in double quotes when you do the search. For example, because the words "internet", "vision", and "technologies" as individual words are common English words doing a search for them will find any site that includes those three words in any combination. To make the search more specific they can be searched as a complete phrase by searching for "Internet Vision Technologies" (including the quotes!) in Google, thereby excluding sites that include those words in some other combination.

Because a lot of influential online content is now found in blogs it's also useful to use specialist blog search engines such as Technorati to see if anyone is blogging about you or your company. You may find there are whole conversations going on among your customers and potential customers and you're not even aware of it: the internet gives everyone the power to communicate directly, and people have an innate understanding that impartial opinions from other customers are far more credible than anything a company may have to say about itself.

Putting yourself in the shoes of a potential customer and searching for your own company can be a very enlightening experience. Once you've spent some time chasing up random external references though you'll notice that a lot of the content is quite old and there's no point attempting to engage with people about it: if someone wrote a derogatory blog post about your company 3 years ago it's probably too late to post a comment or contact them to try to resolve any issues they may have. It's still worth a try if you have spare time but the really critical thing is to stay on top of what people are saying right *now*, both good and bad, and become part of the conversation immediately. If people write nice things about your company, thank them. If they write bad things, try to figure out how you can fix the problem and make them happy. People who complain about a bad experience with your company can in fact turn into some of your best allies: the fact that they are being vocal shows they care, and if you can demonstrate a willingness to help solve their problem it will show other prospective customers that you in turn care about them.

Finding recent content is not just a matter of doing regular searches though. After a while you'll lose track of which online references you've followed up and which you haven't, and you won't be able to do it frequently enough to be useful. You really need to know within 24 hours or so if someone has posted something online about you so that you can respond immediately.

The solution to the problem is a free service called Google Alerts.

Because Google is continuously trawling the internet for new content to include in their index they very quickly discover any new pages that appear, and with Google Alerts you can have them set up red flags on specific keywords so that they will notify you as soon as they find new pages containing those keywords. It's a very simple but extremely powerful tool that every single business owner should be using to keep a watchful eye on the internet to any references to themselves.

To get started just point your browser at www.google.com/alerts. You can then define the search terms to use, which parts of the internet to watch (such as just blogs, or just the web, or just news, or everything), how often to batch up matches and notify you, and what email address to use for notifications.

As an absolute minimum you should create a Google Alert for your company name, but I also highly recommend that you create additional alerts for your product names and brands. That way you'll know immediately if anyone starts talking about you online.

You could even create alerts for your competitors' names: Google Alerts is an invaluable tool for finding opportunities to contact potential clients who may not even know about your company yet but are talking about your competitors.

In my opinion Google Alerts are one of the most powerful yet underutilized tools available today to online marketers.

PS: My latest book, "Quickstart Guide to Google AdWords", has just hit the streets: see www.adwords-quickstart.com. Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:29:20 +1000 Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:29:20 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/100 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

In the last eBusiness News I talked about Google AdWords and offered to send readers the last couple of copies I had of "Insiders Guide to Google AdWords", a simple little booklet produced by Google that explains some of the basics of the AdWords program. The response was amazing: the copies I had available were claimed within five minutes of sending out eBusiness News, and I ended up with a spreadsheet of people who wanted copies but missed out.

"No problem," I thought, "I'll just get on the horn to the Google AdWords marketing team and grab some more copies. A box or two should do it."

No such luck. It turns out that they are out of print, and the AdWords marketing team has no intention of producing more - which is a pity, because it's a very useful little guide that would help a lot of people get started with AdWords.

Oh well, since I talk to a lot of people about eBusiness and many of them want to try out AdWords, perhaps I could arrange to have extra copies printed myself at my expense if Google didn't have plans to produce more?

"Absolutely not. That guide is Google copyright material and nobody else may reproduce it under any circumstances."

Wow. So they don't want me helping to advertise their services and send them more customers by reproducing what is effectively their marketing material for them at my expense? OK, I can understand them wanting to protect their corporate image, but still!

That left me in a pickle. Many of my customers are begging me for a quickstart guide to AdWords, but Google won't let me use theirs. What's a guy to do?

Write one myself, of course!

So over the last couple of weeks I've spent many late evenings writing "Quickstart Guide to Google AdWords", and it's in the final prepress stages right now - the cover has been designed, the internal artwork is being laid out, and it looks really cool. It's being published by Lulu Press and will be going to print in about 4 weeks, and a couple of weeks after that you'll be able to buy it from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble, and good bookstores everywhere.

It's not a big book because I didn't want to waste readers time or fill it with technical fluff, so it's as direct and concise as I could make it: 60+ pages that take you step by step from starting off with Google AdWords for the very first time all the way through to split testing and analysing and optimising multiple simultaneous ad campaigns. It explains the difference between the "search network" and the "content network", the psychological differences between users on the networks, how to put multiple ads up against each other to see which performs better, how to check the popularity of different keywords before you create your ads, and how to understand the sometimes cryptic entries that Google puts in your AdWords bills.

The whole point of the book is to take readers from marketing-zero to AdWords Hero in less than 60 minutes.

Some time in the next few days the ISBN will be issued and the book site (www.adwords-quickstart.com) will be updated with pricing and order information.

Stay tuned! Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:52:53 +1000 Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:52:53 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/98 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Many site owners have found that Google AdWords (and the Yahoo! equivalent, "Yahoo! Search Marketing", often simply called "YSM") are very powerful tools for site promotion. Rather than waiting for web users to find their way directly to your site, they allow you to have targeted ads placed selectively on some of the millions of sites in the Google and Yahoo! ad networks.

In many ways it's similar to the old banner advertising model where site owners paid to have their banners displayed on other sites in the hope that users will click the banner to end up on their site. But both AdWords and YSM are much more complicated beasts than the old banner networks ever were, and coming to grips with them can be a bit of a headache.

Part of the problem is that Adwords and YSM are run like a marketplace: you don't just buy banner impressions for the standard going rate of $X per thousand and hope that you get enough traffic (and conversions) through to your site to make it worthwhile. Instead you have to "bid" for specific keywords, telling the ad network how much you're willing to pay to have users see your ad when they search for that keyword or view a page containing that keyword. The ad network then tracks metrics such as the success rate of your ad (ie: the percentage of people who click on the ad when it is shown to them), the number of advertisers bidding for that keyword, and how much each advertiser is willing to pay. It then automatically determines how often your ad will be displayed and how high up the list of ads it will appear.

Sound complicated? It is. And in many ways it's like playing the stock market, because the value of keywords is determined solely by how much advertisers are willing to pay for them and it changes on a constant basis. You don't want to bid too little or your ad will never be shown, and you don't want to bid too much or you'll be paying more than necessary. Get it wrong and you could easily be paying many times as much for your advertising as you need to.

What site operator could be bothered going to all that trouble? Not many! Most business owners have better things to do with their time than track AdWords statistics on an hourly basis, so they just set up an AdWords or YSM campaign and let it run unattended.

As a result there is now a huge industry of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) consultants who will manage your AdWords campaigns and continually tweak them to gain the best advantage, letting you get on with business. Think of it as having a stock broker looking after your portfolio to maximise your return.

But unless you're running a fairly significant AdWords campaign an SEM consultant is probably beyond your budget - it would cost more than you'd save by the increased efficiency, so it's better just to accept that you're paying a premium for your ads and get on with life.

However, things have just got a lot easier with the official release last week of a new tool from Google. It's called Conversion Optimizer, and it's available to all AdWords customers with conversion tracking enabled who have received at least 200 conversions in the last 30 days.

Conversion Optimizer analyses your existing AdWords campaigns and factors in historical performance along with data about the keywords you are bidding for, and then calculates the optimal CPC (cost per click) bid for each auction to provide you the best possible return on investment for your ad campaign. It's entirely automatic: the only thing you need to do is specify a maximum bid limit, and the tool will do the rest. Rather than managing your adwords campaigns by gut feel (or not managing them at all!) it's a simple matter of activating the Conversion Optimizer in your AdWords account and letting it tell you how much to bid.

Site owners who have tested the beta version of Campaign Optimizer over the last couple of months have reported huge savings in their keyword ad campaigns, in many cases dropping the amount they were paying for keywords to well under half the previous level.

Cutting your site advertising costs in half with just a couple of clicks sounds too good to be true, but unless you're an AdWords expert and your campaigns have been hand-tweaked to within an inch of their life you'll almost certainly save money and improve ad performce with this tool. And if you haven't tried keyword advertising before this could be the perfect time to give it a go.

You can sign up for Google AdWords:
http://adwords.google.com/

Yahoo! Search Marketing can be found at:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/ Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:22:29 +1000 Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:22:29 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/96 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

One of the speed bumps in the uptake of e-commerce has always been the actual payment process - exchanging money for goods with minimum fuss and bother. The dominant online transaction method is credit card payments but credit cards are a mixed blessing for both vendors and customers.

On one hand we wouldn't have business-to-consumer e-commerce at all if it weren't for credit cards. For all their flaws, they are still the best general-purpose mechanism we have to transfer money from a consumer to a vendor with a reasonable degree of assurance for both parties.

On the other hand, credit cards have some serious problems that have made many consumers and vendors wary of using or accepting them for online transactions. The problems mainly lie in that phrase "reasonable degree of assurance".

For all the marketing effort expended by banks to convince us that they're vigilantly watching over our funds and preventing fraudulent use of our credit card details, the entire credit card system is still based on trust. When a consumer enters their credit card details into an e-commerce website, they're trusting that the site operator:

* Is really who they claim to be.
* Is a valid business who really will ship the goods as promised.
* Won't store or disclose the card details to third parties.
* Has implemented adequate security to keep the details confidential.

When a vendor sets up an e-commerce website to sell product online, they're trusting that consumers:

* Are really who they claim to be.
* Are using a credit card they are authorised to use.
* Won't renege on the transaction and have it reversed by the bank after receiving the goods.

Because most of the trust difficulties rest with the consumer the system is deliberately stacked in their favour. For example, a consumer who makes a purchase on an e-commerce website can receive the goods then state to their bank that they never authorised the transaction - the bank doesn't bother doing any form of checking or adjudication, it simply reverses the transaction immediately and takes the funds back from the vendor who then has to fight to prove the transaction was valid to get their money. Pretty scary from a vendor's point of view, and I'm sure most business operators are very glad more people don't know about it. If a significant number of consumers started routinely contesting every charge on their credit cards and forcing all vendors to justify every transaction the whole system would fall in a screaming heap and the credit card system we rely on today would cease to be viable.

All this is background to two very interesting announcements recently, both of which aim to make the process of online and offline transactions easier and safer.

The first was the availability of pre-paid Visa cards in Australia. Obtaining a Visa card has traditionally required that the cardholder open a bank account and satisfy various criteria, which in turn means proving their identity to the bank. Traditional Visa cards also typically provide credit which is charged at a very high rate of interest, posing a trap for many consumers who spend beyond what they can repay. And for those reasons traditional Visa cards are very difficult or impossible to obtain for children or those in financial difficulty - which is of course generally a good thing.

However, Visa is also one of the only practical ways to pay for many services now, particularly online, and having a Visa card which does not provide access to credit and is not tied to a bank account would be extremely useful for many people. Even people who have a traditional Visa account could benefit from using pre-paid Visa cards for online transactions or when travelling overseas when there is the potential for theft or fraud.

We've had Bopo pre-paid Visa cards for a while now in Australia. A Bopo pre-paid Visa is almost identical to a traditional Visa except that it restricts consumers to spending only what they have available in their bank account - perfect for limiting the dangers associated with online transactions. However, you still need to open an account to deposit funds for use with the card and if your card details are stolen your account could be cleaned out.

A possible solution is "VCard", a virtual Visa card just released in Australia but available in Ireland since 2005 and the UK since 2006. Buying a VCard is just like buying a gift certificate or mobile phone credit: you walk into a shop and buy a VCard with a nominated value up to AU$1000. You don't actually get a physical card - hence the "virtual" in the name! - just a printout with the Visa card numbers, expiry, and balance. You can then enter those details when buying online just like a normal credit card except that it's only valid up to the purchased value. A VCard isn't rechargable so once you've spent the money on it you just throw it away and buy another one - every VCard has a unique Visa number, so even if someone steals the details they'll never get access to more than the funds remaining.

Bopo have also now released a "Visa Gift Card" product which operates in almost the same way except that you don't just get a paper printout, you get an actual physical Visa card that can be used both online and offline in regular EFTPOS machines. The idea is that rather than buy a store-specific gift certificate, you can buy what is effectively a non-rechargable Visa card preloaded with up to $750 that can be used anywhere a normal Visa is accepted (including online) just like a VCard.

The second announcement was PayPal's release of Mobile Checkout, a system designed to allow transactions to be conducted directly from a phone handset. Mobile Checkout doesn't require the consumer to have a Visa card at all and opens the way for transactions such as purchasing a movie ticket directly on your phone. Imagine if you could go to the movies without queueing up at all: just pick the appropriate movie and session time on your phone, authorise the transaction, and then walk straight in to the cinema after your ticket has been verified off the screen.

It will be very interesting to see how successful VCard and the various Bopo products are in Australia, particularly leading up to the holiday season. Pre-paid Visa in particular may well be the final piece of the puzzle that makes online purchases possible (and safe) for many consumers. Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:50:00 +1000 Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:50:00 +1000 http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/94 By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Last Thursday I was asked a very interesting question while delivering an eBusiness workshop. The workshop was "How To Grow Your Ebusiness And Stay Sane", and was aimed at people who already have a website but may not be getting much benefit from it or who just want to take it to the next level.

During the session we'd been talking about issues related to setting up and promoting an online store, and the participant said they had previously been selling items on eBay and wanted to know if it was worth continuing to do that even after setting up a full e-commerce website themselves, and if so would it help give their own site more exposure.

The short answer is yes. If you're regularly selling products on eBay there's no reason to stop doing that just because you also have your own e-commerce website, and in fact you can gain some major benefits by running both in parallel. The fact is that eBay has a huge userbase so putting products up for sale on it will almost certainly get them more exposure than putting them on your own website.

But doesn't the lucky-dip nature of eBay work against you if people just want the reassurance of buying directly from you for a set price? Yes, it does. Not everyone is a bargain-hunter willing to wait a week for an auction to end in the hope of saving a few dollars compared to retail price. The fact is that different people have different purchasing habits, and it varies depending on what they may be buying at the time.

So cater to both! If you're selling products online, try putting them on both eBay and your own website and see what happens. You can set the eBay listings to be a bit cheaper than your regular retail price and include a link in each listing to your own website, and also link from your site to the relevant eBay listings. You'll get the benefit of eBay's enormous traffic and have the opportunity to make sales you may otherwise have missed out on, and some of those people may find your items on eBay and want to skip the whole auction shenannigans for the convenience of simply buying directly from you at retail price.

A perfect example of a company doing exactly that is Kogan, a Melbourne-based business that assembles and sells large-screen TVs direct to the public. Their "where to buy" page is a fantastic example of how to appeal to different types of customers with different needs. The page features two huge buttons: one takes you to their own online store to buy at retail price, and the other takes you to their eBay listings where you can try your luck at scoring a bargain.

Absolute genius. I love it.

So if you started out with eBay listings and graduated to your own online store, don't just walk away from your eBay account without looking back. And if you have an online store already and have never tried to sell using other sites such as eBay why not give it a go and put some of the products on your regular website up for auction.

Leverage every resource you have available in order to appeal to the widest market possible, and use the power of eBay to drive traffic to your own site. It doesn't have to be just one or the other.