News

Managing email overload

Thu, 01 May 2008 11:41:10 +1000

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

Domain name transfer policy changes for .au domains

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:53:33 +1000

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/

Online reputation management

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:15:51 +1000

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.

Quickstart Guide to Google AdWords

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:29:20 +1000

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!

Optimize your AdWords campaigns

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:52:53 +1000

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/

Pre-paid Visa smooths online transactions

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:22:29 +1000

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.

Which is better: using eBay or your own online store?

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:50:00 +1000

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.

eBusiness moving from the web to virtual reality?

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 00:08:55 +1000

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Right now there's a major upheaval going on in the realm of eBusiness and most people haven't woken up to it yet.

Over the last couple of years several "virtual worlds" have been growing at an astounding rate. The most popular so far is called Second Life, a system that has been under development by San Francisco-based Linden Labs since 1999. In many ways it looks like a computer game: the client software runs on your local computer and allows you to log into a place called "the grid", which is a virtual reality system running on a cluster of about 3000 servers. Once you log in you're presented with a 3-dimensional view of a virtual world that you can explore along with any of the tens of thousands of other people who happen to be logged in at the same time.

And that's the fundamental difference between virtual worlds like Second Life and the traditional world wide web: you're not alone when you use it. In the last eBusiness News I talked about the problem of being alone when browsing a website, with no concept of whether there is anyone else looking at the same site at the same time. Unlike the local shopping centers you'll never have to fight through crowds at a website, but also unlike a local shopping center you have no way of interacting with other shoppers or getting a sense for how busy a site might be.

Virtual reality systems such as Second Life are like a half-way point between the web and the physical world. Just like with a website you can visit a virtual Second Life shop run by a company anywhere in the world, but the difference is that just like the physical world you'll also see any other users who happen to be there at the same time as you. You can even talk to them. The shop can actually look like a shop, and there can even be human shop assistants there to talk to you and answer questions. Instead of being an isolated entity like a website, the virtual shop exists in the context of a complete virtual world. You can see what shops are on either side. You can "meet" friends and go places and do things together, unlike visiting a website.

I had an odd experience a week ago which really underscored how different virtual reality is to the web we know today in terms of how we interact with it. I was at home in Melbourne and logged into Second Life chatting to a friend in Sydney, and because we were at the same "place" in the virtual world we could see virtual representations of each other while we were chatting. I was doing several things at once on my computer and so was he, and at one point I needed to "go" somewhere else inside Second Life to work on a certain project. But because we were "virtually" in each other's presence I found I couldn't just walk away and go somewhere else in the virtual world. It would have felt like walking away from a real person while they were in the middle of a sentence. In Second Life distance means nothing: you can chat to someone even when they're in a totally different part of the virtual world totally out of "sight" just as easily as if they were close by. But I discovered that the strength of my association of my friend's virtual representation with him as an actual person meant that moving my virtual body away somewhere else would have felt as rude as actually walking away from him in the middle of a conversation if we were standing face to face.

It was a very strange feeling which really drove home to me how much a virtual reality system like Second Life can make us believe that we are actually in someone's presence merely because we can see a representation of them on a computer screen. The strength of the emotional engagement is far greater than just messages flying around in email.

But is it just a fad or is this actually the next big thing in communication methods? After all these years of people telling us that virtual reality was just around the corner, is it finally here? Will systems like Second Life make the web fade into the background and become the technology of yesterday?

Maybe. Maybe not. But it's certainly starting to make people sit up and take notice. IBM, for example, has budgeted US$100 million to Second Life development and a couple of my IBM friends are now working full-time on it. They've completed some stunning projects, including complete recreations of both Wimbledon and the Australian Open tennis tournaments complete with accurate ball motion using data captured from the Hawk Eye ball tracking system. Imagine "walking" around Wimbledon center court watching all the action - while actually being at your computer in Sydney. They've also built extensive virtual office facilities where IBM staff from all over the world "meet" in virtual reality, with their voices carried on a telephone conference call while they "sit" in a virtual conference room to discuss projects. They even run meetings with clients in Second Life now!

If anyone questions how seriously IBM is taking the Second Life phenomenon just have a look at some of the blog posts by IBM Vice President Bob Suter at www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?cat=124. It's obviously a big undertaking for them and it's getting into every corner of their business.

By the time you read this I'll probably be on a plane on my way to Portland, Oregon, where on Monday I'll be presenting a tutorial on customising Second Life to connect it to actual devices and objects in the real world. This represents a whole other dimension to virtual reality: instead of just meeting people online and manipulating virtual objects and shopping at virtual shops, my tutorial will cover ways to link objects in virtual reality to actual physical objects. Click a virtual representation of a thermostat on your virtual holiday house and your real central heating system at your real holiday house turns on, before you even leave work on a Friday night to travel there. Or a fault is detected on a production line, and a virtual representation of the equipment displays the location of the problem so a technician thousands of kilometers away can diagnose it without leaving his desk. It's making physical reality intrude into virtual reality, and vice versa. Blending the two together until the lines become blurred.

Will virtual reality replace the web? Not entirely. Email didn't replace physical mail. The web didn't make all previous forms of communications obsolete. Virtual reality is the same: it will find a niche and become a fundamental part of the way many businesses operate as part of an overall communications strategy involving multiple media. Like the web there will be early adopters (in fact they're already there, doing business inside Second Life right now to the tune of millions of dollars every day!) and those who lag behind. Even today some businesses don't have websites, and ten years from now there will still be businesses that don't have a presence inside virtual reality. But for most it will be a normal part of doing business, just like the web is today.

If it sounds interesting have a look at www.secondlife.com to learn more about it.

Turning on the lights in your online business

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:11:00 +1000

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Whenever I do talks or seminars about eBusiness one of the fundamental themes I focus on is that business is all about relationships and the way you interact with customers and suppliers. That may sound so obvious that it's not worth mentioning, but when people do business online it's very easy to forget real-world wisdom and allow the experience of doing business to become very impersonal and disconnected. You wouldn't set up a bricks-and-mortar shop and then hire shop assistants who hide out the back and refuse to talk to customers. And you certainly wouldn't set up a shop and then leave it unattended, expecting your customers to look after themselves and not be able to ask any questions about your products.

But that's exactly how most online businesses are run. Ecommerce websites are typically set up as if they were just glorified catalogs: a list of products, some pictures, brief descriptions, and an order form. No human interaction at all.

One reason for this is that most site owners have no way to see what visitors are doing. It's as if your website is a wall between you and your customers, with you working to make the wall as pretty as possible and customers doing whatever it is they do on the other side with an occasional order popping into your inbox. Sure, there are plenty of analytics systems around that give you insight into customer behavior either individually or collectively, but they're mostly retrospective rather than real-time.

Let me explain it with an analogy.

Imagine you built a store on Main Street and stocked it with products. You don't put any staff in the store, just an automatic checkout system that lets people pay for products as they leave. Then you sit back and wait. People go into the store but you can't see what they do while they're in there: all you know is that most of the time people leave empty handed, but sometimes they decide to buy something and they pay for it on the way out. You get a report on what people have bought so you know what has been sold, but that's it. Your store is basically a sealed black box and you can't see what happens inside.

That's the stage that the majority of eBusinesses operate at, and it's pretty pathetic. No real-world store owner would be satisfied with that approach.

The first step to improving things is to try to work out what people are doing while they are in the store. Do they have trouble finding things? Do they get lost? Are the shelves and aisles set up optimally? So to answer these questions you could have cameras installed in your store that record what people do, and at the end of each week you could review the footage to see what happened and which aisles people walked down. You could generate statistical reports such as "most popular aisles", and "products that are most picked up but not purchased", and "ratio of purchases to aisle visitors". Then you can use this information to rearrange your store to try to improve things, wait a while, review the next lot of footage and see if things are better or worse. Rinse and repeat. It's store presentation optimisation by statistics.

That's basically what you are doing by using website traffic reports or analytics software to review the behavior of visitors to your website and make adjustments. It's still treating your shop as an unattended black box, but at least you have some idea what people do while they are in the box.

However, it's certainly not engaging with them on a personal level as you would expect in a well-run store. Potential customers are still left to their own devices and have to find things for themselves. In a real store that just wouldn't be acceptable, but it's considered to be absolutely normal for online businesses. Go to just about any online store today and you'll find there's no way to get live assistance: the best you can hope for is a "contact us" form or an email address with the promise that they'll get back to you within a day or so. Imagine if you went to Main Street and into a store, and the only way you could ask a question was by putting a form in a box then coming back the next day for an answer. Not exactly stellar customer service!

So the concept that I emphasize in my talks and seminars is that when you run an eBusiness you have to realise that a typical website blocks your interaction with potential customers when it should be enhancing it. Your whole objective should be to draw customers into a closer relationship with you and to communicate on multiple levels via multiple channels, and your website is just one of those channels. It shouldn't be the only one and it definitely shouldn't act as an anonymizing wall between you and your customers.

One way to break through the "unattended store" problem is by offering live chat or phone-back services through your site.

A live-chat service involves placing a link or image on your website that visitors can click to open a real-time chat session with you. At your end you run a piece of software that alerts you immediately when a website visitor clicks the link, and a window pops up that lets you type messages to each other. For the website visitor it's like having shop assistants standing by to answer any questions they may have rather than being required to submit questions on a form with a 24-hour turnaround. They can interact with you directly, which of course is exactly what you want!

An example of a business that uses this technology is Lulu, the publisher that is handling the Second Edition of "How To Build A Website And Stay Sane" (due out in about a week, by the way!). The Lulu website has all the usual online support and FAQ pages, but their support page at www.lulu.com/help also has a "Live Help" link that triggers a real-time chat session with Lulu staff. A couple of weeks ago when I was going through the process of reviewing proofs for book I had questions about a couple of technical issues, and using their Live Help system I could get answers on the spot right there while viewing the proofs online. Instead of being a lifeless source of static information it turns the Lulu website into a two-way communications medium and made me a very happy customer.

The Live Help system used by Lulu comes from LivePerson (www.liveperson.com) and has a bunch of other features such as a real-time view of what visitors are doing in your site. By running the Operator Console software you can sit back and watch as site visitors progress through different pages on your site: it's like walking through your store and seeing what your customers are doing *right* *now*, rather than just reading end-of-week statistics on which aisles were most popular.

Another technique to break down the barrier is to use a call-back system on your website. What this does is put a "talk to us now" link on your site with a text box where site visitors can enter their phone number. The system then automatically places two phone calls: one to the site visitor and one to you as the site owner, and links the calls together. Your phone will ring, the site visitor's phone rings, and when you both pick up you'll be talking directly to each other just as if one of you phoned the other. Sure, you can put your phone number on your website (and you should!) so that visitors can call you, but very few actually will if they have to pick up their phone and dial you. Making it so easy that they can receive a call from you by clicking a button on your website can increase your customer contact rate dramatically.

Those two tools are just a couple of the techniques you can use to break down the wall between yourself and your potential customers. The critical thing is to change your mindset so that instead of just publishing static information you really focus on how to make your relationship with your customers direct and personal.

Web application integration: the next frontier?

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:24:22 +1000

By Jonathan Oxer
Oxer, IVT Technical Director

I've written quite a lot in the past about how web applications are starting to take over from traditional software that runs directly on your computer. The benefits have been discussed many times such as being able to access your software from any computer with a web browser, and never having to install updates or security patches. Paying a small monthly fee to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider is often a much smarter way to go than paying a large fee up-front to purchase software that you have to install and manage.

The downside though is that the current state of the art in web applications is disjointed, single-purpose programs that do one specific thing very well. The classic SaaS poster-child is Salesforce.com, which is a web-based tool for sales people to track prospects and manage relationships with customers. There are web apps and SaaS providers for managing your photo collection, your to-do lists, your project scheduling, and your documents, and now thanks to a couple of buddies from New Zealand you can even manage your business accounts (Xero) and business plans (PlanHQ) directly in your web browser. For many computer users we're already at the point where there is almost no need to install software on their computer at all. Everything they need to do on a daily basis can be run directly in a browser.

But it's not all cookies and cream. Yesterday morning a potential reseller came along to Internet Vision Technologies to get a rundown on what our system can do for his clients, and he outlined a typical business scenario that demonstrated there's still some way to go yet before we all reach software nirvana.

In this scenario he discussed the tale of woe of a client who wanted to:

* manage their website content
* manage their contact database
* generate personalised emails
* manage and publish internal operational procedure documents
* sell products online and track orders.

It's a very typical set of basic business operations, but the pain is in the lack of integration between the various tools used to solve the different parts of the problem.

For website content management they use the Typo3 CMS. For personalised bulk email they use Vision 6. For online sales they use OSCommerce patched into the Typo3 website. Their contact database ends up being a mish-mash of the users list in their CMS and the recipient lists in Vision 6. And they don't have any solution at all for managing versioning and publication of internal documents.

Imagine adding a few more business tools to the mix: perhaps a timesheet system for internal staff; a jobs listing published by the HR department; a project management system for timelining and tracking deliverables; a private wiki; a job-ticketing system for tracking customer requests; a quote management system; a warehouse management / inventory / shipping system; and a repository for storing marketing collateral. Sure, there are web-based systems out there to solve all these problems individually, but think about the mess you'd have when trying to work with so many different systems all the time!

Typical domestic computer users don't really care very much about integration. The software they run on their own computer generally works on the assumption that they will be the only user, and any integration is generally done using the operating system as the glue. For example, you can edit an image in Photoshop and save it on your hard drive, then in your word processor you can paste it into a document. The two programs don't need to talk to each other directly because they only need to care about where the operating system has stored the file.

Web-based systems have a totally different architecture and can't rely on being inside the same "sandbox" as other programs that they may need to share data with. Even though they are inherently more networkable than a typical desktop app the reality is that they often exist in separate silos with close to zero interoperability.

It doesn't have to be that way though. One of the fundamental design decisions behind SiteBuilder was that it wouldn't just be a content management system, even though that's what it was initially used for: it was designed as an extensible framework with integrated modules (129 at last count!) covering a wide range of business functionality. Working within that highly integrated environment every day I tend to lose sight of the pain that most people go through when trying to put together a comprehensive suite of tools to manage their business processes, and the meeting yesterday really brought it all back to me.

So the SiteBuilder approach of building an internally-integrated, whole-of-business software suite is one approach that has worked extremely well for us, but it's not the only way to do it. After all, web-based applications already have the benefit of being online and having a ready-made communications infrastructure to link them together. So why not just get them talking to each other? After all, that's what mash-ups are all about.

Unfortunately it's not quite that simple, at least not yet. Most web applications are designed to be stand-alone, to manage their own internal user lists, and to provide access only through a human-readable web interface rather than expose their underlying data to other systems. They each have their own menu systems, templating methods, and idiosyncrasies. Creating a unified and consistent user interface that integrates a bunch of different SaaS offerings within a comprehensive menu system while only asking you for a single username and password and sharing the data between each application is a Herculean task.

Many of the tools needed to do it already exist. The single-username-everywhere problem can be solved if all web applications follow the OpenID standard. XML and sitemap tools can create unified menus that encompass multiple web applications. And initiatives such as Zaltana, created by my friend Scott Penrose, aim to solve the problem of each system looking totally different.

But these tools are really still at embryonic stages, and for most people the problem is insurmountable unless they opt for a system that is designed from the ground-up to provide an integrated environment.

The moral of the story is to think carefully about your different business systems and whether they are as integrated as they could be. Is your website content management system totally separate from your back-office inventory system? Then it'll be hard to display stock levels on your website in real time. Do your customer satisfaction surveys, your emarketing system, your newsletter signups, your website, and your quotes database all have their own internal lists of contacts? Then you have a recipe for disaster, or at best you'll miss out on the benefit of having all those programs function as a cohesive system.

A bit of homework and some effort tying your systems together can pay off big-time in improved efficiency, productivity, and ease of use, so keep your eye on the big picture to get the most bang for your software buck.