E-marketing Roundup

Advertising agencies get a digital wake-up call from Nike

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:32:00 +0000

Just Do It! Nike just did, ditching its running shoe advertising agency of twenty five years not because it was unhappy with creative or because of costs, but because Wieden & Kennedy just didn't have the digital media passion or expertise needed to adequately engage the new consumer.

While Nike moving its running shoe business after so long and successful a partnership is news in itself, what is really making waves in the agency world is the reason for the move. Agencies worldwide are generally still doing a half-hearted job of leveraging the internet and related technologies for brand building, and most of them know it. When a manufacturer as intimately in touch with its consumer as Nike is sees the need to do more and do it better, and is willing to just do it, the agency world looks over its shoulder to see who is next to go.

Wieden & Kennedy are not a minor agency – they have long been a creative powerhouse doing work for companies like Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola. They must have seen this coming, and probably had plenty of warning from Nike, but were simply unable to change fast enough to keep the account.

In February, Mark Parker, Nike's CEO, told investors

The Nike brand will always be our strongest asset, but consumers are looking for new relevance and connections. We're fundamentally changing the way we're organized as a company. It's really all about going deeper to get deeper connections and deeper insights, to get more innovation and more relevance, and to make us ultimately more competitive in each of the discrete pieces of our business. This allows us to be more informed and more surgical in creating products and optimizing our go-to-market strategies within each category.

Nike gets it. The consumer – particularly in Nike’s demographic – is now calling the shots, and companies who insist on pursuing a 1980’s-style mass-market broadcast approach to communicating risk being marginalized or, worse, becoming irrelevant.

As the New York Times put it,

The message is clear: No matter how talented an agency's creative team or how well the client's management likes the firm's executives, the agency is of limited value unless it embraces digital media.

That means, just as the web has permeated the lives of consumers, agencies must permeate digital culture throughout their organisations, instead of regarding “internet stuff” as an afterthought, add-on, or external business. For many markets, digital thinking needs to be a foundation of advertising strategy. And while it makes sense to start digital operations as a separate entity (thus bypassing all of the legacy resistance), there has to be a plan to reintegrate online operations as soon as the “interactive agency” is up and running.

But advertising agencies the world over are still dragging their heels. Given that the internet attracts more advertising money than radio worldwide, and was second only to TV in the UK last year, it's hard to keep on regarding online as something that is still not important.

Last week at the Online Media Marketing & Advertising (OMMA) conference in Hollywood, a panel of industry insiders agreed that most ad agencies are simply not ready for the digital era. Tim Hanlon, from Publicis, was adamant that the traditional structure of ad agencies is an obstacle, and that de-siloing brand advertising and response advertising is essential to create the flexibility and spontaneity necessary to get to the online consumer.

Bant Breen of Interpublic was of the opinion that acquiring so-called interactive agencies is easy, but integrating them into existing agencies is not, and that’s the thing which is necessary for a more powerful approach to advertising which can do things like build customer relationships and enable transactions.

What’s the problem with traditional ad agencies?

Firstly, the whole structure within agencies (and the communication structures between agencies and clients) makes change a painfully slow process. Not good when rapid and disruptive change is a key characteristic of online consumer environments. How long does it take to brief, pitch, create and roll out a campaign? Given the aversion to risk within agencies and clients, it can take months. Online, you need to be able to do this stuff in days if not hours. The risk of not operating quickly vastly outweighs the risk of moving so slowly you are effectively doing nothing. Agencies need to be given more latitude to act almost spontaneously, but it is unlikely clients would allow that, and even less likely that agencies would want it.

Secondly, agencies and their clients are way too precious about protecting brand identity. Remember when the primary role of a brand manager was to police the “brand bible” and ensure the eternal purity of the proposition? In a web 2.0 world, consumers want to talk about products. And, in the words of the Cluetrain Manifesto, whether the news is good or bad, they tell everybody.

Trying to protect a brand from consumer comment, being afraid that customer opinion may pollute or hijack your carefully crafted identity, is no longer a valid marketing activity. But encouraging discussion and being ready to respond to it, and making sure you are structurally able to maximize net advocacy, are alien concepts to many marketers and their ad agencies.

Thirdly, the traditional approach to broadcasting generic messages to largely mass markets is inappropriate for digital media, which is all about sharply focused messages for niche audiences who are discerning, informed and impatient. When your medium is newspapers or television, you have to communicate across the broad mix of audiences that they reach, and being too focused in your message risks completely missing important components of those audiences. True, satellite TV and niche publications do allow for a more narrowcast approach, but it is nothing compared with the laser-focused nanocasting and individual consumer conversations that the web allows – and requires. But the broadcast mentality of traditional agencies results in nothing more imaginative online than generic corporate banners on mass traffic sites like directories and online newspapers.

Fourthly, the online business model does not work well for agencies. If a major part of your income originates in placement commissions paid by traditional media, it is very hard to look at online opportunities as anything but financially retrograde. So the only real financial incentives to pursue digital strategies are macro incentives: you’ll pull in big accounts if you are seen to be on top of this web thing, or you’ll lose big accounts if you are not. Ad agencies need to reinvent their business models for the 21st century, because their old models are a significant handicap to progress.

Google to provide a pay-per-action advertising model

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:44:00 +0000

In the past if you wanted to advertise using Google you went the pay-per-click (PPC) route, having Google place your ad either on its search results page in response to a search term you had bid on (the AdWords model), or on a web page in response to some context-relevant content on that page (the AdSense model).

In either case, you as an advertiser paid Google only if a web visitor actually clicked on your advertisement. If you wanted to place ads where you would pay the website publisher only if the clicker actually performed some action (such as buying something, subscribing, or providing information) you could use other services. Prominent among these pay-per-action (PPA) services are secondary search engines like Snap, PPA broker Turn, and affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare.

In March, Google announced that it was putting a pilot PPA product on the market. That’s huge news, because Google is such a dominant player in online advertising. The implications for advertisers are significant. A PPA model lets you pay only on successful conversion of the traffic that your ad sends to your site, instead of making you pay only for the clicks themselves. Many PPC ad clicks are of no value – the clicker made a mistake, was merely curious, or was deliberately fraudulent. Or your landing page and site structure were poorly designed and just got in the way of them doing business with you.

With PPA, you don’t pay for those clicks that go nowhere. But the sites hosting your ads expect something in return, namely a bigger payoff when they do deliver a visitor who actually becomes a customer.

Unlike with Google’s PPC product, where sites displaying the ads don’t get to choose the ads and are not allowed to encourage clicking those ads, sites displaying PPA ads are being given a lot more ability to both select the ads, or a basket of ads, and urge people to click. So expect much more traffic to sites, and correspondingly lower conversion rates – but higher ad ROIs.

Because a PPA payout depends on clear policing of what action (if any) was actually taken, it requires a system that can automatically monitor and verify those transactions. And because of this additional layer of technological complexity, PPA has not been widespread on the web. Till now. Google has the clout and the tech muscle to make this work, and work well, and the existing PPA players must be expecting their businesses to feel a great deal of pain once Google gets into full swing.

For small advertisers, Google’s PPA could be a boon, the equivalent of paying a small sales commission only on closed deals rather than their existing PPC approach which involves paying each time a visitor wanders in through their virtual doors.

Google is also testing ads that appear in text, similar to those currently run by Intellitext. These ads appear as words or phrases that have been double-underlined. Hovering a mouse cursor over those phrases pops up a small box containing the advertisement. As more and more online content is read through RSS feeds, the importance of in-text ads grows, so it is not surprising to see Google move into this space.

Got your MOO cards yet?

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:22:00 +0000

These days it's increasingly hip to be geeky. If you really want to make a statement about how web 2.0 centric you are, you put your commitment to humanising business, personalisation, niche marketing, and social networking right on your business card. And you do it in a format that deliberately bucks the boring uniformity and conformity of ordinary everyday business cards.

How? You have a batch of MOO cards made up for you, printed in a “widescreen” 70x28 millimetre size, with a range of colour photographs on the back that reflect your personal interests or passions.

MOO cards started out with people who spend a lot of their private time in the 3D virtual world of Second Life, allowing them to put screen shots of their alter-ego online avatars on the back of their calling cards. A simple viral concept, the craze spread rapidly, and now it seems everyone in the web world is doing it.

How do you get your own MOO cards? Online, of course, from www.moo.com

No longer limited to Second Life images, you can upload your own photographs or choose from thousands already available at their site. MOO’s online tools let you easily crop your photos to get the best effect. You order packs of 100 cards with as many as 100 different images per pack, for only US$20, and they will ship anywhere in the world.

Not only do MOO cards say a lot about your cutting-edge geekiness, they present an opportunity to promote your interests – or your business – in a way that regular business cards cannot. Because there is a distinctly casual and “fun” element to MOO cards, you can put photos of your your product, or your service in action without risking looking tacky.

There's another advantage, at least while MOO cards are relatively new. Ordinary business cards get stuffed in a pocket and forgotten. MOO cards are not only ice-breakers for your own first encounters, they get shown to other people long after you have gone.

Sun International to buy stake in Chilean firm

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:42:00 +0000

Sun International has agreed to buy a 40% stake in a Chilean firm that holds a 15-year casino licence covering the capital Santiago, it said today.

You can read the article on Business Day

Protea Hotels sold to Australian group

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:35:00 +0000

Australian travel services and hospitality company Stella Group has bought Protea Hotels, Africa’s largest hotel management company, for R1,48bn, or A$255m.

You can read the article on Business Day.

Don’t let website developers rip you off

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:12:00 +0000

Here is a dire warning: read the small print before contracting a website developer, and make sure that it is contractually clear that you will own the code for both the resulting site and your domain name (that's the www.yourdomainname.co.za).

Don't accept the story that it is standard practice in the industry for a developer to own the code outright, because it is not. Any development work done for you should be done on a work-for-hire basis, so there is no legal presumption that the intellectual property resides with the contractor after the job is complete.

The same is true of any artwork or photography you buy for your site -- you, not your developer, should own that intellectual property agreement. Of course graphics and photography are slightly different from code in that you rarely own the original image outright, but you acquire rights to use it in specific ways.

Small businesses in South Africa appear to be at the mercy of unscrupulous website developers, who exploit the inexperience of first-time site buyers. How widespread the scamming is, and how well penetrated it is in larger and supposedly smarter client organisations, is hard to tell. But over the past two months virtually every business owner we have dealt with has a similar tale of woe: the company who developed their website refuses to let them have the code for their site, will not allow them to move to a different support company, and, in many cases, will not release even the domain of the business.

As if this cyber-squatting and code-grabbing were not bad enough, the reasons that most people are wanting to move to new web support companies is that the customer service that they originally signed up for has simply faded away. If it takes you weeks, and a great deal of money, to get a simple change made to your small business site, you have every right to move on. Any web developer worthy of the name knows that sites have to be dynamic and evolving, and that static brochureware sites belong in the 20th century. If their development business is not equipped to handle the creation and maintenance of modern business-oriented websites, they should not be in business.

The horror stories of attempted extortion make your hair curl. One business owner was told that she could have her domain (which costs about R200 per year) only if she paid the developer R200,000. Others wanted to have third party programmers work on their site since the original developers were unable to make desired changes, and were refused access to the code. Still others created new sites after successful legal action to get their code, and found that new site vindictively hacked.

Developers will try to persuade you that to own your code you will have to pay a lot more, but this is rarely justified. In some instances your site may be sharing certain software applications, such as database software or content management software, with other sites being hosted by your developer. In those instances it is perfectly fair to let you know that should you move to another hosting company you will need them to provide similar services.

If the developer absolutely refuses to let you own the code and you really do not want to use someone else, at the very least ensure that your written agreement grants you a free license in perpetuity to use a copy of the code for the purposes of running your own business, and grants you the right to modify the copy of the code as you see fit.

But do not allow bogus claims of how much money you are saving by not owning the code make you captive to ongoing hosting and maintenance fees, with no recourse if customer services are inadequate. The internet in South Africa is evolving rapidly, with newer, better, cheaper services appearing all the time. You need the freedom to put your business where it gets the best attention. If a developer tries to play hardball on intellectual property ownership, find another developer.

While we are at it, it seems that developers are also pressuring site owners into putting a promotional link on their home page which takes your visitors away from your site to the developer's site. Don't accept this, unless the developer is willing to pay for the advertising, and even then put the link deeper in your site, say on the contacts page. Make the site linked to opens in another browser window. You work very hard to get visitors to come to your site – don't lose them that easily.

At Britefire we interact with an awful lot of people who are relatively new to website development, and we are more than happy to pass on recommendations of good companies to deal with -- as well as warnings about those whose business ethics and integrity are suspect. Let us know about your experiences.

Telkom acquires 75% of Nigeria’s Multi-Links

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:29:00 +0000

Telkom is gaining momentum in its plans to march across Africa with a $280m deal to gain control of Multi-Links Telecommunications in Nigeria.

This raises two questions: 1) Why is Telkom spending all of this money expanding internationally instead of investing in providing a superior, lower cost service in South Africa, and 2) How will Telkom manage in an environment where it actually has real competition?

Massive municipal Wi-Fi project for Mexico City

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:22:00 +0000

The Mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, has just announced that the entire city will be one free, wireless Internet hotspot by 2008. With a population of over 25 million people, it’s one of the world’s largest cities, though this project may initially only cover the central district with its smaller population of 9 million.

The project "will accelerate the technological development of the city," Ebrard said after signing a contract with the Chinese telecoms and networking giant ZTE.

Social Networks for KLM Passengers and Business Travellers

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:05:00 +0000

Loyalty programmes are invariably about a company trying to create a relationship with a customer, with the primary motivations being to secure repeat business and cross-sell services. That’s so web 1.0. These days, the objective is not so much to form a company-customer relationship as to facilitate customer-customer networking relationships with the company providing the context.

There is probably no industry in which loyalty programmes are so widespread as travel, so when a major airline starts trying to get social networks working for its frequent flyers, it may be the first sign of a significant evolution. Not surprisingly it is the Dutch, who gave us the compact cassette and the CD, who were the first to move in this innovative direction.

KLM is the first airline in the world to build online social networking communities for its customers. Aimed primarily at frequent business travelers, and currently centered on specific destinations and activities, KLM’s communities connect people with common travel interests. Its first two destination communities, KLM Club Africa and KLM Club China, and its first activity community, Flying Blue Golf Club, are at the moment available only by invitation.

The benefit of belonging is that members of the networks can get to meet and share experiences with people working in similar markets, facilitating connections that might otherwise never happen. Members also get access to services such as translation, travel advice, or legal assistance provided by KLM business partners. And the networks are not exclusively online: face-to-face networking events take place regularly in he destination zones, as well as back home in the Netherlands.

Members of the golfing network (ever meet anyone from the Netherlands who doesn’t love golf?) can use the community to create profiles of their playing ability, arrange to play with other members who are going to be in the same place, and even use frequent flyer miles to pay for games or buy golf equipment.

It is a fairly bold move by KLM to try to unite its customers. Most airlines prefer to keep customers at bay with a divide-and-conquer mentality. But KLM has a good product and an already very loyal customer base. What KLM has done is leverage and lock in that loyalty not by offering “me-too” benefits like more comfortable seats or better in-flight entertainment, but by offering a unique service of potentially great personal value which other airlines might find harder to mimic.

In a similar vein, a new company called PairUp is offering to help travelers (on any airline) to connect face-to-face with fellow travelers with whom they may already have an online connection. PairUp members uploading their contacts list (from Outlook, or whatever their e-mail or contact management tool is). When they schedule a flight or participation in a conference, they put their flight and accommodation information in the system.

The system shows them people in their list whose uploaded travel details coincide with theirs, and lets them pick the contacts that they are interested in getting together with. The system is not exclusively for use by vaguely connected people – it can be used as a coordination tool by colleagues who need to share travel plans.

PairUp also provides a version of its tool to event managers, allowing convention organizers to offer a pairing-up service directly to people who register for their event. Anyone who has participated in major conferences where you struggle to find out who is attending, then battle to track down the people you want to talk with, can see the benefits of such a tool.

Online video ads get more clicks than static ads

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:59:00 +0000

South Africa’s bandwidth premium is of course a significant obstacle to advertisers who would like to use more than the old static banners or animated gifs. Indeed local web surfers are likely to avoid or resent any imbedded ads that chew voraciously into their meagre bandwidth rations.

When Flash animation banners first started appearing a few years ago, they were contentious even in the USA, though the concern there was that such ads were slowing down the browsing experience rather than using up any allocated download quota. Delivery technologies have moved on, and typical download speeds in the US have lifted from being approximately what South Africans experience today to anywhere from 4 Mbps to 45Mbps, and online video has come into its own. But is a video ad more effective than a conventional ad?

DoubleClick studied 2.7 billion online video ad impressions for 300 campaigns, comparing them with data for non-video ads, and concluded that video ads are significantly more powerful than most other formats. They found web surfers are twice as likely to click the “play” button in video ads as they are to click through standard static image ads, though they rarely watch the video more than two-thirds of the way through. Those clicking the “play” button typically watched 10 seconds of 15 second videos and 19 seconds of 30 second videos.

Obviously the lesson, as with most things on the web, is to front-load your message rather than building to a punch-line.

The actual click-through rate for video ads ranged from 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent, compared with click-through rates for static image ads of between 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent.

Of course it’s not just a numbers game – the quality of your creative is clearly important contributor to click-through rates, as is the relevance of the ad content to its positioning. And click-through rates themselves are irrelevant if your conversion rates let you down. But it seems clear that video ads online are finally starting to have an impact on brand awareness and traffic generation.

Online Advertising Spend Just Keeps on Growing

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:56:00 +0000

Global spending on internet advertising increased from $18.7 billion in 2005 to $24.9 billion (£12.6 billion) last year, according to ZenithOptimedia, the media-buying agency. Worldwide, the internet will overtake radio by next year and become the world’s fourth-largest advertising medium.

In the UK last year spending on online advertisements overtook spending on newspaper ads and, at 11.4% ad-spend share, reached just over half of TV ad spend.

And Google was second only to ITV in UK advertising revenue. According to a report by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, UK online advertising expenditure jumped 41.2% to £2.01bn during the year, compared with £1.9bn spent on newspaper ads.

In the USA, Internet advertising revenues for 2006 reached $16.8 billion, a 34 percent increase over the previous record of $12.5 billion in 2005. Fourth-quarter revenue for 2006 totalled just under $4.8 billion, making that quarter the highest on record.

Major broadband speed increase only a year or two away

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:39:00 +0000

A great thing about the internet is the way consumer demand pushes suppliers to perform better, not only in the commercial arena, but also in the technological arena.

America’s network companies are under real pressure to enable what online customers want to do – and currently they want to access more and more video online. That puts a huge strain on existing bandwidth, with some analysts suggesting the internet may actually collapse under the load. If you are Telkom, your reaction to massive demand is to push up your prices and put a cap on bandwidth supply. If you are Alcatel-Lucent or Siemens, your reaction is to invest in ways to supply more bandwidth.

Since putting in new networks of fiber-optic cables is massively costly, researchers are trying to find ways to push more data through the existing infrastructure. And they are succeeding.

The current bandwidth target is 100 gigabits per second (Gbps). Siemens claimed this month that it has sent data at 111 gigabits per second over 10 channels on a single fiber over a distance of 2,400 kilometers. Bell Labs (part of Alcatel-Lucent) have just demonstrated that they can get the current 40 Gbps backbone (those long-distance data pipelines that connect cities together) to carry 100 Gbps. They are forecasting that, at least in America, video on demand is going to make up 90 percent of online data, and there will be a tenfold increase in the demand for bandwidth.

(If you think 100Gbps is impressive, Bell Labs also successfully transmitted data across 80km on a single fiberoptic strand at a speed of 25.6 terabits per second, which is like downloading more than 43 thousand music CDs in only one second…)

So, just as ADSL technology allows us to get relatively high speed data over existing phone lines, anyone in the world with access to existing fiber-optic networks should in the near future be able to get much better data rates through them.

Now if only Telkom can be persuaded to stop spending money acquiring other African phone companies and start investing in South African infrastructure, maybe we can start to catch up with 21st century economies.

Using buses to get rural areas online

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:32:00 +0000

At the other end of the bandwidth spectrum, rural villagers in India, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Paraguay with no landline connection to the web are getting online using a fleet of wi-fi equipped buses and motorcycles. The vehicles do the rounds, visiting each village several times a day, and connect with the local village computer(s) via an antenna.

It’s not real live internet – essentially the vehicles update their web databases in the city before going back out to share the updates with the villagers – but it brings them those aspects of the web that really matter. Villagers can request specific content, which is available on the next visit, a sort of time-shifted web surfing.

The founder of the United Villages initiative Amir Hassan told BBC News that in addition to delivering and collecting e-mails from the villages, the buses satisfy limited online interests, at least for now. "They want to know the cricket scores, they want to see the new Aishwarya Rai photos, and they want to hear a sample of the latest Bollywood tunes."

The system also enables e-commerce for products like fertiliser, pesticides, books and medicine. The wi-fi bus is used not only to facilitate the order, but to deliver the products.

Optimise your site with NOODP and NOYDIR metatags

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:31:00 +0000

Yahoo has just announced that it supports a new metatag, and it is a good idea to use it! When someone searches on Yahoo or Google, and a page on your site appears in the search results, the description that is displayed for your page may not be what you have coded for that page.

First, some very fundamental rules of website development:

1 – Every page of your website should have a description and a title. That’s not the heading that web visitors see on the page itself, but text that you insert within the title tag and the description metatag in the HTML code of each page. A lot of sites do not have these titles and descriptions, because the developer did not bother to insert them, or, if they exist, they are hastily created poor marketing copy. You can see these tags by opening each page in your browser and clicking View then PageSource, or Page then View Source, depending on your browser. Check yours today!

2 – Before you submit a new site to Google or Yahoo, you have to submit it to the major directories DMOZ and Yahoo Directory. The people who edit these directories make decisions about the classification of your site which Google and Yahoo and most other search engines build into their own review algorithms.

Now, back to the NOODP and NOYDIR metatags.

Your site’s descriptions may not be what you see in search engine results pages because Yahoo and Google spiders often defer to the descriptions that have been written by the human editors of those primary source directories, particularly DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) in the case of Google, and the Yahoo Directory in the case of Yahoo.

The discrepancy between what you think should be in the description and what actually appears may be because you have edited your page description subsequent to submitting it to one of the directories, or because the editors of the directory decided that they could produce a more accurate description, or – most likely – because at the time you submitted your page you did not have a description in place.

Now you can get around this problem by including a line of code on each page which tells the search engines to ignore the tags that the directories have, and override them with what your page code has in place.

The "NOODP" metatag is already supported by all major search engines, and it tells them to ignore the ODP (Open Directory Project, or DMOZ) tags. The new Yahoo “NOYDIR” metatag tells the Yahoo search engine to ignore the YDIR (or Yahoo Directory) metatags. To invoke these two overrides, simply add the following code between to the HEAD and /HEAD text of your web page code:

meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP, NOYDIR"
remembering to enclose the line between angle brackets<>

The only impact this will have will be to ensure that the descriptions and titles within your site code are displayed in search results rather than those logged in the directories. But it puts you in control of how your site is described!

Data Security Jargon

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:18:00 +0000

Some data security and privacy terms you need to know:

Social Engineering
The single most common source of data loss, social engineering describes an intrusion that uses human rather than technical interaction, and often involves fooling someone into breaking normal security procedures.

Shoulder Surfing
Shoulder surfing is the process of getting information by stealthy direct observation, such as looking over a person’s shoulder or eavesdropping on a conversation. Shoulder surfing is a common and effective technique to acquire personal information.

Dumpster Diving
Dumpster diving is the act of looking for value in someone else's garbage, an activity which is actually quite legal. In the contexts of computer security and personal privacy, dumpster diving is any technique used to retrieve discarded information that could be helpful in getting into a personal computer or network, or which could be used to steal an identity. Just as you should always shred sensitive paper documents before throwing hem away, you should electronically "shred" computer data rather than simply delete it — use a security program to actually overwrite the file several times instead of deleting it, which merely tags it as ready for overwriting.

Post-it Peering
The act of finding usable sensitive data such as passwords by scanning someone’s personal notice board or the Post-It notes that they tend to stick around their desk.

You can visit Britefire’s online glossary of terms for an explanation of most internet and e-marketing expressions.

Neotel gears up for corporate launch

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:08:00 +0000

Only five years behind schedule, South Africa's official second fixed-line telecommunications provider Neotel will be launching phone and internet services for business customers from mid-March. Apparently Tata-managed company has already acquired more than a dozen large corporate customers.

They are currently putting together a cable/fibre network and a Wimax/CDMA infrastructure that has the ability to bypass Telkom's stranglehold on home phone lines. Neotel are promising to undercut Telkom's prices (how hard can it be to undercut the highest prices on the planet?) and to beat them on service (again, how hard can this be?).

IOL Technology Article

Telkom Takes Over Internet Service Provider Africa Online

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:59:00 +0000

What do you do when you already own the telecommunications market in your home country? You expand internationally. Telkom has apparently acquired Africa Online, an ISP that operates in ten African countries, including South Africa's neighbours Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Telkom will pay R70 million to African Lakes, the UK-based company behind Africa Online.

The penetration of the internet is of course very low outside of South Africa, and there is actually real competition to deal with, so Telkom may find its management competence a little stretched. In South Africa, Telkom's battles with its "competitors" could be likened to a club rugby team who only ever plays against school under-14 teams -- and gets to change the rules depending on the run of play. But out in the real world, there are All Blacks and Lions and more or less level playing fields. With luck, the experience will enlighten senior management at Telkom, and teach them something about customer service.

Perhaps they might even pick up on the economics of abundance -- imagine the impact on Telkom revenues of providing really low-cost web access in South Africa. Imagine the impact on the economy and education...

Business Day article

Nine Questions To Ask About Your E-mail Marketing Campaigns

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:33:00 +0000

The more e-mail marketing you do, the easier it is to slip into bad habits or to assume that what you know worked last year will work again this year. Here are nine questions you should ask yourself about your e-marketing campaigns, to try to keep them focused and effective.

1) Is your address list full of black holes?

Your opening rate may be low because you are sending to people who no longer respond. They are not bad addresses, just people who ignore you. Use your metrics to isolate the “black hole” addresses, those who have not opened your mail in more than six months. Then send them a targeted message with a compelling subject line, inviting them to update their mailing preferences, complete a survey, or even get some incentive. Then delete anyone who stays unresponsive.

2) Do you know how your messages look to all of your readers?

What impact will Microsoft’s decision to use Word to render HTML e-mail in Outlook 2007 have on the appearance of your work? How do your e-mails look on a mobile phone, web-based mail, Blackberry, or PDA? How do they come across in different browsers and mail clients? You should test in as many combinations of browser and mail client as you can. There are services that will do this for you. Try SiteVista's email service ($49 per month): you send an HTML email to the address they provide, and immediately view the rendered message as it would appear in various email clients. (To see how your message, or your site, looks on different browsers, use BrowserCam. A one-day pass gives you unlimited screen captures of your web pages using hundreds of combinations of browsers, platforms, resolutions and plug-ins – all for under $20.)

3) Do your opt-in processes actually work, and how porous are they?

The fewer steps a user has to take to get to the final opt-in click, the less likely you are to have people abandon the process mid-way. Test the links and every step that a reader will have to take. If there are five or more clicks from start to finish, you might have a problem. If you can reduce the steps that it takes, do so. Don’t try to get lots of information at the opt-in stage, merely an e-mail address will do – and you can get that automatically with a simple “click-here-to-subscribe”. If you need to know more about your subscriber, fill in the blanks progressively as your relationship matures.

4) Do all the links in your e-mail messages actually work, especially your unsubscribe links?

There are different types of links: internal links to content that allow readers to jump around the e-mail; links to content on websites; links to images not embedded in the e-mail; and service links such as subscribe, forward to a friend, and the all-important unsubscribe. Have someone test all of them before the e-mail goes out, and make sure the actual e-mail as received is tested on a computer other than the one used to create the e-mail.

5) Who is watching the incoming mail, especially in the unexpected mailboxes?

Just because you give people the right links to click dos not mean they will use them. Just because you tell people not to reply to auto-emailed messages does not mean they will obey your instructions. There should never be such a thing as an un-manned e-mail address.

6) How likely is your e-mail to trigger spam filters?

Different spam filters get alarmed by different things. Your images, links, hidden code, and even use of words or capitalisation can get your message bounced before it gets to its destination. Most e-mail marketing services provide an automated spam check of your mailing – use it. Services such as Constant Contact or Mail Chimp will alert you to things you ought to change to increase the likelihood of your e-mail getting through.

7) How does your e-mail display in mail clients using image-blocking and/or preview panes?

Most mail clients (even web-based mail) now provide preview panes that allow users to see the top part of a message without actually opening the whole thing. That’s good because you are not solely dependent on your subject line to get the recipient to open the message rather than delete it; it’s bad because the top part of your e-mail may be a turn-off. At the same time, most mail clients’ default security settings block images in e-mail (whether embedded or linked). So it’s a good idea to use a combination of compelling content and non-image layouts, colours, and fonts to make the first five-ten centimetres of your message as irresistible as possible. Once the reader wants to see your message, they will do the simple click-to-enable the images. To help them decide to do this, make sure you use compelling alt tags with each graphic which will display in place of the image.

8) Are you immediately engaging new subscribers to your list, and trying to ensure those who have recently unsubscribed leave with the best impression of you?

Don’t leave a new subscriber hanging for months after they have made the commitment to join your list. OK, some people fall through the cracks (we all do it), but work on making your cracks a lot smaller. When someone unsubscribes, confirm this in an e-mail or on the unsub landing page, and provide a link to a brief exit questionnaire. You can learn a lot from this feedback that can help you recapture those who you have lost, or prevent more people from leaving for similar reasons. Remember, markets are conversations and everything we do should be geared to facilitating relationships.

9) Are you sending messages too often, or not often enough? Are you sending them at the right time of day, on the right days?

Depending on what it is you are communicating, you might be mailing daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or even seasonally. If your mailing goes out every few months, you risk people not remembering you and unsubscribing. Too frequently, and they will unsubscribe because they feel spammed. The key is to match content to frequency, and frequency to recipient expectations. If you have a large enough list, test different frequencies to see what the success rate is and what the unsubscribe rate is.

Personalization Desire Outweighs Security Concerns

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:31:00 +0000

It is hard to imagine that people who are neurotic about data loss and identity theft would willingly relinquish security for convenience. But time and time again we see consumers acting in a way that might make life harder tomorrow in order to make life easier today. In German supermarkets, people who would refuse to allow their government to capture their fingerprints willingly pay for groceries by pressing their finger on a fingerprint scanner at the till.

The recently publiched "2006 ChoiceStream Personalization Survey" found that over half of the respondents will provide demographic and other personal information in exchange for a personalized online experience.

Part of this is familiarity. Ten years ago when online sites like Amazon.com first started using cookies and subscriber data to customise the shopping experience, people were wary. Suspicions abounded about who might get hold of the information and how it might be abused. But if you don't provide the necessary information, and if you crush your cookies regularly, the online experience can be dry, tedious, and often irrelevant to your interests. Over time, people get accustomed to the personal service and become more willing to give away information. At the same time, they get more sophisticated and discerning, and they actually read privacy policies and make conscious judgement calls about who to trust and who to avoid. The more information consumers are exposed to online and the more decisions they are making online, the more dependent they become on personalisation as a data filter.

According to the report, in the past year, consumer interest in a more personalized experience has increased by 24 percent to 57 percent of respondents. Consumers willing to let a site track clicks, purchases, and other behavior increased by 34 percent in the same period. Concerns over personal data security remained high, with six out of ten people expressing concern.

Not surprisingly, younger age groups have less concern about privacy and more interest in personalisation. Comfort with the norms of social networking sites play a role, with younger people expecting sites to provide personalised recommendations.

original ClickZ article

Advertising Boosts Municipal Wi-Fi Ubiquity

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:28:00 +0000

There's nothing new about municipal WiFi. It has been around in the US for at least five years (that's 28 internet years), and longer in Japan and South Korea. Now it's available, or in process, in more than 300 cities across the US, and it is becoming almost the norm in major European cities.

The basic idea is that a municipality decides that broadband internet access is a utility, much like electricity or schooling, and that making it available to everyone within the city limits for free can only be good for the city's economy and education levels. The democratisation of information is a strong political driver, and a pretty powerful economic imperative. So the municipalities put up wide area WiFi networks that anyone in town can access with a WiFi enabled computer, phone, or PDA.

Typically these services are free, or at least they are paid for out of taxes, or they are advertising supported. And they are not that expensive to set up: Philadelphia budgeted only $10 million to WiFi enable the whole city, with ongoing costs of about $1 million a year. That's a small price to pay compared with the potential benefit to small businesses, learners, and government.

In South Africa, Knysna has muni WiFi, and there is talk that Gauteng may WiFi-enable the greater Johannesburg area in conjunction with iBurst. There are, of course, political considerations and pressure from internet providers who see their lucrative markets under threat. But inexpensive muni WiFi is inevitable even in South Africa.

Often muni WiFi is paid for by advertising: when you log on to the service, you see an ad. Often these ads are very local, for businesses within range of the nearest signal source. That produces great opportunities for advertising services for small businesses that otherwise would never consider marketing online: local restaurants, dry cleaners, finacial advisors, or car dealers can communicate with potential customers who are right there in the neighbourhood. Try that with TV or local radio.

In the US, a hotspot and advertising company called JiWire now plans to offer ad-supported Wi-Fi through a relationship with Ultramercial. The ads will appear prior to gaining free Internet access at hotspots. To avoid the initial ads you can simply pay a small fee to get online. Once WiFi providers and income generators like JiWire start investing in muni WiFi infrastructures instead of waiting for municipalities to take the initiative, things start to develop at a very rapid pace.

There's an article on JiWire here

New Google AdSense Policies

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:23:00 +0000

AdSense is the Google service that allows websites and (more typically) blogs to host small pay-per-click text advertisements that are dynamically served to their pages depending on the context of the page's content. Keywords that happen to appear on the page trigger the specific ad: write an article about boats, and an advertisement for boats will appear in the Google AdSense placeholder. If a reader clicks the ad, the page owner gets paid a piece of Google's pay-per-click fee.

As with everything Google, there are policies. The AdSense policies have now been updated and made more reader-friendly, having not changed since March last year. Here's what's new:

By far the most significant change is that Google no longer allows its AdSense ads to appear on any site (not just page) which also hosts other non-Google advertising that is formatted to look like AdSense advertisements. Here's their language: "In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads."

Effectively, Google is enforcing a design trademark on its ads, presumably because it feels that the "look" of its ads conveys some kind of quality to potential clickers, or more likely because it wants to maximise the click rate by eliminating competing ads,particularly other contextually targeted advertisements.

There are other changes that affect sites who host AdSense ads. Sites may now place up to two AdSense referral links or buttons on a page per product referred. And referral offerings must be made without requiring users to provide any information such as e-mail addresses from users.

Many blog authors make significant amounts of money from AdSense, and will go to extraordinary lengths to increase the click rate and therefore their income. So Google is now also regulating the use of images next to AdSense ads. So sites may not draw attention to ads by, for example placing large "Click here" arrows next to the ads, or place any images next to the ads designed to mislead users.

If you use a Google search box on your site, you can now also place an AdSense ad placeholder on the search results page.

Finally, Google has broadened its previous policy which forbad the placement of AdSense ads on pages that contained any media such as MP3s or newsgroup postings to include "web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content." So don't expect to see AdSense ads on YouTube any time soon!

Google Updates Its Ad Quality Scoring

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:18:00 +0000

Google is rolling out an improved ad ranking algorithm for AdWords, with a little more transparency than before. They actually now give you a vague idea of what your ad quality score is.

AdWords is the system that places small text advertisements on a Google search results page or places text/image ads on pages in thousands of AdSense enabled sites around the world. (This is relevant for South African advertisers, because Google lets you target the pages on which your ad may appear by location -- so your ad could show exclusively on South African websites if that was your wish).

Those ads are designed and created by advertisers, and are associated with keywords that the advertiser "bids" for. When a searcher enters a search phrase that is or contains a keyword that an advertiser has bid for, the relevant ad appears as a "sposored link" in the upper right hand corner of the search results page.

But many people will bid for the same keywords, so several ads may appear. And the ad at the top of the list is not necessarily the one whose creator has bid the most for the keyword in question.

The Google algorithm takes more than just bid level into account when deciding which ads get precedence -- the "quality" of the ad plays into the ad ranking as well. (If that sounds confusing, it's because you are not supposed to know how it really works -- that way advertisers can't cheat the system and Google's competitors can't easily copy it).

One of the elements that go into the AdRank calculation which scores the quality of your ad is the quality of the landing page -- the page searchers get to if they click your ad. (The other elements are the actual click through rate your ad gets on Google, and the relevance of your keyword and ad text). In theory even if your bid is low you can have your ad displayed at the top of the list if you have a very high quality score, say because you have a good landing page. And, if your quality score is high, you can find yourself paying less per click than the ads placed below you.

This is because Google does not charge you the maximum you have bid for a keyword. You pay only one US cent more than you would have had to to pay if you were the next highest ranking ad.

Here's an example of how it works. Remember that you never actually get to know what your quality score is -- Google will tell you that it is good, average or bad but will not disclose the number. In any event, the score is recalculated every time a relevant keyword search is run.

Joe's Garage bids a maximum cost per click of $0.40 for the keyword "fanbelt"
Jill's Garage bids $0.65 for the same keyword.
Pete's Garage bids only $0.25.

Joe has a well worded ad that gets better click rates and has a good relevant landing page. Jill has not taken much care over her ad, doesn't get a lot of clicks, and sends clickers to her home page. Pete is somewhere in between. Google does its quality calculations and produces Quality Scores of 1.8, 1.0, and 1.5 for Joe, Jill, and Pete respectively.

Google multiplies Joe's maximum bid by his Quality Score and gives him a ranking number of 0.4 x 1.8 = 0.72.
Jill's ranking number is 0.65, her maximum bid (0.65) times her Quality Score (1.0).
Pete comes out as 0.25 x 1.5 = 0.38.

Joe goes to the top of the list, since he has the highest ranking number, with Jill second and Pete third. But what do they actually pay each time their respective ads get clicked?

For Joe to be listed in second place he would have to pay Jill's ranking number divided by his quality score (0.65/1.8), or $0.36. But he's ranked above her, so he must pay one cent more, or $0.37. Note this is lower than the $0.40 he actually bid.

For Jill to be listed in third place she would have to pay Pete's ranking number divided by her own quality score (0.38/1.0), or $0.38. But she's ranked above Pete so she pays a cent more, or $0.39. That's a lot less than she bid, but it is more than Joe is paying in the top slot.

Pete has nobody below him, so he pays only his minimum threshold fee (in this case only 4 cents) every time someone clicks his ad.

The moral of the story is that you can really lower your CPC rates by making sure you create good ads and use focused relevant landing pages. And being third on the list can be a really cheap option..

To become an instant expert on AdWords, go to Google's AdWords Learning Center".

Online Advertising Set to Hit 20 Percent of Total 2007 Ad Spending

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:14:00 +0000

Last year there was a major discrepancy between the share of US marketing budgets going to online media and the share of consumer media consumption time that went to online media (around 20%).

It looks like marketers might be catching up to what their target audiences are doing. According to an advertising spending study just released by Outsell, online ad spend will reach 20 percent of the total U.S. ad spend in 2007. That leaves print at about 40% and TV and radio with the rest.

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are expected to lose one percent of ad spend share while cost-per-action (CPA) ad spending will increase.

Advertising Breakdown by Industry and Type, December 2006 and January 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:09:00 +0000

Nielsen//NetRatings have released their December-January report that gives the US industry breakdown of online advertising placements and types, as well as the top 25 companies placing sponsored links. You can see the summary tables at this ClickZ page.

The boom in bandwidth has had an impact on how advertisers are trying to pitch customers. It looks like Flash adverts have finally come into their own in the US, and in many industries the number of impressions that Flash ads received in January exceeded the number of impressions received by standard images. Rich media ads, not surprisingly, are not making much of a showing at all. In South Africa, where bandwidth continues to be in short supply, we can expect Flash and rich media to continue to have a limited presence, at least for another year or two.

For example, the automotive industry had 2.3 billion Flash impressions compared with only 1.3 billion standard image ad impressions. Flash is ahead in the consumer goods industry, entertainment, electronics, software, telecommunications (12.8 billion Flash vs 3.3 billion standard), travel, and even the health industry. Flash still plays second fiddle in financial services, retail, public services, and business-to-business.

The report also details the top 25 companies placing sponsored links. Here eBay still dominates the top slot with 4.6 billion sponsored link impressions, with Google way behind in second place with 1.5 billion impressions and QuinStreet in third place with 1.1 billion.

What keywords do you have to buy to get that kind of exposure? Well among the top keywords that caused eBay links to appear were “happy new year posters” and “new year graphics.” For Google, it was simply “map” and “gmail.”

How does direct marketing firm QuinStreet get so much exposure for its clients? Long tail keywords like “how to apply false eyelashes” seem to do the trick.

If you are using contextual advertising systems like Google’s AdWords, Microsoft’s adCenter, or Yahoo’s Panama, you will find that not only can longer search phrases get you great exposure and click-throughs, they can be a whole lot cheaper than one- or two-word search expressions that everyone else is bidding for.

Online Businesses Beat Offline Businesses in Customer Satisfaction

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:05:00 +0000

One of the prerequisites of successful online business is a commitment to customer satisfaction. The online customer simply doesn’t take the kind of abuse, disregard, or obfuscation that the offline customer is often resigned to. Online customers can go elsewhere at the click of a button; off-line businesses often perceive their customers to be captive because of the difficulty of going elsewhere, which can lead to habitually poor service by offline businesses.

The University of Michigan and ForeSee Results have just released the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which shows that customer satisfaction with e-commerce now surpasses that of offline business by 11.6 percent.

The Customer Satisfaction Index is a 100-point scale, and on that scale e-commerce scored an average of 80 against off-line businesses average of 68.4. Online retail scored 83 as opposed to offline retail’s score of 74.

Of course it is not necessarily a complacent attitude in offline businesses that is at the root of the problem. Online businesses have a major advantage in both information and flexibility. They are able to get really good insights into each and every customer’s behaviour and preferences, and can tailor a customer experience in a way that is so much more focused than any offline business could manage. Imagine trying to train, for instance, every in-store sales rep at HiFi Corporation to actually know and understand the products they are selling, and to develop the skills needed to understand the needs of every customer they deal with. Well, OK, that’s not so difficult. Maybe it is all down to management attitude after all.

Web 2.0 has played a big role in elevating online customer service. The ability to see multiple views of products, read and write actual consumer reviews, and seek out and provide peer recommendations has added tremendously to the enthusiasm with which consumers do business online. The transparency that Web 2.0 provides is a vital driver of the web as a window-shopping medium. Try to find out in-store exactly what the make, model, performance, strengths and weaknesses are of say the range of plasma TVs on the shelves, and you come away with snippets of information that may or may not be true. Online retailers encourage comparison shopping, and go to great lengths to provide extensive product information. Offline businesses often see informed customers as a threat; online businesses know that informed customers are an opportunity.

Of course, not all offline businesses do a bad job. In the US, many major stores have risen to the challenge and provide superb customer experiences. Multi-channel businesses like the giant bookstore chain Barnes and Noble have integrated online and offline services that pushed them up the Consumer Satisfaction Index to a score of 88, a little higher than Amazon.com.