Online Marketing Roundup for Hotels

Web 2.0, Travel 2.0 – What is it and why does it matter Part 1 - Customer Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 22:52:00 +0000

Web 2.0 was born out of the Web 2.0 Conference and is now in its fourth year. So what is it and why the ‘hype’? In 2001 we saw the famous ‘dot-com bubble burst’ in the USA and with it the cynics concluded that the web was over hyped. Certainly many got burned at that time and lots of people and businesses lost money. But it was pioneers like Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty that observed that what survived the collapse was more important than ever and out of this turning point emerged a call to action and concept called Web 2.0 and with it the first Web 2.0 Conference in 2004.

There is still a lot of debate about what Web 2.0 is. Some people call it a meaningless marketing buzzword and others accept it as the new conventional wisdom. I will give a short definition of Web 2.0 but the intention of this article is to put Web 2.0 (and Travel 2.0) in context, and then to examine one aspect that is of huge importance and relevance to the hotel industry and which we should ignore at our peril, and that is consumer generated content.

So let’s start by taking a look at some definitions. Some people acclaim Web 2.0 as the next revolution on the Web! The common notion is that it’s all about social networking, user-generated content, glowing drop-shadowed logos, blogs, AJAX, mashups, and tagging.

Tim O’Reilly provides a compact definition as follows - Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

In the Britefire Glossary we define Web 2.0 as follows - The term used to describe the evolution of the web from a series of more or less centralised silos of information to the web as a high-speed platform for distributed services, especially social networking and collaboration. User generated content is a key characteristic of web 2.0, which is also known as the read-write web.

While the definitions are important, the appreciation of what these definitions means comes from an understanding of the context of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the result of some fundamental changes and a mind shift with regard to how we use the web. If one does not understand this, then the whole value of web 2.0 is lost and it is relegated by those that don’t appreciate this change to a buzzword or hype. Yes, Web 2.0 is real but let’s not get caught in the euphoria of the buzz but rather understand this evolution and the change that has brought it about.

Timing is everything and the constellation of events and thinking in 2004 was what gelled Web 2.0 into what it is today. I don’t believe that Web 2.0 would have been a reality were it not for the specific point in time when it was born. The other emerging trend that importantly collided with Web 2.0 was the whole thinking about the new consumer and the way the web has democratised the new consumer. At last – after years of saying the ‘Consumer is King’, and the ‘customer is always right’ – we have arrived at a point where one can actually begin to see this becoming a reality with the emergence of the truly democratised consumer. The Cluetrain Manifesto – written by Levine, Locke, Searls, Weinberger in April 1999 (essential reading - read the book for free online) was also revolutionary, un-corporate and confronted the establishment. It’s a great read and contains 95 theses and some of my favourites are

“We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings – and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.”
“Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships”
“Markets are conversations. “
“Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. “
“Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.”

So, the stars aligned, the constellation of timing, events, people and thinking take the evolution of the web (whether you call it Web 2.0 or not – and I personally like the definition, and even more the concept as it has been developed) and put it together with the rise of the new consumer and you have a powerhouse deluxe!

How does this apply to the travel and hospitality industry? I just want to look at one aspect of this, and that is consumer-generated content in the form of hotel reviews.

There is quite a lot of buzz about hotel reviews too. The point is that consumers research their travel. In the ‘old’ days we bought travel guidebooks, read articles and magazines, spoke to friends, friends of friends, and asked travel agents. Today the medium has just become much more powerful. Travellers now research their holidays online (a study in the US by Burst shows that 79% of people will research their personal travel on the internet) and seek advice, opinions and reviews by connecting with people all over the world. Consumers can now relate their stories - both good and bad. Cynics will find multiple ways to discredit this and indeed there are potential issues that we need to deal with. And we can deal with the inherent problems.

Amazon.com has featured reviews on its site since 1995. People have been able to write reviews and consumer guides in a form of self-publishing actually long before Web 2.0 was even defined. Five years ago, you might read the comments at TripAdvisor.com or IGoUGo.com or ask a question at BootsnAll.com or Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum. Just last week, Priceline.com added reader-generated Zagat reviews — and, for better or worse, it shows no sign of dying down any time soon.

“Surveys show people are more influenced by Web sites than traditional media,” says Jeffrey Grau, senior analyst with eMarketer.com. “They’re making [travel] decisions based on peer reviews more than magazines and TV shows.”

Today, everybody and their dog is a guidebook writer. On sites like Gusto.com or Yahoo! Travel you can search for destinations and pick up ideas. Or there are sites where you can find something more personal - people with similar interests, a sense of community, or even someone with whom you can share an upcoming adventure. Sites like TripUp.com and Eons.com are essentially social networks with a travel twist. Defined by the ages and interests of their members, the vibe is either Match.com or Modern Maturity.

Gusto.com’s CEO Jeff Wasson says “We’re not necessarily competing with Frommer’s and Fodor’s. We’re providing another source of information.” And, yes, sometimes that information is invaluable. Even the best guidebook can’t cover time-sensitive issues such as menu changes and the latest renovations.

About two months ago I was helping some American friends plan a safari. It’s been a long time since I have been to the Kruger Park and Mpumalanga. So here’s what I did. I went to the bookshop to see what books I could buy on safaris. That wasn’t very successful – the choice of books is abysmal. I did buy a map… and that too was rather disappointing. I sent the book, Getaway magazine and the map via mail (at some extortionate price) to my friends – hoping that it would arrive safely and intact. In the meantime I turned to the web and spent quite some rewarding time searching and reading. The most valuable resource for this trip was SAN Parks forum.

It was there that I found the most amazing community of people talking about what to do, what they had seen and sharing information and experiences with generosity, passion and enthusiasm. I posted a simple question on the forum. Quite a boring question, I thought, and most certainly a very frequently asked one – what to do in 3 days with American visitors. The response was astounding! From this simple question I learned so much – I learned about the latest camps in the Kruger Park – which ones are best for certain experiences, all about the new concessions in the Park, and was recommended some incredible online resources that eventually led to my booking the most wonderful 4 days.

I could not have done this without the help of others – without the community on the SAN website. No book contains this information. The information I got was UNIQUE – there was no other way that I could have got this information and made the booking. And it didn’t take me that long either! And furthermore, I now have newly made friends in KZN and Mpumalanga that I know I can contact in the future. And I hope I can reciprocate the generosity some time in the future too.

Yes – there is also the downside of reviews – there are bogus reviews, there are people who write attacking and damaging reviews too – and there’s everything in between. But websites are getting much smarter about ensuring reviews are genuine. For example, on Priceline.com you can only enter a review if you can prove that you have stayed at a hotel.

Also, the consumer has some intelligence – people make judgments when they read reviews – they consider the message and also the messenger. I once observed some user testing where a traveller was looking through reviews on TripAdvisor. The traveller was going to a city he had never visited. Part (by no means not ‘ALL’) of his research was to check reviews on TripAdvisor. There were several good reviews and a few bad ones. He read them all, and it was interesting to see how he made judgments about the credibility of each of the reviewers as he went through them. I was even interested to see that he was sophisticated enough to look at even the nationality of each of the reviewers. Some nationalities are far more fussy than others – and he was taking that into consideration too!

For marketers social networking is important because by encouraging people to share information, the marketers can monitor and ‘listen’ in on these communities and learn more about consumers and their behaviour, and can determine their likes and dislikes. It helps marketers position advertising better. For example if you position advertising to reach brand advocates early in their research process, it is likely that the consumer will then help to spread awareness by telling twice as many people as you could reach. A ‘personal recommendation’ from an empowered consumer is much more powerful than you pushing adverts in the traditional way on traditional media.

Take a look at this interview with European MD of TripAdvisor where he is asked about fake reviews, and plans for the site.

While on the subject of TripAdvisor – in a move to embrace the openness of the web, hoteliers can now publish TripAdvisor reviews directly on their own hotel web sites. TripAdvisor provides a web page that automatically generates html code, allowing the property to instantly publish TripAdvisor reviews on their own sites. Find out more here.

Priceline.com has announced an agreement with Zagat Survey under which Zagat will create exclusive online hotel reviews for priceline.com customers to access for free. Brett Keller, priceline.com's Chief Marketing Officer said 'We believe that Zagat's survey-based hotel reviews, combined with priceline.com's proprietary hotel star rating system and our growing database of reviews written by priceline.com customers who also have stayed at these properties, make priceline.com a premier destination for shopping and comparing top-brand hotels and prices.'

Web 2.0 (or Travel 2.0 - the travel industry’s collective application of Web 2.0) holds great promise and potential for the tourist and hospitality industry. Travellers are keen to take control of creating the perfect trip, not just the cheapest trip. And companies need to embrace this trend and use it to differentiate themselves in this vast travel marketplace. A good starting place is ‘listening’ to and learning from the customer…

Hotel Internet Marketing Budget Planning and Best Practices in Hospitality: A Benchmark Survey by the HeBS Team

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Sun, 03 Apr 2016 22:16:00 +0000

As the next year’s budgeting process approaches, hotels will be considering how much budget to devote to the online marketing channel. The dynamic nature of the Internet doesn’t help things much with its constantly changing environment, new media formats, new competitors and new tools, and methods. It is not necessarily the size of the budget that is most important but rather how it is used and allocated. What is clear though is that if you are not planning to spend some budget in the online channel you are making a huge mistake. If this is your first year with an online marketing budget – then what is important is that you make a small start, and learn as much as you can.

Some things that should be taken into consideration are

Direct online distribution is the way to go. More hotels in the US and Europe are selling online than ever before. In South Africa the majority of hotels still do not sell directly online. This is a massive opportunity and an area that deserves serious consideration. Indeed it should be a ‘no-brainer’ as the evidence is compelling – greater amounts of room inventory are being sold, at higher ADR’s directly from hotels’ websites and at lower cost per transaction. The Internet is by far the largest distribution channel – far exceeding the GDS and traditional channels. In the US, the cost to sell directly via your hotel website can be as low as $3 - $5 per booking – compared with the cost of the GDS at $27 (for a 2 night stay at $100/night). And TPI such as Expedia and Travelocity charge $50+ (for a 2 night stay for $100/night). These figures apply to the SA market.
Elsewhere in the world customers are opting to buy directly from hotels rather than third party intermediaries (TPI’s) and the negative impacts of TPI’s is being felt to a lesser degree than before.

This is the first international survey of its kind and offers some invaluable insights and pointers as to how the hospitality industry in aggregate is planning to allocate marketing budgets. Some hotels have been working hard on growing their online revenues, others have yet to climb on to the bandwagon. But regardless of where you are now – the outcome of this survey will be of relevance to you.

The conclusions of the survey show that online marketing for hotels is growing at an incredible rate. What is important for South Africa is that hotels gain the skills and know how of all the techniques so that they can more fully participate in and enjoy the benefits and increased ROI from online marketing.

A short overview of these are below, with some definitions:

Website development – creating your own hotel website (see website redesign for details)

Website redesign – there are a lot of hotels, large and small, that need to take their websites to a new level of sophistication and in doing so take advantage of the opportunity to redesign and/or relaunch their website and brand. Typically a hotel website should be re-designed every 2-3 years. This doesn’t have to mean a major redesign, but it should be revisited at least to ensure that it is still meeting its objectives and takes advantage of any new developments that would benefit your hotel.

Redesign involves redesign of the site structure and navigation, review and renewal of the content (text and images), review and renewal of the graphic design (look & feel) of the site, redesign of transactional processes (e.g. online booking, site search). When redesigning the site, one needs make sure that the new design is ‘search-engine friendly.

Website Maintenance - Your website is like your hotel – it needs to be maintained on an ongoing basis. You cannot create a website and then walk away from it and expect it to work for you or expect customers to beat a path to your online door. You need to ensure that you allocate resources (time and money) to maintain your website on an ongoing basis. As with you hotel, you need to ensure that your site is all in working order, that the content (text and images) is accurate, current and constantly refreshed and enhanced.

Creating a website is the start of a ongoing journey – it is not an end in itself. This is a mistake many people make – they sit back having developed their website, heave a huge sigh of relief and turn to the next project. Not good! Your website investment is only as good as your ongoing effort to keep it alive. So, allocate time and money in your budget to update it regularly – for example have a budget for images, get in a photographer to take some professional pictures of your hotel.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – All of the tactics and tools used to market a site through search engines. These include:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)- The practice of designing and writing web pages to be attractive to the search engines. SEO attempts to place pages highly within the “natural” or “organic” listings on search engines, as opposed to paid ads. An optimised site improves the website usability and performance, improves its visibility in search engine rankings, and increases conversion rates. At the very minimum one should allocate funds to optimise content and keywords.
Pay per Click (PPC) - In pay-per-click advertising, the advertiser pays a certain amount for each click through to the advertiser's website. The amount paid per click varies considerably. Your budget should make provision for buying keywords on a monthly basis (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Local search). The search engines provide tools that enable you to control this easily – you can specify how much, at what time, and geo-target your efforts.
Linking strategies – the creation of relevant and quality links from external sites to your site, and the creation of internal links within your site for the purposes of increasing credibility with search engines that results in higher rankings in search engine results

E-mail marketing – marketing your products through e-mails. Your email strategy should include customer email capture initiatives (online and offline), email marketing to the hotel's own opt-in list (monthly promotions, local news, game sightings reports, seasonal emails), email marketing to key market segments and in key feeder markets.

Local search - is a query that includes not only information about "what" the site visitor is searching for but also "where" or geolocation information.

(Web 2.0/Travel 2.0 channels) Consumer-generated content / Consumer generated media – Any of the many kinds of online content/media which are generated or influenced primarily at the user level. Personal web pages, such as those found on MySpace are rudimentary examples; blogs and podcasts are more evolved ones. Creating the facilities and framework for consumers to publish their own content (e.g. hotel reviews) in prominent places (e.g. on www.TripAdvisor.com).

Banner ads and display advertising – Banners are advertising images that appear on websites. Originally static billboards about an inch and a half high and about four inches long, banners now come in a range of standard shapes and sizes, and are frequently animated. Typically, a banner is also a link—click on the banner and you are taken to the product or page it is promoting.

From this survey you can see that the results suggest the continued importance of search engine techniques through

website optimisation (i.e. customer centric website design to improve the user experience, to provide rich and relevant content)
search engine optimization and organic search (i.e. higher ranking derived from better website design and richer deeper content)
website re-design

The above three top solutions show the (correct) acknowledgement that no matter what you do – the most important thing is to get the fundamentals right on your website. And the rule of thumb is that your website needs to be CUSTOMER CENTRIC. It needs to serve the customer with deep and relevant content. It needs to be structured and designed so that people can easily navigate through the site, find the information easily and have a wonderful experience as they do so.

A summary of the conclusions of the survey are:

marketing budgets will continue to shift online
the results suggest a stronger emphasis on search engines (see the above list of search engine techniques ranked highest)
linking strategies will be important
budgets will go into specialised searches like local search
email marketing is still a popular tool for building one-on-one relationships with customers, especially for international properties
web 2.0 stuff like consumer generated media will grow in popularity and the early adopters will determine the model for the industry. Interestingly this survey indicates that international hotels will spend more on new media formats than the US.
display advertising will take the biggest cut – this may be true for US and Europe – but within South Africa banner display and advertising is still in its infancy. For hotels this is important – if your market is overseas visitors then you need to know that users in Europe and the US are much more sceptical of banners than in South Africa.

Benchmark Hospitality’s Top 10 Meeting Trends for 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 22:04:00 +0000

This is a useful and easy to read checklist for hotels with Meeting and Conference facilities.

This benchmark was conducted on hotels in the US and Asia – but are relevant for our local market – and there are some ‘cool’ ideas. For example, how about culinary team building – now that’s different, and after watching Gordon Ramsay in Hells Kitchen the mind does rather boggle. Not every team event needs to be about scaling cliffs or forging rivers in home-made rafts or other life threatening physical feats, though I could imagine the kitchen becoming quite a devilish environment too!

And then there is the constant quest by meeting planners (who are they – see the article) for new venues. And hey – in South Africa we have a diversity of places to knock the socks off any one!

Starwood Hotels Gives Insider Access to Exclusive Events with New Auction Website

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 09:57:00 +0000

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. and its Starwood Preferred Guest program, the award-winning hotel loyalty program, has introduced a new online auction website where members can use their Starpoints to bid on exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

Moments by Starwood Preferred Guest lets members transform their Starpoints into extraordinary lifestyle events - giving them insider access to red carpet movie premieres, closed rehearsals with today's top music artists, private dinners with world-renowned chefs, rounds of golf with PGA TOUR pros and more. Members can visit Moments and bid on a full range of specially created experiences not available anywhere else.

It's Better on the Inside...

Sit in on a private pre-show sound-check with Justin Timberlake or watch Gwen Stefani rehearse unscripted before taking a front row VIP seat at their concerts. Attend the premiere of Showtime's original series The Tudors and mingle with the cast on the red carpet, tour renowned artist Georgia O'Keeffe's private residence or sit ringside at the upcoming Oscar de La Hoya/Floyd Mayweather fight and celebrate at the private post-fight party. These are just a few of the exciting happenings that are now available for bidding. The auction site will be updated regularly and upcoming events include a private dinner with Jean-Georges Vongerichten at his signature, namesake restaurant in New York City, red carpet access to upcoming Hollywood premieres and more.

According to Robin Korman, Vice President of Loyalty Marketing for Starwood, during a three month pilot for the new auction site several events created a bidding war among members. A Justin Timberlake private sound-check session and VIP concert tickets started with a minimum bid of 20,000 Starpoints and was auctioned for more than 120,000 - the equivalent of a 12 night stay at The Westin St. Maarten or Le Meridien Cancun. A Superbowl package, including tickets to the game and access to several private pre-game events, started bidding at 250,000 Starpoints and ultimately sold for more than 500,000.

"Moments by Starwood Preferred Guest give our members access to once-in-a-lifetime events that go beyond just offering tickets to a concert or sporting event," said Korman. "We want to make an emotional connection with our members that extends outside of our hotel doors by providing them with rich experiences that go beyond the world of upgrades and free flights. Moments is designed to play to people's passions with amazing events that are available only to our members."

To make sure members don't miss out on the experience of a lifetime, Moments will introduce a cash and points option to the site shortly - allowing bidders to use a combination of cash and Starpoints for auction events. For more information about Moments by Starwood Preferred Guest please visit Moments.

Hilton Re-launches Two Web Sites and announces Spanish version of the Booking portal.

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 08:55:00 +0000

Hilton Hotels announced the re-launch of two of the brand's online channels - HiltonJourneys.com and HiltonToHome.com. In addition to the two refreshed sites, the brand recently completed the translation of its Hilton.com booking portal into Spanish, and is in the process of completing a French version of the site.

'The explosive and global growth of the Hilton brand has led us to rethink the way we use the internet to connect with our guests,' said Jeff Diskin, senior vice president, brand marketing and management - Hilton Hotels. 'With these refreshed sites we have three unique touch points that allow our guests to connect with Hilton in ways that are most relevant to them.'

HiltonJourneys.com

As demonstrated by its sponsorship of the Grammy Awards and the launch of its award-winning 'Travel Should Take You Places' advertising campaign featuring emerging musicians, Hilton's marketing initiatives use music to connect with consumers at an emotional level. At the new HiltonJourneys.com visitors will be able to follow the personal journeys of the six emerging artists featured in the ads. In addition to videos of the six ads, interviews with the artists and an acoustic performance from each, the web site also features 'Behind the Scenes' interviews with each musician discussing their favourite things to do while travelling.

Also featured on HiltonJourneys.com are many of Hilton's new products and services, including Hilton On Time, a system allowing guests to pre-order items - such as extra towels or pillows, snacks and drinks - for delivery in room upon check in.

HiltonToHome.com

This e-commerce site offers consumers the opportunity to buy 'for home versions' of the same products they enjoy in Hilton hotel rooms. Crabtree and Evelyn(R) La Source bath products, the Hilton Family Exclusive Clock Radio, and Cuisinart Two to Go Coffeemakers are just a few of the items found on this site.

In its upgraded version, Hilton leverages its relationships with strategic partners. The Hilton Serenity Bed Collection, including mattress/box spring and linens, are now branded with 'As Seen on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,' promoting Hilton's relationship with ABC's TV hit program. To further enhance Hilton's sponsorship of the Grammy Awards, visitors to HiltonToHome.com can purchase the 2007 Grammy Nominees CD.

World Travel & Tourism Climbs to US$ 7 Trillion in 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 08:50:00 +0000

World Travel & Tourism is expected to generate in excess of US$7 trillion in 2007, rising to over US$13 trillion over the coming decade according to the World Travel & Tourism Council's (WTTC) Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) research, sponsored by Accenture and prepared by Oxford Economics.

The new TSA results show strong performance for Travel & Tourism Demand in 2007, growing at a rate of 3.9 per cent. This forecast points to a mature but steady phase of growth for World Travel & Tourism in the short and medium term, averaging 4.3 per cent per annum, between 2008 and 2017.

Some findings summarised from the report are:

The US is still in number one position accounting for US$1,689,3 billion this year
China is going to gain ground and grow at almost 10% per annum over the next 10 years
By 2017 the Russian Federation will enter the top 10 countries
The world’s highest performers are Montenegro, China and India
Other high performers are Croatia, Romania, Namibia

No mention of South Africa… we ought to be there!

Global Hyatt Launches Bold New Brand - Hyatt Place™ - Designed Around Travellers’ Integrated Mindset

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:50:00 +0000

On March 26, Global Hyatt Corporation unveiled its new brand Hyatt Place™, an innovative hotel concept with strong appeal to the “24/7” lifestyle customer.

For this group of sophisticated travellers, personal and professional activities have intermingled. “Hyatt Place is the first hotel of its kind to cater to both the functional and emotional aspects of today’s business and leisure travellers,” said Tom O’Toole, senior vice president of strategy and systems, Global Hyatt Corporation. “For many, the separation between professional and personal life is obsolete, but unfortunately, hotels have not successfully evolved with this trend – until now. Demonstrating that we know what matters most to our guests, we’ve created a hotel brand defined by a mindset of a whole person who is combining personal fulfilment with professional growth while travelling.”

Hyatt Place is designed to meet the needs of this new customer segment and offers travellers a balanced mix of comfortable and functional guestroom amenities such as: 42-inch high-definition televisions with next generation entertainment content; free Wi-Fi access; a comfortable, eight-foot sectional sofa-sleeper, all within an oversized, suite-like room with 20 percent more space than the average hotel room. In addition guests can buy hot breakfast entrées along with Starbucks® specialty coffees or enjoy a free continental breakfast. Hyatt also offers a variety of freshly prepared, café quality items, including made-to-order entrées, sandwiches, soups, salads and pizza which guests can order 24 hours a day, seven days a week via a touch screen menu in the Guest Kitchen or from the Gallery Host.

more about Hyatt Place
press release

Starwood Hotels Brings a New Twist in Travel to Europe

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:39:00 +0000

aloha! Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and its much-anticipated new lifestyle brand, aloft hotels, announced it has signed an agreement with Thornsett Group Ltd, an Irish property development company, to develop the first aloft hotel in Europe, the aloft Brussels, Belgium. The deal was signed at the 10th International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin last week, when Starwood and its stylish W Hotels division introduced their aloft brand into the Europe, Middle East & Africa regions.

The 150 room aloft Brussels will be located on Rue Belliard, Leopold, in the 'European' quarter of Brussels. The property is conveniently located approximately 800 feet from the European Commission and European Parliament buildings, and just minutes away from the Council of Ministers building.

The site has full planning permission for a mixed-use development with a gross development value of approximately U.S. $105 million. In addition to the aloft hotel, the 74,000 square foot development will also include 108 one- and two-bedroom apartments and approximately 5,000 square feet of retail space with parking. Construction will begin in the Fall of this year, with completion scheduled for Fall 2009.

"We say aloha to Europe with the introduction of aloft hotels, a new lifestyle brand that will redefine travel, delivering style with substance and a fun new way to play and stay," said Ross Klein, President of Starwood's Luxury Brands Group and aloft hotels. "From Brussels to Beijing and beyond, aloft brings a sassy, refreshing oasis to a global market."

"With aloft we are reinventing the select service category, and are thrilled to be working with Thornsett Group to bring the first aloft hotel into Europe," said Roeland Vos, President Europe, Middle East & Africa, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. "Brussels is a great city for aloft's first exposure to Europe, and the hotel will deliver great style, comfort, design and functionality to travellers. We look forward to this development being the start of a long term relationship with Thornsett Group."

As a division of W Hotels, aloft is shaking up the lodging industry with urban-influenced design, accessible technology, style and a social atmosphere. aloft offers a total sensory experience, with guest lofts featuring loft-like nine-foot ceilings and oversized windows to create a bright, airy environment. The centrepiece of the loft room is the ultra-comfortable signature bed, and large stylish bathrooms complement the guest experience with oversized walk-in showers and amenities created by bliss spa. Each guest loft is also a combination high-tech office and entertainment centre, featuring wireless internet access and plug & play, a one-stop connectivity solution for multiple electronic gadgetry such as PDAs, cell phones, mp3 players and laptops - all linked to a large flat panel HDTV ready television for optimal sound and viewing.

Designed in conjunction with world-renowned David Rockwell and the Rockwell Group, aloft stays true to W's heritage, offering atmospheric public spaces designed to draw guests from their rooms to socialize and make friends. Guests can read the paper, work on their laptops via hotel-wide wireless internet access, play a game of pool or grab a drink with friends at the re:mix communal lobby area and bar w xyz. The re:charge fitness centre and splash, the indoor or outdoor pool, give travellers options to de-stress and re-energize; while re:fuel, a one-stop food and beverage area, offers sweet, savoury and healthy food, snacks and beverages to grab & go, 24-hours a day.

The first aloft hotels are targeted to open in first quarter, 2008. For more information on aloft, please visit www.alofthotels.com.

To date, announced locations for aloft hotels are:
ALOFT BEIJING – CHINA - Opening in 2009, the 200-room aloft Beijing will be located in Haidian district, a major information technology hub in Beijing, as well as the Haidian government district and site of major universities and research institutes.

ALOFT CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA – USA - aloft Chantilly, a 131-room property featuring aloft's loft-inspired design, accessible technology and stylish, urban attitude is scheduled to open in Virginia in 2008.

ALOFT CHARLESTON AIRPORT, SOUTH CAROLINA – USA - Located in the historic coastal city of Charleston, South Carolina, aloft Charleston is just minutes from Charleston International Airport, and is scheduled to open in 2008.

ALOFT DORVAL, MONTREAL AIRPORT, QUEBEC – CANADA - The 136-room aloft Dorval will offer travellers a refreshing new place to stay in Montreal, right at the entrance to the Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport. Construction is scheduled to start in 2007, with a projected opening in 2008.

ALOFT RANCHO CUCAMONGA, CALIFORNIA – USA - The world's first franchised aloft hotel, aloft Rancho Cucamonga broke ground in Southern California in January 2007 and will open in early 2008. The 136-room aloft is the hotel component of HavenPark, a $60 million master-planned, mixed-use development.

ALOFT TORONTO, ONTARIO – CANADA - Featuring 250 rooms, the aloft Toronto is slated to open in 2008. The hotel is located adjacent to Victoria Memorial Square Park, an area known for its lifestyle offerings, including some of the city's best restaurants and residential projects.

2007 US Business Travel Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:32:00 +0000

The 2007 Business Travel Awards aren't based on a reader poll or an empirical ranking a la Consumer Reports. Instead, it's chooses companies that do a great job of serving the "road warrior" --and the CFO. Take a look at these award winners and the stories behind them:

Best Airline Value: JetBlue Airways
Best Budget Hotel Value: Microtel
Best Midprice Hotel Value: Hilton Garden Inn
Best Upscale Hotel Value: W Hotels
Best New Hotel Brand: Hotel Indigo
Best Car Rental Value: Enterprise Rent-a-Car
Best Site: Booking Buddy
Best Blog: Ellipses
Best Rewards: Rapid Rewards

Sun International to buy stake in Chilean firm

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 04:40:00 +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 04:35:00 +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.

Got your MOO cards yet?

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 04:22:00 +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.

Don’t let website developers rip you off

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 04:12:00 +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.

Advertising agencies get a digital wake-up call from Nike

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

Telkom acquires 75% of Nigeria’s Multi-Links

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 03:29:00 +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 03:22:00 +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 03:05:00 +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 02:59:00 +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 02:56:00 +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.

Google to provide a pay-per-action advertising model

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:44:00 +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.

Major broadband speed increase only a year or two away

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:40:00 +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 02:32:00 +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 02:20:00 +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 02:15:00 +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.

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.

Why ‘Care’ for Your Customers when You Can ‘Love’ Them?

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Parkin) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 04:13:00 +0000

This is a delightful and refreshing article that renews one’s faith in leadership and in leaders who dare to think beyond motherhood, who dare to have passion, emotion, and who dare to dream.

I don’t know how many times in my corporate life that I have been told that I’m too emotional and that I care too much. The body corporate doesn’t like these characteristics – and if you have any hope of climbing the corporate ladder or navigating the corporate politics, these emotions (in their eyes, ‘weaknesses’) must be banished for more acceptable corporate behaviour.

Reaching for the stars and aiming beyond the horizon are viewed as silly. The hospitality industry knows it is selling and providing an experience to its customers. And I suppose you can describe an experience in cold and calculating terms like – we aim to exceed customers expectations. Duh! If that’s all you are doing then perhaps you should be selling railway sleepers to the department of transport!

It is precisely this dreaming that spells the difference between being mediocre and being special. Isn’t it time to take out the dusty mission and vision documents and to breath life into them and create a strategy that takes you, your staff and your guests on a magic carpet ride?