Posts Tagged ‘Online Business’

eBay Launches Series of Seller Events

eBay is starting a new series of events to help small businesses and part-time eBay sellers “accelerate their businesses” on eBay, which has 90 million active users. The series is called eBay: On Location, and has dates set for Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, and San Jose.

“eBay sellers are creative entrepreneurs who understand that eBay’s global reach and dynamic marketplace offer the ideal setting to start and build a business online,” says eBay Marketplaces President Lorrie Norrington. “We invite our sellers to eBay: On Location to connect with each other and to take the next step in making their eBay businesses even more successful.”

The goal of the series of events appears to be to let sellers network with one another and share ideas for maintaining a successful eBay business. There are also courses on “top seller secrets”, productivity to boost sales and reduce costs, and utilizing social media to drive sales.

“eBay sellers have become savvier about how to use eBay in ingenious ways,” says Jim Griffith, eBay senior manager, Seller Strategy and Dean of Education. “eBay: On Location is a great way for the seller community to come together and share those strategies—and learn something new from experts.”

They are only letting in 500 people per event, and registration is offered on a first-come, first-served basis. It costs $45 to get in.

Does the Facebook Application Dashboard Hurt Privacy?

Update 2: Facebook has responded to the privacy concerns with the dashboards: “To ensure that the dashboards meet user and developer expectations for a trustworthy experience, we’re giving developers the ability to hide their applications in the Friends’ Recent Activity, Friends’ Applications, and Friends’ Games sections of the dashboards. We’re also working on giving users the ability to control how their application activity is featured in the dashboards, and it will go live shortly after the dashboards launch to users. “

Update: According to Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook, there is a “slight privacy oversight” (which he also says is “not a minor bug”) that lets users view the latest apps that their friends have been using. He notes that Facebook will probably resolve the issue before full launch.

Original Article: Facebook will be launching the Games Dashboard and the Applications Dashboard in the coming weeks. The company says these will make it easier for users to interact with their apps, and will provide new communication channels from the home page.

“Once launched to users, the dashboards will serve as a personalized destination on Facebook for users to interact with their favorite applications, discover news ones and receive application updates related to recent activity,” a spokesperson for Facebook tells WebProNews. “For developers, the Applications and Games dashboards will provide new opportunities for communication with users, as well as discoverability of their applications.”

On the Facebook Developer Blog, Jordan M. Alperin outlines the following features:

• Recently used applications and games: The top section of the dashboards will prominently display applications that a user has recently interacted with, making it easy to reengage with the applications they use most often. This section will also include a link to a page where users can see all of the applications they have interacted with, whether or not they have been bookmarked.
• News items: Applications will have the ability to display news stories, giving you the ability to communicate with your users and alert them to news related to your application, such as, “It’s your turn in a game against Jared” or “The leaderboard was reset 6 hours ago, come play!” You’ll have the option to set global news items, which will be visible to all users, or personal news items, which target a specific user. The news component will appear as a text field next to each application in the dashboard.
• Mentioning Users: Using simple syntax, you can render users’ names and links to their profiles in news and activities.
• Your Friends’ Recent Activity: The dashboards will display some of the applications that a user’s friends are using along with information about relevant activities within the application. You’ll set these activity stories via the Dashboard API.
• Your Friends Play: Another way we’ll help users discover new applications is by showing them a number of their friends who frequently use applications, and the applications those friends use.
• Directory: The Directory section of the dashboard will show the applications that currently appear in the “Applications You May Like” section of the Application Directory. We will also link to the Application Directory in this section.
• Suggestions: On the right hand side we’ll have a Suggestions area where Facebook will highlight applications we think users might like, based on the applications they and their friends are using.
• Counters and home page placement: “Games” and “Applications” links will appear on users’ home pages and will link to the dashboards, once the new home page launches to users in the coming weeks. Bookmarked applications will also have prominence on the home page, and can be accompanied by Counters that you can set to let users know there are actions for them to take within your applications.

Here is what the Games Dashboard looks like:

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that users can receive notifications from apps in their email. Also, they will phase out updates from apps in the notifications channel on Facebook.

Click Economics: The Last Click

Sorta an old post that I forgot to publish until today! Having the site closed to new members has given me time to start working through a few of my almost done posts that were never published yet. It’s hard to have time to do everything while growing a few businesses…and thus the blog needs a little TLC

Media has traditionally been afforded a wall between editorial and advertising due to limited marketplace competition. But, as Jim Spanfeller stated, the perception of value in “last click marketing” where search gets most of the credit for the entire demand creation and fulfillment cycle, is killing the value of online content:

A publisher can and should price their inventory at levels that will meet the market expectations and drive their business model. What they should not do is allow some sort of invisible hand (or should I say hands) to price their inventory against a backdrop of objectives that can and often does change at a moment’s notice. This practice has fundamentally driven pricing down across the web and, perhaps more importantly, changed the success metrics from ones based on “demand creation” to ones driven by “demand fulfillment.”

Worse yet, the leading metrics most closely track how the poorest members of society interact with media, creating a media ecosystem designed to exploit the poor. The above linked article states “we now know that 16% of web users generate 80% of clicks and that this 16% represents the lower income and education segments of the total user base.”

It may have cost Google 1 day of revenues to create the default analytics tool, which by default has a last click wins behavior that few people know how to edit. They can even add more features like tracking SEO rankings without risk because they know few people will use them.

Google’s web domination is so impressive that experienced and well trained journalists writing for publications like Wired mistake Google’s mission statement as the goal of the web. Literally…

The Internet’s great promise is to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams?

Gary Wolf should know that was actually Google’s mission statement, not the goal of the web.

Sure data mining and sentiment analysis can be parts of the web, but the best bits are often scattered messes and weird stuff we accidentally bump into.

Forbes.com CEO Thinks Publishers are Killing Web Ad Potential

Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com, who also happens to be treasurer of the Online Publishers Association and Chairman Emeritus of the Interactive Advertising Bureau spoke his mind on the state of the online advertising industry in a guest post at PaidContent.org.

He had some interesting things to say, with his main point essentially being that online publishers are driving down the prices of ads by adhering to a similar model that the airlines have used by offering lower rates when they need to fill spots. Naturally, in that industry, consumers wait as long as they can to get the lower rates, and it has not worked out the best.

Spanfeller says that as publishers have adopted a similar model with advertising, they have changed the success of metrics from ones based on “demand creation” to ones driven by “demand fulfillment.”

“Until recently, we had seen the growing use of ad networks to ‘liquidate’ the unsold remnant inventory that was [the] result of people spending more and more time online while the ad-dollar migration from offline failed to keep pace,” said Spanfeller. “The IAB (where I’m chairman emeritus) and Bain Consulting did a study on this about a year ago that showed a huge increase in the percentage of inventory sold via ad networks on a sample of seven member sites (5% to 30% increase in just one year).”

“What this study also showed, though, was the incredibly low amount of revenue that these impressions garnered as the pricing for inventory sold in this manner was outlandishly low (less than 2% of total ad revenue was generated by these impressions and the pricing from ad networks has fallen even further since this study was done),” he continued.

Spanfeller’s piece should prove to be an interesting one to publishers and advertisers alike, but some think it is just simply too late for the industry to adopt a different model. Publishers that try to go a different way face the very real possibility that their advertisers won’t follow them, when they can simply get lower rates elsewhere.

Poor Customer Service Holding Back E-Commerce Sales

Earlier this month comScore released its Q2 retail e-commerce sales estimates, which indicated that US online retail spending dropped from the same period from last year. This is only the second time that has happened.

Sure, you have to take the economy into consideration, but there are other factors that can keep people from making purchases online. A new poll from Harris Interactive found that a lack of human assistance is one of those factors, and a big one at that.

Here are some interesting findings from that poll:

- 4 in 5 online adults who have purchased items online in the last six months (77%) say they would be interested in getting help from a real person before making certain online purchases.

- However, over 4 in 5 (82%) say there have been times when they have not been able to get help from a real person.

- Over half (52%) of those who haven’t been able to get the help they needed from a real person say it’s affected their decision to not purchase the product.

Just look at the following graphs:

“No level of automation can replace the human touch. The results indicate that shoppers still want real people to help them purchase products, even in a digital setting,” said Prashant Nedungadi, CEO and founder of IMshopping, who commissioned the survey. “Many retailers have started taking steps in this direction and we believe it will be the single biggest push for the retail industry over the next several years.”

The following graph shows some of the types of items people really want human assistance with before making purchasing decisions.

Out of the people who have purchased items online in the past six months, the most commonly purchased items include clothing, books, music, health and beauty products, and travel-related items.

While it is a good idea to make the online purchase as easy on your customers as possible, from simply the design and usability standpoint, you may consider whether or not you are offering enough human assistance, and how easy that is for the customer to obtain.

More to Retweeting Than Meets the Eye for Businesses?

Retweeting is a phenomenon that has taken the Twitter world by storm. The concept began when somebody added the letters “RT” to somebody else’s tweet and posted it as their own. The idea caught on on a massive scale, and now there are services that utilize retweeting as the backdrop of their entire purposes. “Some of Twitter’s best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting,” says Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone.

As a Twitter user, what is your opinion of the concept of retweeting? Share with WebProNews readers.

Disclaimer: If you are not a Twitterer, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at “RT” (for ReTweet) and the user’s name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure.

Tweetmeme has been around for a while, offering a service to content providers, where they can add a button onto an article page that lets a reader easily tweet a link to that article on Twitter. It then counts these tweets, which become retweets, just like similar buttons you’ve probably seen for Digg. The more retweets that are registered on that button, the more interesting the content looks at first glance. The reason for this is that theoretically, if a user sees the article has 2,000 tweets, as opposed to 2, they can assume that a lot of people found the article interesting or informative, and will be more likely to continue reading. It’s kind of like the concept behind comments. Articles that display a large amount of comments are likely to catch readers’ eyes for the same reason. The Huffington Post discussed this concept in a recent interview with WebProNews:

This week, a company called Mesiab Labs launched a service that is practically identical to Tweetmeme, at Retweet.com. Obviously, this company is hoping to cash in on the popular concept, while injecting a powerful brand to go along with it. The timing of this is interesting because Twitter recently announced its own retweeting plans in an initiative called ” Project Retweet,” which will presumably see a retweet button at Twitter.com (many consider this long overdue), and retweet functionality right in the Twitter API, opening up a lot more retweeting possibilities in third-party Twitter apps.

Sketch for Project Retweet

But back to why retweeting is useful to businesses. The attention grabbing effect of the retweet button on a piece of content is just one aspect. Another is of course, the promotion the content provider sees from a substantial amount of retweets. They’re viral by nature, and in the best-case scenario, they can drive a ton of traffic to the content.

Famed blogger Robert Scoble started an interesting discussion on FriendFeed about what is better between the retweet and the “like” feature on either Facebook or FriendFeed itself. While I’m not going to get into all of the reasons why one is better than the other, Scoble and other participants in the conversation made a number of good points bout the pros and cons of retweets. Let’s look at some of those.

Pros

- Retweets are viral

- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed

- As opposed to a Facebook “like,” a retweet is shared with everyone

- Retweets typically give credit to sources

- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships

- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content

- Retweets can inspire further conversation

- Retweets can be good for branding

- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.

- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content

Cons

- It’s hard to provide a list of the things you’ve retweeted, as Scoble mentions. He mentions how people can see your “likes” on FriendFeed

- Retweeting creates what many people consider to be “noise” on Twitter

- Twitter’s 140 character limit

- Some people consider retweeting to be like copying other people’s work for your own gain, though this concept is heavily disputed

Conclusion

A recent study from Pear Analytics found that about 8.70% of the tweets it researched were retweets. In some of the more web-oriented circles, this probably even seems quite low. Without a doubt though, Twitterers are retweeting tweets like there’s no tomorrow. Obviously businesses can see value in this, especially if they provide some kind of content that they would like to see shared.

As always, it comes down to providing quality content – the old “content is king” cliché. Even as the web has evolved, that simple fact remains true. If you provide something interesting, people will share it.

Scoble’s whole “Retweet vs. Like” concept is an interesting one in itself. We have certainly seen Facebook make numerous changes to its interface that seem to move the network closer to the realm of Twitter. You have to wonder if Facebook will eventually incorporate some kind of retweet-like functionality itself.

Craigslist Substantially Expands its Reach

Craigslist has reportedly expanded the number of cities it offers its service in by a whopping 25%. Brad Stone with the New York Times claims to have been alerted by a spokesperson with the company on the matter.

Apparently Craiglist has added 140 new cities, including 87 in the United States, 8 in Canada, and 45 in non-North American countries.

“Among the targeted areas in the United States are dozens of small to midsize cities like Susanville, Calif. (population 18,000), Oneonta, N.Y. (13,000), and the counties of Okaloosa and Walton, Fla. (a combined 229,000.),” says Stone. “If that expansion sounds minor, consider that Craigslist also added new sites for international cities like Lucknow, India (population 2.5 million), Shenzhen, China (14 million), and New Castle, Australia, (280,000).”

Craigslist is expected to update the company’s official fact sheet to list all of the included cities by the end of the month. There is not mention of the news on the company’s official blog.

Most of the new sites are English-language only. According to Craigslist, over 50 million people in the US alone use the site. The company also claims to get over 20 billion page views per month. With an added 25% of global coverage, I would imagine it will get a nice boost in that department.

Framing Your SEO Firm

Framing is when you use language to set the agenda.

Framing is short for “frame of reference”, meaning “a set of ideas, conditions, or assumptions that determine how something will be approached, perceived, or understood”.

This is a very important concept in marketing, and business in general. By using an appropriate frame of reference, you can manage how people perceive you.

Seo Is Spam?

For example, “SEO Is Spam” is a frame. It defines the terms of the debate ie. SEO is either spam or not spam. Would we frame the couriers this way? Couriers are spammers? Why do the terms “SEO” and “spam” necessarily go together?

They don’t. That’s a deliberate construct.

SEO is spam/not spam is an attempt to frame SEO as undesirable by associating SEO with a pre-existing pejorative term. That frame came from the search engines, and it has stuck with the industry since the days of Infoseek.

Who is ranked as the #1 ethical SEO company in the world?

Some SEOs have contributed, too, of course, but it has served the search engines well. No matter what side of that debate SEOs take, they have already lost. They’ve been forced to argue within a negative framework.

Getting The Frame Wrong

My personal view if that if you start by framing your SEO service solely in terms of ethics, you’re probably losing business.

It’s a red-flag.

Potential clients would undoubtedly see such a frame in terms of “where there is smoke, there is fire”. Would you trust a car dealer who, upon meeting you, launched into a long explanation of why car dealers have a bad reputation, but he’s not like the other dealers, no sir? Why even bring it up? I’d think that he was trying too hard, and really all I’m interested in is buying a car.

Sell me on that instead.

It’s the same with potential SEO customers. What are they really looking for? Once you’ve answered this question, then you can begin to work on your frame.

How To Construct Beneficial Frames

Politicians use frames all the time.

For example, Al Gore framed the environmental issue as “man made global warming.” Bush re-framed it as “climate change.” Those different frames imply different things. One implies “we can do something about an impending disaster by changing our habits”, the other frames man in a passive role, because climate change is a natural occurrence.

Both those frames supported the underlying political message.

Same goes with business.

Marketers know that the way a statement is framed influences how customers respond to it. Tell a group of base jumpers that 1% of all base jumpers die horrible deaths, and you’ll get few people signing up. However, tell them that 99% live, and it sounds a whole lot more appealing.

A friend of mine told about how he handled an irate customer by carefully framing his response in terms of options. The customer hadn’t received his goods – although they had been sent out – and was quite angry about it. My friend listened to the problem, and rather than debate about shipping delays, the offensive language of the customer, and other factors, he replied “I hear you. You’ll get one of two things – a complete refund, or a replacement package sent overnight delivery. I just need to find out which option you want”.

The customer, given a limited frame, calmed down, opted for the replacement package, and later published an article in, using this story as a great example of customer service. He also became a repeat customer. Using options can be a great way to frame, although care must be taken to present options that are meaningful. Trying to force people to take options they don’t actually want, won’t work.

SEOBook isn’t framed in terms of individuality, ethics, or morality. It is framed as a community-based SEO training site that will help you learn, rank and dominate. There are also mentions of exclusivity, and frequent explanations of value. This is what customers want, and Aaron frames the service in terms of these needs.

So when you’re pitching your goods or services, think carefully about the frame of reference.

Make it positive. Make sure it resonates i.e it touches on attributes the customer actually wants. If the customer perceives widespread dodgy practices, then it is a good idea to address them, but be reluctant about framing your service in such a way to everyone. No good comes from starting on the back-foot.

A good way to frame an SEO business is to talk about solving problems and providing benefits i.e. lack of traffic/more traffic, lack of business/more business, lack of exposure/more exposure etc.

Let this flow through into the language you use. And the language you avoid.

The Myth of Organic Marketing

Well they got that link because they were the best site out there. That was organic. It is a naive view of marketing to assume that if you are the best people will notice you and people will care. It is not enough to be the best…you need others to say that you are. If anything the web is making most people more driven by self interest – rather than lending a helping hand.

Worse yet, due to the anonymous nature of the web (and other automated technologies), we are bombarded with every type of spam imaginable (auto-dial telemarketing, fakevertising, reverse billing fraud, phishing, bait & switch marketing, etc etc etc) and the people who have distribution are gaining a predisposition that if you contact them out of the blue with anything commercial you are a spammer. Further tools like Twitter pull links off the web graph and make conversations more shallow, limiting the discussion of many complex topics.

Affiliate programs are great for distribution (and whoring fake reviews), but most good affiliates typically target brands that already have their own gravity around them.

Even if you make someone millions of dollars they typically don’t want to give a testimonial because they are afraid of creating competition for themselves.

Companies worth over $100 billion dollars – like Google – still need to buy ads and bribe customers for testimonials:

The site has a range of options for letting your company or organization know that you want it to “Go Google,” including things like fliers and pre-populated emails to send out.

And Google is also promising to give away “goodies” each week in August to users who have Gone Google and fill out a Google Doc describing their experience.

Eventually the goal of many forms of marketing is to create something that has enough targeted awareness that it begins to market itself. To become synonymous with a field. Kleenex & Xerox are great examples. But you have to use push marketing, begging, bribery, ass kissing, capital, sweat, blood, luck, and a bit talent to get in that type of position.

You can’t be a successful market maker without first being a market manipulator. And even when you get to the top of a market you still have to try to control market perceptions. To get a refund for an Apple iPod that literally blows up you need to sign a confidentiality agreement:

The letter also stated that, in accepting the money, Mr Stanborough was to “agree that you will keep the terms and existence of this settlement agreement completely confidential”, and that any breach of confidentiality “may result in Apple seeking injunctive relief, damages and legal costs against the defaulting persons or parties”.

In spite of their strong market positions, Apple and Google are still heavily focused on manipulating public opinion of their products.

And Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board to avail himself of key information. He sat on that board as Google attempted to clone the iPhone with Gphone, and stayed on it until his company pushed the FCC to go after Apple for blocking the Google Voice app: “Google brought down the disapproving scrutiny of the FCC onto Apple on Friday night, and on Monday morning Schmidt resigned. It is difficult not to make a connection between these two events.”

And while Google paints the media as trustworthy, it rarely is. The news corporations do business deals to engage in cross-censorship in an attempt to increase short term corporate profits:

GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer reported by MSNBC. You don’t have to agree with the reader’s view of the value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.

One of the biggest flaws with the field of SEO is the presumption some people have that there is only 1 right way to do things, everything should be free, marketing should be entirely organic, you have to keep it all above board or you risk losing everything, and other BS pitched by companies trying to minimize and regulate the field.

The bigger risk for most businesses is being too conservative and thus remaining obscure, unknown, and unprofitable.

Is Outing is a Sleazy Black Hat Marketing Strategy?

Rae Hoffman nailed it:

Is your Web site and marketing strategy really the best it can be? Focusing on what everyone else does and why your organic SEO life is so unfair distracts you from doing what will benefit you most – improving YOURSELF. The best thing you can do for your Web site is to focus on IT and not spend all your time whining about your competitors.

Reporting your competitors is no more an SEO strategy than a heavyset person complaining about what good genes her skinny friend has is a weight loss technique.

Life is never about being fair. Either you focus on what matters or you do not. If people are beating you with low grade spammy stuff then either you are not very good at marketing or you are not putting your full potential into your projects. Outing others because you are not good enough to compete is simply a sleazy business practice.

See also: Why SEO outing is bad + The SEO Police