It feels a little self-referential to write about blogs as a business tool in a blog that’s, well, ultimately meant to be a business tool. But with the NYT blessing the concept of using blogs to help generate business, I couldn’t resist.

Most of the business-related blogs I’ve come across seem to have two main goals. The first is to raise awareness of the underlying business, both by organic search traffic - Google loves blog content - and later on by getting other bloggers (and ultimately mainstream press) to link to and/or quote the blog. For service-oriented businesses (e.g. lawyers and their “blawgs“), the other goal is often to demonstrate expertise, hopefully to convince visitors that the bloggers know their stuff and are worth hiring to help with whatever type of problems they might have.

All of this is well and good, but I think it misses an important point. One of the biggest advantages of the blog compared to other marketing media is its ability to convey the personality of the blogger. You can adopt a much more informal tone in a blog, without seeming unprofessional (or fake-folksy), than you ever could in traditional marketing materials such as a web site or whitepaper.

In service businesses, the client’s level of comfort with the people they’ll be working with is often at least as important as their expertise. Small service firms have a dilemma - people who don’t know them won’t hire them, but they don’t have the time (or access) to make personal impressions on the bulk of their target market. The blog allows a potential client to at least get a first impression of the personalities of the people they’d be hiring - are they too serious? Too goofy? Too techie? Not techie enough?

In an ideal world, our networking efforts would be more than enough to fill our pipelines. In the later stages of some firms’ evolution, that often becomes the case. But for those of us who aren’t quite there yet, hopefully our blogs will introduce us to a few extra people we wouldn’t have had a chance to meet over lunch.

This is going to be a short post as I’ve been caught up with holiday stuff but one of the things that caught my eye this week was a whole range of posts and online articles on a recent study by Blue Lithium Labs that ad conversions on user generated content sites are substantially lower than on other sites.

In retrospect this makes sense as people on sites like Facebook are pretty focused on what they are doing - interacting with their friends - and not predisposed to click on an ad that will take away that focus. So social networking does not equal browsing, at least from a marketing perspective.

Of course the important questions is how do you capture a social networker’s attention and get them to recognize your brand or even to spend some money. Welcome to the wonderful world of social introducers. The key here is to get people to pass your marketing message along as part of their normal social interactions. It is very hard to do and no one has really cracked the code in my opinion but if you can pull it off it is absolute gold.

Something to puzzle over as we head towards 2008. Happy holidays everyone.

One of the strange side-effects of the globalization of the Internet is that it’s exaggerating the apparent importance of the English language. It only takes a few hours in any non-English speaking country to be reminded that the vast majority of people in the world can’t speak more than a few words (if any) of English.

So why then are so many people acting as if English is the universal language of the Internet? From Al Jazeera and Haaretz in the Middle East to Nikkei and Xinhua in the Far East, it’s become common for news organizations to offer extensive web sites in English even though they have little or no English programming in print or video form.

What’s ironic about this trend is that it comes in the face of evidence that, as Internet access spreads globally, the percentage of Internet users that speak (or read) English is surpassed English as the top language in the blogosphere.

So what’s an Internet strategist to do? There’s the obvious advice to figure out whether your target market is really global - do you care whether people who don’t speak English can access your content? If you’re selling stuff only within the US or UK, maybe you can live without it, but for many business models that’s no longer true. The other thing to do is to keep an eye on automated translation software. While the current generation still produces some pretty goofy results, it’s only a matter of time before it improves. If it gets there fast enough, the whole issue might become moot.. but I wouldn’t bet on it.

So after all the fuss over Facebook’s announcement of their Beacon program and subsequent flipflop when users rebelled, they then announced a compromise opt-in program. Funny thing is, that was over 2 weeks ago, and I just checked my profile and there weren’t any external websites for me to opt into. Maybe external partners aren’t exactly lining up to join a service that’s gotten so much bad press?

Sponsored listing - in hebrew??

But on a more rudimentary level, Facebook has clearly begun targeting their ads. I just landed in Tel Aviv a few hours ago, and when I logged into Facebook (gotta keep that status up to date), all the ads were in Hebrew. It makes sense on a macro-targeting level, sell ad inventory by country and use the IP address to determine a user’s location. But in my case (and any other foreigners who happen to be visiting) the advertisers are wasting their money. I wonder how they handle even more multi-lingual countries like Belgium or Singapore?

This is one case where I wouldn’t mind them knowing a little more about me so they could at least send me ads I could read.. which is ultimately the argument marketers make in favor of targeting - that it results in ads you’re more likely to want to see. Then again, it’s kind of nice to not be able to read them, they become more decorative somehow. But in terms of the online business model, not so effective.. ultimately it’ll be a moot point, with the higher CPMs it will bring, better targeting is inevitable.

One of the most talked things on the net among those of us who like to launch websites is search engine optimization (SEO). There are armies of consultants, programmers, online marketers and bloggers who devote their time to guessing what the major search engine robots will find relevant and what they will flag as negative content. Since Google is the Gorilla in the space, much of that effort is devoted to chasing the elusive PageRank, where a difference of a few points can make the difference between web obscurity or a great Alexa ranking.

In building TravelGator we’ve had many of these conversations between ourselves and despite thinking we knew something about SEO when we started (and actually reading all the advice out there from all those consultants who have hung up an SEO shingle), we quickly learned that we were SEO idiots and sequentially made every mistake in the book.

So, while I cannot claim to have figured it out yet (and am still working hard on making Google love the sites I put up), I can share a bit of what not to do from personal experience.

• Don’t build a dynamic site without burying page level parameters in the session (as opposed to the url). TravelGator is excessively dynamic as we wanted to let users access content from many different directions. Therefore our pages change their structure rather significantly depending on where a user comes from. Good for navigation and usability, bad for SEO. We had to go back and bury all that sophistication in session objects and make our urls plain vanilla.
• While usability and great content is critical to designing a good site, don’t forget that the search engines are still rather focused on keyword density and check the density of your pages. TravelGator still gets killed by other sites that have much less content but repeat the same phrase over and over again on the site (not surprisingly including major keywords in the phrase). As much as I’d prefer Google actually learned to read, it is still pretty dumb when it comes to text and context.
• Don’t forget that you still need an old fashioned, 1995 era site map even if your site is pretty dynamic. We’ve found the robots are pretty lazy and won’t dive down into the site much below 4-5 levels or navigate long paths of clicks to get to a page. They are also terrible at following the results of internal site search engines. So on your site only for the consumption of the robots, build a site map that is a couple of levels deep.
• Don’t duplicate your content around the site. Google ascribes what seems like a huge penalty to duplicated content so if you have the same material on more than one page, give all versions of the page a seemingly static url (see point one above).
• Ignore all the chatter on XML based site maps. We did it…had no effect whatsoever on the number of pages we got indexed. Maybe at some point in the future this will matter but not right now. Do it only if you have lots of free time.
• Don’t forget to put keywords in your urls. This is a huge debate online as to whether they are required or not. After a year of looking at search results and trying to figure out why one page is ranked higher than the other my only conclusion is that they matter. We’ve caved and are adding them to the site.
• Don’t syndicate your content. See the point above about duplicated content - it doesn’t matter where it is. So if you are buying, stealing or otherwise acquiring content that is visible somewhere out there on the web, forget about it helping with your PageRank. It will only hurt it (those pages will also end up in the supplemental index…otherwise known as Google hell). The same rule applies if you sell your stuff to others. It becomes pretty useless from an SEO perspective. Unique content rules.

That’s my list so far. Everything else we’ve tried hasn’t worked but by fixing the above issues we’ve had some good success. Not fantastic mind you, but better than if we hadn’t made the changes. I’ll update this post if I come up with anything else that actually works.

There are some days I dream of the original static Yahoo Index…ahh…1994

No medium is better suited for word-of-mouth marketing than the Internet - people have been forwarding jokes, chain letters and silly videos for as long as they’ve had email. There have been many controversial attempts at “seeding” word of mouth by paying people to spread the word. Still, the best way to get a viral message out there remains the simplest, but most elusive - make a piece of content that’s unique and entertaining enough that people will want to forward it to their friends.

Nokia discovers the true origins of hip hop

The rewards of getting it right are obvious. Not only do you get broad reach - often millions of views - without spending a dime on media, you also get people consuming your message in its entirety, instead of getting up to go to the bathroom or fridge. But while it’s hard enough to get people to sit through a regular TV commercial, the number of videos that actually get forwarded in any quantity is vanishingly small.What’s the secret? Production quality does seem to matter - as much attention as the amateurs get, most of the highly-forwarded videos are pretty well done. Some are pretty eye-popping while others are just downright weird. Thought-provoking narrative is clearly not a factor.I won’t pretend to know the secret, but if I had to guess, the biggest factor is pure novelty - people just want to see things they’ve never seen before. As they say… that’s entertainment.

Social shopping/retailing has been getting a lot of press lately, especially its role in helping small retailers reach customers. Top sites include stylehive, Kaboodle and ThisNext, which are all dedicated to online shopping, with users flagging favorite objects available at any online retailer.

Like more general-purpose social networks, these sites play to users’ egos by having profile pages that show off a user’s individual taste. As is typical in most communities, you get a small handful of alpha-users who generate a disproportionate share of the content.. sites like stylehive encourage these people by allowing users to “follow” lead trendsetters and receive updates when they flag new items.

While social shopping is getting a lot of buzz, the volume generated from these sites barely registers - I wasn’t able to find any stats as to what percentage of online retail dollars come from social shopping. Keep in mind, too, that online sales are still only about 5 percent of total retail in the US. But the phenomenon is likely to spread, especially when it migrates to more general social networks like Facebook and Myspace.

When it comes to shopping of any kind, only a tiny minority of the population can be called tastemakers and the rest are followers, buying whatever friends or magazines say is stylinsh, or whatever is put in front of them by retailers. But there’s also been a resurgence of interest in original and unusual goods. For all the homogenization that’s been happening in the retail landscape, flea markets never really went away. As online shopping matures, it will be interesting to see the balance between the walmart.com-style megasites and the bazaar-like style represented by social shopping.

Yesterday a post on Google’s blog announced Knol, a new service they’ve begun beta testing. While most of the ensuing blog commentary focused on the service’s similarities to wikipedia, what’s more notable are the differences.

  (click for full-size screenshot)The most obvious difference is the social-networking aspect of the service. Rather than imitating wikipedia’s obscure (though effective) community-editing process that relies on a few thousand volunteers to maintain quality, Knol looks like it’s adopting a youTube-style quality rating approach to help users surface the best content. It’s not clear whether random visitors will be able to edit articles, my guess is that the feature will exist but most authors (since their mugs are prominently featured next to the article) will lock their articles.

The other difference is the presence of ads on the pages. This is pretty obvious, since the only reason Google would want to get into something like this is to provide yet another venue where it can monetize traffic. Just think of all those millions of wikipedia pageviews with no ads, how wasteful! The inclusion of ads will be up to the author of a given page, but in order to encourage inclusion, Google will share revenue from the ads (no mention of percentages yet).

Not that different from AdSense at first glance, but the fact that they’re providing the entire content platform makes a big difference. While setting up a blog has become almost trivially easy, there are presumably many people out there who just want to write content without any management overhead whatsoever. Associated Content was one of the first to provide such an offering and have amassed millions of pages of content, though they only pay a flat $1.50 CPM rather than the pure revenue share Knol is promising. Given Google’s brand and knack for cross-promoting its tools, they’ll likely do much better, and you can be sure those pages will be well-represented in its search results.

Yesterday the security software firm Astaro issued a press release announcing that their VPN solution will now support the iPhone. It doesn’t look like they had to do too much to their product (if anything) to enable this support, so I suspect other VPN providers (or at least those who support the two protocols that the iPhone does - L2TP and PPTP) will soon folow.

This should help reduce one of the most significant barriers to widespread corporate adoption of the iPhone. When it first launched, it was widely criticized for lacking many of the security features that made the Blackberry such a hit with corporations. While Apple’s stated strategy was to focus on the consumer market first, many professionals use their phones for both business and personal email and data access. Until the iPhone is supported by their employer, it’s inconvenient or impossible for them to have one.

This development also opens up possibilities beyond email. Since the iPhone has a real browser, corporate users will now be able to access company intranets, wikis, and any other web-enabled internal applications. Creating iPhone-friendly versions of the user interfaces will take some work, but consumer-facing sites like Facebook and Google have already shown us great examples of how it can be done. It’s not hard to envision companies fully embracing the iPhone as a mobile platform and using it to fully empower their mobile workers the same way laptops did in the late ’90s.

Ask.com is making headlines today with a new feature they’ve launched called AskEraser. Essentially if you want, any search you make on Ask.com can be made anonymous and they won’t store a record of it anywhere on the Ask servers.

So after turning it on (you have to opt in) when you do a search on “Britney Spears Partying” you can rest assured that not even under subpoena can the folks as IAC tell anyone how you were spending your working day.

Not necessarily new functionality - there are many sites that will allow you to mask your web browsing behind a proxy server (just ask all those politically sensitive bloggers in China how it works), this is the first time that a major search engine has said they won’t retain any information that can be tied to a specific searcher.

But there are some caveats. For one, they cannot guarantee that some of that information isn’t leaked to the partners who provide their ads (Google among them) and of course they are likely still all that rich search data together and using it to drive their own advertising engines. So call it search privacy light.

Still, it is an interesting ploy to stand out in the search space and as Facebook found out over the last few weeks, if you visibly show your users how much you happen to know about them (or can find out) they are going to scream.

Question is, does anyone care about online privacy unless it hits them in the face?