Thinking Tech

Blogging [this IS a blog] is the trend of the day. I started a blog (in fact, two), several years ago, and never made much use of them. I was sporadic in posting, never checked the post backs, and rarely mentioned it. I'm not even sure you could get to it from the DGG Web site.

This blog is a bit different. There's a lot of material coming out that our clients and associates ask us about, and technologies like RFID, ERP, MRP II, Vista, and Project Green (to name a few) (more later about these) are beginning to or threatening to have a serious impact on even small businesses.

So here's my opportunity to talk about some of those technologies, and your opportunity to talk back. I hope you'll talk back, because it's kinda boring talking to yourself...which is what this is like if you don't talk back.

Hopefully, you'll get good information on a number of technologies.

Oh, one more thing. This isn't edited. It isn't approved by the marketing or legal folks. Those of you who know me know that I'm a bit irreverent...particularly about the computer industry...after all, I've been around since before there was a computer industry...but that's another story.

It's good talking to you.

Everybody seems to be picking up on the trend. Trainers, marketers, sales organizations. Everyone. Even the Tennessee Society of CPAs is offering on-line Webinars, Web Meetings, Webcasts...whatever you want to call them.

I think they're great...really...I'm sure they save someone a bunch of time. Check out the link below for yourself to be convinced...or not!
Tennessee Society of CPAs - Online CLE and Seminar Catalog

I must say I'm tired of my inbox filling with this or that vendor wanting to show me the "latest features" of their product via the web. Always seems to turn into more of a sales presentation than a learning presentation. When, for example, was the fact that the product has gained market share a new feature? Or the fact that users rated it 4.75 stars out of 5 stars on usability? Or that PC Week Magazine named it "Least Likely Software To Crash and Burn While You're Trimming Your Toenails?" Who cares?

Show me what I want to know: How will this software help me in my business or life?

If it can help me lose weight or be more likeable, bring it on. Otherwise, I can do without it. I've got better things to do than memorize stats on someone else's software. Like learn the new features...

"HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead." By the end of the commercial, all you know is the product name and that you apply it directly to the forehead.

Turns out the woman rubbing what appears to be a tube of chapped lip medicine on her forehead is trying to get rid of a headache. And the stuff has a mix of herbs and other homeopathic remedies.

What's interesting about this is that it works. Uhh...I mean the commercial, not the HeadOn...and I don't want to get into any arguments about whether homeopathic remedies work. You believe what you want to believe.

But the COMMERCIAL works, at least by all the measurements we typically use for commercials...focus groups...product demand...sales. Interesting. But perhaps not too surprising.

The best technology (like the best marketing) makes use of simple concepts...like the idea that the computer does repetitive things extremely well...and non-repetitive things very poorly.

What makes the commercial work is that darned phrase repeated over and over: "HeadOn: Apply directly to the...."

Maybe if I apply my forehead directly to my monitor, I can get rid of the headache the commercial caused.

The mesmerizing ad for HeadOn. By Seth Stevenson

Web sites just haven't felt like software! Drag and drop, copy and paste, etc., haven't worked as well on web sites as in software. Several technologies have come and gone to make the web act more like software running on a desktop (ActiveX, JavaScript, Java, etc.) Now comes one of the most promising, AJAX. Like all the others, it has risks. Check out eWeek's review.

AJAX Vulnerabilities Could Pose Serious Risks

You've probably gotten the emails: "Contact 3,000,000 potential customers for only pennies per reach..."

It's generally called SPAM. Some people get enough of it to fill a bucket. Because my email account is set up to receive any email sent to our domain for an email address that doesn't exist, I get tons of it in my mailbox. Some of this has names or addresses on it. Much of it I recognize from my wife's emailbox at home. I get emails with one employee's name on them that hasn't been at Data Guidance Group for 5 years. Another employee must have browsed a lot of sites that marketed products for enlarging certain body parts...most of the email I get for him offers such products.

But I supose it's tempting. With a first-class letter costing $0.39 to mail, the idea that you can reach a prospect for a few cents (or fractions of a cent) per piece is attractive. As I look through my SPAM blocker (which allows me to look at email that the software thinks is SPAM in order to decide whether it really is), I see a certain number of emails that look legitimate. I see others for products that I wouldn't think about buying from an unsolicited email (lose weight, get taller, grow more hair, increase the size of various body parts, buy vicodin, buy viagra, etc.)

SPAM has become a problem. Most businesses that use email eventually wind up blocking SPAM. It's a tradeoff. When the quantity of SPAM in email gets so large that it is hard to delete SPAM without deleting genuine email, it's time to get some type of SPAM detection and elimination software.

If you're thinking about using SPAM to promote your business...don't! You'll earn a bad reputation quick as a wink. Sending email can be a great business tool. But be sure you send it to people who want it.

First, I should say that the link below is to Dan Bricklin's article about Small Business Blogging. If for no other reason than that Dan is the inventor of the program Visicalc (the first electronic spreadsheet, and great-great grandaddy of the current generation of spreadsheets like Microsoft's Excel), you should spend a second on his website.

Anyway...back to the subject...I've been blogging for a while but never really recommended the practice to many clients. That wasn't because I didn't think they could get some benefit from it...there are a lot of benefits...it's mostly because clients in general don't have time to get information together for their main web sites, let alone a blog. So what's the deal?

Since you're reading this, I assume you have some idea of what a blog is. To quote Brickland, "A reverse-chronological list of postings, with a managed archive," is a blog. To put that in English: A blog is two things (a) a list of short (or not so short) things you write, with the most recent one first, and (b) to keep the list from getting intolerably long, some filing system to handle old items.

The items on a blog are called posts. I don't know why. You probably don't want to know anyway.

So why in the world would anyone do a blog? Several reasons:

• To have an easy way to update a web page. Most blogging software is web-based, and all posting takes is a few seconds plus the time to type the entry


• To continually change their web site, which results in better search engine coverage. Pages that are updated frequently are given better standing in most search engines like Google and Yahoo.


• To talk to their clients or customers or allow employees to talk to clients or customers in a real voice, unhendered by the normal censoring process


• To talk to themselves. Just joking. I hope they have something worth saying


• To communicate news.


• To receive feedback from clients and customers. Since most blogging software includes the ability for customers and clients to respond (post comments), the blog can be a good way to have dialog.

I'm sure there are more reasons to blog. One of them is...it's fun.

More later. Please comment if you have thoughts.

Small Business Blogging

Brian at the Pajama Market Blog commented on a previous post about blogging. He mentioned my list of reasons that clients might want to think about creating blogs, and commented as follows:

Boost search engine ranking. [Although Bob is right about blogs scoring high on search engine results, he's wrong on the reasoning. In his post he says Google and Yahoo! are given better standing when they are frequently updated. This used to be an SEO axiom, but doesn't hold water any longer. For example, I have a website that hasn't been updated in two years that still ranks #1 for my optimum keyword search 'Americas Army Strategy' (I created the StrAAtegy newsletter). What really drives the search engine rankings is the number of relevant websites that link to your site. The more posts you write, the more likely someone will link to a post, and the more links you get, the better your search engine results.]

Brian is correct that it is not just the activity on a blog that produces rankings on Yahoo and Google. Most SEO (search engine optimization) today concentrates in the areas of (a) keywords, (b) domain names (e.g. if you have a blog on Pajamas, having Pajamas in your domain name seems to elevate the ranking), (c) incoming links to your site (how many other sites link to you), etc. The list is ever changing.

Most important, however, is the choice of keywords. If you try to optimize your site for the word "computer," it's pure luck (or a whale of a lot of work) to get to the top of the listing. Interestingly enough, when I ran the search today, the IEEE Computer Society came up first, followed by Dell, Apple, and an entry from Wikipedia. While it might be possible to get into this list through organic SEO (as opposed to paid search), my guess is that it would take more work than most businesses want to put into SEO. Of course, if you decide to do this, you could just get lucky.

Brian's Americas Army Strategy does come up at the top of the list, and from looking at the page, I can see why. He has multiple references to the search term (Americas Army Strategy), the search term matches precisely several terms on the page, he has links with the term in them, etc.

As another example, Data Guidance Group has produced a link to the dgginc.com site as #1 in Google for several years...even before I put the blog feed on the home page. After all, who else would want to bring people who searched for "Data Guidance Group" to their web page?

So, while I'll agree that there are additional factors in the effect of Blogs on Search Engine Positioning, I still think frequency of update is one factor.

Thanks again for the trackback Brian.

Ciao

Small Business Blog of the Day: Bob Palmer on why your business should have a blog

I've been listening to marketing podcasts (if you don't know what a podcast is, stay tuned for later posts) lately, particularly casts like Across The Sound (below) from Joseph Jaffe. A few others like Managing the Gray by C. C. Chapman (also a partner of Joseph Jaffe in the new company crayon) and For Immediate Release (also a partner). These guys are big into the "New Marketing" or "social media." Social media is a coming thing. May be here already. Connecting via the internet in ways that were not possible even two or three years ago.

But SecondLife is a different thing. It's a 3-D virtual world. Not a game. No objective. No winning. There is a possiblity to trade real money. But note..that's trade. There's a market. A market requires sellers (of virtual Linden Dollars or L$), and buyers (with real $ in some currency). There is also an exchange which allows residents (that's what a person is called in SecondLife, almost always abbreviated SL) to buy L$ for US$.

My first reaction to all of this was, "This is neat, but I don't get it." I thought it was just age (I'm kind of a old codger in the PC world since I remember when there wasn't a PC and my first PC was a Trash-80 [Radio Shack's TRS-80] with cassette storage and 64K RAM [woohoo!]). I was also trained as a CPA (though I've always worked in IT).

Anyway, if you Google "SecondLife I don't get it," you find out that I'm not the only one. I could take comfort from that.

But there's this nagging at the back of my mind (what's left of it)...Toyota just opened a virutal showroom in SL...GM has a virtual showroom...Honda, I hear. And Jaffe, Chapman, and the FIR guys just opened Crayon in the virutal world. They may be a lot of things, but a quick read of their blogs and a careful read of the various published books from the group will tell you pretty quickly that stupid they're not.

So...

I will get it. Just give me time. And if you find Baacus Celt wandering around in SL, tell him where to go...

...wait...

I didn't mean that like it sounded.

Across the Sound: ATS #61 - The New Marketing Podcast from crayonville Island

Been in second life again. Walked around. Said "hiya" to a few folk. Teleported. Flew.

No biggie.

Still don't get it.

I will....

Been in second life again. Walked around. Said "hiya" to a few folk. Teleported. Flew.

No biggie.

Still don't get it.

I will....

To continue our tour of SecondLife (not that I'm obsessed with getting this, or anything)...here's an image of the Toyota showroom. There is a Scion behind me that is $L 300. Pretty cheap with signup, you get $L 1000, and $L 400 a month as an allowance. This costs you a few US$, but if you're serious about SL, you might as well invest real $$.

The problem with $L is that the exchange is like a stock exchange. As long as someone wants to pay real $$ (or pounds, or euros) for your Linden $$ ($L), you're in luck. When the market goes south, your SL wealth goes down the toilet.

Anyway, it's interesting that Toyota is spending the real $$ to have a virutal showroom.

Still don't get it...

I've been in SecondLife again. This time I found the Nissan car vending machine. Put in the code (which you get for free by sending an Instant Message [IM] to the right person), and select your color from the vending machine. Out pops your virtual car. Wonder if I can exchange it with the same code for a real Sentra? Probably not.

Must be honest with you. I'm not really finding this SL stuff addicting like some people do. But I do see some attractions to a virtual world, and I'm beginning to think that I understand the business implications of it.

Take a look at this picture (that's my avitar hovering in the flame shirt which I wouldn't be caught dead in First Life [the one where I'm typing this] wearing). It shows Nissan island, the loop-the-loop, and the Sentra vending machine.

You might want to check out this SL stuff. If you "get it," then leave me a comment.

Oh, and add Reuters to the list of companies with outposts in SecondLife.

Ciao

I embarrassed myself (again) today.

I loaded the first block of information from the DGG web site (www.dgginc.com) into Word, turned on the readability statistics and pushed F7 (check spelling and grammar).

Grade Level: 15.9 (ouch!)

And I pride myself on being able to write a sentence...and one that someone else besides me can understand.

The best writing level for the web is between 6th and 8th grade. It's not because people only have that reading level, it's just easier to browse and read quickly at that level.

As an example: I'm reading a book by a PhD named John McClure now. He's a philosopher. The book has to do with deconstruction and texts and literary criticism. (Don't ask why any of those things make any difference to me; you don't want to know.) Anyway, McClure uses words like deontology, deconstructionalism, and ontological in the book. I had to get my American Heritage. Geez, get a Thesaurus and write in English.

Maybe I should follow my own advice.

I loaded THAT into Word.

Grade level: 6.7

That's more like it!

SecondLife publishes some statistics for you to review. I note that 283,000 people have logged in during the last 14 days, and 601,000 during the last 60 days. Here's the table:

This is an international site. For all the buzz, it still looks like just a few people. Maybe I'm wrong.

Second Life | Economic Statistics

Let's get this straight up front: this post is not about sex.

About 30 years ago, when I sat down at the keyboard of the Radio Shack TRS-80 (affectionately known by those of us who used it as the TRASH-80), someone showed me how typing

>10 PRINT "BOB PALMER"
>RUN [ENTER]

Would print my name on the screen. And

10 FOR I = 1 to 100
20 PRINT "BOB PALMER "
30 NEXT I

Would print my name 100 times. Likewise, adding a simple semi-colon (;) to the end of line 20 would print my name across the 80 character screen until the space ran out, then wrap the line to the next line, and so on.

I was hooked. I didn't have to wait for the test results, or the cookies to bake. I got to see right then, right now the effect of my creation.

SecondLife is like that. You can create stuff and see the effect right now. Make a cylinder, apply a bark texture to it, you have a log (or a tree trunk). Upload graphics. Cut out things on Photoshop. Play around. Upload music.

Part of the attraction in SL is that you can see the result now without having to cut the wood or wait for manufacturing.

Still has its attraction.

In an easy-to-miss article, InformationWeek reported on legal challenges that SecondLife, the virtual world, is facing. Since people in SecondLife talk about the virtual world as if it were real (leading some to suspect that the only reason they need SecondLife is that they don't have a first one), some of the residents of SecondLife are suing the company that created it, Linden Lab, for property rights violations.

As the article points out,

[T]he company sells the idea of ownership on its site: "Become a part of history by purchasing land and developing your own piece of Second Life," the site says. "The Pricing and Fees are simple; you pay $9.95 a month plus a Land Use Fee proportional to the amount of land you own."

So what exactly does this mean legally? Do we have property rights to property that lives only on a computer?

Shudder....

Reminds me of The Matrix....

Maybe the people in SecondLife are just a bit too un-focused on their first one...

Virtual Worlds Collide With Real Laws - News by InformationWeek

According to most of the surveys I've seen lately, the web is becoming more important to decision makers. Some 57% of purchasing officials in a recent survey (can't recall where) confessed to checking the web before doing business with a company.

This means that it's more important than ever to have a solid web presence.

There is also some new research from MarketingShurpa.com that suggests some improvements for landing pages on the web. Take a look. A little bit of improvement could be a big benefit to your prospecting.

While I'm thinking about the web...

I've put in inquiries to several sites lately. Places like libsynpro.com (Podcasting), a ton of employee psychological testing sites, and some sites for information on product purchases. And I've not gotten a single response from several of them.

The sad thing is, the first group that picked up the phone or answered my email got my business.

Good old fashioned courtesy doesn't need to be a thing of the past.

As I've noted before, converting money from SecondLife Linden dollars to real dollars depends on an exchange where people want to exchange real dollars for virtual dollars. As I read it, for $9.95 per month, you get a signup bonus of 1,000 Linden (virtual) dollars (L$), and a weekly paycheck of L$300. Figuring that out over a year, that's 7.2 cents ($0.072) per L$ if I did my math right (it includes the L$1000 signing bonus). It also assumes that you pay monthly rather than annually. If you pay annually, L$ are worth even less.

Stats on population are getting a little better, a few over 2,000,000 residents today, and 233,536 visitors in the last 7 days, with about 18,000 logged in as of the moment (just a second ago) I visited the home page.

And right now on the LindeX (where you trade L$ for real $), the going rate is US$1/L$268. Lest you were wondering, that's 3.73 cents per L$.

Now, I'm not going to interpret that for you...except to say that somewhere someone is paying 7 cents for something I can buy for 3 or 4 cents. Something's not right about that! Somewhere, there's 3 cents worth of value for every dollar going down the toilet.

If that sounds like a good deal, you'll really like the odds on the lottery.

But perhaps I'm being too analytical...it's about social media, after all.

'Second Life' mints a millionaire? | News.blog | CNET News.com

Here's a great piece from the grandfather of eCommerce and Internet marketing, Ralph Wilson. I was going to post this anyway, but I watched it and have a piece of advice that goes further than just the advice that's here.

If you decide to do video to promote your project, and you interview someone online, DON'T STARE AT THE CAMERA while the other person is talking. LOOK AT THE PERSON TALKING.

This is good information, as well as good entertainment. Take a look

YouTube - Getting Emails Relevant--and opened--with Maxine Grossman

Here's a study that revealed that most Twitter "tweets" are pointless. No joke. But...used properly, Twitter can be a business tool. This is discussed in ceoTechCast 17 at http://www.ceotechcast.com

>>As if one were needed, a study revealed that most tweets on Twitter are considered "pointless babble."

Report: Most Twitter Tweets 'Pointless Babble' - The Channel Wire - IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness

Google is changing the way it's search engine works in major ways after the first of the year. Most believe this is to avoid a hit to many of the Internet retailers who rely heavily on Google optimization to bring the traffic that makes their cash registers ring.

Little more than the concept has been discussed thus far. Suffice it to say that if your SEO company hasn't mentioned it to you, you need another SEO company. Here's a brief article about the change:

http://searchenginewatch.com/3631746