Archive for July 2009

Another simple tutorial this week, but one which again can really add value to your website. As a website creator, do you have problems turning your words and numbers into something that looks good on a web page? A table may be the right way to go about it. Watch the tutorial and then have a good adding a table.

How did you get on? Do you have a good example that the rest of us can have a look at? Leave us a comment below.

We’ve spoken a bit before about click fraud. This occurs when someone clicks on a Pay-Per-Click advert for any purpose other than to visit the website of the advertiser, with a genuine desire to look at their products and services.

‘Pay per click’ is one of the main sorts of advertising on the web. Perhaps obviously, the advertiser pays when someone clicks on their advert.  Every advert that appears in the Search Engine Results Page on Google is a pay per click advert.

There are three main types of click fraud. The first is called ‘innocuous’, where users click on adverts accidentally, or habitually click on a particular advert. They weren’t deliberately intending to visit the website of the advertiser, but do so by accident.

The second two types are both ‘malicious’. The first are clicks carried out by competitors to an advertiser, to drive up costs for that advertiser. The 2nd are carried out by website owners, who click on adverts on their own website, since they make money every time an advert on their site is clicked on.

Google claim to detect and filter out these malicious clicks so that advertisers are not charged for them. Google don’t reveal how they work out what is a malicious click since, they say, that would prompt the perpetrators of the click fraud to develop more complex click fraud techniques.

As reported over on Techcrunch, a company called Anchor intelligence has released a report that outlines the amount of click fraud that exists. The report covers January to June 2009.

The report shows that click fraud appears to be on the rise with 22.9% of all clicks being click fraud of one sort of another.

The report also breaks down the click fraud rates by country. In the UK, click fraud is around 17.7%, relatively low in the click fraud league. By contrast, in Vietnam has a click fraud rate of nearly 50%. No other country comes close to that.

And it’s not like Vietnam is an anomaly due to its low click volume. It is, apparently, the sixth biggest market in the world for pay per click advertising.

Here’s some good visuals reproduced from TechCrunch:

What does this mean if you’re building a website with WebEden? Well if you use pay per click advertising to drive traffic to your site, be assured that you’ve got – on a world scale – a low risk of paying for fraudulent clicks. There’s not going to be a lot you can do about avoiding these fraudulent clicks, but just trust that Google and others are not charging you for them.

If you run AdSense adverts on your website, the overall message has got to be: don’t click on your ads! The chances are the Google can already detect from your IP address that it’s you who is clicking, and will therefore not credit you with any cash. The risk you take if you do click on adverts on your own site is that Google will terminate your AdSense contract, since you’re breaking their Ts & Cs.

Have you been the victim of click fraud? Or have you maliciously clicked on a competitors’ adverts? Leave us a comment below.

Do you ever feel that you can’t get away from people talking about Twitter? That every chat show, phone in, newspaper (and blog) article is packed with the latest from the micro-blogging site?

You’re probably right. All this free publicity is the sort of coverage most companies would give their eye teeth for.

This media space has a value. News monitoring service VMS has said that the free publicity generated for Twitter in just the last 30 days equates to a value of almost $50 million.

That adds up to around half of what Microsoft in planning to spend on Bing this year. And that’s just in the last 30 days!

The study said that of the offline coverage Twitter received, 57% of the value was on TV; 37%in newspapers; and 5% in magazines.

VMS Chief executive Peter Wengryn said to AdAge magazine, “”This is huge, We looked at online coverage of Twitter versus Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn’t think anything was more popular than Google.”

If we compare that through to Microsoft’s newest search engine, Bing managed to generate $573,834 (£364,000) of coverage.

But what does all this free coverage actually get Twitter? The short answer is: more users. The service reached 21 million unique users in June, up 14% on the previous month.

As we mentioned in our ‘5 things Twitter doesn’t want you to know‘ post, Twitter has big plans to grow its user base to 1 billion by the end of 2013. With all this free publicity, that job has been made a lot easier.

But every story has its day, and this coverage can’t last forever. Can Twitter boost its users before we tire of hearing about it? Leave us a comment below.

Here’s a story that might surprise the marketing people: despite social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter being aimed at ‘young things’, a recent study has shown that it is the older generation who are adopting social media at the fastest rate.

Research from online measurement company comScore has shown that people over 55 are more likely to spend their time on Facebook than visit a travel, business or technology website.

In May, almost 70% of those over 55 visited Facebook, Myspace or Twitter.

That being said, these figures still lag behind a younger demographic: 89% of 25 to 34 year olds spending time catching up with friends on social networking websites.

Social Networking for older people is more than just a passing fad, or a quick glance: the average 55 and over spends 3.7 hours per month on Facebook.

Mike Read, MD of comScore Europe said:  “There continues to be a misconception that social networking is the preserve of the young. While those under 35 years old are certainly the more prevalent users, there is both a sizeable and heavily engaged audience of those 35 and older as well”.

What does this mean if you’re building a website that targets this demographic? Well to start with, you might want to consider advertising on Facebook. Facebook has a self serve advertising program that allows you to reach people based on not just their age, but their gender and interest group too.

Mike Read confirms the idea: “Advertising on social networking sites has a better chance of reaching these older demographics than site categories such as business and finance, which is a critical insight that might be lost for those trying to optimise their campaign against target audience segments.”

We’ll be showing you how to advertise on Facebook in an upcoming tutorial.

The second is that this should encourage you to get to grips with the new social networking tools available within WebEden. We’ve made it really easy for you to reach out and market to people in your social networks; invite them to become members of your site; and update Facebook from your WebEden website.

Even if you thought you are targeting people ‘who wouldn’t be into that social networking thing’, this research indicates you might be wrong.

Is social networking trans-generational?  Are you using your social networks to create interest in your website? Leave us a comment below.

A couple of weeks ago, something unfortunate happened to Twitter. A person calling himself / herself ‘Hacker Croll’ hacked into Twitter’s network and then copied 310 private company files, including emails, memos, partner agreements and meeting notes. He / she then packaged up all these secret files and sent them over to newsbreaking site TechCrunch.

And TechCrunch decided to publish those ‘secrets’.

So often creating the news, Twitter has become a news topic. Their ‘secrets’ are all over the Internet. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

1. Twitter: how big are they going to be? According to their internal figure, Twitter reckon they will have 25million users by the end of 2009; up to 100m by the end of 2010; and a truly staggering 350 million by the end of 2011. Facebook is currently the largest social networking site with 200m users: Twitter think they will be twice as big as that by the end of 2011. But it doesn’t stop there: by the end of 2013 they hope to have 1billion users – 1 in every 7 who walks the planet!

2. Although Twitter is yet to sell anything to anybody at all, they expect to make revenues of $140m in 2010, of which $46m will be profit. Nice eh? That’s nothing – by 2013 they hope to be pulling in $1.54billion, and be employing 5,200 people. I would love to sit in a board meeting when someone is presenting these figures: “And here you see the graph go up… and up… and up…”

3. They’re currently sitting on a cash pile of $45m. Since they are yet to sell anything, this is all money raised from investors. Whilst $45m is just a fraction of the revenues they hope to make, no wonder they aren’t in a hurry to start selling stuff – the wolf is a long way from the door. Co-founder Biz Stone confirmed this in a recent interview with Revolution Magazine: We’re not under any pressure to hit a home run. We want to take our time and get this right”.

4. Twitter estimates that the cost of providing their service freely to each user is about $1 per user per year. And that’s despite the fact that some users post hundreds of Tweets every single day.

5. Twitter has recently kicked around the idea of a themed reality-TV show dubbed the ‘Final Tweet’. The idea, pitched to them by a US production company, involves a clash between teams of entrepreneurs who compete for a $100,000 cash prize.

The fact that all this private stuff has been moved to the public domain might be a bit embarrassing for Twitter. Whilst not denying their veracity, Biz Stone is saying that these files are very much out of date. “Obviously, these docs are not polished or ready for prime time and they’re certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world,” he said.

What do you think about Techcrunch deciding to make it all public? Does WebEden fit into the same boat since we’re republishing them here? Does this change your view of Twitter? Leave us a comment below

Another back-to-basics tutorial this one, and a little bit old school too. When you’re building a website it sometimes looks better if you add the time and date to your web page. It helps people know that your site is up to date, and what they’re seeing is ‘alive’. have a go adding the time & date and see if it suits your website.

Bing, Microsoft’s newest search engine, has been making serious headway in clawing market share from its rivals. It has been well received on both sides of the pond, helped not least by an estimated $100m marketing fund from Microsoft.

And lots of people have been giving it lots of compliments. Aside from the stylish home page, it displays results in a clear and uncluttered way, and has some great features such as the preview screen that lets you see what a web page is all about before visiting it.

The press has loved it too. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times asked their finest tech gurus to scrutinize Bing: both gave it glowing reviews.

But according to a recent survey by JP Morgan, despite these gains Bing is doomed to failure.

The main problem, according to the survey, is that people are happy with Google and don’t really see a reason to switch. Although a quarter of those who were willing to give Bing a try, almost all people would not be making the switch permanently. As far as these people see it, there is nothing wrong with their current search experience.

The survey isn’t all bad news. Apparently the big advertising campaign had done what it needed to in terms of raising awareness and getting people to try the product. More than half the survey respondents had heard of Bing and a quarter had tried it.

However, of those who had tried it less than 40% had used it more than 5 times in the last month. This pattern is more typical of people just testing it rather than making the permanent switch. Looking to the future, just 11% of those said they would use the search engine more than 15 times in the next month.

As we discussed previously, more and more people are using Bing. But despite the steady growth in market share, Bing is not converting users from Google, but rather switching people from other search engines such as AOL or Ask.com. This idea ties in with our previous post that said that Bing’s growth was very much at the expense of other Microsoft search engines such as MSN and Live.com

So what can Microsoft do about it? According to JP Morgan, the product needs to be made ‘better’ and have a better distribution.

Thanks for those wise words JP Morgan.

Make the product better? Easy to say. Not so easy to do.

Tried Bing? Like Bing? Leave a comment below.

In part 1 of ‘what are your customers saying about you‘, we looked at some research from digital communications company Quba showing that not enough companies are monitoring what their customers say about them online. Doing this – and responding to them – is called having a social media strategy

So what can you do to develop your own Social Media strategy?

The first thing is to find out what your customers are actually saying about you online. If you have a blog or a forum on your website then getting customer feedback is quite easy – the happiest and least happy will be sure to share their feedback with you directly.

But what about those people who will simply give feedback elsewhere on the web, or on their social networks?

There are two separate tools you can use to find out what they’re saying. First, set up a few ‘Google Alerts’ using your company name, and your domain name. If you think there’s a chance that people will discuss you personally then set up a Google Alert for your personal name as well.

With a Google Alert, every time Google comes across a new mention of your company, domain or name as they crawl the web, they will send you an email with a link to where your company is mentioned. You can set up a Google Alert here.

This won’t necessarily give you up to date mentions of your company name since Google can take up to 3 months to trawl every website.

The second thing to do is to search on Twitter for mentions of your company name. The great thing about Twitter search is that you can instantly find where your customers are mentioning you. However, you probably don’t have time to constantly search for mentions of your name on Twitter! To save time, use a service like Tweetbeep.com to send you a daily email with all new mentions of your company name. Its free.

And what exactly do you do when you find people mentioning or talking about you or your brand?

The short answer is: get involved!

If people are criticising your company, then enter the conversation and let them know you’re sorry they had a bad time. Find out what went wrong. Is there anything you can do to rectify it? It often doesn’t take much to turn a negative reviewer into a positive one, once that person knows they’re not being neglected. And you get to publicly show your customer service skills to other people reading the thread.

That doesn’t mean you have to concede that the customer is absolutely right in what they’re saying. If you put your side of the story, and it seems fair, then anyone viewing the thread will see that you have a reasonable point of view.

If customers are saying good stuff then you might want to thank them for their feedback. You need to make a judgment as to whether or not you can add anything to the conversation – sometimes its better to let customers speak for themselves, so as to appear more impartial.

If you can identify the customer then it might be a good idea to send them a personal email thanking them for their comments.

The other good thing to do with positive comments is to channel them towards the better known reviews sites for your market. If you do get positive feedback – either as an email, a comment on a blog or forum, then ask that customer to share that on reviews websites you think influence users most.

We’ve talked about reviews sites before. They are increasingly important in influencing customer decisions: people are more likely to take the opinion of an impartial reviews site than a customer service agent. And in our ‘Google the Innovator’ series we showed how Google itself is increasingly displaying the results from Reviews websites.

Here a are a list of well known reviews websites; you probably know a few for your industry too.

pricegrabber.co.uk
reviewcentre.com
shopzilla.co.uk
ciao.co.uk
dealtime.co.uk
truste-marketing.co.uk
webuser.co.uk
maxxsave.co.uk
dooyoo.co.uk
resellerratings.com

Have you put a ‘social media strategy’ in place? Have you had any positive or negative experiences with it? Leave us a comment below.

In May, as we never tire of pointing out, we catapulted your WebEden Website Builder into the dizzy world of social networking.

Lots of you have grabbed the new tools and are making really good use of them. You’re setting up membership permissions; inviting people from your social networks to become members of your site; and updating Facebook from your WebEden site.

We’ve had feedback too about how the tools could be improved, so we’ve worked hard to upgrade them.

Here’s what we’ve done:

Setting a redirect page after login

Hopefully a popular one this. The update allows you to your members to a ‘success’ page after they have logged in to your site. This is a great opportunity to redirecting them to the ‘members home page’, or another page that you want them to look at. You can set the ‘post login page’ on the Settings tab of the ‘People’ section when editing your site.

Disabling Facebook Connect login

Facebook Connect allows new or existing members of your site to login using their Facebook credentials, so they have no need to create a new user account on your site. This speeds up the joining process, and makes it easier for you to attract new members.

It also ties together with the ability to post out a note to your Facebook wall from the ‘Send a message’ section of ‘People’, which is a great way to invite people to join your site.

This update allows you to disable the Facebook Connect login options for members This update allows you to turn Facebook Connect off!

If its so great, why turn it off? Well it seems that it doesn’t always fit with your plans to grow your websites: some customers (especially business users) had requested this.

Once again, you can change the settings to disable Facebook Connect on the ‘Settings’ tab in the ‘People’ section.

Have a go with the updates, and let us know what you think.

Before the Internet came along, it wasn’t always easy for companies to find out what their customers were saying about them. If a customer had a good or bad experience, the most they would probably do is share that with a few friends down the pub, or mention it over a meal with the family.

If companies wanted feedback they had to ask customers to fill out a ‘customer feedback’ form; and ask their customer service agents what customers were actually saying about them.

Both these channels give a very partial view. People giving feedback would be at either end of the spectrum: they had either loved dealing with your company, or had completely hated it.

Now of course, in the era of social media, customers have lots of channels to spread both their good and bad experiences of dealing with a company. Aside from leaving comments on that company blog, they can submit reviews to reviews websites, leave posts on relevant forums, and of course give feedback through Facebook and Twitter of their experiences.

This makes it so much easier for companies to find out what their customers are saying about them. And it means there is a lot more ‘colour’ and texture to their feedback, rather than a polarised view of ‘brilliant’ or ‘rubbish’.

And apart from finding out what customers are saying, it also gives companies the opportunity to take part in that conversation. If its a good comment, then a company can  give thanks; and if its a bad one they can respond by trying to resolve that customers’ issue, or at least put their side of the story.

And from a product point of view, listening in to what your customers are saying about your product has to be one of the best ways to find out what you need to do to improve that product.

Despite all these opportunities, research out this week from digital communications company Quba has revealed that only half of businesses monitor what people are saying about them on the web. Just a third of businesses have someone who actively manages their online reputation.

Here’s a graph showing it all, published in New Media Age magazine:

For reasons we’ve stated, the reality is that all business should monitor what people are saying about them, and respond to it too. Doing this is called having a ‘social media strategy’.

Check out how to develop your Social Media Strategy in ‘What are your customers saying about you part 2‘.