Three tips for advertising on Yell

It’s been a while since my last post on Yell.com, but I think it’s important that I post a balanced update on the outcome, as well as some tips you might like to take note of if you are meeting a Yell representative to talk about advertising.

The crux of my issue with Yell was this:

The key selling point, for me, was that the page I was advertising on ( ‘Internet Web Design & Development’ in the Reading area) was apparently receiving 414 views a month.

Having spoken to a very helpful lady at Yell I’m informed that the figure that I thought was for the Reading & Newbury area (414 views a month) was actually the figure for national viewings of the advert. There was clearly a misunderstanding as I believed that when I asked to be provided with the viewing figures for the advert I would be placing I was given the figure for the national average, and not the average local to my Reading area.

In my discussions with Yell they did give me screenshot of a slide – that they say I saw during their sales pitch to me – explaining that the national figures were 414 per month on average. Though I concede that I may well have been shown that slide, it’s clear to me that I came away from that pitch expecting 414 views per month for my advert. I had the sales person write down what I could expect each month, and they had written 414 views per month.

It is important for me to stress here that I don’t believe that there was any deliberate trickery on the part of Yell. There was a misunderstanding. However, I do know that I came away from signing a contract expecting something that I did not get. And I know in my own mind that had I truly realised that an advert of the like I was taking out got only 414 views on a national basis, I would have made polite excuses and ran for the hills taking my budget with me.

I’m happy to say that after my conversation with Yell they have both cancelled my advert and refunded the money I invested, which I think was probably the only fair and equitable outcome to be had out of the situation.

But it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth and it speaks volumes for the client service of Yell that after e-mailing my account handler and using a separate contact form to raise my issues, I had to pursue them in public via Facebook, Twitter and a blog post before I got an actual response – though when the response did come it was very helpful and straightforward.

I’m also disappointed because, you know, I wanted the advertising to work. Having spoken to a number of people who have advertised with Yell.com I’m unhappy to report that none have given me any positive feedback on the experience, and considering the sums of money involved, that must surely reflect badly upon Yell.

In part, and admittedly in retrospect after discussions with other Yell advertisers, I would say that Yell.com is perhaps not the best platform for business-to-business advertising, and that it is more specialised for business-to-consumer advertising.

Everybody and every company is individual. I’m not saying you should not sign up to Yell, perhaps you have good reasons to give it a try, and maybe there are organisations out there that have made a good return on their investment, but consider the following three tips I have to offer if you are tempted to advertise with Yell.

Firstly, I would recommend that you absolutely nail down whoever is selling you the advertising to how many views your particular advert will receive each month, at least on average. Not the national figure, but the figure that you can expect to receive after you sign the contract. If the sales person cannot give an answer to that question then it’s not unreasonable to ask why you should pay large sums of money to an organisation with amazing technology at its disposal, but which cannot reasonably show what it can do in return for that money.

Secondly, don’t sign up for a long contract initially. If Yell and/or the salesperson is serious about the value that Yell offers then they should give you a trial period of, say, three months. If I had done this and properly scrutinised the results after three months then I would not have carried on spending my advertising budget with Yell.

Thirdly, set realistic goals for what you want to achieve from advertising with Yell. More visits to your website? More phone calls? Whatever the goals are keep them in mind and if you don’t reach them make a conscious choice to either stop using Yell, or else admit that you are not getting the return you were expecting but that the return you are getting is enough. Don’t get caught in the limbo between these two outcomes.

Personally, I know that I’d rather spend my time blogging for various other sites which, from my experience, appears to generate at least as much interest in my website and services as did spending thousands with Yell.

Why Yell.com doesn’t work

Back in October 2010, I wrote about stepping out of my comfort zone and about how the WhizzyDigital re-brand and website re-design was part of a conscious effort to avoid stagnation. I also said:

I’ve partnered with an, erm, “international directory organisation” and will soon be delivering WhizzyDigital adverts to a website near you… I’ll analyse the results and will likely post an update on this blog as to how the strategy paid off.

The title of this blog post perhaps gives my thoughts away, but so too should the fact that I seriously considered not writing this blog. Who wants to slug it out with a multi-national? Who wants to come off like a bitter client? Who wants to expose their own weaknesses? Not me, that’s for sure.

But I said I was stepping out of my comfort zone so I’m seeing through that commitment in the hope that it serves to collect my thoughts together, get what some might term ‘closure’, and, most importantly, help others avoid the costly mistakes I made.

In October 2010 I purchased an advertising package from Yell. The package consisted of a sponsored link in the ‘Internet Web Design & Development’ section of Yell.com limited geographically to the Reading area where WhizzyDigital is based. Also included was a 118 247 listing, also limited to Reading (so if people call 118 2457 and ask for a web designer in Reading, WhizzyDigital will be on the list). Additionally there was a video produced (based on images taken from whizzydigital.co.uk), some SEO web pages which are separate from my site which I’ve not had much to do with, and finally the ‘netReach’ feature which places a text advert on sites other than Yell.com.

The cost? Well, it was apparently a special offer, with a discount of £910 on the usual price, and so in total I paid the not insignificant sum of £1,923 (excluding VAT) for this package. The deal was in fact a credit agreement – even though a loan was not required. Having entered into this kind of agreement before, my experience is that usually the service provider delivers what they say they are going to deliver, so credit is not usually a problem. If, as appears to have happened with WhizzyDigital, their service under-performs from the standard you think it will reach and you wish to cancel the service, you are still obliged to pay the loan back.

The key selling point, for me, was that the page I was advertising on ( ‘Internet Web Design & Development’ in the Reading area) was apparently receiving 414 views a month.

I knew I was paying for getting the WhizzyDigital name and logo in front of a few hundred people each month. I knew I was counting on the quantity of views paying off and a number of people clicking on my website or calling me and eventually becoming a client.

The Yell campaign was in contrast to my simultaneous contributions to The Online Marketing Mix, which I dubbed my ‘quality’ campaign. It wasn’t going to set the world alight in terms of reach, but it was a great way to project my thoughts in the hope that one or two people liked what I had to say and gave me a call.

The results of this quantity Vs quality approach, I think, are very telling.

In the past 9 months, none of my new clients have mentioned Yell as being the place they found WhizzyDigital. And far from delivering 414 page views per month, according to stats provided by Yell, the page has consistently delivered less than a third of the views I was expecting the page to get – based upon what my Account Manager specifically said. Not an implied or hinted at figure, but one which I was told the page was getting on average.

In 5 of the last 9 months, the page has had less than 100 views. See below.

WhizzyDigital Yell Stats: Oct 2010 – Jun 2011, click for larger image

Considering that the main point of advertising on Yell is the expectation of reaching hundreds of eyes per month through Yell.com, to see monthly views in the 50-100 range is simply soul-destroying. In 9 months my sponsored listing was viewed 850 times.

I’ve no way to account for the difference between what my Account Manager at Yell told me was the average page views per month (414), and the average page views over the life of my campaign so far (94.4).

Coming at the stats from another angle, Google Analytics tells me that I’ve had 207 referrals to my site from the joint reach of Yell.com and the netReach adverts that Yell runs on my behalf. That’s 17 a month over the course of the last 9 months. If that performance is maintained for the next few months I will have had 258 referrals from Yell/netReach, a cost of around £7.45 per referral to my site and no return on my investment to show for it.

In fact, the campaign performed  well early on. I think this is because Yell was then running a lot of TV and radio adverts, and those adverts were one of the reasons I advertised with Yell – there appeared was a big marketing push. But it does seem that once that marketing push tailed off, so did the number of page views.

Yell are advertising again, only now they are advertising their own web design services, and it’s hard for me not to draw a connection between Yell recently starting to advertise their own web design business, and the fact that “click-thrus” (the amount of time someone click the advert) for the WhizzyDigital advert have been in the single digits for the last 3 months.

But it’s not just the poor campaign performance that has shocked me, it’s the customer service also. A few examples?

My advert contained six bullet points, arranged as 3 bullet points in 2 rows within the advert. At some un-identifiable time somebody changed the design of the listings so that the bullet points became one long paragraph with commas separating the bullet points. Now, I wrote those bullet points as bullet points, they don’t make sense when read as a paragraph, and had I known about the design change I would have made changes to my advert so that it made sense. Is it stands, my advert made little sense for an undetermined length of time. I can see many adverts on Yell.com are suffering the same way so I’m not the only one who has fallen foul of this design change.

Apart from the design changes, Yell have recently added a number of “new more refined categories” which is great, but you can’t take advantage of them until after you renew your campaign with them. In the meantime, new advertisers, or advertisers who renew before you, presumably get to take advantage of the new categories straight away.

Thanks Yell! Perhaps this is another reason the amount of views my sponsored listing is getting has fallen off a cliff edge as competitors reap the benefits of new categories whilst I cannot. This actually may not have a huge impact on the website design categories, but I’d love to know how many advertisers with Yell have seen the views of their adverts drop since the introduction of these new categories, how much this has cost them in terms of the Return On Investment and how long they have to wait before they can take advantage of the new categories?

I did e-mail my Account Manager to discuss all the concerns I mention above and asking how to improve the performance of my advert, they have not got back to me. I sent an e-mail through the Yell website contact form highlighting my worries about the WhizzyDigital advert and have had no reply. So no marks for customer service there.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. And if I could go back I’d recommend myself to ask for a trial first, or at least cut the time frame from a 12 month agreement to, say, a three month agreement, as one of my more clued-up clients did, thus saving themselves a lot of their own marketing budget.

The Yell website claims that:

On average, an advertiser with Yell Online gets 9.8 calls a month

In truth, that’s something like the effect I was looking for. OK. 9.8 calls a month was probably too much to ask. But a single solid sales lead in 9 months? Was that too much to ask?

As it is, the only things I seem to have achieved from advertising on Yell is a huge increase in spam – in both the e-mail and phone varieties – which in the beginning I took to mean some element of success in advertising, but now, I’m not sure spam quantity is a relevant indicator of the performance of advertising through Yell, but more an indicator of the ingenuity of spammers.

What about the stats for my quality campaign? Well, it resulted in more referrers to whizzydigital.co.uk than came from Yell.co.uk (153 Vs 104), though when you factor in the netReach adverts Yell wins overall, but at such a high price, was the Yell package worth it?

Consider that many of my clients have told me that through reading my blog they get a feeling for who I am and what I offer, and from the top of my head I can name at least 2 great clients (they know who they are!) who have been directly influenced to use my services after reading either my blog or my postings over at The Online Marketing Mix, and it would seem to me that the return on investment from writing blogs and articles in your spare time is greater than the return on investment of paying for the marketing clout of a multi-national organization.

I’ll have to put this down as a learning experience, albeit a costly one, but it is an experience that I will use to explain to my clients why they don’t necessarily have to spend huge amounts on an advertising campaign. It is possible to generate business using nothing more than a blog, social media tools, e-mail campaigns and common sense.

I’m always telling my clients that there is no quick-fix solution when it comes to search engines, and I think I forgot my advice. I was expecting a quick and easy marketing solution, but it didn’t work out like that in the end.

It has given me a few ideas though…

UPDATE: 03 August 2011 – I added “they can take advantage of the new categories?” to the end of the paragraph stating “Thanks Yell!”. Not sure what happened to that sentence before publishing.

UPDATE: 05 October 2011 – I followed up this post with an update and Three tips for advertising on Yell

Total Cost of Ownership

I’ve recently been consulting on a large web based research project. Whilst I can’t go into too much detail about who my client was, I can say that it was one of the most varied consultations I’ve undertaken for a while. Looking back on my experience got me thinking about the long term Total Cost of Ownership (or TCO for short) of systems.

The first issue I had to settle was that although the system had been successfully migrated from one Internet Service Provider to another, and to all intents and purposes should have been working, a vital part of the system was unavailable. It had just ‘stopped working’. Fortunately, I’d seen this type of problem before and even though I’d never had direct experience of the web-based software that was being used for the project – a well respected third-party piece of software – after a chat, a cup of coffee, and a quick look at the system, it was quickly apparent to me what the problem was.

The sense of relief at solving just this one problem was palpable. It literally meant the difference between success or failure of a large project already under huge time pressure. And yet it was such a small change required, that – as a web nerd – I had seen before, but which, in an ideal world, my client could have been trained to be aware of.

And that brings me to my first point. The cost of a system is more than just the cost to buy it or build it. Ideally you need to factor in training time for any new system. Few people do this, and if I’m honest I’ll include myself in that number when I look at new software myself. Because my client clearly hadn’t been trained to use the software they had purchased, they were the at mercy of a supplier who not only charged way above what I consider the market rates to be, but who was, by all accounts, difficult to get hold of in any case.

The old adage of teaching a man to fish came to mind. My client had the fishing rod, but they didn’t know how to fish and the fisherman was off fishing for someone else. I hope I did my bit in teaching my client to ‘fish’, so to speak.

Then came data security. My client needed to securely move data from within a live database on the web to somewhere completely off that particular server. The final solution agreed upon was an elegant combination of different techniques, but during the course of my consultation, it became apparent that had a little more thought been given at the time of design of the system as a whole, data security could have been vastly higher for a nominally higher investment in database technology.

Sometimes, saving money in the upfront investment stage could well cost you later on in terms of the risks introduced into the project, not necessarily just in terms of data security.

A more expensive system may be quicker and easier to install, it may offer better features such as reporting functions or easier maintenance than other alternatives, or have a better record of reliability, or be more compatible with your existing systems. In all cases it really is worth investing the time to research what’s available on the market rather than plumping for the perceived or de-facto standard software for what you want.

There were other minor issues that I helped to fix, some of which were related to the migration between Internet Service Providers, and simple things like adding a few new web pages and updating the text on existing pages. Again, I tried to teach my client to fish as they were capable of doing these things, but in the past, the ability to do so had been obfuscated from their view. That during my time consulting with them they became aware of how to do things and where to do them will stand them in good stead going forward.

TCO is a bigger issue that I’ve gone into above, but the general gist is that it is important take care to consider the implications of your system beyond the initial investment.

PlayStation Network intrusion is not a game

This article was first published on April 28, 2011, at The Online Marketing Mix.

We are used to governments and banks leaking data on a fairly regular basis, but rarely has a consumer electronics giant ever been so exposed as Sony is right now to customer vehemence and legal action.

Sony discovered an intrusion on the Playstation Network on April 19 and subsequently shut down the network – which connects millions of gamers enabling them to play together online.

The network has been shut down for a number of days at a not inconsiderable cost to Sony in terms of both money and the biggest PR disaster possible only months ahead of the launch of its new console the NGP (or PSP2).

An attack as big as this is always going to garner negative publicity, and serves as a lesson to all of us to take security seriously. I’ve blogged about taking responsibility for your personal security online with regards to multiple attacks on Twitter, and about the security of your company data and intellectual property but this is something on another level.

With the potential exposure of the personal details of 77 million customers, Sony is fighting a battle on multiple fronts. It must first secure it’s network against further attack, and bring it back online. It must manage the media scrutiny and customer anger. And finally, Sony must restore faith in its hitherto unassailable brand reputation.

Now is the time for you to assess how you would fight those battles if your website went down. OK. You might not be the size of Sony, but the principle is the same regardless of the size of your enterprise.

Sony is not only losing money and prestige in the present, but is losing millions in potential future revenue – along with it’s dropping share price. Whilst it is easy to sit back and nitpick Sony from a safe distance, if you are running an organisational website of any size you need to ensure you have some form of disaster recovery plan lest you get a call from your customers asking where your website is.

Investing in a secure and regularly backed-up website – and WordPress, along with a few additional tweaks will suffice for small to medium sized organisations – is one of the best forms of insurance against future loss of revenue, and a sure way to protect yourself and your brand from embarrassment.

Learn the lessons of Sony now so you don’t have to fight their present battles in your own future.

Three Little Words: Content Management Systems

This article was first published on April 4, 2011 at The Online Marketing Mix

Because different people might mean different things when using those three little words ‘Content Management System’, I’m going to begin this article by stating my understanding of what a Content Management System (or ‘CMS’) is.

In essence, and in the context of websites specifically, a CMS is for moving the ideas rattling around in your brain onto your website with as little intervention from the design gurus or technical boffins as possible.

A Content Management System will usually enforce certain design standards upon users so they can’t go all-out-crazy and have a different design on each page, or do something that breaks the entire website. At their core, Content Management Systems control the parameters by which you can update your website, keeping you within the technical and design limitations agreed during the design of the website, leaving you free to concentrate upon the most important thing. Not the ‘management’ or the ‘system’, but yes, the ‘content’.

In the past a CMS was a ‘black box’ of tricks that took months to design and build, and then days or weeks to train staff to use, then another few weeks for the dust to settle and staff to become comfortable with the system quirks.

Given the huge time and cost barriers to deploying a CMS it is small wonder that few companies actually saw the need for one, preferring instead to pay designers and developers to update the website as and when required.

But what happens when you can install a world class Content Management System for nothing? Doesn’t that change the game?

Of course it does.

You see, there is absolutely no need for small or medium companies to pay to developers to build a new CMS when systems like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are out there. All of these Content Management Systems are Open Source (in this case, that means free to use), customisable and extendable, and can easily host small-to-medium sized websites without breaking a sweat.

Unless you are a huge conglomerate, there is no need to build a CMS from scratch, and even then you have the option to use an already established and proven Enterprise Content Management System. Anybody who is trying to sell you a custom-built CMS should, above all else, be asked what their system will offer that an existing Open Source system will not.

It’s a difficult question to answer, but pay close attention, because the reply is most likely to be coded-marketing-speak for “using our system locks you into paying us for what you could get for free elsewhere”.

Even if your website is quite small, use a CMS. That way, you can update it when you need to and not have to pay someone else to do it. There have been huge leaps forward in the ease of use of modern Content Management Systems. If you can navigate a website, you can use a CMS.

A CMS like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal is capable of handling a small site but can also evolve along with your needs. If you want to change designs then get a new ‘theme‘ but keep the same CMS. If you want to add new features then add a new ‘module‘ or ‘plugin‘ with the extra functionality that you need, but don’t throw away the time investment you already made in staff learning to use your Content Management System.

With the advent of Open Source Content Management Systems designers and developers alike are confronted with the problem of not being able to charge for updating websites, and must instead differentiate themselves on quality, creativity, the range of services they offer and the cost-effectiveness of what they produce.

There is an old proverb that come to mind here. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

By all means ask a designer to design your website. And ask that developer to supply and install a CMS and apply the design in that CMS. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll be the same person or company making both ends of that equation add up.

Maybe you don’t have the time or inclination to maintain your own website, and that’s fine, but for goodness sake, make sure that you are not forced to rely on other people to feed you fish for the lifespan of your website.

Image: Creative Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RobertFuddBewusstsein17Jh.png

Optimising WordPress for iPad

This article was first published on March 25, 2011 at The Online Marketing Mix

Today iPad 2 is released in the UK to much fanfare. It is clear that the iPad currently dominates the tablet market. Some predict that during 2011 iPad will grow even more popular and will hold between an 80 to 95% share of a market which is itself growing.

Not bad for what is still a young hardware platform – though the iOS software it runs on is quite mature. The iPad has literally kick-started the market for hand-held tablets which use touch gestures to operate them.

Meanwhile. Over in the web publishing world WordPress dominates the blogoshpere as the de-facto choice for quick and simple blog or website creation. But WordPress still relies on dated input device technology, like, erm, a mouse.

Wouldn’t it just make sense if WordPress websites could be automagically optimised for iPad devices to make the most of those touch gestures? The people who built WordPress think so, that’s why Automattic have announced a new plugin in collaboration with OnSwipe.

Imaginatively called ‘Onswipe‘, the plugin has a number of features dedicated to giving iPad users a better experience on their particular device by simply re-tasking the way your blog works for them with very little work to do on your part.

Onswipe appears to be trying to give iPad users a more magazine-like experience when viewing a WordPress blog, which is no bad thing given the quality of downloadable magazine apps.

Getting back to the numbers game, when announcing Onswipe over on the WordPress blog Nick Momrik gave a hint of further plugins for other devices to come:

On WordPress.com we’re seeing about 750,000 page views a day from iPad visitors and it continues to rise. New tablet devices seem to be coming out every time you turn around. In the coming months we’ll be expanding to work with other popular tablet devices, but we chose to focus on the iPad first because… well it’s cool.

Optimising your WordPress blog for a range of touch driven tablets is a way to differentiate yourself from others.

Right now. WordPress is a tool and iPads are cool. Onswipe is a cool tool. Give it a try and see if you get some of that cool to rub off on your site.

Apple iPad Business Apps

As the launch of iPad 2 is barely a day away I thought it would be neat to remind myself of my thoughts about the first generation of iPad.

Back in January 2010 I thought that:-

Businesses tend to tool people up with laptops and send them out into the field. The iPad – with the potential for custom applications or mobile access to web-based applications or private networks – could be a very tempting alternative. It is thin, small, cool and can already take advantage of all existing iPhone applications natively. I fully expect some innovative business applications to arrive on an iPad near you soon. With the announcement of an iPad specific version of Apple software suite iWork (think Microsoft Office but less annoying) Apple is signalling the flexibility of the iPad. As a mobile business tool, it could really add value to an organisation brave enough and willing to fully exploit it.

I have to admit that I’d been quietly disappointed that this apparently hadn’t been happening. Then I saw what General Electric has been doing with the iPad and was literally blown away.

[GE] apps range from industry-specific monitoring and diagnostic tools to business intelligence resources. For example, the company’s Transformer Monitoring app helps manage gas turbine inventory and electric transformers throughout the world, while PDS Movement Planner lets service personnel monitor railway tracks and get diagnostic information on locomotives.

In combination with the unique capabilities of the devices themselves, GE’s custom apps help the company’s core clients accomplish their business goals faster and better.

“The easy flow of information, the ability to flick through pages, the ability to zoom in from a global map to a specific transformer and read all the key performance indicators — these are some of the ‘wow’ moments we get when we launch these apps,” Bhagat says. “Could you do that on a terminal? I don’t think so.”

Few organisations have the vision to take such leaps. And of those that do, even fewer have the resources to actually support the vision. Cisco and Hyatt Hotels and Resorts are 2 other big name businesses that are backing the iPad as a business tool.

2011 is set to be a year of massive growth for the tablet industry, and whilst many still view the iPad as simply a consumer device, I think it will become increasingly popular in organisations to leave the laptop or netbook at the office, and go out on the road with a lightweight and easy-to-use tablet which could have tailor made business applications, or just access to the thousands of utilities and tools available online.

Apple may well be sneaking up on the business market with the iPad in the exact inverse of the way the Personal Computer developed. Historically business users got used to great hardware and software at work, it was only after that PCs become mainstream consumer devices. Apple has positioned the iPad as a consumer device first and foremost, but is certainly cultivating business users in the hope that the iPad moves from the living room to the board room.

Ditch the blood-sucking social media gurus?

This article was first published on January 7, 2011 at The Online Marketing Mix.

I tweeted about an article by Milo Yiannopoulos I read in late 2010 about ‘blood-sucking social media gurus’. I commented that I found it unfair generally, but the issue deserves a balanced analysis, especially at this particular blog.

Lets take a look at the context of the article. It is published on the website of The Telegraph, and you’ll note that The Telegraph provide useful buttons on the article to allow readers to share it on Twitter, Facebook, and numerous other social media websites.

Pay a visit to the website of Yiannopoulos and you will see that he also favours social media interaction. He is a prolific user of Twitter, and also has Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.

So the issue that Yiannopoulos has is certainly not with social media itself. He uses it, and his employer uses it. The problem is apparently the idea that somebody else could deign to help others benefit from social media.

Amongst the generalised criticisms which apparently apply to all social media Yiannopoulos says:

Many of these charlatans are selling little more than common sense

To some extent, I totally agree with this analysis. However, what is common sense to some, is not to others. In the past I’ve compared building websites to building a car. It is common sense that a car has a chassis, wheels and an engine. That doesn’t mean I actually want to set about building one. I prefer to pay other people to build a car for me because they will do it faster and I’ll end up with a much cheaper, better and safer result than if I started learning how to design a car from scratch.

I have a friend who refuses to use Twitter. Point blank. He understands it, but despises the very idea of it. He is no Luddite, though. He loves using Facebook and has his own blog which he updates using an app on his iPhone.

Now, imagine that my friend were a business. A business that refused to use Twitter on the basis that the Managing Director did not like, or perhaps understand it. That business would be ignoring a powerful promotional tool. And we don’t have to go too far back to find naysayers of that sort who believed that the Internet itself was all hype and would never deliver more than, say, the local mall.

In 1995, Clifford Stoll wrote:

We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Following this 1995 train of thought to it’s logical conclusion would have meant accepting the status quo of shopping at the local mall and not investing in the Internet. History shows this would be – and has been for many – folly.

On the face of it, Yiannopoulos, like Stoll 15 years before him, is worried that the advocates of social media are selling so much snake oil. But then, his view appears not to be consistent throughout his writings. In a different article about Stephen Fry he says:

Surely someone of Fry’s stature needs to learn to be a bit more careful what they say in public. I understand that in the age of Twitter people expect direct access to their heroes, but, in some cases, it’s perhaps best that celebrities do hide behind the veil of PR and image consultants. And if Fry doesn’t trust himself not to fly off the handle, perhaps he should employ someone to tweet for him, like other celebrities do.

Which is interesting, because this is what many social media consultants – amongst other skill sets – are actually selling. It is rare to find a person who is exclusively selling social media skills. Social media experts might also know about web design, or copywriting, or coding, or SEO, or general marketing ‘common sense’.

And social media is but one part of the marketing mix. Even Yiannopoulos, as his LinkedIn profile tells us, is a Director at WRONG, a ’boutique marketing, communications and public relations agency’.

Does Yiannopoulos not manage his client’s social media as part of his public relations expertise? How do we differentiate him from the ‘blood-sucking social media gurus’?

Social media – like the Internet itself – is here to stay. As with the Internet, social media tools will become easier and more natural to use over time, and indeed it will become common knowledge and practice to integrate social media into marketing, but for now, businesses still need a hand getting to grips with it all.

Do blood-sucking social media gurus exist? Of course they do. But the social-media types who can show a good track record using a variety of tools over a long period of time will surely stand out from the rest.

As in any industry, the ‘leeches’ are in the minority, but as time goes on, they will be easier to spot. Which is, I suppose, something that Yiannopoulos and I agree on.

How to measure internet influence

This article was first published on November 15, 2010 at The Online Marketing Mix.

Marketing requires that you influence the attitudes and decisions of others, and there really is no more cost-effective tool to try to influence others than the internet. But how can we measure our internet influence?

To begin with, we need to take a look at the range of tools that we use to spread our influence. Using a wide variety of the top-tier social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube is a good initial indicator that your influence is spread across a wide variety of platforms.

It may pay dividends to specialise in using a particular tool or platform. For instance some people become YouTube superstars, or prominent at blogging, and that is fine, but that does not mean that it does not also reap rewards to extend your influence beyond your normal audience in an attempt to influence others in others on other social media platforms.

It used to be that followers or friends was the equivalent of influence. But nowadays, many individuals and organisations ‘game’ the social media systems by offering prizes or special offers – essentially, bribes – simply for following them. The ‘pure’ currency of counting followers in order to measure influence is nowadays devalued so we need to look at other ways in which we can measure influence.

Ways to measure influence on Twitter would be to see how many people re-tweeted a particular tweet. People tend only to re-tweet things which are particularly interesting or profound, so those who get multiple re-tweets are likely to be exercising more influence than those who simply have lots of followers. Similarly, those who receive a lot of replies to their tweets are also likely to have a wide sphere of influence, and those people who are tweeted about are also more likely to be exercising influence over others.

If you put your mind to it, it is now relatively easy to build up a friendship base numbering in the hundreds. We all probably have friends on Facebook who themselves have a disproportionately large following of friends, here again we can see that the purist interpretation of equating a large number of friends with a large influence is not necessarily the case. Perhaps a better way to measure influence on Facebook would be to analyse how many people make comment on or ‘like’ the updates you post, or how many people share with others the videos or pictures that you shared with them.

As with Twitter, on Facebook people really only pass on or comment on the things which they find interesting, so if your comments or status updates are not being liked or shared or commented upon, you might want to consider why that is the case.

Let us not forget your website in all this. You may have a normal website which people can just read, or you may have a website that you blog at which people can leave comments on, and there are ways to measure influence with both these types of website.

Firstly, take a look at your site statistics. Most website hosts offer site statistics as part of their package, but you might want to look at Google Analytics as a way to help you measure influence. Note the difference between ‘visitors’ and ‘visits’. You might get a lot of visits, but if the number of visitors stays low over time then consider how to increase the number of individual visitors you have. Also, check how long people spend on your website. If you have a blog and the average time per visit is measured in minutes rather than seconds then your influence is probably on the up.

Bounce rate is also an important indicator. The ‘bounce rate’ is simply an indication of how many people ‘bounced’ away from your site after reading only one page. Ideally, you want a low bounce rate which would indicate that visitors to your site find a variety of the content on your site interesting.

If you are running a blog, how many people leave comments on your posts? Do other people cite you in their blogs, link to you or share your musings on Twitter or Facebook?

As you can see, there are many ways to measure influence. Simply counting the number of friends or followers in your network may not be the best benchmark.

Cyber security and your website

This article was first published on October 19, 2011, at The Online Marketing Mix.

WordPress is an amazing tool that has vastly reduced the time and cost for even the smallest of organisations to publish huge quantities of information quickly and efficiently. But in so doing, it has conversely increased the risk that the failure of those websites poses to such organisations.

The UK government recently published a new national security strategy in which cyber security is described as a Tier One threat. This means that the chances of a hostile attack upon UK cyber space is more likely than the Tier Two threat of an attack using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons. This comes days after a call to define the rules of cyber war.

As Governments move to address online threats, so to should you, now is as good a time as any to look at your own cyber security, and particularly that of your website. Security is is an oft-overlooked part of the ongoing maintenance of a website, but critical to understand and to have a strategy for.

The threats you face are many and varied. From a script kiddie exploiting loopholes, to sophisticated Distributed Denial of Sevice (DDOS) attacks, from theft of proprietary software or sensitive corporate data, to a simple database crash which means you need to recover your website from scratch. You need to be in a position where you can recover and restore lost corporate data.

If a website with just a few pages disappears through either malicious intent, or a plain and pure accident, the cost to a business to replace that website is minimal. If, though, you are running a WordPress based website with a large number of regularly updated pages, perhaps your company blog, plus a media library full of images, videos, podcasts, PDFs of company data, along with various wonderful plugins – all of which you should be doing if you want to build a credible online presence – the cost to your business to return your website to its original state should disaster strike is likely to be astronomical in terms of time and worry, let alone paying for an expert to fix it out for you before too many customers notice.

We all take some of the usual precautions. Anti-virus software helps ward off the major virus threats and probably script kiddies too. Having hard to crack passwords and not sharing them is a no-brainer, as is not responding to unsolicited marketing e-mails claiming to be from your bank and asking for password details.

Specifically addressing WordPress websites – though these tips could be applied generally to any website – ensure that if you have multiple users that they all log in using their own username and password, and that they only have access to those areas of a website which they specifically need to. For instance, whilst I can author posts on some WordPress websites, I might not necessarily also need to be able to add or remove plugins to all of them. WordPress has functions right out-of-the-box which allow you to restrict what different users can do and you should be using them.

It is best to think about security before you install WordPress, as there are some things that will be easier to do during installation but after installation there are many plugins that help you “harden” – increase the security – of your website.

For instance, you can lock accounts which have had a certain number of failed login attempts. Or you can install a plugin to hide the WordPress version you are using so that security flaws specific to that version cannot easily be exploited.

Keeping up with the current version of WordPress should normally decrease the threats you face as each successive release of WordPress will reduce the amount of publicly known bugs in the software. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that you backup your WordPress installation immediately before any WordPress upgrade, and always take regular backups regardless.

Remember that WordPress has, in effect, two distinct elements. One element is the WordPress software and site file contents such as the themes, images and other files you have uploaded to the website either via FTP or the WordPress upload functions. The other element is the database which contains the text you enter on each page or post, along with user details and comments, site settings and lots more. You need to back up both of these elements in order to be able to restore your WordPress website in the case of any form of accidental failure or malicious attack.

Spreading your online footprint across various Social Media networks will definitely mitigate the risk of a website failure, but few organisations exist online simply as a presence on Social Media platforms. In the end you know that your own website is the central hub of your online activities, and as such, needs to be a Top Tier priority for your business.