First Organise 1,000

Happy Christmas everyone, here is some great Tribal advice from Seth, have a great one.

Kevin Kelly really changed our thinking with his post about 1,000 true fans.

But what if you're not an artist or a musician? Is there a business case for this?

I think the ability to find and organize 1,000 people is a breakthrough opportunity. One thousand people coordinating their actions is enough to change your world (and make a living.)

1,000 people each spending $1,000 on a special interest cruise equals a million dollars.

1,000 people willing to spend $250 to attend a day-long seminar gives you the leverage to invite just about anyone you can imagine to fly in and speak.

1,000 people voting as a bloc can change local politics forever.

1,000 people willing to try a new restaurant you find for them gives you the ability to make an entrepreneur successful and change the landscape of your town.

Even better, coordinating the learning and connections of this tribe of 1,000 is not just profitable, it's rewarding. If you can take them where they want to go, you become indispensable (and respected).

What's difficult? What's difficult is changing your attitude. Instead of speed dating your way to interruption, instead of yelling at strangers all day trying to make a living, coordinating a tribe of 1,000 requires patience, consistency and a focus on long-term relationships and life time value. You don't find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.

Here is Seths Blog

What matters now

This is from a number of the top bloggers, writers and general internet people of the world. It is compiled by one of our favourites Seth Godin. Check out your free e-book, its a little gem. print some of the stuff out that you like and put them around your office. Some great stuff in there.

Twitter - A fad?

I've been thinking about this recently, and i'm coming to the conclusion that twitter is pretty much a waste of peoples time, and i mean a real waste. I have messed around with it for a couple of months, and really all it does is build links as far as i can see, and not very good ones at that. Now maybe i'm not putting enough into it, but i don't have the time, and neither do most other people, especially if they are running their own business.

I suppose i should be able to make up my own mind, but in conversation yesterday with a far more experienced "Internet Scientist" (i just made that up) than me it dawned on me that many others feel the same.

Think about what you get out of twitter. If you love gosip or have massive amounts of time for link building etc then it really could be worth it for you. Otherwise forget about it, it will only take time out of your day, for no good reason.

In short, what i think, Twitter is highly unlikely to make you money.

Social Media for your business, it won't happen overnight

The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations

"It's a process, not an event.

Dating is a process. So is losing weight, being a public company and building a brand.

On the other hand, putting up a trade show booth is an event. So are going public and having surgery.

Events are easier to manage, pay for and get excited about. Processes build results for the long haul."

Link to Seth

Above is the latest of Seth Godins posts. Its something i meet every day, people wanting to know when they will be up on google, making money from facebook etc. I can't agree with Seth more, even in my own business, we're new, we realise it will take time for us to reach all the customers that are out there. It will take time for us to get up on the first page of google for keywords such as "Web Design Cork" or "Online Marketing Cork". Maybe someday we'll be up there for Irish nationwide searches, but it won't be tomorrow morning.

Like education has become a life long learning experience, from a business point of view so is social media for your business. If you rush in and try to be all things to all man you'll more than likely get caught somewhere in the middle, or the bottom............

Beware of the spammers

This could be particulary relevant to Cork/Munster businesses. It relates to SEO spamming. Our advice is to ask for websites these people have already optimized, and do some of your own "googling" on keywords you might put in for the related business.

Read here

Richard Hearne is a very experienced SEO expert who i met recently through a course (he was the guest lecturer!). I highly recommened him from the brief encounter. His website is www.redcardinal.ie.

Find out what is being said about you on-line!!!

Check out this interesting article from the Sunday Business Post.

We believe your better off knowing what people are saying about you. It may help you improve your service or product, and is almost another form of market research.

Some Solid Seth Advice

The first transaction

Do you really expect that the first time we transact, it will involve me giving you money in exchange for a product or service?

Perhaps this is a good strategy for a pretzel vendor on the street, but is that the best you can hope for?

Digital transactions are essentially free for you to provide. I can give you permission to teach me something. I can watch a video. I can engage in a conversation. We can connect, transfer knowledge, engage in a way that builds trust... all of these things make it more likely that I'll trust you enough to send you some money one day. I can contribute to a project you're building, ask you a difficult question, discover what others have already learned.

But send you money on the first date? No way.

The question then, is how much time and effort does your non-profit/consulting firm/widget factory spend on pre-purchase transactions and how much do you spend on trying to simply close the sale?

You can find more Seth Godin @ Seth's Blog

Getting your website out there

If your business customers can't find you on the internet your website is nearly worthless... (here is what to do about it).

1. There is no cheaper, more effective way to promote your site than by using search engines. We are amazed at how people overlook the potential of natural, non-paid search engine ranking and simply let the "other guy" have the free traffic.

2. Search engines are a free and ongoing service. Pay Per click options tends to bring immediate results when done right. However, when you run out of money or target too large of a market the, effectiveness of the advertising campaign will be lost.

3. Since visitors coming from a search engine were searching for your specific product or service, they are usually a highly targeted and often highly motivated group of visitors. These visitors will more often purchase your services.

4. Money invested in Search Engine Optimization has a long shelf life. If done properly your SEO investment (for as little as $100) can provide free traffic and revenues for YEARS!

Bing goes down!!!

Bit late with this, but its not good news for these fellas.

Microsoft Bing Goes Down

Early in December 3rd last Microsoft Bing went wallop!

The search engine (which claims to have up to 15% market share, depending on who you listen to, although we have yet to meet ANYONE in Ireland who uses the product - except for the nice people who work in Microsoft and therefore appear to have no choice!) went offline for about 30 minutes last week.

Microsoft has apologised for the outage, which had web surfers be greeted with an error message on the search engine’s site. Microsoft stated that a “configuration change” made to the site during testing was the cause of the outage.

This, it said, had “unfortunate and unintended consequences” which included making the site unavailable. The glitch led to people either being unable to find the site or having their queries returned unanswered, Satya Nadella, one of Microsoft’s senior vice-presidents in its Online Services Division, wrote on the Bing blog.

“As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behaviour,” wrote Nadella, who added that the problem was corrected in about 30 minutes.

Microsoft was looking into the root of the incident in order to take preventative measures to prevent such an incident from happening again, Nadella wrote.

You can read the blog posting (written by Microsoft) here.

Interesting facts about Google

Some interesting reading about where the giant Search Engine (which powers this blog :-)) has come from.

20 interesting,amazing and funny things about Google which you dont know.Lets find it out below

1.Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.

2.The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

3.Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.

4.Interesting thing about Gmail is that it was used internally for nearly 2 years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.

5. It consisted of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.

6.The Google search engine receives an amazing one billion search requests per day.

7.Google's index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising of 8 billion web pages. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.

8.Google has a funny tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes - such as Google MentalPlex, which allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. Some thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day was a joke.

9.Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, that includes the lonely Antarctica as well.

10.Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case.

11.Google has a world-class staff of more than 15000 full-time employees - Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex located at Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway.

12.Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices.

13.Another funny fact is that the "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. It was a comfort button which actually takes to the first web page returned by the search results.

14.Google use the unique 20%/5% rules. That is ,if at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the 'Advanced Preferences'.

15.Employees in Google are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. That's why we have such amazing products like GMail,Google News and Orkut now.

16.Google Groups comprises more than 845 million Usenet messages, which is the world's largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.

17.The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank, and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.

18.Googlers are people from different background. One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health is a former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist. And the company's chef formerly prepared meals for members of The Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton.

19. Google’s Orkut is most popular in Brazil and India. It was the brainchild of a Google engineer who was given free reign to run with it.

20.In a 2006 report of the world's richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin was #26 with a net worth of $12.9 billion, and Larry Page was #27 with a net worth of $12.8 billion

Be a Good Client

More great stuff from Seth Godin here. Helping us to improve from both sides of the fence.

Be a good client

"Call to Action"

Here is an interesting article about websites, and the marketing of them. Have a read, we found it interesting. Its from Silicon Cloud, atop on-line marketing company from the US.

7 great tips for optimizing your website