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The Internet is a strange place when it comes to investment.  No one seems to quite know how much money to pour into a Web project to achieve his or her objectives.  The real world seems to have most things quantified quite clearly.  Sure costs can blow out, but in general, the pricing of commodities and services is within established boundaries, as is the scope of most projects.  A building, no matter how big or small, is just a building.  It rarely needs to become twice as large as soon as it opens, or change its structure mid-construction.  Web projects can and do morph very quickly.

So people, armed with much uncertainty, misinformation or even delusion, begin Web projects thinking they will spend nothing, then see how it goes.  And if it takes off, they will invest more money into the project.  The ground they build their plans on is so shaky that it is almost certainly doomed to fail.  Somehow some reality and measure must be brought in.  It makes it hard when we hear stories about start-ups who spent 3 months in a garage and then sold to Google for a billion dollars.  The reality factor is almost non-existent in these kinds of stories.

Websites really are projects just like any other.  They in fact do have parameters, scope and limitations, measurable and quantifiable factors, costs, benefits, investment and returns.

Rather than invest and wait for a return, many people expect Websites to bring in a return and then use that money to invest into the project.

While that sounds like a sensible idea, it ignores the fact that you have to start with something and that something is going to take time and money.  Somehow we have been led to believe that the first version of a Website should be free.  If you are a programmer and designer, this may well be the case, because you will do it all yourself.  But if you are an ordinary business person with little or no design and coding skills, you are going to have to pay someone to do the work… and you may not even know what work needs to be done, so you probably have to pay someone to help you work that out, too.

If your idea really is worth pursuing, it must be worth investing in.  No business is risk-free, so why not take the risk on your own idea?  If it pays off, you will be very happy indeed and if it doesn’t, you will have paid for some very valuable lessons, to take with you to your next project.

Think of how you use Google.  My guess is that when you search for something, you look at many different Websites and maybe even try a number of different search terms to get what you are looking for.  Google is so fast now, that it is possible to conduct 4 or 5 searches in a minute, including the time it takes to click on a few results, check out the sites, assess them, hit your back button, check out some more sites and try another search.

We are all ‘just looking’ and not necessarily going to buy from almost every Website we visit.  This translates to a lot of traffic for each site leading to very few sales.

It’s like a mall full of people rushing around madly, poking their heads into shops for a few seconds, then backing out and moving on to poke their heads into the next shop.  They may come back to a shop they liked, but only after much investigation of everything that is on offer in this giant virtual mall we call the Internet.

Understanding this is critical to how you deal with your Website.  You must realise that a sale is made not just in one visit, but maybe after someone has checked you out, left, checked others out, returned, checked you out some more, left again, checked out even more others, then maybe returned to do business with you.  So, you must be able to captivate their interest and give them a reason to remember you and return.

You also need to try to make sure that every other site they might look at will seem to them to be a lesser choice – less professional, less friendly, less trustworthy and less value for money.

Otherwise, you risk losing a large chunk of potential business to your competitors.  Every factor must be taken into account – from the very basic ‘getting found in Google’ element to the design and layout, imagery, messaging, signs of credibility and success, positioning of your business to indicate the type of people you service (to filter out or pre-qualify leads) and ease of use, so the visitor will find as little resistance as possible going from finding your site to making contact.

Your Website home page is a shop front without a shopkeeper.  It is critical to lure in those window shoppers and get them to stick around long enough to engage with you.

Cyrius Media Group has been attracting customers to our clients for over a decade, bringing in millions of dollars worth of new business.  Find out how we can apply our insights and knowledge to your Website today.  Contact Us.

It’s October long weekend already.  It creeps up on you when the actual holiday Monday is the first day of the month.  One minute you are in the tail end of September and before you know it, you are enjoying the day off and suddenly realising that Christmas is just around the corner!  All bets are off as to when the first Christmas muzak is going to start streaming from the shopping centre car park loudspeakers.

It’s this time of year that we start taking stock and contemplating just how the year panned out, compared to how we thought it would as the fireworks were exploding at midnight, 9 full months ago.  It also dawns on us, that if there were things we told ourselves we would achieve this year, we are 75% of the way there, so we’d better get a hurry on.

Seeing as nobody can predict the future, it is a safe bet that nobody’s year goes exactly to plan.  Sure, we can all get done the things we said we would get done, but we can never know who that next phone call or email is going to come from, or what that next opportunity might be.  We can only fully control what we do, not what anyone else might do.

So it is this October long weekend that we at Cyrius reflect on the year that in many ways went according to plan and in other ways went in totally different directions.  We also look at the to-do list and realise that while it never seems to get any shorter, a thousand things did get ticked off this year.  Whether we were cleaning out the old paperwork from years gone by, or laying plans for the future, we got up each day and got things done.

Here is our little set of things to do as the year’s final quarter kicks off:

Christmas is Coming
As usual, anything that really needs doing before the end of the year needs to be done by Christmas.  Best to start now, because we all know how crazy things get as the silly season gets into full swing.  Start prioritising now, so as not to be disappointed. Maybe those shopping centres are onto something – it might be time to avoid the rush and do your Christmas shopping now!

Update your Website
For some reason, even though Websites are critical to most businesses these days and Search Engines seem to favour sites that update themselves regularly, people never seem to get around to updating them as much as they would like.  How about banging out a blog post or two (just like I am doing) and start thinking about what else you might do.  Why not add a few case studies of the work you have done this year?  Track down a couple of new testimonials or photos for your gallery?  Review all your text and see if it is still relevant, with regard to how your products and services might have evolved in the last 9 months or so?

Give your goals a second wind
Maybe you intended to do more than you actually ended up doing so far this year.  Why not review those goals now and give it a real good shot for the next three months.  With 75% of the year gone, that still leaves 25% and if you procrastinated at all, then you can probably get just as much done in three months as you got done in the last nine.

Start forward planning for 2013
You know how this year went.  You know how the last countless years went.  Maybe 2013 is going to be different.  It will be if you approach it differently.  Instead of waiting until New Years Eve to make your resolutions, why not start thinking about them now?  Look at the calendar and see how it is panning out already.  It might be time to pencil in some exciting new things.  Block out a weekend or two, or set some deadlines that are easy to count back from.  Things get hectic as Christmas looms, so take the time now to think clearly and map out some success for yourself.

Clean-up
How many emails are in your inbox?  How many files are sitting on your (real and virtual) desktop?  How efficiently have you filed away all the attachment files you have been emailed all year?  Are they all in one big messy folder, or have you saved, re-named and filed them where they belong?  How is your office looking?  Have you let it go, or kept it completely organised?  Why not approach the final quarter of 2012 in a state of peace and calm, sitting at a desk where the only thing on it is the thing you are working on right now?  Is there anything you know you should have taken care of months ago, but kept putting off?  Do it, tick it off and file it away.

Newsletter
Did you tell yourself you were going to contact all your clients this year with a nice friendly newsletter?  Did you never get around to it?  Don’t leave it too late, or you will be making contact just as they start to get frazzled and unravel with the approaching silly season.  Get the jump on them – and on yourself – by putting something together this week and getting it out.  You will be making contact at just the right time, allowing for enough time to take on any new work they might give you as a result of the contact and encouraging them to make the most of the remaining three months of the year.

The clock ticks and the calendar flips at the exact same pace, every moment of our lives.  The only thing we can do is to make the most of the time we are given.  This October long weekend, Monday 1 October is the perfect time to get to work.  It is Labour Day, after all...

Every day the proportion of people looking at Websites on mobile phones and other mobile devices is increasing.  A recent study by Morgan Stanley has predicted that by 2015, mobiles will overtake desktops as the primary means of accessing Websites.

Google has seen the writing on the wall and decided that if they are to keep earning revenue from Website owners to drive traffic to their Websites, Google is going to have to help Website owners ensure that their Websites are ‘mobile-friendly’.  Rather than having to zoom in on a tiny screen to a Website designed for a large desktop screen, users want to browse Websites on their mobile phones that have been optimised for the small screen.  This is not necessarily an easy thing to do for many Website’s, since the design and the code needs to be flexible enough to allow this transformation.

The buzzword of the day is “responsive”.  Websites need to be able to detect the type of device they are being viewed on and respond by serving up the most suitable design and layout.  You might notice many larger Websites now have a separate address for mobile phones.  For example, try http://www.smh.com.au and http://m.smh.com.au – you will see two very different ways of delivering the Sydney Morning Herald’s news online.

To address this growing need of businesses to have mobile friendly Websites, Google has launched a Website called HowToGoMo – http://www.howtogomo.com/au/d/ – this site allows you to test your current Website and even allows you to have a go at converting your site into a mobile version.  Depending on the success of this process, they also refer you to a range of specialist Mobile Website developers who can help make it happen.

Cyrius is not listed on their site, but we can help you, too!

Beam Me Up!

Another big shift for business is the ability to hold virtual meetings.  As broadband gets faster and faster, and the technology to facilitate high definition (HD) video conferencing improves on an almost daily basis, virtual meetings are becoming realistic alternatives to getting together in person to discuss business.  When you combine the added enhancement of being able to check out and share multi-media, Website links, graphics and documents, we might just be entering a new era, where business travel begins to grind to a halt, while business interaction grows exponentially.

Check out http://www.gotomeeting.com.au/ as just one of the places that is facilitating virtual meetings, webinars and training sessions.  If you thought this was all a little bit too much like science fiction, you might find that the future is already here.

Another financial year over.  How was it for you?  Did you celebrate?  Breathe a sigh of relief?  Work yourself up into a mild panic over your tax burden?  2011–12 has been an interesting year for us here at Cyrius.

It seems the whole ‘two speed economy’ concept might have a kernel of truth in it.  Perhaps it is more a chaotic multi-speed economy.  It certainly does seem a little more volatile and unpredictable these days than before – the economic climate seems to be changing as much as the actual climate.  What with the Euro crisis, the USA recession, mining booms, bank scandals, interest rate and currency fluctuations, it’s like the financial equivalent of nature’s floods, storms, bushfires and droughts.

We have experienced ups and downs with many of our clients.  Some who are usually experiencing booms have struggled to scrape through, while others who often do it tough seem to be getting on rather well.  I guess it is all part of the fun and games of business and society these days, as technology evolves so fast, bringing game changers and disruptors, making ‘business as usual’ a thing of the past and the only predictable thing being how unpredictable everything has become.

One thing is for sure, in an age of great change and upheaval, there are always going to be great opportunities.  All one needs to do is look for them.  How are things changing?  What new needs, trends or patterns are arising from the chaos?  How are people being affected and how can we help them?

A big opportunity, I believe, is optimisation.  When things get out of control or out of balance, there will always be ways to improve efficiency, eliminate waste, tighten up loose ends and clean up the mess.  Old patterns often represent bad habits that never needed addressing while everything was on an even keel.  Now, when costs are unpredictable, any cost saving, including time saving and productivity efficiency, is going to be very appealing indeed.

Perhaps as we enter this new financial year, it is a great opportunity to reflect on just how efficient and effective your entire operation has been.  Can you highlight and expose areas where you might have been a little lax, or where change has led to convoluted processes?  Have you been spending money in areas that are simply not worth it any more?  Have you been getting value for money out of the necessary expenses?

Take stock, reflect, clean-up, organise and rethink.  That old adage of keeping a level head while everyone else around you is flipping out might be quite apt now.  If things are as unpredictable as they seem, is it not the perfect time to get as much under control as you possibly can?  At least you will know that you are doing your very best, and giving yourself the best chance to succeed against the odds.

Happy New Year!  Here’s to an exciting, albeit tumultuous and unpredictable year ahead!

It's time to turn the Internet industry on its head and take control of our own data.  Google has essentially gotten where it is today by copyright piracy of every Webpage it's spiders could get their legs on, and piracy of our intellectual property – the usage data we create as we interact online.

I advocate total self-control and self-management of all our intellectual property, which includes our content and all our usage data – every single click and keystroke – where we decide who uses it and how much we want them to pay us to use it.

We might need to employ newly established agencies to help us manage our valuable intellectual property, but they would be agencies who work for us as individuals and help us control who accesses us with their marketing, who accesses our information, content and data and what price they should pay us to use what we create.

The current paradigm allows piracy offences in orders of magnitude greater than the piracy the general public is accused of perpetrating against the record and movie industries.

Until that changes, along with new citizen-focused laws designed to protect us from such blatant piracy, I suggest keeping as much of your own content as you can on your own hard-drives or servers, under your own protection and control.  Or at least get yourself a great publishing deal!

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/googles-drive-to-dominate-your-digital-life-20120425-1xk41.html#ixzz1t21MjJyp

The Internet is increasingly becoming the predominant place for marketing and public relations (PR) to be conducted.

In the networked world, everything is in the public space, so everything is publicity – good and bad.  The role of Online PR is to maximise positive publicity, minimise negative publicity, create a buzz and set up a business to attract interest from journalists, bloggers and ordinary Internet users.

Here is a great video about Online PR http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOzylUcfUeQ

Online Public Relations (Online PR) activities can involve:

• Blogging
• Activity in discussion boards
• Responding to negative comments and resolving issues
• Digital press releases
• News announcements on your Website
• Utilising online PR news wire services
• Writing articles
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Developing online networks
• Posting information on social media Websites
• Direct contact with journalists and bloggers
• Running competitions
• Initiating discussions and calling for responses to polls, surveys, articles or interviews
• Re-posting links
• Documenting all publicity received as news announcements and links on your Website

Benefits of Online PR:

• 
Generate publicity for your business, on- and off-line
• Build brand awareness
• Build your reputation
• Counteract any negativity about your business
• Increase traffic to your Website
• Establish yourself as an expert in your field
• Grow your business

Online PR is an exciting area of work, because the Web is constantly changing and evolving, with new opportunities and channels opening up all the time.  Traditional PR is still valid, but anyone who ignores or underestimates the value of the new media landscape does so at their own expense.

Do you want to sell something online?  Accept payments from customers and clients?  Operate an online store selling a range of products?  Welcome to the world of eCommerce.

Online shopping is a booming business – just think of eBay, Amazon and the hundreds of sites, big and small, that we all visit or know about.

There is a misconception that setting up an online shop is easy – mostly perpetuated by the companies who want you to use their shopping cart software.  Sure some software is relatively easy to set up, but an eCommerce project is a lot more than just the shopping cart.  Just like a real shop, there are countless considerations:

• Domain name
• Design and branding
• Layout
• Catalogue
• Features
• Currency
• Payment methods
• Payment gateways
• Security
• Hosting
• Choice of software
• Policies surrounding such things as refunds, privacy and delivery
• Suppliers and stock
• Quality control
• Order fulfilment and processing
• Website updating and maintenance
• Customer relationship management
• Marketing the business
• Competitiveness and size of your market
• Overall traffic levels of people searching for your type of product
• Copy writing
• Photography
• Postage and delivery
• And many more aspects too numerous to list.

Cyrius has been responsible for setting up a number of successful online stores, so we know everything that is involved.  To get your online shop up and running, you need to work with a company who can guide you, advise you and manage the entire production process to ensure it is a success.

What we do:

• Full assessment of your needs and goals
• Research your market
• Determine the right solution and budget
• Design the Website
• Produce the Website
• Market the Website
• Provide ongoing consultation on every aspect of the project and your business, to ensure your plans are realised

To get your eCommerce project up and running, or to rescue a project that has run in to trouble because it was not managed professionally from the beginning, contact us.

There is a great campaign every February called "Feb-Fast", encouraging Australians to give up alcohol completely for one month.  Clearly it was inspired by someone who no doubt went a bit overboard during the silly season and thought it best to go into self-imposed rehab for a month.  They can't have been alone in their thinking, because Feb-Fast is now a very successful yearly charity drive. Click here for the Website and see for yourself.  They have celebrity ambassadors, a leader board of fundraisers and plenty of corporate sponsors – not a bad Website either!

I didn't drink too much over the silly season, but I did indulge in facebook way too much!  In my down-time, my facebook up-time was ramped up beyond acceptable levels.  This is partly due to the fact that, well, almost everyone I know is on there, so I thought I could hardly avoid going there if I want to stay in touch.  It is also because I was involved in a few creative projects and so I figured it was the best way to hook up with my collaborators.  I am not so sure now...

Using facebook to network and collaborate is not that efficient.  If you have built up too many ‘friends’, as I have done, you end up with an overwhelming stream of distracting posts ranging from fascinating videos and links to ridiculous images people really should have thought twice about before posting and way too many photos of dinner plates full of food.  On top of all that, there is a constant flow of alerts, not to mention chat requests, responses to old posts I had made and a never ending raft of facebook changes that I end up having to stay informed about.

In the end, the productivity I thought I was getting involved with became about 10% of the total time I was spending on there.

Remember, facebook, although it looks like it was set up for us to use, really exists for the benefit of the owners of the site.  Their policies and how the site develops is primarily driven by how they might maximise profits while not appearing to be pushing their luck with their audience.  This is why there have been so many controversies over the years.  What is good for us may not be good for them and vice versa.  In the end, public opinion might stop them getting carried away, but since they have so much control, they will always win (unless, of course, another site or another platform takes off).

Perhaps by taking a month off facebook, I might spend some time contemplating this.  Where is the Web going?  What is wrong with the way it works and how might it function better and more in line with the public good, rather than for the benefit of a select few?

Besides these grand questions, I just reckon it might be a good idea to give it a rest and find out what life is like without social media for a month.  Who knows what might happen with all that new found spare time?

Well, the fireworks have all exploded, the champagne has stopped flowing and the sun has risen on 2012.  Pope Gregory XIII introduced our calendar in 1582 after making a few allowances for discrepancies around the fact that an Earth year does not divide exactly into a precise number of whole days.  With a few adjustments here and there, the years have been pretty much ticking over like clockwork ever since.

Regardless of the religious and ceremonial significance of various calendar dates, one year more than anything is a complete cycle of seasons, with New Year being near enough to the summer solstice for us southerners.  10 days either way doesn’t seem to stop us from reflecting back on the last 365 days it took to bring us back to where we started, facing the sun in the summer heat, enjoying some time off work, assessing the year that was and looking forward to another one.

2011 was a dynamic and exciting year at Cyrius Media Group.  It was also a year of consolidation, housekeeping and rationalisation, clearing a path for the future.  We had some significant achievements, challenges, hard work and a lot of fun.

Perhaps our two biggest achievements for the year were the launches of both the public Website and internal staff intranet (which they call their InfoNet) for the City of Ryde Council.  The public site was a huge collaborative effort between Council staff in various departments, including IT, Community Life and Records Management, the graphic design team at Spoonful Design (http://www.spoonfuldesign.com.au/), and our own people at Cyrius, particularly our senior Web programmer, Shawn Drew.  Council uses a Document Management System called TRIM, with an attached Web Content Management System called WCM.  XSLT is the language that WCM speaks and Shawn did a magnificent job in adding to his multilingual capabilities.

The Website is a huge part of Council’s communication and information delivery and customer service strategy – not to mention branding, event promotion and community relations – so there was a great deal to be asked of the system.  After much planning on the Council’s part, collaboration with the CMS developer and all the stakeholders, the site launched in June 2011.

Within days of the public Website launching, all hands were on deck to revamp the staff Intranet to the same standard, using the same system.  This project brought in more departments, including communications and customer service.  The InfoNet is an integral part of internal information management and facilitates access to documents and information that staff needs to deliver to the public.  The launch of the InfoNet was planned for the staff ‘Celebrate Success’ day.  We certainly all celebrated success when it went live that day!

2012 begins with the commencement of third in the trilogy – the City of Ryde Councillor Portal.  We are very much looking forward to bringing that in line with the other two city assets.

While all this Council work was being undertaken, we had a few other irons in the fire.  Throughout the year we launched about 6 other Websites and revamped or maintained many more.

The year ahead is certainly charged with both promise and uncertainty as we all participate in the great global experiment called modern civilization, enhanced with the Internet.  As we have seen recently, the Web challenges many nations to reform their politics and it challenges many others to collaborate on solving some of the big problems the world faces as population outstrips resource availability and financial systems feel the strain of having been set up before the world became so switched on.

Cyrius believes that the best thing that we can do is engage both locally and globally.  Global engagement means sharing the best ideas and best practice – ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’, as the TED Conference says – and local engagement means putting those ideas into practice on a level that is achievable.  Cities are the new unit of civilization, as our creative director discovered at the 2011 Asia Pacific Cities Summit in Brisbane.  They are small enough to be quantifiable, flexible enough to be able to adopt innovative solutions and approaches and with more and more of the world’s population living in more and more cities, once an idea is tried and proven in one city, it is easy to implement in every other city.  Sites like www.citymart.com and www.mindmixer.com are just the kind of catalysts for such change.

It’s an exciting time for anyone participating in the process and we are very much looking forward to doing what we can to help push things along.

Happy New Year!!