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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.

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.

Here are a few quick tips to get your social media happening.

Customise your Account
Sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook all provide some level of control for users to customise their pages.  Make use of all available features, such as background image, avatar, colour scheme, titles & descriptions, applications, etc., to ensure you are optimising the service's features and branding it as much as possible.

Link your Accounts
Most social media sites allow you to link your various accounts to each other in various ways.  So, for example, you can post comments on Facebook and they will instantly appear on your Twitter account.  The more connected your accounts are, the easier they are to manage and the less work you need to do. 

Keep in mind, however, that different social media sites have different formats and often different types of audiences, so don't rely exclusively on linked accounts.  Make sure you take the time to work each account separately and treat your audience according to the format and style of your presence.  Twitter, for example, has limited space in which to post, while Facebook is more flexible. Simply posting all your Tweets on Facebook is not going to cut it.  Assess the appropriateness of each post according to its relevance and suitability for the medium. Linking accounts is great for quick posts for cool links, quick one liners or alerting people to a new video you just posted, but not so good for ongoing conversations and contextual topics.     

Follow & Friend Popular Opinion Leaders who Complement your Business
This must be done carefully and sparingly, but you can build personal relationships with highly influential people by engaging them in conversation, commenting on their posts and joining their other followers in conversation.  If you can build strong ties, then you will get a flow-on effect to your own account and increase the possibility of influential people mentioning you, raising your profile and credibility.

Use YouTube More
People often forget about just how powerful YouTube is, with so much hype surrounding Twitter & Facebook these days.  YouTube is owned by Google and as such, has a very strong presence in search results as well as using Google's searching and indexing algorithms to rank and filter YouTube videos and channels.  YouTube is highly evolved as a service with many fantastic features, such as 'Insights' with valuable real stats to measure the success of your strategies.  YouTube has many networking tools, like subscribers, tagging, linking and friends, to build a vibrant community around your content.  On top of all of this, YouTube is an easy way to embed videos on your Website and for others to do the same.

Be Consistent and Keep it Interesting
This can be challenging, but is the essential ingredient to any successful social media strategy.  You need to develop a habit of posting regularly and developing your style and content as much as possible.  Experiment with what generates a response.  Telling people what you are having for dinner is probably not going to work as well as asking a relevant and interesting, or controversial question about your topic of interest or your particular industry.

Formulate a Strategy
Don't just do random posts here and there – turn your social media activity into a formalised and disciplined business activity.  Set aside time or hire someone on a regular basis, to manage your social media assets.  Keep track of all your logins and passwords, diarise upcoming milestone dates to run specific campaigns leading up to an event, launch or sale.  Determine which key words you might like to use to enhance your search engine ranking, then use those words in your posts and on your own Website.  If you want to use social media for your business, you need to treat it as a business activity... BUT

Don't Try To Sell Too Hard
Social media is great for business, but it is social media.  No one likes spammers, annoying salesmen and shameless self-promoters.  While it is acceptable to post promotions and advertising on your own company channel, it is not so cool to go around posting comments on everyone else's channels to check out your Webpage and buy your stuff.  Social media is about one-on-one relationships, so you need to focus on building those, rather than thinking it is some kind of free-for-all advertising medium.  The businesses who build trust, share knowledge, help people and make friends online can do very well indeed.

Monitor and Analyse Your Strategy
There are many tools available, including Google Analytics, TweetStats and countless other free and paid services to track your accounts.  Treat your social media like any other marketing strategy, that needs to be measured, costed and valued to see if it is worth it for the ROI.  The more information you can gather, the more efficient and targeted you can become as you see what activities and sites drive the most traffic and sales, what key words and phrases are getting you great traffic and how your strategy is trending and evolving over time.

Don't Forget Your Website
Social media can be all you need to build your business, but your Website is the ultimate location for your customers.  There is no point getting people all excited about your business on Facebook, then losing them all when they hit your Website and find something that is not professional or up-to-date.  Websites drive traffic to social media, with 'Like' buttons and Google's '+1' too.  You don't own or fully control social media sites, but you do have full control over your own Website.  Make sure you maintain a site that is rich with information, including your social media feeds, and clearly communicates your expertise, professionalism and how much you care for your customers.

Social Media can play a significant role in your business activities these days.  Taking it seriously and engaging with a professional and considered approach will ensure that you make the most of the networking opportunities that abound.

An article from the New York Times about the experiences of JC Penny and their rather embarrassing foray into questionable Search Engine Optimisation practices.

It highlights the rather contradictory issues surrounding Google, including how their search engine works, how their Pay-Per-Click adverts and client relationships create a grey area for organic SEO and make you wonder in general about Google's overall quality and survivability in a world where everyone is desperate to be number 1.  Spamming Google is obviously bad, but somehow if you are paying for it, filling the Internet with adverts is somehow acceptable.

Quality content is what it should be all about, but with bottomless pockets, what is to prevent the links we follow being controlled almost exclusively by big business and cosy relationships between them and the Search Engine giants?

Go to the New York Times article...

Your comments are most welcome.

By Stefan Sojka

There is often a grey area surrounding computer programming as to who owns the rights to any intellectual property involved.  Before you enter into any Web development project, make sure you and the Web developer are very clear about the rights surrounding the project.

Some programming is provided with a limited single-use licence, since the code itself is owned by the programmers or the company the programmer works for.  Some programming may be owned by you, if you enter into the development under that arrangement – that you will have complete ownership and full rights to the code and any intellectual property.

Sometimes it becomes a legal and ethical minefield, because, while you may own the rights to the business process you are asking a programmer to develop, you may still not own their code.  This makes it very difficult if you want to take your business elsewhere.

Don't forget also that any Website or computer application depends on a whole range of third party software to run, such as server software, operating system, security software, firewalls and many other products.  Almost always your application will be dependent on all these tools to operate and you will be leasing, sub-leasing them or perhaps taking advantage of open source products.  Either way, you will not be in full control nor have full ownership of the entire ecosystem of products and services that you will be depending on.  Much like you might own a car but depend on roads, traffic lights and street signs to get around, owning or using a computer program puts you inside a much larger infrastructure that you can't always control, much as you would like to think you can.

In all matters of this nature, we recommend consulting a lawyer before taking any action.  As part of our digital media and technical consulting process, we can provide you with the range of considerations you need to be aware of.

Internet copyright law is still very much an evolving topic, so it is very helpful to have an experienced company working with you to highlight any issues that could potentially arise.

By Stefan Sojka

While it is common knowledge that many people use overseas companies to take on programming jobs, due to the lower wages and costs, what they often forget are the issues that may arise:

• Communication barriers may exist, not just with language, but with time zones and different business practices or standards
• Sometimes a local ‘agent’ might take on a job, then outsource it overseas without the client knowing or having much say in it.  Then, when the project hits a stumbling block, things can get very difficult, even to the point of the agent losing control and the project failing completely
• It can be difficult to deal with any disputes or legal issues, since the outsourced company may operate under different national laws.  The channels of resolution that we are very fortunate to have in Australia may not be available
• It can happen that the overseas company may quote very low to get a job and then introduce all kinds of additional costs as the project unfolds, once they know you are powerless to take the project elsewhere
• Projects can be developed with proprietary code that you don’t own and can’t take elsewhere, so you are stuck with the development company no matter how badly the project turns out
• It might be difficult to get even the basic specifications of the job right, if you are not able to meet with the programming team in person to work it all out.

If you are considering outsourcing overseas, keep the above points in mind.  In the end it might be cheaper to pay higher local rates in order to guarantee that the job is done right first time, with peace of mind, the security of knowing you can deal directly with the company involved and the protection of our strong local laws, regulations and insurance.

If you want to take advantage of the many benefits of outsourcing programming overseas, it is often advisable to go through a local contact or company with an overseas office where the work is done.  This way you may pay a bit of a premium to cover the local costs of managing the project, but because you are engaging a local company, you will have more protection for fair trading, a local person to deal with and the extra confidence of working with a company that you have a better chance of assessing and determining their credibility and credentials.  Just be sure to do your homework before getting started.

It can work out very well indeed, so long as you are prepared and aware of the risks.