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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.

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.

Here is a link to an article which gives 10 ways to boost your online reputation.  We advise just these kinds of strategies to our clients, especially the ones with a specific goal to build their reputation.

http://mashable.com/2011/02/16/become-online-influencer/

It takes time, but if you plant enough of the right kind of seeds, you will generate the desired effect, especially if you are operating in a niche market.

Welcome back to work everyone!  We hope you had a great time over the silly season and the typically laid-back and relaxing January that follows.  Some people only managed a few days off, before getting stuck straight back into things in early January (usually tying up those pesky pre-Christmas loose ends).  The Australian tradition has always been that the year doesn’t really officially begin until we have all had a big barbecue on Australia Day!

So here we are, February 2011.  How are those New Year's resolutions holding up?  What about the big plans and schemes you hope to unfold as the year rolls out?  If you live in Queensland or Victoria, many of those plans might have been literally washed away – or perhaps the floods and other extreme weather have inspired you to commit even more strongly to your stated goals and ambitions, despite the setbacks.

Are you ready to start 2011?  Any projects in mind?  New Website?  Revamp the old Website?  Marketing your business in a new way?  Whatever you have in mind, start early... because you know things always take longer than you expect.  Have you put a plan together?  A to-do list, or mind-map?  What about considering the resources you might need, both in terms of budgets and materials, but also time and support from associates and suppliers?  From our experience, it is highly likely that you might be in need of a little support from someone who might have been on the journey that you are planning on embarking on.  We can help you sort out all your plans and ideas and start getting it into gear.

Here at Cyrius, we had a very interesting year last year, in our little Web design world, here in Sydney.  We took on some exciting and challenging projects, new clients and even managed to completely re-design and re-launch our own Website.  2011 looks to be the year where all that ground work last year might well have been preparing us for take-off.  We also scaled back in a few areas to make ourselves more flight-ready, allowing a few projects to be passed on to some of our associates, so that we could really concentrate on the ones we are passionate about.  Perhaps this is what you are planning on doing.  De-cluttering and simplifying, so you can really focus on what you want to do.  What better time to do this than right now, freshly into a new year and full of motivation!

Here's to the year ahead!

By Stefan Sojka

The meteoric rise of Facebook into the frontal lobes of the Internet may have killed the whole concept of Website design.  It is interesting to note how much more popular FaceBook has become than MySpace, when MySpace promised so much more flexibility with design and customisation of your MySpace page.

FaceBook's Web design is essentially as plain and boring as you can get, yet nobody seems to mind or complain.  Why?

My guess is that it is because most people are not Website designers.  If you give them the tools to customise their Web page design, chances are they will make it look horrible.  Flashing stars, fireworks and clashing primary colours abound on MySpace Web page designs.  FaceBook's approach is to focus exclusively on the content; text, images, links and actions all done within the same boring desiign framework.

From a social networking point of view, this makes a lot of sense.  It keeps Facebook clean and user-friendly and basically prevents anyone from ruining it.  But do we really want an Internet with no design?  Of course not.  That's like saying all movies should be video versions of stage plays, or all food ought to fulfill basic nutritional needs and that's all.  Design is a fundamental faculty of human experience and evolution.

One must keep something in mind when it comes to Facebook's design/brand – it is Facebook's, not the members'.  They own the site, they profit from it – it suits them to have it the way it is and it works for them.  If they ever change it, it will be because they believe it will be more profitable to do so, not because they they think it will be cool to have more design flexibility for their users.  If they keep it, it will be for the exact same reason – it is more profitable to keep it that way.

Even though Facebook might be huge right now, it is not the entire Internet.  It is not the answer to all the world's problems.  It doesn't fulfill every human need.  It is a Website where people can post content, designed to maximise profits for Facebook.

The rest of the world, the non-Facebook world – you know; businesses, community organisations, individuals, social networks, associations and Websites – still exist, still have a future and are still quietly working away on their missions, goals and objectives.  Those objectives are most likely very different from Facebook's.  They may be to make the world a better place, not to rule the world.  They may be to make just enough money to have a good life, not to become the richest man in history.  They may be to have just enough members that each member feels an equal part of the entity, not just one of a billion 'users' feeding a marketing machine.  For them, design might still play a very important role.  Specialist Websites, special interest groups, small businesses, international organisations and media outlets all continue to require appropriately and artistically designed Websites.  Sure, they may all end up posting their links on the bland mass social media outlets, but they are links to the rest of the Web – the exciting, organic, ever-changing Internet, where ideas abound and new paradigms are created on a daily basis.  Facebook has killed Website design at Facebook, but click on any link that anyone posts on their news feed and you will discover a Web that is alive and well.

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.