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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!!

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.