The Sizzlin' Chillin' Reality Of American Economy

Just got this in an email forward, and don't know if it's really Mark Faber's quote. Here it goes:

Investment analyst and entrepreneur Dr.Marc Faber concluded his monthly bulletin (June 2008) with the Following:

"The federal government is sending each of us a $600 rebate. If we spend that money at Wal-Mart, the money goes to China. If we spend it on gasoline it goes to the Arabs. If we buy a computer it will go to India. If we purchase fruit and vegetables it will go to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. If we purchase a good car it will go to Germany. If we purchase useless crap it will go to Taiwan and none of it will help the American economy. The only way to keep that money here at home is to spend it on prostitutes and beer, since these are the only products still produced in US. I've been doing my part."

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Google Android Now Completely Open Source And Free!

In a surpise move on the eve of T-mobile's G1 release, Google and the Open Handset Alliance has released the complete Android platform source code as open source. In a release (see here), they have announced the availability of the Android platform source code to everyone, for free, under the new Android Open Source Project.

As they put it here - "Android is not a single piece of hardware; it's a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations." It means if you got the money to build the hardware, you can actually build and launch a mobile phone with the Android software.

As with any open source project, now anyone can contribute to further development of Android - remember how Linux became what it is today!

For downloading Android - go here

For developing Android apps - go here

As the Android team asks, "What will you do with Android?"

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Case Study: Twitter As A Marketing Tool - It Works!

How good is Twitter as a marketing tool? There are many theories for and against, which we'll conveniently miss for this post.

I did a small test by creating a twitter channel for our site selling London Hotels(no names here please). The channel was updated weekly once with a tweet about hottest hotel deals in London with no email or SEO promotions. The traffic(however small) came from within regular twitterers. While it's still early days(less than 2 months), the Google Analytics stats has surprised me with the engagement figures.



Average Time on Site:
Visitors from the Twitter channel spent 20% more time on the site compared to normal visitors.

Bounce Rate:
Bounce rates were 40% less than normal visitors!

Pages/Visit:
Page seen per visit were 79% more than normal visitors to the site.

And, how about conversions or bookings?
As I said, this was just a small test to check how good Twitter is as a marketing channel. What we learnt is Twitter users who came to the site engaged much better than normal visitors from search/referrals. Of course, this is just the first month, we'll wait for higher traffic in the coming months to confirm this finding.

Happy Twittering till then ;-)

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Is Travel Industry Downturn For Real? Here's Some Proof

In Jan 2008 Reuters reported - "Travelport CEO sees no major travel slowdown." Well, nine months down the line, it's turnaround time - the travel industry is feeling the effects of economic downturn. Airlines traffic is down, hotel occupancy has declined and corporates are renegotiating their existing deals.

I wanted to check if Google searches display a similar trend. And, you bet - it does. In fact, you can easily notice the down trend for past 4 years.

Here are some screenshots from Google trends for major travel keywords:

Keyword: travel, tours


Keyword: hotel, hotels


Keyword: holiday, holidays


Keyword: vacation, vacations


Keyword: timeshare


With the internet penetration and the number of Google users growing every year in leaps and bounds, the decline in these keywords displays a trend to take note of. Combine this with the actual booking data - the real picture would emerge. Does anyone know where to find broad industry data on travel bookings?

UPDATE(18/12/2008): Thanks for the comments. As @Anonymous and @art wanted - I found the trend for hotel brand keywords for 3 big names - Hilton, Holiday Inn & Marriot - sadly, it's the same trend. See the screenshot below...



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Airlines Finally Agree To Travel Agents On Transaction Fee

Over the last few months, many high-profile meetings had taken place between Indian travel agents associations (TAAI and TAFI) and the Airlines (Air India, Jet Airways and Kingfisher), on the issue of zero-commission regime set by the airlines. The travel agents had argued that customers wouldn't agree to pay a separate transaction fee resulting in loss for the agent. After the latest round of meeting, the airlines have finally agreed to reflect the Transaction Fee on air tickets.

Both TAAI and TAFI are awaiting feedback from their members on this issue. Only after receiving agreement from both the associations the airlines will implement the same. However, this inclusion will be applicable only from November 1 to December 31, 2009.

According to reports, once implemented, the travel agents would charge a Transaction Fee of Rs 350 per ticket on domestic Economy Class, Rs 500 per ticket on domestic Business Class, Rs 2,500 per Economy Class booklet and Rs 3,500 per Business Class booklet.
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Why Does Matt Cutts Rank On Google Minus Google?

Google Minus Google(GMG) is a new search service, which promises to search with Google (Custom Search) without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube.

It's a relief for people (there are many - 3000 visitors to GMG on Day ONE!) who hate a Google search result page lining up Google properties one after another - as if other sites aren't good enough.



I started with a search for keyword "google" itself ;-) and found no results from Google properties(wow!) - but hey, they ranked Matt Cutts blog! For me and many others in search marketing, Matt Cutts is 'the face' of Google.

So, why shouldn't Google Minus Google cut Matt Cutts as well from their search results. What do you think? Let me know on the poll.

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7 Tips For Cuil To Really Become Google-Killer ...Well Almost ;-)

Much has been written about the over-hyped launch and quick 'trashing to bin' of so-called Google Killer Cuil. What got them all the bad press was their over-hype on their index count and the Google Killer claim which failed to impress anyone.

But, hey life is all about failures and learning. Here are 7 'Killer'(ok, ok I'll grow up from this:) Tips, which can still give Cuil a second chance at their Google-killer claim ...almost:

1. The accordion thing is a good idea to start with - but minus the current un-focused keywords on it. My search for 'london hotels' showed such options to expand as 'Building & Structures in Westminster'. While Westminster is very much part of London, why not focus on the keyword searched. Better options could be 'star hotels in london', 'central london hotels', 'greater london hotels', 'budget london hotels', or 'luxury london hotels' - all of them very closely focused on the searched keyword.



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2. For a search for 'london hotels' why bother showing a result with title highlighting Sydney, Singapore and Hongkong? The image is also unrelated to London by any stretch of imagination.



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3. The page-numbers in blue are almost invisible. Why not put this in same background as on this top horizontal bar?



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4. Again, same as Point 1 above. For your own brand, you should be able to drum-up some good tags like, 'What is Cuil?', 'How to search on Cuil', 'Cuil board of directors', 'What's Cool about Cuil' or some such stuff. Now look at the screenshot I have in here - what a shame!



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5. Having images directly in search result is a good idea, but only when it's directly related to the keyword searched. Now what is image of Sania Mirza doing on a search result on 'Tata'? Couldn't you get any images of Ratan Tata or others? If you can't show related images - just avoid it altogether. Make it sensible.



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6. Please do something about this 'No Results Found' message. C'mon, you are a search engine which claimed to have a bigger index than Google, and you couldn't locate this keyword which is also a domain name for 7 years! Try google for the same search(2,030 results) So, hype is OK, but only as long as you show something to go with your claim.



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7. For a search for a city(bengaluru), what made you show me a furniture store site as the first result? Tweak your algorithms to return better results on such keywords - a wikipedia result on top would have saved your face.



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As we saw above, Cuil goofed up on three fronts:
# They didn't fine-tune their algo to return impressive search results.
# They over-hyped the entire thing as Google-killer
# They forgot that displaying better search results is far more important than the size of index.

Hope Cuil has learnt it's lesson and is back on it's drawing board to make a comeback plan. We ARE waiting ;-)

How To Scare Customers With Your Website Trustseal?

I got an email from Borrell Associates to download their latest report "Say Goodbye to Yellow Pages", which seemed like an interesting topic to read. For the uninitiated, Borrell Associates is a leading research and consulting firm tracking local advertising and releases special reports in this segment.





Now Borrell website has a typical way to take everyone through a shopping cart to even download the free summary. While on this page I just noticed (see screenshot above) a new trustseal from Trustwave and clicked on it out of curiosity. What popped up surprised me - Trustwave says it "does not recognize this organization" - their organization and identity is "Unknown". Scary!





While it was OK with me for a free download, this would have no doubt scared most buyers who would be ready with their credit cards to pay for the (full) report. I wonder how many potetial customers Borrell would've lost.

The lesson to learn here is - Use the trust seal on your shopping site only if is valid and working. If for any reason (like expiry...) the trustseal doesn't recognize your company - just chuck it off from your site. It's always better NOT to show this scary message to paying customers.

Be Part of New Guiness Record-Download Firefox 3.0 Today

Yeah, that's right! YOU can be part of this new Guiness Record. All you need is download Firefox 3.0 today, on June 17th, 2008 to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

Why Firefox 3.0?
Firefox 3.0 comes with exciting new features like, built-in spell checking, session restore and full zoom. With more than 5,000 add-ons, you can customize your browsing like never-before. Firefox 3.0 goes one step further by including phishing and malware protection as well within the browser.

How many others are part of this event?
As on current time close to 1.48 million people worldwide have pledged to help create this record. Hundreds are celebrating the event with Firefox launch parties as well.

Where do I download Firefox 3.0?
Head to the official Firefox 3.0 promotion HQ site created for this record-breaking event. Download Firefox 3.0 today and be part of this Guiness Record event.

Interesting Research Papers on Social Networking

While I was busy going through the exhaustive research papers on 'search' from WWW2008, I missed out to mention some interesting papers on social networking. Here's a brief look at the topics I found on the site (use the link at the bottom to download the PDF) which you might find interesting:

Social Networks: Applications and Infrastructures for Web 2.0

* Why Web 2.0 is Good for Learning and for Research: Principles and Prototypes
* Exploring Social Annotations for Information Retrieval
* Lock-Free Consistency Control for Web 2.0 Applications

Social Networks: Discovery and Evolution of Communities

* Tag-based Social Interest Discovery
* FacetNet: A Framework for Analyzing Communities and Their Evolutions in Dynamic Networks
* Statistical Properties of Community Structure in Large Social and Information Networks

Social Networks: Analysis of Social Networks and Online Interaction Spaces

* Statistical analysis of the social network and discussion threads in Slashdot
* Yes, There is a Correlation - From Social Networks to Personal Behavior on the Web
* Knowledge Sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone Knows Something

Internet Monetization: Recommendation and Security

* Optimal Marketing Strategies over Social Networks
* Trust-based recommendation systems: an axiomatic approach
* Secure or insure? A game-theoretic analysis of information security games

The above research paper PDFs can be found on this page of WWW2008 website. Let me know if you found it as interesting as I did...

The Deep End of Search & Web Research

Last week saw the 2008 edition of the World Wide Web Conference which brings together key researchers, innovators, decision-makers, technologists, businesses, and standards bodies working to shape the Web.

The 2008 conference in Beijing focussed on - how the Web access is moving from the desktop to cell phones and TV screens, and how most users are moving from passive browsing experiences on the Internet to active participation in building Web communities.

What really grabbed my attention on their site is a virtual treasure house of search and web research papers. As someone involved in SEO & social media marketing, I loved the depth of these reports. Beware, this is strictly for the academic-oriented, but anyone with deep interest in web or search would understand the value.

Here are some gems from the site - use the link below if you wanna download the detailed PDFs :

Search: Query Analysis

* Modeling Anchor Text and Classifying Queries to Enhance Web Document Retrieval
* Unsupervised Query Segmentation using Generative Language Models and Wikipedia
* Spatial Variation in Search Engine Queries

Data Mining: Log Analysis

* Query-Sets: Using Implicit Feedback and Query Patterns to Organize Web Documents
* Mining the Search Trails of Surfing Crowds: Identifying Relevant Websites From User Activity
* Using the Wisdom of the Crowds for Keyword Generation

Internet Monetization: Online advertising

* Externalities in Online Advertising
* A combinatorial allocation mechanism with penalties for banner advertising
* Dynamic Cost-Per-Action Mechanisms and Applications to Online Advertising

Search: Ranking and Retrieval Enhancement

* Ranking Refinement and Its Application to Information Retrieval
* Learning to Rank Relational Objects and Its Application to Web Search
* Contextual Advertising by Combining Relevance with Click Feedback

Rich Media

* Generating Diverse and Representative Image Search Results for Landmarks
* PageRank for Image Search
* Graph Theoretical Framework for Simultaneously Integrating Visual and Textual Features for Efficient Web Image Clustering
* Flickr Tag Recommendation based on Collective Knowledge

Search: Applications

* Automatic Online News Issue Construction in Web Environment
* Finding the Right Facts in the Crowd: Factoid Question Answering over Social Media
* Personalized Interactive Faceted Search

Each of the above topic has been covered in details reports on PDF which can be downloaded from this page on the www2008 website. Apart from the above, there are many more research papers which are more technical than I can handle ;-)

The Lonely Planet Expose: What a Shame!

I felt like kicking Thomas Kohnstamm after reading about him admitting on Guardian that he did not always visit the places he reviewed on Lonely Planet.

His book 'Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?' talks about writing his 'experiences' in Columbia without actually visiting the country. He admitted using tourism brochures, net and other local contacts for his 'research' and then put it all together "as best you can from there". What a shame!

One way it's good to see him admitting to this blunder, but then, one wonders why people (including me!) spent all that money on many of those 'authoritative' travel guides from the 'Lonely Planet'. Is that the way all those guides are written? Shouldn't I ask them for a refund?

3 Steps To Cut Click Fraud Losses On Your PPC Campaign

Just noticed this interesting site about click fraud. Their latest report says that average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. And, In Q4 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from India (4.3 percent) Germany (3.9 percent) and South Korea (3.7 percent).

Interestingly, their click-fraud high threat heat map shows the entire world in medium to high threat area(!). The only exceptions are countries/regions in Australia and parts of Africa. Probably no one knows about internet in those areas:)

So, how do they tackle the click-fraud problem?
Click Forensics claims to have some 4000 members who have come together to create a Click Fraud Network(sounds like they would be committing click frauds :) shouldn't this be prefixed with Anti-?) Click Forensics would do the back-end work for these advertisers for a cost.

This is a high potential market, which is clear from the fact that Click Forensics has closed $10 million Series B funding round this week. That's big money when you think of the hapless PPC advertisers who are sweating to save their money draining out through click frauds.

The fact remains that, to cut losses through click-frauds you don't need to join anywhere. I can suggest PPC advertisers 2 simple steps which can help them cut losses immediately -

Step 1: Stop PPC advertising on the MFA (Made for AdSense) sites immediately - unless your site gets good/any value out of this. If you have been running PPC ads for some time, you can easily find out that content network shows you the biggest click-throughs but fails miserably at conversions. Why? these clicks are mostly coming through MFA sites which do not add any value to your business. (See more on this below)

Step 2: Start using Geo-targeting - Whatever your business may be, chances are, majority of your target customer would be from a particular geographical region. Then, why not geo-target your PPC ads? Just select the geographical regions you want the ad to be shown in and let Google take it over from there.

Step 3: What if my ads are still shown and clicked outside the geo-target?
You can always claim those back from Google as it would be counted as an 'invalid click'. Google is very pro-active in refunding for genuine cases.

What if my target market itself is in high-threat click fraud zone?
Well, God save you :) In this case you must stop content network altogether or spend some time blocking your ads from MFA sites. Actually not all sites are bad, but it takes time to weed out the bad ones. You'd save quite a lot.

What are the signs of a high-threat click-fraud MFA site?
Look for these signs before pressing 'escape':
- 3 ad units on every/most pages
- use of big rectangle ad unit on every/most pages
- 2 or more ad units above the fold
- pages show more ad units than content

Google or Yahoo would not tell this because they don't want to upset(see related story) their Publisher Networks, which bring in the moolah for them. Any more ideas on this? Let me know ~

How Do Top Social Networks Rank Across Continents?

I have often wondered if it's possible to actually develop more business contacts through social networks with better precision and speed than I currently do. The criteria here is - more contacts, better targeting, and faster results.

I came across this cool graphic chart on this french site which uses Datamonitor ranks for the top social networking sites across different continents. What's interesting here is NOT the rank itself , but the very important thing we normally miss while signing up with every second social network - And, that's "where do I want to develop my network?"

Even though Facebook is among the top social network, if I want to develop my business contacts/ social network in Asia - it's not the best option! In fact, Facebook is NOT even in the top 5 social networks in Asia by usage. The chart shows me that Friendster or Orkut would offer much more traffic and users in Asia. Similarly, if I'm looking at Europe or North America, my first stop must be Bebo and Myspace. That was cool to know!

See how Datamonitor ranked the social networking sites across continents:

North America:

1. Myspace
2. Facebook
3. Bebo
4. GaiaOnline
5. Nexopia
   

Latin America:

1. Orkut
2. Hi5
3. MetroFlog
4. Myspace
5. LiveSpaces
   

Asia Pacific:

1. Friendster
2. Cyworld
3. Orkut
4. Mixi
5. Myspace
   

Europe:

1. Bebo
2. Myspace
3. Skyblog
4. Facebook
5. Netlog
   

Africa:

1. Facebook
2. Hi5
3. Netlog
4. Yonja
5. Skyblog
   

Now this is the kind of information which one can use and get targeted growth in contacts at much faster rate than blindly going with the top social network. Go forth and multiply your contacts where you really want to!