Archive for April, 2009:
Page squatting or Cyber Squatting is becoming popular on the Internet. Likewise cyber squatting of celebrity names, brand names and other public figures in social media is common.
Squatting refers to the act of an individual or group using your name and brand to create a presence on the Internet by utilising FaceBook, Twitter, web pages and any other social media sites.
Cyber squatting has been an issue for organisations since domain names were first introduced to the Internet, with domain names being purchased for minimal amounts and on sold for sometimes for millions of dollars. But more recently Page squatting is becoming popular within Face Book and other social media sites where people with good and malicious intentions are impersonating brands, celebrities and individuals.
Searching for most brand names in FaceBook will yield many results and it is often difficult to differentiate between what is a squatted page and what is a genuine page. The detrimental effects for your business are to many to mention here.
With Face Book currently not taking action on this issue with their preference to leave it to the courts it is up to brand name owners to take action before they are squatted.
Net Mania recommend that your organisation promote your Face Book page on your own web site, within your organisations email signatures and by offering special promotions in your Fan Page.
Thus promoting your legitimate organisation or brand page. Also make your clients and Fan base aware of the squatted page so they do not mistaken it for your Page.
To effectively promote your Face Book Fan Page or other social media site as opposed to using the hard to remember default Face Book address, Net Mania sugest your organisation should use a sub domain from your current domain name. For example Net Mania have implemented a sub domain http://facebook.netmania.co.nz which goes to our Fan page.
The Oceania region accounts for 3.4% of the 200 million FaceBook users and in the Asia region 6.6% of the region use FaceBook.
FaceBook is Australia’s 3rd most visited web site. Google assuming 1st adn 2nd postions. YouTube is 4th most popular site.
While in New Zealand FaceBook is the 6th most popular web site with Google ranked 1st and 2nd, TradeMe 3rd, Yahoo 4th and YouTube 5th. Bebo is ranked 8th most popluar web site.
Information sourced from Alexa.com and Oriely.com
The recession is making companies look at reducing their expenses. Unfortunately over the years there have been many incompetent web companies in New Zealand charging for ineffective services.
Below is a list of some suggestions that will enable you to reduce your costs immediately.
- 1. If you are paying more than $NZ35.00 (ex gst) per annum for your .nz domain or more than $20.00 per annum for your .com you are paying too much.
- If you are paying more than $20.00 per month for Web Hosting you are paying too much.
- If you are paying for a new email address to be added you have the wrong hosting company.
- Do you pay license fees for FTP software. There are plenty of free options such as FileZilla FTP that are equal or better than the commercial equivalents.
- Online advertising campaigns can be costly and inefficient if they are not carefully analysed. Google provide detailed analysis of your campaigns as does FaceBook.com.
- If you are paying your web developer and hourly rate for site modifications you are being taken advantage of.
- If you are paying more than $40 per hour for a web developer – it is time to source a new developer.
- There is no need to spend thousands of dollars on developing and maintaining a new e-commerce web site. There are many free options to create e-commerce web sites. The cost is in customising the site to your organisation
Having a nice and an easy to navigate web site is the first step to being online. You need a way for people to find your web site.
Many companies and individuals claim to be “Search Engine Optimisation” or “SEO” experts. This is usually accompanied by claims that your site will gain top search rankings within days. Sadly many of these so called experts deploy deceptive techniques that will initially gain you traffic or there claims are blatantly false.
The initial traffic is often miss guided web surfers or an act of deceiving search engines to visit your site. Both scenarios are short-term solutions and neither benefit you as the web site owner. The two risks of these tactics is that your site can be blacklisted from search engines and you will be falsely investing money into a web site that is not attracting your target audience.
A certain method to ascertain if your web site has been optimised in a correct manner is to look at your traffic and compare it to the amount of feedback, customer enquiries, sales etc that you receive. If there is a great in balance there may be a SEO issue. A good SEO company will have statistics and analysis immediately available and should already be providing you with at least basic information on a regular basis.
Several other methods to identify inappropriate SEO usage:
(a) The use of words in sentences that may repeat too much to the point that it does not make sense.
(b) Over use of bold text and links to other sites.
(c) Link pages that are not relevant to the original site.
(d) Multiple web site addresses
Many of us travel overseas for work and leisure. For those whom travel overseas for business having Internet access is essential.
As you check for government travel warnings and medical advise etc you should also check to see if the Internet in the country you are visiting has any Internet censorship. You should also do this if you are trying to reach an audience in a different country in a marketing campaign. An example is the US State department has restricted access to LinkedIn.com in Syria.
It is a myth that only a few countires in the world censor the Internet. In fact almost every country in the world has some sort of minor censorship.
http://www.herdict.org is a great site to check for sites that are banned in countires.
For Human Rights activists or if your business needs to access a site in a country that has banned a site then we sugest using https://www.torproject.org/
Conferences and face to face meetings are a great chance to catch up with friends and colleauges whom you have not seen for a long time.
Noramally there are many people taking photos of the conference, firends and group events throughout the meetings. Many memorable moments are often digitally captured and people will upload these pictures to thier FaceBook, MySpace, FlickR etc.
If during the conference there is an agreement to tag photos (in any online service) with a line relevant to your conference this will allow people to easily search and view your photos with out the need to upload two sets pf pictures or use a service that you would not normally use. An example, while writing this i am in Istanbul Turkey at the annual PIR.ORG Advisory Council meeting. We could use the tag line pirAC09.
In a previous post we commented about the importance of registering your organisation and brand names in social media.
This interesting report shows that 67% of popular tech brands are owned by someone else in Twitter.
The statistics show that regardless of the costs and ID theft by organisations when domain names were first introduced, that organisations are still making the same mistakes for the sake of a small investment of time to search and register names.
The time to register names outweighs the risk, time and finances to regain names in socail media.
Although Bebo has experienced 50% growth in the past month from its original 22 million users, Net Mania are urging our New Zealand organisations to be cautious when contemplating using Bebo as a social media service for their organisation.
During the past month Bebo has made significant changes in their appearance and their services.
Last month Bebo redesigned its page layout to be more visually appealing and fresh. It also incorporated Life Stream (a platform that lets users link to their accounts at YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc elsewhere on the Internet). These services are a good service for the New Zealand market, but the potential will grow more and more in the future as New Zealand take up the use of Twitter and other social media tools.
Bebo also incorporated AIM integration. AIM is Americas most popular Instant Messenger application. Currently MSN and Yahoo chat are currently New Zealand’s most popular IM software with Skype increasingly becoming popular with businesses and users who prefer to have an alternative to their mobile and land lines.
AIM users are now automatically taken to their buddies profile in Bebo from their AIM account as opposed to the AIM/AOL web site. Also to update your profile in AIM you are now required to do it in Bebo. Thus generating a lot of new traffic and maybe some new registered users.
Vodafone New Zealand have recently allowed SMS notifications and updates from Bebo. But again the typical user of Vodafone is also a typical user of Bebo.
Utilising Bebo in New Zealand for your social media strategy can be a good idea but it is highly dependent on your target market.
Organisations who scoughed at the fact that Twitter is for kids or not a business tool should consider registering thier organisation and brand names in Twitter. Even if your organisation has no short term plans to utilise the benefits of Twitter.
I am reminded of the mid 1990’s when the Web was new to everyone and these funny things called “domain names” that ended in .com were the new way to find and access information on the web. Organisations and brand owners did not see the potential of domain names and largely were lethargic in their effort to registetr their domain names.
Many of these organisations and indivduals soon ended up paying hefty prices or endured lenghty court cases to gain back domain names or suffered the humiliation of thier competitors registerting prime names.
The increase in registered Twitter users in the past few months has been phenoninal. Also the ever increasing popularity of registering usernames in socialmedia with the intention to monetise in them from the real owners. Not to mention that your competitors are in the same situation as you, now is the time to act and register your names and maybe even use social media.
The New Zealand media reported on our politicians and Twitter. It appears as though someone has created false Twitter accounts of 4 of the Labour Party politicians without the Labour Party or the 4 individuals having any prior knowledge until Prime Minister John Keys mentioned it in Parliament by making a mockery of the Labour Party.
This highlights a need to be more aware of technology and to gain an insight into brand and personal reputation management all services Net Mania offer. Even if as an individual or an organisation you do not use social media or care much about the Internet there is a great amount of people who do use such technologies. Impersonations of public figures and brands is an increasing problem that can be managed with the right solutions. It is also worthy to contemplate interacting more with the public by using such social media.
As a society we are in the new age of customer feedback where customers will Tweet and write blogs about customer service and products that they have purchased. As an organisation your best method is to be aware of such public feedback and use it to your advantage and interact with your customers. This also gives you a chance to turn negative feedback into positive feedback.
If you are a public figure or organisation of good standing, Net Mania is able to assist your online brand management.
