As business has rapidly adapted to capitalize on the infinite potential of the global marketplace, software as a service has grown from a luxury to a necessity. These aren’t platitudes, these are entrepreneurial truisms. Running a small or medium sized business today is more competitive than ever, and to maximize their market potential companies have to overcome time and geography. Online components of storefronts can often times comprise as much of a company’s cash flow as their physical space itself. And the potential they offer far surpasses the physical storefront.

Take John for example. John runs a second hand store specializing in , instruments, sporting goods, game consoles, cameras etc. He has a lot of stock so he starts posting these items on EBay. Increasingly, he finds that people are contacting him to ship some of these things across Canada or abroad through that platform. The market potential of 30,000,000 other Canadian or 300,000,000 American consumers means his potential for sales has gone from the local maximum of say 2,000,000 to an astounding 330,000,000. Of course, his market share of that potential will only be fractions but a fraction of two million is far less than a fraction of three-hundred and thirty million. Let’s say 1% of people potentially want something John is selling. And John, wanting as much control over his business as possible, starts maximizing the ecommerce potential of this own website- EBay doesn’t take a cut anymore, the middleman is eliminated. He is selling direct to a vastly larger market now.

1% of his immediate geographical market (a city or region of about 2 million residents) is 20,000 people  1% of his national market (Canada) is 300,000 people, and 1% of John’s U.S. and Canadian Market (which thanks to progressive trade laws is relatively harmonized) stands at 3,300,000 people. That’s just 1% of the population looking for the products he offers. If we consider the online component of his business could reach a global population then his potential 1% market is 60 million customers. Even a fraction of that, let’s say .5% of the population equals his potential market size (1 out of every 200 people), this means 30 million customers could potentially want one of the items he is selling. John has gone from 1% of his local market population = 20,000 potential sales to .5% of a global population = 30,000,000 potential sales.

The importance of having an online component to your company, no matter what it might be, CAN’T be under-emphasized.  John’s example might be elementary, very simplified and idealized, but it demonstrates how anyone not engaging potential customers online  denies themselves the opportunity to reach exponentially more consumers and thus increase their income dramatically. It doesn’t take vast amounts of capital and labor, it doesn’t take years and years of strategy and patience. It takes a relationship with a service provider who understands the online marketplace, and who can help you create the ecommerce solutions that you need to reach your potential.

There is value in every corner and crack of your company. Products, services, information, even opinion, are commodities with value. Look at your business, look at what you offer and what you can offer online. If you aren’t offering something online, you should be.

For more information about ecommerce and how it can help your company reach its potential contact Thirdi.

Online marketing can sometimes seem like casting a fishing line into a deep lake. You feel you have the right bait, the right line and rod, the boat seems to be in a good position, but what lies deep beneath? Companies like Thirdi help you to see what’s in the lake, who’s nibbling on your tackle and tugging on your line, and where all the good catches are.

Let’s continue with the fishing analogy. Just like in fishing you might drop the line down into a school of fish, but if you don’t have the right bait they won’t go for it. Conversely, if you drop the right bait down for the kind of fish you want but it’s nowhere near enough to them you won’t catch anything either…maybe a boot. And just like you can feel nibbles on your line, clicks act in the same way. It may seem like a lot of people are seeing your ad, but nibbles don’t catch fish, and clicks don’t mean you’ve made customers. So how do we interpret click statistics and consumer behavior online?

If a lot of traffic is coming through your site via an ad then you know that it’s doing its job as far as getting eyes on your site. However, we have to look deeper than that. These numbers tell us a lot, but they don’t tell the whole story. When you buy ad space from another site make sure you are able to get the analytics too. Find out how long people are looking at the ad if it’s a pop up- if it’s one second it usually counts as a click to your ad space provider even if users closed the pop up right away. As far as the provider is concerned, someone saw your ad and that’s the name of the game.

Quality clicks are what you are looking for unless you just want to generate blind, rapid site traffic. Many sites do this, and generate impressive ad revenue from it. But if you own an actual product or service and want to connect with a consumer base you need more than ads, you need content. Potential customers need to be engaged. Attention spans have shrunk and we don’t notice traditional ad media anymore- not to the extent that we used to. Even banner click through rates have been declining. Being able to advertise without people knowing that they’re being advertised to is the trick today. Some may find this underhanded, but in the marketing biz it’s seen more as subtlety. Social media has created new terms of engagement that have helped consumers and companies connect in a more fluid and continuous manner, sticking has begun to replace clicking. This is really where understanding consumer behavior online happens, in the dialogue played out in words and actions online. But for a small business it’s hard to imagine the kind of social media presence that a major company with a large consumer base enjoys (or is conversely beholden too as Forrester researchers often stress) There are some basic and simple things that you can do though, to better understand how your web marketing is working.

Find out who is looking at your ads and who is looking at your site, not individual names and addresses and such, but where they are, how long they are staying, where they are going on your site, what they may be looking for if you can discern it. “How are these people behaving?” is the key question, not “how much are they clicking?” .

If you are able to understand these and other things you’ll see that the water is in fact clear, and not deep and dark as it may have looked before. And you’ll know where to put your line and what to put on it a whole lot easier than when you were when fishing in the dark.

Thirdi

Christmas is a great time to score a bunch of sweet presents, down some nog and eat your weight in turkey and stuffing. Oh, and to visit family too, if you’re into that kind of thing. But if you spend any time online, and I bet you do, it’s also a good time of year to be cautious justifiably paranoid. Why? Because online scammers are out in force, like a little army of cyber-grinches. And they want to ruin your Christmas.

A couple weeks ago, the cyber-security whiz-kids at McAfee released their very seasonally-titled article “The 12 Scams of Christmas”. It details a number of ways (twelve in all, I’m pretty sure) that all those bad Santas out there use the good cheer of the holiday season to scam people online. And, given the increasing amounts of money spent online at this time of year on eCommerce and charitable giving, it’s inevitable that a lot of scammers will make a lot of money using tricks like these:

• Charitable Phishing Scams – Phishers send emails pretending to be from the various charities that are especially active during the holiday season. Feeling generous, you follow a link in the email to donate cash, and the phishers take your money and spend it on things other than hospitals in the third world.
• Fake “Luxury” Jewelery – They warn that a lot of those spam emails advertising Rolex watches for fifty bucks are actually scams. Surprising, I know.
• Auction Site Fraud – McAfee warns that a lot of fake auction sites are set up in the weeks preceding Christmas. They recommend you use a known site like eBay. Though, as you’re about to read, using eBay doesn’t exactly protect you 100% either.

So yeah, watch out for that stuff. But of course, there’s plenty of other stuff to worry about at this time of year too. Apparently data and identity theft enjoys its own Christmas rush too. As online shoppers increasingly turn to eCommerce, they become increasingly exposed to unscrupulous vendors and advertisers looking to pilfer their credit card details, and any other info they can get their hands on.

Now, all these warnings always raise a question for me – do any of these scams actually work? Are the scammers actually able to make more money doing this stuff than by, say, getting a job? Well, have you heard about “The Man”? He’s an English con-man who headed an international syndicate dedicated to selling counterfeit goods on eBay. He was just caught, and as the authorities unravelled his enterprise, they learned that the made enough money to buy 10 luxury houses in Thailand, a restaurant in Australia, and part equity in a multi-million dollar yacht. And what were the goods he was counterfeiting? Golf clubs. He’d have the clubs made in China at a couple bucks a pop, then slap a fake Taylor-Made or Calloway logo on them, and sell them online for more than a hundred bucks each. And he made millions.

So the lesson here is, don’t believe anthing anyone tells you online ever, don’t buy a Rolex off a link you received in a spam email, and don’t let your dad look too closely at that new 9-iron you bought him for Christmas.

The world used to be simpler. There was the brick n’ mortar world, and there was the internet-y world. But with the passage of time, everything’s getting all mixed up. Here are three products and services that in some way blend the two worlds in ways that both useful, and confusing for someone of advancing years, such as myself or your Dad. And yes, they’re all available for purchase in time for the upcoming holiday season.

TweetBookz – Tweets, by design, are meant to be ephemeral and short-lived. You see a funny picture, think up a witty pun, or have an interesting bowel movement, and you tap out a quick 140 character post about it. It gets sent out to your friends and associates and is quickly read and forgotten. Or so we all thought. But TweetBookz take this uniquely online world and give it a permanent, paper-y presence on your coffee table. Or, more likely, in a dusty box in your attic. The idea is simple: you pick 200 of your very best tweets and this company turns them into a book, with one tweet per page. For the sake of veracity, you’re not allowed to go in and edit your tweets after the fact to make them more awesome. And you’re also not allowed to borrow any from some funnier, smarter or sexier Twitter user. It’s gotta be all you. So if I were to create a TweetBook myself, it would consist of 200 identical pages, each saying: “Got up, did some writing, watched reruns of The Office. Tty tomorrow!”  They cost around $25.50 for the hard-cover edition. And you have to go hard-cover, because this will be something you’ll want to read and re-read for decades to come.

Amazon’s Instant Video Streaming with DVD Purchase – What’s the crappiest part of buying  a DVD from an online retailer, instead of down at Best Buy? That’s right, it’s the infernal waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Well, the wait is over. Now when you purchase certain hard-copy DVDs from Amazon, you get instant access to a streaming version of the movie. It’s only available to US purchasers at the moment, and only for about 300 TV shows and movies. And, for now, it’s only for a limited time. But if it’s popular, you’d have to think they’ll roll this feature out on a much bigger level. The best thing about this is that you can buy DVDs as gifts for people, and still get to watch it yourself via the streaming version.

VeriFone’s iPhone Credit Card Payment System – So you’re selling some vintage Scobby Doo collectibles to a guy who saw your Craigslist ad. You meet him (somewhere public and well-lit, I hope) and he doesn’t have any cash. No problem. Just swipe his credit card through this little iPhone gizmo, and his money will instantly be yours to enjoy. It brings the joy and convience of ecommerce to the brick and mortar world of, well, wherever you happen to be. To operate this, you have to pay a monthly subscription fee, so it’s really only meant for relatively high-volume sellers, like delivery pizza parlors, door-to-door salespersons and prostitutes. But if there’s anyone like that on your holiday shopping list, you know what to buy them.

The Cluetrain Manifesto turned 10 this year. For those of you who missed it in 1999, I suggest you get yourself acquainted with its principles – it is far more relevant today than it was when it was published. The manifesto was a statement of 95 theses that would define the future of commerce. While some companies have moved closer to accepting these theses as their new reality, most are still living in the old world of commerce (and are doing so at their own peril).

The first point in the Cluetrain Manifesto encompasses all of the others. It is so important you should read it over and over again until it truly sinks in.

Markets Are Conversations

Note that it doesn’t say “markets will become conversations” or “markets should be conversations”. They always were, and always will be. Whether it is in the form of an Indian bazaar or an Amazon web server, every transaction is a conversation between buyer and seller. Mass Media has served to obscure this fact over the last few hundred years, but consumers have always found ways to coordinate themselves. Whether it is with the Better Business Bureau, or coworkers at the water-cooler, customers will always try and coordinate themselves to make decisions in a market.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in the time before blogs were called “blogs”, when a Face Book was printed and given to college freshmen, and when Google was an unheard-of research project from Stanford. Today, online markets look far more conversational than they did then. Remember: the dominant model for eCommerce in the ’90s was the catalogue. The catalogue itself was born in a time before the telephone, where transactions had to be completed by mail and products took months to arrive. The catalogue model is useless in a world where communication is dirt cheap and instantaneous.

Today, we are getting closer to a world that accepts the ubiquity (and cheapness) of communication, but we are not there yet. Companies have figured out how to harness some of these new tools to talk more directly with consumers. You can see this in the thousands of brands who maintain active Twitter accounts, or keep honest and open company blogs. You can see this in the live chat feature that you can open up on popular retailer’s websites, or the GetSatisfaction forums that streamline customer service. Corporations have found their voice on the web, but I would argue that consumers are actually further behind.

The modern consumer still does not know how much power they wield in 2009. They have had tastes of it: like when American Airlines created the Airline Passenger’s Bill Of Rights because of a campaign from one irate passenger, or when Facebook had to reverse an unpopular change to their terms of service. It is just hard to understand that this kind of collective action will soon be the norm.

We are only at the beginning of this shift. Doc Searls, one of the authors of the manifesto, has spent the last ten years working on a framework to understand these new empowered consumers. It is called Vendor Relationship Management, and it is worth taking a look at. VRM is the inverse of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). It is how purchasing decisions are made when the balance of power shifts in the customers favour. Instead of companies dividing markets by demographics, or geography, consumers will divide providers based on what they can offer. Don’t like the terms of your cell phone plan? Send out a request for proposals to other cell-phone companies and let them compete for your business.

The key to understanding this new world is that customers are no longer alone. Prior to the Internet, there was no reliable way for an ordinary person to complain to an audience of thousands without going through a gatekeeper. Reporters had to be wooed, editors had to consent, advertisers had to be consulted, before a story could be published to the masses. Now, anyone can access thousands of people through just 2 degrees of separation in their Facebook network. Anyone can be a threat to a brand. That means that everyone has more power.

In this new world of amplified word of mouth, companies must learn to listen better than they have been. Customers can be more of an asset, or a threat, than ever before. What they cannot be is ignored. It is too easy for them to join together, now. The communication is too fast. The organization is too easy. The power is too cheap.

Remember, markets are conversations. Conversations are not monologues. If you can’t give your customers what they are looking for, they will join together and find someone who can.

Check in tomorrow for some interesting software that can help you coordinate this listening. Even better: shoot us an email, or give us a call, and tell us about your market’s communication problems. We certainly know how to listen…and we might just be able to help.

Less than a year ago, YouTube announced an aggressive plan to start making money by distributing paid content (as reported here on Senses). That hasn’t quite happened yet, though they have spent the last year starting to experiment with a number of money-making tactics, like pre-roll ads, and working with Vevo, the music industry’s video site.

But now it seems the eCommerce portion of YouTube’s plan to actually make money is finally close to fruition. Google, which owns YouTube, is in talks with TV networks and studios to begin streaming full episodes of TV shows. And, just like iTunes, they plan to charge users for the shows.

Reportedly, YouTube wants to charge $1.99 per episode. It’s much the same business model as that used by both iTunes and Amazon. Though there is a difference. The competitors offer episodes as downloads, while YouTube will only be providing streaming access to the shows.

According to YouTube, they’re confident they’ll be able to arrange some kind of deal amenable to themselves, the TV networks and studios, and end users. YouTube, it would seem, is banking on their strong brand, incredibly high traffic, and the fact that people already come to the site, in droves, in order to watch videos. Whether that’s enough to convince consumers to pay a similar premium for streamed content, versus downloadable media, remains to be seen.

Web trackers ComScore recently predicted that $900 million in sales could be spent online today (Cyber Monday), when retailers offer steep discounts and free shipping on their sites. That big number follows an 11% surge this recent Black Friday ($595 million in sales) making this first holiday shopping season after the great economic meltdown of 2008/09 somewhat of a success. I’m going to go one step further and say on behalf of Thirdi and the Senses team that $1 billion could be spent today when all is said and done, because why the hell not? Doesn’t that sound more impressive?

Ecommerce has truly emerged as an increasingly important engine of consumer spending these past few years, and improvements in shopping cart software, website design, and online marketing through social media and other avenues continues to push ecommerce to the forefront of consumer behavior.

Some believe that the next step will be an integration of social media and TV, but there’s been a counterpoint to that claim (by an un-named source close to this Senses blogger who is developing a social media TV platform- apparently it’s tricky!) I think it’s obvious that it will be tough to do the social TV thing because being social and paying attention to Gossip Girl at the same time can be very difficult, as Gossip Girl can be very intense.  So intense that I am commonly silenced and banished from the living room when it is on. So next Christmas shopping season will you be watching the classic Christmas cartoons and ordering things off e-bay during commercials? Probably not, but as the start to this holiday shopping season has shown, the game is changing. TV will obviously have to adapt, as retailers have now discovered. Social media marketing has been a great success as Black Friday sales attest to, and online sales have risen dramatically this Cyber Monday thanks to the evolution of ecommerce.

I love being introduced to new companies, especially innovative ones with good and original ideas. There’s  something about start-ups and newer companies that are gaining momentum that makes me really excited. Just recently I posted about Lendingclub.com who may be the closest thing we’ve seen to a profit generating social media business model. I also looked at another company called InTouch, who are revolutionizing the fitness industry through a cloud based sales and marketing platform that supplements and supports human capital with digital sales and marketing activities that engages clients while  keeping management well appraised of all sales and marketing activities, in real time.  It’s been a good month, because on top of those first two impressive companies I was just made aware of another company with an innovative online service that I think might completely change e-commerce.

GoEyeball is an online shopping service that saves shoppers time and money by searching for any item as specified by the user based on a price threshold and other particulars. Shoppers make their own eyeballs on the site to find the products they want to keep an eye on, name the price they want to find it at (or a close approximation) and then the eyeball does the rest. Currently the technology is used most on major shopping sites that are compatible with the software but it is being further developed so that the scope and range of the eyeball will increase to include the entire internet; finding you the best price on earth for the product you want.  And you don’t have to do a thing, GoEyeball will e-mail you and alert you instantly when your eye has found the product you want for the price you want. Just in time for the festive season and right in the middle of swine flu season your customized eyeball can do your Christmas shopping for you, everything from kids toys to real estate listings.

I’m pretty stoked that I don’t have to risk  swine flu or debit card fraud on Robson Street now.

Can you hear it? A strange maniacal and giddy laughter faintly travels on the wind. I can hear it loud and clear from my office here in Vancouver…it sounds really close. Shhhh. It sounds like it’s coming from Washington State…yes, close to Seattle. Wait, I know that twisted giddy laugh…it’s Microsoft!

A few weeks earlier here in Senses Land we mentioned how Rupert Murdoch had basically lost his mind and was considering banning Google from accessing his many newspaper’s websites- like the blood sucking freeloading leeches they are. I mean really, don’t these guys at Google have any mid 20th century business-sense? Offering a free service that directs millions of people to Rupert Murdoch’s various newspapers and websites without asking anything in return. I mean come on! Where do they get off? It should be a crime to offer such a convenient service that millions of people use. To think that people would do that rather than walk outside in the freezing cold snow or pouring rain to the nearest newspaper stand and buy a physical copy of The Wall Street Journal or sit at home waiting for something interesting and newsworthy to be “reported” on by Fox News is just shocking. And Rupert Murdoch has been shocked long enough! Here’s the plan:

Murdoch blocks Google so that millions of people can no longer see his newspaper articles through that engine, meanwhile he convinces everyone to start using Microsoft’s search engine Bing; clearly it will be the superior search engine now based on the fact that it is the only one where you can get the twisted right-winged drivel produced by Fox News and other Murdoch owned companies. So if you want what the rest of the world considers news you can still use Google and if you want what Rupert Murdoch considers to be news you can use Bing- oh and you can gall dang paying for it too (Or Microsoft can). The details of how that all works will be worked out between Microsoft and News Corp, who I predict will soon become known as News Corpse, as this kind of backwards logic will surely kill this company. Microsoft paying huge sums of money for exclusive access to what many believe is the most slanted and biased news in the world is also, in my opinion, not good for their brand or their pocket book.

I’m not the only one who thinks News Corpse is doomed. The founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, recently spoke about Murdoch’s plans at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) in London England. To use the main sound bytes, Stone said it was a “vain attempt to put the genie back in the bottle” and that it would “fail fast“. When considering how rapidly the technology and software that powers the internet changes, one can clearly see that putting a “paywall” around your content and burying it inside a search engine with a 10% market share is akin to going cyber-Amish. (Yes I am coining that term, you heard it here first. Rupert Murdoch has officially gone cyber-Amish)

That hasn’t stopped the giddy laughter from Redmond Washington though, as Microsoft has been looking for any way possible to chip away at Google’s market share of the online search industry. I’m not sure if making your search engine the only one where users can pay to get right-winged conservative news from an old man who hates the internet is the best way to go about it though.

And so begins Murdoch’s exodus into the online wilderness, welcomed and aided by another global opportunist; it will likely end poorly for the both. They have officially begun to work against the forces of internet-nature and because of this will surely be covered over by the jungle or swept away by the tide. This story is beginning to read like a Greek tragedy, where two heroes are destroyed by their own greed, ego and ambition. Blinded by their own arrogance and sense of invincibility they feel beyond censure of the gods and nature. (in this case Google and internet users)

What a swan song this will be for Rupert Murdoch.

So much attention has been paid lately to protecting consumers online that many have begun to complain that we are beginning to stifle e-commerce with regulations. New European e-commerce regulations passed to assist online business on that continent have been criticized for  being counterproductive. Shocking isn’t it? Can you imagine a major government bureaucracy doing anything counterproductive to businesses? Recent internet legislation in the US put forth by John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and and Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, aims at bureaucratizing the entire internet within a federally mandated internet security office. To quote Rockefeller  and the Washington post: “People say this is a military or intelligence concern, but it’s a lot more than that,” Rockefeller, a former intelligence committee chairman, said in an interview. “It suddenly gets into the realm of traffic lights and rail networks and water and electricity.” So the internet has now become as essential as the roads, rails and wires we’ve built from coast to coast and the government intends to defend it as such with their full capabilities. But let’s step back for a moment and discuss consumer safety in the “real world” because the government has been largely unable to protect the consumer there as well. Though many are concerned about cyber- security and ecommerce safety , and rightfully so, there is a current outrage in Vancouver BC over a debit terminal fraud that has emptied the bank accounts of thousands of lower mainland residents.

The problem is widespread and consumers have been angered at the lack of transparency concerning the locations where cards were compromised. Unfortunately for those who have been scammed this is  the protocol for dealing with these kinds of bank card frauds. It’s considered the responsibility of the bank, not the government, to protect consumer’s who use the hardware that’s been compromised- but the criminal investigation relies on confidentiality.

Though the security of bank cards and their pin numbers have been the responsibility of the banks themselves, the Canadian government has taken the lead on  identity theft.  While banks maintain responsibility for cards and pins the government is responsible for those who use them. The passing of Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code means that it’s now a criminal offense to obtain and possess identity information with the intent to use the information deceptively, dishonestly or fraudulently in the commission of a crime. It is also a criminal offense to transfer or sell information to another person without considering the possible criminal uses of that information and to unlawfully possess or traffick in government-issued identity documents that contain another person’s information. These steps effectively neuter identity theft operations before they’re able to gain momentum and do some serious damage, or at least that’s the hope.

In finding a balance between the freedom of business and the paternalism of bureaucracy we can create the systems we need to allow for flexible and secure ecommerce. But judging by what we see going on in the physical realm we need to have a co-operative approach. Government and institutions can only do so much- we as consumers need to be vigilant and cautious. Scammers will continue to find new and creative ways to completely screw us over and the more we let them do it (by letting our guard down)  the easier it is for bureaucracies to come tilting at windmills, for better or worse, with legislation and regulation. Suffocating us, and the internet, with their love.