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It’s been a snowy morning here in NYC and in just a few hours, we will celebrate a new year filled with hope for a promising future. Time’s Square will be packed with tourists and locals alike, counting down the minutes in the slushy streets typically bumper to bumper with taxi cabs and impatient drivers. Illuminated by the light of a blue moon, we can take time out to reflect on the past as we plan for a successful 2010 personally, professionally and as a society.

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Although nothing is certain in today’s economy, ecommerce remains a beacon of possibility and profit. Your customers don’t have to leave home to buy your products, and it’s often more cost-effective to host a virtual storefront than a brick-and-mortar one. Ecommerce sites are well positioned in this turbulent time. However, with the economy in flux and competition intensifying now is certainly not the time to become complacent. (more…)

How much impact do your words have? As a writer, I spend an inordinate amount of my time editing and re-editing my copy because I have always divided my writing process into two separate and distinct parts:

Part 1 is the draft copy. In simplest terms, this is when I allow myself to free associate on the topic, and I do so without editing or second-guessing what it is that I am writing. If it comes to mind, it finds itself on my page. While this can be quite liberating it is not a stopping point by any means.

After I have written on the topic at hand, I then put on my editor’s cap, grab my red pen and start hacking away at the copy. I look for tired and common words such as very (very tired, for example, could be overwhelmingly tired or simply exhausted.)

The point here is to give your web site content some serious power by making use of words that are less commonly used and therefore pack a more serious punch, especially from a search engine and marketing standpoint.

Here are 40 words that are guaranteed winners for web site content use:

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Before the Internet we were much more patient people as a whole.

Back then we got bills in the mail at the end of the month, we wrote a check and we mailed it back to the debtor so that they received it before the due date. Now we get those same bills in e-statements through email and then we use online bill pay to pay them on their due date.

If our kids needed information for a school report, we took them to the library after school. If they did what most kids do, their research required several inconvenient trips. Now they can waste the same amount of time sending Instant Messages and changing their top friends on MySpace or Facebook while researching their chosen topic online.

We have instant (or near instant) access to information of all sorts and we can handle a variety of transactions without the inconvenience of even leaving the house, and that convenience has chipped away at the patience of the average person.

While it is true that impatience is the new virtue it is important to draw a distinct line that separates you as the ecommerce business owner and them as the impatient ecommerce web site visitor. In the Internet marketing business, we as entrepreneurs cannot afford the luxury of impatience.

We must practice patience and perseverance in every way. From idea to creation, management to marketing, ecommerce marketing pros know that what sets them apart from the rest is that they carefully plan each and every step and take the time necessary to reevaluate their progress as they go.

Erasing the name Cingular off the face of the earth is no easy job, especially after investing millions to raise high blue bars at every corner. The wireless carrier’s ads were ubiquitous before evaporating in an instant. Well, perhaps AT&T is feeling some remorse for killing off Cingular, so it’s promoting the creation of new names to express the strength of their cellular. Such is the case with New Sanfrankota*, a place somewhere between New York, San Francisco and the Dakotas, or Kantukornia*, where Kansas, Kentucky and California “meet.”

For their new Where Do You Live campaign, AT&T collects your submissions–via a simple and clean Flash interface at www.attwheredoyoulive.com–and quickly makes fun merchandise available for purchase including shirts, mugs, bags, and stickers, all featuring the name of your new place and it’s motto.  Its a fantastic example of 360 degree online branding; you create their promotional items and then pay for the right to display them!

* Click here for specific directions to San Frankota and Kantukornia, some errant traveler in our company might have already visited there.

The most circulated cyber news piece of late revolves around a cracked HD-DVD encryption key being posted on Digg, and the head Diggers’ decision to bury all related posts per a cease and desist order even though the posts did not violate their terms of use. This story has been picked up by Forbes.com, and BBC News, as well as the usual suspects CNET and Slashdot.

On Tuesday, May 1, after being inundated with anti-Digg posts and link backs to the HD DVD hexadecimal code, Digg surrendered to social media democracy and reluctantly gave the power back to the posters by not only ignoring the cease and desist order, but by using said code as the title for a post on the Digg Blog and stating “If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.“

To his credit, Founder Kevin Rose was not left with much of a choice. The Digg community was outraged and the amount of posts received were much more than the Digg crew could handle. The sheer numbers proved to be too much for them to police. Digg conceded; as Kevin Rose writes “But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.” Digg was caught between the proverbial rock (suffering at the hands of the same social community it had fostered), and a hard place (suffer in court by the likes of the AACS, MPAA and others). But this may not be such a bad thing after all. Digg’s situation is just the latest in a crop of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and Copyright infringement stories.

Viacom has a major suit against Google for allowing users on The Daily Show and video clips from MTV. Some observers have said that the YouTube founders, forseeing the impending legalities ahead, sold out before to Google to avoid going to court. Others suggest the impending legalities is exactly why Google snatched up YouTube when it did: As unappetizing as court may sound, if you could afford the court battle and had the chance to set a legal precedence and go down in history (with or without flames) for doing so, wouldnt you?

Although it was not an easy decision to make, Digg has placed itself in that exact position and now has an opportunity to set legal precedence in the ongoing Freedom of Speech/Censorship paradox that constantly plagues internet sites and any mediums that try to be whole heartedly democratic without being served court papers everyday.

Jordan Glogau and I have had quite a few discussions regarding intellectual property before. When it comes to our personal beliefs:

Jordan takes the traditional stance…

“Just because its easy to copy digital Intellectual Property doesn’t make it right. Whether its physical or intellectual, it’s still property and the creators deserve to get paid for their work.”

And I, well…

“We are 3 blocks from Canal St. I just purchased the DVD of a movie that hasn’t been released yet for $5 and this designer knockoff was only 30 bucks. God Bless America!”

One of the main reasons DRM is so hot button right now is because of the quality and ease of new technology.

Jordan adds:

“With a book you first had to actually copy it or typeset it. When copiers came along you still had to stand at a copy machine to make copies and chances were that it was not nearly as good as the original. That’s simply not the case with a digital copy. It’s just as good as the original.”

But when it comes to rights management in the social media space regarding our clients, because we are SEOs, we are very by the book/white hat about things. The worst thing you can do is get a client banned on MySpace because you just HAD to change the unchangable meta data and really, REALLY needed to make javascript work in the profile.

Because the internet is always evolving in such a ‘you aint seen nothin’ yet!‘ manner, sometimes it’s hard to keep up. We here at ECommerce Partners are constantly keeping up with the latest news, trends, programming codes and internet laws as they become available. We would be honored to set a legal precedence in a historic court battle; but we much prefer to serve our clients and offer the best eCommerce solutions and SEO/SEM services available.

The advertising industry is getting more and more excited – when does it get anything else? – about prospects for a big new venue to place ads and get revenue. That’s something to get excited about, of course, if your life is inventing or placing ads.

Among many futurist movies, the Stephen Spielberg / Tom Cruise collaboration “Minority Report” conjured up an entire environment filled with screens of one kind or another – any flat or even curved surface will do – for the purpose of bringing us messages, usually commercial in nature. And sure enough that vision is coming true.

The venue that’s currently enthusing ad-people is what’s being called in the business “place-based television” or “out-of-home networks”. It’s essentially a subdivision of the perennial form of advertising, older than Madison Avenue itself – the “outdoor media” business (billboards and placards, to you and me) – but one which uses all the bells and whistles, not to mention light-emitting diodes where possible, of the digital age. And incidentally, it happens to find itself technically indoors, most of the time.

Ten new ventures in this field are reckoned to be starting every month, with a total of 700 having gotten established since 2002. According to a new report from a Westport, Connecticut-based marketing consultants Profitable Channels these viewing opportunities are fast appearing in stores, in atriums, lobbies, health clubs, coffee shops and the like, and they now account for $1.2 billion of the nation’s advertising expenditure. That puts them, in aggregate, in the same league as a major TV network daypart.

New opportunities for the almost literally captive audience that they can command keep occurring to entrepreneurs. Why not have a screen in the rest-room of a transit station, or in a high-rise elevator, or by the pumps at a gas-station?

Big stores are still the most obvious, and for now the most rewarding site-choices. Outfits like the In-Store Broadcasting Network, Premiere Retail Networks (PRN), and SignStorey represent the fastest growth and greatest potential reach. In-store networks may currently be available only in the country’s top 25 advertising markets, but Profitable Channels estimates they have the potential to reach a massive 93 percent of the U.S. population. This is of course huge – and for advertising analysts it makes the sector that much more attractive than my own frequently voiced enthusiasm – video marketing to mobile devices, which I’ll readily admit will take a long time to be in the hands of 93 per cent of Americans!

Profitable Channels partner, and author of the report, Stephen Diorio also teaches marketing at the George Washington University. He says that his assessments of the size of the out-of-home sector are deliberately pitched conservatively, and that growth may be even faster than he formally estimates:

“It’s a lot like when all the dot.coms were coming out. Anyone with a venue and a good audience is launching something and calling it media.”

But the seriousness of the sector is being attested to elsewhere. Not far from Profitable Channels, another set of analysts PQ Media operating out of Stamford, CT are soon to bring out their own report. So far, says Leo Kivijarv, vice president for research,

“Anecdotally, what we’ve heard is there is a difficulty selling this stuff to advertisers the first time, but once people try digital out-of-home, they are re-upping at a very high rate because they are seeing a stronger ROI.”

And maybe a sure sign of a communications trend that’s unstoppable, the sector now has its own trade association, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau, or OHVAB.

technorati tags: out of home video advertising | ohvab

It’s just not possible to ignore the magnitude of this day when one works a few blocks north of what we used to know as the twin towers and world trade center… and as all inhabitants of downtown Manhattan and the surrounding areas, I continue forward with my life. But I do so on a somber note… it’s not easy having an every day reminder of complete vulnerability. Times are scary… times are sad.

Take the subway or PATH train to the WTC and you’ll see what I mean. This hub used to be completely underground. I could walk multiple city blocks without ever seeing daylight pre-9/11. Today, both the subway and the PATH are completely exposed to daylight. One might ask, “what’s wrong with that, a little daylight in your life?” But all it takes is a quick look around you to see the massive hole in the heart of the city to understand. There’s nothing there. absolutely nothing… I’m supposed to be 5 or 6 stories beneath the streets and sidewalks, yet I see the sky and the clouds.

5 years later, this hole in the ground looks bigger than ever. Granted, some wonderful development has occurred. Mass transit at ground zero has been completely restored, which is amazing. Tower 7 has been rebuilt and is currently at 60% occupancy, which is very encouraging for business and also pretty amazing. And downtown Manhattan is becoming a popular residential location as opposed to a work only location. So things ARE moving ahead…

But I just can’t get over that huge hole in the ground I still see every day. It’s a constant reminder that we are a target. That each and every day I need to be aware of my surroundings on the subway, on the street, everywhere… That each and everyday I wake up, something like this could happen again. If I take a look at the news and believe the popular opinions (or even simply listen to my own instincts), something will happen again… eventually. Life becomes more an issue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when living under such circumstances, which makes one feel virtually helpless. But there is nothing that can be done about that, not in the immediate future anyway.

So if it’s just a matter of time, why stay? To be honest, I don’t know. What I do know is, I’m not leaving… Not for those reasons, no way. It’s not like NYC was a blanket of security to begin with. But in order to fill that massive hole in the ground that haunts us on a daily basis, we need to stay put… build businesses… build life… and help the community move on to bigger and better things.

Therefore, it’s with a heavy heart that I (and we at ECP) send my regards to all affected on that very sad and scary day… As the wound in our island heals and new structures grow from this abyss, the world will begin to see again the true heart of this city, as it once was…

tecnorati tags: september 11 | september 11th | 9/11 | wtc | world trade center | nyc

By turns the ruling giant Google appears disappointing or downright traitorous – at least to believers in the internet as a tool for democracy.

Not content with appearing to kow-tow to Chinese authorities in return for operating within their Communist/Capitalist totalitarianism, and in the US kow-towing also to the FBI in its efforts to track users’ searches (in the interests allegedly of hunting child pornographers) Google this weekend decided to turn over records to the Brazilian government about users of its idiosyncratic service Orkut. This social-networking set of sites in Portuguese quickly found a huge user-base in Brazil. And it’s now, in light of its corporate owners’ collaboration with government, looking very much at risk of losing that valuable base.

Web groups that allegedly encourage racism and homophobia, and other distasteful though not always illegal positions, are known to often use Orkut, as they would since they want to reach a lot of young Brazilians. And The Brazilian government is investigating them. To do so they obviously want records and Google evidently believes, hewing more to local laws and conventions than to anything as business-threatening as its own home-country’s constitutional First Amendment, believes it’s just fine to cooperate.

It does seem, incidentally, that the nasty groups are limited at least to nasty opinions and not acts. But because even their views open them up to possible prosecution under Brazilian law, the government wants their Internet Protocol addresses, e-mail addresses and other personally identifying information that is given whenever anyone signs up for Orkut. Under the not-terribly-onerous throat of being fined up to $23,000 a day, Google agreed to comply.

And in trying to excuse this compliance, Google has opted for some mealymouthed sophistry that’s simply not worthy of the “do no evil” image the service once tried to cultivate.

“What they [the Brazilian authorities] are asking for is not billions of pages”, said Nicole Wong, Google’s associate general counsel. “In most cases, it’s relatively discrete – small and narrow.”

If you’re a Brazilian who’s thrown in the slammer because of posting something offensive on a discussion site, you might just acknowledge that it could be a narrow matter, but not that its small one.

Internet technology being what it is, users are fighting back. New services are mushrooming aimed at foiling official efforts to attach individuals’ identities to their supposedly anonymous Web activities. There have been “anonymizers” for a while now who provide fake IP addresses, and there is one new piece of software called “Track Me Not” that sends search engines nonsensical queries at random, just to confuse any organized probe trying to attempts to analyze users’ data.

“Track Me Not” was developed by New York University associate professor Helen Nissembaum and Daniel Howe, of the NYU Media Research Lab, as a Firefox extension.

“We are disturbed by the idea that search inquiries are systematically monitored and stored by corporations like AOL, Yahoo!, Google, etc. and may even be available to third parties,” they write on a site explaining their software.

The mechanisms may be very high-tech and of the moment – but the principles involved, and the back-and-forth struggle over them, go right back to 1644 and poet John Milton’s robust defense of a free press in “Areopagitica”. For the original true believers in the Web as a democratic engine, the latest Google betrayal may seem more like Milton’s “Paradise Lost”.

I speak to many people each day interested in Ecommerce. Some have existing businesses with supplier relationships. Some have only dreams. I tell each of them the same thing. There is no magic in the Internet. If your idea does not make sense in the real world it won’t make sense on the Internet. You must identify a need and a customer who is willing to pay for it. The Internet can extend your reach and Ecommerce can provide the tools to support and grow your enterprise. Make sure you extend something that people want in the way they want it.

Ecommerce is a very specific subset of the Internet business. There are three things you must do well to succeed at Ecommerce. None of them require technical knowledge and all are readily accessible to a any business owner. Any person thinking of undertaking an Ecommerce venture needs to understand these ideas. If you’re having a conversation with an Ecommerce provider and they can not explain their concepts in simple non technical business terms, Run not walk to the door.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

The first leg of the triangle is getting the customer to know you exist. There any number of traditional marketing routes to reach users. In Ecommerce, we are interested in reaching users who are online. We need to identify people who want to buy what we sell. We need to make them aware of “who we are” and we need to deliver them to our virtual doorstep. We need to do this at the least possible cost per customer.

In Ecommerce we call this Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is making sure you are the top listing when a customer looks for a product or service online. Google and Yahoo have changed the way we look and find things on the Internet. They have developed sophisticated measuring devices to rate the relative merits of providers of information, services and products. Understanding what search terms (Key Words) represent a desire on behalf of the consumer for your product and establishing yourself in the first few natural* listing on the search engines is the difference between success and failure in Ecommerce. We provide this service by managing two crucial elements.

Physical transparency

We build technology that is transparent to the search engines. Transparencies mean we format the physical structure and the information in ways that allow the search engine to understand precisely what our site is about. If your site is not built using correct technologies in correct implementation the search engines will not understand “who you are” and will not rank you appropriately. We are often called upon to replace entire implementations that perform all of the required functions, because the search engines cannot see them. This is expensive and unnecessary. So build your site with the search engines in mind.

External Reference

The second area of SEO is external sites and their direct or indirect reference to your site. If you sell toasters than Google and Yahoo want all the news about toasters to reference you. If a major toaster manufacturer has a list of affiliates your site should be on it. We employ a team of folks who spend their day’s working as publicists for toasters (or your product). It sounds funny but if the Internet is not aware of you from many different point sources you will never achieve a top ranking. So getting the word out on related sites directly influences your ranking in the search engines.

Once you have customers arrive at your doorstep you need to provide two crucial services.

MAKE PURCHASING EASY

The second leg of the golden triangle is about the site itself. The early providers of Internet commerce created an expectation level in consumers. Sites such as Amazon.com and E-bay have defined the way in which customers expect to find products, place orders and follow up on their transactions.

Do Not Re-Invent the Wheel

It is important that you meet base criteria for web transactions. Customers should be able to easily and quickly navigate your products. They should have multiple paths to the same end that fit their individual styles. They should at no point in the process have to deal with a structural surprise. In short, one very important element to establishing credibility is to provide uniform interface capability to your site. No matter how unique your product or service is, your methodology for finding it, getting it into the cart and checking out should not be.

People don’t read

The web is a visual medium. Vast tracks of written detail about your product are worthless. Your presentation must be intuitive and obvious in the first few moments a customer views it. If a five year old cannot navigate your site with ease and procure your service do it over. The end result is that your product needs to be presented in a professional way. Your images need to be high quality. The details of the design need to be clear and concise. Your process needs to be intuitive and obvious and your technology needs to be time tested and solid.

CREATE A RELATIONSHIP

The final leg of the triangle is about everything that happens after the sale. The easiest customer to sell to is one that you already have. The Internet provides a superb low cost method of communicating with your user base. Once a customer buys from you they have already given you several built in options for communications.

Registering them to check on their product will bring them back to the site. Collecting their contact details to make them aware of new offerings is key. Managing and sending those offerings in a way that is going to be perceived as adding value is a complex art that takes time and attention. Having the tools to manage the financial, shipping, and customer follow up are key to making sure your customer has nothing but pleasant thoughts about their interaction with your company. Pleasant thoughts go a huge distance toward return purchases. Without exception successful ECommerce offerings have a high percentage of return customers.

THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE OF ECOMMERCE

• Get the Right Customer to your site
• Make it easy for them to buy from you
• Take care of them after the sale

These simple points require sophisticated tools and commitment. Your ecommerce offering, while related is separate business. When you expand your offering to include ecommerce you need to make sure that the human and financial assets and a partner who can help you make it work.

Good luck and good selling.

* Natural listings are the unpaid listing in Google