Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
Future Target Market: Women
March 24th, 2008
adminIn 2008, 100.4 million females and 93.5 million males will go online at least once a month, according to eMarketer’s latest estimates. In 2012 females will outnumber males online by more than 8 million.
One reason for the difference is that there are more females than males in the
US Census Bureau. In fact, teenage girls are the driving force behind increased female Internet usage in the
In 2008, 68% of all females ages 3+ and 65% of males 3+ will go online at least once a month.
Online Advertising continues to grow
March 19th, 2008
admineMarketer predicts that, despite the economic rough patch, US online advertising will continue to grow through 2008. Online ad spending will rise by 23%.
Yet even that reduced rate of growth will continue to top total media ad spending, maintaining online advertising’s position as the fastest-growing media in terms of ad spending.
“Several elements unique to the Internet will support continued
“The greater ability to measure ads online will likely encourage marketers with reduced budgets,” Mr. Hallerman said. “Those same marketers are finding that the audiences they need to target are spending more of their media time on the Web.”
Search will account for the largest portion of online ad spending in 2008, at 40%. That percentage will decrease slightly through 2012, when it will account for 37.3% of
Conversely, spending on rich media and video advertising is set to grow as a percentage of online ad spending, rising to 18.5% in 2012 from 10.2% in 2008.
eMarketer predicts that total US advertising spending will grow by 3.3% in 2008.
Advertising Age recently reported that other analysts have also predicted total media ad growth.
Speaking at the American Association of Advertising Agencies‘ Media Conference and Trade Show, Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani said US ad spending would increase 4% in 2008, up from an estimated 3.3% in 2007.
Ms. Quadrani said that, despite fears about the economy, marketers still have reason to spend on advertising.
“Many marketers face an extremely competitive landscape with products that aren’t very different from those of rivals. They also have raised prices and need to advertise to get consumers to continue to buy their goods.”
Get your documents remotely
January 21st, 2008
adminI came accross this information at msn.
To use Google’s software — among the most popular — follow these steps on both your work and home PC. First, you’ll need to set up a Google account on both machines by visiting Google.com/accounts. (Be sure to use the same account on both computers.) Then go to Desktop.Google.com to download the search software. When it’s up and running — again, do this on both machines — click on Desktop Preferences, then Google Account Features. From there, check the box next to Search Across Computers. After that point, any document you open on either machine will be copied to Google’s servers — and will be searchable from either machine.
Getting hold of your company’s internal documents could give others insight into your plans, and losing certain information could have legal repercussions. In particular, myriad state laws regulate how a company has to react when it loses private information about customers or employees; most require notifying those people about the breach in writing. Sending those notifications can be costly for your company — not to mention damaging to its reputation.
On top of that threat, researchers have found vulnerabilities in Google’s desktop-search software that could let a hacker trick a user into giving up access to files, says Schmugar of McAfee. (Those vulnerabilities have since been fixed, but more could crop up, he says.)
Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, says that there are bound to be vulnerabilities in any software and that, to the best of his knowledge, none of the Google Desktop vulnerabilities were exploited by hackers. He adds that when Google finds out about a vulnerability, it quickly fixes it and notifies users.
How to Stay Safe: If you have any files on your work PC that shouldn’t be made public, ask your IT administrator to help you set up Google Desktop to avoid accidental leaks.
An alternative to this is to store your work files online.
How to store work files online
The Problem: Desktop search aside, most people who often work away from the office have come up with their own solution to getting access to work files. They save them on a disk or a portable device and then plug it into a home computer. Or they store the files on the company network, then access the network remotely. But portable devices can be cumbersome, and company-network connections can be slow and unreliable.
The Trick: Use an online-storage service from the likes of Box.net Inc., Streamload Inc. or AOL-owned Xdrive. (Box.net also offers its service inside the social-networking site Facebook.) Most offer some free storage, from one to five gigabytes, and charge a few dollars a month for premium packages with extra space. Another guerrilla storage solution is to e-mail files to your private, Web-based e-mail account, such as Gmail or Hotmail.
The Risk: A bad guy could steal your password for one of these sites and quickly grab copies of your company’s sensitive files.
How to Stay Safe: When you’re thinking about storing a file online, ask yourself if it would be OK for that file to be splashed all over the Internet or sent to the CEO of your company’s top rival. If so, go for it. If not, don’t.
More Online Holiday Sales
October 30th, 2007
adminYes, I know it seems early, but the December holiday season is just around the corner. If you’re an online retailer, it’s time to start preparing your site and marketing for increased holiday sales. Here are ten tips to get you started.
Plan to add a touch of holiday spirit to your site. By this I mean one or two graphic elements - enough to remind shoppers that your site is a good place for gifts, but not so much that the graphics detract from usability.
If you use affiliate partners to sell your products, provide them with holiday themed banners and buttons. These can link directly to one of your special holiday promotions.
Do you offer gift certificates? If not, see if you can. Although they can be issued online, many people prefer to give a physical certificate presented in a special envelope.
Do you offer gift wishlists? Many people shop for themselves and give their loved ones suggestions.Make it easy for them to do it on your site.
Categorize your products to make shopping for gifts easier. Use titles like “For Her,” “For Him,” “Gifts under $50,” “Holiday Specials,” etc.
Communicate well with customers, both on your site, and through e-mail. Many will need reassurance that their gifts will arrive on time. Others are apprehensive about the entire online experience. Be especially clear about shipping times, fees, and return policies.
Consider investing in additional advertising and promotion. It’s easy to buy and manage Google Adwords.
Do you publish an e-mail newsletter? Get an issue out at least 5 weeks before the December holidays to encourage your existing customers to shop with you. This is a great tool for promoting special holiday gift offers as well.
Gift wrapping and gift receipts (that don’t show a price) are thoughtful features to add. This makes it easier for buyers to have gifts shipped directly to recipients - good for last minute shoppers.
Fine-tune and test your site.
How a small winery found Internet fame
October 3rd, 2007
MatthewHow do you get your product noticed in a sea of look-alike competitors? If you’re South African winery Stormhoek, you go Web 2.0, with blogging, viral marketing, and crowdsourcing.
"A wine company shouldn’t be like a country club," says U.K. marketer and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who created a wildly successful word-of-blog campaign for Stormhoek wines. "It should have the same attitude as a small Web startup."
Two years ago the Wellington-based winery hired MacLeod to promote its products on his blog Gapingvoid.com, where he publishes advertising and technology commentaries and stream-of-consciousness cartoons.CEO Jason Korman had seen the blog and thought targeting MacLeod’s readers, many of them tech geeks, would be a natural: They shared the same single-minded passion as wine enthusiasts. As Stormhoek’s representative, MacLeod offered a free bottle to any blogger who asked — as long as he or she was of legal drinking age and had been blogging at least three months.
Recipients didn’t have to mention the wine, but many of them did; nearly 100 bloggers posted related items or comments in just six months. MacLeod then used his blog to organize more than 100 "geek dinners" in Britain, France, Spain, and the United States — gatherings of tech workers and influential bloggers who were plied with Stormhoek wine. A recent dinner in San Francisco, for instance, attracted local technorati like former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) and RSS pioneer Dave Winer (Scripting News). While the blogosphere’s reviews of Stormhoek have been mostly good ("drinkable" and "pleasant," with the odd "disappointment"), MacLeod’s results have been amazing. Stormhoek sales have jumped nearly sixfold, from 50,000 cases a year worldwide to almost 300,000. The winery expects to sell a million cases annually within three years.
"The online work has fundamentally changed our business," says Stormhoek’s Korman. "It gives us real-time feedback and lets us talk about things that are relevant to us, our industry, and our customers." The campaign has also been remarkably cheap. For about $40,000 over two years, the company has created the kind of buzz others spend millions to generate. The trade journal Ad Age named the Stormhoek strategy one of the top 50 marketing campaigns in 2006.
The buzz has spread beyond the tech community. Supermarkets and wine stores, including U.K. supermarket giant Tesco, are giving valuable shelf space to Stormhoek wines. That’s no small feat, with thousands of competing wineries hawking pretty good products for about $10.
"We walk in and have a different story," MacLeod says. "We’re doing cool stuff with Web 2.0 people. It got us above the clutter."
Of course, Stormhoek is only as good as its last bottle. No amount of conversational marketing will sell bad wine.
Two Buck Chuck takes a bite out of Napa
October 3rd, 2007
MatthewI came across this article in business 2.0 and had to post it.
There’s a war on bluster, and Fred Franzia is losing. Sure, the CEO of Bronco Wine, the nation’s fourth-largest wine company, tells me repeatedly that only a sucker would pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine - including his own $35 Domaine Napa. And that Napa’s and Bordeaux’s claims about their special soils are bogus: “We can grow on asphalt. Terroir don’t mean sh*t.” After relieving himself by the side of his Jeep, Franzia recounts a trip to Burgundy where, after an elaborate tasting, he told the winemaker at Château Haut-Brion, “You can bottle gasoline if you can sell that.”
Franzia, who rose to fame several years ago when he started selling a $2 bottle called Charles Shaw, calls winemakers “bozos in a glass.” He really goes off on wine critic Robert Parker, who, he says, likes tannic wines that make people gag. He mocks my college (”We buy wineries from guys from Stanford who go bankrupt. Some real dumb-asses from there”), my religion (”A Jew who eats ribs? You impress me”), and my job (”Business 2.0? Hell no, I’ve never heard of it”).
When I ask him about the community service he did after pleading guilty in 1993 to conspiracy to defraud (he sold 5,000 tons of cheap grapes by mislabeling them and sprinkling zinfandel leaves on top), he says of the mentoring of single mothers he was ordered to do: “I picked up on young girls.”
But Franzia gets soft real quick. As he drives his Jeep around the vineyards at Bronco’s headquarters in Ceres, Calif., a tiny Central Valley town outside Modesto, Franzia admits he’d much rather buy out of bankruptcy court than directly from my hurting fellow alumni, since “it’s less emotional.”
He keeps stopping the car to look at grape plants like a puttering gardener. He shows me the land where he plans to build his house, complete with a bowling alley for his granddaughter. Looking up at a hawk flying high over his fields, he wonders whether it doesn’t have a better life than we do. He tells me he has trouble sleeping. I find, on the passenger side of his Jeep, an Enya CD, which he claims one of his many girlfriends left there. I deeply consider giving him a hug.
But losing the war on bluster isn’t a big deal, since it’s only one of many wars Franzia is fighting. In fact, he’s waging war on everything: gophers, ants, competitors, restaurant chains, stores, the state, the Supreme Court. It’s not just his favorite phrase, it’s the way he thinks about business. He says it so much, to so many people, that when I talk to his ranch manager, Junior Robles, he starts telling me about the war on weeds.
There’s even a war against the guy who rents the portable potties for the field workers: When the guy raised his prices, Franzia went for his sword and shield; he’s buying his own portable johns now. “To you, that’s a sh*tter,” he says, pointing to a blue kiosk. “To me, it’s a profit center. It’s a sh*tter war. You got to have a war at all times.”
But Franzia’s main war - the one he’s kicking ass at - is against pretentiousness. Bronco, which he owns with his brother Joe and cousin John, has (including vineyard partnerships) 3,000 employees and does an estimated $250 million in annual sales of mostly low-cost wines such as Estrella, Forest Glen, ForestVille, Montpellier, and Silver Ridge. It also gets income from providing distribution, bottling, and juice to other wineries.
In 2002, Franzia persuaded Trader Joe’s to sell a low-end label called Charles Shaw (after the winemaker who sold the tony label to Franzia, and dubbed Two Buck Chuck by consumers) that waged war on domestic wines in the $4 to $10 range - and was named best chardonnay in a blind taste test at July’s California State Fair over far pricier competition. The label is one of America’s fastest-growing, selling 5 million cases per year, all through one chain of stores.
“There’s not a doubt in my mind that the two biggest things that have happened to the wine industry in the last 10 years are the movie Sideways and Two Buck Chuck,” says Gary Vaynerchuk, who reviews wines on his popular video blog, Winelibrarytv.com. “Has Two Buck Chuck hurt some $8 to $15 brands? Yes. But it’s helped the industry overall by bringing in new people. What Franzia is doing, more than creating outrageous quality, is exposing a lot of mediocre people. There are so many fools in the wine industry who are overpriced. Look at Franciscan, Simi, Kendall Jackson. Those guys are jokers.”
Much like the Australian powerhouse Yellowtail, Franzia built Two Buck Chuck by buying extensive vineyard property in a cheap area - in his case, the San Joaquin Valley. He bought 35,000 acres stretching from Sacramento to Santa Barbara, the largest acreage of any wine company in the state, to which he’s adding three square miles each year. Then he added staggering amounts of bulk wine he scooped up nearly free from other vineyards during the glut that followed the wine boom of the late 1990s.
Once the surplus dried up, everyone thought Charles Shaw would follow. But Franzia has turned it into a sustainable brand, and one that - like Yellowtail or Budweiser - tastes the same every year. That’s partly due to his partner and cousin, John, who blends the wine, and partly due to the huge palette of flavors he gets by trading grapes and growing so many of his own. The vintage year printed on the label, Franzia admits, is irrelevant.
Though Franzia is stymied in his next plan to massively change the wine world - by getting restaurants to reduce their enormous markup - he thinks he’s on the verge of pushing prices down everywhere else. He’s close to getting Wal-Mart to sell one of his labels for $2 a bottle, and he’s just started selling a $6 cabernet with grapes from Sonoma’s Alexander Valley that he claims he bought from a winery that sells its bottles for $75.
He has four vintages and enough wine for more than 100,000 cases of the brand, which he’s calling Alexander & Fitch. He hopes people will see “Alexander Valley” on his label and wonder why they have to pay $20 for other wines from the region. And while he refuses to say this brand is any better than Charles Shaw, when he hands me the bottle, he pauses and says, “Don’t just smoke cigars and drink it. Drink it at a great location.”
Hating pretentiousness isn’t just a business plan. It’s Franzia’s entire identity. His office is a wood-paneled trailer with carpet holes repaired with duct tape that looks like it might house the night manager of a troubled dude ranch. He uses his cell phone only in his car, and he has no computer; his assistant prints out his e-mail messages in the morning, and he handwrites his responses on them.
He’s worked in the wine industry his entire life, but he calls the grapes “varieties” instead of “varietals.” For a while, he has me convinced that he’s planted some weird grape I’ve never heard of called “moh-ver-dee,” until I realize he’s talking about the Rhône varietal mourvêdre. Driving by a guy selling fruit along the side of the road in the hot sun might fill some with pity, but Franzia looks on with pride. He pokes me with a thick finger and says, “That’s a real businessman.”
Before Mail-Order try online
October 2nd, 2007
adminStarting a catalog business is not a project for the faint of heart, says Mark Lee, a veteran catalog marketer who recently began consulting. In his experience, most successful catalog startups are offshoots of established retail or Internet businesses. “At the moment, I am working with a true, from-scratch startup client, but I believe they will have spent more than $1 million by the time their first catalogs arrive in homes. The principals have years of experience in the catalog and Internet industries and have solid capital behind them,” says Lee, of Mark Lee Group, based in Charlottesville, Va
Microsoft Takes on YouTube & Apple TV
September 30th, 2007
MatthewIf Internet-based video is the wave of the future, many of us are already drenched with options including such as YouTube, Joost and Apple’s iTunes. But today, Microsoft is making a play to have its own video download service added to the mix.
During his keynote speech at the DigitalLife show here in New York, Microsoft executive Joe Belfiore will pitch Microsoft’s new, free streaming video service, called Internet TV.
Going into beta on Sept. 28, Microsoft’s Internet TV service will enable users to stream content from MSN Video. It will also offer more than 100 hours of additional, ad-supported content, including television shows like "Arrested Development," full-length music concerts, movie trailers, news from MSNBC and sports from FOX Sports.
YuMe, a broadband video advertising network, is handling the ad delivery for Microsoft.
Microsoft Internet TV is designed for both the TV and PC screen, the company said in a statement. The service’s video is optimized for broadband, and will be compatible with Microsoft and third-party "media extenders" devices for Windows Media Center.
These devices — a new crop of which Belfiore will highlight during the show — wirelessly connect a TV with a PC, delivering TV, PVR, movies, pictures, music and online services to any television set in a home. The products support connections to PCs running Windows Media Center in Windows Vista and generally, Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Media extenders to date include the Xbox 360 console as well as third-party products by a number of networking and storage companies. At the show, Microsoft is expected to showcase new media extenders from Cisco’s Linksys unit, D-Link, and Hewlett-Packard, which all unveiled their products today.
Belfiore said in a statement that the devices are "designed to deliver the ultimate entertainment experience to every TV set in your home."
Microsoft has long been supportive of efforts to extend Internet-based multimedia throughout the home. The company’s chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates last publicly touted extender devices in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
It’s also a hot category for other major players in the PC space. Apple Inc. announced its own $299 PC-to-TV device, Apple TV, only a few months before.
Apple’s offering is designed to let consumers play their movie and TV downloads on the living room TV, and is compatible with the company’s iTunes download service. In May, Apple partnered with Google’s YouTube video streaming service to provide additional, specially formatted content for the device.
When Apple launched Apple TV last year, Phil Leigh, analyst with Inside Digital Media, said at the time that such products answered a consumer desire to not just download Internet video, but to watch in on their televisions.
Today, however, Leigh described the Microsoft effort as, "an incremental step in the right direction, I don’t see it as much more than that."
Yet a number of Microsoft partners are still banking that consumers’ desire remains for watching streaming video on their TVs.
Linksys today announced two Media Center Extender products — one with a DVD player, and one without — for estimated street prices of $349.99 and $299.99, respectively.
From D-Link comes the DSM-750 MediaLounge HD Media Center Extender, which supports HD video resolutions of up to 1080i and Windows Media Video (WMV), DivX, and XVid formats. It includes a USB 2.0 port for access to music, photos and videos on removable Flash drives or external hard drives. It’s estimated price is also $349.99.
The HP MediaSmart LCD HDTV — a television with built-in Media Center Extender capability and 802.11n wireless — will be available in Best Buy stores for an as-of-yet undetermined price.
7 Keys to motivation
September 25th, 2007
Matthew
1. Assign a major goal, but follow a path.
Break down a major goal into a path of smaller goals. As you achieve these smaller, more manageable goals, you will be naturally advancing along the path to your major goal. 2. Always finish what you start.
A half finished task is of no use to anyone. Quitting is a natural habit. You need to develop the habit of finishing self-assigned tasks. 3. Learn how to learn.
We all have the ability to learn without instruction. When you learn the art of self-education, you will create opportunity to find success beyond your wildest dreams. 4. Socialize with others of similar interest.
Mutual support is motivating. You will develop the attitudes of the people closest to you. If they are losers, its more than likely you will be a loser. If they are winners, you will be a winner. 5. Harmonize your natural talent with interest that motivate you.
Natural talent creates motivation, motivation creates persistence and persistence gets the task completed. 6. Increase your knowledge of subjects that inspire you.
The more you know about a subject, the more you want to learn about it. A self- propelled upward spiral starts to develop. 7. Take Risks.
Failure and bouncing back are elements of motivation. Failure is a learning tool. No one on this earth has ever succeeded at anythinh worth while without failing first.
First Impressions
September 7th, 2007
MatthewWithin the first three seconds of a new encounter, you are evaluated… even if it is just a glance.
People appraise your visual and behavioral appearance from head to toe. They observe your demeanor, mannerisms, and body language and even assess your grooming and accessories – watch, handbag, briefcase. Within only three seconds, you make an indelible impression. You may intrigue some and disenchant others.
This first impression process occurs in every new situation. Within the first few seconds, people pass judgment on you – looking for common surface clues. Once the first impression is made, it is virtually irreversible.
The process works like this:
It is human nature to constantly make these appraisals, in business and social environments.