Competitive intelligence

This deliberation would be incomplete, without sharing with you a quote which is the essence of this entire discussion. “If you are ignorant of both your enemy and yourself, then you are a fool and certain to be defeated in every battle. In you know yourself, but not your enemy, for every battle won, you will suffer a loss. If you know your enemy a

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Google accused of ad fraud over AdWords on parked domains

After a lawyer spent a hundred bucks on Google ads that appeared on parked domains and error sites (and generated no conversions for him), he decided to sue the company for fraudulent advertising and to seek class-action status.

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Is Google Biased????

Google's double standard........ The two face GIANT............The story is usual until now and had been sung a thousands times. However I witnessed something (only by accident) that contradicted this widely believed notion. “A temporary glitch” I thought. .......

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The Missing Human Touch

Is human intervention essential in every aspect of search technology, or for that matter is it possible? There are plenty of legitimate reasons for editing the search results manually. Out of billions of web pages resident on the World Wide Web, many contain malicious codes and viruses which could potentially harm users who accidentally happen to visit it via search engines. Some content are in gross violation of intellectual property rights and/or are illegal in nature. The list of websites that fit this category is limitless. It is the legal and moral responsibility of search engines to remove such content and thus safeguard the users against potential harm.

Amit Singhal, in his introduction to Google ranking (don't get all that excited as Google is not going to give away its trade secret) said “In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms.” The statement clearly reflects that policing the content available on the web is not the sole responsibility of search engines, it is a collective responsibility. He went on to further say that “The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.”

However Google is not adverse to manually altering the search results in cases were it is legally and morally obliged to do so. “I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc),” a statement that clearly reverberates Google's stand on this issue. Stay tuned to catch the latest from Google.

Customer is king

Having discussed the essentials of client servicing, I though it would be a good idea to take the discussion forward and discuss the importance of client servicing. Considering a hypothetical situation of all things being equal, why is that some organizations flourish while others perish. Numerous researches have shown time and again that customer service is of paramount importance, and should be integral to any business. Business innovation, concepts, strategies and trends are susceptible to fluctuation, but the one thing that always has and will always be constant is customer service. An organization working toward its commitment to meet and exceed customer expectations would emerge as a clear winner.

The visionaries place customers at the core of their organization's business process. Customer service is critical for success in any business. If a business is to outperform competition, it will have to attract and retain customers. It is proven that the greatest profits result from customer retention, loyalty and repurchase rather than new customer acquisition.

Customers are very sensitive about differences in functionals and emotional benefits attached to a product or service. A recent survey showed that 70% of the customers walked out of business alliance, not because of price or quality issues, but because they were not content with the human side of doing business with that vendor. A fact finding attempt at your end would definitely substantiate the findings of the survey.

No organization, whether big or small, is impervious to the effects of poor customer service. The real danger lies in it becoming a habit rather than a rare instance. Competition will be quick to sniff your weakness, improve upon and gain business at your expense. Tom Peters, a renowned author, in his book 'In the Pursuit of Wow' , accentuates the need for continuous use of heuristic techniques to step out and stand out.

Customer service, usually considered a support function, has emerged as a important marketing tool. It has become as much a marketing tool as it is a management approach. Superior quality customer service motivates customers to tell others about you, generating referral sales. This customer sales force is the least expensive way of acquiring new customers.

Organization's constantly tout the importance of imparting high quality customer service, and everyone seems to agree. There is an abundance of books and articles written on this topic so much so that it is has become common knowledge that quality customer service is the door that leads to success.

If customer service is such an extensively read and talked about topic, why is it that you find so many examples of poor customer service? The answer to this questions still eludes me. I fail to understand why organization fizzle to deliver good service. By doing so they not only lose business, but give a bad reputation to themselves. A dissatisfied customer is more likely to tell 10 others of his bad experience than a satisfied customer.

If there is still an iota of doubt left as to the importance of providing good customer services, turn your attention to internet, a tool prevalently used by disgruntled customers to share their less than favorable customer service experience.

I hope this article provides sufficient reasons to necessitate the practice of providing world class customer service. I am sure you can think of many more reasons. So use all of them to justify your expenditure in training staff to provide quality service. Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, once said “ If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work”, a quote that summarizes client servicing in a nutshell.

Deal or No Deal

The deal between Yahoo and MSN might have died a slow death but this did not deter Yahoo from striking a deal with arch rival Google. In the month of June, Yahoo had announced that Google would supply it with some search advertisements. Industry insiders view this move as an attempt by Yahoo to increase search revenue. As a consequence of this deal (if it materializes), Google would command a wider market share and consolidate its numero uno position.

The ad deal is projected to raise $800 million in revenue in its first year and would also provide operating cash to the tune of $250 million - $450 million in the subsequent years. In order to push the deal through, Yahoo has informed the regulators that the deal was reviewed on the lines of Hart-Scott-Rodino Act , which is used to scrutinize major mergers and acquisitions. Yahoo also apprised the regulators that the deal would be implemented after three and half months, giving regulators sufficient time to review and scrutinize the deal. However, the U.S. Justice department has launched a formal investigation into this deal, an indication that they may have found evidence of malpractice.

The Justice Department is expected to issue civil investigative demands (CIDs) by next week. The move is aimed at gathering intelligence from third parties. The information sought could range from general requests to specific requests aimed probing the deal. This anti-trust probe could potentially derail the deal and spell disaster for Yahoo. Yahoo has pinned a lot of hope on this deal and is desperate for it to materialize. The probe might end in the favor of Yahoo but the delay caused would inflict a massive blow to its financial condition.

In an attempt to dispel the concerns which are clouding the deal, Jerry Yang (CEO,Yahoo) met senator Herb Kohl who chairs the anti-trust committee. This committee is likely to envision the competitive landscape and the ramifications, after the deal becomes operational. The news was first announced by The Washington Post and has been broad casted over the Internet by various websites. 'Wait and watch' seems to be the name of the game.

A Flash of hope

Flash websites were always a 'tough nut to crack' for SEO professionals due to the fact that major search engines could not cache/index them completely. This fact gave many website owners sleepless nights because a website minus flash decreased its customer appeal. Including flash to make a website more attractive resulted in poor search engine rankings. A 'catch 22' situation for webmasters and businesses alike.

A shimmer of hope is glistening over the horizon for webmasters who always wanted their flash websites to be cached and indexed in totality. A press release made by Adobe on 1^st of July 2008 reads “Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.”

The development would have a significant impact on the SEO industry and is being hailed as the next giant leap towards an optimized world.