Updates to this course for 2010

Posted on 1 Feb 2010 at 5:29pm

Updates to ‘eMarketing & Persuasive Content’ for 2010

At the recent Leicester eChampions event (26/01/10) I was asked by a past delegate from this course, how much the course changed in the last 12 months and whether 2010 would see some big changes in the industry.

This caused me to have a think about how this course has evolved over the near 3 years I’ve been running it. And the truth on change is probably caught somewhere between ‘not much’ and ‘completely’.

The ‘Not much’ because the key themes of guiding the business, making products fit for purpose online, speed of change, missed commercial opportunities, ignorance, need for sound strategy and tactics, and even our old friend Web 2.0 and what is represents, remain.

However, the ‘completely’ camp is equally correct, as we are seeing a real increases in social media, shifting priorities in Search (SE0), and a general rise the eBusiness and eMarketing literacy of the average business (your competitors).

Here’s a few additions for my 2010 course:

Key additions for 2010
• SEO updated incl Google Caffeine
• More Social Media incl content ideas for twitter
• My top 10 Free 'Widgets' (website feature improvements)
• Practical eBusiness models (how the money’s made online)
• More delegate case studies incl high growth and award winners
• More careful targeting of what its going to take to succeed

Voted best course at De Montfort University
We perhaps fail to take our own medicine when it comes to promoting AxisCentre and the actual impact of the courses. Did you know that AxisCentre Commercial Application of the Web programme was voted top course at De Montfort University for 2008/9 in terms of delegate feedback? We aim to hold that position in 2010 and are in the running for some other external training and innovation awards as well.

Live feedback on all our courses – new for 2010
My course is currently scoring just over 4.5 stars in our course feedback system. Discover how recent delegates rated this course, and the business impact it is having. By looking at the course feedback tab http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Content-feedback.php

EChampions - top tip for 2010
You can genuinely make a real difference to your business online in 2010. How? Combine attending this course combined with using our eBusiness Champion to support the implementation of the learning.

The two best investments of your time you will make in 2010? I honestly think so, as this is “the best place, possibly the only place to get the strategy, tactics and practicalities for making a success of your business online”  (Malk Hall, MD HallFast Industrial Supplies Oct course 2009).

eMarketing insight into course at Week 4

Posted on 13 Oct 2009 at 9:29am

Hey all, here’s a brief summary of the issues covered on week 3 and 4 of eMarketing and persuasive Content Development for those on the course currently ('Team Flip') and for the voyeuristic generally watching the site.

Yesterday I had to do a presentation most of the day to one of Lord Mandleson’s chief advisors (ooohhh) who asked me to summarise what Web 2.0 was. I was a bit worried that he didn’t know but figured out it was a test and waxed lyrical. Not good enough, he wanted it in one word, the best i could do to retain some semblence of gramatical order was ‘the conversation’. And that's the same phrase I would use to describe what this course, and current group Team Flip in particular.

This current group has been a far ranging discussion on eBusiness models, on what it will take to significantly improve the effectiveness of a website in the short/medium term, and what it is likely to take to improve a business online in the longer term. The down side of such a far reaching discussion is of course is that we don’t cover the slides in full and we don’t cover the practicals and as such it requires everyone to do a bit more 'home work'. The course is therefore now placing more emphasis on delegates keeping up to date with the practicals outside of the training room.

Week 3 and 4 is a bit of a strange point to summarise as its two subjects, one content writing and the second site improvement. However there is an important link which is that everything we are doing is geared towards an improvement in the effectiveness, productivity of the website. More regular and better content writing (superlatives, emotional, left right brain etc) combined with improvements in flow on the websites, as evidenced in Eyetracker and Linear Path.

Practicals by this point
Web 2.0 - Your own favourite definition of Web 2.0, a measure of how web 2.0 enabled your business/site is right now, and action points for your business
Long-tail - Evidence of Long-tail theory in your sector, how this may affect your decision making in the future, and what you are going to do about it.
Persuasive content – Your own new piece of copy based on Veloso 5Q, incorporating emedded commands, presuppositions and a linguistic bind.
Actual article writing - At attempt at taking the 5Q article to hybrid article layering in some of the persuasive phenomena we covered (similar vain to the final Whitby article).
Site layout redesign – A attempt at skatching a new layout for your website at homepage and article levels for improved persormance (flow) based on Eyetracker observations (user behavious tracked using retina cameras),
Site improvement - Reorganisation of one decision process based on Linear Path and the Card Sorting approach, working in left right brain switches

Social media
I also shared last week my feeling that i had misread the full impact and significance of Social Media and its importance. This 'road to damascus' realisiation came to me in part during Maureens poster session and exit interview and means I'm reassessing my course and our offering at AxisCentre in terms of Web 2.0 and social media. Don't all shout that Web 2.0 is old hat, its been aropund a while for sure but what is represents deeper than throwing it around at dinner parties is completly relevant, fairly straightforweard to now work with practically on websites, and its probably going to blow search out of the water in terms of its eventual impact on the actual decision making process for how we source the things we consume as businesses, and er, as consumers.

With this in mind and by way of a gratuitous plug, we have a new Social media for business/marketing course starting on 2nd Nov which still has 3 places. Its 50% off which we usually do to launch a course. 5 days ( 1 day per week) immersion into the future of the web for as little as £155. We must be mad. http://www.axiscentre.com/social-media-course

That’s it for now, see you on the next session for the closing part of ‘website improvement’, PPC (paid search) marketing, and hopefully a quick whiz around practical video editing and uploading.

Focus Group decides future of AxisCommunity website - be a part of it

Posted on 11 Aug 2009 at 3:36pm

The focus group
- Decide the future of the community website

We are seeking 6-10 businesses from AxisCommunity and we want your input and are prepared to pay. OK not cash, but a nice meal paid for by us at Beeston’s premier Indian restaurant (Cottage Balti, High Road, Beeston, just 200m from the main college campus).

Your chance to decide the recipe…
We have talked for some time about the replacement of the AxisCommunity website with an all-singing-all-dancing learning meets networking 'hub' but the difference is we now have a budget. Along the same lines as the current site, ie a private or membership based community website, we want get together for a couple of hours to decide the functionality, ie what we want it to do for you as a learner and for your business.

“The evil spawn of Facebook and Youtube with a bit of Ning, Twitter and Linked in thrown in for good measure?” This website will be the main way of interacting with ‘eChampions’, the new eBusiness support network now under development by a consortium of colleges and universities led by AxisCentre.

Why not be amongst the first people on-board eChampions and help us come up with a wish list to take to developers.

If you think you may be hungry on Tuesday 18th August 7.30pm and want to join us at Cottage Balti, High Road, Beeston for this landmark moment, post up on AxisCommunity or contact Jonny direct. Limited places, first 10 people to confirm will get a place at this esteemed table.

We will keep you posted on developments on this focus group, on eChampions and all things AxisCommunity.

AxisCommunity, eChampions and our '21st birthday'

Posted on 27 Jul 2009 at 4:52pm

AxisCommunity, eChampions and our '21st birthday' 

Those with ears not bleeding from me talking to them about AxisCommunity (such continues to be my near religious fervour for all things eBusiness, Axis and community), will no doubt have heard of rumours of ‘eChampions’ by now.

In short this is AxisCommunity taking the next step into a bigger, larger community, programme of events, networking opportunity and learning experience.  But do not fear, all that is good about AxisCommunity continues... 

eChampions?
So is AxisCommunity ending after our 20th and 21st event planned for the summer break? No, it's more a case of coming of age. AxisCommunity online will continue to be a key component of all courses at AxisCentre, providing forums for groups of learners to share, and anyone to ask questions, share and generally get support.

AxisCommunity events however will concentrate on a new programme provisionally called titled ‘eChampions’ a 3 year commitment by a consortium of East Midlands universities and colleges to offer a series of free training and eBusiness social networking programme, based on the model and values at AxisCommunity.

The next step
Bigger and better events from more locations? Live events broadcast online you can participate in? A new better website/portal? Better speakers? Even a qualification at the end? These are all requests by citizens that we intend to build into eChampions, with events kicking off this October.

We certainly hope you want to share and benefit from us taking this next step and will be in touch soon about the next steps and how to get involved. In the mean time we have two events lined up for this summer that should hit the mark… 

Announcing the next two AxisCommunity events for July and August 09…

‘The Clinic’
AxisCommunity Informal 20
Thursday 30th June 09 7.30pm Cast Bar, Playhouse Theatre, Nottingham

Is your website performing as well as it can? The answer to this is almost certainly no. Bring your site (on laptop, print-off, whatever) to ‘The Clinic’ at the Cast Bar Playhouse theatre this Thursday eve and let us together improve your site, solve your problems, help you make more money online.

“More hits + better code + better technology = better website = more money”

No formal speaker, just sharing with Bjorn, Paul and Jonny, Gavin and your community fellow citizens, us all working together to improve. Infomal clincs by Bjorn Le Roux (web developer), Jonny Green (eMarketing & SEO), and Paul Grantham – Web design & branding clinic. In common with our new commitment to all events, you will leave with 5 must-do actions for your website personalised for your won circumstances.

‘The conversation’
AxisCommunity Informal 21
Thursday 27th August 09 7.30pm, Cast Bar, Playhouse Theatre, Nottingham

Meet up with your peers in AxisCommunity and trainers from AxisCentre for a summer drink and free food, and a quality conversation about where your business goes from here. Hopefully the weather will be fine and we can sit out on the terrace!

We will also be revealing details of ‘eChampions’, a programme of free training and eBusiness social networking programme. This will take us all at AxisCommunity to the next level with bigger and better events from more locations, live broadcasting, a new website/portal, cooler speakers, and a qualification at the end.

“…this is unique, a chance to mix, to learn from others cutting it and moving on online”

The conversation will also be about what events, support etc you want from this next era of AxisCommunity, you talk and we will listen and make it happen as part of eChampions.

A great summers evening drink, in great company, discussing changing your business, your career and maybe the world. What could be better? All welcome, see you there!

See you down at CAST Bar, Playhouse Theatre on July 30th and on August 27th

Job opportunities at AxisCentre & AxisCommunity

Posted on 14 Jul 2009 at 3:22pm

Job opportunities at AxisCentre & AxisCommunity - a chance to become part of something beautiful!

As most people attending any recent AxisCommunity Informal are aware, we have successfully bidded for some ESF money to expand the AxisCommunity concept, leading a consortium of 6 colleges and universities from the region in a project currently titled eChampions (Creating eBusiness Champions).

Those also at recent events may have heard me state that we are keen to receive applications from citizens of AxisCommunity (what better people to lead the next chapter than those instrumental in getting us this far?) 

The posts comprise a Project Manager (currently filled by temporary appointment but going to full external recruitment in approx 6 weeks time), Project Technical Officer/Trainer (interview slots available next week), and Project Administrator/Coordinator (informal interviews next week). All are part time fixed term appointments of 3 years in length and range from 20 to 30 hours per week.

If you have any questions please post up on AxisCommunity in the Learner Lounge or contact us direct on 0115 9256666. Closing dates are 20th July 2009 to hear from AxisCommunity citizens.

In the case of the Project Technical Officer/Trainer and Project Administrator/Coordinator we will attempt to recruit in the first instance from AxisCommunity citizens and if no suitable candidates are available or identified we will go to full external appointment for these posts. In the case of the Project Manager, this will go to full external appointment advertised regionally as described.

Please visit the Learner Lounge on AxisCommunity for links to pdfs (below) detailing the draft job and person specifications which will be available from 8pm this evening until Monday 20th July.  We look forward to hearing from you soon!

ESF eChampions Administrator Job Spec (17k pro rata)
ESF eChampions Project Officer/Trainer Job Spec
ESF eChampions Project Manager Job Spec

What has BBC's TopGear got to do with your website?

Posted on 19 Jun 2009 at 4:49pm

Thursday 25th June 7.30pm, CAST Bar, Playhouse Theatre, Canning Circus, Nottingham

What has BBCs’ TopGear got to do with your website? - Everything.

Seen TopGear? You’ve probably seen the ‘CoolWall’ feature, an entertaining spat usually between the opinionated Clarkson and housewife’s choice Richard Hammond that sees them argue over what cars are cool by sticking pictures of cars on a wall in categories that range from ‘seriously uncool’, through to ‘sub zero’.

OK, exchange the cars for SEO techniques (in English things you can do to get your website to the top of Google) and you have the basis for AxisCommunity Informal 19.

This will either be the most useful, practical interesting cool thing we have ever done at an event, or fall badly on its rear. I’m learning towards the former, but regardless, this marks a new type of interactive event and us taking the practicality the AxisCommunity offers forward.

Experts in Postit noting
We will start with a load of Postit notes and allow everyone to contribute their ideas, rumours of what is supposed to work, even naughty black hat techniques, then a combination of Gavin (of Optillion and Adv SEO course fame, playing the clever and articulate James May), Bjorn and Paul (Clarkson and The Stig), leaving myself to be the idealistic short Richard Hammond one that all the girls like.

It’s going to be an interactive practical session but with purpose; namely to discount all the tired old tricks that don’t work anymore (seriously uncool), and more importantly finish with a set of ‘sub zero’ vital practical SEO tips and tricks that will help you position and defend page 1 positions, in Google.

There is only one page 1
Have you actually worked out what page 1, even position 1 would be worth to your business? Businesses are waking up to just how vital this search engine has become and there’s a hugely increasing mele to try to be included. Read your competitors throwing money and effort at this now.

Come along and learn:
The SEO professional perspective
The content writer and marketers perspective
The web developer’s perspective on SEO.

Our latest signing
We will also be joined by our latest community signing and staff member; Roo Pigott, winner of Yorkshire Entrepreneur of the Year award 2009. Roo, who’s in the same business incubator that produced Google, is joining Axis to help take AxisCommunity to the next level. We hope you want to be part of it.

Stunning chance to learn more about SEO for FREE
This is a stunning chance to learn, get involved and practically benefit from insider knowledge IN SEARCH. This is for everyone, beginner or SEO practitioner. And there’s free food. We’ve seen worse events for £250 just to watch it online. What more do you want?

See you there.

Web Accessibility - report and videos from Informal 18

Posted on 11 Jun 2009 at 9:40am

Website Accessibility and your business
Report and links from AxisCommunity Informal 18
Held on Thursday 28th May 2009, speaker Bjorn Le Roux

Want to know about accessibility in websites? Well you should because its about way more than a tkoen effort to satisfy blind users. More than you moral obligation, this is the law, and it's a business benefits bottom line, even search engine issue as well.

Video part 1 – ‘It’s not about blind people”
What is website accessibility? Who does it affect, who cares. This opening section takes you through the types of affliction your site should be catering for. And a mini spat between Bjorn and I. Groups of users that can benefit. Wider benefits of accessibility.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TCaQc9uYg4&feature=channel_page  

Video 2 – ‘All reasonable adjustments’
£80Bn is spent by registered disabled users in the UK. This video takes you into the more detail of the law, what documents describe this, court cases, how these videos break the law, who is responsible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRjMEzzwqzM&feature=channel  

Video 3 – ‘The Olympics go to court. And fail’  
The Australian Olympic committee and a private prosecution, which doeuments are actually useful to guide you, where the law goes from here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZI7T7S5tso&feature=channel  

Video 4 – ‘The 3 levels of accessibility for businesses online’
There are different levels of accessibility, ranging from some basics that you could get in place relatively easily/quickly (?), more info on how the guidelines work, and a finish with ‘5 practical things to do’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCMqh6-Sj-g&feature=channel  

Video 5 – ‘The post talk Q&A chat’  
We reverse the previous footage with some good footage but bad sound. Views and questions from a few citizens who stopped around for the food afterwards.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDhx1_PzWQo&feature=channel  

What next
Web accessibility from one part of our new web standards and accessibility course, forming part of our De Montfort University Commercial Application of the web programme. This is a must for all ‘grown up’ web designers and companies wanting to really get to groups with W3C, web standards and truly accessible website design. http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Web-Standards-Accessibility.php  

That bloke from Beeston has done pretty well for himself. Lets steal his ideas - Bryan Steel event report and video links

Posted on 5 May 2009 at 11:29am

Bryan Steel... The magic formula and you?
“That bloke from Beeston has done pretty well for himself. Lets steal his ideas”

A short report and links from AxisCommunity Informal 17 last Thursday evening, and for my money, the best and most important event we’ve ever done.

Evenyone needs a Trevor the porn star
This one’s got everything; naughty behaviour, attempted theft of Olympic medals, name drops, life changing events and possibilities, and even a porn star called Trevor. Read on (and watch the videos). OK, to recap, the reason for this event came about was due to a very grown-up conversation that considered why exactly it is that we see ‘polarised’ big winners and big losers online, and seemingly very little businesses in the middle doing OK or muddling along. This prompted the suggestion that just perhaps the ‘magic formula’ consists not just of better web technology, but perhaps something more fundamental, more basic; like actually planning, goal-setting, and getting the right team around you.

The Cross-over
This event was intended to introduce our first non-technical course, and we think it’s a rather important one. For more than a year we have been working with Bryan Steel, a rather modest and straight talking local chap made good as Olympic and World title winning Olympic cyclist, and our old friends De Montfort University, about the possibility of developing a course and approach to taking the basics of the success formula that has turned our Olympic Cycling movement from a bit of a mess into a world respected medal production line. We then cross over the best bits into helping small businesses and individuals plan their careers. Simple!

The new formula
Bryan was the first to test our new formula for AxisCommunity events (our 6 new commitments!) and delivered a short and interesting insight into his career, where he started and the turning points along the way (and the first spontaneous applause at an event when we watched him win his world title!).

Quick overview video
Quick overview of Bryan’s talk (minus my informative and hilarious introduction)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yKIg8dxLoM&feature=channel_page  

The main highlight videos
Introduction, our new commitments and collaborative working idea from Red Creative http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMQ164pFqiA&feature=channel_page
 
Jonny handing over to Bryan and his opening few minutes on his early background and video of Bryan nailing the world title. Get in there! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlcafTfPYU&feature=channel_page

Bryan is naughty and overweight, Bryan’s dad buys him a bike and hey presto he’s in Team GB. But all is not well. He misses out on Athens Olympics and tries to steal Chris Boardman’s gold medal. Gets all committed and then wins one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foEGDV9sMVE&feature=channel_page

Bryan dedicates his silver Olympic medal to his wife, then talks about getting the vision right plus aims and objectives. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o6RhhNxa60&feature=channel_page

Breaking the vision down into day to day activity, and the ‘think about these 5 things’ session. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7WutKmnua4&feature=channel_page

Q&A session and some more insight into success and how the course works and will work to help your business and career. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuYEy61OzDE&feature=channel_page

Bryan’s ‘Do these 5 things’ from the event
1. What does your business really do?
2. Could you easily explain your business to a 5 year old child?
3. What is your ultimate goal in business?
4. What would truly outrageous success look, sound and feel like?
5. Do you know how you’re going to achieve it?

50% off offer for first course
In common with all our future course launches to celebrate the launch of Strategic Planning & Motivation for Success Online we are offering a 50% discount for the first course dates. 8 places first come first served. More info and book online at http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Planning-Success.php . What’s more, you’ll also be awarded 10 UCPD credits from De Montfort University.

What if this course worked? What if it made a difference to you and your business?

'Don't watch the web, watch these people' - Part 1 Seth Godin

Posted on 23 Apr 2009 at 10:37am

“Don’t watch the web, watch these people” 
Books, sites and blogs to watch - Part 1, Seth Godin

In life and online most people just amble about looking a bit vacant in some kind of trance, never really looking up. And in a crisis (economic, whatever) they just do the same only the move a bit faster. It’s understandable, we haven’t all got the time to contemplate the enormity, fragility and bleakness of existence, let alone where we all might be headed.

Want to know if the plane is crashing? Don’t look at the passengers, look at the cabin crew.

Why am I telling you this? Because the analogy fits perfectly with the web. If you just look about generally at everyone online you will see people. Lots and lots of them. Some moving slowly some fast, but very few really understanding the seismic changes currently underway online as the web moves through into maturity.

So if you want to track the development of the web, figure out where we are all going and be there first with the products and services, the smart move is surely to watch the few that really understand wherever the web is going from a business perspective, and importantly can articulate it. In English.

I’ve been asked a few times to put together a blogs and books list. In starting to put this list together I’ve realised that it’s a bigger deal than I thought, so I'm going to do it one guru/zeitgeist/futurologist/technologist at a time.

Thats the introduction to my series done, this is part 1 in my series of ‘don’t watch the web it’s too big, watch them’ – Seth Godin.

Part 1 - Seth Godin
Eminently watchable and readable, this chap has written what I consider to be some of the best (and understandable) work on the web. He clearly understands the people centred context of the web and the fact that everything in our economy is based on consumption of things by people (information, entertainment, products, and services, whatever), and that the basic human condition is the need to interact with other humans. Everything; the web, web technology etc we have invented, not for its own sake, but to allow us to consume and interact.

Seth’s Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Godin  
Seth’s blog http://sethgodin.typepad.com/  
Seth’s books http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/books.asp  
Seth doing a talk for Google http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294  

Tags – trends (people and business), strategic marketing, future of the web, social media, communication

Paid Search & the number of the beast

Posted on 22 Apr 2009 at 1:28pm

Paid Search and Google Adwords
- 666 be the number of the beast…

For those on this current intake of eMarketing & Persuasive Content Development, I hope you enjoyed week 5 and the fascinating world of Paid Search. As normal, it was our usual eccletic paced moving buffet of conversation, insights, and observations, with a bit of course and a little time to play with the ideas. But what has the beast and 666 got to do with it? Well there is at least a tenuous link between paid search and the devil himself so read on.

Dark and powerful forces
There’s enough in what we covered for you to be able to make some sound judgements in creating PPC campaigns that might just actually work. They key is that you need to get devious and creative at the same time in order to beat whoever you are competing against for that all important page 1 and top 5 PPC listing. Why page 1 top 5? Because most people pick organic results over the sponsored links, the number of actual searches is finite, and that the first page of links shares 90% of the user clicks.

There is also enough in what we covered on the day for you to join up in your mind a lot of the concepts covered earlier in the course. That’s the aim at this point anyway, ie to be able to realise that it all hangs together around a fairly quantifiable and predictable mix of understand user behaviour, influence, technology, observation and analysis and that a lot is achievable if you grasp the basics, act and learn.

The good news is that if your initial attempts are insufficiently devious and naughty to give you the right results from your PPC efforts, there are actually lots of opportunities to adjust and rework your site and campaign.

And here’s the tenuous link to ‘El Diablo’ himself, for reflecting on yesterdays session, a 666 pattern occurred, because there are 6 essentials to include in your add, 6 rules for preparing PPC campaigns, and 6 ways to improve your PPC Paid Search performance once underway.

6 things to include in your add
1. The actual key-phrase (duh)
2. Price points at the ‘magic’ levels (each product/service will have these)
3. Preclusive text to minimise clicks from wrong audience
4. Powerful, persuasive and emotional triggers (FREE etc)
5. Customer delight proposition (free chocolates included)
6. Time limited call to action and element of Cliff-hanger

6 Rules for preparing PPC campaigns
1. Specificity is key, generalisation of key-phrase don’t work well
2. Think about the buy signals associated with every key-phrase
3. Use associated, leftfield, and behavioural indicators to generate alternative key-phrases
4. Consider writing ‘articles/reviews’ that are in fact persuasive content vehicles and promoting these via PPC (under the radar of consciousness and all that)
5. Calculate your traffic levels and guide click price and actually do your maths
6. Struggling with PPC (either planning or actuality) maybe suggest a larger problem with your key-phrase selection and even your business

6 ways to improve your Paid Search performance:
1. Fix the holes in your oh so leak website (Pachinko machine)
2. Reduce the click price by writing better ads
3. Increase your overall share of searches made by writing better ads
4. Increase your overall margin, especially by appearing to go niche long-tail
5. Increase the overall order value through cross-sells and up-sells
6. Remember LTV lifetime value and don’t obsess about profit on first sale

But what about me?
“This is all about eCommerce sites and selling online, what about B2B and business services like me”. Show me what part of this doesn’t apply to you.

See you next week for Search Engine Optimisation and how to do devious stuff and devilish things to help your search position. Free chewitt for anyone spotting the persuasive content writing in joke in this last bit).   Any further research on the theme of 666 and spotting disturbing patterns in apparently every day life should be avoided.  Or directed initially towards a Google search around \'Aleister Crowley\'.  Following a sponsored link of course.

The magic formula - Exactly what does it take to succeed online?

Posted on 17 Apr 2009 at 11:50am

The magic formula
- Exactly what does it take to succeed online?

For a long time we have reflected over a pint or two on just what it takes to succeed online, on whether there is some ‘magic formula’ for exploiting the commercial potential of the web.

And one of the basic observations we made is that businesses are either doing pretty damned well, or are doing absolutely nothing, with almost nobody muddling along in between. In no other business environment does it seem that the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ are so polarised; and that online if you miss, you seem to miss by a mile.

So why is this the case?
Do those that succeed online have radically better business models? Better products or services? Possibly. Or is it something more fundamental, more simple? Like actually having a clear vision for where you want to go and a workable plan to get you there perhaps?

“You are where you are as a direct result of where you planned to be”, and “to fail to plan is to plan to fail” are two cleches that spring to mind. But are they truisms as well? All too often we see major investments in technology (websites) with little or nothing invested in the basic planning and working out how the idea is going to be executed. And in many cases with sadly predictable results.

The search for the answer
We have searched far and wide for some solution that would help people achieve success online and compliment the ‘Commercial Application of the web’ mission of AxisCentre and its community. And we found it here in Beeston no less.  Our search led us back almost to our doorstep and to an at first-glance unassuming small business, that revealed both a rapidly expanding business empire and rather unassuming and modest Olympic and world championship medal winning athlete with an interest in coaching and performance of businesses and individuals no less.

Fast forward rather a lot of work with our mystery man and De Montfort University, and we most excited to announce “Planning & motivation for success online”, a 3 day intensive course led by Bryan Steel, former Olympic and World Championship medal winning cyclist to be run from AxisCentre from 2009 onwards.

Planning and motivation for success online
This brand new course offers a rare opportunity to share the planning and motivational techniques used by current Olympic athletes and the chance to discover how these concepts can dynamise your business or career online.

In short this short 3 day course explores the parallels between succeed at the highest levels in sport and in business, reveals how unfocused aspiration can be turned into success in attaining your own goals, and how the same simple evaluation, goal setting and planning techniques used at the highest levels in sport can help achieve business and career objectives.

So whether you’re in business or just planning your career involving the web, perhaps you could benefit from a winners insight into setting and achieving goals. Who knows, you might just actually achieve something online.

50% off offer and more info
HEFCE funding and an extra discount from us mean that you can attend the launch course for an incredible £64.50. For more info and to book your place find out more http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Planning-Success.php, or better still, come along to the next AxisCommunity event (30th April 2009) where Bryan will be launching the course and will be available for questions.

The Axis 'Geek Hub' & Wikinomics phenomenon

Posted on 8 Apr 2009 at 4:41pm

The Axis Geek Hub & Wikinomics phenomenon

A quick Google around ‘Peer production’, Wikinomics or whatever other web, community or collaborative working buzzword you’d care to mention, will quickly reveal that this idea of community and of connection with like minded people for collaborative production and mutual benefit is very ‘now’.

More or less since the very first AxisCommunity get together, we have long lusted after a more creative and productive way of operating AxisCentre and AxisCommunity. A place ideal for delivering our brand of rich, informal practical learning, but also a place we could share with AxisCommunity citizens and current delegates at AxisCentre.

The more visionary amongst us have for some time admired the ‘Hat Factory’ concept in San Francisco http://hatfactory.net/  where a large working space has been acquired by a collective tribe of digital creatives, entrepreneurs and misc others as a space to work individually, but also collaboratively, encouraging each other to be creative and productive.

As you may be aware we are confirmed as moving to Middle Street Business Centre in Beeston soon. We are now starting to plan how we can use the space to experiment in creating our own version of the Hat Factory, our own vision of an eBusiness utopia no less.

The Geek Hub is born
Thanks to Phil from FusionXS, the web designer and hard tackling no-nonsense type from AxisCommunity, we are currently calling this drop in area for web addicts, be it techies, marketers or whatever; the ‘Geek Hub’. I personally like the Nerd Centre (instead of nerve centre). However other suggestions for name are also sought.

How it will work, and what resources we will have? This remains to be seen but at this early stage we want you ideas for what you’d like this space to do, offer, be called etc. The very first suggestion I was given was that we should have a lot of bean bags, a Nintendo WII and a bong, apparently exactly what they have in the inner circle at Google HQ.

Improving websites - eyetracker and pachinko reveal the secrets of persuasion

Posted on 8 Apr 2009 at 3:12pm

‘Improving websites’
– Eyetracker & Pachinko reveal the secrets behind user behaviour

Week 4 of the course is grandly titled ‘Improving websites’, a diverse and somewhat nebulous title. When we first designed the course it was a struggle to fit in all the subjects and insights we wanted to cover. When it was reduced to just 7 days contact even more had to hit to cutting room floor. This left us essentially with Eyetracker, usability, conversion improvement and a few practicals around these that could bridge the gap between persuasive text and persuasive layout.

Naughty words what you must not use
We kicked off with Naughty words http://poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/videos.htm  which was in equal measures a reminder of the previous weeks session in crafting every word to create an image, and the dangers of the messenger getting in the way of the message (them potentially not liking you or you filtering the message to suit your own tastes/prejudices/preconceptions).

Pachinko machine & Japanese businessmen
Pachinko is all the rage in Japan. Apparently Japanese businessmen when they’re not paying you ladies to sit with them while they murder some Bon Jovi track on the Karaoke, love to play a bit of Pachinko.  It’s actually a gambling machine that’s the drunken lovechild of the French game bagatelle, pinball, and a Las Vegas whore of a fruit machine. You basically buy a load of balls and twang them up and around this technicolor machine and they fall downwards, steered hopefully to rest in the right place to win the prize.

The point is that your website is like a Pachinko machine; staggeringly wasteful and leaky of the balls (visitors) and lethargically operated in a fashion that suggests it doesn’t really matter that much if you don’t get a return because you can go and get another cup of 10ps/yens from the slightly frightening lady in the Perspex booth. Eh? The point really is that you are in control of the machine much more than you think. You can basically tip the odds in your favour. with better content, linear path, persuasive layout (etc) in short all the concepts and phenomenon we have been looking at on the course.

Add to that you can actually acquire the balls cheaper than everyone else by actually understand free/organic SEO and paid search, and this old eBusiness game starts to look more appealing, and perhaps you can leave the arcade that is the web with the elated rush every teenager gets when managing to rock the penny shove machine into giving you its ptentyful bounty and you get out before they notice the alarm going off. In short, stop; think about what you are doing at every stage from ball acquisition through to getting them to hit the winning target without bouncing out. 

Eyetracker & the truth about ad-blindness
From there we went into Eyetracker Eyetracker explanation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo_a2cfBUGc  
Video for Eyetracker III http://poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/videos.htm  and Heatmaps for Eyetracker III http://poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/heatmap.htm . This was an attempt to quickly establish a list of basic observations from Eyetracker that could inform your layout and conversion improvements attempts.

The Eyetracker alone has enough for you to mess it up badly to not get an increase in performance. The biggies for me are people look for a point to start digesting the site/page from and it appears to pretty consistently be the nice white background with some black text on it. That we appear to loathe ads with a passion that should be reserved for other things. That images appear to do something different to my preconceptions before viewing the research. You consistently get sweet spots for viewing all round a decent sized image. And big horizontal breaks seem to break people’s concentration/flow when it comes to digesting text.

Or to put it more bluntly
• Have some headlines and proper copy that looks interesting and editorial in style
• Get some decent sized images on there with people in them
• Use the area immediately below your images for cliff-hangers and linkage
• Don’t have any big horizontal breaks between text sections
• People don’t like adverts (imagine that)

So why do you trust a website?
Exactly what is it that makes the difference between two sites? Researches would have us believe that’s it’s principally down to ‘recommendation, familiarity or prior positive experience, colour and association, feedback unadulterated, reputation of product, and trust by association’.

While a grand piece of research in this field suggests you should ‘make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site, show that there's a real organisation - physical address, highlight expertise in your organisation, show honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site, make it easy to contact you, Use a professional design appropriate for your purpose, make your site easy to use - and useful, update your site's content, use restraint with any promotional content , and avoid errors’.

The secret?
All this is hardly rocket science but then maybe the true secret to website improvement and success in eBusiness is that there aren’t any secrets, just the consistent application of the basics, the obvious and common sense.

Homework
• Ideas round robin to help each other with some positive suggestions
• Further develop sketched layout improvement for homepage
• Persuasive content headline brainstorm sheet
• Attempt at Linear path on postit notes

Jonny

’data protection, direct marketing and the internet’ featuring Berryman Nottingham

Posted on 2 Apr 2009 at 3:32pm

Are you breaking the Data Protection Act? (Er, probably)

Last Thursday we were joined at our regular AxisCommunity get together (or ‘Informal’ as we like to call it, final Thursday of every month, Cast Bar Playhouse Theatre, you know the drill), By Gavin, Ellie and Steven from Nottingham based law practice Berryman. The reason? The law and more specifically the likelihood that if you’re involved in direct marketing (emails, mail-shots etc), that you are probably breaking the law right now.

The event titled ’data protection, direct marketing and the internet’ was the first in a series of three events we are running on creating and managing email marketing campaigns, and dealt with the possibly thorny issue of how to collect, store, and use peoples details without upsetting them or any of the judges that front our fine judicial system. The session was recorded and the highlights are now available. Here's a quick breakdown and the links.

Welcome, announcements and a revelation
Part 1 covered a welcome and intro from me, news on our move to new premises, some new funding that you might be able to use, and an endorsement and slightly shocking admission-in-one by me involving Berryman, my good self and the law. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX7EDCIwnn8&feature=channel_page  4.00

Data protection law
Parts 2 and 3 covered the opening, the slightly complex but important issue of where exactly the law stands on data protection and collecting and using collected data (and I bet you’re not complying fully).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPlHflvEifU&feature=channel  7.41
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65iywTjQQi4&feature=channel  7.53

Email marketing
Part 4 was specifically about email marketing and the much talked about ‘opt in’ or ‘opt out’ debate. To spice this up a little there’s also a 'soft opt in' which is actually an opt-out. I think. Perhaps best to watch this one yourself and this appears to be the practical crux of the matter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De0ODPc09lI&feature=channel  8.26

Law suits, Microsoft and Mr Dick
Part 5&6 covered some case law examples of businesses getting sued, particularly the full weight of Microsoft’s legal muscle being brought down on one individual, and a quite clever way they trapped him. Throw in an amusing name and what seems like a lot of effort on the odd individual’s part to vent their spleen on spam, and you have the legal picture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGFOfhp050&feature=channel 7.03
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q07cSbsNgZc&feature=channel  9.14

Summary and question on legacy situations (you probably)
Part 7 was a summary and how to recover from the near inevitable position of most businesses where you have a legacy of data from customers, people who enquired but never took up a course or bought the product or whatever, and bought databases so old you can’t even remember where they came from let alone is its compliant with any of the law.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FeKmdKOiLI&feature=channel  8.36 

My summary & what next
If I was trying to sum up the law and realities in this area I’d say basically that you need to get an explicit opt-in permission to use their data, give them regular opportunities to opt-out on each communication sent, and that the amount you’d be sued for in the unlikely event is peanuts, and you’d have my ‘pragmatic’ position on this subject. Except of course this is the law so I wouldn’t say any such thing.; I'd recommend you watch/re-watch the videos and to be on the safe side take some further advice from Gavin Lee at Berryman http://www.berryman.co.uk/Business  

Many thanks to Berryman and to Gavin, Ele, and Stephen. Ele will be returning later in the year to do a session on Intellectual Property, copyright, stolen content and images.

Whitby & web copy that flies under the radar of consciousness

Posted on 2 Apr 2009 at 2:32pm

Web copy that files ‘under the radar of consciousness’ - week 3 of the course

Here's a quick insight into web copy writing, week 3 of the eMarketing & Persuaisve Conetnt Development course and why Whitby and a certain 5 questions might just be the biggest single improvemement you could make to your business online.

It’s neither rocket science or dark art
The important point to make upfront is that the process of actually writing copy capable of influencing people to take action or see a viewpoint, can be formulaic.  Broken down and done step by step knowing the right techniques it need not present any significant challenge.  Key phrase is at this point is that we need to ‘take part in the internal conversation in their heads’, ie trigger the reader to internalise and consider the right points at the right time.

Second point to make is that at all times you are writing what is in effect a compromise between keeping three 3 masters happy; you (it actually serves your purpose and 'sells'), Google (it positions well in the Google), and your customer (is interesting, relevant and actually helps them). It is possible to write for all three but like any compromise it needs some thought to prevent is getting vague meaningless.

Reframing and the Whitby poltergeist
Remember the power of reframing when it comes to persuasion. Reframing is the copy writing technique that can be used to change people's position on an issue by radically changing the way they look at it, or at least repurposing a product for a new market if the present buyers just won't go for it.

In our case we took a subject of selling a holiday in a cottage out of season on a windy, cold, rainy north east coast (you get the picture), and reframed it by choosing new lanugage and the correct emotional attachments to make it a magical, historic, and spooky experience where the climate not only didnt matter, but actually added to richness of the the experience. This used a lot of right brain switching to get the reader away from thinking about the physical realities of the conditions and onto other matters more exciting romantic and, well bizarre.

I've included a quick guide in this article to step-by-step creation of persuasive copy which basically just consists of what we covered on the day. You can stop at the sales copy level that the Veloso 5Qs takes you to, or press on and turn it into full ‘hybrid copy’ demonstrated by the article I wrote on poltergiest tours around the abbey.  As we found out this is really just about writing useful interesting articles that also persuade by using a construct and close that files just under the radar of consciousness (people don't suss they are being 'sold'), a lovely term that sums up nicely what we are trying to do with this phase of the course.

Veloso and her famous questions
5Q refers of course to Veloso’s 5Q copy writing method which baskically asks the reader questions to identify a problem and compelling need for a resolution, internalise the arguments, think about it from both hemispheres of the brain dealing with the facts and emotional issues, and takes them into the future to see what life will be like when they resolve the issue your way. The clever bit is using it effectively and above stealthily.

For the record the 5Qs of persuasive copy Veloso style are
What’s the problem?
Why hasn’t it been solved?
What’s possible?
What’s different now?
What should they do next?

3 stage guide to building persuasive copy from ground up.
1. How to prepare the piece (pre 5Q) 
Define actually who you are writing the article or copy for 
What are their hot buttons or motivations (all based on fear or pleasure) 
Brainstorm and shortlist your ideas for articles/copy 
Choose the strongest ideas and try to combine two to make stronger 
Decide how the copy will add value, ie actually help THEM

2. Create/brainstorm the 5Qs
Find a definite and identifiable problem the copy will address
Build a series of bullet points addressing each of the 5Qs
Ditch the weakest points from the 5Q brainbstorm and turn into sentences

3. Beyond 5Q
Build in persuasive vehicles (10 discussed on day 2 incl cliffhanger)
Add in embedded commands and pre suppositions
Combine copy to create compound linguistic binds
Soften or expand the copy to work for the audience and subject matter
Close softly but well (no brainer landing, 3 options typically)

5 naughty words
Finally on the subject of 5s, here’s an amusing short video from a slightly eccentric 'red neck' persuasive copy writer in Amercia who I’m told makes a famously handsome living from email marketing. It’s about words you shouldn’t say and what top replace them with. Have a watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry0cOos16r8 

AxisCentre & consortia win prestigous competitive tender

Posted on 26 Mar 2009 at 10:33am

'AxisCentre wins innovation bid'
Draft PR information - breaking news

Axis Centre, Castle College have won a prestigious European Transnational and Innovation contract to research and build an online community of businesses in the East Midlands and beyond that helps SMEs to innovate and grow using the web.

The bid, delivered in partnership with a New College Nottingham, South Leicestershire College, Loughborough College and EMFEC will see the centre team up with De Montfort University and transnational partners Hibernia College in Ireland, to explore the business application of online communities, building on the huge growth and interest in Social Media site such as Facebook.

AxisCentre, established in 1996 at the dawn of the web era in the UK has since pioneered a number of web projects in the field of the business application of web for small enterprises, successfully led one of only two successful college consortia bids in the UK.

On the 20th anniversary since since Tim Berners-Lee, a young English academic working at CERN in Switzerland wrote a short paper where he spelled out a vision for a ‘world wide web’, and in the current economic downturn this exciting opportunity for the region could not have been better timed.

"Up until recent times the web has principally been about information and simple basic sites. This next ten years, characterised by the term ‘Web 2.0’, will be about the web playing an increasingly large and central role in peoples working and personal lives".

AxisCentre and it's consortia will start work in May 2009 on a 2 year project that will see an large expansion of it’s successful concept; ‘AxisCommunity’; a business network, learning and social community of Nottingham based SMEs that for the last 18 months has been meeting regularly online and face to face every month at the Playhouse Theatre in Nottingham.

“The web will leave very few industries unaffected in the next few years. We are looking to engage up to 500 businesses from diverse industries in the East Midlands who are genuinely interested in collectively collaborating, sharing, learning and working together to meaningfully apply the massive commercial potential of the web, almost regardless of their business sector”.

Yay! It's Internet World show time again

Posted on 25 Mar 2009 at 10:29am

Yay! It’s Internet World time again

For those with good memories you may recall that a highly trained team of AxisCommunity veterans assembled last year to undertake an arduous mission into enemy territory in we took my campervan meets people carrier all the way to Earls Court and the Internet World Show.

Along the way we produced a road-trip ‘rockumentary’ film of the event that culminated in a late meal back at the Beeston Cottage Balti and some rather blurry, tired or perhaps slightly drunk comments on the event which are none the less worth watching in my opinion (links included at the end of this blog).

Are expos dead?
To those not aware of the post-event comments, for me it was a life changing cathartic experience, and rubbish for everyone else. True the stalls were predictably salesy, uninformative and short of Dudley inhaling some mysterious gas for reasons I cant remember, it was populated by aggressive sales people that didn’t listen in a very 80s approach to business generation.

And slightly perplexingly, over half of the show space was given over to the print based spammy leaflet printing industry which is surely a complete relic that I thought was already half killed off by PDF, downloads and the web. Well apparently not, at least without it putting up a good fight and taking a lot of trees down with it.

Back to the plot
Why did I come away a changed man when everyone else didn’t? Because I went to some to the smaller specialist speaking sessions and avoided the meat market expo floor. My highlight was getting to meet Charlie Osmond, Esquire Entrepreneur of the year and head of a company that builds communities for business. This guy is proof that you don’t have to be a self absorbed cocky so-and-so to do very well thank you. http://www.linkedin.com/in/charlieo

So the secret to getting anything from expos?
Hand pick the sessions you want to avoid, be at each one early/promptly so you can get in and see and hear, and avoid the meat market of the expo floor. If you do this your life just might change. The future? Well it’s online and niche interest communities like AxisCommunity, simple as that.

Internet World 2009
We are considering going to this event to attend sessions, possibly having an overnighter at some reasonably priced hotel in London as well. Anyone interested in joining us on this possible mini road trip be it for a day or overnighter, email me direct or see me at AxisCommunity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0XAPUJ4dLk&feature=PlayList&p=56E655A5C9454034&index=0&playnext=1 (1 of 4)

20th anniversary of web & new funded training opportunity

Posted on 24 Mar 2009 at 11:20am

eBusiness insights and the past, present & future of the web in Nottinghamshire

Twenty years ago last week, Tim Berners-Lee, a young English academic working at CERN in Switzerland wrote a short paper where he spelled out his vision for a ‘world wide web’. His supervisor’s comments on the possibility of his grand vision for a connected web of documents and information that spanned the globe?

Scribbled in the margin of his paper were the words “a bit vague but exciting”. The web was born.

Fast forward two decades later the web has become a central part of our lives and its reach has extended into practically every industry and home. But what does the web hold for us and our economy here in Nottingham? Just as we started to tip into recession last year, the signs still looked encouraging.

Apparently the East Midlands generated the largest amount of sales through online retail by micro businesses in the UK and had the largest number of eBay start-ups in the UK. Both pointed to encouraging signs for small businesses and the web here. Keen to understand more about the region's economy and thoughts of businesses on these issues, late last year Nottingham City Council commissioned a report from the Independent Business Association, the Nottingham based business support organisation.

Steve Wakeling, Chief Executive of Independent Business Association, who led the research said “Our research showed clearly that one of the positives for Greater Nottingham was that businesses were starting to really engage with the web. Out of what was a mixed picture economically affected by the start of the downturn, the web was one of the real positives.”

Steve continued “We took the findings to Castle College, where I’d known of the work of the AxisCentre in eBusiness for some time, and together we were able to quickly identify some new Train to Gain special funding that enabled us to create the ‘eBusiness Insights programme’ to help businesses further in the areas of skills and understanding identified”.

New eBusiness Insights funded programme launched

So from Google basics, to Photoshop, getting more productivity from a website, and even how to exploit Facebook and the rise in popularity of ‘Social Media’ websites, this programme is intended to help guide you business future online.

It’s available to an initial 10 Nottinghamshire based businesses employing 10-49 staff and it’s FREE subject to the business meeting the basic criteria, and to you signing up to the governments skills pledge which seeks to encourage businesses to train their staff to meet the challenges of the future.

More information is available at http://www.axiscentre.com/insights.pdf or by calling Steve Wakeling at Axis Centre Castle College on 0115 9256666.

AxisCentre is moving to new premises

Posted on 19 Mar 2009 at 10:15am

AxisCentre move to new premises

AxisCentre is to move to ‘new’ premises in the summer. I say ‘new’ because we will actually be returning to Middle Street Business Centre in Beeston, a building we occupied between 2000 and 2006 before it was redeveloped to cope with the colleges rapid expansion into EFL and overseas students.  (The pic is from 2001 and haven't cars changed!)

A social experiment
The move to rejoin the main college campus in 2006 was a social experiment in taking a brand new modern building (Pearson Building and current home) and mixing really diverse learners in the same space. But on reflection this cohabitation of professionals and business owners with some of the less fortunate youth of the region was always a difficult compromise on both sides.

AxisCommunity works
Many thanks to all those a AxisCentre and AxisCommunity who have politely lobbied and persuaded on this issue, particularly some direct and frank feedback from the last AxisCommunity event we captured on video, which when combined with changes in structure and priorities within the college, its funding and its relationship with employers, has created rethink on accommodation and the future.

A uniquely Axis space
We are confident that we will be able to make the space within Middle Street Business Centre close to ideal for our own brand of rich, informal practical learning we are developing with De Montfort University under the banner ‘Commercial Application of the Web’. This may even run to being able to paint the walls a non college standard (I like purple). Regardless, we look forwarding to welcome you there soon.

Where is it?
Middle Street Business Centre, Middle Street, Beeston Nottingham NG91FN. And yes it has its own parking, street parking and a free multi story near it as well. 

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=ng9+1fx&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=19.406082,39.375&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=addr  

Yay! But when?
We are likely to be moving over the summer once a refit and equipment have been put in place. Also sharing the space will be the college's Cisco & Microsoft IT Academy so there should be plenty of new opportunities for all.

We will let you know once we have confirmed dates but at this point we are aiming to move in August and up and ready for September.
Jonny

Emails & Permission Marketing

Posted on 13 Mar 2009 at 1:29pm

Emails & Permission Marketing
- Why you perhaps need a careful look at the future of lead generation in your business

Permission Marketing is basically asking permission to send emails, communications, adverts, samples whatever to prospective customers. First coined by all round web guru Seth Godin in his 1999 book Permission Marketing: turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers, it suggests that people are far more likely to receptive to a message if their permission if first sought to receive it.

Permission Marketing is known in Marketing circles as a ‘pull method’ because the recipient is accepting or requesting the information known as the ‘opt-in’. Email advertising (with their permission) or RSS feeds for example are pull methods. TV and press advertising however are ‘push methods’, they attempt to interrupt other activity and push an idea or offer on people.

Many (all?) of the traditional ‘push’ advertising methods are now in decline as web use increasingly replaces other ad and communication channels and brings with it a distinctly different and less passive acceptance of sales/ad loaded content.

In the UK the ‘opt-in’ is required by law for email marketing, under The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations which came into force 2003. It’s going to be increasingly difficult for any business in the UK/Europe to lawfully actually cold contact prospective customers as legislation is making it increasingly difficult to get to them without penalties.

So when TV, radio and press ads no longer fetch the ducks off the water, and you’re not allowed to ring anyone or send printed junk mail, exactly how are you going to find new business? The answer to avoiding my apocalyptic vision is of course Permission Marketing, and in particular email marketing.

“Slowdown prompts growth in email marketing sector. “The UK market for email marketing platforms is set for strong growth this year as the faltering economy makes customer retention increasingly important. A study predicts that the UK market for email marketing platforms and services will grow by an estimated 24% in 2008” www.internetretailing.net/news/slowdown-prompts-growth-in-email-marketing-sector .

This is why we are putting together a series of three free events to walk you through the following essential stages of email marketing in this early part of 2009:

1. Event 1 - UK law concerning data protection, direct marketing and the internet.
2. Event 2 - How to construct ‘rich’ emails including links, graphics and video content
3. Event 3 - How to get set up and manage great email marketing campaigns

The first of these free events (The Law) is on Thursday 26th March at CAST bar, Playhouse Theatre Nottingham starting 7.30pm. This will be our 16th AxisCommunity Informal event and we will be joined by Gavin Evans from from Berryman (formerly Berryman Shacklocks) Nottingham.

‘Data protection, permission marketing and the internet’
Thursday 26th March 2009 7.30pm
CAST rear bar, Playhouse Theatre Nottingham
FREE event, guests welcome, free pizza in social afterwards

Web 2.0, Longtail & the start of a journey

Posted on 10 Mar 2009 at 2:40pm

Welcome
Hi all, a big welcome to the course (AxisCentre) and to this site (AxisCommunity). Here’s a few thoughts, links and actions following a rather packed first day and hopefully the start of an interesting journey in eMarketing and eBusiness.

The first day
It was really intended to be a sort of “stop, rethink where the web is going, and understand the big concepts that are underpinning the huge change we are experiencing economically and online". The first thing to say is a comment on the format and style of the course. The first day is usually packed and sometimes a little bewildering, however there is reason behind the madness, both on a learning level and as a necessity. Basically we have to get through a significant learning curve as quickly as possible in order to make maximum space for some of the more tactical and practical course material later in the course. This necessitates you getting a basic understanding of a lot of terms and concepts and I deliberately introduce a lot of the key concepts of the course on the first day to help plant some seeds for later on. This was the case yesterday when a lot of reasons for attendance and early observations by you guys fitted so well with what we are doing and where we are going.

Clumsy link here
By way of a clumsy link into the days material, I was trying to make the point that the web (and Web 2.0) could now be defined as a ‘conversation’, not a monologue or broadcast, and that the course is similarly conversational not a broadcast of facts. It is probably the most strategic and tactical of all the courses we have and hence the highest level course we have academically. This linking of a lot of concepts and possibilities does not lend itself well to a set of comprehensive ‘do this, do that’ type notes so it\'s your responsibility to be taking notes when ideas arise during the sessions, whether that’s in your private blog area on your AxisCommunity account or elsewhere.

The big underlying concepts that the academics and economists would want you to get on board early on would be Web 2 and Longtail. Why Web 2? Because the 3 eras of the web described by Tim o\'Reilly and his Web 2 theory (and its associated Web 1 and Web 3) is a great way of understanding why certain businesses survived and thrived on line and which ones are in big-time growth currently. Why Longtail theory? Simply because nothing I\'ve seen comes close to summarising in a simple graph what the web is doing to economics, and to consumption of information, media, and goods and services. If these seem a little daunting or confusing and I wouldnt blame you for thinking that after such a brief look at them, however I strongly recommend you look at these a little further in the links below and in Google and Wikipedia.

Homework
Have a re-watch of the exit interview of Patrick at Great Beans Bags, a naturally good marketer, successful Nottingham business online and top chap. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goaGbdw4mEc . Also revisit the Week 1 The big Picture notes supplied, some of the extra links below, and think about the following by way of homework:

1. What did you learn from Patrick from Greatbeanbags.com
2. What did you learn from the dot com survivors (Web 2)
3. What are you going to do about Web 2?
4. What does Longtail indicate for your customers, products and industry?
5. What are your first thoughts on keyphrase choice

Optional extra material
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=i4evJLzf7eQ  
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ukde7UN80Q&feature=related  
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=kmr7-XbEbiw&feature=related  
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=geXmY4E65ns  
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=R6FsO5R5wQ4  
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=-o91w8V91mY  
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=9vLzpqnm3fo  

Here\'s the trends tool we talked about and I used to get stats suggesting social media is massive and search perhaps changing www.alexa.com. This is Web 2.0 from the originator Tim O\'Reilly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQibri7gpLM  
Finally, and not wishing to blow you away, but we did mention that \'semantic\' word (semantic web, semantic search engines etc). Here\'s a video losely on that theme http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE  

AxisCommunity
The next event is Thursday 26th March and its likely to be a ‘staying on the right side of the law when publishing content or trading online’ type event although we are still waiting for a our preferred speaker to confirm. No cost as ever, some free pizza afterwards etc, hope you can make it. There are a lot of past events available as video highlights (Informal 1 – 15), here’s a link to our AxisCommunity/AxisCentre Youtube account http://www.youtube.com/user/axiscentre  for more info.

Next week
Monetising the web, traffic, keyphrase and working out the value of a page 1 listing in Google .co.uk for your business.  Plus the start of persuasive content writing.

Image courtesy of this website with an interesting article on Web 1 and 2 and the early stages of the web: http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/all_we_got_was_web_10_when_tim_bernerslee_actually_gave_us_w.htm

How Google ruined the web

Posted on 4 Mar 2009 at 4:19pm

How Google ruined the web

Ok this is a story that’s been told by others online, but I haven’t told it yet and maybe you hadn’t heard. So I’m going to tell it, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Let us take a trip back into dark history of the web, in the early years before Google became a verb and all conquering. Back then web links used to be for humans and in much the same way we have left trails to the sources of food, water, anything important, we left hyperlinks, and the hyperlinks became the web, and the web became part of us.

In or around 1998, boffin chums Larry and Serge spotted that a link inbound to a site as a significant indicator of the quality of a site. It appeared that you could sort of tell how good a site was by not looking at it, but around it.  A quick search of the Dictionary and a clever name later Google was born.

Great except that their search engine algorithm, to be based on the famous (and infamous) PageRank or PR, in effect made links count for money. And that simple fact has, well kind of ruined the web.

“PageRank wrecked the web, Google is the cause of all of this and Google is going down with it”. www.skrenta.com/2007/12/pagerank_wrecked_the_web_3.html

I bet their mums are proud
Nobody can deny their insight or the execution of the plan to turn it into a staggeringly big money making machine. Their new approach layered in with some other cleverness made a multi-billion pound machine. However, and here’s the flip side that perhaps acompanies any seismic event; they ruined the web by the very way they measured it.

The Observer Effect
The Observer effect is not a ‘state of paralysis caused by reading a boring right wing broadsheet after eat strong cheese’, but the theory that ‘the instrument used to measure a phenomenon can end up changing the actual phenomenon it is attempting to measure’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics). This whole territory quickly veers into Schrödinger's cat theory and quantum mechanics before departing for another planet.

But what Google did do was put the emphasis on links, on their popularity and their quality. And as soon as Google AdSense and other monetisation of exposure to an audience in Google came in the commoditisation of links caused the entire planet to veer into spammy link generating frenzy that we’ve been in it ever since.

They did what? How dare they!
If you are reading this is a quiet rage that the beautiful thing that is the web has in any way been damaged or sullied by this shocking commerciality and resulting ‘black hat frenzy’ of attempts by the multitude to climb over each other into the top positions with sadness, perhaps hope is at hand.

I sense a rising tide of events that may yet see the great Google knocked off its perch. Have a look into ‘Vertical Search’, Semantic Web, and ‘Semantic Search’, also ‘Wikia project’ and ‘Powerset’.  Look at stats for the rise of Social Media over Search traffic and the possibility of a future where everything is properly tagged, organised and connected properly. A new wave of technology and a rising demand for a commercial or spam free search engine is gathering pace, Google might not have ruined it completely just yet.

Back on planet earth
So you’ve had a vision of the future. Back on planet earth and at the start of most likely a prolonged economic downturn you need traffic, Google still dominates the UK search arena, so you probably need to join the aforementioned scrum busy creating sites and linkage that Google likes. If you’re interested in Search, whether its history, its future, as a career or just how to make you site perform better in Google right now, join me on ‘eMarketing & persuasive content development course’ at AxisCentre, or join us at AxisCommunity to learn more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWRn8Uc4gyA&feature=channel_page  (1 of several)
http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Content.php  (eMarketing course that includes Search and SEO)
http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Advanced-seo.php  (Adv SEO course)

By the way, if you have read this knowing little about Google and perhaps wanting a tip or two about how to rise up Google then you now know what to do.  Get some inbound links that make the link text rich in the keywords you want to be found in Google. And get a black hat and hang your head in shame.

Want some free PR about your business & website?

Posted on 3 Mar 2009 at 3:11pm

Want some free PR about your business and website?
- Concrete Gnomes conquer all in Lincolnshire & our call for businesses to help provide case studies on impact of AxisCentre courses

Have you been on an AxisCentre course and thought it helped improve your business or career online in some way?

We are looking for past and current delegates who could supply us quotes, comments and stats on the impact of attending AxisCentre courses.

Concrete Gnomes conquer all in Lincolnshire
We have had a lot of informal and anecdotal comments about some quite spectacular improvements in Google position, traffic levels, increased productivity by websites or sales online.

From a fortune in sales of concrete gnomes in rural Lincolnshire (yes and using just a simple site and Paypal), to ten-fold increases in traffic, over the last year we’ve had delegates achieve all sorts. Oh and not forgetting AxisCentre which has almost tripled it’s traffic in the last 3 years and now gets over 70% of all bookings from the web, all on basically a zero budget (can we do a case study on ourselves, is that allowed?)

With quite a lot of bodies starting to take an interest our activity with the centre and surrounding community (including BECTA, the national leading innovation in use of technology in learning), we have been asked to provide case studies that could give more of an insight into how the web can dynamise businesses and affect change.

So whether your comments are modest and brief, whether you just feel better prepared to progress, or whether that you have stats showing specific improvements, we’d like to hear from you.

Free PR and links
You supply the comments and stats, we’ll put the articles together. We both get some welcome PR and links, and we approach DMU, Notts Eve Post, Castle College, Accelerate Nottingham and more to get featured in the various media channels.

What next
You can contact me direct at jgreen@axiscentre.com or by posting on this article at AxisCommunity, either is good. What's stopping you? Look forward to hear from you soon.
Jonny

Report & Video from Informal 15 - The future of AxisCommunity

Posted on 3 Mar 2009 at 9:54am

Escape to Victory
- A report on Informal 15 and the future of AxisCommunity

Last Thursday evening (26/02/09), 20 businesses from AxisCommunity, the learning and social community extension of AxisCentre, met to discuss the future of AxisCommunity.

Titled 'Escape to Victory', this event was aimed discussing how AxisCommunity citizens could take over the running and development of the community. It quickly grew into a wide ranging and frank exchange of views that also encompassed the future of AxisCentre and our relationship with De Montfort University, Castle College and more.

Beyond a beautiful concept
Having managed to hold almost successful 20 events as a community over the last two years, and learning that in that time Nottingham has the highest GDP outside London, and the region has the largest number of online sales by micro businesses and largest number of eBay start-ups in the UK, we felt it was surely the right time to discuss the potential for a bigger, deeper, richer and more independent AxisCommunity. But could we really realise our original vision of ‘a community of people sharing, working and learning together, for individual benefit but with common purpose; namely to build a career, living or business from the opportunity that is the web’. Did we share that vision?

The birth of a second generation learning community?
Set loosely on the film Escape to Victory and in particular the differences in style of lead characters Michael Caine and Sylvester Stalone, we discussed the future of AxisCommunity in two teams, based on the vague premise ‘parallel design’ being a good idea for creativity, and finally presenting our ideas as two ‘gangs’ squaring up to each other at the end of a late night drinking session.

One of the main things to emerge from last Thursday's event was that it seems to be impossible to discuss AxisCommunity without discussing AxisCentre. The debate was then to clarify what both the Community and Centre are for and who they served which started to go beyond what we initially expected. I started to summarise the event in a few bullet points for this report but really the best way by far is to view the two highlight videos. Both teams delivered 5 minute presentations together with closing comments and we have attempted to summarise 3 hours of discussion into 15 minutes. (This is a deliberate ploy as I actually think it may be damaging for me to just summarise at this early stage and without the further consultation explained below).

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tALAUHQLoOs  
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRQNxq8_VWk  

So where do we go from here?
I'll add the written comments from both groups to AxisCommunity, along with email comments from citizens who were not able to make it. I’ll also shortly distribute a questionnaire to all AxisCommunity citizens and AxisCentre customers that haven’t become involved in AxisCommunity in order to influence a debate then shared vision for AxisCommunity and a mission statement, a clear and practical method of governance and reporting, and some practical objectives for AxisCommunity.

Does all this affect you?
Yes directly. The web is only going to grow in importance and as a ecomonic and cultural force. If you are at all interested in building a successful career or business involving the web, having a rich, vibrant, responsive AxisCentre and AxisCommunity in this region is vital. This is your chance to influence it, and be a part of creating learning, network, social and sharing opportunities, and a voice for businesses and web practitioners in this area.

Follow the debate
You can follow and contribute to this debate online at AxisCommunity in the Informals and Gatherings section www.axiscommunity.co.uk , at our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/user/axiscentre , and on my blog at www.axiscentre.com/trainer-jonathan-green-blog.php .

Next event
The next AxisCommunity event on Thursday 26th March and is likely to be themed on 'Legal obligations for UK businesses trading & publishing content online'.

We are still working on this so watch the usual sources (email, axiscentre.com, & AxisCommunity) for news.

A voyeuristic insight into SEO & our main eMarketing at AxisCentre

Posted on 19 Feb 2009 at 10:11am

A voyeuristic insight into the closing SEO part of our eMarketing & persuasive content development course....

Planning for top positions in Google
Here's a quick insight into the organic SEO (in english getting up Google for free) part of the eMarketing and persuasive content development course at AxisCentre.  The following are my comments to the delegates after completing day 6 of the course and it may be interesting to anyone looking to learn a little about SEO, analysis and planning for top positions without necessarily having very much knowledge in SEO.

Planning to implement the learning
There is also an insight into the poster session we run on the final day (day 7) where we prepare a what-next action plan and summary of each delegates work, then film a fairly informal conversation with each delegate about their findings, plans etc.  This voyeuristic film is often facinating and forms a component of the next course where they learn form eachother.  Our Youtube channel contains numerous recorded poster sessions http://www.youtube.com/user/axiscentre

Comments to delegates at end of day 6
Hello all. Hope you enjoyed the organic SEO section of the course. This was our last main topic of the course other than some basics on metrics and what next information next week (and obviously the poster which Ill get to). It was a packed session and obviously we didn’t work through the inbound link information, dropping this for a quick insight into Silos which as we all now know is really just about being careful and compartmentalised in your organisation and naming of pages tightly clustered around themes.

You had covered the main part of SEO by us weaving it into every week in some way, eg looking at longtail affecting key phrase choice through to on page off page and so on so it hopefully made sense despite the brevity. The main thing is to basically understand how content crucially affects search positioning and the need to decide your themes or keyphrase upfront and write for Google visibility, but also for your customers (fundamentally interesting, editorial and informative), and for yourselves (persuade them to think and take the action you desire).

The other hopefully really interesting and useful thing we did was the competitor and comparative analysis of your site vs the first ‘beatable’ website in Google for your key phrase. This should hopefully reveal your fundamental features you are lacking to achieve a page 1 position, but don’t forget to also benchmark (do the same thing) for the first website in the organic results that’s not a directory (ie a proper website).

Homework
Finish as best you can the SEO comparative analysis and prepare for the poster session with a few notes, bullet points, thoughts, calculations, actual work (persuasive content, sketched layout, linear path etc).

Perparation for poster session
To recap, here’s what I will be asking you about in the final session and remember don’t stress, it always goes surprisingly well from your perspective (it will be no surprise to me when it goes well as you’ve all done superbly).

Jonny’s poster interview session main themes:
Intro to business
Position objectives on entry
Main topics and journey of course
Stand out moment and how your thinking has changed
What are the main priorities & where do you go from here

Subjects you can cover or choose to concentrate on:
Long Tail, segmentation and position
Web 2.0 components and effect on your business
Guerrilla & viral and other eMarketing approaches
Persuasive content writing
Persuasive site layout/redesign
Video & other rich media
Key-phrase and Traffic estimation
Organic SEO (key-phrase, competitor analysis & plan)
PPC maths & plan
Metrics & stats (what are you going to measure)
Basic eMarketing plan (list of what & when)

DMU’s basic competencies for the qualification:
1. Understand the historical trends in eMarketing and main eMarketing approaches
2. Demonstrate ability to apply a variety of eMarketing tools and techniques.
3. Demonstrate competence in writing and improving persuasive site text content
4. Understand basic web metrics and demonstrate ability to apply metrics and statistical analysis tools to a business websites.
5. Demonstrate competence in the creative planning of an SME eMarketing strategy

See you on Tuesday

AxisCommunity Event 15 - Escape to Victory!

Posted on 18 Feb 2009 at 10:48am

Escape to victory
- Join us to shape the future of AxisCommunity

AxisCommunity Informal 15 26th February 7.30pm

FACT: East Midlands generates the largest amount of sales through online retail by micro businesses in the UK, the East Midlands has the largest number of eBay start-ups in the UK and we have the highest GDP in the UK outside of London. The time and place for a bigger, deeper, richer more independent and responsive AxisCommunity is now.

A beautiful concept?
AxisCommunity is a beautiful concept, people sharing, working and learning together, for individual benefit but with common purpose; namely to build a career, living or business from the opportunity that is the web.

And we have had some cool success and held some entertaining events and discussions online. People and organisations locally and nationally have begun to take an interest, even recognise it as something perhaps a little different.

Escape to Victory?
However to move to the next phase, to grow to become richer, more powerful and more than a worthy concept and social/utopian ideal, it needs to change, to move on, to escape its current decision making processes.

Escape to victory, is a unique event in our history, together we will plot the first stages of our ‘escape’ from the conventional decision making of the college, to an exciting new future, where the ownership rests with the community and we collectively as a community steer, help shape the future of AxisCentre and AxisCommunity, from events, to course choice, even bidding for funding to help realise a shared vision.

• Steer and shape future, purpose of AxisCommunity
• Form a steering board and agree vision
• Decide events for this year, objectives and priorities

What next?
Join us, whether to heckle, observe or immerse fully and become part of the ‘board’ that steers both AxisCommunity. Your community needs you. Ask not what AxisCommunity can do for you, but what you can do for your community.

Meet us on Thursday 26th February at CAST bar, newly rescued from the clutches of administrators and hence still our base for AxisCommunity. Pizza will be provided to oil the wheels of revolution. Pele, Michael Caine and Sylvester Stalone have been invited but have yet to confirm…

Report from Informal 14 - 'Sales strategies for worrying times'

Posted on 30 Jan 2009 at 3:05pm

Report on ‘Sales strategies for Worrying Times’ event

Last night saw the 14th AxisCommunity informal event, themed around our fear mongering title ‘Sales strategies for worrying times’.

Why now?
We had been planning an event since the banking jitters starting to loom onto the horizon in early autumn last year. However as these jitters started to tip into a recession, we decided to bring it forward and start this New Year and new series of AxisCommunity events with it.

As if to compound this increasingly feeling that we must face the ‘R’ word, CAST bar and Scruffys (our two homes for every event we ever done) went into Administration, a surprising and worrying early casuality and sign perhaps of things to come for many.

Cometh the oracle from Burnley…
To get us off to a flying start in this new series of AxisCommunity events, we were privileged to have Nick Eastwood from East GB, a sales consultancy and training company from Burnley.

Nick routinely negotiates and deal with what is by most businesses standards, vast sums of money and has 20 years experience with major brands like Unilever in both sales and purchasing.

His strategic insights combined with wealth of amusing and at times hair raising anecdotal experience is a great and entertaining package. His stories of brushes with terrorist organisations, bandits are proper ‘war stories’, the sort you imagine big hitters used to trade over a cigar and Jack Daniels before they all got into gyms and skinny lattés.

We could have titled this one ‘How to negotiate and escape in a gunship before they kidnap you’. My favourites are frightening tales of doing business in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles, and his gunship helicopter entry into the jungle in South America to negotiate £50m of sugar and get out before he was kidnapped, by some presumably with an even bigger gunship…

You don’t just sell to customers
Nick shared his thoughts on recessions, their threats and opportunities, their temporary nature and how large corporates will have planned for this latest one. He then moved into sales strategies/techniques looking at internal ‘sales’ (getting more productivity from your team and systems), suppliers (negotiating with suppliers that reduce cost), and customer facing (tactics and preparation for closings deals whilst making the client feel they had won).

The latter topic, ‘closing and negotiation’ is a vital area and an event on its own and we have hopefully tempted him into returning later in the year to give us their insight into how you can plan closing sessions and get the order in these ‘worrying times’

Closing comments
We recorded the whole session and the highlight videos are included below. We hope they’re useful, but like everything, you need to actually watch them, and then actually act on the advice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctlBg01NJeM&feature=related  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95iZMYEUh1g  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7Np7mH23fw  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpqpLem01MY&feature=related  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn6NzqZHOVU&feature=related  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPNGrcC9Vb4  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0XinKl6RB8&feature=related  

Sales techniques for worrying times

Posted on 19 Jan 2009 at 1:06pm

‘Sales strategies for worrying times’
- AxisCommunity Informal event No 14 (Cast Bar, Nottingham 29th Jan 09)

Are you concerned about the effects of this recession?
Last week the popular Scruffy’s and CAST restaurant chain in Nottingham announced it had gone into administration.

That such an early and outwardly popular business, not to mention ‘home’ for AxisCommunity since 2007, was an early casualty of this downturn, brought home to us that very few will be immune from the effects of this recession.

You need an escape plan
The fact is that this recession is not going to go away quickly. So what are you going to respond and prepare? In a generally sliding market, exactly how do you survive and even thrive with so many going to the wall?

Perhaps you need a strategy to see you through it, and central to this needs to be protecting your sales levels and margins.

We’ve brought this event forward for a reason
A ‘Sales strategies for worrying times’ event had been pencilled in for several months. However the news about CAST compelled us to bring forward this event. We are grateful to be joined by Nick Eastwood from East GB and sales strategy and training company who’s coming all the way from sunny Burnley (that’s in the north), to share his insight.

Nick regularly advises medium and larger companies in strategic sales and negotiation issues, helping companies sell their products into corporations like Tesco and advising and training senior sales staff at places like Thorntons.

This short session will cover the following:
 Recession or Market Correction?
 Cyclical Correction & lessons from the past
 Case Studies (Car Industry, Woolworths)
 How do you ride it out?
 Selling Tips (Suppliers, internally and customer facing)
 Every Cloud

It’s poignant
To make this clear, CAST is still open at the moment so the event is on as usual in the rear bar area of CAST. However it is quite fitting, even poignant that we will be holding a session on this subject from a business that proved such an early and worrying casualty of these ‘worrying times’

New discounts feature at every AxisCommunity event
From now until the summer we will be launching a new course at every event. The night's launch is for the Adding a Basic Shopping Cart’ to your site, quite fitting for the event we think! There will be 50% discount off voucher for everyone that attends the event for our new ‘Intro to implementing shopping carts’. Paul Truby the trainer will be there to answer questions and give you quick insight how course (+ free cart designed by us) might be useful to you.

See you there
Event 7.30pm onwards, informal speaker starts at 8pm.
Highly relevant theme, free event, 50% off vouchers and free pizza provided afterwards. What more do you want?

Pay-Per-Click Search - A Halloween Special…

Posted on 7 Nov 2008 at 3:55pm

Pay-Per-Click Search - A Halloween Special…
- Report on AxisCommunity Informal 10 + free video course

Heard about Paid search? Google Adwords, Pay-Per-Click, call it what you will, it is the system of paying to have your site (URL and ad) sit at the top of Google, and in effect paying for every visitor that picks and follows your Google link.

“Google Adwords is now bigger than TV advertising in the UK”
Can’t be true surely? Well it is, more or less. Google, just in the UK now have paid search income greater than ITV, our biggest channel in terms of ad revenue by a country mile (it passed Channel 4 and 5 a while back). As the king of commercial telly, ITV for years has been the chosen method of brand and behaviour conditioning by major corporations for the last 50+ years.

So it’s simple, Adwords replaces TV right?
Paid search (or PPC for short) is simple and highly effective, at least in theory. For a start it has to be the most targeted marketing you can get. You bid against other businesses for the right to have your short advert at the top (a short title followed by two lines of max 36 characters, and a URL), but you only pay Google for the traffic that actually visits your site. Great, in theory.

Does anybody have a clue what they’re doing?
It may or may not surprise you to hear that a lot of people in business don’t understand the web very well and paid search is no exception to this observation. They cant tell you a validated key-phrase for their business, the total searches for it in Google per year, the cost of this click in paid search, let alone any sensible CPE (cost per enquiry), CPO (cost per order), or overall profitability position. In other words, most people are still not yet doing PPC and at least half the ones that are using it haven’t got much of a clue about what they are doing.

Can any product/service be sold using PPC?
In short it is possible to make very good money promoting your product or service from PPC. Contrary to the popular belief that it only suits higher value higher margin products, we have customers that are doing well from PPC right now with product items below £10 sale price, and ranging right up to £1000 and beyond.

The event and our free PPC video course…
Last Thursday’s event was aimed at looking at the first and probably the most crucial stages of marketing using paid search, the numbers.

Steps 1 to 3 in our 8 steps to PPC heaven
1. Target your key-phrase
2. Calculate traffic
3. Estimate your return (ROI etc)

Here’s a 9 minute summary of the event, delivered in an amusing historical Halloween style, complete with a chance to play my new splendid parlour game – Google magical patented Adwords money-making game! http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj9as5wLXaM
 
Here’s the link to download the game (pdf) so you can play along
www.axiscentre.com/adwordsgame.pdf
 
PPC courses at AxisCentre…
This subject is covered in the landmark and flagship ‘eMarketing and persuasive content development course’. This course, delivered by yours truly has just been completely redeveloped in Q3 08 and is scoring some fantastic feedback, making seismic changes to businesses (enough said I think…) http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Content.php

Free video based PPC course coming real soon…
We are almost ready to release parts 1 – 3 of our new free video based ‘How to make money with PPC’ course. Recorded actually on Halloween, this will give you a greater insight in PPC and owning your numbers, key-phrase and profitability maths. Hopefully we will make this available from Monday 10 Nov 2008.

How to Make money from Pay-Pay-Click - free event

Posted on 13 Oct 2008 at 11:52am

How to make money from Pay-Per-Click…
- AxisCommunity Informal No10

A quick practical insight into paid search including understanding the field better, your competitors, knowing your numbers, and creating a simple winning strategy.

Pay-per-click search (PPC) is the system of paying to have your link sit right at the top of Google – and it’s in massive growth. As many of your traditional marketing options continue to decline (TV, press ads etc), it potentially provides a huge and immediate amount of visitors all wanting your product or service – a marketer’s idea of paradise surely? At least in theory. But who’s really making money, and how?

PPC isn’t complicated, it’s about being informed, making sensible judgements, applying some basics, and executing a bit better than the rest.

The session will be quick, practical and use real business examples from the room. Together we will work some beer-mat maths to see whether PPC is likely to work for you, and look at how to improve existing campaigns you may be running.   It  will concenrate on bottom-line benefits, not noodling around with Google Adwords advanced features.

Ø How much do clicks cost and how does it all work
Ø Ideas for improving traffic levels and ads that convert people
Ø Beer-mat maths to work out whether it worth doing for your business
Ø Look at common pitfalls
Ø Share your experiences and learn more

New to PPC? You need to understand PPC as its likely your competition will be using it now or looking carefully at it.

Already using PPC? How’s your bounce rate? Conversion rate and landing page experience? You need to learn and move forward by sharing your results and experiences with other PPC users.

All too often we come across small companies spending big money with PPC ‘strategies’ that could work way better (read cheaper) and even worse, that simply don’t know if they’re making money, but just keep spending ‘in hope’ anyway. Often a few minor tweaks to what you’re doing can make a huge difference. If you pick up one tip that makes you more competitive it will have been worth it.

AxisCommunity Informal No10
Thursday 30th October 2008 7.30 for 8pm start.
CAST bar, Playhouse Theatre, Nottingham

AxisCommunity. It’s about the web. It’s about you.

Exactly what do ‘SEO’ experts do? – The dark art of Search…

Posted on 2 Oct 2008 at 2:16pm

Exactly what do ‘SEO’ experts do? – The dark art of Search…
- Comments on the 9th AxisCommunity Informal – SEO a real-world perspective.

First up, many thanks to Gavin, fellow AxisCommunity citizen and boffin-sized intellect behind Optillion Ltd, the Notts based search marketing company who did a superb, frank and understandable talk for the event.

Secondly, for the initiated, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, one of a whole host of abbreviations that litter the ebusiness field, both from the marketing and developer realms of this expanding world of web.

This session, Informal 9, kicked off our events again on semi-serious footing, after frankly too much socialising and time spent drinking out on the patio at Playhouse Theatre in the last AxisCommunity gatherings over the summer.

Wizards, black-hats, dark forces…

Something that still intrigues me, allegedly working in this industry for a good while, is exactly what SEO experts really do with their time. Afterall, this whole ‘how to get to the top and sustain in Google’ field has to be the most cloak-and-dagger smoke-and-mirror contenscious aspect of the whole online business arena by a country mile...

What I do know is that where confusion collides with a gold-rush, money is made. And what history did teach us is that its was mostly made by those those pedalling the myths and selling you mining rights plus equipment, rather than the ondinary folk with a dream and drawn to prospecting themselves...

Black hat vs white hat…

When it comes to SEO online you get information that is vastly out of date, conspiracies, and even people making dark, strange and even almost mystical claims about their powers to manipulate Search Engines to achieve top positions. The battle of the good versus the naughty at the centre of this industry is defined by ‘black hat’ versus ‘white hat’, an idealogical battle between opposing positions of doing the right thing (‘ethical’ SEO to give its current trendy title), versus the dark forces (it's starting to sound a bit like the Lord of the Rings…)

The secret?

The secret is that perhaps there are no real secrets, that good SEO is about basic technical and analytical competence, common sense, and a healthy serving of stoicism and patience.

Gavin, very much (outwardly) embodies the virtues of the white hat, giving us a down-to-earth look at SEO, what it is, and the basics pretty much anyone with some basic skills can put in place on a site without much help. However like all the best wizard teachers, you are of course always left with just the playful suspicion that a) he must have dabbled with the dark side at some point to truly learn his craft, and b) like members of the magic’s inner circle, that he just might be a member of some secret society where they don black hats, and chant incantations over some book of secrets...

Enough of this conjecture, we might be in danger of adding to the myth rather than busting it. If you really want an insight into this industry, how to apply some SEO essentials, and above all ‘exactly what he does with his time as an SEO expert’, have a look at the links to videos from the event provided at the bottom of this article.

Or better still, get involved and come along to the events. To whet your apetitie there are 44 other videos from AxisCommunity and AxisCentre online now at axiscommunity.com to help you get your business online and build a lasting career online.

You can study SEO with Gavin at AxisCentre from as little as £35/day http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Advanced-seo.php
or on my own landmark epiphany inducing eMarketing and persuasive content development' course http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Content.php?course=188

You can join AxisCommunity for free at www.axiscommunity.co.uk. Visit the ‘Informals and gatherings’ area for links to videos of other recent events. Events are final Thurs of each month at Plahouse Theatre and are also free to attend.
AxisCentre is a community. It’s about the web and it’s about you.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nWRn8Uc4gyA  
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kL6M5fMpcVc  
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=hc2xcoS9bK0  
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VbUQ3hN5NG0  
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=g56kF2Vj2TA  

The art of seduction?

Posted on 29 Sep 2008 at 11:57am

Ever wanted to know how the art of seduction really works? To be able to get the man or woman of your dreams? Read on...

First of all it's a science not an art, and its in Week 2 (or Part 2) of the new version of eMarketing and Persuasive content development course. For those who have just started the course, this is what we will be up to in Week 2. For those not onboard and reading this in my blog and no doubt a little confused but perhaps aroused (curiosity of course), read on and enlightenment will be yours…

Week 2 is really two days worth of material taken from the old 'classic' version of the course, crammed into 1 day in this all new extreme concentrated eMarketing essentials course. It’s proved hard to decide what to drop in the new shortened format as the truth is there's so much we could cover and so many directions we could go. We have to steer where I think we could make the most impact and a lost of past delegates have finished the course saying it has become as much a strategic online business and business change course as it has content development, SEO and video. I remain unrepentant...

'DOUBLE concentrated Axis with added PZAZZ for whites that are so white they are actually blue'

Remember that ad when they actually tried to convince us that when you make white so white it actually turns blue? Persil with blue bits in, in their insanely gigantic box era I think, and pre these days of pseudo concern for the environment.
This part of the course is about persuading people, only we are not going to spin them some rubbish about blue bits like Persil or Daz did. We are going to write practical useful content that helps them (imagine that), while at the same time understanding how people make decisions and embedding some basic 'persuasive vehicles' that will fly under the radar of consciousness.

This combination I’m referring to will be the basis of my forthcoming lucrative world lecture tour as ‘Hybrid content’; and is all about writing content that has the usefulness and honesty of a great review article, with the persuasive ability of full-on sales copy…

So can hypnosis and NLP influence people to, er do stuff?

Did I get your interest with my racy title 'sex, hypnosis, NLP’ etc followed by ‘read on’? I got you with a classic there, a ‘Zeigarnik’, or to use its more common name the ‘cliff-hanger’.

This is a real basic of persuasive web copy writing. You hit them early with an emotive title that you think the target audience going to need completion on (the answer), and they have to read on to get that completion or closure which the human brain craves on a story of personal interest. Watch how cliff-hangers are routinely used by soaps, documentaries, even the news and you’ll see them everywhere (United unveil their shock new signing, more of that later…’ type of stuff.

OK here’s your closure on how to pull whoever you want… Visit iTunes and subscribe to the excellent, free and slightly disturbing ‘Sex, hypnosis and NLP’ podcast by Mark Ryan, and discover how an understanding of left right brain functions, and carefully crafted language can be used ‘condition’ (read groom) a potential partner. That or come along to the course. Welcome to 'the science of persuasion and web copy writing'…

http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Content.php  

Bid to establish AxisCommunity as UK model

Posted on 17 Sep 2008 at 12:33pm

“It looks like a cult to me”…

For the uninitiated, Axis has been steadily growing for the last 18 months. I’m not talking about the range of courses or numbers of people attending (which have actually almost doubled in this time), but about AxisCommunity.

Cruelly described early on in its history as an ‘outreach project for lonely web designers’ and at various times as a cult, AxisCommunity was established as the social, networking and learning extension to AxisCentre.

AxisCommunity is all about us all collectively exploring the commercial application of the web, in short how to make a living, a life, and even a fortune from the web. This is the bit of what we do that we are really interested in growing and the bit that’s causing the interest, dare I say excitement of a number of funders and even the government.

Why? Because social networking is cool, or more to the point, themed communities are very cool. Why? The world is changing, the government want us all as business owners, specialist practitioners, creatives and in fact any business, to get together and share technology and ideas that will power our economy when the last of the manufacturing, call centres and seemingly the entire financial system goes east.

Put your money where your mouth is…

Is what we said. Well they have. At least in part. The government have just announced some pots of cash to create, study and grow networks, and ours, AxisCommunity, which I hasten to add really belongs collectively to us all, is in line to get in on the act.

In short we have bidded for funds to expand the events, make them bigger, cooler, better, funnier, more informative and to bring some more people along to the party. The bid just submitted to the governments grandly titled ‘Specialisation and Innovation fund’ will be to study us, help stream and make our events live to new AxisCommunity citizens that will join us from across the UK, and to create some much cooler bigger forums and general web based wizardry that will allow us to interact, share. And as a community rule the world (cue manic demonic laughter).

We will then roll the model, systems and more out across wide range of similar further education colleges across the UK, helping them form their own specialist communities in biotechnology, manufacturing and many more.

Here’s the science bit...

“We have identified a really exciting existing innovation network inspired by Castle College, called AxisCommunity. It is a web-enabled and physical network of 120 SMEs and entrepreneurs with the common goal of sharing best practice, ideas, skills and opportunities to exploit the commercial potential of the web. We believe this exciting network is the inspiration for which we are seeking in Innovation Nation - ‘make Britain the best country in the world to run an innovative business or public service’”.


Carry on regardless…

So there it is, maybe some more staff, resources to make it cooler and better. But regardless of success or not, we have an exciting and entertaining year planned for AxisCommunity. We kick off again this month with a one off chance to learn with the SEO icon, friend and AxisCommunity citizen that is Gavin Walker from Optillon Ltd. Gavin will be doing what he does best; sharing how to avoid a Google caused headache. And as a former GP he should know…

Axis Geeks steal the plaudits

Posted on 3 Sep 2008 at 5:07pm

“Dude, for geeks you guys rock…”

A survey into the effectiveness, quality and impact of the UCPD Commercial Impact of the web programme at AxisCentre, commissioned by de Montfort University in Spring 2008 has recently been released.

The survey, led by De Montfort University’s Academic Quality department, asked delegates drawn from a variety of businesses who attended AxisCentre courses during the 07-08 period to assess the quality and impact of the training on their careers and businesses.

Cutting to the chase we scored overall 4.6 out of 5, and 5.0 in the personal development category, making us amongst the highest rated or regarded of all DMUs course programmes (and they’ve got a fair few).

Many thanks for the feedback for those who took part. If the courses are working then its down to everyone’s enthusiasm and sharing, from trainers to delegates who in turn return to share their experiences in implementing the skills and help others (that’s how community functions surely).

Here’s to a successful new year of new courses at AxisCentre, and fun and informative evenings at AxisCommunity.

Important course prices update

Posted on 27 Aug 2008 at 3:43pm

Where have we been?
The more observant among us will have noticed that we have been missing from the forums and from the centre, in fact AWOL altogether.

The reason for this Marie Celesete style disappearance is that we have been on holiday, and on our annual Axis team holiday. This time our quest to bond, plot and scheme the future of AxisCentre/Community at the surfing mecca of sunny Croyde in Devon. Pictures of the typhoon conditions that saw our awning disintegrate during the fourth night in inclement typhoon conditions will be posted on AxisCommunity in due course.

Course prices update…
Onto maters more pressing. Those similarly observant people noticing our absence will have noticed some confusion over pricing of courses, and on whether the AxisPassport has or has not launched. This hiatus has been caused by the funding subsidies we had planned for you to take advantage of apparently being withdrawn abruptly by the government for all applicants who already had level 4 (degree or HND) qualifications (probably the the majority of you).

We are now close to resolving this favourably for all concerned and aim to announce the prices for the next 12 months on before 22 September, the day before the first of the new courses starts for this academic year.

One price option we are likely to still have is our HEFCE subsidised AxisPassport deal (20 day course bundle full UCPD qualification) which we are attempting to protect for you at all costs. Using this funding/deal training works out at a cost of approx £30/day to you.

For those wishing to attend individual courses, costs the prices will depend on whether funders will support you just attending the odd module. If their definitive position is ‘no way to part qualifications’ then individual courses may have to be £100/day.

And just to throw in a wild card, Train to Gain, government backed business training initiative is indicating it may like and accept our programme as eligible for up to 100% funding for businesses employing 5 or more staff.

Our gut feel…
Our gut feel has now shifted to us being able to probably resolve this favourably. Our recommendation is to push ahead and reserve places on all courses you need, and we will pull out all the stops to announce prices on or before 22 September. If you can’t stomach the funding/pricing deal we manage to do on your behalf then you can withdraw from courses, no hard feelings.

Calculating traffic, position and your share. With the help of the king...

Posted on 15 Jul 2008 at 4:41pm

Do you know your actual Google.co.uk traffic levels?

This article tells you how to find out search levels in Google.co.uk for any word or phrase, then how to calculate what share you are going to get...

Getting a handle on the traffic levels for search terms you want to be found under has been for some time, equally vital and at the same time largely unfathomable, at least to the uniniated…

Are you really the King?
Firstly, why do you need to know how many searches are going on for particular words or phrases in Google? Why is it that this is so important to your business, website and strategy? It's simply that you need to know what words and phrases to feature throughout your site and ultimately whether it’s worth all the graft to get to the top of a page or not.

In short if you are not confident of your numbers, you may be chasing visibility for a word or phrase with huge numbers that’s possibly unfeasible to position on the first page, or even worse, chasing a search term that has an audience of practically zero (or to put it another way, you are king of a very tiny kingdom indeed).

All smoke and mirrors…
OK so you need to know. Problem is will anyone tell you? Er no not exactly.

Word tracker will tell you for £160 or so. Problem with this is that is takes dogpile.co.uk results, and dogpile only have max 1% of the UK search market. To get round this they basically take figures there and multiply them massively, by up to 85 times, meaning that any discrepancy, weirdness or different behaviour at dogpile compared to Google and the error is compounded massively. The other way we used to do it was take Yahoo’s UK results and scale these up as well, just to a lesser level. This would be OK (ish) except that our own SEO guru Gavin Walker from Optillion, AxisCommunity, and our own Adv SEO course, reliably informs me that Yahoo is used or ‘scraped’ by whole host of SEO people and automated tools, making its figures inaccurate as well.

Is it a mirage? No it’s real!....
This huge news is that Google have just done what they have threatened to do for a while, namely just as Yahoo withdraw their transparency on figures, Google have revealed theirs. For the first time Google are now giving us apparently full access to traffic levels for average monthly and last month volumes for any particular key phrase.

Here’s how to do it…

1. Login or create an account at Google Adwords. NB the free external traffic estimator tool outside an Adwords account doesn’t appear to give you these actual traffic figures.

2. Make sure you choose UK traffic figures and hey presto discover the search levels for your search word or phrase

3. Work out your likely share of the pie. If you are on page 1 in google.co.uk, award yourself a percentage of this total figure. Position 1: Your site in this position? You get 42.1% of the total traffic figure, position 2: 11.9%, position 3: 8.5%, position 4: 6.1%, position 5, 4.9%, position 6: 4.1%, position 7: 3.4 % position 8: 3%, position 9:2.8%, and position 10: 3.0%

If you are below page 1, particularly page 3 or below, award your self an absolute max of 1% of the total traffic. The results drop off radically and I mean radically once you move below page 1.

What’s the verdict? Are you the real king of the search, or just a pretender to the throne?

eCommunity, a new future for AxisCentre and AxisCommunity?

Posted on 11 Jul 2008 at 8:21am

‘eCentre and eCommunity’ Nottingham

For some time at AxisCommunity Informals and within AxisCentre we have been discussing the idea of a collaborative shared centre where citizens can be based from, work from, visit and use to benefit their business, learn, collaborate and share ideas as suits their business, objectives and circumstances.

Today we will be presenting a vision of this, the 'eCentre', plus eCommunity, an expansion of AxisCommunity concept, with Nottingham City Council to explore the possibility of securing funding under the ERDF Priority Axis 2 fund. If this looks promising we will look to hold a special meeting of AxisCommunity for all those who would like to contribute to shaping the vision for this exciting possibility.

The proposal suggests the establishment of

‘An entrepreneurial business community and collaboration hub, designed to help grow Nottingham’s capacity to exploit the commercial potential of the web.’

Individual business success in this new era will be based on innovation, creativity, and above all collaboration, sharing and interaction within a community of entrepreneurs, practitioners and businesses from all sectors within the region. This project seeks to create the ideal physical and virtual environment for business creation and growth, through a unifying theme of the business engagement with, and commercial exploitation of, the web.

It proposes the establishment of the ‘eCentre’, an incubation, collaboration and broadcast hub or centre where participating ‘citizen’ businesses will flexibly work, meet, exchange, collaborate, peer-produce and create in an open, sharing and supportive environment.

It also proposes that the ‘eCommunity’, an interconnected community of technology and digital creative practitioners, independent entrepreneurs and all other businesses sectors be developed, all based on sharing the opportunities for business application of the web.

AxisCommunity summer events and the future...

Posted on 8 Jul 2008 at 1:19pm

AxisCommunity Summer Informals and the future of the community…

This summer AxisCommunity changes format, switching from the learning events to two nice lower key chilled Informal socials in July and August.

It’s perhaps a good time to reflect on the last 18 months, on how far we’ve come, what we’ve got right and wrong, and where we’d like to go in the next couple of years as a community.

For the uniniated, AxisCommunity is the social network of entrepreneurs, businesses, digital creatives and all those interested in making a living on and from the web. It mainly (though not entirely) consists of those studying for professional development web qualifications at AxisCentre. It’s open to anyone interested in the web.

The origins…
It was originally set up in October 2007, as a chance for delegates on Drive Higher, the forerunner to the funky and expanding UCPD programme we are developing with De Montfort, to meet socially. It’s quickly turned into a social, chance to learn insider techniques, share ideas, collaborate on projects, and something that has the feel of potentially being quite special.

The events so far…
We’ve held 9 events in total (I think), attempting to combine networking, sharing, learning into a social and informal environment, and experimented with various different formats and themes with varying success.

Informal 1 kicked off with yours truly doing Silios, the ‘next big thing’ in Search Engine Optimisation, or as Bjorn sagely referred to it, ‘just sticking things in folders’. Along the way we’ve had a Second Life theme, looked at the creative ecology of businesses, done a beating Google session, a creative web thinking, a grandly titled ‘future of the web’, and the latest, an ‘Open Mic night’. In and around this we’ve also held four larger additional meal events at Scruffys and CAST restaurant.

The original invitation…
One of the original invitations was issued via a Youtube video and featured a joke invitation by my two sons (then just two and four years old). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIP6LY2PcaU  To produce this video I just told them what AxisCommunity was and left it to them to try to explain it in their language.

Its very interesting look back that relatively ‘un-coached’ they drew on the social and supportive nature of the idea, proclaiming that ‘Axis is your new family’ and that is would be great fun, although their promise of pass-the-parcel at every event has yet to materialise.

What’s also interesting for me is that that fun and family vibe has remained and is probably the strongest feature that defines us. It has interested and intrigued almost every body that has looked at including the people at Becta, DMU, NTI, Castle College and more.

Where from here?
If this first era of AxisCommunity has been about consulting with the communities needs, this next one will be about a much more significant role for AxisCommunity in everything from events, to premises, courses, grants, management and everything else along the way.

For example…
Lots of great new ideas are starting to emerge, from new events right through to the serious bidding for funding for a shared office and working space where citizens can work from, use, meet at, and work alongside the AxisCentre trainers on projects, as well as study.

It’s a genuine honour to be involved in AxisCommunity, we extend an invitation for everyone to get involved ‘in your new family’ at whatever level you want, and together we look forward to creating something, that might just be, well, quite beautiful.

Review of Axis Community event - Open Mic Night 26/06/08

Posted on 4 Jul 2008 at 4:36pm

Review of AxisCommunity Informal 6 - the 'Open Mic Night'

Last Thursday (26th June) we held our sixth informal and (I think) tenth AxisCommunity event in all.

We have been aware from recent events that our experimentation to find the ultimate community event that combined informal learning, networking and social into a 2 hour drinking opportunity once a month, still needed further work.

This event came as a suggestion from citizen Graeme who suggested a rowdy open format used by music and comedy venues where anyone with anything to say could contribute. Although we didnt quite hit the prfect event formula, the event had a lot of the basics that I think we should be aiming for.

The 4 essential values of a top AxisCommunity event
1. It is social, spirited, amusing and good fun (and there's a bar)
2. You get to informally network, mix and share ideas
3. You actually learn useful tips, insights to help your web career and business

It had a lot of interaction and people sharing and presenting ideas, and generally delivered a mix of the essentials highlighted. It also featured a big reduction in the time anyone was formally presenting (evidence 3 shortish highlight videos as opposed to up to 8 which we have had in the past).

The 4 REAL characteristics of a good AxisCommunity Informal
1. There is free food
2. There is a jolly good attendance
3. An implausibly clever and entertaining theme with catchy names
4. The wole event shows me to be clever, insightful and attractive

This is where we really scored some success. Firstly, free food. From this one we decided to switch to free food at every event from now on, and the pizza and misc posh nibles that you would expect from CAST went down a treat.

Second attendance. Not so great as the food. We had approx 15 in attenance, well off our peaks of 40-60. The open mic title was in retrospect a bit scarey as it appeared to suggest we expect ed eveyone to do public speaking or that it there might nopt be any business value in coming. It was supposed to actually communicate our new vision where we all harness the talent and specialist skills in the room to push our businesses on, collaborate share, learn etc.

Third the great theme. For this one we split into the Socialites (social media people), Geeks (led by deputy geek PaulG), Marketers (SEO and business ideas led by Gavin), and finally the Misfits, a leftfield think-tank led by Oceangoer). This produced a lot of ideas for the size of the group.

Random amusing points
This one was both insightful and amusing. It was Paul doing his Patch Kucha moment (look this up, this is a cool simple Japanese idea to explain what motivates and inspires you). Look out for the bleep that blanks some rude language, see video 3...

In conclusion, and being semi serious, I think it managed to get quite close to being genuinely useful and produced a lot of ideas. Watch the videos and see what you think...

Intro, Socialites and Marketers, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxI4h8mRcOY&feature=related  
Misfits http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udlbGQD_slM&feature=related  
Geeks, Paul, closing comments, closing comments http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K42W1Ls1qfM  

AxisCommunity event - Open mic night!

Posted on 12 Jun 2008 at 10:58am

Informal No 6 – The open mic night
CAST Bar, Playhouse Theatre, Nottingham
Thursday 26th June 7.30pm
Free as usual, open to all citizens AND GUESTS

"You have issues... We have a room of talented people. Let’s see what we can solve, create, break, reassemble, and create...”

We are excited to announce the 6th AxisCommunity event, possibly the best or the worst thing we have ever done, time will tell. Regardless, it’s 'Open mic night' and the first of the ideas from the community that was suggested as a result of the excellent Creative thinking session by citizen Woods at the last AxisCommunity Informal.

What exactly is an ‘Open mic night’?
This is a web professional and business community so it’s not stand up comedy. More a chance to share ideas, tips and tricks with each other. The only real theme is that the evening is pretty informal, about you, your business, your ambitions, and your challenges.

Three parts to the evening
1. Arrive. Join a group, discuss, share, get ideas, drink. Whatever.
2. Move. Go to another group, do the same. Then move again.
3. Talk. Open floor for at 9.00pm anyone to have their 5 mins, plus groups will summarise.

Four themes
When you arrive there will be 4 identifiable areas to the room; ‘The marketers’, ‘the geeks’ and ‘The socialites’…and ‘The Misfits’.

The Marketers - People interested in SEO, Google, PPC, eMarketing, creating new markets, exploring new business ideas etc. Look for the well dressed cad of Search Engine Marketing, Gavin Walker from Optillion.

The Geeks – people interested in web design, development, and all the techy ecommerce and code type stuff. Look for the dark overlord of geekness, Bjorn from Axis Centre.

The Socialites – People interested in social media. Where have you been? This is a massive growth field for businesses. Look out for the Web 2 and social app specialist and member of the Social Media Mafia, Caron Lyon from

The Misfits – People who celebrate their leftfield and free thinking and refuse to fit into groups, have their own group (surely counterintuitive). If you want to discuss anything unconventional and don’t want anyone saying it can’t be done, go here. Look out for the intellect and portfolio interest Mr Craig Encer.

Passports for sale?

Posted on 13 May 2008 at 4:02pm

Yes, it has come to this, we are selling suspicious Passports to those wishing to beat the system...

Ok these are not quite the hot topic they are in the media... From the start back in 1996 AxisCentre has always been about helping small businesses and particularly those aspiring to making a living from the web. With our roots firmly in affordable training and in the community concept we have been working hard to lower the cost of training, whilst at the same time attempting to set and raise the benchmark for quality and business impact. With this in mind we are about to launch what we think is a superb value way of getting skills, qualifications and professional status in Commercial application of the web.

With our partners at De Montfort University, since the start of 2008 we have been developing a new and leading portfolio of web related courses, and most recently have been working on ways to reduce the cost of training and reward those studying a number of courses to achieve professional development qualifications. The result is the new UCPD ‘Commercial Application of the web’ programme and the UCPD Course Passport.

Following a really successful pilot, the UCPD Commercial Application of the web programme is set to expand from just 3 to over 30 courses in the next 12 months, all centred creative, business, design and development aspects of eBusiness.

“The aim of this is to give people the opportunity to create their own personalised route to UCPD and University Diploma professional status, whilst delivering the professional skills to be able to achieve their ambitions online as designer, developer, content expert or web entrepreneur”

Business and individuals could do this by bolting together a series of short courses chosen from the programme to closely match their skills and entry and the ambitions on exit. Courses range from Intro to web design, to advanced Search Engine Optimisation.

How it will work…
The passport concept is certainly not unique, and many major training organisation use the approach to offer some discounts on training. The big difference in ours is not that it will offer access to a series of leading edge training courses as others do, but that it offers you the opportunity to package these together to get a recognised professional University qualification, and at a fraction of the commercial rates.

For example you could study advanced Search Engine Otimisation at £250 or even £400 a day at some training centres throughout the UK. The ‘Advanced Search Engine Optimisation’ course which is developed and delivered in conjunction with an SEO specialist company in Nottingham, costs only the equivalent of £99 for 3 days learning. It also gains you 15 of the 60 necessary credits for a UCPD university professional qualification. Just want to attend a single course? You pay the individual course rate of £199 for 3 days (still well below commercial rates).

 Passport prices means training is way below rates available elsewhere
 Range of highly quality courses unparalleled in East Midlands
 Design your own personalised route to professional qualification
 Get the skills to improve your bottom line, and build your career

In summary…
In a nutshell, the UCPD passport gets you access to leading edge skills delivered by field pros, professional qualifications, and all at a tiny fraction of the cost of commercial training centres. Add to this your free lifetime membership of AxisCommunity events and course support before, during and after attendance and we believe it’s a unique offering in the UK. Come and be a part of it at AxisCentre and AxisCommunity.

Olympic medal winning athlete to join Axis

Posted on 13 May 2008 at 3:32pm

Olympic medal winning athlete to join Axis training team

Trying to achieve something with your career and business online? Hope so as that’s kind of the whole point of AxisCentre and AxisCommunity. However, all the eBusiness and eMarketing courses in the world won’t make a single change to your business or career unless you can apply the skills learnt and use them in a productive way.

How useful would an insiders insight into the skills, tips and techniques used by Olympic athletes to achieve success be to you?

We are excited to announce that we have now started work on developing a two-day course on goal-setting, time management and success planning, and to do this, joining us we have a multi Olympic and world championship medal winning member of the British cycling team who has mentored and competed at the highest level of the sport for over 15 years and winning numerous medals at Olympic and world championship level.

Goal setting, motivation and time management

Our initial look at the skills and his methods suggests there is a significant cross over between what an athlete does to succeed and what it will take to rapidly move your business and career on big time. This will be a two day course in goal setting, motivation and time management taking the techniques used by the current Olympic teams and will be aimed at start-ups and existing small to medium businesses and those developing their careers independently.

Did you know that there are only approx 300 Olympic medallists alive in the UK? This is a rare opportunity to spend time with someone who understands goal-setting, time management and developing a winning attitude on a level that few others have experienced. We hope to allow you to share in that insight and make rapid progress in your careers and businesses.

This course is in development and is planned to come on-stream in September. In common with all the Axis new generation of courses, this course will also give you professional development credits leading to respected De Montfort University qualifications including UCPD and University Diploma in Commercial Application of the Web. Prize of a nice 1Gb USB stick for the first 5 people to successfully identify this person (clue is he is 37yrs old and a local Nottingham boy). Email your answer to info@axiscommunity.co.uk or post a reply in LearnerLounge of AxisCommunity.co.uk.

We will announce the launch and available places on www.axiscentre.com and www.axiscommunity.co.uk or contact us for more information.

Axis and DMU seeking partner businesses

Posted on 13 May 2008 at 2:36pm

De Montfort University seeking partner businesses

Own or work for an East Midlands based business? Want to genuinely move you business and career on in 08/09?

Choose your ultimate course package, make real bottom-line impact on your business, then pay nothing. Too good to be true? Here’s info on a potentially fantastic opportunity to benefit your business and be a part of something new…

For the last two years AxisCentre (Castle College Nottingham), has been developing and increasingly close partnership with De Montfort university in developing and accrediting brand new eBusiness training courses. With our decision to switch all our efforts into developing a new generation of eBusiness courses focused on ‘Commercial Application of the Web, De Montfort University and Axis Centre are now seeking companies wishing to take part in the development and delivery and benefit from this new programme.

“We are about to enter an exciting era for De Montfort University where we aim to engage with businesses on a new level, developing short, responsive courses that match your business needs. We would like to hear from employers and businesses of all sizes from sole traders to large organisations who would like to take part and benefit” - Hilary Whaley from De Montfort University

Who are we looking for?

We are seeking 50 East Midlands based businesses to become ‘Partner Businesses’ who in exchange for sharing feedback and helping decide what courses they need, get to attend a package of the best brand new eBusiness courses worth £1000s (£10,000s?), at no cost.

All the courses have professional development credits attached to them, so successful businesses will be able to pick their own courses allowing you to achieve your objectives whilst building a UCPD University Certificate of Professional Development. Courses range from 2 to 7 days in length and attract between 5 and 25 credits.

What’s the commitment?

There is no financial commitment or outlay. Instead we are seeking businesses who want to realise a commercial return from the web who will commit to releasing a key staff member to complete flexible package of training of 60 eBusiness UCPD credits over 12 month period.

This equates to 20 days of training, all on short courses chosen by your organisation to achieve your business objectives. Due to start in early September 2008, 20+ courses will be available ranging from 2 days goal-setting with an Olympic medal winning athlete, to 6 days designing an online ecommerce system, or 3 days learning how to get your site to the top of Google.

What next?

We are only looking for expressions of interest at this stage and the exact criteria on which the businesses to receive training and additional support for free has yet to be chosen. However we are looking more for a willingness to engage and drive your business to achieve something online, rather than specific industry sectors or organisation sizes.

If you are interested in taking up this possible opportunity, post here or email us with your basic contact details. We hope to have news soon on this opportunity and will be in touch shortly.

How to have brilliant ideas - free event 29/05/08

Posted on 13 May 2008 at 2:08pm

Informal 5
Monkeys Wanted: the Art and Science of having BRILLIANT IDEAS
- How to have great ideas and how to go about practically implementing them

CAST Bar, Playhouse Theatre Nottingham
Thursday 29th May 2008 7.30pm
FREE and informal event as usual

A glimpse into the world of business creativity and how it is relevant to you, your business and the future of your AxisCommunity. You’ve heard enough of people talking about creativity and innovation. Let’s simply do it by generating some business ideas for you to take home, plus helping to define what you want the replacement AxisCommunity website to do for you.

“An idea that remains unimplemented is a scandalous waste, so we will look at practical planning. We will hold a Question Time session where you can understand how you can start to implement your newly formed ideas straight away”. Adrian

This Informal is about you. If you are to succeed, thinking creatively will be the cornerstone of your success. However we all know people who come up with loads of good ideas only to fail to implement them. If you are in any way interested in getting on in the next year, you need to be at this event.

This Informal about your community. We want to define how we all want the new AxisCommunity site to inform our careers, lives etc. Let us put together a vision for what we hope will be the best private community site out there.

About Adrian. Adrian is the former Chief Economist for Boots, an active AxisCommunity citizen, and someone who understands how the mind works. An NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming practitioner, accomplished trainer and business coach, fascinating powerful and top fella, Adrian has a heck of a lot to offer the community. We hope to tempt him into some mind mapping, NLP, strategy and innovation sessions later and into returning to AxisCentre to deliver some short courses as part of the new UCPD course programme for 2009.

Health warning. As usual the theme remains the ‘Commercial Application of the web’. Do not confuse this Informal with fluffy bunny consultant speak that’s not relevant to you. All your web technology and Google tricks in the world are meaningless if you can’t create and apply good ideas on which to use the technology. So come along and be part of planning yours and Axis Community’s future.

Also at this event. We hope to have news of a stunning funding gesture from De Montfort University which should be a great fantastic opportunity for AxisCommunity citizens. Chance to network, have a social drink and exchange ideas.

5 fascinating facts from Internet World 2008

Posted on 13 May 2008 at 11:47am

5 fascinating facts from Internet World 2008

It’s been just over a week since we got back from our trip to Internet World at Earl’s Court so I thought Id better share our findings.  Ably abetted by Dennis and CJ, citizens from AxisCommunity and the hardcore of full time deliverers at AxisCentre we were there to seek out where the web was heading, answer some technical questions, and remind ourselves why all choose not to live in or anywhere near London...

Here’s 5 fascinating observations about the event and the future of the web…

1. Some things don’t change
The picture included with this article inside AxisCommunity is of me being administered to at arrival at Internet World by two concerned ‘nurses’ from QUBE. Quite what was wrong with me I can’t remember but I felt better straight away. Remember the basic motivations in life. Everything is about avoiding work/danger/discomfort, and procreating the species. I realise those viewing this outside AxisCommunity dont have quite the full effect here but just remember about motivation when you are writing your usual bland unemotional web content…

2. Duran Duran are bigger than the web.
Last year I took my then girlfriend now wife to see Duran Duran. (John Taylor the basist holds a talismanic like hold over her, I've explained its an old NLP anchor I can sort out but she doesn't want to be cured...). Duran Duran managed to fill Earls Court 1. Internet World could only fill half of Earls Court 2. How is this possible? The internet is the present and almost certain future of business, life everything, yet the past could occupy four times the space? The other half of Earls Court 2 was filled by Direct Marketing, the largely paper based spamming industry that the web and legislation was supposed to have finished off.

3. Community thing is big
The whole social networking community thing is getting a lot of attention now. To illustrate this I met Charlie Osmond, Esquire’s Entrepreneur of the year 2007, a lovely fella who builds private networks for big businesses. He basically uses the social networking phenomenon to create and nurture communities for businesses which use them to develop and test ideas, consult and engage with their customers. Gone are the focus groups (biased, artificial don’t work which if you don’t believe me view this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQS_s2zcyBw). True community to me is about having very little delineation between your customers and your business. The bigger businesses this guy is engaged with sI would suggest have cannot physically (nor have any intention of being truly part of a community) are still talking it seriously (Proctor and Gamble, Dell (IdeaStorm) as examples http://www.dellideastorm.com/ .

4. Neglect feedback at your peril
You are a liar. Editors or magazines are liars, in fact everyone is apart from complete strangers who we believe completely. This is truly the era of Citizen Journalism. Make sure your products and services have a 'star' rating system plus opportunity to leave and view feedback. Why? Because Figleaves.com the lingerie people did it and got a 34% increase in sales just from adding the feedback system. Why? Because we need to know whet other people think. If your idea of feedback is a separate testimonials page where Mrs Smedley of Crouch End thought your product 'most efficacious' in 2004, then you are way off the mark as it’s possible to be daddio. I’ve picked you out a nice example to illustrate my point (surely some winner of the longest and un SEO’d link ever) http://www.figleaves.com/uk/product.asp?product_id=FE-6880&mci=&size=&colour=&image=r3483-p389509-p389502-p000000-style  

5. The event is obsolete
We got up at 5am to get there mid morning, then missed a lot of seminars we wanted to see that we couldn’t get into, or couldnt hear properly, or needed to be in two places at once. It was 10pm before we had got back and shared our thoughts and made sense of it all.  To get all eMarketing speak these sort of events are ‘broadcast’ (miss ‘em and that’s it), not ‘on-demand’. This all of a sudden seemed really outdated and clumsy as a method of sharing. Surely the future is available 'OD'. Secondly, surely the making sense bit would be better facilitated by the web with forum and wiki sessions open to all and in your own private community where you can make sense of the events and what it means to you, like we did back at the Cottage Balti Beeston afterwards (had a refit and excellent btw). They want you there to ‘sell to’ of course which is why people were scanning your badge like crazy without qualifying you, in which case they may as well just buy the database of attendees…

Give me more I hear you cry. With pleasure. For the more voyeuristic viewers, here’s our Youtube video shorts with more fascinating insights, facts and observations….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0XAPUJ4dLk  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvbSgLYChrc  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyvllkWTHjg  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnzjQixEc24  

Join us. For more info on this and other free informal web business sessions held monthly in Nottingham by AxisCommunity please join us for free at www.axiscommunity.co.uk and visit the ‘Informals and Gatherings’ forum.

Post script.  Like spending 9 hours driving to get only 140 miles away and back wasnt bad enough, red kens parting gift to us was a congestion charging zone fine for blundering 10 metres into the charging zone.   

Second Life event review and course launch

Posted on 30 Apr 2008 at 12:06pm

Want a ‘Second Life’?
‘Second Life’ event review and videos 24/04/08 & new Second Life course launch

Heard that businesses are moving into Second Life? Perplexed how they are making money, or even just what on earth it is? Imagine the computer game Sims combined with a 3D version of Skype, then add you and your life...

Last Thursday we enjoyed an insight into Second Life thanks to Caron Lyon from PCM Creative. Caron took us through some of the basics including creating your own character (known as an Avatar), moving around, business, and life generally within this fast emerging virtual online world.

My favourite moments were the dancing, the great swaggering walk Caron's character had, and when one of the characters momentarily lost their trousers during the after-show social (tastefully and within Second Life I hasten to add). It certainly triggered a lot of debate and several AxisCommunity members have reported back that they have since started to participate and explore Second Life.

Looking a little more seriously at the business and career issues the evening raised, in a way Second Life is slightly ahead of its time technologically and culturally, but is gaining some serious momentum that you would be wise not to ignore or pass off as a fad. For instance we learnt that the Second Life main conurbation is already big enough to rival the population of most major European cities and has an economy and population growth that far outstrips anywhere in the ‘real’ world with the possible exception of a couple of regions of China.

I think that we are going to see a blurring or what is real world and what is virtual, and another year to two years will probably see a lot of bigger businesses move there. It still feels a bit like a case of ‘build it and they will come’ and has yet to achieve cultural acceptance or technological maturity, and thus has yet to reach tipping point. But when virtual worlds do (and it’s a ‘when’ not an ‘if’), this sort of interaction will probably completely change the face of the web.

When I can go to Tescos, talk to my friends, watch a new release HD movie, and wander around reclamation yards in Ebay looking for Victorian bits for my house project, it moves from the time consuming abstract exercise to part of life. Guess what, you can do that already in Second Life. Sort of. Gold rush opportunity or fools gold folly, only time will tell, but show me a bigger and more tantalising opportunity out there currently.

Interested to learn more?
Interested to learn more about the potential of Second Life for your business or career? We are launching an exciting course, believed to be the first in the UK of its type and giving you a deeper insight and live linkup ‘in world’ with business specialists already operating from within Second life making it happen.
http://www.axiscentre.com/DH-Second-Life-Ess.php  

View video highlights of the event
To learn more about Second Life and see edited highlights of this event please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9ctdb78Oe0  . To view further videos from this and other events please see the Informals and Gatherings forum on AxisCommunity.co.uk

Thanks to Caron Lyon from PCM creative http://www.pcmcreative.co.uk/  

The web is changing. Are you?

Posted on 10 Apr 2008 at 3:08pm

Is your business in danger of stalling?
- 3 hard questions you need to ask about your business & the web now

"Web 2.O has changed everything". "Re-purpose & reorient for the web or die". "Long-Tail set to deliver a seismic shock to businesses"… Confused where the web is going, or more to the point, about how it's going to affect your industry, your customer's behaviour? For me there is now a tangible feeling that the web is chnaging and evolving very quickly. Maybe it's time you did a little crystal ball gazing and look at a few major trends…. 

The big switch off
Noticed that your traditional marketing channels are starting to struggle? We routinely get reports from customers that back up our own experiences that radio, print, telesales, even the 'untouchable' cash cow of TV is starting to fail to generate or hold the interest of customers.  That's because everyone is switching off. No, not the web as the daily Mail would have us believe, it's the TV, the radio, the paper and almost every communication channel you are your industry has relied on for probably 40 years. So what are we all up to? Simple, we are converging online and at the same time diverging in our interests.

The big split?
As sure as almost every method of communication and entertainment channel has already moved online, or is in the process of doing so, what's also happening is that we are splitting or diverging into a huge series of niche interest groups. In a new phenomenon the experts are calling 'convergence and divergence', the web and its infinite storage, shelf space and connectedness is for the first time freeing us up from limited choice and being told what to think, buy, and consume that has characterised the west since the 1940s. We the users now make or break a product or business, not corporations, editors or ad-men say.

Make sense? OK let's look how this huge change might impact on your business into 2009.  Here's 3 questions that could shape your businesses future into 2009 and beyond.

1. Where are you in Google? Is anybody searching?
Not worried about search? You should be. As sure as the old methods are switching off, search is now a critical factor in 80% purchasing decisions (B2B and B2C). You're already in Google? Great but is anybody searching. The words you are ranked under are critical to determining the level of traffic arriving at your site. What few people yet realise is these words also have a large impact on whether they buy or not.

2. Do you hide your secrets or give them away?
A difficult one this, In a nutshell the web has radically changed from us all hiding our content, ideas, designs, insider tips etc away behind pass worded areas (makes sense, that knowledge is how most of us consultants make a living.  To us not only giving it away on our websites, but also pushing it onto others as free useful content elsewhere on the web. This seems what academics would call 'counter intuitive'. On the new web, reputation and trust is the new currency, and the content is the advert. People simply won't be sold to in the passive way they have been for decades in traditional media and you have to accept this and give them content that has the ad embedded in it in the form of a few under-the-radar persuasive content writing techniques, whilst simultaneously holding their interest with really useful content.

3. How many of your customers are personal friends?
TV down, radio down, Data protection act, junk mail and sales calls being legislated on… Almost every major brand out there is desperately trying to get in touch and know you in a way they have never needed to before. The new measure is how many customers are friends you could call and go out for a pint right now. Sounds silly? It will be one of the real business metrics to shape the next decade.  While we are talking about relationships, you better get a group of them out on the town together as well because if you can't build a real sense of community with your customers and a dialogue between them (often bypassing you entirely) you're going to run into trouble sooner or later if the new dynamics of the web are anything to go by. 

Seriously worried? Not bothered? Truth is maybe you should be somewhere in the middle. We are way past tipping point with the web and it shaping up to be a hugely changed space from a decade ago. If you don't believe me look at how current teenagers, the big consumers of the next 10-20 years.  What are they doing with their time? Watching TV? Nope, they're online poking eachother on Facebook, talking for free internationally on IP phones, gaming, socialising, downloading, and consuming. Do you seriously think they will change from this to the comfy old predictable programmed by TV consumers we were?  I doubt it very much. 

Want to learn more or contribute to this debate? You are reading a posting at AxisCommunity. Learn more and get involved by joining AxisCommunity for fgree at www.axiscommunity.co.uk or join the eMarketing and persuasive content development course at AxisCentre. Maybe its time you reconsidered how your business is going to genuinely and meaningfully engage with the web.

The future of Google and Search

Posted on 10 Apr 2008 at 2:50pm

Why Google is going to fail
By world renowned SEO 'expert', futurist and observer of global trends Jonny Green

A lot of what Axis does on its courses is concerned with business strategy which is of course all about what you do now to prepare for the future. For this reason I thought we might take a look at the future of Google, and challenge the assumption that as the web surely grows, so will Google as the dominant site and search tool.

Skeptical? Does Google look bullet proof to you?
Remember the Fiat Mirafirore? Those old enough will remember it was cutting edge and even voted European car of the year. Yet it rusted and fell apart after less than 2 years and innovation quickly consigned it to the scrap heap. History and hindsight have an amusing way of making once cool things look a bit silly and often quite quickly. Look at Google’s traffic levels using Alexa.com in the last 3 years. Is it in growth? The web is in growth on almost every metric you could measure. Google is not.

So let the heresy commence...
I think the writing is on the wall for Google. Why? Well here's about 10 reasons why:

Google is a comparatively old fashioned business model and not at all Web 2, 3 or whatever you want to call this emerging generation of websites in this ever involving and growing web. It keeps secrets for a start, not least its fabled ‘algo’ and within it the criteria for deciding site merit and thus where it will place you. Who does that in these days of open source, sharing, transparency, copy-left, collaboration, peer-production?. Search engine developments are afoot that tackle the spamming and abuse not by hiding the criteria for decisions but by sharing it and using the open-source development community to create something better and fairer.

Google has a gathering reputation of heavy handedness. We read it is engaged in bully boy and litigious tactics when it is threatened by rivals. It acquires or hires any one and any thing that shows any talent or ambition to (I’m still waiting for the call). It apparently collaborates with regimes with questionable human rights and democracy records (China), cooperating in their censorship of information including Tiananmen square details for a start. This when the very basis of the web since is conception has been as an open and self-regulating community.

It’s one big thing as well. It doesn't fit with the marching inevitable tide of change that Chris Anderson’s Long tail theory clearly demonstrates where we are fragmenting into niches. Add to this it’s clearly not that accurate, is stuffed with commercial content (people hate that and always have online), its spammed and abused, and only indexes only a small minority of the web. Then throw in its very basis on entirely replying on a maths algorithm to decide a documents merit as opposed to us the user deciding its merit based ‘peer appraisal’ (rating it/voting for it and digging it for example).

The social web…
In my humble opinion it is utterly inevitable that the web is going to be a social space where we live, work and interact. People buy and people consume and people buy from people and that’s the end of it. Search full stop is probably going to wane in people’s decision making processes when social networking sorts itself out and we get genuinely connected. Why? We will take the word of someone we know or someone vouched for by a friend versus misc information out of the wild web every time.

The semantic web?
The biggest reason Google may be on borrowed time is perhaps that it doesn’t quite fit with the prospect of a ‘semantic web’. This is where information will be designed, labeled and connected together in such a way that we may not need a search engine at all. Tim Berners Lee, the man credited with inventing the web has recently commented that Google’s achievement and usefulness so far will pale in comparison with what the semantic Web will bring. And when this whole ‘social web’ thing collides with the ‘semantic web’ thing we are in a different web altogether…

So who are the rivals to the crown as mutterings of a coup gather?
Maybe it will be a commercial free ‘Wikia Search’ the engine from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame developed by his legions of loved-up community developers. Or maybe it will be ‘Powerset’ or Hakia’ which are both gaining attention from those in the know.

The truth is out there…
If you want the truth, research the ‘Wikia Search’, ‘Hakia’, and ‘Powerset’ and don’t forget ‘semantic search’ and ‘semantic web’. Despite all my talk of Google cracking, I can almost guarantee that without even thinking you’ll be reaching for Google to do the research, and the irony of this isn’t completely lost on me. Proof if nothing else that Google will probably become even more important before it gets it badly wrong.

Want to know more or contribute to this debate?
Join AxisCommunity for free at www.axiscommunity.co.uk or join the eMarketing and persuasive content development course at AxisCentre.

Jonny Green
10 April 2008