I am now devoting my full efforts to our new company, and that includes blogging.  For the past month or two I’ve dual-posted on both sites, but now I’m going to suggest that you subscribe to the new blog.  We may do some things on this site, but how that fits with the new company is yet to be determined.

Cheers.

Rick

If you aren’t already clued in to Google Buzz, it’s an expanded function of Google’s popular Gmail.  Click the Buzz icon and see your friends’ posts on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other social sites.  But so far, I don’t see how to connect Facebook.  Nor do I see how to add the social network of your choice.  So at this point, it’s limited.

However, because Gmail has so many users (38 million unique users as of 2009, according to Mashable)  Google Buzz debuts as a huge thing, with already more users than Twitter.

The key question for me is this:  how you use Gmail.  I use it primarily as a “personal” address for things not directly related to business and I don’t think I’m alone here.  It’s an accepted best practice to use an email address from your business domain rather than a Gmail address for your business.

So my Gmail address book does not include most of my key business contacts, and since I use social media primarily for business, there’s a disconnect.  In fact, when Buzz launched, it connected me with only about a dozen people  So far, only one of these people is showing up on my Buzz stream.  Not too interesting, eh?  So for me, the net impact of Google Buzz  is not very big.

I know there are many folks using Gmail (especially Gmail for business)  as their primary business email.  Google Buzz will work well for them.   It will also work well for those who do not want to fool with the setup and ramp-up necessary to make Twitter a good experience.   Further, Google will eventually make Buzz more functional and thereby more central to users’ daily lives.

If we’ve learned one thing in the past decade, it’s to never underestimate Google.

What do you think?  What’s Google Buzz doing for you?

I am a longtime seller on eBay, specializing in collectible vinyl records.  Ebay has long been known as an online auctioneer, but they have been moving steadily away from auctions and towards fixed-price items for several years now,  partially to accommodate big retailers and partially to compete more directly with Amazon.com.

In 2003 I jumped on the relatively new eBay store bandwagon, which provided sellers an opportunity to sell fixed price items for a very small monthly fee.  At the time I think it was a penny per month with a $15.95 per month  subscription.  Low visibility compared to auctions, but search-able.  Maybe two years ago, the price jumped to 3 cents, while they introduced a more expensive fixed-price listing category that was as search-able as auction listings.  These varied in price but were typically 35 cents.  My experience with the store concept was very positive.  Rather than depend on the uncertainty of auction results, a seller could determine the appropriate selling price and wait for the buyer to come along.  Sometimes it took months, but at 3 cents per month it was worth the wait.

Now, they are essentially eliminating the store concept by merging these fixed price listings and store listings.  The price changes are tiered and complicated.  You can still pay 3 cents per listing but instead of paying $15.95 per month for the store fee, you’ll pay $299.95.  Or, you can keep your store fee at $15.95 but each listing is 20 cents per month.  In return for this massive price increase, all store items are no longer segregated from auction items.  Everything is equally search-able.  (There are several other pieces to the fee restructuring, not the least of which are eBay’s “final value fees”  but I’m going to focus on the store listing part of it.)

At the moment, though, I am staring at a whopping 667% price increase for listing items in my store.   To continue my current store strategy, I’d have to have a huge increase in sales to pay the fee increases.  All over the US there are sellers reacting similarly.

I’m trying to see  this as a learning opportunity.  So what are the lessons here?

1. Traffic is King.   eBay occupies a very large niche and owns a huge amount of traffic.  They’ll rent this traffic to you, but you have to play by their rules, or, as my dad used to say, ‘go play on the freeway’.  By achieving near-monopoly status as an online auctioneer, they can and do dictate how things work.  They can tinker and fiddle and the rest of us have to adjust.

2.  Their Business Model Dictates Your Business Model. Tens of thousands of small sellers are making a living by using eBay to deliver their customers.  It has worked well, for many, for a long time.  The problem is that you have no control over what eBay does.  They can force sellers to use Paypal, as they have.  They can tilt the playing field in favor of the buyer, as they have.  They can dictate shipping prices.  They can make the seller responsible for insuring packages.  The seller is simply forced to adapt, or move on.  Many sellers are trying to make that choice right now.  One thing is clear:  they are in charge.

3.  Size Matters. As eBay has cozied up to large online retailers, it has also placed obstacles in the way of the small seller.  This is quite apparent in this new structure.  In their heavily-spun announcement of the changes, they trumpet the opportunity for sellers to get fully search-able 3 cent listings.  Trouble is, it costs the seller $299.95 per month just to be eligible for 3 cent listings.   This won’t be a big problem for Best Buy or other retail giants who sell thousands of dollars of merchandise per day on eBay.  They’ll be able to list items for 3 cents while little folks will have to pay 20 cents.  May the best big man win.

4.  Honesty = Transparency. eBay trumpets “lowest insertion fees ever” but really this is a price increase disguised by a few cosmetic price promotions.  Depending on the individual seller’s situation, some of these changes could actually mean lower fees.  But for the rank-and-file seller, it’s another in a series of price increases and disruptions, each of which has been served up as an improvement for the benefit of the seller.  It’s pretty much consensus now that transparency is a desirable characteristic in business.  eBay is losing the PR war by being less than truthful in its communications to sellers.  They will lose a lot of sellers over this, and perhaps they will alienate enough people to open the door for a real competitor.   A lot of folks who feel abandoned by eBay are hoping that is exactly what happens.

5.  Superior Business Models Win.  And that’s what eBay is thinking when it makes things less palatable for sellers.  In the end, some sellers will stick with it, because, for many, it still beats starting your own e-commerce platform, setting up in an antique mall or starting  a brick-and-mortar retail operation. Until a viable competitor emerges, eBay is still the 900 pound gorilla.  A price increase it may be, but many of us will pay it.

Huh, I said to myself, while also pondering the grammatical error in the group title.  Didn’t know that had happened.  How did I miss it?

I went right to Indy Star and the Indianapolis Business Journal to read more about it, but there was nothing.  Nothing at all.

Back at the Facebook page, there were dozens of comments of support for Jimmy, and even comments from Jimmy himself  (Be nice to Q95, he said.  He still has lots of friends there).  The page had been started way back on Saturday, January 9, at 11:52 am.  But there was no news anywhere else that I could find via Google.  So I blogged about it on Tuesday afternoon, and then, as I often do,  used Twitter to promote the blog post and the news.  Meanwhile, good old RSS immediately fed my blog post to LinkedIn, Smaller Indiana and Facebook.

It took until Wednesday morning (January 13) for the news to hit IBJ, and until that afternoon for Indy Star to cover it.  FOUR DAYS after the Facebook page was started, the mainstream media was finally on it.

My blogging about Jimmy’ s departure is an inconsequential piece to the story, because I don’t have a large readership.  Every bit of communication sends out its own ripples, though, and that is exactly why I auto-feed my blog to social networking sites, to extend the reach as much as possible.

What is huge is that the news got out on Facebook and people were jumping in to publicly support Jimmy Matis long before the news media was able to catch up and publish something.

That’s not a knock on our local journalists who do a heroic job in the face of great challenges.  It’s a reflection on the contemporary news cycle, as well as the increasingly limited resources at these media companies, as they struggle with their disappearing bottom lines.

It’s certainly true that Twitter and Facebook are proving to be the first–and sometimes only–means of communication when tragedy strikes, such as in Haiti. What’s just as significant to me is that it is no longer possible for big media to consistently deliver the news to the rest of us fast than we can deliver it to each other, even though our grammar may not always be up to par.

PS:  My best wishes to Jimmy “Mad Dog” Matis, a quality guy who I”m confident will land on his feet.

News of this is just now breaking, but apparently it happened at the end of last week.

Jimmy “Mad Dog” Matis, mid-day voice of WFBQ Q-95, has been let go after a mere 25 years at the station. That’s an eternity in radio.

This follows sports talker JMV’s abrupt departure from sister station WNDE and his subsequent replacement by old Q hand Mark Patrick. Matis had filled in for JMV during the part of the transition.  Hard to believe there is not a relationship between these changes and Matis being shown the door.

Supporters have started a Facebook page in protest.

What followed was out of the norm and I’m wondering what you think, both of their tactics, and of my reaction.

Right before Thanksgiving I got a big cardboard box, delivered by Federal Express.  Inside a ton of paper and packaging were six little cookies, each on a fake “rose” stem.  About $2 worth of cookies, $15 worth of packaging and $20 or so for shipping.

I was offended.  As a longtime media buyer, I’ve gotten my share of holiday gifts, most of them small/trivial like this one, not the kind of gift that could be seen as a “bribe”.  But most of them weren’t as environmentally wasteful as this one.

Then came the hardcore prospecting.  Two emails in three days, followed by a phone call.  Not overly aggressive by any standard, yet it was bothersome, primarily because they kept referencing the cookies.    They didn’t say it like this, but the message was clear:  “Hey we sent you some cookies.  Now you owe us.  We want to give you a 30 minute demo.”

They did get my attention, I’ll give them that.  So I went to the website to get my own look at their product.  Frustratingly, there was no pricing provided whatsoever, just lots of verbiage about how wonderful the product is and plenty of opportunities to sign up for a demo.  I had to use Google search to find a forum where users of this type of software were debating the price-value relationship of this product.

Generally speaking, the reviews were positive.  But I learned that the product isn’t cheap, at least $2,000 per year, potentially much more, and probably not something I need.  It’s my opinion that sellers of packaged products like this one would save everyone time and trouble by publishing their pricing, or at least something like “starting at $xxx” so that prospects can decide for themselves if the price is in their ballpark.  Seems to me to be a good way to qualify prospects and not waste time with those who can’t or won’t pay the price.

Back to all those holiday gifts of Christmases past.  Not once can I recall a company using said gift as a transparent method of getting an audience with me.  Those gifts were just part of the holiday routine, and I considered them thank-you’s for whatever relationship had been built or hopefully would be built.

So i ask you:  is this just a new lean-and-mean business strategy?  Is it reasonable that I’m offended by a “guilting” strategy as practiced by this vendor?  Am I wrong to be offended by the  huge waste of paper/packing/shipping energy in relation to the paltry value of the gift?

Oh, by the way.  This company sells a public relations tool, and is not from Indy.  Perhaps you got cookies from them, too.

Further, Newscorp is reportedly in talks with Microsoft to receive payments so that Bing has access to Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and its other properties.  Today there are reports that other newspaper companies are looking to follow suit.

What could this mean?

Experts are divided on the short term impact. Some think that Rupert is shooting himself in the foot by aligning with Bing and its 10% search share.  Or, is this the beginning of the resurrection of the newspaper industry?

Google still gets more than 60% of search traffic.  Will news junkies switch to Bing just to get more news content?  Or is there so much content that Google will still dominate?

The longer term is where it gets more interesting.  What if news providers end up in a massive exodus to Microsoft/Bing?  Would there be enough revenue in this equation to bring newspapers back to profitability?  Would there be enough content to change search habits?

I think this could be a game-changer for both Bing and newspapers.  But we won’t know for a while.  Perhaps years.

This morning, I got an email from eBay apologizing for sending out an email that promoted 50% discounted seller listing fees for November 23-25.  Apparently some sellers (not me) got that email in error.

Double whammy.  Site outage for all users plus the rescinding of discounts to sellers, many of whom (including me) are still smarting from eBay’s constant tinkering with the seller policies and listing guidelines.

eBay’s initial diagnosis was a spike in listings due to the holidays.  I’m skeptical about this, though, because they’ve suffered from declining sales  for the past year.

All in all, it makes me ask the question:  how’s your web site’s  infrastructure?  Do you know your server’s capacity?  What happens if business skyrockets?  How fast can you fix something that your users depend upon?

This week I’ve had a spate of plausible-looking ones, in two particular varieties.  Both were good enough to avoid the high security of my spam filter and also to make me look twice.

One purports to be from Microsoft (“The Microsoft Update Center”)  and attempts to get you to click on a link to download a critical Outlook update.  The other was to my personal email address and asks you to click a link to “apply new security settings.”  Since we all want to keep updated and safe, a busy person might not think carefully here.

Remember, for one, that Microsoft does not send emails to notify you of updates; instead they are sent via the web and the Windows operating system.

A good thing to do always if you get a possible spoof or hoaxed email:  place your cursor over the link and see what URL it points to.  Almost always, the early part of the string will be the “spoofed” sender, or who they want you to think it’s from, including the dot com suffix, but then it goes into a further, unfamiliar string of characters ending in another URL.  Never click on these links, for obvious reasons, unless you absolutely are familiar with the entire link.

Sorry if this is too basic  for some (who would fall for that!) , but I generally appreciate reminders of how to stay safe on the web, so I’m betting that some of you may as well.

Tweeter's Almanac

It’s out!  The Tweeter’s Almanac, subtitled “The Great #Indiana Initiative of Aught Nine”, edited and spearheaded by Indianapolis “Twitter Ninja” Amy Stark, is now available for purchase here.

Stark is one of the leading Twitter users in Indiana, in terms of the number of people who follow her updates.  The Tweeter’s Almanac provides a great introduction to the use of Twitter, with pages providing syntax,  etiquette and how to get started with Twitter.

The meat of the book, however, provides 30 days of day-by-day actual “tweets”, with each day focused on a specific type of tweet, such as “good advice tweets”, “philosophical tweets”, and “celebration tweets”.  Closer examination of each day allows the reader a deeper understanding of how to intelligently use the 140 characters that Twitter provides for each update.

Interspersed with the 30 day summaries is a comparable number of articles about Indiana from various Indiana Twitter-verse contributors, including me.  There are articles about famous Indiana people, essays, short stories, memories, people profiles,  motivational thoughts, and other pieces that are uniquely Hoosier.  My article is about the history of vinyl records that were produced in Indiana.  There’s even a recipe, so old fashioned Farmer’s Almanac aficionados will be more comfy than they think.

Copies of the Tweeter’s Almanac will fit snugly into the Christmas stocking or Halloween loot bag of a loved one and they make great business gifts as well.  Contact me if you’d like more information on how your business can obtain quantities of the Almanac with your business message printed on the back cover.