Gasta Tech News: Web2.0 in daily business

Web 2.0 gains momentum in Europe, with companies looking for new ways to stay productive

LONDON – 26 May, 2009 – The year 2008 and economic downturn have changed the way companies are going about their daily business. In response to the current recession in Europe, businesses are seeking new ways to stay productive while significantly cutting costs with the help of Web 2.0 solutions. From lower-cost versions of enterprise applications, to utilising cloud computing, ‘crowd sourcing’ business owners are taking advantage of what Web 2.0 has to offer.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.conferencing.frost.com), Web 2.0 Technologies in the Recession-hit Europe as a Solution for Small and Medium Businesses, finds that Web 2.0 will supplement both Web and Audio-web markets that were valued at $190 million in Europe in 2008 and are likely to grow to $860 million by the end of 2014.

“Web 2.0 solutions may be part of the cure for the recessionary headache that many European businesses are now experiencing; social networking sites, wikis, and blogs are just some of the more well-known examples of Web 2.0 technologies that can play an important role here,” observes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Iwona Petruczynik. “These solutions are becoming more prevalent in the European small and medium businesses (SMBs) arena, especially at a time like this, when workers are being forced to do more with less.”

There has been an increase in the usage of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other Web 2.0 solutions like Blogger and WordPress. Until recently, they were primarily associated with consumer applications; however, currently, they are finding usage in more professional areas.

“As an interesting side note, social networking sites are gaining popularity in unexpected places, for instance, the world’s most popular online virtual reality, Second Life, was used by Sweden to open their ‘embassy’ in the virtual world to promote Sweden’s culture and image,” remarks Petruczynik. “In addition, Second Life is used in the Polish Ministry of Interior and Administration, where the Ministry has a room, which a person can visit to find out what the Ministry is doing and even ask the Minister questions.”

However, experts are unable to agree on one definition of Web 2.0 and this becomes a challenge in defining its market size. Yet, it is unlikely that Web 2.0 will become a stand-alone market, as it is a set of technologies and ideas driving the development of existing products and services. The full potential influence of Web 2.0 is only now playing out, as the concepts and technologies are finding their use in manufacturing, customer service, product development and sales.

Innovative modes of interaction among workers, enabled by Web 2.0, contribute to company cohesion and employee retention. Telecommuting staff too can collaborate with each other speedily and effortlessly, outside of the formal e-mail stream.

Despite the evident advantages, some businesses are apprehensive about fully embracing Web 2.0 tools. The popularity of companies’ in-house intranet and concerns about security and confidential information leaks are just a few examples of the restraints faced by the European Web 2.0 market. Moreover, a culture of ‘busyness’ retards the adoption of Web 2.0. If employees are not seen working all the time, they are assumed to be inefficient and unprofessional, when, in fact, they could be conducting their business through utilising solutions such as blogs or social networking sites, like Twitter or LinkedIn. In addition, Europe tends to be more conservative in accepting new solutions. Therefore, the adoption rate of Web 2.0 in Europe is lower than that in the United States.

“In Europe, there is a common misconception that a true deliverable is measured in how many kilograms of paper one produces and hands over to a client,” explains Petruczynik. “This belief is hindering the adoption of Web 2.0 solutions, as more end products are being delivered in the form of a wiki or a blog.”

Moreover, the security concerns that many chief information officers (CIOs) face are equally important. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), a programming technique used by Web 2.0 programmers, poses security risks that in the worst-case scenario include uploading malicious codes onto someone’s computer or hijacking an account.

According to the European Commission, small and medium businesses (SMBs) constitute 99.0 per cent of all enterprises in Europe and provide almost 75.0 million jobs. With such significant market potential, Web 2.0 vendors should not have problems with deploying their solutions in the SMB sector.

“The best practice for those employing Web 2.0 solutions include creating and implementing clear and easy policies, describing how to use social media to avoid security risks, and leaks of confidential information, adapting their corporate culture to promote openness and collaboration, and educating employees on how to use Web 2.0 tools to become more productive and efficient,” concludes Petruczynik. “On the other hand, Web 2.0 vendors should help in creating supportive policies, providing seamless integration with existing advanced corporate communication tools, and offering a variety of ‘a la carte’ Web 2.0 technologies.”

If you are interested in a virtual brochure, which provides a brief synopsis of the research and a table of contents, then send an e-mail to Joanna Lewandowska, Corporate Communications, at joanna.lewandowska@frost.com, with your full name, company name, title, telephone number, company e-mail address, company website, city, state and country. Upon receipt of the above information, a brochure will be sent to you by e-mail.

Web 2.0 Technologies in the Recession-hit Europe as a Solution for Small and Medium Businesses is part of the Conferencing & Collaboration Growth Partnership Services programme, which also includes research in the following markets: web conferencing, audio conferencing, video conferencing, telepresence, unified communications and collaboration market. All research services included in subscriptions provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends that have been evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants.

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best in class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages over 45 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from more than 35 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit http://www.frost.com.

Web 2.0 Technologies in the Recession-hit Europe as a Solution for Small and Medium Businesses



Joanna Lewandowska
frost.com

Gasta Research: Quality Vs Quantity in lead genertion

The Quality Volume Divide
by Editor
It is a problem old as time in the performance marketing sector, one that shows itself much more clearly and painfully in the world of online lead generation. The challenge to produce high quality with high volume. Ask almost any advertiser who has at least a modicum of experience in online advertising, and growing volume while maintaining quality will rank high among their challenges and frustrations. The unfortunate truth is that after a certain point, quality starts to degrade. What exactly is quality, though? The reason that we use lead generation as an example is that quality is easy to explain. Let's use an auto insurance offer running on a CPA network as an example. The offer looks to get users to enter their information to see if they could lower their auto insurance payments. When a user enters their information, the network receives credit and they then credit the appropriate publisher. The person buying the lead receives no money from the user filling out the form only from the percentage of users who then go on to purchase a policy. The higher that conversion rate, the higher the quality. If more people convert from lead to policy, the lead buyer can afford to pay more. If fewer people do, then they will have to lower the payout in order to continue covering the cost of buying the leads.

In the optimal scenario, conversion rates start out profitably and even increase over time as both sides optimize. At a point, though, especially in the optimal scenario where the advertiser sees good returns with good volume, they will want more. Two things start to happen here. The first is often counterintuitive for the advertiser, and we called it the price fallacy in lead generation, namely that more volume comes at a higher price. What the price fallacy fails to capture is what, more often than not, happens to quality. Once under the gun to get more volume, when suppliers attempt to do so, they end up succeeding but at the expense of the initial quality.



As the illustration above shows, the optimal phase sees volume growing with quality remaining above the break even. When the two parties switch into the forced growth phase, volume continues to increase (often it increases at a slope higher than the initial growth), but quality starts to slip. More quickly than expected it goes from the advertiser having a positive yield to a negative one.

Quite a few explanations exist for the quality-volume divide. One of the more straight forward revolves around intent. Only so many people have a given interest in a product. B2B marketers deal with this issue all the time. For some high dollar, super complex sales, e.g., a multi-million dollar database configuration, there just aren't that many people who could be buyers. With auto insurance, the number is fortunately much higher, but it's not infinite. Different traffic channels have different levels of intent - search is not surprisingly higher than co-registration. For many verticals, there are only so many keywords available. To get in front of more users it means trying other avenues - email, display, contextual ads, etc. Each one of those will have its equivalent of head users and tail users - sites / placements where users who click will have an interest as opposed to someone who places an ad on Facebook saying, "Find out how much it is to insure a Ferrari." Each incremental step in obtaining more traffic tends to come at the expense of the intent of the person who views / clicks / converts on the ad. Here is what it looks like plotted.



Saturation also plays a role. At some point, an advertiser will simply have reached the vast majority of potential users for the product. The problem is that they want to grow. They don't want to settle for the same amount, and it pushes them to continue trying even at the detriment of their quality. It's not that higher volume and good quality can't go together. It's all about the incremental lead in the growth phase. In the forced growth phase, instead of the next lead converting at or near the previous lead, it keeps slipping. Good leads still exist, but they get lost among the lower quality ones. It's a problem which, if solved, will mean incredible gains but it currently falls outside the skill set of both the lead buyer and lead seller. Each can get better - they can implement various levels of verification (quality, scoring, call centers) but to get really good, means each getting away from what they do best. Buyers and sellers get closer, but they will never close the divide fully. It's too complex, too distracting, and not urgent enough for them. All of which means one of two things will happen. The divide will come and bite everyone in the behind and/or someone else will come along, solve it, and do very well. A note of warning though, there is another reason why no one has done so to date. It's anything but easy.

Gasta:Google Index of Gasta Search Network By popularity

Google Index of Gasta Search Network By popularity

Google index of gasta search network shows how effectively Gasta has maximised its global reach. Surprisingly on Google rankings Gasta Ireland lags behind some of the newer domains, while Gasta China, and Gasta India outperform even the UK Engine.





Google Index of Gasta Search Network By popularity

14,300 Gasta China

4,590 Gasta International

2,990 Gasta Japan

1,330 Gasta Europe

1,420 Gotagshare

1,420 Gotagspot

1,220 Gasta India

736 Gasta UK

397 Europasearch

395 Gasta Austria

363 Gasta TV

275 Gasta France

272 Baroneracing

263 Surfni

241 Gasta Germany

171 Gasta USA

232 Gasta Money

156 Gasta Spain

112 Gasta Ireland

101 Gasta Travel

19 Gasta South Africa



Yahoo Index of Gasta Search Network By popularity

(4,330) | Inlinks (426) Gasta International

1,764) | Inlinks (258) Gasta UK

1,458) | Inlinks (116) Gasta Ireland

(868) | Inlinks (51) Gasta USA

(806) | Inlinks Baroneracing

(530) | Inlinks (55) Gasta Europe

(410) | Inlinks (51) Gasta Austria

(359) | Inlinks (50) Gasta India

(312) | Inlinks (51) Gasta China

(261) | Inlinks (49) Gasta France

(247) | Inlinks (51) Europasearch


(243) | Inlinks (52) Surfni

(240) | Inlinks (51) Gasta Japan

(225) | Inlinks (49) Gasta Spain

(208) | Inlinks (49) Gasta Travel

(207) | Inlinks (51) Gasta TV

(110) | Inlinks (48) Gasta Germany

(101) | Inlinks (49) Gasta Money

(5) | Inlinks (45) Gasta South Africa

3) | Inlinks (41) Gotagshare

(5) | Inlinks (45) Gotagspot

(2) | Inlinks (9) Gasta Italy

Gasta.com: Using Long Tail Keywords to Your Advantage

A keyword is a simple word or phrase that is typed into the search engine by a user looking for information. For example if a searcher was looking for information on family photography tips, they might use some of the following common search terms.

"family photography photography tips taking photos"

If you used a keyword research tool like Wordtracker, you would discover that these phrases are very popular search terms. In fact, if you built a web page that focused on any of the keywords above, you would have a very difficult time ranking in the top 10 on Google's search results page?

Why? Because the competition for general keywords can be fierce. Keyword competition is defined using the term Supply. If a keyword phrase as a high supply, it means that there are many web pages out there that are using this keyword. The higher the supply, the more the competition.




Long Tail Keywords are simply the longer and more targeted phrases that people type into the search engines. In our photography keyword example above, we looked at a few very general competitive keywords. Here are some long tail keywords relating to photography.

"night time photography tips eliminate blinking from photos removing red eye from photos"

Do you see the difference? Long tail keywords are much more targeted to a specific sub topic. The nice thing about discovering long tail keywords in your particular niche is that they typically have a much lower level of competition, so it is easier to rank in the top ten in the search engine results.

Another advantage is that long tail keywords bring in much more targeted traffic. While the keyword 'family photography' may be a very competitive keyword for photography sites, the traffic brought in by such a keyword will be pretty broad.

By comparison, someone finding your site through the long tail keyword 'eliminate blinking from photos' is looking for specific information. If you can provide that information, you stand a much better chance of building trust and confidence with this visitor and converting them to a newsletter signup, registration or purchase.

Someone that gets to your site via a long tail keyword is typically ready to pull the trigger on some type of purchase or action. We say that they are "late" in their buying cycle. In addition, you'll find it easier to achieve a top ten ranking at the search engines for long tail keywords.

By sprinkling them into your page copy, you are more likely to pull in traffic that converts at a higher rate. The downside is that long tail phrases will typically not generate the high traffic numbers of more general keywords. But remember, the more general keywords are much more competitive.




If you use an analytics package like Google Analytics, you'll actually be able to see the types of long tail keywords that people typed in to get to your site. While long tail keywords can make up 50% or more of your traffic, many of them will only be one-time traffic generators.

So then, is it possible to research and target long tail keywords when writing your web pages? The answer is 'yes' and 'no.'

First off, if you write good original content that is genuinely helpful to your target market, you'll automatically weave in long tail keywords without even trying. As your page content grows, visitors will get to your site through more and more of these long tail phrases. In other words, the tail will grow longer and longer. In fact, you'll find visitors getting to your site using search phrases that you would have never thought of yourself. This is the value of focusing each of your content pages on a specific topic that provides valuable information to a narrow target audience.

Read Long Tail Keywords for additional tips on using the long tail to rank higher in the search engines and generate targeted traffic.

All hail the long tail!