ecommerce: March 2007 Archives

Realex have won a very tasty contract - the online payments for one of the largest online shops in Europe - CDWow! While I've known about this for several months I had promised their CEO, Colm Lyon, not to blog about it until they'd officially announced it, which I see they've now done. I'm delighted for Colm. He deserves every success.

I love reading marketing material. Sometimes you learn something new. Sometimes you giggle. Sometimes you giggle so much you fall off your chair. According Amas' latest report:

Almost two-thirds of businesses, or 64%, had websites in 2006, a rise of four percentage points on the previous year.

Wow! Are they talking about the same country I live and work in? Oh wait.. there's an explanatory footer:

Sources: Central Statistics Office: Information Society and Telecommunications 2006, survey of 12,219 companies employing 10 or more

(my emphasis) So what does that mean? Do companies with fewer than 10 staff not count? I doubt if their owners would be overly impressed to find out that they're not actually counted.. Or is it simply a "clever" ploy to make people feel that we're doing so much better online than other countries? A very large proportion of Irish businesses still do not have websites. They *may* have a domain, but all you have to do is take a walk through any Irish town to see how many are still using free hotmail.com (and similar) email addresses. A holding page does not a website make. I don't know, but it sounds like pointless headline grabbing if you ask me. Of course any report that suggests that meta content is as important as theirs does would make me worry.. Everyone else has been saying the opposite for ages ... Maybe they've rehashed a report from a few years ago when it did actually matter as much as they claim. Don't get me wrong, meta content is important, but whereas a few years ago the meta tags, such as "description" and "keywords" were essential that is no longer the case, as so many online marketers were gaming the search engines. In some respects what really bugs me about the report is the way they talk in absolutes, as if their "findings" were "gospel". Press releases can be amusing, but they can also backfire badly when someone examines them a little bit more closely. A recent example of that being Captivate's press release that was covered by ENN, then slated by RedCardinal and ENN's blog! The moral of the story, if there is one, be sure that you can actually lead by example of know what you are talking about before trying to grab a couple of column inches .... Then again, who actually pays any attention to any of these press releases? Are we all producing press releases to keep ourselves happy or simply to provide sales leads for publications' marketing departments? (I always get offered plenty of ad space when we run an ad in a national paper and get plenty of useless sales calls after a press release from people selling to me NOT buying - obviously!)

Spelling and basic grammar and punctuation drive me mad. This is due in no little part to my grandmother, may she rest in peace, who was a language "nazi". She had zero tolerance for bad spelling, punctuation, grammar and pronunciation. Since I spent so much time in her company as a child it was only inevitable that it would rub off on me to some degree. Other members of the family seem to have inherited the same "problem", if you can call it that. Why do I bring this up? Well it's due to a recent post on Richard's blog. While the issues people seem to have with spelling words might be annoying it's crazy to think that companies that actually print calendars get it wrong. I suppose I shouldn't be overly surprised by this, but I still find it amazing. Spelling and grammar are not the most important things in life, but they are damn important! If you look at a seemingly slick website for a company that is offering you a product or service, do you think twice about buying if they can't even spell common words correctly? I know I do! Yet the number of sites, both professional and personal, that have serious issues with spelling and silly grammatical and punctuation mistakes never ceases to amaze me. From an online marketing / SEO point of view I mentioned the issues some time ago. Of course, if you are doing online marketing you should be aware of typos. It doesn't hurt to bid on typos of your target keywords - while google will offer the correct spelling it can't hurt to try and get the initial search result, can it?