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The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007 and marketers are finding more search dollars by poaching budget from print magazine spending, website development, direct mail and other marketing programs.

The SEMPO study released today offered some good news for Agencies, as 53% of advertisers outsource their organic SEO because it is to hard to stay up-to-date with best practices in-house. 37% say they don’t have the right tools, and 33% say they get more bang for their buck with an outside provider.

But overall, a trend to in-house these efforts is still strong. Forrester research shows least two-thirds of U.S. businesses prefer to keep SEM in-house. In-house training and education efforts will probably continue to improve and drive performance gains. (more…)

I just got around to reading the LatLong blog where they brought my attention to the fact that Lexington is now covered by Google Street View. I wish I’d have seen the camcars.

Sure Enough, you can now tour Lexington with your trusty mouse. At here’s Main and Broadway, and below that the Main St. Library. In addition, many other areas were added as well.

MA: Springfield
NY: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse
NJ: Newark
VA: Virginia Beach
NC: Charlotte, Winston-Salem
SC: Columbia, Greenville
GA: Atlanta
FL: Boca Raton, Cape Coral, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach
AL: Huntsville
MS: Jackson

TN: Knoxville

KY: Lexington, Louisville
OH: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo
MI: Ann Arbor
MO: St. Louis
KS: Topeka
NE: Lincoln
OK: Oklahoma City, Tulsa
NV: Reno

They also added more parks, which is cool if you’re planning to visit

Everglades National Park (Florida)
Florida Keys
Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming)
Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana)
Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
Joshua Tree National Park (California)
Death Valley National Park (California)
Lassen Volcanic National Park (California)
Sequoia National Park (California)
Lake Tahoe (California/Nevada)

I’ve tried them all.

GotoMeeting works, but is total overkill for my 1:1 conversations and is expensive at $40-50/month. Yugma works, and is cheaper, but thanks to its Java interface, 8 of 10 times I wanted to use it with clients they couldn’t launch it. The web marketing discussion turned into a frustrating Java Virtual machine discussion. Using Windows Remote Desktop works, for one person - the one doing the connecting.

There are other tools too, but most of them are “in the way” of the conversation - distracting noise with tabs hanging off the windows or floating configuration boxes, blah, blah blah!

VNC has Been Around Forever. But It Was Designed for Geeks.

VNC is old school. But in the past it required a well choreographed dance of launches and clicks to make the listening viewers work. And the client/customer had to install the whole app - faced with a myriad of confusing features.

So I had never really considered VNC (Virtual Network Computing) because it was too geeky for clients. In my mind it fell into the same category as telnet, SSH, and navigating VI. Stuff I took great pride in being able to master but would simply frustrate my clients. I’ve used VNC and tunneling of various types for 15 years, but things had to change when less tech-savvy clients were waiting for me to show them something.

The Solution.

The other day I ran across UltraVNC (typical VNC server/client) and it’s little “applet-maker” for the client-side called Singleclick IT ROCKS. And it works every time.

Here’s How Singleclick Works

The client has to do this:

1. Unzip it to their desktop.
2. Run it when asked.
3. Done.. nothing else

You (consultant) need to install it: This took me 20 minutes including configuring the Singleclick config file

1. Download it and Install it on your Windows based PC.
2. Configure your firewall to accept connections. You can configure it on a variety of ports for security.
3. In the install directory there will be a folder containing a configuration file, some icons, and the core of an application.
4. Adjust the config file and add your company logo. Here you identify the ports you’ll use, the host name of your VNC server, and other information. I used the funny cat because I can always tell when the application has been run for the first time on their end. They chuckle.
5. “Compile” the applet at the UltraVNC website’s “SC Creator Tool.” It spits out an .exe file ready to run on any Windows computer.
6. Run a virus scan on the resulting application just in case. This is one time.
7. Give that file to all of your clients using Windows. Tip: You need to ZIP the EXE so it will pass through email and anti-virus systems.

Using The System

1. You run the Listening VNC viewer on your end whenever you’re about to do a call.
2. When you want to do a connection, you ask the client to run the program, and click on “Internet Support” on the SingleClick applet. It is configured to hit your IP address (or in my case host name) thanks to the info you put in the little config file.
3. The system pings my VNC server and a dialog appears….”are you sure you want to allow a connection” I click “Yes”
4. I’m now looking at my clients’ desktop along with them. Clean, fast and no confusion. No windows or tabs hanging off the side. You can do it plainly or with 128 bit encryption.
5. When done, the system shuts itself down and uninstalls itself from memory. It can never be initiated without permission at both ends of the wire.
6. By the way - you don’t have to use an ugly cat. You can use your nice corporate logo. :-)
7. If the client has a webcam, you can run Skype and have a pretty decent virtual meeting!

What about Firewalls?

Not an issue as far as I can tell. The client’s initiation of a conversation is akin to a simple ping, and since I initiate the inbound connection on my end, things just work.

After struggling with Yugma for months, this system now works wonders. Every single client has been able to use it flawlessly and we’ve saved hours (and gallons of $4/gal gas) getting little things done. It’s transparent tech the way it’s supposed to be - out of the way of what you’re actually trying to do.

It’s spontaneous and well designed for a busy consultant.

What’s the Catch?

The downside is that the system is not intended for multiple viewers. It’s really just a quick and simple way to get your clients’ screen in front of you. It’s at least 10 times easier than any other method I’ve seen now that Singleclick is in place.

My email to the client representative for a $10k portal software said:

“The edit RSS page for the portal is giving a page not found error for [I entered url] - what do you think would cause that? Thanks, Scott”

The reply from their customer service email:

“We don’t answer questions like that here, and don’t forward things to the support team as a policy. You need to fill in a support ticket for this. [link]”

The link was to a form that had 54 fields. I felt compelled to let them know who the customer was and went on with my day, pissed. It was all I could think of when we had a budget meeting about whether we should continue using the portal.  We didn’t renew.

Was this kind of behavior the reason we cancelled a $12k/year support arrangement? Not sure, but I certainly wasn’t in the best mood when it came time for me to voice my recommendation for the renewal.

I know support ticket systems pretty well in the small-enterprise variety. I have had a few when I was doing hosting and have interacted with probably 20 different ones. My company has since moved to basecamp to give things a more human touch, and basecamp has recently followed some of the advice in this post. I am guilty of the things in the past. But to you, beloved reader, I will say I see the errors of my ways.

Let me be the first to say that if you have 100s of clients, selling a commodity item such as hosting, I recognize the workflow issues you’re facing. We all need to move support issues through the system as fast as possible when margins are razor thin. But if the support systems creators were a little more aware of the non-tech and/or busy customer community, perhaps things could improve.

(more…)

It looks like Google Transit has a new look, and I like the new one better. The US Locations are now in one alphabetic list, with international locations listed on the right. It also adds time of departure or arrival to help with planning in a new simple box.

Old Layout:

Around half a mile from my office is a low-velocity industrial air-moving company named Big-Ass Fans. They win awards, support the arts community, develop environmentally sensitive technology, support HVAC efficiency research, fund animal shelters, and more. They employ a bunch of people and they are growing. On Fridays, small foam donkeys start to fly around the building. Let’s just say they’re a stand-up firm, with transparency in their marketing, and I’m proud of them. They’re remarkable.

They also advertise in over sixty industrial and agricultural trade magazines, and have a unique product and corporate identity that transcends brand erosion an advertising blindness giving them huge bang for their advertising buck. They’ve been featured in the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Discovery Channel Canada and National Geographic Channel. (more…)