The prospect of balmy, sunny days around the corner makes April one of the exciting months of the year. But there’s another reason which adds to my excitement, for in April every year it’s time to renew my mobile phone contract. I have been with Vodafone for three years now and was contemplating leaving Vodafone for exciting offers on O2 or Tmobile. I am after a Blackberry Pearl 8110 with the Blackberry Internet Solution™ and the added functionality of a GPS. Not that I drive, but a GPS is quite handy even while walking point to point (Sounds funny using GPS for Pedestrians, it’s more of a “it’s there, try it” thing). And of course, a Blackberry is no good without the Emails and Internet.

After much thought and deliberation, I rang Vodafone last week to find out about my options of owning a Pearl with the same network. Vodafone doesn’t advertise Blackberry Pearl for individual users…I wonder why!? As Pearl is one of the hottest selling Blackberry devices. However, for business users, they do have attractive tariff. After speaking to their customer services, I was quite convinced that Tmobile is a better option until I stumbled upon the offers by O2. Both the networks offer decent tariff for a Blackberry along with the voice and data plan. I finally decided to call it quits with Vodafone and informed them of leaving and requested for my PAC code. I was assured that the PAC code would be sent within 4-5 days. To my surprise, instead of the PAC code, I got a call from Vodafone retentions department with an offer which not only matched the other two networks but also bettered them. But the only hitch, no GPS subscription with Vodafone as it costs an additional fee!

Vodafone certainly offers free GPS Subsription for Blackberry customers, but I was told that they have stopped including this as a package from the day before they called me. A big lie! Just checked their site this morning on the GPS is still free for 12 months. In any case, Vodafone is offering the GPS service in association with Telmap and it’s possible to buy this service for a one off £39.99 Annual Fee or a £4.99 monthly fee. Sounds good! I took the bait and the device should be delivered anytime soon.

Also, today is the day I complete exactly one year as a Marketing Analyst at ArenaFlowers.com. A year has passed so quickly!

It is amazing how many thoughts and ideas emerge in a forum discussion offering interesting insights into many aspects of a particular topic. I find forums quite useful for many everyday issues I come across where I lack the necessary knowledge or approach to get out of it. Recently, I was gifted a Bose Triport headphones to go with my iPod and though it is an incredible product with brilliant noise amplifying abilities, it does have a major setback. Bose ships these earphones with three pairs of detachable eartips. No matter how careful you are, you end up loosing these eartips very quickly…at least I did. The earphones never stick to your ears and most Triport users are constantly seen holding the earphones closer to their ears to ensure it doesn’t fall off. It is extremely frustrating and you never get to enjoy the music peacefully. And within two weeks of receiving this as a gift, I had lost all my eartips. And the Bose earphone is designed in such a way that you cannot use it without the eartips. How annoying!?!?!

Anyway, my quest to find replace ear tips lead me to find other Bose users who have experienced similar difficulties. Most of these customers have vented their frustrations on forums and I not only found a good number tips from where to get them but also that I could order the eartips directly from Bose free of charge. And of course I found all these on forums. Basically, forums are a great way to connect with like minded people and it makes perfect sense for businesses to host a forum to interact with customers.

The dearth of online forums and message boards in the florist industry is a bit surprising considering that its such a huge market. Of course forums and message boards do not belong to the same age as blogging, social bookmarking and networking, as they are the predecessors of the existing mediums. But forums are great resources where a community of like minded individuals share there knowledge and ideas. Also, it provides a firm base for businesses such as ours to build customer relationships. However, starting and managing a forum is an arduous and time consuming task. Nevertheless, we are convinced that we should be starting a forum to connect with our customers and suppliers. Thanks to Bose’s problematic headphones!

If any of you are experiencing similar issues with Bose Triport Headphones, call their Customer Services on 0800-085-9021. It’s been a few weeks since I complained and am yet to receive mine. I contacted them last week to check the status and was told that they have run out of stock until end of April. Though the headphones are good, I would give a big Thumbs Down for the product unless they come out with an enhanced version. Sad that many of us owning the older versions feel cheated. Sennheiser has better ones!

Recently we have noticed quite a few websites and blogs using fresh flower images from the Arena Flowers site without permission. While we feel privileged to see our flowers on multiple mediums, particularly blogs as they seldom benefit commercially by using our flower images, it is the systematic disregard of commercial websites which is worrying. Controlling the use of content and images of an online medium has been problematic for their owners as an average blogger or a web publisher has little or no idea of copyright laws.

The advent of Web 2.0 has spawned a new generation of public domain websites, where users are encouraged to post their views on a variety of online channels including blogging and social networking. The distribution of product images on these channels by content publishers does help in building the brand awareness for Arena Flowers, but only when explicit references are made to the source of our fresh flower images. Nevertheless, as long as our images are not being used for commercial gains we have no objections, although we would be happy if publishers source the images to our site as a polite gesture for copying. However, we disapprove publishers from benefiting commercially by using our content and images, unless they have a prior permission to do so.

Since the launch of Arena Flowers website, we have seen a couple of sites offering flower delivery services clone our web layouts. However, in the recent past, we were slightly put off by a publisher when he started passing our images as his own to woo customers to his business. When we contacted him to advise him of the potential consequences, he started playing the hardball by arguing that he copied the images as he believed that he was not in violating by taking it from a website which allowed him to save the images on his computer. Of course imitation is a compliment, but copying is not. Either people have a rudimentary knowledge of copyright and trademarks or they they turn a blind eye. For small businesses, when information and digital content is widely available, it is a great temptation to choose the easy path of passing others images as their own to gain access to customers. But they seldom realise the costs of such ignorance.

Firstly, the Intellectual Property Organisation in the UK, clearly states that ownership of content is an automatic right and there’s no need to register for Copyright in the United Kingdom (We are registered trademark owners of our Brand Name and related assoications). Secondly, All of our pages are clearly marked with the Copyright symbol. Finally, for violation of Copyright for commercial gains, criminal charges can be brought resulting in severe fines, compensation and jail for violators. We have initiated the process for further action on the publisher.

Nonetheless, such issues highlight the importance of responsible blogging and publishing in the online world. It is exceedingly important for website publishers to take notice of copyright issues while posting content and media on to their webpages. From our experience during the last few days, we have realised that it is necessary to identify best practice measures for website publishing to avoid unwanted complications.

• Never copy anything from other websites, particularly commercial sites even if it doesn’t have a Copyright symbol. In the UK as with many other countries, authors have an automatic right to the content they create. If you are compelled to use an image or content from a commercial website for non-commercial reasons, always provide a link back to the main website from where the image was obtained.
• If your post needs a picture to convey the message, your best bet is to get the graphic from one of the royalty free image sites like Foto Search. Also, support the Creative Commons by opting to use images rated under the project. Although, Creative Commons is not the legal entity, it is a non-profit organisation working towards creating a universal copyright license.
• It is a great practice to use public domain news websites, Governmental and authority websites for your posts. If you find an interesting post or an article on another website, and wish to comment upon it on your site or blog, use a short quote and provide a link to that source before adding your thoughts and views for refining the point.

By adapting these simple measures, you not only assure your legal rights but it will also help in protecting your own works.

The sudden drop in PR for Arena Flowers from 5 to 3 has been really frustrating and disappointing. Over the last few months quality links has been the buzzword and to that effect, we have been trying to squeeze out editorially vouched links for the site from related domains. At Arena Flowers, we are really proud of our SEO activities. But the anomalistic (it is indeed) drop in PR has got us racking our brains trying to point the drop to a certain differentiator. What’s more annoying is the drop in all the internal pages. We have about 100, 000 pages indexed in Google of which at least 25 % of them had decent PR and none of them have green liquid anymore. The real disappointment is to see our blog have no PR. Flowers…Uncut is widely followed and we have got so much of appreciation for our site through the blog. We also have hundreds of quality incoming links to the blog. To see the blog have no PR value is a bit disconcerting.

We have scoured the Internet and scouted all the SEO blogs and forums and even had an opinion from a global expert in the industry, without success. SEO experts argue that PR is in no way related to SERPs and traffic and makes little sense to websites, unless the sites are based on selling links. But we see PR as an indicator of our SEO performance apart from the other variables like ranking high on SERPs, traffic etc. Post PR drop, traffic is unaffected and SERPs for competitive keywords have not had any impact. However, the little green bar though irritating, does offer some satisfaction when it is a bit longer than it was previously.

It will be a real bonus if we get to the bottom of our mysterious PR drop on the home page as well as the internal pages. I contemplated posting a query on Matt Cutt’s blog, but decided against it as I feel it would be futile. There are millions of websites and even if 10 % of these websites start querying their site problems with Matt, then he would have to quit his regular job at Google.

It’s all back to square one…wonder how long it takes to be back again!

Google seems to be dancing these days. There has been plenty of talk on the SEO front by webmasters who are reporting significant fluctuations in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) over the last few weeks. Being a forum user, I have noticed that some of the digital pointers (A Forum for Webmasters) are being penalised either by a drop in SERPs or by Google’s Houdini Act where the websites don’t rank for their own keywords. A good example are some prominent Web Directories which offer Paid Link Services such as Alive, Aviva etc. Is it the end of road for Directories?

For years, Digital Point has been a great resource for Webmasters, where they have exchanged news, views and expertise and benefited from each other in fine tuning SEO skills. The Administrators have done a commendable job by bringing together hundreds of webmasters with a shared vision. So it comes as no surprise that any changes in the Google World is first highlighted and discussed on Digital Point. Digital Point has been offering good insights into Google’s efforts in optimising the quality of the results, while also conveying the webmaster’s concerns.

Off late, a few webmasters at Digital Point have been hit with Google penalty. We have had official words from Google on how hard they have been trying to deliver quality results to the user. This is clearly reflected in the new message centre webmaster tools, which Google uses to communicate with the webmasters.

After months of effort on search optimisation at Arena Flowers, where we explored every possible avenue of driving in more traffic to Google, we seemed to be breaking into the league of appearing higher on the SERPs for some competitive keywords. Some time mid September, due to Google’s generous tweaking of the results pages, we ranked fairly high for a few of our targeted keywords. But we lasted only a couple of weeks and now we are lost somewhere in the results pages, which has affected our traffic and our conversion rates. As I write this, there have been further changes to the results pages. Our blog used to rank higher than our homepage on the result pages after the mid September changes. Now our homepage appears higher. These changes are giving us a few jitters and raising a few thoughts:

1. Are we being penalised?
2. Did our competitors get more competitive?
3. All’s well, its just Google’s algorithm updation which should happen soon and we’ll be back to normal.

I would love to believe its No. 3. We have always adhered to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. We surely can’t be a victim of Google’s latest tirade on Paid Links. Of course, we have paid for advertising our business on flower related online media. In terms of SEO, we have submitted our site to a few hundred free web directories, while we have exchanged links with flower and gift related sites. But definitely not to inflate our traffic artificially. PageRank doesn’t matter to us. We are not Link Sellers to benefit from a higher PageRank. We are only bothered about ranking well for prominent keywords in the flower business, to make it easier for our customers to reach us. Reciprocal linking and directory submission does not give any quality traffic which could translate into sales. We seek customers who convert well on our marketing spend. I hope Google’s new algorithm helps us achieve this!

Today, Arti left for Tokyo for a week on business…while she is away, I thought I will put my mind to work and come up something extremely intelligent for my blog. But it looks like its a no go, because I am distracted with so many things around me. I have been planning this article for three hours now and these are the first words I came up with…EXTREMELY INTELLIGENT!

Anyways, to drive it forward I recently signed up with Amazon for their DVD rental service, highly recommended by one of Arti’s colleagues. It is one of the cheapest DVD rental services available in the UK. My first batch of DVDs have arrived and one of the movies in the list is Wallstreet. It is a decent movie, but one of the lines in the movie is an all time classic. It just hit me that this could be made the premise for my extremely intelligent article, simply because its an incredible line. It goes like this:

Read the rest of this entry »