Maounis Frangoulis

Why some companies don’t dare to touch their services? Are they afraid of collapsing? Let’s take twitter and the service that is now valued for about $ 1 Billion and only few people in the world can understand why. Why twitter is stacked to 140 characters per tweet? OK they did this at the beginning when they had the SMS in mind, but why they don’t extend this now (is this an Obama decision too)? I know why. Maybe they don’t want to take URL shortening services out of business?

Already many people are saying that Twitter is a new IRC and there is no future at all. Thousands of followers with no meaning. Is anybody out there watching each tweet? Of course no. Everybody wants others to do that.

But I am just thinking the results, if Twitter decides one day to make money from a product like this:

“Upgrade now to a premium Twitter account for just $5.99/month and enjoy tweets up to 150 characters!” WOW!

Are you sure this day is far away?

There is a major activity of online cloud services to Merge information that can easily extract the core info from a set of data. This is by far the most interesting result of the new economy by now.

You can see two of the most interesting examples here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

http://www.wolframalpha.com/ (It actually extracts knowledge from data on the web in real time.  Pretty cool.)

There must be a connection between agents and the recession.

Travel agents… gone.
Stock brokers… gone.
Real estate brokers… in trouble. Photographer’s agents, too.
Literary agents?

The problem with being a helpful, efficient but largely anonymous middleman is pretty obvious. Someone can come along who is cheaper, faster and more efficient. And that someone might be the customer aided by a computer.

The airlines don’t want to pay travel agents, because the travel agents were making more money on each flight than they were. Some house sellers hesitate to pay real estate brokers because they don’t believe the 6% payment is an opportunity, they see it as a tax. Investors abandoned full service stock brokers because trading stocks directly is faster and more accurate than using the phone.

Read the full article here (Seth Dodin’s Blog).

In the middle of an economic crisis everyone needs the work to be done for free (Germany is an exception in my point of view). At the bottom line this means that everyone would like the cheapest services for processes that he or she used to pay for in the past. You can call it “the result of the crisis”, I prefer to call it “the evolution of the future”.

This video (Greek one) is a part of eMTI 2008 event in Crete, Greece where some Marketeers and Google people tried to give hoteliers an idea of what a hotel could do to sell more rooms with the minimum cost, using Google AdWords or other online tools.

But are these services suggested from companies that are using revenues for their payrolls?

I have seen companies encouraging customers to buy services that they don’t need just because their “internet consultant” makes more revenue from the specific services (as a reseller) than from other ones. Someone can say this is the meaning of selling. I just can’t understand it.

The revenue implications is a fundamental issue for the new economy and the big key of success of companies that are making 20% or more on internet sales.

I am predicting that the right services are going to win “internet consultants” at the end. Hoteliers and other company owners will prefer the wining formula rather than keeping their horses out of the market.

Online success is not about complicated technology, but it’s about asking the right question. Of course you have to get the right answer as well.

This has been a major impact for many bloggers and marketing departments and it seems that is a really powerful tool for spreading the word of each new product, post or news. It is a fundamental tool for a company to reach it’s supporters via services like Twitter.

But the big power of such services is in my point of view the ability to mashup the world or the world that a user cares of. This means that each one has the freedom to choose who wants to twit and you can twit him/her. It’s not like Facebook or Myspace that you can end up with 1,000 friends but still not even know half of them. With such services you can choose information channel and Social Impact transparently. Ok this could event work with RSS, but it’s not really user generated and for sure it’s not personal. At least not all the time.

I strongly believe that “personal” user generated information about social “real” information is what the future of information will be. Something tells me that there will be more services that could mashup more targeted info to the right person at the right time.

Twitter Icon

It seems that more revenue is very close to clients than it is to clicks. Conversion rates are noticeable only if clicks are from the right group of people. Of course this makes sense. It would have been wrong if it was the other way around.

So it is more important to stay focused on revenue than web page statistics. Statistics has to do with internet strategy and a web consultant would do a great job on this. I would rather go for a few visits with a good result than many daily visits with no sales.

Targeting is much more difficult than it seems.  That’s why not every web site is a successful one.

Don’t you think?

It’s a fact that not everyone is in trouble with the upcoming recession. How can this happen? Good question…

Not all services and products are so bad under this situation. Specifically in the tourist industry hoteliers must find solutions to spend less money and have more reservations. The answer is the INTERNET. And by this I do not mean just cooperating with online travel agents, but also publish your business to as much as many sources you can. And what is the best choice at this time? Of course Priceline and its company Booking.com with a great success in the industry for the last years. With almost 10% down cheaper commissions against Expedia, Booking.com is one of the few companies that shows growth in Q4 2008 and this is not just luck.

These kind of services have motivated hoteliers to take action and finally understand that can gain more reservations with just a few hours of personal work.

This of course impacted the profit of Priceline itself.