Going Work With Internet

7 Tips To Earn More With Adsense

2010-05-06T20:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a compilation of some of the best adsense tips that will surely increase your adsense earnings. I know a lot of people use adsense as their source of income so here is the list the i made to help you earn more!

# Blend adsense with your content

Your adsense should not look like an ads but should look like a content. So make the colors of your adsense and the background blend with your content. People today avoid ads as much as possible so this is a very important thing to consider when deciding with the colors of your adsense.

If you want to make people click on your adsense then make them look like a part of your content.

Also, when choosing the color of you adsense title, i highly recommend blue (#0000FF). The explanation why blue is the best is pretty simple, it is the most common color for links so people will right away know that it is a link. It is not important that your content title and adsense title should have the same color because using blue for your adsense title works best.

# Make the url go away

It is against the rules of Google if you make it invisible to the eyes of the people. One trick to do that is to change it's color same with the content color of your ads so it will not look like a url.

# Remove the borders

Blend the border color of your ads with your background color so it will not be visible. It can help to blend your ads with your content because if you put

borders in your ads, it will look more like an ads and not a good idea.

# What type of ads to choose from adsense

There are a lot of ads to choose from adsense but one of the most used is the

728 x 90 (leaderboard). This is best to use if you are just starting with adsense and best placed at the top of your page (usually under the header title). You can also place it between your conent and it blends well with your content. Also, avoid placing ads in your footer because not a lot of readers would go that far. If you don't have much space for ads, you can also consider using the 468 x 60

(Banners) and 234 x 60 (Half-Banners). You can also place them at the top or in between you content just like the leaderboards. You can experiment by using different ads a week and use the one with the best results.

I recommend not using the 468 x60 (Banners) type of ads because it is one of the most commonly used one so if you use it, people will know right away that it's an ads so they will AVOID it. Just like what i said, people avoid ads as much as possible so it's not a good idea to use the 468 x 60 (Banners).

- From my experience, the 336 x 280 (Large Rectangle) had the MOST CLICKS because it is the type of ads that blends best with the content.

If you want to place ads in your sidebars, you can choose from 160 x 600 (Wide Skyscraper), 120 x 600 (Skyscraper), and 120 x 240 (Vertical Banner). These are the best type of ads that will fit in your sidebar.

# Don't put too much ads on your site
Avoid putting a lot of ads in your site because if you do that, people will lose

interest in visiting your site because people want good content and not ads. So we can use the quality over quantity where we place only a few ads but has good placements.

# Ads placed above the fold
People spend a lot of time above the fold so this is the best place to put your

ads. Above the fold is the first place where people can see without scrolling.

This is the perfect place for your ads.

# Choose text ads over image ads

In my opinion, people hate banners and will avoid it as much as possible. Text

ads are also easy to blend with your content compared to image ads because

you'll never know what kind if image will come out. But, you can also consider image ads as your last res

Ranking Analysis

2010-04-17T06:07:00.001-07:00

How to Look Beyond What Is or Isn't Ranking
By Mike Murray (c) 2010
Featured Video: Matt Cutts 301s, Googlebot & Page Rank Website owners and managers will always be fascinated with how well they rank on
search engines. However, rankings can be deceiving because they only provide a small part of the data set anyone will need to gauge online success.
Who wouldn't like to be No. 1 on Google for an organic listing? Among the busy array of results (including paid ads and local search), a top ranking still
shines. It shouts: "I climbed the mountain and beat out the other guy."
But did you?
Here are 12 key points to consider with your ranking numbers that quickly touch on other aspects of your marketing online initiative. Keeping these factors in mind will help you make better choices about what next steps you should take to ensure that you're better positioned to improve your company's bottom line.

1. Did you pursue the right keyword?
A No. 1 ranking is possible with barely any effort, but will it drive traffic?
You might rank well for Cleveland Legal Counselors, but odds are more people are searching for Cleveland Lawyers. If that's too competitive, try Lawyers in Cleveland and get your share of traffic from the many ways people search.

2. Are you targeting the right search engine?
A top ranking on Bing can trigger big smiles. However, if your website only gets 3.5% of its traffic from Bing - for all keywords - the ranking may not deserve a lot of attention. Yes, conversions are worth considering, but you need to constantly think about what precious time you're committing to Bing when other engines may pay off in an even bigger way.

3. What's your track record?
You need to chart the progress. It's not a good sign if months go by and you
can't crack the top 30 positions in any search engine results. Own up to the
fact that maybe the keyword phrase is too competitive if it doesn't show an
improvement. Look for headway. For keywords with little competition, maybe
you'll rank higher sooner. But that's not always the case. Your search engine
optimization (SEO) practices may help you show a marked improvement even for more competitive search terms.

4. Setbacks are common.
If you manage to get a great ranking - perhaps in the top 5 spots - don't panic if your ranking dips a bit. It could easily rebound.

5. Substitutions aren't inferior.
Like NBA bench players, new keyword options can excel if given the chance. If
you can't get a high ranking for a keyword phrase among your starting lineup, drop it after a few months. Why keep it if the keyword phrase isn't gaining momentum - either toward a top ranking or in its ability to convert.
[Stop Waiting for Website Traffic]

6. Don't be misled by your computer.
With personal settings, browser history and different data centers, it's
increasingly tough to know if your exceptional ranking is really what it seems. For your most significant keywords, you may want to have someone else tell you how the keyword phrases ranks. Or, test out the search terms with some other ranking checkers (including third-party sources) like the ones listed below.
SEO Book Rank Checker (for Firefox): This tool still references your computer
but has a setting to avoid your Google personal settings.
RankChecker.net: Easy-to-use third party (note that it defaults to top 10)
Mike's Marketing Tools: Third-party tool with multiple engines

7. Understand your landing pages.
It's not uncommon for the home page to be the landing page for a powerful
keyword phrase. Your conversion option may really be an inside page. In a
fantasy world, you could tag keywords and they would magically be directed to your preferred pages. In reality, that's the beauty of paid search. But don't give up on your home page. If it's working, find a way to establish Calls to Action within the content, the core navigation, and diverse user cues to make sure visitors go where you lead them.

8. The crowded home page.
Another problem with the home page is the fact that many keyword phrases often rank well for it. A few keywords may perform better if you are able to adapt your strategy and target some interior pages for some of the keywords. Your website analytics package should help you see what keywords are being used to reach the home page or any other page with a crowded keyword field.

9. Balance greed with diversity.
Online marketers get excited if they have more than one page appearing in the top 10 search results for the same keyword phrase. You should consider whether one of the pages could better support another keyword phrase that lacks the visibility it needs to generate traffic and sales or leads for your business.
Don't make a hasty decision. If a keyword phrase ranks No. 7 on one page and No. 15 on another page, don't assume the No. 7 ranking is the best one to attack because it's closer to the No. 1 position. You need to weigh what you've already done with both pages, keyword themes on the website, the amount of content on each page, conversion opportunities and more. For example, the No. 7 ranking may be the best you'll do for the one page. For another page, the No. 15 ranking may not have taken as much effort to achieve (meaning you could still do more with SEO to improve the ranking).

10. Visitors tell another part of the story.
Unfortunately some businesses lack conversion data and settings. At least you can look at the visitor data in your website analytics. In the purest sense, visitor metrics will indicate whether the ranking has any merit.

11. Be honest about your conversions.
Many websites lack opportunities to connect with visitors. Your top ranking may be wasted if your potential customer encounters a poor design (with usability messes), text overload (visitors typically prefer to scan) and information without a clear Call to Action. Offering your phone number in the 14th paragraph isn't very effective.

12. Know your website strengths.
To appreciate your rankings (or lack of them), you need to know your website's strengths and weaknesses. Take a look at the competition. Study which website ranks No. 1 or even No. 10. What do they have that your website lacks? Maybe it's a great domain name (with a keyword), an age advantage, more links, and more content (multiple pages) to accentuate keyword themes, etc.
Business owners and marketers can study rankings every day, but the ranking position alone won't help. Look at the rankings within the context of overall traffic, conversions, your SEO efforts to date, the viability of your website, and your ability to spread keywords across the website.
Ultimately, you may need more pages to support your preferred ranking over the long haul. While making that investment, keep an eye out for alternative
keywords that your website can realistically support - today and in the future.

About The Author
Mike Murray is the Web Strategy Thought Leader for World Synergy, an interactive online marketíng firm that focuses on website design, custom web applications and business infrastructure services and strategy. Mike has more than 13 years of experience with web site development and marketing online, frequently speaking at regional and national conferences, including Search Engine Strategies.The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Google Personalized Search - Optimization Nightmare or Opportunity

2010-04-08T04:28:00.000-07:00

Hello again and welcome to another AddMe.com newsletter, in this issue we touch
on personalized search and how this effects your websites search engine traffic.
I'm also excited to announce a new addition to the newsletter, Industry Events.
Industry events will feature up and coming industry and trade events that I feel
are worth checking out, these events are great for learning about internet
marketing, website promotion and networking.
If you have an up and coming event that you would like included in please feel
free to contact me via the website.
Thanks again to our sponsors for making this newsletter possible!
Featured Blog Posts
Google Street View Funnies
Some classic and strange pics of people and animals caught during the latesst
Google Street View update
Marketing Your Business and Website Online
4 important points to consider when starting your online business.
Google Internet Speed Test
This is an old post though becoming more important when it comes to Google and
SEO, is your website up to speed?
Input about these and all other posts are always welcome, please leave a comment
about any post you find interesting on the Blog.
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Industry Events
Sydney
Search Marketing Expo (SMX) - April 22-23, 2010
SMX Sydney, Australia's #1 Search Marketing Event is the "must-attend" Search
Engine Marketing and Social Media event of the year in Australia, delivering
superior value to Conference Delegates and Exhibition Hall attendees alike. more
info.....
Search Engine Boot-Camp - April 22-23, 2010
Whilst SMX Sydney is on we are offering our Exhibition Hall delegates the chance
to learn Free of Charge from some of the industries brightest minds, the Agenda
below will run on Day One and Two of the Conference and is Free for anyone to
attend. Limited seating is available, so get to the sessions you want to see
early.more info.....
Google Personalized Search - Optimization Nightmare or Opportunity
In December 2009 Google rolled out Personalized Search for users who were not
signed in, and in over 40 languages. Personalized search has been around for a
while for signed in users who have web history enabled. This allows Google to
fine-tune your search results based on past searches and on the sites you've
clicked on in the past. This is how Google tries to optimize searches for you
when your search terms have more than one meaning.
For example, Googling the term "blackberry" while signed in with web history on
gets the results you see on the first screen shot. From my search history it is
clear that I'm much more likely to be searching for information about the
BlackBerry PDA than about the actual fruit. On the other hand, my mom, who does
a lot of baking and jam-making, would probably end up with search results about
the fruit rather than about the electronic device, based on her history of
looking up recipes.
So now that personalized search is on offer for signed out users, exactly what
does that mean?
It means that personalized search can use an anonymous cookie on your browser to
base your search results on 180 days of search activity linked to this cookie.
This is completely separate and apart from your Web History and your Google
account. When you have the option of personalized results while signed out, you
will see a link that says View Customizations in the top right corner of the
results page, as you can see in the second screen shot. When you click on it,
you can see how the results are customized and, if you want, you can turn off
this type of customization.
Now, there are obviously computers where lots of different people search, so the
browser cookie might be influenced by multiple people's search activity. To
protect the privacy of the non-signed-in users, you can't actually view the
specific search activity upon which the signed-out personalized search is based.
Plus, you can turn off personalized search settings for signed-out personalized
search altogether if you want.
As for signed-in personalized search, you can clear the history upon which your
personalized results are based at any time to protect your privacy. That way, if
you stay signed in and someone else wants to know what you've been searching on,
they won't be able to do it through your personalized search history. Of course
they could still go through your web history, so if you're concerned, you should
use your browser to clear your web history.
If you're a webmaster, you might be wondering whether personalized search,
adopted on a massive scale, will affect your ability to reach the people you
want to visit your website. The answer, unsatisfactory as it may be, is "Yes,
and no."
Consider this. If a user searches for, say, "pith helmets," and visits the top
result and the last two results on the first page of listings. Then those three
websites will be added into the person's personalized search data. Next time the
user decides to do a search for "pith helmets" then those two sites from the
bottom of the first page of results will rank higher than they would in an
organic, starting from scratch search.
But what if the user finds another search result, say the 7th one on the new
results page, and bookmarks it and goes there henceforth rather than searching
for pith helmets anymore for the time being. But then, a few months later, he
thinks that maybe there's a better pith helmet out there so he does another
search. But this time, the one he bookmarked shows up as the top result. What gives?
Even though that site didn't do any special SEO, there it is, right at the top
of our pith helmet-loving searcher. However, other searchers will find other
pith helmet dealers at the top of their results pages.
Dominate Google for Your Keywords Today!
So how do you, the webmaster, change your SEO strategy? Or do you need to change
it? If you're doing legitimate, white-hat ways of getting traffic to your site,
then your site will be more likely to bubble to the top of the research results
for personalized search. A first time searcher might find your site perched at
No. 1 simply because he has already visited it a bunch of times through other
routes. This is true even if your site wouldn't be tops in an organic search.
There's nothing really that you should change in terms of your SEO strategy.
Keep doing the on-site SEO as you have been, and you'll probably do fine. But
there's nothing wrong with using off-site SEO to build up your brand and keep
your visitors happy. Again, it boils down to having great content that people
will find compelling and that will make them want to come back. This helps you
whether the game is organic search or personalized search.
The takeaway is this: Google personalized search isn't so much revolutionary as
evolutionary. It's not going to take all the search engine results and shuffle
them massively. It may mean that sites that focus on the mechanics of SEO
without focusing on great content could lose some ranking, but even that seems
unlikely. Personalized search will change things up a little on an individual
basis, but it by no means throws out the concept of organic search results based
on SEO.
About the Author
John Wieber from http://www.seomoves.org, a full service, bleeding edge seo company.

The Death of Google Adsense And Other Myths

2009-01-14T08:30:00.000-08:00

By Titus Hoskins (c) 2006

Recent changes in the Google Adsense program has many online website owners and marketers seriously concerned. Many have seen their Adsense profíts and income flatline... seen their four or five figure monthly Adsense income disappear overnight. For many the Google Adsense bubble has burst.

What happened?

First, Google made a change in its Adsense program, letting advertisers choose between putting their ads in the search results or on the content pages of Adsense publishers. Search won out and started to receive the higher bids. Search results convert better than content ads.

Next, Google has cracked down on Junk Adsense sites, like they should. These sites consisted mainly of software generated re-hashed search engine links and were totally annoying to say the least. But Google also cracked down on 'squeeze pages' or 'affilíate landing pages' - a lucrative source of income for many online marketers, mainly because these pages helped marketers build an opt-ín list or use permission based email.

The results of these changes produced an Adsense meltdown for many online marketers.

Some Internet marketers are speculating recent changes could even mean the death of Adsense. One online marketer, Scott Boulch even published a free report entitled 'The Death of Adsense".

Many affilíate marketers would agree with Boulch on some of his points, especially the obvious fact that using Adsense on your web content is starting on the bottom rung of the online marketing ladder. Instead of receiving pennies per clíck with Adsense, alert marketers and webmasters have already discovered that by using CPA (Cost-Per-Action) and direct affilíate links, they can produce significantly more revenue from their web pages. Why eärn pennies per clíck when you can eärn $5, $10 or OVER $100 per clíck?

But the fine people at Google are catching on...

In the past Google has made its own swing to the Cost-Per-Action direction with its referral system for the Firefox Browser and giving webmasters credít for signing up Adwords and Adsense accounts.

Many online marketers believe Google needs to expand on these baby steps and open their Adsense affilíate program up to third party products/advertisers. In a recent company statement Google offered some hope: "We're always looking for new ways to provide effective and useful features to advertisers, publishers, and users," the company stated "As part of these efforts we are currently testing a cost-per-action (CPA) pricing model to give advertisers more flexibility and provide publishers another way to eärn revenue through AdSense." Basically, in cost-per-action, advertisers pay for leads, purchases or customer acquisition. It would help with the clíck fraud issue and the monetary returns could potentially make Adsense's revenues pale in comparison.

As more and more commerce goes online... acquiring customers for such diverse services as ínsurance, real estate, telephone, marketing, web hostíng, travel, mörtgage loans, cable TV, banking... you name it, almost any service or product sold in the marketplace is now turning to the Internet for customers and lifelong clients.

Enormous sums of monëy will change hands. Perhaps, the most lucrative of these is customer acquisition. Advertisers are turning to the Internet and webmasters/marketers for acquiring these lifelong customers for their respective services and products. Businesses and companies are quickly realizing paying an attractive lead generating fee/commission is smart business. They quickly build a client base for their services or products and quickly recoup their expenses - realizing in the long run these leads will generate huge profíts.

It can also mean huge profíts for the CPA networks like ValueClick's Commission Junction and Rakuten's LinkShare who supply the advertisers with publishers and website marketers to harvest these leads. It can be a lucrative venture for all involved, especially for those online marketers who have cornered the search engines for lucrative niche markets in big ticket items. Even small ticket items pay quite well for those marketers who know how to market online.

Contextual advertising is fine, but CPA (Cost-Per-Action) will offer much better returns for the website owner. Making any profitable site much more profitable. It will and is opening up a whole area of marketing opportunities that nevër existed before we had the Internet. Creating a complex structure of advertisers, publishers and the Affilíate/CPA companies that connect the two.

Of course, cutting out the middle man has always been even a more profitable venture for most marketers. As more and more webmasters realize they can make much more with dealing directly with companies, rather than going through a middle process like Google Adsense or the countless other affilíate/CPA networks ... online marketers can reap even bigger rewards.

For an online marketer when you get a telephone call or email from the CEO or the affilíate manager with a company or service you're promoting with your website - you know you have made it! Dealing directly with a company usually means bigger commissions and special exclusive deals just for you or your sites.

Only fly in the ointment, all that extra paperwork and business wheeling and dealing. Many marketers and website owners like the idea of someone else handling all the tracking, collecting payments, promotional materials... they just like to sit back and build more websites and content. It gives the affilíate marketer a lifestyle that they are looking for on the web. They just like to market and promote with their sites and let someone else worry about the details. Therefore, there will always be a place for contextual ads like Google Adsense... "Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated."

However, could CPA be a better alternative for the current Adsense contextual ads?

Google would be the natural choice for a middleman if there ever was one. Besides, many savvy marketers know the Google brand name is trusted online, any product/service promoted through Google would be an easy sell. Many argue Google already dominates the web, why should it not be the one to handle these CPA transactions through its Adsense program.

On the flip side, over countless updates and changes to its indexing, many webmasters have experienced more than a few negative dealings with Google. Many have won, many have lost in this Google Age, but all have realized riding the Google Search Engine is like running with the bulls at Pamplona, totally thrilling unless you're one of the unfortunate few who get trampled in the process.

About The Author:

Titus Hoskins is a former teacher who now works full-time online operating numerous websites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: http://www.bizwaremagic.com. For the lastest trade information in your own industry try: http://bizwaremagic.tradepub.com.
2006 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Outsourcing Marketing

2009-01-14T08:14:00.000-08:00

by Gail McGovern and John Quelch

Companies have long outsourced creative, right-brain marketing activities, such as advertising and promotion campaigns. But a fundamental change is under way: Increasingly, firms are farming out marketing operations and analytics as well. A Forrester Research survey of 650 B2B marketing executives found that 53% aimed to outsource more than half their marketing activities in 2004. Forrester projects that CRM outsourcing in the United States will quadruple to $4.6 billion by 2008. And the British firm Astron Group forecasts that customer database and lead management outsourcing is growing 10% annually. What’s going on?

We believe there are two key reasons for this trend: First, outsourcing can save money and improve quality. American Express’s consolidation of customer service call center operations in India, for example, cut service costs per customer by 20% to 30% while improving response time and boosting the percentage of satisfied customers by 20 points.
Second, outsourcing can provide increasingly critical left-brain marketing expertise that many companies lack, such as customer database management and analysis. When Sony, a legendary marketer, wanted to build a customer database, sell services, and market new, high-end products through its online store, Sony Style, it outsourced the program, recognizing that it didn’t have the required skills in-house. Allstate has outsourced lead management, which has doubled the leads each agent gets. Ericsson has outsourced the management of its extranet, which provides the sales force with up-to-date customer information and allows direct communication with selected customers.
American Express now outsources its data mining to specialist third-party firms that can process millions of transactions a day to reveal purchasing patterns and other aspects of consumer behavior. And Best Buy, the electronics retailer, is outsourcing not just database management but also marketing analyses and the complete execution of the marketing programs for two of its six segments—business and high-end customers.
The need for left-brain marketing expertise, we think, will only grow. A discipline that was once principally creative has become increasingly analytic, as the old workhorses—print and television advertising, and direct mail—become less and less effective. Marketing managers tend to be right-brain creatives with a fondness for mass-marketing campaigns when what’s needed are left-brain number crunchers who zero in on the “market of one.” Today, computer models optimize the allocation of pharmaceutical sales representatives’ time, determining which customers to address and which products to promote to achieve the greatest return. Dynamic pricing models allow airlines to change ticket prices in real time based on the number of seats sold on a given flight. And IT-intensive database management now lets companies precisely target just the right messages to just the right customers in just the right terms.
While many things, from customer call centers to pricing-elasticity studies and sales force deployment models, can be outsourced, some aspects of marketing can’t: those that directly drive marketing strategy. The CEO and top management team must regularly spend face time with customers and end consumers and drive this customer-focused culture throughout the organization. A chief marketing officer should be appointed to lead the marketing strategy, inject the customer perspective into new product development, and ensure that the company’s intangible brand assets are carefully stewarded. Major accounts must be served by sales and service teams that have been given the right incentives so that they can integrate themselves into those customer organizations and ensure the “stickiness” necessary for long-term relationships.
To create the most value from outsourcing, marketing managers must become expert ringmasters who cherry-pick, develop, and monitor an integrated network of outside suppliers that brings new capabilities to the marketing effort. Above all, management must start seeing its marketing suppliers not as contractors that need to be controlled but as partners that can create shared value over the long term.

Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks

2009-01-14T08:11:00.000-08:00

New research shows that when people need help getting a job done, they’ll choose a congenial colleague over a more capable one. That has big implications for every organization—and not all of them are negative.

by Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo

One of management’s greatest challenges arises from a natural tension inherent in every organization. People are brought together because they have the variety of skills that, in concert, are needed to carry out a complex activity. But this variety inevitably leads to fragmentation of the organization into silos of specialized knowledge and activity.

It’s an understatement to say that resolving this tension is crucial to success in today’s knowledge-based and collaborative business environment. How do you ensure that relevant information gets transferred between two parts of an organization that have different cultures? How do you encourage people from units competing for scarce corporate resources to work together? How do you see to it that the value of a cross-functional team is more, not less, than the sum of its parts?

The answers to such questions lie not in an examination of organization charts but largely in an understanding of informal social networks and how they emerge. Certainly, organizations are designed to ensure that people interact in ways necessary to get their jobs done. But all kinds of work-related encounters and relationships exist that only partly reflect these purposefully designed structures. Even in the context of formal structures like cross-functional teams, informal relationships play a major role.

In this article, we offer somewhat surprising insights into how informal networks take shape in companies—that is, how people choose those they work with. We then discuss some of the benefits and drawbacks of this phenomenon and offer ways for managers to mitigate its negative effects and leverage the positive ones.

How We Choose Work Partners

When given the choice of whom to work with, people will pick one person over another for any number of reasons: the prestige of being associated with a star performer, for example, or the hope that spending time with a strategically placed superior will further their careers. But in most cases, people choose their work partners according to two criteria. One is competence at the job (Does Joe know what he’s doing?). The other is likability (Is Joe enjoyable to work with?). Obviously, both things matter. Less obvious is how much they matter—and exactly how they matter.

To gain some insight into these questions, we studied four organizations selected to reflect a wide range of attributes—for-profit and nonprofit, large and small, North American and European. We asked people to indicate how often they had work-related interactions with every other person in the organization. We then asked them to rate all the other people in the company in terms of how much they personally liked each one and how well each did his or her job. (For a more-detailed description of the studies, see the sidebar “Who Is Good? Who Is Liked?”)

These two criteria—competence and likability—combine to produce four archetypes: the competent jerk, who knows a lot but is unpleasant to deal with; the lovable fool, who doesn’t know much but is a delight to have around; the lovable star, who’s both smart and likable; and the incompetent jerk, who…well, that’s self-explanatory. These archetypes are caricatures, of course: Organizations usually—well, much of the time—weed out both the hopelessly incompetent and the socially clueless. Still, people in an organization can be roughly classified using a simple matrix. (Indeed, with relative ease you can probably populate the four boxes depicted in the exhibit “Whom Would You Choose?” with the names of people in your own company.)

Our research showed (not surprisingly) that, no matter what kind of organization we studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools.

Design Thinking

2009-01-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.

by Tim Brown

Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb and then wrapped an entire industry around it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.
Thus Edison’s genius lay in his ability to conceive of a fully developed marketplace, not simply a discrete device. He was able to envision how people would want to use what he made, and he engineered toward that insight. He wasn’t always prescient (he originally believed the phonograph would be used mainly as a business machine for recording and replaying dictation), but he invariably gave great consideration to users’ needs and preferences.
Edison’s approach was an early example of what is now called “design thinking”—a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos. By this I mean that innovation is powered by a thorough understanding, through direct observation, of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike about the way particular products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported.
Many people believe that Edison’s greatest invention was the modern R&D laboratory and methods of experimental investigation. Edison wasn’t a narrowly specialized scientist but a broad generalist with a shrewd business sense. In his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory he surrounded himself with gifted tinkerers, improvisers, and experimenters. Indeed, he broke the mold of the “lone genius inventor” by creating a team-based approach to innovation. Although Edison biographers write of the camaraderie enjoyed by this merry band, the process also featured endless rounds of trial and error—the “99% perspiration” in Edison’s famous definition of genius. His approach was intended not to validate preconceived hypotheses but to help experimenters learn something new from each iterative stab. Innovation is hard work; Edison made it a profession that blended art, craft, science, business savvy, and an astute understanding of customers and markets.
Design thinking is a lineal descendant of that tradition. Put simply, it is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. Like Edison’s painstaking innovation process, it often entails a great deal of perspiration.
I believe that design thinking has much to offer a business world in which most management ideas and best practices are freely available to be copied and exploited. Leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage; they would do well to incorporate design thinking into all phases of the process.

Getting Beneath the Surface

Historically, design has been treated as a downstream step in the development process—the point where designers, who have played no earlier role in the substantive work of innovation, come along and put a beautiful wrapper around the idea. To be sure, this approach has stimulated market growth in many areas by making new products and technologies aesthetically attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or by enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising and communication strategies. During the latter half of the twentieth century design became an increasingly valuable competitive asset in, for example, the consumer electronics, automotive, and consumer packaged goods industries. But in most others it remained a late-stage add-on.
Now, however, rather than asking designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, companies are asking them to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value.

How Local Companies Keep Multinationals at Bay

2009-01-14T08:05:00.000-08:00

To win in the world’s fastest-growing markets, transnational giants have to compete with increasingly sophisticated homegrown champions. It isn’t easy.

by Arindam K. Bhattacharya and David C. Michael

Since the late 1970s, governments on every continent have allowed the winds of global competition to blow through their economies. As policy makers have lowered tariff barriers and permitted foreign investments, multinational companies have rushed into those countries. U.S., European, and Japanese giants, it initially appeared, would quickly overrun local rivals and grab the market for almost every product or service. After all, they possessed state-of-the-art technologies and products, enormous financial resources, powerful brands, and the world’s best management talent and systems. Poor nations such as Brazil, China, India, and Mexico, often under pressure from developed countries, let in transnational companies, but they did so slowly, almost reluctantly. They were convinced that global Goliaths would wipe out local enterprises in one fell swoop.

That hasn’t happened, according to our research. Over the past three years, we have been studying companies in 10 rapidly developing economies: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, and Thailand. In those countries, smart domestic enterprises are more than holding their own in the face of foreign competition. They have staved off challenges from multinational corporations in their core businesses, have become market leaders or are catching up with them, and have often seized new opportunities before foreign players could. Many of them dominate the market today not because of protectionist economic policies, but because of their strategies and execution. When we drew up a list of 50 homegrown champions, we found that 21 had revenues exceeding US$1 billion in 2006 and that the entire group’s sales had risen by about 50% between 2005 and 2006 (see the exhibit “Fifty Homegrown Champions”). The skeptics should have remembered that David slew Goliath—not the other way around.

Consider a few local companies that have fended off foreign competition during the past five years or more:

• In Brazil, Grupo Positivo has a larger share of the PC market than either Dell or Hewlett-Packard, and Totvs is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software leader in the small- and midsize-company market, ahead of the world’s largest business software provider, SAP.

• In China, daily use of the search engine Baidu exceeds that of Google China by fourfold; QQ, from instant-message leader Tencent, is ahead of MSN Messenger; and online travel service Ctrip has held off Travelsky, Expedia’s eLong.com, and Travelocity’s Zuji.com.

• In India, Bharti Airtel has taken on Hutchison Telecom, which sold its Indian operations to Vodafone in 2007, and emerged as the leader in the cellular telephone market.

• In Mexico, Grupo Elektra, which has created one of the country’s biggest retail networks, has taken the battle to Wal-Mart.

• In Russia, Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods is the biggest producer of dairy products, ahead of Danone and Coca-Cola.

Indonesian Textile

2008-10-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

An introduction to Indonesian textiles and their traditional uses

http://www.expat.or.id/

KEBAYA

2008-10-10T08:38:00.000-07:00

A Kebaya is a traditional blouse worn by women in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, sometimes made from sheer material and usually worn with a sarong, batik, or other traditional knitted garment such as a songket with a colorful motif.

Kebaya is originated from Arab region;^[1] the Arabic word of Kaba means clothing. The name of Kebaya as a particular clothing type was introduced by the Portuguese when they landed on Southeast Asia. Kebaya is associated with a type of blouse worn by Indonesian women in 15th or 16th century.

The earliest form of Kebaya was first came from the north of the Indonesian archipelago. The clothing type began to spread to Malacca, Java, Bali, Sumatra, Borneo and Sulawesi. After hundred years of acculturation, the garments have become adjusted to local customs and culture.

Prior 1600, kebaya on Java island were considered as a sacred clothing to be worn only by members of the Javanese monarchy. During Dutch colonization of the island, European women began wearing kebaya as formal dress. During this period, kebaya, that was originally made from mori fabric, were modified with silk embroidered with colorful patterns.

In Malacca region, a different variety of kebaya is called "nyonya kebaya" wore by the Peranakan people. Nyonya kebaya dress consists of a kebaya completed with a sarong and beaded shoes (kasut manek). The nyonya kebaya gains its popularity that the dress is wore also by non-Asian people.

Apart from traditional kebaya, fashion designers are looking into ways of modifying the design and making kebaya a more fashionable outfit. Casual designed kebaya can even be worn with jeans or skirts. For weddings or formal events, many designers are exploring other types of fine fabrics like laces to create a bridal kebaya.

The kebaya silhoutte gives emphasis to a womanly figure and that is the beauty of this ethnic wear.

Sarong kebaya, a version of kebaya has become a uniform for Singapore Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, and Garuda Indonesia flight attendants.