Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

http://designerzone.com/ is probably my first failure (I no longer own the domain).

In 1996 whilst at AOL, one of my fondest memories was learning how to build Web sites so I could teach the trainer, who could then teach the technicians.

Friends at the time, laughed at my idea of building a site about the town I come from. They all thought it should have been based on sport. I provided information and pictures of beaches, restaurants, hotels and the usual tourist attractions. With the exception of Yahoo! (indexed by humans), my site was placed in the top five results on just about every search engine. I guess it was easy back then as there wasn’t much to compete with. I remember saying I could charge the hotels and restaurants for advertising, to which my friends laughed and said ‘yeah as if that will ever take off’.

I used the domain http://aol.wexfordirl.com because aol.wexford.com was taken. The site attracted a lot of visitors from the US, many of whom asked if I could make travel arrangements or recommend where to go and what to do. Some asked if I could help track down their families. Perhaps that was yet another missed opportunity. Anyway, the whole idea got me thinking and I eventually decided that I wanted to sell designer clothes for men online. Why? Well, because I used to buy from sites that I felt were crap compared to mine and given how easy it was to appear at the top of every search engine, I figured I was in with a chance.

I conducted market research and continued to study how search engines worked over a six month period. I knew what men wanted, where they came from and the sizes that would sell. I had tens of thousands of email addresses belonging to people who signed up to the research and I had the International Sales and International Marketing Managers at AOL US on board. It was all good to go in late 1996 when there were very few Web sites selling designer clothes. That said, all but designerzone.com was taken, so I bought that. However, when the girl who was going to handle the buying fell ill, I decided to dump the entire idea. I put it down to inexperience. Why didn’t I just get someone else to do it? Ah well.

Come to think of it, I wrote an ebook entitled ‘how to setup an online shop within 24 hours’, based on my research and review of all the products available at the time. Again, I never bothered to publish/sell it. I’m confident that I could have sold a few copies too because there was so little information about ecommerce on the Web. I don’t think the word was even used back then.

So, advertising and selling designer clothes were the two real missed opportunities. Anyone can come up with an idea though. Only those who execute their ideas should be praised. Am I sorry? Absolutely not. We are the sum total of all our experiences and I wouldn’t have ended up with Segala had I gone down a different route.

I’ve had other failures including a marketing agency, which were much further down the road with the employment of staff and rented offices etc. I thought I’d focus on my AOL days because of the recent attention it has been given since the purchase of Bebo.

What mistakes or missed opportunities can you talk about?

Clearing the mound of paperwork after my recent travels is a great start to the working day. My next port of call was Twitter, to find out what had been happening around the world today. You see, Twitter isn’t just a one-way broadcast tool to tell people where you are and what you’re doing.

These days, Twitter is used for micro blogging, reporting news, spreading gossip and soliciting opinion from trusted friends. In fact, Twitter (well, my Twitter friends) has replaced my search engine whenever I’m looking for a recommendation or advice on something. For example, I’m currently conducting research on social networks for mobile users. Rather than spend ages searching on the Web, I decided to ask my Twitter friends. Within minutes I had at least ten people recommend two sites on average. Today I received some good recommendations about my upcoming trip to New York as I need to find reasonable accommodation in Manhattan.

So, before I started reading through the Twitter conversations, I decided to unfollow lots of people. If I didn’t immediately recognise the name, I unfollowed them. This might appear to be unfriendly and I suppose to a degree it is. But I want to increase the quality of the noise that’s coming through whilst making sure I’m not putting up barriers to potential relationships that could prove fruitful in the future.

I’d never intentionally unfollow someone with whom I’ve had a conversation, so please let me know if I’ve unfollowed you when I shouldn’t have. Even if we haven’t conversed but you’d like to know if I follow you, just send me a direct message from Twitter. If you’re not able to DM me, it means I’m not following you. If you continue to care, please let me know and I’ll happily follow you.

As a matter of interest, I follow some people who don’t follow me. But that’s ok, I’m interested in what they have to say and perhaps some day, they’ll have a mutual interest in what I have to say. Perhaps I just have something to say too often

I’m interested in what you have to say about Twitter. I’m also interested in your thoughts about my use of it. Do I talk too much?

I tried to buy flowers on Interfora’s Web site today as it’s Mother’s Day in Ireland tomorrow. Before the sarcastic comments start, Mother’s Day in China is in may; something I learned on Twitter thanks to Siok Siok. I’ve previously used interflora.co.uk so assumed it would have a .ie domain for Ireland. However, when I typed in interflora.ie I ended up on the UK site with the following message

Interflora.ie is currently under construction. At Interflora.co.uk you’ll find an amazing selection of flowers and gifts for delivery throughout Ireland and beyond. Click here to view our range and place your order.

With our international delivery service you can show your loved ones just how much they mean to you no matter how far away they are. We can even deliver your order on the same day in Ireland, the UK and many other countries! All you need to do is click here to place an order, and we’ll do the rest!

Our full Irish site with order processing in Euros will be launched later this year.

They’re obviously paying through the nose for long winded and unnecessary development like they are on SEO (more on that in a moment). I mean, it shouldn’t take almost a year to build a localised version of a Web site that doesn’t require any translation.

This alone doesn’t warrant a blog post though. I would never spend time slagging off companies for the sake of it. I do however, hope to provide some advice on search optimisation by demonstrating how Interflora isn’t just stuck in the 90’s with its Web site, but how it’s squandering money with advertising company, Google. Note that I didn’t call it a search engine. That’s because it would imply Google actually searched for the most appropriate Web sites, which it doesn’t. It provides you with the Web sites that belong to the highest bidders.

As instructed on the Web site, I clicked the hyperlink that was supposed to take me to a page where I could order flowers and have them delivered to an address in Ireland. However, the drop down menu for the address only permits you to choose a UK county. So, it’s technically impossible to send flowers to Ireland via the Web site.

So, I decide to search online for florists. Out of habit, I used Google; http://google.ie and searched for ‘florists in wexford’. The first sponsored link was ‘Ireland Florists’ with a link to www.interflora.co.uk

As I’ve said, this is a sponsored link, meaning, Interflora pays Google every time a user clicks on that hyperlink. This is a complete waste of money because it’s technically impossible for users interested in sending flowers to Wexford to use this Web site. You should only pay for sponsored links when the landing page has an obvious call to action where users do exactly what you’d like them to do, such as make a purchase.

This is a good example of a company that doesn’t understand how and when to pay for sponsored links. Could it be an unscrupulous SEO company taking advantage of Interflora?

I conducted a search for Segala on Google (.com) to see if any of our competitors were squatting on the keyword (this has happened in the past). I was surprised to see that the first result had 7 links to various parts of our Web site underneath the description as per the screen shot above.

Ignore the green tick, that’s what our Firefox extension does to provide more information about the suitability of the content using Content Labels.

Do you know how/why this has happened?

BIMA (British Interactive Media Association), the Association that I Chair, has some upcoming events I thought you might find interesting.

Dialog

Viral: Quality or Quantity?

Date 6th Mar 2008

This Dialog will address the key questions that challenge the industry and cut-through some of the hyperbole in search of some clarity.

The Panel
Chris Kempt, Founder, Kempt (moderator)
Caroline McGuckian, Media Director, LBi
Jez Jowett, Managing Partner, Agency.com
Jim McNiven, Managing Director, Kerb

Read more about this on the BIMA blog

BIMA Breakfast Bites

Word of Mouth/Advocacy

Date 18th Mar 2008

The BIMA Breakfast Bites (B3!) is back in 2008. We’re working on completing the entire calendar for this year so you know what’s coming up but for now.

Andrew Crysell from Ramp Industry is going to kick off the first one. Ramp Industry have carried out extensive research and insight for the likes of Channel 4, The Guardian, River Island and Sony PlayStation, explores the significance of word-of-mouth, brand advocacy and the role played by content.

Read more about this on the BIMA blog