Business tactics

It’s here; the final frontier. The Big One. The moment everyone’s been waiting for – Web 2.0. Hold on, what’s that? It’s already been and gone? Well, I’ll be damned. I guess my text-only, black-and-grey page with endless raw URLs and no .gif files is going to do down fairly badly. As are all the business sites who are still refusing to embrace the amazing impact web design can have on their traffic, business image and message in a world that’s all about the online.

It’s a tricky business, reorganising and redesigning a site. If it’s essentially an address and a floating logo, it’s no big deal to have it prettied up on the sly while you keep working away in the office. But if you’re always blogging and dealing with customers through it, it’s the equivalent of a White Van Man’s MOT – he can’t get work without the van, but the van can’t work without the MOT, and he can’t pay for the MOT without the work that comes from owning the van. You follow? Losing a site can be like losing a limb, even if it’s only for a week, but the benefits are huge. Everyone needs to do everything they can to stand out in the digital popularity contest that is 2010′s World Wide Web, and if you’re not flashing your widgets, you’re going down.

Pruning the hedges

First off, you’ve got to look at the aesthetic side of your website, and whether it’s really as good-looking as all its siblings in the same industry. If you’re an IFA and offering a bare-bones Blogspot domain as a means of communicating with your clients, sitting alongside your biggest competitor who’s fully Flash enabled and has Facebook and Twitter integrated into the footer, then it’s likely most people will gravitate to the one that allows them to play Asteroids while the site calculates their service fees. You’ve also got to factor in the realistic prospect of optimising your site for a multitude of different browsers, some of them no bigger than the iPhone’s resolution. Not everyone’s on dual-monitor setups; most are going to be on home laptops, netbooks, and smartphones, so think about this when you’re designing.

I know I’m promoting Flash and Apple’s wonder-phone (Flash doesn’t work on the iPhone, well done Steve Jobs) but the point still stands. There are a lot of people looking for multi-browser and even multi-platform sites becoming the norm, taking it as far as utilising internet campaigns in order to reach their goal. It’s long-term, sure, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take part. Look at the way most businesses are communicating via social networking – most of these operate through smartphones and are optimised for Macs, netbooks and Chrome (the SEO expert’s choice, in my opinion). Giving them the ability to double-check your figures against that press release you just tweeted is a seriously positive bit of functionality.

It’s also worth checking out what you can do with your GUI. If you’ve got a landing page full of adverts, sidebars and endless widgets, most people aren’t going to picture you as the most informative site in the world. If your website looks like this rather than this, then you’ve got a serious problem. In fact, make sure you click the first link – we’ll go forward from there.

From what we can tell, it’s a political news site, though why it’s called Haven Works is unclear. It’s also a complete mess; I asked a web designer friend of mine to take a look and make some suggestions. He stared at it for a few moments, and I turned to him as he sat, pensive, looking at the mess of HTML and horrible, clashing colours. “Strip it out and start again?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just not worth it.”

Some sites aren’t salvageable, and if yours looks anything like that monstrosity, let me offer some advice: delete. Wipe everything, get a basic WordPress site running as a temporary replacement, and seek help. Now, that probably gets a fair amount of traffic simply because of the amount of aggregate articles and traffic it absorbs, rather like the Blob. But it’s not something you’d visit unless you, like myself, are passing it around to your friends and loved ones as a “get a load of this” site, and that doesn’t rake in the customers.

Behind the scenes

When designing a website, a lot of people seem to forget it’s not just shoving a bunch of stuff together in MS Paint and clicking on it. A lot of code and very heavy maths can sometimes go into very slick websites, and programmers work alongside designers to make this happen (though most designers have a wealth of HTML and CSS skills at their disposal as an unofficial industry standard). Breadcrumb trails, clean source code and good loading times are all factors that are managed by people working in hosting, administration and coding, and not the people who’re putting that sun-glare effect on the side of your logo.

Breadcrumb trails are also seriously important – if you’re looking to optimise for social media, think about the length of your URL. www.news.com/18472 is great if you’re wanting people to fit it into a tiny Twitter window. However, it’s not very easy to just reel off verbally, and you might be better off with www.news.com/this-just-in instead. The difference? Not much. Most people use Tiny URL and similar online services when linking to your content anyway – even we do it, sometimes. The point of a clean breadcrumb trail is that it looks nicer. Having domain.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory/article-929282822 is just sloppy and makes your business’ approach to its web presence look the same. However, if you clean that up and simply give each page its own page without a wealth of parent pages or categories, then you’re more likely to have people remember where they were, and continue from there, if they’ve forgotten to bookmark. Humans can remember “this just in” on a predictive-search browser like Google Chrome. They can’t remember an eight-digit number they saw last Thursday.

My point to you is this – there’s a lot that goes into coding a site, building it up and making it look good, and these are a few points a lot of people (like good old Haven Works) seem to miss. This isn’t the last you’ve heard from me on this topic, though, you’ve been warned. Next week I’ll be tackling widgets and sidebars, and heaven help anyone in social media who’s staring at this sentence with glazed-over eyes. Here’s a tip for popular web-design techniques – if you don’t know it – get it. If you don’t get it, the people who do and their users won’t get you.

Anyone churning their way through SEO and social media news lately is likely to notice an increasing amount of posts and news about Twitter beginning to fail its users on a regular basis. Now, for a lot of people that’s a few regained hours that would usually be spent procrastinating in the office and writing 140-character poetry to loved ones, or, alternatively, Stephen Fry. But for companies who use Twitter as their only source of new-age contact with a consumer base that’s increasingly going digital, and socially digital at that, this could be rather disruptive, and something of a worrying topic to bring up at the next board meeting.

The question is simple: why are companies choosing one social media outlet and running with it to the degree that, if it were to collapse, they would unwittingly cut themselves off from their entire target market? If you’re a company who Tweets, whether as a group, a select team of social media enthusiasts or even someone in Marketing/PR dedicated to the medium, then are you not only wasting your potential by only using one outlet, but putting your entire social media-related business presence at risk as well?

Too little, too late

Let’s be honest – this isn’t the first time we’ve seen businesses face disasters on any scale caused by bad sites or bad software, though software’s definitely the more damaging. CNET once posted an insightful, though rather shudder-worthy post discussing the impact a software failure had on the financial stability of a major company. The bottom line was that the company itself was not held to account for the failings of its infrastructure and its reliance on one piece of software.

Now, this is arguable from both sides of the fence. Yes, even in terms of Twitter (a google search for “fail whale” will give you an idea of the realistic scale of issues with it), the company running the software or website that businesses operate through are ultimately responsible if said companies suffer when the software/site fails. Of course, if this happens with a social media site, there’s a sudden drop in updates and therefore traffic to the blog, which over a day or a week can be rebuilt, steadily. When it goes really wrong is when their blog crashes and they lose all previous posts, or Twitter dies and prevents them from being the first to break industry news – a devastating and horrifying prospect for any business seen to be regularly “on the ball” in terms of new developments in their industry or sub-sector.

However, at the same time, companies are too reliant on one system of doing things, and this largely evolves as a result of the monopoly trend in the digital battle for web dominance. Twitter is never going to be bested when it comes to micro-blogging, and the Microsoft Exchange Server system is an obvious choice if everyone in the office is running to and from conferences with nothing but a netbook and a smartphone to hand.  But to be present in social media circles and rely on only one site, be it Twitter, Facebook or otherwise, is foolish at best. You wouldn’t rely on one leg and never bother having another given the option to have both, right? So why cripple your business in the same manner?

My name is Company A Ltd, and I’m a digital dependoholic

The first step to solving problems like this is simply to spread out. If you’re only running a Twitter, set up a Facebook, even a Flickr account (you never know, allowing the press easy access to pictures of your award-winning team of staff has its benefits, and wastes less of your time when it comes to the news-hounds sniffing around for something to colour their article about Employee 49 with). The same goes for software – if you’re only using TweetDeck and your entire staff roster follows suit, get them to have other options installed (or re-introduce them to their browser, if it comes to it) to prepare for the event that TweetDeck suddenly crashes and the entire tech support department stage a four-week walkout strike. You’d be surprised at the fallibility of online support for software – if Twitter went down and every single account requested support, that’s (judging by January’s statistics) over 75 million angry users. Not a weekend job.

The main issue you have to consider is the support in place in the event of a system/site-wide crash. Let’s take the Twitter example and run a few numbers:

• January 2010 number of Twitter users – 75,000,000.
• Twitter crashes, globally, everyone makes a tech request.
• Time taken to fill out forms on the part of the user, and deal with each request and give a form answer on the part of Twitter, even on auto reply: 10 seconds (thinking along the lines of writing “my twitter account doesn’t work, ” and hitting send, and the receipt page loading on a decent connection).
• Total amount of time to deal with all 75 million requests:
• 750,000,000 seconds
• 12,000,000 minutes
• 20,833.333 (recurring) hours
• 8,680 days
• 23.78 (rounded down, non-leap year) years.

Now, admittedly everyone would get their responses immediately, not one-by-one. But imagine the server capacity to respond, and take into account that almost 24 years of productivity has been lost – it’s enough to give any CEO a heart attack. But of course, if you tweet 50 times a day as a business PR attempt and twitter goes down for a day, that’s 50 tweets lost, and therefore 500 possible re-tweets – 550 tweets talking about your company lost, per day, the equivalent of one or two press releases. It’s a damaging thing to happen, and dependence like this means a lot of companies face a seriously blank afternoon if their means of doing business is lost. Scrooge would be ashamed – we should all still be keeping manual, physical records, but an over-reliance on digitised information, no need for filing cabinets (that new plant looks way better, anyway) and so-called “infallible” backup systems means we run the risk of losing everything.

Remember the Titanic? The “unsinkable” ship? Now apply that to MS Office, your email server, MSN, Facebook, Twitter, and even your phone network and the Royal Mail. Scary, right?

Have you ever submitted your well-written, thoroughly-researched article through to an aggregate site and watched it flounder as endless top-tens and ridiculous controversy soars to the top of people’s reading lists? I can identify with you if you’re one of the many suffering from what I’d like to call “aggregate aggravation syndrome.” It’s a tough disorder to crack, but with the right content and the right attitude to summarising and pitching your content to a global, news-hungry audience, this can all change easily enough.

Realistically, it’s just a case of making sure your article looks more interesting than all the others, and I’m sure we’d all love to think it was as simple as that. Unfortunately, it’s not. Your article remains a needle in a haystack, and it’s your job to make sure it reaches the eyes and ears of every single industry-related party and all the genre-disinterested browsers it can. It’s a tough gig but there are possibilities you may have overlooked, and of course, contraversial strategies you may be using that are, much to your shock, having the opposite effect.

Bigger than Elvis

So, say you’ve written a long, sprawling article on SEO, and it encompasses research, interviews, and a level of writing rarely seen since The Guardian was released that morning. You’re happy with the work, MS Word is letting it go without so much as a single squiggly red or green line, and you’re so into your own work that sharing it with the world seems like the only viable option. So where to go from here? Why, to an aggregate site, of course!

Let me explain this logic with a sobering fact. If you’re blogging, right now, on a WordPress.com account, there are over 300’000 new posts today alone. That’s somewhere in the region of thirty new books full of articles, and you know at least one of them is likely to be similar to yours over the course of the week. Three hundred thousand. Let that sink in for a moment. What chance does yours have, even with tags and that awesome graph you made in Excel? Not many. In fact, one of my highest-traffic articles of all time on my personal blog was a random rant about a LEGO version of a Harry Potter videogame. A year or more later, and it’s ranked thousands of hits, and it was never submitted.

The point I’m making is that the internet is a seriously fickle thing. Take a look at the front page of Digg and tell me what you see. Today, for example, there are a range of articles, but most of them focus on three key elements of global-appeal news: danger, drama and pictures. If we drift into the technology section, as this is where you’re far more likely to turn up (or browse – all news bar the exclusive is, to some degree, regurgitation), then we begin to see a different pattern: humour, heated debate, and leaked intel on new tech. The reason the pattens change is because as news and articles become more specialist, more niche, readers are absorbing writing whose mindset, tone and texture more closely reflect their target audience.

I’d just like to say a few words

Every time you write a new article, think of how you’d pitch it as a freelance piece. I’m serious. I know no one wants to voluntarily pitch freelance pieces ever again if they can avoid it, as it’s something of a humiliating, degrading, grinding process that kills the soul and maims the ego. But it’s also a brilliant acid test – if you could pitch your article to me in ten words, using as much or as little jargon as possible, I can tell you whether or not it’ll work. Let’s take a look at a few high-ranking examples of more opinion-based pieces.

Now, to start with, I found an article that I think is relevant to anyone who works on websites that use Adobe’s wonder-project, Flash. The title is “Is Flash Dead? The Future of Adobe’s Plug-In.” Now, this is a fairly controversial thing to say, but what’s clever is the question mark placed after the opening statement itself. This is key – if you’re debating something about social media, and you had the choice between “Twitter is Pointless” and “Is Twitter Pointless?”, choose the second option. The reason for this is you’re posing as a neutral party, even if this isn’t the case. The decision as to whether or not to invest ten minutes reading an article of considerable depth and debate, and then responding in the comments thread, is often one made in the opening few moments of reading an article’s title and subtitle. By phrasing the controversial statement as a question, it invites debate without inviting wrath or apathy and zero click-throughs from offended parties who see you as a prejudiced commentator.

The second example I’d like to give as a great example of effective aggregate-site-management is “Fortune 100 Companies Leveraging Social Media (Infographic)“. Now, this may seem a tad deep and a little too serious, but this is currently the top Digg article on a search for “social media”. Social media’s a relaxed sport, at best, and not something you can cover without being a little relaxed. This is also a graph site, which suits that industry perfectly – anyone using FaceBook and Twitter is going to want new-age ways of communicating information, and nothing does this better than indicating to them that all they’re in for is a slick diagram rather than 1000 words of prosaic musing on the subject.

It also has stick figures.

Seriously, though, it’s a great way of dragging people in. Entertain them. Tempt them. Make them curious or make them mad, and let them click through to shower you with praise or hatred. One of the most irritating sites in the universe, in my games journalism days, was also one of the most successful, because it kept encouraging heated, angry debate between Sony loyalists and Microsoft fan-soldiers. With social media, why not talk about the advantages of Twitter over Facebook, or why Bebo’s a lost, pointless art? Tempt them in with your tag-line the same way you would if you were designing a film poster, and watch your Diggs soar.

This week I thought I’d take the discussion in a direction inspired from one of last week’s comments. They implied that, in the world of SEO coverage, there’s not a lot of musing about SEO and social networking topics that take place in a UK-specific environment. I couldn’t agree more; we’ve heard the American success stories, we’re aware of the SEO consultant giants across the pond, but what can SEO do for companies in the UK, and what benefits does focusing on your home soil yield for you as a company?

This one’s for queen Liz

I’m going to start with an example you’ll find fairly obvious. Google are a site that love their geographically-focused top-level domains. If you’re in Russia, it’s .ru. If you’re in China, unfortunately, it’s probably a rather unstable .cn, but there in its heavily-censored form regardless. It would seem so obvious to stick with .co.uk if you’re a company or person based within the United Kingdom, but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t do it. I’m a victim of my own criticism – my blog is a .com URL, and I did this for traffic reasons, in my days as a domain and SEO neophyte, when traffic stats and Google Analytics were simply complex terms and strategies that were too far out of my online comfort zone.

Looking back, it would’ve been better to go .co.uk. When someone visits your site – Amazon, for example – the first thing they’re going to notice is the fact that you’re on a UK domain. By this point you’ve already established two important aspects of your website to the consumer, in mere moments. One, there’s no risk of you running a pricing system in USD, as you’re quite obviously based in the UK. Two, you’re also quite happy to appeal specifically to a native market. With UK shoppers increasingly shifting to online shopping, it’s becoming an invaluable time for UK-based companies to look at building their online presence and targeting it towards the home market.

This doesn’t mean you have to ignore your linkbuilding and advertising efforts on overseas websites – by all means, keep this up, and if you’re based multiple countries, consider using IP-based top-level domain redirects – everyone who visits has their country represented. This may involve a few small content changes, however. If you’re writing content aimed at a UK market, you need to consider what language they’ll be expecting to read from you as a fellow user of the Queen’s English. Make sure you’re using the correct grammatical forms, as a UK customer seeing the word “color” repeatedly is rapidly going to see you as an American entity – not what you’re aiming for as a UK company.

Take this blog as an example. It’s a blog about SEO, and it’s specific to the UK. Oddly, it’s on a .com top-level domain, which instantly calls into question how focused on the UK market it really is. The posts have petered out almost a year ago, but only one post on that front-page is focused on a UK SEO market.  The UK SEO market is not as big as people seem to think it is, and this is a problem. We’re the English-speaking part of Europe, and we should be dominating searches on topics that relate to things that come from within our humble borders, our green fields and our smartphones whilst we sit on red buses looking out at Big Ben. Awash with stereotypes, I’ll admit, but still true.

Patriotism and the dot-com mindset

A recent study by NMA indicated that a lot of UK-based online marketing companies are making less and less money, per annum, from specialising in UK projects. This just confirms the obvious – the UK is never going to have as big an online presence as the omnipotent .com of America, and we’re not doing it any favours by putting less money into geographic specialisation. But it doesn’t mean we can’t cater to our domestic customers. For those of you running companies that have no franchises, no offices and no market presence outside the United Kingdom, but own a .com address – what are you aiming to achieve? Good linkbuilding, text adverts and keyword use is going to have the same positive effect on a .co.uk as a .com – the only difference being you’re also going to retain customers who see you as a supplier of products and services specific to their nationality. I’m happier shopping on a UK site than one that’s ambiguous due to a .com, and it takes a long time to get past the fact that someone’s definitely based within our borders when they’re Americanising their URL.

We’re rapidly emerging into an age where people are trending UK-specific topics like #welovetheNHS, and our national treasures are  pulling in bigger follower-numbers than some of the biggest US celebrities. People across the country are delving into Facebook, and we’ve also got the BBC iPlayer. We’re proud, and online. But we need to take bigger advantage of our unique position in Europe. Let me hit you with a few sound words of advice:

• Consider switching to a UK top-level domain. The benefits of representing your company’s “home base” are present without the fear of losing traffic numbers.
• Start thinking about your content and your social media presence – is your company Twitter-rep using hashtags to get involved with UK discussions? Obviously, don’t follow Habitat’s example, but consider this nonetheless. And if you’re a big company and haven’t got a Twitter-rep, then now’s a wise time to get one.
• Are you aiming towards your UK customers? Link-building is a wise idea on global sites, but never forget that your domestic presence needs to be a key focus when thinking about keywords and site structure.

If you’re still thinking about this, then try googling “UK”. First page? BBC.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk, and atuk.co.uk. Three companies, at least two of whom are quintessentially part of the UK’s online mindset. The BBC is one of the most well known broadcasting corporations across Europe, if not the globe, and its focus on UK events is a given – it is the British Broadcasting Corporation, after all. But Amazon? An American site that was smart enough to start building separate sites for separate geographical demographics. It’s paid off in the long-run, and although most online shoppers are aware of Amazon’s presence in the UK, I’d wager not all of them know it’s an American company. Why? Correct spelling, UK marketing, and a top-level domain that doesn’t shut out anyone that isn’t part of Obama’s fifty states.

When venturing into the world of social media for the first time, with the intention of increasing your business growth as a result, it’s sometimes a daunting and slow process, with a lot of uncertainty and insecurity thrown in for extra discomfort. But a look into the effect of social media on small businesses is sometimes enough to turn even the most archaic workplace into a haven of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Let me hit you with a scary statistic. The world’s most widely read newspaper – and this will come as a shock to devotees of USA Today – is the Times of India, with over three million copies read every day. Add to that the rest of the top ten and their respective circulation figures and you’re looking at around 18.7 million papers being read on a daily basis in the top ten around the world. That’s almost twenty million pairs of eyes looking at advertising, news, gossip and other sources of information that would, surely, cancel out any effect of word-of-mouth product, service and business recommendations. Right?

Wrong. Twitter, as of January this year, has 75 million users and climbing. Say each of those users don’t post more than once a day, but they read the hundred or more tweets of other people. That’s a 300%-plus advantage over the papers we read, filled with adverts that are never taken is as readily as a friend’s opinion, be it positive or negative. In fact, Buzz Agent is commonly quoted as indicating that a word-of-mouth recommendation will do more for brand awareness than 200 TV adverts. When you consider the budget involved in producing and maintaining a run of 200 ads on television, and compare it to the non-price of a few good tweets supporting a recent product or service you offer, the choice is clear.

Jack and the Digital Beanstalk

But statistics and opinion are nothing without examples. A mere several months ago, a man called Ramon DeLeon was simply a manager of seven Domino’s outlets across Chicago. A regular manager of a small group of franchises, advertised globally but still never seeing any major changes in operation or surges in demand across the year. However, when an unsatisfied customer turned to Twitter to berate one of his outlets for delivering a cold, incorrectly-made pizza, he took to social media to apologise. The resulting video was then embedded almost 100,000 times – everywhere from blogs to major newspaper outlets.

Social media is all about the individual. Twittering as a business is a great way to interface with the public in a more relaxed forum than, say, a one-way TV advert or sponsoring a sports event. Even so, allow the public to put a name to the person behind the businesses’ Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn page. These people will have opinions, visit industry events, and become an ambassador for your business in the new era of the first online source of digitised interactivity to outrank the pornography industry. Of course, there are risks, and these usually come with careless employees who aren’t as well-read on social media as their peers, but chosen to be the businesses’ digital ambassador simply because they’re young and hip.

For small businesses, it’s an important first step. Twenty years ago, starting out as an entrepreneur with a dream was a risky venture, and usually ended in tears. For those of you involved in one of the many, many dot com collapses in the early millennium, it seemed like a risk to attempt to launch an online business. However, what most people missed out on until the rise of sites like the IKEA online store or your local florist was that we were looking at the problem from the wrong angle. It wasn’t necessary to build a business as an online-only entity when it was in its starting phases. The key was to develop the business as physical presence – an office, a shop-front – and then build its online presence alongside it to maximise potential customers.

I Came, I Saw, I Hash-Tagged

Men and women striking out on their own and winning big is a common fairytale, and one we’re reminded of all too well by Alan Sugar, Duncan Bannatyne and the like. But when we take the plumber uncle we see at a family gathering and the business cards of his we give out to locals who are suffering a broken pipe after a holiday, and transpose it onto Twitter, Facebook etc, it stops becoming a willfull word-of-mouth in person, and becomes a series of online adverts.

Anyone who insists the internet isn’t viral is lying through their teeth. Every single successful site on the web was put there by customers, and the same can be said for any physical business. Amazon, Twitter – these things are spoken about on forums, in bars, on iPhones, and in chatrooms. They spread faster than wildfire, and you’re never waiting for the newspaper the following day to see if your shop launch was a success – as of late, that make-or-break announcement will be coming to you directly through social media sources.

Of course, there’s a trend to be noticed, and one covered well by many social media industry sources: you’re relying heavily on the customer to do your work for you. Word-of-mouth is a fickle beast – either something goes viral and explodes across the web, or it fizzles out within a few re-tweets. The main thing you have to remember is that Twitter is not a replacement for a good reputation – keep satisfying customers, and more importantly let them know that your avenues of feedback have expanded to incorporate social media and the web. The ability to tell someone my pizza is not only cold, but has anchovies instead of chicken on it, and have them respond with a video watched by hundreds of thousands of people, is a pretty good indication that business cares about its customers. And when did you last hear of Domino’s Pizza going bust? Tweet away and remember: it’s not what you’re selling, but how you’re selling it.

Rumor has it the estate of the late author, Philip K Dick, has issued a cease and desist to the Google conglomeration over their usage of the term ‘Nexxus’ for their new Google Phone. According to PC World online, Dick’s daughter find there is an obvious connection between the usage of Nexxus and her father’s book ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’. Seeing as the operating system used on the phone is called ‘Android’, one could argue that it’s not a huge leap from one to the other. Being a huge fan of the movie Blade Runner, I often find myself looking for tips of the cap in current movies, products, and books, either to Dick’s book or to the movie Blade Runner. You can easily find nods within the movie Minority Report (based on the 1958 book of the same name by Dick) to the noir style employed by Scott in BR. It’s easy to see the similarities in the fun and colorful Besson movie The Fifth Element, as well. As for products,  the light saber umbrella pictured here was the only product I could find before Google gave me one of these. I find myself tiring ever so quickly of the Google empire, but I did stumble across something fun on mashable this afternoon as I was getting ready to write this post. That’s one Google product I’d be willing to pay money for.

Google’s much-publicised efforts to turn YouTube into a profitable entity may be nearing an end with the company announcing that 1080p full resolution HD videos are on their way.

Earlier this year Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang said that he believed Google was on course to lose $470.6 million this year mainly because of YouTube’s inability to generate revenue from advertising.

Surely YouTube’s irresistable global presence is enough to make Google an absurd amount of cash via advertisements? Apparently not.

According to the advertising experts, it is YouTube’s video quality that is holding it back in the advertising world.

At a recent press conference that hosted some of the leading minds in advertising, CEO of marketing giant GroupM Interaction, Rob Norman, put it bluntly when he described the technical quality of YouTube, and sites like it, as “complete crap”.

Media agency executive Robert Davis of OgilvyInteractive viewed it similarly, saying, “If somebody put that on TV looking that way, they’d be fired…Why is that acceptable online?”

Last week YouTube blogged the news that should change all that.

“We’re excited to say that support for watching 1080p HD videos in full resolution is on its way. Starting next week, YouTube’s HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today.

As resolution of consumer cameras increases, we want to make sure YouTube is the best home on the web to showcase your content. For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience.”

While YouTube’s announcement focus’s on the benefits for its users, there is no doubt they will be licking their lips at what the change will mean for them.

Advertisers have applauded YouTube’s latest move. After hearing the announcement, Mr Davis told Beet TV that “this is very good news for the industry”.

“As the visual experience becomes more satisfying, the greater the interactive potential becomes for brands ready to play in the content space. For years, we have been forced to build interactive experience around severely limited, technologically inferior video. Not any more.”

So YouTube has given advertisers what they’ve asked for. Now, can they turn this phenomenon into the cash cow it probably deserves to be?

Check out one of YouTube’s full HD videos below

Or click through and watch the Official Toy Story 3 Teaser Trailer in HD

So Rupert Murdoch has had enough of Google and intends to slam the door on the search engine’s access to his news websites.

Earlier this week in an interview with Sky News Australia Murdoch finally bellowed the words he has been mumbling for years. When asked by Sky’s political editor David Speers why News Corp has not stopped Google users from accessing his news pages, Mr Murdoch replied: “I think we will.”

Murdoch proclaimed that, “There’s not enough advertising in the world to make all the Web sites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web sites, but paying.”

With these few sentences Murdoch has sparked frenzied debate, as much about his mental state, as the future of online news content.

Has this great man finally lost it? Is ol’ Roop starting to show his age? Or, is this all part of some master plan and a continuation of his genius?

Personally, I’m a little confused on this one. Is there something that I’m missing here? I write this with the utmost respect Mr. Murdoch, but… I can’t see how this could possibly work.

We live in a world where people now expect to consume their daily news for zilch.

We walk into the train station, we get handed a paper, or two, containing all we could possibly need to know about the days news, sports, weather and gossip for free. If that’s not enough, we can then browse through thousands of reputable news sources for free, read through Twitter and Facebook for free, and when the day comes to an end we get handed a freshly printed evening paper for…yep, you guessed it, F.R.E.E!

What does he expect us to do?

Murdoch argues that people will get what they pay for with his websites. He has promised premium reporting for those who choose to subscribe.

“Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting.”

The way I see it is, sure, people do value quality journalism. But they value free a lot more and, to be honest, the reporting standard isn’t half-bad.

According to reports on Techradar, these pay-walls could be erected as soon as April, 2010.

So, will it be premium or freemium?