To really promote your products and services online, you’ll need to make the most of a few various professional services that are available to help build your online presence.

5 of these services are:

1. Conversion Optimisation – ensuring your website is best placed to convert visitors to customers
2. Electronic Direct Mail Marketing (EDM) – marketing your business through regularly emailing a database
3. Search Engine Optimisation – optimising your website to best perform in search results
4. Social Media – promoting your business and providing customer service through Social Media networks
5. Internet Advertising – running paid advertising through various online channels

You can read more about these services in our Website Resource: Online Services to Market Your Business.

There’s a good reason for this – social media isn’t just for private users. This online form of communication and networking is becoming a huge player when it comes to marketing any business to a growing audience.

Should your business be involved in social media?

I remember when I first came across a website for Kelloggs and I remember thinking “Why on earth would anyone want to visit a website for a breakfast cereal? But today, it’s almost expected that any business will have a website.

With more and more young New Zealanders (ok maybe not as young as this photo would suggest!) using cellphones and tablets on a daily basis, and with some schools even demanding that their pupils be equipped with iPads as standard, our population is becoming more and more connected and there’s a reasonable chance that one day almost every business will have some form of social media account.

With that in mind, without any form of social media presence for your business, you could be missing out on a huge marketing opportunity.

To get started, you don’t have to be an Internet marketing expert and there are even methods by which you barely even have to devote any time to the cause. Check out our Website Resource on Social Media for Business to learn about four different methods that can help you get started in social media.

Flickr image credit: cc511

What is a 404?

Lets start with the Wikipedia definition;

The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. A 404 error should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all. A 404 error indicates that the requested resource may be available again in the future. – sourced from Wikipedia here.

In simple English, if you try to go to a web page and the website can’t find that particular page then it responds with an error saying “that page can’t be found” which is called a 404 error.

Great examples of 404′s

It has almost become a right of passage for a new Internet start-up to have a bit of fun with its 404 page. It’s a nice way to express that the company isn’t all about just making money, they’re there to enjoy themselves while they’re doing it.

Here are some examples of funny 404 pages that can be found around with the best saved to last:

Blippy 404

Digg 404

Techcrunch 404

Twitter Fail Whale

TradeMe 404

Nosh 404

The last one, is the Nosh.me 404. You can view the Nosh.me 404 here. It’s worth watching the video as a great example of what you can do with a 404 page as well as quite likely a real measure of how to build a compelling viral media campaign about your brand!

If you know of any other great 404 error pages, share them in the comments…

If you haven’t heard about IDNs and are interested in the history, NZS.com has covered the development of them over the last few years starting with initial consultation via working group in 2007, the resulting decisions of that working group to hold a sunrise registration period and then the final implementation by the New Zealand DNC of a first-come, first-served publicly available IDN registration on Wednesday 26 July 2010.

With the public registration of IDN’s being available for almost a year now, it seems like a good point to assess the usage of them across the wider NZ Internet.

The most recent domain registration data is from the June 2011 DNC newsletter showing that 440,576 .nz domains were active as at the end of May 2011.

The equivalent newsletter in 2010 shows the end of May 2010 with 399,151 active domains, a total of 41,425 additions over the calendar year. In comparison the calendar year prior to 1 April 2009 – 31 May 2010 shows an increase of 40,592.

So, as a whole the active domains show only a 2% growth in registrations over the calendar year that IDNs have been publicly available.

Active domains that are registered are however not even half of the story. The next things to consider are what % of the registered domains are IDN’s and further to that, what % of the domains are actively used as websites on the New Zealand Internet.

These numbers are significantly harder to find without direct access to the DNC records.

NZS.com completes regular spidering of the New Zealand Internet (well beyond just the .nz sphere) and currently profiles over 160,000 domains that are included in this set as active websites on the New Zealand Internet. It’s another entire blog post and discuss on the details of what we consider is a website on the New Zealand Internet, suffice to say that we’ve been working on the criteria in an iterative way for the last few years.

With this in place, NZS.com is in a reasonably unique position to ascertain how many active websites are using IDN’s on the NZ Internet particularly if we can come to a final figure on how many active domains there are that are IDNs and can calculate our % of active websites against that number.

Being in the same month as Māori language week, it’s of specific interest to also understand how many active websites are using the Māori macrons in the domain, that is one of ā, ē, ī, ō, or ū.

So, at the end of part one in this, we have the basic premise that domain registrations have not increased significantly however we still need to assess if real websites are using these characters or not…

….

You can also find useful tips on the the basics like how to type a macron on your own system on this blog as well.

To give you an introduction to Google+ and its similarities and differences to other existing social networks, we’ve put together a screencast video to give you a brief tour of the service. The transcript can be read below the video.

Note: To receive informative emails about these topics and more, you can sign up to the NZS.com Newsletter here.

Transcript:

Hi my name’s Mark from NZS.com. Just quickly, NZS.com is a directory for New Zealand websites and provides a great deal of website resource and community tools for New Zealand business owners looking to promote themselves online.

I’m just going to fly you through a quick intro to Google+, just because I know there’s a lot of people out there without an invite or they have an invite but can’t get in just yet so I thought it’d be kinda cool to tease you guys with an example of what you can do with Google+.

I’m just going to talk about Circles and Sparks basically. Hangouts is a really cool video-group-chat-thing for up to 10 people but deserves a video of its own.

So the old Google Profile was a semi-smart profile about you but wasn’t really used by a lot of people, it wasn’t really mainstream, so Google+ have incorporated that into Google+ and has connected it with +1, the sharing button, to make it all really useful. The old Google Profile URL now redirects to the Google+ profile page.

Very similar to Facebook in the setup, you have a left column with your Facebook photo and you have what Google call the ‘stream’, similar to the Facebook wall but quite functional in the way it can be used.

Quite slick graphics and animation – you can flick through photos in your profile easily, you can imagine some creative types doing a few smart things with that.

You have your profile area then your photo albums. All very smart, nice graphically and they don’t just display as squares but fit themselves into the page really nicely.

Circles

Google Circles is where a lot of the functionality is at. It’s basically an insight into the fact that Google have looked at existing networks – looked at what works well and what doesn’t work so well – and I think what they found is that the transition between personal Facebook to professional Facebook and public Facebook was quite cloudy, it could sort of be done but it was difficult to get to, no one was really doing it, it was all kind of tricky. People were posting things they wouldn’t want others to see but not really knowing how to change the privacy settings to change that.

Circles makes that really easy. You can see by the way they’ve set up these circles with the notes next to them that they’ve “got it” – they understand why this is really useful. So you can see by the notes next to:

• Friends – Your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private details with.
• Family – Your close and extended family with as many or as few in-laws as you like.
• Acquaintances – A good place to stick people you’ve met but aren’t particularly close to.

It’s really easy to drag people into those circles. You just select a bunch of people and drop them together. You can see it’s all very simple and nice and graphical.

There are three main options for finding people to add to those circles:

• Find and Invite – “Our best guess of people you might want to add to a circle. Get more suggestions by importing contacts from your email account” – Google already have access to your Gmail account so you can get to your Google contacts in this list. You can also import your Hotmail contacts and your Yahoo! contacts. At this stage you can’t import your Facebook contacts; Facebook wouldn’t be too happy about that, but I’m sure people will find their own way around this.
• People who’ve added you –  So people who have already added you to their circle. You may or may not know them. They may have seen you around; seen something you’ve said publicly and wanted to keep up with you. They’ve tried to connect with you and are interested in what you’ve got to say so maybe you’ll be interested in what they have to say and want to add them to one of your own circles.
• People in your circles – This is here so that you can add people to multiple circles if you wanted to. It’s good that Google are quite clear in that they say “Other users are notified when you add them but never told which circle”, they’re never told the name of the circle because you can obviously create your own with your own name. For example, I’m in the web industry so could have a “Web Professionals” circle that I can add people to but they would never know the name of the circle they’re being added to.

The Home Page

Circles come in handy here (on your home page). You’ve got your stream here. By default it shows all of the people in your circles combined. Hopefully down the track Google allow you to set a default circle to appear in your stream when you first visit the page.

To do that at the moment you’d jump into, for example, here in my “Social Media Contacts” circle- which is people that I already know through the likes of Twitter and Facebook – I can put those into a particular stream here so I only see updates from those people.

Likewise, when I post my own updates you can see that it selects that particular circle so when I make the status update, only that circle sees it. You can see instantly that’s going to be pretty cool for separating your personal updates from your professional updates and updates you want to be more public.

You can add photos, videos, links and location to your update. Location comes in really handy for the iPhone and Android apps where it takes a bit of the Foursquare flame (another social network and location ‘check-in’ service) in that you can check-in to places. You can add comments in the same sense that you could leave tips in Foursquare, all pretty cool.

In fact, the streams themselves all shows connections (similarities) with Twitter lists where you’d create a list of people that Tweet about one particular thing or are in a particular industry- you may create a list of all of the people that you know on Twitter that are photographers so you see only updates from those photographers.

Circles work in a similar way but you can also create an update that only displays for that particular list of people, which you can’t do in Twitter.

Sparks

Sparks is similar to the Facebook interests that you would add to your profile. They weren’t just words on a screen, they linked to a page that had information on that interest.

Sparks works like a search stream that you add to a shortcut in your menu (profile) so you can quickly get to that stream easily. Google have some default interests which are just hints and ideas but you can put anything you want.

You bring up a search stream (e.g. ‘social media’) and it shows results for content online that matches that search term. You can scan through, check stuff out, share things, and then you can save it to your interests and then click down here (on the interest) and it brings that stream back up again.

Menu Bar and Notifications

One of the cool things about notifications is that you have this menu bar at the top that a lot of people noticed became black a few weeks ago whether you’re on Gmail or Google.co.nz. Google+ adds this share box here which allows you to share links, post a new update and do what you like without leaving the page that you’re on.

Similar to the notifications, there’s nothing new here, you’ve got your notifications in a list but what’s quite cool is that you can jump through these and play around with all you like – editing circles, making comments – you can access that same menu from your gmail. You can be reading your emails and get a notification that’s quite discreet and choose to respond to that how you like, all without leaving your email. That works the same for Google Documents, Calendar and everything else.

That’s enough of an intro for now. That’s Google+ and I’m Mark from NZS.com. Thanks.

Further NZS.com Resources Related to Social Media:

• Find out how to add social sharing buttons to your website or blog with our Social Buttons guide.
• Learn about targeted advertising on social networks.
• New to Twitter? Check out our guide on How to Twitter.
• Need help with your social media campaign? Learn more about Social Media Management.

Do you have any questions about social media or any other topics? Post a question and start a discussion with the NZS.com community on NZS.com Answers.

Google+ is a social network that combines a number of Google services and makes them accessible from your Google Profile in an attempt to take on other social network giants, namely Facebook.

While the product is in testing, invites have been released to a number of Internet users throughout the world. These users have the ability to send further invites to others. In this way, there are now thousands of users on Google+. Mark Zuckerberg’s profile states that almost 45,000 users have connected with his account.

However, Google have set a capacity limit which means even those with an invite will still have to wait.

At times, Google appears to be opening up this limit in certain regions – so suddenly those in Australasia may be able to use their invite and create a full account, while those in the UK have to wait.

According to Google

The Engineering Director for Google+, a man by the name of Dave Besbris, has posted this message on his own account to explain the situation further:

Hey Google+ folks!

As I bet you’ve noticed, we are facing pretty incredible demand for Google+ invites.

As Engineering Director of Google+, I wanted to take a moment to explain why we’re growing the system slowly. First, we want to make sure our infrastructure scales so the service remains fast and reliable. Second, we want to ensure that bugs are fixed while there are still a relatively few people in the field trial.

Things are going well with the systems right now so we feel comfortable enough to open up invites for a brief period. Our goal is to double the user base in the field trial. (Sorry, we’re not giving details about how many folks are in the field trial yet).

So, in a few minutes, we’ll open up invites again.

We continue to throttle invites, so please don’t mass invite folks as it won’t work. If you invite a handful of your most important friends and family you’re much more likely to get these folks into our system.

Thanks again for providing so much wonderful feedback!

So if you have an invite and you still get the ‘over capactiy’ message then don’t give up just yet. Keep trying back and you may find that you can log in.

For those without an invite, it appears there’s another way to receive one. Users who are already in can create a status update that they can share specifically with your email address, even if you’re not currently an account holder. This will send a notification to you by email with a link to click to gain access. Again, you’ll still have to wait for the service to be opened up again but at least you’ll be holding a pass.

See you in there!

Facebook are currently extending the prominence of their chat service even more by introducing a new ‘messages sidebar’ that appears along the right side of your window with on Facebook.

At this stage, Facebook have released a promotional video launching Facebook Video Calling, although the video reveals little about how the service works.

This ‘awesome announcement’ (in the words of Mark Zuckerberg) is slightly dampened as it follows the recent Beta launch of Google+. Google+ is a social network created by Google and boasts video group calling for up to 10 people in ‘Google Hangouts’. You can either enter a public hangout and wait for people to turn up, or create a hangout for a specific ‘circle’ of accounts that you have previously included in the circle.

Google’s video shows a bit more of how the service works.

To this extent, when it comes to video calling, it’s fair to say Google+ is a step ahead of both Skype and Facebook simply because of the sheer number of people that can be included on the video group call, as well as the clever integration with Google Circles.

However, Facebook has the benefit of being a well established social network with more than 750 million active users, while Google is still in an invite-only beta testing stage. So it could be said that Facebook has a head start while Google cements the transition from ‘search’ to ‘search and social’.

Initial thoughts from the NZS.com community suggest that Facebook could remain strong as a more personal social networking tool, while Google+ will act as a more professional and public form of social networking, perhaps hitting the mark that LinkedIn have been aiming for all this time?

What do you think? Will you be spending your time more on Google+ than Facebook over the next year? Or is Facebook enough of a social network for you?

P.S. Kudos for Facebook’s much nicer version of an embedded video than YouTube! Doesn’t it look much smarter without those controls at the bottom?

Flickr image credit: mofetos

You can click on the image for a larger version.

With Internet use growing day-by-day, I wonder how long it will be before the figures displayed here are wildly inaccurate?

The key trends that we’re seeing in this month’s NZ browser statistics:

• Internet Explorer as a whole has had a 1% increase which is the exact opposite of last month
• Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari all had small decreases contributing to IE’s increase
• Safari has now dropped just below 10% in total usage on NZS.com

IE 9 has continued to take some decent chunks out of IE 8 this month with later down just over 5% this month. Internet Explorer 9 has now over taken IE 6 into third spot, while Internet Explorer 7 dropped in popularity by just over 0.5%. Internet Explorer 6 continues to hang around with only a small decrease this month. The Internet Explorer stats were IE9 10%, IE8 68%, IE7 15%, IE6 6%.

This data is taken from Google Analytics on NZS.com over the month of May 2011.

The key trends that we’re seeing in this month’s NZ browser statistics:

• Internet Explorer as a whole has had a 1% decrease in usage on NZS.com
• Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari have had small gains contributing to IE’s decrease

Internet Explorer 9 has now arrived on the scene and although it has a relatively small usage on NZS.com it has taken some decent chunks out of IE 8 and Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 8 has had a 2% decrease from the previous month where as IE 7 had a 1% drop.

The kicker with IE 9 uptake though will be dependent on the uptake of Windows 7 as Internet Explorer 9 relies on the user running the latest Microsoft OS. The Internet Explorer stats were IE9 4%, IE8 73%, IE7 16%, IE6 6.4%.

This data is taken from Google Analytics on NZS.com over the month of April 2011.