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Category: SOCIAL MEDIA & IT

Social media is a river of social purpose undermining old companies

The challenge of social media

I’ve recently been given two independent but related challenges.

Joe Tooman of BizLink asks:  Which of the FTSE100 companies will use social media in the next 3 years and what for?

Tom Morris, warrior geek philosopher set this formal philosophical test:  Which business in the world will not benefit from social media?

My Answers

I painstakingly looked up each of the FTSE100 companies and sorted them into piles. I found myself thinking about the purpose of the company, rather than its raw materials, processes or customers, and that led me to what has been my chief insight.

Competition between businesses will not matter very much. Once social media kicks in within a sector, the sector will change so much that we will effectively have a new segment.  Now the Boeing 787 has flown, who will seriously ever try to build a plane from start to finish (yeah, I know, AirBus).

Old strategic models matter less than our social purpose.  What is it that we want to do?  And what are the different ways of achieving our purpose.  Hence the title:

Social media is a river of social purpose undermining the foundations of old companies.

As for Tom’s question, I think it is excellent.  When I first began thinking about business models and social media, I thought there might be some businesses, like mining and the army, which would be scarcely affected by social media, but his question sharpened my appreciation.

Social media is like the telephone and the penny post. It is such a radical change in communication that it affects everyone and everything.   The only question will be how and when.

A new question

So that is the question.  How and when will social media affect any particular business?

Let the party begin!

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Social Media needs to work harder to show people its potential

Dear 2010 – phishing, scams and poor service from corporates

My first task of the New Year was to block any possible damage from a phishing exercise.  I received an email from “Virgin Media” saying my direct debit had bounced and that I should login to their ebilling to sort it out. I did.  But didn’t reset my details.  I went first to my bank site to check what was happening then looked at the email more closely.  I followed up an odd looking html address marking the place of a blocked picture and discovered this was a scam.  The owner of the website address had posted the details on 30 December 2009.  I was disappointed that Virgin hadn’t warned its customers and set about changing my passwords.  What a mission. I’ve still to drive to the next town to change the passwords at my global bank, locally.   You know who I am talking about.  The local branch is good but their global IT sucks.  What would happen if I was 1000 miles away from the local branch as in my last billet?

Social Media: at least we acknowledge #So.ME

With this dismal start to 2010, I calmed down with a cup of coffee and read blog posts with a jaded eye.  Straw men.  Blither and blather. Eventually, I got my head in order and replied to a post on Made in Many.  I think my reply will be incomprehensible to them but it may make perfect sense to people from turbulent places.

  • Social Media is a revolution.
  • It perhaps was not a deliberate revolution but those who wanted social change are chortling.
  • The old guard and the old guard who have got left behind are fretting.
  • The old guard who are fretting are wishing away the changes to communication and pecking orders.

So far, so ordinary or so “dittohead” to use Social Media slang.  This is where experience of living in a place that changed rapidly and often helps.

Social Media and Wars of Liberation

There are plenty of times in life when change is discontinuous.  We may have seen the change coming. We may not.  But discontinuous change is by definition abrupt and more importantly changes who are the winners and losers in life.

We are quite happy with change when we are winning.  We are obviously distressed when we are losing.

What do we do with people who are distressed by change?

First, let me tell you what does happen.

  • They “get it” and join in
  • They resent it and try to use their residual status to negotiate the change away (they try to blackmail us).
  • They resent it and “go underground”
  • They exit or withdraw
  • They are ejected.

We notice the second group and we are eventually bitten by third.  The fourth and fifth might cost us through their loss.

Let’s deal with the second group, as they were the subject of the Made by Many post.

If this had been a War of Liberation, we would have deliberately set out to change the pecking order. We would have had little sympathy for the losers but might have pragmatically included them in a policy of reconciliation ~ not because we loved them, you understand but to mitigate the cost of groups 2 to 5.

The parallels between social media and Wars of Liberation

Social Media was not a deliberate War of Liberation but it has similar revolutionary effects.  The old guard is being displaced. They could join in but for the most part they refuse.  Should we just ignore them?  Should we chide them for their surliness?

I don’t think so.

What should we do about people with high status who are trying to “wish away” change?

I think there is no going back. Social media has introduced a more democratic world.  Not a perfectly democratic world but a more democratic world.

I won’t be blackmailed by the old guard who refuse to use social media and use their old positions to try to block change.

But I will lay out a clear road map and tell them

  • How to take part
  • How they will benefit
  • Make them feel welcome

The issue is inclusion

I won’t be blackmailed. But I will put myself out to welcome them ~ because that is the issue. They have to come to terms with the new pecking order.  That is unavoidable.  And they will do that faster when they feel welcomed and accepted.

But there will, sadly, be those who persist in undermining or feel they have to “leave”.  We can only regard each of those as our failure to show them possibilities.  We can only regard each as a failure to show them possibilities.

Social change is never pretty.  And those who lead it should budget for side-effects.  They don’t have to put up with blackmail. They do have to budget for showing people the way (or spending money on defense).

You see, this is a common story. It’s happening as we speak in other arena too.

Social media is a peaceful revolution. But it is a revolution.  We have choices.  Go with history. Or don’t.  Lead others. Or don’t.  When we confront history we get hurt.  When don’t help confused people understand, we get hurt.

Social Media needs to do the work of bringing people into the fold

We need to get organized.  We cannot leave people behind.  Yes, it is their choice how they use social media but have we truly shown them how and assured them of their welcome.  Not their old status but the freedom to interact on the same terms as everyone else.

It is too expensive to leave people behind. We have to try again. And again. And when we are tired. Let someone else try. Maybe that is all that is needed to let the light burn in their eyes.

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Get the internet on your side in the career of your life

Dynamic not static portfolios

For some time now, I’ve been interested in creating online portfolios for students. Students could start a blog, they could start a chat room. They could do any number of things.

In the long run though, they don’t just want a portfolio of who they are. Life isn’t only about ‘stock’, it is about ‘flow’.

We want students who are at ease with the interconnected world and who can get things done when and where they need to get this done. Our portfolios need to be organized dynamically, around ‘doing’ and ‘action’.

Jane McGonigle lists the social characteristics of ‘new’ work.  Adnan Ali has a list of 6 technical skills which we should all be able to do in a rudimentary way.

6 technical skills for getting the internet on your side in the career of your life

I think it would be reasonable for students to have a course where they do a project on each of these 6 skills. Moreover, they should think up experiments to ‘break’ their work ~ that is, to test its limits. In that way, they learn to think analytically rather than subjectively about what they are doing and move from being amateurs to professionals.

1. Market Identification

Understand the structure of the internet as it lies today.

Which keywords do people use to label their work and how do the keywords vary from one group to another?

2. Conversion Model Development

Understand the actions that are taken on the internet.

What action do they want people to take on their page? How is that action depicted? How is it counted? How is it aggregated to have value to the business?

How are various actions connected onwards, for example, through petitions, paypal, etc?

What proportion of visitors are likely to take these actions?

3.  Landing Pages

Understand the ease with which people use the internet

What do visitors see when they arrive and does the page fulfil their needs? What are the different kinds of landing pages (FAQ, blog, profile, etc.) and what solution it is providing? How usable is the page and how does usability affect conversion?

4.  Traffic generation

Understand how people find pages on the internet

How do people find a website through Google? How does a page rise to the top of search? How do advertisements draw traffic? How can we compete for advertising space that draws the best traffic (for us) and how much does it cost?

SEO, Pay per Click, Pay per Acquisition are the technical skills here.

5.  Conversation Management

Understand the 2 way web and our preference for interaction on sites where we control part of the conversation

How can we stimulate conversation between 2 or more people? Why does bringing them together assist them (and us)? What is our role? Should we host the conversation or take part in a hosted conversation? What makes a good conversation?

6.  Analytics Tracking

Understand the mechanics of tracking web traffic and simple experimentation

Track every part of the value chain and run simple experiments to test proposed changes using Google Analytics and other automated tracking mechanism.

Career Psychology and the Internet

One of the principles of career psychology is to train at the ‘level’ that you intend to work.

We want students to manage their entire career, not small parts of it. From the outset then, students should set up a portfolio and ask themselves each week and each month, what did I achieve? How did this portfolio help me achieve and how have I displayed my achievement?

Then each month, they should take one of the six parts and do a focused project to learn more skills. Let’s imagine they have done this 7 times from the beginning of their GSCE curriculum (2 rounds), through university preparation (2 rounds) and through their bachelor’s degree (3 rounds). It is very likely that they will be highly accomplished and goal oriented by the end.

For those of us late to the party, well we can just begin! In a year, we should be as good as a 16 year old! We’ll get there!!

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Personas: A hack used by professionals to imagine people they don’t know well

Shooting in the dark ~ I don’t know these people!

I want you to imagine any situation in which you are preparing to work with someone who you don’t know well.

  • You are going to hire someone and you must write an advert
  • You are going for a job interview
  • You are taking a new class
  • You are going to a party and your host is relying on you to get the party going
  • You are scouting for new business and you are all but cold calling

Personas

In any of the situations, it really helps to write a persona.

We write down a little story of where the person has come from and where they are going to.  How many children do they have?  Who is their partner? What is their immediate concern?  What are the values that have guided their choice in the past?

Sometimes the persona just won’t flow

Once we start writing, sometimes we realize that our expectations don’t hang together.  We can’t make the story “come together.”

That  is the real core of our sense that we don’t ‘know’ people.  We must be able to imagine a coherent story to be comfortable.

Use a character builder

When I get stuck, I find a “character builder” online, fill out the questionnaires, and resolve in my mind all the little details I expect about the person.

The version that I use suggests a Myers-Briggs profile.   It is very good for settling on one persona.

Once I have a coherent picture of someone, then I can imagine what I am going to love about them, and also what I am not going to like.

Here is the key to resolving my ‘stuckness.’  What will I not like about the person? Where must my approach change to be reasonable?

Once I’ve got past this point, I can complete the scenario and write a few more, including scenarios of the person in the context of home, play and work.  Who else will be there and what are their personas?

Useful hack

I hope that’s useful: Use a character builder to help your write personas to understand people you don’t know well

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3 time management systems for grown ups!

Slowness breeds to do lists!

I hate it when I have a slow day.  Sitting around in dull meetings, getting dehydrated and eating at the wrong times, I fill the the time by making to do lists.

When I get back to my office, I see, laid out in front of me, all the things I could and should be doing.  And can’t settle to any.

When I was a youngster, I loved a to-do list labelled with A’s B’s and C’s.  I liked making calls and crossing things off.  I hate it now.  I like dealing with larger chunks of work and  I like working towards a goal that has some meaning.  “Getting things done” no longer does it for me.

My rationale now is to figure out one or two things that are very important and just do those.  As long as something important is being done, and getting finished and getting shipped, a list adds no further value.

But in times when I have a long list, these are the methods that I have found useful.

#1 Yellow stickies

I use an ordinary A5 diary.  For every little task that I have to do, I add a yellow stickie, upside down. The stickies go down the page in columns, overlapping each other. That’s why it is important they are upside down.  The top line gives the title of the task and the details are covered by the next sticky though visible by lifting up the sticky below.

As I complete a task, I rip off  the sticky with glee, and put it on the corner of my desk.  At the end of the day, I have a pile of completed stickies and hopefully a clear diary. If not, I can move the stickies to another page.

And when I need to record my actions, I record what I have done on the page itself.

#2 Access data base

Access databases are pretty handy for projects which have many detailed steps, each of which must be completed precisely and in a particular order.  Anything which needs a PERT analysis is suitable for a database.

Each sub project is put in a table with tasks, expected dates, actual dates and costs.  The report function can be used to list all the tasks that need to be done in the next day, week or month and of course to check that everything has been done.

#3 Google Wiki

I’ve recently discovered Google’s Project Wiki, on Google Sites.  It is not really a wiki – linkages from page-to-page are limited.  It’s more like an electronic filoax!  It is  a full project template where you can add to do lists, time sheets, blogs, documents and pretty much anything else except perhaps a GANTT shart and a PERT analysis.

That’s what I am using now.  I’ll store away every zany idea in my Google Wiki and add a column for priorities.  My personal kanban will become the top items that I’ve resolved to start and finish. The choice is start and finish, or start and dump.  What’s not allowed is more than two or three open tasks.

What’s more, I can add dates that I completed work so I can review my progress at the end of each month.

The front page in the wiki is also useful because it prompts you to put in a strategic plan, which after all you can do for the next quarter!

My only reservation is all the information that I am giving to Google.

Here are you then – three time management systems for grown-ups!

1.  Yellow stickies for bitty projects and a physical reward for knocking off tasks

2. Data bases for precise projects where tasks must be done in order and on time.

3.  Google Project Wiki for messy jobs where it’s not really possible to tell priorities ahead of time but it important to work on on chunk at a time, finish and ship!

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Social media is not putting anyone out of work, not even journalists

Computers have never put anyone out of work!

I got my first job using a computer before I could use one!  I had been given a massive job calculating a correlation matrix for 500 or so people on 35 variables and I had 6 weeks to do it.

I didn’t fancy spending my summer doing clerical work, so I took a week’s course in programming, barely understood a word, talked my way into the University’s computer centre, found a programme, and finished the job in 3 weeks instead of the 6 weeks allotted. Two of those weeks were spent looking for a comma, though I didn’t know that then.

The last three weeks of my 6 week job were spent teaching at the Institute of Personnel Management, administering psychological tests to select junior bankers, and writing up the manual for a set of tests.

Herein, I learned three important lessons about IT

#1 Computers really can cut out the drudgery of office work.  Think how nice it is to cut cutting out 90% of the time you spend on paperwork.

#2 When you don’t know what to do, ask. Often the problem is something trivial that is obvious to someone who has done a similar job before

#3 Computers have never put any one out of work.

But will social media or web2.0 put people out of work?

The troubles of newspapers in today’s world has led me to wonder if it is still true that computers have never put anyone out of work. We hear of newspapers shutting because of competition from bloggers and Twitter.

Is it possible that web 2.0 will put people out of work where web 1.0 didn’t?

After some thinking and scouting around, my best guess is no. Work will change and some newspaper owners may not achieve ‘rents’ they achieved in the past. But the work is still there.

Big institutions need to manage an institutional voice

Today I looked at the NZ Labour Party blog and really, they could do with some professional journalists on their staff.

What does it mean to be authentic when you represent an institution

I know we all want an authentic voice on web2.0. I love it that Paulo Coelho is on Twitter and has real interviews every night.

A NZ Labour Party blog though, represents an institution. There is nothing wrong with MP’s dictating their blog post, or drafting it, and sending it to an editorial team who sub it and check it for coherence (dotting the i’s and making sure it toes the party line).

That’s what Obama does with his speech writers. He is in control and they work on replicating his voice.

In a political party, the MP’s would initiate content and the sub’s would tidy it up using the MP’s voice.

Because the Labour Party is a team, an editorial team would also check whether posts support or contradict each other, extract emerging teams and even hold up a mirror to MP’s about what they are saying and how it might be perceived by their audience.

There is nothing wrong with a service like this running in the background. It is no different from teaching people to write and edit, or, taking a degree in politics and history.

After all political voices aren’t ‘born’. They don’t come ready-made. They are cultured.  And we join political parties to work together on something we find important.

Social media creates better work for us all

So no, I don’t think social media puts people out of work. Social media allows us to work together and accomplish more than we did before.

Social media will not put journalists out of work. It will generate more opportunity for them.

And it may generate better work, in new career tracks, with more opportunity to influence the world.  Lucky them to lose old ways and find new.

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We set goals to give ourselves control. My blogging story shows how.

2 months to go in 2009!  Are you on target to meet your goals?

One of my goals in 2009 was to increase my blog traffic.  In January, I reviewed my blog and what I had read about good blogging and bad.

As ever when we have a big push, we often achieve what we want, and learn that quite different rules apply than ones we had previously thought. This is my story of how my blogging goals shifted as I coped with the ebb and flow of 2009.

The received wisdom in blogging amount to

  • Stay at the top of people’s feed readers
    • Have an RSS feed so people can subscribe
    • Post often
  • Be found in search
    • Choose keywords for which you want to be known
    • Include them in the title and in the body of the post
  • Great content
    • Write scanable short posts
    • Show the benefits of post to the audience
  • Comment on other people’s blogs
    • Your interest in their work is your best advert
    • Your comment provides a permanent link back to your blog which humans follow and which Google counts for page rank

These are the blogging rules I would add

  • Comments
    • Cut out the elaborate logins with Disqus etc.  People will leave comments if you let them do it quickly
    • Have an RSS for comments as well the post and have it next to the submit button
  • Take search seriously
    • Alexa rankings will tell you what percentage of your traffic is from search
    • Mine is low – less than 10%.  Obviously I could improve that.
  • Great content
    • Write for yourself.  The pros do write great magazine pieces.  Write normally and develop your own style.
    • Alexa rankings also tell you the bounce rates, the number of pages each visitor reads and the time spent on site.  I have a very low bounce rate (below 25%), high number of pages (above 5) and high time on site (more than 5 minutes).
    • Google Analytics also gives these numbers.  I use WordPress.com which doesn’t allow a link to Google Analytics
  • Get recommendations
    • Your real goal on the internet is to get people to recommend you.
    • Visiting your site is a recommendation.
    • Commenting on your site is a recommendation.
    • Commenting on other people’s sites is a recommendation (even though it is made by you!)
    • Also Stumble your post and use tags from their basic list of categories.  You will get 50-100 hits from your own recommendation.  Among those visitors some will give a thumbs up.  Your traffic and your chances of another thumbs up goes up exponentially with each thumbs up.

My Results for 2009

I started well in 2009 driving up my traffic upwards each month to 5 000 hits a month which was my modest goal.  Then I got busy on other things and my blog suffered.  In September, I got back to blogging and began to blog more than once a day to catch up.  I also started to use Stumbleupon better.

I probably won’t make 60 000 for the year, but better still, I’ve discovered the art of getting 10K a month.  Such is the result of making a big effort. We learn.

And our goals change accordingly.  Ultimately we set goals to give ourselves control.

In what areas of your life are you in more control than you were last year?

 

 

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Getting wise to printing costs: 5 steps for comparing printer costs

Computing and printing costs in an office

In my early days as a young academic and energetic and ambitious psychologist, I had many spirited discussions with the Director of our Computing Center.  A full Professor of Chemistry, he favored computing power.  Like many psychologists, I wanted better peripherals.

When we use computers in business, the cost of

  • inputting data and
  • printing reports

is far more expensive than an extra ten minutes or so every week on number-crunching.

Our costs come from

  • The peripherals for putting in data
  • The time to tap in data
  • The time to check the data
  • The time to print reports
  • The costs of peripherals otherwise known as printers
  • The costs of consumables

And for that matter –

  • The cost of checking out the best deals
  • Designing an efficient system and training people to use it.

A good inexpensive black-and-white office printer

This week someone asked me to recommend a printer and I’ve looked around for the best printers available right now.

Brother are still making their ‘disposable’ printers that are well worth looking at.

The cost structure of a printer goes like this:

#1 Do we need color printing and any additional facilities like copying?  If not, look for a MONO LASER printer.

#2  Search for the best deals locally and on Amazon

  • The two will give you a good comparison of cost prices and Amazon has good reviews.
  • Amazon will help you consider what extras you should buy.
  • You can also compare the cost and time of driving to your neighborhood big box store with buying from Amazon.

#3 Now think how much printing you do

You have three things to think about: how fast you must print and how often you print and how much you print each year.

  • I’ve found 15 to 20 pages per minute (ppm) quite fast enough, but some printers promise 30 ppm and are horribly slow.  So keep an eye out for complaints on the reviews.
  • Every printer has a limit to what you can print per month without overworking it.  200 to 500 pages is typical for an entry level machine.  That is a lot of paper – half to one ream! Do you do more than that?  Will you make your machine distinctly unhappy?
  • Your annual print is 12x your monthly print, of course.  This number is important for costing your printing and planning ahead.  So read on!

#4 Laser printers come with five costs: the printer itself, a drum, toner, a USB cable and shipping

  • The USB cable is cheap – a few British pounds.  Just make sure you have one. Printers often ship without one!  If you are discarding an old printer, you may have one that is in good repair.
  • Some printers combine drum and toner.  The advantage of Brother machines is that they separate the drum and toner.  Here is where it gets interesting.  The drum is almost as expensive as a printer.  Hence, when the drum is ‘kaput’, you throw away the whole printer and buy another one!

The drum comes with an expected life in pages, say 12 000 pages!  Yay! You can plan ahead.  If you print 500 pages a month, give-or-take, your printer will last you for two years!  If you are chancing the monthly print rate (see above) and printing 12 000 pages a year, your printer will last you, say, one year.

One cost – the administration cost of buying your printer – has just plummeted because you can plan ahead!

  • The toner usually has a lower rating – say 1500 pages.  Toner is not cheap, so it is a good idea to cost it for the lifetime of the printer – or the drum, in this case.  Divide the toner rating into the drum rating and work out what ink will cost you for the life of the printer.  You can buy enough toner for the life of the drum.  If you don’t print a lot, you can bear in mind that toner does have a shelf life and there can be other reasons why a printer may not last several years (coffee, theft, lightning strikes), so maybe buy enough toner for a year ahead.  Also consider whether the model is new or nearly obsolete and whether toner will be on the market in two year’s time.
  • And then there is the cost of the printer itself.  Usually entry-level mono lasers cost as little as a good inkjet and ship with the drum and a small toner cartridge worth 3000 pages or so. The documentation is usually vague on this but you can ring up the local store and ask!

#5 Work out your printing costs!

  • Now you can cost your printer – purchase cost (plus tax) + USB cable if you need one + shipping or trip to the store + drum (no cost because it comes with the machine) + toner for one year.

Brother HL- 2037

As at end of October 2009, Brother has a machine selling through Amazon with the following costs:

  • Printer including drum worth 12 000 pages – GBP70.00
  • Cable – GBP3.00
  • Shipping – GBP0.00
  • Toner – 1 included, but good for unknown pages. A new TN1005 is good for 1500 pages (3 reams) that sells anywhere between GBP55.00 and GNP35.00
  • The machine should be good for a further 6 lots of toner using up the 12000 page life of the printer.

I am going to recommend this printer and wish I had bought one for myself.  I used a similar version when I was teaching.

I bought one at the start of each year and bought enough toner to last the life of the drum.  It worked perfectly (though as an academic I used one with longer drum life of 25 000 pages which lasted roughly one year.)

For a lot of small businesses, 12 000 pages will last many years.  S0 it is important to buy a new model and the Brother HL-2037 is the newest.

Amazon Associates

I am also going to use this to check the Amazon Associates scheme so if you want to “buy me a cup of coffee”, you can follow this link!


In Association with Amazon.co.uk

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Heatmap of personality in Toronto

I love mashups and I love seeing online data that we used to bury in fusty dusty archives.

The Canadians, bless their cotton socks, have taken the personality scores of Toronto residents who logged in online and produced some heat maps.

Follow the link to see which parts of Toronto are

  • Introverted or Extroverted
  • Emotional Stability or Neurotic (Intense)
  • Open to Experience, or Not
  • Agreeable (or scratchy)
  • Conscientious

These are Canadians, hey.  So they are all conscientious.  But the city otherwise differs. Categorizing a place as one or another or neither, then we have 3x3x3x3 =81 personality profiles.  Decide the character of the place you would like to live and move in?

PS If they weren’t Canadians, there would be 3x as many profiles = 243 choices!

As for the technique, there are 3 steps for compiling personality maps

  1. The personality test is online. Anyone can log in and they are asked to add their postal code.
  2. Average scores are calculated for every postal code with more than 10 people.
  3. The averages are mapped on a heat map.

Done!

Technical Aside.  The personality test is commonly known as the Big Five.  It is the agreed “periodic table” of personality.

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How did New Zealand game Google?

Type Google UK into Google.  The result is Google.co.uk

Type Google Australia into Google.  The result is Google.com.au

Now type in Google Egypt, or Google South Africa, and even Google Ireland.

What is the result?

Google.co.nz.

How have the New Zealanders gamed Google? Tourism is the No. 1 export in New Zealand and they are successfully diverting Google-traffic to themselves.

Who is the first SEO to explain in plain and simple language how they did this?  You’ll win the “hot-****” accolade.

And the New Zealanders who gamed Google are likely to offer you a LARGE contract!

UPDATE:  6 December 2009.  This doesn’t work anymore.  I wonder how the Kiwis pulled it off.

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