Bank customer data ’sold on eBay’

The Daily Mail says an ex-worker for archiving firm Graphic Data sold it for £35 on eBay without removing sensitive information from the hard drive.

In the age of the digital revolution, data is easy to come by, but apparently, very difficult to protect properly.

And comes only days after the latest high profile data breach, with a USB stick holding unencryted data going missing.

These privacy scandals used to follow paper details dumped into rubbish bins. But now the scale and size of these breaches happening with digital data is absolutely staggering.

And yet with ISP’s and search engines such as Google routinely hoovering up user details on internet use, how long do we have to wait before legislation finally gives the Information Commissioner real teeth to enforce proper privacy for everybody?

Some of the pricing strategies are priceless, but the first of the 8 tips especially stands out:

1. The Nine and Zero Effect. People associate the number nine with value and zero with quality. Look at the difference between fast food and a gourmet restaurant. A burger meal can sell for about $4.99 while a gourmet entree at the best place in town may go for $30. So the psychology of pricing isn’t so much about gaining additional sales because the price appears to be lower, it’s about what the price communicates about your offering. So which do you want to communicate? Value or Quality? Now you can price accordingly.

as an SEO we need to depend mainly on US, UK, and Australian markets.

The equation is simple – these things exist because there is a need in the market, and you have your share of responsibility in that.

Bollocks - the inability to show professionalism when aiming to serve these markets is what makes “Indian” = “spammer” among UK business.

There are more than enough SEO companies in the UK to serve UK interests - and plenty of SEO cowboys in there as well.

But as the point has already been made here, business services need to be purchased on quality, not price.

Where people look to buy “cheap SEO” what they are really saying is that they see limited value in SEO and search marketing in general.

The trouble is you get what you pay for, and if that means you’re looking for “cheap”, at best many “Indian SEO” companies will deliver little if any value, but some may even get you kicked out from Google.

I can even write “Indian SEO” without quotes - the fact is that most supposed SEO companies in Indian have no real understanding of SEO, and deserve to be relegated to the realm of cowboy trader.

Ironically, not all “Indian SEO” is cheap either.

I’ve seen “Indian SEO” services where they look to charge:

- $15 for a signature link in a single forum spam post - available in volume
- $3,000 for 20 link exchanges

Simply put, I have never seen a quality SEO service from India at work in the UK markets.

Meanwhile, the suggestion that rampant inability to show understanding and professionalism should be blamed on the market, rather than the opportunists seeking to exploit that market is absolutely unfounded.

Meanwhile, I’m about to clear email spam from my inbox from Indian “SEO”’s, plus crap “Indian SEO’s” spam on my forums.

Techcrunch published a story by Serkan Toto yesterday highlighting how Yahoo! Japan is worth almost as much as Yahoo! itself, with market caps of $22 billion and $27 billion respectively.

While YHOO shares have fallen slowly over the past couple of years, Serkan makes a big point of how having a dynamic company run by a dynamic personality with a strong focus on local usability, has turned Yahoo.jp into Japan’s leading internet portal - beating even the mighty Google.

I’ve already railed that Yahoo’s effort with their UK portal remains minimal, not least in their poor usability and poor localisation - and it’s no surprise then that despite Yahoo’s massive brand equity, it absolutely languishes in the UK market.

So maybe it’s time to ask the question - should Yahoo! franchise their international operations - before Yahoo! slowly kills itself?

I think the answer is clearly “Yes!”.

The Failure of Yahoo

Serkan’s Techcrunch article makes a big point of Yahoo.jp’s success:

1. Get a Headstart and Help From a Local Powerhouse
2. Super-Localization Is the Key
3. Do Business The Japanese Way: A Finger In Every Pie

He especially underlines the exhaustive and visionary work of Masayoshi Son, whose company Softbank owns a majority 40% interest in Yahoo Japan and also serves as the company’s chariman.

Compare that the list of grievances I posted about Yahoo! UK and it’s clear that here Yahoo is absolutely missing that element:

1. Lack of identity
2. Lack of usability
3. Lack of focus on user experience
4. Bugs and technical problems
5. No understanding of the target market

Google has made itself the dominant internet powerhouse in the UK with 80% marketshare in search, with Yahoo! UK trailing distantly in low single percentiles.

Investors see Yahoo! itself as lacking leadership and direction - Carl Icahn’s recent challenge underlines this.

Perhaps worse, Yahoo’s long-term future remains troubled.

Google generates around 60% of its income from partnerships - ie, displaying Google Adsense on websites around the world.

When faced with this challenge, Yahoo not only fails to roll out contextual advertising outside of the USA, but even has the tenacity remove its own ads for Google’s, and offer to sell it’s search marketing division to Microsoft. The result can only be the slow strangulation of Yahoo!’s business model.

As a recent letter from a Yahoo employee underlined, morale is sinking in a company that lacks proper leadership:

We have another 80% of the search market left to capture - Google only has about 30%. Now, whose future is truly brighter?

The letter above brilliantly underlines the problems within Yahoo! itself - so no wonder the company can only give the UK it’s most basic and cursory attention.

Why Yahoo needs to be franchised

Yahoo! is a company lacking direction - other than to try and follow Google’s footsteps where possible.

Yet as Yahoo Japan has demonstrated, allowing dynamic personalities and their companies to take charge of their presence outside of the US can reap dividends, literally.

Yahoo! UK is going nowhere fast, while Google continues to elevate itself in the eyes of users. Yahoo! UK needs that dynamism - as, no doubt, does Yahoo’s other partners.

Perhaps it’s time for Yahoo to re-evaluate it’s presence in non-US markets, and look to take a back seat while allowing local companies to shape local Yahoo portals into profitable local directions.

After all, imagine what would happen if the current dull and lifeless Yahoo! UK were taken over by a personality such as Richard Branson? Would he allow Yahoo! UK to languish? What could someone like that do to reinvigorate the presence of Yahoo! in the UK?

Currently Google owns the internet in the Western World. Users may have many destinations, but the single website they are all most likely to visit is Google.

That creates an imbalance which can only be harmful for users in the long run. Yahoo is the only real potential competitor, which is why people like myself are frustrated by Yahoo!’s inability to act competitively.

Ironically, Yahoo! bought out their international partners across many of their overseas operations back in 2005 - but I think it’s time to give it back.

Franchising their operations and allowing others to lead where Yahoo cannot seems the only sensible option.

Yahoo! is a company that could offer so much more to users, but so far, it’s allowing itself to slowly implode, and that’s going to be of benefit to nobody.

Seth suggested that surfers could “tip” websites they liked by clicking on ads - for which the website would be paid for - as a means of thanks.

As many have rightly pointed out, at best this is clickfraud - and at worst it’s a recommendation to completely undermine the online advertising industry.

Seth counters that advertisers want visitors, so this is still good apparently - because it will force advertisers to focus more on conversions.

But in doing so, he completely misses the points, which are:

1. Worthless clicks generate unnecessary costs for the advertiser
2. Worthless clicks devalue the worth of the originating website

We’re living in some of the tightest economic conditions since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, which means advertising spend needs to be further justified as an investment, not cost.

Additionally, search marketing remains a young technology that has found a value proposition in being able to connect those people making purchasing decisions with suppliers. It’s a tentative balance that depends on the good faith intentions of both parties.

Issues such as clickfraud and the diminished value in content networks have plagued search marketing and threatened to undermine it - but it appears that balance remains strong enough to overcome such concerns.

All the more reason why Seth’s comments are both unhelpful and damaging.

When it comes to the internet attention spans are so short, so the only real way to engage users is to ensure you offer something they are looking for in the first place. It’s called targeted marketing.

Advertisers don’t want random eyeballs - that’s old school marketing, and has been rightly slammed as wasteful, invasive, and irrelevant.

The power of online marketing is the clear connection between user intent and supplier intent. That’s why contextually relevant advertising has really taken off.

If surfers really want to tip the blogs and sites they read, then they should do it with their own money instead, via making a donation of the previously popular “buy a beer” meme.

Clicking on the ads is spending other people’s money, and as a habit, is an act of fraud.