Hertz hurts: Would you pay double for some convenience?

Actually, the question is: would you let your company to pay double for some convenience?

Recently, I started a new job that required me to commute weekly from the SF Bay area to Denver.  My company is nice enough to pay for all my travel costs.  I used to travel a lot and I loved Hertz.  I have told many people about the great Hertz Number One Gold service.  It was the gold standard in customer service and customer satisfaction even 15 years ago.  You walk out of the Hertz bus, look up the board to see your name and which stall is your car, walk to the car, and drive away.  It's always a fantastic experience especially appreciated by frequent travelers.

In contrast, years ago when our team used to travel to UK frequently, and we had a special deal with Alamo.  After 12+ hours of international flight (it was very long even though we were flying first class back then), took the long bus ride from the gigantic London Heathrow airport to the Alamo property, waited in line for 15-20 minutes, and then we had to endure and resist the up-sell pitch by the agents.  Once the car was finally selected, the contract done, you have to wait another 15-20 minutes for them to send the car through the mandatory car wash (note that it's raining outside, who cares about getting a car wash?).  All this time, we were thinking about our 45-minutes drive in the rain, driving on the opposite site of the road to the hotel to get some sleep.  This torture would be the total contrast from the Hertz Number One Gold Standard.

Back to my recent Denver experience, the excellent services have not changed and I very much appreciated the tremendously fast  and convenience service.  The first couple of rental reservations were fine, I went to hertz.com via united.com after I bought the ticket. This way, I got a 10-15% car rental discount for the company, and I got 1,000 bonus miles (which I have not yet seen).  I did this for a couple of weeks, and saw the rental price jumped up quickly each week.  As a busy frequent traveler, I didn't have much incentive to change my routine, and I did not have much time to shop around...  until in one of my expense reports, I noticed that with tax and other long list of fees, my 4-day car rental charge was higher than both my air fare and my hotel bill!  This was getting ridiculous. Since I am a reasonably responsible corporate citizen, I asked myself, how much would you pay for a medium size or a compact rental car?  $30? $40? $50 per day?  How could it cost more than a $99 hotel room?

I was kind of hoping my company offers the Web 2.0 comparative pricing business travel services from Rearden Commerce (where I used to work), unfortunately it did not. We are using ADP Expense eXpert, and just a week ago, they brought in the travel agency sponsored Concur service.  The interface is definitely not as pretty as what we had at Rearden, but I had to use what I have.

After I put in my itinerary, it was SHOCKING to see the comparison: Hertz' rate was $62 per day for a mid-size car, comparing to Enterprise, which has the next highest, at $31 per day for a mid-size!  Wow, Hertz, this really hurts.  Can I really justify paying double for the convenience?  I guess I will find out next Monday.

Now comes the news of Hertz buying Dollar.  Will this give Hertz even more muscle to charge a premium, or will Hertz keep Dollar as a value brand just like Enterprise, National and Alamo?  Event thought these three are one company, but the three brands compete in their own individual pricing tiers.  We shall see...  In the mean time, I'd better remember to jump on the green (Enterprise) bus instead of the yellow (Hertz) one next week.

From iPhone to iPad

Apple's release of iPad over the 2010 Easter weekend created quite a stir.  One of my old friends, Derek, waited in line for his iPad outside of the Apple Store Valley Fair in Santa Clara.  He got high five's from about 50 Apple employees and free Starbucks coffee/water courtesy of Apple. It was chilly out there, but he got his new toy and a picture with Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak.

300,000 iPads were sold over a weekend, and US sales went so well that the international release had to be postponed.  The Biongo Hotspot blog reported that in 4 days (click picture to see full story), iPad already exceeded Android, blackberry, and iTouch generating over 5% of non-PC Boingo WIFI traffic at the airports.  Of course, these numbers are sort of biased, since Andoids and Blackberries can get online via 3G, however, the fact that it already made a blip in 4 days is amazing.

So far, people are using it for reading, browsing, sharing pictures, music, and playing games. Beyond hard core technology geeks, it also appeals to wide range of people as it is light and portable.  The potentials for education market is immense, imagine consolidating all the text books into a device like an iPad.  It will have a huge impact to the backpack market and could hurt businesses for chiropractors (maybe they are already focusing on carpal tunnel instead of back pains).

Yes, there are of course many shortcomings in its first release and many other similar competing products will be released in the coming days.  Successful introduction of iPad validates my last post, that a general purpose, web connected App devices like iPhone, iPad, and Andoid will forever change our lives.

67% Mobile Web traffic from iPhone, the new Computing Platform

3 Essential trends makeing iPhone the Computing Platform of the future:

1. The de facto mobile gateway to the Web.
Although the richest woman in the world wants it sometimes, Melinda Gates is not allowed to have an iPhone since iPods and iPhones are banned in the Gates family. However, that's not the case in millions of families around the world. According to Net Applications, iPhone accounted for 67% of the mobile web traffic in February 2009. Today (3/4/2009), China Unicom says they are in talks to sell iPhone in China.

As to other "major" players... Java ME's (represents the stripped-down browsers on most regular phones) got 9%, while Windows Mobile, Google's Android, and Symbian each got about 6%. Palm was left with about 2%.


2. Mobile Video catching up with Internet Video? In a Nielsen report, the media consumptions from TV, Internet and Mobile Usage continue to increase. Most interestingly, Mobile video watchers are watching more videos comparing Internet video watchers. This amazing insight shows the portability power of mobile web for devices like iPhone. As even more main stream content becomes available (According to Video4Cell, CSB just announced Star Trek & C.S.I Episodes to iPhones on TV.com) even more people will rely on their iPhone for video and other content. This continues to pave the way for iPhone to be the dominating portable entertainment device and the computing platform which Microsoft, Google, Palm, Sony, and Nintendo have missed the boat... at least for this round.

3. Portable computing platform for lots of Applications. In addition to surfing the web with Safari and watching videos with Youtube, people are using the iPhone for other applications. In fact, Apple's says 500 million apps have been downloaded and counting. Based on one estimate, that's about 20 Apps downloads per iPhone user comparing to about an average of 5 Apps across all smart phones.

A survey of US smartphone users who installed applications on their devices in 2008, conducted by ABI Research in November, reveals that a surprising 17% spent upwards of $100. No wonder, a lot of people are building and marketing iPhone apps these days... watch out for one of ours, coming soon!

References:

• CBS Offers full length Star Trek & C.S.I Episodes to iPhones on TV.com.
• TV, Internet and Mobile Usage In U.S. Keeps Increasing, Says Nielsen.
• Five Apps Per iPhone?
  
• Buying Mobile Applications: 17% of US Smartphone Survey Respondents Spent More Than $100 Last Year.
• Report: iPhone takes 2/3 of mobile Web in February.
  
• Video Viewing Strong on All Screens.
  
• Banned In The Gates Household: iPhones and iPods.
• Apple: China Unicom Says In Talks To Sell iPhone. (3/4/2009)
  

1 Billion Internet Users as of December 2008

According to comScore, the total Internet users exceeded 1 billion in December 2008 or about 18% of the worldwide population. 41% of the Internet users are from Asia-Pacific, 28% from Europe, and 18% from North America. Latin America, Middle East and Africa accounted for the remaining 12%.

By Country, China had the most Internet Users with 180 Million online which is about 20% of Chinese residents. The US ranked number two with 163 Million users. This is very significant since the measurement was done for home and work locations without counting access from public computers (such as Internet cafes), mobile phones, or PDAs. Japan, Germany, UK, and France round out the top 6. India, the 2nd most populated country is currently ranked number 7 with 32 Million users online. It is expected the future growth will be dominated by new users from China and India.

Source: eMarketer.com

Plum7.com - top 3 on Google Search within a month!

We started 'plum7.com' as a family project during the 2008 Christmas break and beta launched on Jan. 22. We are slowly building traffic by word of mouth and basic search engine optimization. At this point, over 50% of our visits are coming from organic search results (meaning not paid traffic) and referrals from sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.

Today, two weeks after our beta launch, we discovered that we have already achieved the top 3 position at Google search for "top 10 pop songs" for the weekly top 10 music page (with official videos, funny parodies, lyrics, karaokes, and line dance videos), beating big names like Apple/iTune, Google/Youtube, Time.com, video.aol.com, and about 22,100,000 other web pages!

We have helped CadPointInc achieved the top organic search results at Google, Yahoo, and AOL in 2007 -- it remains on the top today, and it's great to know that we can still do it! Of course, our work have just begun, and there are still a lot of things we are planning to do (and we are having fun!). We'd like to do a checkpoint and share with you the tools we have used so far (they are mostly free):

• Content Management System (free): Joomla with php and mysql database with basic template.
• Analytics (free): Google Analytics for tracking and analysis
  
• Revenue (free registration): Google Ad Sense, Amazon Affiliate, and many travel affiliate programs from Commission Junction (We have only gotten a few dollars from Google so far, and we need to seriously consider either optimizing the affiliate conversion or drop those programs... any comments?)
• Search Engine Optimization - keywords: very basic stuff like put meaningful keywords in page URLs, page titles, page descriptions, keyword sections, title of links, and title of images
• Search Engine Optimization - search submission: submit new pages to Google, Yahoo, MSN, StumbleUpon, and Digg. (We have not even submitted to the big directories yet!)
  
• Word of mouth: Email to friends/family, put links in signatures (email and web forums)
• Hosting: Servage.net $6.45/month for hosting with 510GB and $14.95/year Domain registration (with free Privacy, better than Godaddy.com)
  

Even though this is a very new site with a few weeks of history, (and pagerank of zero), we think our weekly top 10 music page was able to get to top 3 organic search ranking because:

• It's a content/information rich page with official video, funny parodies, lyrics, karaoke, and line dance videos,
• It's a keyword rich page with meaningful keywords in page URL, title, description, images, links while not 'spamming' or stuff keywords with density that's too high.
• It's a timely page with weekly top 10.
  

Page performance:

• 27% Home Page
  
• 31% Music Section
• 19% Travel Section
• 18% Dance Section - this is a new section with almost no promtoion
  
• 5% Recipes - we will probably drop this section
  

Here is a distrubtion of current traffic sources:

1. 47% from direct link and email - presumably primarily friends and family, a large perceentage came from Yahoo Mail referral.
   
2. 34% from search engine referral - 95% from Google, with one or two from AOL, MSN, ASK, Kvasir, and Live. Surprising even though we religiously submit every new article to Google, MSN, and Yahoo, we have zero referral from Yahoo Search so far.
3. 18% from StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, and other forums/blog referrals.
   

Concentrated yet wide range of international visitors. The picture on the left is a Google Analytics map showing distribution of visitors in Janurary. So far, most visitors are from California, but it is very interesting to find out that we are already getting visitors from 31 US states, and from 28 other countries ranging from all continents (ok... except Antarctica!).

Ok, that's it so far. We'd like to know your thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Please go ahead and click on the comment and provide your feedback. Thanks!!

Tip: Timing Newsgroup Posting to Optimize Results

There is no doubt that our audience is on many very diverse newsgroups such as Yahoo! Groups, AOL Message Boards, Linkedin Groups, Facebook Groups, etc. Some groups have thousands of active subscribers. Many service providers for these groups will send an email whenever a new post is added, either with a summary or the full message. This is an essential way for the service provider to drive traffic back to the site or to sell ads. Most services will send a daily consolidated email with all posts from the previous day. For message heavy and well read groups, consolidated emails are very popular, so people do not get bombarded with lots of message all day long.

If you take a look at the timestamps from this type of consolidated emails, you would notice that daily consolidated emails from Linkedin and Yahoo! Groups usually come at around the same time every day. This is most likely true for all such services since they are sent automatically on a regular schedule.

Being the top post for this type of email has many benefits. Obviously, the top 2 or 3 posts get the most attention. In addition, for LinkedIn, see the example in the figure (click the image to see the larger version), you will see that the poster name for the first post even appear in the subject line!

If we are building awareness and traffic using newsgroups in popular and high volume newsgroups, the trick is to time your posting so your post appears on the top. The exact method is slightly different for different services.

For example, for linkedin, the latest post appears on the top, and the rest are listed in reverse chronological order, therefore, you would want to time your posting right before the email deployment time.

On the other hand, for Yahoo! Group, posts are listed chronologically for the day before. So if you post at 12:01am on Monday (make sure you take into account the time zone!), you will be the top message for Tuesday.

Try it out, experiment, and let me know how this works out for you!

More Video Ads than Search and Banner Ads Combined?

According to a survey conducted in December 2008 by PermissionTV 67% of US Marketers responded identified online video as a "primary focus" of their 2009 digital marketing campaign in 2009.

This amazing number is 50% higher than Social Media, and about double of Search, Podcast, and Rich Media. Does this mean we will see more spending on video ads than search and banner ads combine? I don't think so. I think this represents what's on marketers' minds as the next frontier but it does not necessarily represent their actual budget allocation. According to eMarketer's projections in November 2008, 2009 spendings for Search and Display Ads are still by far the highest online ad format at $12 and $5 Billion, however, we can see that Video also shows the most significant growth from $587 to $850 Million in this study. This speaks well for companies like Hulu.com and Google (Youtube), especially during recession when more people are expected to stay home and surf the web. We can also see another related trend with all the mobile video updates on sites like Facebook.

Regarding the marketing objectives, a vast majority (71%) stated it would help build brand awareness. Other objectives includes: lead generation (47%) and enhancing loyalty/retention programs (44%) and converting customers (41%).

As to the tactics, the highest priority, with 63%, is to invest in a branded content/video destination. Viral video (39%) and interactive experiences (38%) are the next highest. Only 22% plan to invest in simple syndication.

Sources:
eMarketer: Marketers Eye Online Video for 2009
PermissionTV: Industry Survey Forecasts Adoption of Interactive Video in 2009