When online business is stuck in the last century

It’s taken me more than a little while to get round to breaking the seal on this blog. For openers, I’m taking the easy way out and plumping for a rant about two South African business sectors whose digital incarnations leave a lot to be desired.

Exhibit A: Inbound Travel

Where would the booming South African web marketing industry be without inbound travel? In the world of the ~~holiday~~ vacation salesman, search with a capital G is king, and the Search Engine Optimiser is the muti-dispensing sangoma. The impetus to craft an engaging user experience is invariably poo-pooed in favour of having your web designers fall over themselves to roll out the welcome matt for Mr Googlebot. Believe me, I’ve been to the meetings and fielded the briefs.

Unfortunately more often than not, the requested search engine optimisation strategies are archaic beyond belief. I’m talking traffic-building quick wins that Webmaster World has been dissing for over five years: spam-riddled doorway pages and beyond desperate link-building initiatives. These invariably culminate in pointless lists of underlined text directing Johnny User to car hire companies in Outer Mongolia and hastily compiled SEO directories of yet more rubbish.

The truth will out: quality and relevance scores

Realistically, Google is not going to throw you any bones when you pollute your shop window with this kind of cruft. Quite the opposite. The fuzzy metrics termed quality and relevance scores are more important to your search engine placement than ever, never mind the biped sitting between the mouse and the credit card.

Ask yourself this: why do Wikipedia location pages like this one still trounce all the optimised-up-the-wazoo travel sites in the scramble for the coveted number one Google result? Wikimedia have spent nothing on link-building and amazingly, do not own 43 other one-pager Vic Falls sites despatched to herd search spiders their way.

The seemingly obvious answer is that Wikipedia consistently offers the best and richest source of information for the end-user. But surely the travel companies, as local experts and frequent visitors to these places, are uniquely positioned to be doing this?

Google wants to serve quality results

Regardless of how many side projects Mountain View commits to, its core revenue model remains grounded in serving the best quality search results. Perhaps the biggest pool of intellectual capital ever to congregate under one logo is committed to algorithmically rooting out garbage from that first page of links. Yes, Google is cleverer than your SEO guy, and getting cleverer all the time.

How well you built your web presence
whether or not you paid attention to web standards
and how engaging your content is

now matters not only in terms of organic rankings, but especially for any Pay Per Click campaign you might be running. Don’t even get me started on the old “lets mis-spell the same keyword 27 different ways on one page” technique.

A cursory “site:www.techcrunch.com travel” Google search will reveal that there are many innovative ways to actually add user-focused value in the online travel space. David Sifry of Technorati fame for example, is doing great work with web services and on demand personalised travel guides. Tripit.com automatically builds your itinerary based on the confirmation emails you forward to it. Michael Arrington has called it one of the indispensable web applications of 2008. Thriving business travel community Dopplr is using a Morgan Stanley API to calculate your carbon footprint for each trip, empowering members to offset these emissions. I could go on.

Unfortunately innovation is thin on the ground for South African travel sites courting the attention of foreigners with itchy wallets. From a product perspective, the focus is nearly universally on the most affluent visitors who are urged to book at five and “six” star lodges. From a travel guide perspective, coverage is almost always focused on the familiar destinations and travel regions. Editorial content is poorly presented and stuffed to bursting point with keyword after keyword. SEO copywriters spend their days trapped in a warped episode of Countdown where they have to use the words “South Africa” and “Safari” 27 times in an easily digestible sentence.

The blind leading the blind

In terms of the layout and structure of the sites, there is an unwavering trend towards imitating the big inbound players with their dominant search engine presences. It seems the industry inference has been that these gigantic sites (no, I’m not naming names here) have found the magic Google elixir that brings boundless wealth and fresh enquiries in the inbox every morning. But if you’re thinking of joining this admittedly crowded bunfight for tourist cash, please take heart from the fact that there are still plenty of ways to distinguish yourself from the competition.

Provide a useful resource

Create useful tools. The Google maps API for example offers massive functionality, and there are so many examples out there showing how to put it to work. Absurdly, the online travel operators seem more concerned with reinventing the static map over and over again, like some kind of interminable Standard 5 geography competition.

Be specific

Find those travel niches and immerse yourself in them. There is still plenty of room for specialists who can establish themselves as authorities on one particular kind of tourism. If it’s something you’re already involved in, so much the better. Pin down that purple cow and pimp it like nobody else out there.

Exhibit B: Online music retail

Traditionally South Africa is admittedly a small market for international music. We remain both an insular and somewhat culturally divided musical nation, one that catches on slowly to what’s happening in New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin or almost anywhere else. I would argue though, that there is an opportunity to sell the long tail of independent music to broadband enabled South Africans.

The digitally-empowered youth are no longer the closeted bunch of yore. Mystifyingly this is an online retail opportunity that remains woefully unanswered, both in terms of the big players and on the startup front. Despite the fact that the iTunes store is not an option for South Africans, there are few indigenous alternatives offering the opportunity to pay for MP3 downloads.

The site search on musica.co.za reveals some breadth of choice, but if you want to download your purchases, Windows Media is the only format on offer. What? Even if I was using Bill’s dodgy OS, which I’m not, I still wouldn’t be willing to pay for Windows Media format downloads.

Similarly catastrophic, Pick n Play offers virtually nothing of interest to me, and better yet, insists upon me using Internet Explorer to receive my DRM license with my download. Pardon? What are you people smoking? Not only have I no interest in your ill-fated no-future DRM license, the chances of me using the internet’s worst web browser to receive said pointless metadata are beyond zero.

At the moment, if your tastes run even slightly beyond the mainstream, you need to resort to torrents and Limewire to get that MP3 monkey off your back. The Hype Machine, Pitchfork and Metacritic are great for tasters of what’s out there, but how do you consummate the musical flirtations that the world of MP3 blogs and Last FM offers you?

How do you legally buy and download new albums that are available in bits and pieces for free online? This is especially important for people who want to support the new bands they love. And who want the contextual goodness of album art and other extras to complete the sub-cultural package.

The ranks of the enlightened few are beginning to swell

There is a growing horde of twenty and thirty-somethings in South Africa who have spent time living and working overseas. These people have invariably been exposed to the massive diversity that exists beyond the aural happy meals of 5FM and its relentless mainstream accomplices.

After eight years in London, I can’t even manage thirty seconds of local radio without the urge to smash my car into the nearest obstacle. And I don’t think my involuntary revulsion for dumbed-down media is in any way unique or a passing affectation. Daily diversity online builds powerful bullshit filters into our wider consciousness. As the internet becomes more and more a ubiquitous feature of daily life for this country, exposure to international sub-cultures will grow the demand for the means to own a piece of them.

Anybody who can create a user-friendly way for South Africans to browse and buy the long tail of international music must surely be on to a winning online business. If they can do this and bundle it with the kind of exposure, promotional and distribution opportunities MXit Music has been giving to local artists, they will be unstoppable.

Next on the online sector hit list