Who says we have to sit at desks to be productive? Leggett & Platt is showing off a product they have in development called the “Starry Night Bed.” I call it a bed made for web workers. Not only does it integrate the kinds of electronic controls we need to do our jobs, but it includes intelligence to make sure we get the kind of sleep we need to face a hard day of work.

The bed includes built-in electronics: wireless Internet connectivity and a wireless keyboard; a built-in iPod docking station; integration to life|ware Connected, a Windows Media Center program that controls home electronics; as well as 1.5 terabytes of storage to maintain your media collections.

It provides a surround sound system with four eight-inch subwoofers, an audiophile ribbon tweeter, and 2,500 watt RMS amplification. A headboard projector casts a 120-inch (10-foot) screen on the wall and can be used to project movies, books, music navigation features, the Internet and the local daily weather.

Next, there’s anti-snore technology. The bed detects snoring with a vibration-detection system and automatically moves itself into an angle that will help open the sleeper’s nasal passages to reduce mild to moderate snoring. When the snoring stops, the bed returns to its original position.

Plus, vibration sensor and load cell technologies measure how much you toss and turn, and how often you get out of bed during the night. According to a company press release, the same vibration sensor technology detects and monitors rhythmic breathing patterns that indicate relaxation. It compares these movements to a 30-day baseline measure of the sleeper and then provides tips on a “Good Morning Screen” to improve sleep quality. That’s right. Your bed will start giving you advice about how to improve your sleep performance.

If you don’t sleep alone, each of you can control the temperature on your side of the bed, from 68 degrees to 117 degrees Fahrenheit.

The bed is expected to be out in 2009 and to cost between $20,000 and $50,000, depending on your configuration.

Sure, there are a few gaps here. For one, the design looks like something only the Gabor sisters would love. Second, it doesn’t automate the changing of sheets. Third, a single projection would pose a real problem in my household. We’d always be arguing about whose work deserved the “wall.”

What do you think it’s missing to become the workspace — er, bed — of your dreams?

I was just relearning how to work with Google AdWords and noticed that its tutorials include quiz questions. Why? Because you may want to test your knowledge along the way and eventually become a Google Advertising Professional.

To do so, you need to pass an exam, which allows you to use a “Qualified Google Advertising Professional Logo” — important, I suppose, if you’re in the search engine optimization or online marketing business. The Direct Marketing Association offers its own certification program covering comparable topics.

But what about the rest of us: Does certification still have merit?

If you’re a freelance technical consultant, it may help new customers feel comfortable knowing that you’ve gone through some form of training that confirms your knowledge of a new technology (at least as it existed at the time you took the test). Service sites such as OnForce confirm your certifications and make that part of your online listing.

If you’re working in the corporate world, certification can help your co-workers look at you in a new light, especially important if you’re trying to break out of the mold of your job title. When the manager comes looking for someone to tackle the new web 2.0 initiative, maybe she’ll give you a second look if you mention your new Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist credential in .NET framework 2.0 web applications or your new Project Management Institute Project Management Professional title.

Want to change careers? Try earning a certification in life coaching, security, even beer judging, then place the logo on your virtual business site and reap the rewards (or calories).

Do certifications still have value, or are they an idea whose time is over?

If you’re wondering how to increase the number of people who sign up for your email newsletter, Don Nicholas, editor and managing director for consulting group Mequoda Group, has a tip for you: Don’t call it an email newsletter.

“That’s kind of an overused term,” he says. “It may have a little negative connotation.”

Nicholas, whom we profiled last week, specifically advises publishers on how to develop and refine their online strategies; but the recommendations he offers for converting website visitors to email subscribers are relevant for other kinds of sites too.

Nicholas estimates the industry average for conversions to be about a 10th to a 20th of a percent. That equates to one or two newsletter subscriptions for every 1,000 unique visitors. His clients, on the other hand, are seeing conversions between 3% and 12% — 30 to 120 subscriptions for the same 1,000 UVs. He claims that one European client held a 20% conversion rate for the first 90 days they tried his techniques.

So if you can’t call a newsletter what it is, how do you get people to sign up? Nicholas advises two tricks.

Have visitors tell you that they want to be “notified by email” when you post more content about a given topic. Notice the trick here? Never is the word “newsletter” used. Says Nicholas, you’ll see a much higher conversion of visitors to subscribers than if you have visitors say, “Please sign me up for your email newsletter…”

Does that mean you’ll have to create newsletters on every topic covered by your site? No, but they do have to offer value and follow through on that promise to tell people what’s been posted on the site.

Have visitors register for access to free “special reports.” A special report, says Nicholas, “may be nothing more than 10 or 15 tips published on some topic that are now combined with an introduction, a summary and a cover. Now it’s a guidebook.” This material becomes downloadable content that can be “swapped” for email addresses.

The reports — he advises creating several — can be posted to a “marketplace” page, similar to a bookstore, where visitors can quickly sign up to download one or more. That obligates them to receive the newsletter too — a requirement laid out in text on both the sign-up page and the opt-in confirmation link sent to new subscribers.

Report offerings can also be served up contextually on specific landing pages to match the content on that page. On his own site, which covers 30 to 40 topics, Nicholas presents a small floating box that appears one time suggesting a related report for each topic with an email field and a button that says, “Yes, I want this report.”

Mequoda also offers a traditional email newsletter sign-up on the home page, but Nicholas says the bulk of visitors will probably enter the site through specific topical pages, and those are the ones these techniques are meant to capture an email address from.

Are these too sneaky for you to try? What works for getting your visitors to sign up for your newsletters?

In spite of the fact that some marketing people downplay the value of email newsletters in these days of saturated inboxes, Don Nicholas, editor and managing director for the Mequoda Group, says he has clients today who can prove that between 70% and 80% of every dollar they generate starts in an email newsletter.

Nicholas specifically advises publishers on how to develop and refine their online strategies. His Mequoda Summit Napa Valley 2008 takes place in April. But the recommendations he offers for exploiting the value of email newsletters and building web traffic are relevant for other kinds of sites too.

Plan your website and email newsletter as companions to each other — where every bit of content you generate is posted online and pushed in the newsletter. For example, says Nicholas, if you’re blogging once or twice a day, send out a newsletter once a week that says, “Here are five or 10 new stories we’ve posted and here’s a synopsis for each story…”

Whereas content in email newsletters has a short lifespan — 72 hours, according to Nicholas — those same stories live forever on the web and in search engine results, if the site is architected correctly.

Make sure you hyperlink through the website. A lot of newsletters Nicholas sees are just plain text without any reference to content already published on the site in the last few months. Part of doing a good job is to make sure the topic is contextually linked to what you’ve written before. That helps the reader who may be totally ignorant of the previous 30 entries you’ve written on the same subject — and it increases your page views by driving people to related stories.

Be honest in your newsletter subject line. “A lot of what you see in subject lines tends to be deceptive,” Nicholas says. “We find that not to be the way to build relationships.” The more clear you are in the subject line and in the preview pane about what’s in the newsletter, the more you help readers make an informed decision about whether they want to read a particular issue.

A follow-on to that is to write your headlines straight up. “Google doesn’t get wit,” he says. So forget about cleverness if you want readership.

Try to keep the subject line to 70 characters or fewer. Any longer than that and it just won’t seen by the average user.

Repeat the name of the publication or company at the beginning of the subject line. Nicholas said his daily newsletter, “Mequoda Daily,” has a 10% to 15% higher open rate “if we remind them who we are.” Subscribers are constantly triaging the contents of their inboxes, he says, so it helps to say, “Hey, we’re one of the trusted guys.”

Use the first three to five words after the publication title as keywords. “Don’t exercise your vocabulary,” he says. “Don’t use the $5 words; use the $2 words.”

Also, include RSS as a function on your site for the incremental traffic and links a feed will produce. But remember: Depending on what kind of site you produce, in most cases, you’ll get more mileage from the email newsletters. Exceptions are tech sites, where RSS subscriptions sometimes exceed email subscriptions. For other kinds of sites, says Nicholas, “You wouldn’t die tomorrow, but it’s almost a freebie.” Besides, he adds, “It also makes you look cool and hip.”

Next week, Nicholas will share his advice for turning website visitors into email subscribers. Until then, how do you get people to pay attention to your web efforts?

We’ve shared six ways to start off secure in 2008, shown you how to keep your public wi-fi sessions secure, and supplied you with suggestions for free VPN solutions. But how about if you’re in the IT organization and you want to make sure that all those web workers with mobile devices are following company security policies even when they’re not connecting with the corporate LAN?

Fiberlink Communications calls it the “mobile blind spot,” the gap in network security that exists when notebooks or other devices are connected to the Internet but out of reach of standard security procedures. Its solution, Extend360, places an agent on the user device that constantly monitors for IP access. When an Internet connection is detected, the agent communicates with a management center that checks for compliance to corporate security policies and does what it needs to bring security up to date on that device. No need for the user to be proactive.

“The key with security is that the more the user has to do, the higher the probability it will be less secure,” said Skip Taylor, VP of product management. “That’s been a challenge for many years with IT trying to implement new security. You’ve got to find a way to enforce policy and the user doesn’t even know it happened.”

The Fiberlink solution addresses three key areas:

• Persistent policy enforcement that scans devices to make sure required software is installed and that it’s running and that threat signatures and access-point information is up to date.
• Centralized policy and software management. The administrator gains visibility through a browser-based portal.
• Network access control. If a device isn’t in compliance with corporate rules, it can be blocked from accessing corporate data assets.

“Anytime it gets Internet connectivity, the platform can establish new policies, pull down an audit of what’s been happening on that device so IT can pull it up on web portal and say, ‘Whoa, I see Skip has his firewall shut down and that he needs a current anti-virus signature,’” said Taylor. “The agent is kind of a waiting to be told what to do — I call it the ‘ET phone home’ model.”

Like Fiberlink, iPass is another solution that promises to secure devices outside the corporate firewall. It differs in its approach by using its own 10-center virtual network to provide the interface between the network service provider and the iPass network, where security policies are maintained.

What have you figured out to keep your web workers’ devices secure while disconnected from the corporate mothership?

Sure, they’ve heard the complaints and jokes about Indian accents. Yes, they know that when your computer is broken, you can’t always go online for the help you need to fix it. But the era of personal service outsourcing is here, and iYogi, a new service based in India, said it has already attracted 25,000 customers to its subscription technical support service — most of them American. If you’re a Web worker who doesn’t have ready access to corporate IT support, iYogi could become your next best buddy, for $99.99 a year.

According to president Vishal Dhar, the 300-person firm wants to be the first direct-to-consumer tech support brand in India. “We saw this as an opportunity. The consumer is frustrated with their machine. There’s a pulling back of support [by the major vendors]. It’s difficult for a consumer to know who to call: ‘Should I call McAfee because it’s security? Should I call Dell because it’s a hardware thing?’”

The company said it supports 70-plus applications, as well as laptops, desktop PCs and peripherals such as printers and multi-functional devices. Note that those are Windows-based at the moment. This isn’t the road for you to follow if you’re on a Mac or running Linux. But for the rest of us, the connect time to speak to a service person is under a minute and iYogi reports a 93% customer satisfaction rate and 84% resolution rate. It estimates that 90% of computer problems can be fixed online.

The service works like this: The first time you call the toll-free phone number, the company takes inventory of your system to understand what the configuration is, and that goes into your profile. The next time you call with a problem, the tech brings up your profile to know the baseline immediately and to find out what could have changed in the meantime to cause the current issue.

The company has automated the capture of all voice and data-related sessions to expand its knowledgebase. There’s no residual agent technology involved; the technician tunnels into your machine for the duration of the support call. Once the problem has been identified and presumably resolved, the company does follow-up by email seven days later to see if the trouble persists.

Eventually, said Dhar, the company wants to become more proactive with its support. That would require monitoring your computer so that it’ll alert iYogi when certain thresholds are met that show sub-optimal performance. But that, he acknowledged, is not a one-time fix and it requires a trust relationship with the client.

More promising are services catering to small businesses and to those who want to “green” their PC.

The Small Business Helpdesk costs $93.99 per computer per year. The support is the same. What’s different is the fact that the company will dedicate a particular technician to your account — akin to your business having a tech support person on staff.

In the second category, for $9.99 you can get an energy audit of your current system, along with a customized plan to tailor your PC’s configuration for your kind of usage — primarily to take advantage of power management.

Additional Technical Support Offerings for Web Workers

• Free Tech Support, In a Flash
• Web Worker Payoff: Building a Tech Support Business Using OnForce

Have you tried iYogi? What do you think?

iPhones sales may have made France Telecom bright during the holidays and it could truly be the most memorable new product launch for 2007, but that doesn’t mean your corporate IT organization should have to support it. At least, that’s the conclusion coming out of Forrester, whose analyst Benjamin Gray, lists 10 reasons why the iPhone is not yet ready to be an enterprise-class mobile device.

It’s always possible that some of these obstacles will become history when Steve Jobs takes the stage at Macworld today, but read on for some of Forrester’s thinking…

The iPhone doesn’t support push business email or over-the-air calendar sync natively. Why should you care? Even if IT configures its infrastructure or installs a third-party mobile gateway, the device can only check for new email every 15 minutes. If you’re used to monitoring your new messages as often as you swallow, you may feel like you’re constantly in a state of suspended animation. Plus, you need a proprietary USB cable to sync up with your PC; it can’t be done wirelessly (even though the phone has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth). That means when meetings get rescheduled, you could miss notification.

The iPhone can’t secure data on the device through encryption. Likewise, most users probably don’t create passwords for their devices. The RIM BlackBerry or the Palm Treo both supply IT with full password control, so users have little choice but to follow the corporate-mandated security routine.

The iPhone doesn’t handle third-party applications well. If your company has a line-of-business program for its mobile sales force or mobile customer reps, it can’t be run on this phone. The official software development kit from Apple will come out in February; but until then, other platforms rule for the enterprise.

IT can’t lock or wipe a lost or stolen device remotely. There’s no management software that can handle it. Forrester expects that mobile device management vendors will incorporate Mac OS X into their list of supported operating systems, but it doesn’t believe that will happen before mid-year.

When the battery kicks the bucket, so does the device. No doubt, third-party vendors will fill the gap, but this isn’t a matter of flipping a cover off and plugging in the new battery. According to Forrester, the device needs to be dismantled, which means typical users will be at the mercy of corporate tech support to handle the job for them. Plus, since the iPhone is so popular for recreational use, the battery will drain faster than if it were purely a business device.

Are you convinced that the iPhone isn’t ready yet for the enterprise or has your company already declared support?

Last week, we shared the story of Michelle LaBrosse, who runs successful virtual operation Cheetah Learning. This week she shares the secret to getting that bonus or raise (or both) that you believe you deserve this year. These are strategies her own people have used on her — and that she has used to keep her workforce motivated.

First, make sure your company is performing well. If it isn’t in the black, your chances of profiting beyond a paycheck are pretty small. In fact, said LaBrosse, “One way to lose your job fast is to go in and ask for a bonus or raise when the company is doing lousy.”

Presuming the company is doing well, figure out what your role in that success is. “We just redesigned the website and sales went up 25%,” offered LaBrosse as an example. “They know sales are up. You say, ‘Is there any way I could get a 5% bonus?’”

Collect data before approaching your boss. Has the number of customers increased year over year? Have you taken over the work being done by three people? Sit down with your manager and explain, suggested LaBrosse, “I know you’re going to be showing a profit. I’m going to be a much happier worker if I know that some of that comes my way.”

Understand some basics about the company’s tax situation. That means learning a little about how the company is run. Then time your request to the company’s advantage. “If the company is a December to December fiscal year, they can give you a bonus on the books that actually increases profitability,” said LaBrosse. “And they don’t have to pay it out until March.”

Figure out how you can add value to the business. Propose scenarios where you can bring in extra revenue for the company, which you can then share in. For example, if you’re doing research, figure out special reports that your company could sell. If you’re managing a job shop, consider adding candidate recruitment as part of your position. If you’re running a website, come up with new ways to generate revenue beyond advertising or subscription sales or whatever the particular business model is for the site.

LaBrosse suggests that if you’re truly working for a Scrooge who’s driving a Porsche and buying expensive homes but always crying poverty to you, it’s time to go work for somebody else. “We live in a limited talent pool environment,” she pointed out.

What’s your strategy for upping your pay in 2008?

Michelle LaBrosse believes she knows how to motivate people. After all, the company she founded — Cheetah Learning — trains people to achieve their project management credential, the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional or PMP. She says that 97% of the people who attend one of Cheetah’s classes will pass their exam.

That focus on motivation trickles through to how she runs her 20-person firm, a totally virtual operation with people in Ohio, Connecticut, Nevada, California and Alaska. “I run a boss-free zone,” she says. “We don’t like people who want to micro manage. We also don’t want people who want to be babysat.”

How motivated is the staff? One person who had surgery wasn’t making plans to give herself time off for recovery. After all, the thinking goes, if we’re working from home offices, why can’t we do it while lying in bed? So LaBrosse offered her $5,000 to take off an entire week and let others pick up the slack. “She said it was the hardest week of her life,” reports LaBrosse, but she got the payoff.

Not so long ago, LaBrosse says, she’d forgotten her roots and decided to open up an office so that the company would have a headquarters. Suddenly, payroll was up and profits were down. Most of the people in that office have since been booted out and profits are back up — with the current staff focused on customer-facing activities.

Here are six secrets to LaBrosse’s success.

Use the web to stay in touch with customers. Cheetah has eliminated printed marketing materials totally. That philosophy was confirmed recently in a decision about how to thank its 2007 customers for their business. “A couple of years ago, we sent out cards to 9,000 students,” says LaBrosse. “That cost me $18,000 — ridiculous.” Along with the card was an invitation to take a free course, which 900 people took advantage of. This year, LaBrosse decided to send out an email holiday greeting — and included free access to video cooking lessons online.” That emailer had a 25% open rate — higher than the cards, as far as LaBrosse calculates it. “I didn’t print out any materials. They got a better product.” Total cost: $5,000 to sponsor the site providing the cooking lessons.

Invest once, grow infinitely. LaBrosse says she has very little overhead in her infrastructure. The company built its web site over seven years, and it’s fully depreciated. She figures she can triple her business before she needs to invest anymore.

Hire technically literate people with an attitude that they can work anyplace anytime. She gives people new notebook computers every 18 months. They all have iPhones. Their high-speed Internet access is paid for. They receive $150 a month towards their cell phone bills. LaBrosse points out, “I don’t have to pay for their electricity, heat or rent for office space. I can pass that onto them in higher salaries and bigger bonuses.”

Look everywhere for good people to hire. One of her top customer service people came from LaBrosse’s bank. “I saw him every week when I’d go into the bank,” she says. “He’d just been promoted to manager, and they’d stop doing a lot of their customer-focused activities. I told him, come to work for us!” She starts everybody in customer service (another word for “sales” at Cheetah). After six months, she says, “We figure out the best fit for them.”

Stay in touch with your team daily. LaBrosse says she “touches” people almost every day — by instant messaging and email and phone (a “distant second”). She — along with everybody else — can monitor company health by monitoring sales through a CRM system that tracks the results of sales and marketing efforts.

Get together in person too. The most recent gathering for Cheetah took place in Vegas for the company holiday party. LaBrosse flew them and their families in, allowed them to choose their own hotels, covered a nice dinner and tickets for the Blue Man Group and gave them $500 each for spending money.

Although we’ve shared a multitude of project management tools with you since the start of Web Worker Daily (including, since just the beginning of the month, “Organize Your Life With Jott,” “(Mostly) Free Resources for the Web Worker Who Works on the Web,” and “QuickBase Goes Enterprise“), actually doing the job of project management requires — above all — simple common sense. At least, that’s the take of Kimberly Wiefling, author of Scrappy Project Management.

“In the real world, things go wrong, things change, people don’t do their action items, and everybody knows what’s going to happen on day one on the project, but nobody admits it,” Wiefling said.

Here are the three things to master, according to Wiefling, that will get you 80% of the way to project success.

1. Make the goals as clear as possible. Say the goal is launching a new website. “Often, [teams] find out they don’t all have the same idea of what success is six months from now,” said Wiefling. “Is it just launching the prototype? Is it the home page works, but everything else is clunky? What about bug free. Is it full of bugs or working smoothly? How long does a page take to load? A lot of details get lost in some of the high level, ‘Hey, get the site up in six months.’” Make sure the goal looks the same to everybody.

2. Communicate obsessively — “until even you are sick of hearing it.” This has two components, said Wiefling: talking and waiting to talk. “One of the things we have to get really good at is the listening side of communication. I emphasize that first because people rarely think about it.” What needs to be communicated? “There’s a goal — the big what, then the how — how are we going to get there? Then what is each person’s responsibility for making that happen? Then, status and progress towards that goal.

3. Prioritize ruthlessly. “I talked to one guy,” said Wiefling. “He said, ‘I’ve got 40 projects going on.’ I said, ‘Great. What are the top three?’ He said, ‘Oh, I can’t pick the top three. They’re all important… You’re asking me to choose from my heart, my lungs and my kidneys.’ I said, ‘Your heart is number one, because you’ll die in one minutes. Your lungs are number two, because you can live for 3 minutes. And your kidneys are number three, because you can go on dialysis.’” In other words, if every project appears to be equal in importance, look at the company goals and align the projects to those.

Wiefling said the client finally wrote a one-page description about what the company was about and how it made decisions regarding how it needed to “spend” its people, money and time.

Here are two project management tips from Wiefling that can improve results even if you feel like the project is a disaster waiting to crash:

First, provide status reports. “We have to communicate where are we headed and what’s our progress to our goal — so people will row like hell to get there.” She advises telling the team, “You’re 10% of the way, 50%, you’re 75% of the way, you’re 90%, you’re doing good…” In return, she said, the team will actually perform 60% more efficiently than a team told to “come in every day and work like hell and do your best.”

Second, make your communication tools as visual as possible. For a project kick-off, bring people in from wherever they reside in the world. “Fly them in, stay in a cheap motel, have some biscuits from Costco, and get people together to agree on the goals, objectives, plans, schedules, risks, mitigation, communications, roles and responsibilities and all of those things,” said Wiefling.

Then, once everybody has gone off in his or her own little world, use voice and video camera — “because the words alone in email are totally inadequate to express meaning.” Use screenshots, drawings or slides to simulate final results.

Wiefling has plenty more scrappy advice in her book, but we’d like to hear what tips you can share for getting projects right.

Are you a web worker whose business involves web sites? If so, how often do you think about Hispanic consumers? According to a recent report from Forrester Research, this segment of the population is 44.3 million strong — 15% of the United States as a whole — and 49% are online.

Analyst Tamara Barber shares some interesting data. For example, according to recent survey work done by the firm, Hispanics outpace non-Hispanics on adopting advanced mobile phone features. She observes that “even Spanish-dominant mobile phone owners top non-Hispanics” on media and messaging capabilities. They’re more likely than non-Hispanics to have mobile phones with built-in cameras, the ability to play video, the ability to play music, the ability to access the Internet, to send and receive pictures messages and send and receive email. The chart below lays out some details.

Source: Forrester Research, Inc. (c) 2007 Forrester Research, Inc.

The language and cultural aspects of Hispanic consumers define a unique set of needs they have. For example, language dominance at home is a major influence on behavior in the area of technology adoption and usage. Since 61% of Hispanic adults speak primarily Spanish in the home and another 16% are bilingual, ignoring the Spanish language aspects of your Web planning means you’ll be “missing or frustrating” 77% of this market.

Online Hispanics actually consume digital media more voraciously in some categories than online non-Hispanics. That includes messaging, listening to Internet radio or streaming audio, downloading music, using social networking sites, downloading video and publishing web pages. And Hispanics who prefer Spanish online actually make up 51% of this Hispanic online audience.

Barber writes: “Companies claim to be serious about their Hispanic customers, but most fail to serve them well online.” She offers three steps to evaluate your opportunity for reaching online Hispanics:

• Size your market for online Spanish-preferring consumers.
• Master new customer profiles.
• Commit to a multi-channel Spanish-language service.

As she concludes, “This opportunity will only expand as this fast-growing consumer segment comes online.”

What do you use to monitor the page ranks your sites have in search engines? You could — as I have done — enter the term into a given engine and count where a particular site appears; but that can be tedious when the site isn’t in the top 10 or 20 let alone the top 50.

Randy Zlobec, search engine marketing expert and author of SEM Gorilla, who offered his advice two weeks ago for hiring a search engine marketing expert, shares three tools he has found invaluable for monitoring page ranking — one that’s free (with a caveat) and two that cost.

First, the Freebie: DigitalPoint Keyword Tracker

DigitalPoint.com’s free Keyword Tracker & Keyword Ranking Tool can be used to check Google, Yahoo and MSN and other engines for ranking of keywords over time. According to Zlobec, “You create an account, then the tool follows your activity. It shows you your keyword placement from when you first started using the tool to where you are currently.”

Keyword Tracker requires a Google SOAP Search application programming interface (API) key to work, and that poses a problem. If you don’t already have that key (look in your inbox prior to December 2006 for a message from api-support@google.com), you won’t be able to use this utility — at least, not until the company updates it to work with the Google Ajax API.

SEO Elite
Brad Callen’s $167 SEO Elite is sold through a Web site designed like one of those old-fashioned, yet probably highly effective direct mail letters that go on and on and offer numerous testimonials about how effective the product is. But Zlobec swears by the software. “You can analyze your competition, track where they rank against where you rank. There’s Google AdWords tracking, where you can view the highest pay-per-click ads to see what people are paying for what terms, what ads are being displayed by what companies. You can see what’s been effective for your competition and use that to create ads that will be effective for you.”

For those who see the value in backlinks (in which another web site links to yours), the tool also lets you submit your article to “the most important article web sites that give you the best back links and best amount of traffic,” said Zlobec.

It also includes a keyword finder, which can provide options for your primary key terms. Why not simply rely on similar tools from Google or Yahoo? Because it’ll provide results from all the major engines, he explained.

Web CEO
The more staid Web CEO is similar to SEO Elite but without the article submission aspects. “It has a lot of tracking, a lot of analysis, a lot of historical analysis,” said Zlobec. “You can find link partners and contact them through the software. The company offers two versions, one ($199) for those who do search engine marketing for in-house sites and another ($389) for SEM pros, which provides “private label reports” that can be fed to clients.

Zlobec said he uses both SEO Elite and Web CEO — and has for many years, “because I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel on that. They’re great tools.”

Are you using a cross-search-engine page ranking tool worth noting?

Gen X? Old fashioned. Gen Y? Obsolete. Let’s talk about Generation V.

My son, who’s 5 years old and searches The Wiggles web site for new movies, is a member. So is your 70-year-old aunt who sends you an Amazon gift certificate for the holidays and leaves book reviews every time she logs in. As defined by Gartner, Generation V — for Virtual — represents the blending of behavior, attitudes and interests that happens in an online environment.

“For Generation V, the virtual environment provides many aspects of a level playing field, where age, gender, class and income of individuals are less important and less rewarded than competence, motivation and effort,” said Adam Sarner, principal analyst at Gartner. “For example, an 11-year old individual can be the leading ‘go to’ person for advice on how to upgrade/hack a digital video recorder (DVR) for more recording space. An unpopular office worker can be a highly revered, accomplished 40th-level half-elf in World of Warcraft. The opportunity for reputation, prestige, influence and personal growth provides a powerful social draw for the masses to spend more time in a virtual world.”

The analyst firm predicts, in fact, that in a mere eight years, more money will be spent marketing and selling to anonymous online personas than marketing and selling offline (which doesn’t bode well for big improvements in customer service at the stores we patronize…).

What does this mean for those of us who rely on the web for our livelihood? First, we need to persuade decision-makers to turn in their copies of The One to One Future, which, after all, was published 11 years ago.

Next, according to Gartner, you need to “shift from collecting personal data about individual customers toward collecting more complete and more relevant data around online customer behavior and influence on others.” Forget about demographic information. Seek psychographic insight — personality, values, attitudes, opinions.

As Sarner explained, “Although the real person may never be known, far more intimate information of the persona’s actions, personality, lifestyle habits and attitudes can be collected and exploited for business goals.”

He has some advice for targeting Generation V:

• Organize products and services around multiple online personas — a topic we’ve covered before.
• Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
• Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
• Shift investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the “influencers.”

Figuring out how to optimize your web sites is a job best left to the pros. After all, they’re the ones who should be spending a lot of time trying to understand how the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) operate and how to boost your site’s rankings against their algorithms. But if you’re running a small business, how do you find somebody who can really help you do the job?

We asked Randy Zlobec, a search engine marketing (SEM) expert, to share his advice for hiring a consultant. Zlobec is the author of the upcoming book, Search Engine Optimization, due in December, which is intended to give small website owners the opportunity to “grasp what SEM is and to implement it in their own marketing.”

Put together a shortlist of possible SEM candidates. Zlobec recommends doing a search on “search engine marketing consultant” or “search engine optimization specialist.” He also suggests visiting topseos.com, a site that lists all the major SEM consultants and marketing firms. It provides a ranked listing of the best firms, based on responses to a set of questions, such as “What are the applicant firm’s competitive advantages?” “How are the applicant’s services and pricing levels superior to the competition?” and “What other attributes/innovations does the applicant provide to set it apart from the competition?”

Once you’ve identified finalists, ask them a few simple questions.

• How long have you been in the business? (The longer the better.)
• How long have you been an SEM consultant? (Likewise.)
• What was your previous job? (Was it technology-related and something totally different?)
• How long do your clients remain with you? (A good sign of customer service.)
• Have you done repeat jobs with any of them? (The best testimonial.)

Ask for a couple of client names with web sites and search terms they’ve optimized the sites for. Type those terms into Google, Yahoo and MSN to find out just how the sites rank. “If they’re not on the first page of results, find somebody else who can get you there,” Zlobec said.

Once you’ve confirmed the results, get references. Here, said Zlobec, you’ll want to be cautious. If somebody claims to have optimized a particular site but can’t name a contact person at the client, move onto the next consultant. “I do a lot of research myself. I’ve heard many of [my competitors] say, ‘Well, based on non-disclosures [I can't reveal that information].’” Don’t buy it. “If you’re doing a search engine marketing campaign for somebody, they’re not going to tie you down so much that you couldn’t tell another potential customer to use them as a reference.”

Don’t count on doing a pilot project; it’s all or nothing when it comes to SEM. “It takes quite a bit of time to increase link popularity,” Zlobec said. “It would take a few months. You can’t really give somebody a small project and say, ‘Well, let’s see how you can do on this.’” There’s a lot of strategy behind SEM, he said, both “on-page” and “off-page.”

The on-page optimization is the back end code — meta code, alt tags, description and title tags. “The off-page stuff is link building, article writing and distribution and pay per click campaigns,” he said. “You have to combine that. The engines take time to come and re-index web sites. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

Last, make sure you’re not dealing with somebody who uses Black Hat techniques. One example is creating “doorway pages.” These are additional pages within a web site that could help increase the search engine ranking. Sounds good, right? According to Zlobec, “You’re going to hire the consultant, they’re going to use their black hat techniques, you pay them and they leave and move onto the next client. Then you’ll find your site a few months down the road put onto Google’s blacklist. You’ll never rank.”

The search engines are getting “smarter and smarter” every day, he said. “They’re going to find you one way or the other. You could come up with techniques that are borderline shady, and you don’t want to do that.”

That’s why, said Zlobec, you should expect to pay an upfront setup fee and a monthly maintenance fee. “The engines change constantly. You want them to follow that change and do whatever needs to be done to get them up to the top of those engines.”

What’s your advice for locating just the right SEM expert?

Sure, this is a topic we’ve explored before from multiple dimensions (see “Yet Another Reason to Build a Case for Telecommuting” and “Challenging Telework Myths“). But here’s your chance to get advice for building a case for telecommuting directly from Chuck Wilsker, the president and CIO of The Telework Coalition, who has probably heard more excuses from managers and executives for not allowing workers to do their jobs from home than any other person alive. The Coalition’s mission is, “enabling and supporting virtual, mobile and distributed work through research education, technology and legislation.”

Lay out the reason you want to work from home. Wilsker suggests something along these lines: “I’ve been an employee for three years. I get top reviews. You tell me how important I am to the company. I need a little work-life balance. My kid plays soccer. Even if I leave the office at 4 o’ clock, I can’t guarantee I’ll be home for that game at 6. I’d really like to telecommute.”

Address the equipment issue. If your manager says, “We don’t have the equipment,” you respond: “You’ve given me a laptop already,” said Wilsker. “We have the technology in place. We have a lot of people who travel. Does it matter if the work is done from a hotel room or a home?”

Address your manager’s security concerns. “If you’re dealing with medical records or you have to comply with regulations, make sure you address that,” said Wilsker. That may mean learning how from others in the company who are already doing mobile work.

Consider the business continuity angle. “Ask your boss — especially if you live in the north where you have snow — ‘How many days have you had to close operations because of weather?’” said Wilsker. “‘How much did that cost the business?’”

If your manager hedges, make it easier to agree by reducing the commitment. “Say, ‘I’d like to try it for a 90-day trial. I’d like to do it one or two days a week. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll know then.’”

Put together an agreement. Include “what you’re going to do, when you’re going to be available, what hours you’ll be working, who’s responsible for what.” Assure your manager that your work computer will not become your home computer. Your kid won’t be running CDs from school on it.

Don’t use the “T” word. “Don’t talk about telework or telecommuting,” said Wilsker. He suggests using the terms “distributed worker” or “virtual worker.”

Point out that virtual work will cut down on presenteeism. “It’s like absenteeism — you feel like shit, but you still go into work,” explained Wilsker. “People are coughing and you have these people coming in sick, which can make other people sick.”

Supply statistics. “Show your boss how virtual work will help the bottom line, build morale, bolster recruiting and retention, provide life balance.” The numbers are out there for all of those things, said Wilsker. You’ll find plenty of additional artillery on the Telework Coalition web site.

What objections have you heard that aren’t already on the list?

Imagine a work life that includes two or more days a week of working from home and a compressed work schedule that gives you an extra day off every other week, covers half the cost of installation and service fees for home broadband, and the ability when you are in the office to take up to three work hours a week to attend on-site fitness instruction. Does the Department of Defense come to mind?

You might not believe the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) would be a hotbed of telecommuting, but it is. The federal agency, made up of 5,000 civilians and 1,600 to 1,700 military personnel, provides information systems support for the DoD.

According to Jack Penkoske, the director for manpower, personnel and security, about 40 percent of the highly technical workforce is doing what the agency calls “teleworking” either on a regular basis or ad hoc.

In part the teleworking program is intended to help the agency retain people after it consolidates DISA operations in the Washington, D.C. area to Ft. Meade, Maryland starting in 2010. “But in the larger scheme, it’s something we would do anyway,” said Penkoske.

DISA has discovered, he said, that even jobs with a physical component to them — such as facilities inspector — can provide opportunities for teleworking. “There’s going to be a day out of the week where they have to write up reports,” he explained. “It’s more time management. You segment the work that way.”

The agency’s turnover rate is relatively low at six percent, good news at a time when the feds are facing the baby-boomer retirement crisis in its ranks. One 2004 DoD estimate said that 43 percent of its civilians workers would be eligible to retire by 2009. Penkoske said that in the past couple of years, DISA has been able to reduce the average age of its employees to be three years below the federal average.

The road to a home-based workforce has faced “pockets of resistance,” said Penkoske. “Our strategy over the last couple of years has been, knock down any of the barriers.”

They’ve included the usual, such as the argument that DISA lacked the right equipment. Now, nine of 10 computers are mobile (each outfitted with a card reader for security purposes).

Another objection among managers: How do we measure productivity? Penkoske’s response. You do it the same way as when the employee is sitting in front of you for eight hours. “If you have good measures in place now, you can continue to measure it.”

Ironically, as an executive, Penkoske doesn’t telework yet, nor do the other executives in the agency. That was a conscious decision, he said, made to ensure that the leadership ranks wouldn’t exploit telework before ordinary personnel had the equipment and training they needed to be able to do it. “We telework on Saturdays and Sundays,” he joked.

“We believe in telework — for a lot of reasons you hear: morale purposes and quality of life, [to reduce] traffic congestion and pollution” said Penkoske. “Where we really try to put the focus on is if telework is done correctly, it should as a minimum keep the same — and in most cases increase — productivity… Who’s going to argue with that?”