Two days ago I launched a new Personal Service called Holiday Home Hunters. Its basically a 72 hour manual search for vacation home rentals executed by a real person.

If you have been out on Google searching for your family holiday home you may have stumbled across over the overwhelming results of over 44 million links to holiday home companies, vacation rentals and individuals offering their homes. It isn’t the only downside because many of the same homes are advertised on many different websites Vacation Rental Management companies can have hundreds of affiliate websites where they advertise their inventory.

A few years ago you could go down the local high street travel agent for a catalogue of rentals but only a very few good companies actually print them these days. The web should have pretty much captured the market for vacation homes but instead it looks saturated and ends up not being time saving in any way, in fact it can easily slurp up hours and even days of your time.

So, more choice isn’t necessarily good for the consumer who is time stricken and quality conscious. There are actually a limited number of holiday home management companies and owners who can offer any kind of guaranty your vacation rental is up to the standards you would expect. Getting reviews on individual holiday homes is very good if you trust their opinion and have the time to go through them. Getting someone else to do the search for you who has been in the vacation home rental business for years is probably going to be able to shed the wheat from the chaf.

I was in the holiday business for years and I’ve never sold anything to anybody without having a pretty thorough idea of what I was selling them, therefore getting very few complaints and many returning customers.

I have always been an advocate that there is a growing market for personal services oddly I’d never have thought a manual personal search on the internet would become one of them until very recently. However considering the raving reviews on the launch that does seem to prove the case.

Check it out at http://www.dolcevia.com/hhh/holidayhomehunter.html

or in Dutch at http://www.dolcevia.com/vakantiehuisjager/vakantiehuisjager.html

I have spent some time researching the attitudes of SME on applying internet in a business growth strategy. SME’s actually do not use much of the Internet for advertising or to establish new distribution channels.

However, SME’s do recognize the importance of the internet in their business strategy to benefit from growth opportunities it presents. In fact SME’s consider the Internet as a vital contributor for business performance but do not apply resources to this area if; from one side, they don’t have or need a growth strategy or from the other, the value of the internet is not vividly apparent to them.

If a SME business owner has a value perception of the internet, adoption of an internet strategy is never far off even though there is no actual planned business growth strategy.

It could be that these firms see outside pressure from competition using the internet, another could be that the company owner just has a very good knowledge of the IT opportunities.

However with most SME who don’t have a planned growth strategy, the value perception of the internet is generally very low, there is usually no internal IT knowledge and perhaps they can’t see any competitive pressure.

If you will allow yourself to take a step back and look at technology adoption rates from the perspective of a SME business owner we may conclude that a change in attitude to business growth is needed and not necessarily a change in the perception of the internet as a business driver.

Show me the money

Why we ask ourselves are advertisers sceptical about online advertising and yet they will place an expensive ad in the paper without giving it a moments thought?

In my view its because the value is not transparent to all of us. I do not question the fact that my ad in the Sunday Times will be viewed by millions of readers. I read the Sunday Times, I can see my ad, my neighbour will too because I know he reads the Times front to back on Sunday afternoon. Somehow advertisers perceive the value of online advertising differently than offline advertising.

Let me be the devil’s advocate a moment by stating:. If you can’t visually illustrate ad performance, don’t bother selling it!

This may sound preposterous to an experienced online marketer. Think of all the wealth of tracking tools, analysis and performance stats I can provide to my advertiser, the possibilities to track ROI have never been finer!

All true, good arguments, but I’ll buy your ad because I know it pays off. You are telling me it will pay off and your statistics tell me this but I still have a problem visualizing the ad you are trying to sell me, I don’t even know these websites you want to place my ad on. On top of that he is thinking your pitch sounds pretty complicated. “I’m sorry we just aren’t quite ready for this right now and besides we don’t really have the budget.”

Turn around Adrank

So if we need to put the money where our mouth is, we should perhaps come up with a significantly simplified way to help advertisers visualize the ROI of online advertising.

What if we illustrate the return of ads by offering advertising conversion scores directly on the ads themselves and outside of any kind of Google AdRank. Current advertisers benefit by knowing if adjusting their creative format, copy or adblock will increase conversions for them but I’ve already made the decision to use Adwords by then. Potential advertisers should also be able to see how online ads generate leads before their very eyes and it makes the whole AdRank system much more transparent at the same time. No need to get out the case studies and analytic demo kit, get out of the hard sell business and back stuck into the relationship business.

A new partnership between Ingenio and AOL marks the launch of Click to Call in mobile search Today AOL unveils the new beta version of AOL Mobile Search.
The new interface makes use of tabs that enable users to easily toggle between search verticals within the site like Finance, News and Local Content. The partnership with Ingenio enables click to call for all search results that include a phone number. As with the wireline portal, Google still powers the search results with the exception of local listings, which come courtesy of AOL CityGuide and financial info from AOL News.
Rachel Pasqua is Director of Mobile Marketing for iCrossing gives a nuanced view on these developements in the SE mobile market:

“Now granted the name AOL is by no means synonymous with search, but as Om Malik pointed out in his own insightful column on the subject, the jury is still out on who will own search on mobile devices. Google has the lead at this point, which is pretty much what you’d expect. But there’s certainly room for other contenders. Especially a contender that can wrap up an easy search experience and premium results with great content. The icing on the cake would be location awareness – you still need to proactively tell AOL where you are. But true LBS is on its way, if not right around the corner. A partnership with ThirdScreen is in place for advertising and if they continue to hone this refined user experience, I believe that AOL could give Yahoo!, if not also Google, a run for its money when it comes to mobile users and ad dollars.”
Ingenio commentary on mobile market opportunities