Often times when someone searches for a local business, or category of businesses, Google will show a “7 Box” of local results along with a map. The normal results generally come after this. For example, here’s what I found after searching for [chapel hill coffee].

If you click on the name of the business you will go to their website. To the right of the name is a tally of reviews and “Place page.” That’s a link to their profile in Google Places.

The Place page is a collection of all sorts of data that Google has collected from around the web like reviews, hours of operation, and pictures. The more information Google can find on the web about a business, the more authoritative that business is, thus bringing it higher in those local search results. In local search, mentioning a business, it’s address and telephone number is like a vote of confidence in that business, just like links are for websites in normal search results.

You’re not at the mercy of what Google can find about you, though. Business owners can claim their listing and manually add content. The more content you add, the more Google likes you. So, get out there and claim your listing, and add as much to it as possible. Do a Google search for your business name and city or find yourself on Google Maps to get to your place page. Then, just click the link at the top right that says “Business owner?”

To prove yourself, Google will call the phone number associated with your listing and have you enter a code. It only takes a few minutes. Plus, once you’ve claimed your listing you’ll be able to see statistics about how often your listing shows up for searchers and how they interact with it.

One caveat: These listings are non-transferable. So, don’t have an employee claim your listing while signed in with their personal Google or Gmail account. Generally, the easiest thing to do is create a new Google account to use for the business, and claim the listing with that account.

You should be issuing press releases regularly for two reasons.

1. To get increased media visibility and coverage, giving you better brand recognition, trust and authority.
2. For increased traffic and links for your website, giving you more sign-ups and revenue.

Now, media visibility is a very different ballgame from 15 years ago. Back then, press releases were just for the press. Hardly anyone outside the media and PR firms ever read them. Now that everything is online, press releases show up in people’s search results, in Google News and Yahoo News, and on industry websites.

So, I say it’s okay to depart from the traditional style of release. I’m in favor of adding more background info and color to releases. Now, that doesn’t mean you should think of it as sales copy. Oh no. Keep it objective, but interesting.

If your release can stand on its own as a well written article then it’s more likely to make a splash. An editor may decide to run it with only minor edits to fill some space. Consumers who find your release online will be more likely to read through, and then click through to your website. News websites and blogs may syndicate your release.

I’m not going to teach you the format for releases, but when you’re ready just google [how to write a press release] and you’ll find plenty of sites to tell you the proper formatting rules. Stick to the standard format.

Spend plenty of time on your headline. That’s what will make or break your release. Remember that reporters and editors will respond to headlines differently than general readers. You can tailor your headline for pick-up by established media, or for general readership. Ideally you’ll write a headline that appeals to all of your audiences.

Write it about anything new: new products, new services, new facilities, new charitable efforts, new management… you get the picture. Your release needs to be newsworthy. It does not have to be ground breaking or amazing, just fresh.

Once you have your release, and compelling headline, it’s time to actually distribute it. If possible, post it on your website first. That way search engines know you had the content first.

Then you can e-mail it to all relevant media outlets. (Visit their websites and look for the “Newsroom” link.) You can send your release in email format – no attachments! – to the main Editors’ address, but it’s even better to hit the specific departments and reporters that cover the subject of your release.

Finally, you’ll want some form of online distribution. This is what will get you into Google News and relevant websites. Reporters and editors also comb the feeds from online distribution, so it’s a double whammy combined with your e-mail to them.

There’s a great and free press release distribution website, PRLog. I suggest you start there, as the paid distribution options can get expensive quickly. PRLog will let you set up a company profile with full contact info and logo. Your release can include a photo and up to three links, depending on its length. One of my favorite features is you can schedule your release. So, set up your online release ahead of time.

You should try to send your release out on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. Mondays are too busy. People are just trying to finish the week on Fridays. Releases are often released first thing in the morning, but you might have fewer competitors during lunch time.

You might get a call from the media for more details and such, so be prepared. Have some good pictures at high resolution on hand to send upon request.

Now the fun part: you can sit back and watch. Search Google for your headline or random sentences from your release to see where it shows up! Your distribution service should also provide some data on how many viewers you had there.

Hopefully someone will come in holding a newspaper with your picture and story in it. That’s what happened to J & J’s Deli after the release I wrote went out. Here’s the article.

Get those releases out. Do it every few months. Don’t have time? Hire me. Call 919-636-0953 or e-mail me.

To figure out your conversion rate you need two numbers.  You need to know how many total times you had the opportunity to make a conversion – e.g. website visitors, phone calls, or walk-in customers.  I’ll refer to this number as impressions for the sake of clarity.  You also need to know the number of successful conversions.

Note: Be sure to measure these over the same time period!

Then there’s a little math.  Don’t worry, I’m a professional.  Whip out your calculator and key in:

That will give you your conversion rate.  Bump the decimal place to the right two spaces and you’ll have it as a percentage.

Example: Your website got 328 visits and you made 16 sales.  16 divided by 328 equals 0.04878.  Bump the decimal over and you have a 4.878% conversion rate.

Okay, that’s the math.  What about getting those numbers?  Obviously, if you have an ecommerce site it’s pretty easy to figure out the number of visitors and the number of sales.  It’s a little trickier if customers visit your website, then call in an order or visit the store.

The answer here is training.  Train your staff to ask callers how they found you.  Train your clerks to ask while they ring someone up.  You can keep a clipboard by the register and the phone where your staff can mark down the answers.  Heck, you could even use a fancy spreadsheet.

Spend some time figuring out how to phrase your question.  Be specific.  You probably don’t want to ask your regulars “How did you hear about us?”  You’ll do better with “How did you find us today?”

If you’re tracking phone conversions be sure to tally how many total calls there were in addition to the number of sales made on the phone and how people found your number.

Another option is to get an 800 number that forwards to your main line.  Then put that number on your website instead of your regular number.  Now you can track the number of calls that came from your website.  Of course, that’s another monthly expense.

Now, on the web there are a lot of ways to track conversions.  For instance, you can define goals and funnels in Google Analytics or use Google Conversion Tracking. There are great click-tracking systems you can install like Crazy Egg or ClickTale. That’s a separate article though.

This post first appeared in my e-mail newsletter.

A conversion is when someone looking at your offerings decides to take the action you want them to take, i.e. making a purchase or providing you with their contact information.  On a website, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who make a purchase or give you their e-mail address.

When you know what your conversion rate is and what the average value of a conversion is, you can calculate return on investment, ROI, very accurately.  When you know your ROI you can make the most informed and profitable decisions about the allocation of your marketing budget.  The higher your conversion rate the greater your ROI.

Next month I’ll get into measuring conversion rates, and I’ll have a special offer for newsletter subscribers who want some help getting a system in place to provide these metrics.  Now, I want to tell you about how to increase that conversion rate.

The most effective, simple way of conversion optimization is to simply put yourself in the shoes of your customers, clients or donors.  Walk through the process you expect them to use when they do business with you.  This could mean walking into your store and trying to see it as a customer would.  If you do e-commerce then you need to go to your website, browse a bit and make a purchase.

Every business transaction follows this model: Visit, Obstacle, Goal.  You have visitors and you have a goal you want them to perform.  In between is what keeps them from converting, obstacles.

What obstacles do your put between your visitors and them taking your desired action?  Obviously, some obstacles can’t be removed, like having to reach for their wallet.  If they have to fill out a form on your website then too many fields to fill out can be an unnecessary obstacle.  Every click and every keystroke a visitor makes is an obstacle.  Try to make your website require as little clicking and typing as possible to carry out a transaction.

In a store there are many possible obstacles.  The organization of your products might create obstacles.  If people can’t find what they need quickly they’re less likely to follow through with a purchase.  Your employees might seem disinterested, unhelpful, or even rude.  Poor people create obstacles not just to making a purchase, but to feeling comfortable in a store.

Service providers often create a big obstacle with their price tag.  It’s a lot of money to agree to up front.  So, many of us change the goal.  Instead of going for the sale right off the bat we offer a free consultation or free estimate.  This gives us an opportunity to chip away at the price-tag-obstacle before the client has to face that decision.  Plus, a no-risk goal will always convert better than a goal with a price tag.

Improving your conversion rate is the the process of making it easier to do business with you.  There are more rigorous methods of going about it, such as split-testing, but I bet you can figure out some ways to improve just by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes.

Don’t miss the follow-up to this post, Conversion Tracking You Can Do Yourself, Cheap.

This post first appeared in my e-mail newsletter.

The sky's the limit when you expand toward the horizon.

There are two directions to grow your business, vertically and horizontally.  Vertical growth is selling more to your existing market and expanding your share of that market.  Horizontal growth is selling new products or services experiences to your existing market and adapting your offerings to fit new markets.  At least that’s the way I look at it.  An MBA would tell you that horizontal growth is all about acquiring companies in other sectors.  That’s not very useful to most small businesses.

When you start thinking about growing your business horizontally it’s really helpful to properly understand what it is you’re selling.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m sure you have a masterful understanding of your products and the services you offer.  

That’s not what you’re selling though.  People don’t buy a drill because they want a drill.  They don’t buy cold medicine because they want cold medicine.  People buy drills because they want holes.  They buy cold medicine because they want to stop coughing and be able to breath clearly.

You’re not selling products and services.  You’re selling experiences.  If you happen to sell drills  you’re selling the experience of hole creation.  That experience has real value to a variety of markets.  Drills can be marketed to construction companies, whose work depends on making holes.  They can be marketed to the do-it-yourself enthusiast, who finds great value in the freedom to create holes.  As a final example, drills are valued by arts and crafts types because drills allow them to adapt and create new things that just needed a hole or two.

Each of these groups buys drills, but they respond to different packaging.  The foreman wants commercial grade reliability and power.  The do-it-yourselfer seeks economy and versatility.  The crafts person might desire the ability to make small holes in delicate materials.

OK, enough about drills.  What experience do you sell?

Restaurants sell a dining experience, where someone else does the cooking, cleaning and worrying.  Consultants sell learning experiences that result in some sort of improvement.  Cafes sell a variety of experiences without even thinking about it.  They sell a social experience, a morning caffeine experience, a warm studying experience and more.

So, how do you turn that into horizontal growth?  Package it.

A restaurant could offer a romantic dinner package, with champagne and a private candlelit table.  For lunch they could offer a business lunch package with two lunch dishes, two sides, and two drinks, plus you get to sit at a four-person table even though you only have two.

Give it some thought, and I bet you can think of a way to package what you already sell so that it appeals to a type of person that isn’t already shopping with you as much as you’d like.

Another opportunity for horizontal growth is selling something you already have, but don’t sell.  There may be a byproduct of your operation that has value to someone.  For example, when coffee is decaffeinated the extracted caffeine is sold to make caffeine pills.

More likely, you have knowledge that you aren’t leveraging.  If you own a plant shop then you should offer weekend gardening classes.  Once you have that down, why not write a book or make an instructional DVD?  It’s insanely easy to self-publish these days.

Whatever you end up discovering and packaging, you’ll need to market it.  Email marketing remains the most cost effective method of reaching out directly to people.  Direct mail still works, but can get very costly, especially if you want to purchase a mailing list based on demographics.  Direct mail is pretty affordable if you just do a standard postcard.  You can send a custom color postcard out to your customer base for about $0.50 per person.  E-mail is more like 2 or 3 cents per person.  Either way, when you launch a new package send out a limited-time discount or coupon to your list to get things rolling.

If you find a package that’s popular you can try repackaging it as a continuity program.  You know, a something-of-the-month club.  You could create a romantic dinner club, with easy monthly billing.  Something-of-the-month clubs have been around a long time.  The first that I know of is the Book Of The Month Club, which started in 1926.  Today, if you google “of the month club” you’ll get 10.2 million results.  Be sure to treat your customers fairly in your continuity programs.  Do that, and it shouldn’t be hard to at least break even, assuming you already have the ‘something’ to sell each month.

This post first appeared in my monthly small business newsletter.

I have a question for you this month.

How many marketing messages (commercials, phone calls, junk mail, web ads, everything.) do you think the average American encounters every day? Seriously, stop reading for a second, and take a wild guess.  Once you have your guess, read on for the answer.

Marketing is everywhere.  Can you think of a single website that doesn’t have marketing in it?  They are few and far between.  You can’t drive down the street without seeing some marketing.  Check your mail or pick up the phone, and it’s there.

Our brains have learned that there are many many distractions in our lives that will lead us to parting with money or at least wasting time.  We’re used to it.  So we tune the vast majority of it out.  We are all skilled at ignoring the noise.

Ready for the answer?  First, let me guess what you guessed.  I bet you guessed somewhere between three hundred and a thousand.  The actual number is a bit hard to measure as you might imagine.  According to Bill Glazer (A very successful marketer for those who don’t know the name) the average American encounters 3,191 marketing messages and ads per day.  According to J. Walker Smith of Chapel Hill, NC based Yankelovich, in a 2005 USA Today article, the number is between 3,500 and 5,000.  Today, it’s likely even higher.

So, why did I spend all this time just to get to that number?  Because, I want you to understand just how vital it is for your marketing messages to break through the noise and get noticed.  Before long you’ll be competing with ten thousand other marketing efforts every day.  To really get that, it helps to think about the question before you learn the answer.

You have to stand out from the competition to take the lead.  That goes for websites and search engine marketing in addition to everything else.  When your website uses the same looks, lines and messages as your competitors you stay a part of the background noise.  When your page comes up in search results it has to grab the searcher’s attention to get clicked.  (Being the first result is a great way to get noticed!)  When your pay per click ad shows up it will be right next to other ads.  It has to stand out.

Get the point?

So, how do you stand out?  I say be creative, bold, and real.  Bill Glazer will tell you to be outrageous.  Don’t be afraid to do something different.  Make bold statements.  Never underestimate the importance of an eye-catching headline.  Whatever you do, be real.  We’ve all learned to expect phoniness and misleading statements from marketing.  Stand out by being yourself: honest and human.

One last tip.  Stop copying your competition’s marketing strategies.  The best that can come of that is that you’ll keep pace, a little behind the rest.  The worst case is when they’re copying you too.  You’ll end up with marketing about as effective as a photocopy of a photocopy is pretty.

As usual, if you’d like some help making your business stand out, get in touch with me.  You can hit that reply button right now and get your message straight into my primary in-box.

Know someone who might benefit from this message?  Forward it on!

To the Success of Small Businesses Everywhere,

Peter Grandstaff

PS: Hang Gliding is amazing!  I can’t recommend Kitty Hawk Kites strongly enough.  They also provide a nice example of standing out.  Once you pay for your lesson you get all of it, no matter what.  If you can’t make it, the wind won’t cooperate, or you just chicken out they will give you a ‘wind-check’ to come back and get whatever you missed at no additional charge.  Wind-checks never expire, and they are transferable!  Have you ever heard of such a thing!?

This month, I have some tips for marketing to the local student population and a little news about Google.  First, a quick update: Canine College is continuing to fill it’s board and train program.  If you missed last month’s story about their SEO and Pay-Per-Click campaigns, you can read it on my blog.  I’ll try to tone down the internet marketing and talk about strategies you can put to work today.

School is winding back up, and the local economy is breathing a collective sigh of relief.  Around here many markets are kept above water by the steady influx of cash brought in by all the students.  Just counting the three largest universities here in the Triangle, there are suddenly 70,757 students around.  Hopefully, we’ve seen the worst of this recession, and we’ll see the horizon by the new year.

What can you do right now to help your cash flow?  Promote.

Attract that student crowd with student discounts, free wi-fi, eco-friendliness, and, of course, sex.  (Go turn on MTV for 30 seconds if you’re scoffing at that last one.)

Get the message out with Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail.  You are e-mailing your customer base aren’t you?

Keep new promotions rolling.  Keep yourself relevant and fresh.  If you haven’t already, go sit down and map out a calendar of promotions to cover from now through New Year’s.  Each one doesn’t have to be the most clever thing you’ve ever done.  Just try to map it all out, and worry about fine tuning later.

Okay, back to attraction.

Student discounts appeal to all students.  You don’t even have to give much away.  The psychological impact of the simple fact that you have a special just for them is tremendous.   They will automatically identify with it, and feel welcomed.  It doesn’t have to be a flat student discount, just do something special that requires a student ID.

Free wi-fi will bring you students.  It will also bring you low spenders who hang around for a long time.  You’ll have to figure out if it works for you.  Simply having it available, even for a price, can be a valuable selling proposition.  Maybe make it free to students only.

Eco-friendliness just makes sense.  Go green and don’t look back.  Just make sure your customers know what you’re doing to help!  You can even figure out a way to get them involved in your eco-efforts.  They’ll engage, and you’ll build lasting relationships with your customers.

Sex sells.  I’m not inclined to elaborate much on that one here.  If you’re really interested, check out this conference.  One of the speakers will be the Senior Marketing Manager for Men’s Care at Unilever, makers of Axe body spray.

It’s not enough to just make the promotion though.  You have to get the word out too.  Don’t forget that the college crowd is very internet oriented. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and blogs are all great places to reach this audience.  So is the college newspaper and its website.

The social web is where the college demographic congregates now.  The worldwide majority of Facebook users are in the 18 to 25 age range.  Oddly enough, the 18 to 24 age group is less likely to visit Twitter than the 55+ age brackets!

And now, News of Google.

The search giant has announced a revised algorithm — that’s a series of rules and steps to carry out a function, in this case the indexing the the Web for its search results.  They have codenamed it Caffeine, and you can preview it now.  Initial tests seem to show that it returns many more results than the old algorithm in half the time.

It’s also supposed to be better with relevancy, but that’s more subjective. Personally, I’d say they did great with it.  My sites rank even better.  Canine College even makes it onto the first page for the search [dog training raleigh]!

Well, get the fall started right and I hope you have a great September.  The Better Half and I are planning a trip to the Outer Banks to do some hang gliding.  Hopefully I’ll have pictures in next month’s issue!

www.PeterGrandstaff.com – SEO Web Marketing & Design

As promised, here is the web version of my July e-mail newsletter.  Read on to learn how a small business is making more sales now than before the recession! Thanks to SEO & PPC advertising this dog trainer is selling out his high-end program

I bring news of success in this recession.  Best of all, the methods used are accessible to all of you.  If you’re not up to reading all this, scroll on down and at least check out the pictures.  Then, imagine what this could do for your business.

SEO & PPC Case Study: Canine College of Chapel Hill

Gene has been working with dogs for over 25 years.  Locally, he’s known as The Dog Guy.  I have been Webmaster of his website, www.cc-ch.com, since early 2006.

Gene is a skillful marketer in his own right.  He owns the local minor league baseball team’s mascot, Lucky The Wonderdog.  He has self-published a quality children’s story book – also available to read online as a virtual book!  He holds multiple patents on dog related inventions.  Of course, he’s an excellent dog trainer too.

So, what do I do for Gene?  The most important things I do are Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising with Google Adwords.

Background: Canine College of Chapel Hill offers a board and train program.  Drop off your dog for 4 weeks with $1,470 and pick it up afterwards along with follow-up courses.  Well business hadn’t been very good since the economy tanked.  So, Gene asked me to target Raleigh — the largest city nearby.  Canine College is about a half hour from Raleigh, but that’s not a bad drive for a 4 week stay.

The Campaign: I implemented a site-wide SEO strategy focusing on the most important keywords as defined by keyword research.  Monthly adjustments were made and changes in results placement tracked.  A limited amount of link-building was also carried out.

In tandem to this, several geo-targeted Google Adwords campaigns were deployed.  The ads were continually split tested to improve performance.  Additionally keyword performance was tracked and adjustments made on a monthly basis.

Split testing was an integral aspect of the the Adwords campaigns.  By constantly running two slightly different ads side-by-side we were able to determine what copy worked and what didn’t.

Gene did his part too.  Together, we made frequent updates to the content of his site.  Search engines love to see an actively maintained website.

The Results: Gene sold out his Board & Train Program for July at $1470 per dog!  August is almost full already.  Every dog he’s currently training is from Raleigh or Fayetteville.  Gene never got business from Raleigh, let alone Fayetteville, when he relied on the Yellow Pages and posters.  He wasn’t even selling out before the recession!

How? He dominates the search engine results!  Gene’s site is the first result when you google [dog training durham], or [dog training chapel hill].  So far he’s only made it to the top of the second page of results for [dog training raleigh].  Nonetheless, when people search for dog training in Raleigh they can’t miss Gene’s ad above the search results!

Chapel Hill: Canine College gets first ad, first local result, and first organic result

Raleigh: Gene's ad above the search results

Durham: First organic result, Only ad, and a local business result!

Gene is getting 46.91% of his traffic from Google searches.  On top of that, 15.64% comes in from Google Adwords — mostly from Raleigh.  His site gets a good steady stream of traffic for a local business, with over 400 unique visitors in the last 30 days.  The average visitor spends about 3 minutes on the site and looks at 4.7 pages.

He pays under a dollar per click for his ads, on average.  Continual improvements to the ads have taken the click through ratio from 0.5% up to just under 3%. Plenty of those clickers and searchers are converting into happy customers.

Since visitors in Raleigh live too far away to be interested in lessons, the ads shown in Raleigh focus on the in-board program.  When a user clicks the ad it takes them straight to the page about the in-board program.  Searchers nearer by see ads that mention both in-board and lesson programs.

Thanks to a well managed SEO & Google Adwords Campaign, Canine College is moving forward with its expansion plans and is faring the recession well!

If you would like to see your website bring you plenty of business I can’t recommend SEO and PPC methods enough!  Strong placement in search engine results is priceless.  Google Adwords allows you to get on that front page before your SEO has time to work its magic.  Once you’re placing well, the ads continue to strengthen your presence on those results pages.

Contact me today to learn how these strategies could be applied to your company!

This month’s issue will feature a case study. I’ll explain how exactly one of my clients is doing more business now than he was before the recession!

I’m going to go ahead and post the images from this case study now. The full text will go out by e-mail only in the next 48 hours. After a week I’ll post the full text here on this blog. Subscribe to the RSS feed if e-mail isn’t your bag.

WARNING: These images contain graphic depictions of a small business dominating search engine results.  Click at your own risk.

Dominating Search Engine Results - Durham

Dominating Search Engine Results - Chapel Hill

SEO Takes Time. Google Adwords Gives Instant Results!

[Update: Two images were removed, as I realized the results were 'personalized' for me by Google. These images are all the usual results everyone sees.]

Today’s also my birthday.  I’m 29.

Newsletter Contents

• And now for something completely different…

This month I resolved to exclude Google from the newsletter.  I was going to talk about customer retention strategies.  It’s all the rage these days, what with the economy and all.

Then I watched a video on YouTube. This video blew my mind. It was the first announcement of a new Google product that will change the world, and how we communicate. So, I’ve decided to depart from my usual format and tell you about what I saw.

Google’s developer conference, Google I/O 09, took place May 27 and 28, this past Wednesday and Thursday.  Thursday evening I saw on twitter that the Google Wave Developer Preview from the conference was available on YouTube.  Wow.

Google Wave is now being tested and extended by all the conference attendees, with the first accounts outside Google.  It is a ‘communication and collaboration tool’ to be released later this year.  It integrates the functionality of e-mail, instant messaging, collaborative authoring, media sharing, and discussion forums into a single interface using a single protocol.  The whole thing, server, protocol, interface, is free and open.

Okay, honestly, you have to see it.  It’s such a paradigm shift that I can’t just write up an explanation that will truly impress upon you what Google Wave is.  I’ll do my best though, as the video is geared toward a tech-literate audience, and is an hour twenty minutes long.  If you want to dive in, they start showing Wave itself at about 7:30 in the video.

Watch it on YouTube

Here’s the interface to Google Wave:

This all happens inside a web browser.  On the left are your folders and contacts.  In the center is your in-box on the right is a Wave.  A Wave is very versatile.  It can be an instant messaging conversation, an e-mail, a photo gallery, a collaboratively authored document, or even a game of chess.  Basically it can carry out any type of communication we do on the internet.

All these varied forms of communication have a unified in-box.  If you send someone an e-mail, and they open it while you have it open you’ll see their response in real-time.  If someone adds photos to a shared gallery the gallery pops up in your in-box.  The Wave adapts to any usage as needed.

Each user on a Wave can edit the Wave.  You could post a list of action items for your team, add the team as users, and everyone could add, comment on, and assign items.  You would see each others changes in real-time, with colored markers showing where others are editing in the document.  You and your spouse could label your vacation pictures together from any two computers before embedding the Wave on a website for your friends to see.

Of course, with everyone editing something you need a way to fix things, and see who did what.  So each Wave has a time line.  You can rewind, and play back all the changes to a Wave.  If you and a friend are playing chess on a Wave you can rewind and see the whole game history, move by move.

Sounds pretty amazing, but I for one would be frustrated that all my data lived on Google’s servers.  Remember how I said Google Wave was free and open?  All the specifications and software will be freely available.  Your company can run its own Wave server on your own domain name.  Wave accounts on your server will be compatible with any other Wave account and you can send Waves to anyone.  However, any waves that are only sent between your internal users will never leave your server.

You’ll be able to have complete control over your data.  That’s what will allow Google Wave to change the world.  If they made it proprietary and kept everyone’s data on their own servers then it would never achieve worldwide use.

One feature that is particularly amazing is real-time translation.  If I speak English and Pierre speaks French, we can type to each other in our native languages and Wave will translate our messages in real-time.  It can handle 40 languages.  It’s amazing.  I was awestruck when I saw it.  It’s at 1:12:00 in the video.

Okay, I’m going on pretty long here, so I’ll wrap up with some highlights and further reading links for those interested.

• contextual spell checking – It doesn’t check spelling against a dictionary, but within the context of how you use the word.  So, if you write ‘their’ when you meant ‘they’re’ it will catch it.  It’s so good that often it is so confident that it will automatically correct your spelling.  If you type ‘Icland is an icland.”  It will automatically be changed to ‘Iceland is an island.’
• drag and drop instant sharing – drag some photos from your computer into a wave and your recipient will see thumbnails before you’ve even finished uploading.
• extensible – anyone can create new gadgets and features, like surveys, integration with other websites, or polls and surveys.
• embeddable – Waves can be embedded in websites and comments made on the website will appear in the wave, while comments added to the wave show up on the web.

You can learn more at wave.google.com or check out a good article at CIO.com

Cheers,

Peter

Images courtesy of