It’s a long video… if you are in a rush, here’s our summary of the various Q&A:

Q1. What do you look for in the people you like to work with?
WB: I like to work with people I like. I don’t look at their CVs or Grades to decide who can do what. In fact, I don’t even look if they have a degree. If you are working with people you don’t enjoy, please do yourself a favour, and leave the job and work with people you like. You’ll do better.

Q2. What kind of businesses do you like to invest in?
WB: I want to invest in businesses that are stable and where I can visualize it 10 years from now. Companies like Coke (soft drinks), Gillette (mens shaving blades) are examples of my investment choices. There are many others like GEICO (automotive insurance), Nebraska Furniture Mart (maximum sales from a single store location in the US), Iscar Metalworking Company (an industry leader in metal-cutting tools from Israel). I don’t have the understanding of technology-intensive business like software etc, and I stay away from them.

Q3. How do you do business valuation? How detailed is it?
WB: I like to invest in businesses where I have great comfort with the business owner. A paragraph is often sufficient to know the business value. The example being Nebraska Furniture Mart owned by Mrs. Rose Blumpkin, who recently turned 101 years, who has no formal education but has great common sense.

Q4. Tell us some of your bad decisions and what you learned from them?
WB: I invested in US Air though it was a difficult sector. Call it Temporary Insanity. I have learned that my bad decisions have happened when I had more cash than necessary. The airline industry is one step forward for mankind, a giant step backward for capitalism! And then there are other mistakes that conventional accounting does not capture, like the selling of 5% stake in Walt Disney (at $6m) within a year of buying it (at $4mn) in the 1960s. Today that stake is worth over a billion dollars.

Q5. Why not split the Berkshire Hathaway share to make it more affordable to investors?
WB: I think of my investors as a club or an audience in my presentation and we want long-term investors not traders. I don’t want high trading volumes for our shares. In fact, I will be happy with no trading at all. Our share price ($25k per share in recent times) has helped us maintain that seriousness and attract long-term investors.

Thanks for coming by!
MyOrbit Team

What’s this got to do with MyOrbit and Online Business? A lot! He has very recently started his own blog, through which he aims to share his views on various things impacting his life and industry, and because he has earned the stature – about the society at large as well.

Here’s the link: Amitabh Bachchan Blog

You can consider Amitabh Bachchan as a company himself (in India, he’s called BigB), and he has just started using his blog as a powerful communication channel with his stakeholders, which considering his profession are: fans worldwide and fellow industry professionals, and of course media. And like true bloggers, he has started answering questions as well, which will ensure the most people become regular visitors.

As we have been advising companies — both early-stage and established — a blog presents a powerful self-controlled media that you can use to share updates of important projects (upcoming films in case of BigB), respond to customer queries (fans in this case), and media reports (where necessary).

And here’s his post from today: Day 4 Blog

Okay, while the post titles are not really descriptive – he has just started using this medium – the content is great – and that’s what really matters because the readers know him already!

But if you are a start-up or if people don’t know you yet, then it will help to write more descriptive titles, because that will then show your blog posts in relevant online search-engines like Google, and bring people to your blog.

If you are serious about business relationships, you must be running a blog. The benefits far outweigh the efforts involved. Because the voice of business leaders reaches those they actually need to communicate with.

So, if you have any questions in setting-up or running your blog, please feel free to ask us. We have helped dozens of professionals and companies already. No, there’s no fee on it. We would be happy to set you up online in the best possible way.

cheers,
Shankar
on behalf of MyOrbit Team

A large number of small sellers at EBay are on a strike this week to protest at the treatment they are receiving from the company. Given that EBay generates revenues from the sellers (and not the buyers directly), the sellers are protesting against two things:

(a) The recent increases in fee which is making it very difficult for smaller sellers – who are not ‘power sellers’ (there are various fees that a seller has to pay: listing fee, final value fee, and then PayPal fee).

(b) The fact that EBay has removed the ability of sellers to give negative feedback on troublesome buyers. If you visit the forums, many sellers are especially annoyed this change, because it creates an uneven playing field where the buyer can get away with hurting a seller.

Different reports are quoting different numbers – but the fact is the Ebay listings and sales have gone down as a result of this. The management is sticking to its stand, while the small sellers want to raise us their voice as much as they can in the one week’s time, because many of them can’t afford to not sell for long.

The fee increase mentioned above actually reflects the fact that EBay is struggling with the ongoing damage caused by refunds/returns done by fake sellers and fake buyers – both of them are increasing – and unless EBay uses some new steps to police this aspect (which should involve trusted EBayers in some way to share market intelligence) – this trend will continue to hurt EBay and the majority of genuine EBayers who have been selling / buying on EBay for almost a decade now.

In fact, many trusted smaller sellers have closed down their EBay stores in the last 6-12 months due o the reducing profit margins available to a smaller seller. No doubt, new sellers will take their place because it is a large eco-system.

But this whole episode makes one thing very clear: If we can create a similar system as EBay and get some interested traffic to it, there is a demand for it, and it can take-off.

Here are some news reports on this topic:

CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/07/smbusiness/ebay_boycott.fsb/

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m08/i16/s01

And some of the best discussion is happening these blog posts:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/sellers-give-negative-feedback-on-ebay-changes

http://webpronews.com/topnews/2008/02/20/ebay-boycott-having-minimal-effect

If you use podcasting properly, you can send a recorded audio message/discussion to all employees or to specific customers who has agreed to receive the information. Podcasting for business can also be information made available to recipients without it being automatically delivered to their device – like sending a URL where the actual podcast is available. This practice is more friendly to the target audience as they can view the message at their convenience.

Podcasting for business can be used to send information to employees by way of their cell phones or handheld devices. For example, a recording by the CEO on the new market challenges.

The podcast is uploaded to a server or distribution service where it can automatically to broadcast to all intended recipients at the same time. This ensures that all employees get the same message at the same time. The receiving devices can be used to view the message at the recipients’ convenience and with the right software and structure a confirmation message can be transmitted back to allow the sender to know the information has been received.

Other uses of podcasting for business include sending information to customers through wireless devices or by sending an email to them giving them the address at which information about products and services are available through podcasting.

This is ideal for sharing information that customers may find useful. For example, some best practices, or an interview with a product/solution expert that answers FAQ on a given topic.

Distribution: Sending an email or text message direct ing them to a podcasting site is recommended when podcasting for business. For example, here’s a podcast from Harvard Law School

Respect Privacy: When using podcasts for sharing information with customers, please make sure the customer has agreed to receive the information, to protect your business from any charges of spamming.

Q1. How can I increase my sales through online channels?

Answer: This really is a big question with no one answer – otherwise everyone would have done it! What we have found from our experience of running multiple businesses is that there is a need for a structured approach to attract targeted visitors (prospects) and ensure that the entire chain of events is planned – till the time an order is placed.

Many services companies will say “oh, this may work for product companies, but not for us”. This is just a lame excuse by someone who fears change. We have seen successful examples of services companies generating almost 80% revenues from their website + other online channels. The need is to create an online platform (say, a part of your website/blog) which shares valuable information with prospects, and a system which can do all of what a physical sales person can do. With Audio and Video possible on web-pages, a good website can generate more sales than a team of salespeople, at a fraction of the cost. The only expenses you have to make are for online marketing, for which you can see other posts on this site.

Q2. We have built a great website…now how do we promote it?

Answer: Do you know which places your clients and prospects visit often? That’s the place you need to advertise in some way. Consider buying text links, we have found them best on performance/price. Some sites also offer paid articles referring your site – those are good too. For example, our clients often visit sites like: www.cio.com, www.cfo.com, www.ft.com, and many smaller sites – all of them are good options to advertise. Small sites and blogs can give a great return on online ad spend. So invest some effort in that. Over the last 6 months, we have developed a way to identify such small sites relevant to each business, and you can contact us for more info.

Q3. What are the options to increase my online sales?

Answer: There are numerous options, and each product/service should plan a suitable mix of them: Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, Text Link or Banner Advertising on High Traffic Sites, Sponsored Articles on Sites or Blogs, Email Marketing, Mobile SMS Marketing (this is a very exciting area, and will evolve rapidly in 2-3 years – if you are a consumer products/services company – you just can’t afford to ignore this).

Q4. How much should I spend on online marketing?

Answer: Just like in a physical, brick & mortar business – your online marketing budget would have two components: (1) Brand Building (2) Product/Service Marketing. Now, if you already have a known brand, then skip (1), and spend effort and money only on (2), which is more focused towards earning dollars by selling your Product and Services. Plan to spend up to 10% of the sales volume, and spend in phases to ensure results are coming. So if you have a product/service of $500 value, and you want to sell to 200 customers, then your desired sales volume = $100,000. So you should plan to spend up to $10,000 in online marketing. This does not include your fixed costs, like staff salary and business operating expenses.

Now, it’s important to note that the amount you spend will depend on the gross margin you have on the product/service. So you can choose to spend just 4-5% as well. But 10% is on the upper side, and will perform very competitively to physical sales people. If you are spending more, you are probably not executing well and there is room for improvement.

Q5. What kind of team and skills do I need to increase my sales online?

Answer: The team can be very lean, but must understand your business and products/services well, and also understand how information is shared in the Internet space. Many Small and Medium businesses are able to do it (with some initial guidance) with just 1-2 full-time staff because they can easily coordinate with the sales and production teams. But its a different problem in large companies: the marketing departments often don’t have the skills and support to generate online sales, and the sales teams don’t have access to any part of the website – so it’s a difficult situation.

Our recommendation is to give the responsibility of online sales also to the Sales/Product Teams, and give them the tools and training to make it happen. Regardless of your company size, new media tools can be (and should be!) used successfully. If you are not sure about your team’s understanding/skill of operate your blog (write and discuss with audience), you can contact us for inputs as we have done it for a few companies in 2007. At its core, your website is an extension of your key business people and presentations – and is best suited to generate business leads.

We hope you found these answers useful. You are welcome to ask your questions on how to increase online sales.

Wishing you a great 2008!
Shankar AVSB
CEO, MyOrbit

So you can think of Kindle EBook Reader as a ‘large-screen pre-paid cellphone’, through which Amazon aims to galvanize portable book reading like Apple did to portable music through ipod and iphone. As you can see, Kindle is released just in time for the holiday season! How many gadgets can we really have on us?

Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg talked to Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezor, who unveiled the Kindle, a $400 wireless device – purpose built for E-Book reading. Bezos says Kindle will make reading electronic books much easier. It uses 3G cellular connection to download the content directly from Amazon’s site, and Amazon will take care of the complexity behind the interacting with the cellular. What do you say?

Some serious analysis: The global EBook market is estimated around $25 million, and if this device stands up to the promise, then that market can essentially double. The price point of $400 looks high – its aimed for entry and holiday shopping.

In two quarters, we can expect them to sell on Amazon marketplace under in a more attractive $250-290 range. And if the product does well, which company is best placed to compete? Device manufacturers: RIM with an advanced Blackberry, and Google Books + Nokia with a new large screen version, could be top alternatives.

In fact MyOrbit has a couple of EBooks getting ready for publication, and we will check if Amazon has some special deals for publishers. We will share updates from our discussion with Amazon. Stay tuned.

This latest podcast from Harvard Law School features an article from the November 2007 issue of their “Negotiation newsletter”. It talks about how thinking broadly about your career goals can increase your value and opportunities both inside and outside a hiring organization.

The original post and podcast are available here.
And here’s the main site for more info: www.pon.harvard.edu/

Here’s a video by WebProNews that speaks with Google’s Gabriel Stricker, Brewster Kahle of the Open Content Alliance, and the Boston Library Consortium’s Executive Director Barbara Preece about their efforts in this direction. Now, there have been a few controversial issues among the various platforms, but all agree that the common goal is to increase the availability of paper books and periodicals in the online world.

• Microsoft beat Google on Wednesday to invest in social Web site Facebook, agreeing to pay $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the Web phenomenon – thereby valuing Facebook at $15 billion (!)
  • Our thoughts: Is Facebook 10 times the value of YouTube (which definitely is growing as the largest media and information sharing community online)? This looks more like wanting to stay in the “online social-site play” than business value. Microsoft will of course like to believe otherwise because they have already bought it.
  • Microsoft is quoting the 50 million users of today (and projected 300 million in 2-3 years) as the source of value. With $240m, you can create similar user communities on CNN and BBC – potentially getting over 100 million on its own – and with majority stake. Wonder if these alternatives were explored at all.
• Microsoft also got exclusive rights to sell ads on Facebook outside of the US as part of the investment (60% of Facebook users are outside US)
  • This is the real benefit. Its similar to how Google bought ad rights for MySpace for $900 million in August last year. Now MySpace was supposed to have 100 million users, but analysis revealed 43 million. Along similar lines, its possible that Facebook has about 25 million real users (or about 15 million non-US users).
  • MSN Ad Network (similar to Google’s ad network) will benefit with a captive demand – and will keep MSN Ad Network alive (maybe this was the real thought behind the deal – and also the reason why Google didn’t push it hard – as they already have what Micorsoft wanted most). Without considering any additional deals by Microsoft into Facbook, it will need $120 million of ad sales to break-even on this investment. We’ll keep an eye on this.

This video was selected by WeShow

My reading of the situation: it’s not bad at all compared to the difficult times we have seen before over the last 2 decades; so let’s not get jittery for every pothole on the road. And as far as I know, businesses that are using online channels today to reach customers worldwide are really growing at an attractive pace. So if you are deriving over 90% of your revenues from offline methods – BDMs, Sales Staff, Channel Partners, etc- you are at risk. I have absolutely no doubt in that because your cost structures are just too high compared to your competition which may be using online methods to get up to 50% of their revenues. I can say this because we recently helped a business in increasing the online sales component while reducing the sales force effort. It’s possible and it’s happening.

Stay Tuned!
Shankar AVSB, CEO, MyOrbit.tv