Offshore Outsourcing Conflicts

Offshore outsourcing means the practice of hiring an external organization to perform some business functions in a country, other than the one where the products or services are actually developed or manufactured.

It can be contrasted with off shoring in which functions are performed in a foreign country by a foreign subsidiary.

Some opponents point out that the practice of sending work overseas by countries with higher wages reduces their own domestic employment and investment.

There are so may customer service job as well as jobs in infotech sectors are affected, on counties such as United States and United Kingdom have been potentially affected.


The conflicts

There are some other companies have different points of view on the impact on the various societies affected, which reflects the attitude of Protectionism versus Free Trade.

Some other companies see it as a potential threat to the domestic job market in the developed world and ask for government protective measures, while others, including countries who received the work, see it as an opportunity.

Free trade advocates suggest economies as a whole will obtain a net benefit from labor offshoring, but it is unclear if the displaced received a net benefit.

There’s another one issue that offshoring of technical services has brought more to is the value the value of education is the value of education is an alleged solution to trade-related displacements.

Education may no longer be a comparative advantage of high-wage nations because the cause of education may be lower in the nations involved in the controversy.

Is it rue that education is usually considered helpful to competitiveness in general, but an “education arms race” with low wage nations will not pay off.

Business Process Outsourcing, Increases the Flexibility of Business Organization

BPO is a big impact to all business sectors, because it helps to increase the flexibility of the company. It contains the transmission of processes along with the associated operational activities and responsibilities, to a third party with at least a guaranteed equal service level and where the client contains a firm grip over the (activities of the) vendor for mutual long term success.

Most services provided by BPO vendors are offered on a fee-for-service basis. This helps a company becoming more flexible by transforming fixed into variable costs. A variable cost structure helps a company responding to changes in required capacity and does not requisite a company in investing in assets and hereby making the company more flexible.

Outsourcing of for instance a fraction of the workforce provides firm flexibility and reconfiguring resource deployments and reduce response times to major environmental changes.

BPO has another way to contribute to the company’s flexibility is that a company is able to focus on it’s core competencies, without being burdened by the demands of bureaucratic dictate. All of their key employees are herewith released from performing non-core or administrative processes and can invest more time and energy and building the firms core businesses.

It means, which of the main value to drivers to focus on; customer intimacy, product leadership, or operate excellence. It exemplified by for instance in the case of Dell.
Focuses to one of these drivers instead of more help a company create a competitive edge.

There’s another way or third way in which BPO increases organizational flexibility is by increasing the speed of business processes. They are using techniques such as, linear programming reduces cycle time and inventory levels, which reduces the company’s slack. Supply chain management with the effective use of supply chain partners and business outsourcing that increases the speed of several business processes, such as throughput in the case of manufacturing company.

Lastly, in the organizational life cycle, flexibility is seen as a stage. For an instance in the case of Nortel, which used to be a very rigid a bureaucratic organization. BPO helping the company to transform from a bureaucratic organization into a very agile organization by means of BPO. Ambitious growth goals can hereby help maintain by a company, which do not fit with regular incumbent strategies. Therefore BPO allows firms t retain their entrepreneurial speed and agility, which they would sacrifice in order to become efficient and they greatly expanded.

Link Building; How it works

Link Building is one of the most important factors in top search engine ranking. Link building is as much having to link to as it is about getting the link. Without any links, you cannot have the other. There are two elements of link building; Integration and accretion.

Elements of Integration
Integration is defined as the process of incorporating parts, components, elements into a larger defined unit, set or whole. A site that does not have integral desired by its audience or its admirers, it means that the site owner who build his site solely from his singular perspective and does not involve his audience within the process of development, by default, build failure directly in the design.
If a site with a full integration addresses the needs of all audience members, including, customers, employees, prospects, industry associations and competitors. Each of these people must be understood and addressed. By doing this, you will be creating a Web site that has a value and meaning to the widest set of users. Therefore you will give yourself a significantly higher likelihood of attracting links to your Web site.

Element of Accretion
Accretion is the other link building element. Accretion is defined as an increase by natural growth or addition. Accretion manifests itself in two forms.
The first form is through viral awareness. One audience member recommends your site to a Web user who then becomes a part of your audience.
Standard mechanisms for this might be "send to a friend" e-mail components or icons for social recommendation sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. Links to such mechanisms simply should be standard architecture on today's Web sites.
Not including these elements makes this viral recommendation strategy much more difficult for your audience, consequently causing an architectural failure within accretion.
Without integration, accretion is impossible. This is why we see Web site owners delving into unnatural link building means.
Without an integral site that addresses the needs of all audience members, buying links and engaging in link farms becomes the only option. Accretion simply cannot happen without integration.

The Importance of Keywords

Definition of keyword

Also known as a keyphrase, a keyword is one or more words that represent a key aspect of a web page, document, paragraph, image or other media.

Importance of keywords

The importance of keywords to your website is paramount to its marketing success.

If your website does not have any text (very unlikely), then you might be an exception.

Although even large image content web sites have keywords within the code.

Think of it.

When you use a search engine like yahoo to search for something, what do you type in? Of course, a word or two that represents what you are looking for.

For example, if you are looking for a hotels, then you might type hotels into the search engines.

If the your web site does not have keywords in it, then the search engines will have a amount of work to find out what your web site is relevant to.

This is basically what the search engines are trying to achieve, a relative result to a relative search. The more information you have in your web site to make you relevant, the better.

Benefits of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social media use the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video.

Technologies such as blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing,, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), and Flickr (photo sharing).

Benefit of SMO:

Get the Message Out Faster – and to More People
Social media enables more rapid sharing of information. It may take hours, or even days, for a new announcement to reach the end consumer through traditional channels. Why?
Because when a press release is issued, a journalist or writer must first wade through all the sales and marketing lingo to find the key points. Then, the content must be re-purposed in article format, and sent to an editor or proofreader before it is published.
Social media vehicles, on the other hand, allow for instantaneous dissemination of not just news, but images, audio, video, and other multimedia content as well. And because releases geared toward social media outlets contain only key highlights, pertinent facts, and hyperlinks to related statistics and quotes, the information they contain can be immediately picked up and posted by bloggers and other online journalists.
Social media also provides more widespread coverage, enabling breaking news to reach a much larger and broader reader base than standard media outlets alone.
While magazine readership and the number of available print publications continue to decline, the number of consumers using the Internet to access and share information continues to rise sharply. For example, one recent study showed that almost one out of every four Internet users – over 41 million people total in 2006 – visits MySpace on a regular basis.

Improve Branding
Social media, and blogs in particular, can be a highly useful tool for enhancing both awareness and image. Blogging can help “spread the word” about a company, its products, and its services to more people, dramatically increasing brand recognition and awareness.
Additionally, social media can enable executives to gather input and feedback directly from their target audience, and use that intelligence for more effective reputation management. Insight into why people like – or hate – a brand is needed to help change and control audience perceptions and preferences.

Boost the Impact of Direct Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key component of today’s direct marketing and lead generation strategies, and social media has proven its ability to significantly complement SEO initiatives.
Many social media techniques – such as frequent use of common jargon and key phrases, title tags, ticker symbols, and links to blogs and other relevant Web content – can dramatically improve search engine rankings.
Additionally, while SEO relies on just a handful of popular search engines such Google and Yahoo to drive target prospects to a site, social media expands the potential audience by creating alternate channels.
For example, when content is published to a site, and that content is then linked to from del.icio.us or reddit, it can generate a tremendous boost in Web traffic. Many companies also find it much easier to generate compelling content that is likely to be picked up by bloggers, than it is to keep up with the “rules” required to rank high in today’s popular search engines.

Advantages and Disadvantages of SEO

Search Engine Optimization
Analogies: Similar to public relations (for you marketing folks). Can be compared to "buying" search engine traffic.

ADVANTAGES

We do work upfront, and then, for the most part, we're done. The changes we make today will probably still be driving traffic to your site a year from now. Over time, SEO is usually less costly than PPC. In fact, it can be free of charge after the upfront work is done. There's a credibility factor, since the site is listed in the engines' editorial results. This is a sort of third party endorsement savvy searchers know that the site didn't buy their way in, so the ranking is viewed as "earned." Some searchers skip over sponsored listings and only pay attention to editorial results. Broad coverage on all search engines worldwide. In theory, if you have an optimized site with links pointing to it on other sites, every search engine out there should be able to find and index your site. You may get traffic from search engines you've never heard of.

DISADVANTAGES

We must make changes to your web site. Normally, this is easy to do, and the changes are usually transparent to visitors. However, if you have invested heavily in a search engine-unfriendly site, you may not want to implement workarounds to make it more welcoming to engines. Or if your copy went through six rounds of committee and attorney approvals, changing it may not be an option. Results (rankings, traffic) sometimes start slowly, though they do build over time. Usually, within 3-4 months of submitting the site, rankings get about as high as they'll be. There's no guarantee as to results. We can't predict how many rankings we'll get for a particular search term or engine; nor can we predict how much traffic we'll get. We are limited as to the number of search terms we can target by the number of web pages we have to optimize, since we don't want to optimize any web page for more than one or two terms apiece.