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Well here I am in body if not in spirit. We just did another one of those crazy 2200km/1375 mile in two day trips that we sometimes do just to see some of the family and I am ... well I'm probably a lot of things but right now I'm definitely not alert.

I am however here and functioning at some level that seems to make those around me think that my mental processes are working correctly. I guess I can fool a lot of people when I really try and hopefully I'll be able to fool the editor with a column that is both coherent and interesting.

On the other hand I might have just given the game away totally right there.

Black Friday
So we've had Black Friday and people were definitely eager to spend their money and that's got to be a good sign. Of course over here in Australia I haven't seen any figures yet that might show just how good ... or bad ... Black Friday was there in the United States (it's just a normal day here) but I did see that one poor unfortunate security guard was trampled to death by the crowd at one of Walmart's Long Island stores.

The report I'm seeing is that the crowd couldn't wait for the doors to open at 5am so while someone was trying to open the doors in an orderly fashion the crowded forced their way in and went right over the top of that guy.

Now I like to shop but anyone who is that keen to get into a store is definitely suffering from a serious illness and a lot of people may well start to avoid the real stores when that sort of thing occurs. That means that there's an angle for your marketing; you can tell people that it's easier to shop at home.

Cyber Monday ... believe it or not
And here I am on Cyber Monday and I'm not even bothering to look at my online stores and their stats. It was interesting to see some of the hype that several online writers were trying to drum up about Cyber Monday last week. And of course others have fed off that as well.

One of them produced a wonderful article about what an important day it was for online retailing and even presented their argument complete with colorful graphs. The only problem is that, in the past, Cyber Monday has been something of a figment of people's over-active imagination.

In the past the biggest pre-Christmas online sales days have varied but all have been earlier than Cyber Monday so I guess the lesson there is not to believe everything you read. Instead look at your data as the starting point for making decisions about your business and don't rely totally on the 'experts'.

All too often the 'experts' are just drips under pressure trying to make a buck from writing about something they really know little about. Now I'm not necessarily saying that the Cyber Monday proponents are wrong ... unless of course they're merely parroting something that they read and aren't speaking from personal experience. If they do have personal experience of online sales going gangbusters on Cyber Monday then perhaps their experience is different to many others and that's the filter you should apply to everything you read and here online.

If the person who is telling the story is speaking from personal experience then they're experience may be different to yours. Everyone's mileage varies so compare what they say with others who may not necessarily agree with those experts. Sometimes it's the ones who don't agree with everyone else who really do have a handle on reality.

How to explain the way that Google works?
Before we headed south for the weekend we were approached by one of our clients who was rather upset because he no longer had the top position for a search term he thought was important for him.

In a strange twist the site that did have the top position was one that we had built for another client but the two clients are not competitors. I can't say anymore than that but that really is the situation and the descriptions that Google displays clearly show that they are not competitors but both businesses belong on the search engine results page for that term.

The client with the complaint now has positions two, three, four and six on Google's search engine results page for that particular term while the only listing the other client has is the top one. So now Steve has to explain to the unhappy client how Google works and why it has changed the listing on the results page.

I wish him luck ... I'm not sure that I could explain that situation whether I was awake and alert or not.

Maybe it's time I went back to bed.