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Posts tagged: web development

Aug 27 2009

Your website's radical new role in the social web

Graphic: Metro Denver’s website is built to shuttle people to meaningful content, wherever it might be.

While every marketer seems to be immersed in Web 2.0 these days, let’s not overlook the changing role of the organization’s website in this marketing mix. If you’re not re-thinking the role of your traditional website, you should be!

Websites began as digital receptacles for traditional print content and slowly evolved to be more interactive and useful. The social web is changing all that … radically. Today, there are thousands of places to store and promote company content, and not all of it is going to be generated by friends. That’s why a new core strategy must be to populate the social web with as much accurate and useful content as possible. In my classes, I refer to this as an organization’s “information eco-system,” and it must be systematically maintained, monitored and nurtured.

Your website is no longer just a “destination.” In this environment, the company website becomes a content engine and quarterback, efficiently directing people throughout the eco-system to the news, information and applications they need to meet their needs, wherever it might be.

In research I’ve been conducting on the use of social media among economic development organizations, I came across a terrific case study in Metro Denver. Denver has methodically populated its information eco-system with rich and meaningful content, including a top-notch blog. Search the social web, and it will inevitably lead you to content that guides you back to the website, which is organized into user-friendly buckets of information. Need to go back out to the ecosystem? Links to social media connections are right on Denver’s landing page. This is a brilliant example of putting customer needs at the forefront of strategy, execution and design.

As you hurtle onto the social web, don’t leave your website behind or your social media presence will be sub-optimized!

Tags: best practices, economic development, social media, web design, web development

Filed in B2B and social media, Blogging best practices, Case studies, Google techologies, Internet marketing, Marketing best practices, Social Media Policy, Social Media Strategy, Social Media best practices, Traditional media and advertising, best practices, blogging, business strategy, economic development, social media | markschaefer | Comments (5)

Jun 30 2009

Your website is NOT a strategy

My theme this week is “strategy” and I would like to examine one of the biggest strategy-related problems I encounter with clients.

Last week I was approached by a man who wanted me to help re-position his company’s ineffective website.

I asked him if he had a marketing strategy and he said, “no.” And, after telling me that he didn’t have strong data on his customer base and couldn’t name how he was differentiating his product, it was clear that he didn’t.

When I suggested that he step back and do some work on a marketing strategy BEFORE plowing money into a website, he resisted … “No,” he said, “We just want a website.”

Now I ask you – If your website isn’t working now, how will it be working any better if you don’t revise the strategy behind it?

Ladies and gentleman, your website is NOT your marketing strategy. If you can’t communicate what you do and what customer needs and wants you serve, you’re probably wasting a lot of advertising money. Every business – no matter how small – needs a marketing strategy BEFORE they have a website!

What do you think? Have you had similar experiences? What happens when a website goes live without a strategy?

Tags: competitive advantage, customer acquisition, marketing strategy, web design, web development

Filed in Internet marketing, customer acquisition | markschaefer | Comments (0)

May 29 2009

Google Wave changes the game for small business

There were a couple important new technology releases this week but the most significant for the small business owner is Google Wave. Why? This platform provides a powerful communication and collaboration tool you can use with internal and external stakeholders for FREE.

Google Wave brings together email, chat, photo/document sharing, and many collaborative features that would be very useful to a business on a shoestring budget. It opens the door to business channels that major companies are paying millions of dollars to achieve with expensive enterprise software solutions.

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.

That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Here is a worthwhile summary: http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

This technology could be so far-reaching and important I’ll turn to the commentary of an industry expert. This commentary comes from industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang and his blog Internet Strategist:

Google Wave is about bringing together the Web 2.0 lifestyle to become a workstyle.
Google’s apporach is significant because it will enter the workforce without having to go through IT management. This undercuts players like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP as it grows from the groundup –another groundswell like google docs and yammer.
This also impacts Cisco, Webex and Webex connect who is also trying to try new delivery models to the enterprise.
Existing smaller collaboration vendors and community platform vendors with enterprise focus will be part of the developer ecosystem and can extend their features to the Wave platform.
Google is pushing real time collaboration, and traditional email is asynchronous, yet don’t expect everyone to be interacting in real time, all the time.
This is a missed opportunity for LinkedIn who launched their platform but has not exploited as they’ve only hand selected a few partners.

Tags: eCommerce, Google profile, Internet marketing, marketing budget, marketing strategy, web development

Filed in Google techologies, Internet marketing | markschaefer | Comments (0)

May 27 2009

Is social media re-wiring a generation?

On a rainy day, I was sitting in a shopping mall people-watching. About 75% of the folks between the ages of 13 and 25 were either texting or talking on their phone as they were walking – even if they were with a group.

Being a teen is all about connecting with friends and social media is the perfect channel to do that. In fact, the average teen in America texts nearly 1,500 times a month and 15,000/month is not unheard of (that’s 500 messages per day!)

Clearly, screen-based stimulation has become the primary source of socialization and entertainment among teens and increasingly younger children. Just a few generations ago, the vast majority of a child’s time was playing with friends in the dirt, kicking a ball or playing “house” (or if you go way back, I guess they played “cave.”) What’s the impact of the “highly-wired child” in our new world?

The social media brain

An individual’s neural framework is nearly set by the time they are 15 years old. Everything a child experiences forms neural pathways, and the most-used pathways become aspects of their personality and the foundation of how they interact as adults. Before the days of screen-based entertainment (most of human history!), the strongest pathways were naturally formed by intense socialization with family members and friends, physical activity and interacting with nature in some way.

With so many children spending MOST of their time in front of keyboards and flashing screen, I began to think about this impact on their development and on society. Wouldn’t personality development in the digital age have to be fundamentally, drastically and permanently different?

A disregard for consequence

New research confirms this. A professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College (U.K.) claims social network sites risk infantilizing the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, and a shaky sense of identity.

Professor Lady Greenfield said the rapid-fire reward of video games and text messaging could be a cause of the three-fold rise in Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) over the past 10 years.

She warned against “a marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences. After all, whenever you play a computer game, you can always just play it again; everything you do is reversible. The emphasis is on the thrill of the moment, the buzz of rescuing the princess in the game. No care is given for the princess herself, for the content, or for any long-term significance, because there is none. This type of activity — a disregard for consequence — can be compared with the thrill of compulsive gambling or compulsive eating.

“The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction, Greenwood said. “So we should not underestimate the ‘pleasure’ of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people.”

A new way of relating

For teens already struggling with insecurity, social networking can provide a constant reassurance that they are listened to, recognized, and valued. That can be a good thing unless there is no balance with other life skills such as learning to interpret non-verbal behaviors, holding a conversation, and dealing with conflict when you don’t have the time to think up a witty text message.

Free, instantaneous, global communication is creating a generation who will recoil at the thought of three-dimensional conversations, whose social identity and self-esteem will be validated by flashing messages on a computer or cellphone screen. The sanitized, detached world of social media has become the norm, and will reach even younger children with new innovations that avoid live interactions.

While this sounds depressing, follow the logic through to its conclusion. Social media is not going away … quite the opposite. So in the ADD world of our future, those who grew up as digital natives of the Facebook society should have an ADVANTAGE over those who were sheltered. Can you imagine a world where an articulate, well-spoken, well-read individual is the social outcast? If you’re under 20, it’s here.

Life was so much simpler when I was playing in the dirt.

Tags: ethics, facebook, innovation, social media, twitter, web development

Filed in ethics, futurist, social media, sociology | markschaefer | Comments (2)

May 26 2009

More marketing for less: Think inside the box.

Constant innovation should be a central part of your business strategy but when the budgets get crunched, there is still plenty of value in the “old-school” marketing basics.

Bargains in traditional media. Marketing dollars are moving toward Internet marketing, but there is still a place for TV, radio and newspaper — and the value has NEVER BEEN BETTER! Newspaper ad sales were down 38% in 2008 – it’s a buyer’s market. More than 90% of Americans spend an average of 236 minutes a day with TV. I recently worked with a customer who was paying $9 for a 30-second commercial on a targeted cable TV demographic.

Focus on existing customers. Up-sell, cross-sell and micro-market to your existing customers. It’s 80 percent less expensive to sell more to existing clients than attracting new ones. How have their needs changed during the recession? There are probably new product and service niches being created with your valued customers. Go find them before the other guy!

Is your website alive? You’ve probably already invested in the website infrastructure and this is a highly cost-effective way to attract new customers. Is your site aligned with current customer needs? Does it have fresh, compelling content? A bold call to action? How is it differentiated from competitors?

Service essentials. Follow up on every lead quickly. 88 percent of people are happy to hear from a vendor after download within 24 hours. Waiting 96 hours drops that number by half. And think about using personal, hand-written notes to cut through the clutter and really delight your customers. Writing a letter … now that is REALLY old school!

Destroy complacency. I see so many customers spending money on advertising channels simply because this is what they have always done. Are your channels still relevant and targeted? Have your customers shifted to another gathering place? Here’s a more detailed article on this topic: http://tiny.cc/9VYRI

Measure what you treasure. It takes no capital investment to make sure the way you measure your success is still appropriate and driving the right actions in your business. Is your marketing plan integrated and measurable?

Re-discover email marketing. This can be an easy and inexpensive way to stay in front of customers, especially if you have a built-in mailing list. This is a tricky channel, but done right, can be highly effective.

Tags: advertising, business strategy, competitive advantage, customer acquisition, eCommerce, media spend, print advertising, recession marketing, small business, web development

Filed in Marketing best practices, Traditional media and advertising, business strategy, customer acquisition, marketing strategy | markschaefer | Comments (0)

May 24 2009

Your website is not a strategy

Here’s a mistake I see repeated so often by small business owner — assuming that their website IS the marketing plan.

Many people imagine the Internet like a Mississippi River of money — a wide, swollen sea of cash just rushing by! All you have to do is put an Internet site out there and start diverting money away from ol’Man River. This is rarely true.

Here’s an actual conversation I had with a seasoned business person looking to start a new business. To protect her identity, let’s use codename “Clueless.”

Clueless: “I want to start a new Internet business and I want you to help me build a website.”

Me: “Well, what’s your business idea?”

Clueless: “I don’t have one yet.”

Me: “Then how do you know you want to start a business?”
Clueless: “Does it really matter what I come up with? I mean you can SELL anything on the Internet! All you need is a website.”

I swear … it happened.

In defense of Clueless and thousands like her, the Internet is an amazing place. I read an article where a woman had made over $10,000 selling tumbleweeds through a website. Well, even a blind hog finds an acorn once in while. Maybe it’s you … but probably not.

A website must be viewed as just ONE possible sales and marketing communication channel for your business. And it’s going to be worthless unless you have …. what? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? A STRATEGY!

Your marketing strategy serves as your guide to a successful and cost-effective promotional plan. The strategy is built around customer NEEDS, not your passion to have a website with animations and disco music. If you’ve done a good job on your strategy you’ll KNOW if a website is going to be a major workhouse for you or just a pony you have to have out there for show.

For most small businesses, a website is not even the primary sales channel. Usually it’s another form of advertising or networking and referrals. Is networking really a marketing strategy? Sure it is. Remember, you’re trying to sell more stuff, to more people, for more money. If it helps you do that, it’s marketing.

Tags: Internet marketing, marketing strategy, web development

Filed in Internet marketing, Marketing best practices, business strategy, customer acquisition, marketing strategy | markschaefer | Comments (0)

May 22 2009

Ten reasons your website is killing your business

I’m alarmed by the number of otherwise brilliant businesspeople who are allowing their website to kill their company.

Many business leaders I meet have abdicated their responsibility to market and sell their products by handing this power to a web designer – believing their website IS their marketing plan. The web has become too prevalent, too easy. The Internet has lulled us into becoming lazy marketers! Here are 10 ways websites can sub-optimize a business strategy, drive away customers and make your competitors look great:

1. No purpose. Before you start a website, be clear about your purpose, audience, message, and call to action. You must have a clear marketing strategy BEFORE you have a website. Your website must be part of an integrated and measurable initiative to build a link between customers and your company, brand and products.

2. No promotion. A website only works if people see it and respond to it. Once you have built your site, work it! Drive traffic to your website with advertising, promotions, mailings, placing the web address on your company literature, business cards, etc. “Build it and they will come” is a line from a movie — not a marketing strategy.

3. Ego trip. It’s heady to see your product in cyberspace for the first time, but don’t let personal interests and emotions get in the way of effective marketing. A majority of websites focus on their company and not on the visitor, customer, or potential customer. A website should address your customer’s needs, pain, goals and educate them on how you can help them. Look at your website through the eyes of your customer. Is your website all about you? Don’t sell what you DO. Sell what they NEED.

4. One size fits all. Don’t try to sell too much, to too many people, in one place. Micro-market wherever possible. Design web pages for every market segment and customer need. That’s the beauty of the web – slice up that target market and communicate to them effectively and often.

5. Unrealistic expectations. A website is not a marketing plan. It is an OUTPUT of a marketing plan and is only as effective as the preparation behind its execution. No website can overcome an inferior business strategy or lousy products. I have encountered people who think they will make money just by having an online presence. Business is business and you have to follow the fundamentals to achieve profitable growth. And remember, a website often is NOT the most effective way to reach your customers.

6. Lack of measurement. My teacher and mentor Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant would tell us, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Web analytics track every page a visitor sees on your website and a lot more. By analyzing your traffic you can see what needs to be improved and what people are responding to.

7. Becoming stale. It’s easy to build a website, relax and expect new customers. But nothing turns off visitors faster than an outdated website. Keep your site fresh, expand it, improve it. Keep making it easier and more fun to do business with you. Keep it alive and relevant.

8. Forgetting your customers. Don’t rely on customers to come back to your site on their own. Instead, capture their email and stay in contact with them. Send them new product announcements, press releases, follow-up messages, surveys, and newsletters. And when you do, make them happy you did it. Always leave them with some new information or insight that will make them glad they are doing business with you.

9. Focusing on traffic, not conversions. The ultimate goal for most businesses is to turn a website visitor into a buying customer. But a conversion might also mean the visitor signs up for a newsletter, contributes an idea, responds to a poll, provides feedback on a product, calls a sales rep for an appointment, or donates money to your non-profit organization. Conversions lead to business growth, not page views.

10. No SEO. In the past 12 months, I bought a car, house and $5,000 in consumer electronics. My first stop for research? A search engine. And I’m not alone. Today, the Internet is overwhelmingly the first place to go for shopping, entertainment, education and information. Not having your business show up in the top level of searches probably means you’re leaving money on the table. SEO has become a key, stand-alone marketing skill. Underestimating the need to keep your site atop search engine results provides an enormous edge to your competitors.

Tags: advertising, branding, business strategy, customer acquisition, Internet marketing, measurement, web design, web development

Filed in Internet marketing, Traditional media and advertising, business strategy, customer acquisition, economic development, marketing strategy | markschaefer | Comments (2)

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"I’ve had this discussion many times and find myself feeling rather silly for referring to Social Media as being “spiritual”. But I too, stand by that description. The context I was using it in is the same as yours but I was driving at a different point. When we embrace social media and just spew information, we don’t interact and we shamelessly self promote, in many ways we are being disrespectful to the spirituality of the venue."[more]
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Posts tagged: web development

Your website's radical new role in the social web

Your website is NOT a strategy

Google Wave changes the game for small business

Is social media re-wiring a generation?

More marketing for less: Think inside the box.

Your website is not a strategy

Ten reasons your website is killing your business

Comment Of The Week

Recent Comments

Connecting with Mark

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