Now that you’ve considered the methodologies for your Internet Business Strategy, assessed the current situation, and created vision and goals, it’s time to figure out all the requirements.  Requirements in terms of an Internet strategy plan are much broader than normal project requirements.  These requirements need to encompass everything needed by the organization to reach your vision and goals.  Think broadly.

Here are some requirements to consider:

• Data Requirements - What data and information do we need to attain our goals?  What information do we need for monitoring our efforts?  What content do we need?  Where can we get access to this data and information?  How does the data and information need to be analyzed?
• Technology Requirements - What infrastructure do we need to support our strategy (network, servers, etc)?  What system architecture is needed (operating systems, web browsers, etc.)?  What applications need to be supported (or purchased)?  Do any of the systems or applications need to work together?  How?  Do we have any legacy systems that need to be integrated?
• Resource Requirements - What skills and expertise are needed for our strategy?  Are the skills available within the organization?  Will new staff need to be hired?  Are consultants required?  Are there any other resources we can use to meet our requirements (voluntary, part-time, interns)?
• Standards Requirements - Are there any organizational or external standards that require compliance?  What standards should be required or created in order to assure quality?  How will these standards be monitored?
• Organizational Requirements - Are there any organizational changes needed to meet our goals?  Are the people resources required spread out throughout the organization?  How will they be organized and managed?
• Executive Support - What is required to ensure top-level executive support and buy-in?  How will executives be briefed on progress?  What involvement is required by executives to ensure success?
• Coordination & Oversight Requirements - Who is responsible for coordinating strategy efforts?  Who is responsible for making decisions related to strategy implementation?  Who is the champion of the strategy?  What responsibilities are required and how are they assigned?  Who is monitoring progress and how is progress reported?  Who in these cases does not need to be an individual.  A team may be more effective especially if diverse departments are involved.
• Policy Requirements - Are there any existing policies that need to be considered and possibly altered to attain our goals?  Do any policies need to be put into place?  Are there any external policies that need to be followed?
• Staffing Requirements - If we need more staff, how do we justify them?  What qualifications should new staff have?  What support personnel are needed for implementation and supporting new staff?  Can volunteers be used?  Part-time personnel?  Interns?  Are there any professional credentials or certifications that are relevant?  What are the job descriptions for any new positions (or changes)?
• Budget Requirements - What funding is required?  How will we be funded?  Can we redirect existing funding?  Are there opportunities for cost sharing?  How do we get more funding/money?  How will staff positions be allocated?  How will expenses and profits be allocated?  How can we mitigate any future budget shortfalls?
• Community & Outreach Requirements - What communications are required to keep implementation of our goals on track?  Who will be responsible for coordinating any communications?  Who needs to be informed of progress?  Are any external organizations or stakeholders involved?
• Risk Assessment Requirements - What major challenges could affect the outcome of our strategy (both internally and externally)?  How will we recognize risks and overcome them?  What might happen if we do not overcome obstacles?

Gathering all the requirements probably seems very time consuming.  And it is, but if it is done properly it will make the next step, implementation, much easier.  Requirements gathering is a great place to get many people involved.  Many different types of expertise are needed to gather some of the requirements.  Dividing and conquering can save a lot of time and effort and create a much more robust set of requirements.

What other requirements have you considered when strategizing for Internet business?

(photo by nicolas.boullosa @ Flickr CC)

Related Posts:

• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Introduction
• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Methodologies
• Internet Business Strategy - What is the Current Situation?
• Vision & Goals for your Internet Business Strategy
• Creating an Internet Business Strategy - Implementation

Technorati Tags: internet business strategy, internet strategy, internet strategic planning, internet strategic plan, internet strategy consulting, internet business consulting

Cone, Omnicom Group’s strategy arm, released some data from a recent survey measuring brand trust.  This research claims that 93% of the 1092 Americans surveyed thought that companies should have a corporate presence on social media. It went further, citing 85% of those surveyed being open to interaction with companies within social media.  The demographic breakdown favored young males and weathly individuals, which can be a sweetspot for some marketed brands.

While networks like Facebook and Myspace may be old news for well polished marketing firms representing highly branded labels, this study is suggesting that the time may be right for more conservative consumer industries to follow suit.  If your company is consumer driven, tending towards younger male Americans or the affluent population, Cone is recommending you look at social media for your next marketing campaign.

It should be said that the study is a bit self serving, as Cone is a ’strategy and communications agency’ with a presumed stake in the growth on online Brand Marketing.  That doesn’t make the results any less intriguing.  One of the best pull quotes I saw was this response from the surveyor to the question of what should Companies be doing in social networks:

Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)

People, it can be really simple.  Find out what the top ten customer questions are for sales, the top ten service calls for your product, wrap them up and build them into an interactive Facebook app.  Don’t just spit out one line information or a support number either, if the solution could be automated for the customer, take the added steps to do it.

Your customers don’t want you to be their Best Friend Forever.  But even one answer to a ‘Hey, can you help me with this’ will make you 10x more valuable than a crate of flying sheep.

photo attributed to b_d_solis @ Flickr CC

Technorati Tags: brand, branding, social media, social media strategy, internet marketing, online marketing

Are you interested in keeping tabs on something specific out in the web or in the blogosphere?  Ever wondered how PR firms manage to contact you right after you posted a nasty comment about their client on your personal blog?  Or are you fascinated  in tracking just how internet famous you’ve become? Google Alerts may help.

Now this is really nothing new and it has been around for years.  I think it may just be hitting mainstream users now with more people interconnecting through social networks and adopting blogging habits. Here is the gist.  Google Alerts is a great little tool that can automate a search term and have new results pushed to your email.  Lets see an example of an alert I use.

I’m interested in tracking where my full name shows up out on the internet.  This sometimes helps me see where my work is getting quoted or where my name is popping up in community lists.  Starting with the Google homepage, I test out the search query I’ll use.  I could just enter:

The problem with this is that I will get results that include ones with ‘aaron’ and ‘worsham’ as separate parts instead of a full name.  I’d like to have it look for ‘aaron worsham’ as a phrase, so how about:

This is better.  However, now my results are cluttered with my own blog entries.  Lets try to filter them out:

That should do the trick.  site: is used to isolate what site you want to search while the minus in front of it  excludes the site.  In this case the () are use to allow more than one site.

Once I have my search term, I can go to the alerts page, login with my Google username, and add an alert for this search query.  Options are limited, so I just used email me once a day with the results from the whole web.  There, now I can stare off into my reflection until I drown from the comfort of my own email client.

Alerts can be setup for most anything that you want.  Company name, client name, industry terms are all good use cases.  Its smart enough to only send you new results within the given window, which means you can do really geeky things with the results like plot buzz trends over time for popular terms or track advertisement effectiveness.  I’m sure there are other uses that I haven’t mentioned.  How are you using Google Alerts?

Once you’ve figured out the methodologies for your Internet strategy and analyzed your current situation, the next step is to craft your vision and goals.  Here are some questions to consider when creating your vision and goals:

• What do we stand for?
• What are we trying to accomplish?
• Are our goals measurable?  How will we know when we’ve achieved them?
• How should we prioritize our goals?
• Where do we want to be in a year?  Where do we want to be in five years?
• What should our mission statement be, given our goals?
• Are our goals concise and understandable?
• Can we form concrete objectives and tasks from our goals?

Once you have a clear, concise vision and set of goals, have several people in your organization review them.  It is important that your vision and goals are created in such a way that anyone understands what needs to be done, and more critically, where the organization is headed.

Think about your least business-saavy employee.  Will they be able to understand the vision and goals that you have set for the company?  You may think that only high level executives need to understand where the company is going.  However, if the entire team is moving in the same direction, it is much more efficient and effective.  You’ll find benefits you may not have accounted for, such as great customer service throughout the organization.

(photo by dogfrog)

Related Posts:

• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Introduction
• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Methodologies
• Internet Business Strategy - What is the Current Situation?
• What are the Requirements for your Internet Business Strategy to Succeed?
• Creating an Internet Business Strategy - Implementation

Technorati Tags: internet business strategy, internet strategy, internet strategic planning, internet strategic plan, internet strategy consulting, internet business consulting

Microsoft, founder, organizer and social chair of the Desktop First Foundation, now sees through their own well trenched oppositions and admits that maybe, possibly it makes some sense for some applications to simple live out on the internet.  They now join Google, Yahoo, Apple, Salesforce.com, NetSuite, ZoHo, Meebo, Zimbra, as well as an uncountable number of neuvo-funded startups who have banked on the internet as the universal delivery platform for the future.

Oh, also, Google and Amazon agree that users get antsy when they have to wait more than half a second for their application to respond, affecting customer satisfaction and repeat usage.  Google’s VP Marissa Mayer recounted having experienced a 20% drop in usage for results delivered as little as .5 seconds slower than typical.

Possibly not for the first time, your customers are demanding the convenience and portability of online web applications while still clinging to expectations that web applications should consistently respond as fast as desktop applications.  An immovable object just shook hands with an irresistible force.

The problem with web applications, frankly, is the web.  Months of tuning web code can save seconds in application speed only to be lost in the network through slow routing, lost packets, or bandwidth throttling.  This is the impossibility of speed on the internet.  You have very little control out there.

To keep up with our need for speed, we will have to move more and more interface code off the server and onto the desktop’s browser in the form of Javascript.  Google’s chrome team seems to agree, focusing their performance efforts for web apps on a high speed Javascript engine.  SproutCore, famous for running Apple’s MobileMe web platform, is a fully modeled MVC framework in Javascript perfectly suited for this kind of application.  Servers could begin to revert back to simply offering data storage.  Instead of pageviews, we may soon be tracking information requests.  An online ad industry addicted to clicks and impressions may have to get back on the wagon and find a whole new model (they’re so agile).  This could be interesting.

I’ll just suggest this to any kid starting out the web development world: Learn JavaScript

Photo attributed to pctalbot @ Flickr CC

Tom Wilson, CEO of Palace Sports and Entertainment, spoke about “The Palace Way” at a local networking event last week.  Palace Sports & Entertainment operates The Palace, DTE Energy Music Theater, The Detroit Pistons, The Detroit Shock and Meadow Brook Music Festival.  “The Palace Way” is about winning and striving for excellence but it is also about taking care of your two most important assets - your customers and your employees.

The Palace has been voted Arena of the Year eight times by Performance magazine, twice by Pollstar magazine and is listed annually among North America’s top-grossing arenas. Voted “Best Outdoor Concert Venue” in Pollstar’s 2000 Readers’ Poll, DTE Energy Music Theatre has been listed as the nation’s most attended amphitheater by Amusement Business/Billboard each of the 17 years of PS&E ownership. - Reuters

Striving for Excellence

Obviously winning is important to professional teams, but also is important to any team.  The Palace showed their employees (not just their atheletes) that they were consistently doing ok, but not excellent.  They put it to their employees to be part of the solution and to strive for excellence in everything - sales, marketing, maintenance, customer relations - everything.  This has created an environment which helps the atheletes perform and a place where customers want to be.

Listening to customers

The Palace is always asking their customers what they like and don’t like.  Most people will say everything is ok, but even with 1/10 giving you places to improve, it will help improve the experience and environment for everyone.  Customers talk to each other and every customer who has a great experience will share that experience with their friends and coworkers.

It’s a Team Effort

Along with the accolades listed above, The Palace has been listed as one of the best places to work in metro-Detroit and about half of the employees have been there for 10 years or more.  Employees are treated as team members with a part to play in the overall goals of the organization.  They are encouraged to come up with ideas and, more importantly, given the opportunity to fail.  By failing, employees learn valuable lessons to improve their overall performance and care about the company’s future.  You may have noticed that all of the awards and accolades have been won by groups of people based on the opinions of their customers.  It takes a team working together to provide customer service so excellent that the customers are willing to give positive ratings in a award survey.

Don’t be Afraid to Take Risks & Think Outside the Box

When The Palace was being built, the architect and engineer involved had never built a sports facility of this magnitude.  They didn’t know when to say no, so they were willing to take risks.  The Palace was the first facility to put corporate boxes so close to the floor.  This allowed them to provide an amazing experience for their corporate customers while keeping ticket prices low for general admission.  The result was a unique and rewarding game experience that both corporate and regular customers wanted to be a part of, which, incidentally, creates an excellent game situation for the atheletes.

Do What’s Right

It’s important to make decisions that are moral and ethical and are right for the long term.  Sometimes it is hard to make the right decision for the long run, but it is important to “stick to your guns” and make your case heard.  Mr. Wilson spoke about the period in Piston’s history known as “the teal era”.  The team wasn’t winning and ticket sales were hurting.  The right thing to do was to lower general admission prices so that more people could attend the games.  While this cost the company money in the short term, it allowed them to create a winning atmosphere that paid off in the long run - both for winning games and making revenue.

Summary

Often businesses get caught up in making “business decisions” without taking into account their most important assets - employees and customers.  Sometimes “business decisions” should also be “people decisions” to further the long term health of the company.  No one said doing business is easy or fun, but making the right decisions for the future can be very rewarding.

(photo by laffy4k)

Before beginning to strategize, you need to create goals for your business.  In order to create goals you need a solid grasp of your current situation on the Internet (your current web presence). To get an idea of your current internet situation take a look at:

Website - Ideally your website is the hub of your Internet presence with customer-centric design and content.

• Analytics - How well is your website performing?  Basic statistics such as page views, visits and uniques are useful.  But more importantly, how many leads and conversions are you getting?  Where is your traffic coming from?  How useable is your website?  Are people getting frustrated?
• Usability - Can visitors find what they are looking for on your website?  Is it easy to use?  What could be improved?
• Content - Great content provides your customers with the information they need to succeed.  Creating content should be a continual process.  What content do your customers want to see?  What expertise can you provide?
• Design - Your website needs to be easy to use (usability), but also should be eye-catching and professional.  Are the fonts need to be easy to read and does the layout should draw visitors into your message?

Community & Brand Reputation- Your customers are talking about you both online and offline.  Find where your customers are and join the conversation to get key insights into improving your business.

• Blog - If you have a blog, what feedback have your readers given you? What are other bloggers saying?  Who has linked to your blog and what have they said?
• Forum / Discussion Boards - If you don’t have discussion boards on your website, find places where your customers frequent.  Listen to concerns and join the conversation with suggestions for improvement.
• Social Networks - Your customers are probably on social networks already (if they aren’t they probably will be soon).  Find social networks where your customers frequent and see what they are saying.  Join the social networks to give them an opportunity to connect.
• Reviews - Have there been any reviews of your products and services?  What can be improved?

Search Engines - Many potential customers will find your website through search engines so it is important to understand how search engines currently crawl and index your site.

• Keywords - What keywords do the search engines see on your site?  Where does your site rank for various keywords?  It can be helpful to pick the top 100 to monitor at first.  There are a number of free tools available to help (Google Webmaster tools, Rank Checker for Firefox, SEO Quake for Firefox and Internet Explorer).
• Indexed Pages - How many pages on your website (and blog) do the search engines include in their indices?  (SEO Quake and Website Grader can help).
• Incoming Links - How many other sites are linking to your website?  What are they linking to?  What are they saying? (SEO Quake and Website Grader).
• Outgoing Links - What other websites are you linking to? (Google Webmaster tools, SEO Quake).
• Cache - What pages are the search engines displaying in their results?  What do they have saved that may be old content?  (Google Webmaster Tools).

Marketing - What is your company trying to say to customers and potential customers?  What are the current marketing messages your company is using?  What is the status of any advertising or sales campaigns?  What is the return on investment (ROI) of any campaigns?

• Advertising - It is important to understand how any advertising is impacting your bottom line and helping to reach your goals.  Besides budgets, clicks, and impressions, it is important to measure leads, conversions, or sales - what return you are getting on your investment (ROI).
• Competitors - Who are your competitors?  What are their web presences?  What marketing and advertising are they doing?  What are their strengths and weaknesses?  What opportunities and threats exist?

There is quite a bit of information to gather, but once you have it you’ll be able to get a good overview of what your current Internet presence is.  You should be able to find opportunities to improve and be able to formulate some business goals. As you can see, Internet business strategy merges into traditional business strategy by using the Internet to collect information and feedback and to further business goals.  Next we’ll talk about vision and goals.

(photo by argenberg @ Flickr CC)

Related Posts:

• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Introduction
• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Methodologies
• Vision & Goals for your Internet Business Strategy
• What are the Requirements for your Internet Business Strategy to Succeed?
• Creating an Internet Business Strategy - Implementation

Technorati Tags: internet business strategy, internet strategy, internet strategic planning, internet strategic plan, internet strategy consulting, internet business consulting

Today, Web 2.0 technology just may be passing from the “cool kid’ phase to the business-to-business phase. ~ Jim Kerstetter

Webware.com is reporting on the Web 2.0 Expo in New York with coverage of the change in tone and tenor of conference towards profit minded business tactics. At the same conference Tim O’Reilly stood on stage earlier this week to chastize the online community for focusing on the wrong problems.

“Stop throwing sheep and do something worthy” ~Tim O’Reilly

Meanwhile, ReadWriteWeb is talking about the effects of the credit crisis to online business in the valley, forcing some uncharacteristic introspection.

It seems to me that our industry is being called out on the carpet for its cavalier attitude towards the world surrounding our snow globe. The media is looking out over our heralded accomplishments and wondering how they are helping solve the bigger problems. As quickly as they were to laud accolades at our feet, they have turned a critical eye to our creations. I’m only disappointed it took such dire circumstances to shift the focus back towards the people who need our help most.

While the world may not need another social news aggregator or user generated photo disbursement site, it sure as heck can use our ingenuity. There are economic problems, communication problems, logistic problems, translation problems, analysis problems, coordination problems, deployment problems and social science problems that people are working to solve with online tools. Great accomplishments are happening in academia, government and the private sector, though few were likely to hear about them before now.  That may soon be changing if, believing Jim’s quote earlier to be accurate, we are passing into the business to business phase of our evolution. Attention can help motivate people towards great innovations, as I believe President Kennedy understood all too well in 1961.

For our small part I think Sazbean can do better at delivering information on the potential of online technology for social change.  It will be a small thing, but the only things that didn’t start out small are those that never started at all.

photo attributed to aussiegall @ flickr CC

In the last post in this series we summarized the steps of a internet strategy plan.  In the next series of posts, we’ll go into more detail.  Thinking about methodology or what steps you are going to take to come up with your plan is an important step.  While this may seem like planning to plan, good strategic planning involves all the major stakeholders in the company, which takes good planning to accomplish.

Stakeholders

Who are they and why are they important?  Stakeholders are anyone who has a major stake in the strategic plan.  Put differently, they are people who are affected or affect the plan.  Obviously there could be herds of people affected, so strategy planning focuses on major stakeholders (usually high level managers). Once major stakeholders have been identified, you should also think about who is responsible for what in the strategic planning process and who is supervising the entire process.

Planning to Plan

Will the strategic planning process be handled internally or by consultants?  Does the process need to completed by a certain date? Are there other strategy plans that this fits into (IT, finance, human resources, etc.)? Should the planning be split into phases?  What are the roadblocks to the process (internal politics, resources, budget, etc.)?  What are the factors for success?  Are there any collaboration tools to help the process?

Strategizing

How do you identify quick opportunities for success?  How will you identify opportunities for improvement?  How will you come up with solutions?  What time limits will you impose on the planning process (strategic plans that take too long can have situations change thereby changing solutions)?  What are the realistic goals for the business?  How will you market your strategies?

Monitoring

A key factor to the success of strategic planning is being able to monitor the solutions.  Once you’ve come up with solutions you are going to implement, figure out what to monitor to make sure those solutions are working.  If they aren’t working, how can you change them?  Also important to consider is who will be responsible for monitoring solutions and making decisions about what needs to change (if anything).

Summary

You’ll notice that there are a lot of questions to ask (and try to answer).  Strategic planning is  thinking about the questions that need to be asked and then trying to answer them.  Asking questions helps to develop an understanding of the challenges facing the organization.  Once the challenges have been identified, it becomes easier to come up with solutions.

So far the Internet strategic plan is no different from an overall strategic plan.  A good Internet strategic plan should involve a most of the organization and follows similar methodologies.

Next we’ll discuss how to analyze your current Internet situation.

(photo by The Jamoker)

Related Posts:

• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Introduction
• Internet Business Strategy - What is the Current Situation?
• Vision & Goals for your Internet Business Strategy
• What are the Requirements for your Internet Business Strategy to Succeed?
• Creating an Internet Business Strategy - Implementation

Technorati Tags: internet business strategy, internet strategy, internet strategic planning, internet strategic plan, internet strategy consulting, internet business consulting

People are stupid. History has shown it repeats itself, and people make the same mistakes. ~Harry Debes, CEO of Lawson

That was a pullquote from an interview with ERP software company Lawson’s CEO Harry Debes.  He was answering the reporter’s question on whether software companies had learned anything from previous attempts at making Software as a Service models work.  Clearly, he is not a fan of Salesforce.com, a competitor and SaaS poster child.

Debes makes an enthusiastic case for the merits of traditional software sales over the distributed revenue model of SaaS, which he claims prevents companies from making big returns quickly.  He may be right.

My contention with his argument focuses on his well worn and rehearsed counter claim that customers of traditional software vendors are free to use a software package indefinitely once the upfront investment is paid off, saving them money over time.  Does anyone still believe this fable?  Are we no smarter than we were in the 90’s, or are CEOs simply that far out of touch.

When financial institutions start falling, the press tends to shed light on their spending habits.  If what Mr. Debes is putting forth were true, then surely the 138 year old Lehman Brothers investment bank would be one of the big benefactors to those savings over times.  And yet, they spent over a billion dollars last year in new software. Surely you would expect a financial institution to exemplify the ideals of conservative spending, find any way possible to save money while delivering on their customers needs.  Yet I know that most financial companies spend large percentages of their revenue keeping up technology.  For companies of lesser means, there are still forced upgrades, maintenance agreements, obsolescence, migratory requirements that all lends force to the gale that blows up the costs of keeping companies running.  Has any publically traded company reported in their SEC fillings a year after year decrease in the spending of technology?  Should we be so blind as to assume that hardware, network connectivity, desktops, communication equipment all required new, expensive versions but that the software remained untouched, free from budgetary expenditure?

We now all know the truth masking the lie.  Traditional software would all be free, if we never needed to upgrade. Software as a Service may not reap those immediate returns that you are so eagerly seeking, sir, but do not attempt to misdirect the truth that as long as innovation is a competitive advantage and progress proceeds in a forwardly direction, we will have to pay someone to keep us in the game.

It is unfortunate for the Harry Debes of the world that corporations are slowly but inevitably being inflitrated by open minded technologiest who are apt to question the status quo.  You see, Mr Debes, I believe that people are not stupid.  We do and will learn from our mistakes.  We have already learned some lessons the hard way.  Should you be sitting across from me in your next ERP sales call, I will be more than happy to fill you in on our progress so far.

(photo by tanakawho)