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Archives for September 2008

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Internet Business Strategy – What is the Current Situation?

situationargenbergBefore 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)

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More important work to do

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

earth_in_handWebware.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

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How to Create an Internet Business Strategy – Methodologies

cloudsthejamokerIn 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)

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