Archives for October 2008

Aaron Worsham / Oct 8, 2008

Commitment free entertainment

clockgandm Who knew that in 2008 there were still coffee shops without free wifi? Decaf mocha in hand, I sat down in my local Starbucks for some internet research only to find myself completely offline. Bummer. Fortunately, like a boyscout, I came prepared with a high resolution analog information storage device called a ‘book’. Older patrons smiled up at me from their papers while the younger crowd rolled their eyes dramatically between texting sessions on their Treo’s and jam sessions on their MP3 players.

I have noticed that the rituals of my youth are starting to loose meaning. We used to schedule our evenings around our favorite shows (Friday nights with reruns of the original Star Trek). Prep our tape recorders for radio countdown shows to grab our favorite music. Even go out on Saturday night to the movie theater. We had to earn or ad-laden entertainment through monastic dedications of commitment, and gosh darn we were thankful!

Well, not really. It came as a realization last night to how much of a pain those commitments were. I was on the site Hulu.com and having scheduled half a dozen shows to queue up episodes for me to watch whenever I want, I was drifting in and through old-geek nirvana. I felt liberated. I also felt I was somehow cheating. My friends tell me that I need to get over it, oh and to also get a DVR.

During the recent weeks of the financial crisis on Wall Street, I have tried to keep up with my Wall Street Journal. The desire was there, I only lacked the spare hour to really get through some of the denser articles. Old me would have given up. New me found Planet Money Podcast, an NPR production that has covered this historic event with an inch thick coating of modern journalistic audio goodness. Podcasts as a news feeds can fill those down minutes in your day when you are waiting in line at the bank or cleaning the kitchen. I like This American Life for yard work and cooking. Peter Sagal and Carl Kasell help with the dishes.

I’m not of the pirate persuasion, so movies still cost me money. I’m still awestruck, though, at the myriad ways I can legally get my occasional flix fix. October signals horror movie month in my brain so having choices like Comcast On Demand, Apple iTunes movie store, Amazon UnBox, Hulu.com and Netflix over Internet has been both a blessing and a curse. Sony won the next gen DVD war just in time for streaming content to come in and wash out their footings.

There are still holdouts in my life that are time-honored events that demand a commitment. Sitting in a college football stadium with a hot dog on a sunny, crisp fall day while the kids play down on the field will never be replaced by tape delay. Not in my lifetime, anyway.

Photo attributed to G & M @ Flickr CC

Sarah Worsham / Oct 7, 2008

Reach for Your Business Goals, Not for Numbers

soccerrandysonofrobert One of the top requests we get from clients is to help increase traffic to their business website. Our first response is to ask what business goal they are trying to attain. While increasing traffic may be one of many possible solutions, it may not be the right one. Working on increasing traffic on your website without understanding how it will help you reach your goals is like getting triple-bypass heart surgery before you’ve had a doctor’s diagnosis.

Let’s take a look at an example:

An e-commerce site is spending a great deal of money on Internet advertising and SEO, but is sales have fallen. Their first reaction is to increase traffic to their website. What should they do?

Understand your business goals

Is the business goal to increase traffic? Hardly. Their business goal is to increase sales. Increasing traffic may help, but there may also be other issues. By understanding their business goals, they’ll be able to come up with solutions and ways to measure whether they’ve attained their goals.

Understand the problem

Understanding the problem helps you brainstorm all the possible solutions. The highest return on investment may come from a mixture of solutions or one solution may not be complete without taking a look at other aspects of the website and business. After taking a look at their website, their advertising and marketing efforts, this client had a number of different issues to address, including conversion rates, usability, marketing message, and ROI of advertising, which were all affecting their sales and bottom line.

Look for solutions

Now that you have recognized your business goals and understand the full set of issues, you can come up with the right solutions. In our example, there are a wide range of solutions, of which, increasing traffic was only a very small part. By creating an Internet business strategy from the set of solutions, the client was able to more efficiently attack the problem.

Measure your progress

This is where the numbers do actually help. Of course you need to understand exactly what numbers you are looking for. Just increasing the number of visitors or page views won’t help attain your business goals. For our example, we had to measure conversion rates, ROI of advertising, time on site, exit pages, etc. to see how we were progressing. It may seem like a confusing bunch of numbers, but once you’ve gone through this thought process, the numbers you need are much more clear.

Summary

Before you spend big bucks on SEO or Internet advertising, take a few minutes to consider what business goals you are trying to achieve and all the possible issues that you may need to consider to reach those goals. Just a few minutes of thought can help direct your efforts into the biggest bang for your buck.

(photo by randy son of robert @ Flickr CC)

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

Sarah Worsham / Oct 6, 2008

Creating an Internet Business Strategy – Implementation

gnrimplementation We’re in the home stretch of our Internet Business Strategy planning, but let’s quickly review the parts of the plan:

Executive Summary
Methodologies
Current Situation
Vision & Goals
Requirements
Implementation

The implementation portion of the Internet Business Strategy planning is not intended to be a full implementation plan. Once you have your strategy, you’ll need to create detailed implementation plans. For your Internet business strategy, consider the following for implementation :

Lessons Learned – Are there any previous projects we can learn from? Are there external sources that have implemented similar strategies?
Implementation of Sub-Projects – Does it make sense to divide the project into smaller, easier-to-manage proejcts? How will you divide up the implementation into sub-projects? Who is responsible for each sub-project? How will the sub-projects be managed in order to move towards a common goal?
Phasing and Milestones – What is a realistic timeline for implementation? Should we divide up implementation into phases? What are the various phases of implementation? What are target dates for each phase?
Budget Plan – What are the budgetary requirements for any phasing and sub-projects? Are there any opportunities for cost-sharing with other organizations? What are the specifics of our financial processes? Who is the financial authority for administration the budget? How does the available budget affect the time periods for phases and milestones?
Marketing – How will we get the word out about our strategy? Who is the target audience? Are there any events we should attend? What is our marketing budget?
Measuring Success and Making Adjustments – What are the critical success factors that should be communicated to our stakeholders? What performance metrics should we use? What cost avoidance can be expected and how can it be measured? How often do we assess our progress to determine if adjustments need to be made?

Once you have created your Internet business strategy, you will need to work to implement and communicate your vision throughout your organization. We’ll cover these topics in future posts.

(photo by qnr @ Flickr CC)

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

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