News & Notes

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

Aaron Worsham / Oct 3, 2008

Artificial Stupidity

The title is borrowed from a presentation given by Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks He would like us to remember that computers are suppose to do the dumb things for us, leaving time to do the smart things that only humans can do. I am going to hijack this phrase for a sec, I hope he doesn’t mind too much.

What he is really talking about is Semantic Web, a subject which he speaks passionately on in this Next Web Conference presentation.

Nova Spivack at The Next Web Conference 2008 Note: The first third of this 45min video is explaination, middle third is examples and the latter third is questions. Pick your poison.

My concern with explaining anything about the next big thing on the web is that so many people are having trouble finding room for the now big things on the web. Social graphs, community and transparency may not be the hit we were all hoping for with the business world because it assumes too much change in the way some businesses think about the relationship between themselves and their customers. For the businesses that do embrace social, much will be won. But all companies should be able to understand web 3.0 because it is talking about something they understand, data. Here we should be on firmer ground because, hey, businesses have been working for years to make their industry’s data readable by computers. I promise you that for your industry you have an association or a market research group pooling data on what your company is doing. That data could be financial or it could be manufacturing or it could be sales or it could be more abstract. But somewhere out there today someone is already giving your data meaning (semantics).

Now the real hurdles to understanding the ideas behind ‘web 3.0’ are the distractions. An example: As anyone who remembers the early days of the internet can tell you, things back then were tough to navigate. Fortunately, as Nova suggests, we are good at forcing computers to make difficult things easier. The tedium of using telnet, Bulletin Boards and Gopher gave way to browsers which got easier over time to where now even things as complex as secure online financial transactions are possible by most people. Web 3.0 will be the same way, where concepts that seem difficult to understand in his presentation today will make sense as easier to use tools are created. The programming term for things like this is ‘Abstractions’ and we use them to eliminate Distractions.

So what do you get if you take the problem of computer readable data and remove the distractions? You get a simple idea that says computers need to be able to read data on the web in context so that they can do important tasks for you without you explaining those tasks to the computer. This is such a hugely important step in the value of the internet as a business platform that I’m still a little shocked it took a backseat to social networking for web 2.0. Companies that are foot-forward in doing this kind of work will, in my opinion, gain tremendous ground over their competitors in terms of market credibility, which lets face it, is an enormous competitive advantage. You want the market looking to you online for answers in your industry. The semantic web will make someone in your industry an information leader someday. I believe that strongly.

For anyone interested in learning more, I should point out that researching this subject can be a bit heady. Currently approachable articles on the topic spend 4/5 of their copy describing semantic web and then hint briefly at the players invloved, skipping real world examples altogether. I would start my search at the w3c.org site with terms like rdf and semantic. The W3C is the standards body for many of the ideas out there so people turn to them when they are looking for information. Also, you can look at Radar Network’s application called Twine for more concrete examples.

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