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Internet Strategy Forum Summit – The Building Blocks of Online Customer Engagement

Presented by Dan Stickel, CEO of WebTrends

Let’s take a look at Google’s innovation and how they do it.  They divide their efforts:

  • 70% on core products – search quality, crawl/indexing, AdWords, AdSense, Toolbar
  • 20% on emerging products – Blogger, Google Mini, Picasa, News, Pack
  • 10% on break-out strategies – Offline Ads, Code, WiFi, Talk

Google also has these key ingredients in everything they do:

  • Focus on users
  • Think big
  • Ignore Constraints
  • Break the mold
  • The right people
  • Small teams
  • Iteration & experiment
  • Bottoms-up ideas & projects

Google harnesses the innovation of the entire world through easy-to-use tools.

Use some of these same ideas to turn motivated visitors to your website into customers.  Listen and build a better experience.

Get a 360 degree view of visitors:

  • Listen – On your website, through onsite search, via surveys.
  • Learn – From offsite information and CRM.
  • Act – Email, Direct Mail, and use behavioral targeting.

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Are Your Customers Viewing Your Website With a Fast Internet Connection?

Some 55% of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home, according to a May 2008 survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 47% in early 2007 and 42% in early 2005. Among individuals who use the internet at home, 79% have a high-speed connection while 15% use dialup. – Pew Internet

The report also shows that broadband has dropped slightly for households with incomes less than $20,000, which is not unexpected with the economic downturn.  Take this information into account when you decide what features to add to your website and whether your customers will be viewing it mostly at work (where most have broadband) or at home. If your customers are in a lower-income bracket, they may have a slower dial-up connection or no connection at all at home.  Websites which have lots of graphics and Flash may turn away customers with slower Internet connections.

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Adobe Flex – sitting with the cool kids

In the web’s earlier days the cool kids were the Macromedia Flash Developers. They had that mystical quality to them; a special blend of tech voodoo and creative style. A great Flash artists could bring any early browser screaming to its knees, but inbetween dropped frames and hung processors you swore you were looking at the future of the web. Flash Developers were the Rock Star developers of the web a decade back.

Now we try to use Flash in moderation as if it were a controlled substance. Most business websites have a pinch of flash to spice up the bullet points and mission statements, but it all seems perfunctory and subdued. In the business world, Flash has been relegated to bit parts like tie-ins or transitions, back seat functions to the AJAX revolution. Sure, the media industry is still addicted to their Flash applications as is the online gaming and advertising sectors. For most development houses, however, Flash became an unfamiliar tool used sparingly.

Adobe buying Macromedia has successfully righted that ship, in my opinion. They’re first all Adobe take on the Flash franchise was to relicense a little thing called Flex. Flex was originally a Macromedia product targeted for upper echelon corporations. Flex was and is Flash for programmers. Plain and simple, Flex lets your code slingers write decent Flash applications using tools they understand, namely programing languages. When Adobe got ahold of the property, they wisely saw the potential for curious geeks to adopt this new shiny thing, promote it within their communities, and build it up to a viable web solution. Flex 3 SDK (Software Development Kit) is free to to download and licensed under a open-source friendly Mozilla Public License. Adoption of the Flex 3 platform has been impressive, thanks in no small part to adobe’s marketing of the tools as they have.

N ow the geeks are sitting side by side with the cool kids at the web table. I would say we now have to work on the Jocks (DBAs), but that just might be a bridge too far.

In upcoming posts I will review Adobe Flex and Adobe Air.

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