The guys over at Rails Envy, a Ruby on Rails enthusiast podcast, have a running joke.  Their catch phrase? - ‘Rails can’t scale.’ Yeah, I wasn’t too sure I got the joke either.  Then I heard it myself in CIO level discussions from smart business people parroting things they didn’t understand and read somewhere once in an article in a magazine bylined by a guy in a suit who looked corporate and trustworthy.  Rational reasoning and discourse can sometimes be co opted by bumper-sticker wisdom even at the highest levels.

Here is the thing about corporations; enterprises are in the business of managing calculated risk within the market or industry they operate.  They do this by forcing non-core operations to be conservative, risk-adverse and predictable.  It’s a bit like hedging your business’s bet in the junk bond market (core business) by backing it with rock solid, non sexy T-Bills (non-core like software development).  Sure, the return on the T-Bills is lousy but you know in three years you won’t be out that investment.  Java, backed by Sun Microsystems, and .Net, backed by Microsoft, are some of the blue chip securities of the programming world.  Enterprises trust them.  One-liners like ‘Rails can’t scale’ are the one-handed brushoff of entrenched corporate IT’ers to the mere idea of using something new like Ruby or Rails.

Still, Ruby is a persistent pitch man, especially in the web technologies.

Corporate IT: Ruby uses green threads and Rails is single threaded, why are we even talking?

Ruby: Ruby’s MRI is green threaded, but the JRuby interpreter uses native threads in the JVM, just like Java.  Also, Rails 2.2 just released 2.2 RC1 that is thread safe.  Merb was thread safe from the start and just released 1.0 RC2.

Corporate IT: There aren’t enough ruby programmers to staff a project.

Ruby: The Rails Rumble contest didn’t have any problems finding entrants.  Five hundred programmers just gave up a weekend to write 248,000 lines of code. Teams up to four completed 131 different Rails projects in under 48 hours, so you can see just how productive a small group can be in Ruby.

Corporate IT: Sorry but we need dependable database connectivity, not this serial locking business.

Ruby: So pooled connections in jruby and Rails 2.2 scratch that itch?

Corporate IT: There still isn’t a big company backing it so no support.  No support, no chance bub!

Ruby: Have you ever actually called Microsoft about a .Net problem?  Or maybe Sun to support your Java app?  Maybe you have, or at the very least arranged a support contract with a .Net or Java consulting company.  Try instead one of the fine Ruby consulting companies like EdgeCase, HashRocket or ThoughtWorks.  Sun already bankrolls the JRuby guys and for the Softies out there, Microsoft is putting its wallet behind Ruby on the CLR.

Corporate IT: Books?

Ruby: New one every day.

Corporate IT: You’ll get me to use some text editor in place of my IDE when Heck freezes over.

Ruby: Not a problem.  NetBeans guy, Eclipse, or IntelliJ?

Corporate IT: Yeah, okay, you win.  Now can I have that stack of waterfall project specs back, they were holding up the table at that end.

Ruby: Have you ever considered Agile?

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Photo attributed to Megyarsh @ Flickr CC

Now that we’ve had an overview of what customer-centric design is, let’s discuss how it can be used to create leads.

Providing Valuable Information

Having a reason for customers to visit your site is the first step in creating leads. The most important aspect of customer-centric design is providing your customers with exactly what they are looking for.  Think about everything they might come to your website to look for and make sure the information is easy to find.  It should also be easy for customers to contact you with questions or concerns.

A Place to Connect

By providing a place for your customers to connect with each other and with you, you can help your customers get the information and support they need.  More importantly, you’ll be able to get information about who needs help and where they are in the buying process.

Enticement

Do your customers have a reason to give you their contact information?  Is there some useful information or service you can provide for free in exchange for contact information?  Enticement to create leads can be very effective for you and provide a useful service for your customers.  Remember to keep information gathering to a minimum. (name and email work best).

How do you use customer-centric design to create leads?

(photo by Just chaos @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: customer-centric, design, customer-centric design, usability, customer service, brand, brand management

Explaining what RSS is to most people is a bit like explaining baseball’s infield fly rule to casual observers.  There is futility in even trying because to get it you have to be more than a casual observer.  Similarly, if I was to say to a casual web surfer that RSS is a way to read a website’s content without having to go to the website, it won’t really make much sense because being a casual web user means surfing from website to website.

The good news for anyone confused by just what RSS does is that, according to Forrester Research, you are in very strong company. It seems that adoption of this federated method of content consumption has begun to level off, putting into question assumptions about how most people really do want to ‘consume’ web content.  They claim that usage of RSS is only 11% and that only 17% of the 89% still not using it are even interested.

Lifehacker has a short blirb on Forrester’s paper, sparse on details and quick to the point.  I found the comments, however, to be highly illuminating.  Reading through the threads, I tried to keep score on the points pro for RSS and pro site vists.  Here is the breakdown of the 82 different threads at the time I was looking at the post.

Pro RSS

• Saves time
• Increases total amount of information absorbed
• Way to avoid ads

Pro Visiting Site

• Enjoy the look of a site
• Want to see all pictures related to an article
• Want to read comments
• Editorial control of content
• Quality vs Noise
• Limited duplication of information
• Surfing relieves boredom

These are some points I drew from this data.

First, LifeHacker draws a technical crowd with Pro Site Visitors mixed in.  It didn’t surprise me that the majority of commenters were pro RSS.  I was more surprised by the commenters in the second camp and their diversity of reasons for not using RSS or used it sparingly. If a technical blog like LH has a good sized representation of Pro Site Visitors, it lends anecdotal evidence to the research numbers.

Second, advertisers want Pro Site Visitors.  When you visit a website, you have lent your attention to that provider.  Those in the second camp are interested in quality over quantity & Signal over Noise.  They want the experience of your website and that includes advertising when done unobtrusively.  The Pro RSS group is more intent on absorbing data without distraction.  Quantity and time are their biggest action items and advertising gets in the way of both.

Lastly, RSS was never the right solution for mass consumption.  Have you seen a professional hot dog eating contest?  Nathan’s is famous for, during 4th of July in the US, promoting people stuffing hot dog after hot dog into their mouths within a ten minute dash.  Anyone ever see this and think ‘Now this here is going to change the way people eat hot dogs forever!’  Fact is, most people are very happy to sit down to a casual lunch of a couple coney dogs with cheese and just enjoy themselves.  Slow? yep. Less hot dogs eaten? yep.  Am I hungry?  You bet!  The point is, people don’t always need a new way to do something.

Photo attributed to 96dpi @ Flickr CC

We’ve mentioned customer-centric design in several of our recent branding and customer service posts.  Using customer-centric design on your site is extremely important to your customers.  Why?  Because they only care about what is important to them - getting whatever information, services, or products they came to your site for.  If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll simply go elsewhere.

So what is customer-centric design anyway?

Customer-centric design is design centered around what the customer wants (as opposed to what the company wants).  To do this, you have to always keep in mind why the customer came to your site and make it as easy as possible for them to accomplish their goals.

Ok play nice with customers, but what about my goals?

Your goals are probably concerned with increasing sales and leads (if not, they really should be).  Here’s the best part.  Customer-centric design actually makes it easier to accomplish your goals.  Customers who can find what they’re looking for are much more likely to make a purchase or return later for more information and services.  Most importantly, they’re likely to recommend you to their friends and colleagues, which is one of the most powerful ways to increase sales.

I getcha, now what?

Take a look at your site from your customer’s point of view.  What are the most important functions (for them, not you)?  Are they easy to find from anywhere on the site?  When a customer is in the middle of a process (finding support information, making a purchase, etc.), are there places for improvement by making things more clear and removing unnecssary steps or clicks?  Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Solicit feedback

Sometimes only your customers really know what they want.  So ask them.  It’s an easy and cheap way to get good feedback and by listening to your customers, you can increase customer satisfaction and brand awareness.

How have you used customer-centric design to help your customers?

(photo by ralphbijker @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: customer-centric, design, customer-centric design, usability, customer service, brand, brand management

As we’ve been discussing, sometimes businesses get caught up in the need to increase traffic to their website.  This “traffic” often equates to the number of visitors to a website or the number of total pageviews.  But, as Traffikd discusses, there often is an opportunity to increase the time on the site and the number of pageviews per visitor.  This obviously will increase the number of total pageviews, but it also means that visitors are spending more time on your site - which gives you more time to sell to them.

For bloggers and social media marketers, the desire to increase numbers of unique visitors to a site often overshadows an effort to increase the average number of pageviews per visitor… In reality, the blogger and the designer do have some influence on visitors in terms of encouraging extended visits, and even a small increase in average pageviews per visitor can result in significant gains in overall pageviews. - Traffikd - Increasing Pageviews Per Visitor

LookSmart may be one to consider.  They’ve just added enhancements to make it easier for advertisers to target their customers.  Ad Operations Online has the details here.

Want to learn more about Web (or Internet) Strategy?  Web Strategist and Forrester Jeremiah Owyang has compiled a reading list.

I have to admit, I’m a bit of a trend nut.  Like conspiracy nuts, trend nuts love to postulate wild theories for the sheer elation of occasionally (very occasionally) being right.  For instance, I was the first person I knew who spotted the correlation that the number of bacon strips on my local diner’s breakfast plate special can be directly tied to naked short sales in last week’s commodity pork barrel market (maybe not).

My RSS feeds today had the following stories listed back to back, Web 3.0 Manifesto Published, Semantic Web: Making Advertising more Relevant to Consumers, and Yahoo SearchMonkey gets Sagat, CitySearch.

I talked earlier about my personal excitement over the business potential for semantic web.  I think it will be a huge reboot for the market players who get in on the ground floor.  A quick review of these articles is only strengthening my resolve on that matter.

The Web 3.0 Manifesto, put out by Project10x, is a market research piece about where the opportunities are in this space.  Market research by itself does not a market make.  Though for 3K, one would expect the customers that buy this report are serious enough about the potential that they see the investment worthwhile.  RWW says that the report actually lists out niches where industries can stake claims on this new space.  I really want to get a look at the full report, but for now I will just have the listen to 3rd parties ‘discuss’ it.

The next article discusses Web 3.0 Conference and Expo where they looked at the Semantic Advertising possibilities, Semantic Advertising in my mind is a dressed up way of saying Contextual Advertising like those found tied to search results in google.  We have a limited form of this already, but semantic web will make this easier to do correctly.  Im skeptical about discussions about advertising models that will ‘improve’ on current models in light of studies suggesting that we have developed Banner Blindness unless the results are really highly targeted to our interests.  I’m in a wait and see mode on this one.

Lastly, Yahoo’s SearchMonkey is practical examples of semantic web in search results.  When your content is properly tagged for search bots to read it, you can get rich context results in your search engines like Yahoo.  We talked about it earlier.  While earlier reports suggested Yahoo had dropped to third on the search list behind YouTube for number of search results delivered, it may be enough for them to have highly targeted results that can be easier to monetize.  SearchMonkey is a great place to start playing around with semantic web concepts to see real world results.  Another good place to start is microformats.

Now, did I tell you about my theory involving stop light frequency charts and the price of gas?

Photo attributed to Gunjan Karun on Flickr CC

Yesterday we discussed creating a memorable brand.  Today, let’s try a thought exercise about what makes a good brand. Think about some items/services you might purchase or use.  What is the brand that first comes to mind?

• Car
• Portable Media Device
• Watch
• Purse
• Soda
• Discount Shopping
• Running Shoes
• Fast Food
• Search Engine
• Jewelry

Think about some of the top brands.  What emotions or thoughts immediately come to mind?

• Nike
• Rolex
• Mercedes
• Wal-Mart
• Apple
• Google
• Coke
• McDonald’s
• Tiffany’s
• Coach

Good brands have an instinctual emotional reaction attached to them and are top-of-mind for their product or industry. Now think about your own brand.  What emotions or thoughts come to mind?  What thoughts or emotions come to your customers’ minds?  What would you like those to be?  How can you become top-of-mind for your industry or market?

(photo by Victor Bezrukov @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: branding, brand, brand management, internet marketing, online marketing

When customers see your logo or hear your name, what do they think and feel?  If there isn’t any emotion or attachment to your brand, you’re missing out on an opportunity to connect on an emotional level with your customers.  Here’s some tips on how to create a memorable brand:

• Figure out what traits you want your brand to be known for.
• Create unique images, sounds, looks, etc. that represent your brand traits.
• Be consistent.
• Provide excellent customer experiences.
• Deal fairly with others.
• Handle failures transparently.
• Connect with your customers.
• Listen to your customers.
• Be true to yourself.
• Have fun.

What’s worked for your brand?  Have ideas to add to the list? Please share in the comments below.

(photo by OiMax @ Flickr CC)

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