Jan
06
2009

What is an Internet Strategy?

strategycompujerameyYou may have heard the term Internet Strategy thrown around recently. With the rise in popularity of the Internet, businesses have felt the need to get on the Web bandwagon.  Most businesses have a website, but many are feeling the need for a more thorough look at how to use the Internet effectively.  So, what exactly is an Internet Strategy?

Like any good strategy, an Internet strategy is a process of deciding upon a goal and then figuring out how to work towards that goal.  An Internet strategy should be intimately tied to your business strategy.  If you don’t have a business strategy, start there and incorporate the Internet into your planning. The goal should be a business goal, not just an Internet business goal.  The Internet has matured enough to be able to assist in reaching most business goals.

Once you have your business goal, an Internet strategy is the process of figuring out how the Internet can help you reach that goal.  Think about your business website.  What functionality and information should be available to your customers to help you reach your goal?  What other Internet technologies can help?  It helps to think broadly – email, internet advertising, twitter, social networking, blogs – can all help you reach business goals.

To differentiate yourself from your competitors, think about what makes your business different.  What are you good at?  What is your core competency?  How can you apply that to your Internet strategy?

Your customers are the reason why you’re in business.  Don’t forget about them.  What benefits will you offer them through your products and services?  How can you leverage these benefits on the Internet?  How can your customers help you reach your goals?

(photo by compujeramey @ Flickr CC)

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Dec
16
2008

8 Places to Syndicate Your Business Content

broadcastsoundman1024Now that you understand RSS, you can use it to syndicate your content to other places on the Internet.  Part of your content strategy should be syndicating or publishing your content in multiple places online.  The more places you can use the same piece of content, the more return you’ll get for your effort. Here are some places to consider:

  1. Twitter – Using Twitterfeed you can automatically tweet the title and a link to any of your content (website, blog, delicious) that has a RSS feed.
  2. LinkedIn – LinkedIn has added the ability to add blog and twitter content (both of which have RSS feeds) right to your LinkedIn profile.
  3. FaceBook – There is a Twitter application that will send your tweets right to your Facebook page (as status updates) and with Notes you can have any RSS feeds show up as well.  If you create a page for your business, you can have your content show up there as well.
  4. BlogCatalog – A social network to connect with other bloggers, use your rss feeds to syndicate content from twitter, your blog, delicious, etc.
  5. MyBlogLog – Another social network to connect with other bloggers.
  6. FriendFeed – An easy way for your friends and connections to see all of your content from various sources in one place.
  7. Plaxo – A Business social network, you can syndicate content from your blog, twitter, etc. using your RSS feeds.
  8. Your Social Networks – Many social networks will allow you to add a feed to your content.  If not, consider copying and pasting your content to show up on your social networks.

The more places your content is, the higher chance you’ll be able to provide some useful information to a potential customer.  Keep in mind that your content needs to be useful to others – not just marketing or PR.

(photo by soundman1024 @ Flickr CC)

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Dec
15
2008

RSS – Syndicate Your Content

syndicationcogdogblogRSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to automatically syndicate your content in ways that other people can easily read or aggregate it.  RSS is formatted in XML which allows your feed to be published once but viewed by many different programs.  If you have a blog on WordPress or Blogger (and others) or use Twitter, then you already have RSS feeds.  If you subscribe to blogs using Google Reader or iGoogle, you are subscribing to the RSS feeds from these blogs.

RSS is largely invisible to most people.  As I mentioned above, you may already be using RSS feeds without being aware of them.  However, just knowing you have RSS feeds with various content services means you can easily use these feeds to syndicate your content to wider audiences (which we’ll discuss in the next post).  To see if a webpage has an RSS feed, you can look for links which say “subscribe to this blog” or “subscribe to this website”.  Sometimes the feeds will also just say “RSS” or have a icon that looks like this: A website may have a feed, but it may not be obvious – try subscribing to the website using Google Reader or iGoogle – both will try to find the feed for you.

(photo by cogdogblog @ Flickr CC)

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Dec
12
2008

An Example Content Strategy for Business

chessmarshallflickmanHaving a content strategy is important for businesses because it provides a plan for using their website and the Internet to reach business goals.  Most businesses will have goals around increasing sales, improving customer loyalty and brand reputation, and decreasing customer support costs.  These can all be accomplished online and on your company’s website and having a good content strategy will help.  First step is to consider the questions from yesterday’s post.  Once you’re ready to proceed, here’s an example how you might implement a content strategy:

Write a blog

Blogs are a great way to easily post content.  Your blog content should be information that is useful and interesting to your customers.  Set up a regular posting schedule (at least once per week is ideal) and encourage participation from your readers.

Microblog

Twitter is an easy way to post thoughts throughout the day and to connect with others in your industry and related industry.  Twitter still may have small acceptance in certain industries, but it is growing rapidly and it certainly can’t hurt to start now.  Keep in mind that Twitters should be mostly about giving useful information and linking to other sites, not about broadcasting press releases.

Share helpful links

Join a social bookmarking site such as Delicious and use it to bookmark pages that are interesting to your customers. Using your RSS feed from Delicious you can have these links automatically show up on your blog and on Twitter (check out Twitterfeed).

Record Video

Since most Internet users are on fast Internet connections these days, they like seeing video (even watching their favorite tv shows and movies online).  Video is a great way to put a face to your business and can be helpful for demonstrating helpful techniques to your customers.  Videos can be posted to your blog and/or website and shared via various video sharing sites.

Get Social

Find social networks in your industry, set up a profile, and have helpful conversations with people there.  Many social networks will also allow you to post content from outside using RSS so you may be able to have your blog, twitter, and link content appear on the social network automatically.  Remember not to just broadcast information about your business – connect with people and be helpful.

(photo by Marshall Flickman @ Flickr CC)

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Dec
11
2008

Content is King – So What's Your Content Strategy?

kingmark_cogginsYou’ve heard it before – content is king.  Well without regularly updated useful content your business website will stagnate.  It’s the end of the year and a good time to reflect on how you’re using your website and the Internet to further your business goals.  Take a few minutes to think about how you can use content to help your customers and further your goals.  The good news is that content strategy can be cheap (in dollars) to implement and can provide excellent returns on investment (helping you reach your goals).  Here are some questions to consider in your content strategy:

  • What goals are you trying to reach with your content?
  • How will you measure your progress towards those goals?
  • What content should you provide?
  • How often will you post new content?
  • What types of content will you post (text, audio, video, images)?
  • How will you use your content and get your message out to your customers?
  • How will you connect with your customers and have rewarding, useful conversations?

In the next few posts I’ll give you an example of a content strategy that can work for any business and how to measure progress towards your business goals.

(photo by Mark Coggins @ Flickr CC)

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Dec
09
2008

Online Customer Engagement Findings

cscapelogoAs a followup to yesterday’s post on online customer engagement, reader Sarah Woodbridge suggested taking a look at cScape’s report on Customer Engagement.  The report is well worth a look (and it’s free!).  They’ve been producing a report for 3 years so they have a bit of historical data as well.

Customer engagement is widely seen as a way of deepening and enriching a product or service offering and a method for gaining customer insight.  – The cScape Online Customer Engagement Survey Report 2009

Here are some of the key findings:

  • Only 42% of organizations surveyed have a defined customer engagement strategy in place
  • 41% of respondents said that deteriorating economic climate has resulted in a greater focus on customer engagement
  • There’s interest in creating relationships with customers to increase the long-term customer value and also to increase the value delivered to the customer.
  • Most organizations feel that sensitivity to price is a key customer behavior that will have to be addressed in the next 12 months (48%).
  • Email newsletters are the most likely tactic to improve customer engagement (59%).
  • Web 2.0 and social media such as user ratings & feedback (41%), user-generated content (37%), blogging (36%) and social networks (36%) will also be used to engage customers.
  • Very few companies (5%) have a strategy that uses mobile channels.
  • Lack of resources continues to be a barrier to successful customer engagement.
  • About a third of companies site problems with technology as a significant barrier to cultivating better customer engagement.

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Dec
04
2008

Top Tools for Business Twittering

toolsbategaOnce you’ve decided to use Twitter for your business, using the right tools can make the entire experience much easier and more rewarding.  Here are some of the top tools that I use.  If you have others, please share them in the comments.  Since Twittering is exploding in use, I expect more tools to be developed and to add to this list in the future.

  • TweetDeck – Businesses typically have a lot of followers on Twitter (or should) and usually have a large number of people they are following (following people who follow you is a good way to connect).  This can mean a large number of updates which can be difficult to scan through for the important content.  TweetDeck makes it easy to monitor groups of Twitterers, keywords, and get a quick keyword cloud for what’s hot.  For more info, see our review of TweetDeck.
  • TweetScan – TweetScan lets you set up searches for keywords so you can monitor what is being said about your company, products, and in your industry.  Monitor those searches through email, rss or on their website.
  • TwitScoop – similar to TweetScan, TwitScoop lets you search for various keywords, but also gives you some graphs to see when the keywords have been popular over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days.  While, TwitScoop does not have rss or email capabilities like TweetScan, you can get a nice visual representation of trending for a keyword so I consider them complementary tools.
  • TwitterFeed – If you’re actively participating in the online community, you are sharing links to content other than your own – probably on many different social networks.  Twitterfeed allows you to automate Twittering about those links from any social network that has a rss feed.  Right now we’re using Twitterfeed to automatically tweet our blog posts and our delicious posts.
  • Twellow – Twitter is a wide open frontier and it can be difficult to find people who you should be following in your industry.  Twellow gives you a listing of Twitterers divided up by industry and subject area.  You should consider adding your own business Twitter username if it isn’t already there.
  • SocialToo – Following everyone who follows you can get tiring.  SocialToo automates that process, send a direct message to each person you follow, and also gives you the ability to send surveys out through Twitter.

(pic by batega @ Flickr CC)

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Dec
03
2008

Treat Social Networks like Online Dating

datingmikelichtNow you may or may not have dated recently, but we all have had experience with someone who comes on too strongly or is self-centered.  Let’s say you are at a bar and someone approaches you with the following:

I’m new in town.  Can you give me directions to your place? I can drive us there in my hot new bmw.

Even delivered as a joke, statements like that will probably put you in a negative frame of mind towards deliverer.  What if, instead, they said something like:

Hi.  How are you doing today?

Polite and seems interested in someone other than themselves.  The difference between two alternatives seems pretty obvious, but we see similar approaches in social networking (or even regular networking).  Here’s some comments I’ve gotten on various social networking sites:

Great to see you here!  I invite you to stop by my profile, sign my guestbook and check out my blogs! and while you’re there please add me to your list of friends :) I look forward to networking with you.

or

I’m not trying to sell you anything, but here are my areas of expertise: ____, ____, ____

I don’t know about you, but those types of introductions are real turn offs.  Information about yourself and your business should be in your profile.  If someone wants more information about what you do, they’ll look it up.  If you want to explore the network to find connections, don’t carpet bomb the place with what are essentially advertisements.  Take a few minutes to find people who might make a good connection and leave a more personal comment asking about their business, blog or website.  Read discussion posts, help people out and learn more about people from what they post.  If you think of social networking like dating, by being more personable and polite, I think you’ll find much more effective contacts and not annoy everyone.

Do you have any social networking horror stories you’d like to share?  Please do in the comments section below.

(photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com @ Flickr CC)

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Dec
01
2008

TwitScoop for News & Business Intelligence

twitscooplogo2Want to know what’s hot on Twitter right now?  TwitScoop gives you a quick snapshot of the top words in a tag cloud that updates every 20 seconds.  Hover over any of the words to get a view of the last 5 tweets with that word highlighted.  Click on a word to get a graph of its usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days.  If you see an interesting tag cloud, click the “Tweet this cloud” button to save a snapshot of the page,  with the option to send a link to Twitter (its kind of like freezing time).  Here’s a link to the snapshot I saved of the twitter cloud.  A widget is also available to add the hot trends tag cloud to your blog or website. Or subscribe to TwitScoop on Twitter to be updated with links to top events.

For more in depth results, choose a keyword or username to search for.  Twitscoop will give you an overview of the tweets which you can click on to get more details – the last 20 tweets with the keyword highlighted and a graph of the usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days.  If there are new results, Twitscoop will periodically update the page with a reminder to refresh to see new results (which doesn’t interupt your current research). Click the “Tweet these results” button to save your results, giving you a link or an option to send a link to Twitter.  For examples, this is a link to the results for “social” that I just investigated.

TwitScoop is good tool to get a quick view of what’s going on or for research into what has been said about a certain topic (if it was within 3 days).  Unlike TweetScan, there isn’t an RSS feed to subscribe to results for periodic updates, but TwitScoop’s graphing capabilities can give you good information of how a topic is trending.

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Oct
07
2008

Reach for Your Business Goals, Not for Numbers

soccerrandysonofrobertOne 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)

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