internet business strategy

Sarah Worsham / Dec 1, 2008

TwitScoop for News & Business Intelligence

Want 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.

Technorati Tags: twitter, social networks, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy, internet business strategy

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

« Previous Page