My Top 5 Reasons Why Your Web Site Will Be Unsuccessful
The following are my top five reasons why your Web site will ultimately be unsucessful and be useless stagnant bits and bytes on the Internet.
5. The IS department is in charge of design and content creation/publishing.
The IS department does not know your content better than you, the content contributor. Unless you have a very specific workflow that facilitates the content creation process and how it interacts with your IS dept. for publishing, it will never work.
4. Your content is “brochure-ware”, static and stale.
Have you ever heard this in your office?
“Hey Bob, let’s just put our brochure up as content on our web site. It is the same marketing copy we would use anyway, so why re-invent the wheel.”
This conversation should never happen. If it does, please..PLEASE say “no” and make sure your content for your web site is written for the Web (yes, there is a difference) and it is reviewed on a regular basis if not changes on a regular basis.
3. The majority of your senior managers and middle managers don’t “get it” when it comes to the web.
Your management sees the Web site as a something that you “had” to do to keep up with the Jones’, but never saw the value in it and will not put more resources to improving it.
2. You have decentralized content creation without standards and rules.
Can you say Silence of the Lambs? Wild, rabid kids without any supervision will fend for themselves which gives you a fractured, inconsistent mess for your visitors to wade through to find the content they are really looking for. Without explicit standards and business rules, decentralized content control and creation can become unruley and very difficult to manage globally.
1. You don’t understand your audience and how they interact wit your brand and company.
Rule number 1: Know thy audience and thy will strive. If you don’t know who you are providing content/services to how can you build something they will use or come to?
Leverage Your Off-line Client Intake Form Online
Tom Kane over at Legal Marketing Blog (again, a fellow BlawgThinker) has a revised list of questions you should have on a firm client intake form. Of course his version is legal focused, but in reality, any firm, of any size, should have a list like this to determine how referrals were given, if the client is worth taking on, and how you think you and your company will interact with them and their company. The last thing any party wants is to engage in a relationship that is destined to be fatal from the beginning. I’ve written a couple of articles on law firm Web sites and strategies behind them. A few of them refer to placing a client intake form on your Web site for potential clients to fill out. Tom’s list is a great starting point to develop that on-line form. Make sure you ask all the right questions on your on-line form to answer all your questions on your off-line form.
Blog Evangelizing Tips from Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki shares some ways to evangelize your blog from what he learned in his first 120 days of blogging. He has several great tips, many of which I would have employed when I launched From the 21st Floor. Two that stand out to me from his list of tops are:
- Think "book" not "diary." I totally agree with Guy on this one. But when I launched this site I wasn’t quite thinking "book." I knew that I didn’t want to make a diary. I have another site for that chit-chat babble. No, From the 21st Floor was going to be about highlighting my knowledge on topics and sharing it with you, the reader. It was also an outlet for me to publish my articles and create a professional presence. Taking this process thinking of every post similar to a "book" will only make this Web site better.
- Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant. Guy actually labels this one as Scoop Stuff, but his Japanese philosopher quote sounds better to me. To augment Guy’s comment regarding to read the top fifty bloggers via Technorati and link to important news you find, I say read the top bloggers in your niche market. It could be the top fifty in Technorati, or it could be the top fifty Web designers/developers, or the top fifty knitting blogs. Don’t just limit yourself to blogs either, but any Web site for that matter. I call this reading the beacons or the "information hubs." Information hubs are the bloggers who have way more time than I do to read a lot more feeds than I do. They seem to have their finger on the pulse of the profession you monitor. Thus when they pick up a trend, you’ll know about it. Now they may be the "scoopers" because they are the ones monitoring the feeds, but if you may find something out of their feeds that is just as important that you can scoop.
The only thing on Guy’s list that I would caution readers is regarding number three, Collect E-mail Addresses. I throw out a word of caution on this one in regards to blasting a message out to an acquired list of e-mail addresses. If you acquire them through meetings, business cares, etc. you should be fine with sending them an e-mail. If you harvest them off another blast message you may fall under some CAN-SPAM compliance issues. Finally, whenever you send out an e-mail blast, have a mechanism in place that will allow those individuals whom you have their e-mail address, but never really contact, to opt-out of future announcements. Sounds complicated, I know, but it is really best in the long run. You’ll have a healthier relationship with those recipients. Remember, while we all give out our business cards at conferences, meetings, networking events, we tend to forget who we give them to, and the inbox is a very sensitive place. We don’t want anymore unsolicited messages in there as the next person.
Finally, Guy mentions creating a blogroll, that is on my to-do list and his blog will surely be added.
For the Love of Money or the Game?
Have you seen the recent New Balance commercial on TV? I love it. It asks the simple question, do you play sports for the love of money or the game? I think it resonnates beyond sports and into the business world if you think about it. For the love money or the game…or rather are you in business for the love of making a lots of money your providing the customer the best experience or product possible? I think if you can answer that fundamental question you can set the proper tone and strategy for your business…and you’ll be profitable too.
Don’t believe me, here are some examples of companies who are customer focused, not out to make a quick buck.
– Located in Chicago, Feedburner is the defacto tracking solution for RSS feeds. They aren’t just crazy about syndication and all of its possibilities, they are passionate about it. They are passionate about providing key statistics to their customers. Each year Feedburner takes a day and lets their developers loose to each build one cool new enhancement that can be implemented tomorrow on their service. They are committed to keeping a free version for smaller businesses and individuals to use. They create evangelists one customer at a time every day with the information and service they provide. It is that focus on providing tools for their customers to analyze and monetize their data through syndication that is what landed Feedburner some of the largest publishers in the U.S. including Reuters and the Associated Press.
– Originally a small Web site design shop in Chicago, 37Signals changed their business model in 2003 when they showed their internal, home-grown, project management (or collaboration as they call it) tool. Now called Basecamp, 37Signals launched a revolution of design companies expanding into the software developement world to solve solutions they and their clients have been struggling over for years. 37Signals is passionate about creating small business tools at a reasonable cost. They know that there will be better, more expensive tools created by other companies, but 37Signals is focusing on the lower end of the market. Command the lower end of the market at prices almost anyone can afford and you will profit. 37Signals runs a scaled down version of their products for free with the ability at anytime to upgrade or downgrade levels. They take the mentality that less is more and that enables them to respond to the real needs of their customers.
37Singals then took that mentality and expanded it out to three more products (TaDa, BackPack, and Campfire) and has helped revolutionize a programming language (Ruby) and framework (Rails) into mainstream use.
Those Who "Get It" Monitor the Web and Engage in the Conversation
I’ve started to read Naked Conversations
The “get it” factor is the fact that business can’t continue as usual. Either engage your customers, both the skeptics and evangelists, or be left in the dust. Now, just because the book is about blogs, that shouldn’t matter. Having a company blog, or employees that blog will not make the difference. Rather, engaging your customers in any two-way communications in a public forum is the key. It could be through discussion boards, e-mail discussion lists, or other online-communities. The point is the companies who are putting a human face to their brand is winning customers over left and right.
Want to know what is being said about your company? Head to Technorati or Feedster and conduct some searches on your company, or even yourself if you are a CEO. You might be amazed at the conversations happening without you even knowing about.
If you aren’t monitoring the Blogosphere yet, you should start today. And don’t be affraid to enter the conversation about your company, products, and services. You might learn that the new feature you put on the latest version of Product X doesn’t work like the customer thought it would. Or you might gain valuable feedback on how to improve the product even more. This is market research you can’t buy.
So how do you monitor the Blogosphere? Here are some tips.
- Get a Gmail account (If you need an invite, let me know
- Set up some Alerts in Google for your company, products, services, Senior managers, etc.
- Create a free account on Bloglines or any other news aggregator service
- Set up free accounts at Technorati, Feedster, PubSub
- Create “Watchlists” for the same terms you used for your Google Alerts and add the RSS/XML feeds to your news aggregator
- Start watching
It seems pretty simple once you look at it. But by doing this you can get a quick lay of the land on what is being said about your company by bloggers and other citizen journalists.
The World is Changing. Are you Ready for the What is Next?
No, I’m not talking about the next Apple “super secret” announcement. I’m also not going to sit here and predict what the “next” thing is, but I can tell you it will affect you and your company in ways you can’t imagine today. Why? Because the movement I’m referring to is not digital, though it may be played out in the digital arena. No, I’m referring to a cultural shift from what is “the norm” to what is “winning ______.” That isn’t a typo. ______ refers to whatever business you are in. It could be customers, clients, student admissions, employees, new products—anything. It’s so broad that I can’t define it for you. It is something you will have to figure out for your industry, company, and business. But trust me, the change is coming.
How do I know that change is in the air? Sure I’ve read the books, magazines, articles, blogs that say “it” is coming, but more importantly I’ve witnessed the change. I’ve seen it in people’s eyes. I’ve heard it in corners at conferences. I’ve read it on blogs. Employees, customers, end-users are fed up with “the norm.” They want, we want, something to change from the products and services we use. It could be from the lawyer that helps you buy a home or the server that brings your food to your table at dinner this weekend. We want something more than the usual service.
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