Free Webinar Next Week

Posted on November 11, 2008 by David

I am delivering a webinar next Monday at 12 noon eastern that is free with registration. The topic is “Top 10 Quickest Ways to Create Value Online” and is being hosted as part of the Avectra Academy. The content is tailored for membership organizations.

This is a great opportunity to pick up a few practical ideas with which to enhance the value of your site before the year is over. Sign up today!

Online Career Centers in the Current Economy: Huge Opportunity to Offer New Value

Posted on November 6, 2008 by David

The employment market is dramatically changing as the drumbeat of layoffs and a shrinking economy continue. The potential value of online career centers is, counter-intuitively, skyrocketing at the same time. Here is why:

Employers may have fewer positions available but the ones they do have open are likely to be extremely important;
Employers will have to sift through a much greater number of applicants for each position;
There is going to be an influx of new job seekers who are highly qualified without recent experience in job hunting.

Online career centers have greater value for both the employers and seekers in this market. Think about what additional value you can offer to each.

Can you help employers to more easily sift through a large number of applicants to find the hidden gems?

Can you help the newly unemployed to present themselves in the best light?

Can you offer special services to senior executives and the recruiters looking to cherry pick the best talent in this market?

You get the idea.

The career centers that offer the most value now will be the ones that surge forward with the most energy when the economy inevitably improves and organizations begin hiring in much greater numbers. What are you doing to be ready?

Innovating on the Demand Side

Posted on November 5, 2008 by David

Nick Carr makes a great point today about making sure you look at new outcomes you can achieve with new technology rather than simply getting more efficient at what you already do: The new economics of computing.

The title of this post comes from Peter Drucker who called innovations that enable new value for your customers as demand innovation. Supply innovation is all about creating efficiencies for value you already provide.

News without the Paper

Posted on October 29, 2008 by David

The Christian Science Monitor has announced that they are going web-only for daily news and will print a Sunday magazine: The Monitor Ends Daily Print Edition.

If you read the story, you’ll note they did this in order to cut costs while still retaining their foreign bureaus and reporters. This makes all sorts of sense to me. When I hear about newspapers slashing their reporting staff, I always shake my head. The asset that they leverage for revenue is news reporting. They need to find new ways to leverage that asset effectively rather than cutting it to the bone to preserve an old, declining, business model.

Peter Drucker wrote that the most innovative companies are those who are ruthless about killing off programs, products and services that are no longer producitve. Kudos to the CSM for going boldly to the forefront of their industry.

If you’ve never read it, CSM provides some of the best international coverage out there. I discovered it in college while pulling long graveyard shifts at the periodicals desk as a student employee of the library.

International Audiences

Posted on October 22, 2008 by David

The few bright spots in the earning reports for American companies these days are those who are making gains in international markets. The up swing in profits from abroad is offsetting declines in their domestic markets.

This underlines the growing importance of international audiences for web sites. You need to identify the specific business outcomes you hope to achieve with them and then create sites that focus on that in a way that works for those people from abroad.

In communicating across borders with a web site, there are three criteria you can use to evaluate each audience.

1. Language. If your site communicates with business people and/or professionals, do they speak the native lanaguage of your web site in day-to-day business? If so, you may be able to get away without translating. If not, look at what language will work best for each audience.

2. Transactions. If you collect data or conduct ecommerce transactions via your site, what impact will different international audiences have on the fields you use? Are there privacy laws and regulations you will need to comply with? Again, look at similarlities and differences across all of your international audiences.

3. Culture. This is the tough one. Look for cultural similarities and differences among your international audiences. Do they respond the same way to the same imagery? Is your humorous ad campaign in the home country highly offensive in others? Cross-cultural analysis and testing will help to reveal issues such as this.

Assessing these three characteristics among your international audience and against your home-country web presence will help you to identify which audiences can get by with your existing presence and which may need highly tailored efforts to support them and your desired outcomes.

Time to Increase the Value You Offer

Posted on October 6, 2008 by David

If you’ve been peeking at the stock market this week or reading financial news, you are probably feeling more than a bit uneasy. There are definitely financial challenges out there and the economy may be undergoing a pretty significant amount of change now that it has been up ended.

But that is no reason to hide under our desks, as comforting as that might feel. Now is the time to raise the bar and increase the value you are offering to your customers, members and clients.

How well are you conveying the value of your products and services?

Can improving the usability of key pages on your site increase conversion rates and improve revenue?

Are you getting the most value possible from your existing technology and infrastructure?

Can you improve the efficiency of your processes to free up staff resources for other higher value actions?

Short term: Pick one thing you can do today to improve the value you offer. Do it again tomorrow. And the day after. (You get the idea.)

Medium term: What changes can you implement this quarter to make a significant difference?

Long term: Are new markets opening up for you due to the economy? Should you reduce or leave completely any existing markets that are unlikely to recover?

I guarantee you’ll feel better if you do something today. Go for it.

When to Build and When to Hire

Posted on October 1, 2008 by David

I though this article from MIT Sloan Management Review about hiring vs. developing internal talent was quite interesting. The article posits that the characteristics of the job should have as much, if not more, influence in the decision than the people in question. Here is a relevant quote from the summary.

When ‘Stars’ Migrate, Do They Still Perform Like Stars?

Consequently, organizations should not think of talent management as a simple “build versus buy” dichotomy. Rather, there are some positions for which they can buy, and others for which they must build. Within investment banks, for example, the retail brokers (who handle individual clients) work primarily on their own. In contrast, institutional salespeople (who sell to major institutional investors such as Putnam, Vanguard and Fidelity) are more likely to perform their jobs in teams. Thus, retail brokers are more portable and can easily be hired from the outside. Institutional salespeople, however, should be developed from within, and efforts should be made to retain them.

This has lots of interesting implications for career path development, recruitment and retention.

C. David Gammel, CAE

Helping associations pursue goals that matter.

Author Archives: David