Category Archives: Strategy

Big Book Stores and Amazon

Posted on by David
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So, when you compare Amazon to Barnes and Noble or Borders (just on book selling), how are they fundamentally different?

All three sell online and, while Amazon is still the best, the other two have reasonably easy interfaces for selling books. What is left? Physical stores. B&N and Borders have the liability and asset of a physical retail presence in many communities across the country. However, they fail horribly to the leverage the two together to improve overall sales.

If you are looking for a physical retail store, it is likely because you want to buy a book right away. If you are willing to wait a few days, you can just order online. But if you want it right now, say before you catch a flight that afternoon, you want to know if the store near you is carrying the title before making the trek out there. Making retail inventory available for search by store seems like a no-brainer. It relieves floor staff from having to answer as many phone calls and enables customers to find out if they can buy more immediately.

However, Borders buries this feature several levels down in their site and B&N doesn’t even offer it. What a wasted opportunity.

The ideal interface, I think, would be to set a cookie for the user’s zip code at some point and then offer local retail inventory results along with online inventory.

Gee, that sounds simple. Why don’t they do it? My guess would be that their performance measures don’t reward cross-selling between physical and online operations.

Pre-requisites for a Successful Small Business Web Site

Posted on by David
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There are 6 pre-requisites for a successful small business web site. The are:

  1. Have one!
  2. It lists location, hours and contact information prominently on the home page.
  3. Services and/or products are clearly identified in general on the home page and in detail on dedicated pages.
  4. They qualify that they are the best source for whatever the business provides.
  5. The design looks reputable.
  6. They have updated their listings in the local search engines for Google and Yahoo!.

Hitting each of the above won’t guarantee success but it will prevent fundamental flaws from preventing the best possible outcomes for a business with their web site.

The above is based on part of my presentation to the American Association of Endodontists a couple weeks ago.

Things to Think about Before a Web Site Redesign

Posted on by David
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Mike is getting ready to refresh the design of his organization’s web site. He asks:

In my present job, I’ve inherited a website that is, to put it kindly, dated. It needs a top-to-bottom redesign and I’m finally getting that underway. The questions I’m struggling with — how do the members use the website, if at all? — what functionality do they want and need? — what really works for us?

These are important questions but I like to start at a bit of a higher level before delving into them. The process I use with my clients usually follows this pattern:

What are your overall goals as an organization?
What does your company or NPO hope to achieve in the next year? Two years? Five? You need to clearly understand what you are trying to achieve overall before you even think about your web site, even if it is a key element in achieving the goal!

How do you want to go about achieving those goals?
Otherwise known as: strategy. I picked up a definition of strategy from Alan Weiss, that goes something like this: strategy governs how you make everyday business decisions. It influences your tactics. It defines how you want to go about achieving your goals. Now you can get specific to the Web, placing various strategies into the context of how well they will serve your goals. You should also be looking at which audiences for your site are the most relevant to your goals and develop strategies for serving them.

How should your site specifically support those goals and your strategy for achieving them?
Now you get down to the details. What features and content best support your strategy? What imagery is best aligned with the above? How should it be organized to appeal to your target audiences? And so on.

Ideally, you should spend as much time and effort as needed to answer these questions before investing a penny in a redesign. Otherwise, you put your investment and overall success at unnecessary risk.

Ben and Richard on Prometheus

Posted on by David
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Ben Martin has posted an interesting interview with Richard Lewis about the rebirth of the Prometheus retreat as a stand-alone, volunteer run effort. (Here is an earlier post I made about this issue.)

Nice illustration of how people can pursue the same mission as an association without actually doing so through the association. I think ASAE handled this in a productive fashion, so kudos to them! There are important strategic lessons in this chain of events for all membership organizations.

Why Natural Search Engine Placement Is Risky as a Primary Strategy

Posted on by David
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This Wall Street Journal article, How Search-Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing, provides several examples of why relying on search engine driven traffic to your site as a primary strategy brings along some risks. Your business is subject to significant impact from relatively minor adjustments to the search engine algorithms and policies.

That said, the main example in the article is of a news web site that wants to change its domain name from a .net to a .com for branding reasons (after paying $1 million for the .com address):

Such a simple change, Mr. Skrenta has discovered, could have disastrous short-term results. About 50% of visits to his news site come through a search engine — and about 90% of the time, that is Google. Some companies say their sites have disappeared from top search results for weeks or months after making address switches, due to quirky rules Google and other search engines have adopted. So the same user who typed “Anna Nicole Smith news” into Google last week and saw Topix.net as a top result might not see it at all after the change to Topix.com.

Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10%, that would essentially be a 10% loss in ad revenue, Mr. Skrenta says. “Because of this little mechanical issue, it could be a catastrophe for us,” he says.

Since Google ascribes credibility to results on domains that it trusts, changing your domain name can have significant impact, as topix is discovering.

Any business model should be flexible enough to not be overly dependent on one source of business. For most organizations, search engine placement should be an important but not overarching strategy for the company.