StrategicPoints

Part 3 – Prioritization In the Online Marketing Plan!

If you are reading this article, you may want to check the first two parts here:

This is the first article in the series on writing a strategic online marketing plan
This is the second article in the series on writing a strategic online marketing plan

The more I think about writing a plan for a company’s online marketing efforts, I think about all the cookie-cutter, repetitive actions taken out there by thousands and thousands of website owners and marketers.  This means people are starting to following standards in online marketing and trust me there are many things you should do and are doing right now!   But, in a few cases, I’ve noticed that some things in marketing are much more important and easy to do than others, and just because everybody else is doing it, doesn’t mean you have to do it or should be putting resources into it.  Just because the other kids are doing it is not enough…

What I am talking about is making strategic decisions about what is not just easy, but what is going to give you the biggest bang for you buck.  Now, that is a very important part of the online marketing plan, such as what to first and then next, and so on.  But even before many things can be done, there is and always will be a lot of extra setup work.  If you want to have an email marketing campaign system in place, you need to at least have a solution to collect emails, possibly segment them, store them in a database, and then find an email sending solution,  and then analyze and follow up. But you can’t get ahead of yourself, in that the pillars of a successful part of your marketing may revolve around the SEQUENCE in setting things up.  If you just started sending out marketing email, because you were not patient, from the same server as your business correspondence communications (things like receipts, support and customer interaction) and have not come up with a separate domain for sending your email, you may have gotten things out of sequence… Not the end of the world if you are a start-up, but if you had separate domains you were sending from, you would have protected your business correspondence (your real world important email) from getting black-listed.

So for each area of marketing you need to accomplish for your website, I use a rating system for the priority, ease of implementation, time to implement, and other factors.  Then based on these additional factors the priority may change.  For instance, getting online with a website is still at the top of this list.  One thing that is just as easy is creating videos, that are nicely tagged and have content on Youtube pointing back to your site.  The same thing with easy to implement blog software like WordPress or Blogger, which also points back to your site for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes.  So things have  changed in online marketing.  What was first things first 10 or 5 years ago is not the same.  Video and Blogs are now ground zero…not necessarily email… Email is important and the core, but it is a layer now above the website, videos, blogs, picture and other stuff you can easily use to draw traffic. What you have to infer from this, is it is a hell of a lot easier to get out a video camera and make a Youtube video than getting a great email campaign in place.  Email campaigns mean more HTML, images possibly, landing pages, etc.

So as part of your prioritization in your online marketing plan, you need to come up with all the ways you are going to market online and focus in on a few quick wins.  This is especially true if you want to make something happen now.  Everything these days is about now, not later.  Yes, some marketing efforts will take some time, but things like fixing a domain name to all be www. or buying a domain name can be done today.  Things like fixing a title per page or a url per page can be done now,  not later.

Help Is On The Way

Like I have said in my previous parts of writing a strategic online marketing plan, there are  many, I mean many SEO and marketing firms out there to deliver your marketing program.  But, there few, like me, who actually act as your marketing exec and help you write a plan.  It is the writing of this plan you can’t leave to a one trick pony SEO firm.  It needs to be an in-house, maybe a consultant like myself, developed thing that represents you and your business. Email me at dgudema AT gmail dot com if you want to discuss it…

Just Say No

You can just say no to cookie-cutter marketing approaches, because quite frankly what is good for the gander may not be good for the goose.  If you are a law firm, then how you do marketing is different than an online store.  Don’t fall into a trap that they are all the same, everybody needs to do the same thing.  The only reason you may hear this programmed thinking from your marketing expert/SEO guy/gal is, that is what they know.  What “THEY KNOW” is a common problem in the online world, because we are all limited to what we know. One time I went around and asked a dozen different programmers what language to use.  Each one gave me a different language because that is what they know.  The each sweared that it was the one and only and the best!  What they know is not a guide to what you need to do and in what sequence.  This is a task for a VP of online marketing, not a third party SEO firm.  Remember if you own the website, you use marketing firms to carry out your plan, and rarely do they have what it takes to name the plan and tell you what to do.  Control over your marketing and what you are doing is important and starts from home not externally.

There are many ways to cut a cake and marketing is that cake.  I recently ran into a technique being used for a website marketing to seniors and they had removed all website links, forcing the seniors to go down ONE and ONE SINGLE path.  There was only one way to go through their homepage and it required entering an email address… Why this restriction?  What was going on?  Well, after I noticed they were using Google Optimizer, an A/B and Multivariate testing tool, I realized they must know something and they tested and in fact it may be a smart move for them.  Did the senior really want to go in many directions/places and the answer was maybe not.  Maybe 5% were pissed off and left, but the numbers may be high in the conversion rates on those who entered their email address and stayed.  This was about herding the cattle, and it raised some interesting psychological issues with website marketing.  Some things may be counter intuitive and not straight forward.  How do you figure this out?  You have to test!

Testing

In the prioritization should be some testing.  You don’t know, so you test.  Testing is cheap and easy.  $50 in a pay per click account or putting up a page to find out if people click through, fill in a form, etc.  This is the best way to go about figuring out what works.

There is always more.  I will be adding a fourth article coming up on the same topic… Writing a strategic online marketing plan.

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biz plan, Online Marketing, planning, prioritization, strategic marketing plan, Youtube video marketing

In my first article on how to write a strategic online marketing plan, I discussed some basics of the areas of online marketing you may want to consider.  See the list below.  What I am saying is that you should not apply online marketing to every business in a cookie cutter fashion, and the other issue you need to consider is that online marketing is built on a foundation.  If you don’t have the foundation pieces in place then you are going to have a faulty structure.

Online Marketing Foundation

When I say online marketing foundation, this goes even deeper than marketing, it typically revolves around technology.  A lot of marketing executives will go for the jugular in their job and try to achieve, but achievement may not be possible if the basic infrastructure is not in place, and worse, a serious campaign can be completely a waste if a simple thing like collecting email addresses is not built correctly.  One simple case in point, is one company I worked for collected customer names without separating the first and last names in the DB.  This was a marketing foundation structural problem.  We could not send out the emails in a personalized fashion, because we were not getting the information in the database correctly.  Often executives want to tackle the marketing issue head on with a nuclear weapon that has no army structure behind it.  If you invade a country and have no plans or ability to manage the situation, you will have chaos.  So, this is what is recommended first:

1. Get a good website.

Believe it or not, there is a tiny percentage of companies who market without a good website.  This has to be ready for any campaign.  What I mean by good website, is one that can spell out your value proposition and contains the customer motivation [for arriving at the site].

2. Get a good, structured email collection method in place.

You need to be able to collect email addresses and segmenting them would be a good start.

3. Get the ability to allow customers to optout.

This is critical before sending your first email campaign.  Without it, you may end up pissing off not just people.  If you piss off the email providers such as gmail, yahoo, microsoft or aol, you will have bigger problems.

4. Landing Pages

If you are going to be running marketing campaigns, then specialized landing pages help even more in building out your foundation.

5. Checkout

Now most companies allow customers to buy products online, but if you don’t have it in place and you are pushing customers to your site, you need to give them a place to buy.

6. Contact us

We mentioned email collection above, but customers “Don’t Need To Think”, so they need to be able to easily contact your company.

I am sure there are a lot more structural pieces, but these are a good start.  Notice these are part of the online marketing plan, but they are more than that, they are the building blocks for success.  You need to make sure these are ready for the high volume of traffic you are going to receive.

Online Marketing Plan Areas Explained

I am going to explain each of these areas of online marketing.  Some may not have occurred to be online marketing places for your business, but you may find that they have a greater impact than you would have ever expected.  This is where, in my final article, I will get into priorities, and why making certain decisions to go after low hanging fruit, is critical.

1. Create A Website
   No need to say more.  You and I know what a website is.  Maybe a few people out there think they have a website, because they have a Facebook page.  It is close, but not exactly.
2. Email Marketing
   Once again very easy to understand.  You get together a message and send it via email to potential or existing customers.
3. Search Engine Optimization
   While many have made this a business, it is simple enough.  You make sure your site content, titles, urls and meta tags are optimized for the search engines, mainly Google today.
4. Pay Per Click
   Once again, everybody pretty much knows this. You pay for each click on a Google or others and it is a bid process based on the highest bidder paying for the click.  Google focuses on the top 3.
5. Adwords
   A variation on pay per click, with the variation focused on words showing up on third party content sites, not on the search engines.  This seems to be a big one through Google and it is a way to get traffic.
6. Banner Ads
   This is an old standby.  It is basically an image that people pay for customers to view and get clicks through.  I believe the days of banner ads are coming back.
7. Video Marketing (Youtube)
   A lot of companies don’t understand the power of video marketing.  Thanks to the relationship between Youtube and Google, which are the same company, video can now be seen much higher in the search engines.  The ability to push up video, convert it to flash, comment, tag and search engine optimize your video, this is a high growth marketing area your business may need to take advantage of.  I believe its the future of marketing.
8. Facebook Marketing
   This is really a hot topic right now, as companies are trying to figure out a way to market through social networks. Best part of this type of marketing is the ability to analyze and understand exact keywords and affinity relationships (close relationships) that exist between your product/service and related search terms.  Also facebook marketing harkens back to banner ads and is a rebirth of the banner ad.
9. Linkedin Marketing
   This is just starting and like Facebook will be on a growth area for a while.  If your business is B2B then this is where you should be looking to spend your marketing dollars.  If you are related to the human resources area, it is pay dirt time.
10. Photo Marketing
    Just like video on Youtube a lot of companies misunderstand the power of photo marketing.  You can easily push up hundreds of photos to Picassa (once again a google property and then name, tag, categorize, geotag and comment on these photos.  This information will get indexed on the search engine. This is a low hanging fruit of online marketing and a place, if you have access to images, you need to be!
11. Webinars
    Killer webinars are coming to your town and if you don’t act now you will lose out.  Apparently make products and services need to be shown through a demo.  But there is something out there today that will prepare your webinar in advance so that it does not have to be live.  It can be almost on demand.  Ever notice that during a TV ad they are giving out a url to watch their webinar (especially pharmaceuticals).  This is a great advertising medium for specialized products and services, like health related and that is where your business should be spending its dollars.
12. Chat Sessions
    We were investigating chat sessions way back in 2001 when they came to market.  Some online businesses I know live off the marketing capability of chat sessions and convert most of their traffic via chat sessions.  Don’t under estimate the power of this technology and it is getting more sophisticated as time goes by.  The day is coming when Skype enters this market and you will be able to video chat with any customer!
13. Teleseminars
    Just like video seminars, teleseminars are easy to put together, and unlike webinars, teleseminars can easily be accessed.  So therefor the conversion rate of teleseminars will be much higher, because people can listen easily at work, on the road or anywhere they feel like it.  Ignore this area and you will miss out on a lot of low hanging fruit.
14. Landing Page Marketing
    This is just a reminder that any website can go out and create a landing page separate from the site home page.  Now, place that landing page on a separate domain name, with an optimized title and now you have a new way to gather traffic.  Initially landing pages were for emails, but they are not that way anymore. They can be for search engines, seminars, events, webinars, teleseminars, even SMS.  You keep it this way for many reasons, some of which is a specialized campaign for that medium.  Either way, you control the medium and using landing pages is a great way to do it.  Use a product out there like HiConversion.com and you are set!
15. Affinity Marketing
    Affinity Marketing is not a vertical technology, but rather a horizontal method of approaching online marketing.  It refers to finding relationships with your current customer base.  I like to use the free and cheap Quantcast.com to figure these relationships out, but you could go to Neilsens/Jupiter or Hitwise or others and buy the expensive demographic data.  Either way, if you search at Quantcast.com you will find that people who visit your site or your competitors also visit sites X, Y and Z, and that’s how you figure out there is an “Affinity” between your site and theres.  This is important in deciding where and how to advertise in the long tail [for longer pay per click phrases].
16. Affiliate Marketing
    Affiliate marketing, which I now akin to adwords, was the old place we used to give out URLs with codes and pay out to sites and people who drive traffic.  I personally don’t find it to be a very effective way to market for certain products.  For dating products, like my old speed dating business, affiliate marketing was not just important, it was the life blood. So, this really depends on the type of business you are in!  If it is more personal than commercial, sometimes it makes sense.  Commission Junction is still one of the big players, but I am seeing this area slowly disappearing from the big sites out there.
17. Lead Generation Marketing
    When the old ad “Win A Free Ipod” came out a couple years ago, lead generation marketing had hit an apex.  It is still quite a big field unto itself. You can buy leads from other people who will sell them to you, especially in businesses like Cruise Lines, Online Education, Mortgages and Online Car Buying.  I mention these four, because all four are the hottest lead gen markets known on the web just about.  Meanwhile, your lead generation yourself, needs to be taken care of first!
18. Viral Marketing
    This is an old area of marketing.  Remember the ad, “And She Had Two Friends, And She Had Two Friends, And She Had Two Friends”.  Viral marketing really can work if you enable people to do it.  We used to have the old “Tell A Friend” page. That’s old hat.  Now you have these Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Linkedin, Facebook login aps, that allow you tell your whole world about whatever you are doing.  Viral marketing is the basis of social media marketing!
19. Guerilla Marketing
    Guerilla Marketing takes us in a whole new direction.  It was really popular a few years ago, when the old had to be seen video got passed around or the famous cartoonists about George Bush came out.  I see Guerilla marketing as a crazy, underground way of getting your product or service out and it is still possible online to do it.  Things can grow like wildfire if they are funny or somehow are a “Got To Be Read or Seen Situation”.  Seems like the only stuff I get like this these days are Tea Party crazy friends of mine sending me stupid diatribes about the world ending!
20. Mobile/Smart Device Marketing
    This area of marketing is just getting started.  I am seeing newer and newer technologies showing up on my Ipad, and all are banner ad or video based.  Sorry Google, text links are old technology on the Ipad, and it seems like people want the image or video ads.  Just having an app to download is part of this marketing effort, and if you supposed to be in the cutting edge you should have an Ipad, Android and Windows Smart Device compatible app.
21. Blog Marketing
    Even though I do blog alot using WordPress, I think this area may be a little overblown. Do this area right and you will get a lot of visits, especially if you master tagging, categorization, titles, metas and get posted out to all the right RPC servers in the blogosphere…  If your product/service requires a little more explaining or some leadership in your industry, this is a key area of your business.  Remember though, it is not a foundation.  You need to have a site and checkout and email collection to do this right!
22. Twitter Marketing
    If you have ever used TinyUrl.com, you know all about twitter marketing.  We hear a lot about marketing through Twitter, but Twitter in some ways is really another form of viral marketing, where you can push out a product release or some other message to your customers or potential customers in a PUSH fashion.  I say push, because things like blogging and tweeting are all about push.  You push, instead of pull, which is the old search engine methodology. Therefor it is a bigger bang for your buck.  But remember once again, no foundation, no orders, make no money…

There are more, and I will update this page when I find more…  Thanks for taking time to read my blog today.  There will be a third entry in this how to write a strategic online marketing plan series…

If you are reading this and want to check out the first article

This is the first article in this series on writing a strategic online marketing plan – Part 1

This is the third article in this series on writing a strategic online marketing plan – Part 3

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marketing plan, Online Marketing, strategic online marketing

Noticed today, and it has been a few months since they have planned, a new social engagement tracking feature in Google Analytics.  This is interesting, because there has not been a new feature in Google Analytics in quite a while.  There is a good overview at Search Engine Land here if you want to see how it works.

My understanding and from what I can tell it is true social networking / social media tracking, everything from Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ Circles, Digg, Redit, etc.  Just when you thought there was nothing new in web analytics, this comes along, and it was about time.  Despite the fact that I am not that keen on using social networking, tracking how well they are working is critical to understanding if they work at all, because there is sometimes  evidence sometimes it does not work well for ecommerce, but that is to be determined.

So next time you see the LIKE button on a website, and you click it, and you are logged into a social network, that information will automatically be tracked in Google.  I guess what is next is they will know when we wake up and fall asleep… maybe.

How do you see these new analytics in Google Analytics?

You have to switch over to NEW VERSION.     I noticed this click-able highlighted line in red at the top of my browser while looking over Google Analytics this morning.  Once you click over to the new version, you have to select an existing site you have in the system.  Once you click on a site, you will see a new layout of the data and that is where you will notice new stuff on the left and a different layout.  It’s under VISITORS, that you will see the word SOCIAL.  If you click on SOCIAL, you will see a couple new areas that represent “Social Engagement”.  They break it down to Engagement, Action and Pages.  I am still trying to figure this out, but apparently if somebody clicks that “LIKE” button for Twitter, Facebook and Google then you have socially engaged them…  This means that all your previous traffic is not social engaged.

That’s it for now!  Good luck figuring out how to analyze your Social Engagement!

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digg, facebook, google+ citcles, reddit, Social Analytics, social engagement, twitter, Web Analytics

I was working with a client recently who had brought me in to discuss several aspects of their online marketing program.   The big issues when I arrived to chat with their team was what are you doing currently and what is your plan of attack?  This company had not actually formally created a plan, and more specifically a strategic plan, for online, so I found it interesting when they admitted that they did not have a plan they could show me.  So, over the next couple of weeks I put one together for them.  They are not a typical online company, but they are typical of an offline company, a company that has not  yet hit the ground running and developed a specific and prioritized online marketing plan.

My Credentials

Actually, other than my recent MBA (FAU 2006) and 13 years of web dev and online marketing experience, I have no executive credentials in the online marketing area.  What I do have is battle scars of carrying out online marketing objectives for marketing executives, and few if any marketing executives I will say I have that much respect for.  Not sure if that is because they were not the right people for the jobs, or the typical marketing executive in the online world in the last 13 years was an offline toadie, who had moved online and was still not ready for the task at hand.  I guess if I had worked for a 20 something exec conquering the world, I may have a different story to tell.  Either way, I did work on a site that got 30 million visits a month and 25,000 orders a day and was involved with all aspects of online marketing for that firm for 6 years and I have worked for companies like abcdistributing, Victoriassecret.com and Verio/NTT corp.  So I have seen a few things here and there.  But what probably makes me experienced enough is the fact that I have been involved with start-ups over the past 10 years like Pre-Dating.com and my recent Take It National, and I run into online marketing initiatives head on all the time.

Strategic vs. Tactical Plan

I did a little bit of research and found out that I was going to be writing a tactical plan not a strategic plan.  I had mixed these up, but either way, I was going to give them an idea of what to do online and what priorities to do online.  Does not matter what you call it.  The online strategic plan, none the less, is a higher level plan that determines what you are actually going to sell and to whom.  The online tactical plan is the actual detailed areas that the online marketing will cover in order to capture and convert online visitors.  Doesn’t matter in the end, because what is needed is the tactical plan to do be able to make a decision on what to do.

Not All Plans Are Alike

One thing I realized is this particular business, which I am not going to mention by name, needed a special plan for their needs and not a cookie cutter approach.  I think this is one of the mistakes many companies make.  By cookie cutter, the marketing department tries to cover every part of their plan equally and applies every recommended standard industry method.  Problem is there are now many, many potential online marketing initiatives that I can think of.  Some are standard parts of marketing, some are new and some are just a form of technology you can exploit. I am going to list as many as I can here, but the point is, that some of these methods are better for certain businesses than others.  So you can’t say for certainty that email marketing, for instance, is going to be the most important activity for all businesses (but it is darn close to the top or almost always at the top).  A marketing book may tell you that, but you have see each business in a holistic approach, where you break down all the facts and ways to market online and then come up with a plan that makes sense, for THAT PARTICULAR business. If you try to do everything just about, and therefor nothing in a superior way, you may end up with a mediocre outcome and even a misguided outcome, mainly because you want to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s of marketing and not really do things strategic justice.  Just showing up to work in marketing is not enough these days to do online well.  And just reading a list of what to do on this website is still not enough to make the right decisions.

All The Online Marketing Methods I Can Think Of

I have broken down all the online marketing methods I can think of, and explain them.  Some are what I refer to as vertical methods and some are horizontal, meaning they are methods that span across all the other methods…

1. Create A Website
2. Email Marketing
3. Search Engine Optimization
4. Pay Per Click
5. Adwords
6. Banner Ads
7. Video Marketing (Youtube)
8. Facebook Marketing
9. Linkedin Marketing
10. Photo Marketing
11. Webinars
12. Chat Sessions
13. Teleseminars
14. Landing Page Marketing
15. Affinity Marketing
16. Affiliate Marketing
17. Lead Generation Marketing
18. Viral Marketing
19. Guerilla Marketing

Well, that’s it for now.  In the second part of this discussion I am going to explain each of these areas of the plan and why your business should think about focusing on a specific one.  I am also planning on discussing how to prioritize and make the right strategic decisions and finally how to not get burned by online marketing agencies!

Click Here to read the second article in this series

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business plan, Online Marketing, online marketing strategies, strategic online marketing plan, Strategic Plan

This post is the 3rd post about the Web Feature Discovery Process.  If you want to read all three articles, click here, to start with article 1, and click here to get to article 2.

So far in this series of articles, I have described dealing and identifying Assets and dealing with People, the two ingredients needed to build any web site feature.  The next step is information discovery.  The first article talked about Assets.  Assets, as I describe in the first article, need to be understood and evaluated in an open and free environment, not restricted by management that has already indicated the final outcome.  Knowing the exact, final website product on day one is ok as a goal, but to know the exact way it will work is a not just a mistake, it can create a terrible work environment for those who see the mistakes and can’t fix them.  You start with a general idea of where you want to go in development of web features, and great spec’s can make this possible, but there is a transformation that needs to occur between concept and final product, and that is where a lot of websites go awry by simply never fixing what needs to be fixed.

Information Discovery

Information discovery is all about looking through the data, which leads to idea discovery.   But even before you go through reams of data, you need to figure out what you are trying to accomplish.  This is a bit of a conundrum, like which came first the chicken or the egg.  Let’s say you have a web page or a web site that is already doing its job.  Your site could be a simple page or 2 or be as large as a 20,000 SKU online catalog.  I’ve built both sites in the past.  The question is how do you figure out that you need to add a form to collect information or to place ads on the site?  How do you know if the site should be a marketplace or a straight e-commerce site.  This is not just about data here.  This is about business and business models.   If you have worked on developing websites, and at this point in time, and a few million people have, based on the fact that millions own domains, you probably know a thing or 2 about making your own website.

In my first post on this subject, I described assets, where you have to look at few key pieces of information.  Is there any anomalies showing a possible opportunity, or as Google in their web analytics product calls it, Intelligence?  Is this site getting tremendous numbers of visitors?  Is this site already collecting email addresses?  One site I know of, because I am a part owner, gets an email address added to the system every 10 minutes during the day.  This asset is important, because email addresses can be, should be used properly, by properly, I mean when people give you an email address, they are expecting an immediate response.  The value of the email starts to go down when you wait 6 months till you email them.   The fresher, the more valuable, and that’s because people have a small period of time to read that email you will send them.  This has lead to the concept of email sequences.  First time I had heard about this was from my business partner, who pointed out a company called InfusionSoft, that is big on it.  It’s really a simple concept.  You have a series of emails that get sent out to a person that signs up that go out in phases, like one a day, one a week, perhaps growing in length of time.  Each email has a different message that is part of an overall strategy.  You don’t need InfusionSoft to do this, but they are great at it.

Let The Wind Tell You Where To Go

Often data is telling you something.  For instance, on Whois.net, we noticed a high amount of international visitors, yet we did not offer the ability to look up international domains.  So we solved the customer’s quandry by offering what they were looking for.  So one clue is looking at the key words people search on to get to your site in Google Analytics or Adobe’s/Omniture’s Site Catalyst.  This is a simple task and 90% of online marketers know this.  What they don’t look for is the missing link.  The missing piece is what ties information to a new potential set of features.   Another good example is on checkout of most registration sites, there is a term we now call “Co-registration”.  Co-registration means the customer was here to signup for x, and you added another potential thing for them to get at the same time.  We have considered using this in the event business website I am a partner in.  Another interesting anomaly I noticed in the dating business recently, is that people are using Iphones and Android apps to signup, in significant numbers.  This is where you have to brain-storm, not about features, but about assumptions.  You can confirm these assumptions, through research.  My assumption that people are using smartphones, specifically at work during the day, because it offers more privacy, and the employer can’t track you specifically.  This is one of many reasons, but the end result is we need to have an app for the Iphone and Android…  That is simple detective work.  This is the big breakthrough.  It is finding a new channel.  The big question is having the resources to capitalize on this new channel.  It may not be a new channel to you, but to a lot of executives out there, who don’t know how to deal with this channel, it is a strange new world.

In the retail side its called Cross-Sell or Up-Sell.   Just sign-up for Godaddy and you will get your complete lesson on up-sell and cross-sell.  They are the masters at this.  I used to have people say that is not what I would put on the checkout, because it does lead to Friction, one of the key points in the MarketingExperiments.com formula, where it will actually causes less conversion potentially.   This all depends on the site.  On a dating site, yes, it can slow the process down, especially if the person is not ready to convert.  On a retail site, however, when people have made up their minds to buy, only a broken, poorly designed web page can stop them, especially if the deal is an amazingly good value.  So most features are figured out as extensions of what you already have in place.  If you build on your success, you will succeed even more.  There is no need to be radical, as you will find out the hard way…

Slash And Burn

If you let the status quo dictate what you do, or worse, let the current sales and marketing team make all the decisions, you could end up with a situation I call “slash and burn”.  I came across the concept of slash and burn, while working on a few sites.  The analogy of slash burn comes from the military tactic of burning the crops as you retreat, so your enemy will not have the luxury of food.  It refers to the, sometimes unforeseen, consequences of making a decision to kill one part of a website in order to enhance another.  This is a human decision process, typically driven by revenues.  The best example was on this Whois.net site, where, when I arrived at this company, the previous people who managed it, had attempted to drive all the traffic through links on the site to hosting sales on another site, because that is where the money was for them.   This was a major mistake in my mind.  Yes, they had driven people to where they make money, but that is not why they came to Whois.net.  They were there to look up domains that were available, find out who owns them, and potential buy them.

Consistency

Another very important point I learned from MarketingExperiments.com, and I will discuss them a lot here, is that consistency is real important in the process of building out web features.  You have to start at the beginning of the customer path.  The beginning is when they are sitting at their computer on Ipad.  Let’s say they have not even turned it on.  They are interested in South Florida Real Estate, as an example.  They open the computer and type those words into Google.  Google presents them with relevant results.  Let’s say your site is in those results.  When you click on one of the links, and let’s say its one of the top paid links, you are delivered to a web page.  The words you put in should arrive right in your face at the top of the page in big bold letters.  If not, you are not getting a consistent experience.  This is true for many of the paid links, because they are using something called Long Tail, which has a few meanings.  To me, it  means extending the search words they are buying out to more obscure words, to pay less and get more traffic.  This would typically mean they are looking to buy “Real Estate”, but it was cheaper to buy “South Florida Real Estate”.  This is great for smaller sites and pages that are meant to be for finding this exact stuff, but when you arrive at a generic Real Estate Seminar, you are disappointed.  This is not Google’s fault, it’s about people trying to get traffic, and the result is a lot of inconsistency.  Your consistency is critical in making your site found well and sticky, a term these marketing guys love to use (meaning they stick around).

Don’t Make Me Think

If you have not read this book, “Don’t Make Me Think”  and you work in the web field, you should get it, read it, and live by it.  The book’s simplicity, and I will hopefully sum it up here, is that people have developed common methods of experience online.  This means that they are expecting the same words, in the same spot, each time they arrive at a web page.  A good example is the word “About” or the word “Search”.  The book basically says if you say “Quick Search”, you are going to confuse people, and therefor making them think, like is really “Quick” or different.  More importantly, if your site is missing any of these common elements, such as the words “About”, “Contact” or “Search”, there is a customer disconnect.  And you need to understand that “Search” is a feature.  So for the basics, you need to make sure the customer experience is not so different they run away.  That also means that placing the word “Search” in the upper right of the page is preferential to let’s say the bottom left.  From the web features perspective, deliver to customers at least the minimum they are expecting on the site.  More and more, customers are expecting a web form on the home page and sometimes many site pages, where they can put their email address in, maybe with their first name or some additional data and get on that companies’ mailing list.

Short Form or The Long Form

One of questions is whether or not to put a short form or a long form onto a home page.  So, inevitably with these kinds of web forms, information collection forms, you have techniques that are learned over time.  You can learn this stuff by observing and taking the best of breed (they call it) and do things like this.  One of the methods that is recommended is you ask for a small amount of information up front, like just an email address or email address with a first name.  On the second page, you would then ask for additional information, saying that they are now on the list and they can further tell you more information about themselves.  This two step process like everything, reduces friction on the first step and allows the website visitor to make intelligent choices on the second step.  One thing I ran into when working for a hosting company was a situation where they required a domain name when buying hosting.  This was a system requirement.  It turned out to be a very costly financial requirement.  The reason is, and like everything, it came down to how people react.  The visitor, in many cases, had not decided on a domain name, so often they would just pick up and leave to figure it out…

This Web Feature discovery process article is 3 in a series of 3 so far.  The articles about Web Feature Discovery will continue in a new article next month.

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This article is the second part of 2 articles on the Web Feature Discovery Process.  You probably should click here and read article 1 if you are here for the first time.

Ok, so you have finally figured out the key assets and are starting to go down the road of making your new web feature happen… well let’s just say you are only 20% towards the finish line.  There are some major hurdles involved for most of us, including even the big guy or gal at the top.  The thinking part of discovering ripe juicy revenue or visitor producing features is the easy part.  The difficult part is making it happen, navigating the human beings all along the way, especially when you know they are all trying to make sure you either fail directly, fail indirectly, fail just by the fact that you don’t have the energy to fight anymore, fail because you left the job or fail because the job left you.  It is a fight to the death my friend and its all because you sorted through the company assets with a flashlight at night when nobody was looking and you had an idea, you brought it into the daylight, and now you are a pure unadulterated target for those who don’t want you to succeed.  So how do you proceed  in the most murky of environments…

Social Engineering

I first began to understand social engineering, when I was reading a great article about Kevin Mitnick, the infamous hacker who broke into Sprint and stole tons of information about their customers.  He was not genius.  He was not very technical.  He was basically a petty thief.  How did he do it?  He used social engineering.  If you think about it, social engineering (in the Mitnick version)  is about figuring out how to use information and people of an organization to think what you want them to think and do, using that information wisely.  Mitnick figured out that when executives names where mentioned, people lose their minds and do what you want. “Uh, Dick Lynch the VP said we need that report now!”   Minick found out that if you know some small piece of information or just a name, you could easily navigate an entire organization, call around to people and they would hand you off like you were a friend.  He would use person X’s name and say hey person Y, Person X recommended me.  What really did is say the VP wanted me to get onto System Z, now so get me a login and password…

The point is, you need to understand the dynamics of the organization, the motivations of people in the organization and the hierarchy of decision-making.  Getting the organization on board with you is what I am getting at!  But ultimately, like I have said before, you can take the high road or the low road.  Taking the high road means bring the organization along on a ride towards success (success means getting your feature implemented).

Education Camp

Sometimes unusual methods are needed in order to gain the trust of execs and the whole organization.  For instance, some of the features I was trying to get implemented at my last company required me to make sure that the organization understood the features. What did I do about it?  I ran a seminar.  Now people in my company who came to my seminar looked at me in strange ways as I ran them. Once again who was I to run a seminar?  I was just a programmer there, sometimes a manager, but in no way did I have the keys to the kingdom or really was in charge of much there.  Fellow employees would look at me with confused looks. Who was this guy standing up there talking about things?  I ran periodic internal seminars at the office.  This means a short 45 minute talk, on WordPress for instance.  I ran a seminar on Whois.  I was planning a seminar on a variety of subjects. What was I doing in my crazy convoluted method was starting the social engineering process by planting seeds through my seminars.  I wanted this company to adopt certain strategies and methods.  Once again, nobody stopped me from running a talk at noon time in the conference rooms.  This is a great place to flesh out your ideas and don’t freak if someone shows up to show you up.  My answer to them would be, show me how to do it better!

Plan 32

One thing that a great product manager should always have is a pile of ready to go plans in their back pocket.  You have all the plans (I mean PPTs, Power Points) that are company planned, on the so called “Road Map”.  Actually I am going to digress here and tell you that if there is a Road Map beware!  The kind of process and thinking a Road Map can create can be a real negative, because from experience nay-sayers love to use the Road Map as a way to block new Road Entrances. Never let the Road Map not allow the process to be re-prioritized and redeveloped.  I have yet to see the Road Map (in the web feature world) be the best guide.  Now, as far as plans are concerned, you have the top line plans already planned out from the execs and board.  You have the plans that others know about that you are promoting, and you have a dozen others that they are not aware of, but you have them ready to go, in standby mode, in a file on your hard-drive or cloud, just in case the time is right.  Why the three types of plans?  Well, part of succeeding is not giving it all away too soon.  You have to release plans periodically to the organization, who can’t handle all the plans at once.  They have to be part of a series of changes over time.  Once again, as a champion, of a lot of other people’s ideas (OPIs), you need to map out these features properly and get your presentations just right. Sometimes you have to sit on things and let osmosis occur.  You wake up some morning and your brain somehow figures it out.  Who knows why things work that way, but often they do.  I would highly recommend sitting down with all the guys and gals who thought them up and show them where there idea is now!

The Shadow Government

Sometimes all the education and all the presentations and all the board room brawls are insignificant compared with the reality that something has to be done subversively.  It is a rare thing to do, and there are some well documented cases where it is a necessity.  A great example is the case of the James Cannavino at IBM.  I read a great story about Jim in the late 1960s trying to convince management that he could speed up the IBM Mainframe.  They rejected his notion, but in a subversive move, he had the technology developed outside the company and when it was finished went over his bosses and showed it to the board.  He faced either being fired or being promoted.  Luckily he was promoted.  Hopefully it doesn’t come to this, but sometimes getting things done in an organization require unusual activity, because like I have been inferring there are many more forces at work trying to not make things happen than happen, even on the smallest scale.

Project Mercury

Those funny project names, that often mimic Nasa project names are not just wild imaginative words that are spread around at a company.  They are used to get your attention, to try to get the organization to recognize a plan.  These project names may sound strange and odd, but customer oriented, improved website features are often a shift and they may seem quite odd at first.  Social networking stuff like Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook. These are now household names, but 10 years ago they would sound strange.  And it is only going to get stranger.  When I say Tweet, Joomla, Droopal, lamp or soap to people in the web world, they better know what I mean…  What should be happening in most American web firms is an injection of militarization combined with humor and something to spice it up.  That’s what a project name is all about.  If project names are not attention-getters, they should be.  I would always try to make the name relevant, but a good bit of creativity is a positive not a negative.

Misdirection And The Book Of 5 Rings

Talking about military tactics, people’s military training can go a long way in corporate America.  Just because I was not in the army, doesn’t mean we can’t learn from military tactics.  They are important. At the end of my MBA program I took a class which revolved around Musashi’s “The Book Of Five Rings“. Musashi is a Japanese expert on war in the middle ages who survived to his old age and therefor, because he was only one of the very few warriors to survive, he wrote about his tactics. One of the tactics listed is a method of drawing an enemy towards oneself and at the last minute let the enemy run themselves off a cliff.  In our language we call it misdirection. Sometimes you have to lead people down a path and not stop them from their self destruction.  Often your plan has one way of doing things and another person has their plan.  If you see their plan is faulty you don’t always have to stop it from failing. Sometimes it is best to let it fail.  When I worked back at the phone company we used to leave documents around about projects that were never in existence in order to confuse people about what our real intentions were.  Sometimes it is important to not reveal these intentions until you are ready to present and make it happen.

This the second of a 3 part articles. I have not  yet finished article 3 about Making the Web Feature Happen.

This is the first article (You should read them in order)

http://www.strategicpoints.com/2011/06/22/web-feature-discovery-process-part-1/

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IBM, internet features, James Cannavino, Kevin Mitnick, MBA, Musashi, product manager, Road Map, The Book Of 5 Rings, Web Feature Discovery

Not that I am any bit an expert on web features, product management… and not that I know something that anybody else couldn’t figure out, but I am somewhat obsessed with the website “feature” development process, especially when it comes to overlooked, under-estimated, misused assets. This blog entry is about how I would go about discovering features and services and solutions towards increasing website traffic as well as finding new profitable directions and increasing conversion rates.  I am going to give a few examples, mainly from my experience working on a site like Whois.net (which is far from maximized; as far as I know they have just started the process).  But first, before I describe the process to develop these features and new products (aka, the old product management process in a new era), first we have to understand the lexicon of the web feature discovery process

Assets

Assets are virtual and sometimes physical things that an organization or company owns and manages.  Examples are domain names, websites, email addresses, segmented email addresses, unique site visitors, pageviews, sms, twitter accounts, Facebook and LinkedIn,  Persona of the visitors (how can we break up the kinds of visitors based on background), programs and applications, patents, copyrights and internal resources like people.  Oh yes, even people are assets.  These assets have a value and if you don’t put a value on these assets, you are making a mistake.

You need to start the web feature discovery process by working with asset value and not revenue, because while most everything in marketing is revenue based, the overall value of what you are building towards (ultimately revenue) may be determined by the value of the assets, and assets may ultimately determine long and even short term revenue.   When I say assets, many technology and marketing execs would often give me a blank stare, like they have no clue what I am talking about. (I can only chalk this up to the fact that asset value is not how they are compensated, so don’t blame them, blame the boardroom for not keeping up with current valuation measures!)  But what is going on in the start-up world, whatwe can call the modern world of business, is a whole new world of asset valuation.  And if your division created a website worth $20 million that only made a net income of $100,000 a year, maybe it is time to sell it and take the profits…

The second thing to know about these virtual assets are the more detail you know, and the more they are optimized, the more valuable the assets are worth.  We are in a world where websites, domain names and other assets are sold off to make some cash.  So, don’t overlook asset creation vs. revenue creation.  They now go hand in hand.  20 years ago you would think I’m a loony bird, but the world has changed and companies do sell stuff.  At my last firm they did sell assets, except not after we maximized them, but after they personally devalued them.

Often a firm may be collecting email addresses. I say “may”, because some out of the way places don’t.  Good luck to those outfits.  If  most organizations just knew 10 things about these email addresses, what people were interested in, or simple things like their first and last names or where they are located, the asset value of the list may be double or triple the value.  Add more detail detail like age, demographics, what they like, who they like, etc and increase the value further.

How do you value these assets?  My way of valuing them is simple.  If you were to take them away and wanted to get them back, how much would it cost you?  For instance, and I am often going to use Whois.net as an example, because that was the last large site I worked on.  The Whois domain search site got about 2 million unique visits a month.  Now the company saw no real value there because they had a hard time understanding the relationship to their sales, but when I asked execs how much would it cost you to buy 2 million visits a month by buying the PPC (Pay Per Click) words “Domain Name” and “Hosting”, it would have cost them a minimum $2 million dollars a month budget and therefor, just the traffic was worth $12 million a year or $36 million over 3 years.  It’s a bit of fuzzy math, but going with “remove it and try to reacquire it”, is a great way to get them to understand.  The reason most don’t understand is they typically don’t sell assets and are graded on revenue…but is that really what this is all about in the end…  Because if you make something worth millions maybe the asset sales is bigger than any revenue you would ever be able to generate.

So start the process by doing an inventory of assets.  First day on the job and you want to make a new web features happen at your web company, start by finding out the basics.  What domains do we own?  What websites do we run?  What are total number of email addresses?  How many visitors to each site?  How many segments are we catching from customers in the email area?  How many members?  How many orders?  How many skus?  How Many? What? Where? Why and How?  Get this information down on paper, because this information is the foundation for new and improved services.

Champion

Leaders, execs, people who have an idea, guys in the company basement, people on the customer service lines, MBAs with a business plan or just a lonely CEO with an idea are champions of web features.  This means that somebody has to believe in it and want to make it happen.  A group of people may want the features to happen, but a person has to ultimately answer and stand up and say I am the product champion.  Groups don’t champion stuff, individuals do.  This is one of the critical mistakes made by corporations, to think that a group of people will decide by committee ultimately what a web feature will do and how it goes is a big mistake.  Not that web features are made by a dictator, and if the champion is a dictator, he probably will fail.  If he is a benevolent dictator and listens well, it will succeed.  Funny thing is this champion can not be limited to execs with great salaries and titles like VP, Director, CEO, CIO, CTO, BFD or Founder.  A champion can and should be everybody.  That is what makes companies succeed, not a special group who say only we do the thinking.  It can and should by anyone, including employees, shareholders, customers, husbands & wives, sons & daughters, friends and the UPS man. Champions need support and guidance and promoters from above, below and sideways. Being a champion has its risks, as I’ve learned and you can get burned by being the champion or you can get the accolades and make it happen.  You can even make it happen and not get the accolades, but then you would have known inside you made it happen.  So it does not matter!  Money comes later, first comes action!

Little Trees

Years ago we used to pay to plant trees in Israel.  And then years later when I visited Israel I got a chance to see those trees grow.  In order to grow a tree, a big tree, you have to plant seedlings or small trees. This is where many execs lose their patience and understanding of the product management process.  You have to test, test and test again these little trees in order to find a big one.  Ok, if you don’t get the tree allegory of ideas, you may be missing the point. Where do you find these little ideas?  Somebody recently said, “Dan’s An Idea Guy!”  That is not true.  I am not an idea guy, I am a guy who listens and hears other people’s concepts and evolves them into ideas. There are ideas all around us, if we would take the time to just listen and sort through the data.  Remember, the assets… Just doing an inventory will start to flesh out these little trees or concepts or ideas.  One thing I always did at these companies is walk around and chat with the various people in the business.  They have ideas.  They know what may or may not work and though they don’t know how to implement, they do know something they are not telling everybody.  Often its something in the business that bugged them for years that they want to share.

Sharing

Never thought the web feature discovery process would come down to sharing, but learning to share, something my 3 year old has not yet mastered, is the key way towards finding those little trees.  People need to get together and chat and think and find answers. These answers are something somebody read somewhere.  A company environment where people don’t share their thoughts is a place that will never flesh out new concepts or web features.  Look at Google, they are actually asking for the ideas and look what they have produced.  If we want the rest of corporate America to be successful on the web, they better listen up and start to share. Like I said earlier, it is the champion that takes an idea and makes sure it happens, not the product management guy or gal. The product management person should be the facilitator and not the creator in the end.  Listen and learn, not ignore and complain. Sometimes doing your job requires less not more of giving and taking.  Learn from your childhood and share.  The secret to sharing is giving of oneself.  If you can not give to others, by give I mean tell people something about yourself or your ideas, you will not be able to acquire ideas.  The sharing has to start with you.

The Other Guys

Now this is the easiest way to find those things that people have not thought of and get the real brainstorm on what is happening in the market. You actually need to go off and look carefully at the competitors.  This is not about mimicking people, this is about concept development.  You see a feature on another competitor and you grab it.  Fine, but you not only have to take it, you have to own it and therefor it needs to come from you in a new way.  What I ended up doing for my Whois.net thesis, which you will read about in my other blog articles on Domain and Whois Tool searches. This meant locking myself up and reading through 500 websites.  From this exercise alone I ended up with a dozen new products and features for the Whois.net site.  No rocket science involved here.  It is simply looking and learning.

Integrative Strategic Thinking (Aha Moments)

Once you have all this data in front of you, such as the assets, the new ideas from those around you, and the competitive information, you now start to see things from a different level. At this higher level, as you look holistically at information.  You can start to piece together stuff you did not see originally in just the assets.  For instance, when I looked through and discovered that Whois.net did not allow international domain  name look-ups, I knew immediately this was an important issue.  The importance was simple enough. If you increase upon (extend) what people already like, you will probably have success.  They used to call it product extensions.  This is where you take a product that is already successful and you add on a new feature or extend the product to new areas.  Not a high risk activity.  For Whois.net, international domain name traffic look-ups blew out the traffic, automatically doubling it in six months and it tripled and quadrupled traffic over a year.  Just satisfying people with stuff they already wanted is easy.  However, what is easy to do, is often not seen by the blind.  And when you are busy in a high end corporate product management job,  you are blinded by the requests from above and from the sides.

Stats and Prioritization

What did I do with the 500 websites I viewed in my these on Whois searches?  I came up with a scientific approach to figure out what feature was important.  Most of you who read this probably prioritize every day.  I rated each feature by value (yes a monetary value), ease of implementation, where I found it, as well as the monetary value of the websites I reviewed. This review process was not about money, it was about assets again.  What I focused on, was how do I get visitors to this site, not on how do I convert.  I was leaving conversion and selling at this point up to marketing and sales. That was something they knew how to do pretty well. What you need to as a good champion is to understand the data beneath the hood and how to use this data to make a point.  Prioritization and hitting low hanging fruit are extremely important ways of working as well.  We are in an impatient world, where execs don’t have the time or energy to listen unless they are just seeing the cream of the crop.  Maybe they shouldn’t know everything till the time is right.  Sometimes companies kill a product or project the first time around because it failed.  That does not mean the second time it will be the same.

Learn From Your Mistakes

Organizations that learn from their mistakes and take actions the second time around to make things right are rare.  Most organizations bury a concept that has failed and when it is mentioned again by an newbie, the newbie is crushed with the notion that “this has failed here”.  This is a big mistake.  Failure should never be viewed as a doorway an organization can not go through again.  It should, however, be the shining example of how not to do the same thing, the same way.  Failure should be used as a way to understand what to do right next time. Like a pyramid, building upon their knowledge, great organizations store this learned mistake information and use it positively going forward.

Leapfrog

One of the concepts I learned while working on a well ignored site like Whois.net was if you are so far behind the competition, it is sometimes worth it, to not mimic, but rather take a leap of faith and go for something greater, different, in a way that competitors would never do.  Why won’t they?  The competitor has already made their product or web feature decision and taken the current path.  If they are leaders in the market already, it will take a lot for them to change.  This leap of faith may be something like give it away for free, or combine it with something new or offer something completely different or in a way that is easy to identify but not the same.  Simply cookie cutter mimicking is a nuisance on the web. Who wants to go to Bing, when Google does it so well?  Why would I ever do that, other than Microsoft has figured out a way to trap me when I load the next IE Browser?  Now if Bing did something so different, so incredibly well done, it would make sense.  If they were better on an Ipad, sure.  If they were better with voice search, sure.  If they were bettter or different…it would matter.  Making it matter means being different not the same.  In the case of Whois.net, I was determined to make the site a competitor with Sedo, the domain auction house, except my idea was to make it a free place to buy and sell domains.  Sedo is not free.  This is the kind of leap that makes a difference.

Hopefully this blog entry got you interested in discovering a new web feature…  I will continue this blog entry in Part 2.  Click Here to go to Web Feature Discovery Process – Part 2!  And it turns out there will be a part 3, which I am currently working on.

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A few years ago, and I would love to find this article again, on Yahoo Finance, there was an article about why you should just forget about getting an MBA.  Just start an Internet start-up and skip business school!  That is what the writer prescribed. Not sure if this was written to get the Yahoo Finance readers up in arms or to make a point.  It did get lots of responses, good and bad.  And in some ways I totally agree with the writer.  In some ways I did not.  I had my own answer to this, but my situation was very different than the audience the writer was writing for. Seemed like she was writing for a group of 20 something technology hacking recent grads.

Your GMAT Score Is Inversely Related To Your Ability To Run Your Own Business

Your GMAT score is inversely related to your ability to run your own business.  I stole this line from a book I read years ago on how to survive the Harvard business school. Yes, it is true that MBA programs train people to work at companies and deal with big company issues.  It is also true the degree is a generalist degree in many ways, kind of like an engineering degree.  What you learn in school is not what you are going to be doing in real life. And it may actually be true that those who go to get their MBA are often not able to start and run their own business, but when I ask entrepreneurs if they could have an MBA right now to assist them in their business and their answer is always yes.  It is always better to have more education.  I would get a PHD, if I had unlimited money, time and resources.

More Learning Means More Money

If you do some research, like here, you will find that the more education you get, the more you earn in general.  Obviously we would all love to start a company and make money on our own working for ourselves, but the statistics say that overall getting more education means more money.  It is a simple principle.  Also, not everybody can go off and start an Internet company.  There are as many failures in online business as there are offline.  It is easier and faster to start a business online and thousands of new websites every year prove it.  You can’t knock people from trying, but don’t argue this start-up method is an alternative to an MBA.  You can have an MBA and be in a start-up, in fact that combination is more powerful than a start-up founder without an MBA.

I Went To Learn

My MBA education was not about the degree.  Well, it became about finishing the degree in the last year, but overall, it was done over time, at 2 programs and I literally took my time and made often my class work about my day job.  This was not about the degree in my mind, it was about my mind.  I think it is important to learn and not just be handed a piece of paper.  One of the issues that speaks broadly about this, is the lack of ethics among MBA grads.  Well, if they are not about learning, and just about the degree, what do you expect them to be like.  There are many with no scruples, no ethics and why do we often hear about guys like Madoff attempting to run a scam.

Education Realization

I recently had a epiphany not about my own MBA, but about certain pillars of my own learning in the past 10 years, especially about the web.  What I realized is that there are probably a dozen foundational areas of being an expert on websites, such as web design, web programming, web analytics, business development, product management, email marketing, search engine marketing and organic SEO.  What I realized is that you can be an expert in one of these areas.  Once you become an expert, you will find that your desire to learn more in that specific field may top out, especially after many years in the field.

This just means you need to get knowledge in the other areas, if you work in the web.  Our brains can handle the same thing day in, day out for just so long.  And learning something new does not mean giving up what you know, it means building on what you know by learning a new area, especially if it is related. Maybe I am nothing like the rest of the web workers out there, especially if their answer is I am happy knowing my little silo of information and that’s that.  This is a rare person, and in fact, this kind of person is the perfect company person.

Ford’s Assembly Line

If you look at the original concept of Ford’s Assembly Line and why it was so ground breaking, its because of specialization.  Each person in the factory would specialize in one small area of the making of the car and just do their job.  I probably would have quit that job at some point, or maybe I would have moved around the plant and worked on the fenders for a while.  I need to get around and learn more about different areas after I master an area of business.  I had for the longest time been considered a web analytics expert.  This expertise, which is somewhat uncommon in the market, is in my opinion, not an end unto itself, but one of many disciplines needed to truly understand the web.  It is foundational.

The Designer Becomes The Programmer And Vice Versa

I have actually seen web designers start out writing a few PHP programs here and there and turn into a full time programmer.  I have seen designers become directors and engineers become writers.  We seem to migrate towards not what we know, but what we are good at.  In fact, maybe initially we did not even know we were good at these things, but when we found out, by chance, that we were good at it, be decided to like it.  I stole that idea from the New York Times article on why Chinese Mothers are superior (They make their kinds learn something.  They say be good at something, and then one day you will learn to like it!).

Web Education

Let’s face it, you can get an education on any subject in like 15 minutes today.  I use Youtube.com when I cook and watch videos on how to make Indian food.  I use Instructables.com to figure out how to do this or that.  I research facts that make me as knowledgeable as any doctor, on certain matters, in a matter of minutes. I even found out at a retail outlet going out of business recently, the approximate value of a painting on the wall, before it was sold to me.  We are empowered with the ability to discover and learn at a moment’s notice.  Think about the impact of this on future generations who will have an answer to any question imaginable in a second.  Still the web doesn’t give us the core part of an education that we get in the classroom, and that is working in teams, directly with an instructor that can’t exactly be mimicked online.  The day is coming with Skype, Wifi and iPads where this will not be true anymore…

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Education, MBA, start-ups, Yahoo Finance

Synchronicity seems to happen in 3s.  You hear something once, then you hear it again. When you hear it a third time, you may want to listen up.  Maybe the world is trying to tell you something.  Three times in the past 2 weeks either a person or a short video stated bluntly that you might as well hang it up as an internet start-up if you are not in Silicon Valley, NYC or near Boston.  That sounds kind of ominous if you are not in those three cities.  What are we to do?  Are the other 95% of Americans in a technology business, trying to make an Internet start-up a reality, supposed to just stop right now.

The answer is no.  This “you have to be in these three cities” is not a prognosticator of success, but rather the possibility of receiving venture capital for an Internet start-up.  And venture capital is the fuel that makes big or decent size Internet software ventures run. But from listening to videos of successful start-ups out of the San Francisco area, it would seem that it goes way beyond just venture cap.  It is finding the management, getting the right employees, having the right legal work done.  And it seems this is just the way it is.  I think if you are wanting to be a start-up and you are in Kansas, South Florida, New Mexico, or Maine, it just means you have to focus back on either boot-strapping, self-funding, using Angels, or try the long shot of getting backed from another interested firm, like Google Ventures.

In South Florida recently, we’ve heard that Cross-Bow Ventures is no longer in business in Palm Beach County and that there really is not a lot of VC dollars to go around in the south east at this point in time.  This means that trying to raise certain amounts of capital will be nearly impossible unless some new funds start to take up the slack.  It could, however, point to a major problem in South Florida trying to raise capital.

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south florida internet, Venture Capital