The saying goes “You care about what you measure”, after all how can you improve something if you don’t know how your doing with it, or whether your getting better or worse at it. In this example, climate change is what you care about, so its measured. To get a measurement you need a tool for collecting data and a system for analyzing that data into meaning. If you want to increase your businesses sales, you have to track the sales over time. This will tell you whether or not your improving or not. This doesn’t help much on its own, you also need to know what changes have taken place that can be used to explain the movement of the trend. A big problem with trying to identify the actions that cause the changes are to figure out what actually makes a difference and what doesn’t.

Assume that I try to see what has caused a 10% increase in my sales. The first thing I notice is that on the days my sales increased I wore a blue tie. I might be tempted to mandate that all sales people wear blue ties. While there is some data that indicates the color of your clothing can have an impact on how people perceive you and therefor have an impact on whether or not they want to do business with you, it is not a proven fact that my blue tie has anything to do with my performance. It might just as likely be true that I happen to wear my blue tie on the sames days that the state employees get their paychecks, so they are more apt to buy because they have the money now. So what impacts the increased sales, the tie or the cash on hand.

The most believable story I have heard against global warming is that the thermometers used to gather the temperature readings  are located near airports in most major cities. When the airports where built they were located outside of the city. As the cities grew, the large amount of concrete and asphalt from the city development crept closer to the where the temperature readings where taken. The concrete and asphalt held the heat from the day longer and raised the temperature of the immediate environment making the readings of the thermometers higher than they were previously. Whether or not this is actually the case, it illustrates the errors that can occur in metric gathering and analyzing. Check your metric gathering tools and see what other elements could effect its readings or your analysis of them.

Whether or not every position that has had a case made for it reaching the C-suite actually gets there is up to each organization to decide, but the fact that the case is made so frequently suggests a few points to consider.

1. Most departments or professions feel under represented. The only reason to be part of the C-suite is so that your department has more of an influence on major decisions. This suggests that many people believe that their profession is either under represented or that other departments are taking more of the spotlight than they deserve. Everyone just wants to have a voice, right?
2. Interdepartmental communication needs some improvement. A persons belief that their point of view is over looked or at least not defended when they are not present is a good indication that organizations still suffer from departmental silos.

The strength of a brand relies on the ability of the organization to work toward a shared set of ideals and vision. Each department needs to be performing it’s function to support the goals of the organization. With departmental silos, it can be difficult to rally functions toward a common goal. As the economy returns to one driven by marketing instead of advertising, unity will become more and more important.

This advice seems to be pretty self evident, but you might be surprised how many professionals forget this. It’s so easy to throw yourself into your work and spend all your time trying to get more done, all the while believing that it’s the most effective way to increase your value and your professional growth. Believe me and my 80 hour work weeks.

Its good to keep up with your industry, and just as Thomas Edison used to say “Genius was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”, so working hard is good too, but to really understand people you need to spend time with them. Get out of your safety circle of colleges and friends and meet some new people. It will give you a different perspective, and often, insight. Especially if your job is to communicate a message to a market (people) its good to remember that not everyone thinks the same way you do. Go find those people who think differently and have a conversation.

Always proceed with your best judgment, but then take the time to set up a feedback / improvement system to continually improve. Like many things on the web, getting this part right is usually done faster through quick test and improve cycles rather than months of contemplating the right move.

The key here is make sure that you are offering an experience for your user. Pay attention to not only what you are saying, but how your are saying it, and how it all looks. A good combination of content, presentation and interaction are the cornerstones of a good experience, so long as its unique.

Being unique is critical. With so much competition out there on the world wide web, it is easy to forget or get confused about who is who. Getting around this problem is the process of building a brand. Too often, however, people try to take a shortcut and end up shooting themselves in the foot.

Remember splash pages? Thankfully most of these monstrosities are now gone, but there was a time when the “splash page” was running rampant and out of control. Part of this tragedy can be linked to the early idea of the web being the new television, but a lot more of it had to do with trying to take an experience short cut. Instead of spending the time to make a compelling experience, these folks tried to throw so much sizzle at us in flashing, fast moving graphics hoping to blind us from the lack of steak.

While splash pages are now mostly gone, the tendency to take this short cut still exists. It is a good idea to try and be clever and push the envelop, but there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. This line comes in the form of the “use your mouse to chase down the moving navigation elements” and other such ill-conceived ideas. The biggest problem is that it can be hard to know where this line is until you’ve crossed it. Getting the user to chase your page elements around is interactive and can even be fun the first time, but when the novelty wears off it becomes frustrating and a waste of time. Its kind of like a one night stand. It seems like a fun adventure, but it’s no way to build a long lasting solid relationship. No one wants to be with (or be) the guy who is a lot of fun for the first few minutes but then falls short after that. Don’t let your first impression online be that guy. Marriages are built with the consistent guy, not the party guy. Spend 10 minutes on your own site everyday for a few weeks and see if you can find where it falls short.

In the middle of the town is a common. If you are not familiar with commons its pretty much what it sounds like, common area used by all the towns folk to keep their livestock, plant gardens, etc. The commons is where the town gathered, worked and talked about the news of the day.  To be a successful business, it made sense to put your business on the land facing the commons. Location, Location, Location, right? The age old philosophy of “go where your customers are” was very important before yellow pages and search engines. So there you are, in your bakery on the edge of the commons, accessible to anyone in town who may want a loaf of wheat bread.

Relationships were the driver of business in this time. The people who chose to buy from a particular baker most likey did so because they  built a relationship with them day after day of talking in the commons or at the bakers shop. People liked to buy from people they know. To increase bread sales, the baker could go out into the commons after the morning rush and offer discounts to try his bread, or he could start an affinity program. The baker could also hire some local kids to sell his goods for a percentage of the profit, starting an early affiliate program. No matter what the plans where to keep the business going strong, it relied on personal relationships (at least personal as in “in person”).

It would be entirely possible for the baker to bake his goods at home, and then build a stand to sell out of in the commons. By doing this he wouldn’t actually need a storefront of his own, and he could just make his money from the stand he built. This works until the customers either leave the commons to go a new area, or the commons get purchased and his stand is longer allowed to be there. In either case, the work that he put into creating his stand, and making it accessible and comfortable to customers is all lost.

Fast forward a few hundred years to today. The commons are back. There called social networks. In much the same way as our earlier ancestors, businesses are realizing that building relationships with people can pay off. All the advantages ( and disadvantage) from back then are all back, and community is the new topic to pay attention to. With all the ways you can now reach out to your customers base, the question has been raised as to whether or not a company really needs a website anymore. There are so many new services out there like Facebook and Twitter that customers spend time on that it can seem like a companies website isn’t where the people are; however, what was true in 1805 is still true today.

The point of a company having a website is to control its online domain – the space that is theirs. Thats why they are called Domain Names. Companies could spend all day on Facebook just like our baker could have spent all day in the commons, but if the commons ever became unavailable, he was out of luck. Today, the online equivalent is actually even worse. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, and may not be the last. At some point someone will create a new social network that people think is better and they will jump ship and move to that one. Facebook did it to MySpace, and MySpace did it to Friendster before that. When that day comes, then all the hard work that was poored into Facebook will be gone. I don’t mean to pick on Facebook, pick any social networking platform you want, its the same deal. 200,000 Twitter followers won’t do you much good when Twitter shuts down.

The point here is to go ahead and go out into the social media world and explore. Experiment and learn. Leverage its technology to build community and its power to build your business. Do as much as you can, but always maintain your home turf. Maintain your website. Use it to give your customers an experience that Facebook doesn’t provide them. Make it the center of your universe, just like the bread store on the edge of the commons.

Often, this process is done the other way around. Someone gets an idea that they “need” something, and then put together a Request For Proposal (RFP) to find out how much it will cost by getting bids on it. This doesn’t seem bad on the surface, except that most of the RFPs I come across are copies of some other RFP for someone else, or an old one that is reused with only a few words changed in it. To say the least, these RFPs have missed the whole point of an RPF.

This happens most with technology related purchases. It seems that some companies base their decision to buy something on some technology that is hot, or that other companies like them are buying. “Well, XYZ company just got a new widgetizer 5000, and they are doing good, we should get a widgetizer 5000, too.” This line of thinking does not a good strategy make.

A new technology foundation for your website (read CMS) or a new shopping cart will not increase the value of your website on its own. A good web strategy is not defined by what software packages you put on the back end. You can run a website on anything if your strategy is sound. If your strategy is not, no software package in the world will help you out.

Magento is an open source shopping cart and storefront that seems to be getting a lot of attention lately. I’m in the midst of working with Magento right now for a few clients myself. It has some really great features, but it is not the greatest thing to hit the internet. It will not improve your conversion rate. It has ton’s of features, but that also means its very complicated. One client requested it from the C-suite, and when the employees that actually have to run the software found out, they go scared. “We have seen Magento, and we don’t get it.”

We have been shown time and time again that sometimes what makes a technology so successful and useful is by what it DOESN’T do, not what it does do. Don’t buy bullet points on a box. The only way to know what features you need and what features you don’t is by understanding what you need to accomplish, and why. Start with the strategy. Plan it out, make charts. Understand as much as you can about the outcomes you want, and then work backwards to arrive at what you need. When all that is done, then go software shopping.

Wy wife has spent over 30 years in Tampa before she was dragged across the country to the middle of the desert. She loves seafood. There isn’t alot of seafood in New Mexico. Burritos, Yes. Crab legs, not so much. You can imagine the excitement she felt when during a trip to WalMart we discovered you could buy gift cards to restaurants. In between the gift card for Chili’s and Applebee’s was one for Eat at Joe’s Crab Shack. We had no idea there was a Crab Shack here in New Mexico.  We rushed home and looked on the interweb to find our Albuquerque Crab Shack location only to find that there isn’t one. 

I understand that you could buy one and mail it to someone in another state, but by having this card in there for a restaurant that is 8 eight hours away in another state doesn’t do me much good for local family or friends. What this has essentially done has made me not buy ANY gift cards from WalMart because I have no idea which ones I can use here and which ones I can’t. If that sounds a little silly to you, then I suggest you talk to your customers more. You’d be surprised the things that make them not buy. 

This whole thing could be cleared up with a sign, or some section devoted to local or non-local chains. That is all it would take. Its the simple things that can reduce the barriers to purchase and give you more share of wallet.

I have been reminded of this fact again recently when I was checking the analytics on this blog to see what people are reading. My second most read post is this one – Would you sell your subscribers email address?

This post is not reaching the right people, as the number way people are finding it are by searching for “How to sell email addresses.” This group is obviously not the group that I’m trying to reach with this post, and this post is probably not what this group is looking for. The bounce rate for this post is in the high 80% range. Perhaps I should have titled it “How to piss off your customers”, or “The fastest way to lose your customers trust”… but alas, there it is. Think about your headlines and make sure they are sending the message you want your audience to receive. 

To make good on the promise on this headline, go check out this post from CopyBlogger entitled 10 sure-fire headline formulas that work- they got it right on.

The headline read “Help save the environment. Stop filling our land fill with grocery store bags.” Then came some copy about how grocery store bags are not reused because they were so weak so most end up in the trash, and then the call to action was to buy a nice cloth reusable shopping bag.  All in all for a homegrown flyer it wasn’t bad. I’ve seen some “professional” copywriters do worse. The only problem with the message was the media.

I got this flyer from my front door. So did all of my neighbors. There are probably at least 350 houses in my subdivision, and they all got the flyer on their doors. I can’t help but think that all those flyer went in the trash. The flyer about reducing trash and being responsible… went in the trash… about 350 of them. That message, while unintended, was loud and clear to me.