If I visit your website from Australia, is it any different from the website I see if I visit from The USA? Or from England?

That’s only half the question really. The real question is: Could your website perform better if it looked different to visitors from different countries?

A few larger sites understand that they can perform better by speaking differently to visitors from individual countries, and a few of the larger ad networks do too. If you hit the Amazon.com homepage from outside the USA, they ask you politely to visit your local site like this:

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Whether you’re running a blog, a shop, a forum, or anything else on the web, you’ve made several hundred decisions to set it up & keep it running. But one big decision that’s often just passed by is the ‘content communication strategy’: You know the type of content you want on the site, but you may not even consider that there are several totally different options for getting that content on there.
In this article we’ll talk about the 4 most common ‘content communication strategies’, with a few pros and cons of each, plus a few examples of sites that use each strategy.

The strategies we’ll talk about are:

1. The Central Controller
2. The Group Effort
3. The Multi-Way Conversation
4. Of The People, By The People (For the People!)

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If you’re having trouble with fraud, here’s a simple idea for an additional fraud check you can perform automatically when someone signs up for a new account: When a new registrant on your website says they’re based in New York & they’re shipping to Paris, you would expect them to have visited your site from either the USA or France. Taking a log of the addresses they enter & comparing those with their actual location allows you to automatically flag suspicious accounts…

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Let’s say your website has 10,000 products. You have a sales team of 100 people & 2 product managers. How do you educate your sales team about all of those products with such a tiny resource?

Here are three stategy ideas:

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Using your website to “turn your company inside out” is quite common. This was a message at the heart of the Cluetrain Manifesto & it’s one of the foundations of corporate blogging: Allow the individuals that make up your company to broadcast themselves externally & you benefit them individually & benefit the organisation as a whole.

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There’s a lot of chatter about “who’s winning online” in the US Presidential election. Pundits are claiming it’s the first presidential campaign to really be fought online (just as they said last time & the time before). Last week there was a Youtube debate, shortly there’s a Yahoo debate. So I thought I’d take a quick look at some of the freely available stats to see how Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama are each faring online.
Barack Vs Hillary - the ‘orange’ cells are the winners:

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This is a little post about something you may never have thought about before: The single, unique problem that the web solves. The extra functionality it offers that didn’t exist for the first few billion years of the planet.

It’s just a simple little fact but, when you understand it, you will understand a little more about what everyone’s doing on the web. It’s a piece of knowledge that will open new opportunities for you.

Here it is - presented in a brief history of communication…

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In 2003, O’Reilly Publishing came up with the term ‘Web 2.0′. A couple of years later, Tim O’Reilly wrote a great article titled ‘What Is Web 2.0?‘ in which he shared this graphic from their original brainstorms:

Few would disagree with the right-hand column (other than perhaps ‘napster’) & there are some seriously accurate predictions in there. But amongst the left-hand column - the Web 1.0 elements that were supposed to fade - there are a few items that are still going as strong (if not stronger) than they were back then.
I’ve highlighted them above & here they are (in no particular order) including a couple of nice ironic twists: Keep Reading this entry –»
 

Every company wants to gather data around their customers & their products. For Google this is quite a unique problem:

1. Google’s customer-base is huge: pretty much ‘everybody online’
2. Google’s biggest product (targeted advertising) relies on them knowing as much as possible about their customers (you!)

Q: So what would you do if you were Google?
A: Try and track as much as you possibly can; make some strategic acquisitions to build a more detailed picture; create new tools & products to learn even more about your users

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This post is about a little piece of information that can turn around a failing search campaign; A golden nugget of knowledge that can turn an already-good campaign into an utter barnstormer; A pearl of super-condensed wisdom that can… You get the picture - it’s something really simple that offers big benefits yet hardly anyone recognises its possibilities…

Here’s a chart from the latest Enquiro search survey showing a summary of 1,086 b2b buyers answering the question (totally paraphrased):

“where (online) do you start each phase of the purchase cycle”?

• 65.3% begin the ‘awareness’ phase of a purchase at a search engine
• 51.8% begin ‘research’ at a search engine
• 42.1% start ‘negotiation’ at a search engine
• 42.6% begin ‘purchase’ at a search engine

What’s The Golden Piece Of Information Here?

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