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:
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.
A lot of brand management time often goes on a few things:
This is understandable - it’s usually the brief brand managers are handed from above. Not to mention the fact that most brand terminology is around this: “image”, “projection”, “identity”, “recognition”…
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:
If you’re just starting an email newsletter campaign, or you’re reevaluating how you use email, there are 5 very simple questions you can ask to solidify your plan & give you the best chance of success.
Thinking of all of these questions together & the trade-offs between them will help you to understand why & how you want to use email, which gaps it bridges between you and your customers, and how you will know when you’re moving toward your goals…
If you’ve ever made regular, site-wide improvements to a website you’ve probably come across the problem of trying to please all of your visitors all of the time. You fix something because a couple of loyal buyers complain about it, then you notice your ‘new customers’ number is dropping. You simplify the cart to try and fix that, and suddenly your loyal buyers are complaining again. You look at your sales numbers & everything looks fine. Where did you go wrong? Are all of your ‘loyal’ customers unhappy, or is it just a few shouty complainers?
After a while this causes problems & slowdowns on new projects:
So what do you do?
Keep Reading this entry –»
A very simple way to quickly improve a website’s performance is to pick out some key pages (eg. checkout pages, signup forms, product pages) and try out different versions of the page to see which performs best. This article explains 4 different test methods & the advantages of each…
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…
If you’re thinking of hiring someone to write for your website, you’ll be looking at people who fall somewhere within this range:
It’s often tempting to hire the people at the lefthand side of that: their portfolios can look very impressive, they’ve often been established for many years, they’ve got a client list full of names you recognise. But it’s worth taking a few minutes to think about the skillset required online & a few of the key differences…
Here’s a TV ad for ‘Cravendale Milk’ that someone, somewhere uploaded to Youtube:
Cravendale Last Glass Ad
I’d never seen it before (I no longer have a television), but I noticed a reference to it on the Wieden + Kennedy London blog and sought it out as a result. This is a funny time in adland. The internet is simultaneously opening up new opportunities & threatening to close many doors. Keep Reading this entry –»
