thinks

Happy Leap Day, folks. Here’s this week’s group of reading goodness to help grow your small business online.

• Aaron Brazell leads off with a spot-on post about why it is important to cultivate a personal brand to help grow business. While it’s an open question whether business can be social, people sure are. Your employees should be well known, which will help you be well known, too. Look at these leadership qualities and notice how well they align with helping your employees gain recognition, both for themselves and for your business.
• Now even if you - or your employees - gain awareness among your customers, that doesn’t matter if they don’t think of you when they’re in the market for your products. Seth Godin recognizes this fact. Sorting out customers to recognize their needs is becoming a crucial skill for successful businesses.
• Fortunately, Bryan Eisenberg shows a method to help you prioritize your website optimization. Because those relationships don’t matter - in a business sense - if they’re not profitable relationships.
• Finally, SMX West hosted a panel discussion about what customers of the future will look like: Generation Google. While I agree with Rebecca at SEOmoz that the panel could have provided greater depth into unique insights among this group, it’s worth the read.

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business, e-commerce, e-commerce strategy, local business, marketing, seth godin, small business e-commerce, small business e-commerce strategy, social, social networks

Typically, I spend this time each week (or so) reviewing what I’ve just finished reading. But, I haven’t actually finished reading anything for the last couple weeks. Here’s what’s on my night stand right now:

• Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working from GigaOM’s Web Worker Daily - Anne Truitt Zelenka and Judi Sohn discuss the transition from knowledge worker to web worker and what that means for business and their employees. Anne and I have debated this point from time to time, though she makes a compelling case in the book. Check back in a couple of weeks and I’ll let you know if she’s convinced me.
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb takes what ought to be a dry topic and makes it interesting, engaging - and sometimes funny. Not funny enough to read it quicker (this one’s been on my nightstand for a while), but worthwhile all the same.
• Influencer: The Power to Change Anything - I feel like I walked in late on a conversation on this one. The authors (Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, and Ron McMillan) detail the steps others have taken to affect change in key performance drivers. But, they seem to ignore how one goes about identifying those key drivers in a particular enterprise in the first place. Maybe I should read their earlier books?

So, that’s what I’m reading right now. Here are my questions for you: What are you reading? What should we all be reading? Drop a comment and let us all know.

I was on a panel yesterday called “I Hate My CMS” for the Internet Strategy Forum and Society for Information Management (despite the fact they keep adding an ’s’ to my last name. Peter. Just Peter ;-). Here are the slides:

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The main point is that web CMS tools need to provide:

1. Workflow management
2. Content management

And, in practice, they suffer from a number of issues. For instance, your product catalog might be in one database. Your images might be on Flickr. Your e-commerce engine might be somewhere else. You might use eBay as part of the fulfillment. Pulling those diverse data sources together easily to create compelling product pages designed to drive sales simply doesn’t work. Not near well enough.

What we really need is a system that can take data feeds (likely via XML) from multiple sources and expose those in a clean interface to a marketer. And allow for easy A/B testing of those pages. And do it inexpensively. Why is that so hard? Or am I missing something here?

Let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags:
business, marketing, small business e-commerce, e-commerce, e-commerce strategy, small business e-commerce strategy

While we’ve been taking a look at what to do as part of your e-commerce strategy, it’s also important to look at how to do it. By far, the biggest question for businesses is whether to build or buy in your e-commerce investments. My answer: Both.

Assuming it’s one or the other is what logicians call a false dilemma. I call it BS.

Almost all investment will require your time and people to make it fit your business. While some off-the-shelf solutions, such as editors like Jimdo and Weebly, or analytics packages like ClickTracks or Google Analytics work “right out of the box,” fitting them to your business requires at least modest investments of time to get the greatest benefit. For instance, getting the most out of Google Analytics requires setting up filters and goals - definitely worth the time, but requiring time all the same.

By contrast, building should never be from scratch. Too many good open-source or paid solutions exist to allow a developer to start with a blank slate.* At a minimum, you should see if your industry has defined open XML specifications for things like inventory management or content sharing. Then, any build efforts you undertake can comply more easily with industry standards without locking you into a custom solution later. Groups like OASIS and its companion XML.org website detail standards across many industries. Make sure your developers know about them and that you require their use where possible.

So, what process is best for deciding how much to build and how much to buy? Here are 6 steps to figure it out:

1. First, define your problem in real terms. For instance, don’t say “I need a content management system.” Say, “I need to be able to post content every Wednesday outlining my weekend specials and have those specials automatically come off my site every Monday. And I don’t want to have to learn HTML. And I need it to integrate with my inventory system.” While not as robust as a fully blown spec, this process allows you to understand your needs without limiting your options as to solutions.
2. Next, take a look at the marketplace for products that might potentially meet your need. Be skeptical of “out of the box” solutions will “meet all your needs with no effort on your part.” Sometimes sales folks can be… overzealous. But don’t eliminate expensive “out of the box” options out of hand. And don’t assume that all solutions cost “too much.” Development is expensive and many open-source or less expensive options exist of even the most robust commercial products. Even if you can cover half your needs with a commercial or open-source offering, you’ve limited the amount of development you need to do.
3. Third, before negotiating pricing for a purchased tool, have your development team - or your outsourced developers - prepare a quote for what it would take to build out the functionality from scratch and for enhancing the third-party solution. Make sure the quote covers enhancements for 24-36 months. And make sure they account for training and developing documentation. Better yet, get two quotes: one from your incumbent vendor and one from the folks most recommended by your friends.
4. Fourth, get a detailed quote from the packaged solution vendor or open source integrator. Make sure you’re comparing like-to-like with what your development folks quoted, so include items like training and full documentation.
5. Next, compare those quotes. If they’re within 10% of one another - in either direction - you’re probably better off with the purchased solution. If they’re more than 10% off, go back and double check your assumptions, then go with the better deal.
6. Finally, try piloting the selected solution for 60-90 days and see how it works in your world. Obviously, if you’re going to build, that’s harder, but see if you can get a prototype running in a few weeks so you can compare. It may not tell you everything. But it will tell you a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

This method is by no means fool-proof. And it certainly is biased in favor of buy. There’s a reason for that. Building products to meet your needs can be incredibly rewarding and generate excellent returns for your business. But it can also be a bottomless pit into which you throw money for long periods with nothing to show for it except for loss of focus on the business you’re really in. Buying usually gets you part way there quicker and cheaper. And piloting provides an excellent opportunity to learn what you really need in a low-risk environment.

A great strategy poorly implemented is never a great strategy. When you look at where you build, where you buy and where you build and buy carefully and make educated decisions about which works best for you, you’re well on your way to a well-implemented strategy.

* Unless your business model is to create tools for websites. And even then, you probably reuse design patterns, AJAX frameworks and the like. Or you should.

Social Media and SEO

• Noted SEO Aaron Wall tells “The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing”
• Equally noted Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang responds with “Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media –not just Impacts of Advertising”

Social Media/SEO Analysis

I don’t usually comment on the links I select, but this is an interesting topic for small businesses - and large ones, too - to think about carefully. I definitely agree more with Jeremiah, despite the great points Aaron makes.

First, why I agree with Jeremiah. Engaging in social networks for your business depends on engaging with your customers where they are and when they want you to. Social networks provide excellent opportunity to do that and to see your customers “in the wild.” No skill matters more in marketing than listening to your customers’ needs. Social networks and social media can help you listen more effectively.

Now, why I agree with Aaron? Because his fundamental premise is right. If your participation doesn’t ultimately lead to sales, it may not be worth your time. You’ve got to measure your activities and determine what the right places to engage your customers are. I suspect social networks will be one of them. But don’t assume Digg or MySpace are those places. Look for niche networks, focused on areas where your business excels. Serve the luxury market? Look at ASmallWorld. Offer food products? Look to key culinary bloggers. And so on.

Social is neither bad, nor good. It’s a tool. How you use it is up to you.

While it’s unclear whether Ebay or its sellers will end up taking a hit here, this EBay boycott illustrates the benefits and risks of using third-party partner sites as part of your small business e-commerce strategy.

No simple answer exists as to whether you should use a third-party channel or not as part of your total e-commerce strategy; however, the risks and benefits are clear:

Benefits of Third-party Partner Sites

1. Exposure to potentially large audience - Customers often start their search for products and services on large aggregator sites. Listing your products with one of these sites gives you a larger potential audience than you might get on your site alone.
2. Scalability - To serve the needs of large audiences, sites such as Ebay, Amazon, Expedia and Travelocity need robust server farms, far in excess of what small businesses can hope to create for themselves. Making the most of their hardware can often be a smart ploy. Even given Amazon’s recent S3 outage, you don’t get less risk with a smaller player.
3. Low cost - Typically, large web sites like Ebay and Amazon gain significant economies of scale and can pass those savings on to you. For many businesses, the cost of a partner channel might be the least expensive - at least in the short run.

Risks of Third-party Partner Sites

1. Greater competition for attention - Sure, listing your products with one of these sites gives you a larger potential audience than you might get on your site alone. But that’s true for the other products and services listed there, too. Ebay lists more than 14 million items at any one time. So, don’t rate the site on its potential audience. Rate the partner on volume of sales.
2. Less control - As this Ebay flap illustrates, relying on a partner site for too many of your sales can put you at a disadvantage when they change their rules.

While the advantages of partner sites outweigh their disadvantages for most small businesses, you should run the numbers for yourself and see what makes the most sense. Partners have terrific upside and, in most cases, can make a big impact as part of your overall e-commerce strategy.

What do you think? Will Ebay’s change make you change your view of partner sites? Are there better places to look? Drop a line in the comments and let me know.