From the monthly archives:

February 2008

Small Business E-commerce Link Digest – February 29, 2008

by Tim on February 29, 2008

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.

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

Tagged as: aaron brazell, bryan eisenberg, customer of the future, generation google, linkdigest, SEO, seth godin, small business, small business e-commerce, small business e-commerce strategy, social networking, social networks, socnet

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Open question: What are you reading? (Book review of the week-ish)

by Tim on February 28, 2008

in Book Reviews

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.

Tagged as: anne zelenka, black swan, book review, connect, influence, influencer, judi sohn, nassim nicholas taleb, the black swan, web worker daily

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Why CMS sucks. (Guide to Small Business E-commerce Strategy)

by Tim on February 27, 2008

in E-commerce

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:

Workflow management
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