thinks

Time for the monthly thinks roundup of top content. This is the most read and commented items on the blog in March. And for some reason, Steve Ballmer keeps making strange appearances in the list.

• The small business web hosting comparison continues to garner the love as does the follow up Jimdo review.
• New to the list are the weekly small business ecommerce link digests. The February 29, March 7, and March 21 ecommerce link digests got the most attention so far.
• Book reviews continue climbing the charts, including my review of Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” and the list of the 12 most important business books of the last 10 years.
• If Steve Ballmer and Jim Sterne were to have a love child, he’d hop around screaming, “Analytics, analytics, analytics!” OK, maybe not. But he’d definitely want you to see the 7 keys to successful web metrics and my interview with Avinash Kaushik on measuring customer satisfaction.
• The ongoing Steve Ballmer/Jerry Yang soap opera continues, driving plenty of you to read what Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will buy in 2007. OK, so I was off by a year.
• Finally, a couple inspiring posts jumped into the list. The phenomenal “I heart Zappo’s” customer service story has gotten big visits. So has my advice to do what you love. And, as ever, some folks just want to find who Tim Peter is.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has great piece today about Comcast using Twitter to as an early warning system. Add this to your list of ways to get business value from Twitter.

Increasingly, businesses are using Twitter and learning about their customers from it. For instance, someone from Zappo’s - they of the best customer service story ever - started following me on Twitter this past weekend (before I dropped a couple hundred bucks on shoes for me and my family). And I suspect I’ll hear from them again.

It’s become increasingly fashionable for people to claim Twitter is a waste of time or useless. But in practice it’s increasingly useful as a tool for smart business folks to learn what their customers care about. If smart companies use Twitter, why don’t you?

UPDATE: McNeil just learned a valuable lesson about Twitter with a failed commercial. You can read what they did wrong and how to avoid that here.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure you’re ready for the mobile, social, local web? Subscribe to thinks today and get more than the news. Get understanding.

A friend forwarded the results of a marketing study to me this morning. It’s from a political campaign, but it highlights key points for any marketing plan:

1. Repeat your message to help influence a “purchase decision” (voting, in this case)
2. Use multiple contact channels to reinforce your message
3. Too much repetition turns off buyers
4. Make sure your analytics are in place. That will show what works and allows you to improve your message, channel and frequency

#4 might just be the most important one. Do you track your key business metrics for all of your marketing?

In my price transparency presentation last week, I mentioned how mobile was going to shatter price transparency. (Audio transcript of presentation coming next week).

Amazon now allows customers to buy from their mobile phones, too.

Imagine a customer standing in your store who decides to check your prices against Amazon - or another competitor using something like Slifter. Are you ready to close that sale? Or does your customer buy with their mobile - while standing in your store? Competing on price alone isn’t enough. Can you satisfy your customers needs across the board?

Kudos to Whitney Hess for pointing this out via Twitter this morning and doing a great review of TextBuyIt.

[Full disclosure: I’m an Amazon affiliate, but, so far as I know, Amazon isn’t offering this as an affiliate service currently.]

Since the Web is awash in April Fool’s jokes today, I felt it best to leave it to the professionals:

• The Onion - “America’s Finest News Source”. Satirical and often hilarious
• JibJab - Online animation at its best

If you’re not interested in April Fool’s jokes and looking for information about ecommerce, ecommerce strategy, online marketing or the social, mobile, local web, try these popular posts:

• Compare site hosting for small business websites
• What sales channels matter most to a small business’ ecommerce strategy?
• Four tips to help you decide the right amount to spend on your website
• What it means to be a geek marketer
• Google shows how customers use mobile search to find local businesses
• Follow these 7 steps to keep your website alive
• The 12 most important business books of the last 10 years
• What happens to your brand when corporate bloggers leave?
• Why is your business still invisible online?
• What is the business value of Twitter?
• Is Twitter an ecommerce driver?