Here are a few things you can do to review and improve your login:

• Use it a few times! Don’t apply a saved username and password in your browser. Login manually as your first time or infrequently visitors do. This alone can reveal a lot of issues that you can fix.
• Observe some people using the login. Have your mother or grandfather try it.
• Analyze your web traffic and see if you are losing a lot of people at the login stage.
• Talk to people in your call center or anyone who fields customer complaints about the web site. I guarantee they will if your login is not working well for your visitors.

Once you identify any problems, immediately meet with your web team to determine what needs to be changed and make it happen. Commit to getting in done in no more than one week.

Make sure your virtual front door is appealing and easy to open.

The best web teams are those that focus on generating results above all else. Guides and standards can be very useful tools and I’ve helped to generate a bunch of them. However, they are a means to an end. Don’t let your guidelines become straight jackets that limit your ability to achieve fantastic results online.

There are some implications here for anyone who makes direct sales via their web site. The primary one is that the usability of your online store is more important now than ever. When times are good, it’s easy to ignore some loss of sales due to challenging interfaces. When numbers are no longer growing or even contracting, however, you can’t afford to lose anyone who wants to give you money.

Here are a few things to look for:

• Review your web traffic reports and conversion rates. Identify any steps in your processes that tend to lose people.
• Personally observe several people completing transactions on your site and note any areas where they get confused or slow down.
• Have an expert mystery shop your store and identify where you can improve. (I can help you with this, by the way!)
• Talk to your call center staff and see what issues they hear about from customers who call them.

Once you have identified some improvements, drop everything until they are done. Otherwise they are less likely to be implemented. I’ve seen instances where a single small change had a 6-figure impact on revenue.

Interviews with cashiers at 16 Meijer stores suggest that its system has spurred many to hurry up — and has dialed up stress levels along the way. Mr. Gunther, who is 22 years old, says he recently told a longtime customer that he couldn’t chat with her anymore during checkout because he was being timed. “I was told to get people in and out,” he says. Other cashiers say they avoid eye contact with shoppers and generally hurry along older or infirm customers who might take longer to unload carts and count money.

Efficiency has a lot of value but you have to be careful you aren’t undercutting your ability to deliver the same product or service at an equal or higher level of quality.

It reminds me a bit of Circuit City firing their highest-paid and most experienced sales people to cut costs and then watched their sales weaken just as they headed into our current economic mess. Genius!

First of all, any change prompts people to look at new opportunities and solutions. We are clearly in the midst of great change as a society.

Secondly, during times of economic uncertainly, people look for an anchor. Professionally associations can be that anchor. Think for a second, if you knew your job was in jeopardy, isn’t one of the first places you would go for help your professional association or network. That is the place to make contacts, go to job boards, attend meetings, and interact on a listserv.

The broader online community, dispersed across innumerable blogs, twitter, FaceBook and other sites, has no universal bozo filter. However, you can control who you choose to follow and read.

Review all the sources of information and commentary that you continue to listen to and read. Are they all still providing value to you? Are any worthy of being bozoed and removed from your subscription and alert lists? It’s healthy communication practice to prune your subscription lists periodically. Otherwise, you’ll end up spending most of your time marking things as read and getting little value from it.

This is a great opportunity to pick up a few practical ideas with which to enhance the value of your site before the year is over. Sign up today!

• Employers may have fewer positions available but the ones they do have open are likely to be extremely important;
• Employers will have to sift through a much greater number of applicants for each position;
• There is going to be an influx of new job seekers who are highly qualified without recent experience in job hunting.

Online career centers have greater value for both the employers and seekers in this market. Think about what additional value you can offer to each.

Can you help employers to more easily sift through a large number of applicants to find the hidden gems?

Can you help the newly unemployed to present themselves in the best light?

Can you offer special services to senior executives and the recruiters looking to cherry pick the best talent in this market?

You get the idea.

The career centers that offer the most value now will be the ones that surge forward with the most energy when the economy inevitably improves and organizations begin hiring in much greater numbers. What are you doing to be ready?

The title of this post comes from Peter Drucker who called innovations that enable new value for your customers as demand innovation. Supply innovation is all about creating efficiencies for value you already provide.

If you read the story, you’ll note they did this in order to cut costs while still retaining their foreign bureaus and reporters. This makes all sorts of sense to me. When I hear about newspapers slashing their reporting staff, I always shake my head. The asset that they leverage for revenue is news reporting. They need to find new ways to leverage that asset effectively rather than cutting it to the bone to preserve an old, declining, business model.

Peter Drucker wrote that the most innovative companies are those who are ruthless about killing off programs, products and services that are no longer producitve. Kudos to the CSM for going boldly to the forefront of their industry.

If you’ve never read it, CSM provides some of the best international coverage out there. I discovered it in college while pulling long graveyard shifts at the periodicals desk as a student employee of the library.