Archive for October, 2008
October 29, 2008
News without the Paper
The Christian Science Monitor has announced that they are going web-only for daily news and will print a Sunday magazine: The Monitor Ends Daily Print Edition.
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.
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October 22, 2008
International Audiences
The few bright spots in the earning reports for American companies these days are those who are making gains in international markets. The up swing in profits from abroad is offsetting declines in their domestic markets.
This underlines the growing importance of international audiences for web sites. You need to identify the specific business outcomes you hope to achieve with them and then create sites that focus on that in a way that works for those people from abroad.
In communicating across borders with a web site, there are three criteria you can use to evaluate each audience.
1. Language. If your site communicates with business people and/or professionals, do they speak the native lanaguage of your web site in day-to-day business? If so, you may be able to get away without translating. If not, look at what language will work best for each audience.
2. Transactions. If you collect data or conduct ecommerce transactions via your site, what impact will different international audiences have on the fields you use? Are there privacy laws and regulations you will need to comply with? Again, look at similarlities and differences across all of your international audiences.
3. Culture. This is the tough one. Look for cultural similarities and differences among your international audiences. Do they respond the same way to the same imagery? Is your humorous ad campaign in the home country highly offensive in others? Cross-cultural analysis and testing will help to reveal issues such as this.
Assessing these three characteristics among your international audience and against your home-country web presence will help you to identify which audiences can get by with your existing presence and which may need highly tailored efforts to support them and your desired outcomes.
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October 10, 2008
Creating Member Value with Social Media
I gave a presentation a few weeks ago to the Maryland Society of Association Executive on creating member value with social media. This presentation is always very well received and I post my slides below for your perusal.
I offer professional speaking services and can tailor this presentation for your staff or leadership in keynote and workshop formats. Give me a call at +1 (410) 742-9088 If social media is on your radar and you want to maximize the value your organization creates with it.
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October 6, 2008
Time to Increase the Value You Offer
If you’ve been peeking at the stock market this week or reading financial news, you are probably feeling more than a bit uneasy. There are definitely financial challenges out there and the economy may be undergoing a pretty significant amount of change now that it has been up ended.
But that is no reason to hide under our desks, as comforting as that might feel. Now is the time to raise the bar and increase the value you are offering to your customers, members and clients.
How well are you conveying the value of your products and services?
Can improving the usability of key pages on your site increase conversion rates and improve revenue?
Are you getting the most value possible from your existing technology and infrastructure?
Can you improve the efficiency of your processes to free up staff resources for other higher value actions?
Short term: Pick one thing you can do today to improve the value you offer. Do it again tomorrow. And the day after. (You get the idea.)
Medium term: What changes can you implement this quarter to make a significant difference?
Long term: Are new markets opening up for you due to the economy? Should you reduce or leave completely any existing markets that are unlikely to recover?
I guarantee you’ll feel better if you do something today. Go for it.
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October 1, 2008
When to Build and When to Hire
I though this article from MIT Sloan Management Review about hiring vs. developing internal talent was quite interesting. The article posits that the characteristics of the job should have as much, if not more, influence in the decision than the people in question. Here is a relevant quote from the summary.
When ‘Stars’ Migrate, Do They Still Perform Like Stars?
Consequently, organizations should not think of talent management as a simple “build versus buy” dichotomy. Rather, there are some positions for which they can buy, and others for which they must build. Within investment banks, for example, the retail brokers (who handle individual clients) work primarily on their own. In contrast, institutional salespeople (who sell to major institutional investors such as Putnam, Vanguard and Fidelity) are more likely to perform their jobs in teams. Thus, retail brokers are more portable and can easily be hired from the outside. Institutional salespeople, however, should be developed from within, and efforts should be made to retain them.
This has lots of interesting implications for career path development, recruitment and retention.
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