Recent Articles from the Blog
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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September 30, 2008
Quoted on MSNBC.com about Cleaning Up Your ‘Digital Dirt’
I was quoted yesterday by an MSNBC.com columnist about what to do when your online history, as shown by Google search results for your name, begin to cause career problems.
Here is the main portion that quotes me:
Many of us may want to find ways to erase the negative information about us on the Web, but that may not be the best strategy.
“What to do when you don’t like the impression given by your online persona?” asks C. David Gammel, a corporate technology consultant. “The counterintuitive response is the best: Post even more content about yourself online.”
However, he adds: “The content should be of a nature that is at least neutral, at best positive, for your career prospects. Blog about your professional interests. Discuss research you have conducted yourself on a topic of interest.”
Gammel believes in burying the Internet skeletons in positive cyber dust. “Once the less savory items are pushed off your first page of ego search results on Google, you’ll be fine with most people,” he notes. “That’s why you have to post more, not less, to get rid of the impact of those skeletons.”
The same thing is true for organizations as well.
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September 26, 2008
The Literate Web Developer
Rafe Coburn, a very long time blogger, posted today about how he is seeing more and more web developers who don’t know SQL very well.
It seems to me, though, that actual knowledge of SQL seems to be falling. I blame this on the growing popularity of persistence frameworks that abstract the database away, allowing developers to interact without databases without writing much (or any) SQL. … Many developers don’t even learn SQL in depth, period.
Rafe goes on to explain why knowledge of SQL (a way to query databases directly and with great flexibility) is key knowledge even when your team uses a development framework that abstracts away the database.
He makes a closing point that I think is good advice for any web developer. He recommends developing your skills in HTML, CSS, SQL, and Javascript, as they will be around forever (in web terms!) even as new frameworks rise and fall. Any developer with good chops in those areas will have a long term career advantage over someone who is exclusively a specialist in Ruby on Rails, for example.
For those of you who managed web teams and developers, make sure you are investing in these fundamental skills as well as in the specific technology that is unique to your operations.
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September 25, 2008
Podcast: Social Media and Young Professionals: An Interview with Lauren Turner
Today I have a real treat for you: an interview with Lauren Turner who is leading some innovative efforts to use social media to engage with young professionals for the Chamber of Commerce in Fort Worth Texas.
In the interview I ask Lauren about where their young professionals are engaging online, how they have reach out to them and which techniques seem to be the most effective.
Here are a few links mentioned in the interview:
- Vision Fort Worth. The web site the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce created specifically for the young professionals audience.
- Vision FW Facebook Group. Requires login.
- Vision FW Twitter Account.
- Vision FW LinkedIn Group.
The podcast is a tad over 15 minutes long. I will also be discussing Vision Fort Worth as a case in an American Chamber of Commerce Executives webinar on October 2. Be sure to register for that event if you are interested how to engage with young professionals in your community.
Play the interview below or follow the link to download the MP3 file.
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September 24, 2008
Google Says Dynamic URLs OK (Must update my soapbox!)
Google posted to their official weblog today a bit of background on how they can process dynamic URLs. A dynamic URL is one that contains lots of junk that humans can’t read, including symbols. A LOT of system still create URLs like this, especially when the web page is created from data stored in a database.
It used to be common knowledge that URLs with natural language words in them did better in natural search results placement than dynamic URLs because Google would be better able to process them. It appears that is no longer operative. The key graph from the post today on that topic:
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs:
While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.
While there is still benefit to displaying static URLs for the human using your site it seems that, from Google’s perspective, it’s not worth doing just for search engine placement. Interesting!
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September 15, 2008
6 million reasons to pay attention to accessibility
A nearly three year old lawsuit has resulted in a $6 million settlement over accessibility problems at Target.com.
Target has settled a class action lawsuit with the National Federation of the Blind over accessibility complaints with Target.com. Despite the law being unclear as to whether the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to websites, the company will pay a substantial fee and update its web site to make it accessible to the blind.
Another case study in how building accessible, standards compliant, web sites is not only the right thing to do but can save you millions. Plus, doing the right thing in this regard is easier to do than ever before with improved browsers, web application frameworks and agreed upon standards.
A complicating factor for some organizations can be that they are using systems for their sites that have been developed and added to since the early days of the web when accessibility wasn’t even an afterthought. However, committing to upgrading your system before the lawsuits were filed would have allowed Target to invest a portion of that $6 million in improving their site rather than paying a fine.
(Spotted via Gadgetopia.)
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September 11, 2008
When You Get Slammed Online
Eve Tahmincioglu, a columnist for MSNBC.com, quoted me recently in a blog post she wrote about her experience interacting with a blogger who slammed one of her articles as ’sloppy journalism.’ It’s a good case for how to approach criticism online with good results in this instance.
The key thing Eve did was to take a deep breath and respond initially as if the person criticizing her was rational. Turns out he was and they were able to find common ground via comments and blog posts discussing the issue.
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September 8, 2008
Finding the Biggest Bang for Your Usability Buck
Most people acknowledge that usability is a critical factor in the success of a page, application or entire web site. Poor usability will drive away users and limit the results you can achieve.
However, how can you best determine where to start with your usability efforts? Here is an easy way to triage your opportunities and identify those with the best chance for high impact.
Identify which processes or transactions on your site are repeated the most frequently and ideally result in the greatest value for the web site publisher.
You want high frequency so that you are targeting the most (or most active) users of your site.
You want a cumulatively high value of all those actions in order to focus on those that create the most value for your organization.
A process that happens a million times a month and is worth, on average, 10 cents to the publisher is cumulatively worth $100,000. A minor usability improvement to that process which adds a penny or two to the average value has a big impact. You get the idea.
The best usability improvements are not necessarily the most brilliant or unique; they are those that generate the most value. A high value usability improvement could be a simple as adjusting a confusing label.
What are the highest volume and highest cumulative value processes on your site? Focus on making incremental usability improvements there in order to be a usability superstar.
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September 3, 2008
Improving the capacity to act.
I recently conducted a workshop for a clienton the topic of knowledge management. As I prepared for the event, I rediscovered a great definition of knowledge from Karl Erik Sveiby:
Knowledge is a capacity to act.
I find this to be a highly useful definition of knowledge because it helps to focus any knowledge-related endeavor on a specific outcome.
For example, does your intranet improve the ability of staff to act? This one question will lead to a cascading inquiry of the actions employees need to take in support of their goals, how they can best take them, and how your intranet can then facilitate that action taking process.
It boils away all the impurities of knowledge management as a field and highlights that which it is supposed to create in the business context: the improved capacity to take action.
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