B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

I just came across a fantastic free service which utilizes the CAPTCHA image generation feature (you know, the hard-to-read distorted words on website registration forms) that offers a free service for performing the same protection for linking to an e-mail address:

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

Here is a link to my e-mail address (fill out the reCAPTCHA form and you’ll get my unencrypted e-mail address). This is perfect for posting your address publicly, but protecting it from being picked up by spam bots/spiders that routinely scour websites for e-mail addresses. I’ve also posted this link in the “about the author” page on this blog, too (no more having to contact me through my LinkedIn profile!).

Furthermore, reCAPTCHA also has the added benefit of using their API to help digitize books:

Here’s an example of how we’ve used Flash to implement improved video playback on SuperMotors. It’s YouTube-like, and we still need to add in some additional sharing capabilities, but it’s a major improvement over our previous method of only allowing viewers to download videos (as opposed to playing them directly in their browser or embedding them within a page on another site).

This morning I received a my Scotts Lawn Care update newsletter. I love this newsletter! Anything to help me out with what to do next with my lawn, which fertilizer to use, how to control weeds during this time of year, etc. is welcomed information. Here is a screen shot of the top half of the newsletter, personalized with my account information, and with a call-to-action on “What to do now”:

Great! The weather’s getting really warm here and I can tell the lawn isn’t growing as quickly as it has been several weeks ago — typically an indicator that it’s time for another feeding. So, I click on the “What to do now” link:

Not good! Scotts is assuming I’m already logged into the site. What’s interesting is that they provide quick links to be able to modify subscription preferences for e-mails without having to login, but they don’t include a way for me to directly link to the “next steps” that already includes my zip code. Since they already sent me an e-mail, they have my account on file with my zip code — they should implement a way for me to link directly to the “what to do next” that applies to my account and zip code.

I enter my zip code and get the following:

Fair enough, a few quick links to suggestions on what to do next. Having already visited their site before and setup an account, I decide to log in so I can get the full details on what’s next in my Soctts Annual Lawn Care Program. After logging in, I click on the Annual Lawn Care Program link:

I have to enter my zip code again — even though I’ve already entered it once AND have logged in. This is a major usability oversight.

The conversion funnel for Scotts should look like this:

1. Deliver targeted, personalized e-mail to remind consumer the next feeding for their lawn is due.
2. Visit annual planner for their location
3. Identify next product needed based on time of year
4. Provide store locator information for nearest retailer

Instead, their conversion funnel looks like this:

1. Deliver personalized e-mail to remind consumer the next feeding for their lawn is due
2. Provide a link to “what to do now”
3. Require zip code to be entered (despite linking directly from e-mail or already being logged into the site)
4. Show consumer generic page with possible suggestions on their zip code of what’s next
5. Link consumer to the annual planner for their location
6. Require entering of zip code again (despite having already entered it)
7. Require specification of grass type (even if they are already logged into their account and have specified this in a previous session)
8. Require specification on where consumer normally shops for Scotts products (even if they are already logged into their account and have specified this in a previous session)
9. Identify next product needed based on time of year

9 total steps in the actual process versus 4 steps of what the process could be. Scotts already has all of the information available to them when consumers visit the site, it’s just a matter of streamlining the conversion funnel so the consumer doesn’t have to jump through all of the hoops.

If Scotts is requiring consumers to enter this information every single time they visit the site, then there’s no value-add for registering an account with them. Registering an account should always provide quick access to information you routinely enter on a website.

Initiatives like these make me a happy advertiser. Google has performed another wave of crack-downs on MFA (Made For Adsense) sites. These are sites which offer little-to-no content value and are specifically designed to lure uneducated web surfers into their sites to only get them to click on a sponsored link. The typical trick is to bid on low-volume keywords in an effort to turn around and get surfers to click on higher-priced keywords in the Adsense ads placed on these sites.

A quick search for “levolor blinds” produces a search result for a site called http://www.all-window-blinds.net and http://www.wholesaleblind.org.

These sites present a problem for advertisers and brands for the following 3 reasons:

1.) MFA sites derail the consumer
For the consumer looking for real information on a product, this creates an unnecessary step. For a product category already as confusing as blinds and shades, the last thing our industry needs is another speed bump in the research process.

2.) They drive up pricing of keywords for legitimate customers (as well as brand advertisers)
As we know, search advertising is based on “highest bidder wins.” The bidding will go as high as the competition is willing to pay — MFA sites force legitimate advertisers to increase their bids to gain higher positions in sponsored search results. Furthermore, if an advertiser is not careful, they may be placing sponsored links on MFA sites and be getting charged for ad impressions/clicks on these sites.

3.) They dilute a brand name
For manufacturers of brand names that mean something to the public, any tasks associated with the research of your brand name can reflect positively or negatively. A brand who does not have sponsored links under control both with their partners and by eliminating MFA sites altogether will suffer from having a product that becomes difficult to find credible/relevant information about online.

How would you like to be competing for advertising space amidst other companies who had nothing to offer in regards to your products? Who wants to dial a phone number from a classified ad found online only to be met with a recording that provides other phone numbers to call to find the product you’re looking for? I hope Google makes it easier for the community to report MFA sites in the future. This will help them create a sweeping algorithm to eliminate more MFA sites from their list of Adsense publishers.

Recently, a post on the CIO advice and opinion forum posed the question about working your way up the IT food chain. This made me think more about advice for IT, developers, and general “tech” people and how they can break the mold of IT and advance up the department ladder. Some developers or engineers find themselves working for managers who “have no clue.” What they don’t realize is the managers have the ability to work with internal stakeholders effectively and translate business problems into requirements for the technical team to implement.

Here are some examples of how you can position yourself more effectively with other departments in your organization so they look at you as the “go to” person not by just the title on your business card, but by the value you bring to their business functions.

The title on your business card defines what you do, not how you do it
The title on your business card does not always mean you are viewed as the “go to” person for your functional area — I have experienced plenty of people in business who are avoided at all costs due to lack of strategic and/or big picture thinking within an organization or on a project. Your title defines what you do, but how you go about doing it is another game completely.

In IT, understanding the needs of another department is extremely important when they come to you with a question or request. Nobody likes feeling stupid, and this is one area where IT typically falls short — fail to understand the problem, provide short, non-descriptive answers to questions, and allow the uneducated business person to craft the design requirements for a (web) project that makes little sense. This then results in an application or solution that underdelivers due to poor planning and creates a customer (the employee in the other department) who is unhappy.

Picture yourself bringing your car to a mechanic for service…how do you want to be treated?
(This is often times an easy analogy to make, so if you already understand cars, then pick another area where you are not as knowledgeable in and put yourself in the position of that customer.) You drive your car into the shop — it’s vibrating whenever you “drive it” and you obviously want it fixed because A.) it’s annoying and B.) it seems very unsafe!

Now, there are two ways to approach this: probe deeper, ask questions to help you navigate the troubleshooting process with the customer face-to-face, or take the car and run a series of tests that run the risk of looking at an area of the car that is not broken (and in the end not be able to find anything wrong — we’ve all experienced this, and it’s frustrating!). Vibration in a car can be a number of things — bad brakes, unbalanced tires, unbalanced driveshaft — the list goes on, and can be varying degrees of technical explanation depending on the customer’s expertise on the matter. A “go to” person asks questions because they genuinely want to help.

Sometimes the problem described is not the source of the problem at all
Odds are the customer doesn’t know exactly what the problem is, but they may suggest a fix because they don’t want to appear stupid in front of you. This happens countless times in business! They could say “the tires feel out of balance” but in reality, it could be that the vibration only occurs during braking, which generally points to warped brake rotors (among other things). Being the responsible businessperson you are, you would always start this process by going back a step or two to understand the customer’s needs and a description of the problem.

This will ultimately lead to a more accurate and timely resolution to a problem and a solution that hits the nail on the head. Part of being the “go to” person is providing that guidance that other departments lack — knowing they can come to you with an idea and you can help them make the most of it without making them look incompetent is critical in business. You will turn them into repeat customers.

Your customers (fellow employees) don’t really care about your deadlines
Another problem area in IT is the ability to turn on a dime or the tendency to paint a dreary picture from a resource standpoint. Just like bringing your car to the shop, you don’t really care to hear about all of the other work the shop has queued up, so spare your own internal customers (fellow employees) the details. Explain that you want to help them, understand their timeline, and fit their project into the mix where you can. If you make other departments feel like you’re doing them a favor for every request they come to you with and that it feels like pulling teeth just to get some time, you will lose your position as the “go to” person. Likely, they will look elsewhere or even outsource — at which point you’re cut out of the process completely.

A “go to” person follows up.
Ever brought your car to a mechanic, the expected due date comes and goes, and you never hear from the service manager? Avoid this situation at all costs. Manage your customer’s expectations, and provide reasons for why you’re going to be later than promised. Things happen, deadlines change, but how you manage the situation will also improve the satisfaction and perceived value you bring to a project and will ultimately paint you as a “go to” person. The “go to” person gets things done and follows up when they have or haven’t been accomplished. It’s just that simple.

Work through the process and/or problem, don’t work around it or point fingers
Many times IT is looked at for solutions to sharing data or information with other internal departments or external customers. This often times means creating a new process for the application or implementation you’re building on behalf of a department. If the success of your project implementation depends on the actions of another person or department, then work with them until their job is finished. Unless explicitly told to do so, don’t “pass the buck” and assume your work is done when another department has to get involved. Part of being a “go to” person is finding the answers to problems that are outside of your current knowledge or your functional area’s expertise.

Your internal customers may not realize the amount of collaboration involved, so don’t hesitate to give them a high-level (notice the phrase “high level” — avoid the technical details!) overview of what’s being done throughout the project. This is what will make them look to you in the future for other projects and view you as a “go to” person.

This post over at Brand Story got me thinking about how similar this topic is to strategic inflection points (from Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew S. Grove). I work in an industry where competition from product imports (from China) are a serious threat to our business. The discounts at which their products are sold are very challenging to compete with. Fortunately, we think we have disruptive innovations in the works, but reading the post at Brand Story really got me excited — primarily because what we’ve got coming up over the next couple years is really exciting, and we’re doing it right. There are however, downsides to new innovations that must be taken into consideration, namely tunnel vision.

Fortunately for our industry, competing profitably at much lower costs is not the end-all, be-all of business strategy. Driving costs down is certainly always top-of-mind when competing with imports and when dealing with retailers who private-label imported products to directly compete with your brand-name products. At the end of the day however, and this may be the case for several other industries, you’ve got an industry with a plethora of products and brands, all similarly priced, but giving the consumer serious information overload and confusion (ever tried shopping for blinds and shades in a retail store? ).

Avoiding tunnel vision: Consumer insights are your friend!
Disruptive Innovations, while game-changers, cannot get away from the fact that consumers still need to understand how to shop your category and ultimately make a decision to buy. A lot of new product development may lead to tunnel vision — being so focused on that great new feature, huge cost savings, adopting a “me too” product (playing “catch-up” to other competitor innovations), or a new type of product altogether, that sometimes the “big picture” is lost for consumers.

Tunnel vision is really hard to see while you’re in development mode. You may begin to see it after the product is ready for consumer testing and you are able to take a moment and step back from the nitty-gritty and see just how consumers respond to what you think is an innovation. From a web development standpoint, it’s very easy to get lost in the cool, new features of a website and completely forget that the consumer must actually find their way to your site at first, be aware of the new technology, and know how to navigate to this area of your site.

Don’t forget the marketing
Worse yet, consumers may respond quite well to the innovation itself during the consumer insights session, giving you the reinforcement you’d be hoping for — but your innovation may tank in the marketplace. The branding, marketing, advertising, and/or overall awareness will help bring your disruptive innovation to its full potential.

Sometimes, this is the most critical component. You may have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, or it’s buried in an aisle of other similarly confusing products, then you’re back to square one. Don’t forget to think “big picture” when it comes to consumers — it’s very easy to get lost in the industry competitiveness. Consumers insights and evaluating all aspects of the innovation are critical to success. This applies to many businesses, not just manufacturing companies — web companies are just as guilty (Google is a major offender: I just discovered Google Browser Sync, nearly a 1-year old product and I love it! But where’s the marketing for it?).

It’s been a particularly bad week for customer and client service from two very important vendors to us (*ahem*…Omniture & scene7). Rather than focus on the negatives, I will instead post my 100% satisfaction with the service and support of Rackspace Managed Hosting.

Web-based support that can be trusted for a speedy response
Rackspace has both phone and web-based tech support, but they are so speedy and courteous at responding to web-based support messages that I routinely go there first for a question, request, or resolution to a problem. How many companies can you say this about?

You know the drill: the cryptic support hierarchy laid out on a company site, insisting you search their knowledgebase first (which is always sub-par and rarely has the answer to your question), presenting you with a customer service contact form, and if you’re lucky, a toll-free support number.

I can’t tell you how many times my only point of contact is an e-mail address at a vendor either for their “technical support” or for an account manager. I always am concerned that the e-mail will go into a black hole and never be returned (e-mail is such a terrible way to manage tasks). I’ve been so accustomed to this, that I always end up BCCing myself so that I know to flag the e-mail for later follow-up. Otherwise, I’ll forget about it and I may never hear back unless I resend the e-mail.

A customer knoweledgebase that just works
The Rackspace support model is equally as fantastic. You have an account manager and essentially a “dedicated” team of support techs of varying skill sets that you’ll basically always deal with throughout the week. Each message is signed by the tech, an entire log of your conversation is available in their support ticket system, and it all just works — it’s a complete CRM solution customized for their business and the customer benefits from their collaboration. No matter who you talk to, they can access the same information anyone else in the company can access (aside from sensitive information like server passwords). What a concept!

Better yet, the account managers can access what the support people are doing with your account. Not the case at some vendors who have departments operating in silos.

Managing customer expectations
There’s nothing I love more than to report a problem or submit a request, get a response within a 2-hour window with a list of “next steps” and when it will be resolved by. Sometimes a customer problem is not a simple, 30-minute fix, either. Even the problems that keep Rackspace scratching their heads over the course of the week are kept up-to-date on a daily basis each week and always have a senior technician checking in on the status each day.

With these other vendors, I am the one checking in with them. Where’s the client service in that?

Anyway, thank you, Rackspace. Always a pleasure to deal with you.

I’ve come across a few posts lately as well as some confusion (in the office and in blogs) about the roles and responsibilities of the CIO (Chief Information Officer). A CIO is not “the computer guy,” “web guy,” or “a techie.” A CIO essentially bridges the communication barrier, knowledge, and strategic gap between the many departments of a business that require technology (whether they realize it or not) to solve business problems.

Big-picture thinking
The CIO is a strategic position because it requires big-picture thinking, and the ability to quickly and effectively identify broken processes (or lack thereof) where technology can be integrated to improve efficiency and the bottom line — or better yet, drive new business and capture market share. Driving new business and capturing market share is really a critical area where a CIO can contribute — because it requires a heavy dose of business intelligence and market awareness.

But I thought the CIO was the head of the IT department?
The IT department is an operational entity, responsible for executing the support of the daily technical needs of employees, implementing new technology as a result of a business need, or implementing/building new services as a result of a business need. IT still needs the “business need” delivered to them as well as an operational manager who manages the department. Depending on the size of the organization, there may be multiple operational managers within the various divisions of IT. The CIO will guide the functional managers in IT to implement solutions that satisfy current and future business needs/problems.

Why don’t other departments just talk to the operational manager(s) of IT?
Typically, departments (marketing, HR, Finance, engineering, etc.), lack the technical expertise to be able to identify exactly what they need to solve their problem. IT can normally listen to these problems and provide a very specific solution. The problem is when these solutions are implemented in silos. Over time, you have many “one-off” IT projects, built as temporary fixes or workarounds that gradually grow into a substantial maintenance burden and waste of IT resources.

This is where a CIO-role plays a strategic role. The CIO has visibility to multiple departments and layers of the organization. The CIO thinks about all of the needs of the various departments, takes future needs into consideration, and plans for scalability. The “silo effect” is neither fun or fair to anybody in IT and as a company grows, managing all of these silos becomes cumbersome and uninspiring — and costly. To undo years and years of silo’d development is usually a major undertaking.

Alright, so the CIO doesn’t manage the IT employees. What is the CIO involved in, then?
To quote an excellent editor’s note from InformationWeek, “CIOs are less involved in day-to-day operations and technology implementation and more involved in business strategy, revenue generation, business-process management, and customer relations.” This article was written in July 2004 and still holds true today. The only addition I would make is that the CIO is also heavily involved in online strategy because it is such a critical customer touch-point and is a major source of revenue generation (directly via e-commerce or indirectly via offline sales), customer relations, and requires strategic business-process management.

The other day we started experimenting with AuctionAds.com’s real-time, targeted eBay auction ads. What I didn’t realize was that I could supply any keyword in the AuctionAds (AA) code so that the keyword would generate eBay ad links in real-time as the AA ads were served. So, I was setting up individual ads in their campaign manager for 1978 Ford Bronco, 1979 Ford Bronco, 1980 Ford Bronco, etc. I was testing the ranges of years that Ford Broncos, Ford Excursions, and Ford Crown Victorias were in production (70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s). This mean for a lot of ads and a very time-consuming setup process.

Then I read about their WordPress plug-in. All this was was a way to allow WordPress users to dynamically insert keywords into the AA ad code. This provided even more relevant ads for bloggers because they could provide keywords that were relevant to the post/article they were writing.

So, we did something similar on SuperMotors. Instead, we dynamically insert targeted keywords based on the year/make/model or make/model of a registry entry, album section, or individual image or video posted by our user (you may need to scroll down on a couple of these links to see the AA ads). This eliminated my need to individually setup ads in our AA account, so I simply created a global campaign in our account that these targeted ads would run under. Targeted ads (on SuperMotors) have always outperformed generic ads by leaps and bounds with our visitors. Since the automotive crowd are generally heavy eBay’ers, we are hoping with this tighter, more strategic integration of ads throughout the site, that we see increased click-through rates and revenue.

High Click-through Rate (CTR)
We are pleased with the 1.55% CTR thus far during our test. Now that we have an expanded implementation of AA ads, we’ll see more impressions (and presumably a slight drop in CTR). Regardless, due to the highly-relevant ads, the CTR of 1.55% is much higher than Google (which ranges from 0.10-0.15% CTR on a daily basis for us). Many of the automotive items are higher-ticket items, so we should also see a fairly decent revenue share on items sold.

More updates on AuctionAds.com as we get further into the month.

Late-night talk show host, Conan O’Brien, recently hosted his show in San Francisco. There was a segment where he toured the Intel headquarters. They were great sports but it really made the Intel business offices look like a big giant machine with no inspiration:

I’m currently reading Only the Paranoid Survive by Intel’s former CE, Andrew Grove. It’s interesting to read this book and read about how innovative and cutting-edge Intel is described, so naturally you start picturing what their facilities and culture are like. The Conan video makes office life at Intel look very drab and uninspiring.

How would your business look if Conan toured your facility? Would you even let him?