B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

In this era of Google-dominated web applications, it’s a rare find when another competitive service by a much more established company is actually better than Google’s. My wife and I are AAA members. AAA provides a service in which they will map out a road trip for your travel needs. This service is called a “TripTik.” Historically, this has been a service that you call AAA for and they send you a bound, printed copy of your driving plan, like this:

Like any company adjusting to modern times, AAA is moving many of their services to their website at AAA.com. This includes the TripTik service (you can still order a printed copy!).

AAA TripTik vs. Google Maps
One thing I do give Google Maps is the fast, convenient nature of their mapping tool — which is great for short trips and quick directions to that new restaurant or store in your area that you want to check out. For road trips, however, it falls short of the robustness of AAA’s TripTik service.

Google’s UI Advantage:
This post wouldn’t be complete without some discussion on usability and user interface. Google makes it extremely easy to quickly type in your start and end destination. Simply enter in the following:

minneapolis, mn to chicago, il

And voila! Your map is created.

AAA’s UI Disadvantages
On AAA.com’s TripTik, you have to first find the “Internet TripTik” link (small, fairly unnoticeable button…see it? It’s under the “Gas prices near you” tool on the bottom right-hand side of their homepage.):

There is no easy URL to remember like there is for Google Maps (maps.google.com). If there is one, they don’t advertise it, which is a bummer. A simple http://triptik.aaa.com that redirected to the full URL would work wonders! Here’s their full URL:

http://ww1.aaa.com/scripts/WebObjects.dll/AAAOnline.woa/2004?

association=aaa&poiKey=259&club=111&page=ITTServices&

sessionRedirect=1198155291293

Next, there’s the interface for entering your “start” and “end” destinations. This is also another usability issue compared to Google Maps in that you are required to type in your city separately from the state (you have to choose the state from a drop-down menu). This is another reason why Google Maps is better than AAA for “quick” directions & maps. It’s much easier to quickly enter a “start” and “end” destination within Google Maps: Type in maps.google.com, page loads instantly, type in “from city, state to city, state” and you’re done. The extra clicks and effort to fill in the AAA TripTik do not make it a viable tool for extremely easy and quick data entry.

AAA’s advantage over Google
The meat of the TripTik service is its ability to map out detailed driving directions, including lodging information, notices on when to expect heavy traffic (when traveling during rush hour through various cities), and road construction details. These are all areas where Google Maps does not provide any guidance.

Additionally, the “printable” version of AAA’s TripTik provides a nicely-formatted PDF specifically designed to be printed on your home computer. Google Maps on the other hand will print like any normal web page would — adding page breaks where it’s most inconvenient. AAA’s TripTik PDF’s have directions in logical chunks so that it’s easy to follow on your road trip. Take a look at the screen shots:

(The yellow boxes indicate road contruction. Also notice the rush hour notification at the bottom of map #2)

AAA Internet TripTik trumps Google Maps for road trips…but not for quick, local trips
With a few minor changes, AAA could actually be a contender with Google Maps for quick, local directions and trips. Longer distances, where it’s important to know where lodging is available, where road construction is, etc. and it’s an excellent tool. I’m willing to look past the usability nuances for the much more detailed information for extended road trips.

Evaluate the usability on your website
Are there any areas like this on your website? Would a simple, easy-to-remember URL benefit your consumers or customers so they can quickly arrive at a tool they use most often (i.e. maps.google.com)? Or do you force them to navigate through your site to find the tools they need?

Subtle changes can go a long way in improving your site’s usability and customer satisfaction. It’s always good to solicit feedback from your web users and do frequent competitive analysis of “the other guys’” sites.

As the blogosphere ogles at the “success” of the “Elf Yourself” campaign, I find myself wondering if the old cliché “there’s no such thing as bad press” is true. While this particular campaign has been positive for Office Max, will it (ever) contribute to the bottom line? Or does this campaign simply go down in the books as “fun” and win an award?

The “Elf Yourself Campaign
Put together by Officemax, here’s the comparison of the ElfYourself.com demographics and Officemax.com demographics:

The above graph is for ElfYourself.com

The below graph is for Officemax.com:

Demographic & site analysis
Officemax.com hits the internet average for female and male visitors skewing slightly higher in the 55-64 and 65+ demographics. The ElfYourself.com campaign however is highly skewed towards 65+ females. We do see an obvious jump in traffic to OfficeMax.com during the same timeframe that the ElfYourself.com site has been running (presumably due to the coupons offered on ElfYourself.com when you click on the OfficeMax logo).

Will it translate to revenue? Time will tell.

PR firms focusing on “viral” vs. product
Switching gears from OfficeMax to my day job…it’s interesting seeing the campaign ideas we are pitched from marketing firms who aspire to earn our business. There’s an overwhelming amount of focus with online marketing, but in our industry (blinds & shades), is making it up the ranks of digg.com really going to translate to revenue? Many marketers think so and go out of their way to focus on links we receive due to PR, blog mentions, and diggs. Let’s step back for a moment and focus on digg.com’s demographics (courtesy of Quantcast):

Skewing higher than the internet average on the 25-34 Male demographic is not exactly the sweet spot for us when it comes to spending money on press that end up on digg.com.

Common sense in online marketing
Viral campaigns are fine — if they are targeted towards the demographic you are seeking as customers. digg.com is not a “mass consumer” demographic and should not be treated as one by marketers, but for some reason it is. This is nothing against digg. There comes a time when you have to ask yourself the “So, what?” question when a marketing pitches you a concept. With the viral success of the Elf Yourself campaign, be sure to ask yourself the “So, what?” question if a marketer comes to you with a great viral idea that does not pave a clear path to sales revenue.

Marketing campaigns can and should be measured in sales
Some marketing agencies are not held accountable to revenues generated from campaigns. Generating impressions is great, but if the campiagn cannot be tied directly to sales, then you should find a way to measure it. Every campaign we run is measured — sometimes we may not know the potential return (which is often the case testing new ideas/technologies surrounding promotions and marketing), so we measure it to see what the return is after the campaign is over with.

Your sales cycle may be a long sales cycle, so campaign “success” may not be measurable immediately — it could take weeks, months, or even years. If this is the case, plan your campaigns accordingly because the sales cycle should help drive the types of promotions that work for your business. OfficeMax seems to have played their cards right with the coupons/discounts on ElfYourself.com and the traffic spike to Officemax.com.

However, traffic spikes do not always equate to revenue — especially if the campaign is driving unqualified customers to your site. This is the one thing that many agencies fail to grasp in this new age of viral campaigns and del.icio.us, YouTube, and digg.com’s of the world.

I came across this article yesterday which presents very interesting findings relating to branding and search engine results. The proper combination of paid results and organic results has a positive impact on brand affinity, brand recall, and purchase intent.

This presents an interesting dilemma for those keywords that don’t convert well (i.e. “blinds”) but are high-volume in nature. Some terms are so generic that for folks in the market for the product, it can actually make sense to play in these areas for branding-related purposes.

A proper SEM strategy with channel partners and an SEO strategy for your own site now theoretically will not only help conversion rate, but the influence of your brand. Sometimes you can’t show up for every possible keyword that relates to your products, but through a combination of leveraging the breadth of sites that sell your products online (i.e. your channel partners) and your own SEM/SEO strategy, search has a significant potential to influence buyer preferences.

In essence, the more they see your brand for all keywords related to your product, the higher the probability they will associate your brand with those terms — and hopefully convert/purchase your products.

My first week has come and gone (officially) in my new role as eBusiness Manager. Not only is this a new role to me but we are also replacing two people on the team who had previously been in development roles for several years at the company. One is advancing to corporate and the other is leaving the organization. One replacement has been hired and his first week was very challenging, to say the least!

The Open Source Dilemma
I’m an enthusiastic supporter of open source applications and development. However, without proper documentation of home-grown applications, the cost savings up front of an open source deployment will eventually come back to haunt you down the road when those original developers leave. This is the exact position we are in. While it won’t be damaging to the organization, it will create a rather steep hill for the new developers to climb as they dive into the custom code (and lack of documentation).

When to buy or build?
This had me thinking during the first week in this new position — where is the line drawn between buying software and building software? I have to bring up a saying I use quite often: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” I think this is a perfect application for this phrase. I’ve discovered a lot of the home-grown applications were built as a cost-savings measure and “because we could.” That mentality has backed us into a corner today as we scramble to educate the new hires as quickly as possible before the original developers leave the organization.

Don’t view IS as a cost center
In talking with the original developers, it seems as if the mentality of the organization was such that IS was viewed as a cost center, not an innovation center. Therefore, an expenses incurred in IS were viewed as negatively impacting the bottom line. As a result, we ended up with a lot of home-grown applications utilizing different languages and database backends. This strategy works if you never plan to migrate to new technology and never plan to advance your developers.

Future-proof your IS strategy: standardize and document
Moving forward, we will begin to standardize on select platforms. We have a series of consumer websites, internal applications, intranet sites, and reporting spread across a myriad of technologies. Our downfall was this strategy (or lack thereof) which resulted in dedicated employees for managing each of the technologies/platforms. Since each platform was different, development was being handled in silos with very little strategy being shared between the silos. It also made us extremely dependent upon the individuals in charge of the silos.

Standardizing on a few select platforms and technologies will enable the proper cross-training among existing staff to be able to support applications in the event of individual vacation schedules, sick days, or departures from the organization. It makes sense from a technology strategy, business strategy, and also in keeping the sanity of your staff. It’s no fun for the weight of the world to be on the shoulders of a single individual.

Documentation seems to always take a back seat to projects in any business. In an enterprise like ours where we rely on reports and data feeds from external vendors, corporate IS, and other departments, documentation can save a lot of time and also prevent downtime. We have the fortune of being forced to start with a clean slate with new developers, so our first several weeks will simply involve documenting existing applications and systems.