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Archive for the ‘Commerce Performance’ Category

The key difference between an (old-fashioned) Intranet and a Portal

What typifies a modern intranet portal is that there is a standardised user interface (”UI”) with a built in system for user authentication. In other words, the user signs in to the portal rather than simply accessing it. This brings us to the key difference; an intranet portal knows who you are, whilst with an old-fashioned intranet, the user is anonymous.

If the user authentication is properly linked to your employee data, then the portal will know things like (a) what grade the person is, (b) which department they work in, (c) what location they work at and (d) what job they do.

If the portal authentication is also liked to a metadirectory (along with the authentication for all the other systems the user needs to use in their job) then the portal will additionally know (e) which applications the user needs to do their job and (f) the rights the user has (from their security profile) to access different application functionality.

Finally, if an infocube-based web statistics package has been installed, the portal will know (a) which areas of the portal are accessed by the user and (b) the frequency and depth of that access.

The opportunity to personalise the portal experience

Clearly, given the knowledge above, it is possible to personalise the UI for each individual user. For example, if the user works in the sales function, then the homepage that greets them upon logon could be the Sales team homepage. If they work in Leeds, the facilities link on their homepage could be to maps, traffic, fire orders, etc. about the Leeds office (rather than anywhere else). If their specific job is as a field sales manager, then field sales performance graphs and management dashboard could be displayed on the homepage.

If the user is of a grade that places them on the company insider dealing list, then additional (price sensitive) real-time data might be displayed on the screen (which other users would not see). If statistics tell us that they are not reading important communications, then messages could be served to them that draw their attention to what they are missing. Finally, if they use functionality from three different (legacy) systems to do their job, then these could be brought together and surfaced via a portlet application on the portal page.

The prize is clearly a smoother and more integrated user experience, with key information “pushed” at the user in a way they can’t ignore and always no more than a single click away.

The depressing truth about personalisation today

Many portal vendors have undertaken research with their existing customer base to explore (a) how many customers have made extensive use of personalisation and (b) how many surface key business applications via their portal. The results do not make encouraging reading (with less than 20% achieving much beyond what Plumtree call “the empty portal”).

This prompts an obvious question. If the benefits to the user of personalisation are so obvious, why have companies not taken advantage of them? In fact, based on my experience, there are multiple reasons not to personalise, which I group into “bad” and “good” reasons.

Bad reasons not to personalise

There are a number of typical failings that tend to stem from a lack of courage, poor understanding or personal prejudice:

1) Failure to link through to employee data and/or a metadirectory
This can be due to a number of factors, including (a) the costs of software seen as too expensive, (b) a perception that implementation will be too difficult or prone to failure, (c) a lack of confidence in the quality of employee data and (d) realising too late that this work is important and having failed therefore to include in project scope or business case costs

2) Failure of vision and/or lack of confidence in personalisation benefits
Typical problems include (a) a lack of experience of using portals and thus a lack of awareness of the possibilities, (b) a nostalgia for the old-fashioned style of intranet navigation, (c) an unhealthy focus on the intranet simply as a communication channel, rather than as a business tool and – perhaps most interestingly – (d) a perception that personalisation is synonymous with (or otherwise encourages) individuals failing to observe and comply with single, enterprise-wide processes and policy.

Good reasons not to personalise

There are actually several valid objections to personalisation, which you would ignore at your peril. The two most notable are:

3) The whole is more than the sum of the parts
Many portal projects are built on the concepts of (a) increased knowledge sharing between teams, (b) better awareness of the “big picture” of what is happening in the company and (c) a sense of belonging to a single, enterprise-wide community. By personalising teams and individuals into “ghettos” where they only see information and applications directly relevant to them, the opportunity is lost to have them explore the intranet presence of other colleagues.

4) Log-in as a barrier to user adoption
A (valid) concern that requiring people to log-in each time they access the portal will act as a deterrent to them doing so, thereby reducing the portal benefits through a reduction in intranet usage. This has lead to some customers disabling the log-in feature! Of course, such problems can be overcome through the implementation of a single sign-on application, where rights to access the portal (without a separate log-on procedure) are granted when the user logs onto the network. However, companies often fail to plan or budget for such changes.

So is personalisation the right thing to do? If so, how can I make it happen?

On balance, of course, the benefits of personalisation, for most organisations, far outweigh the risks and costs. After all, why buy a Ferrari, then only use it to do the school run? If you were never going to use the portal for these advanced functions, why did you buy one? It would have been much cheaper to invest in your traditional intranet!

If you are looking to make it happen, however, you must recognise the organisational, financial and technical challenges inherent in the work. Firstly, you should ensure that your business case contains the full costs of integrating the portal with employee data and metadirectory capabilities. Ideally, you should also extend this to a single-sign-on solution if you can afford it. Secondly, you should showcase to sponsors what personalisation looks like, so that they can improve their understanding of the opportunity. Finally, you should not underestimate the technical grunt work involved in cleaning up your employee data and systems rights.

Do not neglect customisation

I define customisation as the ability for users to customise their own portal settings and appearance (as distinct from how I am defining personalisation, where the portal provisions information and applications authomatically, based on the user’s profile). By letting users “do it themselves” you allow for the possibility that they may wish to share knowledge and collaborate with people outside their immediate role. You can also learn (by observing their behaviour in customisation) where you could improve upon your personalisation.

Some final thoughts

Personlisation should be a key element of your early visioning work with sponsors and drive costs and benefits in your business case. If you find at that stage that the return on investment (ROI) is not there, then you should perhaps question whether a portal investment is really for you! A mini is adequate, after all, for the school run!

About the author:

David Viney (david@viney.com) is the author of the Intranet Portal Guide; 31 pages of advice, tools and downloads covering the period before, during and after an Intranet Portal implementation.

Read the guide at http://www.viney.com/DFV/intranet_portal_guide or the Intranet Watch Blog at http://www.viney.com/intranet_watch.

Copyright 2006 Clifford Mee

Have you ever heard of the expression, “You’ll laugh all the way to the bank”?

Well people who’ve discovered the magic of autoresponders don’t even do that anymore, because when the money rolls in it’s automatically sent to their bank accounts…they just laugh!

If you don’t know what an ‘autoresponder’ is, it’s simply an ‘email automatic responder’.

But the simplicity stops there, because autoresponders are probably the single greatest business innovation to happen since the birth of the Internet.

They have completely revolutionized what can be done.

And you can use them too, to make an instant impact on your business.

So here are eleven proven methods for maximizing your business, even when you’re fast asleep, using the magic of autoresponders.

1. Instead of answering every customer question that’s sent to you, publish a “Frequently Asked Questions” using your autoresponder. This saves you time, money and effort.

2. Use them like a library. Make all your past newsletters or promotional pieces available from your autoresponders. Visitors appreciate having access to your archives.

3. Create an email training course in several parts delivered by autoresponder. This automatically builds a relationship with your prospects which positively influences their decision to become your customers.

To see an autoresponder training course in action send an email to mailto:trainingcourse@aweber.com and you’ll receive a course showing you the ‘20 Quick Tips’ on how to use training courses to increase your traffic and sales.

4. Collect valuable customer satisfaction information by publishing a survey via autoresponder. People like to give their opinions and you benefit from this by knowing what your customers want.

5. Publish reports with your autoresponder. The reports should be related to your business or web site. Giving away good content will quickly increase your traffic. This gives you greater exposure, makes you an instant authority and ultimately results in more sales.

6. Provide instant customer acknowledgement to those who send you a message. Let the autoresponder message reassure them you have received their message and when to expect your reply.

7. Offer an e-book through your autoresponder in easy to read chapters. You could include promotional resource links covering each chapter of the book when delivered.

8. Create an index of all the information which is available from your autoresponders. Then set this up as an autoresponder to enable your customers to retrieve the particular information they are interested in.

9. Publish a complete list of all your products and services which you offer with their order forms and other sales material. Consider including a time sensitive discount coupon code in the autoresponder message to stimulate more sales.

10. Convert your entire web site into autoresponder format. Visitors may not want to stay online reading web pages. Give them the option of downloading all the information from your autoresponder to print off and read at their leisure.

11. Upload all your testimonials, endorsements and articles to your autoresponder if you don’t have space in your advertising copy. The more interactive you make the experience for your prospects the more sales you will likely make.

Now that you have eleven sure-fire ways to use autoresponders in your business, the most pressing consideration is how to implement them without it becoming a headache.

As with any vital business operation, rock solid reliability is the most important factor when choosing what kind of autoresponder solution to go for.

In autoresponder terms this is deliverability of your messages and information. There’s little point using autoresponders if what you send out ends up in a virtual black-hole because of vicious Internet Service Providers’ anti-spam filters.

That’s why when choosing how to implement autoresponders in your business you must check on the solutions deliverability.

It is the absolute key for a service you can put your trust in.

What is the Internet?

In order to provide a discussion on the Internet it is essential to provide a short description on what the Internet actually is.
Put in the most basic of terms the Internet can be described of as a massive collection of computers that are sited around the world and that are connected together in order to create a huge network that allows information to be collated and shared by millions of people.

Origins of the Internet

This article is largely built around e-commerce and the way in which technology is transforming the world of retail. The question is therefore raised as to what has made e-commerce the way we know it today? In order to answer this question it is a necessity to discuss the origins of the Internet.

In 1969 the U.S. government undertook an experiment today known to people all around the world as the ‘Internet’. The purpose of this experiment was to create a way of preserving communications in the event of a nuclear war. Through the collaboration of ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) and some academic institutions involved in joint research on defence technologies via interconnected networks ARPANET the earliest version of the Internet was created.

As time passed the popularity of the Internet grew and what was originally a network of a small handful of computers in the United States was now a growing phenomenon amongst educational establishments and enterprising entrepreneurs who were beginning to see the potential in selling Internet access into peoples homes.

In the 1980’s the UK and Europe realised the potential of the Internet just has the USA previously had. In 1980, NSF (National Science Foundation), the body which took an active role to support ARPANET created an academic network called CSNET which enabled the computer science departments of some universities to be connected.

At the start CSNET used a backbone, which was supported by NSF, but in the early 1990’s, it established the Internet with TCP/IP with the support of the country’s major networking companies.

Even though the Internet clearly existed since the 1980’s it was not until the early 1990’s that the corporate world were able to make use of it instead of just the academic community and government sponsored organisations. This limited use was due to the ‘user unfriendly’ nature of the system, which led to the need for an interface to be designed to make the Internet easier to use. This interface is what is now known as the WWW (world wide web).

The World Wide Web (WWW)

In 1993 a researcher called Tim Berners-Lee with the aim of making the Internet a user-friendly environment introduced the WWW. Designers had the task of designing and formatting web pages with the use of HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) to link documents together electronically. This new technology enabled a world wide web of information to be provided.

However real usability came shortly after the introduction of the WWW when in 1993 a team led by Marc Anderson at the University of Illinois developed a browser called
Mosaic which was a graphical user interface for the Internet to facilitate point and click navigation, more commonly referred to as browsing.
N.Bandyo-padhyay cites Reid (1997) who states that by July 1996, 150,000 server computers were ‘web-enabled’. In 1994, the same team developed Netscape, which is today the most commonly used browser. Netscape was equipped with a search engine to type keywords into and was created using advanced HTTP.

Being able to perform keyword searches was a huge factor in the increased popularity of the Internet. Other browsers such as Internet Explorer by Microsoft soon followed and shortly after that several websites dedicated to producing keyword searches such as Yahoo and Lycos appeared. These are today known more popularly as search engines.

The WWW also contributed to providing increased levels of security on the Internet by encrypting the messages that moved between servers. Security on the Internet is today a huge cause of debate.

The Internet Revolution

The increased popularity of the Internet brought about the realisation that almost unlimited amounts of information on any topic would be made available and at little cost and improved convenience. In fact the Internet brought about endless opportunities to exploit enhanced communication techniques in a variety of ways.

It was made possible for people to communicate with family and relatives who lived on the other side of the world without having to pay extortionate telephone bills. Universities were able to educate international students situated in their home countries and businesses were able to use dispersed employees working on the same project through the use of groupware (software designed for a team of workers to share documents and files electronically and work on them interactively) running on the Internet.
Technology as always meant considerable changes such as when the Personal Computer (PC) altered the way that businesses now conduct their affairs.
The Internet and the WWW created the Internet revolution by causing changes in the way that organisations conduct their business. Dave Chaffey cites Andy Grove (1996), Chairman of Intel and one of the early adopters of e-commerce, who provides the following analogy of the Internet. He says:
“Is the Internet a typhoon force, a ten times force, or is it a bit of wind? Or is it a force that fundamentally alters our business?”.
It seems as though this statement seems to sum up what everybody in this day and age would like to know. It is partly due to this ‘Internet enigma’ that this article has been compiled.

In a highly competitive market companies have had to review their strategies in order to attract customers. The capabilities of the Internet through the world wide web has meant that the role between business and customer has changed whereby the customer is now able to demand better service and has quick and easy access to information and goods.
This has meant that businesses can know longer rely on old practises and must continue to evolve in order to meet ever changing customer demands.

If you like this article and share the same passion for the phenonenom that is e-commerce then please feel free to pay a visit to the authors own e-commerce store at ToyGrotto
The author would very much appreciate any kind of feedback that you have to offer regarding ToyGrotto. Please feel free to submit your comments to the author at toygrotto@toygrotto.net.
All comments and suggestions of all natures will be greatly appreciated and will be taken on board. The key to writing good articles is by having a wealth of knowledge and sources which then can be analysed and shared with others.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article.

The author is 24 years old, has just completed a Business and Computing Bsc Honours Degree and is the owner of an E-Commerce website called ToyGrotto.
The author has a special interest in E-Commerce after undertaking E-Commerce has the subject of the authors final year dissertation. If anybody would like to view this disseration please email me at toygrotto@toygrotto.net. Your views would be greatly appreciated.

When it comes to e-commerce, the time-tested cliché is, “Content is king.” In this case, the cliché is correct.

Content

For the purpose of this article, content is defined as pages of text on your site. Content is often broken down into two categories, primary pages and information pages. Primary pages are the core of a site, to wit, the home, FAQ, site map, about us, contact us and service or product pages. Information pages are additional pages that support the primary pages, explain your service or product and answer questions. Primary pages convert visitors while information pages generate traffic.

Primary Pages

Preparing content for your primary pages must be done carefully. You should have a list of keywords you want to highlight for each page. Using these keywords, content should be written clearly and concisely. Do not sacrifice the flow of your text in an effort to maximize the placement of keywords. While this common mistake can lead to quicker search engine rankings, it can damage your conversion rates and give visitors the wrong impression of your business. Traffic is useless if it can’t be converted to money. Focus on converting the visitor into a customer.

Information Pages

Information pages serve a number of functions. First, they explain and support your primary pages. Second, they build credibility by providing evidence of your extensive knowledge and expertise. Unlike primary pages, information pages can be written with more of an eye to keyword manipulation.

Information pages also form a critical platform for promoting your site. The pages should be written in such a way as to be easily converted into articles. The articles should be submitted to directories for publication with a byline including a link to your site. As the articles are published, the byline will dramatically increase the link count of your site. The higher the number of links to your site, the higher you move in the rankings.

Information Page Subjects

If information pages are so important, how do you come up with topics? There are three methods.

The first step is to review your product or service. Pages should be created providing explanations for the most simple to complex elements of whatever you are promoting. Make sure to cover basic items. For a real estate agent site, topics should include 1) how to buy a house, 2) how the process works from beginning to end; 3) how escrow works and so forth. Never assume your prospect understands some element of your product or service. Once these pages are created, the site should be significantly bigger and, thus, more attractive to search engines.

The next step is to review the results of the keyword research conducted when you decided to build a site. Looking down the list of keywords, focus on keywords with less than 1,000 searches a month. Every one of these keywords is a potential topic. Because there are few monthly searches, competition for rankings under each keyword phrase is probably low. As you site gains links, the various information pages will move up into top rankings. If you have 50 information pages each producing 100 clicks a month, they will produce 5,000 free clicks a month. Assume a conversion rate of 1/100 and you have 50 sales. As more pages are added, the figures will continue to rise.

Finally, forums are an excellent place to find topics. Forums are sites where people gather to discuss issues related to a particular subject. The discussions typically start when someone posts a question. Each question is a potential topic for a page on your site. Make sure to focus on posts with lots of replies, as the number of replies reflects the amount of interest in the topic. To find relevant forums, simply search for “forum + subject” on any search engine.

In Closing

Google, Yahoo and MSN frequently change the algorithms each uses to produce rankings. Such changes can blow holes in search engine optimization strategies. Continually adding relevant content to your site is just about the only method to smoothly ride these fluctuations. After all, content is king.

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com – an Internet marketing and advertising company comprised of a search engine optimization specialist providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing consultant providing internet marketing solutions through integrated design and programming services.