BOOK MONDAY: Who visited your website and when?

Ready for another one? Just so that the new readers stay on top of things. Every week I will be publishing an excerpt from my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

Last week I disclosed parts of the chapter “Diversifying operational risk of domestic market behavior” and this week we will dig into web analytics and why it’s important to know who visited your website and when.

So here we go:

The problem with intelligence is that hardly anyone knows its true value. This also applies for the intelligence you can collect from your website.

The same is true for website traffic analysis. Only, that it is even more important to know who visited your website, what pages they viewed for what period of time, where they exited your website, and where they came from in the first place.

Let’s start with the information you can ascertain from website analysis:

1.   where your website visitor came from can be good to know if you want to determine whether a link building campaign was successful or which ones you can easily neglect

2.   what geographic region did your website visitor come from is valuable if you have launched a regionally limited marketing campaign and want to figure out how successful it was

3.   How long did they view which pages might be helpful to know because it can show you what pages of your website have to be revised: imagine you have a page which takes you about 4 minutes to read and your visitors only stay 30 seconds on average. That’s an indicator that you have a damn intelligent readership or the content sucks.

4.   Which pages were visited most is definitely a good indicator to figure out what you should be writing about in the future. The reason for highly frequented pages can either be that they are spread all over the web and the visitors come in by link or that this page just hit the spot and people are coming in using search engines.

5.   What browsers and operating systems they use is important to know to determine whether your readership can view your content correctly. If 70% of your readers use mobile browsers and your website is only made for regular ones you’ll know why they jump off immediately.

These were just five of the many reasons I love analytics. But there are a lot of things you can really suck out of the reports you get from a good analysis tool.

Speaking of good analysis tools for website traffic… they do not have to be expensive products which you buy from a company which specializes in this field.

Google offers a free, very powerful, and easy to implement tool called “Analytics” which will do the job for a majority of companies out there.

It captures all of the features I pointed out above and way more. Hey, Google holds that information anyhow so why not make it accessible to users out there to help them improve their website and get rid of flaws they may have.

If you want to learn more about this topic, my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) is available for purchase and – as always – if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any time.

BOOK MONDAY: Diversifying operational risk of domestic market behavior

Welcome back.

Last week we started with the introduction and are now moving on to the first chapter which is called “Diversifying operation risk of domestic market behavior” from my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle )

E-Business can be the specific thing you have been looking for to make your operation independent if – for instance – your “home-markets” screw up.

While the recent recession struck the US and devastated a vast amount of market segments, other parts of the world remained pretty relatively untouched, some even totally intact.

Before we go on we have to differentiate though because the memory of the masses is pretty widely subjected to Alzheimer’s.

In the 1920s we’ve had a similar situation on the global markets. Back then the governments and banks decided to take money out of the market to stabilize the system which proved to be wrong as we can all see in the history books with awe; the outcome being the great depression.

In 2008 when the situation reoccurred, the governments and banks, which had learned from the devastation they caused in the roaring ’20s, are starting to flood the markets with money in hopes that this will help the world stay out of disaster.

This opposing reaction can be the chance for your business to take off.

More money in the markets means that the buying power of the people is secured. It will of course have an effect on their buying behavior, but will lead to the fact that there will always be money in their pockets for necessities. And this covers the first group, the middle and lower class.

The upper class of course was hardly affected by the recession because they were able to diversify the investment risk through spreading their wealth to several investment channels.

This leads us back to your business.

When I say operational risk this includes a vast variety of factors. Some of which you can influence, most of which you can’t. So let’s be realistic about diversifying your operational risk.

The conclusion of the above mentioned could be to go international which will leverage the risk of a domestic market screw-up significantly.

Meaning, that if you’re a retailer in the US and with your operations limited to that specific region, you will probably be pounded by a market downturn in the US.

The fact that the economic downturn in the US has happened will also lead to a destabilization of the dollar in comparison to other currencies which will make the margin on the products you have in stock even higher.

So let us for a short while, imagine that you would have already made the investment and your website or e-commerce portal available in the other major languages around the world, which are Spanish, French, German, and now: Chinese.

You would instantly have access to the markets speaking those languages because if someone were looking for the products there they would not care where the product they are buying is from if they’re looking to save an extra buck.

Of course you’re right – I only mentioned the retailer in the US but this model can be applied to pretty much every business vertical in these times.

This chapter contains several examples of applied eBusiness models. If you want to read more, please consider buying “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

Obama’s secret evacuation routes show up on file sharing sites

Today the pressetext Austria revealed that several top secret documents were found on public file sharing sites.

Amongst these documents are secret evacuation routes of the US chief executive, Barack Obama.

While it is unknown whether the documents are recent or not the question about the capabilities of government is the issue that comes to focus because it’s not the only exceptionally embarrassing failure of e-government and related issues.

A short while back the BBC published an article in which they wrote about an external consultancy who’d lost a memory stick with the data of “thousands of criminals”, and the list of mishaps goes on and on.

I got my personal take on how responsible governments are handling data of their citizens when I ordered my new passport a year ago which required to submit biometrical data, amongst others my fingerprint. When I stood up to put my finger on the reader I caught a glimpse of Microsoft Windows XP Home running on the machine that was obviously going to store my data. If that doesn’t give you a “high security feeling” then I don’t know what does.

In several talks I’ve had with government entities the one thing I’ve learned is that the citizens are very skeptical when it comes to using e-government platforms. And who’s going to blame them considering all of these disasters taking place repeatedly.

The primary issue which all governments should be working on is establishing trust to their platforms, followed by hiring usability consultants because e-government portals in most cases have another major flaw: missing usability and accessibility.

What is your take on applied e-government?

BOOK MONDAY: Introduction

Starting today I will release portions of my recently published book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” (Ebook Version | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle) every Monday.

Please understand that I will not totally disclose the content but only excerpts because it would be unfair to those who have already bought the book and of course I want to make – at least a little – money off of it.

So the topics you will be informed about are:

• Diversifying operational risk of domestic market behavior
• Who visited your website and when?
• Taking your business from local to global for a few thousand
  bucks
• Learning marketing from the porn industry
• Make your customers do the customer service themselves
• What makes Corporate Blogging important?
• Corporate Online Reputation Management
• Search Engine Optimization
• Customer Information Management

So here is the introduction:

Many businesses shamelessly neglect the fact that their business strategies need to be at least reviewed, if not totally overhauled due to the introduction of the internet. Some companies don’t even do the least, for instance having an appealing presentation of their company on the web. First of all we have to define the term “business strategy” and what the heck this “E” is all about. Wikipedia says that “strategic institutional management” is the conduct of   drafting,  implementing   and   evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve
its long-term objectives and that is has something do with an organizations missions, visions, and objectives or processes. If we remember our first year in business school (no, not the fun parts) we’ll remember that we learned something about formulation, implementation, and evaluation.

In context to a business strategy measure this could mean:
1. Formulating the whole plot, which outlines the allocation
of necessary budgets, personnel we need, creates a
situation analysis and the goals we set or what we want to
have changed.

2. Implementing what we have written up which means nothing less than executing what we have formulated.

3. And evaluating the outcome and whether it met our
expectations or not.

Regardless, if the measure was successful or not we have to go back to step one and compare the outcome and expectations, thus closing the circle.

The “E” stands for electronic and refers to the fact that the things I will be mentioning in this book are related to the internet and generating business thereon. Now that we’ve cleared that out, let’s see how we can put these in context to each other.

If we unite the two terms we come up with something like “E-Business Strategy” which is exactly what we’re going to try to establish over the next few chapters.

The internet offers businesses not only the possibility to diversify the risk of negative, domestic market behavior, but it can increase the visibility of your company for a fraction of the cost which conventional marketing measures would consume through so called search engine campaigns and other measures, strategically positioning your business miles ahead of your competitors, and even more.

This book is based on the knowledge I ascertained while working on projects around the globe. Most of the projects I was able to successfully close either in terms of significantly increasing the business my clients made over the web and in some     cases   I  helped    by   integrating new    means    of communication      and   business    development  into   existing strategies and structures.

There is one thing the clients all had in common though: their skepticism towards these measures and the internet in general, which    switched    totally  to  the   contrary   because  of  the measurable increase of business they experienced.

The things pointed out in this book are anything but theoretical approaches and go far beyond what most CEOs, even very good conventional    business     development consultants  can   ever imagine.

So regardless if

-   your operation is into wholesale or retail;
-   you’re a consultant looking for assignments throughout
the world;
-   you’re a charity looking for new ways to spread the word
and collect donations for your cause;
-   you’re a politician looking to attract the younger voters;

or whatever else.

The internet offers you plenty of opportunities to gain business, increase sales or ROI, generate leads, get more visibility thus making your  marketing dollars more effective, and much, much more.

Before I forget… Even though I’m probably going to feel like saying “please keep out of reach of children” please do not misconceive this book as a “how to” guideline and think that you’ll be able to rule the web alone. You’ll probably set yourself up for failure.

On the following pages you will learn why it is inevitable that you have a dynamic team with a variety of strengths which surrounds you.

Hope to see you next week for the chapter from “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” (Ebook Version | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle) called “Diversifying operational risk of domestic market behavior”.

How Online Reputation Management saved Alaska Airlines’ ass

In my book, “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” I dedicated a chapter to online reputation management.

I stated therein that a single person with enough online influence can ruin your corporate reputation just by posting something on the social web.

It so occurred that companies became aware of that phenomenon and service providers popped up, which monitor the web 24/7 in search for negative news.

But not only service providers are taking care of this vital issues, but many companies try to achieve so themselves as Alaska Airlines proved in a very good way last week on Twitter.

An actor boasted out the complaint:

Hey @AlaskaAir you cant just cancel flights & then say, “Sorry”! & not help people get to their destination. Not cool. Fix yr planes, jerks.

complaint about a flight being cancelled which he was apparently booked on.

Note: this exploit was published on June 25th at 19:41 (CET – GMT+2).

Generally this would not have been a problem. But as you can see on the image, this user has an outreach to nearly one million people following him and his updates on the social stream.

Alaska Airlines, who apparently use a tool called CoTweet to intervene to cases like this on the social web, did not even take one minute to reply directly and openly to this complaint.

The consequence of them replying open resulted in their question showing up in context to the users profile so that followers or Wilson were able to monitor the discussion taking place and be impressed by the responsiveness which Alaska Airlines was displaying.

Their reply

@rainnwilson What’s the flight #?

took place online one minute later on June 25th at 19:42 (CET = GMT+2) and led to a discussion which could be followed publicly.

Because of the significant visibility of this user this incident could have easily led to a remarkable decrease of Alaska Air’s reputation.

But since they have done such a remarkle job on monitoring what is being said about them on the social web, especially on Twitter which is one of the largest and most frequented platforms, they were able to prevent worse things from happening.

What do yu think? Is online reputation management something you should dedicate more time to?

10 Indicators that your Web Designer may be an Idiot

Although I officially started my web career in 2006 the internet and all associated to it has been my passion since I got my first connection to the world wide web.

The more skills and knowledge I ascertained about the internet, the more anger arose in me whenever I saw poor presentations on the web.

Yet it wasn’t particularly the anger at the presentations themselves but primarily the outcries of the owners who were desperate to earn money off these presentations looking like crap.

This presentation (CLICK) contains the most common errors made when creating a web campaign and solutions on how you can improve yours.

Among many others it addresses the topics

• search engine optimization,
• user interface design,
• the importance of web analytics,
• etc.

Happy easter holidays

Lars

Why NOT to quit email but rather educate the people surrounding you

There are several experiments out there currently which promote that the solution to email problems is to quit it totally.

Since I do not agree on the motives exploited because of the fact that most of them are based on convenience I took a closer look at email in this podcast, addressing some historical points of view and proving that email is still worthwhile. And of course offering a simple solution about how to get email in line.

My conclusion is that Email still has it’s place in most of todays corporate communication – both organizational and inter-organizational. Along with the fact that it is more valuable and beneficial to educate the organization members and people around you about how to use email efficiently thus cutting down hassle of communication.

Really looking forward to some interesting discussion,

 

 Why NOT to quit email but rather educate the people surrounding you [5:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

1000%+ Website ROI? Success Stories and Case Studies by Lars Hilse

I finally have my case studies ready. The include a variety of projects I have worked on or assisted in. So do have a look and download the success stories here.

Get your own – Open publication

Podcasting to support “The Web Tactician”

Upon the constantly increasing number of podcasts out there I thought it might be a good idea to take a similar route.

Note: this blog will remain up and running as a supportive feature to display and post associated material such as images, downloadable files, etc., yet the primary shift is going into the direction of audio.

Reasons? Simple: we are constantly moving forward to a mobile society and it has just proven to be impractical to run around with a laptop infront of your eyes. Sound in your ears just seems to be the better alternative.

In this context: WELCOME TO THE   N-E-W   WEB TACTICIAN – of which this introductory episode features an overview of the topics addressed in the future and the direction this blog/podcast combo is going to go.

Have fun and support me by writing me suggestions for improvement.

 

 The Web Tactician Podcast Introduction [11:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Interview With Stan Relihan on the Connections Show

Stan wrote the following about me:

Lars Hilse is a Web Strategist, Speaker, Entrepreneur and Author, based in Germany.

In addition to giving us his perspective on the social networking scene in Europe, Lars discusses a wide range of topics, including the importance of good Customer Relationship Management Systems and simple, rewarding User Experience and Interface Design.

Lars has also been successful in using a variety of Social Networking sites, such as Ecademy, LinkedIn, Xing, Ryze and SiliconIndia to generate business on a global basis.

In this interview, he shares some of the techniques he’s been using to raise awareness of his personal profile, skills and experience – and how this has resulted in key consulting projects with clients from around the world.

[podcast]http://connections.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_connections_20080601_032_Lars_Hilse.mp3[/podcast]

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-6c2b49c87d49ef8caa5f1dfe4e8a9b6c}