Who should be in charge of the web?

Both marketing department and IT department have their respective responsibilities to focus on.  The marketing department has to take care of the nitty gritty details with the actual products and services that the companies are selling, and to convert them into marketing messages for the public to understand and eventually to buy.  As for the IT department, they have to take care of the security issues, system implementations, server maintenance and even to the stage of programming level.

Web becomes the victim of both IT and marketing departments’ politics when they are deciding who should take charge of it.  It sounds like the marketing department should be in charge of the contents published on the website.  It also sounds like the IT department should be in charge as the website needs to be maintained for all sorts of IT reasons such as security and to keep the server running.  In fact, both departments are not suitable to think about the web strategies for the company because they do not have a deep web knowledge to know what they can do on the website for the company.  Web is indeed a discipline of its own over here.

What happens when either IT or marketing department is in charge of web?

When the IT department is in charge of the website, the website becomes a data entry job where the marketing department will be requesting the IT department for content changes.  IT department is only focusing on taking care of the security side of things.  Things become very structured and proper, but people may face rejection for doing things so as to glorify the name of “IT security”.  A lot of things will not be approved, and the marketing department may just leave the website alone since they cannot do much about it anyway.

And when the marketing department is in charge of the website, the website may become an exciting place for the marketing department as they can look at all their available marketing channels for the companies.  It may sound like a good idea here, but the problem is that their work is focusing more on the monologue side, hence the website will not have its full focus even though it is indeed the Face of the company!  Also, the backend contents will definitely become very messy, and the IT department will be the ones complaining why they should do the dirty job of cleaning up for the marketing department.

Because the marketing and IT have their respective interest to take care of, the web becomes an abandoned child for the adopters to push around.

Also, it may sound that the marketing department is the ideal adopter of the web and they might even have a dedicated web personnel to work in the marketing department, the importance of the website is always placed at a lower priority to the department actually.

What does a web division comprises of?

There are no hard and fast rules of how the web division should be comprised of.  But here’s some suggestions about what’s the kind of departments it should have.

1) Static website content maintenance
- Regular website updates
- Asset digitization from offline materials
- Microsite setup and maintenance
- Search engine optimization
- Search engine marketing

2) Customer relationship management
- Customer loyalty programs
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Mobile marketing

3) Partner relationship management
- Internal and external E-commerce contents
- Affiliate marketing programs
-  Social media
- Email marketing
- Mobile marketing

The number of things that you can do, is really up to the amount of human resources that you are willing to dedicate.  If you ever think that the website is not your company focus (because you are not Google), you are missing a very big picture here.  And I guess you should not have seen my article on the website here because I am not Google either…

How does a web division play along with marketing and IT?

Every division has their respective role to play here.  The product marketing focuses on the numbers and making sure that the product contents are done correctly.  The marketing communications focuses more on the communications side of things (Web is just one of their focus, not their main focus).  And the web is to assist the communications to be smoothly executed.  And lastly, the IT is to make sure that the security side of things are being executed properly.  See below.

Product Marketing <–> Marketing Communications <–> Web <–> IT

Though many companies may not have done that today, I believe this will become the new direction one day.  And I hope that day is arriving not because it is trying to cure a crisis, but to prevent it.  As the old saying goes “Prevention is better than cure”.

What do you think about this?  Why companies are not willing to have a web division in their companies?  Do leave a comment here to let me know.

And when it comes to marketing communications and pr, all of you will start to compete in terms of the ATLs, BTLs and TTLs that you have done. Furthermore, a lot of people don’t really see how marketing can help them to make money. People start to measure ROI by comparing how much they have saved from making advertisement.

All these things are so unreal and yet they continue to do so.

Today, many of you are jumping on board in social media because this is becoming the media where a lot of people are in. What you didn’t realise is that social media is so widely spread across many websites. And even in one particular website such as facebook and twitter, you are like a needle being found accidentally by the people in the sea.

Everyone of you are so engrossed at doing your own things, and in the end some are struggling with just 10,000 followers on their social media page. Yes, I still think that 10,000 is still a small number when you compare with your market share that you should have.

Just think about this… Social media has made everybody equal. Whether you are rich or your company is supposed to be only for high class people, everybody is talking about you! And they actually compare you with your competitors publicly while you are still in your own silo trying to brainwash your followers. Your followers are now well informed with all sorts of available information online. People now don’t like to be cold-called for sales. Advertisements are now too much for the people to absorb, we are all bombarded by hundreds of ads every day!

In short, your competitors are now in the same struggling situation as you! What can all of you do?

First of all, everyone of you have your fair share of your respective market on social media. Your reviewers also have their share of the market where they talk about you and your competitors altogether.

On the internet, internet marketers are well-known to collaborate between themselves even though they are selling the same products. Why can’t the big brands out there do the same? That is to say they can actually market their competitors’ products!

Your customers will start to applause to your openness, and your credibility will increase tremendously! Maybe, you will have an even better convincing power than the reviewers out there! And you can even start to understand your product differences with your competitors so that you can improve your product better and better.

In conclusion, your competitors are no longer your enemies.

This is very possible, and I believe it will be common in the near future…

Different marketing philosophies

First of all, an Ad Agency tends to talk about the goodness of interruptive marketing.   The “bigger” your brand logo, the better visibility to interrupt the public to get a lot of “eyeball impressions”.  Frankly speaking, I don’t think that eyeball impression is that important if there is only a small fraction of them who are interested in your company.

On the Internet, we are talking about tracking, analysis, conversions, etc.  It’s all about showing the right things to the right people.  And this can be achieved by showing only the relevant contents together

1. when the public is searching for that certain keywords,
2. when the public is reading an interesting article,
3. or even when the public is searching actively for your product directly!

Then, it’s all about converting the right people into prospectives…

Then, the prospectives into potential buyers…

Then, the potential buyers to become customers…

Then, the customers to become after-sale customer support…

Then, the customers continue to buy more from us again and again and again…

Push versus Pull

Secondly, the Ad Agency will only know how to push information to the public even when they don’t feel like watching it.  For example, we are not interested to brands everywhere we go when we are not looking for them and yet they seem to be hunting after us.  For example, is it really important for Facebook to inform the world that they are employing?  In my opinion, Facebook is using the Pull factor to look for interested applicants only.  They are not interested in pushing the information out because it may be costly to use other people’s media, and it is also an interruptive marketing to me.  I feel this somehow “cheapens” the job value if they actually do that…

Internet marketing focuses more on the Pull factor.  Yes, there are a lot of people who are pushing very hard to spam everybody that they are selling certain products… This only causes us to delete the email and forget about it… For sure, some may just got interested about it… But looking from a big picture, it really irritates most of us!  Pull factor refers to showing information only when the people are looking for it.  This is definitely more valuable because we are now living in the world of overloaded information, and it is terrible to see so much information which we are not interested in.  That’s where Google really shines when they can find the most relevant search results amongst all the search engines out there!

Website design

Please remember that graphic design is not the same as web design!  Programming is also not the same as web design!  Web design is a very unique set of skills which involves creativity and a logical mindset.  Hence, it requires your left and right brain!  While you may be creative in your work, you will need to do all these things in the form of programming at the backend!  Or, while you are good at programming, creativity plays a huge role in getting up a successful website!   And to make things worse, you have to have online marketing knowledge to optimize your landing pages!

There is a problem here… The type of work done with the print is usually about graphic design…. TV Ads may also involved programming… But, all these things have nothing to do with landing page optimization!  Which means that there is no real optimization allowed to increase sales conversions.

It also means that we are now facing a very big issue if we were to ask a multi-purpose agency to help us with the web design!

Anyway, that’s just my thoughts… What do you think?

For whatever reason it may be, it is always good to start your own online community where you have audience to hear what you have to say about your favorite topic.

This recently, I have shared with a couple of friends that they should start something of their own (just like me!).  But what’s the point of starting something like what i did?

First thing first… You may not make money online just because you are starting a community of your own.

But what do you get out of it?  You will get interested audience to listen to you… You will get agencies – who are selling a consultancy service of what you are doing – to be jealous of you… You will get interested companies who might want to employ you to hear your “expertise”… You might even get companies to engage you for advices or even to form strategic partnership based on what you are already doing…

There are a lot of things you can do once you have massive listening ears out there in the world… It’s almost boundless because we will never know who we will meet along the way in the social media… Many of my friends are using the social media to keep up with their friends, to make more friends or even to find their other half of their lives!

What can I do with the social media that I am building?

1. I can start rambling about the bad days that I had… I know I have listening ears out there from all sources… From my own friends, my vendors and colleagues, to my “close” strangers in the social media and my good friends coming in from Google searches…
   And I may get comments from my close friends as well as from the community that I have built.  And just to let you know that it can make quite an impact in the social media…
2. I get to see a couple of proposals every now and then… From becoming their affiliates, to making strategic partnerships with other websites… There are a few who actually want to sell me the idea of proposing white-hat SEO for my sites… Thanks for approaching me!
3. I would love to see how this little hobby can evolve into… It helps me to understand more social media strategies than any other people I know of.  I get to experience different social media sites, and people simply love to give me sites to try it out!

Bottomline

At the end of the day, I am building a portfolio which can stay with me forever because it’s my face and my name.  It is my resume to my job.  It is a place where I can learn more things than from anybody who can teach me.  I am building a personal branding of myself.  It’s an asset of knowledge I have built.  And with my current experience in the social media topic, I can almost thought of an immediate social media strategy for any business.

What do you guys think about it?  Have you started your own community?  Why not?

Photo Credit: baliartphotography.com

I thought this might be an interesting idea that we should hold “Office hours” session to have a chat with your colleagues and customers about your products and services.  This idea came from Harvard Business Review when Bill Taylor thought of taking an hour or two out on every working week, and discuss about how we can improve our products and services.

This idea is actually quite noble, although it is already been used during the school days when we ask our lecturers out for a discussion.

You can be surprised that many big and small companies are focusing so much on their actual day-to-day job that they have forgotten how to be more productive in their jobs.  Many of them may just want to be an average worker, but this calling of “office hours” by the CEOs can actually improve the working relationships and talk about something which any average worker will never thought they will voice out like this!  It can’t be a huge group for sure because many of them will shy away because of the huge crowd.

And this kind of productive “gossip” can improve our thoughts, and make us willing to work harder.  It can be really motivating to see what we can do to make a better company!

Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs

This domain name http://www.catchcheatingspouse.sg caught my attention as it is a very catchy word which explains itself.  This domain name is currently advertised on many car bodies of the Taxi in Singapore.  It is so catchy that I just took note of it and wanted to check it out on the website.

I was really disappointed when I see that they actually link this catchy domain name to their corporate Private Investigation website which is actually having their own presence at http://www.kokusai.com.sg/.

Furthermore, this official website is actually to squeeze everything together, making the whole website very cluttered.  However, it still looks pretty decent as a company website.

If they have optimized a landing page for http://www.catchcheatingspouse.sg, it could have brought them even more business… For example, it should be a sales copy which attempts to sell them the idea of finding out how to catch their cheating spouses with their Kokusai service.  And if they wish to find out more information about Kokusai, they can link it to their official website.

One thought

They could have worked out a squeeze page where their targeted visitors can only do two things… One is to book an appointment with a private investigator to find out what services he has to offer… Another is to ask for more information by providing questions with their names and emails.  In this way, they will be able to capture most of the leads from the appointments as well as people asking questions… Isn’t that a better usage of this catchy domain name?

Photo credit: o’mell

Online quizzes are no doubt to be entertaining to many of us.  They can be treated seriously or jokingly.  It may sadden some people if they reveal “bad news”, while energizing the rest with “good news”.

1) Hidden agenda of being an online survey

While we tend to see many types of online surveys for us to take so that companies can find out more about customer behaviours, online quizzes surprisingly can be used as a hidden agenda of doing online surveys!  Just imagine the online quizzes are asking questions which may be even to the very intimate level… It is so much more effective than doing online surveys because users tend to assume that these information will not be stored.

This information is very valuable for companies in the relevant industries, and can be sold to them so as to understand the market even better and to react accordingly in their marketing strategies.

2) Hidden agenda of selling relevant products

As you are taking the online quizzes, you are actually revealing information about yourself that you need certain products to enhance your life.  With a clever website optimization technique, the visitor can slowly be led into a sales funnel.  If the sales funnel is crafty enough, it will not lead the visitors into an online purchase immediately.  Instead, it will ask for their email addresses in return for the online results, and to opt in for relevant e-newsletters.  Steadily, it will then build a database and lead them into an online purchase.

For example, this is very effective for those visitors who wish to know very intimate health answers, which drug companies can look into sponsoring the online quizzes.

3) Hidden agenda of selling the quiz results

I have ever encountered quizzes which reveal answers partially only when I entered my email address.  And I will have to pay a certain amount of money to have a detailed analysis of the quizzes I have taken.  This can be really ridiculous especially when I have taken a very long time to answer all the questions, and it makes no sense for me to give up just because I have to give my email address!  These online quizzes ought to be punished for not telling us in advance about how the results will become.

Time is really money.  Just imagine that you have taken a very long time to answer all the questions, and they will only give you the answers in exchange of your email address and/or money…

Whichever the case is, please only take a pinch of salt if you are having fun playing with online quizzes as they are usually created by people who are not credible enough in terms of their education and experience.

Photo credit: odegaard library

I happened to see a parody of it recently. It is no surprise that any marketer would have thought of leveraging on such an exposure that he could actually create a buzz himself. I saw this “wanted list” at the Orchard car park when I was parking my car opposite Orchard Cineleisure.

This paper is definitely not incidental. He might have thought of doing this interruption marketing many years ago. But with the continual pursuit of Singapore’s most-wanted terror fugitive, this poster is definitely going to get more attention from the public.

The Usual Free Traffic
While that might be true to most of the people playing with Pay-Per-Click, many of us know about the free traffic that we can capture through the various efforts that we made on the web. We can write quality articles online… We can write good blogs online… We can write good comments on other blogs to capture the attention from the visitors… We can reply good postings on the forums to capture the attention of the mass…

The Better Free Traffic
Now, everybody knew about it… We have our very own Facebook to start with our new marketing strategy… Facebook is a highly addictive website with people visiting it to keep up with their scores and friends in it… Facebook has opened up a whole new market for us to get into it as a user as well as a developer to capture the attention of the visitors. You could think of a new application relevant to your business which can capture the attention of relevant users and to keep them in the loop because they chose to be in your list! And because they have chosen to be in your list, they can either proactively promote your business to their friends, or they can show off your business in their profile to create a viral marketing effect in both passive and active way!

The Video Marketing Traffic
And yet the Internet has not forgotten about showing our very own personality where we can show our faces and actions on video… It’s highly viral when you mix it properly with the social websites like Facebook or in the blogs… And if you can do a contest which you would want to see people embedding your video, you can promote even more traffic from other blogs without having the bloggers to think and write what they think about you… It’s more effective this way…

The more active you are, the more the Internet is going to work for you… Many tools have been surfaced up just for you to use to market your business in both paid and free methods… They are mutually exclusive from each other… And they are more likely to compliment with each other if you can mix and match the two sets of tools properly for your website! Enjoy!

Forms of Business Leverage
When we are talking about leverage, we are talking about re-using the existing visitors that they have in many forms:

1. Additional value-added services which is beneficial to the existing customers.
2. The more difficult-to-deal-with customers to be referred and enjoy other company’s services.
3. Modifying the existing services to give an even better products and solutions for the customers.
4. Giving the customers more choices according to their preferences of budget or criteria.

Taking care of your operations efficiently
While it may be a good thing that we can leverage on another business for our business to create a “shortcut” in our business progress, many companies might just afraid you might screw up the whole business if you don’t have a proper plan of managing huge volumes of business. Making money is the result… But the process of attracting the money must be right by giving the right values that they want efficiently.

When a company is dealing with only a few customers, it might be feasible to charge only a small fee since it is manageable within the company’s expenses. But when there’s huge volume, there might have a change in the company’s pricing criteria because of the need to pay for additional manpower. Hence, a small company might be good to provide for the big company’s customers only to a certain extend…

Making things to work comes in big picture and small picture
While many people tend to complain because of a certain small problem, but because they might not have seen the big picture which will then ease their mind about the small picture’s problem. Always look at the business from the bird’s eye view as well as the human’s eye view!

How To Start Leveraging?
I saw a big-time blogger (I think it’s shoemoney) recently looking into employment for admin to handle his daily work. This is a good time to start leveraging by working for him. Instantly, you get to learn some of the things he might be doing all along.

Another way, it’s to do a joint-venture where you ask a big-time blogger with a business proposal to attract the visitors in his blog. That’s a way of bringing in traffic to your blog… However, you have to make sure your blog is ready to accept traffic and to convert them into your loyal readers!

Or else, you might want to start by putting advertisements on big-time bloggers’ website. That’s a way which is only seeing yourself as a passive blogger who may or may not have a plan…

Why re-inventing the wheel when you can buy a wheel yourself?