If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog. Thanks for visiting!

In a thread at Cre8asite entitled, “How well do companies do web marketing?“, DianeV took me to task for creating the word “webmastering“. She was quite right. It isn’t in the dictionary, although you may be able to guess what meaning was intended if I substitute the phrase “Web mastery“. Clearly it’s the ability to use the Web (Internet) to achieve your goals.

Of course one of the most celebrated Forums on the web is the Webmaster World Forum. So is this skill practiced only by the type of people who visit such a Forum? I think not. The Internet is now the principal method of communication for a good slice of business activity. So, many people should be ‘Web masters’. It’s not just that guy in IT who looks after the website. It’s intriguing how that Cre8asite thread has developed. It today is in a discussion about why more marketing people don’t get involved in Web marketing.

Certainly marketing people need to be involved, but I think there is a much wider and more important group of people who need to be involved. I’ll take the population of business people involved in Manufacturing and Wholesale Products in the Province of Quebec in Canada as an example. Luckily there is an excellent database of such companies maintained by iCRIQ, an agency of the Quebec Government. Here’s a profile of the companies involved with respect to size.

Note that only 6% of companies have more than 100 employees. Presumably most of these companies are large enough to have marketing departments. 22% have between 21 and 100 employees. Perhaps say a quarter of these might have a marketing department. 72% of companies have 20 or less employees. Summarising, probably 7 out of 8 companies do not have a marketing department.

For these 7 out of 8 companies, it falls to the owner or a partner to be the masters of the Web. That’s the new reality and the new challenge. Interestingly the various Forums involved in Usability, SEM Web Design and related fields quite often get highly technical. However the biggest group needing help to become effective Web masters are all these company owners and senior managers.

Related: Webmaster, an obsolete concept

Tags: webmaster, Internet marketing

The following is a true, sad story. Congratulations are due to a new website owner involved in business communications. Unfortunately commiserations are also necessary too.

Yesterday one of the many spam e-mail messages I receive only had a 85% spam score as decided by my spam filter software, K9. Could this be a false negative? I hadn’t requested this e-mail message but I checked it out anyway.

It was a very well produced HTML message that was a very inviting invitation to visit a new website. The website came on line November 1st so this message on November 9 was very timely. The website home page when visited had a very similar look to the e-mail message, so I was somewhat impressed. So far, so good.

I’ll come back shortly to what I saw in the website. Later in the day I was searching in iCRIQ, a government database of manufacturing and service companies in Quebec. My search was on some products involved in business communications. I was most surprised to see that the search results now included banner ads. Even more surprising, by coincidence there was a banner ad for the company with the new website.

So first my congratulations to this website owner. So many website owners assume that their website will miraculously bring in sales leads. So many are also disappointed as time passes without results. This particular company realized that you’ve got to be proactive and do some other things as well to help boost the traffic. It will cost time, effort and possibly cash but the ROI (Return on Investment) on this Internet marketing will far outstrip the ROI for other marketing initiatives.

So why did I mention commiserations. Well it’s all to do with that website. You work hard to get visitors so, when they do arrive, they should have a positive experience that encourages them to contact the company. Unfortunately it’s all too easy to make an attractive website, but there are many more skills involved in making a website that generates sales. Let me just mention some of the problems in this case. In Quebec, visitors may be French-speaking or English-speaking. So there was a choice: ‘Français‘ or ‘English‘. I moved my mouse towards the English link but immediately saw only the words ‘Available Soon’. All this effort to get me here and then this let-down. Not a good way of introducing me to the company.

Not to worry, I’m persistent and also French-speaking. So I explored the French web pages. Again many problems surfaced. The biggest is that all the pages are in Frames. So here is outdated technology that will make it very unlikely that search engines will rank the web pages highly for relevant keywords. Human visitors will also have problems in bookmarking web pages or printing them. Then the Usability aspects of the website were not very effective. Visitors might well not know how to move around the website. The screen seemed somewhat cluttered and it was very unclear where to click to move on. Even in French, the Portfolio, an important tool to convince potential clients, was also ‘coming soon’.

Unfortunately this is a true story. This company knew that a website alone was not enough. They did not realize that those essential proactive web marketing activities will only be as effective as the associated website.

Well it’s not just the British who are not very enthusiastic about ***. I guess it’s probably true for most world citizens.

The *** I’m talking about here are those little asterisks that you find around forms on some web pages. Usually there’s a single asterisk, often incredibly tiny, that indicates an ‘Obligatory Field’. In other words, you must put an entry in this field. If you don’t, then a reminder web page comes up that informs you that unless you insert the missing items you cannot proceed beyond this point.

Of course, there’s no check on whether you have made a typo in what was typed. All that is necessary is some entry. So why bother? It’s a needless hassle for the web page visitor and doesn’t provide any guarantee that useful information is being provided. Of course if a financial transaction is involved, then some information is an absolute necessity. In this case, the * is appropriate and useful. However in all other cases, little is gained by making fields obligatory.

It’s that usual two way table again: what do you win versus what do you lose for each of two alternatives. With obligatory fields, you do get entries for each of those fields, but you may irritate someone who inadvertently forgets an item. They may decide not to proceed. Without obligatory fields, you may or may not get entries for all the fields, but you’ll never irritate someone who chooses not to complete an entry. Through this, you may well get more responses. In neither case is the data obviously more correct.

It’s easy to specify obligatory fields in forms throughout any website, so there may be a natural tendency to specify at least a small number. This is probably unnecessary and may cause lower response rates. Most people will fill in as correctly as they can what they regard as reasonable data. So why not go with what they naturally provide?

In short, let’s keep *** out of our web pages.

Washing Detergents seem to be sold more by what appears on the outside of the box, than by the attributes of what is in the box. It’s tough to do a real test of one powder versus another. Equally it’s becoming tough to know what is inside the Search Engine ‘box’.

Microsoft now seems to be confirming that it’s what’s on the box that counts. As noted, “The computer and software giant recently revealed that it was putting personalisation at the heart of its search strategy over the next few years.”

Google used to tout its relevancy with its famous PageRank concept as one of its major strengths. However it was the clean, simple search engine page that may well have been the key selling feature. Indeed the PageRank concept may have had within it the seeds of its own decay. When everyone knows that back-links are important to get noticed by Google, then everyone starts working on getting as many back-links as possible. As Yahoo! now gets into full swing, serious questions are being raised on whether Yahoo! is producing more relevant search results than Google. In other words, does ‘content’ beat out ‘back-links’ for relevancy.

The secrecy surrounding the search engines algorithms means that it’s tough to know what is the logic being used. So which logic is more likely to give more relevant search results? Relevancy has become that mysterious powder in the box. Relevancy must be adequate but the consumer has a great deal of difficulty in detecting that one is better than another. It’s going to be the packaging that actually sells the product.