Posted On November 3rd, 2011 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Business, Marketing,
I was looking at a website today and noticed a link to an online application for payroll. Great, I thought. An alternative to ADP. I reviewed their site and found the sign up form to learn about a special offer.
I took the time to fill out the form, which included fields asking how many employees I have, and what I currently use for payroll, and within 30 seconds I received a call from the sales agent. Everything okay so far. But he made several mistakes that lost him the sale in the end:
Uncomfortable Silence
The sales agent seemed like he wanted me to start the conversation when he was the one who called me. After some ums, ahs, and stutters, he asked me what I wanted. He should have already known what I wanted since I filled out a form to learn about a special offer!
Making me repeat myself
The rep then asked how many employees I had and what I currently use for payroll. It wasn’t hard for me to repeat what I already typed in the form, but the point is that I already told them and he should have had that info in front of him already. It just made me start to lose confidence.
He then asked how I found the site and I told him it was through an affiliate site - which he already should have known since the URL and banner on the site showed the online affiliate!
Put me on hold
Finally, he asked me to hold and I waited on the line for about 1 minute hearing shuffling and muffled talking, before hearing music kick in. At that point I hung up. He called about a minute later but by that point I was busy and didn’t care any more.
You would think that these days any company would think of this stuff as common sense what-not-to-do, but amazingly this company is probably wondering why they are having trouble closing deals when the answer is right in front of them - an inefficient sales process and inexperienced sales agents.
I’m sure there are lessons here we all can learn from when it comes to selling for our own companies.
Posted On September 18th, 2011 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Design, Business, Development,
Just recently, a big change came along in web design; Arguably the biggest revolution since modern web standards in the early 2000's.
Responsive Design has been invented. It's a term used in new age architecture to describe buildings that behave 'responsively'. That is, they adapt or respond to conditions such as the amount of people in a given room, for instance. They will automatically change heat, air and even room size (yes, the walls expand and contract!) to accommodate more or less people.
And just like Responsive Design in architecture, when it comes to the web, responsive design allows websites to no longer behave like static online brochures that scroll, but rather they adapt by expanding and contracting, resizing themselves to appropriately fit a variety of screen sizes. So for example, a website might have five columns when viewed on a 52" wide screen, but when viewed on a laptop it may scale down to three columns, two on an iPad and down to one column when viewed on a smart phone.
The best way to illustrate this is by viewing this gallery of well-designed responsive sites. You'll see four views for each site, from wide screen down to a small screen. Pretty impressive, huh?
The best part is, designing sites to be responsive does not add a lot of size, scope or complexity to a project. Sure, it adds some work for the designer and developer. But really in the grand scheme of building a website from start to finish, building it responsively is not all that time consuming once you know how.
Now, like all things in life, there's a catch. Building a website with responsive design is not a replacement for a mobile app or site. There are subtle but key differences.
Depending on your business, you may find that you actually need a mobile web application instead of just a website that scales to a variety of devices and screen sizes. The reasons are:
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Functionality
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Weight
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Business Model
1) Functionality
The trick with responsive is that it's all in the layout. When a user is on a smart phone, they are looking at the exact same site as on a desktop computer, but the CSS or style sheet is scaling the site visually to look better on a mobile device. It's kind of like window dressing. The HTML page is exactly the same.
Now you may find that on a mobile device, you want to do more than simply make the website look different. You actually want to take advantage of a mobile device' hardware. You may want to let the user shake their phone to randomize a search, upload photo's through their phone camera, plot their location through GPS. These are things you'll actually have to build specifically for the mobile device - you obviously don't want this functionality for users on a desktop!
There may also be a lot of functionality on your main website that you want simplified and altered significantly on the mobile experience. If you have an iPhone, think of how different the main Facebook website is from the iPhone app version of Facebook. On the latter, the functionality is simplified significantly from how you would use it on the website (no instant messaging for example).
An added benefit of mobile websites is that you can include a link at the bottom of the site "Click here to leave the mobile version". This way, you can present your user with choice so they default to the mobile version, but can always load the desktop version on their phone if they so choose.
2) Weight
With responsive, again, the HTML page is exactly the same regardless of what device you're viewing it on. On a mobile device, every bit of information a user has to download counts - because users often have slower internet connections and their phones have less memory than a desktop computer.
So if your main website has a lot of intensive graphics, videos, and sounds that a user has to download, responsive design is not going to change that when the user is viewing it on a smart phone. A mobile web app on the other hand is a completely different site, made specifically for phones, and there are a lot of techniques developers can employ to make the page as fast and lightweight as possible.
I won't get too much into the technical stuff here, but it would include using HTML5 local storage techniques, limiting the amount of http requests, keeping Javascript libraries as compressed and minimal as possible, loading smaller images and a whole lot more.
3) Business Model
If you have a blog, chances are your website will be used the same way regardless of what device you're user is accessing it with. Blog's are always for finding and reading content, and sometimes commenting on a post. In that case, responsive design is probably a perfect solution, since it allows the content to be optimally viewed on a phone.
Now on the other hand, if your website involves a lot of user functionality, like the aforementioned Facebook, which includes adding photos, tagging pictures, posting content, finding friends and more, it's much better to design a specific mobile experience that varies greatly from the desktop experience.
And you don't have to be as big as Facebook either. There are a lot of companies whose desktop websites wouldn't translate well as merely a shrunken down mobile version, but would benefit from a true mobile app. Some examples may be banks, movie theatres, restaurants, concert venues, e-commerce stores, social sites... the list goes on.
The other factor to consider too is whether or not you want to sell your app and/or make it available on the iTunes Store or Android Marketplace. If you do, responsive is not going to work. On the other hand, you could make a native iPhone/iPad/Android app, OR build a mobile web app using open standards and using the insanely clever PhoneGap, you can package your web app as if it is a native app. This will enable you to use the phone hardware like contact lists, voice and camera, and will also allow you to sell it on app stores.
Closing thoughts
As a general rule, I like to think of it like this: If your website is meant to be viewed, Responsive Design is an amazingly simple technique to please visitors on your site (in fact, I think that building in Responsive is the first place every company should start when they want to dip their toes in the mobile landscape).
On the other hand, if your website is primarily meant for users to interact with (games, accounts, videos, social, e-commerce etc.) then a mobile web app is an important investment worth making.
Posted On May 18th, 2011 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Business, Marketing,
I was recently doing business in the US when a potential client for a large organization asked about the value of social media. He said a prominent person posted something on Twitter akin to “Wow, the sun finally came out today. I want to get to some long overdue gardening”. His point was, who cares and why should his followers be subjected to such pointless drivel?
I’m going to use two examples to illustrate the value of needless information in social media:
Celebrity Magazines
It always astounds me how celebrity gossip magazines/blogs stay in business. But they do because there are millions of people out there who care what Brangelina ate today, where they went, what they bought at the store. And when a celebrity starts a twitter account, look out! Millions of followers are ready and willing to read when their last bowel movements were.
Advertising
How many of us look forward to Super Bowl ads? Have you ever noticed that some of the best ads that we enjoy watching do not sell with information or logic? They often sell with emotion and humor - two powerful weapons of any marketer. We don’t enjoy them because they gave us information and told us about their product in a direct manner, we enjoy them because they entertain us, and over time we associate their brand with positive feelings.
Social Media can build your brand
So to answer the question; Who cares what you ate for breakfast? Everyone who follows you does. If they have cared to subscribe to your content, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Four Square or any other social network you use for your company, then people care about what you are doing.
Does that mean they are necessarily going to comment or respond any time you make small talk that is weather, food, travel related? Not really. Sure, constantly talking about irrelevant personal data will get annoying and people will stop following you. The key is to mix it up and be yourself, just like you would if you were talking to someone in person.
Talk about things that matter to you and throw in a few trivial statements about whatever you happen to be thinking about. If you’re funny in real life, then be funny on the web. Some posts can be informative, some can be direct self-promotion, and others can be statements on the weather.
What’s the point you may ask? If someone is following your posts, then small talk shows that you’re human, that you have feelings and that you don’t just use Facebook to talk about new deals you’re offering. And the more someone trusts you and associates your brand with positive things like gardening in the spring, or enjoying a fine ale at the local pub, then the more likely they are to give you a call when they need work done, or visit your site to buy products. That is just marketing, and the principles haven’t changed just because social media came along.
Posted On March 30th, 2011 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Business, Marketing,
You’ve come up with the perfect idea for a website! A social-media application that let’s users (insert brilliant idea here). You’ve secured the funding, and have done your due-diligence to find, interview and ultimately assemble a dream team of talented designers and developers to make your ingenious idea a reality.
When you’re asked how much traffic and revenue you expect from the site, you modestly predict that within the first month alone, you’ll get anywhere between 10,000 - 100,000 unique visits. Sure, during that first month, you only expect to cover your overhead and break even. But two months after launch? Heck, you’ll already be preparing for early retirement! The ad revenue alone is going to top the $1 million mark, and that’s not even taking into account the third month, when you sell the website to the highest bidder (they’re naturally going to be clawing at each other to become the lucky buyer of your fortune 500 enterprise).
I realize that this is coming across as sarcastic and condescending — so I digress…
This exaggerated scenario resembles how some entrepreneurs approach a new internet business venture. It’s exciting to come up with an idea that has legs, and even more so to see it come to fruition. However, I believe that over-confidence has a counter-productive effect on a web business and that it’s far better to be over-zealous. Let me explain the difference:
Over-confident website owners
Over-confident website owners feel that just because an idea seems good and because friends and family think it’s great, that it will require almost no work to make a success, or that it will require work only short term and then become self-sustaining. To inexperienced website owners, once we website it built, the work is done and now it’s just a matter of marketing it.
What happens is that these people realize shortly after launch that the site is not getting the traffic or attention they feel it deserves, and it puts them in a re-active state, changing the site on the fly and quickly running out of the money required to make these changes.
Zealous website owners
On the other hand, a more experienced website owner knows how much time and effort it takes to successfully run a website and then be able to monetize it. So instead of becoming over-confident, she become over-zealous (in a good way). She starts small, maybe with only a simple website, and she pour her energies into it. It becomes her hobby. For the first while, this person isn’t worried about how much money she’s making, just how much quality content is being generated and how much discussion can be ignited.
Many simple websites have been gradually built to the point that they are ready to be commercialized, but only once they have built a steady following and respect among users. This cannot happen overnight. It can only happen with hard work and determination.
Start simple, plan for complexity
In the case that your website idea is not just a content-driven blog or community site, but rather a larger, more complex web application, the advice here is still to start as small as you can. The reason? You will need more money to maintain and improve the site over time. Don’t blow your wad of cash at the very beginning when you don’t even know what kind of update you’ll get. A successful web application is never a one-shot deal, it always evolves over time. Plan for that growth.
If you build it, they won’t necessarily comment
Another scenario in which website owners can become over-confident is with user-commenting. All too often I’ve been asked to build the ability to comment on a website blog, only to told later to remove it because the owner is afraid he will receive too many comments to have the time to moderate.
There are two fundamental problems with this line of thinking.
- If you don’t have time to approve or moderate comments, then you don’t have the time to write content quality regularly for a blog. This is like someone who wants to have a dog but doesn’t feel they’ll have the time to walk it. If you can’t make the time, then don’t have one. There is no way to “automate” a blog in any kind of genuine manner.
- These people are grossly overestimating how much commenting their site will actually get! It’s hard to get users to comment.
Most users read so many blog posts, tweets, wall posts and news articles on a daily basis that the only time they will actually take the time to comment is if they either know the writer or if they really feel what they have to say is valuable. As a website owner, you may have a lot of readers but still find it tough to ignite much in the way of good conversation. It’s hard. It takes patience and determination to write content that really encourages users to interact.
So lower your expectations, but don’t curb your enthusiasm. Approach a website like it’s going to be an uphill battle, but one you won’t lose. It’s just going to take hard work and a long attention span, then when if finally does become a success, you’ll be that much more satisfied with the results.
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