Online Business Advice

Are you ready to reinvent your business?

Sohal Khatwani - Thursday, November 12, 2009

Written by Rieva Lesonsky

Remember the famous Tom Hanks line in the movie A League of Their Own: "There's no crying in baseball"? Apparently, entrepreneurs aren't crying in their beer either. According to a study just released by ThomasNet.com, the online site that connects buyers and sellers globally, "despite challenges that are out of their control," business owners are both optimistic about their abilities to ride out the rest of the economic storm, and also expect to grow this year.

An overwhelming 76 percent of those surveyed in the semi-annual ThomasNet Industry Market Barometer believe the economy will improve by the second quarter of 2010 or sooner. And 35 percent actually expect their businesses to grow this year.

These people are not delusional; over half saw a dip in their businesses in the first half of 2009 (most of them lost customers). But they are determined, as one survey respondent said, not to participate in the recession and to focus instead on changing the way they conduct business.

But the most interesting part of the survey was how these businesses chose to fight their way back to business growth. Most decided to essentially reinvent their sales strategies. To find out more, I spoke with Linda Rigano, executive director of strategic services at ThomasNet. Rigano says 70 percent of the businesses decided to institute new sales tactics, specifically by:

Increasing online marketing
Expanding into new markets, particularly internationally
Exploring new channels of distribution

Nearly 40 percent are tackling the problem by innovating and creating new products.

There's a good lesson here for all of us. As Rigano says, in times as challenging as these, "You can't go back to your old ways." To survive, "you've got to do something different."

Perhaps the easiest way to start reinventing and reinvigorating your company is to take a good look at your Web site. While it's important to have a solid Web site with good content and navigation that's easy to use (as well as a price list, a fact I learned years ago from another ThomasNet survey), Rigano encourages entrepreneurs to develop a strategic online sales plan.

This may sound intimidating, but Rigano says you should look at your offline sales plan and replicate it. For instance, if you were hiring a new salesperson (offline), your first step would be to "identify your business objectives." To help you do that online, ask yourself, "How can my Web site help me meet my business objectives?"

The next step, advises Rigano, is to consider your customers, both existing and potential. Determine where those customers are shopping, what they're looking for, and what actions they take when they find it. Rigano advises that you consider what customers are asking for and find a way to bring it online. Do your customers currently call you? Make sure you list a toll-free number on your site. Do they compare your products to the products of other vendors? Build an online comparison engine that customers can use. Engage in e-commerce? Make sure customers can get a price quote or fill out an online purchase order.

The key is to make it as easy to do business with you online as it is offline, since the more business you conduct online, the lower your overhead is likely to be. If you're selling products, it is crucial you offer an online catalog. In the Market Barometer survey, many respondents decided not to tackle that on their own. Instead, they reported that they focused on their "core strengths" and turned to experts for help creating online catalogs or developing new sales strategies.

How much of a difference can this make? Rigano cited a client who, after posting a new interactive online catalog, saw a 15 percent jump in sales for the year. This client reported that the new online catalog was the single largest contributor to the increase.

Rigano says there are two common mistakes small businesses make when moving some of their business online. The first is not paying attention to metrics. You need to know how many people come to your site, how much time they spend there, what pages they're looking at, and how often they are abandoning their shopping carts. And check your metrics as often as you would check in with your salespeople. The key, according to Rigano, is "to arm your Web site with the same ammunition you would give a real salesperson."

Asking the wrong question may be the second big mistake you make. Too many business owners ask, "What do I want customers to do when they come to my site?" Instead, ask yourself, "What do customers want to do when they come to my site?" and design it accordingly.

This week President Obama noted the important role of small business in leading the nation out of these challenging economic times. If the optimism and strategic thinking of those answering the ThomasNet Market Barometer survey are any indication, better times may be right around the corner.

http://www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/sales-selling-sales/13271108-1.html

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Facebook and Barack Obama - Story of a people expert

Fergal Coleman - Thursday, March 19, 2009

From
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/134/boy-wonder.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1207594/print

How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign

By Ellen McGirt

Chris Hughes is having a philosophical moment. "I don't really know what 'community' means. And I never use that word."

We are in Washington, D.C., just three days before his most recent boss, Barack Obama, will take office. It is so bone-jarringly cold that even nestled over coffee inside a Starbucks, we can see our breath. I resist the urge to pat his nearly whiskerless cheek, or reach over to tighten his jacket against the frigid air. Such a baby face. But at the age of 25, Hughes has helped create two of the most successful startups in modern history, Facebook and the campaign apparatus that got Barack Obama elected. Both were dedicated to the proposition that communities, and the way we share and interact within them, are vitally important. As he recounts his two years as director of online organizing for the man who put community organizing on the map, the existential reverie is understandable. He doesn't know what community means? Really? "Well, I just never think of myself as being in the business of building an online community."

Hughes is a technology star whose business is people. At Facebook and in the Obama campaign, he has been plowing what he observes about human behavior into online systems that help real people do what they want to do in their real lives. He helped develop the most robust set of Web-based social-networking tools ever used in a political campaign, enabling energized citizens to turn themselves into activists, long before a single human field staffer arrived to show them how.

"Technology has always been used as a net to capture people in a campaign or cause, but not to organize," says Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. "Chris saw what was possible before anyone else." Hughes built something the candidate said he wanted but didn't yet know was possible: a virtual mechanism for scaling and supporting community action. Then that community turned around and elected his boss president. "I still can't quite wrap my mind around it," Hughes says.

His key tool was My.BarackObama.com, or MyBO for short, a surprisingly intuitive and fun-to-use networking Web site that allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another -- not unlike a more focused, activist Facebook. MyBO also let the campaign reach its most passionate supporters cheaply and effectively. By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages.

There were, of course, many players in the Obama victory, starting with the candidate himself. President Obama was not made available for an interview (not surprising given his new set of responsibilities). But Plouffe, sounding very much like the jubilant CEO of a super-successful startup, is clear: "We were very lucky that Chris gravitated to the campaign early." Indeed, a close look at Hughes's efforts and their impact on the campaign sheds new light on Obama's success at the polls -- in both the primary and the general elections -- and offers lessons for any enterprise seeking to tap social networking as a tool.

At first, online organizing was a stepchild within Obama's new-media operation. But after the loss in the New Hampshire primary, the volunteer networks that Hughes had built with his bare-bones staff "became critically important," says Plouffe. "When we turned to the community, they were there. We sent staff into Colorado and Missouri for caucuses, and the staff was already half-organized." The theme of the campaign, direct from Obama, was that the people were the organization. "We were there to support the people," Plouffe continues, "but that simply would not have been possible if we did not have a set of online tools that enabled us to do that. It wasn't just a tactic. Chris made that happen."

Continue the article....

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