Web strategy & Web development blog

Posts Tagged ‘website strategy’

Social Metrics are Important: Infosys

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

smA month back I was talking to R. N. Prasad, Associate Vice-President of Infosys Technologies Limited at Conference on “Leveraging Innovation for Knowledge Economy” held at J.N. Tata Auditorium, National Science Seminar Complex, IISc, Bengaluru.

He was talking about “Business Intelligence Framework”. On discussion he revealed how Infosys is using social media data. He called it as “sentiment analysis”. They extract data from forums where people are discussing about Infosys. They use the data to analyse their supply chain management and the investor relation management. He clearly explained it helps them to be a better company for their stakeholders (i.e. investors, clients etc.) So you can take a lesson from Infosys and hear the free voice of the people, which will help you to understand what your users are saying about you.

Internet (social media, forums and blogs) gives a freedom to people to express anything their mind say which you can’t get by survey and offline talks. It is a metrics that could break the ice moulded mind set of your company and you can serve your stakeholders better.

We admire Infosys as a company and closely following its online strategy and can say its one of the early adopters of social media and blogs in corporate India with its Think Flat and other blogs. You can checkout this blog post what they have to say about Social Media & Risk Management. Also you can expect the quickest reply from @infosys in twitter (my experience)

Website Strategy Equation:
Social Media + Blog + Forums + your website = Better Risk Management + Better Supplier + Customer + Investor relation = A better shock resistant company.

What do you think about the role of social media in your organization?

Web Strategy of The week II: Don’t make your visitor surf a lot

Saturday, September 12th, 2009
We know you want visitors to spend a lot of time on your site. But he/she shouldn’t spend 70% of the time roaming over irrelevant objects to him/her.

Often who visits your site want to be converted. That’s why he came to your site. But we see site owners make it difficult for them to get converted. We often see more visitor need to surf more to find what he or see wants, more chances are their he/she quits the site and don’t think to comeback again.

So here are the rules:
a) Make your services easier for me to find:

You can check our site. We placed the direct links to our major services on our main navigation bar instead of putting these under a service tab. Again we categorized our services for each of our target market. And also we have a search box attached which make it easier for you to find our services within a fraction of time.

When anybody comes to your site, he/she is coming to know more about your services rather than your company. And if he likes your services then the next step he does is going to checkout whether you are a good company or not. So give 1st preference to your service on your site.

b) Make your contact details readily availability:

As soon as the visitor decides to take your service he/she will search the contact details. So a readily available contact details will benefit you. Place a call to action button that takes to your form on each page so as soon as they decide to buy you they will give you their details. And you know “Time is Money“.

c) Put links to your blog articles, videos, slides on a perticular service on that service page itself:

In maximum cases a visitor doesn’t decide on its first visit. So he/she needs to know more about your service and its importance and they need to come to your website again and again. So it is a good idea to call them to see your blog posts, your videos & your slides.

Site owners often put a link to the home of the blog. But think a while, your blog contains posts about other services or topics also, in which he/she may not be interested. So while putting links ensure the link leads them to the related blog articles. You can do it by putting a link to an archived page for a certain tag which facility is readily available in most of the blog softwares.

If you have more ideas, please reply below I’ll follow it up. If you want to discuss more with me on “website strategy” please tweet me @sanmaya quickly. I’ll request you to follow me.

Web Strategy of The week I: Do an early stage engagement

Saturday, September 5th, 2009
How can you get more convertible lead? How to do an early stage engagement with your visitors. Your website strategy for this.

leasure-meet-weding-bizIf you had read our blog post on benefits of reaching your customers early, you would have understand how crucial it is to engage with your target market as early as possible. Today I’ll discuss about how to do an early stage engagement with your customer by using your website and other online media.

a) the best way to know how, is to meet your present client base

I can’t give you all the data relevant to your business. So we meet our clients on regular intervals to know what better we can serve them. How things are going on. Do they have any idea to increase the potential of their site.

But the important thing we ask them is, “When you were looking for a web designer or company what was the first thing you did?” Then we note it down how they found us gradually.

One of our client told me, “We didn’t search Google or gone online to do it.  Instead I asked my managers if they know somebody very good in web designing.” So we had a conclusion that it is good for us to meet their professionals or managers and to engage with them as early as possible. But for a small team like us it was not possible for us to meet them. So we searched even better and found that they are using different social media sites. So we engaged with them online and made the conversation with more personal touch.

We told each of our employees to have a personal touch with as many other professionals as they can. And to our surprise they not only gave the project of their company to us, but gave project of other 2-3 companies also as one of his friend is working in that company.

We use Orkut, Twitter, Face book, Hi5 etc to engage with them, but we never used marketing them to, we discuss about our professional and personal life and some time we share our experience with a project with them.

b) The second best thing to be on Google

More than 62% of professionals start their online activity searching Google and 80% of the professionals search B2B projects on Google. So when they are searching Google why not to be on Google? For being on Google several companies would recommend you to run SEO campaigns etc. Yah! It’s important. But before doing that make your contents appealing, more problem solving and regularly put fresh contents to your site. This will give you a boost on your SEO activities. For a detailed SEO visit our SEO section or wait for a blog post.

c) The third best thing is to be on blogs

Your blog should solve the early queries in their mind, so it should b your prime focus to write articles on it. So when they Google a query, your blog article will be the one to solve it. So it will give you an early engagement with them. But don’t forget to maintain about your blog articles on other social media where you have a presence.

But more importantly you should have a good presence on other blogs than too. If you are a cosmetic company you should have a presence on cloth companies’ blog / lingerie blog. But be social, don’t spam. Do a healthy discussion their. Yah, you can mention, “when our client come to shop cosmetics they too agree that good lingerie help them to make their man in mood. I do agree with you. “This is by no mean a spam but the other people commenting their will know you are a cosmetic company and engage with your clients more.

d) The fourth best thing “I don’t know!”

Yah! Website strategy is an evolving topic and it has many face and facts. So you may invent a new, we may invent a new! As soon as we will get something new you could see that on our “video of the week”.

To know about our service on website strategies visit our service section here. Website strategy service