Tag Archives: business thinking

January 28, 2016 · 9:47 am

Feeding The Spiders

As happens from time to time in this space, today’s post might seem a little geeky. Please bear with me – there is a broader business point that emerges from the somewhat technical premise! 

I was discussing Search Engine Optimization with a prospective client the other day. For those of you who don’t know what that is, you can think of it as the process through which web pages are optimized to rank highly in search for particular terms. As you know from your own use of a search engine, ranking on the first page of results tends to get you more clicks than being on page 3. It used to be a highly technical process, and while there are still some fairly technical pieces to it, the best practice I follow when working on it with clients is pretty simple: create a great user experience.

Oddly, it helps to think of the search engine spiders (the robots that comb the web for pages and organize them) as people. If you create a great user experience for a person, odds are that the spider will find it attractive too and ingest the information properly. What do I mean? Great content is a great user experience. So is a site that’s easy to navigate with clear buttons and no broken links. Content that has been proofread and is error free makes a great user experience. While there are some technical things – title tags and back links to name two – that require attention, it’s the user experience that it driving SEO these days.

We can say that about any aspect of business, I think. A great user experience – a pleasant, functioning environment married to great customer service – is the most basic requirement. Solving a customer’s problem and providing great value while doing so (notice I didn’t say at a low-cost!) is the recipe for success.  Thinking about how best to feed the search spiders can help create a better business experience overall. Does that make sense?

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January 25, 2016 · 12:44 pm

Still Not Worthy

I’ve written before about an annual survey conducted by the Gallup folks. They ask people to “tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields – very high, high, average, low, or very low.” I’m sure it’s not shocking to you that nurses top the chart with respect to the percentage of people who respond their ethics and honesty are high or very high. It might, however, be a shock to you where businesspeople – and ad people in particular – fall on the scale.  

Just 1 in 10 US adults rates the honesty and ethical standards of advertising practitioners as high or very high.  While ad people did manage to surpass car salespeople (8% rating as having high or very high honesty and ethical standards), members of Congress (8%), telemarketers (8%) and lobbyists (7%), it’s still not very good.  In fact, it’s sad.  But is it a surprise?

Unfortunately, I don’t think so.  Not when we can read members of the ad community advocating disguising ads as content.  Not when we knowingly allow robots to access our sites so it appears that we’re serving up more ads to people than we really are.  Not when influencers talk about something they like without disclosing that they’ve been paid to mention the product.

It’s not just the ad business.  Business executives overall were well thought of by only 17% of the respondents.  That falls behind lawyers (21%) and labor union leaders (18%).  Again, not a shock, given the almost daily news reports of unsafe products (hoverboards, air bags to mention just two) that the manufacturers knew had a problem but which were sold anyway.

2016 is only a few weeks old. Maybe instead of resolving to lose weight or to quit smoking, those of us in business need to resolve to up our ethics and honesty?  Maybe we should be focusing on doing right for our customers and not for our shareholders?  What are your thoughts?

 

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January 22, 2016 · 11:13 am

Ripe

It’s Foodie Friday and this week’s post is inspired by my breakfast. My weekday breakfast almost always involves a banana, and this morning’s banana looked yummy until I actually bit in. It was not really ripe enough. The texture that too hard for my taste and the flavors hadn’t really matured. In fact, it was kind of tasteless and quite unsatisfying. The banana would definitely have benefited from another day or two of ripening. 

Despite my day not being off to a great start, a business point popped into my head. Many businesses suffer from the same phenomenon as the banana (although honestly I am not blaming the banana for being eaten too soon). We don’t let things ripen and we move overly fast. I see this with some clients who forget the original business plan when a new opportunity presents itself, losing sight of what had got the business to this point. That sort of action – moving too fast away from what was a good idea – does nothing but engender short-term thinking.

Failing to let the business ripen also means you’ve not got enough customer feedback. It takes time to scale, and even if you enjoy explosive growth, it takes time for both the business and your customers to figure out what feedback is meaningful based on repeat engagements, etc. You would much rather hear from a customer who has purchased and used your product several times that a one-time experience.

You need to ripen to assess the right size of your staff. You need to ripen to estimate what your real operating costs are and will be. To the extent scale improves product costs, you need to ripen in order to make that assessment. Finally, you need to ripen to ascertain what your real capital needs are. Early cash flow won’t be as promising as it will become down the road (hopefully) but those needs don’t present themselves right away.

I am all for moving quickly, particularly when a company is young.  Haste, however, can make waste when that speed and a failure to let things ripen means a loss of focus.  Make sense?

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