Google Analytics on your desktop

Image via Wikipedia

 

If you have not heard of Adobe AIR before then it may not be a surprise. However, if you are a marketer and you have not heard of Google Analytics then I would be flabbergasted.

Tracking your visitors and web traffic through the use of Google Analytics is an essential activity for most web marketers these days. This data is one stream of many pieces of information being fed to you all day and everyday as part of your job. It’s a tsunami of information which needs to be tamed and used effectively.

This is where Adobe’s AIR comes in nicely. You don’t really need to know much about AIR if you are not a developer. You just install it for free on your PC or MAC and forget about it.

Then you can download a free tool from the Adobe web site called ‘Google Analytics Reporting Suite’ which sits on your desktop and provides a very nice way to analyse your Google Analytics information in a much more user-friendly way than from the web site.

In the jargon, this is called a ‘Rich Internet Application’ which is software which allows you much more control over how the information that is important to you gets displayed. It’s good and you will see a lot more of these sort of tools which take information from the web and present it to you in a much better way than previously possible.

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Star Wars Mouse

 

I saw this on Microsoft’s homepage and it took me a while to understand what it was. It’s their new mouse and it looks great.

It’s as though it has come out of the Apple design studios it’s so different. It’s about time we had some different looking hardware and this mouse is great.

Compared to these old fashioned looking things which we are all used to.

Image by williamli1983 via Flickr

 

 

 

 

 

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Overspending on web development for small businesses

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Some years back, I set up and launched an online delicatessen which sold the produce of small farmers and producers. There was a demand locally and nationally, and it was differentiated from other delicatessens.

I hired a web design company to set up a super web site which had e-commerce capabilities. But, I had no money left to market it effectively and it broke the business.

The lessons were that I should have spent far less on the web site, more time building my business at small markets to begin with, more time writing a blog about food and producers which pointed to my web site and developed my business more cheaply using suitable web methods.

If I had done this, then I would have enabled the business to survive and kept vital cash in the business while still promoting it through my blog and web site.

There was no Twitter at that time and Facebook was barely off the ground. Google Adwords did work and brought me some nice leads, but even then, it cost more money than I had left to market it correctly with the lack of money to do it.

Web sites are important for small businesses but you must keep your scale and your ambitions in check and invest in your web site in line with your clear marketing strategy and budget.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Surveys just waste our time

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I had to laugh this morning watching the BBC’s breakfast TV show this morning while eating a slice of toast. One news item talked about a new survey which was revealing which fast food retail outlets were the worst offenders for causing litter in the UK.

Why on earth do you need a survey to tell you that? You just have to look at which are the most numerous fast food outlets in your local town or any town you pass through on your travels to make a pretty well informed guess at which those fast food outlet offenders are likely to be.

Of course, it is not the fast food outlets causing the littering. They merely provide the materials for people with less than adequate socials skills to make their statement about not caring about their environments.

It appears that the BBC is littering the airwaves with these nonsensical surveys which just waste our time and don’t reveal anything that we don’t know already.

 

 

 

 

 

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Will LinkedIn and Twitter kill telemarketing?

 

 

I have recently joined a great small business which develops digital solutions for its clients and produces very high quality work. I have been hired to develop new business so that they can continue to grow their profits and expand their capabilities.

The small sales team is very good and highly committed. In the past, to generate new leads and appointments they hired the services of a telemarketing company. They pay them £400 per appointment made as long as it is qualified to their requirements.

Fair enough, you may think, for them to pay the telemarketing company that sort of money for making them appointments according to their brief. But, if they make five appointments for them a week the bill soon mounts up (£2,000 a week if your maths is a bit tired!).

I have been encouraging them to use LinkedIn and it was easy to see that using this tool will be far more effective for the sales team to find new clients than paying a telemarketing company.

Using LinkedIn, I found a prospect in the group of one of their existing key clients. We asked their current contact if he knew the person in question and he replied in the positive. We now have an appointment with contact found on LinkedIn and it cost us nothing bar a couple of phone calls and an email, saving us £400.

So, my question is simple. Will LinkedIn, and other tools such as Twitter, kill telemarketing companies when it is far easier and cheaper to find key prospects using these tools?

 

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Selling like they’re your friends

 

 

This is a great article about selling to customers as though they are your friends.

http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen.articles/37/Friends–Motives-and-Profits–Avoid-Fear-based-Selling

Back to social networking blues

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Three days back at work and you wouldn’t know that you had been off work. Well, apart form that I have just started a great new job in an exciting business.

My first day was very revealing about the use or misuse of Facebook! The number of people who had written their true feelings about going back to work was noticeable. Some had written about how they would rather break their leg than go back or about their overwhelming reluctance.

People forget just how public their Facebook profile is and it was fun hearing people squirm when their boss commented on their comments!

One social networking tool I have been using is Twitter. Initially sceptical, I am starting to see how useful it is for picking ideas and information and for finding people who are interested in the same things that you are interested in. Addictive is the wrong word for Twitter.

It is a step up from just Googling to find interesting information. With Twitter, you search for terms or topics you are interested in and sign up to or follow the ‘Tweets’ that people write about that and other details.

More often than not, I have picked up information, news and articles which I would never have found through just Googling them.

After a short while, I noticed I was getting a bit overwhelmed with Twitter and following ‘Twitiquette’ which involves politely saying ‘thank you for following me on Twitter’ when people start signing up to hear your Tweets.

So, I found some interesting tools including ‘Tweetdeck’, which sits on your desktop and draws down your Tweets from the internet automatically. Also, there is ‘Tweetlater’ which politely respond to anyone who follows your Tweets for you.

Twitter looks like being a useful tool for seeing what people are saying about your business, or information you are interested in a much more active way than Google or other search engines.

VOIP and virtual classrooms

Using VOIP in conjunction with virtual classroom delivery of training, is good if it works. But with some virtual classroom systems you can enable the delegates to record a version of the session to their local machines. In my experience, this can make demands upon the VOIP system of the virtual classroom which negatively effects the voice quality.

Also, if you use VOIP which is integrated with the virtual classroom, when the virtual classroom service is interrupted, so is the VOIP with it. This leaves the delegates ‘stranded’ which is why I always have a normal ‘phone bridge backup in case this happens.

I work with another phone bridge provider which provides a good service compared to most phone bridge/conference call services by way of offering an ‘all you can speak’ product thereby stripping out all of the variable, price per minute services on the market. For example, for one phone bridge number we pay only £39-95 per month no matter how many conference calls we make per month on that number.http://www.allconferencecalls.co.uk .

Alternatively, you can use Skype with a virtual classroom. I have used some good services which combine phone bridge with Skype ( http://www.hidefconferencing.com/) so you can enable your delegates to use either VOIP or a normal phone line in a session. This is quite cheap to use and it also has good chairperson controls to mute everyone if there is a lot of background noise and to control the questions being asked so that the trainer can keep his course on track.

 

The trainer must set the rules at the beginning of the course to say when he/she would accept questions live and when he/she would answer them through the usual Q&A tools in the VC. To me, this sounds like a case of poor virtual classroom preparation by the ‘training company’ and the trainer.

There are large financial benefits to be gained by using a virtual classroom system compared to a ‘bricks and mortar’. If we were not using our partner status with Microsoft, we would only be paying £100 per month for an account with one of their service providers in the UK for Live Meeting 2007. Add this with our ‘all you can speak’ phone bridge service (when we are not using VOIP) then the cost benefits are easily seen over a traditional classroom. A traditional classroom in the UK can be rented per day for about £250 to £300 for a non-technical classroom.

The virtual classroom makes business sense as long as the product is sold correctly and, to re-iterate my earlier comments,any virtual classroom course needs to be run in a very particular way to ensure that the learning value is not lost.

If you would like any further input and advice, please do drop me a line. I have run virtual classroom based courses with my own business, for the UK largest IT training company and also for Hewlett-Packard over the last three years and I have a lot of experience in how to run and manage them.

will@arryawke.co.uk

 

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Using virtual classrooms

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I have been using and trying virtual classrooms for three years and have used Webex and Live Meeting mainly. I have also looked at Citrix’s ‘GoToMyMeeting’. I have been using Live Meeting as our choice of virtual classroom in my own live online learning business (www.retendotraining.com) for a year now.

Of all of the systems I have used, Webex was the most reliable but the most costly. Live Meeting is cheap (if you are a Microsoft partner), GoToMyMeeting) is good but lacked VOIP capabilities when we looked at it. I looked at Moodle but it required too much development for us at the time.

As for effectiveness, that really comes down to the trainer and the content. The trainer needs to be very skilled in delivering the course in a virtual classroom because they need to keep the delegates engaged which is much more challenging than in a normal classroom. They do this through asking questions, by using whiteboard scenarios onto which delegates write responses, using polls and running live demonstrations or videos, as well as asking for feedback on whether the course is running too fast or too slowly.

Most of the virtual classrooms enable these capabilities. Webex is strong and reliable and enables you to add on modules to help administrate courses. Live Meeting through Microsoft can sometimes be unreliable when using the VOIP.

The content needs to be delivered in a different way which, in a nutshell, requires it to be broken down into chunks which are delivered in no more than two hours at a time in the virtual classroom. We deliver two modules of two hours each per week through a virtual classroom per course, for instance. But the main point is that you need to make sure that the content is delivered in a very engaging way to make up for the lack of face to face contact.

As for delegate reaction to this form of training, my experiences are mixed. Some like it, some don’t. Those that like it, like the variety (we mix up live sessions with self-paced learning, practical work and modular assessments). Those that don’t like it are usually trying to learn when they are at their workstations which can be noisy and distracting which inhibits effective learning.

Dr Ruth Clark has some very useful information about using virtual classrooms effectively. http://www.clarktraining.com/.

In general, don’t expect that a course designed for delivery in a normal classroom can be delivered through a virtual classroom without being adapted to the online environment.

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Ten things I learnt this year…

Ten lessons in business start up

Hindsight has always been my best teacher and learning by doing is how I learn. It is a painful process but it is valuable. I have read many business books and watched many ‘business TV shows’ but nothing is as valuable as getting stuck in and doing it. The pain this year has not stopped any desire or drive to do business. It has inspired it.

Here is my 2008 list of lessons I learnt this year which I will keep at the front of my mind this year.

1. Don’t  be cocky when starting a business about how well it will go.
   • Researching a market before you start a business must go further than just one prospect and a few positive conversations. It’s easy to get excited about an idea but you need to ask real prospects about your idea and their response to it in detail before you decide it is a realistic proposition.
2. Being friends with people when you start up a business is not the same as knowing that the team will work.
   • People who are very skilled and experienced in their professions will not necessarily work together in a manner which will produce the results your business needs. This can be said for any team, whether in business or sport. Make sure the team works before you start and be prepared to walk away if you have any doubts.
3. Make detailed plans before you start the business.
   • You need all the time you have when you start a business to sell your product or service. Any time spent on writing a business plan during selling time is going to negatively effect your sales pipeline. There is not the  slack in a small business which those in a large business take for granted. So, write a detailed business plan before you start the business and get selling.
4. Give up your job only when you have sales and working capital in place.
   • Sales are your lifeblood. Working capital is your backbone. Nobody will believe your business idea enough to lend you real money until you have proof that customers are spending real money with you. Without these you will find yourself in a very difficult position where a great business idea shrivels and becomes just an idea that cost you a lot of money.
5. Ensure you do all the boring paperwork before you do anything.
   • In a business start-up make sure you do all of the dull activities like setting up a directors agreement and official paperwork with the government before you lift a finger. It may seem unexciting to do the dull things like deciding if you and your business partners can afford to take any holiday in the first year of your business, or what you charge to the business or not for expenses. When you know what is expected of you and what you expect of your business partners then life is a lot easier and it will ease any animosity later on.
6. Working virtually is fine in short bursts.
   • Working at home or in different offices when you start a business is a bad idea. You need to see your business partners to make sure that everyone knows what is going and to discuss the details and the ‘big rocks’. Working virtually is good when you are more established and need to be in different places. For me, my home is 150 miles from my business partners and this did not work. I had to spend scarce resources on travelling and being away from home a lot created tensions.
7. New technology is great when it works.
   • Even though using technology provided by major suppliers to run our business sounded as though it was reliable and was supposed to be, it was still relatively new. Newness is cool but be prepared for when it breaks. Relying on new technology without having a backup can mean your business looks amateur through no fault of its own.
8. Keep marketing aims realistic.
   • When you are small business you are unlikely to have much in the way of marketing budget. Don’t use big business methods in a small business. Your marketing plans must be in line with your business strategy. Speculating on marketing is hope and not strategy. Make sure that you research your market, as said earlier, and only spend on marketing your business when you are confident that it is an investment in your well researched strategy. I now ask myself “Would Warren Buffett spend the money on this marketing campaign?” If this answer is anywhere ‘no’ then it is risky speculation and not investment.
9. Don’t be arrogant about your idea and be prepared to change direction quickly.
   • Although you have an idea which people say good things about, you are the one who needs to make it work. The beauty of being in a small business is the ability to change direction quickly. If your business idea is not working out quite how you expected and it is not selling easily in the way that you imagined it would with your strategy, then listen to what your customers are saying and change it. Better to change your strategy and swallow your pride than waste time and money trying to carry on.
10. Small businesses have small business benefits.
    • It is exhilarating running your own business. You need energy, guts and guile to get it going. You must be prepared though to drop any corporate ideas you had from being an employee about your two weeks off in the summer, your skiing holiday in the New Year or the expense account until you have started to bring in sales and to make the business profitable. You may feel tired but, like having your first child, your business needs you to give it life and nurture it.

My lessons are likely to put a wry smile on the faces of other business people who recognise them. I have listened to many people and I have learnt a lot about people and business in the last year and I am the better for it. Listening and questioning are two activities I will carry out in earnest in 2009.

Look out for my list of challenges for 2009 coming soon.

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