Both Ken and Barbie are very similar in nature. Each possesses a natural propensity to succeed, have a strong work ethic and want to grow their businesses. In the past, both have worked with and had less than desirable experiences with web designers and developers, so as they look to enter the online environment with their new projects, they are trying to be more efficient.

In any case, they both need:

1. A solid Internet marketing strategy
2. A website that is built around their online strategy
3. to Drive traffic
4. to generate online sales

There is one major difference between Ken & Barbie’s mindsets. Ken thinks that he needs to exercise greater control over his next project because of his experience with less than stellar web designers and developers in the past. With this control, he’ll ensure that the website is built, designed and laid out exactly as he wants it. He understands that conversions and sales will translate to online success – especially if he is intimately involved with each phase.

Ken knows that  he can build his new vision on the cheap and is reaching out to ‘find a coder’ type  websites and understands that he can easily get in touch with an offshore team via Craigslist to keep his costs way down. After all, his niece is 14 years old and had designed her own website so why not keep costs to the bare minimum?

Barbie on the other hand, believes that she can become successful online but only if she has all the right people in place. She knows that she’ll need a designer and developer to build her website, but that she also needs a team that really understands the online space to make her idea work.

Here’s why Barbie stands a much higher chance of succeeding than Ken though they both possess the same skills sets.

• Barbie is more likely start her questions with, ‘What is the most effective way to…” versus “Here’s what we’re going to do…”
• Barbie doesn’t care if she doesn’t understand terminology or all the latest trends, but she’s determined to learn as much as she can whilst forming a relationship with a good Internet marketing team. (Ken won’t ask questions about what he doesn’t understand. Ken’s the man with the plan, so why would he need outside consulting?)
• Barbie wants to bring in someone who has a thorough understanding of the online space, is willing to take the time to understand her business vision in order to reach deeper into the US market.
• Barbie believes that in order for her online business to succeed she needs an effective blend of creative design, web development, online marketing and analytics. Most importantly, she understands that all must be given equal weight.

1 Year Later

Ken has actually been faster to launch his program. He hired a team in India for $12/hr and got his new site up fairly quickly. He’s already started some pay-per-click efforts and driving some traffic to his new site.

Barbie launches her site a few months later and feels comfortable with the Internet agency she hired.  Her site has little traffic but she’s already generating consistent online sales and is about to start her traffic driving campaign once her team shores up various bug fixes and improvements.

18 Months

Ken has double the traffic than Barbie’s site but is getting nervous because he has few online sales. India can’t keep up with Ken’s requests so he fires them and switches back to a local web designer and developer in the  U.S. Ken is now re-thinking the entire site and isn’t very happy that he may have to re-do his entire website, content management system and online strategy.

Barbie at 18 months is starting to see significant results. Her team had challenges of their own but were able to come up with solutions on the fly given the increasing number of online sales. Not only is she happy with her web team, she’s turned over much of the consulting and management of the website to them, given their familiarity with her business goals. She’s adding more players to the mix and ramping up additional online marketing spend.

Paying close attention to analytics and cost of conversion, she is able to make accurate spending decisions. Additionally she’s making enough money and realizes that she won’t need a second round of investment. Her customers are starting to spread the word about her products via Social Media and her online business is taking off.

Two Years Later

Ken ends up firing his web team in the U.S. (again) – much to their relief. He spends the next six months trying to assemble another team to manage his current site but no one is willing to do it for the price he wants to pay. Ken is a trooper though and despite difficult lessons learned he realizes that he needs to do more homework and really immerse himself in the online industry.

Ken pushes on but it is becoming evident to him that he’s spent triple the amount he thought he would and that he could have hired a seasoned US team from the start, and for less than he’s already spent.

On a whim, Ken attends and Internet Marketing Conference – where Barbie Roberts is the featured guest speaker. Ken has heard of her online boutique figures it wouldn’t hurt to hear a little more about Barbie’s success story. (not to mention he thinks she is hot after seeing a picture of her in a popular magazine recently)

Meanwhile, Barbie has a full ‘online staff’ and is still using the original team that built her site and constructed their online marketing plan. The business has gained enough traction and is confident with her team so that she’s able to have more time to herself. She dreams of meeting the right guy and settling down one day…

We all know what happens next. Ken and Barbie meet at her web conference and fall madly in love. Barbie gives Ken the contact information for the agency that helped that get her company off the ground. The rest is history. Ken gets the girl, Barbie is no longer lonely and the agency gets a new client.

The moral of the story you ask?

“Just do the damn thing right from the start.”

You’ll save time, resources, money and have a better product.

On the other hand, Twitter caters to the tech savvy not your casual (or older) computer user – which FB is going after. This will need to change if they want to compete with Facebook in attracting marketing spend.

Here are some points to consider about the two mediums:

• Twitter is more of a communication platform, while Facebook is more of an online destination/community.
• Facebook is also more personal, Twitter is somewhat impersonal.
• On Twitter, anyone can follow you.
• Women love Facebook
• Older men tend to avoid it until they finally cave in
• Many people still look at Twitter and say, ‘I don’t want to hear about when someone brushes their teeth, I just don’t get it’.
• On Facebook, by default, they cannot be your friend, unless you give them permission to.
• For a Facebook Fan Page though, anyone can become a fan (or ‘like’ a page as it is now called).

There is certainly cross-over & similarities between the two, but for businesses this realm does represent significant potential. Only in the last 6 months have I really felt this as Facebook has opened the door wider to businesses.

On the web & technology front, Twitter tends to attract the tech savvy type and therefore can easily continue its momentum in this regard. Something tells me that Twitter will eventually be purchase – but by whom (don’t say Google) ? And how would they integrate it (would Google nix Buz if they did purchase it)

But I also think it boils down to the ‘type’ of business. For example, here is a very random sample of business/brand entities and what they might see with these mediums.

• Clothing company:
  Facebook is completely relevant, Twitter is less effective based on what we are seeing.
• Coffee shop (ie. Starbucks)
  Twitter is very relevant as customers tend to be tech savvy and ‘on the go’ but Starbucks has nearly 7 million fans on FB compared to under 800k followers on Twitter. Wow!
• Golf Course:
  Facebook is more relevant, Twitter is not very effective from what we are seeing.
• Marketing company:
  Twitter more relevant, Facebook not as relevant (yet)
• Company/Retail:
  Facebook will become increasingly a better medium for all retail business now that Facebook is integrating e-commerce.
• Food Chain:
  Facebook becoming more relevant than Twitter
• Celebrity or Athlete:
  Twitter is an amazing platform for these folks (who are already popular) to enlarge their following. A perfect medium for stars and athletes on Twitter. It keeps people (followers) at a distance, and allows them more 1 way communication without too much interaction if they don’t want it.
• Renewable Energy Company:
  They could rock both spheres but I think FB could generate a lot of momentum for these types of companies.
• Gym (Fitness)
  No brainer. Facebook. They can create a sense of community online and get their members to talk to each other outside the gym *Creating an Online Community* – which is the highest achievement of any web presence.

The way I see it, Facebook may not seem very inviting right now to many businesses, I think that is changing very quickly. They will be a juggernaut for businesses looking to tap into Social Media.

What about your business?

Years later, now older, wiser…better looking, many now come to me and ask for my team to provide the very services that I explained ad-nauseam for 10+ years on my soap box.

Make no mistake.  I bask in this warm glory.

The evolution of communication, websites, applications and online marketing is staggering, and the pace of this evolution has been unbelievably fast—the understanding of these changes on the other hand has not. Many businesses in the mid- to late 90′s paid mind-boggling amounts of money to have their websites built to good salesmen at web companies mass producing websites.  Those days, like the idea of a brochure-ware website, are finally being laid to rest.

Despite being able to say things today like, “I told you so,” events like these are nothing more than ego-boosters, small victories that simply become personal mementos of countless hours of work. And while everything that I thought would happen (hoped for) has come true – there is something that is nagging me – something that begs my attention.

• What is the future of the corporate website?
• Will it die?
• Will it morph into something else now that businesses are finally on board?

Let me first state that this is not a new topic. Others have written about this and I’m starting to climb aboard this thought process. A website, for many businesses, is still quite critical right now and will continue to be for some time. In fact, most good online marketing strategies still benefit from having the website site at the center of all their marketing efforts.  The landscape that supports this idea however is shifting as I write this.

For the time being, websites will remain incredibly important for businesses, campaigns and selling products and services. What I question is how long this will last.  Here are some factors that may start digging the hole for corporate websites as we know them:

• Facebook (slowly but surely, FB is becoming a juggernaut – and me thinks they will try to replace the Corporate website for small biz)
• Social media (new sites will creep up & some current ones will grow bigger)
• Mobile devices make it easier to get  info while away from the desktop
• Lack of consumer trust in anything ‘corporate’
• Consumer’s increasing reliance on alternate channels (ie. social media)
• Less of a need to sell products from the ‘corporate’ site and more of a need to sell easily via different channels via their social business accounts
• Google Local Business
• Automated or Super-simple website building (ala WordPress or Business Catalyst)
• Did I say Mobile phones or computers?
• Less centralized marketing efforts & the decentralizing nature of the web
• Future entity (FB, Google, other) that reduce reliance on traditional sources of information
• Virtual environments – some  kind of virtual world will catch on in a game-changing way, or has it already?
• Smaller processing and ability to project a screen anywhere, e-paper..etc

One of the bigger forces that stands out to me is the decentralization that is taking place with the Internet.  For the last seven years, the core of a businesses’ online marketing program consisted of the following three pieces:

• a website
• the customer database
• an email marketing program.

This still remains the de-facto plan for many businesses. Yet, this plan is not only waning in the shadow of newer forms of communication, it is quickly becoming an antiquated model of thinking. Why though? Because it still is one-way communication. Businesses that aren’t able to create ‘conversations’ via the Internet will be at a major disadvantage.

Spewing forth mindless marketing and sales babble is just not enough any more.

In the end, a change is taking place and the old model of placing a ton of useless data on a website is coming to an end. The factors that surround this topic is enormous and this blog post is already too long, but an online marketing strategy has become much more important that designing a website. The traditional corporate website is dying – or perhaps in some kind of cocoon that will materialize as something else in just a few short years.

Don’t blink.

This is a challenging time for the media & marketing industry no doubt. It will put some out of business and create opportunities for others. Hourly rates have gone down and engineers, developers, designers, producers and marketers have all been shaken to the core.

After all, marketing is usually the first to go on the chopping block for businesses. Even so, there has also been a renewed interest in marketing and advertising for business that are looking for new & better ways to reach out to customers.

From a budgetary perspective many companies are faced with, ‘do I outsource to India (or somewhere else) or hire someone local?’. This is a very important question. The way I look at it is this, not only does our industry constantly have to deal with the inherent deflationary pressures of the Internet, we’ve had to deal with a very nasty economy as well. This has been very effective at deflating egos – just as it has deflated certain sectors of the economy. I see this as a good thing.

For those of you who understand what I’m talking about, this was (and will continue to be) an opportunity for all of use to light a fire and go beyond our comfort zone. If you fit into this category – or a person that is working harder than you ever have and have left your ego at the door – then you will know that as an industry we’ve done the following:

• Learned to work faster
• Learned to manage our schedules more efficiently
• Got off our lazy asses and took our game to a new level
• Thought differently
• Took those old ideas off the shelf and started moving on them
• Had better communication with clients
• Realized that salaries and hourly rates should be more reflective of what is being accomplished, versus what we ‘think’ we should be paid.
• Become more knowledgeable and thus better at what we do

Through this process, we’re bettering the design, development and marketing industry as a whole. We’re allowing smaller businesses to get a leg up on their competitors. We’re understanding that we ‘can’ finish that project under that timeline and within budget. The players just have to work a little harder, smarter and faster.

And for all those remote development teams – especially the ones that triple their hours to make up for their hourly rate – let this be a warning. A fire has been lit in the US.

We’re ready to work again

And this means that we will be turning more towards our humbled engineers, designers and developers who have realized that it is more important to have a steady job – than drive a cool car or buy a house that we can’t afford.

Just as much as this recession has decimated many industries, for those that survive it and are able to hold on, there will be plenty of opportunity.

We must also be careful that during this time we don’t sacrifice our standards or do ridiculous amounts of work for very little. We still have to be selective with our clients and projects. And we must continue to evolve.

That’s about it. For all of those passionate people in this industry who love what you do, keep up the fight, leave the ego at the door, work for reasonable rates and make things happen.

My six year-old was quite disappointed when he wasn’t selected to learn the ways of the Force at the Jedi Training Academy at Disney’s Tomorrowland. I didn’t realize until our 2nd attempt that day, that kids will start lining up a half-hour early so they can be closest to the stage when the Jedi come walking out and seek that eager young soul that is ‘strong with the Force’. I didn’t realize at the time that this Jedi adventure would be a learning experience for my son as well as a fundamental marketing lesson for me.

On his first attempt, Evan stood in the second row haphazardly waving his hand, hoping that the Jedi Master who was choosing the young Padawans would look his way and just appreciate him for the simple fact that he was there. He wasn’t chosen, left the stage area upset, and I had to pull him aside and explain to him a few of life’s little lessons while other young Padawans were learning to yield light sabers against Vader or Maul.

I pulled him over and said, “Look son, sometimes in life you do have to stand out if you want something. You can’t be in the back row if you want to get picked” A frown on his face, he continued to growl at me as if he’d been condemned to the Spice Mines of Kessel, “You’re going to have to find a way to get that Jedi up there to notice you!”

What was I saying?!! Was I telling my kid to be a pushy, win-at-all-costs young competitor – teaching him that unless he pushes all others aside, he’s not going to win the prize? I felt the pull of both trying to be a responsible parent versus that overbearing, Great-Santini like character who wants his son to win at all costs. But as much as my advice went against my natural inclination to just say, ‘well, maybe next time kid,’ I started believing  my own advice the more I thought about it.

Just a minute or so later as we watched the ‘chosen’ Padawans fighting their way to glory with their new light-sabers, my wife, who was standing nearby, started talking to a woman with a huge smile on her face. This woman was  hoping that her son would get picked and it turned out that he had. She went on to explain that they had made the long journey to Disneyland for a few years and each visit, her son had not been picked as a Padawan. So instead of wanting to go 0-4, she came up with a plan. At the hotel in Disneyland she had her boy construct a sign out of cardboard they found. What did the sign say? Simple. “Pick me!”

Her son did get picked and was now fighting Lord Vader in a pitched saber battle to save the Rebellion.

This re-affirmed the comments that I had just made to my son. I leaned over to my son again, told him that the next show was in a couple of hours, and that we should take this time to enjoy a ride and come back after. So we hit up Pirates of the Caribbean, hung out with ’Captain’ Jack Sparrow in the greatest ride ever built, danced through the dreary night of a harbor bombarded and listened to the eerie echo of the voice that repeated:

“Deead meeen teeellll noooo taaaaaleess”. What a ride!

Two hours later, we made our way back to Tomorrowland and I had my Padawan-hopeful sit up front just behind the red line that was painted on the stage floor. We were there early, waiting…watching. Soon after, Stormtroopers blazed out of some back room and the game was on. They were followed by Maul himself: evil, menacing, and yet stopping to give me a quick smile.

The Jedi’s came running out and talked a little about the Force and how ‘it is an energy field created by all living things,’ and that ‘it surrounds us and binds us together.’  The Jedi Master then defined the light saber, as not being ‘as clumsy or random as a blaster, [but] an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.’  At one point, the  Jedi Master made a joke and no one laughed.  He then repeated the joke and with a wave of his hand said, “You will all find this joke funny…”  That was enough to make me laugh. Good stuff and not so subtle reinforcement of his message–don’t we all wish it was that easy?

Anyway, the time came where he started picking kids. “You there in the red shirt.” “That young boy there with the Star Wars shirt on.” (Note for aspiring Padawan parents: it seems your odds to be picked as a Padawan increase exponentially if you have proven your worth by purchasing and wearing officially licensed merchandise.) “And you there Miss, in the pink shoes.”  He made one last sweep over to my boy’s corner where Evan was gallantly waving his hand at the most feverish pace I’d ever seen. He stood on his toes as tall as he could and with all his spirit and might, he did his absolute best to capture the attention of the sole determiner of fate. Could my son try any harder? Could he reach any higher? Could he wave his hand faster? Could he say ‘Oh, oh, oh, ew, ew, ew..pick meeee’ any better?

Blam! “You there, the eager one, in the skeleton gloves and long-sleeved blue shirt.”

He got picked. Immediately after the Jedi said, “Thank you but we have all the trainees that we need for this session. Do not be discouraged but support your fellow Padawans on their journey to become a Jedi.” He had been picked, for the love of Jar Jar’s death…he had been picked!

My boy went on to let go of his conscious self and act on instinct. He learned to ‘unlearn what he had learned.’ Okay, enough of the quotes– he did end up fighting Maul and won (perhaps Mr. Maul may have been going only 75% but who’s counting?).

In retrospect, I think we both learned a lesson that day. And that is, sometimes we do have to be out front and grabbing the attention of those whom we are trying to reach. That doesn’t mean we have to step on others, do something that brings shame or offend others, or create a Superbowl commercial-esque type of campaign every time we want to say something, but it does mean that we have to be noticed sometimes, and by the right people.

This notion is echoed by Simon Cowell on American Idol. He occasionally makes the comment that some people are forgettable during their audition despite the fact they can sing well. On the other hand, some people get their 15 minutes simply because they got noticed..and were memorable.

So, in trying to grab someone’s attention,  win a new client, get a job…etc., we should never underestimate the power of simply getting noticed.  Once we are in, well… then it is all about results.

“Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt and live like it’s heaven on Earth.”

— Mark Twain

So often, we tend to focus on the end results before we even start; be it a website, campaign, online marketing…etc. Clients tend to pay less attention to the process and the many small variables that a good designer, consultant or developer brings to the table. But this is a very difficult concept to get across to the a prospective client. You’re essentially trying to sell them on your experience and it ends up sounding like something that Chris Farley might have said in the movie Tommy Boy.

This came to light recently when a client insisted that a Facebook Ad look a certain way. They insisted that the itty bitty ad that they wanted have writing on it, i.e. name of company, website..etc. I tried to tell them that this wouldn’t be readable for the user and they’d be much better off with something simpler and that they should rely on the text below the add for any details. I mean, what would we know – we’ve only been doing this forever.

So, the we placed their ad up. But the story doesn’t end there.

To prove a point, we kept the other ad to and served it as well without the client knowing (and we paid out of pocket to see how our ad would perform). Lo and behold, our Ad returned 700 percent higher click-through rate than theirs. We mentioned this to the client and they said something to the effect of oh, yea..we wanted ‘our’ designer to do the work because they ‘understand’ our style and brand. Huh?

Every time I think about this my heart starts beating just a tad bit faster until I calm the mind with some ‘Buddy The Elf’ truisms that I keep handy. All kidding aside though, I come across countless small experiences where experience can help a client, increase campaign performance, drive online sales, increase leads for websites but most of them tend to fall into the ‘intangible’ category – things that aren’t easily tracked and things that are done without the client even knowing.

This concept of  ‘many small things’ become evident when working with a good developer who understand usability. A good developer will create small elements, enforce logic and simplify based on experience that eventually enhances the user experience (and eventual success of a website). Nearly all of these things will go unnoticed by clients.

So how do we compare how a site is built, versus how a site would have been built if the client moved in  a different direction?

I guess it really boils down to good communication with the client and in making sure that we focus on analytics. In the end, success online comes from the proper execution of many small elements. If we can show companies results at the end of the day maybe the details should remain the intangible things that make up a good marketing team, dev or design team?

In mid 2009 I turned my attention to Goodbarry.  Not sure how I found the site, but when I got there, the site was not only well designed (old site no longer available after Adobe’s purchase) but it was very intriguing.  Goodbarry was the retail brand for the core system called Business Catalyst.

First, for over 10 years companies have tried to make a product that makes it ‘easy’ to create and build a website. Pretty much all of them have failed. Why? Every developer  knows that there is really no such thing as ‘out of the box’ solution (yet) that makes it easy to build a website, integrate an e-commerce platform or CMS. In the end, someone has to learn it, implement it, tweak it, modify it for the client’s needs while navigating the learning curve.

Anyway, it was obvious from the start that Goodbarry knew what it was doing simply by how they attracted both business owners and developers – and embraced them both.

Additionally, they catered to both ‘mom and pop’ but also made it a point to let developers know that they could create custom layouts, coding and still use the Business Catalyst system.

But, could they really succeed where so many others have failed?

Marketing agencies, web shops and production houses have been looking for easier ways to plug websites into CMS’s. Many of these needs have been fulfilled with Drupal, Joomla, Modx and WordPress.  Yet, even though these are open-source systems they still require a significant amount of work (or expertise) to make them work with each new product.  Sure, there are shortcuts, reusable code, plug-ins, and various other community oriented tools that spring forth, but in order to get different functionality that sites need (e-commerce, analytics, email marketing..etc) the development team now has to work with different third-party tools and then try to integrate those into this open source environment.  Easy right?

So why would a company create a closed system amidst an open-source boom and try to do what so many others have failed to do?  They weren’t just after mom & pop.  If they were, no one would care.  Neither were they focused on hard corps developers.  So what’s the catch?

If I’m right, this company scared the crap out of Adobe for the following reasons:

1. In the history of building websites, this was the first company that could render a lot of Adobe products ‘less needed’ to get a really good site up and running.

2. If it were to gain momentum and a developer following  independent of Adobe – it could easily become a direct competitor for ‘building sites’ in the web space.

3. It had the potential to corner the market in the CMS space – something that Adobe wants to be a part of.

4. Multiple software features under one roof – the combination of e-commerce, email marketing, contact management and analytics as a single package sent shockwaves through the R&D department of Adobe.

This is a good move for Adobe. This company had waaaay too much promise. My initial thought is that they would squash the project and sweep it under the rug.  The more I think about it though – I think they are going to build some kind of Business Suite around this product – and someone cater to both Developers and Clients directly.

Will be watching this one closely.

Along came blogs.

When the first blogs came out they weren’t very pretty either. But someone got it in their head to really focus on readability. Large type-faces entered the scene for headers, more readable fonts and fundamental readability practices (i.e. line spacing, paragraph spacing and other elements). It wasn’t too long after this that WordPress came along and the designs became even cleaner.

During this time, Flash started taking a back seat on many sites (big ‘sigh of relief’ for ‘skip intro’ haters) and rightfully so.  It took on more of a useful role in my optinion – where it was actually needed versus just using Flash for the sake of using Flash.  I’ll get back to this in a minute though.

Things started to change when corporate sites started to look more like blogs.  Why not? They were clean, readable and had a strong focus on simplicity. I quite enjoyed this transition.  And when FI launched their blog-like site, then it was on like Donkey Kong.  This became one of the many sparks that created an official ‘ok’ for professional organizations (via online agencies) to go simple.

Other uber-clean oriented sites started showing up like the 1 page portfolios, the larger and larger footer areas and now larger and larger headers. To me, I think this is all pretty cool.  Not everything works, but a lot of the newer design directions are a great improvement over year’s past. Lately, I’m event seeing traditionally Flash-tastic promotional sites go half blog/usable Flash (ie. Flex) oriented.  Ford did this with their recent Mustang Site.

Sadly, many small to medium (and sometimes large) business do not see, care or understand this evolution. The good news is that we are making things cleaner, better and easier for people to do things online. This design evolution bleeds into usability, user experience and development as a whole.

Having recently been converted into a fan of Project Runway, there’s a quote that reverberates in my head spoken by that gorgeous (yet evil) blonde, ‘one day you’re in, the next day you’re out’.  This makes me wonder, when will the simple, clean blog-like feel give way to something else?  Will a site made 10 years ago look good 5 years from now?

I certainly hope not.

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