Even the best and distinguished companies forget about SEO as they keep the default settings of their CMS (Content Management System) in place. In this case Joomla!.

Joomla! – dynamische Portal-Engine und Content-Management-System.
Joomla! – the dynamic portal engine and content management system
In both cases is not about their business but about Joomla!.

Even if the company domain shows up in the search engine result pages, it is likely very few people will click on the link. Only those who know the company will.

It is clear no-one in these two example companies ever searched for the company website on a search engine.
Or is Joomla! so complex nobody knows internally how to change these default texts ?

The English example is one out of 3.8mio if you search on Google for “Joomla! – the dynamic portal engine and content management system”
The German is one out of 9.8mio
Why do all these companies have a presence on the Internet ?

Wondering if this is any good for Joomla ! As it gives the impression Joomla is difficult to handle CMS.

Being in the business of identification of website visitors by company we daily visit many of websites before granting a 30-day free trial.
As the pricing of our web services is in relation to the number of monthly visitors we like to give advice to our customers in order to increase their visits (so we can charge more later on).

Five things we frequently encounter:
- The intention of the website
- The url of the pages have no significant meaning
- The keywords are the same for every page throughout the website
- The description being equal for all pages
- The main navigation menu needs to be in text
- The all Flash websites

1. The intention of the website
What do you sell ?
To who do you sell ? What is your market? B2C, B2B ?
If we can’t figure out what you are selling and to who, how will your potential customer know that he might have found a solution to his problem.
People do leave a website in less than 4 seconds if they don’t understand immediately what it is all about.

2. The urls
If your pages have an url like

http://www.company.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=235&Itemid=209

Then you can’t tell which page it is and what the page is all about.
The same is valid for Google, Bing and Yahoo: they don’t understand it neither as it has no meaning.
Each page should have a url that matches the content of the page: especially the keywords or titles used.
Just like this blog post which uses the title of the post.

http://www.LEADSExplorer.com/blog/2010/11/15/the-6-most-frequent-website-design-mistakes

If you can read it then Google can read it and tag it which makes Google happy and friendly.

3. The keywords
Many web designers seem to use the same keywords throughout the website.
However every page should have keywords matching the content of the page. Each page should be considered as a landing page attracting its’ own interested visitors.
Again this will make the interpretation and filing of your page easier for Google.

4. The description
This is similar as the keywords: the description of each page is the same. That doesn’t make the operation of the Google algorithm easier for filing your web pages.
Help Google & Co in order to help yourself.

5. The main navigation menu in text
The main navigation menu should be easily found and in text format in order to let Google read your menu items.
In case your menu consist of images then make sure all the images are named to make them understandable.

6. The all Flash website
Of course you can have Flash on your website as it will animate and make it more lively.
Still it doesn’t mean you have to have an all Flash website which is really bad for getting indexed by search engines and thus getting found by potential customers.

How to ?
A question we often get:
How to see the keywords, description and menu items:
In FireFox: Go to “View” then click on “Page Source”
In Internet Explorer: Go to “View” then click on “Source”

Have fun with this video of a presentation:

How bad is your website ?

Creating analog content in the past
When people take pictures they shoot a series of them in order to pick out the best afterwards.
When people used analog cameras to take pictures they took the time to think about the picture, the positioning, the layout, the content, the expression, the lightning.
The entire composition was well-thought out as every image made was real out of the pocket money due to the high cost of the film and the development cost.

This slow creation process has been lost in this digital world.

Analog content is shooting pictures with a photo camera or movies on photographic film, writing on a type writer and speaking a text into a tape recorder.
The carrier of the content can be paper, film, wax disk, canvas, stone, …all unalterable and relatively expensive.

Digital content is all content that is being produced and generated using digital media which can be erased or altered easily.

Analog craftsmanship vs digital fast food
When creating analog content you have to plan, prepare and know exactly what you will be doing next as any creation results in real out of the pocket money: the carrier of the content and the time invested.
Changing analog content requires to redo the entire scene or page as the content in most cases is not erasable (except tape recorder) or modifiable.
This requires craftsmanship and a thinking process.

When creating digital content you work mainly using trial and error (erase).
Or even with post-modification using a tool like Photoshop or the backspace on your keyboard.
You don’t care so much about planning, thinking and organizing but point and shoot: like fast food.
After the content creation process the good content is selected from the all the content created and digitally improved.

Note: We have altered this text several times before publishing, but is this the best we could create?

Due to the fact the creator of analog content needs to plan, prepare, think over and use all his expertise before and during the creation it is likely the content will have higher value than digital. The brains of the creator have been processing the content several times before the physical creation.

Digital content creation is more like having a series of trials and select the best results or what approaches the most what you intended to achieve or present.

Could it be possible that due to the lacking long preparation and thinking process the better content is with analog content instead of digital ?

What do you think what generates the best content: analog of digital media?

Due to the high cost involved using and processing analog media we will stick to digital media even we are convinced analog content would be better

The music industry died due to digital

The music industry almost died due to not adapting and adopting the change imposed by digital technology.

During the nineties home computers were capable of producing quality music and after 2000 the Internet gave people the channel to distribute music at a low cost.

The newspaper missed the Internet

The newspaper industry is dying due to all the blogging and the available free content – even in real-time – on the Internet.

The Internet gave people the possibility to blog and micro-blog creating quality or specific content. The Internet is both production apparatus and the distribution channel.

TV broadcasting industry could be the next prey

The next industry is probably the TV broadcasting as more and more people are switching over to streaming video content from YouTube, Vimeo and others. For the consumers is has the advantage of on-demand content instead of sequential content to wait for.
Additionally the TV industry model is nearly completely dependent from advertising which can flip over to any other medium almost instantly.

The movie industry is an experienced survivor

The movie industry is already a survivor as it survived the TV competition during almost 50 years.
The movie industry is doing its’ utmost by proposing 3D movies that give audiences a new experience (with the hurdle of the goggles).
3D movies make it harder to download over the Internet due to the larger volume of data and the difficulty of creating the same experience in the living-room. Even though 3D TV sets are coming to your home soon too.

In the movie industry a phenomenon like Paranormal Activity has shown the production apparatus can be owned by anybody due to the low cost of equipment (<$1,000) and making a low budget movie ($15,000)
Still Oren Peli needed the marketing power and the money of Paramount Pictures for the marketing and distribution of the movie.
It is clear the movie industry still has some time to keep on going and they have a plan: 3D that seems successful.

The Internet changes industries: your industry too

Each of these industries (except the Movie industry) have collapsed or are collapsing due to the change in the ownership of the production apparatus and the distribution channel: from a controlled environment to the open market of the Internet where anyone can compete.

Many services and systems will be replaced by online systems using the Internet as the channel for both access and distribution.
The Internet will cause disruptions in many industries.
Your industry too can become under threat one day.

Maybe your production process will not be under threat, but the distribution, the marketing, the sales process, the customer service or the administration will be.
Your competitors could just take advantage of the Internet in one way or another, making your company old fashioned and obsolete.

Marketing can delay the threat

Marketing is best placed to use messaging for delaying the digital disruption by:
- Claiming quality compared to the Internet offerings
- Personal service instead of an automated service
- Appropriate or suiting products or services instead of generic solutions
- Creating fear: fear of the unknown, fear of lacking security, fear of less quality

Fear will probably have the biggest effect and last the longest as it relies on subjectiveness and is in most cases intangible.

Although marketing can delay the threat, eventually marketing will not be able to circumvent it as the Internet will also step into your industry and impose changes.

How big are the digital challenges for your industry ?

The tale of a market leader encountering open standards

This is a tale of a market leader who since many years made good sales and profit in a market niche using proprietary technology.
Management believed they were the ‘Masters of the Universe’ having high margins and ever growing sales volumes.

As the news of the ever increasing profits spread and the growth of the market had become evident as it was no longer a niche market, more companies became interested to become a supplier for this expanding market.

Due to the fact only proprietary solutions were available to the market, an industry organization or a competitor gathered a several vendors in order to define open standards.
As one of the market leaders the company was invited to participate, however management decided not to participate as the standardization didn’t seem to bring any immediate benefit but was considered as a waste of time. Management estimated it was certainly no threat for business of the company.
They considered themselves as the people with vision who had spotted the market long before (in reality it was probably just a lucky shot).

Slowly the open standards gained field as more vendors adopted them. Even the company enabled the open standard on some of its’ products in order to be able to present it to their customers but without the intention selling it.

Over time the open standard matured, got more features and gained field in the market. It became a real competition to the products or solutions of the company.
Customers preferred the having the freedom of choice and switching of vendors at almost no cost.

Open standards vs legacy technology

Once a technology is available as open standard the barrier to enter the market is lowered significantly as almost any vendor in the world can propose the solution (even Chinese manufacturers).

The sole differentiators that your company still can use for selling the legacy technology based products are:
- The installed base: all the references acquired since many years
- The quality of products and services
- The presence in local markets (if this has been achieved)

It will become hard to explain the premium price to be paid for the legacy technology as the open standards can rely upon components available on a large scale at a lower price and hardly any investment on development to be depreciated.

Proprietary or legacy technology is only possible in emerging or niche markets as innovation still counts.
Once a market grows and becomes significant in size, open standards are introduced, then you have the choice:
- Embrace open standards
- Look for a different market or a different solution as prices and margins will only decrease.
Your competitors will be lean and mean as they never had big margins on these products.

Do you sell solutions based on proprietary technology or open standards?

In the software industry before releasing a product commercially to the market the solution is to be given to so-called beta customers.
The idea is that these companies or users will test the software thoroughly in real life situations experiencing real life events in the hope to debug the application as much as possible and to test have real life strain tests.

Reasons for becoming a Beta user
Why should people or companies sign-up for the Beta?
- They have the opportunity to influence the development of the solution
- They can have a solution at no cost

Beta vs future customers
- Are the suggestions made by the Beta users the same level of importance for your future real customers ?
- Could using Beta users drive and change your solution surpassing the original goals set as these Beta customers are far more technically advanced than the potential customers of the marker you are targeting ?
- Is the Beta customer representative for your future paying customers ?
- Will Beta customers eventually become paying customers ?

It is the myth of Beta customer.

Finding beta customers
In reality finding and having signing-up user as Beta is not that simple. It requires a complete marketing campaign to generate interest and having people to take the risk.
Getting the Beta customers to sign-up is not that easy.
Especially with business applications, as these companies need to take the risk:
- For the benefit of having a free solution
- Having to stumble on all the possible problems and errors
- Interrupting the normal activity due to these bugs
- Reporting the required feedback to the vendor
Whereas the main rule for companies is risk-avoidance.

The myth of the Beta company customer is even bigger.

Currently we have the Beta for popupbooster:
- Providing relevant content to your visitors in real-time.
- Dynamic web pages: less bounces
- Matching landing pages: keep their attention
- Decrease cart abandonment: more sales
- Exit stopper: win their interest or gain awareness
- Conditional conversation starter using popular web services
You can sign-up a Beta user here – If you want.

Most of your customers or leads will have a voice mail system in place to be used in case when they are away from their desk.

Voice mails are hard to do

Typically when speaking into a voice mail system, people:
- Constructing the strangest sentences
- Telling the wrong things or things that not really matter
- Missing to tell the real point
- Being very brief missing essential parts of the reasons for your call
- Speaking too long (over 2 minutes)
- Using the wrong wordings
- Speaking with the wrong intonation
These problems are probably due to the fact that there is no human response from the receiving party at it is a recorder.
Of course you can always use the delete option and re-record until you get bored or more nervous.

The receiver will listen to a voice mail differently than during a normal telephone conversation. This adds on to the difficulty of a voice mail. Also the receiver can replay your (weird sounding) message several times allowing analyzing your strange behavior on the voice mail system. This will not add on to your credibility.

The end result is that the important message that needed to be communicated can:
- Leave the wrong impression
- Be misinterpreted
Both having with the result of creating the wrong response or action.
Still you can use an email as back-up referring to your voice mail just to be sure that the message is communicated.

A voice mail gone wrong in the British comedy TV show “Coupling“:

Voice mails in the sales process

During a sales process, if you need to bring an important message or information to your customer or lead, will you then leave a voicemail? Or try to call back later?

What harms the most?
- Using the voice mail in order to leave the message: that can be misinterpreted or not listened.
- Disconnecting and try to call back a little later?

Calling back later will require more time from you and you can fail to speak your prospect or customer again.

There is a trade off:
- Using the voice mail system: a wrong interpretation will be hard to repair.
- Not bringing the message on time has a certain cost too as a decision can depend on it.
But which one is the costliest?

There are the additional problems of:
- The many voice mails are never returned which stops your conversation.
- The facts changing or events happening after leaving the voice mail.
The best is of course if you could speak the person personally.
An alternative is to send an email, but maybe that’s not suitable for your all-important message.

How effective are you in leaving voice mails?
Did leaving a voice mail ever helped the sales process?

Google is B2B

Google (GOOG) is and has always been in the business of selling services into the business market by providing an online platform for advertising for businesses based upon their search engine system. The operations of Google use a distributed massive computing platform throughout the world. Thus thanks to the B2B business Google has:
- Company names
- Contact details
- Online ad spending indication by company
- Experience in web services.

Amazon is B2C

Amazon (AMZN) started out as an online bookshop and expanded the business by offering more consumer goods.
Due to the consumer business (B2C) Amazon has:
- Contact details of individuals – thus no relation to companies
- Experience for web services mainly as web shop.

Google gets lost in Streetview

The almighty Google
- Is and was the leading computing platform.
- Was well positioned to offer other services for businesses.
Especially compared to a B2C company like Amazon.
Still Google decided to ignore their business customers and started to focus on services related to consumers. The advertising business model of Google made them decide to start initiatives like Google Maps, Google Streetview. The latter requiring huge amounts of storage space. Many of them services with doubtful, yet-to-be-proven or non-existent business model.

At the same time Amazon started their S3 (Simple Service Storage) right into the business market and challenging the computing technology of Google.
As this wasn’t enough, Amazon launched also their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) virtualization platform to complete the offering.

Overnight Amazon defined and conquered the market with affordable pay-as-you-go pricing system. Exactly where one would have expected Google.

As Google had busy with other initiatives like Android (mobile operating system), Streetview, … they responded rather late with their Google App Engine offering. The App Engine offering is much more limited than the Amzon offerings: not only by the languages supported but also for porting existing systems and more flexible.
For further comparison:
- Markus Clems – Cloudy Times
- ZDNet Dion Hinchcliffe – Platform-as-a-Service
- GridGain – Open Cloud Platform

Amazon the bookstore conquers the computing cloud market

The start-up companies were the first to embrace the offering of Amazon Web Services, soon followed by larger enterprises.
Even IBM embraced Amazon Web Services for:
- Delivering IBM’s market leading software to clients and developers.
- Running IBM software (already-purchased by IBM clients) on Amazon EC2.

While Google was shooting pictures of the streets of the world, Amazon took market leadership in the cloud market for SaaS applications and web services.

The company management of Google failed to recognize and to catch a market where they should have become market leader as they had:
- The technology platform
- The technology experience
- The operational experience of running large computer centres
- The B2B market relations
- The B2B marketing experience
- The market esteem for innovation
Still Amazon, without any of the above qualities or recognition, snatched up the market that was not even related to their core business.
These businesses are further apart than if IKEA would sell call services to businesses.

Big marketing and product marketing mistakes can happen in any company: even market leaders do fail big time as they are even more blurred by their own success and their self-satisfaction.

What are your product management mistakes?

A few weeks ago we found out the market leader in Marketing Automation, Demand Generation and Lead Management has copied our Activity charts concept.

We have noticed several website visits by the company during the year 2008 and a few at the beginning of this year as our web service LEADSExplorer registers all companies visiting our website.
They have adopted the idea and concept and added some features.

Activity charts

These Activity charts represent the activity of the visitors of a company combined with the communications with the different people in this company on a time axis.

The visit activity is represented by the intensity of the color (more pages viewed) and the height (duration of a visit).

The communications include: emails, telephone calls, white paper downloads, completed forms: each represented by a different color.

The purpose is to analyze:
- The increase or decrease of the interest in the solutions you offer.
- The effectiveness of the nurturing for both leads and customers.
- The efforts for customer retention.

Proof of having a vision and being successful

We can only be proud that we had the vision of the concept of these Activity charts long before the market leader.
Getting copied is a proof of innovation, vision and success.
In many markets, market leaders have copied the smaller companies as they challenge them.

We are not worried as there are still several functions, features and concepts within the LEADSExplorer solution that sets us apart and we are not direct competitors.

However we have the challenge to keep one step ahead of the competitors by providing new, useful and convenient solutions beneficial to our clients: the drive to innovate.

Have you ever been copied?
Or do you copy others?

Business cards are outdated

In this video Joel Bauer declares your business card is crap.

In the video he shows the business card that took him 25 years to design, costing $4 and not fitting in a Rolodex. Seems a waste of 25 years.
Moreover a Rolodex is a relic of the past (over 25 years), but so is his newly developed card.

Business cards not adapted for social networking websites

Still he is probably right that your business card is crap for many other good reasons:
The business card is a thing of the past, not adapted anymore to the online world and online life people live, even in business.
Eventhough your mobile phone number, your email address and your company website have been added in print, the card will always miss your online presence that goes beyond your email address: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, and many more …
- All people have many presences on the Internet
- Not enough space on the card for all the links
- Online changes happen faster than the printing of a new stack of cards: you can’t keep up.
- Entering data from a business card into any computer system is a waste of time (so 70’s).

The Poken as business card

At the same time in some countries in Europe a new craze has started: the Poken.
It connects the online social networking into the real world.

Actually it is a USB memory key with an RFID antenna.
You know the RFID technology from the card people use to open a door of a building: physical access.
The RFID is used to exchange data.

The idea is you store your online credentials on the Poken using the USB connection on your PC.
Online credentials like your LinkedIn page, your Facebook page, your Twitter page, your MySpace page or your personal website.

When you meet with somebody new you exchange your online credentials by nearing your Pokens. If the data has been transferred the Poken hand will glow green. If faulty the hand will glow red.

Up to 64 contacts can be stored on the Poken. If you don’t upload the data to the website on the Internet, the oldest contact will be erased from the memory when adding on a next contact.
Price is about €15 or $20 and to be purchased online of course.
The company Poken SA is from Lausanne in Switzerland and has a presence on Facebook.

Already popular in schools, not yet in use for business: but that can change soon.
If teenagers can use it, their parents will be able too: they just need to ask their kids.

Will you next business card be a fancy paper card or will you have a Poken?