Filed under: Business, Design, World wide web, E-mail, web 2.0
Nearly every small business has a Web site and a high percentage of those sites are mired in Web 1.0 parameters. Perform a site self-checkup to determine how Web 2.0 your small business’s online presence is. We’re talking about all of your on the web presence and not simply your Web site. Here are 10 ways to grade your business’s Web 2.0-ness.
- Last update - if you haven’t updated your Web site yet in 2008, it is definitely old web and not going in the Web 2.0 direction toward interactivity. When content doesn’t change, your site is nothing more than a brochure online.
No updates yet in 2008? Give yourself a C. - Who, When Where - if you aren’t regularly checking your site’s visitor trends, possibly using Google Analytics, then you don’t know who is visiting your site, when they are paying attention or where they are coming from. You could run a promotion and never know if anyone online saw it. How old-web is that kind of thinking?
No site stat research when marketing is everything? Give yourself a D. - Purchase me! - does your site scream BUY SOMETHING rather than equally illustrating why your product or service is essential? Show us some case studies, success stories or testimonials in addition to pitching your product.
No examples of your product’s usefulness to buyers? Give yourself a C+. - No response - when is the last time you paid attention to website-generated email or calls and analyzed how much web-based contact your small business receives? Are you considering how to raise your online contacts through different, not necessarily more, online strategies?
Not planning how to garner more online contact? Give yourself a C. If you don’t yet know that Google Forms can be used to collect survey data, mark that down to a C-. - Still breaking the law? - if you’re sending unsolicited email through your personal email program like Outlook, then you’re probably violating the 2004 CAN-SPAM Act and fines are $10,000 per instance. It’s time to invest small business dollars in a compliant email application. Begin with Constant Contact and research from there.
Still blasting from a personal email application? Give yourself an F because it’s toying with disaster. - Feeding time - have you resisted adding an RSS feed to any portion of your small business presence because you really don’t understand what RSS is? Get one your children to explain it and then generate a weekly updated on the internet feed for your business.
Not feeding your customers yet with good information? Give yourself a C-. - Remote access denied - if your staff still has no intranet and your sales force can’t find up-to-the-minute pricing and forms, try the new Google Sites and get everyone on the same on the internet page. Add a calendar and share it with your staff to give your business more bang for its virtual buck.
No online sharing? Degrade yourself to a D-. Information is king. - Identity Interrupted - does your logo designer know who your PR and Web firms are or are they each operating in an information vacuum? Worse, are you still trying to figure out if you need any of the above? Get your old logo converted into a high-resolution graphic and share it with your Web designer to pull together your branding and small business identity on the web and in print.
Using a Publisher-created logo on the internet? Give yourself a D+. - Anti-social - very few small business owners know what Twitter is and fewer use it. Are you closing your ears to comments made about your service or your product? Why not Twitter and send a “track [your company name or product]” message or at least use a Twitter search engine to see what’s been tweeted. What else should you track? See what Cameron Olthuis, Jeremiah Owyang or Joseph Jaffe advocate.
No ears on? Give yourself a B- only because Twitter is sort of new but not for much longer. - Remote island - spend time with one or two quality small business blogs a week by subscribing to their feed and figuring out which posts are important to your business. Try Small Business Resource for starters.
Don’t know how to subscribe to a feed? Give yourself a D+ because RSS is simply not new; it’s everywhere.
The end of the first quarter is upon us and you’ve probably just paid first-quarter taxes. Now is the time to score your on the web presence and raise your grade during the rest of this fiscal year. Got more grading areas? List them in comments, please.
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