Writing Web Copy

September 30, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

The most perfectly crafted web copy will not do much for us if we do not take the time to do some Search Engine Optimization on the final design and layout of our webcopy.

Most of us, after spending some time working on writing copy, become myopic, and loose the ability to be objective about our work. I mean really, we spend a day or two writing and editing the perfect sales pitch. We run it by some family members and friends who tell us it is the coolest thing since sliced bread. We are convinced the copy writing effort will pay off. In the back of our mind, we wonder if it might even be Award winning copy. And it very well may be. In fact, we assume the copy cannot get any better, so we turn it over to the engineering staff to be put up on the website….Hooray!

But now, guess what? It is time to brace ourselves. Do we know what is coming? Our baby….the work we gave all our mental energy to, is about to be picked at, teased apart, added too, modified with new key words, optimized, with new paragraph headings added, and perhaps even a new title. Our masterpiece is coming under the SEO spotlight. The thing we did not realize is that the quickest way to cripple our advertising message on the internet is to forgo the search engine optimization of our content. What is the key phrase density? Do the meta tags meet the goals of the SEO team? What is in the top line of text? Will it need to be changed? At this point, we find ourselves compromising. Why? Because web copy and search engine optimization are two critical partners in our future profitability and success. We cannot do one without the other and expect our website to generate real profit.

If we write an article or web page that has a Key Phrase focus, it will sound odd, forced, and not quite right in the readers mind. The compelling and urgent copy that will cause the reader to move to a “Call to Action” will not be there. It is best to write a compelling, heart felt article that helps the reader, by providing information, solving a problem, or taking them to our shopping cart. After the copy is done, let the SEO experts review, suggest, and improve the copy, to reach the goals of the copy that were set out in the first place.

The perfect copy writing is producing copy that is compelling and leads readers to a call to action, and also makes use of all the SEO tools available. This is where discipline and experience come into play, Those new to the business fail to realize the importance of combining expert copy writing with expert SEO to create the perfect blend.

Expectations, that is what it is really about; we need to have the proper expectations that no matter how good of a writer we are, the SEO review will make the copy better. Even if we complete both steps ourselves, we need to know when we have on a copywriter’s hat and when we have on an SEO hat.

We MUST understand the painstaking hours of labor and incredible attention to detail that go into coordinating an entire website marketing campaign. And that’s what most new marketers completely miss when they’re just starting out trying to drive traffic and business to their sites.

Killer Copywriting + SEO = Higher Sales Conversions!

Pat Holman is the CEO of iXod Conversion Marketing, an Internet Marketing firm.
Pat Holman

IT Strategy Consulting Challenges

September 29, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

David Clark is a former Managing Partner for Gartner UK Consulting.  Prior to that, he has been in senior positions at a few of the other “tier one” consulting firms and a couple of enjoyable stints as a CIO positions in industry. His career spans about 25 years during which time he has delivered around fifteen or so IT strategies and had four “done to him”.  It’s always a good idea to hear from someone in the trenches about challenges of IT Strategy Consulting rather than reading Business School Case Studies.  My brief chat with David validated that.  I learnt a lot from my conversations with David and hope you do too!

Raj: Any common theme you found in your IT Strategy Consulting?

Dave: What I’ve found again and again and again is how much a strategy and the IT function all too often mirrors the personality of the CIO and when moving into implementation it can end up costing way more than it needs to if the CIO has ambition beyond their pockets.  Every consulting firm, regardless of what any of them say approaches strategy in a fairly similar way – and most of them can arrive at a fairly obvious and sensible outcome.  Some can do it in a few weeks and some spin it out for eternity.  My point about the CIO’s personality is that I’ve noticed over the years that more often than not the strategy eventually twists and turn into something that they then rationalize to fit their own original thoughts.  Unless of course it’s Accenture delivering it then he or she will probably be lucky to remain the CIO.

Raj: So you reckon that managing the CIO’s ego is also part of a consulting job?

Dave: Without question, although I’m not sure it’s managing it or simply recognizing it!  I think the thing that I have found, more than anything else over the last twenty five years, is that everything boils down to people.  It might on the surface look like a technology issue or perhaps a process problem but seriously – when you dig down – 9 times out of 10 it’s a people problem.  It boils down to a mixture of ego, ability, personality, capabilities, behaviors which then manifest themselves in all sorts of ways.  I can wax lyrical on this one for hours – so I’ll try and stop myself. It’s also what really makes business interesting so I shouldn’t complain!

Raj: What did you find out about CEOs and CMOs involvement during your IT Strategy Consultancy?  Are they interested in defining IT Strategy or do they delegate it to CIO?

Dave: Hmmm. I think this is a really interesting question about the other members of the exec. I think that the challenge around aligning the business, and I have to say I hate the term aligning with the business – how often do you hear that Sales is aligning with the business or HR is aligning with the business, sorry off on a tangent there, as I was saying all too often the business itself lacks a true strategy – I’ve often encountered companies who say they have a business strategy and don’t and then IT have to try and align to something that’s ill defined and often bland.  I’ll give you an example – we reviewed an IT strategy for a large commercial company – the business strategy was sell more services to more customer in more sectors, which in itself was hardly incisive and their IT Strategy: be more efficient, modularize and optimize.  Yea – sure – they don’t need IT Strategy Consultants to tell them that although they had actually had one of the tiers one firms in for quite a good few weeks before we got involved. Perhaps one day there will be a single integrated strategy for the business with IT as a thread within it – some companies are now doing this so hopefully it’ll catch on.

Raj: So the other ‘C’ level executives know what IT can do for their business strategy?

Dave: They think they know, or rather they have some ideas, which today is perfectly reasonable, as so many business have graying boards -  i.e. the CEO knows IT is important but he’s 55 years old and in many ways only “gets” a bit of what IT should mean to his company.  The COO often views IT as the function to blame when any operational issue occurs, or they can’t deliver in time.  The CFO will as ever be asking about costs and where savings can be made, etc etc… this scenario plays out time and in again in so many companies.  So the CIO has to mash all of this together and then deliver something interesting, engaging and compelling usually for less money that it really needs and in less time than he would ideally like.

Raj: So, what should CIO do to get the board interested in IT Strategy?

Dave: I think the CIO has to really create a highly visual and compelling story to try and engage his/her board – I’m a big fan of the story teller CIO – so for example in the case I mentioned earlier – we attempted to condense the IT Strategy into a compelling idea and then build the story around this – but in all honesty Raj this is really to try and get the attention of people who I personally think should pay attention in any case!  Over the next few years I think it will start to change as a generation hits the board room who have been raised on smart IT.  I find it difficult to imagine any of my children for instance needing to have the benefits of collaboration explained to them, or accepting it will takes eight months to introduce a new application….!?  As an aside collaboration and corporate are in many cases mutually exclusive, they weren’t built to collaborate – but that’s probably a topic for another day.

Raj: Moving on to a different topic… What do you think of SaaS and Cloud computing?

Dave: I’ve got very strong views on this so here goes…whilst the various consulting firms and technology vendors argue about definitions, security, total cost of ownership, transferability, cost per server, cloud, SaaS, PaaS, on-premise, off-premise what they seem to miss is whether they like it or not small and medium size companies are happily buying services over the internet.  For them it’s all down to cash flow, flexibility and scalability and these small and medium sized companies are just as important, if not more so to the economy than the industrial giants.

I often think therefore that the debates themselves tend to re-enforce the IT geek model.  However I do accept that for larger companies SaaS and cloud has quite a few more implications, but really it’s just another delivery model that the CIO can factor into his strategy and thinking. So, I’m not sure if you agree, but I think we are sitting at a really interesting point in IT – a sort of tectonic plate shifting time – eventually the whole SaaS/Cloud stuff will make a difference across the industry, regardless of all the debate and I personally think it’s going to cause some interesting shifts in the traditional Consulting/SI firms – which is good for the customer as well.  At least I hope so as I took the plunge of leaving Gartner to start a new consulting/SI type firm which is really founded on this new generation services that are starting to appear.  Sort of put your money where your mouth is approach!

Raj: So what’s your vision for your new consulting company?

Dave: Oh no the dreaded elevator pitch – here goes then…a business and technology firm formed from collaboration with many active members across the globe linked by great systems and sharing capabilities, knowledge and profits in an equitable and ethical manner.  I just don’t believe that it makes sense anymore to have 10,000 people on your books, in a hierarchical model, driving you to make decisions that are so often sub optimal for the client – and I know this is the case because in my time I’ve seen it happen – lots.  I described our company recently to a customer as “An efficient 21st century workers co-operative!”

Raj: All the best with your new endeavor.  Keep us posted.

Dave: Thanks Raj, likewise with the blog -it’s good fun and it makes me smile and think a bit – which is what it’s all about really.


Related posts:

  1. SaaS Challenges for 2009
  2. 10 things to know about Cloud Computing Strategy
  3. The next frontier in IT Strategy: A McKinsey Survey


Wikimedia’s “Open” Strategy Planning Session

September 26, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

135px-Wikimedia_logo_text_RGB.svgWikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia has grown without a strategy. But Barry Newstead in the HBR article titled “Inside Wikimedia’s Open-Source Strategic Planning” says that there are some strategic issues that needs to resolved.  Now they are ready to tackle strategic questions like “How to prioritize growth initiatives that involve reaching every single human being? How to make ever increasing amounts of knowledge freely sharable? How to cultivate a healthy, growing and diverse community of contributors? How to enhance quality of knowledge? How to ensure Wikimedia has the resources and capabilities to sustain its work in perpetuity?” Now is a good time to tackle these issues.  But what’s unique is that the board of directors is going to go into the strategy session that is ‘open’ to the world.  This mean, according to Barry Newstead, Wikimedia strategic planning process will be blogged pretty much as it happens. Their goal is to tap into ‘crowd’ expertise, perspectives and creativity for the benefit of Wikimedia’s strategy. Their biggest challenge, which Barry concedes, is how might one develop a strategy that could provide direction to such a complex and connected organization without losing the voice of its millions of community stakeholders? Barry writes that they are going to use the following core principles as a guide:

•    Anchor on the vision: Wikimedia has a powerful vision (”a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge”) that serves as a touchstone for the strategy process
•    Do it the Wiki way: Open, transparent and evolving deliberations that trust in the constructive spirit of diverse volunteers to bring powerful expertise and perspective
•    Use the best of nonprofit strategy know-how: Drive dialogue and decisions from facts and rigorous analysis of options; Focus on the most critical decisions that will drive large scale impact; tackle questions that require “values” choices explicitly
•    Presume good faith: People are engaging with Wikimedia in the best spirit of volunteerism and contribution to social good and will act with the best motives
•    Learn and change: Try stuff, If it doesn’t work stop, and try something else

This is unique and exciting!  Will Wikimedia be able to exploit the “wisdom of the crowd” to achieve you strategy?  The problem with involving the ‘crowd’ is the noise that it generates.  How will they ferret out the right ideas from multiple substandard ones? How will they identify if a ‘bizarre’ feedback is actually an ‘out of the box’ creative solution?  On a small scale these issues are manageable but by opening up to a large crowd, they have magnified the scale and I think this might become a management challenge.  Their past in being a pioneer in open collaboration definitely qualifies them to succeed in “Open” Strategy Planning. We will have to keep our fingers crossed…


Related posts:

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WidgetPad Introduces Web-based Open-Source Development Environment for iPhone Widgets

September 21, 2009 Open Source No Comments

WidgetPad Inc., a provider of collaborative developer environments for hybrid Web-based mobile applications, has announced WidgetPad for iPhone. WidgetPad for iPhone helps developers easily create native applications using standard Web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, and distribute them as stand-alone applications via the Apple iTunes store. WidgetPad is a collaborative, open-source environment that will allow thousands of developers to share source code and learn from each other.

WidgetPad takes the complexity out of creating native applications and eliminates the need to learn platform-specific API sets and tools, by taking advantage of emerging new standards, such as HTML5. Available through the Web via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, WidgetPad for iPhone allows developers to create fully interactive, media-rich mobile applications. These applications can leverage all of the iPhone’s advanced hardware capabilities (GPS, accelerometer, compass, etc.) by simply accessing WidgetPad.com through standard browsers – Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Some key features of WidgetPad for iPhone include:
- Editing: Source code editing for JavaScript, HTML 5 and CSS (with syntax highlighting)
- Resource management: Uploading of various resources (image, sound, and other JavaScript and CSS files) and project management
- Code Sharing and Forking: Automatic sharing of all public projects
- Secure cross-domain scripting: Easily create mash-up applications with existing Web services accessing Web-service APIs over the domain boundary securely
- Application previewing: Run the application on a PC/Mac browser without the iPhone (Safari compatible)
- Publishing: Developers can choose to publish applications to iPhone either via a generic WidgetPad client (free), or as their own branded applications (free or paid)

WidgetPad Development Environment

WidgetPad Development Environment

Upcoming versions of WidgetPad will allow developers to seamlessly port applications to other smartphone devices such as the Palm Pre and Blackberry. The basic version of WidgetPad for iPhone, which is free, allows developers to distribute their applications to iPhone users via a generic WidgetPad client (also free). The source code of those “public” applications will be automatically shared among other developers (MIT license), creating a great learning and collaborative environment for developers. The premium version of WidgetPad for iPhone, available later this year, allows developers to create “private” projects and distribute stand-alone applications to the Apple iTunes store.

For more information about WidgetPad for iPhone and to instantly start developing hybrid applications for the iPhone, visit www.widgetpad.com.

WidgetPad Inc. is a provider of collaborative developer environments for hybrid Web-based mobile applications. The company’s development environment allows Web developers to easily and cost-effectively create hybrid web applications for smartphones and mobile devices, such as iPhone, Palm Pre and Google’s Android devices. The company was founded by Satoshi Nakajima and Yuichiro Masui. Nakajima is the creator of the world’s first CAD application for the personal computer, and a defining force behind the architecture for Microsoft Windows 95 and the creation of Internet Explorer 3.0. Masui is a contributor of various open source projects, such as PukiWiki, and played a leadership role in building Ruby on Rails community in Japan. WidgetPad is based in Bellevue, Wash.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

WidgetPad Introduces Web-based Open-Source Development Environment for iPhone Widgets

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Lean Manufacturing and IT Strategy

September 21, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Olivier Drean is EMEA alliance partner for APRISO, which is an editor of MOM (Manufacturing Operation Management) system. He has 15 years of manufacturing experience that is split between production management, Lean Manufacturing consultancy before joining APRISO. Olivier has a Mechanical Engineering degree and a MBA.  He has a unique perspective of IT in manufacturing organization.  I had an interesting conversation with Olivier and here is an excerpt of my conversations with him…

Raj:  What do you think is the biggest problem manufacturing organizations are facing that IT has not solved yet?

Olivier: In the manufacturing world one of the biggest challenges we are facing is a strong aversion to IT by the business people.  IT is often perceived as intrusive and with minimal value added vs. automation which can provide a lot of help. This gap has even been increasing by the massive implementation of ERP which is not a dedicated manufacturing tool. The result is a large set of local custom development or initiative has led to a huge heterogeneity in IT systems that prevent people from working together. This has ultimately led to a chasm between business and IT.   I think IT can play a strong role in enabling large business transformation project such as Lean Manufacturing or 6 sigma initiatives which has not been exploited by the manufacturing organizations.

Raj: Tell me more about the solution APRISO has and how do you solve IT Strategy Issues?
Olivier: APRISO has developed and implemented a business consulting offering named OVA – Operational Value Assessment. This is a way to align business strategy from top to bottom and bottom to top.   We define IT needs right down to the shop floor. The goal of this analysis is to be quick. It take us more or less 2 days per plant and a few days of interview with C executive and consolidation to be able to deliver a phased project/program in line with business needs with a target saving which build the ROI of the project. Last year we performed a few of those and for a 3 sites OVA the overall duration is from 4 to 6 weeks maximum, then a project can be started. As a key MOM player the savings we delivered to our customers are really amazing and with more 600 plants running in discrete manufacturing we start to have large numbers of testimonies.

Raj: Interesting approach… Do you see resistance from your customers to adapt to this approach?
Olivier: As Software editor, this approach is quite surprising and customers still view our approach with suspicion. That’s why we are looking at IT consulting firms that provide high level IT infrastructure or just at IT standardization to justify ROI, while at the same time they can be part of business transformation initiatives that lead to even bigger and more sustainable savings. IT can play an important role but with most of Lean people who are still claim that Lean journey can be taken is without IT, while Toyota is investing 10b$ in IT since 2003, is very much frustrating.

Raj:  Maybe that is the myth created by ‘Lean experts’.  All the books I have read about Lean Manufacturing, claim that Toyota manages Lean process with minimal IT Support.  But you say Toyota is investing $10B. Do you know where they are investing?
Olivier: Yes and it is public knowledge. In 2003 an article was published (in Japanese) about how Toyota invested 2 billion USD in IT to do what they called “Global Kaizen”. This is also called the 1st step of the planned “10 billion dollar Kaikaku”.

Toyota tends to be very secretive about their investment plan. This article is written by a highly regarded Japanese magazine called “Nikkei Information Strategy” which hired several Auto industrial consultants to investigate Toyota’s IT investment.
They have identified 4 areas that Toyota invested heavily on IT.

  1. Electronic Kanban for global purchasing – In 2003, Toyota’s profit margin was Japan 9.2%, NA 4.6%, Europe 0.2% => best practice failed to roll out from Japan to overseas
  2. New product planning and design – switching from old “V-Comm” system to CATIA and automate cost estimation
  3. Support for BTO – to adopt Dell model… capability to search what WIP are on the factory line and then allocate to customer requested options / specifications
  4. After sales service – consider as major revenue stream – traceability system extended to post sales and running record on vehicles
  5. Multi-tera byte M-BOM – Dassault PDM

There is an interesting comment at the end of this article: Toyota does not use the word “Standard” in any documents but rather calls them “Format”. This is because the Toyota is not concerned whether oversea facilities have inferior performance or Kanban not running correctly. Toyota’s biggest worry is Kaizen being stopped and employees blindly following according to “Standard”. Hence all standards are considered as temporary formats subject to Kaizen changes. This is their greatest concern in rolling out global “standardized” IT systems.

Therefore an important takeaway, when talking to Toyota, do not talk about standardization of process. Only talk about standardized platform to sustain Kaizen.

Raj: Wow that is an important distinction! No wonder Toyota is a leader in continuous improvement of their business process.  Is there anything else IT can learn from the Lean Manufacturing?
Olivier: Lean relies on capability to improve continuously, IT is perceived as rigid and constraint full. IT development and project management has been evolving and today can fully embrace and support Lean philosophy. A key element of the lean journey is embracing changes, the IT world should learn from that principle: to go back to simplicity and rely on the strength of everyone and not only pushing dogmatic vision that are not serving their key resources, pragmatically it means that stronger collaboration with business people.


Related posts:

  1. Testing GM’s IT Strategy
  2. IBM’s IT Strategy
  3. Emerging Role of IT in the Marketing Strategy of Coca-Cola


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