Corporate Websites 2.0; it’s all about business 2/3

Part 1 suggested that business websites are underused.  Two factors were raised.  We continue with the 3^rd here followed by suggestions to make it business oriented.

Click here for Part 1

3. Misguided use of websites, misguided understanding of business internet

       “Social media is only the tip of the iceberg”

Executives then (first phase of the web, pre-2000) misunderstood the internet as a tool for commerce.  They couldn’t grasp the differing culture or the changed rules of business. The result is that many firms today, through their websites, are not realising their full potential in a digitising economy.

To overhaul the website to do so will require the firm to meld business objectives it wants to achieve, say, long term engagement of their customers, online and applying the right digital mechanisms.  That is to say, apply the relevant internet ‘rules’ to the business processes.  This is more than using responsive web design, agile or another term the tech industry spews out. A grasps of the fundamentals of the machinery of the internet economy will help.  This is a huge topic so I’ll just leave references.

Most will agree that operating or even using online services feels a bit different from what we are used to.  Since culture eats strategy (Peter Drucker), some understanding helps. 

  The culture that lead to lean startup   Key is to be able to live the open culture.

“’Free and open’ was what made the internet work then, and it’s a critical principle now. I didn’t have to ask permission to build my first websites.  I had unfettered access to material that helped me teach myself how to code. As I learned more, I quickly came to understand that the internet was so much more than a network of cables and wires that connected computers around the world. It was a platform for the purest expression of freedom, openness and possibility that I had experienced in my life”

                                                                                 – Chad Dickerson, founder of Etsy

One big trend is the consumer economy - whence once the consumer only consumes, they now also produce.  This made billionaires of the founders of Facebook, Uber et cetera.  Consumers can indirectly play a role for a business if they are ‘asked’ 

   Crowdsourcing; a tool for business

‘Free’, once a niche in business is now taking centre stage in the internet economy.  Would Facebook be free to use if a traditional telco invented it?  Rules have changed, new business models have emerged.  Tech firms use ‘free’ strategically, so can traditional firms.  They understand that free now has value.

Another is active vs passive websites.  Website 2.0 is active by definition because it engages the public, using an open (digital) platform to do that.

Finally, this is self explanatory.

  Internet business model

Towards a 2.0 company website

 “Digital capabilities increasingly will determine which companies create or lose value” - McKinsey, May 2014

Business websites today tend towards sales but business is more than about selling.  2.0 version adds three things to improve business; capability to engage consumers (market development), put online specific business processes (to execute goals like market surveys) and improving the overall user experience.  It does more than that but three suffices here.  And by being inclusive, business should improve just as costs are brought down. 

Engaging consumers

Website 2.0 is about selling but it also engages consumers, some of whom would in the process contribute to the business.  Instead of traditional marketing, which is really one-way, online it is two-ways using crowdsourcing.  AT&T had an initiative in a crowd-driven video to market its phones.  The first episode was posted online, inviting anyone to suggest how the story continues.  The only condition was that AT&T phones are featured as crowd cartoonists build their ideas into the story.  Downloads were high.

Crowdsourcing can do more by engaging consumers.

The peer-to-peer model

Open source business model

          These are about applying the relevant ‘rules’ to increase digital impact.  ‘Rules’ refer to
          methods, business models and mechanisms of the internet economy.

Obviously the use of such a platform is not limited to marketing but to business development and other aspects of a business.  This leads to the second capability.

Business processes 

Essentially this is about weberising business processes.  Businesses from time-to-time necessitate specific actions; carrying out a market study, developing a new product, recruitment, etc.  In this new social-economy, the crowd can assist rather than doing everything internally.  Why?  Because you can and it improves the deliverables while lowering costs.  It also brands.

 “China’s Xiaomi crowdsources features of its new mobile phones rather than investing heavily in R&D, and Telstra crowdsources customer service, so that users support each other to resolve problems without charge” - McKinsey, ‘Strategic principles for competing in the digital age’
  
Why they can is because Free now has value.

Let’s see how Acme does it.  Acme is in retail, hawking a variety of bicycles and accessories.  To better stock the shop, it wants to know what his customers really want.  Talking to them is one way but they know that idle chatter, say while a group of enthusiasts is on a country trial provides the most authentic data,.  Let’s see how this can be realised online.

Acme set up a forum off its main website, titled ‘off roading’ suggesting that enthusiast use the forum to discuss their experiences.  Accessories they like, specific performances of their bicycles and issues would be in the chatter.  Acme simply reads the forum for data.  They also set up another, a Q&A forum for its customers and opened to others. If the shopkeepers respond diligently and add a dose of enthusiasm, some of them will become customers.  When they want to ascertain something specific, say, whether to stock an accessory, he posts it as a question on the forum.  [Twitter and Facebook can also be used.]  This way, he is researching his market.  They can do more.

This is a simplistic example. Execution is never easy unless you are a global brand with an established fan base.  To get the forum going is like a branding exercise, it needs creative effort and there’s no guarantee.  A combination of traditional marketing (PR, giving talks, article placements in trade magazines, etc), traditional internet marketing (email, website, etc) and social media (Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, etc) can draw in the initial participants.  In all cases, ask for email addresses.

User experience is probably the most important for a business website.  This is discussed in the next concluding post.

@tommichen7

©Thet Ngian Chen, internetbusinessmodelasia.blogspot.com (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015).  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thet Ngian Chen and internetbusinessmodelasia.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Corporate Websites 2.0; it’s all about business 1/3

 Corporate websites seem handicapped in the digital era.

They have traditionally been underused, as a corporate front or shopfront with a product catalogue.  That’s 20% of its potential; tech firms edge towards 100%.  By adding the capability to engage consumers, a wider market can be developed. By adding specific business processes, they could carry out market studies, product or sales development whilst lowering costs. And by improving the overall user experience, revenue would increase. 

Many websites of Asian businesses are a facsimile of the cover page of annual reports, some in the care of IT departments.  But today they should be all about business.  Pre-dot.com (2000) it wasn’t. The mentality was that it must be a thing of beauty.  That’s because websites then were merely a presence, an address on the internet.  You’ll want your shopfront to look good, won’t you?

Corporate website 1.0 provided company information.  Business oriented ones added product listings, with contact information but sales continued as they normally do - offline.  Use the telephone if you want a response!   It has improved, adding more responsive customer service, better selling but except for the hits counter which barely moved, they are mostly static.  By static I mean the website is not actively engaging the consumers but waiting for potential buyers.  With revenue increasingly moving online, more can be done.  Turning it into an active shopfront with revenue-generating activities, both direct and indirect is a way forward.

This post suggests how firms can align their websites to their business operations, rather than simply sales.   And since online, businesses play by different rules, it further suggests incorporating digital mechanisms to improve customer experiences.

What can be done depends on size. Small firms will continue focusing on sales while the large may execute a gamut of initiatives from business development, R&D, branding to long term real-time trend harvesting. 

Lost in translation

Web 1.0 was during the period companies first recognised the internet as a place for business.  It was without precedence.  In designing their websites, they took inspiration from the early dot.com’ers who in turn took it from media.  That phase was all about portals. They saw themselves as the new media, thus the newspaper-look.  This has now changed as other digital business models emerge.

Three factors that drove website 1.0 now look out of place.  It is a lesson we can take from.

1. Treating websites as real estate - every open space must be filled

By aping newspapers, Website 1.0 acquired the complex look.  Companies even thought they could sell ads on their websites like newspapers!

Today, witness the new digital firms where the bland look is common. And that’s not because it’s fashionable.

As the new and the old entered their turf, ‘their competitors are only a click away’.  This changed everything.  Looking pretty gave way to making the site impactful.  User experience became design rule number one.

This means the site got to be fast.  The days of loading a beautifully made video on the corporate homepage is over.  Amazon has data to show that delays of microseconds manoeuvring their site costs them millions in lost revenue.  A site needs to serve up content quickly and as directly as possible.  And so distractions, whence once was thought of as a scheme to keep eyeballs on the page became passé.  Now the aim is for a customer to ‘get in, get out quickly’.   The.simple model was born. 

2. Treating the internet as an IT tool

Traditionally, IT is perceived as a tool for back-end operations such as accounting.  The internet was lost in this translation.  Most firms do not regard internet tech as a tool for business, associating it with IT.  In fact media treats AirBnB as a tech firm but really it is in hospitality using internet technology immersively and at the front to drive business.  Similarly Uber would be classified in the transportation sector, not tech in time.  Conventional firms could adopt tech as they have, deliberately, systemically to run their business, at the front and back.

I associate the term ‘tech’ with technology used to drive front-end revenue while IT automates back-end operations.

The next post continues with the third factor, ‘misguided use of websites’ and how to move forward.

@tommichen7

©Thet Ngian Chen, internetbusinessmodelasia.blogspot.com (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015).  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thet Ngian Chen and internetbusinessmodelasia.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.