In our recent post "Harvesting Ideas Online to Solve Tough Problems," we touched upon the value of crowdsourcing as a mechanism for generating ideas and solving problems for your business.

In the same spirit, we would like to introduce Passenger, an on-demand, online customer collaboration tool. The solution includes the collaboration platform in combination with client service/support. As Passenger is a software as a service (SaaS) model, there’s no need for any IT integration, downloads or add-ons. Simply log on through your web browser.

Passenger can be used to inject the voice of your customer into your product/service development, and more specifically, the company suggests the following potential uses of its collaboration solution:

Market & Customer Insight

* Monitor shifts in perspective
* Identify current and emerging needs
* Discover counter-intuitive opportunities

Customer-Driven Innovation

* Deliver what customers need
* Identify and refine the most salient ideas
* Extend existing strengths and capabilities

Brand Advocacy

* Empower key customers through participation in the process
* Fuel passion for your brand

Website Marketing NOW is a major advocate of customer collaboration to drive your small business forward. Passenger is just one more potential tool for your arsenal to engage with your customers and to leverage their insights in driving innovation for your business growth.

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Barack Obama has the unprecedented opportunity to leverage the Web in solving the US’s major challenges and in strengthening the country. Through the online medium, Obama has the opportunity to tap into a resource filled with millions of curious and thinking minds — the American population.

And he has started to achieve this through the creation of Change.gov, a website that offers the American people an opportunity to share their visions, ideas and suggestions. To register, go to http://www.change.gov/page/s/yourvision.

After the recent presidential election, Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research commented on his blog that just as Obama expertly connected with real people through websites such as my.barackobama.com, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube during his campaign, he has a similar opportunity to energize people and leverage their passion in solving today’s incredibly difficult challenges as a component of his presidency.

The solution?

The crowdsourcing of ideas.

After the election Bernoff wrote in his blog, "Barack Obama faces perhaps the most complex set of problems to face a president in the last fifty years, from terrorism to a teetering economy to a deficit that scares the crap of out me for my children’s future. He has the power to inspire people behind the solutions he may come up with. He’s clearly intelligent. But does he have the humility to gather those solutions from the popular groundswell that elected him?"

Bernoff continued, "I call on president-elect Obama to create a community of committed Americans to discuss the solutions to the problems that face us. I call on him to designate a US Community Manager, with a small staff, to moderate and harvest those discussions to solve the country’s problems. Forget polls. With a few million people in my.america.gov, Obama will be able to tap into the world’s largest focus group. Communities are cheap, compared to most of what the government does. Create a space for the brightest people you know; use them to attract the best ideas. And better yet, use this energized community to sell those ideas to America."

What a fantastic idea. It’s an idea that companies are already tapping into through crowdsourcing. Starbucks looks to improve its store experience by tapping into the insights of its customers at MyStarbucksIdea.com. Dell taps its customers’ insights at IdeaStorm.com. Crowdsourcing platforms like Kluster put innovation in the hands of the crowd for just about any company, regardless of size. The overarching idea is to tap into the power of the people to help solve problems and create positive change.

Of course it would be silly to think that Obama could rely exclusively on this type of input. However, by leveraging crowdsourcing he is going to gain insights from intelligent people around the country on an ongoing basis throughout his presidency. It’s difficult enough for a president to hear the true voices of the American people. This is one way that he will stay connected with real people, and see things from an endless variety of perspectives.

As Bernoff points out in a later blog entry, the change.gov website is a good start. However, it’s not yet a transparent social model, in that previously submitted ideas are not shared among site visitors and therefore are obviously not voted on among participants. Taking it to that level of community would certainly be the next step in the process. By empowering people to vote on all ideas submitted, the Obama team will be able to quickly and efficiently see ideas that resonate with great numbers of the American populace, ideas that they may not have come across in the sometimes insular world of Washington D.C.

How about your company?

There’s nothing stopping you, as well, from taking this approach. Regardless if you are a 100 person firm with a long history or a solo entrepreneur in a home-based startup, you can extend your brainpower, problem-solving capabilities as well as ability to capitalize on new opportunities by building your team exponentially through crowdsourcing.

Why not try it today? Go to a crowdsourcing site such as kluster and start a brainstorm around a single idea. See what happens. By starting small, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain if the test is successful. And then all of a sudden, you are no longer a company limited by the number of employees on your payroll. Instead, you have transformed your company into a creativity lab filled with hundreds, thousands or even millions of ideas.

Not bad for any small company looking to drive revenue growth and beat larger competitors.

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Looking to jumpstart your small business? Inject some innovation into what you do and what you offer your customers. Here are three ways to get you started in injecting new, fresh life into your small business:

Think!

Stop! Stop what you are doing right now, put all your paperwork away, and take a full day to brainstorm ideas for your business. Brainstorm new products and services. Brainstorm ways to help your customers better. Brainstorm ways to become more efficient. When was the last time you spent a good 8 - 10 hours just on quality thinking time for your business?

Become Your Customer

Spend a day as your customer. Literally, take the time to put yourself into your customer’s shoes and see life from this alternative perspective. As you move through the day, what objectives arise? What challenges arise? What surprises arise? What is it that becomes critical to your day, in order to make it successful?

Solve Problems

Spend a full hour outlining every potential frustration and problem that your customers face. Go through the entire process that your customers progress through in getting their work done. Break up the process into individual components. Identify frustrations with each component. Figure out better ways to get tasks done at each component level.

Further reading to keep your mind innovative and creative:

–Lateral Action

–Creative Think

–Fast Company * Innovation

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Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus is a useful book that helps small businesses increase conversions (leads, sales, etc.) from their websites.

Small businesses cannot rely on expensive marketing channels such as national TV and print advertising, like their large company counterparts. Consequently, it’s critical for small businesses to maximize returns from their websites.

Many website designers focus on making a website look good. However, many of these designers stay away from issues of return on investment. Unfortunately, that is EXACTLY what a small business needs to focus on.

Web Design for ROI suggests that you do that through a focus on what the customer wants, a commitment to incremental changes through ongoing testing, and the use of metrics to track and measure website success.

The book is divided into three main sections:

The Big Picture
The first three chapters focus on higher level and strategic issues.

Design Guidelines
The fourth through ninth chapters focus on design tactics covering six different website areas, including product ("detail") pages, forms and the checkout process.

Resources
The final chapter provides a list of additional website enhancement resources. Complementary to the book is the accompanying website at www.WD4ROI.com.

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Stop. Visit your website. If this were your very first time to the site, what would you be feeling? Would you be curious and intrigued?? Would you feel compelled to learn more and spend more time with your brand??

Curiosity is powerful.

Make your website visitors curious, and they will click on more links, view more pages and spend more time with your brand.

GirlEffect.org

Wow! What a great website. Talk about building curiosity.

Land on GirlEffect.org, and you are presented with a video. However, the video doesn’t try to stuff your view with everything the site has to offer.

Instead, it slowly builds a narrative. One. Word. At. A. Time.

The site begins by listing a number of global problems: AIDS. Hunger. Poverty. War. Then it asks, "What if there was an unexpected solution to this mess? Would you even know it if you saw it? The solution isn’t the Internet. It’s not science. It’s not government."

Are you curious now?

The website is dedicated to the power of investing in girls in the developing world. These girls on average reinvest 90% of their income in their families (as opposed to boys at 30%-40%).

Instead of overwhelming the site visitor with tons of statistics, though, the website guides the visitor through a simple, yet ridiculously effective, storyline of how the visitor can help change a girl’s life, and in the process, change the world.

Enough. We will not reveal anymore here.

Drop what you are doing and visit GirlEffect.org right now. See how the website builds curiosity in the site visitor.

Then, visit your own website again. And figure out at least one way that you can build curiosity into your own site, compelling your prospective customers to want to click and click and click through your site.

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Webmasters and online marketers in general have a useful online resource in WebmasterRadio.FM.

The free online radio channel covers topics ranging from advertising, affiliate marketing, public relations and entertainment, to SEO, international marketing, conferences and Internet marketing.

The channel boasts more than 2,500 episodes, in addition to a blog, online chat and a news section.

The only caveat is that you should be cautious of the publication date of the episodes you might be interested in listening to. For example, the latest episode in "NextStuff Now," a topic area within "Internet Marketing" that covers companies developing new technologies, products and services for the Internet, is September 2007 as of this writing. Obviously you are better off sticking with the most recent content, considering how quickly the online marketing world is moving.

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If you are a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, you need to create a website that effectively supports a sales process directed at companies rather than individuals. So, what’s the best way to do that?

Audience

When creating a B2B website, it’s useful to start with the audience. Unlike with a business-to-consumer (B2C) website, a B2B website needs to identify the departments, roles and titles within an organization as the specific buyer. For example, is your target audience the VP of Human Resources, an office manager or a staff accountant?

Make sure that your B2B website speaks to the right level of person within the organization. For example, an engineer might prioritize lots of product-related specifications and answers to "how" your product/service/solution works. On the other hand, a VP or C-level executive might instead be seeking proof of return on investment (ROI). The language and contents of your website should be aligned to your ideal target audience.

Support the Internal Approval Process

Unlike with B2C purchases, a B2B purchase often involves multiple individuals and sometimes multiple departments and levels of approval. The B2B sales cycle typically takes much longer than with B2C sales. In certain cases one sale may take months or even more than a year.

In consideration of these complexities, it’s important that a B2B website be structured to support the internal approval process, from start to finish. This means addressing the needs of not only your target individual within an organization, but also the other players in the approval process. It’s equally important to support your main advocate within the organization with the tools and information in order to sell your products or services or solutions to others internally (on your behalf).

This means your website should provide not only your core product/services/solutions information, but also broader research-oriented information, such as whitepapers, trends reports, market reports, points of view documents, and research papers. In addition, it should empower your internal advocate with selling tools, such as product demos, slide shows and ROI calculators. It should support the communication flow as your prospect moves through the purchase cycle, so adding customer relationship management (CRM) features is also key. This can take the form of a newsletter registration, special reports, company updates and webinars.

Build Credibility

With B2B, it’s important to let your audience know why they should trust you. To that end, press coverage, press releases, proof of industry leadership, third-party validation such as industry awards, etc. are all useful elements of a B2B website. This will make it easier for your advocate inside your prospective client’s organization to convince others internally that you are a good comparative choice.

Make it Interesting

Too often, B2B websites are boring. They use corporate-speak excessively, as if the actual people behind the B2B purchases are unfeeling robots. They forget that even in a long sales cycle, prospects like to be engaged. This presents itself as a great differentiation opportunity for any B2B firm.

A B2B website can differentiate itself with a distinct personality in its writing, and with engagement opportunities such as blogs, forums and Q&A sections. In addition, a B2B website can be juiced up with the addition of useful tools, calculators and widgets.

Great B2B Website

For an example of a B2B website that "gets it," check out Salesforce.com. It’s a B2B website that provides the site visitor with endless information, support and tools customized for various roles within the company. Check out their success kits, webinars and vertical solutions, and don’t be surprised if you wind up learning a thing or two to take your own B2B site to the next level in the process.

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Online shoppers’ expectations of retail websites are changing, as these shoppers trend towards expecting and demanding more and more from their website experiences.

In eMarketer’s article Shaking Up Online Shopping, it is clear that retail websites are going to need to add features and enhance the website experience in order to satisfy online shoppers and maximize revenue from their sites this holiday season.

According to an Allurent survey after last year’s holiday season, a full two-thirds of respondents confirmed that they expected online retailers to keep up-to-date with the changing online landscape, including technology improvements and innovations similar to those introduced continuously by Google and Facebook.

The leading site feature that online shoppers are seeking is clear, easy-to-access product information. Apparently, too many retailers are simply not providing users with the full slate of information that they seek in order to make a final purchase decision. This should be relatively easy for an online retailer to correct.

Another area where online retailers can better meet user expectations is by providing a mechanism for user reviews, user ratings and user forums. Additional useful retail website features include relevant product recommendations, buying guides, blogs, interactive personalization tools/surveys, video, demonstrations of the product "in action" (rather than in static images alone), etc.

In addition to all of the above, Website Marketing NOW has noticed another large opportunity for online retailers. One area that is commonly ignored by retail websites is the implementation of effective audience segmentation strategies to better meet the expectations of specific audience types. This can have a dramatic impact on a retailer’s conversion rates.

For example, instead of treating all visitors to the website in the same exact way, cater to their individual preferences. Instead of being exclusively product focused, provide a unique website experience for each audience segment, and allow the products to appropriately fit within these customized environments aligned to the customer’s lifestyle. A music site should treat visitors who love punk rock differently than those into folk, jazz or classical music. By customizing the website experience for the retailer’s main audience segments, visitor satisfaction should increase as well as site conversions (e.g., sales, live chat, request a catalog, locate a store look-ups, etc.).

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