Paul Boag’s 10 Truths about Corporate Web Sites

Boag wrote an article a while back for Smashing Magazine that lists 10 things most large organizations don’t seem to understand about their Web sites. None of the points were new even then, but all are worth considering and reconsidering.

My favorite point is actually #10 on the list: “You have too much content.” Boag recommends taking Steve Krug’s advice (see Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think):

‘Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.’ This will reduce the noise level on each page and make the useful content more prominent.

Hear hear.

Content that Works: Gerson Lehrman Group

Enterprise 2.0 is often presented as an imperative. Companies not only have to have a corporate Web site, they need an online presence. They should consider blogging, launching a Facebook page, or sending tweets. They should publish ebooks and cast pods (preferably including audio and video).

But to do most of these things well, a company not only has to have something to say, it has to have something compelling to say that captures the attention of its target audiences. How many companies do these things well? I don’t know of many, but I’d like to know of more.

So this is the first in what I hope will be a series of ”Content that Works” posts that will highlight companies that regularly generate compelling content. I’ll be on the lookout for examples, so any suggestions you have will be much appreciated.

The first company on my list is the Gerson Lehrman Group.

GLG describes itself as a “global marketplace for expertise.” The company has assembled a network of thousands of specialists from a wide variety of industries around the globe who provide insights and advice to anyone who can afford GLG’s fees.

GLG News, on the other hand, is free. The service consists of expert analyses, usually in response to articles from the mainstream press or industry journals, “that keep clients apprised of important industry developments across a range of sectors and topics.” The company’s Web site contains thousands of these analyses, which read something like brainy blog posts. And anyone can subscribe to receive analyses in their areas of interest by email or RSS.

The content is not particularly well organized and the analyses can be a bit dry and rough, but GLG has created a powerful approach to generating rich content, and I expect its presentation will improve over time.

Gov 2.0, Governed Zero?

The Obama administration has made a number of efforts to use “Gov 2.0″ to reduce the barriers to citizen participation in government. But according to the New York Times, the results have been less than inspiring. The efforts are often dominated by highly motivated, vocal minorities who seem to prioritize issues like the legalization of marijuana above managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the economic crisis. And the Internet, including Gov 2.0, can be particularly useful to those who would distort the truth, whatever that might be.

Obviously, the dynamic is different for businesses who seek online input from customers, but companies could learn something from these experiments in Web-mediated democracy. Among other things, it is important to find ways to gauge whether the customer input you are able to gather is actually representative of your customers’ opinions.

The piece led me wonder what Walmart might do with analyses like the one done by Crimson Hexagon that was the subject of a previous post. It’s no surprise that Walmart gets a lot of flack online, but the company is also turning in profits that exceed analysts’ expectations.

Re: Customer Comments, Walmart Off Target

According to a short article in Adweek, “buzz monitor” firm Crimson Hexagon determined that people who leave comments online about Target are more likely to discuss their shopping experiences than people who leave comments about Walmart, who are more likely to leave comments about the social impact of Walmart’s business practices. Crimson classified 75% of the comments left about Target as positive and 61% of those left about Walmart as negative.

McKinsey: Companies Continue to Embrace Web 2.0

A new artcle in the McKinsey Quarterly reports the results of a survey of executives about the benefits of useing Web 2.0 technologies to support innovation, marketing, and knowledge sharing as well as lower costs and increase revenues. The short story is that companies are using these technologies more and more and the benefits of doing so are increasing . Check out this interactive tool for a snapshot of the findings.

The question I had is how did executives determine the ROI on their Web 2.0 activities? I know this is the wrong (often because it is the unanswerable) question. But its hard to make sense of the trends in the absence of some common measure of benefits gained.

In any case, it looks like McKinsey is trying to put its money where its mouth is. As of September 11, the Quarterly had 33,673 Facebook fans and 15,465 followers on Twitter. And the online version of its new publication What Matters offers the full range of Web 2.0 features, from comments and RSS to audio and video. No public blogs from the Firm yet – as far as I know.

Cents and Sentiment Analysis

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article about the “emerging field of sentiment analysis.” The article discusses a number of new companies (particularly including Scout Labs, Jodange, and Newssift, which is owned by the Financial Times) that scour portions of the Web to determine what people think about particular topics (read: your company). These technologies aim to translate potentially vast amounts of raw qualitative information (gathered from newspapers, magazines, blogs, Twitter, etc) into some semblance of hard data that enables users to gauge public opinion. It doesn’t sound like anyone has cracked the code quite yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time before sentiment analysis is mandatory for virtually every business.

Fear and Lifelogging in San Francisco

The latest issue of BusinessWeek has a profile of Microsoft researcher Gordon Brown, a pioneer of “lifelogging,” the practice of digitally documenting large portions of a person’s life (in Brown’s case, his own). It seems were all doing this to some degree, whether we know it or not. The article raises pros and cons – the cons largely having to do with Orwellian concerns about privacy and manipulation. But one has to wonder what we are doing to ourselves by indulging this other kind of logorrhoea.

Making Your Blog Your Home (Page)

Chris Anderson seems to have coined the phrase “retail blog” – a business site that make its front page “almost all blog, with the products relegated to a sidebar.” Why don’t more companies do this? Anderson’s examples aren’t all that fantastic (the post is a year old, so perhaps there are better examples out there today), but the idea seems solid. It would seem to particularly appropriate for companies that sell services such as consultancies.

Everyone’s an Inventor

Quirky.com is a new company that helps anyone with an idea for a product to refine and bring it to market – with input from an online community of like-minded amateurs (or professionals, for that matter). The company is out to democratize product development by harnessing the power of collective creativity. “Everyone has a product idea,” says founder Ben Kaufman.

Host Your Customers’ Product Reviews

More and more companies are inviting customers to leave product reviews, including negative ones, on their corporate Web sites. But doesn’t this pose a significant reputation risk? Why be the repository and mouth piece for bad news about your own products?

According to the Financial Times, negative reviews don’t have to work that way. Think of them as constructive criticism. The companies that do this well use critical reviews as a way to identify and manage negative perceptions and address product shortcoming faster and more effectively. And evidence suggests that customers are generally pretty fair. When they aren’t, other customers usually post correctives.