Seth’s “Top things to do if you run a website” and responses from a Web Strategist

Categories: Web Analytics, Web Strategy, Web Theory, Web ToolsPosted on September 24th, 2006

Seth Godin one of the top minds in Marketing has released this post called top 8 things to do if you manage a website.

Good starting list but from someone involved with corporate websites (and know many others) not all of these are valid corporate web strategies.

I see this list as great for small websites trying to harness low cost marketing and social media, but for a large eCommerce site, more serious tools, considerations and strategy need to be considered, measured and analyzed.

My thoughts below:

1. Register with Technorati
Jeremiah: Register a corporate site for Technorati is an interesting idea, but does this model work if your homepage is not pushing RSS?

2. Become a Digger
Jeremiah: Become a Digger, yup, makes sense, soon we’ll have all of our employees digging and we’ll learn to game the system. So if one company that has 300,000 employees gets all their employees to digg every press release will that make Digg effective and accurate?

3. Build a Squidoo lens
Jeremiah: I’ve not used it (Mike Arrington didn’t speak highly of it at Future of Web Apps) Squidoo is a company that Seth is involved with.

4 Get your team to spread the word
Jeremiah: Agreed! Some of the best evangelists in your company are you loyal employees.

5. Issue a press release
Jeremiah: Perhaps when relevant, also consider using blogs?

6. Get a sister site for testing
Jeremiah: Most corporate web groups have staging sites, development sites, testing sites, production sites for testing, refining and iterative changes.

7. Google Analytics
Jeremiah: I have a buddy who’s a senior analytics guy at a eCommerce company in Silicon Valley, they have dozens of analysts who are measuring their website using analytics tools, and they’re NOT using Google Analytics.

8. Don’t be boring
Jeremiah: Agreed.

Seth, I think these are great points for the small business, however they may not apply to the larger or corporate web strategy. I’d love to hear the thoughts and opinions from others.

Oh, I met Seth in Vegas, he’s an amazing speaker.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 7:52 am and is filed under Web Analytics, Web Strategy, Web Theory, Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

SEM Basics

This blog inspired me to write a short post about how to talk to your customers online. You can read it at http://sembasics.com/sem-blog/how-to-talk-to-yo...

I would, of course, love it if anyone could add to the list. These were just the initial ideas that I thought of.

Either way, thanks for the post and thanks for the inspiration.

All the best,

Moshe

SEM Basics

I have an idea that I'd like to add to the list. Talk to your customers, find out what type of content, product and/or services they want from your website and then give them what they want. We can become so focused on marketing our site that we forget the most important element in any business venture (online or offline) -- the customer! Furthermore, there are numerous ways to keep in contact with your customers, blogs, newsletters, suggest a feature sections, forums, etc. One of the best examples of this is Brad Callan of SEO Elite and Keyword Elite fame. He has a forum for customers where customers can suggest new features that they would like as well as problems and/or questions concerning present features. He regularly interacts with his customers in this section and makes product updates accordingly. There is no reason why more websties can't do this.

All the best,

Moshe

Lance Shields

Jeremiah, I agree that big businesses are a different fish. I work for medium to gigantic corporation and while I absolutely love Seth's words and constantly share his ideas with my team, I often find myself wishing he'd write a bit more for non-startups wanting to be the "new small".

I think Digg is certainly not enterprise enough. Jeremiah, I've worked for Hitachi on many global projects (actually I designed the current hitachi.com) and I could never imagine the parent company using digg, delicious or any other social network to spread the word. To be fair, I know Seth has chiselled away at the idea of the big, unagile corporations that MUST embrace new approaches to be competitive with the smaller guys. I just think that he needs to go deeper on how to ACTUALLY get big monster companies to start moving. Good post dude.

jeremiah_owyang

Sorry for the delay in comment approval I'm in travel mode as I write from the O'Hare Airport in Chicago.

Brian, You may be right and I did indeed overlook a key word. If so, we should also add Delicious to the things to do. Also, create an RSS feed for a lot of content and also sign up for feedburner.

Justin, I'm not critizing Seth, in fact I'm a Seth fan. I read his blog, buy his books, and have seen him speak. See above for some suggested additions. The corporate tips would require more work, but I agree it would make a great post.

Justin, I beg you to re-consider that I was bashing, it's simply a discussion and my point of view. No ill-harm intended, and if that was the case, I apologize.

...Thanks all, Boarding soon...

Justin Brooke

While just about everything you say is valid. I think you unfairly critize Seth. I have never thought of Seth to be a corporate marketing hero. I would have to say his branding has always been geared for the start-up. It would have been nice if you could have explained your own top 8 for corps.

On a sidenote yes the Digg thing is losing ground but...is it not the easiest cheapest publicity trick at the moment?

You have a nice site and I might check you outagain someday, if I remember. It would have been more valuable to me and bookmarkable if you had used constructive bashing instead of destructive bashing.

Brian Brown

As with most lists, there is usually one nugget to unearth. Mine was Google Analytics...I just added it last night.

I think it should be noted that the title of the post is "The 8 Free Things Every Site Should Do." For some reason, you omitted free from your link (unless Seth added the word "Free" after the fact.

I do think the title should say "Blog" instead of "Site" because these ARE blog-specific. And I also agree this list is more applicable to small business websites rather than large. This is probably a very good list for the audience of my site. I'll link to this post as well for some contrast.