You know it as well as we do: a website is a kind of proxy for the organization behind it, and thus a site tends to reflect that organization – warts and all. Because sales and marketing don’t talk, the site’s product pages don’t work well. The US page is full of content; the Russian page….not so much. You get the point.

One of our clients, Magus, has dedicated its life to helping big organizations clean up on both sides of the curtain. That is, they provide probably the world’s best solution to manage and quality-control content on large sites, and they’re thought leaders on the subject of website governance (which they reflect on their blog).

They’ve seen what can go wrong and what needs to go right. So we sat down with them to illustrate (with not a little tongue in cheek) how things can go wrong in their experience, and what’s going to help keep things going right.

To show how things can go wrong, we worked with them on a visual story about a hypothetical website called www.webloop.com (yes, there ARE two meanings). It’s a humorous, but painfully accurate, account of the struggles of many large sites. Click on the image to get the full-sized version.

To describe what’s going to keep a website on the straight and narrow, we developed an eBook together with Magus that stakes out the golden rules for website governance. Here are the seven critical mistakes websites make, and how to avoid them. Click on the image to download the full eBook.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Clients, ebook, infographics, web governance, website design

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ShipServ is the shipping industry’s #1 e-marketplace, and, as of today it’s also winner of the Red Herring 100 Award for European innovation.

It’s a very cool company.

Eight years ago the shipping industry was awash with e-marketplaces making bold promises of new beans for the ‘new economy.’ Today, only ShipServ flourishes (the others are toast). They got in touch with us towards the end of last year to see how we could help revamp their brand and their online presence.

Here’s what we did.

We took them from this:

…to this:

Along the way we’ve worked hand in glove with ShipServ’s VP of Marketing John Watton, and CEO Paul Østergaard to redefine their core positioning and messages, turbo-charge their corporate pitches and plan their next brave moves into the world of web 4.7.

So, we’re thrilled that the new site is now up and sailing.

Thanks to John and Paul for giving us the space and direction to do work that we’re really proud of.

Big thanks also to the extremely talented Ben at Jackfruit for his superior web development skills (Ben’s the guy who did the physical build); and thanks to Rob and the team at RMA for their work on another top drawer piece of design (they’re the guys who created the site templates).

…And watch this space – because there’s more to come.

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, Branding, Clients, Identity, Innovation, Marketing, Petri Dish, Sites We Like, Web Design, Web Marketing

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Pretty much every one of them says their own momentum is intimately connected to what leading industry analyst Gartner (which just happens to be a Velocity client, BTW) thinks about their company, their products and their technology; specifically people care passionately about where they sit on the fabled Magic Quadrant for their industry or product segment.

Many of them do seem to spend lots of time and money – with PR companies and analyst relations houses in particular – trying to convince Gartner to shift their position to the top right of the MQ. And many others – usually the smaller, newer ones – exhaust themselves just trying to get on the MQ radar at all.

No surprise really. Customers – the people buying tech – use Gartner to create shortlists. But could tech firms spend less time, effort and money and have a bigger impact? And are they really paying attention to what Gartner says is important for Magic Quadrant success and then taking the relevant action in response? I’m not convinced, because Gartner’s advice is so explicit.

A quick reminder of what the Magic Quadrant is all about. As the expensively produced chart below shows, Gartner plots what it calls a vendor’s ‘Completeness of Vision’ against its ‘Ability to Execute, creating four quadrants ‘Leaders’, ‘Challengers’, ‘Niche Players’ and ‘Visionaries’. The higher on the Quadrant vendors are found and the further to the right they place the more seriously rich customers take them.

So how do you become a Gartner nominated ‘Leader’? Well Gartner is pretty explicit about this. It calculates a vendor’s Completeness of Vision by differentially weighting eight separate factors. The highest weighting is given to two things: the first unsurprisingly is a company’s capacity for innovation. This relates specifically to R&D performance.

The second is ‘Market Understanding’ – basically the ability of a vendor to align its marketing strategy with market needs. And two other marketing factors, ‘marketing strategy’ and ‘offering strategy’ – what most companies call product marketing – are also judged to be critical in a company’s Completeness of Vision. So three of Gartner’s eight criteria on this axis put great marketing at the heart of a great rating.

What about ‘Ability to Execute’? Well marketing is important here too. This axis seeks to measure how well the vendor in question is equipped to succeed in the market in question. It scores product function and feature, the quality of the sales force, the overall viability of the company in financial and organizational terms and the quality of the customer base. But the highest weighting (equal in importance to scale and quality of R&D investment) is what Gartner calls “Marketing Execution’, defined as:

‘the overall effectiveness of the vendor’s marketing efforts, and the degree of ‘mind share’, market share and account penetration that the vendor has achieved. Marketing execution is a significant driver of sales, growth and brand awareness and therefore receives a high weighting’.

With Gartner being so explicit about the importance of marketing to Magic Quadrant success, and buyers listening so intently to what Gartner says, why do so many tech B2B vendors see marketing as a cost instead of an investment? Frankly, it’s baffling.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, Clients, Marketing, Thought Leadership

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© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, Clients, Marketing

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