Marketing is a source for big income in the Internet. Because of the powers that advertising possesses especially with a highly directed method that the Internet can offer, there is a bigger possibility that Internet ads will meet more success. For example, a person who is looking for a new computer and sees an ad for an online store offering a sale on computers will most likely click on the ad. Very few ads in other media can seek to approximate this demand-specific distribution of ads. This is also the reason why there is a growing influx of companies both big and small – that are allotting more budget towards Internet advertising. Consequently, more and more websites or publishers are also wanting to get in on the action because the click-throughs will mean big money for them for a very minimal effort.
There are many programs that have emerged online that seek to help web publishers take advantage of the revenue opportunities in advertising.
Yahoo.com, one of the search engine pioneers and a formidable force in the Internet industry, recently announced a new program that would enable web publishers gain more in terms of the benefits of pay for performance or pay-per-click advertising. The program, called Yahoo! Search Marketing, makes advertising on the Internet easier and more manageable to handle.
Yahoo! Search Marketing is based on the technologies and research used by Overture Services, Inc., otherwise known as http://GoTo.com – one of the first search engines that was able to include paid ads in its results. In 2003, Yahoo! acquired Overture and turned it into a fully owned subsidiary tasked to become the backbone for the whole search engine advertising or Pay-for-Performance setup. Overture’s innovative solutions with regards to advertising in search engines has been a great influence on other search engines since they have also come out with their own programs using the principles set by Overture, among them Google’s AdSense.
With the Yahoo! Search Marketing pay-per-performance program, publishers bid on search terms or keywords (this could be words, phrases, or a combination of both). The winning bidder’s web page is then placed in the search engine results for those keywords, with the position being related to the amount that was bid for the said keywords. This function is part of Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Sponsored Search feature, that makes advertising in Yahoo! so much more powerful and effective. The various features included in Sponsored Search allows you to not only control the position of your website in keyword searches, you can also set your own price per click and pay only when people actually click the link to your website.
This is a far more effective way of getting more visitors to go to your web page. First of all, Overture offers a far wider reach compared to other competitors, especially Google. Overture’s reach extends not only to Yahoo but also to AltaVista, CNN and Infospace, among others. The reporting function is also more intuitive now and far more complete in terms of searching for the effectiveness of certain keywords.
For more information please visit www.theinternetone.net
If we don’t change our direction we are likely to end up where we’re headed.
In today’s “Nanosecond” culture, successful organizations are doing what was once considered impossible. They are increasing customer satisfaction, shortening process cycles and response times, reducing costs, and developing innovative new products and services — all at the same time.
Not long ago, organizations could succeed by excelling at one or two of these areas. But the corporate landscape is now littered with the once mighty victims of this obsolete thinking. Today’s winners are capitalizing on the changes and challenges facing all organizations by being better and faster and cheaper and newer then their less nimble competitors.
Pointed In The Wrong Direction
Transforming a traditional organization to one that’s better, faster, cheaper, and newer is extremely difficult. That’s because organizations have built powerful cultures, systems, and practices that are now pointed in the wrong direction. This misdirection can be found across three key areas:
• Internally-Focused — most decisions about products, services, and organization direction are inside out. Product and service development specialists, technical experts, managers, planners, and other professionals spend most of their time inside the organization pushing products and services out to the market.
Too often the needs of the organization are put ahead of those people it’s trying to “serve”. As John McDonnell, Chairman and CEO of McDonnell Douglas put it, “we did not always listen to what the customer had to say before telling him what he wanted”. This we-know-best approach is now finding many long time leaders out of sync with their markets. The ratings (and revenues) of many mighty corporations are plummeting. Their “loyal” (once treated as captive) customers find products and services that better reflect their changing perceptions of value.
• Functionally Managed — individual departments work to optimize their own internal efficiency. Goals, objectives, measurements, and career paths move up and down within the narrow, functional “chimney walls”. Functional managers and their employees focus on doing their own jobs or segment of the production, delivery, or support process.
Functionally managed organizations typically reduce service/quality levels while increasing cycle times and costs by; 1) fostering an “us-versus-them” approach to communications and fighting for organizational resources, 2) leaving unmanaged gaps between departments which disrupt cross-functional work processes, 3) making improvements or changes in one department which hurts the effectiveness of other departments in the process, and, 4) losing sight of customer-supplier relationships and meeting everyone’s needs.
Since the 1950s, Toyota has worked tirelessly to reduce the walls and gaps between departments. By the 1970s, their manufacturing methods became widely known throughout Japan as the “Toyota Production Methods”. In the early 1980s, their highly successful practices migrated to North America as Just-In-Time manufacturing. Stressing the importance of managing across organizational boundaries, a Toyota executive said, “It is not enough to manage the affairs within your own division. One of the most important functions of a division manager is to improve coordination between his own division and other divisions. It you cannot handle this task, please go work for an American company”.
• Management-Centered — management’s needs, goals, and perspectives are the starting point for all activities. Managers and their staff professionals are the brains and employees are the hands. Employees serve their managerial masters and do as they are told. Broad business perspectives and strategies, operational performance data, problem solving and decision making authority, and cross-functional skills are kept by management.
But the world is now moving too fast to maintain this archaic “command and control” approach that puts management at the center of the universe. Managers can no longer know enough, fast enough, about enough things, enough of the time to anticipate enough of the changes that are needed to improve the organization enough to become better and faster and cheaper and newer enough.
Partial Improvement Patches and Pieces
Recognizing the urgent need to quickly reverse direction, many organizations are implementing a variety of improvement programs and process. These include:
• Employee Involvement and Empowerment — many training and motivational programs, as well as structural changes aim to move daily problem solving, decision making, customer satisfaction, and productivity improvement responsibilities closer to the front lines.
• Teams — a rapidly growing employee involvement trend uses departmental, problem solving, cross-functional, project, process improvement, planning and coordinating, and self-directed work teams in many combinations and configurations.
• Customer Service — increasingly organizations are identifying key customer groups, clarifying and ranking their expectations, working to realign the organization’s systems customer around those expectations, and training employees to deal with customers more effectively.
• Process Improvement and Reengineering — data-based tools and techniques, flowcharting, and other “mapping” approaches improve processes at micro or departmental levels. In other cases, processes are radically reengineered across vertical departments at macro or strategic levels.
• Training and Development — many executives recognize the need for massive improvements in skill levels throughout their organizations. This is leading to major increases in technical, personal communications and effectiveness, team (leaders and members), data-based tools and techniques, process improvement and management, and coaching skill development.
• Technology — investments in factory automation, information systems, voice and data communication systems, inventory control systems, and so on are growing rapidly as companies push for higher productivity, faster response times, and improved service/quality.
Many of the above efforts are piecemeal or implemented in isolation. For example, training and development, customer service, technology, and process reengineering are often implemented by separate departments with little or no joint planning and coordination. As a result, products or services are either better or faster or cheaper or newer, but rarely all four. That leads to a weakened competitive position. And cynicism for subsequent change programs grows throughout the organization.
Total Quality Management (TQM) is one management approach that can successfully integrate all of the above improvement efforts. But very few organizations are implementing truly total quality management. Most so-called TQM efforts are really PQM — Partial Quality Management. That’s why many studies now show that 50-70 percent of what are called TQM efforts are dying or dead. The good news is that 30-50 percent of TQM implementations (those that are truly total) are dramatically increasing customer satisfaction, shortening process cycles and response times, reducing costs and strengthening innovation. Although it’s very tough to do, it can clearly be done.
The Labels Rarely Describe The Contents
The TQM/PQM problem is hardly unique. Most labels describing a number of organization change and improvement efforts have become meaningless. For example, when an executive talks about building a team-based organization, he or she may mean instilling a “teaminess” attitude. Or this might mean using temporary task forces to solve problems. Possibly the executive envisions filling their organization with employee improvement teams (similar to quality circles). Or he or she may want to develop self-directed work teams with no direct supervision. Some times “Reengineering” describes layoffs or traditional “slash and burn” cost cutting exercises. In other cases, reengineering means a change to the organization’s structure. Sometimes it means installing new information technology systems. Or reengineering could be a radical revamping of the macro, strategic processes that establish how most work and customer interactions flow across the organization.
Successful change and improvement initiatives are integrated or “whole” rather then partial and piecemeal. They flow from the organization’s basic reason for being, values, vision of the future, and strategies. The effort is intertwined with the organization’s operating goals, systems, and measurements. These changes and improvements aren’t programs bolted on the side of the organization. These approaches are tightly intertwined and connected to management systems, daily practices, and behavior.
As he continues a long string of successes in building “the new GE”, CEO Jack Welch observed, “The winners of the 90s will be those who can develop a culture that allows them to move faster, communicate more clearly, and involve everyone in a focused effort to serve every more demanding customers”. At Multifoods, the international food processing giant (brands include Robin Hood and Bicks), Human Resource vice president, Bob Maddocks finds that “the improvement process isn’t separate from good leadership and management practices”. He adds, “We want everyone involved in operating the company, focusing on customers, and improving our processes and systems. It’s got to become a way of life for all of us”.
Whatever labels are used, a “wholistic” or systems approach to change and improvement means reversing the inward focus, management-centeredness, and vertical management found in most organizations.
Reversing Direction
1. From Internal Focus: Products and services are pushed out to the market
To Customer Focus: Products and services are pulled through the organization
From Internal Focus: Management and internal professionals “know best”
To Customer Focus: “Naive listening” keeps everyone tuned to changing needs
From Internal Focus: Performance measurements are top down and aimed at maximizing internal control
To Customer Focus: Rigorous measurements are based on customers’ perceptions of value
2. From Functional Management: Departments are narrowly accountable for the results of their individual units
To Horizontal Management: Managers are accountable for understanding and managing core strategic processes that flow across departments
From Functional Management: Departmental walls cause work and customers to “fall between the cracks”
To Horizontal Management: Customer needs drive the key work processes that are managed across departments
From Functional Management: Management intuition and hunches drive decision making and resource allocation
To Horizontal Management: Rigorous data and analysis help clarify systemic cause-and-effect relationships
3. From Management-Centeredness: Management’s needs come first in a “command and control” hierarchy
To Total Involvement: Managers become “servant leaders” to a team-based organization
From Management-Centeredness: Employees serve management
To Total Involvement: Employees serve internal and external customers
From Management-Centeredness: Information is hoarded
To Total Involvement: Information is widely shared
For most organizations, these are not minor course corrections. Each of these three key areas demands changing direction by a full 180 degrees.
Besides changing direction in any one of these key areas individually, there is an ever more pressing need to integrate all three as an organization-wide system. This can be either an area-by-area evolution or a broad scale simultaneous implementation. For example, an organization might start by focusing on customers, begin managing processes with basic teams, and then move toward shared leadership and self-directed teams. Or the change effort may begin by involving employees through teams, focus on customers, and then move to incorporate process management.
An executive at a US-based telecommunications equipment manufacturer illustrates how these areas can evolve and merge, “We hit the cultural change wall because people didn’t want to do the behavioral stuff (skill building, dealing with conflict, changing habits and practices). People didn’t want to do that because it hurt too much. That got real ugly. So we said, ‘we’re not going to do that behavioral stuff. Instead we’re going to do process improvement work.’ And, after beating our heads against the process wall for a few months, some people found out that they’re really not separate and distinct. You can’t do one without the other. And, oh by the way, the only way that is going to work is to have teams. So, we’re starting to break through the barrier of linking all of those pieces that were originally perceived to be separate. We’re really breaking through the barrier and recognizing that this is all interconnected.”
However the transformation is begun and whatever it’s called, effective long-term change and improvement efforts integrate all three of the key areas. Only through an integrated systems approach to customer service, process management, and employee involvement can organizations become industry leaders who are clearly better and faster and cheaper and newer than their competitors.
Jim Clemmer is a bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, teams, and personal growth. During the last 25 years he has delivered over two thousand customized keynote presentations, workshops, and retreats. Jim’s five international bestselling books include The VIP Strategy, Firing on All Cylinders, Pathways to Performance, Growing the Distance, and The Leader’s Digest. His web site is http://www.clemmer.net/articles
There are literally thousands of places on the web to get your sports news information. Whether you want the latest headlines, up to the second scores, editorials, or in depth analysis, there are a myriad of choices for you. While some sites only offer one or two of those things, there are several that offer all of those and more. My Top 5 are below:
5. Yahoo! Sports (sports.yahoo.com) – this site is all substance and no flash. It looks essentially the same as it did five years ago. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just doesn’t knock your socks off. Any information that you need is readily available and up to date. Columnists aren’t as well known as the top sites, but they are solid.
4. FOX Sports (msn.foxsports.com) – a few years ago this site was a mess. It was the anti-Yahoo! – all flash and no substance. In the past few years they’ve toned down the flash and increased the substance. The live gamecasts at the top of the page are extremely innovative. For example, for a baseball game you not only see the score, but also an overview of the diamond and what runners are on base. If you are interested in a specific game you can roll your mouse over it and get more details. If FOX keeps innovating like that, they won’t be number 4 for long.
3. Sports Illustrated (sportsillustrated.cnn.com) – this site excels in two things – editorials and rumors. They have THE best writers (they are Sports Illustrated after all) and they do an excellent job of providing tons of content. Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback column is absolutely priceless. They also compile a ‘Truth and Rumors’ section for each of the major sports. It’s essentially a compilation of all of the rumors from local newspapers across the country. The best part about it is it’s free, unlike ESPN’s rumors.
2. CBS SportsLine (cbs.sportsline.com) – everything is great about SportsLine – they are often the first to break news, gamecasts are innovative and effective, and for what it’s worth the fantasy sports are the best on the web. Well, they are great at everything except editorials and analysis, and they are horrible at that. Tony Mejia, Dennis Dodd, Pete Prisco, and Greg Doyle are the worst group of sports writers on the web. Where are the editorials from their on-air personalities like Jim Nantz and Billy Packer? ESPN and FOX manage to get their on-air personalities to write, maybe CBS should consider it. Read the comments at the bottom of any article by any of the aforementioned writers and you’ll realize that I’m not the only one that thinks they are horrible.
1. ESPN (www.espn.com) – they are consistently ahead of the curve in every one of the important aspects. They are the worldwide leader in sports and they show no signs of giving up that crown on the web. I commend them for getting their best personalities – John Clayton, Steven A. Smith, Barry Melrose, and Peter Gammons – to write consistently good articles. The only downside is that too much information is hidden in the ‘Insider’, ESPN’s paid service. It’s frustrating to read a headline, click, and then realize that you can’t read the story because you have to pay for it.
Disagree? Rate and review sports web sites at Scorecard.SportsLizard.com.
Adam McFarland owns the SportsLizard.com Network – a network of sports sites including collectibles, movies, books, video games, and more.
SportsLizard.com recently won honorable mention in the Microsoft Start Something Amazing Awards and was featured in the February 2006 issue of Tuff Stuff Magazine.
