Tag Archives: Waltham (Massachusetts)

About 1356 days ago Business Software

Tech Talk: Data Analysis Helps Drug Firm

Trinity Pharma Solutions, based in Waltham, Mass., has been the technology arm of life sciences consulting firm Trinity Partners since 2004. The company, which employs 30, helps pharmaceutical companies create, deploy and manage data management solutions. But the firm found that it was able to help its customers solve business challenges by better analyzing data, director Glenn Wong tells IncTechnology.com. Elizabeth Wasserman: How does your company use data? Glenn Wong: We are a business and tech solutions provider to pharmaceutical and biotech industries, primarily to manufacturers. The mainstay of what we do is to build reporting and analytic solutions to help the sales teams, the folks who sell the pharmaceutical products. We’re not just reporting what they did but we help them with data management. Wasserman: Why did you decide to look into business intelligence? Wong: It was to help us do our job better. We were actually introduced to TIBCO Spotfire by one of our clients. They said, ‘We know you are smart guys and you deal with a lot of data. Take a look at this.’ We did and we really liked the software. It did help us analyze information better, faster, easier and with more richness. We started using it internally on projects initially for clients. Wasserman: What problems did it help you solve? Wong: In our world, data can be quite complex. Finding an insight or answering a question can take a number of steps. It requires fairly technical knowledge. This product simplified that process and allowed us to get to an answer faster. It also allowed us to get to a better answer. We had a great tool and it wasn’t as if we went out to find problems to fix, but as we started to use it, we recognized problems the software could help with and started addressing them better than before. Wasserman: Such as what? Wong: In the pharmaceuticals industry we look a lot at segmentation. How do you look at your customers? What are the criteria that let you classify and categorize your customers? With pharmaceutical clients, we’re typically looking at physicians as the person you’re selling to or trying to influence. One thing that’s important is understand prescribing patterns – whether a physician is likely to use a drug when it’s first released and what are the patient populations different physicians have. We also try to derive other information. What are your target customers and how would they respond to a different message or market event – for example, if another product, such as a pain medication, would enter the market, are they likely to use that quickly or are they likely to wait and see what the general feedback is? You’re looking at patterns of behavior. Depending on the richness of the data, you can look at the promotional response. If I have a sales rep go talk to doctor once a month, does that make it more likely he would use my product? This doctor attended a conference. Could we look a few months down the line and see whether his prescribing changed based on attendance of that conference? Wasserman: What have the results been? Wong: It’s made us get answers in a more timely manner and it’s also made us more responsive to our customers. It allows us to see insights we might not have otherwise seen. Besides the speed and flexibility, it’s also a great visual tool, which allows us to see multiple dimensions faster than you would otherwise. If I’m putting together a graph using PowerPoint or Excel, I’m lucky if I can show three variables. With Spotfire, I can put up five or six in the blink of an eye. It’s also made us more responsive to our customers.  For example, a client VP asked an off topic question during a presentation. Using the software, we came up with an answer quickly and at the VP’s request, gave him soft and hardcopies on short order. He said, ‘I’ve been asking this question internally for 2 months, and you just gave me the answer in 10 minutes.’”

About 1630 days ago Online Marketing

Publishing an Effective HTML Newsletter

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Want a cost-effective way to build your business by nurturing your present and future customers? Then create an HTML newsletter. In this challenging economy, small businesses should consider the e-newsletter as a vital part of their marketing plan to distinguish themselves from the competition and allow potential customers to get to know them over a long sales cycle. E-mail marketing software providers Constant Contact in Waltham, Mass., and iContact in Durham, N.C., help customers launch permission-based e-mail campaigns through step-by-step templates and easy contact uploads. “Newsletters create top-of-mind awareness,” says Ryan P. Allis, CEO and co-founder of iContact . “It’s important to do e-mail marketing right and branding yourself with your local customer is what an effective permission-based email marketing campaign can accomplish.” How to get subscribers Encourage your customers to sign up for your newsletter directly from your website where they can quickly provide their information and choose exactly what kind of information they want to receive from you. Both iContact and Constant Contact provide an archiving function so potential subscribers can view previous newsletters’ content. Potential subscribers can also sign up for your newsletter via a signup sheet provided at your retail counter, conference, workshop, or presentation. Make sure, though, that on the signup sheet, as well as on your website, you let these signups know what the newsletter will contain and the frequency of your campaigns. Says Allis, “It’s critical that you disclose what they’re signing for so you can sell them the benefits.” Under no circumstances should you disclose your contact list to anyone, but consider broadening your contact base by a partnership with another comparable business. You can publicize their event or workshop on your newsletter and they can do the same for you. What your newsletter should contain First get the basics right with a clear subject line that reveals your company’s name. The line can be creative or more straight-forward, but it must set up the reader’s expectations of what’s to follow. Allis says that once a subscriber opens the newsletter then you can continue to build your list, expose them to links, send valuable content, and get people to become clients to take action. Taking action includes customer purchases, visits, and donations. “What matters is engagement with your customers, not size, “Allis says, “You need to know what percentage of your clients are clicking through.” He suggests using list segmentation for a specific promotion and integrating video and e-mail links with social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook so you can receive more viral views of your content and receive higher click-through rates. Next, figure out what you want to say. “Write great content,” advises Eric Groves, senior vice president of worldwide strategy and market development at Constant Contact. “Stop writing about you and write about what you know. Make their experience on your newsletter fun and always have something that customers are interested in. Consider attributing survey questions to your customers to get them engaged.” How the information is presented is also important. “Make your layout look professional,” Groves says. “A reader’s eye can’t digest content as if they were reading a book, so include white space and graphics. We make it easy to match your colors so your branding stays consistent.” Groves suggests using third party content from other newsletters, with their permission, of course. RSS feeds and websites can add to your content to make your newsletter more professional. Cheap marketing tool Rock Blanco, CEO of Prime Numbers Technology in Medfield, Mass., a year-old travel database company would be “lost without” his Constant Contact-generated newsletter. He communicates industry trends, products, and news via his newsletter, which also serves as his public relations champion. “One hundred percent of my sales and marketing effort is managed by Constant Contact,” Blanco says. By observing his click-through rate, he’s able to assess where his subscribers are spending their time. He also uses Constant Contact’s survey function to generate advance and specific customer support for his new products. Everyone can afford to send an HTML newsletter with iContact and Constant Contact pricing their monthly fee below $20 per month for 500 contacts. Both companies also offer a free trial. iContact and Constant Contact give their customers numerous tools via tutorials, webinars and videos to meet their marketing needs and make them successful. “We’re here to increase the lifetime value of your customer base,” says Allis.

About 1844 days ago Data Security

Avoid Security Pitfalls with Subcontractors

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You’re a not-so-big company, and you simply must outsource some sensitive tasks — perhaps payroll or the 401(k) plan. But news headlines about laptops carelessly unencrypted by subcontractors and then stolen are everywhere. How can you protect your company from the errant security breaches of a subcontractor? In March 2008, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Agilent Technologies became the latest victim of this scenario — a subcontractor hired to handle the company’s employee stock plan left the information on an unencrypted laptop. The laptop was later stolen. In Agilent’s case, Agilent had a clearly stated policy that all such data must be encrypted, and that subcontractors must do it, too. But the subcontractor did not honor this policy, according to Amy Flores, an Agilent spokeswoman. While some risk always exists, experts say, you need to make sure the service-level agreement (SLA) you have with your subcontractor is as airtight and specific as possible, and that you constantly keep tabs on whether they are complying. They offer the following advice: Call your lawyer. “Knowing your exposure is specific to your industry,” notes Scott Almas, associate attorney with the Albany, N.Y.-based law firm Lemery Greisler. Almas, who has drafted many an SLA and litigated ones that have gone awry, says that your company lawyer should know what’s needed in terms of data protection to comply with such federal laws as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act (HIPAA). Spell it out. Explain the purpose of the application you are requesting that the subcontractor use and why. “Take the time to explain it — which data is private, what needs to be encrypted, the rules of who has access,” says Jack Danahy, founder and CTO of Ounce Labs, a Waltham, Mass.-based software risk management firm. Require specific protections. Insist on fingerprint sensors on all laptops the subcontractor uses, WPA encryption on their wireless systems, secure networks and careful protections on all remote access, says Almas. Look into NAC. Network access control (NAC) programs can allow you to scan any computer, PDA, or thumbdrive and keep tabs on any remote worker, subcontractor or not, notes Paul Roberts, senior analyst for enterprise security at the 451 Group, a technical analysis form in Boston. “If it’s not okay, you can quarantine the computer until the subcontractor cleans up their act.” NAC tools, offered by Cisco, Mirage Networks, Nevis Networks and others, are expressly designed to address the unique security breach issues raised by laptops and other mobile devices. But some note that the technology remains very new — and perhaps too pricey for the smaller business. A less expensive option is a hosted option, such as those offered by AT&T and other ISPs, says Roberts. Encrypt first. “Encrypting the laptop is one approach, but encrypting the data before ever transmitting it is the better approach,” says Ounce’s Danahy. Reviewing the source code to make sure that the subcontractors’ systems are in order is another approach that Ounce offers its enterprise customers, Danahy says. Include enforcement — and consequences. Reserve the right to enforce the agreement and check up on workers, says Ounce’s Danahy. “Put something in like, if we discover you’ve done this, you’ll be fined 5 percent per month, or we won’t pay you,” he says. Adds Almas: “They need to agree to indemnify and defend you against any losses.” Include destruction policy. When the project is over, make sure you’ve spelled out to the subcontractor how you’d like the sensitive information wiped or destroyed, says Almas. Otherwise, that laptop or PDA could be discarded someday with all that sensitive data still on it. If it’s your company that’s the subcontractor, showing a willingness to take security steps can help you seal the deal, notes Ounce’s Danahy. “Small contractors who ask the right questions and tell their potential client how they’ll encrypt the data, that can be a real differentiator for bigger companies,” he says. SIDEBAR: What to Do if Disaster Strikes Let’s say the worst has happened: your company’s sensitive data has been breached, despite your diligence. What can you do to contain your risk? The first step is to notify your clients or employees — those whose data is at risk — of the breach. Under California’s SB 1386 breach notification law, companies that tell their employees or clients of the breach as soon as possible, and can show that they did everything possible to protect sensitive data, are given a safe harbor. Experts say it’s also wise to offer employees or customers a credit-monitoring service for a time to help them track any possible identity theft. Agilent’s Flores reports offering this service to their employees. Even outside California, companies that don’t inform their customers/employees right away do so at risk. In March 2008, two separate lawsuits were brought against the New England-based Hannaford Bros. grocery chain for failing to notify customers until late March of a credit-card security breach that occurred Feb. 27, according to published reports. A breach can happen to anyone, but companies that show they did what they could will fare better — in the public eye, and in the courts.

About 1965 days ago Computer Security

Wi-Fi Security: Block Rogue Access Points

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Wireless technology in small and mid-sized businesses has introduced a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of allowing workers to be increasingly mobile and not tethered to a desk. While this has had a positive impact on productivity, it has opened glaring security holes that administrators of wire-based networks did not have to address.   In a survey conducted by INT Media Research, more than half of businesses admitted they had experienced at least one type of security incident involving a wireless local area network (WLAN) during the past year.  One third of businesses that reported a breach of their WLANs failed to strengthen their security policies after the attacks. Some of the biggest vulnerabilities are posed by rogue access points.  Rogue access points are set up when someone installs technology, such as wireless routers, without the knowledge or approval of the company’s network manager. These breaches can also occur when someone from outside an office installs an access point to get free Internet access or to hack the network. Rogue access points cause pain These types of rogue access points can cause small and mid-sized businesses a lot of pain. Proprietary information could become vulnerable to hackers or data thieves. And it’s not only your wireless network that is vulnerable. These tricks are used even more commonly on wireless networks in public or quasi public environments — such as an airport or café — and fool users into logging on and divulging sensitive personal and financial information that can be used in identity theft. Large enterprises may have huge teams of IT and security personnel to identify and protect against rogue access points. Smaller companies, without access to these resources, must develop a more cost effective approach to the solution. “The problem is that the technology has become so easy to implement that the average user is not aware of security problems,” says Michael Markulec, executive vice president, technology and operations, Somerset, N.J.-based Lumeta Corporation. “This wasn’t the case five years ago. It’s becoming easier to buy this technology and a lot easier to install. As the demand for information continues to grow, we will continue to see the proliferation of wireless networks’Š and hence potential problems.” Technology can help reduce risks For large enterprises, Wi-Fi has become more secure over the years, says Carl Blume, of Colubris Networks, of Waltham, Mass. “The number of risk areas has decreased significantly.” But small and medium sized businesses are constantly at risk. Blume notes that it’s critical for small and mid-sized businesses to select the appropriate infrastructure for security purposes. With small IT staff and limited budgets, small businesses may be tempted to buy consumer-grade security products. Blume says that these types of products will not support the level of security that’s necessary. Lumeta’s product, IPSonar, administers a test for rogue access points that scans the network to identify wireless access points that may be attached to the network.   Colubris’ product, RF Manager, is a wireless intrusion prevention system of servers and wireless sensors that continuously scan the airwaves and provide automatic protection against unauthorized WLAN activity. RF Manager detects and prevents threats from rogue and mis-configured access points.  

About 2210 days ago Search Engine Optimization

The Monster Dilemma

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For business owners plagued by a dearth of candidates for key job openings, the Web was supposed to provide an ideal solution. Job-search sites like Monster.com can put postings in front of millions of applicants instantly. And newer business-oriented social networking sites like LinkedIn provide similarly fertile recruiting territory, supplying access to the contacts of thousands of people. On the other hand, anyone who’s actually tried to hire someone through the Web knows the truth: You post an ad and are immediately flooded with hundreds of resumés, many from people whose backgrounds are wildly inappropriate. So much for the Web making things easier. It’s enough to make you long for the days of print newspaper ads and snail mail. But just as technology created the problem, newer technology aims to solve it. A new generation of hiring tools promises to screen out inappropriate applicants, allow the suitable ones to put their best foot forward, and even hunt down good candidates who haven’t applied. As these new services get better at these tasks, they may well change the balance of power in the job-recruiting industry and could even redefine the way we think about jobs. A shot at diverting a river of weak applicants is the chief advantage offered to employers by Protuo, a Woodstock, Georgia-based start-up that launched its service in January. Protuo isn’t only a job-listing site; it also forwards its clients’ listings to some 270 established job-listing sites, including Monster. But applicants can’t respond to a Protuo posting unless they spend seven minutes or so filling out a survey that asks about experience, skills, workstyles, and job preferences. Employers can customize the survey by choosing from a wide field of prepared questions or by adding their own, and they specify which responses get a candidate’s resumé past the screen. Has the candidate managed a technical project? Is he or she willing to move? The approach is modeled, to some extent, on the sort of compatibility gauging one encounters on a matchmaking site like eHarmony, notes Jennifer Gerlach, Protuo’s co-founder and vice president of marketing. Gerlach went through the dating process on eHarmony just to research the technique. “I learned a lot,” she says. “And I met some very, very nice people.” With online job postings sometimes pulling in more than a thousand applicants, the ability to winnow the flood could mean the difference between being able to retain control of the hiring process and having to bring in a professional recruiter–at a typical cost of $30,000 for a midlevel hire. The time and expense of dealing with a huge influx of resumés is all the more frustrating because much of the flow comes from online applicants who indiscriminately bombard hirers with resumés. You can try a keyword search on the resumés to narrow things down, but applicants have learned to load their resumés with them, often by pasting in phrases from the job posting. Even LinkedIn has suffered from inflation, as many users aggressively build networks of people they don’t really know in order to make themselves appear better connected. “There’s no value in a lot of these contacts,” says LinkedIn user Chris Knudsen, who heads business development for podcasting company Podango in Salt Lake City. “It can just be someone whose card you got at a trade show.” (A LinkedIn spokesperson commented via e-mail: “Anyone can join the LinkedIn network; however, the quality of your own personal LinkedIn network is the responsibility of each individual.”) But a well-designed survey, contends Gerlach, allows users to skim the cream. Fred Donovan, who runs Donovan Networks, a seven-employee computer network security firm, has been flooded with applicants responding to previous postings to Monster.com and other online job boards. He is currently conducting a Protuo search and likes what he’s seen so far. “I can specify that I want to see only resumés from people who say they have 10 years’ experience in negotiating sales and are familiar with the software development process,” he says. “I’m seeing a small, better-qualified subset of the applicants.” There must be something to the idea. Other hiring sites, including Market10, Jobster, and Taleo, are introducing their own approaches to automated candidate screening. And Monster is doing the same, making available–for a fee that adds about 20 percent to the cost of posting a job–the ability to direct applicants to a questionnaire designed to rank the suitability of candidates. Sure, candidates can try to game these surveys by being less than truthful. But Gerlach insists that surveys can be designed to stymie such people by asking questions that don’t have an obviously right answer–such as whether the person prefers to work independently or in groups–and by warning candidates that they can be rated as overqualified. Protuo, which costs hirers $44 to $295 a month depending on the number of jobs they’re posting and is currently free to job seekers, also offers applicants a chance to do more than post a resumé. The firm invites users to create online portfolios that can include whatever documents, photos, videos, or other material that best represents that person’s career to date. (Monster is currently testing a similar capability.) ZoomInfo, in Waltham, Massachusetts, takes a different approach. It assembles profiles of potential job candidates from all available online data, whether or not they’re looking for jobs. Starting with the same techniques that Google uses to gather Web data associated with a person’s name, ZoomInfo adds the significant additional step of crunching the results to pull out the most relevant information, weed out data referring to other people of the same name, and assemble a professional profile. ZoomInfo has an R&D team of 35 working on the technology. So far, the company has assembled some 34 million profiles, and as far as I can tell, most of them are fairly informative and accurate. (Check out your own name to put it to the test.) But somebody has to pay for all those scientists, and that somebody is you. The company charges $5,000 a user per year for the ability to dig up personnel profiles by company or industry. It sounds like a lot, but ZoomInfo’s COO, Bryan Burdick, notes that if you get the right candidate for a single vacancy, the price is one-sixth that of using a recruiting firm. The company also offers less expensive, more limited searching capabilities aimed at smaller companies, as well as free access to searches on individuals. Many major executive search firms, along with some 500 other corporations, already use ZoomInfo, claims Burdick. “I can find personal information, professional backgrounds–and, sometimes, damning evidence–on tens of millions of people without having to go through 1.5 million Google hits on each one,” says John Boehmer, managing partner at executive search firm Barlow Group in Norwalk, Connecticut. Boehmer is quick to point out that as ZoomInfo-like services get better, and more companies get comfortable using them, corporate hirers won’t need professional recruiting firms like his to turn up candidates. “It’s commoditizing the front end of what we do,” he says. “Eventually, everyone will know where everyone is and how to get hold of them, so we won’t be able to charge for identifying and contacting candidates.” Search firms will still be valuable for assessing candidates, he contends, though he acknowledges that new e-hiring systems could eventually eat into that end of the business as they get smarter and have more online data to work with. For that matter, it’s easy to imagine the not-all-that-distant day when online tools make it so easy to find people to fill a specific slot that the notion of permanent jobs becomes irrelevant for many positions. Why hire a manager for years when you can find a new one with exactly the skill set needed for the precise tasks at hand? That’s not necessarily bad for employees: Think of an economy where top employees are constantly being sought out and bid over by companies that recognize them from their Web trails as the perfect short-term solution. And talented employees would be just as smart about whom they choose to work for–using similar services to weed out companies that aren’t good matches for them. You’ll want to treat those people well. If you don’t, and they post that fact online, it could haunt you for a long, long time. Contributing editor David H. Freedman (whatsnext@inc.com) is a Boston-based author of several books about business and technology.

About 2361 days ago E-Commerce

E-mail Marketing the Right Way

With costs as low as $15 a month, hiring a company to for e-mail outreach is probably the best marketing investment a small business can make. While about 95 percent of companies do at least some e-mail marketing, most get someone else to do it for them. About half of companies with between one and five employees do their e-mail marketing in house, says Jeanniey Mullen, senior director of e-mail marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide, a New York interactive ad agency. But the larger the company, the more likely they are to outsource the function, she says. For companies that have more than five employees, the percentage jumps to more than 80 percent, according to Forrester Research, of Cambridge, Mass. That’s because sending a mass e-mail may sound simple enough, but in reality it can be pretty tedious. The pitfalls of doing it yourself Jennifer Gordon, president of Sojourn Bags, a four-year-old Chicago company that sells distinctive handbags, tried the do-it-yourself approach but found that if she got one e-mail address wrong in a mass mailing, the whole thing would bounce back. “We didn’t have the bodies to throw at the problem,” says Gordon, whose handbag firm has five full-time employees and 27 part-time sales reps. While manpower is one problem, more often firms that do their own e-mail marketing run into another firm because they lack an understanding of the specifics that can make or break an e-mail marketing campaign. Here are some questions you need to ask: Are you using a spam buzzword that will get you blocked by most firewalls? Will your e-mail look the same in e-mail programs from Google, Yahoo! and MSN? With those questions in mind, about 18 months ago, Gordon hired Constant Contact, a Waltham, Mass., company that handles outsourced e-mail marketing campaigns. Other such firms include Bronto Software and Email Labs. Return on investment Gordon says she pays $15 a month to reach about 500 clients. Since she signed up, sales have risen about 65 percent. “We see a huge jump in numbers when we send [an e-mail blast] out,” says Gordon, although she notes that not all of the increase in sales is due to the e-mail marketing. “It’s definitely the best marketing money we spend.” Gordon couldn’t quantify a response rate because, she says, it’s hard to tell if a buyer on the website was driven by an e-mail plug. Generally, the conversion rate for e-mail is about two to five percent and the engagement rate (meaning those who open the e-mails) is about 60 percent, according to industry watchers. Sojourn only sends e-mails to those who opt to receive them and so there are generally no worries about being lumped in with spam. But just because you aren’t a spammer, doesn’t mean you won’t be treated as one. A less-than-reputable e-mail firm may work with a spammer and as a result, all e-mails from the e-mail firm’s IP address may be blocked by certain recipients. As a result, some firms may want to also buy their own IP address, which jacks the monthly price up into the $200 range. Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact, says her customers rarely ask for an IP address because her company doesn’t work with spammers. “Permission marketing is the only way to go,” she says. Usually, though, firms can expect to pay between $15 and $75 a month to get a third party to run their e-mail marketing. The average return on investment on $1 spent on such a program is $57 in new business, according to the Direct Marketing Association, an industry group based in New York. Mullen says that rate can fluctuate wildly. This is one area where small businesses can have the edge over large ones, she says, because they have smaller e-mail lists and can experiment with different formats. “Small companies that take e-mail seriously can have significant success,” Mullen says.

About 4217 days ago E-Commerce

The Best Small-Business Sites in America

Web Awards: Best Practices We went looking for a few outstanding Web sites. That’s exactly what we found. Earlier this year Inc invited entrepreneurs to enter the magazine’s third annual Web Awards competition. Nearly 800 did so. The Inc editorial staff and a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts reviewed the entries, slowly narrowing the field to an elite constellation of 16 small-business Web stars. One of those sites — a California adventure-travel site — was named our all-around champion, earning Inc‘s prestigious General Excellence award. So what distinguished the honorees from the also-rans? What lifted those few finishers out of the crowd and into the winners’ circle? For our best-in-show choice, it’s a pretty simple formula: cool, useful features plus strong customer service equals big-time success online. Judges unanimously praised All-Outdoors Whitewater Rafting, of Walnut Creek, Calif. ( www.aorafting.com), for creating a site with streamlined good looks and nifty mile-by-mile virtual river tours. But they were even more impressed with the company’s online customer service. Web-site visitors can check trip availability, ask questions, make tentative reservations, price gear, get maps, check river and weather conditions, arrange accommodations, and even qualify for last-minute discounts. (See ” A Web Strategy Runs Through It.”) “What’s not to be wowed by?” asked judge Ron Zemke, president of Performance Research Associates Inc., in Minneapolis. “It loads quickly, it’s clean, it’s easy to understand. It has a wonderful balance of information, glitz, and service features.” Not to mention the family-owned company’s remarkable return on investment; in fact, the site is also Inc’s second-place finisher in the ROI category. Then there’s Nova Cruz Products LLC ( www.xootr.com), a New Hampshire scooter manufacturer that earned Inc’s honorable mention for General Excellence, as well as first place in Design and a third-place finish in Marketing. The Nova Cruz site looks terrific. More important, though, it gets the job done. As one judge put it: “They exhibit their products well and make it easy to find out what you want to know in a visually appealing way.” Overall, however, our judges insist there’s still plenty of room for improvement. They visited many sites where, as Gertrude Stein once observed of Oakland, Calif., there was no there there. “Too many were devoid of content and did nothing but look good,” said judge Jakob Nielsen, a principal at the Nielsen Norman Group, in Fremont, Calif. Put another way, many sites simply lacked value. Said Nielsen: “There has to be some reward to the user from visiting a site. Especially in business.” Even some of the best small-business sites could benefit from better online branding. One judge called the much-admired Nova Cruz site pretty but somewhat unfocused. “What is the name of this company?” asked a slightly exasperated Bill Demas, an executive vice-president at Vividence Corp., a consulting company in San Mateo, Calif. “Is it Xootr? Urban Transport? Or Nova Cruz?” (He’s referring to the Web site’s home page, which features all three names. For the record, Nova Cruz is the name of the company, Xootr is its product’s name, and urban transport is its mission.) And many site owners still haven’t learned that Web users have no patience for pages that take forever to materialize. “It took over a minute for some product photos and descriptions to load,” one judge observed in disgust. “Totally unacceptable in a world where customers get itchy fingers after eight seconds.” Other sites use Flash technology to create intricate introductions with dancing graphics on their home pages. Increasingly, those same sites feature a button that users can click to skip the show — raising the question of why the company bothered with Flash technology in the first place. Many small-business sites seem to fall victim to the too-much-is-better theory: they cram every centimeter of every page with tiny, hard-to-read text and links. Or they indiscriminately clutter their sites with additional articles, tips, and other resources. In its Web Awards application, one entrant wrote the following about its content-stuffed site: “The first impression you get when you come to our site is that it is an exclusively information [sic] site.” “That’s a problem,” pointed out judge Phil Terry, CEO of New York City-based Web-strategy company Creative Good Inc. However well intended, that tidal wave of supporting materials drowns out the retailer’s real mission: selling products. “It took eight clicks to find a price list,” Performance Research’s Zemke observed of the same site. “That’s something consumers hate.” Even the best small-company sites still struggle with technology. Nova Cruz, our General Excellence runner-up, was off-line for several days during judging owing to a router problem. “It was shocking to see that several sites were not up and running during the judging,” tsk-tsked Marcia Yudkin, a Boston-based author of several Internet-marketing guides. One travel agency’s site, rated highly by several judges, missed becoming a finalist because of its own technical horror story. But for all those warts and wrinkles, this year’s best sites prove that the Web still offers promise. “I see companies slowly becoming more sophisticated about using the Web as a place to do business in all its forms,” said judge Ryan Bernard, president of Wordmark Associates Inc., in Houston. “The entrants ran the gamut of sophistication from those who still see the Web as only an E-commerce tool to those who see it as a way to build and manage business activities.” Judge John Hartnett, CEO of BlueMissile, a Web-design company in Minneapolis, agreed. “What struck me was the diversity in budgets and approaches — all of which seemed to add up to the same excellent results,” he said. Based on those results, we developed what amounts to a blueprint for small-business Web-site success. Call it the “Seven Best Practices of Highly Effective Web Sites.” The winners have these characteristics: 1. They’re run by people who know what they want. Whether they’re one-person marketing sites, corporate intranets, or E-commerce efforts, our winners have clear strategies, goals, and priorities. Best example: All-Outdoors Whitewater Rafting. CEO Gregg Armstrong wanted to boost revenues by scheduling more trips and reducing the number of empty seats on each day’s expeditions. In addition to generating new business by expanding the company’s reach far beyond its northern California base, the site makes trips more profitable by offering discounts to customers who fill last-minute vacancies or book trips for off-peak dates. That helped the nearly 40-year-old company hit a record $2 million in revenues last year, up from $1 million in 1993. 2. They use technology that’s appropriate to their mission. Again, our General Excellence honorees provide sterling examples. At All-Outdoors Whitewater, it’s the virtual mile-by-mile tours and equipment illustrations. At Nova Cruz it’s the all-angle views of those hot little scooters. Cadkey Corp. ( www.cadkey.com), a software company based in Marlborough, Mass., our second-place finisher in Customer Service, earned our judges’ respect for its judicious use of Flash animation technology. Cadkey’s Flash presentation appears on the middle of its home page “but doesn’t dominate it,” said Bruce D. Weinberg, associate professor of marketing and E-commerce at Bentley College, in Waltham, Mass. “Every other part of the home page is visible and available” — a blend of dazzle and restraint that customers undoubtedly appreciate. 3. They streamline design. More and more, successful Web sites are demonstrating that when it comes to design, the most important issues are clarity and ease of use. “Too many sites used nonstandard navigation, probably in an attempt to be leading edge. One of the entries even mentioned this as a goal,” said Web-design guru Nielsen. “You don’t impress people by being difficult to use. You impress them by taking the standard design elements they already know and using them well and by stressing informative and helpful content.” Of course, there’s no such thing as the one best way to design a Web site. Successful approaches are as varied as the customers they target. What’s important is that a site’s design reflect an understanding of the needs and desires of its end users. (See ” Duh-sign of the Times.”) 4. They make sure their sites work. Enough said. 5. They make it easy for customers to learn about and contact them. Often, accomplishing that is as simple as creating two key pages — “About Us” and “Contact Us” — and making them highly visible on the home page and easily accessible from anywhere else on the site. The About Us page should tell the company’s story, at the very least including a mission statement or explanation of “what we do,” a brief history, and short bios of key executives. It might also include customer testimonials, press releases, and links to media coverage. The Contact Us page should give visitors everything they need to reach the company: mailing addresses, E-mail links, phone and fax numbers, and, if appropriate, driving directions and a list of whom to contact for what. In addition, it’s a good idea to prominently post the company’s privacy policies, explaining what information the business is collecting and how it will be used. 6. They do ROI reality checks. It’s important to know just what you’re gaining from all that time, money, and expertise you’ve poured into your Web site. Nobody does it better than our first-place ROI winner, Ipswitch Inc. ( www.ipswitch.com). Because the software developer, based Lexington, Mass., examines ROI from every conceivable angle, its executives know that for every dollar they spent on Web- related salaries and resources last year, they generated $22 in online sales. They also know that had those sales been handled by real live customer-service and sales reps, the company would have spent an additional $2 million on salaries. (See ” Many Happy Returns,” page 150.) 7. They constantly look for new ways to expand their Web use. Those range from digital newsletters to online forums to contests to relevant activities encouraging customer loyalty and participation. For example, Earth Treks Inc. ( www.earthtreksclimbing.com), a mountaineering company based in Columbia, Md., won second-place Marketing honors for creative features such as climbers’ journals and virtual participation in climbing expeditions. (See ” Traffic Magnets.”) Such interactive efforts are, in fact, a prerequisite for success on the Web, says judge Beerud Sheth, cofounder of eLance Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif. “Web sites need to facilitate interaction and transaction,” he says. “Teasing Web users with content online just to pull them off-line is not the right approach. The businesses that will succeed online are the ones that provide users with as much of that experience online as possible.” Overall, our judges say, this year’s competition proves that, despite the setbacks of the past couple of years, Web-based small business is far from finished. “The Web lives!” crowed Richard W. Oliver, professor of management at Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. “Companies with a good plan and reasonable dollars and a sensible approach can still make money on the Web.” Anne Stuart is a senior writer at Inc. The 2001 Inc Web Awards The Best Small-Business Sites in America The 2001 Inc Web Awards: Winners A Web Strategy Runs Through It Traffic Magnets Duh-sign of the Times Home Groan Many Happy Returns Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4217 days ago E-Commerce

The 2001 Inc Web Awards: Winners

The 2001 Inc Web Awards General Excellence Winner All-Outdoors Whitewater Rafting www.aorafting.com First place, Customer Service Second place, ROI Marketing finalist Honorable Mention Nova Cruz Products LLC www.xootr.com First place, Design Third place, Marketing ROI finalist Customer Service First place All-Outdoors Whitewater Rafting www.aorafting.com Second place Cadkey Corp. www.cadkey.com Third place Street Glow Inc. www.streetglow.com Design First place Nova Cruz Products LLC www.xootr.com Second place TidalWire Inc. www.tidalwire.com Third place Mosca www.moscahome.com Management (intranets and extranets*) First place Sunbelt Business Brokers Network Inc. www.sunbeltnetwork.com Second place National Services Group www.nationalservicesgroup.com Third place SLP Capital www.slpcapital.com Marketing First place Merriman Capital Management www.fundadvice.com Second place Earth Treks Inc. www.earthtreksclimbing.com Third place Nova Cruz Products LLC www.xootr.com ROI First place Ipswitch Inc. www.ipswitch.com Second place All-Outdoors Whitewater Rafting www.aorafting.com Third place The Connoisseur.cc Ltd. www.low-carb.com Sole Proprietors First place Limelight www.limelightart.com Second place Somerset Estate Sales www.somerset-estate-sales.com Third place Restaurant Connection Inc. www.restaurantstaffing.com *Management awards are given for Web sites that are password protected, so the URLs are only for the companies’ general sites. How the 2001 Inc Web Awards winners were selected: Earlier this year, 800 small businesses applied online for the 2001 Inc Web Awards. Using an Internet-based judging site, members of the Inc editorial staff screened all applications, eliminating ineligible entries and selecting finalists in six categories: Customer Service, Design, Management (intranets and extranets), Marketing, Return on Investment (ROI), and Sole Proprietors. We then had outside judges (listed on facing page) review the Web sites and submit comments and recommendations. Based on the judges’ input, Inc selected the winners. The Judges Ryan Bernard is president of Wordmark Associates Inc., in Houston, and the author of The Corporate Intranet. Mary E. Boone is the president of Boone Associates, in Norwalk, Conn., and author of Managing Inter@ctively: ExecutingBusiness Strategy, Improving Communication, and Creating a Knowledge-Sharing Culture. Bonny Brown is director of research at Vividence Corp., in San Mateo, Calif. Erik Brynjolfsson is codirector of the Center for eBusiness@MIT at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass. Michelle Chambers is the president and founder of New Tilt, in Somerville, Mass. Larry Chase is a New York-based marketing consultant, author of Essential Business Tactics for the Net, and publisher or Web Digest for Marketers in New York City. Steve Crummey is the cofounder and chairman of Intranets.com Inc., in Woburn, Mass. Bill Demas is an executive vice-president of Vividence Corp., in San Mateo, Calif. Paul Edwards is a self-employment consultant and the coauthor of Home-Based Business for Dummies. He is based in Pine Mountain Club, Calif. Martin T. Focazio is the CEO of Martin T. Focazio LLC, in Upper Black Eddy, Pa., and author of The e-Factor. Jeffrey Harkness is the cofounder of Diesel Design in San Francisco and the host of CNet’s monthly Design Talk radio program. John Hartnett is the CEO and president of BlueMissile, in Minneapolis. Randy J. Hinrichs is the group research manager in Learning Sciences and Technology, Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corp., in Redmond, Wash., and the author of Intranets: What’s the Bottom Line? Donna L. Hoffman is a professor of management, director of the electronic commerce concentration, and codirector of the eLab at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. Peter Kent is president of Top Floor Publishing, in Lakewood, Colo., and the author of Poor Richard’s Web Site. Michael P. Largey is the executive vice-president of IT Web Solutions Inc., in West Long Branch, N.J. Terri Lonier is the president of Working Solo Inc., a consulting firm in San Francisco, and the author of Working Solo: The Real Guide to Freedom & Financial Success with Your Own Business. Harley Manning is a research director at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Jakob Nielsen is a principal at Nielsen Norman Group, in Fremont, Calif., and the author of Designing Web Usability. Richard W. Oliver is a professor of management at Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers are founding partners of Peppers and Rogers Group, in Norwalk, Conn., and the coauthors of One to One B2B. Patricia B. Seybold is CEO of Patricia Seybold Group Inc., in Boston, and the author of Customers.com: How to Create A Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet & Beyond and The Customer Revolution. Beerud Sheth is the cofounder and general manager of eLance Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif. James Slavet is the cofounder of Guru Inc., in San Francisco. Robert Spiegel is the author of The Shoestring Entrepreneur’s Guide to the Best Home-Based Businesses. He lives in Albuquerque. Phil Terry is the CEO of Creative Good Inc., in New York City. Mark C. Thompson is chairman and CEO of Network Public Broadcasting International Inc., in San Francisco, and chairman of Integration Associates Inc., in Mountain View, Calif. Bruce D. Weinberg is an associate professor of marketing and E-commerce at McCallum Graduate School of Business, Bentley College, in Waltham, Mass. Marcia Yudkin is the Boston-based author of Poor Richard’s Web Site Marketing Makeover and other Internet marketing guides. Ron Zemke is the president of Performance Research Associates Inc., in Minneapolis, and coauthor of E-Service: 24 Ways to Keep Your Customers When the Competition is Just a Click Away and other books. The 2001 Inc Web Awards The Best Small-Business Sites in America The 2001 Inc Web Awards: Winners A Web Strategy Runs Through It Traffic Magnets Duh-sign of the Times Home Groan Many Happy Returns Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4370 days ago Business Software

Information In The Bank

Techniques: Microcases Data Management Problem: Expanding data storage with limited staff Solution: Outsourcing the project to a pay-as-you-go data-storage company Payoff: Tech staff can focus on profit-making projects Time and again, Greg Strakosch heard the same complaint from information-technology professionals he met as president of the technology division of United Communications Group (UCG). They needed to keep up-to-date about the computers and the software they used, but they didn’t have time to look through stacks of magazines or surf for the information on the Net. Strakosch had a dot-com brainstorm: search engines targeted specifically at the interests of the IT pros. By 1999, the 38-year-old publishing executive was CEO of TechTarget.com, a start-up that was spun off by UCG. And he had his own IT problems to solve. To reach its “target” audience, TechTarget planned to build a large family of IT Web sites. But faced with the threat of copycat competition, the company had to act fast. Creating the sites would be easy and relatively cheap. (Launching the first one, Search400.com, for users of IBM’s AS/400 servers, cost only about $50,000.) The difficult part would be deciding where to put TechTarget’s stockpile of content, advertising, sales, and user data. Once considered the backwater of IT departments, storage was in the forefront of Strakosch’s concerns before the launch of a second Web site, Searchdomino.com, for Lotus Domino users. Strakosch expected that data would accumulate, but he couldn’t predict how fast or how much. He could only estimate what his needs would be based on the response to Search400.com and his research into the size of each potential market. He observed that storage costs ate up almost 50% of most companies’ hardware budgets, and he figured that before long that figure would be 80% for his business. One of the options that TechTarget had for storing its data was buying computer hardware as needed and keeping the function in-house. But Strakosch was skeptical. Expensive hardware eats up capital, and installation takes time. Plus, he feared that because of the perpetual industrywide shortage of IT workers, TechTarget might not be able to hire staff who had the right expertise. Besides, Strakosch didn’t want his managers running storage servers; he wanted them working on projects that would build his business. So he presented a second option: outsourcing the function to StorageNetworks Inc., in Waltham, Mass. Now Patrick Laughran, TechTarget’s chief technology officer, had misgivings. None of his staff had ever outsourced storage before. Under the proposed arrangement, his people would be responsible for a vital operation that they wouldn’t control. Sure, StorageNetworks offered the ability to add storage capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis as fast as the company would need it. But the company’s data would reside on disk drives at StorageNetworks and would be overseen by the storage company’s personnel. So Laughran grilled StorageNetworks’ staff until he was convinced they could handle any problem that came up. In the end, Laughran swallowed his fears and decided to give outsourcing a try. Hiring more IT staff would take time that he didn’t have. “We had to get a product to market that could start generating revenue in weeks, not months,” Laughran says. Almost immediately, a glitch tested the relationship between TechTarget and StorageNetworks. As Strakosch tells it, the two companies had only 30 days to put together a system. But TechTarget goofed in a hardware order and as a result couldn’t hook up its equipment to the data-storage company’s network. Even though StorageNetworks wasn’t responsible for the mistake, the vendor scrambled to fix it overnight. TechTarget now has 24 Web sites, including the popular Whatis.com encyclopedia of computer lingo. About 200 employees cater to more than 1 million registered members and 2 million monthly visitors to its sites; the company now stores two terabytes of data in StorageNetworks’ digital vaults. The storage bill comes to more than $100,000 a month, but Strakosch figures that by now he would have spent an equivalent amount — some $2 million — if he had kept storage in-house at TechTarget’s new headquarters, in Needham, Mass. What matters to him is that his IT staff can work full-time on building the company by creating moneymaking services. “In hindsight,” says Strakosch, “outsourcing storage was a home-run decision.” Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4370 days ago E-Commerce

No Receptionist Necessary

Bulletin Board Last January, Tim Doreck got a message on his voice mail saying that a dozen people wanted to charter his dive boat for that afternoon. But by the time he called back, the group had booked another boat. “I lost about $1,000 right there,” says Doreck, co-owner of Monterey Express Diving Charters, in Monterey, Calif. But these days Monterey Express isn’t missing such opportunities. Doreck has started using a Web-based reservation system called TimeTrade, which allows his customers to book charters themselves. Now his clients can simply log on and check what’s available and make a reservation. Customers get an instant confirmation online, followed by another by E-mail. Doreck says he’s cut his long-distance and cellular phone bills, and he spends up to 70% less time writing E-mail to customers who want reservations. What’s more, he’s experienced a 25% to 30% increase in business among his regular clients. “They’re more inclined to book trips further ahead,” says Doreck. “And they’re more inclined to book when they just think of it.” TimeTrade Systems Inc., based in Waltham, Mass., operates Doreck’s new reservation system. Among those using TimeTrade are health clubs, photo studios, auto-service centers, and chiropractors, not to mention corporations scheduling internal activities such as training classes. For sole proprietors, the service costs $49.95 a month. Businesses that want to schedule a variety of activities — such as reserved time on racquetball courts, personal-training sessions, and massage therapy — can get a more elaborate version of the service starting at $99.95 a month. Bulletin Board See Bot Run Rent a Phone, Lose a Headache No Receptionist Necessary Things We Love: Home-Phone-Line Networking Log On, Turn Off, Spend Less Acronym Watch A Network for Networkers A ‘Black Box’ for Your Car Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.