In case you missed my last posts, this is the time when we announce our eBusiness Index rankings. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the Websites that set the standards in the IT industry.
Related research: The eBusiness Index Report. If you are a siteIQ client or subscriber, click here.
There are plenty of hits and misses on this year’s roster. My favorites are . . .In my last post, I shared some info about the top five Websites on the siteIQ eBusiness Index. Here’s my interesting surprises and “oops” list:
Symantec.com’s usability ranks second, and the site misses a “Good Practice” rating by a hair.
Juniper.net and Oracle.com complete the usability top five. Of the two, Juniper.net is most likely to move up a slot and knock CA.com off its perch.
Intel.com aced the online recruiting category and is the only four star (the best) in this category. (OK, so most recruiting zones are a big snooze – but we have to give Intel.com chops for its four star performance).
Services marketing continues to be Nortel.com’s claim to fame; HP.com and IBM.com are still second tier contenders.
Juniper.net hits the high note in the communities category – but Cisco.com and Intel.com also operate four star (the best) communities. (This is another way of saying that the new guys are zipping past community pioneers).
If call to action is your bag, look no further than Cisco.com. It is the only call to action “Best Practice” site on the eBusiness Index.
Newegg.com’s e-commerce capabilities puts it with the big boys: Dell.com & HP.com. Newegg ranks third with four stars (the best) and a “Good Practice” nod.
A couple of new entrants on the 2010 eBusiness Index roster did better than expected.
Related research: The eBusiness Index Report. If you are a siteIQ client or subscriber, click here.
An interesting thing happened when I reviewed the search terms used to find our Web properties this week. Search terms with the words ‘eselling’ and ‘b2b buying process’ jumped to over 50% of the total search requests. Dell.com and HP.com – both eselling powerhouses in their own right – ranked second, and the terms “NewEgg” and “CDW” ranked third. Anybody else get the feeling that Web managers are starting to focus on their Website’s selling bottom line?
These stats don’t come as much of a surprise since tough times call for more attention to how effectively the company’s Website creates – and more importantly, harvests – qualified prospects. Face it, nothing beats a Website for its global reach and the ability to win and woo potential buyers at the lowest possible cost.
Given these realities, it should be really interesting to see if the sales forces we test have finally gotten eselling religion. I wouldn’t bet on it
This, of course, brings me to an interesting question. Assuming the Website does its job, what happens next? Are salespeople actually contacting ‘anatomically correct’ prospects streaming in from your Website – or is your sales force still playing the same games we’ve seen in previous years? Which leading IT companies are doing the best job harvesting interested buyers? Which companies need to kick their sales force in the pants?
Since selling is the name of the game these days, we’ve decided to launch our 10th siteIQ Secret Prospect study this week. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this study, here’s the basic approach in four easy steps. Read More→
We recently put the finishing touches on our research project to identify how effectively leading IT companies address language requirements on 700+ global Websites operating in 232 countries around the globe. The companies under our microscope include the Who’s Who in enterprise systems (IBM, HP, Dell and Sun), enterprise software (SAP and Oracle), and the networking industry (Cisco and Nortel Networks). Quite frankly, we would have loved to add other major players, such as Microsoft, CA, Symantec, Adobe and others, but at 700 Websites we had our hands full.
The good news is that everyone can learn from the steps and mis-steps of these leading IT vendors.
siteIQ clients have access to our study results in a new siteIQ SnapShot report, Global Websites | Key Metrics | Language Compliance. For those who don’t have access to the siteIntelligence Research Center, I thought I’d share some of the more interesting things we learned.
The Big Picture
The IT industry has come a long way since we last looked at the global landscape in 2005. Then, language compliance in key markets, such as Latin America and Asia Pacific, were hit and miss at best. Today, these regions stand out as having some of the strongest language compliant Websites. Among the companies studied, Dell’s Latin American regional sites are the venues to watch.
In a reprise of our 2005 results, Oracle retains the crown as the worst global language performer.
On the other end of the spectrum, the emerging market du jour – Eastern Europe – is a language compliance disaster. Here, companies are following a number of less-than-effective strategies.
Those that deliver sites in Russian appear to be unaware that this language is spoken in less than half of the 29 countries in this region. Others, like Oracle, fall back on English-based Websites in a region where English is not a first, second or an official language. None of the companies we studied “get it”, but if you want to see the best of a bad lot, spend some time observing Eastern European sites operated by IBM.
Oracle.com doesn’t bother with sorting by company size; on Oracle.com it’s every company for himself
I was in a meeting the other day with a client providing a readout of their most recent siteIQ results. Our diagnostics analysis was around the site’s community marketing effectiveness—and the conversation turned to the problems that crop up when a company doesn’t clearly identify how it defines small business vs. medium-sized businesses on the site. I was astonished when I receive push back on this notion and a suggestion that small business and medium business definitions were pretty much standard across IT companies on the Web.
What Web are these folks looking at?
If you cruise around the IT Web, the one thing that is obvious is that there are few standards, and even fewer IT vendors identify who fits in what bucket. Just for giggles, consider this: Read More→
