Related research: The eBusiness Index Report.  If you are a siteIQ client or subscriber, click here.

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.

• Brocade.com and EMC.com rank 7^th and 8^th on the usability chart – and finish in the middle of the pack when all of the scores are tallied up (EMC.com ranks 12^th; Brocade ranks 14^th).

• Among the sites that debuted on the Index in 2010, Deloitte.com and SAS.com turned out to be boat anchors. Deloitte finished dead last – and SAS.com debuted in 17^th place (out of 23 Websites).

Related research: The eBusiness Index Report.  If you are a siteIQ client or subscriber, click here.

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.

1. We create a fictitious buyer with the right title, authority, budget, and buying timeline.
2. We go out to every Website on the siteIQ eBusiness Index, pick one or more products or categories, and test different ways to engage with the sales force. We fill out the contact forms, send emails, and hit the “call me now” buttons. About the only thing we don’t bother to do is request an online chat (previous tests show that these features typically work like a charm).
3. Along the way, we document every part of the process. We identify how many inappropriate questions are required on forms. We note all of the promises made, including when we should receive a response. We check to make sure privacy policies are front and center. After we’re finished, we measure how effectively the company continues to market to prospects and how efficiently it connects them back to the right place on the site.
4. Then we sit back and start the stopwatch. We track when the salesperson calls, when we receive various emails – and how often the company’s sales organization reaches out. After 18 days, we close the study, add up the numbers, and publish the results.

Looks pretty simple, but the results can sometimes be damning. I’ve provided a peek into how companies like Oracle, IBM, HP, Adobe, CA, Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco, Nortel, Accenture, and EDS fared in our last test in the siteIntelligence Research Center (siteIQ clients can log in here). From a big picture perspective, here’s how the industry’s biggest players tend to behave.

• Getting a response across a company’s product groups is largely the luck of the draw. One product group will respond within minutes, while others fiddle around for days (if you are lucky).
• About half of our requests go into a black hole. Meanwhile, sales chat almost always delivers the goods, while request a quote and email requests are hit and miss at best.
• Handoffs to partners almost never work (typically a function of incompetent handoffs, plus partners who apparently don’t like the vendor’s leads).
• Finally, few companies follow up on prospect requests unless the prospect calls back – and almost none use email (cheap, fast, and effective) to keep prospects warm.

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. After nine of these tests, my bet is that we’ll see the same old dysfunctional behaviors. On the other hand, I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised. We’ll be posting real-time results in the siteIntelligence Research Center — and will publish the winners and losers here in April. Stay tuned.

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.

Among the companies we studied, Dell, IBM, and Cisco stand out as good-to-excellent performers across the globe.

• Dell achieves this distinction by having a massive global footprint (sites in 166 countries), an intricate and highly effective regional schemas – and also pads its overall score by having the best Latin America performance across the board.

• IBM, with sites in 98 countries, is actually the provisional leader in our minds, due to a strategy that delivers content (at minimum) in the target language at the top four levels of sites. IBM also gets our vote for leadership because it is the only vendor in our group that operates zero (yes, zero) sites that are not language compliant.

• Cisco (75 sites) also gets our ‘good housekeeping’ seal of approval by pursuing a strategy that, on average, delivers either perfect language compliance or compliance at the top four levels.

In a reprise of our 2005 results, Oracle retains the crown as the worst global language performer. Over a third of Oracle’s sites are not language compliant and it appears that the company has never seen an English-based global Website it didn’t like. If you want to see language ‘bait and switch’ in action, Oracle is the company to watch.

The Method to the Madness

When all of the scores were tallied, we found that four distinct global language strategies are in play around the globe.

The most effective is the “Almost Perfect” strategy executed by sites that deliver virtually all content (except support) in one of the country’s top three prime or official languages (as determined by data provided by the CIA FactBook).  Although the random piece of content may be delivered in English, these sites clearly focus on delivering most marketing, channel, corporate, and promotional information to visitors in their lingua franca. Just over half (51.3%) of the sites we studied fall into this category—but when you factor out English-speaking countries, this drops to 22.8% of non-English speaking sites. In other words, relatively few companies operate perfect, non-English-based global sites.

The next effective is the “Largely Compliant” strategy which is observed on 14.8% of the sites. These sites deliver the vast majority of content in the country language, but rely on US or English-based content up to 20% of the time (we would have preferred 10% but 20% ended up as the logical break point). Of the 700+ sites reviewed, only 14.8% were deemed to be following a ‘Largely Compliant” strategy.  The company that relies most on this strategy is Cisco (48 sites or 64% of its total global footprint).

When you get to product detail, however, you are on your own unless you speak English. Of the sites reviewed, about a fifth (19.6%) fall into the “top four levels” category.

We dubbed the next strategy the “Top Four Levels” gambit, which reflects that these sites tend to deliver the top four levels of the site in the target language, and then link visitors to the company’s U.S. site content at lower levels. Typically, these top four levels consist of a language-compliant home page and features, reseller and channel information, product gateway pages, press releases and promotions and occasionally, top level product pages. When you get to product detail, however, you are on your own unless you speak English. Of the sites reviewed, about a fifth (19.6%) fall into the “top four levels” category. Here, SAP is most likely to pursue this strategy (53.1%), followed by IBM (33.7% of all sites).

Finally, we have the least effective strategy across the globe—the “Non-Compliant or Bait and Switch” strategy. These sites give every IT vendor a bad name (to put it mildly). They either deliver language compliant home page links that lead to English content—or don’t even try to deliver a site in the country’s target language. (This, of course, begs the question: if they don’t speak English, what’s the point?) The good news is that only 14.2% of global sites we studied exhibit this egregious behavior. Among the companies we studied, Oracle gets the prize (35.9% of sites) and Sun Microsystems gets an honorable mention.

Words to the Wise

Even the best funded Website teams struggle . . . what should the less well-heeled do?

When all of the numbers are tallied up, it’s obvious that even the best funded IT vendors (note: the companies we studied spend well over $2 billion annually on their Website operations) struggle to deliver perfect global language behaviors. Given that, what should the less well-heeled do?

• Avoid List Envy. Ignore where your competitors (or leading IT companies) are operating global Websites. Just because a company has a footprint in a country doesn’t mean it operates an effective Website. To avoid playing follow the loser, map your global Website strategy to your own channel strategy—and then prioritize countries based on their IT spending, the number of Internet users in each country, and  the country’s real language requirements. If you can’t support the site in the user’s local language, put this country at the bottom of your list.

• Think Regional. Some of the best performers build their excellence on well-crafted regional language sites. Dell’s Latin American sites—which are built around country-specific home pages backed by a Spanish-based regional site—is a classic example of a regional schema that works. Regions that are prime for regional language designs are Latin America, the Caribbean and about 10 countries in Eastern Europe.

What do you think of the global Websites operated by IT companies? Sound off in comments.

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:

IBM.com operates separate small business and medium business zones; presumably enterprise customers have full run of the site. HP.com divides its site into Home/Home Office, Small & Medium Business, and Enterprise. Dell.com sorts by Home/Home Office, Small Business and Medium & Large Business zones. No standards here and definitions are blissfully absent from these sites.

Want to play with software? CA.com offers Home and Home Office, and Small and Medium Business zones; like IBM.com, enterprise companies are presumably left to wander around the site. Symantec operates separate Home/Home Office, Small and Midsized Business, and Enterprise Solutions zones. SAP limits its community play to a Small Business Solutions zone; I guess medium and large businesses have to fend for themselves. Oracle.com doesn’t bother with sorting by company size; on Oracle.com it’s every company for himself. When you roll all of these behaviors up, its pretty clear that standards in the software industry are nonexistent. Of the companies discussed, only Symantec.com bothers to provide any definitions.

Finally, no run is complete without some quality time in the networking pen. Cisco.com operates Home & Home Office, Small & Medium Business, and Large Enterprise zones. Nortel limits its coverage to Small & Medium Business and Enterprise zones. Novell limits its audiencing strategy to a Small Business zone. No standards here either.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there are no community marketing standards in the IT industry. Picking the wrong community marketing approach can also create additional work

This of course, brings me to the point. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there are no community marketing standards in the IT industry. Picking the wrong community marketing approach can also create additional work. Of the options on the board, organizing your communities around Home & Home Office, Small & Medium business and Enterprise Business creates the least confusion. These categories are self-evident for most visitors and it’s unlikely that a visitor will pick the wrong category and end up wandering through the wilderness into another zone.

On the other hand, if operating separate small business and medium business zones is your cup of tea, telling visitors how you define these segments is critical to success. Sans that information, visitors will end up staring at your community list wondering if they are a bigger than a breadbasket or smaller than a kumquat. If they make the wrong decision, they get a fun-filled hour of pogo-sticking between these zones trying to ferret out which one serves their needs.

As for approaches, that’s a mixed bag as well. Based on our research, employee headcounts make the most sense. Here, the very loose rule of thumb seems to be that small businesses have less than 100 employees. Medium businesses, on the other hand, are a nightmare to define. Depending on the vendor, the high end for these companies can range from 1,000 to 10,000 employees. At 10,000 employees, of course, this definition begins to bleed into the enterprise business category—which is a whole ‘nuther Oprah I’m not going to touch.