Do you have a Plan 'B'?

Having recently read Paul J. Bruemmer post highlighting the need for organisations to have a Plan B i.e.  a plan that does not start and end with Google, I was struck by the thought that whilst a plan B is indeed admirable, many companies still don't really know what their Plan A is!

I still meet with many companies who have and continue to invest significant sums in developing on line marketing strategies, yet are still unclear as to what what their key objectives are. I think many companies would do well to review their websites against Bryan Eisenberg and Jim Novo's four key categories to help them understand and clarify their online proposition. Their four categories and associated objectives are:

1. Ecommerce sites - to increase sales while decreasing marketing expenses.

2. Content sites - to increase readership, visitor interest and site stickiness.

3. Lead generation sites - to increase segment leads.

4. Self-service sites - to increase customer satisfaction while decreasing customer support costs.

To this list, Breummer has suggested we can now add a fifth category, namely Social-networking sites with key objectives that focus on increasing membership numbers and the amount of member activity.

Finally, it's interesting to note that the growth of social networking has led to the introduction of a new discipline: Social Media Marketing (SMM) yes, you heard it here first (perhaps)!