Case Study (Part 1): Hamilton Door Company, Asheville, NC

My brother-in-law Jeff owns a custom garage door installation company in Asheville, N.C.  Hamilton Door Company was named after his hometown of Hamilton, Ohio, where his family originally immigrated in the 19th century and began a tradition of high-end manufacturing, producing some of the finest products in their field.  For the last two years, Jeff has worked hard to build a company from scratch that has grown to become the number one dealer of Carriage House Door Company products in Western North Carolina.  A born salesman, Jeff’s hard work and dedication has brought him a great deal of success in this field, but when it comes to his online presence, he lags far behind his competitors.

Jeff Benninghofen of Hamilton Door Company

Like many small business owners, Jeff knew that he needed a web site but he knew nothing of HTML, PHP, CSS, or any of the other tools necessary to build a decent custom site.  Instead, he signed up with his web hosting company and used their templates, along with some pictures of his family and his product to put up a website quickly and easily.  Jeff was even savvy enough to contact customer support and get a quick lesson on keywords and META tags.

In spite of clever local radio ads, networking with builders and business groups, and forming tight relationships with purchasing decision-makers, every time a potential customer searches Google for “Asheville Garage Door,” they are presented with obvious results (Asheville Garage Door Services) – and Hamilton Door Company is nowhere to be seen.  In fact, even if someone thinks they know the name of Jeff’s company and they do a search on “Hamilton Garage Door,” Jeff remains invisible.

I thought I had solved my invisibility issue, but alas, I am only promoting David Hall at Asheville Garage Door everytime someone searches locally. THAT P!$$ES ME OFF.

 
Now I’ve never been a fan of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – the practice of desiging web sites to maximize page ranking in search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc,) results.  SEO always seemed to be full of voodoo and wierd practices to me – coming from the old-school online world, I still believed that “if you build it, they will come.”  But the more I thought about Jeff’s situation – here was a guy who was doing everything right to create a business, working hard to build and manage customer relationships, giving back to the community he loves, and yet in spite of his best efforts, his online presence is virtually non-existent – I realized that search engine results pages (SERPS) are perhaps one of the last examples of pure competition in the business world.

Even when you include all of the sponsored links and AdWords ads (items which most people have learned to ignore anyway), Google still does a really good job of delivering relevant content to users who are searching for specific things.  If a potential customer is searching for your products or services, they will be presented with thousands of choices grouped ten per page.  Google has a complex and ever-changing algorithm they use to filter search results in such a way that the most relevant will rise to the top.   If a user does a specific search for your goods and services and your business is not represented in the first or second page of Google results (and I’m being generous here by including the second page), then it may as well not exist. You have lost a potential sale and your competitors are waiting right there to take it from you.

No one knows exactly how the Google algorithm works, but you can read a brief description of the concept here.  In spite of the fact that Google changes the algorithm whenever they see fit (always in an effort to present relevant content to their users), SEO experts strive to work the system in order to achieve the highest page rank possible.

Over the next couple weeks we will follow Jeff’s efforts as he strives to improve his page rank and ensure that his web site is working as hard as he is.  Future topics will include Identifying Your Market, Evaluating Your Competition, Choosing Keywords, Creating Content, Building Links, and Promoting Your Business.

Detecting Weak Signals with Web 2.0 – Twitter

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve at least heard of Twitter. You might be an active Twitter user (sometimes referred to as Tweeple), you might have a Twitter account that you never use, or you might have been able to avoid the whole phenomenon (so far) – but chances are good you have heard of Twitter and you probably know a few Tweeple yourself.

I’ve always been turned off by the cutesiness of Twitter – it’s ‘Tweeple’ are known to send ‘Tweets’ at regular intervals in which they inform their online network of such fascinating activities as breakfast time, nap time, and a gaggle of other mundane tasks.  These Tweets are short (up to 140 character) text messages that are primarily meant to be sent and received via mobile phone.

There are several web-based tools that make make it easy to use Twitter to update all of your social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) – thereby making Twitter a good hub for those people who want to simplify the task of updating their MySpace profile, their Facebook status, their Yahoo profile, their Yammer account, their Flickr log, and on and on.  At first glance, Twitter seems like a perfect tool for those who think they are more important than they really are.  Who cares when you get your haircut or what your teeth brushing habits are?  But enough people are fascinated by this capability – I suspect more fascinated by the potential than by the actual content – that Twitter users have grown at approximately 10% per month for the last two years.  Current estimates place unique Twitter users at about 3.4 million. This growing user base, combined with a few high-profile examples of Twitter’s power as a less mundane broadcast tool have many people (and investors) re-examining the usefulness of such a service:

• In 2007, Twitter users helped to provide updated information regarding the San Diego wildfires.
• In 2008, the Mumbai terror attacks were closely followed by Twitter users around the world.
• In 2009, a Twitter user posted what is recognized as one of the first photos of the US Airways crash in the Hudson River.

As TechCrunch and Slate Magazine have pointed out, one of Twitter’s new great values is as a search engine:

By collecting millions of people’s immediate thoughts, Twitter is building the Web’s best database of “real time” information, these people argue. And that collection might be very valuable—when people want to know what’s going on in the world right now, they’ll increasingly check Twitter, not Google.

For business intelligence, this means that millions of people can potentially talk about YOU – your products, your services, your brand name, your company.  They can also talk about your competitors – and they can talk about those trends that might affect your future business environment.  Want to know what people are thinking about gas prices? Check Twitter.  What about people’s feelings about the Housing Bailout? Even more powerful, is Twitter’s ability to narrow a search by location – are people in San Diego talking about home foreclosures differently than people in Cincinnati?  You bet they are, although with this example you might need to do a little digging to spot the differences. 

A good forecaster should be able to identify these key issues before they become strong signals, and therefore have a better sense of upcoming trends – rather than feeling the need to react to the wave after it has already arrived.  That’s the power of a good weak signal detector – by processing these signals early on, your organization will be able to react in a powerful and effective way, rather than having to spend excess resources on a crash response program.

Check out the Twitter chatter on these local San Diego companies:

• WebSense – a leading web security/filtering firm also specializing in e-mail security and data-loss prevention.
• Avaak – a new company developing personal wireless video networks for fun and security.
• SAIC - a leading defense contractor and engineering firm with strong ties to the San Diego community.
• WD-40 – the ubiquitous cleaner and lubricant is also the parent company for several household brands.
• Sempra Energy – the parent company for San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas.
• Aptera Motors - a Carlsbad company developing a plug-in hybrid automobile promising 100 mpg.

Each of these companies could benefit by monitoring Twitter (as well as other sources) for those signals that could potentially affect their business – whether it’s gauging customer loyalty, discovering product evangelists, measuring public opinion, predicting upcoming trends, or keeping track of the competition.

Try a Twitter search of your own and see what you can find (don’t forget to try the Advanced Search option.)  Chances are, if you’re interested in it, then someone is talking about it – and if they’re not now, they will be soon!