Where do you get your web advice?

How are you going with keeping up with e-business and e-marketing developments?

Are you in touch and up to date? Or feel you have a pretty good handle on it?

Or like the majority of SME operators, completely overwhelmed with the hype, jargon and speed of development of this still nascent industry?

And who can blame you?

Last year it was YouTube, this year Twitter, and now we are hearing about something called the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine (!).

While you were working out how to pronounce that, the latest batch of overnight experts emerged to tell the world how to make or save a bundle by adopting this wonderful new capability.

In the meantime, GFC-affected small business operators just want to know they can pay the week’s wages on time.

So who can really blame them for giving the web a really wide berth?

Traditional media (white) flagging

At the same time, traditional media moguls like Rupert Murdoch are finally waving the white flag to the web, admitting that new business models have to be found to prop up ailing media businesses steeped in fading technology and migrating readerships.

So therein lies the concurrent paradoxes of:
• Need for business to embrace the web and its marketing and productivity capabilities.
• Reduced time to properly research and assess online alternatives.
• Increasingly complex and fragmented eBusiness supplier base.
• Less funds to invest in new online developments.
• Few truly independent sources of advice and guidance.

Could the landscape be any riper for truly independent and affordable advice on the online world as it pertains to the specific needs of your business?

In fact the lack of independence of the vast majority of web industry purveyors is a cause for real concern.

The problem with the way the web industry has been established is that each provider is no position whatsoever to advise business operators on the best solution for their requirements because there is a fundamental conflict of interest – they are in the business of selling as much of their own product as possible rather than the one that is right for the customer.

But how is this different to any other industry you ask?

Impartiality has been slow to evolve

The big difference is that other industries have well developed channels for impartial advice.

A good analogy is in the not unrelated field of advertising. Advertising agencies exist because the media is a complex and fragmented industry that the business operator or marketer has little hope navigating to find the best promotional mix for the special needs of their business.

Agencies are hired to not only help deliver a promotional strategy but identify the best media channels via which to distribute the promotional message. In turn they usually include creative departments to develop the promotional message in all kinds of formats.

The survival of agencies is directly aligned with their performance. If the campaign doesn’t get results they are quickly dispensed with.

In this environment, can you imagine an agency that only recommends and plans for one channel on one medium? They would soon go out of business because they have failed to add any value to approaching that media channel directly.

Yet in the main the web industry has failed to understand the importance of this impartiality.

When it was simply the domain of web designers it was quite simple. They performed the work and the website did its stuff.

Navigating a complex landscape

But now there is an increasing number of e-marketing channels that need to work in tandem with the website, as well as a myriad of website technologies with different capabilities and corresponding price levels.

Now a website has to be integrated with e-marketing techniques like online advertising, email marketing, search engine marketing, social networking, blogs and more.

The underlying website could be custom-built with a range of programming languages, or with open source software, or be “leased” using software-as-a-service technologies.

So using the advertising analogy, working with a provider that is not independent of both the emarketing technique and the underlying technology is a bit like going to a media publication or channel and asking them where you should spend your money.

Do you really think they are going to send you to a competitor?

You don’t know what you don’t know

Without getting into Rumsfeldisms, the web is one place where you don’t know what you don’t know. How do you know that social networking is good for your business, and if so which social networking engine or combination of them? Is the e-commerce technology you are about to invest in compatible and integrated with the email marketing requirements you are about to roll out.

And does it “talk” to your product data and bookkeeping systems? And is that important anyway?

Are you able to add unlimited pages to your website? And is it easy to add new menus, pages and media like images, audio and video? And how good is the support that comes with it?

What about scalability? Is it easy to add new functionality to the website or will I be slugged each time I want to change something?

The list goes on as to the number of complexities your choice of website technology introduces as time goes on.

Craig Reardon is a leading eBusiness educator and founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which provide the gamut of ‘pre-built’ website solutions, technologies and services to SMEs in Melbourne and beyond. www.theeteam.com.au