e-Christmas cards - hot or not?

The PM Forum has just done a survey of 211 legal and accountancy firms to see what they think of Christmas cards. The response is pretty inconclusive as you might expect, as this sort of thing is really a matter of personal opinion. It's fair to say that whatever your opinion, you'll be able to find something in the report to support it and something directly opposed to it.

I'd hate to make a judgement on the rights and wrongs delivering a Christmas message, but I was entertained by the reasons given as underlying people's reasons for eCard. "Accountants use electronic greetings to save money; law firms want to save the planet. 23% of firms retain the savings rather than giving them to charity."

I guess that the only inescapable conclusion is that sending business Christmas cards is a business decision. And in this case, it's about managing people's perceptions of your business: I'd suggest that if you want to be perceived as a leader rather than a follower, get up to date and do it online!

FULL RESULT (Word doc)

PS - I'd also like to suggest a slightly different survey for next year. Why not ask the clients what they would like to receive?

Barriers to trading online

According to a Barclaycard survey of 1,000 retailers, two-thirds (69%) of UK retailers are missing out on potential revenues by not offering their goods or services online. [Source: Barclaycard via E-Consultancy Blog, December 2006]

23% claimed the cost of setting up online was a major barrier.

13% were put off by the technical knowledge required to set up a website.

But are these concerns justified?

In theory you can get an online shop up and running for £500. If you use an Open Source shop and can write some code. £1000 would get you up and running using a product like Actinic, but again you'd need to have a pretty good grasp on what you're doing, especially if you wanted to do anything that wasn't straight out of the box. I would have said that pretty much anything that has the chance of moving your business forward will cost more than a grand.

So ultra cheap is possible, but not straightforward. And you need technical knowledge.

So what does it cost to outsource the development of an online shop. Well , about £4,000 is a sensible starting price. For that, assuming you go to someone who knows that they are doing, you should be able to get a fully functional shop. OK the design would be straightforward (but not "crappy" looking) and you wouldn't be getting much in the way of bespoke functionality. But you would be able to sell to a hitherto unreachable audience.

What else could you spend £4k on that could open up a completely new seem of new business for you?

Which says to me that cheap is possible and you don't need technical knowledge. So what are you waiting for. I'd say give it a go. What have you got to lose.

Check out www.justeau.com to see one we did earlier ;-)

Only 1% of users are "creators"

This is a bit of an old stat, but not one I'd seen before. And I think it's very interesting. Apparently there is an emerging rule of thumb suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it. (The Guardian, July 2006).

It's interesting as it gives a perspective on the value of any interactivity and contributions that you are able to generate on your website. And in the glorious new world of Web 2.0 where UGC (User Generated Content) is king, it certainly shows that if you are generating any user content on your website you are doing pretty well. More cynically, it would suggest that you shouldn't base your website on UGC unless you are pretty sure you're going to be generating a lot of traffic.