Identifying the areas where organizations need to improve their capabilities most is an important step in any change effort. Such a skill is helpful particularly in times of cost-cutting—where limited training resources must be used to close the critical competency gaps that prevent companies from meeting business objectives.

Read more on McKinsey Quarterly

If ever a retailer could get away with having exceptional cross-selling and up-selling functionality, yet provide a new visitor checkout process and web forms that break many usability rules, Amazon is certainly one of them. On the other hand one of Amazon’s competitors, The Book Depository, certainly appears to focus more on providing better usability throughout the buying journey, especially for new customers.

Read more

Jared Spool’s Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon presentation at An Event Apart in Seattle highlighted some great design lessons from Amazon’s Web site.

Find the summary of the presentation here.

Shopping attitudes vary across Europe. Retailers must tailor their online offers to the needs of target segments

Retail sales in Europe have been hit hard by the economic crisis, but as retailers struggle to navigate through the storm, they shouldn’t lose sight of the region’s longer-term shopping trends. Online sales have been growing there—rising 31 percent across France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom in 2007, according to the latest available aggregate data. Some signs indicate that Internet sales will continue to grow during the recession: last December, for example, UK online sales were up by 30 percent, compared with those of the previous year—even as sales in stores fell by 1.4 percent, British Retail Consortium figures show.

Read more in McKinsey Quarterly

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Please add yourself to the community & become fans wherever possible.

Find below the videos made for our 3rd Anniversary by some of our colleagues.

What kind of people work at ecomZera?

What do eZians think about ecomZera?

What is the work culture at ecomZera?

What is the result of the work culture we have developed?

What is the future of ecomZera?

Ecomzera celebrated its Fourth year anniversary on the 5^th of May… cherishing every milestone, taking pleasure in every service we provide, a promise to perform better and the determination to realize every milestone. Having touched the lives of millions of people across the sea, sharing every joy and grief, ecomZera has reached yet another milestone!

Emotions and pride donned every face in the party. The pride of having accomplished something and the joy of living this moment of triumph! What else can we say…. In a small celebration at 201, Rishi started with a not-very-long-speech recounting the milestones the company has achieved in the last four years, then, he passed on the invisible mike to Vasanth and then Sai and Sreecharan and Apoorv. The list of people who spoke went on and kept adding to the list of achievements.

Let me recount a few for you:

• The company which started with 2 in a garage-like arrangement is a fifty-plus strong team.
• Our services have spread from 45 countries in 2007 to more than 80 this year. We are looking forward to expanding it to more than 100 countries in the next few months
• The product line of our clients has increased from 2000-5000 to more than 60,000
• More than 4 million people have visited our websites
• The daily traffic which was 400-500 last year has increased to more than 20000 this year
• BBC recommended ecomZera’s “TheFlowerExpert.com” among websites on flowers in 2006

The numbers will go on and the list is never ending. But what is important here is the number of lives we have touched. Like Apoorv said, …touching lives, sharing special moments, lending a shoulder at times of grief, cherishing a moment of glory, living every moment with flowers, fun and free will! That is what ecomZera is about after four years of existence in this industry!

The party proceeded with the cake cutting by the first employee of the company: our own Praveen and giving the first piece to our latest member Swetha. Keeping the tradition of the family, we went on to celebrate with fun, food, music and laughter!

Cheers to the Team!

Ecomzera celebrated its Fourth year anniversary on the 5^th of May… cherishing every milestone, taking pleasure in every service we provide, a promise to perform better and the determination to realize every milestone. Having touched the lives of millions of people across the sea, sharing every joy and grief, ecomZera has reached yet another milestone!

Emotions and pride donned every face in the party. The pride of having accomplished something and the joy of living this moment of triumph! What else can we say…. In a small celebration at 102, Rishi started with a not-very-long-speech recounting the milestones the company has achieved in the last four years, then, he passed on the invisible mike to Vasanth and then Sai and Sreecharan and Apoorv. The list of people who spoke went on and kept adding to the list of achievements.

Let me recount a few for you:

• The company which started with 2 in a garage-like arrangement is a fifty-plus strong team.
• Our services have spread from 45 countries in 2007 to more than 80 this year. We are looking forward to expanding it to more than 100 countries in the next few months
• The product line of our clients has increased from 2000-5000 to more than 60,000
• More than 4 million people have visited our websites
• The daily traffic which was 400-500 last year has increased to more than 20000 this year
• BBC recommended ecomZera’s “TheFlowerExpert.com” among websites on flowers in 2006

The numbers will go on and the list is never ending. But what is important here is the number of lives we have touched. Like Apoorv said, …touching lives, sharing special moments, lending a shoulder at times of grief, cherishing a moment of glory, living every moment with flowers, fun and free will! That is what ecomZera is about after four years of existence in this industry!

The party proceeded with the cake cutting by the first employee of the company: our own Praveen and giving the first piece to our latest member Swetha. Keeping the tradition of the family, we went on celebrate with fun, food, music and laughter!

Cheers to the Team!

Best Employers in India-2009

Hewitt Associates announced Hewitt Best Employers in India 2009.

The Judges selected 25 Hewitt Best Employers in India 2009.
25 Companies that kept employees smiling even in the slowdown.

The results are presented in ranked order:

The study procedure involves surveying the participating organizations using 3 instruments developed by Hewitt which are:

1. The Employee Opinion Survey (to gauge the level of employee engagement and gather information on employee perceptions of their work environment),
2. People Practices Inventory™ (to gather information about philosophies, practices, and policies that influence the management of people) and
3. CEO questionnaire;

followed by ‘blind’ judging by external jury panel. All judging is ‘blind’ in that each set of organizational data is assigned a code and the judges don’t know the company name until after their decisions are made. Eventually, organizations that are able to demonstrate a high level of employee Engagement and a strong alignment of their people practices with their business strategy are selected by the jury members as the Best Employers.

Source: Hewitt Associates

Video Marketing is one of the hottest and newest forms of internet marketing. It allows you to get your website to rank on the first page of Google, Fast! And you don’t even need a website.

Video Marketing is just like a TV commercial but much more effective. You demonstrate your product or service and list your website address and/or your phone number. So even if you don’t have a website you can drive traffic to your store or to your phone number.

A benefit of video marketing is that, unlike a TV commercial where most of us just turn to a different channel or go into another room, people searching the internet are actually interested in what you have, as long as your video commercial is interesting. You’ll have targeted eyes reading every word or listening to everything you have to say. Best of all it’s free.

Video marketing is a fairly new concept, however, a lot of experts and internet marketing specialists still doubt its effectiveness. People often worry that the time spent creating an online video might be better spent using some of the other typical methods of internet marketing or search engine optimization.

But why does video marketing work?

Because it’s: Simple, Easy, and Convenient. SIMPLE: because an internet video can be created in a few minutes to a few hours. EASY: because your prospects don’t have to do anything except sit back and watch with just a click of a mouse. And CONVENIENT: because watching and listening is always easier than reading, and it usually takes less of their time.

I discovered video marketing a few years ago after seeing some of the top internet marketers using it to capture my email address and information. I didn’t quite understand how to implement it into my marketing efforts but I did realize the power of it. So I bought a domain name that was available so I could build a website at a later date.

Video marketing gives you the power to show your message to your prospects without the need for them to thoroughly read any content.

But, the most important benefit of video marketing is its visibility. Not only is it easy to advertise on a lot of free video sharing websites, but it can also be sent around the web without fearing that it loses its ability to get traffic to your site. The social sharing or viral flexibility is also its strongest point.

You can also have videos in your website, upload them to many video sharing sites, or have them bookmarked in social bookmarking sites, which will not only provide you with many backlinks to your site but also get you a ton of FREE traffic. This is where video marketing has many advantages over article marketing.

We all know articles can just be copied and forwarded along in emails. But, people don’t actually like to share content as much as they like to share videos, which can be much more entertaining.

Video marketing is now a whole lot easier and more convenient to utilize, especially with all the web 2.0 and social media sites that support video, like YouTube.

People say the secret to marketing is creativity. Video marketing certainly allows you to be very creative, uncover ideas and open your imagination. Discover creativity and success with video marketing.

Source: Promotionworld