Wednesday, July 7, 2010

If You Were the New Beckett Media President

Beckett Media has a new president and he's addressing their website performance issues and talking about future plans for the organization.

In an announcement on the company sites, Brian Gulledge, posted a message about the need to grow the site and his focus to improve their online presence. A new website will be launched in December, 2010. His message referenced that taking a long time, but considering the amount of data, that seems pretty aggressive to me.

In addition to the website, the new president will obviously tackle several other issues with the company.

The two biggest changes I'd like to see:
  1. New Website: Clear difference between what is blog vs. what is front page content.
  2. Mobile App for iPhone/iPad/Droid
If you were the new Beckett Media President, what would you do?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would hire more people to do the pricing so that prices over a couple years old actually change from month to month.
I would stop sending jobs to India. I would bring back Allan Muir or someone that knows something about hockey.

Anonymous said...

Curious as to why you think there needs to be a difference between content on a blog and on a website when a majority of it is clearly reporting. What isn't is multimedia, which is rarely any different, and other items which are opinion pieces are regularly noted as just that. Plus, any credible operation wouldn't allow commentary pieces to run if they are dramatically off-base with reality anyway.

News outlets use blogs to break news on a regular basis, too, and presently Beckett's blog and website run parallel to each other. If someone does not like using Beckett.com they can use the blog and vice versa.

James said...

@Anon - From my experience and in my opinion, I think there's a big difference between a blog and a website.

A website drives the traffic to what the buyer/customer is looking for: products, navigation and is more static with some new content. It drives the product sales. In this case, ads for BGS specials, subscription links, forums for trading and product release dates.

The blog is the opinion piece, perspectives, demonstrate more of your brand personna and humanize the company. In this case, more of the product reviews, user interaction, etc. Blogs seem to have been SEO (I can't speak to all of the specifics why though - I haven't worked much with web SEO).

Just my opinion again.. I don't think they should run parallel - they can feed off each.

Love a good marketing discussion!
Thanks for commenting.