Category Archives: About us

Before You Sponsor Any Blog … Get the Facts!

Continuing my recent post on Making Sense of Web Stats, before you sponsor any blog, including this one, you should get the facts … and do your own research. While they don’t capture all of the traffic, or even every site, used in conjunction, the free traffic ranking sites of Ranking, Traffic Estimate, Compete, Quantcast, and, most importantly, Alexa are usually directionally accurate and are a good place to start. For example, if you were to check up on the major blogs in the space on August 15, 2009, you’d find:

Blog Alexa
Rank		 Traffic Estimate
Visits		 QuantCast
Visitors		 Compete
Visitors (US)		 Ranking
Rank
Spend Matters 317,868 47,000 12,000 7,760 188,166
Sourcing Innovation 324,279 47,200 4,400 — 159,761
Supply Chain Matters ???,??? ??,??? ?,??? ?,??? ?,???,???
(AG) Metal Miner 573,991 25,200 — — 924,425
Supply Excellence 960,349 10,700 — 1,767 217,056
Procure Insights 1,546,610 — 2,000 — —
Purchasing Certification Blog 3,080,943 — — 370 —
e-Sourcing Forum 3,108,516 — 2,300 — 873,926

This says that Sourcing Innovation, which briefly held the top spot on Alexa from June 10, 2009 to August 15, 2009 (and still holds the top spot on Traffic Estimate and Ranking), is currently ranked as the second most trafficed niche blog in the supply and spend management space. Not bad for an Upstart Blog that’s only three years old.

Furthermore, since you are also concerned about how much new traffic a site will attract, as new traffic is key to continued growth, the site’s ranking with respect to relevant searches is also important. For an overview of how each blog ranks, I refer you to the Google Rankings of the Sourcing Blogs of June 19, which is summarized below for a corpus of 99 relevant search terms:

Blog Top 10 Top 20 Top 30 Top 50 Top 100
Sourcing Innovation 8 10 13 17 23
Supply Excellence 4 4 7 10 15
Spend Matters 2 4 5 7 10
e-Sourcing Forum 2 4 5 7 10

This is one of the reasons why, from a new traffic acquisition perspective, Sourcing Innovation, which continues to grow anywhere from 3% to 30% month-over-month, is one of the top two blogs, and why, one day after the blog’s three year anniversary when Sourcing Innovation claimed the Top Supply Management and Spend Management blog ranking on Alexa, Sourcing Innovation has, in the past year, at least temporarily, ranked #1 on all five of the major traffic ranking engines.

Now that you’ve informed yourself, you can make the right choice. For more information on SI sponsorships, see the Open Pricing Model. (For more information on other blog sponsorships, if available, contact the respective blog owners.)

Are You Taking Full Advantage of Sourcing Innovation?

While Sourcing Innovation is, first and foremost, a daily blog dedicated to bringing you the latest and greatest in best practices, education, and innovation in sourcing, procurement and supply management, it’s more than that. In addition to its archive of almost 1,300 deep and insightful posts that remain as relevant as the day they were written, Sourcing Innovation also offers one the most extensive resource sites in the space, and a growing collection of wiki-papers, white papers, and presentations.

The SI Resource Site, which is completely searchable through the Site Search page, catalogues more events, on-demand podcasts and webinars, publications, and societies than any other site in the space. It also contains:

  • A Glossary
    with about 30 articles on core topics, each complete with reference links to more information
  • The Illuminations
    which represent Sourcing Innovation’s branded thought-leadership white papers
  • New Presentations
    which are designed to distill key pieces of information from long posts, articles and white papers

Then there’s:

  • The e-Sourcing Wiki
    where the doctor authored or co-authored almost 35 wiki-papers on relevant supply management subjects
  • The (new) Linked-In Group
    where you can ask the doctor questions and participate in conversations with other supply management leaders
  • And Slideshare
    where the doctor has started to post presentations for those of you who like viewing presentations on-line

I encourage you to check out all that SI has to offer, and I welcome any suggestions you may have.

Who Reads Sourcing Innovation?

Educated, informed, driven individuals like you … who care more about education, innovation, and self-improvement than the gossip of the day. You’re in good company. Last week, over a 5 day period, a sample of approximately 1,000 randomly-selected unique IPs were traced back to 888 unique organizations. Here are 88 random companies. As one smart and informed individual remarked, it’s a “who’s who of global sourcing“.

  • Aerospace Distributors
  • Alcan Aluminum Corp
  • Amazon.com
  • Ameriprise
  • Army & Air Force Exchange Service
  • AT&T
  • Bank of America
  • Bell Canada
  • Boeing
  • Canadian Tire
  • Caterpillar
  • Chevron
  • Cisco Systems
  • Computer Sciences Corporation
  • Continental Airlines
  • Cox Enterprises
  • Data General Corporation
  • Deere & Company
  • Defense Research Establishment (Canada)
  • Deutsche Post
  • Earnst & Young
  • Eaton Corporation
  • Emerson Electric
  • Ericsson
  • Fisher Scientific
  • Fox Entertainment Group
  • Fujitsu
  • General Electric
  • GlaxoSmithKline
  • Google
  • Harcourt General
  • HCL Technologies
  • Henry Ford Hospital
  • Hertz
  • Hewlett-Packard
  • Hitachi Credit America
  • Home Depot
  • Honda
  • Honeywell International
  • IBM
  • Intel Corporation
  • Johns Hopkins University
  • Johnson & Johnson
  • JP Morgan Chase & Co.
  • Kohler Company
  • KPMG
  • Kodak
  • Kroger
  • Loblaws Companies
  • Loyola University Chicago
  • MIT
  • Merck and Co.
  • Molson Coors
  • Motorola
  • NBC Universal
  • Nordstrom
  • Northrop Grumman
  • Oracle Corporation
  • Oxford Brookes University
  • Perseco North America
  • Pratt & Whitney Canada
  • Praxair
  • Raytheon Company
  • Research in Motion
  • Rhodes University
  • Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
  • Samsung
  • SAP
  • SAS Airline
  • Schneider National
  • Shell
  • Siemens
  • Solar Turbines, Inc.
  • Sony
  • Staples
  • Sun Microsystems
  • Suncor
  • Tata
  • Texas A&M University
  • Time Warner Telecom
  • United Nations Office
  • United Parcel Service
  • University of California
  • Uponor
  • Virgin Media
  • Wachovia
  • Wal-Mart Stores
  • Whitepages.com

Like you, these readers are globally focused … and global. Even though about 95% of Sourcing Innovation’s readership, as you would expect, is from North America, Europe, and Asia, in that order (in a rougly 63%, 17%, 15% split), Australasia, South America, and Africa are also increasingly represented. In fact, the last month saw traffic from 168 countries.

SI’s readers are also numerous (and growing monthly). On an average day, around 1,000 of your intelligent and innovative peers will visit Sourcing Innovation, and in an average month, at leat 11,000 of your global counterparts will be here with you, collectively hitting the site about 150,000 times. (And, as I’ve pointed out before, that traffic is on par with many of the “leading” publications in the space, and was enough to secure Sourcing Innovation top blog on three of the five top external traffic ranking sites. See the archived posts, linked on the sidebar.)

I’ve seen some ridiculous claims on websites about readership levels, which is a shame, because it penalizes those of us who provide accurate data. For example, if a site that publishes new content daily claims to have a regular readership of 10,000, yet it only gets 20,000 hits a month, that says the “average” reader only visits the site 2 times a month, which makes no sense. Remember, the numbers have to add up and make sense. If they don’t, they’re just wrong.

I’ll outline in my next post about how to make sense of the confusing jumble of web statistics thrown at you. In Sourcing Innovation’s case, the “average” reader visits 2 to 3 times a week and accesses about 10 pages a month. Most accesses are home page accesses (which allows the reader to catch up on all the posts since their last access). This is about the regularity you’d expect from experienced and informed supply chain leaders who are too busy to spend a lot of time reading blogs, yet take the time to make Sourcing Innovation an integral part of their news, research, and continuing development efforts.

OK, You Don’t Have To Fire Your PR Firm If You Don’t Want To But …

Don’t expect me to talk to them, reply to their e-mail, or even read any of their missives. I’m not trying to be arrogant, I’m just sick and tired of having my time wasted. Although your PR firm will casually overlook the fact that this is NOT my full time job and that from an opportunity cost standpoint, it’s still a loss for me (as the income I pull in from it is still less than what I would make spending an equivalent amount of time consulting), those are the facts and I’m tired of being:

  • spammed six times with the same press release I wasn’t interested in the first time around
  • ignored when I do reply
  • run-around in circles after being promised a conversation with an executive, customer, etc.
  • rescheduled six times for a demo that ends up not happening because your PR firm has no organizational skills and / or control over your schedule
  • told the week after my trip to the other coast that “we have a meeting set up for you tomorrow”
  • etc.

In other words, I have not had a good experience with an external PR firm since I started this blog. (And every message from a PR firm that slips through my spam filters now results in a new spam and/or auto-delete rule.)

But more importantly, as Jason Calcanis wrote in his phenomenal post On How To Get PR For Your Startup: Fire Your PR Company, and as I elaborated on in my Blogger Relations II post on Fire Your PR Company, the best way to get PR is for YOU to BE THE BRAND. It’s about being amazing, being everywhere, and being real. A PR firm with a lackey parroting a press release is not real. A media monkey with some sound-bites who cares more about the monthly cheque than your product is not real. A voice who never wavers from a script, and who can’t answer a simple question about your product or service, is not real.

What is real is an executive reaching out saying “Hi. I’m so and so of Company X. I believe we have a great product. I’d love to show you.” That’s real. That gets attention. That get results. Especially from yours truly.

I’ve never turned down a demo*1 request that came direct from a vendor … and I don’t plan to, ever*2. It’s one of the things this blog lives for as it’s the only true way for me to educate my large and growing readership on what you do and how you could help them. Now, if it turns out the demo is not as exciting (to me) as you claim, or that I don’t see anything innovative in, there’s a chance I might not blog about it … but I will have sat through the demo and will be more than happy to tell you what I think. So it’s a win for you either way because maybe I’ll see something you didn’t, and give you a suggestion that could take your solution from good to great or great to greater. And you’ll never know unless you contact me. My e-mail’s on the blog (check the sidebar and the “about” posts). Looking forward to hearing from you.


*1 Just a reminder that by “demo” I mean real product demo and not a powerpoint presentation.
*2 The one condition is that you have to have some flexibility in scheduling. Since this is not my full time job, you can’t expect me to be available at any specific time.

Buyer Bereft? the doctor Can Help

This is an advertisement for the doctor‘s services. Regular programming will resume with tomorrow morning’s post.

In this morning’s post, I outlined a sequence of steps that buying organizations can take to return to business as usual and put this recession behind us. However, I know that many of you won’t be able to do it alone, especially with all the FUD that some of the bigger vendors have thrown at us over the years. What’s really needed is clear and concise information that will help you make the right decision. I can help.

  • Real Spend Analysis
    I can help you select the right product and then hook you up with the right services provider to make sure you get this very important process right the first time. The biggest initial savings come from expert consultants familiar with your business, who know where the biggest savings are likely hiding, and who can find them quickly. Most importantly, because my particular expertise in analytics is in designing, building, selecting, and integrating systems, I can show you how to get continuous (not just one-time) value from spend analysis, using an appropriate-for-you mix of in-house and contract resources.
  • Category Experts
    Technology (hardware, software, and IT operations) is always an area with large savings potential. I can help you understand what you need, what you don’t need, and what you should be paying. Outside of the technology category, I can help you identify the appropriate category experts to get you to the next level.
  • e-Procurement & e-Sourcing
    This one of my particular areas of strength, and I can help you with the RFI, evaluation, selection, negotiation, and implementation. I know the process, the systems, the requirements, and the true costs inside-out, backwards and forwards, and blindfolded. I can make sure you don’t get bamboozled and shell out a ridiculous amount of money for a product that’s not right for you. There’s RFP Help Here.
  • Training
    Systems. Processes. Technologies. I can help you with one, or all. I can do a one or two day “blitzkrieg” session on a technology or process of your choice and supply the background you really need before you select a new e-Sourcing, e-Procurement, Optimization, Spend Analysis, Trade Visibility, or other piece of supply management software. After you select the system, I can help you modify your processes to get the most out of that system.