Grassroots.org

By Mike Mann and Grassroots.org

Great tools and ideas are necessary to research and develop for any organization that wants to be successful online — either for profit, or for charitable organizations. Please comment on the products you've used below and tell us what we are missing (mikemann at mikemann dot com). Feel free to repost and link this document. Thanks.

Project Management
Going Viral
Other Advertising and Marketing
Content Management
E-Commerce Tools and Ideas
Customer Service
Marketing
Web Development
Tech
Public Relations

Project Management (Use Basecamp for all line items)
1. What special offers are you testing to enhance conversion rates?
2. What are the key metrics you are tracking for your site and company?
3. What are the changes since last period? Tracking where, deviating where? (Distribute links to your data on schedule via email; automate in analytics software)
4. Do you have stable HR, legal and accountantancy? New programmers? Establish employee reporting and to-do lists.

Going Viral:
4. Install Octazen and/or its competitors at various points in site navigation/UI; associate this viral component with special offers, signup/conversion processes, links in emails, etc. (Octazen Power.com, Contact Mines, ImproSys, IpInvite, Contact Grabber, ParaInvite)
5. Test Magento and optimize if viable
6. How can you leverage Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, Blackberry apps, YouTube, LinkedIn, SalesForce, Digg, etc.?
7. Are there any widgets/middleware/APIs that you want to develop for your organization to go more viral?
8. How can you successfully leverage sharing media/blogging? RSS apps, Ping.fm, Google alerts,Splitweet, Sharethis, Addthis, Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Messagepub.com, Docstoc, docstr, Knol.Google, fliiby, and edocs. Newsletters/VideoBlogs etc., try Vbulletin/PHPbb/Blogtv.
9. Email resources to test: ConstantContact, MailerMailer, MailChimp
10. Using crowdsourcing for crowdmarketing instead; testing your sites, products, and services; they are secret shopping you and providing valuable feedback, while you are exposing your offerings to their community.
11. Consider the relevance of setting up your platform on Socialengine.com or Ning etc.
12. The “Ize”: Incentivize, Socialize, Optimize, Customize, Localize, Personalize

Other Advertising and Marketing:
13. What opportunities and apps are there for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, and Cost Per Action (CPA): Adsense, Adwords, RoiRevolution.com, dynamic banners, etc.
14. Develop relationships with Google, ReachLocal, ServiceMagic, and other advertising and marketing groups and sites.
15. What more can be tried with PPC? Why shouldn't you increase your PPC investing?
16. Create a "conversion funnel" or theories for multiple conversion funnels; if successful your cost of new customers should constantly decrease
17. Try A/B multivariate testing of some SEM SEO LPO conversion strategies
18. Try UserTesting.com and UserVoice.com What did they tell you? What similar sites are there to try?
19. Have you thoroughly tested all the relevant features of these Google tools: Analytics (incl. heat maps), Wave, Insights,, Trends,Searchwiki, Website optimizer, Adwords, AdSense, Index level (ie Pr5/Pr4… and plans therein)
20. Have you thoroughly tested all the relevant features of these other tools: Yield Software, Trendeley, BlvdStatus, Quantcast, Alexa, Compete.com, CrazyEgg.com, VerticalResponse, Inquisite, Woopra, AWstats, Comscore, Hitwise, Spyfu, Wordtracker, Clickable, WebsiteOutlook
21. Is your Salesforce.com contact management system integrated with your web site, PDAs, and PCs? (or SugarCRM, IntelliCRM, HighRise, Act)
22. Consider and comment on LivePerson, LiveHelp, BoldChat
23. Try Upsellit
24. Look into Flash tools for flash site tours and various presentations. Try Animoto
25. Which sites and forums do you follow for SEO, LPO, Webdev?
26. Crowdsourcing market research in detail
27. Put case studies, called “Success Stories,” on your website
28. Develop and post customer and partner testimonials - Try CustomerLobby
29. Investigate your top prospects for new partnerships. How can you improve old ones?

Content Management
30. Crowdsourcing for content, SEO tagging, designs, apps, voice, administrative and data entry. Be creative, this is a whole new paradigm of opportunity:Mechanical Turk, Elance, Rentacoder.com, Crowdspring, Sitebuilder, Sitepoint, 99designs.com, Guru.com, Voices.com, etc., and hire experts on crowdsource
31. WordPress is standard and review Magento, Movable Type, DotNetNuke.com, Drupal. Study environment at OpenSourceCMS.com
32. What is your overall content strategy? What is your multimedia strategy, and what applications do you use for web, email, thumbdrives, pdas, DVRs? (Photo, video, music, voice, radio and texts)
33. Content sources to review: Constant-Content, shopping.com, Associated Content, Affiliatesummit.com, other?
34. Consider other affiliate marketing or content generating ideas with partners; syndicated content; sources for more compelling content to drive traffic and conversions; cross linking partnerships.
35. Productize everything with unique landing pages
36. Consider a media gallery like Cooliris, which allows for 3D navigation with YouTube and Flickr

Ecommerce Tools and Ideas
37. Ecommerce tools: XCart, Merchant accounts, Pay Pal, PayPal creditcards, PayPalx (x.com), PaySimple, RetailMeNot, Authorize.net, e-checks, Amazon Payment, Google Checkout, Magento, Expression Engine, OSCommerce, Zen Cart, Stormpay, Commodo, RadarBlue. Which are keepers?

Customer Service:
38. Consider these popular tools: EZ-Ticket, PHP Ticket, Help Desk Pilot, Kayako, and Hdeskonclick, Revelation Help Desk

Marketing:
39. Develop a vision, processes and controls; establish a narrative on marketing, presentation, perception, branding, with ties to to-do list and weekly conferences
40. Look into Commission Junction, Linktrust.com, Linkshare and Tradedoubler or Oddcast.com.
41. Don’t forget professional online groups! Some of the most popular include, Meetups, Boards of Trade, Chambers, online associations, local tech events, MindShare, YEO, YPO, AngelCap, Technet.org, SeptemberThird, Tedco, MDHitech.
42. Develop a list of bloggers in your market who will carry your RSS
43. If you’re interested in text message marketing, look into Trumpia or other email/SMS marketing services
44. Would GeoIP tagging be useful for your organization?
45. Will using flash cookies/(Local) Shared Objects enhance your visitors’ experience?
46. Marketing sites to work with:
MarketingSherpa, MarketingExperiments, Makeuseof.com, Mashable, Marketingprofs.com, Digitalppoint, Webtalkforums, Webmaster Forum, Webmaster Forums Online, Warrior Forums, The V7, 5Star Affiliate Forum, MediaBistro
47. Marketing brainstorming — which tools are useful for your organization? Conferences , communities, groups, profiles, games, comments, messaging, Calendars of events, News channel/ticker, Video archives, Classifieds, Search of site, Polls/Surveys , Ecards, secret shopper, gift certificates, Widget strategy for us and outside providers and users, iFrames of other sites to converge content, Special offers, Contests, Sweepstakes, Celebs backing site, athlete sponsorships, Gift/Wish list widget, Ad specialty trinkets, Print ads, Bookmarking site, Biz cards with special offers, Wikipedia listings, demographic questionnaires with incentives
48. How can you leverage webinars like Gotowebinar.com, for example? Other online events?
49. Are you following up by phone from web commerce forms that were abandoned before being completed by potential new customers?
50. Create a flash or Powerpoint product presentation explaining your business to prospective clients
51. Update a PDF “One pager” explaining your business
52. Product fulfillment: drop shipping? one vendor or multivendor xml integration with white label when possible? or can you own and white label your own brand(s)?

Web Development:
53. Consider: Layout, functionality, wire, framework, ontology, navigation, taxonomy, sitemap, UI, search and browse, administrator modules, control panels, APIs, widgets, design database, timelines, approval processes and staff assignments
54. Check cross browser compatibility with Internet Explore 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, iPhone, etc, with varying speeds and technologies, and keep ping on network services
55. E-Directory.com
56. Make it clean and easy for consumers to do what they want, find and buy what they want, when they want, from anywhere, for any product or service
57. Create flash tour storyboards, flash sites overall, and flash presentations
58. Do you need an investor presentation?
59. What is your mission, audience and value proposition or your site or organization?
60. What do you want each person to do when they get to your site? What is the end goal of the visit?
61. Integrate charity and investor logos/text.

Public Relations:
62. Develop a press plan: Clear messaging globally; special messages for each service and notable timely items; current newsworthy activity?
63. Develop a list of reporters in your market space who will spin your press releases or interview you - put it in SalesForce.com and keep in touch with them

Tech:
64. Look into app development tools, such as Codeigniter and Zend LAMP platform
65. With Webkit your app immediately integrates with iphone, android, Palm Pre...
66. How can you dynamically deliver your site content for varying users and subscribers? Could they see a different home page, could other components be customized for disparate audiences?
67. In what manner are you deploying LAMP, PHP, Ajax, Flex, Ruby, Dojo, RSS, XML, server side includes, iframes? Other ?
68. Are there Truste/Thawte/Verisign/encrypted pieces of site?
69. What are your long term plans for hosting and bandwidth, network infrastructures?
70. Do you have backups, redundancy, monitoring, code repositories, version control?
71. PC Management: Backups (Acronis True Image/Carbonite/ BESR/Network Backup)
72. For remote access, visit http://www.zolved.com/remote_control or GoToMyPC
73. Do you have Virus/Firewall Control or ZoneAlarm?
74. Investigate flash timelines, such as http://www.dipity.com/timetube/YouTube_Nirvana_Videos
75. What is your document testing methodology, functional, load, performance, stress, volume, security, usability, localization, data migration and automated tests?
76. Is the domain up to date? Are there ancillary domains for protection? Is there any other IP dev or protection?
77. Do you have control and backups of all your code and intellectual property, clear title? Do you have the ability to sublicense or reuse for other sites?
78. Look into Spam Assassin and SORBS lists.
79. Look into a usability review for your website (Benevolabs.com, UserCentric.com, UserTesting, UserVoice)