Budgets are shrinking. Resources are tight or shrinking. In a recent post, I discussed how ideas that I had been a proponent of for 2-3 years suddenly became extremely valuable to companies during the downturn of 2001-2003.

This downturn is a different beast. This means that you will need more than basic technical smarts to get through. To survive in the world of e-commerce for the next 18 months, here are some strategies you should take to heart.

• Clean up the cruft. Development and infrastructure changes are going to slow during the downturn – accept this. So do a code audit. Make sure that your applications aren’t calling files that no longer exist. Get rid of (backup and archive or Sarbanes-Oxley will bite your butt) old directories or application code that is no longer supported or maintained. In other words, do your Spring cleaning.

• Take care of the annoyances. In the rush to get code out or fix issues, little things that could help your site are often overlooked. Take the time now to optimize your images, minify your JS files, ensure your CSS files only contain styles that you use. Tune your SQL queries. Optimize your app code. All those things that got lost in the rush to get stuff out the door. As Microsoft and Apple have realized, people want performance, not more features.

• Make your site Browser Neutral. I work for a firm that allows me to view various sites with different OS/browser combinations easily and recommend to clients that they do the same. I hang my head when I look at my own blog and realize that it is not Browser Neutral. Take some time to investigate to how to eliminate this frustrating annoyance that makes people cranky and doubt your technical savvy.

• Get to know your visitors/customers. Unlike a ‘real’ store, you can’t step out onto the floor and talk to customers. But you can do this far more easily in today’s world than ever before. In the past, visitor analytics would have been the extent to which a company would have gone to determine information about their visitors/customers. Today, Twitter, Facebook, and all other manner of social sites make listening and talking to customers much easier. Just remember to be real.

• Get to know the people you work with. Just like getting to know your visitors/customers, you need to spend some time getting to know people in your organization. I know this sounds like manager-speak, but if you have contacts in Finance, Product Management, Operations, Admin, you are more likely to be able to more effectively due your job. If you understand the ebb and flow and stresses that are going on outside your little enclosed silo, you can place things in a larger perspective. While social-networking may work here, be careful to back it up with face-to-face contact.

• Get to know people! I made a number of contacts in the last downturn by taking my key interests (Web compression, Web caching) and turning them into sites, published articles, and one failed conference appearance (contact me if you want to hear more). Over the years these contacts have had me comment on their posts, edit their books, and keep them up-to-date on where I think the latest trends are headed. Going into this downturn, I have a whole group of new contacts that I am building on to do the same things. People aren’t bad, they’re just misunderstood.

• Read the fine business plan. I know these things are evil. They are in horrible management-speak. So don’t read it that way: Active read it. Make notes in the columns. Turn it into a MindMap (that’s what I did this year). Extract the meaning of what the goals of the business are and how the Web site fits into it. If you understand what the rest of the business is doing and what their challenges are, your problems will have context!

• Know what the next big thing is. While the objective of the organization in a downturn is to try and be more efficient with fewer resources, remember that you have to take time (whatever you have left) to know what’s coming next that could affect your Web site. Read the tech news. Understand the fundamentals that are driving the latest ideas. Keep on top of security. Sometimes a side-project that uses a technology that is new can become a bigger part of your site when resources free up.

I know these are general, but when this downturn started, I looked back on what worked for me during the last downturn. These are a few of the things that got me through, kept me busy, and helped me make an impact on the company and industry I am in.

These things also don’t hurt your reputation, as you become known as someone who understands the industry, the business, and the customers.

There is clear dissatisfaction with the current state of marketing among the social media mavens.

• Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are looking for companies to invest in to take advantage of this.
• BuzzLogic releases their conversational ad service.
• The Inquisitr moves from AdSense to Technorati Media, indicating a potential shift at b5 Media.
• Lookery is providing demographic information that is relevant to social media providers and shaping ad presentation that way
• A completely off-the-radar person such as myself realizes that there is gold in what holds the attention, and that’s not always the latest and greatest

So what can be done? Jeff Jarvis points out that the problem lies with measurement. I agree, as there is only value in a system where all of the people involved agree on what the metric of record will be, and how it can be validly captured.

Currently CPM is the agreed upon metric. In a feed based online world, how does a CPM model work? And, most importantly, why would I continue to place your ads on my site if all your doing is advertising to people based on the words on the page, rather than who is looking at the page and how often that page is looked at.

In effect, advertisers should be the ones thrying to figure out how to get into the community, get into the conversation. As an advertiser, don’t you want to be where the action is? But how do you find an engaged audience in an online world that makes a sand castle on the beach in a hurricane look stable?

The challenge for advertisers is to be able to find the active communities and conversations effectively. The challenge for content creators and communities is to understand the value of their conversations, the interactions that people who visit the site have with the content.

In effect, a social media advertising model turns the current model on its head. Site owners and community creators gain the benefit of being attractive to advertisers because of the community, not because of the content. And site owners who understand who visits their site, what content most engages them, how they interact with the system will be able to reap the greatest rewards by selling their community as a marketable entity.

And Steven Hodson rounds out the week’s think on communities by throwing out the subversive idea that communities are not always free (as in ‘beer’, not as in ‘land of’). If a community has paid for the privilege of coming together to participate in communal events and discussions, then can’t that become an area for site owners to further control the cost of advertising on their site?

While the benefit of reduced or no marketing content is the benefit of many for-pay communities, this benefit can be used by site owners by saying that an advertiser can have access to the for-pay community at the cost of higher ad rates and smaller ads. The free community is a completely different set of rules, but there are also areas in the free community that are of higher value than others.

In summary, the current model is broken. But there is no way to measure the value of a Twitter stream, a FriendFeed conversation, a Disqus thread, or a Digg rampage. And until there is, we are stuck with an ad model that based on the words on the page, and not the community that created the words.

Lately, there have been outages for two large sites: Amazon and Facebook. Working for a company that monitors such things made me able to confirm the nature of the outages.  But how I became aware of them has had me thinking in new ways for the last few weeks.

I became aware of both of these outages through a combination of FriendFeed and Twitter within minutes of them starting. This information spread quickly. And, due to the nature of these new technologies, people were able to comment on the outages, and theorize about the cause of the problems these large online firms faced.

The question you are likely asking is “So what?”. Well, as anyone who has been paying attention for the last four years should know, while you cannot completely control the conversation, you can participate in it and help prevent the spread of negative or incorrect theories about what is happening on your site.

The technologies that people who come to your site use to comment when something goes wrong can be used to interact with the customers. The classic example of this is Zappos. If you look on Twitter, you will find a number of members of that organization who are using the service to interact with customers on a human level. And if you have a problem or question, you stand an excellent chance of getting a response from the CEO if you ask a question.

So, if your site experiences an issue or problem, how do you interact with customers? Or do you just hope they don’t notice?

After suffering with some negative reactions to my medications this weekend, I decided to do some research. It took a little longer than I expected because the information is gloriously hard to find, and I was drooling like an ether fiend in a wolverine pen.

It turns out that Bupropion inhibits the effectiveness of Paroxetine and magnifies the effectiveness of Trileptal. Of course the drug interaction studies are buried right next to Hoffa, and only a few of us lunatics actually blend this mindful cocktail to produce enhanced states of sanity.

So, off I go, down the path of medication adjustment once again.

Maybe if I fly off to Switzerland and check into one of those very private clinics I can get all of my bodily fluids flushed. Have my body completely dried out…look like Reagan on a bad day…then have them added back in the proper order, and the proper amounts. Then maybe the madness will end.

So, we’re packing up the minivan and heading for the idyllic wilds of Maine for the Holiday weekend.

I will have connectivity, but frankly, there will be too much going on with five kids, four adults, a dog, and a flock of sheep (no sheep-human interaction! You people are sick!) to be online much.

Rick Segal is in China at the moment, and is writing about his experience.

One question came to mind when I read this:

Next up, you run your bags through an X-ray as part of customs. I did this and the customs guy decided to open my camera bag, ignoring my computer bag and luggage. He takes my camera out (Nikon D200) studies it and says, in perfect english, “I have a Nikon digital and was thinking about upgrading, how’s this camera?” We proceed to have a ten minute conversation about Nikon digital cameras and at the end of this conversation, he smiles, and says “Welcome to China, enjoy your stay.” That’s two “welcomes” and 100% positive interaction with the government officials so far.

And the question is: How can a Chinese customs official afford an $1100 camera?

Technorati Tags: Rick Segal, Nikon D200, China, chinese customs

Yesterday, Scoble noted (and I validated) the idea that the browser is less and less relevant for those of us on the bleeding-edge.

In the blogs that I read, people access information:

• Via mobile phone
• Via PDA
• Via data aggregators
• Via IM
• Via e-mail
• Via personal interaction

Web sites are now targets of information, not providers of information. I increasingly hear of new ways for HTTP(S) to be a conduit of information, not limited to the browser.

Port80 is used by so much more than it was designed for. Extensible browsers attempt to lock customers into the old way of approaching this information. The decade-old paradigm is disintegrating.

My main Web access is through FeedDemon. I use my browser to write, check e-mail and check my server stats. This is very different from 2 years ago, where in lived in the browser.

Two years from now…where will I be spending my online time?

I gave up. Blogger is too slow, flaky and clunky. I would rather pay the folks at TypePad/Six Apart.

Once again, I walk away from the free Google service into a for-fee service: Yahoo! Mail Plus and TypePad.

What does everyone else think?

ADDENDUM: Just checked in with my one other contact who uses Blogger, and she stated that she is seeing the same level of spotty performance and reliability that I have been experiencing. Her interaction with the Blogger support team resulted in an admission that the back-end at Blogger was getting some more kit to try and remedy these issues.

Too late, was the cry.