The interactive marketing rules are constantly rewritten. Is your digital IQ growing? Interested readers, click on the logo to get more insight into strategies to engage your small business. This is the first of a monthly installment for Rousta as a columnist.  We look for it to be an engaging relationship.

Young Entrepreneur, launched in 1999, is one of the largest online communities for entrepreneurs worldwide.  The website reaches a unique collection of investors, startup CEOs, programmers, mentors, and so forth.

The influence of human resources today will define labor developments of tomorrow.  Agile human resource departments are necessary to make operational adjustments in an era of market uncertainty and shortage of raw materials.

Arman will discuss how trends in technology impact our daily operations at the office and home.  He plans to explain how in The Shift Age (David Houle‘s term for this era), time management is crucial to mastering a work-life balance.  In his mind, consciousness is also important to successfully adapt to problems.

Understanding the forces at work and resulting trends is a key component of corporate strategy, especially in this time of rapid transitions.  If HR professionals can use forecasting intelligently, management can best take advantage of current forces and market trends.

Arman will also explore the rise of Eastern markets, from an anecdotal perspective.  He will recount some of his experiences during the past fifteen years of building and managing global business.

For more details on the conference, visit the website here.

The people of Software Advice have created a nifty interactive feature spotlighting the development of CRM up to present day. Highlights include the Introduction of the first client architecture, which led to the development of software for the management of information.  Another pertinent development included the move of CRM to providing a broad suite of solutions for sales, marketing, and customer service teams.  Executives instrumental in the software’s timeline include Tom Siebel, Pat Sullivan, and Mike Muhney.  Software Advice is also looking for more events to add in this timeline.  Feel free to submit those events and other feedback here to Lauren Carlson, CRM Market Analyst, lauren@softwareadvice.com, and they will be included in subsequent updates.

There are a range of essential factors that influence the look and feel of e-commerce websites. The top features include quick & easy navigation, product related simple design for increased visibility of product, effective branding, specific product images, displaying related or recommended products, listing popular products, offers & discounts, simple checkout process, and complete website search option.  

The navigation of product pages should be carefully designed with more options for the users to locate the product easily.  This feature of the site requires thorough user experience testing to ensure all navigational issues are addressed properly. With the help of some simple design approaches, the site will give better visibility to the product, as selling is the key point of any e-commerce website. For better performance of the website, the design should be related to the style of products available and thus making a direct connection with the brand.

Your firm should include product specific photos, especially in different angles.  This will help the user get a feel of the product and to make an easy purchasing decision. They should also make use of the homepage and help the users to find something really interesting by adding offers, popular products, new arrivals and other discounts. Displaying a list of related products on the product details page to the user may result in increased sales of those products as well and serves as a promotional tool for similar products. Users may find it difficult to land with the particular product of their interest even with good navigation, so in order to avoid this and help them gain easy access to the product, it is advised to include search box with range of options.

In total, e-commerce websites with all the above good features provides advantages for small and medium businesses in developing countries reducing operational costs and increasing efficiency.

• A Contribution to the Offshore Outsourcing Debate: Part 1
  
• On Offshore Outsourcing: Part 2
  
• On Offshore Outsourcing: Part 3
  

Blueliner was also featured in Crain’s Magazine for being one of the first US web development companies to outsource to Bangladesh.

Presently, as I write this post, I’m sitting in Blueliner India’s air-conditioned office in Hyderabad, complete with high-speed Internet and power generators to support electricity outages.  Conditions have vastly improved over my last trip here, for businesses as well as the local people of Hyderabad.  If you’ve read The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman, you’ve got the sense.  The Hi-Tech City area, where we are located, really feels like Silicon Valley, with all the big companies, from Microsoft to Dell to Oracle to Google, right down the block.  I’ll be documenting the trip with video as well as pictures, which you can follow on Blueliner’s YouTube Channel.

Phase 1 of building an offshore company was about infrastructure.  The reason for the title of this post being “Phase 2″ is that we’ve just passed five years in the agency outsourcing model, and with infrastructure now well in place, I feel that it’s time for something different.  Phase 2 is all about team building. Team building is always important, right from the get go in any new location.  If you can’t find those first one or two good local leaders, the whole venture becomes that much harder.  I was fortunate enough to find two good leaders – one in India, one in Bangladesh – who have helped Blueliner build great SEO, social media and web development teams.  I’m using this opportunity to get to know our staff on a personal level.  It’s amazing to meet people, like Siva Dosakaya, who have worked for me for almost three years, for the first time.  He and fellow SEO Specialist Satya Dev (1.5 years with Blueliner)

Several days later, I presented Prasad Sistla, Blueliner India’s fearless leader and General Manager, with a small token of my gratitude for what he has done to put us on firm footing in an ultra-competitive and very exciting city.  As Blueliner continues to build its reputation globally as one of the top SEO, Social Media and Web Design agencies, I want to see those who have been through the tough times with us be properly rewarded.  Prasad is one of those special people.  See this interaction (video) as well as a welcoming of our first operational staff member to Blueliner India – MVN Guptha, a very experienced bookkeeper.

I cannot stress enough the importance of these moments.  Building personal relationships with your co-workers that live half way around the world is as important as those relationships with your local, day-to-day co-workers.  The reason being that there is a tendency to treat “off-shore workers” as if they are just user names on a Skype interface.  Since you don’t see each other, the work connection is generally less personal and completely results-oriented.  There is no personal touch or real connection unless you make the effort.  That is why it’s important to travel and experience what it is like to work in their offices, eat their food (even if it gives you an occasional stomach ache, like the one I had yesterday) and spend time together, both in and out of the office.  I’m not a subscriber to the “work is work” or “business is business” philosophy; to me that is a convenient way of detaching from the realities of life and importance of human relationships.

The Art of Outsourcing is akin to The Art of Living.  Treat people well, work hard, listen consciously and learn from your observations and experiences.

Today I would like to try my thoughts and experience against the issue of the falling dollar. Has it damaged the benefits of offshore outsourcing as a long-term strategy, or is this merely a hic-up in the grand scheme of the global economy?

There’s no denying that the American economy is facing real challenges. The slump in the housing marketing and the credit crunch, inexorably tied to the tragedy of billions of dollars lost from irresponsible lending to the lower middle class, has sprouted poisonous tendrils in other, one might say “innocent,” sectors of the economy like retail, construction, the auto industry and direct marketing firms. Unprecedented gas prices, which flirted with the historic $100 a barrel, certainly haven’t helped. Neither has a ballooning American deficit. With all of these factors crushing down, the dollar has suffering next to the euro, the pound, even the Canadian dollar and the Indian rupee.

This has taken a bite out of offshore profits, especially in India and Eastern Europe, but there is little to suggest that the dollar is going to remain a pariah forever. Major investors from the oil-rich Middle East, as well is GDP-happy China are coming in to save the day for financial institutions in the US that are writing off billions and billions of dollars. Investors, successful ones anyway, rarely throw good money after bad, which means that America’s historic stability is such that investors can see a rosy future. In the meantime, America’s sad trade deficit is getting lift, something most businesses should celebrate.

Aside from the patience to endure until the dollar regains its value, another solution to the volatility of international currency is to establish what our VP of Business Development likes to call the OOM – optimal offshore mix. Placing all of your eggs in one basket, or offshore offices in one country, means that your profits are tied to shifts in currency exchange, as well as the social shifts, of just one other country. It might be simple to manage, but it makes for volatile profits. Instead, a careful evaluation of the individual strengths of different offshore locals can allow a company to develop the optimal mix of offshore offices for various projects.

When Blueliner Marketing first made the decision to open an office in Bangladesh, it experienced cost savings of up to 50%. An outside observer might wonder why we didn’t quickly consolidate the team there and there alone. The answer is that India and Bangladesh have individual strengths and weaknesses, which complement each other for client projects. India has more in-depth programming experience while the Bangladesh team features more designers and more experience with open-source software. Add to the mix our team in China, which handles product development and production, plus free lancers from Eastern Europe, and you have an global mix of people producing high-level work at a fair price.

So the solution to the downward spiral of the American dollar? Patience, and a mix of workers from several countries, whose strengths and weaknesses create a streamlined offshore outsourcing unit.

The article discusses how Bangladesh is a rising star in the international economy with industrial analysts from Goldman Sachs to Cisco Systems predicting that it has high potential to follow in the successful economic steps of the giant next door – India.

High turnover, rising salaries, and intense competition for talent have made India gradually less attractive to businesses seeking the dramatic cost savings traditionally associated with offshore outsourcing. On the other hand, Bangladesh has a rising population of tech-savvy workers, thanks to investments in IT infrastructure from the European Union, as well as extensive educational opportunities, which are supplemented by Indian educational institutions.

For Blueliner, the Bangladesh team has been a tremendous asset: bringing solid language skills, programming acumen, and tremendous work ethic to the company. The cost savings, as much as 50% over India, as well as quality work is passed onto our clients who appreciate the lower price of Blueliner’s services.

The entire article can be read here on our site or by purchasing a copy of Crain’s New York Business from newsstands this week only.

Unemployment is not the only issue people have with offshore outsourcing. For many, sending customer service and computer programming overseas is the equivalent of sending manufacturing to China: it cheapens the product and damages quality control. This mind-set has been exacerbated by the fact that outsourced customer service is hard to hide. If you get on the phone with someone in India, after all, they are probably going to sound Indian. Minor language barriers, combined with latent American frustration and impatience when anything goes wrong, make for combustible situations.

The result is a generation of people who see offshore outsourcing as a drain on jobs and detrimental to the customer service of American companies. Add that to the perception that big corporations and their wealthy executives are pocketing the profits, and you have a ticking public relations bomb.

Again, I don’t have all the answers, but I do know how Blueliner has approached the issue. Basically, as a company who manages its offshore division in-house, Blueliner can assure customers that they are receiving work from top-of-the-line staff. We do not believe in saving money at the cost of quality output, so all of our employees come in with extensive experience. Our designers have done work for major government websites at home, our programmers are all certified in the latest programming languages, and our managers bring extensive experience and advanced degrees to the table.

We also never put our overseas team on the front line with clients. We know the damage that language barriers can have on good communication and customer relationship management. By appointing US-based professionals to handle project management and customer relationships, Blueliner maintains a totally professional flow for the entire life cycle of a project. The managers work directly with the development team to ensure quality control while simultaneously communicating with client to ensure that everything is done according to client desires. This combination of quality overseas workers and U.S.-based managers on the front lines with clients eliminates many of the issues that are brought up in the “quality” debate.

As for the question of who benefits from cost savings, the ideal solution should be everybody. Expanding overseas has allowed Blueliner to grow at a much faster pace than it could have domestically while simultaneously increasing the ROI of marketing campaigns. Clients benefit from campaigns with a lower acquisition cost, while Blueliner has been able to expand its revenue by 500% and its staff by 1000% since 2003.

Is losing American jobs to other countries a tragedy? Or a new way of helping the third world get on its feet? Are businesses sacrificing quality for higher profit margins? Or are customers reaping the rewards of less expensive goods and services? Is India really the answer for outsourcing? Or should we look elsewhere? And as the American dollar spirals ever downward, is offshore outsourcing really a viable long-term business model at all?

As a business that has made offshore outsourcing a key element of its ROI-orientated business model since 2003, Blueliner has had to, and continues to, wrestle with these issues. I can’t say I have all the answers, but in a series of blog entries, I hope to discuss a few things that may benefit businesses, small and large, struggling to form an offshore policy…

On the Loss of Jobs

I hesitate to generalize here, since the loss of jobs is easy to talk about in a theoretical manner until you meet someone who has actually suffered from it. I can only say to those who cry out that outsourcing has ruined the American job market, the reality is that job stats in October were strong, with 166,000 jobs added and unemployment at relatively low 4.7 percent. Net job losses from the month before, as well as doom-and-gloom predictions from economists about the job market in 2008, stem more from the credit crunch, struggles in car manufacturing, and a dismal housing market than moves to offshore outsourcing (“Jobs Pick Up But Red Flags Remain”).

For those afraid of losing a job to an offshore team, keep in mind that at the end of the day, some jobs can’t go overseas. Copywriting, office jobs like administration or management, sales, investor relations, and marketing research require a physical presence, language skills, and understanding of American culture that you can’t match in an offshore team. Innovation, high-level technical expertise, and business development are a few other jobs that will largely remain State-side for the foreseeable future. Working hard, proving your value, and shifting as much as possible into positions that would be prohibitively difficult or expensive to outsource are the best strategies for workers to stay competitive

At Blueliner, offshore jobs have only been added when an equivalent US employee was prohibitively expensive and no American Blueliner employee has ever been laid off to make room for an offshore employee. In an ideal world, businesses would follow this model, adopting offshore teams only as an element of growth rather than cutting current American jobs, but this is simply not practical for large organizations looking to cut expenses. Those businesses must carefully evaluate the costs and benefits of an offshore team, including the effect on company reputation and the moral of the American team that is left over after cuts.

Finally, it is important for all who enter the offshore outsourcing debate to realize the fact that those outsourced jobs have very real benefits for the developing countries in which they are based. In essence, if one looks at the global economy as a whole, jobs are gained instead of lost, since many companies can afford to hire more people overseas. These jobs result in a trickle down effect, where countries can use an influx of capital to spur domestic production, services, and infrastructure. This has a better long-term effect on the economy than First World tax-supported donations or the loans of major international banks, which have propped up third world economies until now. While Americans shift their mentality to hone in on jobs that give them a competitive advantage over foreign workers, those very foreign workers are finally being given the doorway into a style of living, which has been locked up in the First World until now.

That is the mentality that Blueliner has adopted. We see our offshore team as a supplement to our American team, not a substitute for it. And we are proud of the small contributions that Blueliner has been able to make, through its teams, to the developing economies of India, China, and Bangladesh.