Digital Strategist – by Silu Modi

This post doesn’t have much to do with Digital Strategy, but I found the topic very interesting. Two somewhat unrelated articles this week. One talks about how kids are losing their cursive writing skills. The other talks about how kids today are becoming better writers than in any other generation. Interesting corollary.

Apparently, they’re not teaching cursive handwriting much in schools anymore as more and more writing is being done on keyboards now. Kids see handwriting as something you do when you put a note on the fridge. Block letter printing does just fine for that. Using a pen for long writing is not a skill that’s deemed necessary for long term employment.

So… kids can’t write with a pen… but apparently, they can ‘write’!

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.”

Contrary to popular belief, the writing skills of the young today are blossoming. With text messaging, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other communication platforms prevalent, young people are writing more now than ever.

“It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.”

That is very true. When I was in high school, I remember many of my friends complaining (ok: I was complaining) that the essay writing that we had to do over and over again were never going to be useful again. Most would probably never write a long piece of text again until they got an email address some 10 years later.

An interesting point the article makes is that students today not only write more prolifically, but they also have a innate understanding about the audience for their writing. Unlike previous generations, these writers understand that their words will probably be transmitted for tens, hundreds, thousands of people to see and may be around forever. They also know that different forums require different levels of vocabulary and communication. Something that earlier generations would have never considered. An essay in high school was read by your teacher, and then probably trashed.

“We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.”

After hearing so much about the illiteracy of today’s generation, it was refreshing to see that we may have entered a new renaissance.

There’s a great story about Pablo Picasso.

Some guy told Picasso he’d pay him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso whipped out a pen and banged out a sketch, handed it to the guy, and said, “One million dollars, please.”
“A million dollars?” the guy exclaimed. “That only took you thirty seconds!”
“Yes,” said Picasso. “But it took me fifty years to learn how to draw that in thirty seconds.”

Some time ago, a friend of mine that was working as a writer for a TV show asked me how he could go about setting up a basic website for himself. I pointed him to a cheap host and a where he could get a free 30-day trial version of Dreamweaver. He wrote me back a few days later with a link to his website. He also (jokingly) said that he’s amazed people pay me to help them with their websites when, with a copy of Dreamweaver, he was able to do it himself for next to no cost. I replied that most people have a copy of Microsoft Word. Why would anyone pay him to write when they can do it themselves?

The tool, or the end result of using the tool, is not special. I use the same tools anyone else does. It’s starting from a blank screen, knowing what you need to do, knowing what your audience wants and delivering it with consistency and quality that make the practitioner more valuable than the tool.

Having hundreds of friends on Facebook, thousands of followers on Twitter and dozens of cool iPhone apps does not make one a Social Media expert. Being able to solve a business problem and deliver the results a client requires, perhaps using social media as one of the tools, makes one an expert.

Josh Bernoff, one of the authors of Groundswell, posted a great article on another approach to creating a digital strategy. I posted earlier on the 6 Basic Pillars of your Digital Strategy. Josh sums it up in 4 pillars, which he calls POST. POST stands for People – Objectives – Strategy – Technology. From his post:

P is People. Don’t start a social strategy until you know the capabilities of your audience. If you’re targeting college students, use social networks. If you’re reaching out business travelers, consider ratings and reviews. Forrester has great data to help with this, but you can make some estimates on your own. Just don’t start without thinking about it.

O is objectives. Pick one. Are you starting an application to listen to your customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your best customers to evangelize others? Or are you trying to collaborate with them? Decide on your objective before you decide on a technology. Then figure out how you will measure it.

S is Strategy. Strategy here means figuring out what will be different after you’re done. Do you want a closer, two-way relationship with your best customers? Do you want to get people talking about your products? Do you want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and generating new ones? Imagine you succeed. How will things be different afterwards? Imagine the endpoint and you’ll know where to begin.

T is Technology. A community. A wiki. A blog or a hundred blogs. Once you know your people, objectives, and strategy, then you can decide with confidence.

The interesting thing to note here is that he puts technology as the last part of your strategy. That’s the right place. The technology is just the tool to achieve your objective. It is not an objective in and of itself. I hear that quite often… ‘We need a blog,’ ‘We need a Twitter account,’ ‘How do we get a Facebook Fan Page?’

None of those matter unless you know what you want to do, who you want to reach and how you’re going to reach them. Putting the tool first is what Jeremiah Owyang calls “Fondling the Hammer.”

Start with the objectives, the audience, the assets and the metrics, then figure out how you’ll build it.

My favourite quote of the week:

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” – Margaret Thatcher

Some years ago, I sat behind a one-way mirror as a research organization attached contraptions to volunteers as they viewed our websites. These contraptions tracked the user’s eye movements as they surfed our site trying to accomplish tasks we had outlined. The findings from our private study were surprising and made us reconsider some basic assumptions we had made about our audience.

There have been several eye tracking studies published on the web. While the specifics of our study applied only to our site, this study discusses some general principles to keep in mind when designing your sight for maximum impact. Some key findings from the report that I found interesting:

1. Lists (such as this one) hold attention longer. If you are talking about several related points, a bullet list or numbered list will help draw it out.
2. Show numbers as numerals instead of as text. 600 is easier to read than six hundred.
3. Large blocks of text are avoided. Break your content into smaller, more digestible paragraphs instead of large blocks. Ignore the grammar rules.
4. Big, clear images get a lot of attention.
5. Users focus on the top-left corner first. Make it impactful.
6. The bottom portion of your page is usually scanned. Only if something truly stands out, will it be read.

The most interesting part of the study was the eye tracking heat maps. They overlayed eye movement on several websites and found that the eye moves roughly in an “F” pattern. Top left -> Across -> Down and right -> Down -> then maybe gone:

More detail on these studies and more actionable suggestions can be found here. Keep these design ideas in mind when you are designing your next website, or re-evaluating your current site. (Bet you almost missed this line because you just scanned over it.)

“How do we measure our Return on Investment from our Social Media efforts?”

That question will eventually be asked by Senior Management. Unfortunately, that question is usually asked after the strategy has been planned, executed and in the wild for some time. At that point, the teams usually scramble to find any stats and data that show an up or down trend in… something before and something after the launch of the strategy. But how should you measure the ROI?

Good question.

The Problem:
The tough part is figuring out what you’re going to measure. First, to get the obvious out of the way, if you have an eCommerce site, and you have a campaign that has specific targeted links to your shopping site, you can easily measure your ROI from increased sales through those links. We’ll leave that out of the discussion for this post.

In a social media strategy, your execution could potentially be free (not counting soft or brown dollars). If your campaign relies on internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) communicating and engaging with your audience using free channels such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs, your incremental cost of the strategy can be close to $0.

On the flip side, you may have invested considerably into your strategy. What do you measure to see if you’re reaching your objectives? The answer ties back to your Digital Strategy. When you discovered your objectives in your Digital Strategy, you decided what you were going to measure, right? If only life was so easy.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative:
The problem usually comes down to the old “Qualitative vs. Quantitative” issue. You want to achieve qualitative results, but measure them in a quantitative, unambiguous way. Typical objectives of a Social Media campaign may include:

• Increase customer loyalty
• Provide better customer support online
• Encourage brand evangelism
• Increase trust in our company
• Increase brand awareness
• Increase the influence of our brand

All reasonably valid. The tough part is finding the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure them. A common suggestion is, ‘Double (or Triple) the number of followers we have on Twitter.’ Achieving that is not too difficult if your execution team is actively engaging people on the right platforms. But the question is, ‘what does that achieve’? Is it better to get 1,000 random new followers on Twitter, or 100 targeted new followers that are qualified leads, in the right places, that will lead to one of your qualitative objectives? The goal here is to lay out your qualitative measures and make them quantifiable. They need to be defined at the outset, to avoid the tendency to measure any statistic that is going up as a sign of success!

What to measure?
Examples of KPIs from qualitative success criteria include:

• Reduction in support calls and emails from baseline
• Number of blogs relevant to our industry that posted something about our brand (good or bad)
• Number of influential Twitterers that tweeted something about us
  • those influential blogs and Twitterers have to be identified in your Strategy before you execute the campaign
• Number of repeat visits to our main site or micro-site
• Increase in average session length or page views
• Number of new comments on our blogs / posts / support forums
• Number of comments on other blogs / posts / forums made by our team that elicited a positive response from others
• Increase in Google PageRank against baseline

Of course, there are many more things you can attempt to measure to see if your qualitative objectives are quantitatively achieved. These measures also give you something to hang your hat on as you continue to refine your tactics to achieve those goals.

Good Luck!

This one’s an oldie, but a goodie. Seth Godin (Marketing Guru Extraordinaire) gives a simple 10 point plan on how to create a great website. I can’t argue with any one of his points. Some of my favourite points:

1. Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. I completely agree. I’ve found that the more people involved in creating (or strategizing) a website, the more watered-down the ideas become and the more ‘standard’ the website looks and feels. If you’re trying to generate interest, buzz or Google Juice, you’re not going to do it by taking a consensus of dozens of different opinions.
2. Get the best people possible. He makes a great point that’s been made over and over again. Ten mediocre people can’t do the job of one great ‘rock-star’.
3. One Voice. One Vision. Similar to point 1. One person needs to lead it with their vision, and have final say.
4. Don’t Settle. You get one chance. Every details matters. Every detail.

See also: How to create a Good Enough website.

I can’t remember where I’d heard this quote, but if you’ve ever worked with me for more than a few weeks, you’ve probably heard me say it out loud:

In theory, theory and practice are the same
In practice, theory and practice aren’t

Going back to a post I wrote earlier, this ties right into Point 4 in Seth Godin’s “How to create a great website.“

Lee Huang wrote a post on centralizing the Web Marketing function in a company. He describes the things that he feels need to be taken into account when centralizing this function:

1. The “What’s in it for me” questions that will inevitably arise from the business units that were used to owning and controlling the direction of their individual web presence. He’s nailed it when he says that getting the buy in early from the affected business units is key to succeeding.
2. Being responsive. One of the worst things that can happen (and I speak from experience) is taking the web marketing function away from the business units, and then bogging down all requests with slow processes and high dollar amounts. They key is to show value-add early with quick wins and high-value consultation into more than just the mechanics of web marketing.
3. Prioritization of projects. Transparent prioritization may not be a big issue early on, but needs to be in place early on. Again, from experience, at the beginning, work will be simple and trickle in at a pace that can be easily handled. However, if you do things right and are successful in your strategy and campaigns (you do have a Digital Strategy, right?), the requests will start flooding in. At that point, the key stakeholders from the various business units need to be a large part of prioritizing your team’s resources and budget. Favouritism will come back to bit swiftly

The point that Lee doesn’t make, but I have found just as important is “What skills are you going to staff this department with?”

Are you going to transfer the “web” people from the other business units? The pros to this approach are getting the business knowledge that comes with these people. But the big con is that there will always be some loyalty to the previous business unit and it will be hard to prioritize without undue influence.

Are you going to hire people to do the work in-house? Or out-source the execution and just have strategy kept internally? Out-source to your internal IT team, or completely outsource? Again, three different approaches, each with its pros and cons.

Having a one-stop shop in-house allows you to get work done quickly and control the team that works on it. However, you are “stuck” with the skillset you you in house. If you have all Java developers, everything is an enterprise Java solution. Also, you’re at the mercy of internal policies on how quickly you can get work done.

In-sourcing the development to your internal IT team has the advantage of keeping you arms length from the execution, while still having the internal influence and power derived from the relationships normally formed by people in close proximity, and by the normal management interactions. However, IT has processes that may not work at the speed of web development, and when major corporate initiatives occur, your “silly little web projects” can take a back seat to the “really important work.”

Outsourcing the execution usually gives the most control over execution. You can pick and choose different agencies for different executions based on expertise and workload. You can get more work done faster by spreading the work around. But you are at the mercy of hard dollars instead of soft, internal dollars. You are also at the mercy of an agency where the only true relationship you have is with the Account Manager. And we all know that Account Managers say “yes, of course we can do it,” to everything, right? You lose the day to day, looking over a shoulder to see how it’s going. And again, that can come back to bite hard.

If you are thinking of centralizing your Web Marketing function, think about how you’re going to set it up, how you’re going to sell it internally, and how you’re going to handle the fire hose when you succeed!

I just love this image. It says it so well.

The most difficult part of formulating your Digital Strategy is staring at that blank screen and blinking cursor, trying to figure out where to start. What helps is starting with a “Cheat Sheet.” The basics that need to be flushed out before you can even call it a Digital Strategy. I’ve put together several Digital Strategies for various different brands. Through lots of trial and error, Google searches, and standing on the shoulders of giants, I’ve finally put together a basic template I use when I start. It consists of six headings with the questions I have to have answered before I can even claim to have a basic strategy.

OBJECTIVE:
When this Digital Strategy is completed and executed successfully, what will be the outcome? What are you trying to achieve? Increased brand awareness? A 5% reduction in calls to the call centre? A 2% increase in sales in your North East market? Or as simple as getting 10,000 followers on Twitter? Perhaps it’s a better connection with your audience by answering 100 questions per month via online channels? You have to know why you are putting together the strategy and how you will know if you’ve executed is successfully.

Another part of the objectives is the constraints. As much as we’d all love to hear, “Take as much time and money you need to reach the objectives,” chances are you have constraints. This is where you also lay out the timelines and budget as you understand them, as well as any assumptions you are making in the rest of the strategy

AUDIENCE FOOTPRINT:
Who is your audience? What are their demographics? Are they even digital people? If so, where do they congregate? Are they primarily email users only? Do they read blogs, or do they only read “real” news sites like CNN or New York Times? Are they actively engaged in social media sites? Are they Facebook / Twitter users? Would they actually subscribe to Fan Pages? You have to have a very good idea of where your audience is, how they interact in the digital world, and what they would find relevant and engaging.

AUDIT:
OK, so now you know where your audience is and what you want to achieve. Where are you starting? Start with an audit of the digital assets you already have on hand. Domain names, logos, videos, websites (active and old “cobweb-sites”), social media profiles, etc. What are your building blocks?

Next phase of the audit is to understand how your brand is already perceived and being talked about in the digital world. Start with Google searches on your brand names, your product or service sphere and your competitors’. Set up Google Alerts to notify you when you are mentioned. Look at your existing web properties and analyse the incoming links. Where are your visitors coming from? Monitor your search engine logs to see what they’re looking for. Consider using a free or paid social media monitoring tool to dig even deeper. I’ve used Trendrr and YackTrack on the free side with varying degrees of success, though your mileage may vary. On the paid side, you could look at VoxTrot, BuzzMetrics or Cymfony.

Now is also a great time to do a competitive audit. What are you competitors doing? What’s working for them? What sort of commitment are they putting into their Digital Strategy? Do all of the above for your competitors and gauge where you stack up in your market.

ROADMAP:
The $1,000,000 question. Now that you know what you hope to acheive, what’s already out there, what assets you have on hand, and what your audience wants, what are you going to do? In your audit, you may have found some low hanging fruit. Quick executions to start building some momentum with low cost and quick wins to put the wind in everyone’s sails.

First, look at your existing websites. Are they relevant? Do they even provide the basics? Do they speak to your targetted audience? Or to your shareholders? Or to new recruits? Maybe you want to look at a complete overhaul in one fell swoop, but often time, the existing brand sites may benefit from a phased execution. Do you need special sites  targetted to special segments of your audience or specific campaigns (also know as micro-sites). Is the content on your sites current? Are they optimized for Search Engines?

Second, look at your audience profile to help determine if and how you want to engage your audience. Does the CEO need a blog? Or the heads of various business or product units? What information will you share? Who will write the blogs? Your PR or Marketing group? Or the person in charge? What Legal sign-offs are required? How often will the blogs be updated? Do you need a support forum? Do you have Frequently Asked Questions that could be found in an FAQ on your site? What about connecting via Social Media platforms? Is your audience active there? Do you want to have one (or many) Twitter accounts? What about front-line employees? How engaged do you want them to be in your connections with your audience? These are just a few of the questions that come from the audience profile.

Third, look outside your own assets. Should you be getting engaged on other sites? Sites that specialize in your product or service area. Will you monitor the forums and respond to questions about topics about your product or brand? Will you comment on other blogs about topics in your area? In short, how engaged will you be in the so-called blogosphere?

And the final question… what can you accomplish in the time and budget you have, and what part of the roadmap is for future consideration for the elusive Phase II.

(I will write further about the execution of the strategy when I post about 2MCE)

COMMITMENT:
Wouldn’t it be nice if you put together a plan, executed it, and then were done? Sadly, it’s just the beginning. The Digital Strategy needs to outline what the ongoing commitment to the strategy will entail. If you are relaunching your main sites, who’s responsible for making sure that content is fresh, updated and relevant? Who’s responsible for answering email queries about products and services? Who is responsible for monitoring the web and tracking mentions of your company, your brand and your key people? What will they do with that information? Who will be monitoring the blogs for mentions of your sphere and be able to answer questions, complaint and concerns in the comments in a professional manner? Who will monitor your own Social Media properties and put a human, social “face” behind your brand? This is an on-going operational cost, not a project cost. If you can’t get a commitment on the commitment, it’s time to rethink your Digital Strategy.

MEASUREMENT:
How will you know if you succeded? There is a post coming soon about how to measure ROI on the web, but suffice for now to say that it’s not easy to find quanititive measures. What are your measures of success? Is it site visitors? Press mentions? Blog mentions? Followers on Twitter? Fans on your Facebook page? Or something more subtle such as level of engagement by your evangelistic base? Blog mentions vs. your baseline? Google PageRank? Revenue in the North East territory? Call volumes? Go back to your Objectives and bring it full circle by showing how what you measure will prove (or disprove) your success against your objectives.

There you have it. The 6 basic pillars of a Digital Strategy. Of course, you could have more (lots more), and in the coming weeks and months, I’ll elaborate on the Digital Strategy and discuss other pillars to a strong Strategy. But if you think through these basics, you’ll be well on your way to online success!