Category Archives: Strategy

The Single Greatest Pre-Requisite for an Effective Web Strategty

Posted on by David
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The single greatest requirement for developing an effective web strategy is the will and ability to set priorities in what you want to achieve.

This sounds obvious, as do most pragmatic ideas. However, in my many years of working with organizations to develop web strategy, those who were ready, willing and able to set priorities for what they wanted to achieve online were the most successful.

The secret to setting priorities effectively is not so much in identifying the top ones. That’s usually easy. The challenge comes in actually investing less in the lower priority outcomes. This is where discipline pays off. This is where having the right people at the table who can actually enforce the desired allocation of scarce resources pays off.

Without that discipline you may have a prioritized set of outcomes but you end up investing in them all equally. Or, worse, one of the junior outcomes gets more than top priorities simply because it has a more effective champion representing it! Effective web strategy is built upon a statement of intent and your wherewithal to implement that intent will determine your success or failure.

This is why I like using the concept of a driving force web strategy that determines the content, design and functionality of your site more than any other factor. It forces the conversation on priority and gives you a strong implementation path for making it a reality. I cover this in great depth in my book, Online and On Mission: Practical Web Strategy for Breakthrough Results.

Remember, no web strategy fails on the white board. Failure will happen during execution of the strategy, so make sure you stack the deck in your favor by exerting discipline in your outcomes prioritization.

The Real Threat that For Profits Challengers Have for Associations

Posted on by David
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Tony Rossell, a very smart marketer, posted recently about for-profit companies competing with association. He raises some good points.

The root of the threat from for-profits is not so much that they will eat the associations’ lunch but that they will offer full meals that the association can’t serve to their own members.

Many organization are not very nimble for a whole variety of reasons: inertia, history, policy, politics, poor leadership, sclerotic decision making, and others. For-profits, especially start-ups, are less likely to have that same baggage. For-profits also need to show a profit in short order, which tends to motivate them to try new things until they find the right mix with which to generate their desired returns.

Given that, if I were going to start a for-profit targeted at an association’s existing market I would focus purely on the innovation space, providing valuable goods and services that market can’t get from their membership organization. New, high-value, services can demand higher fees and you avoid a direct challenge to the association’s core space.

My challenge to associations: seize that innovation space before someone takes it from you.

How Will Broadband Adoption in Specific Segments Affect Your Audiences?

Posted on by David
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Pew Internet & American Life Project has released their most recent statistics on broadband adoption among adult Americans:

Home broadband adoption stood at 63% of adult Americans as of April 2009, up from 55% in May, 2008.

The most interesting bit of data in the report is that the following groups achieved above average increases in adoption: senior citizens; low-income; high-school graduates (no college); older baby boomers, and; rural Americans.

These demographic shifts can be a great source of innovation in your online efforts. Take a look at the outcomes you want to achieve online and the audiences with which you need to achieve them. Do the changes in the Pew report open new opportunities? Create challenges?

Sites that achieve breakthrough results regularly assess shifts in audience so they can be most effective online.

Too Many Chefs in the Home Page

Posted on by David
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This post on Fast Company, which features purported inside scoop on how the American Airlines home page is managed, tells an all too common story.

The post features a hypothetical redesign of the home page that dramatically simplifies and focuses the page from the hash that it is currently. An anonymous staff person from American commented on how their decentralized team of over 200 people who work on the site are simply incapable of creating a design like that due to their structure and processes.

Here’s the problem at American and many other organizations with overcrowded, ineffective home pages: they have decentralized the ownership and management of a centralized interface. In effect, no one owns this one page, so any design has to be the product of compromise and consensus.

Home pages benefit from benevolent dictators who make sure this critical entry point to their site (yes, home pages still matter even with Google driving people past them) is focused on achieving tangible outcomes that matter the most.

Massive teams and committees simply cannot muster the discipline required to create a focused and effective home page.

No One Cares About Your Intranet

Posted on by David
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James Robertson points to a post decrying the lack of attention that corporate intranets receive nowadays in a challenging economy.

Expecting executives to fund the intranet is like expecting them to fund fax machines: better make a good case leading with the value of the outcomes an intranet can achieve rather than the depth of your features or total document count or the purity of your taxonomy.

In fact, I’d stop calling your group an intranet team immediately. Rebrand yourself as the rapid solutions team, working tirelessly to help profit centers make more profit and cost centers to cost less.

Hear Me: Podcast and Webinar

Posted on by David
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A couple free resources for you on a lovely Thursday afternoon.

First up, my second podcast interview with Sue Pelletier is up on the Face2Face blog. We tackle lots of issues around social media and events, including back channels, blogging, and if a blog will put your event out of business (answer: no).

Next Tuesday I’m leading a webinar on using data to drive membership marketing for associations.

The presentation is part of the Avectra Academy series and is free to attend. I’ve been told there has been a huge response to this one, which makes all sorts of sense. I’ll share why NOW is the best time to be a marketer ever (really!) and how associations can benefit from using data to focus their marketing rather than spamming the hell out of everyone in your database. Hope to see you there!

Outcomes and Audiences

Posted on by David
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Successful web sites have extreme clarity on the outcomes they are built to achieve and which audiences they will need for success. These two factors are more important than almost any other element of the process: if they are off base you’ll never get anywhere no matter what you invest in design or technology.

Yikes!

Here are a few questions to consider for the next program, product or service you wish to support with the Web:

  • What specific outcomes do we need to create to achieve our goal?
  • What markets are relevant to those outcomes?
  • Which of these high-value outcomes can best be supported or achieved online?
  • Given that, which audiences among the relevant markets are important for those specific outcomes?

With those answers in hand, you are well on your way to creating a focused effort online that will produce results for your organization.

Web Strategy for Meetings and Events

Posted on by David
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Sue Pelletier of MeetingsNet and the Face2Face blog interviewed me last week about web strategy for event web sites. This previews some of the ideas I will be covering at ASAE’s Annual Meeting in Toronto this August.

I was fortunate today to have the chance to speak with Web guru C. David Gammel about what organizations can do to make their event Web sites really get the results they want. He has lots of ideas that you can use to increase the likelihood that potential attendees will register, exhibitors sign up for booths, and overall increase the buzz around your meeting.

You can listen to the podcast here. Thanks Sue!