Category Archives: Strategy

What is Web Strategy?

Posted on by David
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A lot of work I do with clients involves developing a strategy for their web efforts. But what is web strategy?

I picked up one of the better definitions for overall strategy that I have seen from Alan Weiss, who got it from Benjamin Tregoe and John Zimmerman in Top Management Strategy:

“We define strategy as the framework which guides those choices that determine the nature and direction of an organization.” (Page 17.)

The rest of the book discusses the framework they recommend for guiding strategic decisions. They identify 9 strategic areas and suggest that a company has to identify one of them as their driving force, which then determines their markets and products more than any other factor. It is a refreshingly concise yet powerful framework.
So what does this imply for your web strategy?

Tweaking their definition a bit, your web strategy should be a framework for guiding the choices that determine the nature and direction of your web site. It should determine which audiences you are going to address. It should determine which content and service you chose to offer online. And as a framework, it should help you to rationally assess and deal with both opportunities and challenges as they arise.

Ultimately, your web strategy should driven by your overall strategy. If your overall strategy indicates that you will serve certain markets with specific products, your task as a web strategist is to develop supporting strategies to execute that vision online.

Public Relations and Social Media

Posted on by David
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A question about sample PR policies for social media came across a list I am on. I responded by saying that before writing policies, it’s important to know how you want to engage online and to what purpose. Without that, any policy is going to be irrelevant, at best, or more likely harmful.

I have written a framing device that you can use for yourself, team, or even your Board to discuss at what level your organization wants to and should be engaged in online conversations: Four Levels of Engagement in the Blogosphere.

Here are some questions you can use with the device:

  • At what level are we currently?
  • What level would best serve our goals and mission?
  • What level will our current organizational culture support?

The answers to those questions should get you on solid footing for identifying how you want to engage online.

For more on PR and social media, see this post by Steve Rubel on why the future of PR is participation rather than pitching.

How would you rate your experience with our coat hangers?

Posted on by David
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I just got an e-mail survey from Starwood Hotels, who wanted to know, in excruciating detail, about my experience at the Annapolis Sheraton two weeks ago.

The survey had over 60 questions. Sixty! I skipped most of them. The only feedback I wanted to give was that the A/C was out in the entire building except for the guest rooms and that the elevator almost stalled out on the way up to my floor. You know, big important items.

Instead, this survey asked 10-point likert scale questions on every possible facet of the room and hotel. They may as well have asked about the coat hangers too. This survey probably has a response rate of less than 1 percent and would generate data only from their guests who are willing to invest an hour filling it out. These people are probably not their desired customers.

Paging Fred Reichheld…

Deep Thoughts from Peter on Associations and Participation

Posted on by David
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I was at ASAE’s Annual meeting earlier this week in Chicago and did not blog a single thing about it. Lots of others did, though. (An aside: seems like a blog tipping point was reached at this meeting. Very active and diverse blogging going on all over the place.)

Peter Turner has posted an interesting idea based on the Decision to Join report and Jeff De Cagna’s Ungovernance session:

The longer your association waits to implement governance and product development changes that are more “open and inclusive” to the rank and file member, the more likely you can expect to generate lower retention rates or product sales.

Closed ended models of governance and product development in an era of open innovation and product co-creation is THE CANCER in association management today.

Rings true to me. I think that all the excitement about social media in the association space is a direct response to the subconscious feeling that the time tested models aren’t going to work for much longer.

Podcast: Interview with Jeremiah Owyang on Measuring Social Media

Posted on by David
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I am working on an article for Associations Now about how to measure social media success. The questions I am exploring: How can you measure success with these tools? How do you know you are creating value with a blog, podcast, wiki, RSS, etc.? What’s beyond the page view?

I interviewed Jeremiah Owyang, about this issue last week. Jeremiah is with PodTech, an online video network. Jeremiah has been writing about social media, and metrics in particular, quite a bit this year. He even started a Facebook group on social media measurement.

In the recording attached to this post we discuss the idea of measuring engagement, subjective vs. objective measures and what the near term future might look like. Jeremiah shares several tips on getting started with measuring social media (follow the link for a write-up of these). Thanks Jeremiah!

Drop me a line if you are using social media at your association and would like to share your experience for the article. You don’t have to have solved the problem (if you have you can write the article!) but I am very interested in talking about the value you think your efforts are providing and issues related to measuring that value.

Update: Jeremiah has posted a few additional comments and links related to what we discussed in the interview.

World Bank 2.0: The BuzzMonitor

Posted on by David
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I just heard about a new open source application for tracking discussion of specific issues in social media (blogs, tags, podcasts, wikis, etc.) online: The BuzzMonitor. This was developed by the World Bank for their own purposes and then released as an open source application. From the about page:

Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple plaforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it. At the time, no solution (either commercial or open source) met those requirements so we decided to build our own.

We were playing with Drupal, a solid, open-source content and community platform for different pilots. Drupal being so flexible and module oriented, we decided to write the specifications for a “super aggregator” that would help us people understand, follow and collaborate around mentions of the organization online.

I asked Pierre Guillaume, who announced it on the Social Media Measurement Group on Facebook, how they are using it internally at the World Bank. His response:

Thanks David. We are rolling it out to communicators across the bank with a guide on how to use tagging, voting, rss feeds etc…there is, not surprisingly, a bit of a learning curve both in terms of “getting” social media and using the tool but some champions are emerging, embedding findings obtained through the buzzmonitor in their regular comm and web reports, adding relevant bloggers to their contacts etc.. We also feature the most recently voted on items on a page available two clicks down from the intranet home page, for all staff to see.

Sounds like a great tool for raising awareness of how issues important to the Bank are evolving online. I recommend listening to the online conversation as a key activity for any organization and this looks like a great tool for assisting in that. I have downloaded the application and will give it a try this week.

Ah, Modern Yearbook Anxiety

Posted on by David
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This story in the Washington Post brought back memories of being a yearbook staffer (I was even co-editor in chief my senior year!):

From Facebook To a Yearbook, Teens Get a Jolt – washingtonpost.com

This story is about how the yearbook staff of a high school lifted a bunch of pics posted by students to Facebook without permission. Not smart. They don’t mention a yearbook advisor in the story, but I see it as a failure of the the high school staff to inform and monitor the yearbook students. Looks like they are moving on the ethics education piece, which is good.

What they ought to do next year is create a yearbook group on Facebook and use it to get photos submitted by the students for the yearbook. Leverage the trend, don’t fight it!

Marc Andreeson on Facebook's API

Posted on by David
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Marc Andreeson, founder of the original Netscape, has posted his thoughts on Facebook’s new API, which has created quite the storm of attention since it launched. This observation is quite interesting:

Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in

The implication is, in my view, quite clear — the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways.

In short, creating a Facebook application with the API requires that you provide your own server resources to power the application. Facebook’s super-viral distribution of popular apps leads to crushing load on your web servers in a very short amount of time if you are (un)lucky enough to create a popular application.

The capacity to rapidly scale up server capacity is probably beyond even some large corporation’s ability unless they have specifically prepared themselves to do so. Your web application needs to be designed for scaling up the number of servers as well.

A Couple Conference Opportunities for June

Posted on by David
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There are two conferences I’ll be attending in DC in June that I wanted to let you know about. They happen to overlap but are in the same building, so you could hit them both if you wanted.

First, Jeff De Cagna is spearheading a social media unconference for association executives on June 5, 2007 at ASAE & the Center’s meeting space in the Reagan Building. The event is free and will be driven by the attendees. Simply add your name to the registration list on the web site if you wish to attend. I’m very excited this event is happening and I encourage you to attend if you are passionate about social media and/or want to learn more about it.

The second event is the Gilbane Washington DC conference on June 5-6, 2007, also at the Reagan Building. This conference focuses on content management technologies for government and non-profit organizations. Content is tracked, so there should be something for everyone. I will be facilitating a panel on integrating association and content management systems and processes. This event is not free but you can get a $100 discount by entering my last name as a promotional code when you register.

I hope to see you at one or both events!