Basically, I tried to express that there should be a philosophy behind his work and that he needs a body of evidence regarding that in terms of an expression of applying that philosophy.  It was a pretty heavy set of advice but I had hoped to get him on track at a root level.

Anyway, after chatting for a while he mentioned a new group that had been forming in the north of Tasmania for Web Professionals and that the group had asked “are there any real web strategists in Tasmania”?  To which my young associate had said “yes, I know one”.

It reminded me that we’re thin on the ground here in Hobart.

Considering the designer in front of me and how he’d arrived at calling himself ‘a designer’ it occurred to me there’s a number of ‘web strategists’ or ‘digital strategists’ popping up too.  And, I’d argue with a great weight of evidence in my pocket that these self-proclaimed ‘web strategists’ suffered from the same founding issues as the designer in front of me.

It sounds cool to be a digital strategist doesn’t it?

From http://bentremblay.com/en/category/social-media

Sums it up pretty well really.

The emergence of web strategists / digital strategists

This is not a new title.  Go back in time to big tech companies of the last decade and they’ve been around for ages.

I remember meeting with a director of a recruitment firm 4 years ago and said to him “keep an eye out for the emergence of a new role that will become very important in the crossover of marketing to digital – digital strategists”.  I stated that there would be few but they’d be of high demand as media convergence became common place.  I expected a bit of gold fever by the end of last decade.

Where there’s a gold rush the mining experts (or should I say hopefuls) emerge.  And, with there still being limited web education processes I haven’t seen a Web Strategy Degree being offered at Uni.  We have to piece the role together through specialisation in certain areas.

Is web strategy and digital strategy just gobbledegook for online marketer?

There are plenty of people around that have been commercially involved with the web for some time now and the role is often bandied about and usually in the context of marketing.

But is a digital strategist just about marketing?

What I’m observing at the moment is this:

1. Ran a website before
2. Been involved in planning a website
3. Taken a website from concept to go live state
4. Done a bit of digital marketing i.e. ran a few SEM campaigns in Adwords
5. Created a facebook page or similar
6. Maybe worked in or ran a project team

Done those things more than once and you might call yourself a digital strategist.

Well to the low end of the market you’d clearly know much more than the average bear.  But you’d fall well short of my view of a digital strategist.

What characteristics and experience do we look for in digital strategy development people?

Strong depth of knowledge of the following:

1. Business process, business models, and business fundamentals including budgeting and financial flows
2. Marketing process, brand development, brand strategy, path to market, value propositions, productisation and product / service segmentation, market trends, direct marketing, digital marketing, and convergence of media platforms.
3. Creative direction, visual differentiation, market relevance, marketing platform integration and cohesion
4. User behaviour, usability testing, demographics, recruitment of test subjects, focus group management and unbiased processing of user feedback
5. Technical development, web technologies, mobile technologies, understanding the software development lifecycle
6. Systems integration, database development, data warehousing, and back-end platforms such as CRM and core business software.
7. Project Management, stakeholder management, methodologies such as agile, communications strategies, risk management, and governance.
8. Social Media, influence, viral, and touch points.
9. Conversion methodology, persuasion architecture, design optimisation.
10. Reporting metrics; not just traffic and conversion but behaviour interpretation, and how to leverage this
11. Consulting frameworks and processes for extracting organisational needs and converting them to digital roadmaps.
12. And more I’ve probably looked over…

And if you really want to set all that apart: 

1. Innovation capacity, ability to distil concepts into commercially applicable but boundary pushing results, an ability to step back and see the big picture and the trends
2. Hands on experience in architecting, designing, developing actual solutions
3. Leadership capacity to drive multiple stakeholders, teams, suppliers, and resources to common goals.

Lastly, how much experience is required?  How did the ‘web strategist’ earn their title?  What body of work shows their credibility?

That’s up to you to decide.

So is digital strategy all about marketing?

In many ways I’d have to say yes as sales drive organisations BUT sales don’t equal profits.  Profit comes from so many other areas such as effectiveness of support, service costs, consumer relevance, transactional and operational flow awareness etc.  And, whilst digital strategy work may be seeded by marketing types I believe a proper digital strategist is a helluva lot more than a marketer.

How can you be a master of all these trades I mention?  Won’t they be jack of all and master of none?  Potentially yes.  More likely you’ll find strength in only a handful of the areas I look for.  The ones that can cover all areas well are incredibly rare.

…so, coming back to my young design friend.  He can ‘do’ design but does he have what it takes to put together a design with a rationale and strategically justify how it will work for the client and hence minimise their risk in releasing it?  Not really, and this is what worries me about the emerging ‘web strategists’.

“..if your experience is mostly in offline marketing and you’re about to deal with the web then you need to understand that it’s a platform, it’s like an investment in software, and it needs plenty of work that you may not be used to.”…

Remember the agile approach: test and learn, tweak and try again… Well it’s back on the agenda this week with a new angle.  Sadly the throw away society mentality is ripe in so many organisations. 

Blame the platform rather than the users of it.  Sound familiar?

Point in case : Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra

After more than a year of agreeing to sponsor the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (TSO) at significant cost to the employees and shareholders of Future Medium, and not to mention the scheduling delays our paying clients experienced while ‘we did good’ for Tasmania, the website has gone out to redevelopment because it doesn’t meet its targets.  See case study.  Incidentally we won’t be bothering to respond and wish the future supplier good health and prosperity.

So back to an old chestnut: selection criteria for web projects and specifically in this case ’being realistic about expectations within your budget’.  This might seem like a rant and a rave  (ooh a party…) but hopefully this comes across as a coherent reaction to this recent experience.

What makes someone throw a functional website away?

Working with the TSO and witnessing a change in marketing management after site release and seeing some ongoing gaps in terms of utilising the platform (that we built) has given me a very close and unfortunately negative experience with sponsoring an organisation’s web needs.  As sponsors we wrote the brief ourselves and did what we thought mattered (validated of course by TSO staff and external marketing consultants…)

So why does a project just go in the bin after such hard work?  I’ve seen this many times before but typically in state government (possibly because there’s a strange detachment from budgets and commercial return backed with a number of I.T. egotisms)… don’t shoot me for saying what we all know to be commonplace.  Private sector tends to view expenditure as an investment, not a bucket that needs emptying each 1/2 FY.  So where does that leave a charity / not-for-profit in terms of asset development?  Somewhere in between or worse than public sector?

Anyway, witnessing this ‘throw-away’ has reiterated the importance of setting criteria and project goals and building a staff and supplier relationship to keep adjusting outcomes towards emerging / previously unknown goals rather than:

STOP, THROW AWAY, and START AGAIN.

So getting back to setting website project expectations

How do we quantify our selection criteria for a website if we’re a traditional marketer and the web has forced upon us new demands as a business?  And, how do we convert that into a logical and reasonable brief for our suppliers?

I’m not going to to claim that any of this thinking is tested, definitive or even logical but merely a bunch of thoughts about the inside of a ‘marketers’ head when it comes to web criteria.  Notice I haven’t said ‘web-marketers’ criteria:  I’m questioning “what goes through the mind of an old school marketing person when they think web”?

First of all let’s pretend we know nothing about technology, have no grounding in the complexities of data storage, end user devices, or any idea at all how to build a website (‘cos that’s someone else’s issue) but we have been charged with the responsibility of pushing out products & services through the web as one of our channels.

What would our agenda be?

Image (right content, product, and style) + flexibility (ability to change at will and in any way my marketing heart desires)

If we get those right (and our product is desirable) and we use our traditional thinking of getting people to look at it then we’ll get a financial return right? (well maybe not…. but bear with me and assume so)

How important is ‘image’ to my market segment?

Let’s question the ‘image’ criteria; it brings all sorts of things to mind:

• Brand,
• Photos,
• Style,
• Content,
• Copy-writing,
• Dynamism, and
• Interactivity

What does our market segment want? Or what will they accept if I can’t give them all the bells from Christmas or the lights of Las Vegas?

I like to work on continuum’s when I conceptualise something and let’s work from ‘trash-to-great’.  What is acceptable for our market segment?

How much flexibility does my market segment need?

I need to be able to be up-to-date and changing.  My market will typically expect that – remember this is the web - it’s the saviour of all print’s failings in terms of currency of data.  But I’ve got a problem…

Image and Flexibility are inextricably linked

You can’t have a progressive web image without changing to align with market needs, inspiring the market etc., and of course this means flexibility. But poorly managed flexibility will probably damage your image so what’s the right balance?

The Axis of Greatness

So if image and flexibility are inextricably linked and I’m certain that these criteria will drive my marketing effectiveness, and thus financial/economic return, then all that needs to be considered is my investment:

(yes it looks like a penis … I meant that).

So in this line of thinking the more I invest (resources: cash and people time) then the more flexible my solution can be and the better my solutions image will be … OK.  Seems fair.  So really it looks like this:

The website challenge: injecting the right resource skill and commitment to achieve greatness

So if money were no option and I could buy all the resources I needed and commit them to the project could I achieve greatness because I could have a great image and be flexible?  Yes probably, in fact no reason why not if you know how to manage them to that outcome … but for most of us money is an issue isn’t it.

OK so I’m not Microsoft, GE, or Coke … boo hoo.  but there has to be a sweet spot right?

I believe in the law of diminishing returns (heck, I do up classic cars for a hobby and no - the last 1 extra BHP isn’t worth chasing), so somewhere on our continuum from ’shit’-to-’awesome-infinite-love-and-happiness’ (which of course has a relationship to resources) I reckon we can find a way to balance out our suppliers and internal capabilities to get a good compromise … I mean result … sorry.

Defining the sweet spot in resourcing our project to achieve greatness on the web

I want brand integrity, quick time to market, good cost/return ratio and great user interactions.

At this point I’ll switch out of being the marketer looking for a website solution and tell you specifically what drives each of these:

Integrity: comes from being consistent and of course ethical and transparent - which would involve being ‘on message’ and not pushing other agendas than the one I’m known for.

Quick time-to-market: comes from systematising all known characteristics of business needs using tools, processes and matched resource allocation (maintenance and burst capacity).

Return on investment: is driven by so many aspects and I’ll assume that traffic is being generated, social media is being harnessed to drive qualified leads, and that offline media is busting its unquantifiable, expensive balls to throw a wide net (full of holes),and that with all those things being sorted my ROI focusses squarely on production effectiveness and management prowess.

With all other ducks properly in a row then we get left with the supplier relationship.  It’s a plant in your organisations garden and it needs the same water and nutrients that all your other plants (staff etc.) need.  If you feed your plant (supplier) different food, only some of the food, or give it less light and less water then it won’t be as great as it should be, it certainly won’t be harmonious and well … you get the picture.  You might even create a weed (certainly something you don’t value).

If you want a mushroom then stick it in the dark and feed it poop …  Presumably you don’t want a mushroom so focus on cultivating something greener and more attractive!

Great user interaction is going to need MORE THAN all the market knowledge you’ve got in your office filing cabinet.  It needs the experiences of all your customer-facing staff, it needs independently verified external opinions to give objectivity, yes it needs management input and it needs a committed approach to building the right tools (functions) and keeping it in tune.  This will never be right first time but you can tweak it and keep testing and learning.

Also great user interaction isn’t solely the job of your supplier.  The supplier gives tools to work towards this but if you truly want customer engagement then you’ll need to push your staff to keep this on the boil. Or engage someone to do that as an outsourced channel manager.

So how good are your staff at fulfilling that role?  Remember you’ve got to allocate someone to the job and if you don’t ask a supplier to specifically do that you’ll get a weak outcome.

Summing up

Is it fair to expect image and flexibility to create results or did we miss out on the solid process, planning, supplier relations, and investment required to create a great result?

My point here is that if your experience is mostly in offline marketing and you’re about to deal with the web then you need to understand that it’s a platform, it’s like an investment in software, and it needs plenty of work that you may not be used to.

If you’re aware of your skill gaps then you need to trust your suppliers.  Obviously back to the example of our sponsorship deal with the TSO we didn’t get that bit right.

Anecdotally, in closing, what can we expect from spending little if we’re a not-for-profit?

The grass is always green ‘there’ isn’t it ? Even if you are for-profit?

We all want to love the outcome but are all limited by cost; unless you’re a charity and get sponsored.  If someone sponsors you and gives you the solution you’re in a rare situation and presumably you ‘needed the help’.  Ironically those who don’t pay tend not to value and in this case an investment in the web may not be seen as a platform from which to build on.  Does sponsorship give rise to the luxury to throw it away and ‘dream again’?

When you wrote your project brief and criteria did you think ‘this is the be-all to end-all’ or did you think this is ‘a journey I’m starting on and I’ll keep investing, testing, tweaking my people and my processes to the outcome I want’?

How far does the agile methodology have to reach to get commercial results?  I’ve learnt from this sponsorship deal that both the client and the supplier need to embrace agile from the start.  Not in part or on one side.  And, trust has to be the basis for the working relationship.

“I can get someone to make me a website for $120 a month”, says the builder working on my kitchen.  “Good for you”, I thought.

Isn’t it great that the web industry has progressed to the point where traditional tradesmen are now thinking about the web as an important part of business?  More to the point, accepting ‘pay for use’ licensing rather than ‘build from scratch’.

What’s interesting is the level of sophistication you now get from pre-packaged web deals all over the place.

Every man and his dog, or should I say every willing designer working from home, can now offer pretty comprehensive solutions almost turn-key.  Others out in web-land are ready to take care of your hosting, your content management structure, support, and even customer relations issues.  Wow!

So what is this doing to the web market?  As richer core functionality becomes expected rather than a bonus it’s logical that the baseline has changed for web development.  What once was written from scratch is becoming modular and a commodity.  As we’ve adopted the internet, and value it so much, we expect a lot more from it.

Package sites have put real pressure on the price point of custom solutions.  Custom work is now vastly more expensive and the customer benefits aren’t as clear anymore.

So is a package template website going to work for you?  Well maybe.  Think of it this way – is your business unique?  Do you believe you have a unique offering that has to be communicated in a unique way?  If not, then a package is just fine for you.

If you don’t want to be forced into a mould then you’re going to have to think smarter.  I know most marketing people worth their salt will be standing up right now and saying that they want their client to have a unique offering.

So it stands to reason that if you’re really serious about the web then you need a custom built site.  Right?  Well maybe not.  Find a supplier that has a strong base of technology at an affordable price yet also focuses on identifying your ‘real’ needs and then customising to suit.  That’s a smart compromise.

I fear that as the web industry matures all prospective website owners will fall into the trap of judging solutions on features.

It’s not unusual for this to happen.  Look at Plasma and LCD TV’s.  A few years ago you’d be stoked just to have one – but now, how many HDMI inputs, what res., what refresh rate, contrast ratio…. etc. etc.

The market for those goods has matured and hence consumers think they need to know all this techno-stuff.  They’re buying on features under the guise that this equals quality.  That’s just not so in my opinion.

It’s also like the crazy remodelling of cheap sound systems back in the late 90’s.  Gosh!  They started making them look like something out of Aliens, sticking lights and blinking garbage all over them, and to top it off ghastly numbers to tell you how POWERFUL they were.  None of this made them sound any better.  The more discerning customers turned away and went back to proper component HIFI with as few knobs and whistles as possible.  And why?  Because those items did exactly what they wanted and exceptionally well.  Nothing more, nothing less.

So when it comes to effective web design, less ‘is’ more. But there’s a disclaimer around that.  Doing less has to be done better (which is harder) and that means proper strategic architecture to suit users and not the confines of some package.  Buying for features at the back end doesn’t equal a better user experience even if it costs less.

So you’re bound to get a great package website now if you look carefully.  My advice is to focus on what your users need.  This will pay dividends early.

I’m reminded of a dilemma that one of our clients faces now.  A six figure investment in a custom solution that plays to the hearts and minds of his target audience as effectively as it can.  Or, one quarter of the cost for an out-of-the-box solution that ticks all the features he wants.

I ask, if it doesn’t look the part and isn’t tuned to users specific issues, how much damage will it do?  What long-term value should you place on the reputation of your brand?

Nobody’s actually asked me that in the last 6 months but this issue has stopped almost every commercial social networking project in its tracks.  I’ve lost count of how many businesses have come to me with dubious enthusiasm to push their product or service and gone home sour after picking apart the fundamentals.  Now hopefully this isn’t a reflection of my character and more so a reflection of the relatively intangible value and uncertain path to leveraging social networking for commercial outcomes rather than individual benefits.

So what’s the problem?

I think the need for fundamental mindset shifts are coupled with marketing challenges to form two significant barriers.  That and of course the wad of cash needed to build something like a Facebook application.

When people group together to derive value from one another online I think there’s a point where a critical mass must be realised.  There’s a point where the return is clear and self sustaining – I call it social momentum.  Facebook has done it, but just because there are lots of users doesn’t mean they want anything to do with your business.

I’m concerned about how we get through this phase of web interaction from a commercial standpoint.

There’s a broad spectrum of ways of taking advantage of this movement.

• Some people want to build Facebook-style functionality into their sites to hold richer member or customer profiles and let them do status updates, blogs, comments, and ratings… but do people really want this?  It can look great for you i.e. ‘you care’ and want to give ‘freedom of speech’ to your members or customers – but – how many of us users really want to have accounts across tens or hundreds of sites in order to contribute?  I don’t!  And so I wonder what business value is there in simulating functionality that exists all over the place anyway?
• Another example would be a brave commercial entity devoting effort to setting up a simple forum – knowing very well that this could be a political and media nightmare that damages them.  Well is that where the customer is going to put a complaint (or maybe praise) or will they vent it through rating a Google search result or some other highly visible and highly trafficked area?  In this case the brave organisation may end up with a disused forum that has moderation staff allocated to it…  It is tough to know where you’ll get the value from.
• If you were a real estate company you could build a Facebook application that let prospective home buyers display and rate properties they were considering from you.  But I don’t think these things work for commercial entities because the data is so limited and consumers don’t work in such narrow channels – they’d want to list properties from multiple agencies.  So if you were a real estate company you’d be better off investing in building a universal application that showed your competitors too.

So we hit on a nerve here.

To do something successful you may have to shift your thinking and be open to abuse, criticism, supporting your competitors, sharing secrets and so on… and maybe give benefit to someone other than yourself.  But that’s kind of the essence isn’t it?  If you’re doing something in the social sphere then you need to play to the need of the masses and not that of your organisation.

Will the brave be the ones that are rewarded for their risks in this open new world?  I think so.

If I could give you advice on this problem it would be to play to your own strengths as an organisation and not fear competitors working alongside you.  Use your brand credibility to build something interesting and of social value and the seemingly intangible return will be channelled via increased exposure and association with something hopefully cherished by your customers.  But what that is exactly will need great consideration and advice.

Considering that blogs, forums, and feedback tools are cheap functions to buy then it has to be worth a punt at face value.  Just don’t expect it to work without a serious marketing push, a well seeded base from which to operate, and some ongoing investment.

Over the last two years, the TSO has been working with Hobart based website developer Future Medium Pty Ltd for a digital strategy and the delivery of a new public website as part of a major sponsorship deal.

Future Medium is utilising its Strategic, Creative and Technical strengths to deliver a state of the art website redevelopment to promote the TSO’s goals and objectives. This will benefit the TSO by presenting a new site that is visually engaging and strongly aligned to the TSO brand, and will act as a powerful communication and education tool. This work will be seamlessly integrated with the TSO’s current back-end systems, facilitating increased business efficiencies. Both parties see this as a ‘Win, Win’ situation.

During the initial stages of the process, Future Medium discovered the TSO required assistance with its branding position and prompted the TSO to establish a new brand strategy and identity with the assistance of Inspired By Marketing and subsequently Clemenger Tasmania.

With the arrival of the new brand material the web project went into full swing – for the last four months Future Medium have been designing and developing an exciting new website.

“Along with the new ‘Ignite’ look and feel, the website will include many new interactive features, bringing the TSO to the front of the pack on a global scale” said Glen Johnson, Managing Director of Future Medium.

An interactive timeline of upcoming and previous events has been created for users to browse both upcoming and historical events. Similarly, a browser has been created for users to view and purchase recordings produced by the TSO.

Facilities will be provided for user reviews and feedback of events and albums. Users can book tickets and purchase albums online via the new integration of the Tessitura booking system.

An array of information will also be available about the TSO, its venues and concerts.

Launch of the new website is scheduled for late 2009 and is sure to be a classic hit.