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’.

Future Medium thinks BIG on the web – but maybe Kevin Rudd thinks even bigger!

What does the National Broadband Network proposal mean to consumers and suppliers of internet content and services?  Well,  when it all comes down to it, as providers of website and web applications we’re essentially concerned with two things:

1. content delivery, and
2. service provision.

The web as we know it is subtly changing every day. I like to think of it as an organic creature that grows and evolves to consume available resources in new and interesting ways (and yes I hear Terminator noises and picture Skynet as I write this . )

What does this evolution mean to us?

• To the consumer it’s an ever changing way of communicating or accessing services.
• To the business it’s new opportunities to access customers – be it enhanced service functionality or simply new business methods becoming viable.

We’re not looking at an overnight change here though.

Right now there isn’t much rich content available – unless downloading illegal movies is your hobby – so we’re looking at an investment that probably won’t see revolutionary differences to consumers in the first few years if at all; think of it as an essential evolutionary step instead.

The National Broadband Network has the potential to be the backbone to a far more effective way of communicating and doing business.

What’s of interest to us is the relative haste with which internet content has improved in line with available bandwidth over the years.

Go back only a few years and recall the relatively simplistic content available on the web – and compare that to the richness we have now.  Take YouTube as an example, a short while ago such an application would have been far less interesting given the time it would have taken to access content.

With super fast broadband our clients can put their hand on their heart and say “yes let’s go ahead and build a more interactive experience” knowing that 90% of the country can access it properly. That’s really exciting!

Take the tourism industry as an example.  Imagine tourists being able to have convenient access to uploading high definition videos of their own experiences in our state.  We would gain access to immediately relevant content that could be virally shared – ala YouTube – to promote our tourism industry.  Similarly, our tourism operators could deliver rich multimedia experiences that reduce barriers to purchasing/booking. Reducing barriers to rich content sharing – in this case – can offer great economic returns. The National Broadband Network can make this a reality.

Whether or not the business case is there for this being a financially sound investment in the long term vs. wireless technologies is certainly another discussion.  I’m not going to get too wound up in that sort of debate.  Instead, I’ll look at this as a major step in the right direction and work with our clients to find ways to leverage this new power.

I’m reminded of Tim the TOOLMAN Taylor in this and recall his “ugh ugh hmmmph – powerrrrr” sort of outbursts.  I wonder what Jeremy Clarkson would make of this pursuit that he’d probably call “the quest for more internet’s”. (Plural intended).