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Last week’s OpenText’s Purpose-Driven Speakers Series event in DC featured Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution. Michael is always enthusiastic and thought-provoking, and in this talk, he summarized takeaways from 5 of the top Web 2.0 thought leaders.  He also provided a set of simple guidelines for leaders to use to move their organizations toward utilizing the transformational potential of Web 2.0 (download slides here) .

First though, in order to talk about organizational strategy, he provided a simple way to define that strategy:

Strategy is language that does work.

He a defined organizational strategy as aligning tactical actions over time, which move the organization toward a goal.

There were a lot of keen observations in the talk and on the slides, but these are the core guidelines, which Michael calls design patterns, to follow:

• Edge to core – Identify the successful innovators at the edge of your organization or audience, and free them up to continue innovating by moving successful innovations into the core processes of the organization.
• Be self aware about change – Organizations have immune systems and metabolisms — be self-aware about change and how your organization deals with change so that positive change is not slowed or stopped because of bureaucratic turf wars between the old and new ways of accomplishing your mission.
• Focus on your mission – Do not pursue or support innovation for its own sake. It must be about supporting the mission in a cost-effective way and at the same time preserving room for experimentation and innovative thinking.

Probably the overall thing I will remember from this talk are the penguins. You have to go through the slides or video to get this reference, but the point is that there are innovations available today that will transform the way you do business or run your organization. The trick is to figure the optimal innovations you can adopt quickly that will help achieve your mission more effectively.  Planning technical and specific actions too far in advance (as most organizations do) will ignore new technologies and innovations that appear almost daily during this new age of constant technology change.

Ken Fischer

Ken is the CIO at ClickforHelp.com Inc and Director of Gov20Labs.org. He focuses on connecting web efforts to organizational outcomes through measurement, metrics, findability and usability.

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Fancy web tools and tactics are great, as long as they are executed well, of course.   But when they are applied without an audience-centered approach, they either don’t work or don’t work as well as they should.  

I was reminded of how often this is forgotten when putting together websites and marketing campaigns just this week.  I was in a meeting talking to the company’s CEO, who simply could not understand why the marketing services they purchased from other vendors were not working for them.  It turns out they had purchased a simple “webvertisement” with some minor SEO (search engine optimization) and adwords.   They got lots of traffic (mostly expensive ad traffic), but little or no results.

They offered a free quote,  so why weren’t people taking them up on it?  Because their audience did not understand their value proposition and market differentiators.  The company had skipped over audience research, and they had not developed a clear value proposition or clearly differentiated their services from competitors.  Instead, they went right to a marketing campaign.

This is a classic example of a “technical” implementation of tools and tactics.  There was nothing technically wrong with the implementation (well, ok, the SEO was not very good but that is true of 90% of all SEO out there). The site was up, the adwords were being clicked on, and the “Home”, “About Us”, and “Services” web pages were being visited.  

But none of these pages convinced the audience that this was a company to do business with, because the content was written from the inside-out, not the outside-in.  By inside-out,  I mean that it was written from the business owner‘s perspective, not from the perspective of their audience’s needs (outside-in).    It takes time to understand your audience, and even when you do, it can be difficult to best to explain to them what you do and why it benefits them.  

While it may be tempting to look at “Content Writing” in proposal and say, “We don’t need that.”  The issue is not what you do, but your audience’s “perception” of what you do.  This issue seems to come up in bigger companies frequently because, even though audience research is usually done, the committee-style message and content approval process often filters it back out.

In short here is what to remember: People find you when they want to fulfill a need of theirs.  The better the ability of your message and content to connect those needs with your services (in about 10 seconds),  the better your chance of getting their business.  Only then will your enticement of a free quote, demo, discount, etc. have a much better chance of getting them to engage with you.

You will know if you are engaging your audience by using metrics to assess each aspect of the find, connect and engage path your audience takes. You can remember this by simply remembering you want to put your best FACE forward online.  We call this the FACE^TM Web Strategy Framework.  There are some more subtle implications which we talk about in a white paper (currently in draft), but basically “FACE”  is just an easy to remember a commonsense approach to using the web as an effective marketing and lead generation tool.

Ken Fischer

Ken is the CIO at ClickforHelp.com Inc and Director of Gov20Labs.org. He focuses on connecting web efforts to organizational outcomes through measurement, metrics, findability and usability.

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