Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I thought that it was way too late to write about how important the Web is to business because you know that already, right? You know that your customers are looking for ways to simplify their lives with or without you, right? You know that there is a 23 year old woman on your payroll that will leave, start her own business and bury you in 4 years, don’t you? Yep, she lives through your organizational weaknesses everyday and is growing frustrated that you are towing the line and chanting that status quo mantra.

You’re not listening to her, because…well, what does she know?

Why are you still doing it the old way? Oh, that’s right you’re busy. Never mind. (It reminds me of an old saying my father-in-law would tell his dental patients: Just ignore your teeth, they’ll go away!) Same goes for business; just keep plugging away at it the old way, the pain will eventually go away!

What if you had 10 solid warning signs that you need to pay more attention to your company’s online initiatives? What if you had a smoke detector-like mechanism protecting your company from burning away?

Here are 10 frightening warning signs that you’re paying too little attention to your online communications initiatives and that your business is in danger:

1.) Your CEO loves the Web site. When we see an uncomfortable executive we know we are doing it right! If she smiles and says she loves it, we’ve probably failed. Not because what we’ve done isn’t good, but because she probably feels the bleeding has stopped. I’ll bet I have been part of 100 or more Web site campaign design/development projects in my career. I’ll also bet 80% of the time, the executive sponsor (CEO, CMO, COO) was delighted with the outcome and decided by decree that while it was an expensive project, it is finally completed and those resources can now focus on other important work. I feel compelled to write these next sentences in all caps.

GUESS WHAT? YOUR ONLINE INITIATIVES WILL NEVER BE COMPLETED. IT’S NEVER-ENDING. IT’S YOUR FUTURE. IT WILL BE DONE WHEN YOUR BUSINESS IS. STOP THINKING ABOUT IT LINEARLY. Is your business ever done? The CEO needs to know this—better yet, they need to be the ones yelling this the loudest. And as a good leader she needs to realize and sponsor its perpetual growth. She needs to assign people to nurture it each day and she needs to lead her charge through it. She needs to set goals for it, meet them and then set higher goals for next month. Notice, I didn’t say “next year.”

2.) The cobbler’s children BS. This is, by far, the most common mistake we see being made in most all corporations. For those with internal “Web teams” they are usually developing products and cannot quite get to it. Or the marketing department is still secretly (or not so secretly) at war with the IT folks who are two and half years behind on another vaguely-sponsored management directive. (Side note: anything that takes more than 6 months usually needs some reconsideration.) And updates to the Web site come only when management intervenes. (See warning sign number one above.) For those that hire outside interactive agencies, it is usually your internal project manager who just needs to finish up the tail-end of two or three projects and then they will get to it. Or they are “negotiating” objectives with marketing, product development, corporate communications, HR and Sales. Sound familiar? Think your customers care?

Hey cobbler, buy some shoes. You cannot keep trying to get by the way you always have. Assign a dedicated resource to your online initiatives and make sure they are guided by solid, measurable goals. Here are five starters:

   a. Grow traffic to the site by 25% every six months. No exceptions.
   b. Establish 5 primary key words and phrases, measure where you fall in a Google search for each of those terms and strive to stay on the first two pages of relevant search results.
   c. Create 5 personae representing those from whom you want interaction. Get to know everything about each representative user. Interview people resembling each persona and build a strong composite of their wants and needs and focus on creating use case scenarios on your Web site that satisfy them. Now grow your persona over time. They will save you!
   d. Endeavor to add one usable new tool or traffic-driver to your Web site each six months. Try an online survey, a cool game or tool that your customers will want to send along to their peers. Use network sites like Digg.com.
   e. Blog or Podcast. Get smart people to write about things that demonstrate that they know what they are doing. Do it religiously and frequently. The bottom line is that by creating more value, you create more transactions. And believe it or not, your customers probably like the kind of value beyond what you may believe you are providing them. None of us really knows our customers as well as we should. Experiment.

With these you have targets to increase your overall offering and thus you need resources to make them happen. Make it difficult for your competition to keep up with your energy. Don’t skimp on man hours to optimize the most important touchpoint to your marketplace. Tomorrow will be worse if you keep using the cobbler’s children excuse. In fact, tell that excuse to the board chairman after he pulls himself off the floor upon hearing about your competitors’ recent gains. He’ll understand.

3.) The words “Web” or “online” are not being mentioned in every board or management meeting. We see the fast “needle-moving” businesses are pulling up another chair to the table and inviting the Web strategists to have a seat. Chances are really really good that these folks have their finger on the pulse of where your business can grab more market or mindshare on the Web. You know why? They live the Web and probably see 200 times the average number of thriving business plans in action. They are trained in the art of spying and cruising on the Web. Thanks to MTV and Motorola they probably also move faster in thought, and are paid to figure how to direct traffic at the intersection of Marketing and Technology. Think about that for a second. They know how to spot a transcendent idea and are probably working on it at home as a means to seed their first entrepreneurial venture. Get them to join your club, instead.

Try it for a few months and see what happens. If you are unsatisfied after this, you probably do not have the right people thinking about the right things toward the right objectives. (Warning: Web people and management people can often speak different languages so it may take a few meetings before everyone gets acclimated.)

4.) When you unplug your Web servers, nothing happens. I have actually done this to prove a point and was promptly fired three or four jobs back. Make sure you know what you are unplugging. The point I was trying to prove was that after it was unplugged, no one would call or email wondering what happened to their access to the company’s products and services. I did this because the client who had hired me had fewer than 3 online transactions a day and their call center was painfully unaware of the Web site and the products the company needed to support. Further, my client believed that they had millions of Web site visitors browsing their catalog each second of the day; clearly they had misinterpreted their Web stats—which was the case. I had proven my point by the end of the day. Nothing actually happened. No calls or emails resulted from my prank. Management didn’t invite me back but they did realize that their Web site wasn’t actually doing what they thought it was.

The thing is, there is a giant chasm between what happens with your users out there and how you, as a smart company, react, adapt and prepare to make positive change happen on the Web. You simply cannot wish and hope and let that lead your online strategy. That’s just it—you need a solid, measurable strategy for accomplishing your online goals. And you have to pay for it. Good strategy is a process involving experienced practitioners and sometimes, provocateurs who aren’t afraid to jump into the fray. Another thing is that good strategy isn’t cheap and it doesn’t happen over night. It takes a team of objective Web thinkers to function as staunch advocates for your customers’ online experiences ALL THE TIME. If you are providing that, unplugging your servers will create a new hell in your call centers that your customer service reps won’t likely forget.

5.) You haven’t changed your Web site in a few weeks. Nothing new can be said about this. But still, it rings the loudest as a warning sign that you don’t care and subsequently, you are in danger. Commit to fostering ongoing change, at least to the top three levels of your Web site, each week.

Print out a calendar divided into 52 weeks. Title it, “Web Maintenance Schedule,” divide all the weeks up into four categories and get started. Here are the four Web Maintenance categories:

   a. New stuff we want our customers to know about how we care.
   b. New stuff that demonstrates that we know our customers better than anyone else. Hell, let the inmates run the asylum. Let your customers start posting their feeling and experiences directly on your Web site. Sure, the truth is painful. But truth be told, integrity is all about showing the world that you care about what they think, right? And trust me, you would much rather they talk about you on your site than on their own blog, or worse, they crusade around a negative issue on a protest site. If you allow them an outlet to vent and d demonstrate that you care and will do what it takes to find a workable solution, it will go miles where ignoring it can do much greater harm. My experience is that people are inherently good and want to say good things when things are good. Be good!
   c. New stuff that demonstrates that we know our business better than anyone else. Write insightful articles, whitepapers, ideas and distribute them freely. People want to do business with smart people that can make their pain go away. If you can connect with them through an article, you will have gone the extra mile that your competitors are too busy to get to. Get my point?
   d. New stuff that will make them want to bookmark and come back for more. Suppose you go ahead and f follow the suggestion above and write some insightful articles. At the top of the page, let your customers know what the next three articles are going to be about. Let them subscribe to your articles via RSS (Real Simple Syndication) so that they can be notified that new stuff is available. Make it simple for them. Remember, your customers’ number one goal is to make their lives simpler—whether they state that overtly or not.

6.) Your “Web team” agrees with everything you say. Simply put, how comfortable are you with a plumber who asks you how you would like him to fix your leak? Don’t you just want them to do the very best, most economically feasible thing to make the leak go away and stay away?

Assembling the right team takes a lot of work and dedication from any company that “gets it.” When you have the right team in place, you should get reasonable push-back on some of your ideas. After all, the Web takes a massive amount of attention and your team works hard to keep up with your industry and theirs. Keep in mind, theirs changes every 15 seconds. They are exposed to how the Web medium can work for you. Expect them to know a little more about the best way to accomplish the company’s goals online. Pay attention to their ideas and if you sense they have a better approach to a problem, listen to them. (Caution: this may require a change in your company’s culture.)

7.) You rely on your customers to continue to do things the way they did last month because you are afraid that you may alienate someone. You need your customers to rely on you to help them get their problems addressed using less of their resources. If you lead, your best customers will follow and your costs of doing business with your best customers will likely drop. Don’t be afraid to introduce new and better ways to do business with your customers online. If you can ultimately save them some time and money by training them to start doing more online, they will.

Provide some incentive for your customers who want to conduct their business online.

8.) No one in the organization knows about the Web site usage statistics. At least three people in a significant leadership position at your helm need to know most of the top 20 referrers to your Web site, from memory. In fact, they need to use site statistics at least weekly to know the following:

   a. what terms people are using to gain access to the company’s online offering.
   b. who is visiting the site—at least in some broad strokes.
   c. the level of traffic to the site
   d. where the traffic within the site is going. Call this the “clickpath.” Clickpaths illustrate where users go once they land on your site. It can show that a user entered through your home page, then they clicked into your catalog, then they drilled down directly to a product, then they placed a product into their shopping cart, then proceeded to the checkout and then they went to your contact page for some reason. You want to know why they abandoned the purchase so you can help the next guy execute his transaction, right? You want to aim for the highest degree of conversions possible. Without understanding your users and the path they chose to take within your site, you will not succeed.

9.) You spent less than 10% of your marketing (and potentially operations) budgets on the Web last year. Let’s face it. The Web is a little more important each year over the last for your overall marketing, operations, certainly your sales, human relations and corporate communications efforts. Is the CFO adjusting internal budgets accordingly? You will know that you are spending the right amount on the company Web site initiatives when you are able to accomplish the ideas in numbers two and five above.

10.) Your company doesn’t show up on the first two pages of Google for the handful of keywords that define your company’s purpose. Simply put, you need to improve the keyword/phrase value and density in such a way that it continues to get the company’s leadership position in the industry across to all the people that matter. Google is one of the “people” that matter in this case. A colleague of mine once said to me, “Google is the largest blind user of all Web sites.” It doesn’t care the least about how the design looks because it cannot see it. It can only digest the text on a Web site. True, but what about the people using the site. Just serving up text would please Google but is Google going to actually buy my product? No, it can drop potential buyers off at the door. Like everything else in life, its about balance.

So between your keyword optimization and your user experience people concentrating on making all visits to your site positive, you need to create all pages strategically. You need to make sure that your pages are titled with valuable keywords, your pages have a palatable amount of content and that your overall experience is one that people will find easy, engaging and memorable. Strive to strike that balance and you will be in good shape. My experience is that the secret Google algorithm that determines page rank always improves to benefit those that are following good practices and aren’t out to trick or cheat.

So there you have it. Your ten warning signs that will let you know if you need to take immediate action and ten ideas to think about when addressing the challenges in front of you. When you go over the ten warning signs also keep in mind;

   1. Business hates change but knows it needs to in order to survive.
   2. The Web hates stasis and will change every few seconds no matter what anyone can do or say. These are two forces that inherently act like oil and water.
   3. The Web was invented to trade text documents not to transact like we force it to each day. Things like AJAX and Flash are helping us make the Web more of a comfortable transaction medium than it was originally intended. Even though the Web moves at mach speed, inventing whole new technologies takes time.
   4. The art and science of optimizing the shift of our businesses online is still relatively new and awkward.
   5. It takes experienced people who’ve failed and learned many times over to help create the maps to guide us. Don’t be afraid to tap into their experiences. Success on the Web is largely foreign and many don’t know when they hit or miss.
   6. The process of optimizing any Web site is just that—a process. It doesn’t have an end point. Stop thinking about it linearly.
   7. Everyone is different. My rules and signs can only hope to help. They, like everything else, should be taken with a grain of salt—or a pint of beer.