Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Who do I love? Duke Corporate Education.
 
You know what I love?  Well, besides diet soda of course, I love the feeling you get seeing a site that you put your heart and soul into finally launch live on the Web.  Dukece.com launched on Wednesday, check it out if you have a minute.  
 
As we all know, working day in and day out on a project can cause one to get buried in the trenches of day to day project management.  Stepping back from the flurry of activity post launch Wednesday night (with a Coke Zero in hand), I consulted the Blueprint to assess where we finally landed compared to where we started this project almost a year ago.  Looking back on this experience, I fully realize not only the worth of pleasing our clients but also the true value in sticking to strategic objectives defined in the discovery phase.  
 
Thanks to everyone who touched this project and to those who make it possible for us to do work that explores the avenues of imaginative navigation techniques.  Each and every one of you deserve an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper.  I’m buying.

This article introduces the concept of a social media plan and was written by Tola Oguntoyinbo, a former Capstrat guy.

Social Media is not an exact science by any means and it can be tough to figure out where to start.  I think that I read somewhere about "failing fast and often" as an approach to navigating the social media landscape.  I tend to think that doing that with some of our more corporate clients (or even with our own brand) is probably not the best idea. 

At the same time, I haven't found a ton of information about the process of creating and running social media-based marketing campaigns.  Earlier this year I spent some time thinking about the idea of a social media plan - a process and procedure for mitigating the risks of playing in the social media waters.  It's a little rough around the edges, but it should generate some thought.  I had fun putting it together - especially the graphics - I freely admit to having a Photoshop problem. Check out the site here.  Take a look - comments and feedback are welcome.

When clients come to our firm for interactive recommendations they generally have a lot of ideas. The interactive world is scary. There are a lot of acronyms. There are nerds that keep information shrouded in secrecy so that you will have to continue to rely on them. Or worse, there are nerds that complicate things by overexplaining things you don’t need to know.

As a result, clients try to get up to speed on current Internet trends or hide behind their IT person. 

The first thing they will try to tackle and understand is the development language. Clients will often agonize over the language used to develop their site, but this is the wrong focus. Technology is going to change. Developers are smart and they will figure out a way to make new technology work with what you have established. If you build a site and continue to pay attention to the backend as well as the front end, you are going to make a long lasting Web site that will have a longer shelf life. If you build a site and don’t touch it again for 18 months, you are going to have to rebuild it the next time you touch it. So why agonize over the language? Trust the experts.

As a client, your focus should be...

The most important thing you can do as a client is decide what function your Web site will perform. Is it a brochure site? Is it an application? Is it core to your company's business?

There are plenty of companies out there that don’t need to create anything more than a brochure site. We don’t all need social networking sites.

The clients that are most successful are focused on the results, not the way we get there.

Instead of blowing all of your money on a redesign and then doing it again 18-48 months later, spend your money wisely. Invest as you go along. Pay attention to your analytics. Find an expert that is going to keep you up on technology without boring you with the details. You don’t care if Django or Python is the best solution, but you do care that users are finding the right information on the site.

This approach is not always applicable to large companies. When your Web site has to fit into a large-scale enterprise solution, it is very important to perform the due-dilligence to ensure the technologies you invest in will be supported later by your in-house technology team.

As an interactive professional for the past 10 years, I have seen a lot of languages and development theories come and go. Don’t agonize about the language, you’ll always be able to find someone to support it. Instead, focus on the content and the user experience.

Marketing is all about relating to humans. One way to truly be a step ahead is to take the budget you have for your redesign, double it and spend the second half on committed maintenance on your site. It will guarantee a longer lifespan and will help you focus on customers- the reason you made the site.

A while back we were asked by Lenovo to design an ad banner and landing page/microsite campaign.

What we learned was how flexible and adaptable our Interactive team can become to meet deadlines. While it is not how we "love" to work, we learn a lot about each other and our abilities when our clients ask us to do the extraordinary. Let's face it, clients we want to work with want an agency that gets them but almost more importantly they want an agency that feels like they're down the hall.

We operate in a competitive field and there are many firms that would really like to have the opportunities that we earn. How quickly we adapt has impressed me since I started working here.

I have also learned that adaptability is synonymous with abilty to produce a lot of quality in a short amount of time. We have learned that it also means being able to execute changes in real time to react to how A/B tests serve us results. Long gone are the days where agencies like ours have the courage to say, "we'll get to it..."

I think adaptability defines us. We measure our value by how "down the hall" our clients feel we are. In reality, some of our clients aren't in our time zone. We also measure our value in terms of how quickly our working relationship spreads from one business unit to another like wildfire within big corporations. We attribute this to being adaptive.

I think a big challenge in trying to communicate precisely what an integrated communications firm like ours can do for our clients is helping our clients and prospects see themselves in a different light. I know, I know, its not really about who we are as an agency. Its far more important that we adapt to our clients communications challenges and craft solutions or stories that work. I had an idea about how this can be done in a light-hearted, fun and informative way.  

Produce a fun and engaging online video game of Capstrat working for clients. People who believe we may be the right communications partner come to the Capstrat site, click on "game" sign in- or not sign in, get a brief on one of a handful of projects that we make up yet are characteristic of our skills and industry concentrations. Think Sims for an integrated communications agency.

They then try to solve unique communications problems using combinations of Positioning, Branding, PR, Public Affairs, Government Relations, Web, Dynamic  Media, Social Media, Viral and Design. Each game session is successive. You win points and go on to lead the score. Every few weeks we add another scenario and the high score gets something neat like a new iPod.

Here is a scenario: "Welcome, Sandy. Your objective is to boost the national rating of the local university's school of medicine. You have 5 years to make a difference but only 6 months to demonstrate initial progress. How do you plan to start?" A) Positioning B) Media Blitz C) Press Release(s) D) Rebranding E) Bottle of Whiskey

Essentially it is a model of our office and an integrated working methodology. It is an interactive means to show our next generation clients what we can do and why they ought to choose us. It could also integrate examples of a lot of our work including creative, interactive, dynamic media, media buying, advertising, our awards, our space, our strategic and articulate staff and our superb ideas well executed.

Think this could fly? 

Have you ever watched a Mom try to reason with a toddler in a toy store? That’s the image that came to mind when I heard about the NFL’s attempt to control its online content. From an article in Ad Age.

It’s great that the NFL is capitalizing on its vast storehouse of clips. Armchair quarterbacks, fantasy football enthusiasts and even casual fans ought to enjoy “instant replays” from today and seasons past. But, while ramping up its Web site, the NFL has decided to restrict other sites from featuring NFL clips. This runs counter to the mass democratization of the Web. It remains to be seen whether this approach will be successful.

And, I had to chuckle when I read that the NFL’s legal team is going to police other news and video sites, including YouTube. Like the Mom trying to wrestle control from a 3-year old, I suspect the NFL would be better off with a less rigid approach.

Interactive or Web Strategy at the enterprise level is like braiding a giant squid. First you have to dive to incredible depths to find it. Once found, the challenge becomes keeping your hands on the tentacles long enough to wrangle them.

My team is working on braiding a giant squid right now. The principal challenge is braiding the corporate initiatives, priorities, goals, objectives, vision, current features, a history of enterprise successes and failures to consider along with everything their end-users want in an experience to make their lives easier and more rewarding. Tie all that together and you got yourself a plan, right?

How you tie all that together is what's remarkable to me. Our team's allegiance to the User-Centered Design (UCD ) approach makes this project so much more doable. I remember trying to accomplish enterprise Web transformation for a major financial exchange in Chicago the late 90's before I knew specific strategies about framing enterprise Web around users. I am a little ashamed to admit that I have little idea how our team pulled it off without stricter user-concentrated goals. Back then it was understood that your publish content based on organizational lines or strategic business units. And you were happy to have accomplished that. 

What I've learned is that with the right people and approach, even the most daunting of tasks can be much easier. This enterprise Web transformation project will be a giant and frankly is the third one our team has jumped on. We will follow a methodology whereby each strategy, tactic or left-field feature idea will consider user interactions through testing and will be measured not only by its ability to please end-users but also by its liklihood to serve its corporate goal.  

And while sometimes it feels like we are braiding a giant squid, its more apt to say, we are making sure that all tentacles are accounted for before we set it free.   

As corporations shift Web marketing money toward the social Web, I imagine they are asking themselves a few hard questions. 

As corporations become hip to the idea that social media is worth the energy and attention, they are setting up shop and looking for good thinkers and writers to help them hang the corporate Web 2.0 shingle. Some have been doing it for years, like Cicsco , Sun and a company I've been lurking at called Coudal Partners .

Several things come to mind. First, corporations are starting to ask themselves the buy vs. build question. Should they buy a small blogging outfit who understand everything about getting the platform developed. Team and workflow, design, content management, video and sound and so on. They are also realizing that they have to either solicit good writing and thinking from internal folks or hire on someone capable of extracting the subject matter expertise from the internal ranks. This is the build. Perhaps there is an internal Interactive team ready to go and a bunch of people that are willing and able to enter their cogent thoughts into a blog on a daily or weekly basis. Perhaps neither option works and they have to outsource it until they gain enough comfort to go it alone.

The second thing that came to mind is that there is the whole strategic part that corporations' corp comm folks often overlook. The whole reason a corporation would venture into this space is to join the conversation. It would seem they want to get a message out there and have people engaged, right? Well that takes some strategy. For instance: search, linking, relationship building. Also, blatant marketing blogs are not handled very well in the conversations that attract people. They are typically blacklisted. This means there is likely more risk in alienation than chance of success unless there is a real good strategy to keep the ship afloat. 

I wonder how many corporations have quietly (with or without intention) emerged onto the blogosphere fully equipped to engage thousands only to find no one showed up.  

 

 

If you work anywhere near the intersection of traditional public relations or media relations and Web or interactive communications, you have to be thinking about how things are changing really fast. Rapid technological changes are forcing these industries to quickly rethink how they provide value to their clients. They have for many years already. Survival of the fittest, right? If creating measurable impact is the key, it is important to think about impact from different perspectives and look at how measurement has lead to what many feel is a near cataclysmic impact on all communications industries.

In college I studied how modern genetics has changed the way folks continue to think about religion. I studied quantum evolution alongside Christianity, Buddhism, Paleontology and Economics. I learned that Quantum evolution is a widely disputed genetic theory, which, in so many words, claims immediate external forces can have a dramatic effect on the otherwise natural evolution of a species or range of beliefs. I recall being asked to imagine and explore the effect of an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier smashing into the Gulf of Mexico and how that might change the earth’s species. I could only surmise that it would change everything much faster than would the natural course of evolution. My first thought back then was how that would really suck.

Part of my job at Capstrat, is to help theorize, anticipate and prepare for how the Internet and online user experiences are profoundly changing the complexion of public relations, specifically regional and national media relations, for our clients. I am specifically interested in how it relates to how “consumer generated media” (mass-amateurization; blogs/wikis/folksonomies/ key word tagging/social networks, et al) is changing/has changed the way reporters/editors relate to their readers and visa versa. And I am interested in how we, as communications professionals, regardless of our medium, need to better measure the impact of our work for our paying clients. (Note to self: Can you believe they pay me to sit around and think about this stuff? Finally, my once-useless interdisciplinary degree from Iowa is being used to fight the forces of average.)

I firmly believe that the mass-amateurization of knowledge and thought-leadership is like that aircraft carrier sized asteroid ripping through near space. Traditional PR, in my example, is the Gulf of Mexico. However, it hasn’t yet smashed into us. We can see it ripping through near space on its imminent collision course. And we are paying some attention to those who we feel can shed any light on how it will impact us. Right now, we are all just wondering if it will nail Siberia, the vast Pacific, or as some may believe, it may miss us altogether. I’d bet there are many who mistakenly believe it will miss them. I don’t pity them for very long.

Over the last few months, I have been building an historical-futuristic continuum that extends back far enough for us in this industry to see where it came from and where it is going. This has been my observation as far as how the Internet’s quantum effects have and will impact PR:

Timeline:

2001: Many PR professionals breathe sigh of relief as the great dot com bust allays fears of change. Advertising sees continued declines all around with a miniscule corresponding up-tick in PR industry revenues. For a decade, industries have been slowly blurring the distinction of advertising and PR. The reason: The Web. Those who’d always remained skeptical about age-old measurement efficacy of ads see how the Web changes measurement. The great dot com bust is giving way to a more solid field of online ad impression and click measurement. For most, ad revenues are their only means of survival. Instead of sleeping, the online industry figures out how to sell online advertising value to anyone with an ad budget. PR industry helps counsel their clients’ ad dollars onto the Web—away from more traditional channels. Thus the miniscule up-tick. Everything is trial and error at this point. Thousands of the ad industry’s top brass almost literally traded offices with those in the PR field figuring out what their plan of attack should be. Despite the bust, salaries for those at the top were at an apex. No one really every knew about this.

2002: PR firms start spending more energy on their Web sites but still do their back office media relations the same old way. Reporters and editors of traditional media outlets are still selectively fielding press releases and phone calls from PR people and making editorial decisions about what they believe their readership will enjoy—the way they always had. This is and has been, largely a “publication-centric” model where the newspaper tells you what is interesting. PRNewswire and others have foreseen events to an extent and have business models in place to deal with the forthcoming changes. Smart, right? Well…maybe not. Very few people are blogging at this point. Those that are have little credibility and are seen in the same light as HAM radio operators. Mainstream media claims that blogs will most certainly go the way of the CB radio.

2003: Massive information aggregators (AOL, MSN) are still trying to land grab hoping that search engine traffic will land on their “soil” driving the prices of their online advertising inventories up as more and more people gamble their move to the Web. PR practitioners are still largely writing press releases and phone calling journalists the way they have for decades except more are using email instead of fax and a few begin to dabble with pure online release companies. Media companies begin to see incremental downward shifts in their revenues, blindly point at the Web as culprit and begin laying folks off. 70,000 media-related jobs are lost in 2002 and 2003. At this point everyone finally knows about Google. Really, for the first time, mainstream media sees clearly how embedding advertising, in any form, into Google’s search engine results yields undeniably rich and measurable impact. Thousands of new search-based companies are born. Bust? What bust?

2004: Advertisers start freaking out about where their ad dollars will have the greatest impact and start blindly moving their dollars online. Reporters and editors follow suit making their articles more Web-friendly. This means they are becoming better versed in how to write their articles so Google will pick it up and show prominence. Bloggers are quietly multiplying exponentially and start linking to news stories by something called “tagging.” Tagging is online content’s dna. It is the two or three word summation of a story. More progressive journalists begin tapping top bloggers for content. Readers start moving to the Web because tagging allows them to quench their information thirst with a fraction of the energy—essentially they begin to read blogs. Mass-amateurization collides with media consumption. But let’s face it, for the most part, a vast majority of people still do not understand what is happening. Like stem cell research, many can spell it but have no idea what the hell it means beyond what the president tells us. PR and ad agencies remain among those still in the dark for the most part. The big conglomerates are snatching up search engine optimization shops and online marketers like crazy. Media is still shifting online using Slate.com as their semaphore. Slate.com, incidentally, is not making a profit. WSJ.com, San Jose Mercury News and the New York Times have bought into the paradigm shift but it is clear their business models are predicated mostly on hunches. Google decides to start putting as much literature into their massive and growing indexing machine as humanly possible. Kindergarteners are introduced to the notion of a terabyte. The average person with access to the Web is now performing 15 Google searches on average per day. They begin supplementing their paper-version of news consumption with the online versions. Bloggers and other igniters of information creation and delivery figure out how to compile more information about any topic in one area making it more fun and productive to use the Web to learn more about anything, including up-to-the-minute news. People are raving about the quasi-blog drudgereport.com—still. CNN.com becomes the top online national news source. Chagrin—porn is still raking in billions.

2005: Now that bloggers have more access to a greater pool of information surrounding any given topic, main-stream media starts to listen to them. Remember Dan Rather and Rathergate? Thanks to a blog, if you recall. For the first time, subject matter experts begin to outflank national media writers on topics like politics (dailykoz) public relations (steverubel), advertising, sports, media, healthcare, consumer product goods, automobiles, technology, medicine, fur-trapping, mutual funds, porn, cycling, grass seed, gems, furniture and all others imaginable. People with shared interests flock together and over night build their online networked communities and like army ants, take over most topics. Old dogs who don’t like new tricks start to notice where the action is going and begin to move everything online. PR firms for the most part are still sending out the traditional press releases to their hard-fought media allies who still have jobs; while their media allies are spending more of their day reading blogs whose limelight has just flickered on.

2006: Reporters at this point are clearly paying less energy to press releases and traditional PR media relations and start using tagging-based search tools like de.licio.us, technorati.com and others to get to the heartbeat of any given topic they want to read about. While people are still addicted to their local and national media outlets both online and off, the mass of amateurs now has the full attention and credibility it demands. Anyone with a Web connection can find almost anyone anywhere in the world who’s capable of speaking about any topic imaginable. At any given second in the day, anyone can get real-time access to what the top performed searches are on Google and Yahoo inviting us, for the first time ever, into our own bloodstream. Surreal isn’t it? It gets weirder. The notion of a subject matter expert or thought leader is now more democratic. The New York Times is as powerful as Jim next door. The difference still is that more people know about the New York Times--still. Newspapers all over the world stop selling papers and start selling themselves. Both Inc. and Fast Company magazines are sold to the online financial magnate who started Morningstar for pennies on the dollar. PR firms start experimenting with blogs and podcasts both for themselves and their clients. Jeffrey Veen, one of the nation’s top bloggers, sells himself and his flagship product to Google. His product is a blog measurement tool.

2007: Every PR and Media relations player has a team of taggers and social network patrollers to make sure they have their clients’ needs covered on the Web. For the first time ever, we see an “end-user-centric” model replacing the “publication-centric” model in main-stream media. Those that truly understand the chemistry and mechanics of the Web now have a seat at the table. Natural patterns in the English language begin shifting overnight because the way Google and Blog search and measurement tools determine rank and relevance begins to impact how we as human beings communicate. Writing almost begins to take the place of talking. A majority of publications rely on instant surveys and polls to keep their pulse on what the masses want to know or learn. They do this in order to keep their ad inventories low and relevant. There is a serious convergence of Web and video and it is all moving to the small screen. Media outlets are figuring out the extent to which they condense news and all other media onto smaller devices and in smaller increments. Why? For some reason we are home less and with our devices more. Google, OnStar and satellite radio combined with geo-positioning technologies mash up and figure out how to deliver voice-activated tidbits on command. “GoogleOnStar…Wall Street Journal headlines for three minutes and top rated Ethiopian restaurant within 20 miles. Have my husband meet me there in 30 minutes. Oh... and find me a new dry cleaner and schedule a pickup for tomorrow morning at 7:00am. Record Lost, 24 and Da Ali G show and send to my phone asap.” PR and ad agencies concoct a series of embarrassing flops in an opportunistic attempt to seize more revenues and reputation.

2008: Any predictions beyond one year at this busy intersection is pure hubris.

The bottom line is simple. Shifts in all industries at the intersection of PR and the Internet are only as cataclysmic as we make them. Many aren’t prepared for this change. (However, that may be exciting for those morbidly curious types who like to see things end.) Many of the stalwarts fear the change and hope their steadfast adherence to traditional practices will be their salvation. On the other side, many of us are aware and prepared—in fact we’re excited as hell. We welcome the changes. I am lucky that the company I work with has a lot of respect for this change. They find the challenges as opportunities to re-invent and cultivate something new—a springboard keeping us youthful and awake.

As long as we, as PR practitioners, can prove that we understand impact and the ever-shifting importance that new medium mash-ups bring and we are able to measure it effectively, we can continue focusing on executing big ideas regardless of the channel. In this age of extreme sports and work hard, play hard mantras, it is only natural that prototype companies like Capstrat figure out how to go quantum; getting out in front of it and harnessing a cataclysm.

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.