Tagged with 'strategy'

Although it’s gone by many names and through many iterations, the practice of content strategy has been around for over a decade. However, content strategist Kristina Halvorson would argue that it’s just beginning to come into its own, both as an essential component of a usable, lasting website, and as a process and strategy in its own right.

The importance of content is often underplayed, overlooked, or seen as something to work around, and a result is often disorganized and lacking, dragging down a potentially impressive site. Drawing on a wealth of personal experience, pioneers in the content strategy movement, and even Pixar’s touching eco-dystopia Wall-E, Kristina spoke with clarity, passion, and humor, outlining content’s frequent role in website creation, how it got pigeonholed there, and what we can do to make sure what’s actually on a website isn’t something shoved between 11th-hour design tweaks and launch. The CEO of Brain Traffic, a Minneapolis-based team of content strategy consultants, she believes in content strategy’s power to benefit user, company, and the Internet as a whole. Click “Read the rest of this entry” to see the video.
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The new Internet flavor of the month has arrived in the form of Twitter and law firms are going through their ritual hand-wringing about creating social media policies. “OMG! Someone might utter a legal opinion!” Social media “experts” and “gurus” are popping up like our springtime dandelions and everyone is wildly cribbing social media policy from what were heretofore internal memos at IBM or the US Air Force.

Your Policy: Duct tape your mouth

I have nothing constructive to add to the policy discussion because my policy recommendation would probably be to duct tape your mouth so you couldn’t speak and break all your fingers so you couldn’t type. Like I said, nothing constructive to add. On the other hand, perhaps law firms (and, ya know, every other business for that matter) needs some social media strategy.

Your Strategy: Give this some thought

Policy makers! Relax. Sit back and think strategically about social media for just a minute. Although we seem to be at some kind of tipping point for social media, it isn’t all that new. So, duh, others have been thinking strategically about this for a while. And here’s some of the thinking that I’ve picked up along the way. Yeah, I’ve cribbed it from others too. Except, because I’m a trendy Web 2.0 guy, I call it crowdsourcing. Start here. Then build on it:

Why bother with social media?
Eight years ago I was asking law firms why they wanted to build a website. They didn’t give me good answers. And many built (and still do) pretty crummy non-strategic websites. But very pretty – with clean design and intuitive navigation to nothing in particular. Now you have a second chance to not blow it. Answer this question or go home: Why would you spend one nickel on social media?

What are your targeted objectives?
I see you cowering in the corner without answers. I’m going to make this an easy multiple choice question. Select from these options (It is ok to imagine your own)

• Social media gives us an opportunity to be part of a community where there is a dialog. We might actually learn something about our market if we listen to the conversation that we are involved in.
• We want to establish our authority and promote our brand. By making valuable contributions to a conversation, we will become recognized in the community for our knowledge and authority
• By planting our flag all over the internet we increase the likelihood that people will follow links back to our website where they can learn even more about our deep expertise and our 150 year history.

Who will implement your strategy?
Didn’t think about that did you? Most law firms are renowned for hiring one marketing person for every 10,000 attorneys. Yet now you want to actually conduct conversations online? Just who do you think is going to do that? Your web developer? The associates you just furloughed? You better think through skill sets and resources before you make this leap. Seriously, bro.

What are your tactical tools?
Your LinkedIn presence is hit or miss. Your blogs are siloed in a couple practice areas if they exist at all. You don’t Tweet. You have nothing on YouTube. Nor Flickr. So exactly how do you plan to go social? You want a website with social media capabilities? What the heck does that mean?

What are your metrics?
I know metrics is a dirty word. You haven’t yet figured out how to measure your website performance. And now you’re diving into yet another area of Internet endeavor. And you don’t know how to measure this either. So then this is what we would call a faith-based initiative?

Sorry to ask the tough questions. Maybe that’s why you’re thinking about social media policy. It’s the easy part. The strategy part is just so darn scary. What do you think?

What about using a wiki as a war room, a single location for strategic action-packed activity surrounding a specific set of goals? Wikis have lots of great features that make it an ideal collaborative web space. We’re not the first to think of this either – this article from a wiki about using wikis for Project Management discusses Building a Virtual War Room. But Duo has an excellent example of using an internal wiki page as a command center, a war room of sorts.

Duo uses its internal wiki to document and collaborate on mission-critical projects, like Chicago Park District registration. When the throughput gets intense, the Duo Consulting team uses an internal wiki as a war room for troubleshooting a web application that contains underlying SQL queries to help Chicagoans register for park department offerings. The wiki becomes a strategic command center, a virtual room from which information is gathered and decisions are made. With a slogan for Chicago Parks like “Come out and play” a war room metaphor seems opposite to the end game, but the team must attempt fully concentrated efforts and strategic decision making from one location. There are a couple of reasons why the wiki is so useful:

• there are so many people involved, with so many time-critical tasks and dependencies, that one central location that shows the progress prior to registration helps keep the team on track as a team
• during registration itself, there are so many people monitoring so many different aspects of the application all at once that they need one central location to store that information, as well as knowing who is responsible for following up on any immediate issues
• the wiki engine itself does an awesome job of syntax highlighting and storing SQL queries
• the team can use the wiki as a task list, crossing off items as they’re done.

A specific scenario as an example: one team member might log an issue where a patron can’t register for a particular class. The site is giving the user conflicting information about whether the class is sold out already or not. Another team member might throw up the raw database SQL for that class display on the wiki, and a third team mate might closely analyze that SQL for clues as to what the underlying issue really is – all within minutes, because it’s so important for people to be able to register for these programs as quickly as possible. It’s like the wiki page is the heads-up display in the war room.

Kelly Tetterton, director of development at Duo says, “In some ways, I would imagine working on Chicago Parks Department registration is not entirely dissimilar from working at the air traffic control tower at O’Hare – it feels like that kind of high-pressure, high-intensity experience.”

I’d say that wiki updates give more immediate answers to questions than emailing and waiting for a reply. Wikis make all decisions known to all who monitor the pages. Wikis let you display mission-critical information in a heads-up display or you can print if you happen to like your clipboard or three-ring binder. Wiki’s history pages give you the path to the decision made, and wiki discussion pages can contain lively back and forth while the main page maintains the “truth” decision for the time being.

Let’s hear some war stories – how are you using internal wikis as your strategic project war room?

We are often asked two variations of the question, “How long is my website relevant.” Both have the same answer.

The first variant is, “Our site is x years old, is it time to redesign it?” The other variant is, “How long should we expect our new site to last.” The answer is “it depends.” But let me try to offer a better response.

First, we identify an economic life of a website. This is a balance sheet issue. Few actually record the website as an asset, but it is not unreasonable to assume it to be fully depreciated after 5 years. Some choose 3 years. Whatever you choose for business reasons does not necessarily translate to the useful life of the resource and it certainly doesn’t answer the question as to whether the site is still relevant or if the technology still works just fine. But it is the best way to establish a life of your site while also managing its replacement cost.

We believe the non-economic variables that determine the life of your old website or newly launched one are strategy, message, technology and look & feel.

Strategy is simply the manner in which you satisfy your business objectives online. The brief historic nickel tour of website strategy migration starts with a) establishing an online presence (the brochure-ware model) (1993 – 1999), b) becoming interactive (2000 – 2004), c) Web 2.0, social media and syndicated content (2005 – ?), d) semantic web (200X – ?).

Message is the way you tell your story. In its simplest form, the message is something as simple as “recently merged/acquired/out of business” which tends to shorten a website life considerably .  More commonly, the message is the outcome of an internal business review which re-prioritizes your services, service delivery and restates your unique value proposition. When the website is sufficiently out of line with the message, continual patching of the site may not produce a desirable outcome and re-imagining the site is called for.

Technology is merely an enabler of strategy. So technology is rarely the game ending culprit. Unlike our analog TV’s which the government is forcing us to abandon for new technology, websites built a decade ago will operate just as well (or poorly) as they did when launched. It’s when your strategy puts demands on your website technology that something’s got to give. Although it may look like the technology failed, in truth, look to your migrating strategy to determine the life of your technology.

And finally there’s the look and feel. Sometimes merely updating the accessories can do as much for a website as it does for the look of an old suit. While it is often the excuse for a new website, it is rarely the real driver.

Should you put a link to LinkedIn on a biography page of a law firm website? That was the question posed recently on the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) listserv by Gail Lamarche Director of Marketing at Henderson, Franklin, Starnes & Holt.

I opined that, for professional services firms such as this law firm, the attorney biography page is the best thing we have as a “money page” on the website. Therefore, driving visitors away from the money page was, strategically, a bad idea. Moreover, it seemed if there were really content on LinkedIn that was valuable to the site visitor, then that information should be on the bio page. And if it wasn’t there, the bio page was somehow deficient.

Smug I was in the righteousness of my response. But I got an earful of dissent from LMA listserv contributors. The arguments are worthy of consideration:

Jayne Navarre, LawGravity, presented these points persuasively:

• Branding – The LinkeIn link is like a hip badge of Web 2.0 awareness
• Connections – LinkedIn provides a transparent view to an attorney’s connections, arguably a value to any prospective client
• Authoritative – Access to the LinkedIn Questions & Answers provides additional proof of the attorney’s authority

Heather Milligan, Director of Marketing at Barger Wolen emphasized that LinkedIn:

• Human – helps make the attorney “dynamic, human, liked”( in case we have any residual concerns about their humanity) and helps the attorney pass the “known, liked & trusted” test of prospective clients.
• Dimensional – And in rebuttal to my “bio is deficient” comment, Heather notes that to maintain a certain appearance consistent with other bios and the overall website, “the firm bio is controlled for content, style, etc….(while) LinkedIn is the perfect place where an attorney can bring together their outside interests and professional careers, making them more human and likeable.
• Connections – Perhaps the most valuable feature, LinkedIn is fundamentally a connecting tool that might serendipitously reveal a third party connection to the site visitor which presents all kinds of opportunity for real introduction.

It’s not a slam dunk either way. The answer to Gail’s original question seems to be, “It depends.” The circumstances dictate the strategy. I’ll give it a nod of possibility and something worth trying.  Yes, I know, “first I was against it, now I’m for it.” Thanks to the enlightenment of my marketing peers.

But I’ll have this last (never!) word.  Think doubly hard about sending your site visitor from the most valuable conversion page of  your site to an information wasteland. Don’t do it unless the LinkedIn profile to which you are sending visitors:

• provides a rich set of business connections
• demonstrates some effort to contribute authoritatively to the online Q&A discourse
• otherwise expands on the website attorney bio page
• (if possible) provides a path back

And whatever you do, measure the results. Professionals keep score.

Now you can link away to my LinkedIn profile.