Posts tagged web development


Your website’s radical new role in the social web

Aug 27th

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Graphic: Metro Denver’s website is built to shuttle people to meaningful content, wherever it might be.

While every marketer seems to be immersed in Web 2.0 these days, let’s not overlook the changing role of the organization’s website in this marketing mix. If you’re not re-thinking the role of your traditional website, you should be!

Websites began as digital receptacles for traditional print content and slowly evolved to be more interactive and useful. The social web is changing all that … radically. Today, there are thousands of places to store and promote company content, and not all of it is going to be generated by friends. That’s why a new core strategy must be to populate the social web with as much accurate and useful content as possible. In my classes, I refer to this as an organization’s “information eco-system,” and it must be systematically maintained, monitored and nurtured.

Your website is no longer just a “destination.” In this environment, the company website becomes a content engine and quarterback, efficiently directing people throughout the eco-system to the news, information and applications they need to meet their needs, wherever it might be.

In research I’ve been conducting on the use of social media among economic development organizations, I came across a terrific case study in Metro Denver. Denver has methodically populated its information eco-system with rich and meaningful content, including a top-notch blog. Search the social web, and it will inevitably lead you to content that guides you back to the website, which is organized into user-friendly buckets of information. Need to go back out to the ecosystem? Links to social media connections are right on Denver’s landing page. This is a brilliant example of putting customer needs at the forefront of strategy, execution and design.

As you hurtle onto the social web, don’t leave your website behind or your social media presence will be sub-optimized!

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Your website is NOT a strategy

Jun 30th

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My theme this week is “strategy” and I would like to examine one of the biggest strategy-related problems I encounter with clients.
Last week I was approached by a man who wanted me to help re-position his company’s ineffective website.
I asked him if he had a marketing strategy and he said, “no.” And, after telling me that he didn’t have strong data on his customer base and couldn’t name how he was differentiating his product, it was clear that he didn’t.
When I suggested that he step back and do some work on a marketing strategy BEFORE plowing money into a website, he resisted … “No,” he said, “We just want a website.”
Now I ask you – If your website isn’t working now, how will it be working any better if you don’t revise the strategy behind it?
Ladies and gentleman, your website is NOT your marketing strategy. If you can’t communicate what you do and what customer needs and wants you serve, you’re probably wasting a lot of advertising money. Every business – no matter how small – needs a marketing strategy BEFORE they have a website!
What do you think? Have you had similar experiences? What happens when a website goes live without a strategy?
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Google Wave changes the game for small business

May 29th

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There were a couple important new technology releases this week but the most significant for the small business owner is Google Wave. Why? This platform provides a powerful communication and collaboration tool you can use with internal and external stakeholders for FREE.

Google Wave brings together email, chat, photo/document sharing, and many collaborative features that would be very useful to a business on a shoestring budget. It opens the door to business channels that major companies are paying millions of dollars to achieve with expensive enterprise software solutions.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.
That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
This technology could be so far-reaching and important I’ll turn to the commentary of an industry expert. This commentary comes from industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang and his blog Internet Strategist:
  • Google Wave is about bringing together the Web 2.0 lifestyle to become a workstyle.
    Google’s apporach is significant because it will enter the workforce without having to go through IT management. This undercuts players like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP as it grows from the groundup –another groundswell like google docs and yammer.
  • This also impacts Cisco, Webex and Webex connect who is also trying to try new delivery models to the enterprise.
  • Existing smaller collaboration vendors and community platform vendors with enterprise focus will be part of the developer ecosystem and can extend their features to the Wave platform.
  • Google is pushing real time collaboration, and traditional email is asynchronous, yet don’t expect everyone to be interacting in real time, all the time.
  • This is a missed opportunity for LinkedIn who launched their platform but has not exploited as they’ve only hand selected a few partners.
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Is social media re-wiring a generation?

May 27th

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On a rainy day, I was sitting in a shopping mall people-watching. About 75% of the folks between the ages of 13 and 25 were either texting or talking on their phone as they were walking – even if they were with a group.
Being a teen is all about connecting with friends and social media is the perfect channel to do that. In fact, the average teen in America texts nearly 1,500 times a month and 15,000/month is not unheard of (that’s 500 messages per day!)
Clearly, screen-based stimulation has become the primary source of socialization and entertainment among teens and increasingly younger children. Just a few generations ago, the vast majority of a child’s time was playing with friends in the dirt, kicking a ball or playing “house” (or if you go way back, I guess they played “cave.”) What’s the impact of the “highly-wired child” in our new world?
The social media brain
An individual’s neural framework is nearly set by the time they are 15 years old. Everything a child experiences forms neural pathways, and the most-used pathways become aspects of their personality and the foundation of how they interact as adults. Before the days of screen-based entertainment (most of human history!), the strongest pathways were naturally formed by intense socialization with family members and friends, physical activity and interacting with nature in some way.
With so many children spending MOST of their time in front of keyboards and flashing screen, I began to think about this impact on their development and on society. Wouldn’t personality development in the digital age have to be fundamentally, drastically and permanently different?
A disregard for consequence
New research confirms this. A professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College (U.K.) claims social network sites risk infantilizing the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, and a shaky sense of identity.
Professor Lady Greenfield said the rapid-fire reward of video games and text messaging could be a cause of the three-fold rise in Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) over the past 10 years.
She warned against “a marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences. After all, whenever you play a computer game, you can always just play it again; everything you do is reversible. The emphasis is on the thrill of the moment, the buzz of rescuing the princess in the game. No care is given for the princess herself, for the content, or for any long-term significance, because there is none. This type of activity — a disregard for consequence — can be compared with the thrill of compulsive gambling or compulsive eating.
“The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction, Greenwood said. “So we should not underestimate the ‘pleasure’ of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people.”
A new way of relating
For teens already struggling with insecurity, social networking can provide a constant reassurance that they are listened to, recognized, and valued. That can be a good thing unless there is no balance with other life skills such as learning to interpret non-verbal behaviors, holding a conversation, and dealing with conflict when you don’t have the time to think up a witty text message.
Free, instantaneous, global communication is creating a generation who will recoil at the thought of three-dimensional conversations, whose social identity and self-esteem will be validated by flashing messages on a computer or cellphone screen. The sanitized, detached world of social media has become the norm, and will reach even younger children with new innovations that avoid live interactions.
While this sounds depressing, follow the logic through to its conclusion. Social media is not going away … quite the opposite. So in the ADD world of our future, those who grew up as digital natives of the Facebook society should have an ADVANTAGE over those who were sheltered. Can you imagine a world where an articulate, well-spoken, well-read individual is the social outcast? If you’re under 20, it’s here.
Life was so much simpler when I was playing in the dirt.
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