"Process over progress"; "Analysis Paralysis"; "Bogged down in the details"... there are many sayings used daily in Corporate America all saying basically the same thing; "We have lost sight of the objective and our project, meeting, memo or presentation has gone way off course."
Vision statements were supposed to provide the commonality of objective needed to move a group or team toward a specific goal. Written by committee these "visions" often resemble little better than the winning entry in the "Who can use the most jargon" contest.
If the goal is to sell widgets, say that. If the goal is to provide technical assistance to customers installing a product or using a service, say that instead. In the end, in depth discussions on "how to do something" will always be more focused if business leadership can articulate very clearly what it is that you and your team are trying to do. The internet brings together disciplines across business and technology areas that all bring perspective and expertise to a team. This diverse team will be most effective if the objectives can be clearly articulated early on. If the objective is unclear and the leaders of the effort can't clarify them, then solutions multiply and things get really complicated.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Brand Matters
One of the great things about the Internet, is that there are many, many ways for your customers to make themselves heard. Even better, if you are paying attention, you can measure it. Most websites provide the ability to contact the company via email, or phone or in person. For the most part, these avenues are useful and necessary but will never tell the whole story about how your customers feel.
Blogs, Tweets, Review Sites and other channels often provide a very public forum for sharing opinions about a company or it's products. These channels can be extremely valuable if you are paying attention. Of course monitoring multiple channels of communication for any company can be overwhelming, especially as you compound the situation by targeting multiple audiences, across multiple product lines in multiple countries.
The only reasonable way to leverage all of the avenues of communication is to maintain a strong and consistent sense of brand, and the manifestation of that in the user experience. If in this case communication is about a company communicating with a customer, there needs to be only one voice (regardless of the channel) representing the company. Brand is the one persona that really matters. If you can engage your customers in one conversation, even if there are several topics, you can maintain a much better sense of your market perception than if you allow many independent disconnected conversations to represent you. Measurement against key elements of your brand identity can be applied across your channels to optimize the performance of your message regardless of how a customer chooses to receive it. The validation of the approach will be evident in the 3rd party sites, comments, reviews or tweets and how closely they resemble your internal brand message.
The easy route is to allow each channel or conversation to stand on its own, the result is a very complicated or even conflicting presentation of your company to the marketplace. The harder route is to simplify your brand message to its core elements, and then apply it across your interactions with the market. If you want your customers to truly understand your company's message, and ultimately your differentiation from your competition, you need to be consistent and clear.
Blogs, Tweets, Review Sites and other channels often provide a very public forum for sharing opinions about a company or it's products. These channels can be extremely valuable if you are paying attention. Of course monitoring multiple channels of communication for any company can be overwhelming, especially as you compound the situation by targeting multiple audiences, across multiple product lines in multiple countries.
The only reasonable way to leverage all of the avenues of communication is to maintain a strong and consistent sense of brand, and the manifestation of that in the user experience. If in this case communication is about a company communicating with a customer, there needs to be only one voice (regardless of the channel) representing the company. Brand is the one persona that really matters. If you can engage your customers in one conversation, even if there are several topics, you can maintain a much better sense of your market perception than if you allow many independent disconnected conversations to represent you. Measurement against key elements of your brand identity can be applied across your channels to optimize the performance of your message regardless of how a customer chooses to receive it. The validation of the approach will be evident in the 3rd party sites, comments, reviews or tweets and how closely they resemble your internal brand message.
The easy route is to allow each channel or conversation to stand on its own, the result is a very complicated or even conflicting presentation of your company to the marketplace. The harder route is to simplify your brand message to its core elements, and then apply it across your interactions with the market. If you want your customers to truly understand your company's message, and ultimately your differentiation from your competition, you need to be consistent and clear.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The Basic Question
If the internet is about communication, then isn't it primarily about how we interact with the audience one person at a time? While we know this intuitively, our tools and approaches often seem to interfere with that basic premise. Today's best practices in design and planning often start with the idea of a persona to prepresent a user in a particular situation. The design process then optimizes against that particular scenario.
From a company perspective this approach is logical, and can yield very usable task oriented web sites. From an audience perspective, none of us are really ever that one dimensional. For any given company we could be a customer, a partner, an investor, a job seeker, a supplier or a prospect. Similarly we might choose to walk into a store, log onto a website, call on a phone or text message a question or complaint. For each different relationship / method of contact pair, our current best practice approaches could concievably yield a unique user experience. The synthesis of these multiple targeted pathways can easily lead to a disjointed experience and message.
As many online users seek "independent" confirmation of claims made by a company, this can be compounded by impressions, and messages gleaned from non-company sponsored sites such as review sites, social media and news outlets. Using the current approaches, the more we attempt to manage across our relationships, the more confusing our overall presentation could become.
If then we really were attempting to be "user-centric" wouldnt we abandon a "push" model for segmentation, where we assume we know what a user is interested in? Why wouldn't segmentation be a "pull" model where users make their preferences known for this visit, task or overall?
From a company perspective this approach is logical, and can yield very usable task oriented web sites. From an audience perspective, none of us are really ever that one dimensional. For any given company we could be a customer, a partner, an investor, a job seeker, a supplier or a prospect. Similarly we might choose to walk into a store, log onto a website, call on a phone or text message a question or complaint. For each different relationship / method of contact pair, our current best practice approaches could concievably yield a unique user experience. The synthesis of these multiple targeted pathways can easily lead to a disjointed experience and message.
As many online users seek "independent" confirmation of claims made by a company, this can be compounded by impressions, and messages gleaned from non-company sponsored sites such as review sites, social media and news outlets. Using the current approaches, the more we attempt to manage across our relationships, the more confusing our overall presentation could become.
If then we really were attempting to be "user-centric" wouldnt we abandon a "push" model for segmentation, where we assume we know what a user is interested in? Why wouldn't segmentation be a "pull" model where users make their preferences known for this visit, task or overall?
Welcome To Complicated Is Easy
"Complicated is easy, simple is hard. "
This saying is one that has always stuck with me, as a professional and as a leader. Some of the most successful ideas in history have always seemed in hindsight to be really simple. This blog is intended to surface some ideas around the online space, it's trends and it's complexities and see if we can't find some "simplicity". So far in many ways we've already done the easy part and made it really complicated.
This saying is one that has always stuck with me, as a professional and as a leader. Some of the most successful ideas in history have always seemed in hindsight to be really simple. This blog is intended to surface some ideas around the online space, it's trends and it's complexities and see if we can't find some "simplicity". So far in many ways we've already done the easy part and made it really complicated.
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