Web Strategist Lab

Huh. So this is what happens when you treat every business like every other business (as a money machine who’s only need is growth at any cost)  and not as an idea unto itself.

From The New Republic, “Why can’t Americans make things? Two words: business school.”

A focus on financial instead of manufacturing leads to the commoditization of business itself. A well-run and well-managed company that has a crappy product and horrible service will succeed where a badly-run business selling a kill product will thrive. For example: XEROX, IBM, Digital, and every other company the Tom Peters/Jim Collins crowd talks about as being well-run vs Microsoft and the entire music industry who made money hand over fist despite having horrible management and seeming not to be able tot do anything right for years.

Just because you can take financial management models and replace the money with people doesn’t mean that’s a smart way to run a business.

From a VP of some sort:

“We’ll do that based on our  five strategic directions.”

Someone should let this VP know that moving in five directions at once is the same as going nowhere.

Yeah, I know. It’s “semantics” but I am perpetually amazed by the looseness and vagueness of language at some places. And frankly, if being clear isn’t important to the VP, it won’t be important to their employees, who will make it very unclear for their customers.

This is the same place from whence “I don’t think there’s a difference between strategy and tactics” came.

Do you know what it costs to start a national magaizne these days? Multiple million at the very least, depending on whether or not Tina Brown or Jann Wenner is on the board.  Where does that money go? Not to writers or designers (they account a tiny fraction of the cost). Maybe a little to the sales team (gotta get all that ad revenue), but that stuff can’t account for half the cost of a magazine.

I bring this up because I’m getting sick of Fast Company. Not the web site, but the magazine. What once was a glorious beacon to those work 2.0′ers who understood the weight of Tom Peter’s “The Work Matters” manifesto, one that discussed new models in working, new ideas in getting things done, and trying to cross-pollenate ideas from one industry to the other is now In Style for the laptop-and-business-class set.

Recent covers: McGee, director of Terminator. Sure, he’s got an interesting history but… shouldn’t that be on movie magazine? Skater/surfer kid Shawn White? The current issue some cleavage-bearing woman with hair bigger than Montana. Skin on the cover of Fast Company? This is the same magazine (technically) who’s August 1997 cover was simply “Brand You,” a model just getting traction (And note that the magazine really fell down hard when it stopped putting just typography on the cover and started finding pretty people for the cover… Ning anyone?).

Ask any pro in the publication world and you’ll hear the same thing over and over again: in order to cover the sunk costs of starting up and the hard costs of printing and delivering a magazine, a magazine must sell X number of copies to justify the real engine: subscribers. A magazine doesn’t make money because you buy it, it makes money because it call sell your eyeballs to someone else.

Thus, magazines are a numbers game. If you can’t keep your circulation above certain point, it almost makes more sense to mail all the subscribers a booklet of ads.

But why buy a magaine? Is it for the ads? (Maybe it is for Vogue, but not why I used to buy Wired, Spin, Business Week, Fast Company, The Industry Standard or the Red Herring.) No.

It’s the content, stupid.

You build a customer base by having good ideas, well written and well-presented. That creates fans, increases the circulation base to justify ads. (I swear, the ad model makes as much sense as owning a grocery store not to sell produce put to collect coupons.)

But everyone seems hell-bent on skipping steps 1-5 that they make nothing but crap magazines.

So here’s the solution.

Web-based magazine (duh!).  But it’s more than that. It’s turning the model around.  Instead of building a print magazine that makes money and you build a seperate website to remind people how much they love the printed magazine, make the web site first.  Create great content. Open submissions to anyone. The crowd picks the best articles (and helps copy-edit it), adds great comments and you pick the best stuff (and the comments), package it up with ads (yes, you have to re-write the ad contract to say you are buying web ads, and that the paper ads come free) and ship it to newstands and people who are willing to buy a paper-based subscription.

How does that work? Well, everyone gets the content for free (plus ads). But in the process, everyone helps build the magazine. Crowd sourcing determines the best ideas (you know, the ones that would sell best on a newstand). You only pay for stories that make it to press. Ad buyers will pay a higher web rate knowing that their ads are also in the print peice. 

The best part is this: if you want it on the newstand or a subscription, each issue is $30. An annual subscription is $200. No one would buy it?  Wait. Who buys magazines on a newstand? People in airports waiting to fly business-class. People who can afford it. People who don’t have time to read a whole community site. People who buy subscriptions to summerized business books. Execs who have more money than time. If it’s an amazing magazine that’s built a reputation for bringing new ideas to light first in a well-managed forum (and that’s exactly what the website would be), they’ll pay for it.

The best part? Costs are like nothing. Server space and a couple of drupal managers and a team of copy-editors and designers with an editorial lead. You pay per word relative to the sales, so if no one buys the first few issues, you don’t pay the writers much. But if sales go crazy, writers get paid big bucks, thus drawing more people and ideas out of the woodwork. Print costs are unit-based just like writing, and you can even say that the first year the magazine will be web-only just to get things going.

It’s already been said: Journalism isn’t dead, newspaper are. The model must change.

Help!

I’ve been mulling and talking internally (quietly) for a while about this idea I think could be a killer. But I’m not getting the interest I was expecting. So I haven’t started to try and sell it up the chain until I get more people on my level enthused about it.

So I’m looking for help on trying to find a way to pitch this project.  Allow me to explain:

We are a staid, structured web site.  I have spent two years trying to integrate social media tools into the site: load your own photos, comments on most pages, contests, games, etc. My feeling is that it doesn’t take because people don’t really think about us when it comes to web 2.0 type-stuff. We are a reference site: when you want to learn about events or to look up alums, we are your site.  Otherwise, there’s no reason to visit for any length of time.

So my solution is that instead of trying to push this rock up a hill, we change the rules: we make a seperate site that is 100% web 2.0 (details: i’m thinking drupal for a Fast Company-based thing), that doesn’t have to worry about being the “main site,” it can be a seperate thing. In fact, I’m recommending that this rogue site have no connection to our “main site.”

The site would be about agregating content form all over, regardless of the politics (in our position, we have to be very sensitive to our place on campus), regardless of source, to have controversial conversations, to be more anonymous, to be more of itself.

Push back comes in the form of “Why wouldn’t we want ‘credit’ for building this site?” and “Why does it have to be unconnected to the main site?” And I’m just having a heck of a time convincing people that this makes sense.  I’m guessing it’s because I’m too close to things that I’m not shaping the message properly, so I’m looking for ideas.  Even ideas about other sites/companies who have been able to make seperate fan sites like this would be helpful.

So I’m asking.  Help?

Seth Godin asks the question: If you started to think of your customers as members, how would things change?

I think the goal was to make people think about not making “the sale” and more about how to get people involved with you and be with you along for the ride.

I fin it amusing, because I work for an org that has members, not customers. And I would love for us to think, sometimes, more about them as customers and not as members.  In our world, this is how I see it:

Members are “engaged” (our second metric alongside with revenue that we measure on a religious basis), but we measure engagement as someone who contacts us on some level once in the last five years. For example, if they write us a letter, if they sign up for a newsletter, if they travel with us once in the last five years, they are “engaged.” If they do X number of things in the last five years, they are “highly engaged.”

On the downside, our members are taken for granted.  We send them emails and a quarterly magazine and that’s that. We assume once they are “engaged” (read the definition above and decide exactly how engaged they really are), we move on to the next thing. We don’t have products to sell, we have memberships to sell. Once they are a member, we don’t do much with them except send them messages about other events or programs with think they might be interested in (based on location and age, usually).

This stems from the idea that they are members because of our connection to the university. They aren’t really members because of us (for the most part), but because we explain that we are the gateway to the university. Thus, we don’t sell ourselves and what we do, we sell ourselves as a kind of middleman to the university. Once they are members, we forget about them (we just put them in the queue for all the stuff we generate).

I’d love to talk about them as customers. If we thought about them more, more often, thought about what their needs were, what their needs are going to be, we’d be better positioned to help them and make them love us, which is the goal, right?

A year ago, I went to Brandworks Univeristy (if we had the resources this year, I’d go again as it was the best conference I’ve been to in a while).  Excellent.

I was wandering through my notes on a lazy Friday afternoon and came across something I wrote down about who I was and what I did.

“Through me, you will have the freedom to become more yourself.”

I don’t build websites anymore. I wont build an ad for you.  I don’t have a social media program I’m going to sell you to install on your server.  But through a program of seeing who you are and what you do and who you are trying to attract, I can make the minor adjustments that pay off huge dividends.

I don’t change you. I won’t tell Microsoft to get in the airline business or Kraft to get into massage business.  But I take the essence of who you are and make it 10% better. 25% better. 100% better. I focus you, I put you in front of the right people and amazing things happen.

Which is cool, but it makes for a tough pitch. What I sell sounds like magic. It sounds a little crazy, like I’m contemplating my navel in saffron robes.  

I’m a fixer, I guess.  I just wish I had a name for what I did.  Any thoughts?

Semi-related, Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor is like the workbook for Seth Godin’s Tribes.  If I could force everyone at work to read them, I’d spend less time pushing a rock up a hill.

Edward de Bono (he’s a well-quoted thinker about thinking, if you can say that) says that our first instict is to shy away from competition. If you’re a restaurant and another restaurant opens up across the street, we feel the dread of competition.

We worry that the new place will cut our customer base in half because suddenly people have a choice that didn’t exist before.

deBono debunks it by saying that the second restaurant will make people think of your area as a restaurant district, bringing people to the area to make their decision about where to eat once they get here. You’ve increased the marketplace by bringing more people to your industry. Even if you market share drops, you total number of customer will increase.

Why? Because youa re shifting the position of the decision. If people came to your restaurant, they had to make the decision to eat there probably before they got in the car. If there’s 3 or more restuarants in the area, people will show up and decide in place.

What’s the difference? If you force people to decide before they get in the car, you are competing against every restaurant in town, even if you don’t see that competition. As a member of the restaurant district, the decision can be made closer to (your) home. Your localized marketing efforts will have more payoff once you get people close to your store. And localized marketing is cheaper than city-wide or region-wide marketing. It’s better targeted and will generate more returns.

A new trend has popped up on my side of the world in terms of web strategy.  Clients aren’t interested in joining the conversation online via social media if they can’t “get credit” for being there.

I work under the assumption that users want great content first.  The best way to get your message out to people is by bundling it with other content you know they want.  That’s how commercials worked: you bundle your message about a great new fabric softener in between bits of “Friends.”

You build a channel people like, that they know is full of good stuff (including your stuff) and they will read ravenously. If you sent them your brochure by itself, do you really think anyone will read it? Let alone read it ravenously? 

For example, maybe a organization with rabid fans all around the world shouldn’t have a Twitter account based on their mascot that grabs news and other information from around the web (including inserting stories about and for the organiation itself).  They don’t see the value in creating a channel of data that contains information that users want because the organization doesn’t get credit for delivering it to them. The users won’t know that the users should be sending the organization patronage (via memberships) becasue the users don’t know (or care) that the great information they get is coming from the organization.

How about you build a community site based on something related to what you do? A place where all the rabid fans can talk about you (let’s pretend that users actually want to talk about you, because in this case, they do) in a free and open way. You want to build a Tribe (see: Seth Godin) and let people become more enthusiastic about something.

In that case, what happens if throwing your organization’s logo all over everything dampens (or really destroys) the conversation? What if your car community is run by Ford (for example)? Sure, you can talk about your Audi, but the conversation is going to talk about Mustags, not A4s. And if Ford is the clear owner/maintainer of the site, would you assume that criticisms about recent models would be left to flourish or pushed to the side? And if conversation isn’t free and open, then who the heck is talking on this site? No one.

But if that’s the case, why still do it? Why not create the site anonymously and let the conversation happen, allowing for and interjecting great (true, no astroturfing) stories about Ford (and GM, and Mini, and Hyndai and Lotus, et al) into the mix? Yes, Ford is no longer the only one talked about, and yes some people may say some disparaging things, but so what? They’re already having these conversations on forums and Twitter and Facebook without you, so stop pretending that they don’t happen and be part of them.

Why do organizations feel the need to get credit for having done these things? Isn’t it enough that you are growing a conversation around you organically (read: more useful and valuable) that you can harness? Isn’t it enough to have rabid fans you can talk to without having to hit them over the head that you are being paid to do this?

You have a plant in your office. It’s a gift from your mom and you keep it on your desk.  It is “yours.” If people want to see the plant, they have to come in to your office to see it. But that plant will never get bigger than this because it’s inside in a pot. 

What happens if you move it outside and plant it in the groud? It gets bigger.  Much bigger. But its no longer yours.

Why is everyone obsessed with getting credit?

Maybe I’m just from a Smiths-loving generation that rewards self-doubt and angst, but I had a great idea last week and it’s kind of a weird feeling.

Most of my good ideas work. They aren’t bolts of genius out of the blue, but a feeling that comes from years of doing this.  They’ve been “I’ve worked with wood all my life to I know how to use this piece of wood” crafts-level kind of good ideas.

But last week, we were in a hole.  We were converting 36,000 email accounts from an old HORDE-based system to a Gmail-based one.  Our users are not always the most tech-savvy, so there was a lot of concern that switching from one system to another would be a support nightmare, along with looking like we didn’t care enough about the user when we switched.  A technical issue popped up and we dealt with it, but in so doing, it caused us to stop and talk seriously about delaying the launch.  We did our pros and cons lists of all the different options available but the process of talking it all out stopped marketing efforts because we might delay.  It felt like runnning, hesitating for a step and not being able to break back into a run.

But there, in the middle of things, I had the idea to not delay the launch, but to keep the systems running concurrently for a month.  The idea solved a lot of problems, top among which was that people wouldn’t panic if they knew they could access their email for an entire month in the old system. It would let us keep out launch date, decrease customer service needs to something very managable, and look like we were trying to put the customer first.

The more I explained it to people, the more I knew this was a silver-bullet solution perfect for what we wanted to accomplish. And it felt a little weird to feel proud of it (it’s my job to manage these things, right?). I was also feeling weird that I assumed that no one would know that it was a hell of an idea (though obvious in hindsight) and that it was mine.

But today, my boss mentioned in passing that it was a heck of a solution, so there you go.

It it feels good that I was able to pull all this off.

Tomorrow or the next day, I want to do a “Give It Away” about a plan to build a rogue site for work, if that appeals to anyone.

I don’t have an answer, but I was wondering if a strategy is a function of an adversarial relationship.  Pepsi’s strategy: Beat Coke.

Can you have a strategy in a vacuum without an antagonist? Or is it enough to simply “succeed” by however you define success?