Web Strategist Lab

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?

Is it strange that two recent posts have drawn “Sorry about that! Contact us and we’ll help you with… whatever” -type comments.

I don’t post to be a complaint board and generate responses from these people, I do it to explain what they might be doing wrong.  I’d hope they spend as much energy thinking about their web sites and strategy as they do hunting for complaints online trying to address them. An ounce of prevention and all that.

http://www.mohawkpaper.com/

I thought we’d all learned our lessosn in 2001: cool/sweet/hot/attractive flash interfaces are not with the money spent on them.  You know who this impresses? People who don’t buy paper.

This isn’t a technical failure as much as it is a marketing one. 

Let’s start by trying to look at paper. Well, if I don’t already know the name of the type of paper, you’re starting at a loss.  Let’s click on the “Paper Selection Process” and I can select the shade, grade, finish, weight of the paper.  But then things get weird. It starts to put crosses into boxes for “Windpower” without me asking for it. Does that mean you are elminating Windpower from my options or that you only have Windpower? And what the hell is Windpower, anyway?  Once you’ve blindly selected some things that sound good, you are presented with a grid of… something.  Paper types? Brands? Clicking on them shows me 50-word desciptions of the paper (note to masochist copy-writers: try and explain the differences between two papers with words that anyone can understand. Can’t be done). No way for me to buy paper, even if I liked what I see… except I have nothing to see.  No paper samples or pictures. The only image is the cover of a brochure which is clickable but doesn’t actually do anything when clicked. One of them says “Null” at the top so… maybe they don’t make that paper anymore? Then why display it?

Flash windows on top of flash windows make reading things or moving around impossible. More than once I landed on… a vast field of gray with nothing on it. Which was fine because this was the fifth browser window Mohawk opened for me in five minutes and I’m thrilled to get rid of it, too.

I’m lost.  Let’s start over.

Paper selection, try some things, click on the “Find Paper” button I didn’t see before. Now I get “results” but I’m not sure what results you were giving me before. I see six different Cool White opens of paper.  If I put my cursor over one of the options, I get a  .5″x.5″ square of scanned paper to show me what this paper looks like. It was scanned with the contrast turned up high so I can see how much texture the paper has, but in so doing, I wouldn’t want to buy this paper. I have no idea what these papers actually look , but what does it matter when they are all Cool White? 

(Note: An email sent one week ago to info@mohawkpaper.com asking if a certain brand itpaper was still made there got no responce. Don’t bother publishing your email address if you aren’t going to bother answering emails.)

This is a site that’s supposed to market “superior runability” to printers. Well, they get sample books and order through local distributors, so they don’t actually need this web site.  Congrats! You’ve built a website for people who don’t need a website.

What should Mohawk have done? Well, pick an audience, for one. Let’s say you want to focus on selling your slightly-cooler-than-your-standard-copy-paper (why? Well, because its impossible to compete against all the other paper companies on the basis that your white copy paper isn’t exactly the same as everyone else’s copy paper, so you might as well differentiate your products). Who’s gonna buy it? Well, lots of people. People who want to print their letters and correspondence on paper that’s cooler than “Parchment White” but isn’t covered with ladybugs and sunflowers (see: scrapbooks stores).

Who is that, you ask? How about people who are looking for a job and would like to stand out? Hmm… does that sound like a market to serve? Can you already picture the ads where you help someone pick a superior paper with some clout and style, making them stand out from the pack of resume jockeys who all went to Staples for Parchment White?  If you can’t you should get out of the marketing game.

Congrats! You’ve just created a new market segment and are currently the only people talking to them: start printing your money.

Building a site with too much money to the wrong audience was a lesson I thought we all learned years ago.  I guess the paper industry hasn’t been keeping up.

Alumni Travel is a subset of the travel business that deals primarily with groups of people from the same collegic background.

I wish I knew how alumni travel started. Like the first guy to eat an oyster, it doesn’t seem obvious: why would 10-50 people from the same school (different backgrounds, different ages, different travel wants, etc) get lumped together. Often alumni travel groups get lumped in with other alumni groups (competing schools) or just non-alumni travellers. That trip you took to Paris through a travel agency had a bunch of Gophers or Sooners or Ducks along for the ride. They didnt know each other from Adam and aside from where they bought their ticket, you wouldn’t have any clue they were alumni travellers.

Travel companies build trips. They say, “We’re going from Chicago to Europe. We’ll put together airfare, a tour bus, hotels at each stop, a few meals, and the occasional feature, package it up with a little overhead to pay for the tour manager and a little on the top for the company and sell them to whomever.” Travel agents around the world try and sell that trip to people who come up and say, “Do you have a trip from Chicago to Europe where the details are handled for me? Yes? Do you have a brochure I can look at? Great, sold.”

Alumni associations are acting like travel agents in this instance. They send brochures (taken from the travel company with an alumni association logo slapped on) to alumni who have stated a preference for European travel and hope to sign them up in a bundle. The price is usually the same as registering through a travel agent, though an alumni travel agent will have a more limited number of trips to sell than a travel agent.

The value to the alumni association is that they get a percentage of the sale, and if enough travel pakages are sold, free trips are thrown in. Commonly, these free trips are given to management or university faculty and staff the alumni association is trying to curry favor with. The person taking the free trip is to act as an alumni travel liason, helping the alumni travellers however they can, and bringing issues up to the tour manager. The make sure that the alumni needs are met. While this seems like extra value that the alumni association is providing the alumni travellers, the tour managers usually do the heavy lifting: the alumni tour helper-person is there to make the alumni traveller feel good.

So how in the world does an alumni association sell a trip?  The cost is the same but the selection is less. Alumni associations add some value in sending an extra person, but that seems negligible.  The reason why alumni travel in these groups thorugh alumni associations is because of the connection they feel to the university. Alumni feel that no matter when you graduated, you went through the same things as every other graduate, and thus you have a common groud. On a more base level, it helps travellers feel like they won’t be travelling with the riff-raff, that these are people who went to the same school, thus have similar beliefs, though in practice, this isn’t at all the case.

So how does an alumni travel program grow? Here’s what I would propose:

1) The Web 2.0 Fairy Dust: Social Network. Some white label social network will be fine (Ning, etc), so long as it can be admin-ed by a 10-year-old and has the ability to add events. Nothing fancy, nothing crazy, no need to connect it to Facebook or authenticate it to your alumni database. It has to be a stand-along site, with a seperate domain and seperate name. Yes, stick the alumni association logo all over it to show it’s a legit site, but don’t feel like it has to have the exact same look and feel (trust me, this is a plus: alumni associations have to build sites that are all things to all people, making them examples of decision-by-compromise —  a stand-alone site will be able to specialize and focus). Let travellers set up their own regsitration and look around.

2) Don’t Be Lazy. Alumni travel departments are spread thin, so they slap logos on other people’s brochures and copy the text to the web sites.  If they get the time, they add postage stamp-sized photos. They do a great job making Paris, Istanbul, Dubai and London look like Akron. It’s a miracle someone plunks down $3,000 for these trips with this kind of info. Every trip needs to be re-written. Take the text and re-write it to focus on what the alumni will get. Focus on the destination, yes, but what the alumni will experience and with whom (basic differentiation). Trips are spent trapped in boats and busses with strangers — make alumni feel like these are people they’d want to be trapped with.

3) Get Social. Add upcoming trips as events.  The site should allow people to express interest in the trip, ask for a brochure, as well as show who else is interested in the trip (popular trips breed interest). Encourage previous travellers to upload photos and tell their stories (10% discount for the best photo every month or a free t-shirt or a free poster-print of the photo). You want the crappy snap-shots someone took with their $150 2-megapixel Panascony camera becaus eit looks more real. You want people who talk about the funny stories of travelling (even if, and especially if they are bad stories: travel is about the experience) and what they did.  Not just a paragraph of “I loved it. I would do it again and again. It was better than Cats.” You need real stories. Print out business cards with the URL and remind travellers to stop by the computer in the hotel lobby to post their day’s experiences.  The system should encourge them to send their diaries and photos to friends and families through the system. Encourage them to get together and talk about the trip ad which trip they want to go on next. Let them be advisors to future travellers on what to expect, what to pack and when to do.  Let new prospective travellers ask questions.

4) Document Like A Freakin’ Pro. For most trips, the alumni travel department shouldn’t give trips away to staff and faculty, they should go to professional photgraphers, journalists, journellers, poets, artists, writers and reporters. What you want isn’t a fleshed-out itinerary of stops and sights, but a capturing of the feeling of the new. When you are thinking about spending $4,000 (per person) on a trip to the Middle East, wouldn’t you like to read about the person before who stood in the footsteps of Jesus and Mohammad? The photo of local kids playing? The poem about the Mona Lisa? The stories of the travellers themselves, why they chose to travel to Italy/Panama/Moscow/Antactica? The pictures of travellers on a Japanese bullet train or seeing the remains of the Berlin Wall for the first time? The movie of a walkthrough of Notre Dame with a voiceover that’s a little more than “This church is pretty?”

Travel is about experience. If your prospective traveller can’t put themselves in the picture orthe story or the movie, they aren’t pulling out their checkbooks. If they don’t feel emotion about the re-telling of how the last time a traveller was in this place, they were wearing camo and carrying a gun. If you can’t document the trips for sale to the next people, you are commoditized to the point of non-existance. Even if your next trip is to Norway and you have no Nroway pictures and stories, people visiting your site will see the experiences of past travellers and be able to extrapolate.

5) Tell a Friend Program. If one traveller comes back and tells their friends, and one of them books with you, there needs to be an incentive. It doesn’t matter what, but the first traveller has to know that their story is wanted and that it helps the organization and the business and that it is appreciated. If a discount is applied, let them apply it to the trip they make with that friend. Share share share.