Web Strategist Lab

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.

Today’s definition of frustration: I brought a proposal to a client, one they didn’t expect but achieved everything they wanted to achieve, using a technology they hadn’t considered before, for a cost that was dramatically different than they expected to pay (how dramatic, they were putting a proposal to ask for $50k to hire a company to build a magazine site from scratch, and my propsal costs less than $1k to use WordPress).

You’d be thrilled, wouldn’t you? Like a fairy godmother had stepped in from out of nowhere to bring you a super-cheap solution to your problem (for the record, I don’t think I look good in a tutu and magic wand)? Maybe you’d even thank them for solving their problems.

Nope.  In this case, you’d be pushed aside to allow print designers and print managers pretend to know how a web project worked, how to design for function not for look, how to plan for a steady stream of different types of content but stil have a cohesive look and feel.

And when you mention that no one on the project has more than 6 months of web design or web thinking experience, and that you have 12 years, you will be marginalized and mocked.

I’m not sure what I expected when I brought this project to the client, but I can assure you it wasn’t this.

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?

Which is why I haven’t been posting the last few weeks.

I want to thank Google for being both a pain to work with and a welcome solution-provider. One department would create a problem for us, andothe rprogrammer would just happen to have some alpha solution he or she’d been working on in their spare time that saves our bacon.

This is the new distributed workplace? Messy.

More when I can catch a break.

If you haven’t seen it, you need to:

http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-manifesto.html

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

To everyone who talks about social media without a Facebook/Twitter account, I direct your attention to rule 9.

Was all about becoming frustrated (again, seemingly for little reason) over a project I see landing in my lap that I will have control and the burden of responsibility over without actual ownership. If it fails, I did it wrong. If it suceeds, someone else will claim credit.

So in order to handle myself I completed a dozen minor tasks only to have someone tell me I should consider changing all my priorities to theirs. Which I will have to do.

But I got some amusing responses to my tweet about third-party email systems very quickly, including a vendor who noticed I mentioned their name and dm-ed me within 20 minutes.

To sum up: I dislike projects that don’t know what they are and twitted has clearly hit some sort of critical mass

Let’s talk about something we don’t like to talk about (well, maybe you do, but from my experience, it’s like talking about death in a funeral home – everyone knows it’s always a possibility, but speaking it is verboten) — messing up.

Not failure, per se. Failure feels to me like something that didn’t work from top to bottom but no one stopped the train as it barreled over the cliff. Messing up is making a mistake, trusting in the outcome, not keeping a close enough eye on something, miscommunication, dropped deadlines, forgetting a detail, passing something off to someone who can’t handle it. These things, these very everyday things, are what I think of when I think about messing up.

And I’ll start our little game by admitting up front that I have messed up. Almost all of those things in my list above I have done. I have also finished meetings before I completely understood the client’s needs and expectations. I have allowed vendors to tell me everything was going fine without asking for more details. I have been distracted by other projects and let my focus slip.

Yep. I have done those things, and not always in the distant past.

And I guarantee that I have learned from every mistake.

The only place I’ve ever seen a discussion of these kinds of issues is when Fast Company talks about Toyota. For all the success Toyota has found from openly and frankly evaluating mistakes (seemingly without spin), I have not heard much about other companies using these ideas.

The only place I’ve heard of something like that is in a doctor’s Morbidity and Mortality conference when a patient dies (a great insider’s viewpoint of an M&M is Atul Gawande’s “Complications”). The doctors get together behind closed doors (away from patients and their lawyers) and talk about things that could have been done better purely in the hopes of educating each other. It guarantees that education never stops, it forces every one to be part of the solution, because you know one day you will be the subject of everyone’s scrutiny.

At my current position, we do “post event” work. But its mostly about counting guests and talking about how to make sure there was enough fruit at the event, or how many registrants needed additional help. It’s fine to do this level of examination on the execution level, but not enough feedback or discussion as to how we conceptualized the event, how we marketed it, how we chose the event, or even how we designated participants. It’s not a failure because the event brought in the 50 people we expected it to bring in, but that expectation was a function of the event. No one said, “How do we get 1,000 people to attend an event and what would that event look like?”

Do we screw up by not asking those kinds of questions? I wonder what it would take to create those conversations on a regular basis? I wonder if we have the culture that will keep people from pointing fingers and make people hear other ideas?

In the last two or three weeks, I have been involved in focus groups for two different projects. In fact, I was in opposite roles for each group. First, I helped develop a presentation by the Diretcor for a focus group for a coming Capital Campaign. Sadly, they came to me a week before the presentation was scheduled and when I asked what the outline/goal/theme/intent/purpose (you know, the actual “stuff”), they just shrugged. So the process was one of me getting everyone to understand that a presentation, espeically one to a focus group, where you have actual questions to ask them (or at least that was the idea). One would think that it would be an obvious thing, but the rules, as always, don’t really apply here.Then, a week later, I was on the pointed end of a focus group, specifically one about a proposed new web site. I think there were maybe 8-10 people in the room, but half of them never said more than a few sentances. I’m not sure why they were there other than for political purposes (“We invited them so they could play a part… if they wanted to,” it seemed to say). While the second focus group seemed to get somewhere in a hurry, it was because three people mapped out in a few minutes what should be done, why it should be done, and then spent most of the next two hours explaining to the rest of the group that it was the right answer. Is it common for the tech people to hijack the meeting in order to sort out the issues while the other stand by and watch? (Yes, I was one of the geeks who ran away with the meeting.)

It just seems clearer than ever now that the preperation for meetings is more important that what happens at meetings. There’s been a lot of talk lately about meetings and how they are evil and suck your time and how they are filled with useless blather. And they are mostly right. Meetings beget meetings like spam in your inbox. And most of them take all the time alloted to them (whether they need to or not), and just serve the person in the room who doesn’t seem to have anything to do but hear themselves talk.

When I first got here, a lot of people commented on how fast my meetings were. I think I’ve slipped lately (as the projects I run involve mroe and more people) and I’m in danger of becoming what I hate — a guy who lives in meetings.

I’m trying to put up systemic forces to keep that from happening. For example, we have a meeting that could meet every week and have ten people (nightmare!). But I set up the system to have two groups: the five core members and a rotating set from the other five. Meetings never have more than 7 people in them, and the people I trust most are in the majority of the meetings.

If only my boss’s boss could do the same for divisional meetings…

I could write a nice narrative detailing my interaction with a mid-level manager and how she wanted a new web site for her program pretty much NOW, and how, once we built it, took three weeks to even look at it for fixes, and after giving us fixes, is only now setting up an 18-person (yikes!) meeting discussing what should be on the web page… but I will spare you. Mostly I’ll spare you because you have your own stories of people who think the cart goes before the horse and pick out wallpaper before finishing the architectural designs.As I learned a long time ago (and have had to teach many people since then), the web is in such a unique position in most firms because it is a program without a country. It does work for all divisions. As such, it is one of the few things that can reach every nook and cranny of an organization. It is one of the few ways to affect enterprise-wide change (I mean, is your financial department or purchasing program shape the way programs do things?).

Most people think, “I have a problem. I have devised a solution. Now I will create a web-version of that solution. This is what it will do. This is what it will look like. Now, let’s talk to the web guy…”

Maybe other web-people think that makes sense. Maybe they are happy to accept the assignment and do the work whether or not they see issues with the solution.

But I’m not that guy. I want to be there meeting 1 and help someone discover the solution (and how it is web-able will be discussed in turn, but by having me at the table early on, the web-solution will be obvious as it was thought about during first-level meetings).  I think the the web is a tool that invites conversations about the process. not the process of design or development, but the process the client is trying to take to the web.