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.

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.

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?

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.

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.