Web Strategist Lab

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.

Okay, so in the midst of my Seth Godification (I think I’ve read 4 or 5 of his books this week), I’ve realized that if I want to really get where I want to get and be who I want to be, I can’t wait for someone to swing by with the big Ed McMahon-Sized check and a job offer to be a web strategist.  I gotta be it and just do it.

So I am going to kick-start off a series of posts (I hope — blogs are the refuge of the “good idea without follow-through” crowd sometimes) where I take a project, program, site, business or model and say what I would do with it.  Is this back-seat strategizing? Yes. But the point is that the best solutions don’t come from one source (i.e. “Let’s sprinkle a little Web 2.0 dust on it!” or “Let’s make it open source!”), but from a system change. One change works because it is supposed by other changes.

My first one is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: alumni travel, which is actually a bit more interesting that it’s title suggests.

Not to dismiss the combined genius of Tom Peters and Seth Godin, et al, but I question the value of using Personal Branding as a solution to current problems. Specifically, if you’re unemployed, enhancing your personal branding is the way to get a job.

Which sounds great. Give yourself a logo and buy bobtheaccountant.com with a blog and a Twitter account and you’re all set. The offers will come rolling in as people looking for an accountant will beg to hire you. As if you are different from 1,000 accountants in the area who are also quite good at what they do.

Personal branding only works if we treat ourselves like a professional service firm. It requires multiple contracts. It requires that we sell ourselves like goods in the marketplace (Buy Bob! Now with enhanced stain-fighting power!), which isn’t to say that a job hunt isn’t exactly like that. But it’s the difference is that a job hunt requires that we end up with one customer. Personal branding is predicated on mutiple customers.

Pitching yourself to one client and pitching yourself to multiple clients are two very different things. To one client, you need to show you can meet their specific needs.  To multiple clients, you end up trying to be all things to all people.

And let’s not get into the idea that office managers, customer service reps, wait staff, line cooks, web assistants, event staff, interns, SQL developers, technical support, managers or the like can bill themselves as “stars” that can be flipped to the next level.  That creative solution that the SQL developer came up with isn’t unique enough to justify a white paper, but was exactly what the organization needed right then, making him or her a hero for 20 minutes.

Can we all be stars? How many marketing stars can the marketing world hold before we go blind from the light?

Being good at something specific, something sellable and marketable, marketed to a specific customer, is how most people will get jobs, not just in the past, and in the present, but in the future.  For all the Fortune 500 companies looking to hire the rock stars of HR, there are all the Fortune 1,000,000 who need someone is qualified and competant and easy to get along with to get the job done.

Dear Staples and Office Depot,

Is the only thing that seperates you two the color scheme? It can’t be your level of service (bad to the level of almost non-existant) or your selection (identical), so I have to assume it’s your color scheme… and maybe the ad agency who charges for the idea of the “easy” button.  But really, you are the same.

They have the same pens. They have the same furniture. They have the same post-it notes in the same bright colors in the same volumes (I read somewhere that 3M has ten thousand SKUs for post-its. Where are they selling them?). The same labels from the same manufacturers.

Looking for resume paper? They have five kinds. The same five kinds. The same brands. The same corresponding envelopes. Roughly the same prices.  Ask the copy shop clerk if they can order paper for you (You know, something that’s a little nicer than “WHITE” or “OFF-WHITE”) and they look at you funny.  Why would anyone want a nice, high-end paper with an ounce of creativity or interest (without turning to the “lady bug and sunflowers” papers of the scrapbooking store) when you could get WHITE? Or CREAM. 

They are the same store. 

And when they are the same store, is it any surprise that one can’t get a leg up on the other?

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.

Someone passed along a book on copyrighting theysaid was like the “Little Red Book” on marketing.  Claude C. Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising (read the full copy for free).  

Actually, they didn’t call it the Little Red Book, but when I read it, it reads like The Book of Five Rings, short koan-like statements that sound like one thing but mean another.

Of course, when I read it, I can’t help but think of Dwight Schrute’s speech to salespeople:

(I love the way this one is edited)