Digital Strategist

I wrote something similar a few months back, but I just loved this image. I have no idea where it came from (if it’s yours, please let me know!). It was emailed to me. For everyone that thinks Facebook is free:

I’ve been doing digital strategy for a long time now (over 15 years!). I seem to have found a pretty good niche recently, specializing in digital strategy for the Canadian financial services industry. I’ve been doing this long enough now that I feel confident to call myself an expert. However, it wasn’t until recently that I got an inkling of what it means to be an expert in a particular field.

Then I stumbled across this excellent post from Eric Barker at Barking Up The Wrong Tree. The line that tweaked with me was:

…novices sought and responded to positive feedback, and experts sought and responded to negative feedback…

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have an ego as big as the next person’s (well… maybe a little bigger). I still like it when I’ve been told that something I’ve done has been helpful / useful / profitable . However, I get more juice from someone teaching me something or guiding my thinking into a direction I haven’t been. I’d like to say I like getting pulled out of my comfort zone, but like most people I get that little feeling in my stomach that resists the move initially. But I’ve gotten to where I am because I’ve been able to take the chance to do something I’ve never done before and figure out how to do it.

Of course, it reminds me of a post I saw recently on Joey deVilla’s Accordion Guy blog:

I recently read a great post by amazing folks at Digital Tonto talking about the 3 fundamental laws of digital technology and a 4th that has nothing to do with technology. The laws are:

1. Kryder’s law which states that storage capacity doubles every year

2. Moore’s law which states that processor speed doubles every 18-24 months

3. Nielsen’s law which states that bandwidth will double every 2 years (in practice, longer)

The fourth law is what they call the Caveman Law. This article doesn’t have a great explanation of it, but in my opinion, it states that no matter how big or powerful the technology is, if it can’t fullfil a person’s primitive desires, it’s useless.

The article goes on to eulogize Steve Jobs, but this is one of the few I agree with. Apple rarely talks about the first three laws. When they launch a product, you don’t often see specs on processor speed or storage. It’s all about how it fulfills your desires. Apple did a lot of things right, but this is probably the most important.

I’ve recently started using the WPTouch theme for my blog. If you haven’t seen my blog on your smartphone, please check it out using your mobile browser. It’s pretty amazing and almost zero configuration!

At my day job, one of the questions I get asked quite often is “How do I get my site to the front page of Google?” I usually have the same answer and it’s not one that everyone likes to hear.

“Write great content… regularly and consistently”

For the most part, it really is that ‘simple’. SEO techniques will only get you so far if you don’t have good, current content.

… Which is why when I came across this Salt and Pepper post from Chris Brogan, it really struck a chord with me:

Executing cleanly on simple efforts is far more valuable than pulling off something clever that gets you attention briefly, but has no lasting change.

Much of what I do is actually quite simple. It just stems from years of experience and learning from my (many, many) mistakes. What separates the wheat from the chaff in my line of work is this: The good ones can take something that looks complex and turn it into a series of simple steps. Or as Chris puts it:

And truly, if you want to know just one more secret, I’ll share it: complex is usually just a lot of simple things played out in a smart sequence.

Steven van Belleghem has posted a great presentation on Slideshare showing the state of social media worldwide in 2011. Warning up front that this slideshow is well over 160 slides!

As I was going through my Evernote files (did I mention I LOVE Evernote?), I came across this image that I had saved from some website. Unfortunately, I didn’t save the original site this came from. If you know where it came from (or if it’s yours), please let me know.

I’ve used this quote several dozen times in the past several months when I hear someone complain about a free service they subscribe to. They often complain about why that product or service doesn’t care more about their customers. People are generally a little shocked when they realize that *they* are not the customers.

I’ve been asked several times how to create a Digital Strategy from scratch. I always point people to my digital strategy blog, but I’ve been getting the feedback that the original post is hard to find as it was written a while ago and has fallen off the main page.

As I’m on vacation this week, I thought it would be a good idea to repost the original article in it’s entirety here so that it comes back to the top of the list.

Enjoy.

__________________________

The most difficult part of formulating your Digital Strategy is staring at that blank screen and blinking cursor, trying to figure out where to start. What helps is starting with a “Cheat Sheet.” The basics that need to be flushed out before you can even call it a Digital Strategy. I’ve put together several Digital Strategies for various different brands. Through lots of trial and error, Google searches, and standing on the shoulders of giants, I’ve finally put together a basic template I use when I start. It consists of six headings with the questions I have to have answered before I can even claim to have a basic strategy.

OBJECTIVE:
When this Digital Strategy is completed and executed successfully, what will be the outcome? What are you trying to achieve? Increased brand awareness? A 5% reduction in calls to the call centre? A 2% increase in sales in your North East market? Or as simple as getting 10,000 followers on Twitter? Perhaps it’s a better connection with your audience by answering 100 questions per month via online channels? You have to know why you are putting together the strategy and how you will know if you’ve executed is successfully.

Another part of the objectives is the constraints. As much as we’d all love to hear, “Take as much time and money you need to reach the objectives,” chances are you have constraints. This is where you also lay out the timelines and budget as you understand them, as well as any assumptions you are making in the rest of the strategy

AUDIENCE FOOTPRINT:
Who is your audience? What are their demographics? Are they even digital people? If so, where do they congregate? Are they primarily email users only? Do they read blogs, or do they only read “real” news sites like CNN or New York Times? Are they actively engaged in social media sites? Are they Facebook / Twitter users? Would they actually subscribe to Fan Pages? You have to have a very good idea of where your audience is, how they interact in the digital world, and what they would find relevant and engaging.

AUDIT:
OK, so now you know where your audience is and what you want to achieve. Where are you starting? Start with an audit of the digital assets you already have on hand. Domain names, logos, videos, websites (active and old “cobweb-sites”), social media profiles, etc. What are your building blocks?

Next phase of the audit is to understand how your brand is already perceived and being talked about in the digital world. Start with Google searches on your brand names, your product or service sphere and your competitors’. Set up Google Alerts to notify you when you are mentioned. Look at your existing web properties and analyse the incoming links. Where are your visitors coming from? Monitor your search engine logs to see what they’re looking for. Consider using a free or paid social media monitoring tool to dig even deeper. I’ve used Trendrr and YackTrack on the free side with varying degrees of success, though your mileage may vary. On the paid side, you could look at VoxTrot, BuzzMetrics or Cymfony.

Now is also a great time to do a competitive audit. What are you competitors doing? What’s working for them? What sort of commitment are they putting into their Digital Strategy? Do all of the above for your competitors and gauge where you stack up in your market.

ROADMAP:
The $1,000,000 question. Now that you know what you hope to acheive, what’s already out there, what assets you have on hand, and what your audience wants, what are you going to do? In your audit, you may have found some low hanging fruit. Quick executions to start building some momentum with low cost and quick wins to put the wind in everyone’s sails.

First, look at your existing websites. Are they relevant? Do they even provide the basics? Do they speak to your targetted audience? Or to your shareholders? Or to new recruits? Maybe you want to look at a complete overhaul in one fell swoop, but often time, the existing brand sites may benefit from a phased execution. Do you need special sites  targetted to special segments of your audience or specific campaigns (also know as micro-sites). Is the content on your sites current? Are they optimized for Search Engines?

Second, look at your audience profile to help determine if and how you want to engage your audience. Does the CEO need a blog? Or the heads of various business or product units? What information will you share? Who will write the blogs? Your PR or Marketing group? Or the person in charge? What Legal sign-offs are required? How often will the blogs be updated? Do you need a support forum? Do you have Frequently Asked Questions that could be found in an FAQ on your site? What about connecting via Social Media platforms? Is your audience active there? Do you want to have one (or many) Twitter accounts? What about front-line employees? How engaged do you want them to be in your connections with your audience? These are just a few of the questions that come from the audience profile.

Third, look outside your own assets. Should you be getting engaged on other sites? Sites that specialize in your product or service area. Will you monitor the forums and respond to questions about topics about your product or brand? Will you comment on other blogs about topics in your area? In short, how engaged will you be in the so-called blogosphere?

And the final question… what can you accomplish in the time and budget you have, and what part of the roadmap is for future consideration for the elusive Phase II.

(I will write further about the execution of the strategy when I post about 2MCE)

COMMITMENT:
Wouldn’t it be nice if you put together a plan, executed it, and then were done? Sadly, it’s just the beginning. The Digital Strategy needs to outline what the ongoing commitment to the strategy will entail. If you are relaunching your main sites, who’s responsible for making sure that content is fresh, updated and relevant? Who’s responsible for answering email queries about products and services? Who is responsible for monitoring the web and tracking mentions of your company, your brand and your key people? What will they do with that information? Who will be monitoring the blogs for mentions of your sphere and be able to answer questions, complaint and concerns in the comments in a professional manner? Who will monitor your own Social Media properties and put a human, social “face” behind your brand? This is an on-going operational cost, not a project cost. If you can’t get a commitment on the commitment, it’s time to rethink your Digital Strategy.

MEASUREMENT:
How will you know if you succeded? There is a post coming soon about how to measure ROI on the web, but suffice for now to say that it’s not easy to find quanititive measures. What are your measures of success? Is it site visitors? Press mentions? Blog mentions? Followers on Twitter? Fans on your Facebook page? Or something more subtle such as level of engagement by your evangelistic base? Blog mentions vs. your baseline? Google PageRank? Revenue in the North East territory? Call volumes? Go back to your Objectives and bring it full circle by showing how what you measure will prove (or disprove) your success against your objectives.

There you have it. The 6 basic pillars of a Digital Strategy. Of course, you could have more (lots more), and in the coming weeks and months, I’ll elaborate on the Digital Strategy and discuss other pillars to a strong Strategy. But if you think through these basics, you’ll be well on your way to online success!

Not much to add to this one… I renamed it a little bit. The original article is 25 guys to avoid on Wall St.

I’ve been heading up Digital Strategy at a few financial services firms in Canada for the better part of a decade now. My current employer excluded (everyone there really is amazing!), I’ve run across quite of few of these types in my day… and not just in my Bay St. jobs.

Particularly the following:

• Avoid the guy who calls you ‘Chief’.  He doesn’t remember your name.
• Avoid the dim-witted back-slapping managing director. He’s not as smart as you are—but he’s been throwing guys like you under the bus since you were in grade school.
• Avoid the girl who cries at her desk. (You can ignore my advice on this one—but either way, you won’t make that mistake twice.)
• Avoid anyone who tells you to ‘take one for the team’. He got where he is by convincing dopes like you to jump in front of an oncoming train.
• Avoid anyone who is ten years older than you are—and is still more junior in the reporting structure. He hates you more than you could ever imagine.

Especially the one about ‘Taking one for the team…” Learned that lesson the hard way.

I’m proud to say that I worked my way through the ranks to get to the position I’m in today (VP, Digital). I started as a junior programmer for McGill Multimedia back when there was no such thing as .com (or more accurately, almost nobody had heard of it).

A long time ago, I made the transition from individual contributor to manager. That transition was difficult. I was no longer responsible for just my own work, but for the work of several others. I learned a lot of lessons the hard way. As I reacquaint myself with people that used to report to me or that I used to report to, I always feel like I should apologize for some of the things I said or did while I was learning to be a manager.

One of the key lessons I learned as I worked my way up the managerial ranks was that excuses don’t exist. I’m given goals to achieve and my job is to achieve them. If they are not achieved, I cannot go back and say that “X didn’t do what he was supposed to do.” There is no X… it’s just me and I hold all accountability for anyone that didn’t deliver on my initiative.

When I ran across this article from Business Insider about Steve Jobs and the speech he gives to new managers, it struck a chord. I wish someone had given me this speech several years ago. It would have saved me from stepping on a lot of land mines and driving my bosses crazy as I figured out the lesson above.

Excerpt:

Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, “Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn’t get a key.”

An irritation for Jobs, for an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn’t do his job. As a janitor, he’s allowed to have excuses.

“When you’re the janitor, reasons matter,” Jobs tells newly minted VPs, according to Lashinsky.

“Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering,” says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is “crossed when you become a VP.”

Remember that as you climb the ranks, at a certain level there are no more excuses. Only success or failure.

After my interview with Investment Executive, they invited me in to an on-camera interview about social media and the new guidelines for investment advisors.

Click on the image below to go to the video interview:

Forgive a little ego stroking, but I was recently featured on the front page of Investment Executive magazine. I gave an interview regarding the social media efforts at the company I work for.

Click on the image to read the article

<WARNING: This post has absolutely nothing to do with Digital Strategy.>

Today is my birthday. Approaching my birthday, I started thinking about making a list of things I still want to do, but haven’t for whatever reason.

I came across several sites that had sample lists, but the one that really caught my eye was from Esquire from some time back. The post is called “75 Things Every Man Should Do” However, I think that most of them would equally apply to both sexes.

I strongly suggest reading the entire thing, but there were a few that stood out for me and are now on my list of things to do in the coming few years:

No. 6: Fast for three days.

Drink water. Not talking about a juice fast. Not an induction diet. Just a pure nothing-in-your-mouth fast.

No. 7: Drive the Great Ocean Road in southern Australia.

Or the Pacific Coast Highway. Or the Ring Road in Iceland. It doesn’t even matter if you stop. A two-day-long drive next to an open body of water is among the twentieth century’s most meditative gifts to travel.

No. 11: Do a flip off a diving board. Nail it.

No. 12: Leave yourself a letter in a library book.

Look for it twenty years later. Pick an obscure biography in a college library, since no one there wants to insult obscurity by decataloging a book, and the library will most likely always be there. One page. Be discreet. Type it on erasable bond, tuck it in the back, and hope that no one ever notices. As for content, skip the hopes and dreams. Mention the weather, tell yourself what you ate that morning, make a list of your friends, note how much you weigh and whether you feel fat, remind yourself of a secret you want to keep.

No. 22: Carry a totem in your pocket.

A watch, a badge, a medal, a poker chip, a silver certificate — for one year. Then give it away. My dad, whose brothers were tailors, carried a thimble on his key ring for forty years. In our house, where keys were constantly interchanged and lost, it marked the set as his. Several years ago, he gave the thimble to me. He’d had several strokes by then, and he was afraid he was going to lose it. I told him to put it away instead, to leave it on his dresser. He shrugged and asked me why. “I can’t remember anything,” he told me. “And you can. That’s the point of a thing like that.”

No. 26: Throw a real party.

Memorable for something other than cake, party favors, or strippers.

No. 28: Start something that scares you.

Deal with your most gnawing fears, the kind that have been present inside you so long that you deal with them mostly by avoiding them. Public speaking, that gut, the drinking thing, money. Make a plan.

No. 54: Give a panhandler all of your money.

Most of us spend the early years of our adult lives walking straight by the people standing on street corners or at freeway exits asking for money. Probably with good reason. There’s a cautionary tale for every moment of real charity. Now clean out your pockets. Do it when you have some money on you. Empty the wallet. Pick it clean. Just give it. Make no demands. Expect nothing. Not even a thank-you. Then you’ll understand that you may not even deserve that much.

I keep an online notebook with quotes and articles I want to hang on to (thank you Evernote!)

I’m usually pretty good with keeping the source, but in this case I lost it. However, the quote is so insightful that I wanted to post about it anyway.

If you choose to manage a project, it’s pretty safe. As the manager, you report. You report on what’s happening, you chronicle the results, you are the middleman.

If you choose to run a project, on the other hand, you’re on the hook. It’s an active engagement, bending the status quo to your will, ensuring that you ship.

Running a project requires a level of commitment that’s absent from someone who is managing one.

We’ve all worked with ‘project managers,’ but very few of us have had the pleasure to work with ‘project runners.’ I like to consider myself a runner. If I’m responsible for delivering, I own it all and find every avenue to ensure the project delivers.

Which one are you?

P.S. If this is your quote, or you know where it came from, please ping me and I’ll make sure to give you the proper attribution.

In part 1, I discussed the initial tasks when taking over the digital strategy for a company. As you start getting the analytics, interview your stakeholders and devise a plan for the quick wins, it’s time to start assessing the overall infrastructure. So, what’s next?

1. Get a list of all domains:
Chances are high that your company owns more domains than your main website’s name. Go to your IT group or your hosting provider to find out which other domains you own. There were probably several campaigns that had URLs purchased and are currently sitting unused or have outdated content. Also find out if you have any micro-sites or vanity redirects (i.e. www.yourcompany.com/campaignName) that are still live and have outdated content. In many instances, you’ll find sites that people have long forgotten about that have old prices, old logos and are still crawled by search engines.

If you don’t already own them, try to purchase as many mis-spellings of your main company name, as well as defensive names (CompanyNameSucks.com).

2. Internal Assessment:
Find out how the sites get updated. Who has to approve the content? Who writes it? Who creates the artwork? How long does it take the change a comma on the live site? To update a graphic? To create a new page? To create a new vanity redirect? Is it all done in-house? Do you rely on external people? Are you beholden to just one or two? The best way to do this is not to ask what the process is, but to live through the process. Make sure you have actually updated all of the above on your website(s) within the first two weeks to truly understand the processes. Chances are, the real processes are slightly different than what you’ve been told they are.

You also need to understand the reliability of your websites. What has the uptime for your site been for the last 12 months? What is the escalation process? When the sites go down, who finds out and how? Is there an automatic notification? Who’s on pager support? Do you get called? Do you have to take action, or is it automatic to get them back up?

3. Budget and ROI
How much money do you have to play with? What are your monthly costs for hosting? For resources? Do you have internal billing for IT help? For Legal sign-off? What is the process for justifying more budget? How will the executive level determine if you are making good use of your budget? What level of sign-off authority do you have? Can you pick your contractors and vendors, or is there a preferred list?

4. What is the importance of Online?
Finally, you need to determine how important the online properties are in the overall strategy. When new products are launched, is the online group part of the planning process? Or are they brought in when the strategy is already determined? Or worse yet, are you just given the collateral and asked to put it online with no input? Do the sites generate revenue (directly or indirectly)? Or are they just seen as a cost centre with no impact? If they are not seen as important, is that because of historical issues? If you show value, is there an appetite to change perceptions.

If the answers to question 4 are not encouraging, then your tenure may be frustrating and short-lived. However, if you sense there is an appetite to make the digital strategy an important facet of company strategy, you’re well on your way to making a significant and measurable impact to your company!

Congratulations! You’ve been hired or promoted to take charge of your company’s online strategy and execution! At some point, the elation will fade and you’ll confront the same question everyone faces when they’ve been put in charge… “Where do I begin?” There are many different places you can start, and many would be correct. But if you are stuck in indecision, maybe this can be a path to get you moving.

First things first, and this has nothing to do with digital strategy. I suggest you read “The First 90 Days” by Dr. Michael Watkins. It is an amazing guide to getting up to speed in a new organization, helping you survive the transition and come out at the other end with solid momentum and a strong reputation.

Assuming you’ve read the book, here are a few things to get you started on your digital strategy:

1. “In God we trust, all others bring data.” — Framed plaque from the ‘60s at NASA’s Johnson Space Center
First, get the analytics. Very soon into your first week (and ideally, your first day), open a corporate account at Google Analytics. Throw the analytics code into the bottom of every page (ideally in a common element of all sites like a footer).  As well, get an account at Google Webmaster Tools, put the confirmation file on your root and start collecting the data. If you don’t know how to do the above, your IT group should be able to help you. Don’t worry about the data for at least a month. Let it collect.

While you’re waiting for that month of data to accumulate, you need to understand how to interpret the data you’ll be collecting. To do that, you must read one book. “Web Analytics 2.0” by Avinash Kaushik. I’ve been looking at Google Analytics stats for years and thought I understood what the numbers meant. After reading Avinash’s book, I realized that I had no idea what I was looking at. It changed my entire outlook on analytics.

2. Understand the needs of your internal stakeholders:
Most likely, the reason you were hired or promoted to that position is that some powerful people within your organization realized there is potential online that the organization is not tapping effectively. The power brokers probably have an idea of what they’re expecting to see online (and what you need to accomplish to be considered a success). Don’t guess at what that is. Ask! If you want some great guidance on how to find that out, I again direct you to Manager Tools and their excellent podcast on “Jump Starting Internal Customer Relationships.”

3. Find the ‘Low Hanging Fruit.’:
Based on your data and the remarks from your stakeholders, you probably have a sense of some low hanging fruit or things you can execute and launch quickly to build momentum. Momentum is often overlooked. Early wins help everyone see that ‘something’ is happening and it’s not going to be all talk and analysis. It also helps spark conversations. As the old saying goes, “It’s far easier to critique than create,” so give the stakeholders something small to critique. It provides low-risk feedback and helps hone your longer term strategy with minimal effort.

This advice will probably get you through the first week. In Part 2, we look a little longer term and talk about how to get an assessment of your team, understand your corporate culture and how to define your own measures of success.

Peter Kim wrote a fantastic article on the dangers of following the latest Social Media trends without understanding what you’re doing. The article is called ‘The Marketer’s New Clothes‘ and it highlights what I’ve seen happen a few times.

Four things strike me as lessons from the article:

1. Make sure you know what you’re getting into:
If you don’t ‘get’ digital media, no worries. Do your research (starting here, of course). Go to industry networking events. Find other marketers that have run digital campaigns. Learn from their successes and their failures. Stand on the shoulders of giants.

But for heaven’s sake, don’t just get your information from an agency or a ‘Digital Strategist’ that has a vested interest in getting you to buy what he’s selling. If you are talking to an agency, don’t let them baffle you with jargon or make you feel stupid for not understanding. Remember what my motto:  ‘If you can’t explain it to a 6-year-old…“

2. Question everything:
Don’t let the latest trends get in the way of a proper strategy. Whatever shiny new thing is being developed for you, ask how it is going to contribute to your bottom line. What measurements are going to be used? What’s the baseline? How are you going to measure the ROI? Again, if your agency or your strategist can’t answer these questions off the top of their heads, you may want to start asking even more questions. That should be considered a huge red flag.

3. Beware the herd mentality:
Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean you should. You have to know who your audience is, where they live online (if they even do) and what they are looking for. It has to be relevant. But even more important, beware the herd mentality inside your organization. I’ve been in the situation where the CEO of the company walked into my office and told me that we need to be on Facebook! Every other major company is on Facebook, why aren’t we?

(Sidenote: When the CEO walks into your office and says we need to do ‘X” right away, do not say ‘NO’, unless you want me to introduce you to a couple of fine recruiters I know. Figure out a way to do it, put together the plan on how to do it right and the cost/benefit. When you’re discussing the plan, try to find the opportunity to inject your thoughts on the feasibility for the company if the cost/benefit isn’t there, along with alternatives to achieve a similar end result).

4. It’s ALL ABOUT the ROI:
At the end of the day, we’re all in this for one thing. Money. Yes, I’m sorry to break it to you, but every company is out to make money. And if any activity you do doesn’t contribute to the bottom line, chances are that you won’t be doing it for long. So if you’re getting into digital media, make sure you know how you’re going to prove to the higher powers that the $100,000 you’re spending are going to make or save the company $100,001 very soon. And the person or group putting your digital media strategy into action had better have the answer for you as well.

‘The reason they want you to fit in…

is that once you do, then they can ignore you.’

- Seth Godin

I found this on the awesome Accordion Guy blog by an old friend of mine, Joey deVilla.

The difference between Marketing, Public Relations, Advertising and Branding:

So you’ve started getting your strategy together, figured out who your audience is, where they live online and what your target metrics are. Now what? How do you go about actually getting your message to your customers, and more importantly, how do you engage them in a way that is relevant to them.

One of the most lucid examples of this process I’ve come across in my travels is a method called 2(MCE). That’s a geeky mathematical way of saying “Monitor, Measure, Create, Communicate, Engage, Empower.”

Monitor: First things first. You have to know what the current state of your brand is. At it’s simplest, it’s setting up Google Alerts to ping you whenever your brand (and probably, your competitors’ brands) are mentioned online. If you have the money and know-how, you can also use monitoring tools like BuzzMetrics or Radian6 to paint a better picture.

Know where you currently stand. Are you being mentioned in a positive or negative light? What are the key messages from your audience? What success stories can you build upon? What issues do you need to address? What are your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses?

If you have an MBA or have been in strategic planning sessions, you may recognize the above as a process similar to SWOT Analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths / Weaknesses / Opportunities / Threats . Strengths and Weaknesses are internal to your organization. Opportunities and Threats are external. Strengths + Opportunities = huge possibilities. Weaknesses + Threats = immediate action needed. Of course, SWOT is *much* more than that, but this is the jist of it.

This is also a great opportunity to find out where your audience lives online. What kinds of sites are generating the most content? What’s around the mentions of your brand? What is relevant to your audience? Does it jive with what you expected? If not… you may want to re-examine your assumptions.

Measure: Look again at the metrics you are going to track. How will you know when you’ve successfully executed your strategy. What measures need to tick up? What measures need to tick down? Establish your baseline. Know how you’re currently performing, otherwise you won’t be able to see any trends.

Another key point about measurement is establishing your timeframe. I recently had someone contact me via email asking how they could re-arrange the products they sell on their site to see a significant and measurable increase in sales within one month. I’m sure it’s possible, but I also think it would be either a fluke, or a short-term gain. To have a significant, long-term and measurable impact on sales via online channels, you have to take a significant and long-term approach to strategy. Quick fixes and quick measurements may lead to quick results, but perhaps at the cost of long term loyalty, trust and engagement.

Create: This is probably the most difficult part. Creating the content that your customers will find relevant. Hopefully, knowing what they already find relevant is helpful. Your research in the ‘Monitor’ step should give you a good indication of what kinds of sites and what kind of content elicits the responses from your customers you desire. Some possibilities (though these are just abstract examples):

• Insightful commentary on your industry
• Trends in your market
• Insider information on new product lines
• Insightful and honest interviews with key executives (consumers love it when a company admits to a small error and explains how they corrected it)
• Responses to customer feedback
• Product support forums
• It may even be as simple as games
• Facebook fan pages
• You can almost never go wrong with discounts

There are many other types of content you could publish. It all comes out of your research earlier on.

Communicate: “If you build it… they will come.” Right? Umm, no. With billions and billions of web pages out there, how would anyone know that you have content specifically relevant to what they are looking for? You have to communicate that the content is there. Luckily, this step is easier that it sounds. You don’t have to take out thousands of ads on other sites, radio and tv spots. Not even word of mouth.

The easiest and most effective way it to go back to your monitoring homework, look at where your audience is, and meet them there. Make the URL of your site part of your signature. Post a link to your content on Twitter. Use a Facebook Fan Page to link to your content. Use the LinkedIn account of your employees (with their permission, of course) to broadcast your new, relevant content… and of course, engage your customers where they are. Which leads us to…

Engage: You know where they are and what they are talking about. Respond! If you see a question about your product or your industry, respond publicly. If you see positive mentions, thank the person publicly. If you see a negative comment, respond the the person publicly and humanly (i.e., not PR spin), and if you can, offer to make it right.

Make sure every response comes from a real, live human being with a real name and real account. Their signature should have their name, the company they work for (yours), their title, the web address, any any social media contact info from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

(Caveat: Others may argue with me, but I believe that the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account need to be the ‘professional’ accounts of these employees. If they choose to have a separate private account, that’s fine. But the Facebook and Twitter accounts that are linked in the sig to responses representing the company should not have anything that could put the company in a bad light.)

The ideal response to any of the above would be a short response, followed by a link back to your site to the relevant content that addresses the customer’s comment. If you make the text preceding the link and the text within the link relevant to what the issue is, you will have performed a better job of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) than any company you could pay to fiddle with keywords and tags.

Of course, if you don’t have content on your site that will address the issues and questions raised by your customers on other sites… CREATE IT! There’s free market research for you!

Empower: Now that you have driven users to your site, you don’t want them going away. You don’t want them going back to the original sites you found them to carry on the conversation. You want them to start congregating on your site, talking about your products and your services (and other company’s products and services) in a forum that you can monitor, measure and react to instantly… and with your logo on every page.

That means you have to provide the means to for users to continue the conversation. Forums, support areas, product information, and a list of *real* contacts for people to ask questions and receive responses. Empower users to engage with your company, evangelize your products and services, and eventually, even moderate the forums. If you want people to register (a great way to get a handle on demographics), give them a benefit.

DO NOT make people register just to post and engage. You will drive away too many potential users by throwing hurdles in the way. But a real benefit such as occasional sneak previews via email, or special coupon codes are just enough to get people to register.

There you have it. Taking a digital strategy, and using simple tools to figure out what to execute and how to drive visitors to your site. Good luck, and feel free to contact me if you have any specific questions:  silu.modi@digitalstrategist.ca