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 There were probably several campaigns that had URLs purchased and are currently sitting unused or have outdated content.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if you have any micro-sites or vanity redirects (i.e. www.yourcompany.com/campaignName) that are still live and have outdated content.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

Some time back, I posted a lengthy article on how to measure your Social Media ROI. That seems to have become a big topic recently, so I decided to revisit it.

Several recent articles have varying thoughts on the topic, from Sysomos blog that states that there is no ROI to measure in your Social Media campaign (and I blatantly stole the image on the right from their post) to Oliver Blanchard’s fantastic presentation on how to measure your ROI.

I’m more in agreement with Blanchard. Mostly for the reason that I’ve done exactly the same type of measurement in the past and it proved, without a doubt, that our primary web visitors were spending more with us than non-web visitors.

In a past life, I had to prove that our website was actually delivering value to the company. And there was no buying into the old stand-bys of ‘increased brand recognition.’ The powers that be wanted to see one thing… dollars.

Fortunately, I had our entire customer database at my disposal. We decided to set up an A/B/C comparison. We knew who our frequent site users were (frequent meaning visiting at least once per week), and who our non-visitors were. We started built a baseline to show what our sales were with visitors and non-visitors. That chart showed a clear pattern. Site visitors were more valuable than non-visitors. However, we didn’t have a control group. We didn’t know for sure that it was the website that made sales increase among that group. We had to set up a control case.

We started a campaign to recruit 1,000 new visitors and watched their sales patterns over a year. Using the baseline previously established, there was a clear inflection point in sales once those new recruits started using the website more frequently. Without going into numbers, you could see with the naked eye an inflection up in sales (and other measures) once users registered for the site and started using it more often.

Key Steps to measuring ROI:

1. Establish a Baseline: Understand the objectives you are trying to measure, measure them today for as far back as you can, and establish a baseline. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea if you’re reaching your goals.

2. Keep your time line: Every time you do something of significance online, add it to the timeline.

3. Control for other actions: If other outreach actions are happening in your organization, control for them as they will also impact your baseline measurements. If possible, look at the impact during similar campaigns in the past and establish a way to discount for those impacts when measuring yours.

4. Keep measuring: Keep an ongoing tally of your stated objectives and metrics.

5. Look for the inflection: Don’t be disappointed if the inflection doesn’t come quickly. It takes some time to see a real financial impact from your digital strategy. You’re looking for something like the following slide, copied from Blanchard’s presentation:

6. Adjust: If the inflection doesn’t come, or it’s not as big as you had hoped, adjust. Don’t just sit there with your fingers crossed. Look at your qualitative measures to see if they are adding up. They don’t always correlate into dollars, but if they aren’t where you expect either, you may need a larger adjustment.

As much as we in the digital world would love to believe that our qualitative measures are the be all and end all, eyeballs and positive sentiment don’t pay the rent. Our strategies and campaigns, at some point, have to translate into real $$$.

When I wrote about the Basic Pillars of a Digital Strategy, the question I received most often was ‘What goals can I start with?’ It’s difficult to answer as the goals are usually internal to the needs of your company and your brand. I outlined in my post about measuring your ROI about how you can turn qualitative goals into quantifiable measurements. But there are some qualitative goals you may want to keep in mind that you may not want or need to measure. They are goals that should be part of your strategy, but only if you truly believe in Social Media as a way to keep in touch with your customers:

1. Listening
   Before doing anything, listen to what’s going on. Use any sort of paid or free monitoring tools to find out what is being said about your company and your brand. These are your customers, your potential customers, your peers and competitors, your evangelists and detractors. Use their unsolicited feedback to help shape your strategy and improve your business.
2. Caring
   Listening won’t do much if you don’t care about the response… and show that your care about the response. Before telling your own stories and pushing your products, respond back to those who took the time to comment about you. Give thanks for positive feedback and help turn your detractors into evangelists.
3. Sharing
   Those who care about your company, your brand and your products love to get the inside scoop on what’s going on. Share stories of real people inside your organization, real trials and tribulations you’re facing, real success stories.
4. Speaking
   Get involved in the conversations taking place all around the internet. Get engaged with your audience and talk where they are listening. The response received when a person from a company responds to a user on an open forum is usually positive, if it’s done with a human voice, with genuine caring and without spin.
5. Building relationships
   Building strong relationships with influencers online is one of the most effective ways to keep building positive social currency, or ‘Whuffie‘ as it was coined by Cory Doctorow and used by Tara Hunt.

These goals are hard to measure, but they should be part of any Digital Strategy as they are the currency that enable your company to truly engage with your audience.

“… But what if people say something bad about us? On our own site? How would that look?”

This is probably the number 1 fear from executives about opening up the corporate or brand website to user-generated content. And they have a good point. What if you build it and they actually do come? To complain?

I’m here to say that not only is that a possibility, it’s probably going to be the reality. Probably not what the executive wants to hear. But the real questions shouldn’t be ‘What do we do if…’ but ‘What do we do when…’

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. If you have a product or service that holds a promise that you don’t deliver, you have bigger problems than the comments on your website or public forums. You have a bad, unsustainable business model. But let’s assume that you have a good product or service and you strive to deliver value to the customer. You’re still going to have some people not happy and they may vent on your site. That’s not a bad thing.

“What?”

That’s right. It’s not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, this is a perfect opportunity to turn it to your advantage. Everyone knows that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. How you respond to those issues makes a big difference.

1. Allow comments on your site and your postings:
   First things first. If you want to be true to the ‘social’ part of your social strategy, you have to let your customers be heard. Their comments are the voice you’ve been wanting to hear. Unfiltered by your staff. Again, if you are holding your end of the bargain, you will have good comments more often than the critical ones, but encourage both. Use the comments as an opportunity to get market research from the people that took the time to come to your site. But that doesn’t mean you have to let anything through.
2. Have a visible and permissible moderation policy:
   You do have to moderate your comments. But your moderation policy has to be clearly posted and fair. Criticism must be allowed, and even encouraged. However, language must be civil. No spam, advertising, link bait, personal attacks or off-topic comments. Otherwise, even if the criticism seems unfair, it stays.
3. Respond to your evangelists and critics alike
   Let people know that you’re listening. That doesn’t mean that you have to respond to every comment. But comments that are critical or evangelical deserve a nod of acknowledgment. As simple as “Thank you” or “Much appreciated” for good comments is enough.
4. Respond with a human voice
   For the critics, you have a choice. For simple customer service issues, a comment from the company stating, ‘Please contact Joe directly at this email address and he’ll make sure your issue gets the attention it requires” is remarkable. Not only are you helping to resolve an issue for one of your customers, but you’re doing so in a public way, letting everyone else know that you do, in fact, care about your customers. In other words, do not have all responses to your customers come from your PR department. Do not regurgitate the marketing speaking points. If you do it correctly, you may turn customer complaints into kudos as @comcastbill has been able to do for Comcast.
5. Allow SMEs through the company to respond on the company’s behalf
   SMEs stands for Subject Matter Experts. If there are questions or concerns about a specific product, let the people in charge of that area respond with a human touch. Answer questions clearly and directly. Again, not just with a marketing line, but as if you actually *do* care about what the respondent is saying.
6. Spiral out. Respond on other sites, not just your own
   Use an alert tool, such as Google Alerts to monitor your name in the news. BlogPulse, or Radian6 to monitor what’s going on in the Social Media space. If you see mentions (good or bad), go to those sites and respond. Let the world know that you care about your customers, where ever they are talking.

Building loyalty and evangelists comes from not just having a good product or service, but making sure that your customers feel like they are being heard.

There’s a great story about Pablo Picasso.

Some guy told Picasso he’d pay him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso whipped out a pen and banged out a sketch, handed it to the guy, and said, “One million dollars, please.”
“A million dollars?” the guy exclaimed. “That only took you thirty seconds!”
“Yes,” said Picasso. “But it took me fifty years to learn how to draw that in thirty seconds.”

Some time ago, a friend of mine that was working as a writer for a TV show asked me how he could go about setting up a basic website for himself. I pointed him to a cheap host and a where he could get a free 30-day trial version of Dreamweaver. He wrote me back a few days later with a link to his website. He also (jokingly) said that he’s amazed people pay me to help them with their websites when, with a copy of Dreamweaver, he was able to do it himself for next to no cost. I replied that most people have a copy of Microsoft Word. Why would anyone pay him to write when they can do it themselves?

The tool, or the end result of using the tool, is not special. I use the same tools anyone else does. It’s starting from a blank screen, knowing what you need to do, knowing what your audience wants and delivering it with consistency and quality that make the practitioner more valuable than the tool.

Having hundreds of friends on Facebook, thousands of followers on Twitter and dozens of cool iPhone apps does not make one a Social Media expert. Being able to solve a business problem and deliver the results a client requires, perhaps using social media as one of the tools, makes one an expert.