Is it being digital or being customer focused?

Recently David Cooperstein from Forrester Research has invested a fair amount of time with CMOs and agency executives, working through the challenges that marketing faces, especially as shiny new objects like social and mobile develop some patina and digital gets categorized as a mature channel. In a past post on Forbes he called the era we now live in a “post-digital” world for marketers, because the strategies that matter most are those that don’t start with the channel (i.e. mobile-first or digital-first). Marketers need to put themselves in their customers’ seat and define the marketing activities they take on from a customer-first perspective.

I agree that it is important to focus on the customer first. That is to some extent all that matters. 

Read more in this blog:  The Age Of The Customer Requires An Obsessive Focus By CIOs And CMOs | Forrester Research

Make your content readable

We all want our content read. That is the objective. Here are some great ideas on how to improve the readability of our sites. As a digital executive, while you have staff devoted to content, you should pay attention to some basic concepts to focus on a content strategy. Strategy is your job.

When your content is highly readable, your audience is able to quickly digest the information you share with them — a worthy goal to have for your website, whether you run a blog, an e-store or your company’s domain.

Best Practices for Improving Your Website's Usability (from Mashable)

Here are some best practices:

• Use visuals strategically
• Keep content as concise as possible
• Use headings to break up long articles
• Help readers scan your webpages quickly
• Use bulleted lists and text formatting
•  Give text blocks sufficient spacing
• Make hyperlinked text user-friendly

Digital executives understand the basic concepts and make sure the experience for the customer is supported by a great content strategy.

Just the facts ~~ Please!!

Dragnet's Sgt. Joe Friday character frequently implore informants to provide 'Just the facts'. We have all kinds of "facts", data from analytic platforms and internal operational systems. Take the call center or a website. There is so much there that can help improve digital experiences dramatically because it separates fact from fiction.

To mine this data for experience improvement opportunities, focus our efforts in examining the actual behavior of customers. Many companies use Google analytics on their website. It helps us understand where visitors are going and what they do when they get there. Nothing like the facts. One company I know of used web analytics to prove a 65% customer drop-off rate at a point where login was required, prior to checkout. And when analysts at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) mined web analytics data for design opportunities, they found users pogo-sticking between search results and hotel landing pages, which tipped them off to the fact that users were digging for specific information.

Here are some other things to look for:

• Study customers' mobile and tablet behavior
• Examine customer behavior across channels
• Look at the moments that matter

This is powerful for improving the customer experience. We have the facts.

How do you combine technologies to innovate?

This makes so much sense. It is the combination of technology that becomes so powerful in this model.

Well worth reading and thinking through as an enabler of innovation. Adam really nails this one.

These technologies can be combined in numerous ways, and we are just starting to see companies really taking advantage of the possibilities. These four technologies will have a disruptive impact on your business, almost regardless of which industry you're in. The question is whether you will choose to adopt them before a competitor does.

What are they?
1.  Microprocessors
2.  Sensors
3.  Wireless connectivity
4.  Databases

The Four Technologies You Need to Be Working With - Adam Richardson - Harvard Business Review

Why can't Amazon make a profit?

Why can't Amazon make a profit? The answer is, they choose not to. Now to some extent this defies logic on several levels. First, they are a publicly traded for profit corporation. Second, you would think the stockholders would demand it. Yet, Amazon has been one of Wall Street’s darlings in the past decade. Amazon’s stock price jumped 234 percent in the past five years alone, giving the company a valuation of around $120 billion.

In those five years, Amazon’s sales have tripled to more than $60 billion a year, while its profits stayed remarkably flat. The reason for Amazon’s stagnant profit is its founder’s notorious commitment to long term growth. Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon in 1994 and has lead the company ever since, has a track record of investing everything his company earns right back into it. Defending his investment strategy in his latest letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote:

  “Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas.”

This way, Amazon became the largest online retailer in the world and in the same way the company is now striving to become a dominant force in the distribution of digital media.  So far, investors seem to believe in Amazon’s long term success, but some day the company is going to have to proof it can turn a sizeable profit.

It is as Bezos recently noted:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine. We’re always working to build a heavier company.”

You're Doing Social Wrong. Your Teenager Does It Right.

It seems that everyone is freaking out about teens abandoning social media sites like Facebook. By "everyone" I mean advertisers. They’re racking their brains trying to figure out why it’s happening. If you’re puzzled too, read this lovely piece in Medium by Cliff Watson, who argues that the number one reason kids don't need Facebook is that they "literally don't need Facebook."

After running through a host of theories as to why, including the fact that parents (ew) and even grandparents are on Facebook now, he comes up with a much more reasonable reason: Young people are gravitating toward messaging services such as Kik, and in doing so, they’re recapturing the intended meaning of social: "Making contact with other human beings. Communicating. Back-and-forth, fairly immediate dialogue. Most of it digitally."

In other words, it's not a post; it's an exchange. Snapchat anyone?

Are you saying pretty please?

Dan Zarrella is a great thinker on social media. He mines massive amounts of data and bases his recommendations on hard science. This is relatively rare yet needed in the field of social media marketing, and so he’s well worth following.

He recently analyzed 2.7 million tweets and concluded the following that people retweet when they are asked nicely as part of the original tweet. Conclusion? If you have something you want people to spread, ask them - with a pretty please.

Use your personal smartphone for work email? Your company might take it

If you use your personal smartphone or tablet to read work email, your company may have to seize the device some day, and you may not get it back for months. Employees armed with a battery of smartphones and other gadgets they own are casually connecting to work email and other employer servers. It's a less-than-ideal security arrangement that technology pros call BYOD — bring your own device.

Now, lawyers are warning there's an unforeseen consequence of BYOD. If a company is involved in litigation — civil or criminal — personal cellphones that were used for work email or other company activity are liable to be confiscated and examined for evidence during discovery or investigation.

More here: Use your personal smartphone for work email? Your company might take it - Red Tape.

What should you do to start the journey of constituent experience?

The effect of everyone jumping on the constituent experience bandwagon is a slowdown in the maturation of this new business discipline. Confusion abounds as does disbelief. No one wants to risk exposing their constituents (and their job security) to new engagement practices that might increase instead of decrease frustration and churn.

However, the growing confusion opens unique opportunities. Here are a couple of strategies to start action plans around.

• Creating a disruptive mindset by reimagining your business and constituent relationships in a digital world.


• Making trusted content the center of your business strategy and constituent experience.


• Infusing social constituent experience across all business functional and digital touch points.


• Repeatedly measuring and proving the financial results.

If you haven't begun the journey, now would be the time to start.

“Lithium’s blueprint is in direct response to customer requests for advisory and insight services to help them make their social customer experience strategy a reality.” He defines social customer experience as “unlocking the passions of your customers in the digital world in a way you can capture those insights, measure them and empower your organization to bring your customers along.” ~~Rob Tarkoff, Lithium Technologies President and CEO

What is the difference between responsive vs. adaptive web design?

Users who access your websites through their mobile devices or other display screens really do not care what method you use, just as long as that they can effectively navigate your website on whatever device they happen to be using.

For that reason, the two methods described in this article have been devised for web developers to meet the challenge, and while responsive (RWD) and adaptive (AWD) design methods are both addressing the issue for rendering websites on mobile devices, there are subtle differences between them that it helps to be aware of.

More here: What is the difference between responsive vs. adaptive web design? | TechRepublic.

What is the real cost of email?

Tom Cochran  believes that email is the most abused method of communication in every office environment. And the widespread perception that it has no incremental cost is chronically damaging workplace efficiency. According to Tom, the challenge we are facing isn't an aversion to technology, but change. I think that sums it up very well.

Tom suggests there is an entrenched level of comfort with email, making it habitual and a communications crutch. We have to take a holistic view and see email as one of many channels for collaboration. Adopt a breadth of tools to connect people, teach them the appropriate use of each and encourage smarter use of the right technology.

I also find that an open office environment creates less of a dependency on email as "literally" walls come down and teams naturally collaborate.

More here: Email Is Not Free - Tom Cochran - Harvard Business Review.

Who is responsible for your nonprofit Digital Community Building?

When it comes to building community and increasing brand awareness, some organizations hire communications, marketing, and engagement staff to handle these activities. And that makes sense -- someone needs to be charged with keeping a close eye on the organization’s community growth.

Jamie Millard and Lori L. Jacobwith also suggest that building awareness for your important work in an increasingly cluttered space can’t be the responsibility of just one person or even a department. When an organization embraces the culture of creating and empowering all staff to become “brand ambassadors,” authentic and exponential growth starts to happen.

More here: Ctrl+Alt+Delete: Rebooting Your Digital Community Building | NTEN.

Usage Of RSS Feeds

Google has announced that it will shut down Google Reader on July 1, 2013. In its announcement, Google states that it’s doing this because the usage of Google Reader has declined and it wants to concentrate on fewer products. There was a lot of buzz online about this decision, and some fanatical Google Reader fans put together a petition to keep the RSS reader alive. They garnered more than 50,000 signatures in just a few hours.



Forrester’s Technographics® data gives an understanding of the usage of RSS feeds over time. Google is right about the decline. The data shows that it was always only a dedicated group who used RSS feeds at least weekly — about 7% of US online adults in 2008; this had declined to just over 4% last year, with about one in 10 US online adults using RSS feeds about monthly.

RIP Google Reader. I will miss you.

Related articles

• How do I create a very specific RSS feed from a webpage? (ask.metafilter.com)


• FeedRoller - One Of The Most Interesting Ways To Read Your RSS Feeds [Windows] (makeuseof.com)


• New RSS Feed (unretrofied.com)


• Google Reader shut down, try these RSS feed alternatives (cbsnews.com)

Why are we going online?

Americans are going online to pass the time more than they were just a few years ago, according to a new study.

A report from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that about 53% of young adults ages 18 to 29 go online on any given day for no particular reason except for a diversion or just for fun. About 81% of people in this demographic said they have done so at least occasionally.

Is Twitter just for people who like to say what they ate for lunch?

Is Twitter just for people who like to say what they ate for lunch? Is it a useless tool for self gratification?

I don't think so. Here is a great resource on who to follow for leadership ideas. Tom Peters is one of my favorites.

http://blog.kevineikenberry.com/leadership/top-leadership-tweeters/

Is it productive to work at home or anywhere other than the office?

Certain subjects just naturally incite opinion wars. The big ones, like political preferences, or whether you’re Team A or Team B, are better left out of polite conversation. But when it comes to doing your job effectively, where do we draw the line? Should the nature of a person’s autonomy — or lack thereof — be at the whim of the boss, or the discernment of the employee?

The four corners of the Internet nearly came to blows recently when tech-world darling and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer boldly put a stop to employees working remotely. Needless to say, people are a little upset.

I'm definitely in the let them work at home camp. Here is a pretty good infographic on the state of things.

Can you eliminate the need for email?

With some careful application of social media tools, could you actually eliminate the need for email?

Luis Suarez, who works for IBM, ditched email. He still has an email account, but since 2008 he’s tried to wean himself off email.

Suarez documents the decreasing amounts of email he receives with blog posts tagged “A World Without Email“. When he started, Suarez received more than 30 emails per day; by 2011 he received 16 emails per week. (I always imagine the phrase being read with the deep voice of movie trailer narrators, “In a world without email, one man stands alone…”)

Headlines highlight Suarez’s lack of email as an oddity. In 2012, Wired ran a story titled “IBM Gives Birth to Amazing E-mail-less Man“. The idea that a tech professional could do actual work without email boggles! Bah. Nearly impossible!

Headlines about Suarez should read “Man Chooses to Work in Public”. Suarez replaced email with a mix of internal and external social networking tools. He posts to his Wordpress-powered blog at elsua.net several times a month. He uses Twitter and Tumblr to share what he’s doing. He even uses Google+ now and then.

Suarez’s choice to share his work came as a result of thinking and practice. He worked for years in the field of Knowledge Management. And he’s highly proficient at learning new tools and ways of working: he started blogging back in 2005.

So, can you eliminate email? Yes, with the careful use of social media and the willingness to "work in public", it can be done. What is the value? Knowledge is shared. Work is collaborative.

Are you shaping the digital world with agility?

Digital leaders shape digital enterprise with agility. They are all about doing things better and faster; with elasticity: scale up and down seamlessly and resilience.

A digital organization is empowered by digital tools and relying on a winning combination of face-to-face and virtual initiatives. It involves the creation of an interactive multi-channel communication and sharing process to generate awareness about new digital tools and processes to help accelerate and secure workforce buy-in.

Are you leading in this area regardless of your role?

Remember the Kodak moment? It is now the Instagram moment.

Remember the Kodak moment? It is now the Instagram moment. Great short video from Brian Solis promoting his new book, "The Future of Business".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwtQpNCqWrQ

Are you leading a digital transformation?

Breakthroughs often begin by thinking differently about the company's mission. Pages Jaune, the French Yellow Pages, was losing business as paper books became less and less relevant. The CEO led the effort to re-conceptualize the business as one that connects small businesses with local customers, which led to new products and services, such as mobile apps and Web pages for its member companies.

We have all used the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies as a metaphor for this form of breakthrough thinking. Are you focused on speeding up the caterpillar's process? Or are you envisioning that totally new butterfly?