http://www.brelson.com/2011/10/sit-down-on-overground-prepare-for-war/

Device strategy and conclusion

Device strategy

The importance of digital strategy has grown because of the increased size and complexity of the digital landscape. This is especially true when it comes to the devices used to access digital services and information.

There has been a large growth in the number of connected device types

Digital devices have proliferated significantly in the last decade and continue to do so. Where the chief distinction in delivering digital services was once between browser versions, it is now between different classes of device.

It can be argued that there are currently five classes of device, as separated by a specific form factor, usage context and design needs. These are conventional PCs, tablet PCs, smartphones, feature phones, and connected televisions. While conventional PCs – desktops and laptops – are relatively mature, with established design standards, other device classes are still emerging, and entirely new device classes will emerge.

The role of device strategy is to make sure organisations are ready to deploy the right services to the right devices at the right time. Depending on the broader strategic positioning of the organisation, this might involve being among the first to market when new devices appear – on the other hand, it could be more in line with the brand’s personality to launch when the platform has matured. Businesses should avoid being reactive in either case, and a well-informed device strategy is essential in ensuring that errors and mis-steps are avoided.

Conclusion

The turbulent nature of the digital landscape means that the components of digital strategy outlined here, and their relative priorities, will continue to change over time. Also, individual organisations will apply their own prioritisation to these components based on their specific needs and objectives.

However, each of these areas has some relevance to any organisation that uses digital tools and technologies to interact either with the outside world or with internal audiences.

A strategic approach to the digital space is now imperative; but the choice of partner in this new landscape is an increasingly difficult challenge. Many are experienced, but few are sufficiently qualified to trust with the long-range health and success of your organisation.

In addition to serving as a useful introduction to digital strategy – what it is, and what it is not – we hope that this document will also help you identify and evaluate the right partner.

Content and Engagement

Content strategy

This is a growing and increasingly recognised discipline within the delivery of digital projects. A content strategist will be involved at the early stages, alongside – or sometimes prior to – information architects. They continue to champion content as others move into their own areas of specialisation.

Digital projects are complex so are often tackled with a technology first, content last approach. For end users, the opposite is true - content is the primary focus.

As a project proceeds, a content strategist will expect to evaluate every element of content and understand the specific business need & customer goal it is intended to fulfil. Following on from that the content strategist will begin to pare down the content, removing duplication and padding, and possibly laying the groundwork for additional content if a clear need for it has been identified.

A keen interest in other workstreams is essential. If a UX team is conducting a usability study, the content strategist should want to see the results. If an experience planner is presenting findings from stakeholder interviews, the content strategist should be there, asking questions. When content producers use the new CMS to create, edit and publish materials, the content strategist should help to improve their workflow and output.

Content strategy isn’t an optional extra that can be ignored. Instead, it is an unavoidable aspect of almost every digital project – a content strategy always exists, even if the strategy is that there is no strategy. A project team may choose not to define a content strategy at the appropriate stage of the project, but at some point before launch the content issue will need to be addressed. When this is left too late serious problems can arise. It is the content strategist’s job to prevent this.

Engagement

Digital engagement strategy is where the digital disciplines intersect with marketing, communications and customer service. It is one of the more rapidly changing components of digital strategy, as engagement channels are continually evolving. Five years ago it was dominated by email marketing – but this is just part of today’s mix alongside social media, blogs, SMS and stakeholder communities.

The danger in such a fast-changing space is that “silos” for each channel form within the business, with one team responsible for the Facebook page and another managing email campaigns. By overcoming this compartmentalisation, engagement strategy promotes a coherent, consistent approach across existing channels while helping businesses quickly take advantage of emerging ones.

Like search strategy, digital engagement generates large amounts of data. This presents the opportunity for greater measurability, but also the risk of becoming bogged down in weekly tactical cycles. Effort should be made to identify strategically relevant insights – the needles in the haystack.

To achieve this engagement strategy should work closely with public relations and marketing teams, being informed by their strategic objectives and established methodologies. Third party expertise should be brought in if needed to ensure the organisation can retain its strategic focus, even if disaster strikes erupt.

At the same time, this component needs to keep an eye on the horizon in order to anticipate and respond to changing channel behaviours among customers and other relevant groups – something that demands a specialised digital mindset.

What not to do

Vodafone’s “Made Me Smile” Twitter campaign in December 2010 placed unmoderated tweets on to Vodafone’s website. Anti-Vodafone content from tax avoidance protestors quickly filled up the page, leading Vodafone to pull the feature in the first weekend of launch.

Next week

This series of posts will come to an end next week with the publication of the concluding chapter.

Strategy components: Search, Experience Planning

Search strategy

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click search marketing (PPC) are intensive activities that have developed a highly tactical focus over the last few years. This is due to the vast amounts of data they generate and their ability to measure performance on a weekly or even daily basis, which fosters a tendency to plan and manage on these timescales.

A priority for search strategy is to inform SEO and PPC activities with an understanding of their place in the broader business context. By examining how their content makes organisations discoverable through search, search strategy helps organisations brief manage their search agencies more effectively, realising greater value from those relationships. It also aligns seemingly unrelated web, infrastructure, or content projects with search-related objectives.

The first stage in the process is to create a business case for investment in search. If detailed analytics are available, potential benefits should be identified in a clear and accurate manner. The process for creating the business case relies on these analytics as well as data from other sources that measures volumes of search traffic and trends in keywords used. A successful business case for search conveys the “size of the prize”, demonstrating how much the company stands to gain from improved discoverability through search.
Following communication and acceptance of the business case, the second stage is to create the roadmap for search.

As a strategic plan the roadmap is not necessarily linear, and is based on assumptions whose liability to change is acknowledged. The search roadmap should also incorporate details of planned or in-flight projects that may impact the company’s effectiveness in search, and in doing so will touch upon technology and content as well as branding, marketing and even operations.

However it may include a greater level of detail than other strategic plans, offering tactical guidance possibly based on a close examination of tactics used by competitors. This detail should prove valuable to implementation and content teams some time after the strategy is delivered, in keeping with the principle that strategic thinking should be communicable.

Finally, the data-intensive nature of SEO and PPC means that effectiveness of the strategy should be highly measurable. Any strategic search roadmap that does not define clear objectives should be seen as invalid.

Experience planning

The experience planner’s aim is to drive real business change through customer experience.

“Experience planning” is another term for what might also be called “user experience strategy”. It’s an activity that bridges the gap between conventional market research, business planning, and user experience design. The main outputs from this activity are typically a set of UX principles along with a roadmap showing how the customer experience will evolve over a long time period, typically several years in duration, and how that evolution will serve the interests of the business.

The real value of this activity, however, comes not so much from these final outputs but from the by-products of their creation. The experience planner will have read and synthesised as much research as possible, potentially carrying out primary research also. While the final outputs will distill these into a manageable executive summary for senior stakeholders, the detailed findings from are extremely valuable to anyone who will be involved in the framing and delivery of related projects.

Experience planning often involves exercises that would typically fall under the remit of “classic” UX such as scenario modelling, persona definition, behavioural analysis, all the way up to wireframing or prototyping in some cases. The difference here is that UX artefacts are used to tell a story about the future rather than to dictate the form of an actual product. In this situation the experience planner needs to draw upon their experience in UX, often working more rapidly than usual, and drawing upon whatever research and data they can gather.

There is a lot of similarity between the stories produced by experience planners and the outputs that form the basis of high-level strategic visions. One difference, however, is that experience planning is concerned with the specifics of how the vision will come about – the incremental transition of the current customer experience towards its planned future state. Experience planning must therefore be considered when designing and delivering even smaller projects such as microsites or campaign materials. If it is restricted to grand, large-scale efforts its purpose will be defeated and the long-term customer experience plan will start to move in divergent directions.

Next week

In the next chapter, we’ll continue to explore the components of digital strategy by looking at Content and Engagement.

A component-based approach

Digital strategy should operate within the broader strategic framework of the business, connecting the day-to-day operation of digital projects & initiatives with the high-level objectives of the business.

Components of digital strategy (click for full size)

At the centre are the vision and roadmap. The vision is a clear, concise representation of what the business wants to achieve through its digital activities. The roadmap is the plan connecting today’s situation to the future aspiration.

Supporting the vision and roadmap are a number of strategic components focusing on specific areas of digital activity. The evolving nature of the digital landscape means that these tend to change over time, but for now our focus is on search, experience planning, content, engagement and device.

Vision and Roadmap

When a leadership team is asked to define its digital strategy, it will often respond with a large and incoherent body of documents, ranging from market research reports to business cases, third party white papers, and copies of strategic plans from across the organisations. Any strategy lurking within this maze of information is almost impossible to discern.

The challenge facing businesses is to reconcile the complexity and volume of thinking that goes into strategic planning with the need to communicate it in a concise and inspiring way. Creating a “vision” helps to overcome this challenge.

These outputs use visual and interactive techniques to embody the company’s thinking about the future, distilling the broader themes into something far more compelling and tangible. They often involve prototypes of digital assets to show scenarios where future customers, prospects or employees interact with the business in new and beneficial ways. The use of story-telling methods turns the potentially complex strategic plan into an accessible and engaging message.

Visions should not be produced by teams of specialists isolated from the current reality of the business. Instead the production process should involve stakeholders from across the organisation, ensuring that the final output resonates outside the bubble of strategic planning.

A strategic roadmap is an act of storytelling whose theme is transformation – and whose conclusion is the strategic vision made real. As such, it’s important to consider how the story is to be told. The roadmap must be visualised and labelled in a way that’s compelling and memorable. And for each phase in the roadmap there needs to be a clear goal, expressed with answers to straightforward questions:

• What is gained during this phase?
• How will it enable us to move on?
• How will our customers, staff or partners’ experience of us change as a result?

The roadmap needs to connect with a senior audience, so needs to be concise and visual. Circumstances might change – one program might be cancelled, another might be delayed, one competitor might acquire another. The roadmap must remain focused yet elastic, linear yet flexible.

Next week

We’ll continue looking at the main components of digital strategy, focusing on search and experience planning in next week’s chapter.

When to form a strategy

Every organisation has a digital strategy. This is true even if the organisation has no digital presence and no intention to develop one – in this case, the strategy is simply that there is no strategy.

For most organisations the digital strategy probably doesn’t exist in a communicable form, so will have little effect on how the organisation actually operates. Digital projects will go ahead with little or no co-ordination, with the only defined objectives being project-level rather than organisation-level. Success is perceived when projects are delivered on time, but the role these projects play in the broader narrative is rarely considered.

In these situations the organisation can benefit greatly by forming and communicating a digital strategy. These benefits range from the short-term and tangible to gains that are less direct and longer term – but no less valuable.

Creating a digital strategy need not be an especially difficult or time-consuming process. It can be accelerated if the organisation has an existing strategic framework in place, covering topics such as channel, platform, brand & marketing, products and proposition. The digital strategy should be produced to be operate within this framework, so that digital initiatives can contribute towards the broader objectives of the company.

Companies that do not have this framework in place face a dilemma – whether to create a digital strategy now, or postpone this until a generalised set of strategies has been defined. It is usually wiser not to wait, especially if the company has a substantial online presence and is regularly allocating funds on digital initiatives. Aligning an existing digital strategy with a refreshed organisational objectives is far less damaging than operating without clear and coherent direction.

Strategic drift at Yahoo!

Sometimes we don’t have to look at internal assets like Facebook’s insignia to see visual manifestations of a company’s strategy. Sometimes, we can learn all we need to know by looking at the design of the public homepage.

Comparison of Google and Yahoo homepages

Both Yahoo! and Google drastically expanded their range of products & services between 1996 and 2005. But while search remained at the core of Google’s strategy, Yahoo’s proposition lost focus and rapidly became cluttered. The company’s strategic drift was reflected in the appearance of its homepage.

Next week

In the next chapter we begin to explore specific components of digital strategy, starting with an overview of the component-based approach.

Gridiron versus football

One way of understanding the importance of communication to strategy is to consider the differences between football and American football (which we’ll call “gridiron” here, to avoid confusion). What role does strategy play in each of these sports?

Gridiron

In this sport the coach has frequent opportunities to communicate tactics to the team. After each play, the game stops and there is a chance to consult, with players receiving a detailed tactical brief on the next sequence of moves.

Frequent touchpoints between coach and team

Football

Football teams need to play for 45-minute periods with no opportunity to communicate in depth with the coach, who must stay off the pitch. While the game is in progress, the coach can shout from the sidelines or pass instructions through players brought on as substitutes.

Limited opportunities for tactical briefing

Both games are strategic, of course, but strategy’s role in football is more analogous to its role in a typical organisation. In the gridiron model, it’s not a problem if the team doesn’t understand the strategy – it’s enough for the coach to know the strategy and provide tactical briefings to the team at regular intervals.

In football, however, the team will fail if it does not understand the coach’s strategy. A player may get sent off, a surprise goal might be scored, the weather might change – a lot can happen in 45 minutes, and the team will have to adapt to the changed situation on its own. The detailed tactical briefing will have to wait until the half-time break.

Businesses can suffer when strategic thinking, and the strategies it helps to produce, remain inside the head of an elite team. That team will need to become like the gridiron coach, micromanaging all parts of the organisation to make sure it’s operating cohesively. This in turn places a huge burden on the leadership team, whose time is quickly consumed by the need to form and relay tactical briefings.

A more effective approach to strategy is to follow the football model, where the leadership successfully conveys the strategy to the organisation and, in doing so, shares ownership of that strategy. Teams and departments can then adapt their tactics as circumstances change in the daily reality of business, with no need to be micromanaged from on high. The leadership team has the time to remain focused on strategic issues, and strategic briefings are less frequent but more valuable.

Implications for digital strategy

To work well, digital strategy needs to put organisations in control of their own digital operations & initiatives. It fails when it is treated as the preserve of experts, and succeeds when it enables people from different backgrounds to contribute to the success of their digital business.

This is particularly important in the digital field, which is fast-changing, technologically challenging, and prone to jargon. Digital strategy must be able to frame its ideas in a way that is easily understood by non-expert audiences.

Next week

Some organisations know that they need to create a digital strategy at some point, but not right now. Maybe there are too many projects on the go, or a key decision-maker is about to move to a new role. But this can lead to dangerous periods of strategic drift. Next week’s chapter explores this theme in more detail.

What we mean by strategy

It’s worth being clear about the meaning of the word “strategy”, which can be difficult to define even though it is used often.

In a business context, the word “strategic” is sometimes used as a synonym for “important”. A project or initiative is described as strategic when all that is meant is that it is valuable and should be treated as a high priority.

Used in this sense, the word “strategic” is stripped of its finer meaning and becomes something of a blunt instrument. Budgetholders, worried that their initiative might be deprioritised, compete to prove the “strategic” credentials of their projects. Strategic planning becomes difficult as suddenly all projects are “strategic” and attempts to differentiate between them risks controversy.

To avoid this situation, we should be clear about what we mean when we talk about digital strategy. We’ll look at two specific concepts here – the approach or mindset called “strategic thinking”, and the tangible plans or outputs known as “strategies”.

The strategic mindset

Books can (and have) been written about what it means to think strategically. But we need a more concise definition here. The strategic mindset satisfies two main criteria:

1. It perceives the broader narrative unfolding behind the daily, weekly, or monthly reality of business operations
2. It is able to connect this broader narrative to the aforementioned daily reality.

If the first condition is not met, good ideas and coherent directions are unlikely to form. And if the second is not met, strategic thought takes place in a bubble, its value unlikely to be realised.

These criteria are both essential to the strategic mindset, and digital strategy is no exception.

Producing and communicating strategies

At the simplest level, a strategy is a plan that embodies strategic thinking. It is less linear and more adaptable than a “classic” project or program plan, and must be applicable in a wide range of circumstances. Strategies are plans that are capable of giving rise to new plans at differing levels of detail, and that remain relevant even when underlying assumptions and conditions change

Another particular aspect of strategies is that their form and function are intertwined: the communicability is as important as the content. A well thought out strategy has no value if it’s only understood by the strategists that created it. To be effective, it must be understood by the organisation at large.

This means that strategies sometimes have a dual nature. There is the detailed strategy, a detailed plan touching on numerous areas that is highly sensitive and intelligible to a mainly executive audience. But there is also the communication of the strategy, which distils the detailed strategy into a memorable statement or graphic that is understood across the organisation. Both of these are equally important.

Mark Zuckerberg’s mysterious insignia

In June 2010 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was forced to remove his hooded top on stage a the D8 conference. In doing so he inadvertently revealed a diagram which apparently articulates Facebook’s strategy, centred around the three pillars of Graph, Stream and Platform.

Facebook's internal strategy insignia

Is this a “good” strategy? The image may be baffling but Facebook’s success suggests that the organisation is capable of crafting strategic plans and executing them well. Artefacts like this are a small manifestation of what is clearly a significant activity within the business.

Next week

The next chapter continues the exploration of what it means not just to think strategically but to communicate strategically instead. Check back next week to keep on reading.

Chapter One – Why now?

Today, businesses discuss the subject of “digital strategy” with increasing regularity. Yet it is still an emerging field whose meaning and value isn’t fully understood.

This white paper introduces digital strategy to a business audience, exploring the underlying principles as well as some of the specific activities and outputs digital strategists create. Its aim is to promote understanding of digital strategy and its relevance to today’s business landscape.

Why now?

Businesses started to engage substantively with the internet in the late 1990s, and have only increased their involvement since then. So why is it that “digital strategy” has only recently become so prominent?

The answer lies in the way the digital landscape has changed in the last five years. There are more platforms, more services, more devices, more ways to connect. More people are online, generating more data than ever before. Technologies are more modular, easier to link together, and less expensive to utilise.

All this means that making decisions about digital initiatives is less straightforward than it once was. The organisation considering how to engage with today’s digital landscape is faced with a bewildering array of options with no obvious way to proceed.

Contrast this with the late 1990s, when many organisations were presented with a large but simple problem: the lack of a basic web presence. Tackling this problem was not cheap, but the decision to be made was obvious and the strategic direction self-evident.

This is not the case today, when organisations are presented with an abundance of problems and possibilities. Should we create a YouTube channel, or optimise our main customer journeys? Should we focus on organic search presence, or partner with high-traffic websites? Do we need a Twitter account, and if so how should we use it?

When making decisions like this, organisations should not ask themselves “can we do this?” – because the answer is almost always yes. Much more important is the question “should we do this?” – and this is the question that digital strategy sets out to answer.

So digital strategy has grown in importance as the number of digital services, devices, platforms and channels has proliferated. And as this proliferation shows no sign of slowing down, the importance of digital strategy is unlikely to diminish.

What not to do

When Gordon Brown’s press office decided to use YouTube to issue a statement in response to the MP’s expenses scandal, the thinking behind the decision seemed clear – that the intimacy of the medium would help create a more personal connection between the prime minister and the electorate. And, of course, it wasn’t expensive or technologically challenging.

Gordon Brown's YouTube appearance

Of the many options available to the press office, this wasn’t the best choice. The medium’s intimacy had an effect, but it wasn’t quite what Downing Street had in mind: Gordon Brown came across as awkward and insincere. The episode did more damage than good to his personal standing.

A mistake like this would have been unlikely ten years earlier, when the cost of setting up a webcast would have ruled it out as an option. This example illustrates the strategic dangers inherent in today’s abundance of digital options, and underscores the need to ask if something should be done, before asking if it can be done.

Next week

The words “strategy” and “strategic” are encountered often but you’d be surprised how hard it is to get a clear definition of either of them. In next week’s chapter we’ll outline what we mean when we talk about strategy.

The site, My Starbucks Idea, is nothing profound or new. It’s a blog engine where users post their ideas and Starbucks respond to them. These ideas can be commented and voted on, and a raft of social media links help spread the word.

This has been done many times to varying degrees of success, but what struck me most about My Starbucks Idea was the obvious engagement of the users and their receptiveness to the responses from Starbucks. They were being listened to. They were being interacted with. A simple thing, really, but something that big companies are traditionally bad at doing for their customers, paralyzed by the fear of negative comments.

Of course it helps that the design is clean and simple, making it easy to follow and become immersed in. The website’s purpose is obvious and it’s easy to see both what people are suggesting and how Starbucks respond to those suggestions. The list of ideas put into action was prominent and larger than I expected. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Starbucks responded in a frank, honest and human tone, as opposed to the corporate tone of many companies.

Ok, so there are some problems too. One idea I ran across, a free shot for card holders on Monday mornings, was noted as being vetted two years after originally being posted. Another took around six months, and a raft of user comments, before responding to a request for a larger non-smoking area outside of the stores.

Categories are not easily accessible (the navigation has a couple of types, but search results have links to a number of others) and it took a while to figure out that the website did indeed touch upon the world outside the USA. And why oh why is the dropdown list of categories only available in the semi-hidden categories themselves and not in either the main categories or within any of the posts?

However all things considered, I thought that this was a fantastic website, playing a great role in providing a positive customer experience. Having seen so many of these kinds of ideas fall flat due to lack of investment or through a myriad of corporate issues, I was really happy to see one that appears to be successful. Well done Starbucks!